While cleaning my family’s place in Chula Vista, my brother stumbled upon a few writing assignments from when I was in first and second grade.
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Rain
The rain is raining all around,
It falls on feild and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas hear,
And on ships at sea.
[January 30, 1981. Second grade. A literal drawing of the poem is [...]
Apologies in advance: there may not be anything else in this post as good as the title.
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I.
There are two musics (or so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, [...]
I.
“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he [Kilgore Trout] said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard [...]
(These poems were written in January 2007. The second part was published in 2008 by Meritage Press as part of The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II [available here]. Because it’s part of a set, I’m publishing the entire long poem here for the first time. More below the cut.)
My fave MeFi post from the past several days has got to be this one, about the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. All of the following links have been lifted from that thread:
Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel lecture “The Poet and the World,” is wonderful, as are the columns she wrote for the Polish magazine Literary Life, in which she [...]
I.
From The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), lines 19-42
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no [...]
<⁄bush>
Cheney’s cyborg legs must need a software update, because he got rolled out of his hellpit in a wheelchair. He looks so much like the Big Lebowski that I was waiting for him to start shouting, “The bums will always lose!”
The other guy got airlifted out on a helicopter:
I love how the Washington Monument and [...]
“Poem for South African Women” by June Jordan (1980)
Excerpt from We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, by Alice Walker (2006)
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Barack Obama, February 2008)
I.
The Unicorn Tapestries
Capturing the Unicorn: How Two Mathemeticians Came to the Aid of the Met
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II.
When the Depression hit I was taken out of private school and put into public school. So I had a new set of friends to bring home to have a look at whatever my father was. These were the [...]
So, there’s this medieval song called “Sumer is icumen in,” which is the oldest existing example of a round (think “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”). Listen to it here. It’s kind of meh; any awesomeness it has comes from its historical value, the fact that one of the lyrics talks about a stag farting, and [...]