Yeah, more Jorie Graham ALL RIGHT!

Opened up my New Yorker today, and Jorie Graham had a poem in it. I don't even have to tell you that I was excited. It's a good one.

Later in Life

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the neglected girlfriend

Finishing third place
after good beer and Halo:
story of my life.

"Poets don't have to work."

I love hearing writers read their own work. Maxine Hong Kingston (author of The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey) is a fun one to listen to. Her reading at U.C. Berkeley's Lunch Poems makes me laugh out loud. She talks about her process of becoming and being a poet and reads from her more recent books, To Be The Poet. The video is almost an hour long--it's high quality but if you can't sit for too long, at least listen to her poem about elephant seals. Start at 10 minutes if you want somewhat of an intro to the poem. But if you just want to skip straight to the poem, forward to about 13:30 minutes.

For Sarah and Joy

When the river is

still, to stand beside the shore

is to see the sky.

Dublin

I got into Trinity College, Dublin, for the whole year. I know, this isn't the expressed purpose of this blog. But seeing as how only two other people check it and those two have asked me repeatedly, I thought I'd share.

Snedding and all that it entails

This poem should have been here a long time ago. One of my favorite from the summer.

The Turnip-Snedder by Seamus Heaney

For Hughie O'Donoghue

In an age of bare hands
and cast iron,

the clamp-on meat-mincer,
the double flywheeled water-pump,

it dug its heels in among wooden tubs
and troughs of slops,

hotter than body heat
in summertime, cold in winter

as winter's body armour,
a barrel-chested breast-plate

standing guard
on four braced greaves.

"This is the way that God sees life,"
it said, "from seedling-braird to snedder,"

as the handle turned
and turnip-heads were let fall and fed

to the juiced-up inner blades,
"This is the turnip-cycle,"

as it dropped its raw sliced mess,
bucketful by glistering bucketful.


The first poem from Seamus Heaney's new (2006) collection "District and Circle." Read it aloud. With an Irish accent, preferably. Especially "from seedling-braird to snedder."

not a poem, but one of the shortest short stories in the world:

"El Dinosaurio" por Augusto Monterroso (1921-2003)
Cuando despertó el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.


the translation
"El Dinosaurio" by Augusto Monterroso
When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.



Um, I'm a little irked by the fact that people can get away with writing one-sentence stories. Am I allowed to do that? That aside, I suppose the point of this story is to get the reader to imagine. That's what my Spanish prof says, anyway. What immediately comes to my mind: A purple (a majestic purple, not a Barney purple) dinosaur resembling a dragon, which sleeps protectively next to the narrator.... I guess I'm not in one of my cynical moods right now.