I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust.
- Henry David Thoreau, “Walden”
(probably braining in some poor S.O.B. passing by Henry’s window … you […]
“I know you’re in there - I can smell your brain …” Return of the Living Dead (1985)
I suppose if I were forced by powers beyond my control to come back as a zombie, a flesh eating one might be of some interest. Yet it seems so stereotyped, commonplace, platitudinous. And why […]
I found this morning a bit cold when I rose from bed; autumn, they say dismissively. It seemed logical then that I should add a new page to this blog-thingie of mine: “Contests, Awards and Deadlines” — under the idea that we all need awards and if other people are as bad as I […]
Okay folks, Mouseketeer blog-roll call; this week’s review is all about poetry and music …
“Poetry as music?” you ask. Not really; why do certain poetry blogs favor name-dropping various CDs and musical artists for no apparent reason? Is it because they are listening to that very track on that very CD as they […]
Eduardo C. Corral talks today in his blog of feeling down and blue and putting Cyndi Lauper on his stereo. He recommends her live version of Joni Mitchell’s Carey. Cyndi Lauper (!) — good god, how these two words are sending my groggy head whirling back in memory. Was there a time1 […]
“In the story/ of every river, there’s a twist/ where it vanishes under ground.”
– Dean Young, from Periodicity of Clouds
“Did you ever/ stand and shiver/ just from lookin’/ at a river?”
– Ramblin’ Jack Elliott
Today feels like a day for a road-trip;a trip or transmogrification — one way or the other. Things are […]
Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O, my Best Beloved; I have been reading blogs of late. I find it interesting that many poets post short lists of what they are reading; however, the one thing we do not do very well as blog-poets and thinkers […]
Today seems the day of missed events, say, birthdays. Since I come from a tradition that does not celebrate ancestor worship, the two “life events” (for lack of a better term) we pay attention to in other people are their births and their deaths … and not much in-between. I thought about this […]
“What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God’s closet.”
– August Wilson (1945-2005)
By way of respect for […]
(ATTENTION FRIENDS: ALWAYS CALL FIRST TO VERIFY VENUE)
At first I was going to simply title this “Mid-Michigan Poetry Events,” since that is the distance I usually can push my auto to drive to a poetry reading or artistic shindig. However, that leaves out most of the actual poetry occurring all around me. Yes, […]
I turned on my local NPR station, WKAR (our motto: “Nostalgia for 1965 is Not a Crime”) a station I was raised on and which I love, only to find another bitchin’ harpsichord solo underway. Why, Gurus of Classical Music, with the wide range of exquisite, carnal, mesmeric classical music in the world, does […]
It was about a year ago I started my search for the Armenian Sonnet. It was a description of the work of Vahan Tekeyan (1879-45) by Diana Der-Hivanessian, poet and translator, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: “… his painstakingly honed sonnets have earned him a reputation as a visionary” (page […]
Self-portrait at 35. After many years of spiritual beggary and lackadaisical destitution I recently saw Akira Kurosawa’s Ran again. According to the DVD box the title translates into chaos. And why should chaos interest us? We value order, or at least the idea of order, and yet it is chaos, easygoing and […]
One of the aims for this website is to generate a new home for translations. The whole concept of the power of good translations was brought home to me during one of the conversations held at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival at the Duke Farms. I attended “The Mysterious Life Within Translation” […]
… crawling through the poetry guidebooks so you don’t have to …
Surprisingly, there is a large selection of websites devoted to the villanelle. True, most of them contain the exact same examples of good villanelles (you’d think besides Dylan Thomas there were only four other villanelle-poets in the whole, wide world: W.H. Auden, […]
Perhaps Jazz Poetry might not be the way to go for a villanelle? It is hard to say, what with the need to hear a refrain half a dozen times. Isn’t that the soul of jazz, though? The mind-blowing refrain that is at once modern and classical, hep and primitive, old and […]
The world is full of bad villanelles but good dim sum. It seems a safe estimate to make from a simple glance at what we have available to us.1 Perhaps the trouble lies when poets who normally work in free-verse attempt a bombastic, mannered and flamboyant form? Ronald E. McFarland, in his […]
This morning it is raining. There is a smell in the air I associate with larger cities and their aging struts, domes, turrets and stones — terrible permanence? mellow decrepitude? unending yearning? — whatever it is, rain seems to release it. I smelled it last time I was in Chicago with Shelby. […]