R i f f s & P l a i n t s
Here Mark blogs. From time to time. Expect lyric rants and quieter meditations on the matters that concern him and many of us—climate justice, care with language, soul-making, landscape, the lyric, reading and writing and parenting and the art of living well. These are the plaints. The riffs will be similar, but lighter. Short essays and filibusters and letters from Here. And the odd poem.
The Fire Next Time
Racism, enmification, all forms of cruelty, all failures of the human spirit, begin in refusal to forgive oneself for being human. We tend to hate in others what we cannot accept—the beautiful and the wounded and the wild—in ourselves. If we can bring out what’s within us we will save ourselves; if we cannot, we may destroy ourselves and those around us. James Baldwin writes about this in an essay from 1962 (“Letter from a Region in my Mind”” that’s suddenly very current as Trump’s America goes up in flames. But the message in America’s immolation should not be lost on each of us. And poetry can be our teacher: one of its gifts is forgiving us for being human, while asking a little more of us, beginning with our language.