PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1988 - William Meredith

ENVOI


Go, little book. If anybody asks
Why I add poems to a time like this,
Tell how the comeliness I can't take in
Of ships and other figures of content
Compels me still until I give them names;
And how I give them names impatiently,
As who should pull up roses by the roots
That keep him turning on his empty bed,
The smell intolerable and thick with loss.


----------------------------------------
from "Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems" by William Meredith,
published by Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 1997

I Can't Light no More of Your Darkness

The Dark Knight Going Green

Only in Quebec!!! --- Are Quebec Separatists Living in a Separate Reality?

Sir Paul McCartney has tried to defuse the row about his forthcoming gig in Quebec City by telling his critics to "smoke the pipes of peace".

Referring to his 1983 song of the same name, the former Beatle told Quebec nationalists opposing his appearance at a concert marking the 400th anniversary of the city that it was a "show of friendship" and that they should let history remain in the past.

The controversy has arisen because of a British invasion of Quebec in 1790, with nationalists arguing that a performance by a UK artist was not appropriate.

In an interview with Radio Canada, McCartney said that the protesters' attitude was comparable to him still refusing to play in Germany because of the world wars.

He said: "I think it's time to smoke the pipes of peace and to just, you know, put away your hatchet because I think it's a show of friendship.

"I'm very friendly with the French people that I know. I know people of all nationalities and, hey, I'm friendly with German people and, by that argument, I should never go to Germany or they should never come here."

The argument began with an open letter to McCartney, printed in a local Quebec newspaper, calling for him to learn some French songs before the gig.

The letter read: "The presence of your English-language music on the most majestic part of Battlefields Park, as beautiful as it might be, can't help but bring back painful memories of our Conquest." ...

----------------------------------------
source: NME

Editorial Response:

Separatists true colours come out.

This is what anglos and minorities have to put up with day in and day out in Quebec the petty disrespect and constant moanings of the French separatists. Canadian tax money funds their constant moanings btw. ... This time they have embarrassed themselves and Quebec tourism on the world stage in front of the world media. ... This is what they are like in Quebec all the time. Never happy and constantly wanting to make life uncomfortable for those not drinking their political ideology coolaid. ...Too bad our Canadian politicians don't have the same guts as Sir Paul did and tell these sad sack separatists to "smoke the pipes of peace already". No guts no glory. Sir Paul thank you for telling it like it is. All the decent and tolerant people of Quebec salute you and honour you excluding the bitter hate filled separatists of course!

-------------------------------------------


It's Deja Vu All Over Again: Montcalm Versus Wolfe or is it Dion Versus McCartney? The Fight Over the Plains of Abraham:

A recount in the turf battle of the Plains of Abraham - set off when Céline Dion's husband-manager René Angélil objected that Paul McCartney would have 250,000 spectators for his free concert July 20 and Céline would only have 100,000 for her Aug. 22 performance - has resulted in a tie.

Each show now has room for about 200,000 spectators.

Daniel Gélinas, who heads the Société du 400é, which is managing festivities marking Quebec City's 400th birthday, told reporters yesterday that calculating three persons a square metre, and expanding the site, there will be room for 170,000 to 200,000 at the natural amphitheatre where the McCartney show was originally planned.

Using the same calculation, 350,000 could squeeze into the site planned for Dion's show. But he admitted not all those places have a good view.

So in addition to the 100,000 holders of free tickets, who will have reserved places, Gélinas said another 100,000 to 120,000 could see Dion's show.

Gélinas phoned Angélil in France yesterday and reported that Dion's manager is "very, very happy" with the the new arrangement.

-------------------------------------------
KEVIN DOUGHERTY, The Gazette
Published: Wednesday, July 09

NOW THEY TELL US...

It's better to smoke dope than to multitask


Pay attention here for a minute. Turn off the TV, put down the phone, stop stirring the soup, and just read. This is about multi-tasking.

Hailed just a few short years ago as a breakthrough in efficiency, doing several things more or less simultaneously is now being compared to attention deficit disorder. The human brain, the latest research is showing, is just not capable of performing two or more tasks simultaneously with any degree of efficiency. It gets agitated and distracted. Multitasking doesn't help learning; it hinders it.

The business world once embraced multitasking as a solution to increasingly demanding schedules. But the bloom is off that rose: A British study published in 2005 found that workers who were "distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers." How big a drop? Ten IQ points. Let's not even think about multi-tasking dope smokers.

The study's author, University of London psychologist Glenn Wilson, was also quoted as saying that constantly breaking away from tasks to respond to email or text messages has essentially the same effect on alertness as missing a night's sleep.

Recently, a U.S. analyst estimated that the yearly cost to the U.S. economy of the inefficiencies and errors generated by multitasking at $650 billion. Meanwhile, some 28 per cent of workers surveyed said they believed their time was wasted in multitasking interruptions.

There's more: Experts believe that children might be at risk of underachievement because of out-of-control multitasking. In an interview in the Atlantic magazine, Jordan Grafman of the U.S. Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke said this: "Children (who) are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV are not going to do well in the long run."

This is the sort of observation cranky grand-parents have been making for years now, but often it's hard for conventional wisdom to stand up to the latest theories from efficiency "experts."
U.S. psychology professor Russell Poldrack warned, in an interview in the New Atlantis magazine, that humans are "not built" to multitask.

"We're really built to focus," he said. "And when we sort of force ourselves to multitask, we're driving ourselves to perhaps be less efficient in the long run even though it sometimes feels like we're being more efficient."

The moral is evident: One thing at a time.


--------------------------------------------------
source: The Montreal Gazette: Monday July 14, 2008

Quotes & Quotables

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

------------------------------------------------------------------Anais Nin

PULITZER PRIZE WINNING POETS: 2000 C.K. Williams

THE DRESS
by C. K. Williams

In those days, those days which exist for me only as the
most elusive memory now,
when often the first sound you'd hear in the morning
would be a storm of birdsong,
then the soft clop of the hooves of the horse hauling a
milk wagon down your block,

and the last sound at night as likely as not would be
your father pulling up in his car,
having worked late again, always late, and going
heavily down to the cellar, to the furnace,
to shake out the ashes and damp the draft before he
came upstairs to fall into bed --

in those long-ago days, women, my mother, my
friends' mothers, our neighbors,
all the women I knew, wore, often much of the day,
what were called housedresses,
cheap, printed, pulpy, seemingly purposefully shapeless
light cotton shifts,

that you wore over your nightgown and, when you had
to go to look for a child,
hang wash on the line, or run down to the grocery store
on the corner, under a coat,
the twisted hem of the nightgown, always lank and
yellowed, dangling beneath.

More than the curlers some of the women seemed
constantly to have in their hair,
in preparation for a great event -- a ball, one would
think -- that never came to pass;
more than the way most women's faces not only were
never made up during the day,

but seemed scraped, bleached, and, with their plucked
eyebrows, scarily masklike;
more than all that it was those dresses that made
women so unknowable and forbidding,
adepts of enigmas to which men could have no access,
and boys no conception.

Only later would I see the dresses also as a
proclamation: that in your dim kitchen,
your cellar, your bleak concrete yard, what you
revealed of yourself was a fabulation;
your real sensual nature, veiled in those sexless
vestments, was utterly your dominion.

In those days, one hid much else as well: grown men
didn't embrace one another,
unless someone had died, and not always then; you
shook hands or, at a ball game,
thumped your friend¹s back and exchanged blows meant
to be codes for affection;

once out of childhood you'd never again know the shock
of your father's whiskers
on your cheek, not until mores at last had evolved, and
you could hug another man,
then hold on for a moment, then even kiss (your father's
bristles white and stiff now).

What release finally, the embrace: though we were wary
-- it seemed so audacious --
how much unspoken joy there was in that affirmation
of equality and communion,
no matter how much misunderstanding and pain had
passed between you by then.

We knew so little in those days, as little as now, I
suppose, about healing those hurts:
even the women, in their best dresses, with beads
and sequins sewn on the bodice,
even in lipstick and mascara, their hair aflow, could
only stand wringing their hands,

begging for peace, while father and son, like thugs,
like thieves, like Romans,
simmered and hissed and hated, inflicting sorrows
that endured, the worst anyway,
through the kiss and embrace, bleeding from brother
to brother into the generations.

In those days there was still countryside close to the
city, farms, cornfields, cows;
even not far from our building with its blurred brick and
long shadowy hallway
you could find tracts with hills and trees you could
pretend were mountains and forests.

Or you could go out by yourself even to a half-block-
long empty lot, into the bushes:
like a creature of leaves you'd lurk, crouched, crawling,
simplified, savage, alone;
already there was wanting to be simpler, wanting, when
they called you, never to go back.


-------------------------------------------------

Post With No Name

PULITZER PRIZE WINNING POETS: 1998 - Charles Wright

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.
How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.
Birds fly back and forth across the lawn
--------------------------------------------looking for home
As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
--------------------------------------------I flit from one thing to the next.
What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?
Tomorrow is dark.
--------------------------------------------Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.
Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening
--------------------------------------------up from the damp grass.
Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,
Go quietly, quietly.


----------------------------------------------------

Two For Tuesday

PULITZER PRIZE WINNING POETS: 1972 - James Wright

The Journey

Anghiari is medieval, a sleeve sloping down
A steep hill, suddenly sweeping out
To the edge of a cliff, and dwindling.
But far up the mountain, behind the town,
We too were swept out, out by the wind,
Alone with the Tuscan grass.

Wind had been blowing across the hills
For days, and everything now was graying gold
With dust, everything we saw, even
Some small children scampering along a road,
Twittering Italian to a small caged bird.

We sat beside them to rest in some brushwood,
And I leaned down to rinse the dust from my face.

I found the spider web there, whose hinges
Reeled heavily and crazily with the dust,
Whole mounds and cemeteries of it, sagging
And scattering shadows among shells and wings.
And then she stepped into the center of air
Slender and fastidious, the golden hair
Of daylight along her shoulders, she poised there,
While ruins crumbled on even, side of her.
Free of the dust, as though a moment before
She had stepped inside the earth, to bathe herself.

I gazed, close to her, till at last she stepped
Away in her own good time.

Many men
Have searched all over Tuscany and never found
What I found there, the heart of the light
Itself shelled and leaved, balancing
On filaments themselves falling. The secret
Of this journey is to let the wind
Blow its dust all over your body,
To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly
All the way through your ruins, and not to lose
Any sleep over the dead, who surely
Will bury their own, don't worry.

Some Poet Jokes - Because Poets Are Hysterically Funny - Don't You Think?

Here are a few poetry jokes guaranteed to make you a sensation at the next
open mic. Some are original. All are stolen from Allan Wolf. A couple are even funny.




Po-Joke #10
Question: How does a poet sneeze?
Answer: Haiku!!!




Po-Joke #12
Question: What do baby poets play with?
Answer: Tanka trucks.




Po-Joke #13
Question: What did William Wordsworth mean by “a spontaneous
overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility”?
Answer: Puberty.




Po-Joke #15
Question: How is a book of poetry like O.J. Simpson’s testimony.
Answer: Nobody buys either one of them.




Po-Joke #20
Question: What do you get when you combine Robert Frost and James
Bond?
Answer: The Road Not Shaken but Stirred.




Po-Joke #24
A nurse is giving a young medical intern a tour of the hospital.


The intern approaches one bedridden patient and asks, “Why are you here?” The
patient replies, “Wee sleket cowerin’ timrous beastie/O, what a panic is in thy breastie.”


The intern moves on to the next bed and asks the same question, “Why are you
here?” The patient answers, “O, my luv is like a red, red, rose that’s newly sprung in June.”


The intern moves on to a third bed and asks again, “Why are you here” to which
the third patient replies, “The best laid plans of mice and men, may often gang awry.”


At this the intern turns to the nurse and asks, “What ward is this anyway.” And
the nurse answers, “It’s the Burns Unit.”



------------------------------------------------------

For more poetic humor check out Allan Wolf's poetry site at
http://www.allanwolf.com/

Shocking Blue

Hear...Hear!

Read this over at Seth Abramson's :


"At present, one group of writers--poets with no first book, no money, and no high-level connections--are being essentially kept out of the process altogether, even as gurus in the poetry community are assuring us that there are too many poets out there, too many publishers, too much access to full-manuscript publication for those as yet unprepared for it. I beg to differ, and always have, and think that someone, someone, needs to stand up for what undoubtedly is a huge demographic in the very midst of the American poetry community."


----------------------------------------------
read the rest at: The Suburban Ecstasies - "2008 State of the Small Presses "

I Know...I Know It's Only Rock n' Roll But....

Marya Zaturenska, - Pulitzer Prize Winner in 1938.

The White Dress
Marya Zaturenska (1902-1982)

Imperceptively the world became haunted by her white dress.
Walking in forest or garden, he would start to see,
Her flying form; sudden, swift, brief as a caress
The flash of her white dress against a darkening tree.

And with forced unconcern, withheld desire, and pain
He beheld her at night; and when sleepless in his bed,
Her light footfalls seemed loud as cymbals; deep as his disdain,
Her whiteness entered his heart, flowed through from feet to head.

Or it was her face at a window, her swift knock at the door,
Then she appeared in her white dress, her face white as her gown;
Like snow in midsummer she came and left the rich day poor;
And the sun chilled and grew higher, remote, and the moon slipped down.

So the years passed; more fierce in pursuit her image grew;
She became the dream abjured, the ill uncured, the deed undone,
The life one never lived, the answer one never knew,
Till the white shadow swayed the moon, stayed the expiring sun.

Until at his life's end, the shadow of the white face, the white dress
Became his inmost thought, his private wound, the word unspoken,
All that he cherished in failure, all that had failed his success;
She became the crystal orb, half-seen, untouched, unbroken.

There on his death bed, kneeling at the bed's foot, he trembling saw,
The image of the Mother-Goddess, enormous, archaic, cruel,
Overpowering the universe, creating her own inexorable law,
Molded of stone, but her fire and ice flooded the room like a pool.

And she was the shadow in the white dress, no longer slight and flying,
But solid as death. Her cold, firm, downward look,
Brought close to the dissolving mind the marvelous act of dying,
And on her lap, the clasped, closed, iron book.

Two For Tuesday on a Monday

Be There or Be Square

The Box invites you to an evening of short word, film, play and music by:

Stephanie Comilang
Kristyn Dunnion
Stacey May Fowles
Chris MacLean
John Martz
Mindbender
Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra
Jaclyn Quar and Mallory Diaczun

+Â door treats galore. Thanks to the Toronto arts council.

The Box is a quarterly salon night of readings, performances, screenings, interventions and networking that aims to bring diverse communities and audiences into an environment of artistic and social intermingling.


8 pm
Wednesday, July 9
Rivoli, 332 Queen St W. (Back Room)
Toronto, Ontario


pwyc, $5 suggested donation

Host: Louise Bak

boxsalon@hotmail.com
416-929-1906
http://www.boxsalon.com/


Stephanie Comilang is a romantic and realist who lives and works in Toronto. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design and has since been in collaboration with a number of artists. On her completion of school, she started touring Europe and North America extensively with Final Fantasy accompanying Owen Pallett and his violin with live shadows and drawings on the overhead projector. Together they have played both garages with mattresses as seating and big Scandinavian concert halls. She most recently directed a meta-trilogy of music videos for Final Fantasy, which can be seen on TV and your computer. Stephanie has also collaborated with experimental theatre company Mammalian Diving Reflex on Diplomatic Immunities researching and presenting in Lahore, Pakistan for the World Performing Arts Festival last November. She is working out logistics for their next collaboration entitled Parkdale vs. Queen West. She is currently mapping out a puppet show about growing up with an Elvis impersonatorfather entitled Children of the King.

Kristyn Dunnion is a saucy tart. She is the author of Missing Matthew, a quirky mystery for 8-10 year olds, Mosh Pit, a queer punk novel for adult rebels, and BIG BIG SKY, a brand new speculative fiction. She has short stories in these collections: The Horrors: Terrifying Tales, With A Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws, and Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures. She is also the trash-talking hostess and macho-femme Miss Kitty Galore. Hear her roar! www.kristyndunnion.com

Stacey May Fowles' written work has been published in various online and print magazines, including Kiss Machine, The Absinthe Literary Review, and subTERRAIN. Her non-fiction has been anthologized in the widely acclaimed Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and First Person Queer. Her first novel, Be Good, was published with Tightrope Books in November 2007, and in fall 2008 she will release an illustrated novel, Fear of Fighting, with Invisible Publishing. She currently lives in Toronto where she is the publisher of Shameless Magazine.

Residing in Toronto, Chris MacLean graduated from University of Toronto with a BA in Cinema Studies and from York University with a BFA in Film & Video Production. Sharing his time between his paid life in the local film/television industry and his filmmaking-related hobbies, he has written/directed/edited over two dozen films/videos. His work has been screened at festivals worldwide, including Cinematexas, Images, and International Film Festival of Rotterdam. He has also served a stint at the One Minute Film & Video Festival as a member of the Selection Committee and as its Technical Director.

Mindbender is a ever-rising star in Toronto hip hop, who has performed with EL-P, Pharoahe Monch, Del, MF DOOM, Aceyalone, Brother Ali, Cage, Aesop Rock and many others. He has also played countless shows across North America, received local and international press from Pound to Now Magazine to URB, inked distribution deals with Urbnet and Sonic Imprint (UK), and completed a record-breaking fifth year organizing Toronto's best open mic, 'In Divine Style'. He released 2 albums in March 2008, 'Better Late Than Never Made' and 'Invisible Rhythm Showcase', and is constantly creating the future sound of Canadian/international hip hop, for you to enjoy. Stay tuned to Mindbender Supreme...

Through her multi-disciplinary practice, Jaclyn Quaresma focuses on the moment of subtlety in a relationship when attraction turns into negligence. While maintaining a strong involvement she slowly distances herself from the object of her affection, eventually abandoning it without remorse. Hence, her work captures the paradox when both attraction and negligence coexist with same force, and the viewer lingers for a moment on the brink between intense intimacy and imminent separation (Braid). The same logic extends and incorporates her relationship with objects exemplified in Televison: a poem, He Was Different Without His Glasses. Jaclyn is also interested in the play between documentary and fiction, which she then investigates through a dialogue of the private vs. public.

Mallory Diaczun is a Toronto-based artist whose interests focus on sex, with a particular emphasis on glamourized examinations of pornography, black youth culture, and the hyperbolic world of (in)famous basketball players. Diaczun explores the relationship and interaction between human intimacies through a highly sexualized manner. By attempting to expose the space between sexualized relationships, previous bodies of work have derived: a Barbie-esque pornographic colouring book entitled Jenna; an investigation of power through Suck My Dick, Bitch; and an ongoing suite of performances such as Braid, with Jaclyn Quaresma. Both Quaresma and Diaczun are currently obtaining their Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at the University of Toronto/Sheridan College.

John Martz is an illustrator and cartoonist living in Toronto whose clients include Hallmark Cards, CTV, Yahoo!, and chicaDEE Magazine. His website, robotjohnny.com, is home to a menagerie of cartoons, typefaces, and other creations. John's love of wordplay can be seen his comics, movie reviews in verse, and in his popular recreation of the TTC subway map as a series of anagrams. He is also the editor of the illustration and cartooning blog Drawn! (www.drawn.ca)


Switching from premiering a piano concerto with American piano virtuoso Thollem McDonas one month to stunning Wavelength hipsters at Sneaky Dee's the next without needing to change gears, the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra transcends genre and erases the artificial distinction between high and low forms of art. Sweeping vocal and sax lines interweave between layers of aggressive minimalist string patterns punctuated by driving percussion and bass drones; the result being structures both concrete and unquestionably human. Their music has been described as "the meeting point between Philip Glass, Billie Holiday, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor". In addition to their repertoire of original songs, the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra is known for their reinterpretations of songs by Brian Eno, Kurt Weill, New Order, and Wire. The Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra is: Kristin Mueller-Heaslip (voice), Jennifer Wardle (saxophone), Alex Cheung (violin), Adriana Pera (cello), Michael Kaler (bass), and Michael Rosenthal (drums), and Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip (pencil/paper)

George Carlin: 1937 - 2008

Warning: Contains words which may be offensive to some

Two For Tuesday

Reflections

Desperately Seeking Poet to Swap Chapbook Manuscript With:

Thanks to Justin I believe that my chapbook manuscript is getting closer to being ready for the next round of submissions. After reading my MS he's given me valuable advice on the narrative arc of my MS. After reading his blog and the trials and tribulations his MS has undergone I kinda feel pedantic in underlining the minimal adversity that I have faced in my subbing odyssey. (So go on over and wish him well as he sends his own MS out. Go ahead you've got my permission. )

But what I really need right now, and I'm serious about this, is some close scrutiny. No I don't mean me ...I mean my chapbook! (I'm under enough scrutiny as it is...Sheesh!)

So if you are on the same journey as yours truly: i.e. looking for a publisher for your chapbook but wanting to put your best MS foot forward go on and try this challenge on for size.


---------------------------------------------------

Silence is Golden...But my Eyes Still See.

Feeling Mellow?

Poetry in Vitro - Vol 3, No. 10

And so it goes...

Quotes & Quotables

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

-------------------------------------------------Albert Einstein

The Two For Tuesday Which I Should Have Posted Yesterday

Try & Catch the Wind & Other Stories

Cuban Art at The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sugar-cane Cutters, by Mario Carréno, 1943.

From ¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today,

an exhibition running from January 31 to June 2, 2008

at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Jorge Arche (1905 - 1956)

Portrait of Mary - 1938

Oil on canvas, 91.5 x 76.5 cm

Museo National de Bellas Artes, Havana

Photo Rodolfo Martínez

Courtesy The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

To be a Poet Without a Book:

Lately, I've been feeling like that kid pressed up against the candy store's window unable to get inside because the front door just doesn't want to open up for me and even though there are probably 100 other means of ingress it just won't feel the same unless I get in through the front door. I see my friends and fellow poets in there having a blast. But I cannot share in their joy except perhaps vicariously. I've gotten wary of congratulating poets on recent pubs even though I truly mean what I say and fully acknowledge and revel in their mastery of the craft - feeling that I might inadvertently jinx their streak of good luck. (Not only is my muse not accepting my calls - the number she gave me has been disconnected.) And I'm wondering how long I can go on with this charade. I mean how long can I pretend to be the "poet without a pub or book" who's on the verge? (On the verge to what?) I mean how long can I go on practicing my responses to Kate Greenstreet's interview questions about my first book?:

Kate: "How did you feel when your book first arrived from the publishers?"

Me: "Yeah, (subdued laughter here) I remember vividly when the postman left that non-descript brown box on my doorstep - I couldn't wait to tear it open but realised (much to my chagrin) as I read the address that I had mistakenly been sent Paul Guest's books and had to send them back. (unabashedly balling my eyes out here)"

This circle of friends that is this online poetic community has been very good to me. Scratch that - they have been very accommodating and welcomed me with open arms. And even though some of my staunchest supporters have turned their backs on me as of late - silently and unnoticeably deleting me from their blogrolls - I understand that in the PoBiz you're only as good as your last pub. And since my last serious pub was a couple of years ago - I figure it's put up or shut up time. Or should that be "put out" or "butt out" time.

The truth is that I really haven't been subbing much and that 2007 has been (at least for me as Peter Pereira aptly called it) an "annus horribulus". (2008 - so far - hasn't been going according to plan either.) But there are no excuses made here and I am done whining. So you can pull your earplugs out.

But I also must admit that I had ostensibly abandoned this creation I called my "blog" before I even knew what it entailed and how its hungry little mouth always yelped to be fed. My recent time away from blogging did give me some perspective. In the midst of all the soul-searching that I did while away - which I must admit can be a very thirst-inducing business - I realized that all the stats regarding the status of my blog that I had been so meticulously referring to every day just seemed to melt into oblivion. I was getting so caught up in this blog's Technorati's "Authority Quotient" and my Blogshare's market value & the Holy Grail of stats: my overall “Hits & Blog Visits". I mean what did all these stats mean anyway & how were they really relevant to my poetry. This was just becoming a popularity contest of sorts. I realized that I didn't need this to show me who or what I really was. And even though I wasn't blogging my hits went up. (I'm not joking here.) So I figured maybe they're trying to tell me something - maybe if I don't blog for a year before you know it I'll pull in thousands of hits. (I'm joking here.) (Asides provided for the humorously challenged.)

So where does that leave me? Hell - if I know! I suppose that the fact that I'm still here means something. The fact that you're still here means something too. I'm just not sure what. I'm dense that way! So hey if you've got a sure-fired way of getting my manuscript published - short of making death threats to publishers - let me know. Otherwise I'll just be puttin' out the same old - same old and ride out into the sunset.

Christopher Marlowe Had Nothing to do With This

Rhymes With Orange: by Hilary Price

Two For Tuesday + 2 - For Good Measure

Catching up on the Mail

This from Brian Leary over at 42opus:


May at 42opus

Currently featured on the site is "The Adventure of the Mason," a brief, classic story by Washington Irving. Also featured this month is work from Farrah Field, John Clare, Keetje Kuipers, Matthew Arnold, Brittany Fonte, Carmen Giménez Smith, Sara Levine, and Ryo Yamaguchi.

Farrah Field began the month with "Desperate Mothers Are an Easy Lay":

They usually treated Detective Summers as though he were bravebecause they thought spending time with him would bring their children back.Summers approaches some women by what they're willing to door outdo. They believe it themselves, a freedom with bunions.It's easy to use someone's body.… read more…

debuts last month

The following pieces debuted on 42opus in April 2008:

Losing Your Breasts a poem by Joy Ladin
Apocrypha #9 a poem by Richard Froude
The Scholar Gypsy a poem by Matthew Arnold
Dover Beach a poem by Matthew Arnold
Postcard from a Kitchen Window a poem by J. Mae Barizo
Noche Buena a short story by Curt Eriksen
Out of Sorts a poem by David Thornbrugh
Rappaccini's Daughter a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Yellow Absence a poem by Melissa Koosmann
Another a poem by Melissa Koosmann


This kinda caught my eye and ear:


Out of Sorts

by DAVID THORNBRUGH



I have a zebra in my neck
going the wrong way against
his stripes, like Venetian blinds
caught in the throat
of a late afternoon hotel room.
Is this malaria in the public bath,
is this curare in the toothpaste,
is this my prostate clicking
on one of those digital ducks
swimming across the top of the page?
The streets of heaven are lined
with Prozac, and hell, well,
hell is beer that's all foam.
Drugs and religion both wore out
for me a long time ago
and lately my laptop overheats
alarmingly. By birth I’m a
fire sign tiger giving off noxious fumes
as I smolder towards tomorrow,
and the ache in my spine
is a vulture flopping itself clean
in an eyelid birdbath.

Via E-mail Express

Smartish Pace Issue 15 Release Party; Featuring Poets and Bands!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Saturday May 31, 2008, 7:30 PM

The Whole Gallery,

405 W. Franklin St.,

Baltimore, MD 21201.

410-452-1816.

$10 at the door includes a copy of Issue 15 and all the food, drinks and merriment you can stomach. The event is free to Smartish Pace subscribers. Everyone is welcome.

Poets (from #15) at 8 PM: Douglas Basford, Christopher Cunningham, Stephen Kampa, Lia Purpura, Elizabeth Spires & Terrance Wedin.

Bands at 9 PM and playing late into the night:

Beans (Folk, Blues, Ghettotech) http://www.myspace.com/sinebean,

Baby Venom (Synth Lovely) http://www.myspace.com/babyvenombaby

& TBA (very soon).

For more info or questions e-mail Editor Stephen Reichert at sreichert@smartishpace.com.

http://www.smartishpace.com/

From the "You Know Your Career is Going Down the Toilet- When:" File

Oliver Stone to Shoot George W. Bush Biopic

Stone is famous for courting controversy with dramas like JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). But with W, the 61-year-old filmmaker isn't merely courting it — he's grabbing controversy by the lapels and giving it a big wet smacker. For the first time, he's turning his cameras not just on a living president but on one who'll still be knocking around the White House when the movie premieres late this year. As if that weren't provocative enough, Stone could end up releasing the film as early as October, at the height of a presidential campaign in which one of the major issues will undoubtedly be the legacy of the guy on the screen. The movie has become a lightning rod before Stone has shot a single frame. ... Josh Brolin will play President George W. Bush and Elizabeth Banks will star as Laura — there is one major character still in search of an actor: a heavy named Dick Cheney.

-------------------------------------------------------

source: First Look: 'W,' Oliver Stone's Bush Biopic

By Benjamin Svetkey - Entertainment Weekly

Two For Tuesday

Mail Call

Received this from Karen Craigo of Mid-American Review:


CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

As I mentioned earlier, we do read work all through the year, and in general we're actually faster in the summer. So feel free to send your poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, translations, and reviews to the following address:

Mid-American Review
Department of English
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green OH 43403

Unfortunately, we do not yet accept electronic submissions except in very rare cases for people with special circumstances. We expect to change that and open up electronic submissions to all in the future. Hopefully I'll be able to make that announcement in my fall newsletter. ...


Best,
Karen Craigo
Editor-in-Chief

Quotes & Quotables

A man loves his sweetheart the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Irish Proverb


Happy Mother's Day

In The Mail

Sid Miller sent me this - I thought I'd pass it along:

4th Annual
Burnside Review
Poetry Chapbook Competition

Judge: Paul Guest

We are sponsoring our fourth annual poetry chapbook competition. Winner will receive twenty-five copies and a two hundred dollar cash prize. Competition runs March 15th to June 30th. Winner will be announced approximately September 1st, with publication date set for winter. The same dedication and care will go into the production of the chapbook as with our journal—quality cardstock cover with photography, linen paper, excellent layout. We will make the publication process as cooperative as possible.

Guidelines

--18 to 24 pages of poetry. Individual poems may be previously published.
--2 cover sheets, one with the title of the manuscript, your name, telephone number, and address. The second cover sheet should list only the title of the manuscript.
--A page acknowledging previously published poems
--A self addressed stamped envelope
--Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us if the manuscript is accepted elsewhere

IF BY POST: Include a self addressed stamped envelope and a check or money order for $15- made out to Burnside Review. Entry must be postmarked by December 31st to: Burnside Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, P.O. Box 1782, Portland OR 97207
IF BY ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION: E-mail all of above a single Word file to contests@burnsidereview.org. Send $16- by Paypal to sid@burnsidereview.org. Fee and entry must be submitted within 24 hours of each other. Receipt of entry will be send after both arrive. (This method will save money and trees.)

The initial readers of the manuscripts will be Burnside Review staff members. They will choose between five and ten manuscripts as finalists to be passed on to the judge for selection of the winning collection.

We ask that former students or colleagues of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest’s judge—as well as any writer whose relationship with the judge constitutes an unfair conflict of interest—refrain from entering the contest. The Burnside Review staff reserves the right to disqualify entries deemed conflicts of interest and will return those entry fees.

At no time will the judge have the names of the finalists.

Winner will receive 25 copies of the chapbook printed by Burnside Review Press and a cash prize of $200-.

All questions happily answered by e-mail : sid@burnsidereview.org.

Paul Guest is the author of The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, winner of the 2002 New Issues Prize, and Notes for My Body Double, winner of the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. In 2007 he was a recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award. He teaches at the University of West Georgia.

complete guidelines available at www.burnsidereview.org

One-Hit Wonders

Make Like an Apeman

Wake Up to a Strawberry Alarm Clock

Quotes & Quotables

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------Yogi Berra

One for Poetry Month

A Phone Call to the Future

by: Mary Jo Salter


1.
Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black-and-white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.


Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you're not there.
You'll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there's only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family's having dinner.


Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That's how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.


The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onion skin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who made their dresses for the dance.


2.
This was the Fifties: as far back as I go.
Some of it lasted decades.
That's why I remember it so clearly.

Also because, as I lie in a motel room
sometime in 2004, scrolling
through seventy-seven channels on my back
(there ought to be more-this is a cheap motel room),
I can revisit evidence, hear it ringing.
My life is movies, and tells itself in phones.


The rotary phone, so dangerously languid
and loud when the invalid must dial the police.
The killer coming up the stairs can hear it.
The detective ducks into a handy phone booth
to call his sidekick. Now at least there's touch tone.
But wait, the killer's waiting in the booth
to try to strangle him with the handy cord.
The cordless phone, first noted in the crook
of the neck of the secretary
as she pulls life-saving files.
Files come in drawers, not in the computer.
Then funny computers, big and slow as ovens.
Now the reporter's running with a cell phone
larger than his head,
if you count the antenna.


They're Martians, all of these people,
perhaps the strangest being the most recent.
I bought that phone. I thought it was so modern.
Phones shrinking year by year, as stealthily
as children growing.


3.
It's the end of the world.
Or people are managing, after the conflagration.
After the epidemic. The global thaw.
Everyone's stunned. Nobody combs his hair.
Or it's a century later, and although
New York is gone, and love, and everyone
is a robot or a clone, or some combination,


you have to admire the technology of the future.
When you want to call somebody, you just think it.
Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera.
You can scroll through the actual things that happened,
and nobody disagrees. No memory.
No point of view. None of it necessary.


Past the time when the standard thing to say
is that, no matter what, the human endures.
That whatever humans make of themselves
is therefore human.
Past the transitional time
when humanity as we know it was there to say that.
Past the time we meant well but were wrong.
It's less than that, not anymore a concept.
Past the time when mourning was a concept.


Of course, such a projection,
however much I believe it, is sentimental-
belief being sentimental.
The thought of a woman born
in the fictional Fifties.


That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.


All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.


------------------------------------------------
Via Knopf Poetry Month: Excerpt from
A PHONE CALL TO THE FUTURE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS.
by Mary Jo Salter

In Through The Out Doors

One of The Reasons Why I Spent Some Time Away:

Something that an on-line poet that I'm glad that I've made the acquaintance of posted as a response to a topic on this blog:

"...but what to do with someone who spends hours on pushing just the right words into just the right words because they feel that something currently unsaid must be spoken? Beyond that, what to make of the (thankfully) non-marketable thing that's created by such effort?

If that's not an outsider in America, I'm not sure what is. "

Made me stop to think... Could that be me?

Now Where Was I? - Oh Yeah! - Poetry in Vitro Vol. 3 No. 9

over & done with for now

The Lights Aren't on But Somebody's Home

Two For Tuesday Times Two

Quotes & Quotables

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.

----------------------------------------------------------------------Albert Einstein

Jeff Healey Dies of Cancer at 41

Canadian blues, jazz, and rock musician Jeff Healey died on Sunday (March 2) in a Toronto hospital at 41. He finally succumbed to retinal cancer, which claimed his sight at age 1. The Grammy-nominated guitar virtuoso, famous for playing his instrument flat on his lap, reached the height of his success in 1988 with his album See the Light, which spawned the hit single ''Angel Eyes.'' Healey shared the stage with guitar legends like Stevie Ray Vaughn, B.B. King, and Eric Clapton. Though he started out playing blues-rock, his last three studio efforts leaned toward jazz, which was said to be Healey's true love. He died a month before the April 22 release of his first rock album in eight years, Mess of Blues. He is survived by his wife, Christie, and two children. (AP via Google)

Alternate Two For Tuesday

Two For Tuesday on a Wednesday

MSN Generation

I Have Become Comfortably Dumb

• Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

• First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story.

• According to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts: In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

• In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus."

• In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

• I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events.

• The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

• According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

• That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge.

• The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

• There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
*source: The Dumbing Of America - Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces

By Susan Jacoby - The Washington Post - Sunday, February 17, 2008 -

Cat's in the Cradle

And of Course - It's Two For Tuesday

The Way of All Flesh (& Muscle)

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Robert E. Howard

As a young lad (like most other adolescent boys & girls) I enjoyed science-fiction and science-fantasy and a genre which is often called sword & sorcery. I reveled in reading Asimov, Heinlein, LeGuin, Blish, Strugatski, Bester, Brunner, Burroughs, Lovecraft, Tolkein etcetera.... I also read about Conan of Cimmeria's exploits well before Schwarzenegger donned a scabbard & sword.

Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror."

He is well known for having created — in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales — the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can only be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

Between Conan and his other heroes Howard created the genre now known as sword-and-sorcery in the late 1920s and early 1930s, spawning a wide swath of imitators and giving him an influence in the fantasy field rivaled only by J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien's similarly inspired creation of the modern genre of High Fantasy.

As a seminal figure in the history of modern fantasy, Howard remains a highly read author, with his best work endlessly reprinted. He has been compared to other American masters of the weird, gloomy, and spectral, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Jack London.
------------------------------------------------------------
*source: Wikipedia

Of course I bought and read all the Conan books which were illustrated by Frank Frazetta. Two covers in particular caught my eye. And so as a 12 year old would-be illustrator I copied as best I could in pastels the Frazetta cover art. The reproductions pale in comparison but I think clearly show my love (at an early age) for this genre:

--------------------------------------------

Mighty Quinn

Do You Believe in Magic?