Poetry at the Zoo

Yesterday afternoon, my husband and I decided to go to the zoo. It seemed like the perfect day for it, eighty something degrees after months of temperatures in the hundreds. And, not only did I get to laugh at the anteater, shudder at the python, and admires the giraffes--I also got to enjoy some poetry.

Poetry at the Zoo is a program paring wildlife exhibits with "poems that celebrate the natural world and the connection between species." I noticed poetry by the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (one of my favorites), the American Walt Whitman, and many African poets. The lines of poetry posted all over the zoo were an added dimension of enjoyment for me.

Poetry lovers, you should go to the zoo.

Financial Poetry

The economy's got people down. Unemployment. Bailouts. Astronomical (unearned) bonuses. Foreclosures. Health care debates. You get the picture.

Want to do something about it? Write a haiku!

The Peter G. Peterson foundation has established a website called Fiscal Haiku. Foundation spokesman Myra Sung says that they launched the site "to constructively express the multitude of frustrations of the American public." If you'd like to contribute, all you have to do is express and submit your frustration in haiku form: three brief lines totaling 17 syllables--five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables, respectively.

What are you waiting for? Start writing!

Holy Violence

This week, in our Brit Lit I class, we studied the works of John Donne. I've loved his poetry ever since I first read it for my own undergraduate British Literature class--it's so shocking, so beautiful, so different from the poetry that comes before it, especially the religious poetry.

We laughed over his carpe diem poem "The Flea," and we all appreciated the conceits in his "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," but the poem that engendered the most discussion was this one:

HOLY SONNETS. XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you

As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,

Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Not every student liked it, of course. But most did. And not just in a "That's an okay poem" kind of way. The fervor of the poem was mirrored in their responses to it. In a world full of bland clichés about God, the idea of someone longing for Him enough to beg for his violent posession holds a strange attraction.

I love classes like that.

2009 National Book Award Finalists

The finalists have been revealed. The winners will be announced November 18 at the National Book Foundation's 60th anniversary celebration. Additionally, Gore Vidal and Dave Eggers will be honored with lifetime achievement awards.

Fiction
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Nonfiction
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Young People’s Literature
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Small, Stitches (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

Poetic Soul

The other evening, my husband and I were sitting out on our patio, enjoying the cool evening breeze and the sunset.

As the sun slowly lowered, dipping behind the oak trees in the distance, the sky lit with colors hard to describe--pearly gold, purplish pink, neon magenta. It was beautiful.

"Look!" I said. "That huge cloud is an avenging angel, his stern, angry face looking over the earth, his wings outspread, on fire with the wrath of God."

Then "Look! Over there is a man in a wide-brimmed hat, smoking a cigarette, his back to the wind. The breeze is blowing the cigarette smoke straight out away from him."

Again "Look! Right in front of us is a horse . . . no, a prancing steed, his head up high and proud, his feet lifted in a high trot."

My husband just looked at me. After a moment he said, "There's a backwards L. With one wing."

Guess who has the poetic soul and who has the practical one?

It Is Good She Did Not Know

I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.
--II Samuel 12:23

It is good
she did not know
the end
from the beginning.

For then,
how could she ever
have left the side of his crib?
counting the ticking minutes
through the numbered nights.

It is good
for then
how could she ever
have smiled and waved
as he boarded the yellow bus,
or said yes
to a sleepover,
or told him
just go outside and play.

It is good
for then
how could she ever
have counted
out the candles
and said make a wish
when she knew her own
would not come true.

It is good
for then
how could she ever
have shown him how
to fold his hands,
how taught him to pray
when she herself
was not quite sure
how God answers.

It is good she did not know.

--SME

Found Poem

Here's the latest tagging thing on Facebook--a Found Poem from your ipod. Here are the instructions:

1. Put your Mp3 player on shuffle
2. Write down the first line of the first 20 songs
3. Repost them in a poem
4. Play a 21st song, that is your poem title and what you title the journal.


Here's my Found Poem:

You Always Had an Eye for Things That Glitter

If it was in your mind to really cut me down
I am a pilgrim, a pilgrim of sorrow
Come on and dance.

That’s all I wanted, something special, something sacred in your eyes.
You say that somewhere over the rainbow . . .
Pardon me.

She would meet me in the morning on my way down to the river.
Has she got naughty eyes?
I am a man of constant sorrow.
I am living in danger.

I can hear your heels clicking on the sidewalk—
Oh what a dream, oh what a dream!
I fell, fell around the world.

How many of you people out there have been hurt in some kind of love affair?

I brought flowers to your door last night.
Don’t worry about me, I’ll get along
How do you solve a problem like Maria?

In the face of the unexpected, you never know what’s gonna happen tomorrow.
Long ago my heart and mind got together
When we come down we’ll be dreaming safe and sound.

Try it. And if you'd like, share the results.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

OK. So what were the other two books I bought?

After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country dweller is something of a shock -- Taylor is one of the only professional women in the community -- but small-town life offers many of its own unique joys. Taylor has five successful years that see significant growth in the church she serves, but ultimately she finds herself experiencing "compassion fatigue" and wonders what exactly God has called her to do. She realizes that in order to keep her faith she may have to leave.

Taylor describes a rich spiritual journey in which God has given her more questions than answers. As she becomes part of the flock instead of the shepherd, she describes her poignant and sincere struggle to regain her footing in the world without her defining collar. Taylor's realization that this may in fact be God's surprising path for her leads her to a refreshing search to find Him in new places.Leaving Church will remind even the most skeptical among us that life is about both disappointment and hope -- and ultimately, renewal.

From Booklist
Collins is a jester and a double agent. A poet readers flock to, he gets the laughs and the applause, he paces and bows, concealing his weapons and serious mien. His self-portraiture is mordant, his drollery preemptive, his insouciance camouflage, his intelligence of the stealth kind, and his intricately constructed poems detonate as they blossom in the reader’s mind. Collins is fanciful and mindful, cocky and prayerful, blissful over ordinary things and intimate with dread and loneliness. Here he is morose in Paris, staring down a fish staring back on a plate in Pittsburgh, rain-harried in Dublin, awake and repentant at the fringe of night in a bright bathroom, loitering with intent in the kitchen. Collins’ seductive poems are decoys drawing us into deep waters where memories waft like tangled weeds and death lurks in the cold spots. Wryly philosophical, caustically whimsical, disarmingly beautiful, Collins’ covertly powerful lyrics deftly snare all that is fine and ludicrous about us, from the old habit of poetry itself to the spell of love and the long, rolling song of the self. --Donna Seaman

Booking It--Sing, Sing a Song

If you’re anything like me, there are songs that you love because of their lyrics; writers you admire because their songs have depth, meaning, or just a sheer playfulness. So, what's today’s question?

What songs … either specific songs, or songs in general by a specific group or writer … have words that you love? Why? And … do the tunes that go with the fantastic lyrics live up to them?

I’ve been working too hard on my dissertation—reading, thinking, analyzing, aaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhh—to feel like explicating any song lyrics right now searching for epistemological insights. So, how ‘bout this? We’ll examine a serious subject—a crisis of identity—and have a little fun at the same time.

Here we go . . . Picture Chevy Chase in your mind right now, right hand to left elbow . . .


Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al”

A man walks down the street,
He says, Why am I soft in the middle now?
Why am I soft in the middle?
The rest of my life is so hard!
I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption!
Don't want to end up a cartoon,
In a cartoon graveyard .....

Bonedigger, Bonedigger,
Dogs in the moonlight.
Far away, my well-lit door.
Mr. Beerbelly, Beerbelly,
Get these mutts away from me!
You know, I don't find this stuff amusing anymore ....

If you'll be my bodyguard,
I can be your long lost pal!
I can call you Betty,
And Betty, when you call me,
You can call me Al!

A man walks down the street,
He says, Why am I short of attention?
Got a short little span of attention,
And whoa, my nights are so long!
Where's my wife and family?
What if I die here?
Who'll be my role-model?
Now that my role-model is ....
Gone ...... gone,
He ducked back down the alley,
With some roly-poly, little bat-faced girl.
All along .... along ....
There were incidents and accidents,
There were hints and allegations .....

If you'll be my bodyguard,
I can be your long lost pal!
I can call you Betty,
And Betty, when you call me,
You can call me Al!
Call me Al ......

A man walks down the street,
It's a street in a strange world.
Maybe it's the Third World.
Maybe it's his first time around.
He doesn't speak the language,
He holds no currency.
He is a foreign man,
He is surrounded by the sound, sound ....
Cattle in the marketplace.
Scatterlings and orphanages.
He looks around, around .....
He sees angels in the architecture,
Spinning in infinity,
He says, Amen! and Hallelujah!

If you'll be my bodyguard,
I can be your long lost pal!
I can call you Betty,
And Betty, when you call me,
You can call me Al!
You can call me Al ......

Gleanings from My Readings

“Consideration & Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty.”
---Jane Austen, in Lady Susan

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“History is most responsibly understood as a mosaic of probabilities or as something like a babble of voices from which emerges a fallible consensus of opinion. Narratives give us focused, if varied, points of view, and storytellers elide, forget and filter whatever facts they believe they possess. About the best you can hope for in a movie’s presentation of history is that it is not an overt lie.”
---Philip Martin, columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, in his article “Defiance Is Riveting Drama; Is It History, or Its Shadow?” 1/20/09

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“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the sad feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
---Andrew Wyeth, American artist

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“There is, of course, a cognitive disconnect to reading poetry to an audience numbering in the millions, as Alexander did. Most poets never reach that many people in a lifetime, which may have something to do with the choice to keep her focus simple, her imagery direct. Even so, the crowd began dispersing well before she was finished, as if her words were little more than an afterthought. Partly, that has to do with her placement on the program—after the president; she had the misfortune of following the main event. But even more, it suggests the tangential role of poetry in our national conversation, which is unlikely to change no matter how seriously this president, or any other, takes the written word.”
---David L. Ulin, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, in his article “The Poem That Failed”

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Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem:
“Praise Song for the Day”

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

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Happy Reading!

Disagreeing with Dr. Johnson

I admire Samuel Johnson. I really do. A man who can compile a Dictionary of the English Language in seven years with exacting precision is hardly to be argued with. But I am today.

Dr. Johnson wrote:

Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression. Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that verse can do is to help the memory, and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.

I don’t claim to have the analytical powers of Dr. Johnson, but I do have a few things to say in rebuttal: John Donne. George Herbert. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Christina Rosetti.

Have anything to add to the argument?

Gleanings from My Readings

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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NEW WORD: orthorexics—people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating

“...nutritionist thinking has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”
---Michael Pollan, from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

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“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
---Aldous Huxley, novelist

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“To me the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.”
---Jodi Picoult, novelist

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From Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”:

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
[. . .]
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”

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From Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World”:

“I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled . . .”

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice

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“Fortunately, I enjoy fooling with letters, moving them around, going back and forth over them, over and over, screaming . . . The terrible thing about writing is also the great thing about it: you can keep on changing it. ‘We say that we perfect diction,’ wrote Wallace Stevens. ‘We simply grow tired.’ But it’s a good tired.”
---Ray Blount, Jr., in the Introduction to Alphabet Juice

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“A powerful agent is the right word . . . Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
---Mark Twain

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“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
---William Faulkner

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“She tried to remember that last time she’d tucked herself in to the pages of a good book or outsmarted a crossword puzzle or patronized the musicians in the park of been mindless in a movie theater or drunk on a poem.”
---Patricia Cornwell, in her latest novel Scarpetta

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From Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time”: (1648)

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.”

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From Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare”:

“He was not of an age, but for all time!”

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Happy Reading!

Booking It--Highlights

It’s an old question, but a good one . . . What were your favorite books this year?

List as many as you like … fiction, non-fiction, mystery, romance, science-fiction, business, travel, cookbooks … whatever the category. But, really, we’re all dying to know. What books were the highlight of your reading year in 2008?

Here are mine, in no particular order:

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees
Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth
Mary Ann Schaeffer and Annie Barrow’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Naomi Shihab Nye’s Fuel
Sarah Waters’ Affinity
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones
Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen
Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women
Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel

If you read a book this year that you’d like to recommend, please share it here. Maybe it’ll make my Highlights list in 2009.

Gleanings from My Readings

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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“Few of us have the temperament of monks. Most of us draw sustenance from the human drama. We might recognize the tremulous signals emanating from some invisible inner universe, but most of us see no choice but to live in the world, to engage in commerce, to seek delight in people and things around us. Perhaps when we knock wood to preserve our luck, what we’re really doing is convincing ourselves of the solidity of the present, distinguishing the actual from the wishful.”
---Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat Gazette columnist

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Actual title of new workout video: Bollywood Booty. I’m not kidding. Not only will this video help you “stay fit and get firm,” it will also “help you release your inhibitions.” Isn’t that what everyone looks for in a workout?

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“To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don’t remember what I was like before I learned my ABC’s, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.”

“I do hope you realize that every time you use disinterested to mean uninterested, an angel dies, and every time you write very unique, or “We will hire whomever is more qualified,” thousands of literate people lose yet another smidgen of hope. And please promise me you will never lose your grip on the subjunctive.”

---Ray Blount, Jr., in the Introduction to Alphabet Juice

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“The problem with God—or at any rate, one of the top five most annoying things about God—is that He or She rarely answers right away. It can take days, weeks. Some people seem to understand this—that life and change take time. . . . I, on the other hand, am an instant-message type.”
---Anne Lamott, from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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John Donne’s “A Hymn to God the Father” (1633):

I.
WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before?

Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,

And do run still, though still I do deplore?

When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;

For I have more.


II.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won

Others to sin, and made my sins their door?

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun

A year or two, but wallow'd in a score?

When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;

For I have more.


III.
I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun

My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;

But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son

Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:

And having done that, Thou hast done;

I fear no more.

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
---Jane Austen, in Mansfield Park

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“Direct and honest communication by an intelligent writer is more nourishing than partisan, dishonest theory.”
---Marc Smirnoff, editor of The Oxford American

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“As I’m writing, I’m always reader-conscious. I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.”
---Billy Collins

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“I thought I’d save it for the weekend, but maybe, just take a peek at it that night, you know, just to confirm my original suspicions. Five hours later, I’m a third of the way through the book. By the end of the weekend, I’m forcing myself to slow down so I won’t gobble the whole thing.”
---Sarah Prickett, about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love

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“If there’s anything more punishing than writing a book, it’s being married to someone who’s writing a book.”
---Meghan Daum, essayist and novelist

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From Steve Kowit’s poem, “The Grammar Lesson”:

“See? There’s nothing to it. Just
memorize these rules . . . or write them down!
A noun’s a thing, a verb’s the thing it does.” (16-18)

Kinda reminds you of Grammar Rock, doesn’t it?

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“Monet Refuses the Operation”

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~ Lisel Mueller ~
(Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

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Happy Reading!

Booking It--Wish List

This week’s book questions are especially appropriate for the holiday shopping season. Post your answers, and maybe someone will take the subtle hint.

1. What’s on your book/reading wish list?
2. What books are you giving this year?

#1—I’d seem greedy if I listed all the books I actually wanted, so here are a few:
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (You’ll hear why tomorrow)
Billy Collins’ Ballistics
Stephen King’s Just After Sunset
Maya Angelou’s Letter to My Daughter
Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food

#2—I’m not telling! Everybody I’d buy a book for reads this blog.

Gleanings from My Readings

“But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.”
---Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey

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“Arabella, whose Delicacy was extremely shocked at this abrupt Declaration of her Father, could hardly hide her Chagrin; for, tho’ she always intended to marry some time or other, as all the Heroines had done, yet she thought such an Event ought to be brought about with an infinite deal of Trouble; and that it was necessary she should pass to this State thro’ a great Number of Cares, Disappointments, and Distresses of various Kinds, like them; that her Lover should purchase her with his Sword from a Croud of Rivals; and arrive to the Possession of her Heart by many Years of Services and Fidelity.”
---Charlotte Lennox, in The Female Quixote (1752)

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“I keep thinking about a story I heard somewhere. A child asks an old woman why she looks the way she does. “Because I’ve been living,” she says. A long life is a beautiful thing.”
---Judy Kirkwood

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He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. ~ Arabic Proverb

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From Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

Horatio: My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.

Hamlet: I prithee do not mock me, fellow student,
I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.

Horatio: Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.

Hamlet: Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral bak’d meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

(I can't help it. These are my favorite lines in the play.)

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with.”
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice

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“Thinking too much about pop culture is dangerous, for it can lead to over-analysis and the obliteration of joy.”
---Phillip Martin, Arkansas Democrat Gazette columnist

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“Can we please stop referring to midlife women as still beautiful? One newspaper describes Christie Brinkley as “still stunning at age 54,” but we bet we’ll never see a headline saying “Donald Trump—still rich at 62,” or “Jon Stewart—still short at 46.”
---editors, More magazine

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“The phrase standing up for yourself is not just a metaphor. When people want to feel powerful, they plant their feet, they square their shoulders, they look straight ahead.”
---Andrea Cooper, in “How Your Body Can Help Your Mind”

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“I have always been bewitched by old turns of phrase. They stay in our language for the same reason poetry does: because they are so beautiful and economical. I remember the thrill as a child on first hearing, “He was between a rock and a hard place.”
---Kay Ryan, the new Poet Laureate of the United States

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Kay Ryan’s poem “Wooden”:

“In the presence of supple
goodness, some people
grow less flexible,
experiencing a woodenness
they wouldn’t have thought possible.
It is as strange and paradoxical
as the combined suffereing
of Pinocchio and Geppetto
if Pinocchio had turned and said,
I can’t be human after all.”

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From Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequence Idea:

LVI
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

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Happy Reading!

Literary Gleanings for Thanksgiving

“Mrs. Norris had been talking to her the whole way from Northampton of her wonderful good fortune, and the extraordinary degree of gratitude and good behavior which it ought to produce, and her consciousness of misery was therefore increased by the idea of its being a wicked thing for her not to be happy.”
-Jane Austen, in Mansfield Park

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"Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,
From North and South, come the pilgrim and guest,
When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board
The old broken links of affection restored,
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before.
What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye?
What calls back the past, like the rich pumpking pie?"
- John Greenleaf Whittier, "The Pumpkin"

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"I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy."
- Anne Frank

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"I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and new."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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"If we meet someone who owes us thanks, we right away remember that. But how often do we meet someone to whom we owe thanks without remembering that?"
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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"Our rural ancestors, with little blest,
Patient of labour when the end was rest,
Indulged the day that housed their annual grain,
With feasts, and off'rings, and a thankful strain."
- Alexander Pope

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"Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for - annually, not oftener - if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments."
- Mark Twain

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"Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production."
- Ayn Rand

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"Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude."
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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Happy Reading!