I survived the most horrible winter

Soon I will be able to add a Published Work section to my resume. It will go nicely under all the minimum wage retail jobs and the glossed-over lack of a high school diploma, until I fail to mention high school altogether and just mention that I'm working on a degree.

On Wednesday I got an email from White Wall Review. They are publishing two of my poems under the pseudonym Patrick Walker-Nelson. That makes me a published poet times 9.

Today I went to Grant MacEwan College to chat up a student advisor. I think they are going to let me in.

Woke up at two am to a house of dark, whippy, rainy air and two open windows, ate an orange in bed, which tasted very sweet on account of the dark, woke up again at seven to bells, pre-dawn and freezy floors, drank tea, got dressed, cleaned my rooms, and when the sun started warming up the floors I sat on them and wrote a bit. Then I played Bach, Dvorak, and Reger in the loud front room of the apartment, without the mute, and I sounded fantastic. Then I sat on the stairs to my door and almost finished a poem. Then he came and we left. The day has been full of delicious orange juice, milk, tea, and Starbucks [a slight lack of food, probably going to be rectified later] and a drenching of sun and three logic problems solved.

The anti human-chauvinism movement slightly disturbs me. It's true that human chauvinism, the idea that humans are the surpreme goal and best possible product of evolution, is simply uninformed, but the writers trying to correct this view in the common consciousness seem too often to swing to the other, just as stupid, extreme, ignoring that though it may not be the pinnacle of anything but its own history up to this point, human achievement and ability is a marvelous thing.

At Chartres

by Katy Didden

Who wielded the chisel
at the left portal,
south porch, the scene

of Theo chained,
naked to the waist, leaning in
to the brutal hand

of what looks to be
an even younger boy?
What man carved stone

to mimic flesh
as it would look inside
the torture of its flensing?

How he must have held
the scene in his own
mind, thought it back

to the act itself,
modeling the lines
with his own limbs

so he would know
both how a body
bends in pain, and how

a hand extends the flayer’s rake.

While I realize how statistically plausible it is, it astounds and disappoints me continually how badly people misunderstand and misappreciate poetry in their attempts to "interpret it", as if this was some joke of an English class.

"What does the grapefruit stand for?'

"A grapefruit."

"But what does it mean?"

"What it says in the poem."

It is something of a hardship to revel in my own improved writing while people are asking such questions. [These past few weeks I've been working a lot, and am delighted to watch myself.]Most of them seem entirely unable to deal with the complexities and subtlties of metaphores that are not childishly simplistic, one-to-one and direct, but also entirely unable to take a phrase at face value before deciphering the metaphore which may be there. It's as if their set of mental catagories was less nuanced, less developed, and smaller than mine. As if they cannot easily relate physically unlike things by abstraction, except in common, popular cases. It disappoints me.

My poems are good.

I would have been proud to be an early American

The writ of habeas corpus is one of what are called the "extraordinary," "common law," or "prerogative writs," which were historically issued by the courts in the name of the monarch to control inferior courts and public authorities within the kingdom. The most common of the other such prerogative writs are quo warranto, prohibito, mandamus, procedendo, and certiorari. When the original 13 American Colonies declared independence and became a constitutional republic in which the people are the sovereign, any person, in the name of the people, acquired authority to initiate such writs.

1. x is the greatest prime

2. Form the product of all primes less than or equal to x, and add 1 to the product. This yields a new number y, where y=

[2x3x5x7x11x...x[x]] +1

3. If y is itself prime, then x is not the greatest prime, for y is obviously greater than x

4. If y is composite [not prime], then again, x is not the greatest prime. For if y is composite, it must have a prime divisor z; and z must be different from each of the prime numbers [2,3,5,7,11,...,x] smaller than or equal to x; hence z must be a prime greater than x

5. But y is either prime or composite

6. Hence x is not the greatest prime

7. There is no greatest prime