Certainty is Overrated

In the end it all comes down to this you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.  ~David Bayles & Ted Orland in Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

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Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. . . .All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. ~H. L. Mencken

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Despair is a kind of of certainty that the future will be like the present.  ~Rebecca Solnit

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Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one. ~Voltaire

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Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” has comic potential, besides being the best formulation of the comic spirit.  ~Charles Simic, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth

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Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities — for success, for happiness, for really living — are waiting.  Martha Nussbaum

Thanks: May Update

Thanks to editor Peter LaBerge and reviewer Derick Edgren at The Adroit Journal for reviewing Mendeleev's Mandala. The review is not yet available online, so I'll link to the review once it is. Other books reviewed in this issue include Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Ansel Elkins' Blue Yodel,  Richard Siken's War of the Foxes, and Christina Stoddard's Hive so it'll be worth your time. Plus poems by Nicole Rollender, and more.

Also, I talk about sound for The Poets Studio. Thanks to Liz Whiteacre for the invitation. Also look for tips from poetry pros like Rebecca Foust and Todd Davis.

Finally, thanks to Straight Forward Poetry for including all three of my books on their 2015 Poetry Shopping List.

Wakening, for Nepal

With the loss of life so high in Nepal, and especially with the loss of so many climbers on Mt. Everest, Nina Romano of Bridle Path Press has decided to re-post my poem "Wakening" on the press's Poet's Corner. "Wakening" originally appeared in Rattle.

I hope this poem can be of some comfort to someone during this crisis, and the aftermath, which lasts for so much longer than those of us whose daily lives are unaffected can imagine.

Straight Forward

Somehow I missed this, the posting of my straightforward answers to some questions about my favorites in poetry, asked over at Straight Forward: A Poetry Publisher, as part of their April Poetry Month goings-on. Thanks to Lindsey Lewis Smithson for including me!

And the Winner Is . . .

Thanks to all 31 people who participated in my drawing for the Big Poetry Giveaway 2015. I'm happy to announce that the winners are:

1) Guy, who will receive a signed copy of my book, Mendeleev's Mandala;

2) and Juliet Carpenter, who will receive Cynthia Arrieu-King's People are Tiny in Paintings of China.

Congratulations to Guy and Julia; I will contact each of you by email to make arrangements to send your prizes.

And thanks to everyone else for playing. I hope you were winners in some of the other drawings sponsored by other poets as part of the Big Poetry Giveaway 2015.