1. NOONIE link. Nuni. Nuny—SNL, you win on this one.
2. David and Sandy Katz, summertime
3. Long poem that’s worth it and made me cry, in a good way.
4. Today I planted thousands of sunflowers. Literally thousands, and about half a dozen types. In a few months, there will be a 1.8 acres more of beauty in the world, and I will have been part of it.
and i would keep you for the allotted 6 months that grad students get to keep library books
Yes, it’s early, late or middle Friday evening in the universe. Oh, the sounds of time are pouring through the window and the key. All ideardian windows and bedarvled bedarvled mad bedraggled robes that rolled in the cave of Amontillado and all the sherried heroes lost and caved up, and transylvanian heroes mixing themselves up with glazer vup and the hydrogen bomb of hope.
(-Jack Kerouac, from his narration of the short film “Pull My Daisy,” part of which you can watch right here, with Italian subtitles, black and white versions of late afternoon Manhattan sunlight, and Kerouac, rambling long and short and narratively.) (I just learned how to embed videos on my site thanks to this really cool person’s daily song website. One small step for panache perhaps.)
The excerpt below is from a poem entitled “In Loving Memory of the Late Author of Dream Songs.” It was written by John Berryman’s good friend, William Meredith. William Meredith taught at Connecticut College for many years, and when he died our school held a memorial for him. I picked up Richard Wilbur at his house in Connecticut in my 1998 Toyota Camry LXE so that he could read a poem at Meredith’s memorial service. His house was in the beautiful Connecticut countryside, and I was a little early so a woman who I assumed was his caretaker had me wait in the sitting room. It was late autumn. I sat on a very stiff couch and his Siamese cats entered while I waited, upright on the sofa: two of them. They stared into my soul with their four blue eyes. Richard Wilbur was much easier to be around than his cats. We talked about weather and dangerous curves of the highway, and he told me a story that took place in Key West, and he told me another story where the punch line involved some sentence which proved a poet he admired knew Latin even better than he did. His voice was very soft and I did not mention that I wrote poetry, or that I had found poetry relatively recently and now knew I had to study it and keep writing poems. I stole a line from something he said to me during that car ride and put it in a poem, but I changed the phrase by taking out a word, and I didn’t credit him, though there’s an invisible footnote there that only I can see. I can show you to that poem, it’s in my thesis. It’s a love poem, but that doesn’t help you much: they all are, especially the ones since the thesis.
Do we wave back now, or what do we do?
You were never reluctant to instruct.
I do what’s in character, I look for things
to praise on the riverbanks and I praise them.
We are all relicts, of some great joy, wearing black,
but this book is full of marvelous songs.
Don’t let us contract your dread recidivism
and start falling from our own iron railings.
Wave from the fat book again, make us wave back.
We are all relicts of some great joy, some of us even newer than relics–some of us perhaps just made.
A corner of Maira Kalman’s studio. Full article found here. It’s charming, of course. (Thanks to Kath, who found it.) (“Who’s Maira Kalman?”)
(Makes me want to write a poem called “Small Chair Poem,” in which thumbs could be found sitting on chairs.)
Somehow, even after 7 hours in the studio today (4 art books due very, very soon), I still love books and writing so much that it’s hard for me to express it in words. I’ll try something James Dickey said:
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe.
And then there’s this book I was given, a tiny little thing, with tiny poems letterpressed into its pages, poems I feel I almost wrote myself (and after taking this book arts class, I actually COULD make this book myself [!!]):
I can’t seem to write anything small these days. I am long-winded, full of things to say, full of poems despite how much I must do in the realm of schoolwork every day to insure that by the time I board a plane to Nashville, on May 11th, everything will be finished. It will be gloriously bound, pressed, researched, written, edited, stapled, sent, dropped off, handed in, handed over, FINISHED!
For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
It feels very good to read something that reverberates so strongly in my bones.
things I love today/i love today’s things/ today’s love-things/in love, today’s things/a lovely day for things/things of today (love)/a day of love, a love of things
(scanned from the newest issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal)
I’m in the middle of my fourth reading of Giovanni’s Room–the third reading this year. I don’t think there’s much left for me to underline, but I’m sure I’ll find a way.
“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.”
panache, perhaps 