Just finished reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (on Kindle for iPad), and I have to say I just LOVED IT! I realize I am probably the last person in America to read it -- but what a sophisticated page turner. Enough plots and characters for ten books. And the character of Lisbeth is just so endearing. How can you not just love her? I hear Daniel Craig might play Blomkvist in the American version of the movie. Perfect.. I can hardly wait to see all his naughty bits!

I have already ordered the second book. Wheee!

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This is TOO FUNNY! Thanks to KT for the link.



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A sweet-sad poem from Peter Everwine, from a recent ALP article in the Lake County News. It really fits this year's Northwest summer, where the rains and mists have been everpresent, and fall seems to be coming early.


Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.


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I have been reading A History of Clouds by Hans Magnus Enzeberger (translated from the German by Martin Chalmers and Esther Kinsky). I picked it up off the poetry table at Elliott Bay the other day. It has a gorgeous cover, a photo collage of a street scene with buildings and clouds, and a bicyclist with angel's wings. I liked the first few poems I opened, so bought it, and it has been quite a delight to read. I don't know if it is just this poet, or if it is a particularly German sensibility, but I love how these poems are so philosophical, how they ask deep questions, yet still keep a sense of the joy and absurdity and sacredness of life.

The title poem is a long sequence,ostensibly about clouds, but really about the ineffable, the spiritual, life after death, etc etc.

"Appearing as they do,
overnight, or out of the blue,
they can hardly be considered
as being born.
Passing away imperceptibly
they have no notion of dying.
And anyway, nobody
can match their transience. (from part one)

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I love the poem "The Instruments," about medical instruments, and the doctors who use them, perhaps at times too coolly. And the poem "An Earth-Coloured Ditty," in which every other line ends with the word "potato," is beautifully done:


An Earth-Coloured Ditty

Another poem about death, etc. —
certainly, but what about the potato?
For obvious reasons it's not mentioned
by Horace or Homer, the potato.
But what about Rilke and Mallarme?
Did it not speak to them, the potato?
Do too few words rhyme
with it, the earth-coloured potato?
It's not too concerned with heaven.
It waits patiently, the potato,
until we drag it out into the light
and throw it onto the fire. The potato
doesn't mind, but it could be
that it's too hot for poets, the potato?
Well, so we'll wait a little while
until we eat it, the potato,
sing about it then forget it again.

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Highly recommended!

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Musical Mondegreens

Just finished a week of on call. Driving back and forth between hospital and clinic and home, I kept hearing this hypnotic song on the radio — a dreamy woman's voice singing "eight six six oh, eight six six oh." I thought it was a secret keyboard or cellphone text message to a friend or lover, but the letters didn't add up to anything. I googled and came up with nothing. Finally one day, when the announcer said it was a new song by MIA, I found it.



Not 8660, but XXXO. Duh! But give it a listen. Don't you hear "8660?"

Anyway, it is now Dean's and my special goodbye-tag in the morning, or on the phone. "Bye dear, love you, 8660."

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The new season of Project Runway starts tonight. I can hardly f-ing wait!

http://www.mylifetime.com/shows/project-runway

Interesting brief article over at Huffington Post:

Poetry and Medicine: Keats Was an Apothecary

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What a weekend! Seattle finally has some summer weather. Spent a lovely Saturday on Vashon Island with old friends: dinner, fellowship, the garden, nature. Ahhhhhhh . . . . it's so good to get life's priorities in order. To discover again what is most important, what really matters.

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Poetry group tonight at Sylvia P's. Not that Sylvia, of course, but a living Sylvia P. *wink*

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Some recent poetry I've been reading. . .

Romey's Order, by Atsuro Riley. I'd seen his poems the last few years in Poetry, and liked them. And this book is a delight. His poems are dense and sonically packed with scrumptious thick hyphenations like "gloam-knelling," "spawn-floss" and "ditch-jellies". There is definitely a bit of Gerald Manley Hopkins here. There is also a fascinating family history in the background, with Riley (and the semi-autobiographical poems' speaker: Romey) being a child of an American soldier and a Japanese woman, who make their family home in the South (South Carolina, in fact). The mix of Southern Gothic images, and Japanese sensibility (he spies images of Mt Fuji one day in a book of his mother's) are wonderful. Highly recommended.

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Bar Book: poems and otherwise, by Julie Sheehan. I picked this book up blind off the shelf at Elliott Bay a few weeks ago. What a hoot! It's the story of a marriage, the birth of a child, and a bitter divorce, told through drink recipes and bar tending stories. There are prose poems, poem poems, poem recipes, a bit of a scene from a play-poem, numerous footnotes and asides. It's really a fun and varied collection. Here's a taste:

How to Make a Slow Comfortable Screw

This cheap date of a cocktail wears too much makeup. Even the name is fake. What masquerades as sexual innuendo turns out to be the recipe for the drink: "Slow" is for slow gin, "Comfortable" is for Southern Comfort -- tell me if I am speaking too shrewdly, too lewd-ish -- and "Screw" is for screwdriver, that most common of beverages. . . . . (pg 62)

The divorce poems are a bit spiteful, vindictive, and painful to read -- and her ex sounds like he deserved every bit of it. Still, I would not want to ever be the next person to cross this woman.

Read the Bar Book if you dare . . .

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My Kill Adore Him, by Paul Martinez Pompa. Chosen by Martin Espada for the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. This was a really good read. I liked the Chicano-identity displayed here. These were assertive poems, that pulled no punches, whether it was about homophobia in grade school or the NBA locker room; sexism, racism, transvestism (a fun poem about a bar where straight men dance with chicks with dicks), or police brutality. Here is a taste:

Exclamation Point

Exclamation Point -- a punctuation mark that indicates strong feeling in connection with what is being said. It serves as a signpost to a reader that a sentence expresses intense feelings. An exclamation point may end a declaratory statement (Put your fuckin hands up!), a question (Do you want me to put a cap in your Mexakin ass!), or a fragment (Now asshole!). It may express an exclamation (Your ass is going to jail!), a wish (If you move, I'll shoot your fuckin ass!), or a cry (Okay, okay, take it easy, officer!). As these examples show, exclamation points are commonest in written dialogue. They should be used carefully in any writing and very seldom in formal writing. (pg 43)


Recommended, yes.


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Interesting article about the difficulties of reading poetry in the e-book format:

Breaking up is hard: Poems a tough fit in e-formBy Hillel Italie, Associated Press

"The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break," Collins says.

From Judith K's blog: a poingnant story about asking for help.

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New compost bins, virtual garden tour

Here is Dean, smiling beside our new compost bins, built by Johnny Guerrero. Nice job Johnny! If you want info for him to build some bins for you, just let me know. We're pretty happy with the job he did, and how they turned out.

And please join me on a virtual tour of our garden: how it looks today, July 13th, 2010.

Colton Harris-Moore Caught?

Oh no! Say it isn't so . . .

"Harris-Moore, who has been running from American law enforcement since escaping from a Washington state halfway house in 2008, gained fame and thousands of fans who admired his ability to evade arrest. He is suspected of stealing cars, boats and at least five planes - including the aircraft he allegedly lifted in Indiana and flew more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) to the islands off Florida's coast, despite a lack of formal flight training."

Where Paint and Poetry Meet

This is a fascinating article. I love how the painting was created in reference to a poem, rather then the reverse. What do you call the inverse of Ekphrastic? Is there a name fore it?

Charles Demuth's 'The Figure 5 in Gold' is a witty homage to William Carlos Williams and one of his poems.

On its own, this visual impact might have made Charles Demuth's most famous work into an icon of American art. But "The Figure 5 in Gold" has much more going for it. It's the best work in a genre Demuth created, the "poster portrait." It's a witty homage to his close friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, and a transliteration into paint of his poem, "The Great Figure." It's a decidedly American work made at a time when U.S. artists were just moving beyond European influences. It's a reference to the intertwined relationships among the arts in the 1920s, a moment of cross-pollination that led to American Modernism. And it anticipates Pop art.

Happy Fourth of July!

From The Whitman Archive: a recording of Walt Whitman Reading "America." Apparently only the first four lines are captured. And there is some controversy whether the voice is truly Whitman's.






America

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

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And, personally, I prefer Simon and Garfunkle's song "America:"

"Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together"
"I've got some real estate here in my bag"
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said "Be careful his bowtie is really a camera"

"Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat"
"We smoked the last one an hour ago"
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all gone to look for America
All gone to look for America
All gone to look for America


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And while we are at it, here's something of mine from a long long time ago . . .


On First Hearing a Newly-Discovered Recording Believed To Be of Walt Whitman Reading “America”


Six lines, six long breaths:
could this be your ripe tenor
seething beneath the rhythmic thunking

of a chipped wax cylinder,
emerging from the radio's static
like a phone call from the dead?

Grandfather of American poetry,
lover-nurse of fallen soldiers,
tree hugger, imp — is it you?

We may never know
for sure, but goose-bumps
covered my flesh as I listened,

imagined your beautiful blue
eyes, your white beard, your mouth
making love to each word.


Chiron Review Winter 1992

This looks like an interesting book — from an English teacher turned Nurse:

In the new book, 'Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life and Everything in Between' (2010, HarperCollins Publishers), Theresa Brown examines life as a first-year nurse in medical oncology after leaving her life in academia to become a registered nurse (RN) in a field that she describes as "just feeling right."

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Great reading at Hugo House Tuesday night. Standing room only! For Elizabeth Austen's new book The Girl Who Goes Alone, from Floating Bridge Press. The title poem is a long (3 page or so) narrative piece about what it means for a woman to hike alone. It's pretty moving stuff. Check it out here.