M.C.--but not Hammer

Who Should Paint You: M.C. Escher

Open and raw, you would let your true self show for your portrait. And even if your painting turned out a bit dark, it would be honest.

What Artist Should Paint Your Portrait?

It Pays to Improve Your...

Your Vocabulary Score: A+

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

It's Freezing Here!

THE ICE HOUSE--James Wright

The house was really a cellar deep beneath the tower of the old
Belmont Brewery. My father's big shoulders heaved open the door
from the outside, and from within the big shoulders of the ice-man
leaned and helped. The slow door gave. My brother and I walked
in delighted by our fear, and laid our open palms on the wet yellow
sawdust. Outside the sun blistered the paint on the corrugated roofs
of the shacks by the railroad; but we stood and breathed the rising
steam of that amazing winter, and carried away in our wagon the
immense fifty-pound diamond, while the old man chipped us each
a jagged little chunk and then walked behind us, his hands so calm
they were trembling for us, trembling with exquisite care.



Lakeside View #1: Brewery, Bottle House, Ice House

Free Writing under the Influence of Lynn Emanuel

Caution: Please note that BABUSHKA in Russian means aged woman or grandmother (Baba is short for this). It does not mean headscarf when used in Russia.

(This is an excerpt from a longer piece about my family’s heritage--I Led Three Lives: The Rerun Years. Yes, my family’s of Russian descent. No, we weren’t supposed to talk about this during the RED SCARE of the 1950s. Yes, we do have a specific history of glassblowing, public scenes, and love for Pasternak. No, we don’t own a Faberge egg or any photographs of Olympic skaters. Whatever this is—memoir? poem? not-so-urban legend? shameful sentiment?—it began its life as a villanelle then fled, as did Baba herself, outside formal constraint).

SNIP SNIP SNIP SNAP SNAP SNAP SNUR SNUR SNUR

"Coincidence? I think Not!" Thank you, Maxwell Smart.

What Is Poetry?--John Ashbery


The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

___________
Regarding that last line's question:

"The word anthology comes from a Greek word that means bouquet”
William Matthews, "Personal and Impersonal"

What I want for Christmas and 39 Reasons Why I Deserve It

1. What is your occupation? Transcriptionist/adjunct teacher.
2. What color are your socks right now? Red
3. What are you listening to right now? Hank Williams, Senior. Every once in a while, I have to follow the red-gravel road to Heartbreak City. (Now, all CDs of his offspring are banned in this household, due to an unfortunate encounter in a local establishment. Suffice it to say that Bocephus went the way of all good hockey pucks).
4. What was the last thing that you ate? Eggs Benedict. Because I deserve them.
5. Can you drive a stick shift? Yes, but the results aren't pretty.
6. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Pink (to clash with the socks)
7. Last person you spoke to on the phone? Harvey
8. Last letter you received was from: The IRS-a $400 refund check. I was frostin' amazed, to paraphrase ADT.
9. How old are you today? One day older than dirt, and a day younger than mud
10. Favorite drinks? Coffee
11. What is your favorite sport to watch? Basketball or tennis--it's a tossup (no pun intended)
12. Have you ever dyed your hair? Not on purpose, but I did just lop off 2 feet of it.
13. Paper or plastic? This is where situational ethics come into play-I'm not in favor of plastic towels or paper bands.
14. Favorite food? Pasta alla mara
15. What was the last movie you watched? Stranger than Fiction
16. Favorite day of the year? Christmas Eve, especially if it's snowing
17. What do you do to vent anger? Bitch, bitch, bitch
18. What was your favorite toy as a child? Tied: My bike. My Baby Pat-A-Burp doll. My GI Joe with KUNG FU death grip.
19. What is your favorite--fall or spring? Fall.
20. Hugs or kisses? Depends on how much lipstick I'm wearing. And on whether there's mistletoe or chocolate involved.
21. Cherries or Blueberries? Cherries
22. Living arrangements? House (1893 Queen Anne-painted yellow with green, gold, cream and purple trim)
23. Poetry or Fiction? Bi-genre (like both rhyme and reason)
24. Gold or Silver-Yes, and platinum, copper, Bakelite, Lucite-I heart costume jewelry. The more rhinestones the better has always been my motto.
25. Who's the real Bond? Fleming's version-but for a blonde, Daniel Craig is rather, yowsa.26. When was the last time you cried? Last week, when an iron fell on my foot. The iron must be severely depressed, as it definitely is not overwork that led to its plunge.
27. What is on the floor of your closet? My closet has a floor? WOW. I thought the shoes were piled all the way down to the basement.
28. What's the funniest thing you read recently? A newbie (transcriptionist in training) transcribed the patient was without focal neurological defecate.
29. What did you do last night? Read Daniel Anderson's Drunk in Sunlight-what a terrific book of poems. The formalist in me applauds and wants to write some pentameter.
30. What inspires you? Art.
31. What are you afraid of? What's happened to the hamster?????
32. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers? Cheeseburgers
33. Favorite dog breed? Papillon (my dog)
34. Number of keys on your key ring? 6
35. How many years at your current job? 19 years, 7 months and 5 days (not that I'm counting the 20 years to retirement, or anything such as that. No, sirree, Bob.)
36. Favorite day of the week? Sunday
37. How many states have you lived in? Four
38. Favorite holidays? Thanksgiving and Easter.
39. Ever driven a motorcycle or heavy machinery? Heavy machinery, yes; a motorcycle, no. (I have ridden an elephant and a camel, though not simultaneously).

I must have a cold...

There is no doubt that I am from a notch in the Bible Belt--the Kentucky hillbilly accent is my true timbre--not the South, not the Midwest, but the Commonwealth.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The South
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Angels from Two Perspectives

Rilke--from The Duino Elegies ("First Elegy")

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying


Levin--from In the Surgical Theatre ("The Baby on the Table")

--I can't tell
if they are bending in lamentation or praising
hallelujah, if the egg
is a cross
in a circle of light—when will they lower
the kiss, the fist, the sharpened
scalpel, the angels
are waiting, calm, impassive, the emanations
of science
in each white face—
Can you help me sew up
what they're about to open? Can you feel
the chill of the table
on your own small back?

Auden was right--and I wasn't.

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

Why I'm Thankful

My faith. My family. Pumpkin fudge. Hot chocolate pie. Cornucopias. New books. Poetry.

Poetry Daily doesn't always nail it, but this did today. I'm ordering the book. (Read this aloud--it's even more awesome).

When the Burning Begins

(for Otis Douglas Smith, my father)

The recipe for hot water cornbread is simple:
Cornmeal, hot water. Mix till sluggish,
then dollop in a sizzling skillet.
When you smell the burning begin, flip it.
When you smell the burning begin again,
dump it onto a plate. You've got to wait
for the burning and get it just right.

Before the bread cools down,
smear it with sweet salted butter
and smash it with your fingers,
crumple it up in a bowl
of collard greens or buttermilk,
forget that I'm telling you it's the first thing
I ever cooked, that my daddy was laughing
and breathing and no bullet in his head
when he taught me.

Mix it till it looks like quicksand, he'd say.
Till it moves like a slow song sounds.

We'd sit there in the kitchen, licking our fingers
and laughing at my mother,
who was probably scrubbing something with bleach,
or watching Bonanza,
or thinking how stupid it was to be burning
that nasty old bread in that cast iron skillet.
When I told her that I'd made my first-ever pan
of hot water cornbread, and that my daddy
had branded it glorious, she sniffed and kept
mopping the floor over and over in the same place.

So here's how you do it:

You take out a bowl, like the one
we had with blue flowers and only one crack,
you put the cornmeal in it.
Then you turn on the hot water and you let it run
while you tell the story about the boy
who kissed your cheek after school
or about how you really want to be a reporter
instead of a teacher or nurse like Mama said,
and the water keeps running while Daddy says
You will be a wonderful writer
and you will be famous someday and when
you get famous, if I wrote you a letter and
sent you some money; would you write about me?

and he is laughing and breathing and no bullet
in his head. So you let the water run into this mix
till it moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
which is another thing Daddy said, and even though
I'd never even seen a river,
I knew exactly what he meant.
Then you turn the fire way up under the skillet,
and you pour in this mix
that moves like mud moves at the bottom of a river,
like quicksand, like slow song sounds.

That stuff pops something awful when it first hits
that blazing skillet, and sometimes Daddy and I
would dance to those angry pop sounds,
he'd let me rest my feet on top of his
while we waltzed around the kitchen
and my mother huffed and puffed
on the other side of the door. When you are famous,
Daddy asks me, will you write about dancing
in the kitchen with your father?
I say everything I write will be about you,
then you will be famous too. And we dip and swirl
and spin, but then he stops.
And sniffs the air.

The thing you have to remember
about hot water cornbread
is to wait for the burning
so you know when to flip it, and then again
so you know when it's crusty and done.
Then eat it the way we did,
with our fingers,
our feet still tingling from dancing.
But remember that sometimes the burning
takes such a long time,
and in that time,
sometimes,

poems are born.


Patricia Smith

Starbuck Supreme

THE SPELL AGAINST SPELLING
George Starbuck

(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)

My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place.
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can't?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.

You won't get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I'd sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I'm on their side. I better be, after my brush with "infinitessimal."

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.

And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, "George..."

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
"Their their," I needed to hear them say, "their their."

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."

I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."

"Om?" they inquire. "No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you've only got two more guesses
And you only get one more hint: there's an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers' bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that's all the time extension you're going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don't be surprised if it's the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys."

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini's Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other "Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!" and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.

At Least I'm in the Norton...

Philip Larkin! You scored 45 Demeanour, 54 Debauchery, 58 Traditionalism, and 65 Expression!

Cheer up, asshole. Everyone loves you, and still you treat them like shit. And still they love you! They love you all the more for it! Why is that, do you suppose? Because you're a freakin genius, that's why! You make an insult sound like love song! You spew your venom at the world and the world laps it up! From your dark, ugly little heart gushes forth a veritable geyser of gorgeous ideas and melodious language. I hate you. Let's hang out sometime. Your masterpiece is "The Less Deceived".

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Demeanour You scored higher than 99% on Debauchery You scored higher than 99% on Traditionalism You scored higher than 99% on Expression

Link: The Which Famous Poet Are You Test written by Torontop on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

The Land's Wild Music--Time and Rhythm

Here's a quote:

Although he has written this book of prose… James Galvin think of himself as a poet. To be known as a poet is important to him. It is a matter of temperament, he says. He doesn’t feel prose is up to the tasks to which he wants to put language on the page. “Poetry has a kind of snap to it,” he says. “Getting back to horse terminology, poetry steps out so smart.”

Prose, according to Galvin, is tethered to time and ordered by reason, whereas poetry, ruled by line breaks and shot through with gaps, runs to a beat. It is organized spatially, not temporally; it moves outside time—it is lyric. “If you sit down to write a prose work,” Galvin says, “before you even touch the pen to the paper you have already addressed the idea of the passage of time. And if you sit down to write something that’s in lines, you have already decided to resist that passage.” A line of poetry depends on space; its very purpose is to fill a set space with a particular pattern of beats. A sentence, however, disregards space; it sets out to name something and to say something about that thing: subject and predicate—there is your sentence, no matter how long or short, regardless of its syllable count. Sentences and paragraphs are defined as units of thought. Of thought, you see; not of music, not of space.
__________________

*Italics added.

What do you think? I always think of the accentual/accentual syllabic line as a unit of breath, and necessarily a unit of music because it's based on rhythm. Isn't that timing, if not time? And what about the prose poem? The sheerly syllabic poem? The lyric moments in prose (whole swaths of Beloved and the end of "The Dead" as just two examples)? Aren't these governed more by music and timing than time? I don't think of prose as necessarily harnessed to the predicted predicate moment.

But maybe that's just me.

What We're Learning this Week--"Annabel Lee"

From a class years ago: "Poe's poes are remarkable for their use of illiteration."

Indeed.

Proof that Coffee Stunts Your Growth

David Niven, how you've shrunk...

________________

1. Costume ::
Masquerade:: Anthony Hecht poem "Harlequin"

2. Beg ::
Borrow:: Steel:: Wool

3. Hottie ::
"Venus of Willendorf Visits Lido" (the first drawing Harvey ever gave me, the first time we met)

4. Celebrity ::
Death Match

5. Saturday ::
's Child (if you remember this Monkees' song you are way older than you look)

6. Buckle ::
Swash

7. Doorbell ::
Avon

8. Rude ::
Drunken heckling of my former poetry teacher at a reading

9. Absence ::
Absinthe

10. Hyper ::
pigmented, as in Frank Stella paintings