Ghouls and Goblins

What should I be for Halloween?? -LM

Definition of the Day

draw - to pull out to full or greater length; make by attenuating; stretch: to draw filaments of molten glass.

Sledge!

you could have a steam train
if you'd just lay down your tracks
you could have an aeroplane flying
if you bring your blue sky back

all you do is call me
I'll be anything you need

you could have a big dipper
going up and down, all around the bends
you could have a bumper car, bumping
this amusement never ends

I want to be your sledgehammer
why don't you call my name
oh let me be your sledgehammer
this will be my testimony
show me round your fruitcage
'cuz I will be your honey bee
open up your fruitcage
where the fruit is as sweet as can be

I want to be your sledgehammer
why don't you call my name
you'd better call the sledgehammer
put your mind at rest
I'm going to be-the sledgehammer
this can be my testimony
I'm your sledgehammer
let there be no doubt about it

sledge sledge sledgehammer

I've kicked the habit
shed my skin
this is the new stuff
I go dancing in, we go dancing in
oh won't you show for me
and I will show for you
show for me, I will show for you
yea, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do mean you
only you
you've been coming through
going to build that power
build, build up that power, hey
I've been feeding the rhythm
I've been feeding the rhythm
going to feel that power, build in you
come on, come on, help me do
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you
I've been feeding the rhythm
I've been feeding the rhythm
it's what we're doing, doing
all day and night

--Peter Gabriel

Poem of the Day

The Letter

I am not feeling strong yet, but I am taking
good care of myself. The weather is perfect.
I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea.
I expect to swim soon. For now I am content.
I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am
doing my best. It reminds me of when I was
sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside
and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something
in me that others receive more naturally.
Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life.
Even my failures in poetry please me.
Time is very different here. It is very good
to be away from public ambition.
I sweep and wash, cook and shop.
Sometimes I go into town in the evening
and have pastry with custard. Sometimes I sit
at a table by the harbor and drink half a beer.

--Linda Gregg, from The Sacraments of Desire [Graywolf Press].

Wild Boys, 1984

The wild boys are calling on their way back from the fire
in august moon's surrender to a dust cloud on the rise
wild boys fallen far from glory
reckless and so hungered on the razors edge you trail
because there's murder by the roadside in a sore afraid new world

they tried to break us, looks like they'll try again

wild boys never lose it
wild boys never chose this way
wild boys never close your eyes
wild boys always shine

you got sirens for a welcome there's bloodstain for your pain
and your telephone been ringing wile you're dancing in the rain
wild boys wonder where is glory
where is all you angels now the figureheads have fell
and lovers war with arrows over secrets they could tell

they tried to tame you looks like they'll try again

wild boys never lose it
wild boys never chose this way
wild boys never close your eyes
wild boys always shine

--Duran Duran

Jean Valentine poem in The New Yorker

On a Passenger Ferry
by Jean Valentine

(For Grace Paley)

The deck is big, and crowded. In one corner,
an old woman, sick, on chemo, not in pain, is
writing in an elementary-school notebook.
Nobody else saw her, but I saw her.
I had seen her before. Her round, kind face,
smiling and still as a photograph
outside a window—


The New Yorker
September 24, 2007

Poem

Mango

Delicious slivers of mango
cut like long tongues--so it's as if we eat
our passion, this longing

sticky like the afterglow of our sex,
with skin the reddish mottle of mango skin.
How often had I eaten these alone

bought at some Upper West Side bodega
and cut open with a pocket knife,
sitting at Riverside park, sunset

orange in the Hudson below:
sunset orange with a knife in it,
bleeding orange in my hands.

--Gerry LaFemina

Originally published in the Winter 2004-2005 issue of The Southeast Review.

Spinner

Some recent records of note:

Liars - Liars - [Mute]

I'm not entirely convinced that Liars, one of my favorite bands, have written a cohesive, fully-realized record with this, their fourth release, but that particular truth may not matter, given that the new songs are more about mood and tone, as opposed to ideas. Having said that, it is best that would-be listeners not overlook Liars for what it is: a document of a daring, risk-taking music prepared by a band interested not in pleasing its audience, but in circumventing tired norms.

The tracks to which my ear is especially drawn include: "Leather Prowler"; "Sailing to Byzantium"; "Clear Island"; and "Protection," a song that can best be described as haunting (a falsetto has never sounded so right), and which is probably the best album-closer that I've heard in the last five years.

I will take your Polaroid / You will show me how to drink...

M.I.A. - Kala - [XL]

It has a good beat and you can dance to it.

from "Stars" by McGrath

We are human and our form is a corruption of starlight
poured like heavy syrup into soft-skinned molds,
like decorative soaps, or candles.

Like the stars we burn fiercely, reluctantly,
as a dragon consumes its golden hoard.

Of my eyes, of my skin, the stars shall know nothing.


--Campbell McGrath, a selection from his forthcoming Seven Notebooks, published in mipoesias.com

Writing Tips

1. Parenthetical Remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
2. Don't use no double negatives.
3. Proofread carefully to see if any words out or mispeld something.
4. Eschew obfuscation.
5. Verbs HAS to agree with their subjects.
6. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
8. Avoid cliches like the plague (they're old hat).
9. Be more or less specific.

Close, But No Fine, Hand-Rolled, Imported Cuban Cigar

Dear Danny _________:

Thank you for sending us "The Cartographer." We really enjoyed this piece, but it didn't work for (esteemed literary journal) right now. We hope that you will continue to send us your work.

Sincerely,
The Editors of (esteemed literary journal)

I love Google translate this page

Linee di Florinda Fusco, from www.editricezona.it/linee.htm:

“Like clearly enunciated sin from the frontispiece, those collections from the Fusco are `lines here', not “backs”, or “poetries” (even if the proposed tiration wants obviously to be offered like vicaria regarding such alternatives). `A line' is something of other (not “less”, even if is fuor of doubt the tone `in minor') regarding a back. But in what consists this difference? Or, said otherwise, and perhaps little better: what characterizes `a line' of the Fusco and of it it determines its same leggibilità? They said, a lot in order to express to me with a formula, the coincidence and nearly the superimposition, between `the capacity' of its development on the page (just in the sense of the amount of oral materials, of images etc that every `line' transports to the just inner) and its ritmica necessity. The prosodia, insomma, it is a category of analysis that with `the lines' works little: you notice yourself, in so far as, the nearly absolute lack of the enjambement, that is the ritmica figure that than more every other denunciation the collision between prosodiche requests and syntactic requests. For against, those turn out amplify all to you mark them (lines white women, inner spaziature to the back, paginations to step: and then also parenthesis, italics etc) that they stretch to isolate every single `line' or fragment of it like unit in sure measure self-sufficient person.” (from the famous one of Mark Berisso).

to have a north wind to two ropes (I could perhaps be raised)
I dredge in the water the shapes of I dredge in the water

the body that wheel (a grooved pleasure)

to prepare itself in the bottom of the sand/to imitate the shapes of the water

misurala as you can you remove the coat and misurala with the body

sordamente
the minimum sinks to articulate
glacial states of waking and generations
to go up or to wait for to touch the field

to have the just words to mistake with the words
to try the force points
to float like the north wind

(not there is certainty in repairing
in the repair broken one is something much
of untied frozen cut I confirm
broken one is something much
I want to say that the center is various from the side
the repair is maceration)

to soil the face of black
to be based to a small table in station

Brooklyn Book Festival

The second annual Brooklyn Book Festival will take place this Sunday, September 16 in various venues throughout the borough, and is due to feature a number of interesting poets/writers, including: Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kimiko Hahn, A.M. Homes, and many others. Of the gathering, Marty Marokowitz, Brooklyn borough president, writes:

Greetings,

The second annual Brooklyn Book Festival on September 16, 2007 is a book lover’s dream come true! The festival presents exciting and innovative fiction and non-fiction programs with author discussions and readings—come early to get a seat! Nearly 100 booksellers and thousands of books will fill beautiful Borough Hall Plaza and Columbus Park. You can hear a poetry slam, participate in a define-a-thon, and have your favorite book signed by the author. Children can hear their best-loved books read at the Target Children’s Pavilion; teenagers will find sports, fantasy, graphic novels and more at the Independence Community Foundation Youth Pavilion. The Brooklyn Book Festival is a best seller! See you there!

http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/

Wow Poem by Anne Carson

Poem: ‘Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony’

Anne Carson

I
Do you think of your saliva as a personal possession or as something you can sell?
What about tears? What about semen? Linguists tell
us to use the terms alienable and inalienable
to make this distinction intelligible.
E.g. English speakers call both blood and faeces alienable on a normal day
but saliva, sweat, tears and bowels they do not give away.
Bananas and buttocks, in Papua New Guinea, belong to the inalienable class
while genitalia and skin of banana are not held onto nearly so fast.

Such thinking will affect how a word like rape is defined
or how sorcerers aim their spells or how you feel in your mind
when you address animals. Of course cows and cats,
sheep, pigs, donkeys, dogs and rats
depend on their owner to keep or dispose.
But your pony you cannot sensibly classify with those.

II
Another thee.
A summer’s day.
Double vantage me.
Never to repay.
And Will in overplus.
Making addition thus –
your pony is all these to you – and more:
he can detect the smell of danger

and will not take you through a door
if there is doom or pain there.
So at the end of his life if you want to sell him for meat
you’ll have to change the pronoun with which you greet
at dawn his shaggy head,
at dawn his shaggy head.

III
A body in the dawn.
A body in the cold.
A body its breath.
Its breath a plume.
A dance a plume.
A dance not thou.
A thou, a thee.
Thou, breath.

There stands.
Breath, plume.
How cold is.
A dawn is.
How still stands.
Thy breath.

recipe for suddenly single

Cockgobbler Cocktail

6 oz. Marino's cherry italian ice
6 oz. Finlandia Vodka

Stir into slushy liquid. Drink.

wooden spoons

from http://www.oddtodd.com/message434.html:

Dear Mr. & Mrs. Marino,

The other day I was at the supermarket looking for some alternative to ice cream because my face is too round and when I push my chin into my neck it doesn't look so good. I was considering some yogurt fat-free frozen gunk when I saw a box of Marinos Italian Ices. Watermelon flavor. Six cups in the box! I'm like, 'Italian ice! I loved italian ice as a kid! Psyched! Yummy with the wooden spoon thing scrape scrape fun delicious activity thing!' I threw the box in my cart and shoved off.

When I got home and opened the box and was hugely disappointed. There were no wooden spoons in the box! There were no spoons at all! Just the six things of italian ice all alone! I shook the box out and looked inside. What?! No wooden spoons?! WTF!? That's half the fun of having italian ice I think! How could you (of all people!) not know this!? So I grabbed a stupid regular old metal spoon and did the scrape scrape with that but it wasn't the same. It sucked. And there was something slightly chilling doing the scrape scrape with the metal. Like chalkboard nails stuff.

So Mr. & Mrs. Marino, I'm telling you you're making a huge mistake by not including the wooden spoons! I'm definitely not going to buy any more take-home italian ice until you rectify the situation with the wooden spoons! You're f'in crazy to not have the wooden spoons in there! Is it a cost cutting thing? How much could a wooden spoon cost? Uncheapify yourself! I'd settle for one and just reuse it!

Get your act together Mr. & Mrs. Marino! C'mon! Jeez louise!

ok bye!

tOdd

Poets On Call No High Horse

Up in Smoke

Found on a postcard at St. Mark's Bookshop:

If Jesus smoked he would have made
It easier for those who pray

A little match, a little flame,
A little smoke that spells our name

And by that smoke, immortal life--
By Camel, Kool or Lucky Strike

Charles Simic for the Win

Charles Simic has been named the new poet laureate of the United States. Of the new consultant to the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets writes: Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2007. About the appointment, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, "The range of Charles Simic's imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor."

Late September

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.