Christmas

A Hymn on the Nativity of My Savior
Ben Jonson

I sing the birth was born tonight,
The Author both of life and light;
The angels so did sound it,
And like the ravished shepherds said,
Who saw the light, and were afraid,
Yet searched, and true they found it.

The Son of God, the eternal King,
That did us all salvation bring,
And freed the soul from danger;
He whom the whole world could not take,
The Word, which heaven and earth did make,
Was now laid in a manger.

The Father's wisdom willed it so,
The Son's obedience knew no "No,"
Both wills were in one stature;
And as that wisdom had decreed,
The Word was now made Flesh indeed,
And took on Him our nature.

What comfort by Him do we win?
Who made Himself the Prince of sin,
To make us heirs of glory?
To see this Babe, all innocence,
A Martyr born in our defense,
Can man forget this story?

In Bimini, without a haze...

We've decided to take a (temporary) break from our Poet of the week feature in order to concentrate on excerpts from chapbooks, anthologies and other poetry books that grab our attention.

Today we've got an excerpt from Derek Walcott's brand-new book, The Prodigal. On one level, it's a travel narrative, a series of collisions between the culture of Walcott's home island of Saint Lucia and that of Europe and Latin America. It's also a personal meditation on old age.

The following is taken from one of Walcott's St. Lucia sections.

Part III, 17, IV

You never think of January as a stormy month,
but the African wind blows rain across the cape,
the combers come in fast and their high surf
explodes irregularly along the Causeway.
It is the season of rainbows, of a thin drizzle
in the wet air; so many, their backs arch
like radiant dolphins, they leap over the hills
above the villages, profuse with benediction,
over the hissing sea and the small fine roads
and the indigo ranges heavy with the darkening rain.
But now, even farther north, in Bimini,
it would be clearer, finer, without a haze
over the lime-green shallows and the violet reefs
and the dark chasms full of wavering reeds,
and the abyss of my deep cowardice,
my fears and treacheries in an old age
foam-crested with conspiratorial murmurings
subliminal, submarine, when my ageing prayer
is, hooked to this craft, to break clear of the nets
to shudder like a great convulsive marlin
into heaven and fall crashing and leap again
scattering prisms and led by veering dolphins
vault for the last time breaking free of the line.

From The Prodigal, copyright © 2004 by Derek Walcott. Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Other places:

More on Derek Walcott (including an audio clip) at The Academy of American Poets.

Writing = home

We just found out about the late Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali and are planning to corral as many of his books as we can, in hopes of making him a featured poet. In the meantime, here's a sample...

Stationery
Agha Shahid Ali

The moon did not become the sun.

It just fell on the desert

in great sheets, reams

of silver handmade by you.

The night is your cottage industry now,

the day is your brisk emporium.

The world is full of paper.

Write to me.


Other places:

A bio., poems and links at The Academy of American Poets.

Agha Shahid Ali on the ghazal (a form of poetry at which he excelled) and more, on Slate.

Much more (including an interview, articles and poems) at Norton Poets Online.

A tribute, Remembering Shahid, by Rafiq Kathwari.

Poet of the week - Rita Dove

We couldn't resist posting one of the pieces from her brand-new book, American Smooth. Here goes:

Fox Trot Fridays
Rita Dove

Thank the stars there's a day
each week to tuck in

the grief, lift your pearls, and
stride brush stride

quick-quick with a
heel-ball-toe. Smooth

as Nat King Cole's
slow satin smile,

easy as taking
one day at a time:

one man and
one woman,

rib to rib,
with no heartbreak in sight—

just the sweep of Paradise
and the space of a song

to count all the wonders in it.

From American Smooth, copyright © 2004 by Rita Dove. Published by W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.

For more on Rita Dove, visit Poetry Daily; also Rita Dove's home page.

Poet of the week - Barbara Hamby

We found Barbara Hamby's love letter to American English on The Writer's Almanac site. Read it aloud - the irreverent humor and genuine feel for street talk might make your day.

Ode to American English
Barbara Hamby

I was missing English one day, American, really,
with its pill-popping Hungarian goulash
of everything from Anglo-Saxon to Zulu, because British English
is not the same, if the paperback dictionary
I bought at Brentano's on the Avenue de l'Opera
is any indication, too cultured by half. Oh, the English
know their dahlias, but what about doowop, donuts,
Dick Tracy, Tricky Dick? With their elegant Oxfordian
accents, how could they understand my yearning for the hotrod,
hotdog, hot flash vocabulary of the U. S. of A.,
the fragmented fandango of Dagwood's everyday flattening
of Mr. Beasley on the sidewalk, fetuses floating
on billboards, drive-by monster hip-hop stereos shaking
the windows of my dining room like a 7.5 earthquake,
Ebonics, Spanglish, "you know" used as comma and period,
the inability of 90% of the population to get the past perfect:
I have went, I have saw, I have tooken Jesus into my heart,
the battle cry of the Bible Belt, but no one uses
the King James anymore, only plain-speak versions,
in which Jesus, raising Lazarus from the dead, says,
"Dude, wake up," and the L-man bolts up like a B-movie
mummy, "Whoa, I was toasted." Yes, ma'am,
I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy,
rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering,
shopaholic rant. I miss its quotidian beauty, its querulous
back-biting righteous indignation, its preening rotgut
flag-waving cowardice. Suffering Succotash, sputters
Sylvester the Cat; sine die, say the pork-bellied legislators
of the swamps and plains. I miss all those guys, their Tweety-bird
resilience, their Doris Day optimism, the candid unguent
of utter unhappiness on every channel, the midnight televangelist
euphoric stew, the junk mail, voice mail vernacular.
On every boulevard and rue I miss the Tarzan cry of Johnny
Weismueller, Johnny Cash, Johnny B. Goode,
and all the smart-talking, gum-snapping hard-girl dialogue,
finger-popping x-rated street talk, sports babble,
Cheetoes, Cheerios, chili dog diatribes. Yeah, I miss them all,
sitting here on my sidewalk throne sipping champagne
verses lined up like hearses, metaphors juking, nouns zipping
in my head like Corvettes on Dexadrine, French verbs
slitting my throat, yearning for James Dean to jump my curb.

From Babel © University of Pittsburgh

Poet of the week - Liz Waldner

We live in a dairy-farming area and, on occasion, have had cows on our lawn. (They invited themselves.) So we couldn't resist posting a poem that begins with "Cows on the spine of the hill..."

Where, Broken (the darkness
Liz Waldner

Cows on the spine of the hill like the spine of a book are some letters
Letters with legs; like an E and an L or an R that is squared like the box of the
body of cows
Like the spine of a book, the legs and the bodies of cows spell out the name and
maybe the head spells also the name of the book on whose spine is embossed
the name made of grass:
The light of the many days and the darkness the roots of the grass pull up out
of the hill and the light pushes down with the feet of the cows and the darkness
inside of the skulls of the cows, all these the name has eaten
The lines of the spines of the cows grazing the sky, the meeting of spine and sky
also marking the arcing edges of dark or light letters on dark or light pages
where, broken, the name grazes the thing it will know or mean or become
These are the choices.
However, there are other books.

From A Point Is That Which Has No Part by Liz Waldner, published by University of Iowa Press. Copyright © 2000 by Liz Waldner.

Poet of the week - Dorothy Parker

Comment
Dorothy Parker

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.

From Not So Deep as a Well, 1937.

Other places:

A miscellany of Dorothy Parker quotes can be found here.

A Parker bio. and poems can be found at AmericanPoems.com. Grit your teeth, close the popunder ads and enjoy the rest!

Poet of the week - Ibrahim Ag Alhabib

We've been listening to Amassakoul, the latest release by the Tuareg group Tinariwen, and were impressed by the powerful song lyrics by the group's leader, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib. Although we have to present them in translation, we're certain you'll find them haunting and evocative of life in the Sahara.

Ténéré Daféd Nikchan

I'm in the desert with a wood fire
I'm keeping the night company
With its shooting stars
Life
In the ruins
These traces that cry memories
Deep in nostalgia
My head resting on a pillow of woes
Tonight I sleep in the ruins
I follow the traces of my past
It sometimes befalls me to live like this
My heart oppressed and tight
And I feel the thirst of my soul
Then I hear some music
Sounds, the wind
Some music which takes me far, far away
To the clear light of morning
Where, before my heart
The brilliance of the stars goes out

Copyright © Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, 2003. Translator unknown.

Other places:

Tinariwen is on tour now. Click here for dates and locations.

Pablo Neruda

We've skipped our "poet of the week" feature for a while, since (due to glitches in Blogger's software) new posts aren't registering as usual. But after listening to a radio program on poetry and music, we realized we'd been very remiss - 2004 is Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's centennial, and we've neglected to post anything by him.

Without further ado, here's an untitled poem he wrote late in life, translated by William O'Daly.

My name was Reyes, Catrileo,
Arellano, Rodríguez, I have forgotten
my true names.
I was born with a surname
of old oaks, of saplings,
of hissing wood.
I was deposited
among rotting leaves:
this newborn sank down
in the defeat and in the birth
of forests that were falling
and poor houses that had recently been weeping.
I was not born but rather they founded me:
all at once they gave me every name,
every family's name:
I was called thicket, then plum tree,
larch and then wheat,
that is why I am so much and so little,
so wealthy and so destitute,
because I come from below,
from the earth.


From The Sea and the Bells, Pablo Neruda, Copper Canyon Press, 1988. This poem was originally published by Fundación Pablo Neruda, 1973.

Other places:

The Academy of American Poets' Pablo Neruda page has a good bio., bibiliograpy, and many links.

Poet of the week - Dana Gioia

The Country Wife
Dana Gioia

She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.
Following their voices on the breeze,
She makes her way. Through the dark trees
The distant stars are all she sees.
They cannot light the way she's gone.
She makes her way through the dark trees
Down to the lake to be alone.

The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.
She cannot see the winds that break
The night reflected on the lake
But knows they motion for her sake.
These are the choices they have brought her:
The night reflected on the lake,
The fire of stars changed into water.


from Daily Horoscope, Graywolf Press, © 1986 Dana Gioia

Poet of the week - Nuno Júdice

Recipe for Making the Colour Blue
Nuno Júdice

If you wish to make the colour blue
take a piece of sky and put it in a pot
large enough to place on the flame of the horizon.
Stir into the blue a pinch of early morning red
until it dissolves. Pour everything
into a brass bowl that has been well washed
to eliminate all of the afternoon’s impurities.
Finally, sift in a few smidgens of gold from the sand
of midday until the colour adheres to the bottom of the bowl.
To prevent the colours from separating with time,
drop a charred peach pit into the liquid.
It will disintegrate, leaving no telltale
sign, not even – from the black ash – an ochre trace
on the golden surface. You may then raise the colour
to eye level and compare it with genuine blue.
The two colours will look so alike
that you cannot distinguish one from the other.
This was how I did it – I, Abraham ben Judah Ibn Haim,
illuminator from the town of Loulé. And I left the recipe
for whoever, one day, would imitate the sky.

© Translation: 1997, Richard Zenith

We found this piece on Poetry International Web, one of the best poetry resources we've come across in a long time.

Poet of the week - Nancy Willard

Choosing a Stone
Nancy Willard

The tide pulls back, leaving its cargo of stones
on the broad counter of sand.
A boy takes only black stones halved with a white thread,
like a parcel too private to open.
His mother gathers stones that mimic food:
two quartz eggs and a granite potato
and a loaf of bread with a cold crust.

This man hunts the white stones,
smooth as unblemished fruit
made, he feels, for his hand alone.
He picks one up, fingers a hairline crack.
Throws it back. This woman saves stones
on the verge of extinction. Thin as a cat's ear,
they shine like coins rubbed faceless
for luck, for safe crossing.

From In the Salt Marsh, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Poet of the week - Yannis Ritsos

Part 3 of A Greek Miscellany. (See previous posts.)

People and Suitcases
Yannis Ritsos

Don't leave your wet towel on the table.
It's time to start straightening up.
In a month or so, another summer will be over.
What a sad demobilization, putting away bathing suits,
sunglasses, short-sleeves, sandals,
twilight colors on a luminous sea. Soon,
the outdoor cinemas will be closed, their chairs
stacked in a corner. The boats will sail
less often. Safely back home, the lovely tourist girls
will sit up late, shuffling through color glossies
of swimmers, fishermen, oarsmen--not us.
Already, up in the loft, our suitcases wait to find out
when we'll be leaving, where we're going this time,
and for how long. You also know that inside
those scuffed, hollow suitcases there's a bit of string,
a couple of rubber bands, and not a single flag.

From Late Into the Night, translated by Martin McKinsey. Copyright 1995, Oberlin College Press.

Click here for more on Yannis Ritsos.

A Greek Miscellany, part 2

In the spirit of the opening ceremonies at the Athens Olympics, we'd like to present Colin Wood's version of Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops:

Odysseus and the Cyclops movie. You'll need Quicktime in order to watch...

(Sometimes we like Classics Lite - be sure to check out the anachronistic dialogue and Odysseus' sporty cowboy bandanna. Who knew?)

A Greek Miscellany

The Athens Olympics are in full swing, so we thought we'd post some Greek poetry in lieu of a "Poet of the week" feature.

WINTER 1942
Manolis Anagnostakis

The calendar once more dawned Sunday.

Seven days
One after the other
Bound together
All the same
Like the jet-black beads
Of seminary rosaries.

One, four, fifty-two

Six whole days for one
Six days waiting
Six days thinking
For one day
For just one day
For just one hour
Afternoon and sun.

Identical Hours
Without awareness
Trying to shine
On a background of pages
The colour of mourning.

A day of dubious joy
Perhaps just one hour
A few moments.
In the evening the waiting begins again
Again another week, four, fifty-two

………………………………

Today it's been raining since morning
A fine yellow sleet.

© Translation: Philip Ramp . Reprinted from Modern Greek Poetry.

From Three Poems of Rock and Sea
Pavlos D. Pezaros

Greece,
Every time I write your name
- As I fill in the backs of envelopes -
In foreign letters
I cry.

From Poetry Greece, Issue 3, Winter 2001/2001.

Poet of the week - Gwendolyn Brooks

the sonnet-ballad
Gwendolyn Brooks

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate - and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?


From "Appendix to The Anniad: leaves from a loose-leaf
war diary" in Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks, published
by Harper. Copyright © 1949 by Gwendolyn Brooks. All rights reserved.

Read more about Gwendolyn Brooks at The Academy of American Poets website and Modern American Poetry. Listen to Brooks reading two of her poems on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

(Our opinion: Brooks should have been a Poet Laureate.)

!#@*

Or, in this case, simply &.

&
Rex Wilder

Do I have to spell it out? And is a grand-
parent or sacred text, respect on demand
Certainly, a star on every language's
Hollywood Boulevard, but no teenager's
First choice when heady impatience
Walks into the room, her future tense
All beguilement. Eternity's stunt double,
Space with impeccable timing, trouble
Looked forward to: the ampersand insists
On promiscuity, on strangers' trysts,
No previous likeness necessary until later,
When they get to know each other better.
One line, one pick-up line to prove
No match is inconsequential, or love.

From The Southern Review, Volume 39, Number 4 (Autumn 2003).

We found this on the Poetry Daily website.

Poet of the week - Randall Mann

While browsing Poetry Daily, we found this piece by Randall Mann...

The Heron
Randall Mann

A pond the color of Oriental teas.
A heron refusing to look anywhere but east.

Mangroves flecked with a fire,
deep-set birches rife

with the wait for night. In stone,
the heron stares: the stoic tones

of the sky a storied procession of palms;
their red-tipped fronds, overhanging lamps.

Water-bird, it has been centuries since I felt
anything for you. You have been left:

look around. Why does the owl
rest on a goddess's shoulder while you wade so low?


From Complaint in the Garden, 2003 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry for a First Book, (Zoo Press).

Monotony

We came across this poem in an anthology, and think the pauses say more than words ever could.

After Forty Years of Marriage, She Tries
a New Recipe for Hamburger Hot Dish
Leo Dangel

"How did you like it?" she asked.

"It's all right," he said.

"This is the third time I cooked
it this way. Why can't you
ever say if you like something?"

"Well if I didn't like it, I
wouldn't eat it," he said.

"You never can say anything
I cook tastes good."

"I don't know why all the time
you think I have to say it's good.
I eat it, don't I?"

"I don't think you have to say
all the time it's good, but once
in awhile you could say
you like it."

"It's all right," he said.

_________________________________________________

Leo Dangel's focus: rural American life. For more of his poems, look here.

Poet of the week - Mark Strand

The Coming of Light
Mark Strand

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.


Excerpted from The Story of Our Lives by Mark Strand. Copyright © 2002 by Mark Strand.

Look here for more on Mark Strand. (This site includes plenty of links to get you going.)

Carnaval Plea

We're big fans of Brazilian popular music, and of American poet Elizabeth Bishop, who lived in Brazil for many years. She loved Latin American literature and was an accomplished translator. Here's her rendering of one of the hit sambas from Rio's 1965 Carnaval season:

Come, my mulata,
Take me back!
You're the joker
In my pack,
The prune in my pudding,
Pepper in my pie.
My package of peanuts,
The moon in the sky.

From Bishop's The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979).

We also recommend Bishop's translation of The Diary of "Helena Morley" - it's a great introduction to everyday life in 19th-century Brazil. The US edition (Noonday Press, 1995) is out of print, but there are lots of used copies for sale on the web. If you want a new edition, try Bloomsbury Magazine's bookshop.

Read more about Elizabeth Bishop here.

Poet of the Week - Naomi Shihab Nye

Half-and-Half
Naomi Shihab Nye

You can't be, says a Palestinian Christian
on the first feast after Ramadan.
So, half-and-half and half-and-half.
He sells glass. He knows about broken bits,
chips. If you love Jesus you can't love
anyone else. Says he.
At his stall of blue pitchers on the Via Dolorosa
he's sweeping. The rubbed stones
feel holy. Dusting of powdered sugar
across faces of date-stuffed mamool.
This morning we lit the slim candles
which bend over at the waist by noon.
For once the priests weren't fighting
in church for the best spots to stand.
As a boy, my father listened to them fight.
This is partly why he prays in no language
but his own. Why I press my lips
to every exception.
A woman opens a window – here and here
and here –
placing a vase of blue flowers
on an orange cloth. I follow her.
She is making soup from what she had left
in the bowl, the shriveled garlic and bent bean.
She is leaving nothing out.

("Half-and-Half" copyright @1998 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted from "Fuel," by Naomi Shihab Nye.)

________________________________________________________________

Read Naomi Shihab Nye's The Wreath that Eats Two Ice Cubes.

A lake of finest ale for the King of Kings

We know, we know, it's an unusual title! But we didn't make it up - it comes from early medieval Ireland. The supposed author: Saint Brigid of Kildare. The reason for that line - well, here's Thomas Cahill's telling of it:

"Following [Brigid's] conversion, her father, an extremely wealthy man, was appalled to find his beautiful daughter giving away his stores to beggars. Quite out of control, he threw Brigid into the back of his chariot, screaming 'It is neither out of kindness nor honor that I take you for a ride: I am going to sell you to the King of Leinster to grind corn.' Arriving at the king's enclosure, the father 'unbuckled his sword, leaving it in the chariot beside Brigid, so that - out of respect - he could approach the king unarmed.' No sooner had the father gone off than a leper appeared, begging Brigid for her help. Since the only thing handy was her father's sword, she gave it to him. Meanwhile, the father was making his offer to the king, who must have smelled something fishy, and insisted on meeting the girl before accepting. When king and father came out to the chariot, the father noticed immediately that his sword was missing and demanded to know where it was. When Brigid told him, 'he flew into a wild rage' and began to beat her.

"'Stop,' cried the king, and called Brigid to him. 'Why do you steal your father's property and give it away?'"

"'If I had the power,' answered Brigid, 'I would steal all your royal wealth, and give it to Christ's brothers and sisters.' The king quickly declined the father's kind offer because 'your daughter is too good for me.'"

Cahill goes on to tell us that Brigid's monastery was (not surprisingly) a haven of hospitality.

And here's the grace they said:

I should like a great lake of finest ale
For the King of Kings.
I should like a table of the choicest food
For the family of heaven.
Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith,
And let the food be forgiving love.

I should welcome the poor to my feast,
For they are God's children.
I should welcome the sick to my feast,
For they are God's joy.
Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place,
And the sick dance with the angels.

God bless the poor.
God bless the sick.
God bless the human race.
God bless our food,
God bless our drink,
All homes, O God, embrace.

Well, what can we do but agree with Brigid? She knew she was right.

__________________________________________________________
 
Look here for a fuller version of Brigid's bio., along with more poetry attributed to her.

Listen to Donal Donnelly read a short passage from Thomas Cahill's book, How The Irish Saved Civilization (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995).
 
Our sincerest thanks to Thomas Cahill for his writing style and his many books, and to Robert Van de Wyer for his translation of "Brigid's Feast," from his book Celtic Fire (Doubleday, 1990).
 
Last of all, we cribbed "she knew she was right" from novelist Ivy Litvinov, whose story we might tackle in the future.  For now, though, you can read her truth-is-stranger-than-fiction biography here. Our thanks to the late Isaiah Berlin (and Oxford University's archives) for this article.

Dollar Brand, klezmorim and hemidemisemiquavers

It's no secret - we love music as much as we love words. And we like Garrison Keillor's public radio show, The Writer's Almanac. His anthology of works that have been broadcast in seasons past is aptly titled Good Poems (Viking, 2002).Chapters include "Snow," "Yellow" and "Failure," so we decided to post a few poems from (what else?) "Music."

The Fantastic Names of Jazz
Hayden Carruth

Zoot Sims, Joshua Redman,
Billie Holiday, Pete Fountain,
Fate Marable, Ivie Anderson,
Meade Lux Lewis, Mezz Mezzrow,
Manzie Johnson, Marcus Roberts,
Omer Simeon, Miff Mole, Sister
Rosetta Tharpe, Freddie Slack,
Thelonious Monk, Charlie Teagarden,
Max Roach, Paul Celestin, Muggsy
Spanier, Boomie Richman, Panama
Francis, Abdullah Ibrahim, Piano
Red, Champion Jack Dupree,
Cow Cow Davenport, Shirley Horn,
Cedar Walton, Sweets Edison,
Jaki Byard, John Heard, Joy Harjo,
Pinetop Smith, Tricky Sam
Nanton, Major Holley, Stuff Smith,
Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan,
Mr. Cleanhead Vinson, Ruby Braff,
Cootie Williams, Cab Calloway,
Lockjaw Davis, Chippie Hill,
And of course Jelly Roll Morton.

Alley Violinist
Robert Lax

if you were an alley violinist

and they threw you money
from three windows

and the first note contained
a nickel and said,
when you play, we dance and
sing, signed
a very poor family.

and the second one contained
a dime and said
i like your playing very much,
signed
a sick old lady.

and the last one contained
a dollar and said,
beat it,

would you:
stand there and play?

beat it?

walk away playing your fiddle?

____________________________________________

Other places:

Hemispherical, our music blog.

All About Jazz, for info. on those names and much more.

The Academy of American Poets website.

Nicholas Humbert and Werner Penzel's Three Windows, a video installation celebrating the life and work of Robert Lax.

Last but not least, definitions of those plaguey words in the title of this post. Look here for "klezmorim" and here for "hemidemisemiquaver." (Note: South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim used the nickname "Dollar Brand" on his early recordings.)

To keep me from palpitating....

We know, it's an odd name for a post, but what the hey - it's a fine Irish idiom. We've been reading The Country Girls, a novel by one of Ireland's finest contemporary writers, Edna O'Brien. Her narrator is a rural schoolgirl whose observations on the world around her are keenly compelling. (Witness her good-natured mockery of a shopkeeper-cum-writer who's forever going on about the "...kings and queens walking the roads of ireland, riding bicycles, imbibing tea, plowing the humble earth, totally unaware of their great heredity" and suchlike.)

This short passage grabbed us and wouldn't let go:

"I had looked at primrose leaves for seventeen years, and I had never noticed before that their leaves were hairy and old and wrinkled. Always on the brink of trouble I look at something, like a tree or a flower or an old shoe, to keep me from palpitating."

Yet another passage, this time a portrait of a neighbor in a brief but memorable take:

"Mr. Gentleman was a beautiful man who lived in the white house on the hill. It had turret windows and an oak door that was like a church door, and Mr. Gentleman played chess in the evenings. He worked as a solicitor in Dublin, but he came home at the weekends, and in the summertime he sailed a boat on the Shannon. Mr. Gentleman was not his real name, of course, but everyone called him that. He was French, and his real name was Mr. de Maurier, but no one could pronounce it properly, and anyhow, he was such a distinguished man with his gray hair and his satin waistcoats that the local people christened him Mr. Gentleman. He seemed to like the name very well, and signed his letters J. W. Gentleman. J. W. were the initials of his Christian names and they stood for Jacques and something else."

Are we ready for more of O'Brien's work? You bet your boots!

Transparency

"Through a gap in the trees of the park I can see the blond grass of the meadow - turned quite yellow under the sun like the waters of the old River Plate - and the dark green of the oak woods, offset beyond, the trees so densely leafed that they seem to billow out over the sun-bleached yellow grass like smoke or waves. And, closer to, the sharp clarity of the sunlight on the bushes and the creeper around the house is perfect: the perfect balance of leaf-shadow, leaf-shine and leaf-translucence - absolutely correct, as if worked out by mathematical formulae to provide the ideal visual stimulus. Down by the barn a thick patch of thistle is in seed and the wandering breeze snatches the thistle-down and lifts it sky-ward in small urgent flurries - backlit by the sun so that the down seems to sparkle and gleam like mica or sequins - so much so that it looks like photons of light are taking to the air, flying upwards - rising upwards, blowing away across the meadow - like what? - like glow worms, like lucent moths."

- William Boyd, from Any Human Heart, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003

Poet of the week - George Herbert

 
Love (III)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.

"A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.

_________________________________________________________

Read about George Herbert at The Academy of American Poets web site.

Poet-a-tete - tedious Tuesdays banned!

Last summer we were introduced to the world of performance poetry (aka slam) by D.C.-area poet Cheryl Crockett. She's known around town as the host of Poet-a-tete, a combined reading/workshop/slam session that's held twice monthly. (We even took a super-quick turn at the mike.)

So we know that:

Poet-a-tete is fun.

It's a terrific place to try out new material. We've seen writers grow and grow and then some, and we've enjoyed meeting new people, listening to the featured poets (as well as all the writers who read during the open-mike time), sharing ideas, laughing, getting insight into the hearts and minds of others, and most of all, being moved to create.

And guess what? It's 100% free!

It all happens on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month, in Arlington, VA and Rockville, MD respectively.

See Poet-a-tete for more details.

Please tell Cheryl that you read about it here (and say hi from us, too). You might even coax her into performing her signature piece, "Standard English."

Raison d'etre

Hey, it's no secret - we love books! And writing and... the whole creative process.

We've already started a blog for music fans (Hemispherical) and eventually came to the conclusion that sticking to one topic was too limiting.

Expected areas of coverage: books, poetry (formalist and performance; we're fans of both) and more - maybe ALL of the arts, if we take the notion.

So join us for an unscripted, insiders' looks at what makes art (and artists) tick, and more.