Arthur Sze named 25th U.S. poet laureate Sze is a poet with a lot of acclaim — he's won the National Book Award, was a Guggenheim fellow and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He aims to promote interest in translated poetry in his new role.

A well-deserved honor for a unique & essential presence in contemporary American poetry …
www.npr.org/2025/09/15/n...

One of the major symptoms of the general crisis existent in our world today is our lack of sensitivity to words. We use words as tools. We forget that words are a repository of the spirit … (Abraham Joshua Heschel)

My partner having passed a little over 4mo ago, I'm still deep in grief … While I'd hoped to write a piece touching on more collective concerns by way of the intimately personal, what came out insisted on its own idea & scale … It's true that my poems end up writing me as much as I write them …

Take it from Joan, there's a lot more to this writing deal than mere "self-expression" … ✍🏼

Projet 山川 Articulating the energetics of presence in poetry, poetics, performance, and visual art …

New posting to my website *Projet 山川* – poetry & prose on grieving the loss of my partner … Ordinarily I'd want to maintain a yearlong ceremonial silence before opening up on such matters, but I've been moved instead to consecrate my bestie's memory by making art …
dai-shin-kokyu.com

How the body remembers as much as the mind – another poem dedicated to the memory of my late partner, all of 3½mo gone … Straight goods arriving practically readymade while I was working on a prose piece for my website 'Projet 山川' … Love

Projet 山川 Articulating the energetics of presence in poetry, poetics, performance, and visual art …

ANNOUNCING the renewal & renovation of my blogsite 'Projet 山川' on WordPress – a venue for posting both poetry and prose observations touching on poetics, consciousness, & the energetics of performance … Please feel free to check in periodically to see what's up in my poesi\verse!
dai-shin-kokyu.com

W/everything going on, both out in the world & in my personal life, I sometimes forget that I have an account on this platform … Here's a poem I wrote a month ago – another memorializing my late partner, Laura Renee Givens, 2mo after her passing …

LATEST POETICAL EFFORT, finished during the misty predawn just this morning … Memorializing my partner of 43yrs, who passed just a little over 3wks ago – posting on what would have been her 72nd birthday … Love

Ocean Vuong on Anger “To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (…

Not a single sentence or page I’ve ever written in my work was written out of anger … It’s not that I’m not angry, but I’m not useful – as a writer, as an artist – when I’m angry … (Ocean Vuong)

www.themarginalian.org/.../07/ocean...

First finished poem for the year, a long time coming … A bit "precious," perhaps, in view of the gross brutalities going on all around us; but registering, I hope, something intrinsically plaintive to our conscious condition as human beings …

The state of birth, suffering, love, & death are extreme states: extreme, universal, & inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge … (James Baldwin) ❤️‍🔥

WORLD POETRY DAY 2025

OFFERING IN OBSERVANCE this piece I wrote 8yrs ago, riffing off Jerome Rothenberg's "A Paradise of Poets" …

"Against the ruin of the world,
there is only one defense: the creative act …"
~ Kenneth Rexroth

"Live the Self that fills the whole Universe …"
~ Sawaki Kōdō

"Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination," according to Ishmael Reed … To be able to "move the perimeters of saying beyond one's own boundaries," as Jane Hirshfield proposes here, comes pretty close to the whole point of the craft, it seems to me …

A love poem framed in a meditation on impermanence … Written 4+yrs ago, but resonating all the more acutely now in light of my BFF's current medical struggles – & reflecting, if more obliquely, a more public grief over what is happening to our country …

I sought to touch on that state that the love-drunk Ṣūfīs call 'fanā' (فناء) – literally, "to die before one dies" … Not the ultimate consummation, but that stage in the divine romance where ego & its referential web unravel & burn away before the radiance of the Beloved …

SHARING A POEM I wrote 9yrs ago … Even w/all the heated political rhetoric eating up the air at the time – maybe because of – I found myself writing a love poem to GOD, an expression of devotion to the Divine, riffing off the story of Psyche & Cupid … ❤️‍🔥

Maintaining our seat in the face of civilizational collapse …

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, w/those crackpots & fools whose lack of intelligence & creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty … (Hannah Arendt)

Safe space …

ABHAYA MUDRĀ –"gesture of fearlessness" – w/the Ukrainian flag …

A graphic with light blue background showing a mosque and crescent moon, stars, lanterns, and geometric patterns

Ramadan Mubarak!

TASHI DELEK! Celebrating Tibet's lunar New Year of the Wood Snake!

From an interview just months before his passing on this day in 1983 …

MAHA SHIVARATRI, "Night of Lord Shiva" –
tonight's waning crescent in advance of Thursday's new moon, a particularly potent occasion in South Asian tradition for ritual fasting, prayer, & meditation … Seems to me that our world could sure use the uplift – SARVA MAŃGALAM! 📿

And this … 🔥

Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship vs. Creative Force It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all ar…

Poetics, life, & LIVING the life … 🪔

"I aspire to & admire a sanity from which, as in a climax ecosystem, one has spare energy to go on to even more challenging – which is to say more spiritual & more deeply physical – things …"

www.themarginalian.org/2025/02/22/g...

Obliquely expanding on a famous line by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado in resonance w/Buddhist tropes of "leaving home" & "taking refuge" …