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Sunday, April 3, 2011

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

Thursday, March 31, 2011

To and away

I read The Best American Poetry 2008 but cant recall even one poem. Not even The water cooler poem by Paul Muldoon rings no bell. His sweet-throated throstle in many lines, didnt etch itself enough in my memory.

Reading the same line or word or sound more than once, whether in a refrain or rhyme, takes the poem and the reader outside of the realm of everyday written language. - Poetry for beginners, Margaret Chapman & Kathleen welton

While in fiction, the authors are urged to write dialogue mimicing the everyday language, poetry is willing to go on a flight with snowman

Collage

from Paul Muldoon's Plan B

Falderals
Femora
Fouter
Nereid
Runt
Triton
Throstle
Flitch

In Muldoon's poetry, myth and the world of harm, debt coexist.

Love the country enough

to expect a great deal of it. - Obama's messageas in the introduction of the following book.

Starting today: 100 poems for Obama's first 100 days, is an interesting project.

After the inaugural poem by Elizabeth Alexander, 99 followed her.
Matthew Rohrer

Can we solve Billy Collin's dilemma of what a poet Laureate should do, by suggesting that he trap each day, moment?

Them

A lawyer once told me that
lawyers are social doctors.
And shelley told the world that
poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world

Wit about

According to Marion Meade, in the introduction of Dorothy Parker's Complete poems,
A E Housman's poems were an influnece on her.

Coty perfume.
19th Amendment

Reading a last line of Dorothy Parker's poem Epitaph
and watch the worms slip by, slip by.
I wanted it to be
and watch the worms slip slip by


Elinor Wyle's poems
Phyllis McGinley's poems

Some poems of Parker have an Envoi. Its like PS.

Politician poet

Gabriela Mistral. Her poems.


Morganatic