I encountered this bright and brief poem this afternoon, courtesy of Chris‘s recent lightening of his library:
Risk
by Robin Becker The kildeer nested on the ground-- seconds from the horses' hooves and the graceful arcs of the canter. Each time we rounded the turn, she stood over her speckled eggs (I could see them from my horse's back) and made a display of her fierce white feathers. How I admired her! Audacious before the iron shoes!
The NYT featured an interesting op-ed by poet and critic David Orr on the restrictions of copyright law and the well-known fogginess of Fair Use when quoting poetry (“When Quoting Verse, One Must Be Terse”, Sept 8, 2011). Orr rightly points out that the unofficial standard used by poetry critics is often to include the entire text of a poem; however, legally speaking, this practice oversteps Fair Use.
“As things stand, poets and critics are at the mercy of an incoherent system,” Orr writes. As we in higher ed are too well aware, one could easily replace “critic” with teacher.
Personally, I have no shame about having shared entire poems here, on this blog–in part this is because one can hardly talk about a poem without having access to the poem, but also because I believe that poets, along with many other classes of artists, benefit from open sharing of their work.
Episode 7 of The SciFiPunkRockabillySurfHorror Half-Hour for DS106 Radio:
It’s been a long time since I’ve had time, let alone will, to sit and draft a poem. Let’s credit this one to intolerable psychic pressure and leave it at that. Thankfully, only that part of the poem is true.
Eve of the Empty Apocalypse
We've turned away from the sun; In the East, the Rocky Mountains loom, their tallest painted purest white. They say these, too, will shake apart or crumble down to dust. I leave, driving east, hoping to slip between the mountains before the lunar oracle proclaims their doom, instructs their snowy crowns to haunt the valley. And if I'm never seen again, oh well, I'll any some day break in their abyss, so why not now? And seal our final argument, which conjured Christ and Sartre, Camus, Prince, my father, and the Buddha. And yet I keptEverett'sSchrodinger's secret safe, galvanized|encouraged by my squinting son, who's blue eyed smile says, "Bye-bye," to prophecy that I'll return with certainty so perfect that it quakes the ancient church across the street. I feel its stone walls leaning, I bear its weight, but no meaning, and burn what scion faith I can't refute.
Two things I know I don’t like: the imprecision/abstraction of the final line, and the fact that “Eve” is only implicitly in the poem.
I originally had “Schrodinger” instead of “Everett”, which has a better poetic ring to it, and is probably less obscure, but I couldn’t tolerate the knowledge that Schrodinger didn’t necessarily endorse literal conclusions from his famous thought experiment. If I can be corrected here, I’d be thrilled to change it back.
Episode 6 of The SciFiPunkRockabillySurfHorror Half-Hour for DS106 Radio flaps heavy on the rockabilly/psychobilly side of the alley.
Scheduling seems sketchy, so I can’t say when this might play, but here’s the set list anyway:
A lot of these selections were obvious, though a few were tough. For instance, I had a hard time settling on a Thee Flatliners track from the Vampires EP–I favored “Dracula’s Descendants” but ended up choosing “Vampires” because of its distinct Castlevania sound. Blitzkid is not a band I’d normally favor for this show, but, man, this track “Nosferatu” is crazy! Tiger Army finishes with a slower, introspective track — a little more subtle than the rest of the psychobilly songs in this set.
Another episode of The SciFiPunkRockabillySurfHorror Half-Hour for DS106 Radio.
Synopsis: Dragonmen and Devilgirls invade the Earth, using our own rock n’ roll against us!
Special thanks to Bradley Trinnaman for introducing me to some great, new psychbilly and horror punk this week–plenty of material, now, for the next several episodes. Coming up: vampires, ghosts, evil laboratories, and more zombie love.
Not sure if/when this will play on DS106 Radio, but here’s the next episode of The SciFiPunkRockabillySurfHorror Half-Hour.
Synopsis: Sharks in the surf! Primates from prehistory! Monsters by the megaton! Hippies without heads!
I lived out a bit of a childhood dream by creating set lists for a music show on DS106 online radio station, as masterminded by Jim Groom, Grant Potter, et al. Frankly, I could run a different kind of set night after night, week after week, from industrial to electropop, from post-punk to classical, but decided to focus on a peculiar theme that I’ve enjoyed for a number of years, the exotic, bizarre, obscure, and often silly sci-fi/horror themed music put out by a small group of punk rock, surf rock, and rockabilly/psychobilly bands. And so we have the SciFiPunkRockabillySurfHorror Half-Hour.
Since the songs themselves tend to be highly narrative, it was easy to put them together in a way that created something approximating a narrative arc. I sometimes traded variety to showcase my favorite bands repeatedly, yet am proud to have been pretty stubborn about excluding songs/bands if they didn’t fit the plotline.
Here are the set lists for the first three episodes, along with a synopsis of the storyline I had in mind:
Synopsis: Young (vampire) love is threatened when an asteroid on a cataclysmic collision course with Earth is preceded by radioactivated zombies.
Synopsis: The vampire-turned-zombie lovers escape a doomed Earth, but will romance survive capture by the alien cyborgs who are following in the asteroid’s path?
Synopsis: Our vampire-turned-zombie-turned-cyborg hero returns to a scorched Earth. Tormented by memories of his lost love, he flees to his homeland of Transylvania.
Episodes 4 & 5 are both planned, and will showcase Nekromantix, Zombina and the Skeletones, Famous Monsters, Daikaiju, The Pixies, and more.
I just finished re-reading Matthew Yeager’s poem “From ‘A Jar of Balloons, or The Uncooked Rice’” (link is to extended version), and the more I think about my disappointment in the poem the more absurd–both the poem and my reaction–appear to me. The poem begins with a fairly novel concept: an extensive list of simple but personal questions that range from the banal to the sublime. The feel of the poem is unfortunately random and haphazard, like a game of Would You Rather without a partner–and that you allow to persist too long. A better–or at least more fitting–response to this poem than writing about it, in my opinion, follows:
Response to Yeager's From "A Jar of Balloons..."
N large very Y ? N gray me Y N N N 27" showers $20 Y layers neither eat 3rd NA Y mildly Y 1 fair N above average Y 17 Y NA Y chest-high N cake both N Y N Y both N bottom mix it up easy center N window Y "damn" <20 above average Y N poor Y depends one temple NA white, cream, green, red, tan Y bicycle N N Y N Y (elaborative) often Y (rhetorical) Y NA NA depends palm out existing, persisting, [private], etc N (elaborative) Y black smooth peel as I eat tear into N both Y N Imperial City crying drive Y N N (rhetorical) N both Y (rhetorical) Y (rhetorical) Y sinking Y N Y crowd Y Willem 3 N Y Y Y depends no response #2 4 occaisionally N NA (rhetorical) Star Wars toy gun Y don't know est. 12 N, Y occaisionally obligatory Y (rhetorical) walk around by myself N depends Y "out of sight out of mind" N NA real star Y right rear don't know Y Y, N Y butter depends depends Y last week N Y N NA don't know NA N don't know Y Y N depends dysentery Y poor October N (elaborative) depends don't know rarely N family members rarely either N Y Y N depends N pecan depends N N depends poor don't know (rhetorical) few or none varies Y (elaborative) Y (elaborative) N (elaborative) Y N N, Y don't recall Y Y (elaborative) send back N work putting on socks, or walking Y NA reading all of the above (elaborative) N N Y N NA none NA NA N depends Y N NA 50 NA Y N N Y N depends N Y N NA me Y flexibility, resilience Y N Y don't know Y (rhetorical) Y N sometimes Y, N depends not for myself N it's a form of tyranny NA above average don't know N don't know NA Nick Cave in The Birthday Party N N $5 Y Y Toys R Us average average Y sometimes NA Y Y NA (rhetorical) don't know "kitty-corner" N (rhetorical) N NA (funny) 1st degree Y sometimes tea, books -- fewer things as I age opera poetry oh, Y Y both N N "I can get this" Y Y Y don't know GRE Literature, or that one history of the English language final oscillate N Y very 2002 Y 4 Y Y grandfather brother N fair good NA N N clip N N N both Y N (rhetorical) 12 hours
Did I miss any? Do
I care?
I enjoyed posting on select poems from The Best American Poetry 2009 last December, and planned to do the same this year. We’re clearly a week into December with no posts or poems, which says a lot about how I follow-through with Good Ideas. Chris mentioned he might record selected poems from BAP 2010 and post them with commentary; I think that’s a great way to reinvest myself in podcasting literature, personalize this year’s BAP reading, and save myself the trouble of retyping the poem accurately.
Before I begin (or, really, because I haven’t begun) I want to share my first-pass shortlist of dog-eared poems from BAP 2010:
Todd Boss – My Dog Has No Nose
Anne Carson – Wildly Constant
> David Clewell – This Poem Had Better Be about the World We Actually Live In
> Billy Collins – Grave
Peter Davis – Four “Addresses”
Lynn Emanuel – Dear Final Journey,
> Vievee Francis – Smoke under the Bale
Sonia Greenfield – Passing the Barnyard Graveyard
Corinne Lee – Six from “Birds of Self-Knowledge”
> Hailey Leithauser – The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon
> Jeffrey McDaniel – The Grudge
W.S. Merwin – Identity
> James Richardson – Vectors 2.3: 50 Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays
Charles Simic -Carrying on like a Crow
David Trinidad – Black Telephone
Derek Walcott – 21
> Catherine Wing – The Darker Sooner
Mark Wunderlich – Coyote, with Mange
> Indicates a poem that was also on Chris’s first-pass list.
There’s not a chance that I’ll cover all of these poems this month–I’ll be lucky to hit my five favorites. But for one reason or another I found these poems noteworthy enough to take a second or third look at, and it is likely from this pool that I’ll release some totally unauthorized audio recordings.