The Best American Poetry

Well, Did You Evah! [words & music by Cole Porter]

 

What Are You Doing New Year's Eve? by Frank Loesser

--sdh

Sandy Koufax was born today!

after pitching the fourth of his four career no-hitters

cover of Life (August 2, 1963)     in action

What do they have in common? Jews!

Watch Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy Preview on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

Curtain Up on Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy Tuesday, January 1, 2013 at 9:30 p.m. on PBS from THIRTEEN’s Great Performances.

Check your local listing and catch David Lehman's star turn in this amazing documentary. 

“In any great adventure, if you don’t want to lose…you won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews.” Eric Idle

-- sdh

Dangerous in the Right Way: Remembering Charles Durning (1923-2012) by Michael O'Keefe

I saw Charlie Durning for the first time onstage in the Broadway production of That Championship Season at the Booth Theater on West 45^th St.   At the age of sixteen I was already certain I wanted to be an actor and that play, and all the performances, made a very strong impression on me.  So much so that I stole the poster from the local train station in Larchmont, NY and kept it in my bedroom through the remainder of my high school years.  Years later I did the first revival of That Championship Season in New York in the role of ‘Tom’ and kept a replica of the original poster in my dressing room.

       
  In 1988 I had the pleasure of doing a TV film entitled Unholy Matrimony, in which Charlie and I played con men busted by Patrick Duffy after murdering a young woman.  Beside the need to pay my mortgage I took the part because Charlie had already been cast and I jumped at the chance to work with him.  One look at his work onstage or in films like The Sting or Dog Day Afternoon and you got the immediate sense that he had great instincts, a pugnacious demeanor, and would be a blast to work with, which he was.

         The film we did wasn’t so great but one story comes to mind about Charlie that I don’t think he’d mind me telling.  We were in San Antonio, TX, staying at a posh hotel.  The next day we were flying to Phoenix, AZ to change locations.  That evening a young man who was in town for a Herbalife convention approached me in the lobby. 

         “Mr. O’Keefe,” he said earnestly, “I see you’re here with Mr. Durning and I just want to say I can’t let this opportunity pass by.”

         “Really?” I replied.  “How so?”

         “Well, the man is obese and I think I can help him.  I’m here with Herbalife and if I could just get a chance to speak with him I believe I could be of service.”

         “I’m sure you could,” I said, concocting a bit of a plan on the spot.  “Here’s the thing, Charlie, um, Mr. Durning is a very early riser.  Your best bet is to call him around 4:30 or 5 AM and make your pitch.”

         “You all are staying here in the hotel, aren’t you?”  the young man asked.

         “Oh yeah,” I said.  “We’re here.  You ring Charlie up.  Early.  Real early.  It’s going to go over like a song.”

         The next morning the entire cast was outside the hotel at 9 AM to catch a van to the airport.  I came outside to a sunny morning with a bright-eyed feeling, spied Charlie, and said, “Hiya Charlie, how’s it going?”

         “Fuck you,” Charlie replied.  And I burst out laughing, as did the other actors after both Charlie and I explained what had gone down.  I thought that was the end of it and we were none the worse for the wear.

         At the airport all of us checked in together and I took all of the claim checks for the luggage and put them on my ticket, which I carefully placed in the inner pocket of my sport coat.  We’d need those in Phoenix. 

         Upon arriving and walking as a group to baggage claim I was dismayed to find I didn’t have my ticket or the baggage claim stubs so I ran double time back through the airport to the plane, which was still at the gate.  I went over the plane a number of times and still couldn’t find them. 

         Back at the baggage claim, prepared to grovel for all the luggage belonging to our cast, I was greeted by the sight of the entire cast in a van, with all the luggage, including mine, waiting for me.  Charlie had lifted my ticket with all the stubs from my jacket without me noticing.  He had the last laugh and it was a well-deserved one.

         In the movie business chances are you will make more clunkers than memorable films and what you have when you’re done is not necessarily what you meant to do but what you did.   After learning that lesson I learned that the relationships you have with your co-workers are imperative, not just because we all depend on each other to get the work done, but because when it’s done all you do have is the memory of having done it. 

         My memories of Charles Durning are vivid and enduring.  He was funny, dangerous in the right way, and knew how to hit his marks and speak the truth.  I’ll miss him but, thankfully, I’ll have his many amazing performances to remind me of how talented he was and how lucky I was to get to know him.

- - -

Michael O'Keefe is the author of Swimming From Under My Father (Noble Swine Press 2009).  He has many film, television, and theater credits.  His new pilot King and Maxwell will premiere on TNT in early 2013. His films, Neighbors, Junction, and A Thousand Cuts will be released in 2013.  Apt. 143 (Emergo) is available on demand on most cable networks.  Bonnie Raitt recorded Marriage Made in Hollywood, which O'Keefe co-wrote with Paul Brady.  It is on Raitt's new record Sliptream, which was just nominated for a Grammy in the Americana category.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CONNIE VOISINE by Anthony Madrid (via facebook)

CONNIE VOISINE (12/28)

Hey Nonny Nonny, ya NECTARINE
Happy birthday, Connie Voisine

Tawny and Scrawny are both turning green
Happy birthday, Connie Voisine

I’m bending a note for the BENZEDRINE
Happy birthday, Connie Voisine

The Queen of qua non, if you know what I mean
Happy birthday, Connie Voisine

☎

Oh, happy birthday, Connie V.—!!
Our uncles and nieces and cousins and we

Are taking a much-needed break from routine
Happy birthday, Connie Voisine

 

(ed. note: for more about Connie Voisine visit her website here. sdh)

Quote of the day: Four New Potatoes by Joe Weil

("The Potato Eaters" Vincent Van Gogh, 1885)

I remember boiling 4 "new Potatoes (those are the small ones others call salt potatoes) making myself a small sauce pan of melted butter with pepper, and eating the potatoes whole and scewered on my swiss army blade as I read Williams' Selected poems. I was 18 years old, and the only one awake in the house at three in the morning. It is one of the happiest memories of my life. Maybe it was the linoleum which was torn just under my seat. I scratched an itch on my bare foot with it. Maybe it was the flourescent light. It could have been Williams' poems, too, but I know, know beyond all doubt that, without those 4 potatoes, no happiness would have been as possible.

                        -- Joe Weil

Let it Snow X 3 by Jule Styne & Sammy Cahn

 

On Christmas, Barbara Stanwyck and the Singular Life [by Michael O'Keefe]

(ed. note: This post originally appeared on December 21, 2009 and it's a perennial favorite. I share Michael O'Keefe's love of Barbara Stanwyck and especially Christmas in Connecticut. When you've had enough of gifts and food and family, this movie, and Stanwyck's amazing performance will get you back into the spirit. I watch it every year.)

---

 For some A Christmas Carol, (Alistair Sim’s version please) is the definitive Christmas film.  For others It’s A Wonderful Life holds the honor of best film to watch during the holidays.  “Marry Christmas Bedford Falls!  Marry Christmas, Mr. Potter!” James Stewart bellows returning from a parallel, yet horrible, reality to face charges for bank fraud in “the real world,” whatever the hell that is.  Both have the Christmas spirit for sure.  But for me the films to watch at Christmas all star Barbara Stanwyck.  

First there is the not very well known Remember the Night (left). Fred MacMurray and Stanwyck star in Preston Sturges’ screenplay.  (No, they don’t plot the murder of her husband, though Stanwyck does play a shoplifter.) In the interest of transparency I should mention it’s a romance, the protagonists meet cute, overcome obstacles, fall in love, observe traditional male and female roles (and I mean traditional for 1940) and live in an America that may have only existed in the mind of Preston Sturges and his contemporaries in Black and White Hollywood, USA.  Oh yeah, transparency.  I should reveal that in the singular nature of my love life, I'm not extraordinary nor remarkable.  I’m single and stand alone.  And my proclivity to indulge in sentimental notions around Christmas makes my opinion not only biased but most likely hooey, as they used to say in 1940.

As hokey as some of the sentiment is, and as obvious as the plot line of a shoplifter bailed out and brought home to Wabash, Indiana by a prosecutor for a heartwarming Christmas is, the film knocks me for a loop every time. The key and the heart of the film is Stanwyck.  MacMurray’s family is seen through her eyes, and their homespun values melt her cynicism in moments that pierce what passes for my veneer of sophistication. Perhaps the fact that I’m approaching the age of fifty-five and have little to show from my love life but a collection of snapshots, cards and memories that linger but do not nourish should disqualify me in the holiday movie round up.   Or could it be that that same status should make me Chairman of the Christmas movie board?  For the purposes of this blog let’s hope it’s the latter. The two other films to look for are Christmas in Connecticut and Meet John Doe. Though the latter is not set at Christmas its climax takes place on Christmas Eve and that’s close enough for me. In Christmas in Connecticut (right) Stanwyck plays a columnist that has created a fantasy world of a farm in the country, a loving husband and a handle on domestic details that surpasses anything Martha Stewart ever cooked up.  When asked to take in a wounded Vet for Christmas by her publisher she attempts to con them both but ends up falling for the Vet, played by Dennis Morgan.  The look in her eyes as she gives herself over to her longing is spectacular. But her speech at the end of Meet John Doe, a wonderful Frank Capra film, where she begs Gary Cooper not to jump from roof of the City Hall, is the topper of them all.  She’s suckered Gary Cooper into playing ‘John Doe’ so that her ruse of writing a John Doe column for a powerful paper won’t be uncovered. Cooper plays along at first but when he realizes he’s been a stooge for a power hungry Nazi-like bad guy, Edward Arnold, he tries to reveal the scam but is thwarted in his attempt to do so.  Abandoned by all those he’s touched across the country he decides to keep John Doe’s promise to throw himself from the roof of City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest man’s inhumanity to man.  What he doesn’t know is that Stanwyck, Arnold and his cronies, and some loyal supporters are there waiting for him.  Sick with the flu, and desperate to stop the suicide Stanwyck throws herself into his arms and begs him not do to it.  The depth of her plea is staggering and when she calls him “Darling” I fall to pieces every time. In short: If Barbara Stanwyck’s character from any of these films walked into my life I’d sweep her off her Black and White feet and never give the bright and shiny world a second glance. I’ll be home and alone for Christmas this year but Barbara Stanwyck, with a little help from her friends, will give me hope.  And that’s gift enough for me. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

A Bronx Irish Christmas Long Ago (by Terence Winch)

  
In the kitchen at 1912 Daly Ave, Bronx, NY, ca. 1961: Paddy Winch, Bridie (nee Flynn) Winch, my brother-in-law Kenny Reich, Jesse [Jimmy] Winch, Terence  Winch, P.J. Conway.

 

C E L E B R A T I O N

___________________________

In our world, nothing compared

with Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

God’s power surging through the congregation,

from altarboys in our stiff collars and big red bows,

to the solid men of the parish in their finest array:

Blue suits, gold wrist watches, crisp white shirts.

The women perfumed and girdled, lipsticked

and bejeweled.  Enough incense

in the air to do the Wise Men proud.

 

The procession wound through the church,

organ honking, voices lifted in the special

Christmas sense of the slate wiped clean

and the universe beginning anew.

The tree in the house lit with fat colored bulbs

that looked good enough to eat. The old suitcase

full of fragile decorations, buried treasure found

every year on Christmas Eve and set free again.

The baby Jesus alive and well!  Herod thwarted!

 

This called for presents.  Toys, games, maybe

a watch or a knife.  Along with Jesus came the whole

cast of Yuletide characters—Santa, Rudolph,

the Chipmunks, Bing Crosby, Frosty, Scrooge. 

I’m surprised the Easter Bunny didn’t crash

the event.  My father put out apple pie

and a glass of milk for Sanny, the remaining traces

of which on Christmas morning were proof enough

for me and my brother Jimmy of the entire

supernatural infrastructure of Bronx Irish culture.

 

But it was the party after Midnight Mass

that I remember most.  Relatives and neighbors

would pour into our apartment for an all-nighter.

My mother would get the percolator going,

and start making breakfast for half the parish.

Bacon, eggs, blood pudding, plates of fresh rolls

with poppy seeds bought that day

in the Treat Bakery on Tremont Avenue. 

 

Eating breakfast at two in the morning!

This was a miracle for a ten-year-old boy. 

Bottles of Seagram’s and Canadian Club

stood at attention on the kitchen table,

silver ice bucket ringed with penguins

awaiting duty beside them.  Ladies smoking

and gossiping.  Glasses clinking.  Laughter

throughout the house.  The smell of pine,

the delicious aroma of sizzling bacon,

all welcoming Jesus back for another year.

 

Then the music and singing would start up,

my father on the banjo, P. J. Conway on the box.

The Stack of Barley, The Lakes of Sligo,

medleys of marches, waltzes, and polkas.

Theresa McNally, from my mother’s own town

in Galway, would sing “Galway Bay.”  Steps would

be danced, jokes told, more drinks mixed and gulped.

 

I would go to bed so filled with the spirit

it seemed impossible to believe that life could

ever return to normal.  Lying there exhausted,

but anxious to sneak down the hall at the earliest

opportunity and tear open the tantalizing packages,

I believed in everything: Jesus our Lord, Santa

our magic benefactor, my parents the immortal source

of the ongoing celebration that could never end.   

 

 [from Boy Drinkers, Hanging Loose Press, 2007]

 

Celebration, read by Pat Broaders of the Chicago-based band Bohola

 

 

P.J. Conway, my father Paddy Winch, and Brian Keenan in 1958.  P.J. and my father performed locally in NY as "The Two Pats."  If they had a drummer for any particular gig, it would either be me, my brother Jesse, or P.J.'s nephew Brian Keenan, who immigrated from England in the '50s.  Brian went on to become the drummer for The Chambers Brothers, who were popular in the '60s and later.  He died pretty young, and lived pretty hard, as I recall. I am the steward of P.J.'s Walters D/C# accordion and my father's Vega tenor banjo, seen in this photo. I used to have one of those green plaid tuxedo jackets, too, but it has vanished.

You might also like:

The Chambers Brothers

(ed note: This post originally appeared on December 23, 2010)

Dino Crocetii died today in 1995

On December 25, 1995, this is how they reported it on TV: 

 

In Praise of Amateur Singers, Carolers, and More (by Jenny Factor)

You now behold (in the photo above) a group of Beverly Hills High School alumni (parents, bankers, singers, and friends) returning to the alma mater as they do each December to sing "Still, Still, Still" with their old high school singing group, The Beverly Hills High School Madrigals.

They are singing under the baton of a very dear teacher, Joel Pressman, who was already making room for creativity and discipline, tenderness, tough love, and a lot of humor when I was a creative soul lost in the halls of that high school. Mr. Pressman's powerful voice draws us all back. What a teacher! What a singer! And all those voices--those alums who have gone onto careers in diaper-management, advanced cookie baking, accounting and the law, we alums who still love to sing, who still remember to slow down for that huge diminuendo in the final verse, and know how and why to watch the conductor--well it leads all of us in the audience to a place very close to tears!

Here is a video of this year's event. Over a hundred singers of all ages. And Joel Pressman with the baton.

  I had been a parent for oh about a minute when I realized that I would never again stumble upon a group of carolers singing on floor 3 of the mall, children chiming off-key in a red velvet auditorium, middle school brass sections bugling themselves bug-eyed at Disneyland without instantly bursting into happy tears.

Every face, every trying-hard face is so shiny and focused. And then there are always a few faces, bored and daydreaming...the child in the navy satin poof skirt inaccurately mouthing the words. The boy with the monkey-face dramatics who couldn't quite pull the requisite colored outfit together, and would fit in better at the local Chuckie Cheese. And the social dynamics. Gee, they just slap one in the face until the stomach remembers the old flip-flops. Nodding to the parents with a "hip" Queen medley mostly from Bohemian Rhapsody, "mamma, I killed a man...my life had only just begun..now I've gone and thrown it all away" as we audience members howl with laughter, the joke on us for getting old, humming along. A high school diva in a black slinky dress, draped over a piano as if she were a lounge act, supported by four guys her own age in hats and bow ties, two of whom she'd never date, and one who would never date her (wrong gender), and the one who just maybe...and that isn't even storying up to the accompanist. The girl-on-girl duet, part love, part catfight. The sounds of the audience, the live net of high school affections and antagonisms, providing the soundtrack to the series of festive, frought events. I love them. I love every single one of them.

There we sit, we parents, grandparents, and other partisans, holding our tinier-each-year camcorders and recording our bigger-each-year children. I am purged over and over by the beautiful imperfection of the music, from the tiny beauty pageant kindersingers, to the high school minnesingers or maestros, tuning with purpose, and following the conductor with more verb and verse. Sometimes it seems as if you can feel layers under the singing or strumming--the hours of practice, all the different ears assaulted by scales, the "have you practiced enough" arguing behind every household door, and then later the "stop practicing till you have done your homework" or the "that dress is black but it's too short" "too fancy" "too casual". The parents, the children and their dreams. Like raising peacocks or grooming unicorns part of what's so touching is knowing that this is it, this is childhood, the most "adult" form this art will ever have for many of our children. 

It seems so grown-up really, to believe in this effort and practice and excellence. To work hard. And then to come together to live it all out. What's wrong with us adults--so quickly bored and scattered, our energy dissipated by not wanting to disappoint our own hopes. How big we were, small like that!

Last week on NPR, Barbra Streisand (now in a new movie) was interviewed by Terry Gross. She talks about singing "People who need people," a song whose lyrics might be exactly opposite of what she believes, but they felt right. She talks about the moment when she was thirteen, and a bridge in the music, a bridge she swore was too long, suddenly got filled by a new idea for her, and when she came back in, the sound that came out of her--it was new. It was something she didn't know she had inside her.

And so this is what art is like. What life is like. Near as I can tell it.

We stop worrying about perfection. We pause for not knowing. We let effort happen, for its own mysterious reasons in its own mysterious state. 

And sometimes, if we're very lucky, both Heaven and Nature sing!

Thanks, Joel Pressman. Happy Holidays to One and All...j.f.

Happy Boxing Day y'all (by Tynan Davis)

I'm from Texas, live in New York, and am currently wintering in Louisiana.  I haven't the slightest clue what Boxing Day is.  I never asked my Canadian former roommate and my English violinist-friend says it has to do with helping the less fortunate and "boxing" up charitable donations the day after Christmas.  I choose to picture a voluntary, boozy, postprandial family slugfest celebrating making it through Christmas without incident.  I'm pretty sure we're both wrong.  Anyways, happy bank holiday to all my friends in the Commonwealth!  (And happy first day of Kwanzaa, too!) 

I just want to get this thought out of the way: I am not a writer.  (I feel so much better now!)  Therefore, gentle reader, go easy and know how intimidated I am at this moment.  I'm in no way issuing an apology for what may spew forth, but I think context is important.  Truthfully, I'm not foreign to this community of writers, but my only experience is with dead ones.  Lyricists and librettists of decades and centuries past.  My image of writers usually includes a quill pen and candlelight.  Are there any last holdouts in today's writing community?  Old school blotters and ink-stained fingers?  

More than the drama and costumes and wigs and make-up, what's interesting to me about being a singer of opera is, regardless of technological aides (digital recording devices offering immediate aural and visual feedback, etc), voices are trained today in essentially the same manner as voices a century or two ago.  The finer points could be argued, no doubt, but in broad terms, there aren't too many ways for a human voice to be heard over an orchestra without amplification.  The musculature hasn't changed, we haven't seen laryngeal evolution of any kind.  We are still dependent on our body's acoustical resonant amplifiers and a very complex coordination of neurons and muscles to compete sucessfully with strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion.  I think it's pretty damn cool actually.  Sometimes it's technique that keeps me coming back for more and not the stage theatrics. 

Happy Holidays (by Laura Orem)

A confession - I'm not very prepared this week, having succumbed, as usual, the holiday insanity. Today I've got cookies, wrapping, and cleaning on the agenda, and, what with the rest of the holiday preparation, I just haven't had the time to think up something brilliant, moving, and appropriate for this week's post.

So instead, I'd like to share my all-time favorite Christmas poem. (I tried to get Black Jack and the sheep to pose for an illustration, but they were more interested in breakfast than art this morning.) This is a poem specifically about Christmas, but to everyone of whatever faith, or questioning, or none at all, blessings this holiday season and for the New Year.

"The Oxen" by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
 "Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
 By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
 They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
 To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
 In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
 "Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
 Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
 Hoping it might be so.




(ed note:  This post originally appeared on December 23, 2008)

Paddy Kavanagh's "A Christmas Childhood" (by Terence Winch)

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) continues to inspire conflicting feelings and opinions. John Nemo, writing in The Dictionary of Irish Literature, puts it this way: “His followers, a varied but vocal group, speak of him admiringly as an important force in Irish letters, second only to Yeats. His detractors, fewer in number but every bit as vocal, dismiss him as a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant who disrupted rather than advanced the development of modern literature.”  As a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant myself, I will take my place among Kavanagh’s followers.

One of his most ardent admirers was my old friend James Liddy, an Irish poet who spent most of his adult life as a professor at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee until his death in 2008. Many years ago (in the ‘70s sometime), James sent me a copy of an Irish journal called The Lace Curtain, which included his “Open Letter to the Young about Patrick Kavanagh.” Describing Kavanagh’s work (and, really, his own as well), Liddy writes, “Or there is a poetry in which real ideas from living come at us. This kind can be direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet. It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”

Kavanagh brings that emotional intelligence, I think, to “A Christmas Childhood,”  a poem one encounters regularly this time of year in Irish circles on both sides of the Atlantic.  As an Irish accordion player, I relish the mention of his father’s melodeon (pronounced melojin), which is a single-row button accordion.  

The poem introduces us to the thrumming imagination of a six-year-old Irish farmboy, ca. 1910, who is perfectly in tune with the magical world around him.

 

A Christmas Childhood

by Patrick Kavanagh

                           I

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost—
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw—
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood's. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

 

                           II

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon. The Three Wise Kings.

An old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk’—
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade.
There was a little one for cutting tobacco,
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At his wedding in April 1967; Kavanagh died in November of that year.

One final note: Kavanagh’s best-known poem is probably “On Raglan Road,” which was written to the tune of an old march called “The Dawning of the Day.”  Many singers have recorded the song since the ‘60s, including Van Morrison and Sinead O’Connor. 

(ed note:  This post originally appeared on December 21, 2011)

He'd Walk a Mile for a Camel (by Stacey Harwood)

For the events leading up to this spectacular photo of our man in Mongolia, watch this video:

We took a ride last Thursday night to the country outside Ulaanbaatar.  Along the way, we encountered this camel.  The voices you hear in the background are of the young Mongolian man trying to negotiate the terms of a ride; U.S. Ambassador Mark Minton; Kevin Nolan, an intern in the Embassy (whose speech moves fluently from English to Mongolian); David; me ("I don't want to get on") and the compliant camel. 

-- sdh

(This post appeared originally on June 2, 2008)

"Gulf Stream" Interviews David Lehman

<< Lehman was visiting Florida International University in Aventura, Florida, on October 18th as part of the Writers on the Bay reading series. Lehman and Ashley M. Jones discuss prose poetry and its limitations (or lack thereof), the ways in which poetry can be generated with or without inspiration, the new technological frontier of poetry, and poetry’s place in popular culture. >>

Link here for the full interview -- and more, including an interview with Margot Livesey.

"Victory" [by Chelsea Reilly]

We are tired of washing things
so we quit our jobs and travel
making out and littering wildly.
We survive on winnings
from hot dog-eating contests
and also, hot dogs.
I smell like sauerkraut.
I think you still love me.
You grow cocky and enter
any competition you can find.
Spelling bees.
Triathlons.
Fishing derbies.
We can’t lose.
All our fathers
Are finally proud.
I tell you I want to settle down,
build a castle for our trophies.
You build a glass display case
and strap it to my shoulders.
I accidentally leave it behind at a rodeo.
You burn my eyelashes.
When I finally win Miss Teen USA
I am immediately disqualified
because of my age and marital status.
The judge snaps my tiara
and hands you the pieces.
You glue them together
and crown the runner-up.
She nuzzles your chest.
You propose and everyone cheers,
even though she is only fourteen and
I am standing RIGHT THERE.
Like any disgraced pageant queen,
I am gracious.
I shake her hand and hope
it rains for the rest of her life.

-- Chelsea Reilly

Belancholy Days by Anonymous (via facebook)

Chilly Dovebber with his boadig blast
Dow cubs add stribs the bedow add the lawd,
Eved October's suddy days are bast—
And Subber's gawd!

I kdow dot what it is to which I cligg,
That stirs to sogg and sorrow, yet I trust
That still I sigg, but as the liddets sigg—
Because I bust.

Add now, farewell to roses add to birds,
To laded fields and tigkligg streablets eke;
Farewell to all articulated words
I fain would speak.

Farewell, by cherished strolliggs od the sward,
Greed glades and forest shades, farewell to you;
With sorrowing heart I, wretched add forlord,
Bid you—achew!!!

((from *The Penguin Book of Nonsense Verse*, Quentin Blake, ed., 1995)        

MELANCHOLY DAYS

Chilly November with his moaning blast
Now comes and strips the meadow and the lawn;
Even October's sunny days are past—
And summer's gone!

I know not what it is to which I cling,
That stirs to song and sorrow, yet I trust
That still I sing, but as the linnets sing—
Because I must.

And now, farewell to roses and to birds,
To laden fields and tinkling streamlets eke;
Farewell to all articulated words
I fain would speak.

Farewell, my cherished strollings on the sward,
Green glades and forest shades, farewell to you;
With sorrowing heart I, wretched and forlorn,
Bid you—adieu!

                (tr. by Anthony Madrid)

Winter Solstice Time (by Jenny Factor)

Henry David Thoreau, while barely catapulting out of his own 20's, was nevertheless ready to dispense valuable advice on creativity and the energy necessary to sustain a life of purposeful alertness. Here he is speaking on mornings.  

"The most memorable season of the day, the awakening hour. 

For an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. 

Be awakened by our Genius, not by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor.

Be awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, not factory bells.

Be awakened to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light."

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 

I love these quotes. And largely, I love mornings. Though, in those funny creative collisions and collusions so common to early parenthood--timeless days, endless nights--one December, I found myself reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden over my infant's sleepy head. You may imagine I got a bit of a kick out of the statement on mornings that Thoreau makes above. And still today, on this "shortest day of the year", I curse at my 'nudging mechanical servitor' and solemnly swear that my rescue dog--the newest "baby" to interfere with my sleep--must be by tautology, logic, and luck, my personal genius. Now if only I could teach him to use a pencil....