Oh what a glorious day we had yesterday! My mother and I met the Seattle Independent Bookstore Day Challenge and went to all 17 participating stores, got a fabulous haul of books, and had a blast all day long.
Independent Bookstore Day Adventures
Category Archives: Poetry
In Which One Things Leads to Another
Part One, In Which One Thing Leads Clearly To Another
I got Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work from the library because someone on Facebook or somewhere posted his great “How to Support an Artist You Love” list and then I googled him.
[Go look at it then come back.]
[Welcome back. It’s great, right?]
I liked Show Your Work, which is to say I agree, it seems pretty smart about trying to be an artist in that which is our now, how to get out there, how to connect, how to show your work. (Also, he quotes Dan Chaon, Alison Bechdel, Cyndi Lauper, and John Le Carre, so what’s not to like.)Continue reading “In Which One Things Leads to Another”
Thinking of Red
For this month’s Famous People poem, Linda Bierds’ “Thinking of Red” (epigraph: “Marie Curie, 1934“).
It’s a little like complaining that Rembrandt* is always doing beautiful things with light to talk about how Linda Bierds’ poems are so often doing the same thing, because they are doing that same thing so damn well and that thing is so exquisite and resonant, immediate. “Bierds’ persistent subject is the effort to imagine herself so fully into historical events that the past becomes the present, the public merges with the private” says David Walker in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets, “Her poems reflect a double vision, set in history and yet released from it by imagination. Though her research is impeccable, she is fortunately not confined by it; the facts keep giving way to intuition, intensely empathic and hauntingly articulate.”
*(Poets.org goes with Vermeer instead: “Linda Bierds has become our premiere verbal portraitist of the space-time continuum, tracing the fine lines of transcendent human experience with the sure hand of a Vermeer, fashioning events of verbal meaning with the impeccable ear of a Yeats.”)
Poetry Month 2015 is Nigh!
April is Poetry Month, of course!
Most bookstores have poetry book sales in April, and I urge you to seek out an in-person reading in the towns of wherever you are at some point in the month (though, really, in every month).
But there’s plenty online for a dose of poetry daily. Here are a few I like:Continue reading “Poetry Month 2015 is Nigh!”
What Profit Is There In Being Marlene Dietrich
For this month’s Famous People poem, Barbara Hamby’s “What Profit is there in Being Marlene Dietrich”
What profit is there in being Marlene Dietrich
if you don’t rip the intestines out of some dummkopf
who adores you? […]
This sonnet starts off with a roar — I admit I’m a sucker for poems that use sound combos like “intestines” and “dummkopf” in a single line. It’s a great setup for the attitude of the poem, and a really turn after the line break. Continue reading “What Profit Is There In Being Marlene Dietrich”
AI’s “Hoover, Edgar J.”
For this month’s Famous People post, Ai’s “Hoover, Edgar J.”
The poet Ai’s is usually summed up with something along the lines of “noted for her uncompromising poetic vision and bleak dramatic monologues” (Poetry Foundation bio). The first couple times I tried to read Vice, her National Book Award-winning new and selected from 1999, the bleak and uncompromising part turned me off. But friends kept recommending her because I write dramatic monologues, so I went back. My initial take: the 1st person (all her dramatic monologues are in 1st person) sometimes works well , and sometimes sounds like the poet putting words/metaphors the character wouldn’t actually say into their mouths, to less effect.
One poem I do like though is “Hoover, Edgar J.” It’s a long-ish, tight, fast-moving poem with internal rhyme that takes soundbite/quotation/political colloquial and pushes it to poetry without sounding like ‘poetry.’ The tension of line and speech holds things taut here, and the character painted, right in line with J Edgar’s pop culture persona (I don’t know much about his deep biography), is complex and fascinating (and a little scary).
Babel’s Artifacts Reminds Me
“Babel’s Artifacts” by Scott Cairn caught my eye on Plumepoetry.com— I love “nattering tribe” and I like the in-in-and-back moves the rhythm makes.
Seeing this poem reminded me that I have on my shelf and really liked, years ago when I read it, his book Philokalia. Frequently the poems are quite engaged with the spiritual/religious, but they’re lovely poems that even heathens like me can get into (though presumably those who know their Bible better will get out of him even more). Like his poem “Nous” for example.
He’s good at the long sentence and its movement down lines, Continue reading “Babel’s Artifacts Reminds Me”
Bessie Smith & Bessie Smith
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? […]
Briefly Reviewed: the Catch-up Edition
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.
Traumerei
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…
Catherine Bull 