Thursday, March 1, 2012

To Adelaide Crapsey, Which Is How I Feel


nothing matters no-
thing matters nothing matters
nothing matters no-
thing matters nothing matters
nothing matters nothing mat-

ters nothing matters
nothing matters nothing mat-
ters nothing matters
nothing matters nothing mat-
ters nothing matters nothing

matters nothing mat-
ters nothing matters nothing
matters nothing mat-
ters nothing matters nothing
matters nothing matters

rinse & repeat

Friday, February 17, 2012

Pop Quiz: I Want Answers


Romney: Soylent Green, Inc.,
is people, my friend.
In this year of primary battles for the upcoming presidential election, how close attention have you paid to the pointless political prattle?  Take this brief quiz to see how well you've focused.  Simply identify the speaker or speakers of the following quotations:


1) "Let me count this day, Lord, as the beginning of a new and more vigorous life, as the beginning of a crusade for complete morality and the domination of the Christian church through all the land. Dear Lord, thy work is but begun! We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!"

2) "Disease takes a thousand forms, so must the cure."

3) "We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports." 

4) "It is my brother who would have saved the last of our lands, won important public office, done all a good son can be expected to do in the way of piety towards his family gods. I know this is true and feel my life, my whole body’s weight in the saddle, as a burden."

5) "But what are soldiers for if not to be used?"

Extra Credit:  "A man peddles love songs because it is easier to do than it is to peddle coconuts . . . "

Answers below:  

Gingrich's plan for empowering children of underprivileged families
1) Pat Roberston may have been your first guess, but given what an idiotic gasbag he is, he's not the answer to anything. Or Pat Buchanan. Actually, any number of candidates, past or present, could have uttered such Jesus-babble on the campaign trail. It's easy to imagine Rick "Oops" Perry saying it, for instance, since it doesn't require him to count to three. How about corporate gaffe-machine Mitt "Makeover" Romney? Is there anything he won't say only to recant later? All good--rather, evil--guesses, but all wrong in so many ways! To find out the correct answer you need to turn the page back to 1927, when none other than that old charlatan himself, Elmer Gantry, in the novel by Sinclair Lewis, first proclaimed this wholly fucked up goal.

2) Doubtlessly, the answer involves someone associated with Health Care Reform, yet it seems extremely unlikely that Finance Chair Max Baucus would have said something that even hinted at options, public or otherwise. Ironically, since the committee wasn't looking for options, the single-payer system (which the president himself deemed not an option) would have seemed perfect. Alas, no. As for the quote, it comes from Roman poet Ovid's The Cure for Love--not Michele Bachmann's husband, Marcus, the gay doctor (i.e., he cures the gay), as you may have, albeit mistakenly, guessed.

3) Easy, right?  This was part of a leaked email from Mitch McConnell or another in a series of Speaker of the House John Boehner's bombastic boners. Perhaps Eric Cantor? Just say no to all of those bozos. Although it's a major part of the Republican strategy, you may be surprised to learn that Mao Tse-Tung voiced this selfsame plan in an interview 1939. What a grand old party, eh, Chairman Priebus?

4) It may also surprise you to hear the correct answer to this question is Ted Kennedy. It would surprise me too since that's incorrect. A less surprising response--I mean, the mention of the saddle is a virtual giveaway--would be to attribute it to Dubya Bush, said in an interview with some Faux News flunky to help lay the foundation for Jeb's no-brainer presidential bid. For the record, the correct answer is Ovid again. Well, not Ovid per se, but the fictionalized character of Ovid in exile in David Malouf's An Imaginary Life

5)  Par Lagerkvist's The Dwarf is what I'm looking for here, but to be fair, I'm fairly confident nearly everyone in the Bush administration said this very same thing at least once during those eight sad, if not sadistic years. Obama would never say any such thing. He would instead say something, pregnant with pauses, dignified about democracy & duty, as he sends troops somewhere they shouldn't be. Take Afghanistan--that's an order!

Santorum:  I <3 inequality.
Extra Credit:  If you said jumped-up jingoistic jingle-loving jughead Donald Trump, give yourself a million dollar comb-over & get the hell out--you're fired. Actually, it was former Vice President Dick Cheney--no, I'm kidding. But it was a former vice president of Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co., not to mention one time Mussolini supporter, Wallace Stevens, in his collection of essays, The Necessary Angel. An insurance executive with fascist leanings--what are the odds? Better than those of your claim being approved, I can tell you that much.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

An Illustrated Step-By-Step Guide to Traditional English Poetical Meter



IAMB

TROCHEE

ANAPEST

DACTYL

SPONDEE


PYRRHIC

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Top Ten Hits

The following list shows my most popular posts, according to the blog's auto-tracker--if you can trust Google.  Personally, I don't know that you can.  The arithmetic seems off at times, but what do I know?  I have difficulty balancing my checkbook, though that's primarily because I find negative numbers confusing, if not meaningless.  Speaking of which:

1.  Emily Dickinson Post is the runaway leader, with twice the hits of any other post & only half the calories.  If you're a fan of Emily Dickinson, perhaps you'll enjoy Greetings from Boston.  If you're a fan of the pseudo-bio thingy, then perhaps you'll like In Memory.  Now in individual fun-size servings!

2.  Imitation of Immortality is a parody of sorts of César Vallejo's oft-imitated "Black Stone on Top of a White Stone."  By the way, if you have a parody of Vallejo's poem, please feel free to go to this post & share it.  If you're into parodies, perhaps you'll enjoy the ironic dissection of the process in Composition of Parody.

3.  R-S-T-U-V, Find Out What It Means to Me places third, thanks to geometry.  Apparently my attempt to echo, however loosely, Aretha Franklin spelling out the title in her hit single "Respect" parallels a particularly tricky math problem, in which the letters R-S-T-U-V represent points on a geometric figure.  For those who've come to this site looking for help with your math, haha!  Hmm, I wonder if people who Googled implementing 2nd Amendment Rights were directed to Going Ballistic?

4.  How to Make The Divine Comedy Relevant to Today's Audiences, a tongue-in-cheek Lucas-esque adaptation of Dante to film, is one of my personal favorites.  If you like this post, perhaps you'll enjoy Homer's Space Odyssey.  Also, The Iliad.  Similarly, why not give Richard Lovelace, Vaudevillian a read too?

5.  Rock'em Sock'em Robots:  The Movie is the post that spawned the clearly plagiarized movie starring Huge Jackoff.  I wants my monies, bitches!  I can't help but wonder how come nobody's ripped off this yet?

6.  New Zoo Poetry Review #11 is the result, were I to guess, of web searches for New Zoo Poetry Review.  So if you're looking for magazines, may I also recommend NYQ 64Interpoezia 4, What Are You Reading?, & Verse & Adversity.

7.  Presidents' Day Poem gets plenty of hits in February, so I figure it's school related.  If you're an educator, please feel free to use "Washington Crossing the Delaware" in the classroom.  Also, since you've come here looking for classroom material, let me steer you to my extremely helpful comments on "The Road Not Taken" in Frost Warning

8.  Blog Rage is pretty much self-explanatory & if you want to read more angry rants, check out Walter Sobchak's Take on Occupy Wall St.Laying Claim to the NameDear Blah Blah Blah, & A Few Thoughts on National Poetry Month.  Hell, come to think of it, if you want angry rants, just click about anywhere on this site.

9.  Hey, Hollywood!  I Got Your Next Blockbuster Right Here! is my initial reaction to the aforementioned Hollywood ripoff.  For a later response, read Real Steel or Reel Steal?

10.  The Top Ten Poetry Posts Ever & More serendipitously sits in the 10th spot of this list. If you like lists--& why the hell not!--click here, here, & here.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Saturday, December 31, 2011

What I Read in 2011: Book Edition


January

1. Selected Poems, Apollinaire
2. Sky, Michael Benedict
3. The Complete Poems, Stephen Crane
4. Ulysses, James Joyce
5. Poems Seven, Alan Dugan

February

6. The Tormented Mirror, Russell Edson
7. Off the Map, Gloria Fuertes
8. Vita Nova, Louise Gluck
9. What Narcissism Means to Me, Tony Hoagland
10. Collected Poems, James Joyce
11. Passing Through, Stanley Kunitz
12. Masterpieces of Japanese Puppetry; Sculptured Heads of the Bunraku Theater, Roy Andrew Miller, English adaptation
13. The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin
14. Travels, W.S. Merwin

March

15. Dear Blood, Leonard Nathan
16. Love Poems of Ovid, trans. Horace Gregory
17. Winter Trees, Sylvia Plath
18. Selected Poems, Pierre Reverdy
19. A Simple Plan, Gary Soto
20. Malloy, Samuel Beckett
21. Riven Doggeries, James Tate
22. The Dirt, Nance Van Winckel

April

23. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
24. Riding the Earthboy, James Welch
25. The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
26. The Foggist, Dean Young
27. Family Reunion, Paul Zimmer 

May

28. Fate, Ai
29. The Stillness, the Dancing, Linda Bierds
30. Within a Budding Grove, Marcel Proust
31. The Poems of Catullus, trans. Peter Whigham

June

32. The Bomb, Howard Zinn
33. A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi
34. Candide, Voltaire
35. Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa

July

36. Boone’s Lick, Larry McMurtry
37. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
38. A Russian Beauty & Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov

August

39. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
40. Poems Seven, Alan Dugan (2nd time this year)
41. Collected Poems, T.S. Eliot

September

42. Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde
43. An Imaginary Life, David Malouf
44. Complete Poems, Kenneth Fearing
45. The Great Fires, Jack Gilbert

October

46. The Erotic Poems, Ovid, Peter Green, trans.
47. The Legend of Light, Bob Hicok
48. War & Peace, Leo Tolstoy, Constance Garnett, trans.

November

49. La Vagabonde, Colette
50. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
51. Ghost Town, Robert Coover

December
52. Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon
53. The Dwarf, Par Lagerkvist
54. The Complete Poems, Randall Jarrell
55. The Art of Love, Kenneth Koch

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Rewriting Jarrell's "The Soldier"

In the first year
of the first war
each taught each
to give all for all,
all alike, the poor
& the poorer,
deaths sown over
continents like salt
for the old
evil--the good
of trade, so books
once red
as blood may show
a profit to die for.