Poetry & Books (& A Little More But Mostly Poetry & Books)
(A post-Super Bowl follow-up to the pre-Superbowl “How to Survive Living in a City Going To Its 2nd Super Bowl in a Row When You Don’t Care About Football: An Epiphany“.)
“Let’s go all “Whos in Whoville” and have a parade anyway,” says a friend so I ask her a question about the Worst. Call. Ever. without calling it the Worst. Call. Ever. But it’s too soon still, still too soon.
In public, in Seattle, it will always be too soon.Continue reading “On Defeat”
Sliding in with just over an hour of January to spare (in my time zone anyway), the first installment of 2015’s monthly series, which for this spin around the sun will look at poems about famous people. (Previous years having covered poems about Music, Animal poems, and poems —I was really hewing to the literal idea my first year of blogging, apparently—about Months).
I already know this topic’ll let me work in Linda Bierds, Ai, some more William Matthews, and a Frank O’Hara, maybe that great Barbara Hamby sonnet about Marlene Dietrich if I can find it again. I already fear it’ll devolve into a 12-part argument with myself about how much a reader needs to know about a poem’s subject (or be told in the poem, and how to do that) to really enjoy it/get it.Continue reading ““Nobody Dies Like Humphrey Bogart””
So…I’m not into football.
So…I recently moved to a city with a team going now to back-to-back Super Bowls.
The Seahawks’ blue and green is everywhere, I mean everywhere. I mean dictionary editors are rewriting their definitions of ‘ubiquitous’ to take the prevalence of Hawks paraphernalia in Seattle into account. I mean every business in town that has dress codes or uniforms now officially includes in employee handbooks “or just head to toe Hawks gear, that’s cool too.” I mean the “12th man” flag* flies from cars, yards, windows, balconies, construction cranes, high-rises, busses, ferries, church readerboards with the message lined up to read “Services at 10 so you can be home by “12””, the Space Needle, people’s ears, people’s dogs, people’s kids’ Lego castles. I mean at a production of Measure for Measure a board member of the Seattle Shakespeare Company with perfectly bobbed silver arts patron hair and an expensively tasteful outfit came on stage, gave her nice patrician welcoming speech, then flashed open her sweater to reveal a jersey and yelled “GO HAWKS!” and then the play started. I mean my mother is now raving about Cam Shamwow “just leaping like a gazelle over the other guy. Like a gazelle.“Continue reading “How To Survive Living In a City Going to its 2nd Super Bowl in A Row When You Don’t Care About Football: An Epiphany”
Dawned cold in Seattle this morning, which means it’s clear and gorgeous, mountains out. Hello, 2015, good to meetcha.
I’ve been out of school for ages now and am not a teacher, but fall still always feels like the real start of the year to me, calendar and tradition notwithstanding. This year in particular — I got a big new job and moved to Seattle in October, a brand-new start on all fronts. (I even have new hair! growing it out after something like 15 years of having it very short). And years are funny anyway, some have those moments you can specifically date, when someone close died, when someone had a wedding, when you got your puppy. Other years you remember but can’t date, that year we all had terrible coughs on Orcas Island and had to sleep sitting up in the beach chairs in the living room, which year was that? that year the family friends’ boys so entertainingly hog-tied their mother’s pugs with Christmas ribbons, which year was that? the year I finally broke down and started texting, which year was that? the year I read like all of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels back to back, which year was that? And now I’ve got my Portland years, nine of them, and fairly soon I won’t be able to remember which apartment I had while I had with which job, which year I started going to Stumptown for coffee every morning, which year my writing group started.Continue reading “A 2014 Reconnoiter”
Here’s a two-fer Music Poems post (since I missed November by a mile) — two with Bessie Smith, the ‘Empress of the Blues’ who had an unsurpassed voice and was in her time (the 1920s) the highest paid black performer around.
First up, Jericho Brown’s “Langston Blues“. I saw Jericho Brown last weekend at a Copper Canyon Press shindig in Seattle and holy moly is he a great performer! He was mesmerizing and his work was beautiful (not pretty beautiful, hard beautiful). I strongly urge you, if you have the chance to hear him live, to take it.
[…]
Let my words
Lie sound in the mouths of men
Repeating invocations pure
And perfect as a moanThat mounts in the mouth of Bessie Smith.
Blues for the angels kicked out
Of heaven. Blues for the angelsWho miss them still. Blues
For my people and what water
They know. O weary drinkersDrinking from the bloody river,
Why go to heaven with Harlem
So close? […]
Continue reading “Bessie Smith & Bessie Smith”
Briefly reviewed: City Boy by Edmund White (2009) | Almost Invisible by Mark Strand (2013) | Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger (1990) | The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten (2010) | A Lady’s Life in the Mountains by Isabella Bird (1870s)
I’m behind on my what-I’ve-been-reading posts (moving+new job = such things!) so here’s a catch-up Briefly Reviewed, briefer than usual. This list includes two of the best-written non-fiction books I’ve ever read, and some really excellently executed prose poems.
Continue reading “Briefly Reviewed: the Catch-up Edition”
Delightful to open my email today and see that Bellingham Review‘s latest issue is up…including my poem “The Vagabonds, Now Mortgage-Bound” — in which Rambo and Rimbaud “are living out their golden years / together in a house on the coast / with ropes and buoys decorating the deck.”
I wrote this poem several years ago — part of a whole series I wrote mashing up the 80s action symbol and the French Symbolist bad boy — and it’s really fun to see it out in the world at last. You can read the whole poem here: “The Vagabonds, Now Mortgage-Bound.”
October’s music poem: Linda Bierds’ Traumerei.
You will have to forgive me — I just moved apartments, cities and jobs (hello, Seattle!) — for leaving you with just this for this month’s Music Poems post. Read Linda Bierds’ “Traumerei“.
(If you want to know more, read it while listening to Traumerei. Or read this about Schumann’s Traumerei and this about Schumann’s life, and then read Linda Bierds’ Traumerei again while listening to this Traumerei.)
And then come back and we can get into an argument about whether or not ‘knowing what it’s about’ matters to the beauty of the poem…
My review of Jeffrey Bean’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is up at Smartish Pace, check it out. (Spoiler: I think it’s great.)
I previously wrote about Bean’s poem “Minor Seventh” for June’s music poems post.
A. Van Jordan’s “Que Sera Sera“ — this month’s Music Poems post. Oh, this is a great poem. The music descriptions are great, the stream-of-consciousness build of momentum is great, the dual layer descriptions of the experience of being pulled over for “driving while black” are great, the circular pull back at the ending is great. For instance look at how many different ways you can read the words “light” and “color” and “within your flesh” and “you’re on your feet” in this passage, after the speaker, who has been listening “to what / sounds like Doris Day shooting / heroin inside Sly Stone’s throat” (this song) while driving through Black Mountain, North Carolina, is pulled over by a police officer, and the questioning makes his hands “want to ball into fists.”
But, instead, I tell myself to write a letter
to the Chief of Police, to give him something
to laugh at over his morning paper,
as I try to recall the light in Doris Day’s version
of “Que Sera Sera”—without the wail
troubling the notes in the duet
of Sly and Cynthia’s voices.
Hemingway meant to define
courage by the nonchalance you exude
while taking cover within your flesh,
even at the risk of losing
what some would call a melody;
I call it the sound of home.
Like when a song gets so far out
on a solo you almost don’t recognize it,
but then you get back to the hook, you suddenlyrecognize the tun and before you know it,
you’re putting your hands together; you’re on your feet—
because you recognize a sound, like a light,
leading you back home to a color:rust. […]
And then the poem goes into its long and excellent dive into memory around the color rust. Great stuff.
Catherine Bull