Unexpected hip-hop lyric du jour
Dressed smart like a London bloke.
Before he speak, his suit bespoke.
From Kanye West’s “American Boy.” (And apparently, I’m not the first to grin at this.)
The Danish Poet
via Paideia
New elimae
The August elimae is now posted.
Schoolboys and farting
I was perusing my favourite dictionary this morning while doing 300 crunches to make my abs look awesome, and came across this gem:
randle (răn’dəl) - n. a nonsensical poem recited by Irish schoolboys as an apology for farting at a friend.
What a cool freaking word! So I immediately postponed my crunches and consulted my OED to find out more… but nothing. Nothing more on the internet either—just amateur dictionaries that have the same definition word for word.
RATS! I want to know if the nonsense poem has specific words or any nonsensical uttering will do. Am I allowed to rip one into the face of my good pal and then recite Jabberwocky and everything will be hunky-dory again? Also, why would this randle placate the poor feller who has just been farted upon? It would have to be a pretty awesome poem to keep me from wailing on my assailant.
No Colony — first issue
Blake Butler and Ken Bauman’s No Colony is about to release its first issue, including work from Kim Chinquee, Tao Lin, Brian Evenson, Robert Lopez, our fellow flocker Derek White, and more. Go buy a copy. They’re also reading for issue two, which will include a short piece by yours truly.
Mon semblable — mon frère
Serré, fourmillant, comme un million d’helminthes,
Dans nos cerveaux ribote un peuple de Démons,
Et, quand nous respirons, la Mort dans nos poumons
Descend, fleuve invisible, avec de sourdes plaintes.
(Charles Baudelaire. “Au Lecteur”. Les Fleurs du mal.)
Kay Ryan: “I so didn’t want to be a poet…”
Thus saith the US’s new Poet Laureate:
“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”
But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”
And the Albatross begins to be avenged.
About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue and white.
(From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Grasa de Pantera Classics Illustrated edition.)
Scene
I had most need of blessing, and Amen
Stuck in my throat.
(Macbeth. Act II. Scene 2.)
Tao Lin: reading
Picked up from his blog.
New elimae
The July issue of elimae is now posted.
Mamihlapinatapai
A single word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego
It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. Ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other.
— via kottke
My WCW/Interstate Driving “Poem”
Has there ever been
a red pickup that
wasn’t hauling an
open-bed trailer full
of construction crap?
June elimae
The June issue of elimae is now posted.
When ‘Writer’ Means ‘Typer’
Idea: how about you get a newspaper and type every single word of it into a book, then try to market the book as avant garde neo-poetry? Kenneth Goldsmith did exactly that with Day, an 840-page book that contains every single word of an NYTimes issue.
He typed an entire issue of the New York Times into an 840-page book called Day. He recently completed a trilogy, The Weather, Traffic and Sports. They are transcriptions of a year of radio weather reports, a 24-hour traffic cycle and the radio broadcast of a Yankees game. Ums, uhs and ads included. If you think that sounds unreadable, you’re right. Goldsmith himself says, “I don’t read them. I get bored.”
Odd way to get your 15 minutes, but hey, at least he got them.
‘Uncreative Writer’ Retypes the ‘New York Times’
(via swissmiss)
Vandals Take Poetry Class As Punishment
More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost’s former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.
Ritsos’ chair - for Cooper
Greek Scene
He dismounted, hitched his horse to the huge mulberry tree, took a leak.
The horse was looking at him. He slapped its neck.
“We’re young,” he said.
The sun was calling out among the osiers.
The cicadas were coming on strong.
The fig tree’s shadow banged against the stones.
A huge red sail was flapping above the plane trees.
The horse was twitching its ears, sometimes the one,
sometimes the other, while below,
two young boatmen were rolling the huge iron barrel along the road.
Samos, August 19, 1963
William Topaz McGonagall
A selection of poems from “the world’s worst poet” are set for auction today.
William McGonagall was mocked by literary critics and had food thrown at him during public readings, before dying penniless in an unmarked grave in Edinburgh in 1902.
The works could collect as much as 6,500 pounds.
If the collection goes for its estimated price it would be in the same league as first edition copies of Harry Potter books signed by author J. K. Rowling.
This is his most famous poem.
So the train mov’d slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay.
Welcome, Mr. McGonagall, to the clusterflock hall of shame.
May elimae
The May issue of elimae is now posted.
Dezembrum
I love the poems of Wallace Stevens, and one poem of twenty lines has long intrigued me. Here are the first four lines:
Tonight there are only the winter stars.
The sky is no longer a junk-shop,
Full of javelins and old fire-balls,
Triangles and the names of girls.
That’s just lovely, in my view. But I have a question. I have looked in the OED and a number of dictionaries, and I can’t find a definition for “Dezembrum,” the title of this poem. I believe it is a musical term, but I haven’t found it in dictionaries of music either. Any ideas?
Skunk Hour
Out loitering at dusk, I spied one of this year’s crop of skunk-kittens — skunks are such beautiful animals — and it put me in mind of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour”. If you can get past the unpleasant timbre of Lowell’s voice, his reading of the poem on the Academy of American Poets site is worth a listen. The poem is more complex than I’d remembered.
A bit of notice for elimae
Ross Simonini has written an article about online literary magazines with a very nice nod at elimae. (I wish he’d known that Deron was the force of the ebooks, though.)
Confessions
- I sort of like the Travelocity gnome.
- I’ve only seen a few Coen Bros. films.
- I wonder if there is any advertising entity to which The Postal Service has not sold rights for “Such Great Heights”.
Books I Read and Loved: Gordon Lish, The Quarterly
Not exactly a book, each issue reads like one. Renner and Scroggins were in early and many issues of the magazine. Each one is curated, and reads like a novel in some ways. At the time, it felt like literature was real, was a possibility, that good writing could live in America. It’s interesting how much of that sense was dependent on one person.
Bild, 1959 by Franz Wright
Kudos to Stephen Schenkenberg who posted about this delightful ditty by Franz Wright:
Bild, 1959
the bourbon’s level
descended in the bottle
his voice would grow
lower and more
indistinct, like a candle flame
under a glass
Sunlight in the basement room
So he reads to me
disappearing
When he is gone
I go over
and secretly taste his drink
Mushroom cloud of sunset