Author Archives: Anita Sullivan

“I began collecting bits and pieces of other people’s writings at an early age. I still have some of these yellowed pieces of paper with my original savings. Eventually, I got officious about it and began to type them up and paste them into a loose-leaf notebook. In earlier centuries, they used to call these […]

“Like an ancient map, its spirit roads in the visible realm can, effectively, never be found. A dish, about the size to fill two slightly cupped hands. Narrow, vaguely circular, disappearing from not only view but from longing itself, into the pinkish shadows beyond the treehouse, a kind of context it carries as an outer […]

“Thus it was I found myself recently on my hands and knees in full sunlight confronting the usual collection of weeds, many of which were already producing lovely tiny white, pink, or purple flowers. I will spare you the list. As I was filling my bucket, I became vaguely aware that even in weeding there […]

“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 […]