Easy book to carry along

Read twice

Debora Greger

The cover seems very familiar. Chairs. The women in them are focused on are they turn their back and focus into the inner world. 

I have never read poetry of Florida so much. 

Feeling cold is not something we ever go for. But the poets lines urge you to divest the objects of their agreed symbols and utility and build new ones in the process of comprehension.
With Tomas Transtromer (can I refer to him as Transformer) as inspiration, I can see where she gets her obscurity in her poems from. 

The reader cone

I didnt think I would read much of this book from the LARB review. How do reviews manage to accomplish distancing the readers instead of getting them into the reader cone. (A review like this comes from the other end of what the book could have been). But once into it, I like the book's development as it goes through reading and women in history.

Silent reading. As kids there was a stage where we had to graduate from reading aloud to silent reading. It is interesting to know that at some point most reading was done aloud in a room. 

The introductory point where the book had me was about the myth of Philomela were weaving was used as a communication tool to point to the times when education for women was not prevalent.

the book lists the service of many women towards paving the path for other women to learn. By digging up history it breaks the common held knowledge of the lack of educated/powerful women in Arab countries. The book is geared towards women in the west and Europe. There are a few references to the east. I kept thinking about how was it in India.

A slate article

A review

Author interview

Walk 'into' mountain

(Poetry exercise)
1. In Hardy's novels, stretches of path can carry memories of a person, just as a person might of a path.
2. how we are scattered, as well as affirmed, by the places through which we move.
3. He(Edward Thomas? or Hardy) imagined himself in topographical terms. corners, junctions, stiles....
4.For paths run through people as surely as they run through places.
5.what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And then vainly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself.

Machair
William Fox essay - cognitive issonance in isotropic place
NYT review
An example of what William Fox says
Hachure map
Miniature lake of mercury in Chinese king tomb

Syntax virus

What is a syntax virus? In the notes the author says that it is an exact grammatical replica of another poets poem, injected with her words.

Area 25  poem is about a part of brain called area 25 that can help relieve depression for some.  Not until this poem id the book start for me. up until this the list in the poems seemed like
chubby cheeks
dimple chin....
syntax virus of Sylvia plath's You're seemed like that rhyme. The poet does love rhyme's, what with 'the countin sing no 5'. At least 'one two buckle my shoe' reaches the end faster.
In Paradise-Un, not in this book, the poet shows her talent, her ability to be inspired and sustain the journey of that projectile.
Area 25, Still murmur, Riddle in the vein of poems on body.
Playing with words in Self-medication (This article will lead you to raw poetry exercise.)
But it must be with the experimental angle that the poet delivers simple, elegant The Darker sooner

A fan
Review of poets previous book

Adam Zagajewski

Life as a board game

Dots and Boxes is a game like tic tac toe. How does love compare in your life to the claiming of lines that can be connected and the concomitant boxes that can be claimed.

Apophasis at the All Night Rite aid and other poems.

In the Apophasis poem, the poet 'not wanting to be alone' is shown the door to the moon.

Litany by Billy Collins that begins with an exact pin pointing of what 'you' are goes into an apophatic phase with what you are not.

A Brief poetics of the Hinge, an article by the poet Catherine Barnett is her search for hinge in poetry, where there is both movement and restriction like that offered by a tether. In Providence,

some of the best sermons

dont have endings, he said

comes to my mind as an example of the restriction and release. (A poetry exercise, map the dynamics of your poem to a physical object and vice-versa)

chorus is the title of many poems in this book. One thing the title helps with is the conectedness and the identification of the literal chorus for/of many voices. But with so many under that tag, readers will have to remember the first line of the poem for its ID. Couldnt these poems be put into one section with 'Chorus' subheaing and look for any other interesting internal theme.

Agape  is for word lovers, not the ones who like them by sounds but for those who like them for their meanings sometimes only and sometimes many.

Coming to the style of the poems, with so few lines and words, the reader is forced to think what the poet intended instead of just bagging nice phrases as low hung fruit and proceeding to the next poem. Having hooked the reader into the gap of the poem, there is no choice but to fill our thoughts after the question in Inventory, ii

Really, what chance do any of us have 

for moments of bliss?

But proceeding on without waiting for us to come up with suggestions, she  dismisses them.

Inventory

In Old story, The clock doesnt have an amygdala. With no Amygdale, there is no sympathy. As in the warning time and tide wait for none.  Whats natural than time and waves, but the measuring of them makes them so inorganic. In 'to speak of other things' gardens speak in a way reminiscent of the serpent eating its tail. Styrofoam in 'Scavenger hunt' shows an imbalance of  biodegradable activity and chemical nonbiodegradable inactivity.

A review

Open Verse

Printers Devil Review is looking for essays on Charles Olson  Projective verse

The essay itself starts with an assumption that we want verse to go ahead and stay of use. the essay is supposed to end with 'Objectism' reducing the writer of the verse to an object. Let us see if verse can have meaning without the relevance of the life of the breather. Can verse 'put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath , of the breathing of the man...'.

When we talk of energy discharge from poet to poem to reader it seems like a uniform thing. But there are peaks to it. How do we transfer that?

Related article by Fred Wah

Walking like a fox. Slowing down to natures pace.

Saving birds

Guinea pigs are the experimented. But so are pigs. Earlier explorers left pigs on uninhabited islands to see how well they fared before trying to inhabit it themselves. 

Rhinos

I had to pick this book for 2 reasons

1. Rick Bass

2. The book before it was about White rhinoceros

The tales beneath the board

Authors site

An article
The first part is about the incident that changed the author's life like Bethany Hamilton's.
The later part of the book talks about the acute senses of Great white shark. They dont do well in captivity.

The wonder of the cosmos

Reading this book I wonder how are stars measured. 

Twinkle Twinkle little star

How I wonder what you weigh

How are new planets found?

The author compares the stars in the sky to fish. I once dreamt that the constellations actually looked like the form we imagine them.
Waiting for new objects in the sky seems much like waiting for fish with a rod.

The Ignored pipeline

To the last breath
The distance between us

Life as a cadaver

This book is like 'The natural history of senses' by Diane Ackerman in its reach of all things core topic.

Author Mary Roach 's new book:

Blooming thinking of flowers

In How to learn to love Poetry, Natasha Tretheway says that children look at broccoli as trees. Wow.

After  Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane poem was tweeted. Its not until you reach this poem, that you get to a solid poem. But wait what was that about counting leaves in Foolishness? No its not crazy but beautiful. Poet Mary Oliver is busy praising nature. 

Percy seems familiar.

In 'The Mockingbird', she calls him 'the thief of other sounds'.

In 'The way of the world, a wondrous fish 'In its silver scales / it seemed dressed for a wedding'.

On Traveling to beautiful places, the poet says we are all on this only ship. In Stiff, Mary Roach likens a cadaver to being on a cruise lying on the back and brain blank.

Cook in the dshwasher

picnic indoors.

Eat using only hands. How else would you eat? my husband explains it mans without using cutlery.

How to cook something in the dishwasher. So instead of scaring the child with soapy water for bad words, you just riddle their wrapped food with holes?

Walk on the same path for 30 days and notice the changes. 

Good review

A good review of a book is to me the one that brings out the role of the book in the bigger picture of literature. Yes the whats and hows of the book would be expected but thats a catalogue and a reading can decide on that easily. Multiple reviews that contradict on the content leave us where we start. 

Reading many books

at once is like playing Musical chairs. You read further into each book to decide which one gets eliminated. If a book has promise, it is kept aside to be savoured. This game can go as long as the library allows or does not interrupt with holds from other such players who think your book might jazz up their game.

The Joys of Reading many Books

Potential literature

Poetry prompts:

Beau present 

Metro poem
Apero
Prisoners constraint, its opposite
Antonymic translation example and meaning
Borders of the poems
Exercices de Style

A review
Storytelling organizations

To think of the less travelled path

Jeremy seal

An article
Another article
Beycesultan Mound with ducts for heating 1000 years before we know of it.

The writing about the travel along the meander in an inflatable canoe along with the stories from the maps of the past is like Rephotography.
One thing that kept rearing up in the book is the pristinity of a foreigner as a stranger with a possibility of medicinal knowledge, different ways of grooming and the xenophobe's horror. In the current global world, people can ease into a culture by reading up on it before hand.
Strangers in the villages he stops for the night treat him with green almonds.

Randomized field trial

A review

Can government run an experiment by providing stimulus to a smaller section of people to see how far it stimulates the economy?

Instead of only traditional market research, moving on to trials.

Another review
Yet another review

A title like this attracts readers like flies

Tell tale tit

Writing
Birds bees and traveling salesmen animals solved a wildly complex mathematical
20 native american authors you need to read. Been to readings by Sherman Alexie and Simon J Ortiz. Read Leslie silko's Ceremony and Joy harjo's Brave

Archaeoastronomy

paleoastronomy

Running lines

It befits that an editors book should start with crossed out lines of Shelley in coming up Orphan hours.
This book is dedicated to Michael Collier with whom the author Stanley Plumly has co-edited a book.

The crack up in The Crows at 3 AM.  In those Orphan hours, like Michael Coliier's poem about birdsong, this poem has birds and other poets on birds.
The poets does away with spaces and runs lines in effect bringing to mind, different meanings of a word. after sunrise, the 'rose' recalls the flower, its colour and the verb rose of the sun and its concomitant colours in The Jay.
The sogs for the birds continue:
Still missing the jays
Vesper sparrow
Against starlings

On Dartmoor. A nature poem.
In 'Arbitrarily' the poet tries to match the pending gray of death.
Perspective. So many things must have been said about it. But the poet compares the perspective required in drawing to the one offered in life by memory, thus bridging two worlds.
Blind. A list of acquaintness with the blind, real and literary.
Ground birds in open country. The poet travels to many occurences of bird watching. We chase the birds or we are chased by them in memory.
Amidon Vhristmas Tree Farm cardinal. That bird death causing glass.
In 'I Love you' and Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Plumly acknowledges the power and presence of death.
caravaggios conversion
Some more poems
A review
An interview

Bikini like a parachute

Necrophoresis, cyclops and other poems 

The poem Necrophoresis of bees is a nature study of bees at work. While the queen enjoys reproducing, she too is obligated to work. Michael Collier's fascination with bees extends to other poems like 'The Bees of Deir Kifa'. 

Odd number of swans. The poet draws an inference out of the mated truth about swans. This insistence of previous knowledge to be traced into the scene in the present is seen in In certain situations I'm very much against birdsong. It feels like the scientists decry at anthropomorphization of animals but specific to the vocal department.
 Labyrinth is set in such a everyday place where not much happens, children play. But there is a silent interchange between the Child - the father of the man and the man at display.
My mother of invention, Grandmother with mink stole, Cyclops all in the tradition of capturing the loved ones as you remember them. Even when Memory of my mother was 'too young to recall'.
The concrete of Bint Jbeil
Attend to the sounds in The singer.
Six lines for Louise Bogan
Bikini

The greatest life advice from Kurt Vonnegut

Things to blog about
Jack Gilbert poem

Articles

Why cant we tickle ourselves - Creative
How to book review
best essays

An Odyssey in a slot canyon

A colleague had old me about this incident  a couple of years ago, when I imagined it that he was stuck at the mouth of a cave.

Recently a friend suggested that we should watch 

While watching Everest 82 and thence about survival - rescue stories, this movie came up and since then non stop I looked online about the movie. 

It doesnt have to be fun to be fun - Mark Twight
Warren Macdonald, still hiking after a boulder crushed his legs leading to amputation.
Tarahumara walk 50 miles with a mouthful of water


I Shouldnt Be Alive - Rescue stories.