it looks like the wind caused the tree to split as easily as a banana
A tree that predated Columbus fell outside a senior center in a wind storm in Lancaster Ohio.
People at the senior center who carve statues and toys will be given first dibs on the wood.
A wonderful Jack Gilbert poem
I found this while Cindy and I were searching for various Japanese words related to kinds of beauty. This poem seems to be an illustration of the language we were swimming in this morning.
dream name
Austin Derwatt.
tweet of the day
tweet of the day
Computer Gossip
A computer generated poem ‘Nonchurchgoing’, made from only human gossip the structure of human gossip.
It all started when Genevieve, Kenda and Michelina arrived. Don’t tell Jacquelin I said this, but Tamekia and Tina were nonchurchgoing with reckless abandon. According to Renaldo, Claribel and Inell were unwilling with Scottie. From start to finish, it was bizarre but not really amazing.
Totally.
So you didn’t like it?
I love it when reviewers of poetry books just go all out with the invective. This review of a Robert Hass book contains a wonderful response to a passage:
The second volume, Praise, now reads as a primer in late-seventies period style, the kind of laid-back beach koans that led people to believe Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear” was a good poem. There are more berries, more naming of flowers, more embarrassingly tin-eared warbling in the demotic:
It is different in kind from a man and the pale woman
he fucks in the ass underneath the stars
because it is summer and they are full of longing
and sick of birth. They burn coolly
like phosphorous, and the thing need be done
only once.
—From “Against Botticelli”Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy.
(Thanks, Rick S.)
Sit down. Shut up. (I’ve done this before — and some audiences actually laughed.)
Brian Beatty in Minnesota Playlist on how and why he does what he does:
Poetry entered my stand-up sets because I wanted to up the “snob” factor of my stage persona, to increase the comedic tension.
Poem
Under Night
A fire cannot be built
without memory, or watched
for need but for
loss informing the hands.
So, always, the blaze
of twigs is a city,
and the faint hiss and splutter,
amid ash,
human voices brought
to fuel.
We warm ourselves by all
that fades; we put away
our tending
to step in.
wanted misc garbage (my treasure items)
kids
wagon tonka
toys funnels clay
pots
concrete statues chandelier (or
chandelier parts) clear
glass plates metal pipes
mailboxes
twigs large plastic spice
containers
lattice tea
cups with saucers bottles
different shapes and sizes extra
large metal cans license
plates
coffee
containers
scrap wood door knobs/handles (any kind)
old pool liners (can not have holes in the bottom)
like the kind with the blow up ring at the top
the ring can have holes
just not the bottom
bird
baths wind
chimes metal trash
can
lids marbles
shed storm
doors sliding
glass
doors will pick up in a central location (like at walmart or krogers)
unless you have a lot of item
tweet of the day
from the comments
The poem:
He, “Tighter Vagina.”
She, “Dick Thicker.”
from the spam
hello everybody subservient to the bronze knick-knacks
That’s flagrant of the record-breaking
I’m luxurious to here
Tickled pink as bop to look at you all
Entreat graciousness to to my blog
Melt. Thaw.
And resolve itself into a dew.
The onset of spring: for me, a time of joy often tinged heavily with melancholy.
from the comments
This man would love to sneeze.
Without regret
Distrustful of such happiness, I thought
to break a window out of our small room and soon
had bloodied both my arms, had cut and caught
my wrists on shards, sharp shrapnel of a ruin-
ation I would try — did try, and failed to fly or flee. Then you,
you, painstaking, reframed each single pane and turned
and asked me how the light looked then, and left
me still a moment, looking at the sky. My arms both burned
when you took me into yours. (I felt your heft.)
You showed me where the door had always been
and offered to undo the locks, unpry
the hinges that we two had closed together, painted over, sealed.
A brief whiteness passed the window: I turned to you.
Other things have yet to make me stay
like well-marked exits do.
- Amy Cannon
from the comments
Some people think it was inappropriate that I gave Flannery and Ryan a set of Sylvia Plath oven mitts for a wedding gift.
You are listening to Los Angeles
Okay. My 24/7 soundtrack. Ambient music and live LAPD police radio.
(Thank you, Mr. Ledgerwood.)
The Mad Farmer
On Wednesday, President Obama presented the 2010 National Humanities Medal to agrarian philosopher Wendell Berry. I enjoyed these remarks by Slacktivist commemorating the occasion:
Wendell Berry scares me. He is a poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, husband, conservationist, radical and gentleman. He writes with an unrivaled clarity of language, clarity of thought and clarity of conviction. It’s that conviction that scares me, because often when I read Wendell Berry I can’t help but think that if he is right, then a great deal of the rest of the world is wrong. And he usually seems to be right.
If you’ve never had the opportunity to page through his books, I can’t recommend them enough.
Charles Wright
After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
March elimae
for your enjoyment.
Waterboys / Yeats
The Waterboys have other fine songs, but this is probably all you really need:
And it also proves that young Billy Yeats had the goods from the get-go.
February elimae
The Genius of the Crowd
from the comments
I remember going to a cocktail party at a person’s home in Highland Park after a big literary reading at SMU (in the late 70s) I was an undergraduate then (at a different university), and was very grateful to hear the likes of Saul Bellow, Jerzy Kosinski, and a number of well-known poets of the day. I was also very happy to go to any event that provided free food and drink. The house was one of those small ones of only seven or eight thousand square feet, not counting guest quarters and pool cabanas littered about. The main crowd had Kosinski cornered in the living room, asking him questions about Hollywood debaucheries; Bellow didn’t attend. Among the featured poets was none other than Alan Dugan. People smiled at him and then quickly turned away, probably because of his average working class middle-aged-guy looks. My friend Sparky nudged me and we got Dugan by the elbow and took him to a little table in the smaller kitchen at the back of the house, where there was a fridge full of beer, and the three of us drank freely and talked late into the night. Sparky and I heard wonderful stories of such things as how Dugan had been supporting himself (when he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award at the age of 39) by working for a planned parenthood-funded factory that made plastic models of male and female genitalia for sex education demonstrations. I can’t speak for the well-dressed ones in the front room, but I had a great time. And that experience definitely shaped my perception of what is good and what is bad about cocktail parties.
