The proof is in the (above) pudding! 

The piece I wrote for The Millions a couple weeks ago (ahem, having forgotten to post it much earlier, here it is now).

Leo and George

81st and Columbus

[nyc]

Can you spot the jealousy in this photo?

[Lower East Side Summer 2011]

More on My Walk with Jon, An Extended Dialogue

How do you see walking in relation to wanderlust, if you see it relating at all?

Thoreau “traveled widely” in Concord, and he urges us to do the same – wherever our Concord might be. He walked daily, documenting microseconds. Through his walks he becomes attuned to ceaseless flux. Whatever he senses tends to strike him, since it has never happened before, and will never happen again. This mind/body alignment is described beautifully by Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust. She portrays “the mind at three miles an hour.” Walking is not just a source of physical pleasure. It’s key for the healthy functioning, the spark, of our intellect.  


Why poetry and walking? Why not some other word-form combined with movement? 

Poetry evokes this flux better than most art forms. Poetry can be light and mobile; it can track time. I’m particularly interested in a kind of poetry that heightens our sense of time, and wakes us as much as possible. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado once wrote: “If it’s good to live/ it’s better to dream,/ and the best thing of all/ is waking up.” My fiancée Claire Hamilton and I are making slideshows that combine poetic fragments with photographs. The Believer just posted one based on an 8-hour walk we took from one end of Fire Island to the other. It’s called “Fire Island Slideshow.” Given the ease of putting multimedia work online, this is an exciting time for poetry, which can now incorporate audiovisual components and evolve in new directions. 


How do you see the idea of place in relation to the digital world? Facebook, Twitter, etc.? 

Digital work and social media give us some familiarity with places. Just look at, for example, photos from Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces on his gallery’s website, or footage from Occupy Wall Street’s livestream. But these digital phenomena can’t replace concrete experience. No matter how attuned to a particular place, the digital world is still less present than the forest path along which we’re walking. Online we could read Pythagoras’ fragment: “The wind is blowing; adore the wind.” But here the breeze is tangible. This fragment becomes all the more truthful, all the more ecstatic.  


What advice would you give to those like me (a relatively recent transplant to NYC from rural Maine), who just can’t help valuing “natural” landscapes over urban ones?

How about this line from Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency”: “One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes – I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” I think I just heard the Metro North.

For Jon Cotner and Claire Hamilton’s Bedford Avenue slidewhow, for The Guggenheim Lab, go here:

http://blog.bmwguggenheimlab.org/2011/09/local-worlds-a-bedford-avenue-slideshow/

For Jon and Claire’s Fire Island Walk published in The Believer, go here:

http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/cotner/

Why We Love Maine [summer issue]

A sign on El Camino de Santiago, or The Way of Saint James, which Leo and I walked the summer of 2009. And which I walked previously the summer of 2006. I don’t think it really attests to how we felt.