I DO: SUPPORT MARRIAGE EQUALITY

Check out the photo stream of people sending in pictures of themselves holding the "I Do" sign in support of marriage equality.  It is so moving to see all the support from all walks of life:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seatimesopinion/8027230294/
or here:
http://seattletimes.com/html/edcetera/2019160137_referendum-74-i-do-photos.html

another good one from Poem a Day:

Big Game by Brenda Shaughnessy         —after Richard Brautigan's "A Candlelion Poem" What began as wildfire ends up on a candle wick. In reverse, it is contained, a lion head in a hunter's den. Big Game. Bigger than one I played with matches and twigs and glass in the shade. When I was young, there was no sun and I was afraid. Now, in grownhood, I call the ghost to my fragile table, my fleshy supper, my tiny flame. Not just any old, but THE ghost, the last one I will be, the future me, finally the sharpest knife in the drawer. The pride is proud. The crowd is loud, like garbage dumping or how a brown bag ripping sounds like a shout that tells the town the house is burning down. Drowns out some small folded breath of otherlife: O that of a lioness licking her cubs to sleep in a dream of savage gold. O that roaring, not yet and yet and not yet dead. So many fires

I love this poem from today's Poem a Day:

The Future is an Animal
by Tina Chang

In every kind of dream I am a black wolf
careening through a web. I am the spider
who eats the wolf and inhabits the wolf's body.
In another dream I marry the wolf and then
am very lonely. I seek my name and they name me
Lucky Dragon. I would love to tell you that all
of this has a certain ending but the most frightening
stories are the ones with no ending at all.
The path goes on and on. The road keeps forking,
splitting like an endless atom, splitting
like a lip, and the globe is on fire. As many
times as the book is read, the pages continue
to grow, multiply. They said, In the beginning,
and that was the moral of the original and most
important story. The story of man. One story.
I laid my head down and my head was heavy.
Hair sprouted through the skin, hair black
and bending toward night grass. I was becoming
the wolf again, my own teeth breaking
into my mouth for the first time, a kind of beauty
to be swallowed in interior bite and fever.
My mind a miraculous ember until I am the beast.
I run from the story that is faster than me,
the words shatter and pant to outchase me.
The story catches my heels when I turn
to love its hungry face, when I am willing
to be eaten to understand my fate. 

Let's Have a Kiki

Check out this "instructional video" from Scissor Sisters. Such a hoot!



And while you are at it: this live performance of "Only the Horses" is pretty hot. Even Tom Jones was giving them a standing O.

Love this poem from today's Poem a Day. So fitting for the end of August (though we are not to the end yet!):

 Mist Valley
 by James Longenbach

At the end of August, when all
The letters of the alphabet are waiting,
You drop a teabag in a cup.
The same few letters making many different words,
The same words meaning different things.

Often you've rearranged them on the surface of the fridge.
Without the surface
They're repulsed by one another.

Here are the letters.
The tea is in your cup.

At the end of August, the mind
Is neither the pokeweed piercing the grass
Nor the grass itself.
As Tony Cook says in The Biology of Terrestrial Mollusks

The right thing to do is nothing, the place
A place of concealment,
And the time as often as possible.


*

Sounds like Argentina has a good thing going (from Atlantic Cities online): "Another installment of: Literary Laws that Will Never Exist in the United States. This week we turn to Buenos Aires, Argentina, home of the late Jorge Luis Borges, where aging novelists, poets and playwrights are eligible to receive government pensions. The New York Times reported Sunday that the recently-established program is now distributing pensions of up to $900 a month to over 80 writers. One of those recipients, Alberto Laiesca, told Romero that “the program is magnificent, delivering some dignity to those of us who have toiled our entire life for literature.” The requirements for the pension are strict, according to the Times and the Argentine news blog Occidentes: 15 years residence in the Argentine capital, a continuing commitment to the arts, and the publication of five works of literature, poetry, essays or theater, barring some other extended engagement with literature." full story here: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/08/retirement-day-poets-pension-buenos-aires/2935/

Romney VP pic coming soon. Who will it be? . . . and while we are waiting, here's a funny bit of reminiscence from today's Huff Post: "Meanwhile, the ghost of Sarah Palin continues to loom over Romney's decision. Only two days ago, former veep Dick Cheney, 2008 loser John McCain and La Palin herself engaged in a mud-slinging ménage a trois over whether or not Palin was up to the task of riding shotgun on the Republican ticket four years ago. The ever-dour Cheney asserted that she was not. Ya think? McCain, who will forever bear the Palin stain on his political legacy, played Sir Walter Raleigh-on-Geritol yet again and bashed Cheney on her behalf. The half-term governor, who now appears as a bobblehead doll on Fox News, tossed an incoherent (and duplicitous) word salad in her defense, reminding the world yet again why Cheney was right." Ya think? *

A Guide for the Poet Within‘The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets,’ by Jeffrey Skinner

I love the tongue in cheek of the title -- sounds like this might be an interesting book! "Halfway through Jeffrey Skinner’s new book, “The 6.5 Practices of Moderately Successful Poets,” he quotes W. H. Auden: “Form looks for content, content looks for form.” It’s a pithy bit of near tautology that also happens to neatly describe Skinner’s thoughtful and genre-defying book." --from NY Times review

This looks to be a real fun evening, and for such a good cause. Hope you can come!

Such a delightful, heartwarming movie. Multiple interwoven stories, all coming together at a rundown but beautiful old hotel in India, that an unrelated group of British ex-pats have landed upon in their retirement years. A wonderful ensemble cast, including faves Judie Dench, Tom Wilkinson, and Maggie Smith. And a surprising (and quite moving) plot line involving an Englishman who grew up in India, returning now to look for a lost love (also a man). The movie had so much going on, I am sure they left out a lot of the novel. In fact, this is one of those movies that makes me want to go back and read the book it is based upon: These Foolish Things, by Deborah Moogach.

Such an amazing journey: a magic carpet ride from Istanbul to Venice, and everywhere in-between.

Click here to view this photo book larger

Visit Shutterfly.com to create your own personalized photobook.

Sharon Needles Wins!

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/gossip/la-et-mg-rupauls-drag-race-finale,0,2716191.story But what was that thing she was wearing on her forehead?

Happy Earth Day

Remember to love your mother today (Mother Earth, that is!).

For Earth Day, Dean and I have been spending the lovely sunny weekend tending our garden. So satisfying to be getting our hands dirty, digging and planting and weeding and pruning. Almost nothing could be better . . . .

I love this poem from Poem a Day, and what it says about language, and memory-- as well as the nod to WCW.


Untitled [A house just like his mother's]
by Gregory Orr

A house just like his mother's,
But made of words.
Everything he could remember
Inside it:
Parrots and a bowl
Of peaches, and the bright rug
His grandmother wove.

Shadows also—mysteries
And secrets.
Corridors
Only ghosts patrol.
And did I mention
Strawberry jam and toast?

Did I mention
That everyone he loved
Lives there now,

In that poem
He called "My Mother’s House?"



*

RIP Adrienne Rich

Wow. End of an era. End of an era. So sad. so sad.

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Poet Adrienne Rich, whose socially conscious verse influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died. She was 82.

Rich died Tuesday at her Santa Cruz home from complications from rheumatoid arthritis, said her son, Pablo Conrad. She had lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s.

Through her writing, Rich explored topics such as women’s rights, racism, sexuality, economic justice and love between women.

Rich published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction. She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems “Diving into the Wreck” in 1974. In 2004, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her collection “The School Among the Ruins.”

She had first gained national prominence with her third poetry collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” in 1963. Citing the title poem, University of Maryland professor Rudd Fleming wrote in The Washington Post that she “proves poetically how hard it is to be a woman — a member of the second sex.”