Basking in the Sunlight of Overwhelming Gratitude for Life and Art

Sadly (happily?), Poem Box will be taking a break for June and July.

I leave you with a hilarious "essay" on "Seattle" by literary provocateur Tao Lin.

An excerpt:

"When I make myself think concretely about Seattle, I get an image of a 12-year-old Native American boy reading a Sherman Alexie story collection in a Starbucks and it's raining outside...But if I think abstractly about Seattle, I feel a strange emotion like I'm currently living in a clean, well-furnished house with expensive electronic equipment in Tennessee in May by a small river on a green hill with no other houses nearby and that I have a steady cash flow and am working on multiple projects each day with a lot of excitement and no obligations...So 'Seattle' abstractly means to me something like 'basking in the sunlight of overwhelming gratitude for life and art' but concretely to me something like 'feeling like there's no possible routes for escaping a life of poverty and alcoholism while staring at sentences written by Sherman Alexie in an environment of people shouting things like 'quadruple soy latte.' I don't know. I feel 'tricked.'"