I gave up working on the Mac when I noticed it liked to stare off into space almost as much as I do.

Writing, teaching, having a conversation, feeling comes through. So often you can just see the writer hunching forward, forehead strained, lips pursed. Another birth dream? or another dog angry at having to do its business in public.

Read the current Manhattan Review with the special on Australian poetry. Surprised to find myself admiring Les Murray's compression, and frowning at John Kinsella's drifting in and out of pertinence. What's the sense in convicting a poet of impertinence, though? it's an infraction, not a crime, and it may indicate the poet's orbiting a subject of real interest.

Subjects. Ha. All that really matters is the poet's focused attention -- talk about anything as it actually is and you're liable to disclose new information. Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick goes on a ways about sunflowers:

It is as if the blacksmiths of Nottage forge
had poured them from a ladle.
I know another season soon follows the sunflowers
but still their plasma refuses to cool.

Drowsy, dogdayed,
the salt air turns their copper faces green.
How many channels can they receive?

Before you beat me with a Craig Raine, please at least admit to being charmed however briefly by Minhinnick's extension of the satellite dish metaphor. If there's a flower that can bear his persistent comparison to metal and rock, it's the tournesol.

More Marilyn Hacker translations here also. Admired her version of Amina Saïd's "Blood of the Sea": "beneath the poet's portrait / the child from Hadj-Diddeh asks me / did you know Rimbaud, ma'am?"