Form is Emptiness. Emptiness is Form

Spinozablue welcomes the poetry of Virginie Colline, Hilary Sideris, Changming Yuan, Kenneth Pobo, Joan McNerney, and the fiction of Shanna Perplies.

*     *     *     *     *

A tip of the hat goes to nnyhav for the link to Tim Parks’ excellent article in the New York Review of Books, The Chattering Mind. While most of the article is about modern literature, there is a section on the Buddhist quest to still the mind which I found brilliantly concise and relevant to past and future discussions here. The entire article being relevant, of course . . . .

Sitting for ten days on a cushion, eyes closed, cross-legged, seeking to empty your mind of words, it’s all too evident how obsessively the mind seeks to construct self-narrative, how ready it is to take interest in its own pain, to congratulate itself on the fertility of its reflection.

Kenneth Pobo: Lobster Telephone

 

RENDEZVOUS OF THE FRIENDS

 

    By Max Ernst

It’s the usual thing—when friends
come over, they head for the kitchen.
I’m a poor cook, impatient.  A slow
simmer makes me crabby.  Today

is weird.  My friends avoid the kitchen.  
They’ve come to see a mountain
that bolted up out of the ground
like a spring coneflower.  How it got there,
who knows?  I wouldn’t allow anything
that would dwarf our forget-me-nots–
tiny blue flowers sing louder than
many a mountain, but they’re hard

to see.  My friends never climb mountains.
Most prefer swings and Lazy Boys.  Indolence
takes our hats, puts them in a deep closet,
and we forget them. …

Scroll to top