poetry
The past of his image upon me
Poetic drugs
The haiku
Japanese Death Poems
Silent Conversation
A few things that could be poetry
An Article by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels- The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point
- Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed
- The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly
- Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context
- A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection
- An idea, if you consider it divine enough
155-217-155
A Website by Nick TrombleyThe Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music
An Article by Maria PopovaThe poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance — not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.
The way an oyster does
A Fragment by Kay RyanHer poems, [Kay Ryan] says, don't begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation." An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as "It's always darkest before the dawn" or "Why did the chicken cross the road?"
"I think, 'What about those chickens?' " she says, "and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés."
If we were allowed to visit
A Poetry CollectionIf We Were Allowed To Visit is an anthology of poems by Gemma Mahadeo rendered by Ian MacLarty.
As you move through the game's environment, the poems are rearranged into the shapes of the objects they're about, each frame becoming a new generative poem.
Haiku 2018–2019
A Poetry Collection by Katy DeCorahI found an old note that contained a project to write a haiku every day. My project started in December 2018 and ended promptly in January 2019. The themes included work, baking, and difficulty finding nice fabric.
Some Other Sign that People Do Not Totally Regret Life
An Episode from 99% Invisible by Roman Mars & Kurt Kohlstedt
Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
It begins with craft
Something strange is happening in the world of software: It’s slowly getting worse. Not all software, but a lot of it. It’s becoming more sluggish, less responsive, and subtly less reliable than it was a few years ago.
In some ways this is hyperbole. Objectively, we’ve never been able to do so much, so easily with our smartphones and laptops and tablets. We’ve never pushed more data between more places more readily. But while the insidious “worseness” I mention falls only in part on the engineering side of things, it falls harder on the more subjective, craft side of things, making it all the more worrisome.
Why should we care about this? Because the majority of our waking hours take place within the confines of applications. A truth recently amplified by the covid pandemic.
And I believe software used by millions (if not billions) has a moral duty to elevate the emotional and intellectual qualities of its users. That elevation begins with craft.
Penn Station
In the same way that physical architecture can affect a mind, so too can software. Slower, less reliable software is like Penn Station: Sure, you can catch a transfer from one train to another but the dreary lowness of the place, the lack of sunlight or sensible wayfinding will make you feel like a rat, truculent and worthless, and worse: You’ll acclimate to that feeling and accept it as a norm.
Edges
Hardware has literal and metaphorical edges — it must be fully complete and largely bug free to ship. Software? It’s far more amorphous, like mist. Patches can be endlessly pushed. It never ends. Faulty hardware can destroy a company. Faulty software can be patched. The butterfly keyboard debacle may never be lived down. Even as I type on this improved Magic Keyboard, I can’t help but wonder: Did they really test this thing? I had three butterfly keyboards die on me, twice in the field. Not fun. Hardware failures live long in the mind.
The business case for craft
macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit.
In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe.
And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks.