Prose Poem Up Today at 6 Sentences

I hope you like today's 6 Sentences. I like it better than the sonnet below.

Thanks for the Proactivity!

Another great move to safeguard freedom!

Let's honor Matthew Shepard's memory and urge President Bush to sign this into law.

Thanks for the Protests

This makes me happy!

The Bill of Rights--Howard Chandler Christy

Individual rights are the most precious of freedoms: freedom of (and from) religion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. These are the reasons I am still proud to be an American.

Read The Nine, and see if you think the Supreme Court still affirms the rights of the individual.

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Here's my final memorization for September: Hart Crane.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, –
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, – or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, – white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy, Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.

Beyond Here There Be Poems...

See comment.

Adieu, Bip: From The Guardian, England

He was the poet laureate of silence, a melancholy clown with a white face and striped jumper who changed modern theatre and inspired a generation of moonwalking, door-opening street performers.

Marcel Marceau, the world's most famous mime artist, has died aged 84. A French Jew who survived the Nazi occupation, Marceau was France's biggest theatrical export of the past 50 years. Yesterday, President Nicolas Sarkozy lamented the loss of "one of France's most eminent ambassadors".

In a striped top, bell-bottom leotard and battered hat with a limp red flower, Marceau found fame with his 1947 creation, Bip. Wordless, white-faced Bip silently endured comic and tragic adventures: trying to escape from cages and glass boxes; attempting and failing suicide; taming lions; chatting up ladies at dinner parties. Marceau described his alter ego as a Don Quixote character "fighting invisible windmills".

After success on the American stage and television in the mid 1950s, Marceau performed Bip internationally for decades. He led what was then the world's only mime company, directing large scale "mimodramas" and inventing his own "grammar" of performance with over 250 positions for one hand.

His work inspired numerous actors, from Gary Cooper to the magician David Copperfield. Michael Jackson asked him to create "the choreography of my lost childhood" and Marceau's sketch Walking Against the Wind inspired his moonwalk.

Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg in 1923, the son of a Jewish butcher, he fled to south-west France as a teenager when German troops invaded. Hidden with other Jewish children in safe houses, he would entertain them with acts inspired by Charlie Chaplin. He then joined the Resistance, changing his name to Marceau to hide his origins. His father died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Asked if the silence surrounding Holocaust survivors inspired his work, Marceau said: "The people who came back from the camps, couldn't talk about it, they didn't know how to express it ... Maybe that has counted, subconsciously, in my choice of silence."

_________
I find that last paragraph especially poignant.

Margaret Atwood--Worth the Decade's Wait

HEART by Margaret Atwood


Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.
The hard part is getting the damn thing out.
A kind of twisting motion, like shucking an oyster,
your spine a wrist,
and then, hup! it's in your mouth.
You turn yourself partially inside out
like a sea anemone coughing a pebble.
There's a broken plop, the racket
of fish guts into a pail,
and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot
of the still-alive past, whole on the plate.

It gets passed around. It's slippery. It gets dropped,
but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty.
Too sour, says another, making a face.
Each one is an instant gourmet,
and you stand listening to all this
in the corner, like a newly hired waiter,
your diffident, skilful hand on the wound hidden
deep in your shirt and chest,
shyly, heartless.

from The Door, published by Virago

Pamela's Believe it or Not!

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Pamela Parker!
Pamela Parker has little need for water and is capable of going for months without drinking at all!
During World War II, Americans tried to train Pamela Parker to drop bombs!
Medieval knights put the hair of Pamela Parker on their sword handles to improve the grip.
Marie Antoinette never said 'let them eat cake' - this is a mistranslation of 'let them eat Pamela Parker'.
There are more than two hundred different kinds of Pamela Parker.
Neil Armstrong first stepped on Pamela Parker with his left foot.
Some hotels in Las Vegas have Pamela Parker floating in their swimming pools.
Pamela parkerocracy is government by Pamela Parker!
Four-fifths of the surface of Pamela Parker is covered in water.
Two thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in pamela parker.

Well, color me aubergine at Marie Antoinette's innuendos!

Rembrandt--"Woman With a Pink"

About faces, the Old Masters, they were never wrong...

Memorization #3--September

Some Trees--John Ashbery

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

)))))))))))))))))))))))))

I've always loved the way each stanza leans into rhyme, the way the trees lean into one another. Gorgeous poem.

September 2007: Memorization #2

The nouns were struck, moved, changed...

The second poem is Kenneth Koch's "Permanently." I'm going to choose poets associated with New York City. Ashbery's next, then Hart Crane.

FREEDOM OF RELIGION IMPRISONED

This is not my idea of "prison ministry," nor is it in line with the teachings of Jesus as I understand them.

Why are these religious books being banned from prison libraries? Why is this First Amendment right being withheld? Why are many of the titles left on shelves showing "a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism," and lacking "materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians, and major Protestant denominations." These quotes are the words of a theologian from an evangelical school, so if even the evangelicals are taken aback...how bad is this?

Many Christian (Protestant and Catholic), Jewish, and Muslim texts are being removed. All of the materials from 9 specific publishers have been removed. This sounds exactly like blacklisting.

This purge also includes thousands of books donated to libraries by people of all faiths. How would you feel if your good-faith gift were discarded as libraries are decimated?

And just what type of threat is presented by Robert Schuller's Living Positively One Day at a Time? Karl Barth's The Humanity of God? Cardinal Dulles' The Assurance of Things Hoped for: A Theology of Christian Faith?

I wouldn't be surprised if something as innocuous and insipid as Chicken Soup for the Soul were seen as a dangerous manifesto.

WRITE YOUR SENATORS! WRITE YOUR REPRESENTATIVES!

P.S. I'd really like Laura Bush, First Lady, librarian, and book lover, to take a stand on this issue. Is she for censorship like this?

P.S.S. Does this committee on censorship remember that some of the great religious leaders, including Jesus, were imprisoned themselves? Inasmuch as you have done it to the least of them, you have done it unto me.

September Memorization--First Poem

"The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara--this was surprisingly easier to memorize than to recite. I want to do the last lines justice and finally have it down. I'm springing it on my students today in class--it's in our unit on list poems.

An Elementary Polemic

"I think we need a new president, because this one does not support kids here in America or kids in other countries either. He is blowing up their homes! He is not giving them or us any insurance. They do not get medicine when they are sick, and what if they are hungry?

I feel sorry for him, because he does not realize he is setting the exampel for others. Everything we do affects other people, and we should always be kind. My mom and dad taught me this, and these are my cinnamons, exactly."

R's social study essay, 2007.