Author Archives: Anita Sullivan

“The sky is always dark blue, trending towards lavender/when I remember and say—we should not go extinct,/and each time this knowledge arrives/like a silent taxi headlamp in the rain./This evening it comes in a black and white video/of Grigory Sokolov playing a Bach Partita.”—Anita Sullivan On the Other Hand By Anita Sullivan EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—February […]

“But such hasty assumptions would ruin an ancient double-monster analogy/of particularly delicate dreadfulness, the current manifestation of which/ we recognize to be—just lately—infiltrating this and/ other trainyards each night/but do not call out its common name while we endure through sleep.”—Anita Sullivan On the Other Hand By Anita Sullivan EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—1 December 2020— “Analogue: […]

“We don’t understand this virus from the inside out. We don’t even know in what sense it is ‘alive.’ It seems not to have any means or purpose other than simply to continue. This reminds us of the story of the Welsh cauldron, into which dead soldiers could be tossed, where they would seethe and […]

“How could this precarious situation come to pass? That instead of climate change we humans might instead be finished off a bit sooner by a simple attack of a highly infectious disease we failed to prepare ourselves for. But we don’t see it that way yet because even here in Oregon, which has a fairly […]

“For me, it just takes a little Bach in the early evening, well played. For one thing, it’s so wonderful to listen to something unabashedly complex again, after being clubbed on the head with the daily twigs and sodden noodles of mildly ugly, innocently simple stupidity. Here is the work of a fellow human being […]

“I’m not really talking about painting at all, I’m talking about sketching. I don’t even own any paint except for a couple of cans stored in the garage and last opened five years ago to cover the walls in my bedroom. But I find myself thinking like a painter; I am seeing and feeling the […]

“Let’s imagine that silence roams our world and sometimes inhabits a segment of space/time, effectively blotting out any sound that was there previously. And as an analogy, poetry roams our world as an innately wordless being, which sometimes inhabits a group of words, effectively banishing any prior ‘narrative’ meaning and instead infusing the words with […]

“There we were, a bunch of strangers in a random field, all facing the same direction as if we were sitting on the beach. But our heads were tipped back and we were wearing these silly grey glasses that looked like we had cut them out of a coloring book. Almost as soon as we […]

“Isn’t there something deeply wrong with this picture? Yes, because it’s probably true. Those of us who take scientists like Guy McPherson seriously, we know the days of Happiness by Worm are on their way out. It’s enough to turn you into a raving maniac, into a person who comes out to yell at robins […]

“In ancient Greece, the epics of Homer did not really have a word for the human body. Not as a whole, only as an assembly of various limbs—and especially the ones that are routinely wounded in war. The ‘chest’ was one of those limbs, and about as close as he came to talking about the […]