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Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Found Fount

yesterday I found a fountain in the oddest of places. I was waiting at a gas station that I usually go to. Its next to an auto service station. In the boom of people walking in and out with their quick reasons to stop on the go, was a weak fountain surrounded by huge stones. I was reading of skating from a soprstwriting book.
Fannie's last Supper

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Parenting and eating

Melanie Rehak mentions a baby crawling backward first in Eating for Beginners.
In the introduction, the author describes her confusion in choosing what to feed her child with so many ways to go as in parenting itself in a rather heightened emergency way of hitting a wall.
Lowboy
M F K Fisher mentioned in maya Angelou's book Great food, all day long along with Elizabeth David, Jessica Harris, Margaret Visser, Jacques Pepin as writers who loved food.
Wyatt Prunty's A Winter's Tale

nature looking out from the cheekbones of EberHart

The Groundhog. Compare this experience with William Stafford's 'Traveling through the Dark'.
Eberhart's line ' my stick had done nor good nor harm'- The stick like stylus to turn the words up and down, in and around the coils to see what one side wont reveal, the other hides.

Compare them both with The Wellfleet Whale of Stanley Kunitz.

cute collection likeWWF cards of poets and their poems.

I like this poetry site

I am looking for 'the Swallows return' by Richard Eberhart. His line 'death is available to birds as to man in all weathers'.

Gnat on my paper. Its usually spider on my paper. Tiny ones. The penultimate one I saw had 8 legs with symmetry around the central axis. The ultimate one had a leg sticking out extended like a long-legged? It was light brown in color with dark spots at equal intervals. I was looking for the kinds of spiders and found that the legs dont have to be symmetrical. One species has pairs of legs grouped like a cross.

21st century man with his poem tampered and Long term suffering with 'time's up, put your pens down'.

Correspondence

I am looking for 'Coast of Maine ' poem too. Eberhart has written more on Maine
Design y Rober Frost.

PS: For title refer to The hard structure of the world poem by EberHart.
Wellfleet oysters in Fannie's Last supper

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Delhi

Author Sam Miller sees ring roads as carotid arteries in his book Delhi- Adventures in a Megacity. Yesterday I saw a medium sized white, narrow oval plate with a navy blue ribbon through the slits in the plate that was neatly tied in the ribbon like the pink lacing through the white holds in this unhappy man's neck.

Poet Foxy

In Literature Alive, The Golden Touch story of Midas's daughter turning into statue is Nathaniel Hawthorne's spin.

Raisin in the sun movie

My Last Duchess

esculent in There was a child went forth


Like this stack of Bremen Town musicians, yesterday while looking for a gift I found a stack of a pig on a something on a cow.

Fox in The Little Prince of Antoine de saint Exupery is a poet.

New

Luke Johnson

I think I saw Two tailed swallow tail today. Must be the trees around.

Dik Dik looks like an alien or he/she seen an alien.

Brocket Deer

Calamian Deer

What business?

An inmate tells that he is in A business. When asked about it, he says he is not in the A business. He is not even in the B or C or D business. Reminded me of Billy Collins
Bread and the Knife poem

Friday, April 22, 2011

Menippus

His work nekyia or necromancy.
There once lived a woman who tried to kill her neighbors baby is scary fairy tales.
I liked the 'Incident at Sokolniki' story. Even dead people seem to need the last rite done well that they are haunted by the lack of observance of the rite.

References

Comparing mom's multi tasking to a thousand armed Guanyin in Years of Red Dust- stories of Shanghai by Qiu Xiaolong
The stories are such that you read them in one go.

All the Chinese proverbs and sayings fit in right well except for two references of River styx and Furies.

A guest comparing his family crab dinner to the one in
Dream of the Red Chamber

Legend of white snake

Walls have ears. Indians and Chinese too have this saying.

Chinese have Five Evils. Different from Sikh'sFive Evils.

poet Bai Juyi

Hark to the Lark

Bald Coot and Screaming Loon even though compiled in a question answer format, it is not academic, thanks to the informal tone of the Niall Edworthy

Tube noses
Fieldfare
Dovekie

The book is about birds and what they eat(or what we should or should not feed them), where they live and all the other things they do. He degrades them in the beginning to put them on the pedestal after the introduction.

I have read a Q&A book on birds before that didnt sustain my readership for too long. Compared with that, this book is an eye candy with accurate, lyric and funny illustrations. Its an ear candy too with the poems in it. My favourie is Dixon Lanier Merrit's poem in which he rhymes pelican with '(his bill can hold more than his)belican' and '(But i'm damned if I see how the) helican'.

If you are a beginner, you will learn a lot about how the birds 'flying' rules all of its other activities - molting, what organs it can or cannot have. For a bird with scavenging habits, you cannot have feathers on your neck. The most amazing fact to know for me was the duration of day that it takes to make an egg. Again its the need to fly for food. Bird mommy gets no maternity leave. That they discard their nitrogen in a way very differet from mammals which again goes back to how it cant bloat itself so that it can fly. Dusting. Anting and many other phenomenon.

If you have not done birdwatching before, theres a how to.

With so much going on about air controllers caught sleeping while on duty, a patrol crane with a stone held in its feet might have a way out for waking when you fall asleep.

When the author describes how the birds drink water, from what I have seen or remember, I think they posess a soaking ability. I will have to watch more keenly and look for them to hold their head back to gulp it down.

If you are not a beginner, still there are many new things that will you make you wonder about the bird world. That swifts cant walk very well like other birds, having chosen the fast life. The technique of Albatroses and others with their tubenoses that desalinate might help us too. If you knew all this about birds, there are still many quotes, poems and anecdotes to enjoy. The best i like is by Emily Dickinson - 'I hope you love birds,too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven'.


I have added a new item to my wish list. To watch a mass migration.


Beauty brains

Marisa Silver

Grosgrain in Alone with you
Toby is found reading Pnin

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Notes to the reader

1. If there is a meeting of people, then there is going to be parting.

If Dream interpretation is the popular genre in prison libraries, what is the popuular dream?

Myth loaded

All these birds by Richard Wilbur

Philomela

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Monday, April 18, 2011

What we hoard

When Graham finds a stash of biblical notes in Legacy of a Pack Rat, I didnt realise the significance not knowing that Billy Graham was an evangelist.

Choice

What element of myth is picked from the myth orchard for your wreath, brocade?

Ichor in Death by Aesthetics poem by Mona Van Duyn

words like chirreting,unchinking logs,

Buzz

Blunderbuss in Message from a cloud of flies: On Distraction

I keep the patio door open to let the fresh air, summer light, dust, bumble bee, flies, black stranger cat with green eyes in.

The fly is insistent in doing certain number of rotations and revolutions before getting out.

Once in a while, starlings hop <2ft into the air.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

A sneeze

in an empty apartment sounds like a basketball thump

Common Thread

I wonder if Dakota Spiritual geography and Bird cloud will cross path in experiences.

The fountain of western Classics

Dont judge the book by its cover

All things Shining

Bringing out the truth of a cliche was one of Wallace's writing principle. This is something solid about David Wallace. The more I come across this writer, the more he gets shrouded. But for now, authors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, have bottled good wine in bad bottle.
After reading 'David Foster Wallace's Nihilism' chapter, I am left wondering making sense of 'no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can construct for our experiences'. The text leading to puzzles likes this skillfully ties the Luther's obsessive confession disorder to Wallace's agonizing writer self. Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert are shown as whats right with the literature world in their works dealing with forging ahead instead of portraying whats wrong with the past. This being common, their philosophies are shown different. Wallace with lack of 'sacred' in his dictionary, experiencing an unbearable quality(pain) in the opposite(bliss) and Gilbert seeing an artist as a medium are pitted as two opposites. A middle ground is subject of the concluding chapter.
Many book characters walk in and out to prove the author's points regarding God perceived by other thinkers in their works.
In the third chapter, the authors go into movie snippets or summaries to illustrate their line of thought on fate and meaning in life. The reader can judge Homer's morals and learn of the Roman Fortuna (with no prejudice) and Grecian concept of lady luck smiling on the chosen.


People or book characters who know what they are all about.
David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert about how to go forward in life than duplicate the dark of life in their writing.
Obsessive confuser Martin Luther.
Wallace's non-belief in God and self as perpetrator and Gilbert's self view as a medium for art are at odds.

Book fancy

Klezmer in Running the books
I didnt try to decpher the cover, thinking it to be some letter combinations. They are date stamps of book returns to a library.
The author ran in laser tag. I move so cautiously trying not to get tagged.
The prison that produced Malcolm X housed Whitery Bulger too.
Yuppie
Fleet week

Writing in the dark

A way to not read what you are writing until you are completely done with it. Things too happen to us like being written in the dark. We arrive somewhere we do not exactly know.
Night at the beach. Night at the office. They are not lifeless. Theres sea life at the former and mosquitoes throbbing at the latter.
The thing about teeth health, it doesnt matter what goes in there, only nothing gets to stay over for the night.
The world's ink is spreading onto the paper,
exceeding the paper,
onto the blanket, carpet,
out the street, into the lake,
into the sea, dark blue ocean.
Even into the Blue Hole. What happens when it mixes the red hydrogen sulphide. Magenta.
Cannot go hungry to bed. All the tubers in the salt lake see the color enveloping them, some fill their beer bottles with it. One student takes it to his lab. He sees the test tubes filled with it and the litmus test he will put the solution through. The perfume tester changes colors. A dab of the liquid starts a tine, a little more bring out a hue, and then some more colors the molecules in a unique way. Two perfumes with their colors next to each other and close is the mixture of their colors.
White flowers with dash of purple here and there like speckles on an egg shell. What is it chemically? What if we changed colors as we ate?
Grow as a flower. Deliver a flower. Float it.The flower takes after the blue of the water, her vine twirls around the perches on the shore. Sometimes the march of people awakens her. She crouches fro the stealth of unwelcome intentions.
A transparent stomach shows a bed of cookie crumbs.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Sympathetic magic

In the prehistoric times
hunters drew the
bulls and horses they wished
for
The entwined chinese characters
of dots for heads
and dashes for hands
and sticks for bodies
inflate with life
as the hour gets close

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Manichean
When Amy Chua said that she lifted 50 pound rock in her Battle Hymn of the tiger mother, I asked my friend if she could. She said that mothers found immense strength in time sof emergency to save their child. few chapters later, the author drove her car over the childs foot and they both fainted.

Myth

Antinomian
Louise Gluck started out with enrolment at Leonie Adams poetry workshop.
poems on myths.
Telemachus poems
Penelope

Hibernation

of snails.
The song of snails who are going to a funeral by Jacques Prevert
Snails trapped in ice reminds me of Thoreau and the crickets
I am amazed that crickets hibernate too.
Issa's lines keep coming up in the wild snail book.
Epiphragm

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

April 12

After Ted kooser's day titles

A starling is a horse garb
over a stick
A starling hops along the curb
to picks its food in the morning
In the evening two starlings
picking grains like chicken
on the grass
tinge of dark blue on the head
a green on the shoulder
Iridiscent did you say
Impermanent

Hilet

Today I went to the park. The grass was partly dry to sit on it with shorts. the part of the ground with the evening sun had no bench and table. A rain drain into the park ended in rocks mostly small but one bigger than a basketball. That was my seat to read the book from. On the left was a tree with large part of its trunk on the sloping ground. A father and his little 2~3 yr old are waling on it gingerly. When they come down the slope, the kid falls as a bound toy soldier.
On his way home, he says hi. Too low for her to hear, father says. When he calls louder, I apologize and reply hello. He says hi again.
L'eternel retour in To a waterfowl
Battle Hymn of the tiger Mother
Robert Arneson
Sam Gilliam
Samoyed
love rushes into the absence that is loss
- Norman Fischer, In the face of fear

even if the loss is that of love.

Kill the Day poem by Donald Hall. Writing in third person.

Monday, April 11, 2011

On your feet

In The checklist manifesto, two doctors are just exchanging strange cases. One thing that doesnt escape the reader is the call for quick action.

Its all Mediterranean

with words like Almohad. I have never heard of Maimonides. So the mappy looking cover jacket of
Maimonides in his world book was attractive.

Snail have teeth

is the first thing I learn in flipping through The sound of snail eating.

In the way the snail is reacting to the environment, even though it cant talk, you can already see the bond forming between the author and the snail.

In the way, the author Elizabeth Tova Bailey describes the motions of the snail,I can now imagine the world from a snail's point of view. at least in terms of magnitude. Say for example, if it were in the woods it would be lying on the floor with wooden chips its size, that would translate to me climbing over megalith stone tools my size. Last weekend at an Audubon migration celebration event, there was a question. Guess how much nectar would a hummingbird have if it were the size of a child? they had atleast 18 gallons of nectar. They said it needs 3 times its weight.

Somehow I never thought that all the slime it leaves on the trail has to be generated by itself. Even the dried flowers on the ground or shells of nuts though lie vastated, have to be all produced.

I was wondering what a pain it would be for such a tender body if has to travel on sharp bodies. the snail has won that battle too.

Picture Proof

One way or another

When I saw To a mountain in Tibet, I wanted to read it for my love of mountains. Some day.
Looks like the reader is still towards the same destination through
In the shadow of the Buddha

Phurba

Meet up

I was intrigued by this book Wild Men: Ishi and Kroeber in the wilderness of Modern America on Ishi

In the folds

of a comforter
theres a world
to make thought
the needle
and went through
to make
pleats

Images and Allusions

Mattocks keeping time in
Forgotten Fountain
Alba is a nice image to paint.

Orpheus and Person from Porlockin Doubt
A plain Ordinary steel needle can float on pure water by Kay Ryan. Like she mentions in the interview, this poem is inspired from Ripley's Believe it or not.

Andre Breton
Jeunesse Doree in My Weariness of Epic Proportions

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Poetry today

Before starting Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern poetry, in order to get an idea of David Orr's work, without much difficulty, I landed on his article regarding poetry in O's magazine and his `The Politics of poetry' article on poetry foundation. The beginning of the latter article had me trifle amazed that he linked poetry and politics. It augurs well.

Jump into the book. The `personal' chapter is a sunny day for the general reader. At the end of it, the reader can tell how a poet can keep his/her person out of the poem and still make the reader think that he/she has been a confidante. Sharon Olds tell all poetry is a good example of how she distances herself from the whole scene, while still escaping its influence.

The `politics' chapter is certain to lose audience with its difficulty. A common affliction of prose and not just poetry. Poetry don't worry, you are fine, nothings wrong with your form.

That brings us to the form chapter. A turning point in the life of poetry which takes it back to its definition. This is a good place of discussion for all readers to find themselves in - questioning an art form, its purpose.

The rest of the chapters are like voices from a distant world. Like his articles, the idea and intentions of introducing general readers to poetry are great. But his choice of approach - birds eye view at the world of poetry, moved me a step down from liking the book. The author does say in the introduction that it is not an inclusive approach which does justify the end product's loose stucture but by degrees it moves away a lot. In the last chapter of getting personal with how 'water' poem of Philips Larkin changed his attitude towards poetry, he does get his bearings back as the messenger of poetry.

Using the author's metaphor of poetry as Belgium, once there you would like to see how it is different from your native country in detail and it suffices to know of any similarities just in name.


With regards to modernity of poems,
American life in poetry

Last of the 100 day poets

TV Antennas on the terrace. Wind or rain affects the transmission quality.


Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Kathrine Varnes

Cin Salach

Sean Thomas Dougherty

John Gallaher

Susan Briante

Josh Corey

Laynie Browne

Pimone Triplett

Brenda Hillman

Jenny Browne

From a poem to many

Elizabeth Hughey Sunday houses the sunday house. More poems of her. who is Veronica who reappears in her poems?


Aporia. Monica de la Torre.

On Van Jordan. His poem MacNolia are from different characters POV.

Michele Batiste's poem and chapbook

Jean Marie Beaumont

Box of metaphors

Laura Mullen's Banyan poem makes the reader allocate a place for everything that thrives in its own way.

Hop scotch of prose and poetry

Maxine Hong Kingston, an accomplished author has recently published I love a broad margin to my Life, a free-verse memoir.

If you are wondering what is free verse…

Meghan O’ Rourke, a poet, wrote of a grief experience in ‘The Long Goodbye’ prose and then in ‘Once’ poetry form. Rourke was scared of poetry’s openness.

Why an artist wedded to a form loses grip on her medium during a turning point in life?

Growing up I was interested in essay form where Robert’s Frost ‘miles to go before I sleep’ stanza still crept in. After a poetry class, it seemed like I had said goodbyes to the only form of staking words that I knew.

Poetry undulates between the high of giving wings to your experience but of removing your stable ground too at the same time.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Animals and Orchards

This collection is a menagerie.

Strange wood poems by Kevin Prufer are evocative.
Tektite

Eric Pankey
Coracle

Memoir

so that one of them could climb up her backbone and escape the poverty... Rick Bragg, All over but the shoutin'

With raw sentences like this, I dont think I know what I signed up for by picking to read this book.

Bluetick hound

Southern link

In Hoi Polloi, Nin Andrews wotks in the myth of Goldilocks very well.

Her poems are puzzles, each peeling revealing her roots.

Journal in poetry

David Lehman, familiar as the editor has this concept of poems in journal in The Daily mirror and The Evening Sun


If so many people read their newspapers in the park, the paperboy should hit the park.

Monday, April 4, 2011

Who but the flying Dutchman

Fata Morgana

Birthing the Literary baby

Writing motherhood, a book by Lisa Garrigues can be used by not just mothers but anyone, who treats what they write as their babies.

Origins

Faces of America is a fun book to browse through. Yo-Yo mas story with three generaions of building foundation towards making a maestro is interesting.
Malcolm Gladwell being called the creative journalist is so apt. the inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander's ancestors worked with the office.
Kristi yamaguchi

Thoughts of older selves

Michael Dumanis
Major Jackson

Erin Belieu

Craig Morgan Teicher

Many facets of poets

BJ Soloy likes company. Especially poets. soloy invites them into his poems. Lot of birder language in the poems.

Cole Swensen/s poems on gardens of Andre Le Notre is not a single spurt of an aha moment.A Garden is a start is a good introduction to the thrall of her work. Imagine gardens being called Oubliettes or dungeons at some poin in history. As a style, it seems to be her way to do long works on a single subject. On Hand in The book of a hundred hands.

Laurel snyder

Cate Marvin spreads the length of a sentence to its breadth.

Nibble for the day

In an artsake interview, Caroline Klocksiem admires Miklos Radnoti poetry.
His poetry. poetry on him. Thanks to Kate Daniels. Need more time for those long lines.

For a flavour of Cornelius Eady, Hardheaded weather is the one to choose.

Rachel Zucker. This photo speaks.

Delirious hem. A good enough place to introduce The Satin Dress by Dorothy Parker.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

More poets

John paul o connor

Leslea Newman

Rebecca wolff - wampum in her Figment book.


Kathleen Rooney's review of come on all you ghosts

The n

in Wintry weather and Job slaughter poem could only have come from the author of The Method.
Sasha Steensen a 5 minute chapbook in Poets on teaching

Only this way

Lyn Lifshin's poem Michelle's Citrine Dress when asked to write on Obama's first 100 days, factors in the role of the first lady in how things go in that period. Browsing through poems of Lyn Lifshin in Cold Comfort on a coveted dress, another on extra fat, the take on the dress - image - makes more sense.
I do wonder how she writes so much. And there's an answer to it.

Think you can recall

Today while trying to understand how 'Small Memories' by Jose Saramago worked even though it was more a summary like memoir instead of craft in it. I used Tristine Rainer's Your Life as a story to get an idea of how a childhood memoir should be written. In that I came across a mention William Zinsser's book with Russell Baker's essay in it.
In Inventing the truth, Frank mccourt wrote about how he came to write his Angelas Ashes book. Eileen Simpson, Alfred kazin, Jill Ker Conway and others contributed to this book.

Disavowed nostalgia



After reading ‘The Notebook’, a translated compilation of the author’s blogs, that prompt themselves to the end and next, Jose Saramago became a mystery author to me.

In a beat, the author explains why he called the book small Memories. He began with big ambitions of showing himself as a person prone to desires and terrors as in the beginnings of St Anthony, but his journey brought him to the ‘Nothing of great note .... small memories of when I was small’.

The book begins with recalling of the place where Saramago’s childhood & adolescence
Occurred. His usage of the marsupial pouch, the magical cocoon for the place called Azinhaga make you wonder if we should trust him when he says that he doesn’t bemoan the loss of the familiar place.

He came to it and did not begin with it. At the whim of his random and disoriented memory and images the reader goes through his familar landscape of childhood and adolescence, where his motto must have been 'leave no tree unclimbed'. Most stories revolve around family, neigbours and school. A myth of seamstress, then prevalent Santa, old time porters, a little of political scene are touched upon too.He does have a disclaimer whenever he is unsure of details of a sequence.

When Saramago says that the best moment of glory was dethroning a spelling bee monarch as a child over and above winning the PEN prize for his novel, our search for the writer in his 'small memories' should be put at bay. He was taken by the potter at work, blind writer punching words into the paper, shoemaker familiar with Fontenelle. He was fascinated by artists, letters in a newspaper but writing wasnt his idee fixee in his childhood. Connections with three of his works do show up in this book.

There are no chapter breaks. No wands of dramas and scenes. Its plain childhoodese. An old kind of Memoir like Harry Bernstein's.

Food

from Small memories
Vianinhas or Vienna rolls
A string of pine nuts - edible necklace.
Nonedible pinenut necklace from Native Amerians.

Nothing to declare

is a short travel memoir of the Mary Morris's stay in San Miguel. Like the lost search for themselves in a church, library.. she moved away from her NY life onto an unknown terrain, a steep hill overlooking the fishermen with their nets of dragonfly.

She begins with the ways to get there and how she found her accomodation. From there her range of roaming is nailed to the realities of the places. The Wall. The screen that divides the rich and the poor.

The Alexandria Quartet

I cared enough about the place and looked for it in my Fodor's Mexico 2006.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Lucretius



Overtime by Philip Whalen

Lucretius and Horace

Yesterday, I saw a Road runner land and then run looking for things to add to its nest. Something white caught his attention but didnt make the cut.

Korin screen