Speaking Truth to Dylan
With the caveat that he “is not a music blogger,” AKMA, in an end of year post on pop music, writes:
I was not as impressed with this year’s Bob Dylan album, Modern Times, as I was with Love and Theft. When I heard Love and Theft, I heard a new chapter in Dylan’s work, and [...]
Thoughts on The New Blog
I’ve got the new weblog set up with the help of my online friend Andru Matthews, though I haven’t had a chance to begin taking advantage of my new digs yet. Once the last details of my semester (read: grading) are over, I hope to have a more leisurely look around my own site & [...]
Quiz: What Poetic Form Are You?
This very clever quiz with very entertaining questions gets me dead to rights. If I wasn’t terza rima, by the way, I’d be blank verse.
I’m terza rima, and I talk and smile.
Where others lock their rhymes and thoughts away
I let mine out, and chatter all the while.
I’m rarely on my own - a wasted day
Is [...]
Birds
This fall I took an old cedar four by four I had lying around, cut a bit off & notched it to make a T & set it up at the edge of our little patch of lawn, near the spruce & cedars beside the stream. I hung bird feeders from the arms of the [...]
Finished Grading
I entered my grades around 1:00 Saturday afternoon. Sunday I didn’t do anything. It’s Monday & now I have to start planning next semester’s courses, not to mention the development of a wholly online version of my Vietnam course for summer. But all that can wait until tomorrow. Time for a bit of retrospective musing.
This [...]
Imaginary Blog Titles
Carl Zimmer is my favorite science writer & this piece in Forbes, of all places, doesn’t disappoint. If I needed to start a new blog today, I would call it Chirping Rats:
Play is also an opportunity for animals to bond. Rats, for example, like to rough-house with one another, releasing high-frequency chirps that may be [...]
The Sleep of Reason . . .
breeds nightmares.
International Esperanto Day
December 15th is International Esperanto Day. A while back, Steven Brewer asked me if I would participate in posting something on my blog translated into Esperanto & the first thing that came to mind was a poem from my last book, “The Language of Poetry.” I have reproduced the translation below, followed by the original [...]
If I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate
That is the poem’s greatest wish. Or at least that’s what claimed over at Jonathan Mayhew’s blog. Jonathan rightly dismisses the idea that rhythm & sound in poetry are mimetic except in occasional & mostly superficial cases. This is something my old teacher Donald Justice, who as a young man trained as a composer, made [...]
Norman Dubie
The other day I pulled an old Selected & New Poems by Norman Dubie off the shelf in my office & stuck it in my briefcase to take home. No particular reason. I’ve been dipping into the book more or less at random over the last few days — giving myself a break between reading [...]
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