Creativity Funding: Plus ca change....

NEA funding is still less than New Zealand's culture budget. Even adding in a $155 million allocation to the National Endowment for the Humanities, we still have nothing resembling a national commitment to creativity.

What we might call "the creativity stimulus" goes far beyond job creation and even economic development. Culture is not just something conservatives wage war on. The arts are not just something liberals dress up for on weekends. Creativity can be a powerful form of organizing communities from the bottom up. The economic crisis gives us a chance to rethink the role of creativity in making a vibrant economy and civil society. Artists as well as community organizers cultivate new forms of knowledge and consciousness. One of the unsung stories of the past twenty-five years is how both have used creativity to inspire community development and renewal. Creativity has become the glue of social cohesion in times of turmoil.

La maison en petits cubes

Astounding, really, the things you can find on Twitter!

Creative Nonfiction

I have a memoir-ish/kind-of-lyric essay up at Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal.

Finishing Line Press is going to publish my chapbook, Love and Other Four-Letter Words. I'll let you know details about preordering as soon as I know them.

Best Poem Read This Month: John Brehm

Songbird

Even though I have not seen it,
I know how it could be,
how when the skylark flees
from a falcon's quick pursuit,

it will turn sometimes and begin
to sing, as if to say, "Being
eaten by a falcon is the last thing
in the world I'm worried about.

You cannot catch me, Tra la la.
I've got breath enough to waste
on a song like this, which you
may as well enjoy before I vanish

into air." And the raptor knows
it's true, knows that anyone
foolish enough to sing in such
a circumstance is quite beyond

ever being caught, and that for all
his hunger he'll be given just
a song, tumbling through the air,
as the body he desires disappears.
__________________________________

The world should listen then,
as I am listening now.
Shelley, "To a Skylark"

Deborah Digges, 1950-2009

The Little Book of Hand Shadows

You who began inside me,
see a tortoise, a stork, a wolf come out of my hand.

Stand behind me, your shadow eclipsing
my shadow.

Make the cock crow by opening and closing two fingers.
We can be anyone now.

We can be spirit, ships homing, ten brothers in heaven.
Can you feel the sweet wind of their wing beats?

Can you smell the damp forest
as the walls fill up?

The breathe with things.
Crook your right forefinger which forms a paw.

Remember a crab moves a little sideways.
Pick me up like you used to and whirl me around.

Mother Hubbard's dog's begging.
Your Dapple Grey appears to be running.

Our shadows spill shadows.
They pool, they molt.

They grow out of the dark, they grow
out of themselves.

They crowd the ark, they crowd the world with their finger-ears
and thorny toes and their broken beaks

and knuckled hearts,
their broken beaks and knuckled hearts.

______________________

Heartbreaking news.

Charles Wright's Sestets, Poetry Daily

and all those books, those half-baked books,/sweet yeast for the yellow dust?

Class and Style

The whole thing is great. However, starting at 3:45, this must be the best rockabilly bass I have ever heard.

Broadsided April 2009

Go look....It's gorgeous!

Fear the Artist

Ekphrasis in Elizabeth Bishop's "Filling Station"

From The Telegraph

This links to a great article on learning poetry by heart: Here's an excerpt:

As anyone who loves poetry will testify, when you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. You have a voice that will pop up in your head, whenever you want it, and say something beautiful and consoling and true. A poem can keep you going when you are driving on a lonely motorway, or when you are trapped on some freezing ledge in the Alps, or when you are engaged in any kind of arduous and repetitive physical activity, and need to keep concentration. When some disaster overwhelms you, or when you are feeling unusually cheerful – or when you are experiencing any human feeling whatever – it is amazing how often some line or phrase will swim to the surface and help to articulate your emotions, to intensify them or to console.

Resolution for April (poetry month): Instead of a poem in my pocket, I'm going to put a poem a week into my brain.

Oh.My.God.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

Really great poem (via Land Mammal)

I heard Alicia Ostriker read this at AWP and longed for the the line/stanza breaks. (I took it down in shorthand--does anyone even use those hooks and crooks anymore?) I was glad to find it at Coal Hill Review, where one can also find other fabulous poems, and it's serendipity that the red tulips are blooming in my front yard today.

THE BLESSING OF THE OLD WOMAN, THE TULIP AND THE DOG--Alicia Ostriker

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God’s love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

Ephemera: Doll Dickinson, Paper Flapper