From the Rutland Herald’s From bad to verse: “After more than two dozen young people trashed a former residence of poet Robert Frost during a drinking party, the dilemma was how to punish them. A jail term might be too harsh, community service too easy. So a prosecutor decided on some poetic justice instead — [...]
From Seth Godin’s When poets get angry: “By now, Poetree.coop has probably been shut down. While it lasted, it was the best-designed, richest source of p2p poetry sharing available online. Only a typical lunk-headed heavy-handed ploy by the inner circle of poets was able to shut it down. All the classics were there: Rod McKuen, [...]
April 26, 2007 – 10:04 am
Under the simmering beat of sun
And confused drone of crickets
One bends his back to the sound,
Discordant and clanging
Like a god wearying of his hammer.
This back will not straighten till the song ends,The eye has wept as though stung by a bumblebee.
The weak flame is reached and touched
By a hand which burns, and sears,
And finally shivers [...]
Check out Playing House by Dana Biscotti Myskowski. Dana is a good friend of mine from Goddard, and her screenplay just got published in the Pitkin Review. It’s a beautiful, wordless poem in the form of a screenply. Take a few minutes and discover what’s possible.
December 27, 2006 – 12:00 pm
It startles the heart the toll sunlight
Takes on man’s devisings,
Unchecked and unobserved,
One realizes that to be
Resigned, fully resigned
Takes more than patience,
But also exhaustion of the wellspring,
The self and further options.
Today it snowed for the first time.
The grasses in the fields are trodden down
By winter’s old miserly settling,
Creaky, indifferent-
The milkweed pods tattered, their downy comas drifting, [...]
November 17, 2006 – 10:34 am
A street not far from here
Has been inhabited by vagrants
For some time,
Will continue to be so I feel.
A shuttling red ensanguines
In steady flashes
Its rain-sheered surface;
History, here, remains only in drear fetters
Clinging to the walls—
Achievement in gutter spume.
Sonorous still, the knell of an invisible
Instrument, ubiquitous whine cants
Of the separation of races, of poverty,
The mechanization of birth, [...]
November 1, 2006 – 04:00 pm
Walking along a forgotten strip of beach
On Nantucket Isle,
I am thinking: When civilization ends,
It will look like this.
My bare feet pad over
Rocks smoothed by the surging tide, and
Old empty horseshoe-crab shells, wide brown-rimmed
Carapaces lie in sand-flanked
Clusters where the gulls dropped them.
Knotty driftwood and streamers of
Dry seaweed line the banks, blown by a salty wind,
And the [...]
October 17, 2006 – 06:00 am
Such a small inn room and so much money for so little;
how warm you are tonight but cold, your fingers
in the bathtub’s clear stinging water, runneled with red of a sudden, and you
asleep on the sheets, so different
from me.
I cannot find you tonight because I am too lost in myself, have beenfor far too long–
two [...]
February 28, 2006 – 10:50 pm
I finished reading an awesome book last night. With a three-tiered title, it’s name is Literature Against Philosophy: Plato to Derrida: A defence of poetry, by University of Virginia professor, Mark Edmundson.
The book is exactly what the title says it is. Edmundson pits poetry (or really, any creative work) against the literary theorists whose modus [...]
October 19, 2005 – 02:43 pm
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.-Pablo NerudaOde To The Book(translated by Nathaniel Tarn)
There are three people sitting my kitchen write now discussing poetry. It’s 1:55 [...]
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