WordWacky

Rarely am I treated to a new idea in the world of words. There’s something reminiscent of the refrigerator poetry that was so popular a decade ago, but somehow this is way cooler.

Here’s the latest in the series of Newspaper Blackout Poems by Austin Kleon:

There’s also a book coming out, so go preorder it. (Via @splintergen)

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain….

So begins the first poem in Poets & Writers’ National Poetry Month celebration, which could also be called “A Dead Poet a Day.” This first one is by T. S. Eliot (who, if you believe the story told in the movie Tom and Viv, wasn’t such a nice guy), “The Burial of the Dead.”

Writer’s Digest blogger Robert Lee Brewer is holding a Poem-A-Day Challenge: write a poem every day in April using his daily prompt, post it in the comments section, and you’ll earn a badge for your blog or website and a certificate. There’s also some other prizes, which I’m unclear on because I didn’t read the myriad rules & blah blah blah.

For me poetry can be painful (if you don’t believe me, try reading all of the first day’s entries on Brewer’s site). Not just other people’s poetry, either. My own is perhaps the most painful, since not only do I have to read it, but I bear some responsibility for it, too. And I’ve done nothing but failed at these NaWhateverMo challenges so far. So maybe I will or maybe I won’t participate, but I can almost guarantee that all 30 of my poems (or however many I do manage to write) will not be available for public consumption.

Other poetry month activities include Poem in Your Pocket Day, which not only seems a little silly to me, but also invites that tried, tired joke, “Is that a poem in your pocket….” On the Academy of American Poets’ website, I learned that they’ve trademarked the whole poetry month business (not cool), and made a celebratory poster (pretty cool).

I guess when everyone thinks poetry, they think T. S. Eliot, who, though he might have been a cruel month himself, was in fact a darn fine poet.

In a month there is time… to write 30 poems.

When my wife and I were watching clips of Katie Couric and Sarah Palin, I commented that her responses were more like poetry than prose. They were non-linear, free association style riffs, and with her (affected?) midwestern lilt, it sounded like a spoken word performance.

Apparently I was not the only one who noticed. Slate writer Hart Seely added some line breaks to her quotes and came up with “The Poetry of Sara Palin”:

“On Reporters”

It’s funny that
A comment like that
Was kinda made to,
I don’t know,
You know …

Reporters.

(To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)

It reminded me of an oldie but goodie, the George W. Bush quote poem I had hanging in my cubicle for some time. It still gives me joy to read, so forgive me for reproducing it here. This one is slightly different than the Sarah Palin poetry, in that it is a multitude of quotes that are rearranged to create the poetry. But each one has been verified.

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty
And potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet
Become more few?

How many hands have I shaked?
They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.

I know that the human being
And the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher!
Make the pie higher!

Indeed. Let’s make the pie higher.

I am about to have my first traditional publication credit: two poems in an anthology. I would be lying to you if I said I wasn’t pretty jazzed about it, but the subject matter of the book — if only because it’s my first publication — is a little embarrassing.

The book is called Women. Period. Wanna guess what it’s about?

Why is it that our “time of the month” is taboo? In some cultures, menstruating women are banished from their marital beds during Aunt Flo’s visit.

In our culture we come up with cute names to talk about menstruation, mimic it in television commercials with something that looks like it could clean windows, and charge exorbitant prices for pressed cotton wrapped in something called Dry-Weave — to keep it away from us.

And yes, even though I see right through all these euphemisms and whitewashes, I am still embarrassed that I wrote two poems — one of which I even count among my best — about the subject. Worse yet, they’re not hiding away in a document on my now dead computer. They’re out there, in the world. In a book.

So it is with a familiar mix of pride and shame, and shame of my own shame — metashame? — that I announce this publication. Truly it’s a gift that I get to put something in my artist’s resume. Certainly it’s an honor to be chosen. And someday it will be a funny story.

For now, it’s mine. And damn it, I’m proud of it.

by Anne Carson

Rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book marks, without an ember of doubt, the first time I’ve ever felt burned by my lack of education in the classics. I approached this book ready to feel cowed and lost, so I was enthralled when that was not the case.

I understand Geryon intimately, for I, too am a red creature.

From a forgotten notebook of mine:

“On my steady diet of nicotine and coffee, my thoughts grind (like bad teeth) into points. I am a sharp-shaped thing. A needle, an arrow, I cut. I can touch rage: rage that was the only sprig of life on the barren potato farm; rage tucked into the left work boot for the dark walk home from the plant; rage channeled into the line of a razor’s making, at first invisible, then blessed red. We all know the color of rage. Red will unmake me.”

Geryon’s red is a different hue, as has my own ripened with age. Passion. Shame. Love. The interior exposed and vulnerable. Heat. Longing. Did you know longing was red? Do you know how close you are to knowing that?

Like the terrestrial crust of the earth
which is proportionately ten times thinner than an eggshell, the skin of the soul
is a miracle of mutual pressures.

Fuck Herakles. That bitch and his arrogance, never seeing the deep red interior of his jailbait trick. Winning is blindness. Winning is empty. Winning is lonely, even with a joint in one hand and a cock in the other. It is through losing that we learn to make bread in the volcano’s eye. It is through returning that we get wings.

Anne Carson, thank you for making a hero of the vanquished, for turning a flat story over and finding the life growing beneath it.

Geryon stood upright
within the rayon planes of his brother’s sports jacket. Sweat and desire ran
down his body to pool
in the crotch and behind the knees. He had been standing against the wall
for three and a half hours in a casual pose.
His eyes ached from the effort of trying to see everything without looking at it.
Other boys stood beside him
on the wall. The petals of their colognes rose about them in a light terror.
Meanwhile music pounded
across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being
a self in a song.

“What is time made of?” Geryon asks frequently.

Fear of time came at him. Time
was squeezing Geryon like the pleats of an accordion.

And:

…A man moves through time. It means nothing except that,
like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.

What does this thoughtful young artist have against time? We might think it’s his death — we all know his demise is assured before reading the book, or at least once we find out he goes up against Herakles:

on the other side of the world somewhere Herakles laughing drinking getting
into a car and Geryon’s
whole body formed one arch of a cry — upcast to that custom, the human custom of wrong love.

But here Carson has turned the story around — it’s not death Geryon waits for, but heartbreak. And heartbreak, as we all can’t help but know, is red like thunder.

View all my reviews.

…own a bookstore located on their farm in Wisconsin. It’s not marked; it’s not centrally located. They never advertise, and their only regular hours are 9-5 on Saturday.

They have more than a million titles, which is many more than a shopping center chain store.

This inspiring couple will amaze you.

Lenore says that the most important book of all is Mother Goose’s nursery rhymes:

“If a child knows eight nursery rhymes before the child is four years old, that child will be an excellent reader when he is eight years old.”

(The video is a little slow to start, since there are a couple of intros edited in. But it’s worth it.)

[via My World... My Perspective...]