“My Mother Would Be a Falconress” Read by Robert Duncan
I’ve been meaning to point to this text & audio page with Duncan’s poem about his mother & now I’m finally getting around to it. It’s a remarkable poem both for its music & for the precision of its language. The beauty of this poem startles me every time I read it, but I had [...]
Buying a Chair
I ordered a leather chair today, as a gift to myself for my 58th birthday later this month. A chair for reading. And when I say a chair, I mean a chair — it’s not terrifically large & its lines are simple, but it’s the sort of chair you you have to special order & [...]
Late Spring Birds
In the yard, mostly goldfinches, sparrows, & chickadees. Heard a loon call around 5:00 a.m. the other morning, then spotted him flying over an hour later while we were walking the dogs. Carole says she hears a kind of crazy desperation in the loon’s cry, but I hear more mournfulness — anthropomorphizing in both cases, [...]
Adrienne Rich & Graphs of Experience
In her later work, Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic technique that presents the reader with a graph of experience. By experience, I mean the moment by moment tracings of conscious perception. There must of course be a a process of editing during composition, but the poem presents itself as a graph — the poet [...]
Whitman Podcast
I’ve had the idea for a while that I want to read all of “Song of Myself” & post it to the blog. This is a test. Whitman’s Song of Myself (1805) Section 1 & 2
Note: Volume issue is fixed, but there is a pretty bad buzz in the background. Still figuring the best way [...]
Resentful Dreams
Funny how dreams lag behind events. Folk wisdom says that dreams predict the future, but my experience is that they predict the past. Over the last couple of nights I have dreamed, just before waking, about crappy things my colleagues have done to me. The events in the dreams are fictional, but related to things [...]
Summer
I’m used to feeling a major relaxation at the end of Spring Semester each year, but this year the relaxation has only been partial. Partly, this is because I’m going to be teaching a summer course online, which begins next week, but the course won’t really take that much time since almost everything is already [...]
Corrupter of Youth
I’m still in a May Day mood & so thought I’d pass this link along, about Allen Ginsberg in Prague, May 1st 1965. That’s when he was crowned King of the May & the authorities decided that the poet was corrupting the fine socialist youth of the city. [Via the New Poetry email list.]
“For a Coming Extinction” (W.S. Merwin)
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were [...]
Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall? (Tom Russell)
Here’s another video via Scott McLemee. Seems appropriate since yesterday was May Day:
We got fundamentalist Muslims
We got fundamentalists Jews
We got fundamentalist Christians –
They’ll blow the whole thing up for you
But as I travel around this big old world
There’s one thing I most fear –
It’s a white man in a golf shirt
With a cell phone in [...]
