"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.

I heart coffeehouses

I read this poem, along with T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," at our dorm Fair Trade coffee house last night. I don't think there will ever be a day when I read something by Margaret Atwood and say, "Hmm, she could have done better." This poem is no exception:

IN THE SECULAR NIGHT

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house.
It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

In a Station of the Metro

Once I realized that there are a lot of long poems here, I thought maybe a short one would be fun.

In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

So, the first line just runs, skipping and iambic. The second just drops, stagnant. One is motion, the other is stagnation. Of all the times I've looked at this poem, this last time is the first time I saw that. Just a reminder to read everything twice. Or, like, three hundred times.