The Bookity Book & Tall Grass Salon

lacygnette · Sep 25, 2014

Faulkner - I loved him. Reading the quotes made me want to pick up his books again.

Still cogitating on the poems for review. Will definitely send in one - not because I'm any good at it, but to make myself really look at the poem I like and parse out why. Anyone else in?

Pouring rain, sometimes a relief - I don't feel the need to be cheery and outdoors. Wish I could send some to California.

Kylabelle · Sep 25, 2014

I intend to. I also feel I am no good at it. I think one of the purposes of the contest is to attempt to encourage more of us to get more comfortable with commenting on and critiqueing poems. I expect the results of this contest will be very informative in more than one way.

In the Poetry Crit room, we really want good quality critiques and more of them, and also we want (or I do anyway) to feel less like a ghetto. It would be super if a greater swath of the larger community -- non-poets -- felt at ease and felt inspired about critting poems here.

KellyAssauer · Sep 25, 2014

I don't mind doing the occasional crit, but it's a thin line to walk for me. I have a good writer friend that became too well know for her crits. So that worries me some. =)

Chris P · Sep 25, 2014

Let me respond with a story. Humor me for a minute:

My cousin and I recently took a six-hour car ride with her fifteen year old son. Bright kid, talented in the classroom and super friendly. He's got a lot going for him. But being fifteen, he's a bit naive or should I say inexperienced in the mundanities of American life. Only he doesn't know it yet. No matter the subject, he's got it figured out. Mortgages. Car repairs. House repairs. Finance. Politics. If the whole world would just listen to him everyone would be happy. It's just that every time he talks he proves that he has no clue what he's saying. The world just doesn't work the way he thinks it does.

Me providing crits on poetry or on any aspects of any art beyond the surface would be as helpful as my cousin's son's solution to the ebola outbreak. I just don't know enough to be helpful.

whiporee · Sep 25, 2014

Maryn said:
I made absolutely sure our kids were prepared to go out into the world by buying them their own copies of "Uncle Shelby's A-B-Z Book."

Maryn, good parent

I can't find that anywhere. I loved the book. "Here kids. A bright shinny quarter, just for you. Unless your mom took it." Or something like that.

Maryn · Sep 25, 2014

http://www.amazon.com/dp/067121148X/?tag=absowrit-20

O is for Oz

Do you want to visit the wonderful far-off land of Oz where the wizard lives and scarecrows can dance and the road is made of yellow bricks and everything is emerald green?

Well, you can't! Because there is no Land of Oz, and there is no Tin Woodsman, and there is no Santa Claus!

Maybe some day you can go to Detroit.

Maryn, fan of Stanley the crazy murderer who kills little children in their beds

lacygnette · Sep 25, 2014

Well, I don't know too much about poetry either, although I admit to reading a bunch. My favorite poetry book is "The Voice That is Great Within Us." All American poets, fabulous with breadth.

Anyway, while I'm thinking poetry, here's a link to a friend's blog - she had a guest blogger who was included in Best American Poetry this year. He reminded me (profanely) of why we ought to read it.
http://www.workinprogressinprogress.com/2014/09/best-american-poetry-reading-2014-by.html

BTW Kyla, I post in the Literary SYW area and it also sometimes is a ghetto. Who writes literary anymore...sigh. I'll try to get to the poetry crit forum.

Chris P · Sep 25, 2014

I loved the A - B - Z book! Deliaghtfully twisted.

Kylabelle · Sep 26, 2014

Swanny, I know it! These genre barriers are like barbed wire in my soul.

I haven't read the Silverstein book but from the snippets here, I bet it's poetry.

Okay, here be today's offering:
The Writer's Almanac for September 26, 2014

The poem is wrenching but I want it to be moreso somehow. Still, it's an expression I'm grateful for.

George Gershwin, Jane Smiley, T.S. Eliot, and a man named Carl Crow all were born on this date. Crow is the one that fascinates me most. What an intriguing life!

Maryn · Sep 26, 2014

Lives like Crow's make me feel as if I've wasted my time here on earth.

Maryn, who loves her some Gershwin

Kylabelle · Sep 26, 2014

I feel quite sure, Maryn, that there are things you have accomplished and experienced that would have been quite out of Mr. Crow's reach, albeit not as dramatic in the telling or perhaps even as quantifiable.

Kyla, defender of the individual path and the ineffableness of it all.

whiporee · Sep 27, 2014

Damn, did the health department finally shut this place down?

Hope everyone's okay and just too busy watching leaves turn today.

Kylabelle · Sep 28, 2014

Oops, yup, I missed the almanac yesterday. In fact I was recovering all day from a bit too much strenuosity in the garden, but I don't know where anyone else got to. Weekends tend to be pretty quiet anyway, in this already-quiet corner. :hi:

Matt.

Here's today's link:

The Writer's Almanac for September 28, 2014

The poem is wonderful, better as it goes, with a perfect ending.

And today is the day Confucius' birthday is celebrated. He's somebody worth studying, or at least investigating, if you haven't.

It would be curious to listen in on an encounter between Confucius and essayist George Trow, whose birthday was today (is? he might still be alive.) Context means so much and often is not attended to very consciously.

Ouch. After that one I need more coffee. Hope everyone has a swell Sunday.

Chris P · Sep 28, 2014

The colors are starting to be on the decline here. We're getting a last-chance spot of nice weather all alst week and probably for the next few days, but that winter is coming.

The poem was very nice. Some good imagery there.

I visited Battle Abbey at Hastings a few years ago. I wish I had understood more about the warfare of the time, I would have gotten more out of it. For example, the Normans had cavalry and the English did not, and the English hadn't developed the prowess with the long bow they woild later be famous for. In addition, King Harold and his army had been up north and rushed to Hastings, only to arrive exhausted and on foot against rested and mounted Normans. It was a bloodbath. But not knowing the details at the time, I couldn't picture it as well as I could now.

Maryn · Sep 28, 2014

I like today's poem a lot. Anyone who lives where there are four seasons can place themselves in the center of that one.

Thompson's life sounds fascinating and adventurous, the sort few people dare, then or now.

Maryn, devout coward

Kylabelle · Sep 28, 2014

What was most neat about the poem was the ending "Sit. Stay." Taking what are commands to a dog for its behavior and adding that much resonance and layered meaning, doing it so gracefully, is sublime poetry, IMO.

Kylabelle · Sep 29, 2014

Happy Monday.

The Writer's Almanac for September 29, 2014

About the poem, I'll say I feel it's very hard to write a poem that does justice to a single visual moment. This one does that well although I'd want more from the ending -- a lot more.

Today the first radios were sold, those radios we used to listen to, remember that? Enrico Fermi was born, and Dizzy Gillespie played Carnegie Hall for his first performance there of fifty (I would so love to have been there!)

It's said to be the birthday of Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote is one I've never read though I have vague memories of dipping into it at some time.)

It's also the date naturalist John Muir began publishing his letters about Alaska in a San Francisco paper. I'm spending some time in the sentences quoted from him. Nothing at all to add.

Chris P · Sep 29, 2014

Don Quixote is wonderful, just skip the 120 pages of the "Ill advised curiosity" story he inserted. I'm sure it fit in there somewhere, but I sure can't see how :/

The tidbit about the radios is helpful to my historical WIP. My MC has the idea for television in 1917, although his technology is nowhere near how TV actually came to be. I was going to have him compare it to radio, which had been around for a while but apparently not commercially. Hopefully a minor detail I can work around.

Kylabelle · Sep 30, 2014

Good morning.

The Writer's Almanac for September 30, 2014

Today's poem stays still, suspended from its first two lines. It's the poet's birthday. W.S. Merwin is still living,the almanac says, in Hawaii, where he is active in restoring native flora and investigating Buddhism.

Today is also the birthday of Elie Weisel, and of Truman Capote.

For some reason, the dedication of the Hoover Dam gets more column inches than any of these. Huh.

*sips green juice*

Maryn · Sep 30, 2014

The column-inches thing bothers me, even though I like the Hoover Dam just fine.

And I liked the poem. I say it again, this thread has me reading one poem a day and liking around half of them, most quite a bit. That's a big change for me.

Maryn, not a poetry reader

lacygnette · Sep 30, 2014

From what I've read of his, I really like Merwin. And his Buddhism seemed to me at the heart of his work. But this: "He has translated verse from French and Spanish and Italian and Portuguese and Latin, and also from Yiddish and Japanese and Sanskrit." Holy cow!! You'd need at least a working knowledge of those languages, even if you worked with the author.

I, too, love starting my day with a poem. Smooths out the path, at least for a while. And today's is a beaut.

*Lacy, mourning the rejection of a full*

Maryn · Sep 30, 2014

Aww, sorry to hear whoever had the full didn't see it for its wonderfullness. Next one should, right?

kuwisdelu · Sep 30, 2014

I wonder how uncomfortable I can make my all-white poetry class with my postindian poetry?

Professor wanted to see more darkness in my poetry (I've been trying to write more hopeful stuff the last few years, so maybe I've gone a bit soft) so I've been opening veins left and right and bleeding over everything.

Kylabelle · Sep 30, 2014

Share one here?

("postindian"?)

kuwisdelu · Sep 30, 2014

Kylabelle said:
Share one here?

Here's the one I turned in today, all rough and fresh.

He wanted dark so I ran with it. I'd been wanting to write a ballad.

Ballad for Bitterness said:
You left me with this emptiness
in the contours of our bed
where ghosts of you still haunt the sheets
where we fucked and sweat and bled.

But bitterness is my old friend.
She's tattooed in my skin.
I know her face from DNA
passed down from kin to kin.

She walks with me from bar to bar
as I erase your face
and how your mom once called my dad
a traitor to his race.

"A whiskey please," I say as I
dream up hate-songs to sing,
and I'll dilute this blood some more
with natural medicine.

"A whiskey please," I say again,
and drown the loneliness
in burning gulps that remind me
of my Indianness.

The happy couples at the bar
are perfect razor blades,
a fuck-you to my bitterness
by those who’ve got it made.

Face hot and red as Crazy Horse,
I want to fight the world.
With serpents on my tongue, I’ll be
the flags of war unfurled.

I shamble through the wintry night
to find an enemy,
so we can kiss each other’s blood
and share our misery.

I'm rough, I'm tough, I'll fuck shit up,
if you dare to even stare,
and strangers run from the Indian
with vomit in his hair.

But siren lights and pale-faced men
tase through the fever dream.
As handcuffs close behind my back,
I punch and kick and scream.

The cop is you and emptiness,
and the parts of me I hate,
and he's George Armstrong Custer, too.
Ain’t that just fucking great?

I'm sorry, God. I'm sorry, Me.
I'm sorry Mom and Dad.
Am I a real Indian now
or am I just real sad?

A jail cell is a thing that looms
above the hearts of men,
waiting for the relume of fire
in a poet's heavy pen.

This cage is like an empty page,
and against its walls, I'll rage.

(I've been meaning to post in Poetry Critique again, but I want to write people some crits first.)

("postindian"?)

It's a postcolonial term coined by anishinaabe poet Gerald Vizenor to address the fact that "indian" is a name given by Anglo-Americans to describe hundreds of disparate tribes, and how we are attempting to move beyond act of linguistic imperialism.

The Bookity Book & Tall Grass Salon

Sucked in by AW again

unaccounted for

The Anti-Magdalene

Likes metaphors mixed, not stirred

At Sea

Sucked in by AW again

Likes metaphors mixed, not stirred

unaccounted for

At Sea

unaccounted for

unaccounted for

Likes metaphors mixed, not stirred

At Sea

unaccounted for

unaccounted for

Likes metaphors mixed, not stirred

unaccounted for

At Sea

Sucked in by AW again

At Sea

Revolutionize the World

unaccounted for

Revolutionize the World