Bow to the Google Gods!

Really, we should all be worshiping at the feet of the Google people. Even if they had created that wonderful search engine and called it a day, we would still be indebted to them. But then they gave us Gmail, Google Talk, iGoogle, and Google Reader, among a slew of other tools to make our lives easier. I just recently got to know the last two programs, and dear God are they wonderful!

Other news: I've been doing some heavy listening lately, which is not the same as listening to Slayer. Elliott's Song in the Air was on all day yesterday, and Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports has been listened to straight through at least once a day for the past week. I've been catching up with the 1990's by way of Built to Spill and Braid as well. More important than all of that though is new music: the Band of Horses album Cease to Begin that comes out in October is not as bad as everyone would lead you to believe. Hopefully I'll get around to writing a review soon. It doesn't match the strength of their debut album, but it isn't a clunker either. However, Kanye West's Graduation is just as good as everyone says it is. "Stronger," the song that samples the Daft Punk track, is pretty much all I've listened to today.

And one other thing: I'm reading a lot of academic writing about poetry right now. I read a good blurb about syllabics this morning that helped answer my main question of "Why write in syllabics?" and I'm also making an attempt to get through Rosenthal's The Modern Poetic Sequence. I have a long line count sequence poem due at the end of the semester and I need some help in wrapping my head around what makes a good one. Reading The Dream Songs is on my 'to-do' list as well for that assignment.

Andrew Bird is tonight. I heard great things from my friend Jamie after he saw AB in Asheville last night. Can't wait.

What We Have Lived

I've been under the weather lately, so last night I took some time off from doing homework to do some pleasure reading. Well, maybe not pleasure reading - I am in a poetry writing class this semester so any reading of poems I can do can be called 'studying' if I need an excuse not to do work for Economics 101.

I decided last night to read through Ellen C. Bush's Licorice again, and after enjoying that, I moved on the the Spring 2007 copy of Tar River Poetry that I hadn't read yet. Here was my favorite poem in the TRP, a villanelle by Bruce Bennett, who is the director of Creative Writing at Wells College.


What We Have Lived

We live again what we have lived before.
The path leads back. See, see. There is the chair.
We feel it deeper, knowing less, and more.

See. There's the book; the album on the floor.
Old papers waiting to be signed are there.
We live again what we have lived before,

Except, this time, we know we won't explore
what hangs unspoken, heavy in the air.
We feel it deeper, knowing less, yet more

About what grief has schooled us to ignore;
our innocence the sole way we can bear
to live again what has been lived before;

To face again what words cannot restore,
last sessions we can neither change nor share.
We feel them deeper. Knowing less, and more,

We pay fresh homage, pilgrims at the door,
held fast by truths we still cannot declare.
We live again what we have lived before,
yet feel it deeper, kn0owing less, and more.



I hope it is okay to put this poem up. It isn't up on the TRP site, and I really wanted to put it on my site. You know a poem in a specific form is a good one when it makes you want to write in the same form. Villanelles might just be my favorite.

Duke's Creative Writing Classes Must Be Like UGA's "Basics of Basketball" Class

I'm stalling on finishing the final stanza of a poem I have due for tomorrow's writing class so I spent some time on the internet searching for the some great examples. I came across some poems by a relative unknown. Says his name is Jonathan Clay Redick. I say he should quit his day job.

Here is the wonderful collection of J.J.'s poems that SI.com selected to publish.

I can't wait to read the ones he wrote about that whole drunk driving thing.

The Flee From Me

I'm not usually one to go crazy about poems from antiquity, but this first stanza of "The Flee From Me" from Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503-1542) is pretty much perfect. Those first four lines, they punch like nothing else.

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.

more lovely and more temperate

The one and only place I've ever been published, Brave Little Poem of the Day, was not really daily to begin with, as it actually changed the featured poem every three days. I won't split hairs though - they were the first to deem anything I wrote worthy of acceptance, and I will always have a special place in my heart for their website. For that reason, it saddens me to see that BLPotD has gone on hiatus until January 2008. I hope that the nice people there get things back and running. I will probably sit a poem or two aside to send to them in case they do.

And in case you caught on from the title, I am knee deep in Shakespeare's sonnets right now. I hope no one is ever compared to a day like today - there was nothing pleasant about the brain-draining heat we are getting right now. Will's sonnets are making me work quite hard, and I feel better for it. Hooray for getting back to college. Hooray.

Stop if the car is going "clunk." / Don't answer emails when you're drunk.

I decided to move my writing from the Livejournal because the site setup over there didn't allow for everything I was hoping to do. Also, this white background is prettier. Look for writings on whatever interests me at the moment.* Discussion is welcomed.





*What interests me will probably be music, baseball, literature, and humor.