It was quite another slog, Wednesday. Home late. But I did hear three interesting minutes of radio on a break. Excerpts:

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“Yanyi’s new book of poetry is called ‘The Year Of Blue Water’, and for National Poetry Month, he read us one of the untitled poems from his collection.

YANYI: (Reading) I’ve been writing to women, women of color, queers, genderqueers, spectra, crystals, animals. I want fame with you. I don’t want to be famous. Let’s redo what it means to be famous. I’m famous because I am in search like you. I have been writing for you. I’ve been writing for myself. I, too, want to be familiar. What else could famous mean?

YANYI: So this poem is me thinking …
of starting to become interested in one’s own life.

YANYI: The first reader who you have when you first write something is you … Especially growing up as a young woman, I felt as though … *

… creating a writing practice around my own desires and my own interests was crucial to me discovering what I desired about my gender and about my queerness that I eventually incorporated into my own life.”

–today’s All Things Considered

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* The host called the poet ‘he’, and the poet says the poet grew up as a young woman. Invent your own label for your own private use, and without judgment if possible; I know I did.

So there’s a lot going on here. The language is captivating, and it’s hard to edit because the thoughts flow naturally from and to each other. I ask forgiveness for my awkwardness in doing it. Dig out the whole thing if you want. It’s available as text and audio, out there in what they now call the Cloud. (It will always be webs to me.)

The poem itself is pretty great. “I have been writing for you. I’ve been writing for myself.” I resonate with that.

He talks about fame but to my eye he’s really more talking about a relationship to and with an Audience. At least that’s the WAY i resonate with that.

Then: Creating a writing practice. You do it and you discover things inside. The act of discovery changes the insides. Per Heisenberg, all very scientistic.

As should be, I reckon.

Not all distraction is evil, not all distraction is necessary evil at best. For three minutes I was distracted and then later I spent another, oh, half hour. Contributing to the creation of a practice.

I think this is why it will be useful to set a timer on the obviously non-productive distractions. And to just let the productive ones have their way with me.

The productive ones. Like letting McKibben distract me for forty minutes last night and another twenty this morning. There is so much more to say about that, at length. But for now, let it be said that the notion I ascribed to him, about Central American refugees being driven north by climate change, wasn’t apparently his notion. It seems to have been more credible and, uh, data-driven, than notional at all. Ripped from today’s headlines, et cetera. I’m not going to track down the source, but it seems that sustained drought means nothing will grow there, and subsistence agriculture isn’t enough to live on anymore, and that this (on top of the gangs and the rest) is how we get the crisis du jour hooked up with the crisis that’s gonna kill us all.

In the meantime, I am in search like you.