Poemanias off air for a week

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Thom Gunn was a

Happy child, shattered teen. Revered poet, reluctant celebrity. Teacher and sage, aging Peter Pan with a growling libido...

Self-esteem is the prize

awarded by you to you for playing by your own rules -- in which case, you'd think it would be easier to come by.

Terry Rossio

Moore's Law original issue found

A copy of the original Electronics magazine in which Moore's Law was first published has turned up under the floorboards of a Surrey engineer

Sad Mike Snider Anniversary

Which I've realized also has something to do with the fact that fifteen years ago yesterday, two days after my daughter Lee's 6th birthday, I came home from work to find my first wife had taken her and left. A week or so later I found out that my wife, damaged by a pituitary tumor, the drugs prescribed to treat it, and by having been convinced by Duke University Hospital psychologist Susan Roth that she (my wife) had been raised in a murderous Satanic cult, had accused me of molesting my daughter. It was nearly a year before the accusation was dismissed with prejudice, and in the meantime our house was repossessed. Shortly after that my dog died, I lost my job, and my wife and daughter disappeared

A Daisy Godwin moment

According to yesterdays Sunday Times gossip column, Daisy Godwin apparently adds poems of her own to her anthologies, using pseudonyms. You can read that again if you like.

"The writer's fundamental attempt

is to understand the meaning of his own experiences. If he can't break through those issues that concern him deeply, he's not going to be very good."


Robert Penn Warren (via Choriamb) - it ain't elegant, but it's hard to argue with.

The authenticity of your feelings, their depth, novelty and sincerity, are not markers for commercial success

The view from Salt

Essential Hitler mood icons

The Annals of Chile

A group of seven Chilean poets who held a poetry reading in a baboon enclosure have praised the animals' patience.
It had been feared they could attack the poets ...

Oh, yes, the rain is sorry. Unfemale, of course, the rain is

Four poems by Brenda Shaughnessy, including the wonderful Project for a Fainting that Roddy has discovered over on the poem discussion board.

Billy C on ee

In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings.

Poemanias competition #.4356

It being an official hangover day at poemanias, here goes a competition to find the longest string of repeated phonetically identical words which contain some loose form of meaning, as in:

'there, there; they're there' - where the first two are the consolatory expression, and the second two reference an set of objects and point to their whereabouts....

(and using Shakespeare doesn't count). There!

Auden on acid...

'Nothing much happened, but I got the distinct impression that some birds were trying to communicate with me'...

The DNA of Literature

Over 50 years of literary wisdom rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews...

Prospect on Quixote

Don Quixote de la Mancha, icon of everything in humanity that is calamitously idealistic, is renowned for qualities other than rationalist courage: for kindness and foolishness; for unintended comedy and a refusal to be disenchanted; for clairvoyant lunacy and obstinate romanticism in a rotten, factual world...

Somalis take Bysshe literally

Poets in Somalia hold an inordinate sway over the indigenous population. They sing the praises of war with the same alacrity and vehemence that they invest in glorifying peace. And the population listens and follows these dark skinned pied pipers. Lately, they have been extolling peace and peace prevails in Somaliland

No, CK hasn't forgotten long lines...

Tar

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain,
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a
hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake
at seven
when the roofers we've been waiting for since winter sent their ladders
shrieking up our wall,

(cont. at poets.org)

Poets Walk on Google Maps UK

Kanye West's Lyric

"The Way School Need Teachers / The Way Kathie Lee Needed Regis / That's the Way I Need Jesus," Adapted for Other Religions...

Islam
The way Madonna need the Kabbalah / The way Skee-Lo needed more royalties from "I wish I was a li'l bit talla" / That the way I need Allah.

(from Mcsweeneys)

"I can win an argument on any topic,

against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."

Dave Barry

Auden's take on the 'Road less travelled'

The Crossroads

The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake; one flashes on
To fame and ruin in a rowdy lie,
A village torpor holds the other one,
Some local wrong where it takes time to die:
The empty junction glitters in the sun..

So at all quays and crossroads: who can tell,
O places of decision and farewell,
to what dishonour all adventure leads,
What parting gift could give that friend protection,
So orientated, his salvation needs
The Bad Lands and the sinister direction?

All landscapes and all weathers freeze with fear,
But none have ever thought, the legends say,
The time allowed made it impossible;
For even the most pessimistic set
The limit of their errors at a year.
What friends could there be left then to betray,
What joy take longer to atone for? Yet
Who would dare complete without the extra day
The journey that should take no time at all?

WH Auden

What was bugging him that morning? And why so cryptic at the end?

Now this is Jane Draycott doing an experimental sound piece on us...

Unbelievably pretentious? Or does it sort of work somehow? Or both? New art form?

A Signals Interview with Jamie McKendrick

Is there a particular method you use when writing? Is writing poetry a constant preoccupation?

No method, unfortunately, but the absence of method. I envy poets like Montale who write, as he claimed, with "pochi ritocchi" (few retouchings). In my case most early drafts are execrable, but if there's a halfway decent line, (and this is the same process for translation) the poem seems to have a chance. It's an intermittent thing for me - I noticed with dismay that there's a six year gap between my last two books. Only very occasionally do I try to write something without having first felt some kindled excitement, and then I quickly abandon it as useless. Better times occur when one line leads to another, and even one poem leads to another

CK Williams 'We'

We

A basset-hound with balls
so heavy they hang
a harrowing half-inch from the pavement,

ears cocked, accusingly
watches as his beautiful
mistress croons
to her silver cell-phone.

She does, yes, go on,
but my, so slim
-waistedly
does she sway there,

so engrossedly does her dark
gaze drifttowards even
for a moment mine …

Though Mister Dog of course
sits down right
then to lick
himself, his groin of course,

till she cuts off, and he,
gathering his folds
and flab, heaves
erect to leave with her …

But wait, she's turning to
a great Ducati
cycle gleaming
black and chromy at the curb,

She's mounting it, (that long
strong lift of flank!)
snorting it to life,
coaxing it in gear …

Why, she's not his at all!
No more than mine!
What was he thinking?
What was I? Like a wing,

a wave, she banks away
now, down-shifts,
pops and crackles
round the curve, is gone.

How sleek she was, though;
how scrufty, how
anciently scabby
we, he and I;

how worn, how
self-devoured,
balls and all,
balls, balls and all.

Listen to C.K. Williams reading this poem.

Quote: 'My mother buried three husbands...

and two of them were just napping'.

Rita Rudner

And further to the Motion spat

Apparently it wasn't the Poet Laureate that Don Paterson was calling a 'bag o' shite' but rather the metaphor referred to the office itself.

Haggis: bag o' blood n' guts. Bagpipe: bag o' goat's guts.

20 Questions the Artificial Intelligence way

The Geek Chart

Now what about one for poetry readers...

Fooseball: the ballet

Poetry: the health hazards

Kaufman surveyed nearly 2,000 significant male and female writers and found that nonfiction writers live an average of 67.9 years, novelists 66 years, playwrights 63.4 years and poets 62.2.

Comedy scriptwriters nomenclature

and at Kung Fu Monkey too...

36. Sonny on the Causeway: Thinking a joke is a sure-fire winner, then getting ambushed by the silent audience reaction.

Iapetus, Saturn's moon

has a 60,000ft high wall stretching along its equator. Say again?

Elvis Night at the Bering Sea Saloon

You can hear the thump
from five blocks away.
The street is white and empty.
Someone has tied a pet reindeer
to a rusted truck bumper.
It snorts for food in my hand.
A young woman grabs my arm
her words are lost in the din.
I squeeze past into the smoke.
A fat man in dark glasses
and star-spangled boxer shorts
is singing "Blue Suede Shoes."
He has two front teeth.
"Thank you," he shouts
"Thank you very much."
The locals are jamming tonight
because there is no tomorrow.
The owner's lease is running out.

By DAVID KIFFER

Empson biog

'Obscurity in a writer may be due,' William Empson once wrote in an essay on Dylan Thomas, 'not to concentration, but to a refusal to speak out.'

the W factor: Bush on dnext....

Democracy in 60 seconds

(via wonkette)

New find for the Carmina Archilochi...

Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome...

One discovery in particular, a 30-line passage from the poet Archilocos, of whom only 500 lines survive in total, is described as "invaluable" by Dr Peter Jones, author and co-founder of the Friends of Classics campaign.

Sunday Times Diary Poet Spatathon

John Dugdale writes:

Interesting developments concerning the inter-bardic spat mentioned here last week, as Don Paterson tells the Diary that Craig Raine — who recently launched a multi-warhead attack on him for anonymously rubbishing Andrew Motion as “shite” — was misinformed. Paterson admits that he did use the term when asked for his response to Motion’s appointment as poet laureate, but says it didn’t reflect his view of Motion’s oeuvre, and was just “a totally idiotic response by a drunk Scot on receiving the news”.

and

Things are clearly hotting up in the genteel world of verse, as last week also brought news of legal rumblings following a lecture by Bloodaxe’s Neil Astley slating verse publishing and reviewing. Once available in full online, the talk now has a section cut “for legal reasons”; Astley says it dealt with a poet and critic he declines to identify, who protested via his solicitor. Is this stroppy chap influential, then? “He likes to think he is.”

The man who made the mask

The recent discovery of hundreds of unpublished letters to his wife Elizabeth written over a 30-year period complicates the orthodox view of Severn as primarily "the friend of Keats"

for the rhyme impaired

it takes a few seconds for the script to read the page and shout out some dope rhymes.
actually, what really happens is that1. you submit a URL (remember, it's subject to traffic schedule).2. the server script reads the HTML page at that address.3. it treats the code as literal English words.4, assembles 16 lines from them

Hartley Coleridge's Song

The earliest wish I ever knew
Was woman's kind regard to win;
I felt it long e're passion grew,
E'er such a wish could be a sin.

And still it lasts;- the yearning ache
No cure has found, no comfort known:
If she did love, twas for my sake,
She could not love me for her own.


Don Paterson was complaining in the Guardian about how hard it is to resurrect a poet who has fallen into neglect, oblivion, whatever. Donne and a couple of the other metaphysicals were salvaged, but presumably this was because the age that did the salvaging was a tad more aware of poetry than ours is. I certainly can't think of an utterly lost poet whose been found within the last thirty years. Any thoughts?

Silence

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon and the quiet of the day
far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

Billy Collins

(from Poetry)



The magic of the list - Roddy Lumsden is another list master.

Jersey poets immortalized at rest stops

It's no accident, after all, that the New Jersey Turnpike has more rest stops named for poets (three) than for presidents (two).

Julia Darling dies at 48 of breast cancer

Visualisation

You are on a path, leading to the blue wood,
you are floating. Everything you touch shivers
then blossoms. You have perfect knees, glossy hair.
You are sure of your destination, (breathe deeply.)
You pass a waterfall spilling from a cave,
and an elegant fish leaps from the water.
See its rainbow scales. A kingfisher hovers.
Go to the bank, put your hand in the water.
Pure, ice cold water. Wipe it on your lips.
It tastes of honey and elderflower. Drink deeply.
This water will cure you, feel its cool fire
soaking into your bones. You are strong.
Stay there, with the birdsong, don't open your eyes,
for a wrathful cat sits on your chest.
and your sheets need washing.
Stay with the path. Keep the nettles trimmed.

'80s Lineups that read like tabloid headlines

Flock of Seagulls Jam the Tubes

Thirty-eight dishonest tricks which are commonly used in argument, with the methods of overcoming them

In most textbooks of logic there is to be found a list of "fallacies", classified in accordance with the logical principles they violate. Such collections are interesting and important, and it is to be hoped that any readers who wish to go more deeply into the principles of logical thought will turn to these works. The present list is, however, something quite different. Its aim is practical and not theoretical. It is intended to be a list which can be conveniently used for detecting dishonest modes of thought which we shall actually meet in arguments and speeches

Donald Justice Primer

Haiku U

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past:

Tea-soaked madeleine –
a childhood recalled.
I had brownies like that once.

The Microcredit Revolution...how to get involved

ACCION International is a nonprofit that fights poverty through microlending. Every day, millions of enterprising women and men around the world struggle to better their lives by opening tiny businesses. They work exhausting hours yet they barely scrape by. What they need to break free is a little credit - a loan as small as $100. With ACCION, they can get it.

Poet was real author of london sex guide

Irish poet Samuel Derrick was the real author of a popular but controversial 18th century list of London prostitutes, a British historian concludes.

Don't Shave that Yak

Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. "I want to wax the car today."

"Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I'll need to buy a new one at Home Depot."

"But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls."

The fourth thing I have learnt...

PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.

Early in my career I couldn’t wait to become a professional. That was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything - not to mention they got paid well for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is limiting risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please doc, do it in the way that has worked in the past.Unfortunately in our field, in a so-called creative activity – I’ve begun to hate that word. I especially hate when it is used as a noun. I shudder when I hear someone called a creative. Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is desirable in our field, is continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. Professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.

How De Soto defeated Shining Path

How property reform and the democratization of governance helped defeat the Shining Path in Peru and what that means for other countries today...

is it just me, or is this in fact the most interesting political movement around?

Draw a pig personality test

via growabrain

The Panama Canal Palindrome revisited

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal--Panama!

Fire, Fire, call in the Lawyers...

Neil Astley's StAnza piece is still up, and very much worth a read. I'd heard that StAnza had taken it down, after complaints from Peter Macdonald. These culminated apparently in a legal writ - presumably some kind of stay or desist order which might have to do with the references to Macdonald's Tower Poetry reviews. Astley has apparently complained to the Oxford authorities about the anonymous reviews on the site which savaged Kate Clanchy and Roddy Lumsden among others. The reviews were subsequently removed. Responses to Astley's piece (which also attacks the Guardian Review as mysogenist) can be found here. Paul and Sean cover the bust up best...

Paul Farley

Lester Bangs used to say there were only 10,000 or so pairs of ears on the planet capable of hearing and enjoying Captain Beefheart, and it's easy to draw an analogy with contemporary poetry. But I hope he was wrong. You could argue that poetry's marginal status gains it liberties from the marketplace. Concepts like a mainstream versus an experimental cohort, and perennial anxieties concerning gender or ethnic representation, start to become very relative when you realise hardly anyone's listening.

The relationship between poets and their critics is complex, but what I would say is that poets of my generation - born in the early 60s onwards - have, bar a few notable exceptions, not enjoyed the severe scrutiny, pruning, championing and advocacy a robust criticism affords. My generation haven't had criticism; they've had marketing. Which all sounds bleak. But I think there is a readership for poetry, and that most poets would like to be read, and that the contract between reader and poet may be injured but isn't broken beyond repair.

Sean O'Brien

As advocates for poetry know, the same problems recur every few years in different guises. There's a pull towards populism, followed by a balancing reaction from the academy. The avant-garde goes on typing, the professors discover the answer again (it's Geoffrey Hill) and the public browses and moves on. Meanwhile good work is written and (despite everything, including most bookshops) eventually finds a readership.

Hamlet's Cat

To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:
Whether 'tis better for a cat to suffer
The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather
That Nature rains upon those who roam abroad,
Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,
And so by dozing melt the solid hours
That clog the clock's bright gears with sullen time
And stall the dinner bell.To sit, to stare
Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state
A wish to venture forth without delay,
Then when the portal's opened up, to stand
As if transfixed by doubt.To prowl; to sleep;
To choose not knowing when we may once more
Our readmittance gain: aye, there's the hairball;
For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob,
Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,
And going out and coming in were made
As simple as the breaking of a bowl,
What cat would bear the household's petty plagues,T
he cook's well-practiced kicks, the butler's broom,
The infant's careless pokes, the tickled ears,
The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks
That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will,
He might his exodus or entrance make
With a mere mitten?

(cont...)

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Thomas Mann

But look what a spinning birds head can do to a drop of water

Water would not splash on the moon

HERE'S a Zen-like question. If a drop of liquid falls on a flat surface and there is no air around it, does it make a splash?
The answer, which may or may not help you reach nirvana, is no.

New Kerala backs poetry

If literature is food for the mind, then a poem is a banquet, scientists say.According to psychologists at Scotland's Dundee and St. Andrews universities, poetry exercises the mind more than a novel since the former guaranteed far more eye movement associated with deeper thought, reported the daily Scotsman.

Heaney's Prose

“from the beginning there was an element of the ‘duty dance,’ of the good boy doing his university work, about my criticism.” - as always self perceptive...

The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Became An Evil Overlord

My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

(this list is growing...)

Tony Curtis Villanelle workshop

The villanelle was developed by the French from an earlier Italian folk-song form. Its exact origins as a formal poetry discipline are arguable, but it was certainly becoming established in late 15th-century France, and had been adopted by English language poets by the end of the 19th century. Many notable poets have worked within the form: Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, WH Auden, Dannie Abse, Paul Muldoon, William Empson, even the singer-poet Leonard Cohen

Verse reviews Roddy Lumsden's Mischief Night

In this collection, Lumsden in turn tenders and skewers countless life philosophies

And a complete collection of Muldoon audios

Dylan reads 'And death shall have no dominion'

(via growabrain)

Poemanias going to sleep for a week...

back round the 10th