Dylan Thomas Comic

You will have to click on this one to read it . . .

From The Circus of Lost Dreams

http://vimeo.com/58982720

http://poetsandartists.com

This is one of the little videos that are in the iPad version of The Circus of Lost Dreams. While the PDF is nice, you really have to see the book. That is, if you can.

The Circus of Lost Dreams!

Emily and I just completed our first collaborative effort, which was published by the amazing artist, editor and publisher, Didi Menendez. You can actually download it from Itunes and read it as an interactive book on an iPad. Or you can get it as a pdf.


http://poetsandartists.com

If you click on the PDF, it will just download as stills. But the iPad book has features that are unique and really fun--little videos and readings. It's pretty amazing to see what Didi has done with this.

Pound Comic

While my hair was cut straight across my forehead,
I played cheerleader in the front yard.
You came by on a skate board, acting so cool.
You came by tossing footballs, frisbees, baseballs . . .
And we went on in living in our suburb of Youngstown, Ohio:
Two small people full of dislike and suspicion.

AWP RECOVERY

AWP 2013

Coleridge Comic

Aphra Behn comic

A Thousand Martyrs I Have Made
by Aphra Behn

A thousand martyrs I have made,
All sacrific'd to my desire;
A thousand beauties have betray'd,
That languish in resistless fire.
The untam'd heart to hand I brought,
And fixed the wild and wandering thought.

I never vow'd nor sigh'd in vain
But both, tho' false, were well receiv'd.
The fair are pleas'd to give us pain,
And what they wish is soon believ'd.
And tho' I talk'd of wounds and smart,
Love's pleasures only touched my heart.

Alone the glory and the spoil
I always laughing bore away;
The triumphs, without pain or toil,
Without the hell, the heav'n of joy.
And while I thus at random rove
Despis'd the fools that whine for love.

Whitman Comic

Shelley Comic

From Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Once upon a time, USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with fecal contamination. But about 30 years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now clssified as a 'cosmetic blemish.'"

"Every week, millions of chicken leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers."

"Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that 'the water in these tanks has aptly been named 'fecal soup' for all the filth and bacteria floating around. By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you're practically assuring cross-contamination."

p. 130 from the kindle version of the book, Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

Auden Comic

Remembering My Father

My father was a habitual story teller. It was a day like no other day, he would say, beginning one of his many stories. Immediately my mother would correct him.

It was a perfectly ordinary day. I remember it well.

The air was so electric, my father would continue, ignoring my mother. Even the hairs stood up on my hands.

Hairs don’t stand up on hands, my mother said. Besides, it’s hair, not hairs.

I said hairs. I meant hairs.

Sitting cross-legged on the living room floor in front of the box fan after dinner, I would listen to my father’s tales, and my mother like a hound tracking his every word. They were good stories, made better by my mother’s interruptions. And they were evolving stories that changed with every telling.

Sometimes my father would be joined by his friend, the writer, Peter Taylor. The two would trade tales about their families, the south, ghosts, and famous writers. My father, a competitive man, could hold his own on the first three categories of stories. He even suspected Peter was stealing his tales and using them in his fiction. Secretly my father thought he was the better raconteur of the two.

But when it came to stories about authors, Peter Taylor, held most of the cards. He and his wife, Eleanor Ross Taylor, could talk at length about Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford and many others. But my father did hold one ace. William Faulkner visited our farm before I was born. Did I ever tell you about the time William Faulkner was thrown off our horse? he would begin. Peter nodded. After a while, my father decided to tell a James Dickey story instead. After several tellings, my father went back to talking about William Faulkner. I’ve often wondered how many times William Faulkner fell off our horse.

Brevity
Photo collage by Robert Carioscia

Happy Holidays

And I've been practicing yoga. Okay. Not exactly practicing . . .

In a Dark Time

"In a Dark Time"

Wild Tights! Wild Tights! after Emily Dickinson

Wild tights! Wild tights!
Were I in thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Doha Climate Conference

Reading the news about the Doha Climate Change Conference and thinking about the idea of a seven degree temperature rise and what a seven degree rise by 2060 would mean, I feel so hopeless. It's nuts that so many people don't seem to want to do anything about this issue.

Boston Terrier Comic

Boston Terrier Comic

It's been a rough week for one of my pups. She's been so sick . . .

For Whom the Belle Falls

from Locals by Claire Bateman

Locals

Interview: Carolina Wren Press on BAP

Interview: Carolina Wren Press

Locals by Claire Bateman

Locals

Interview with Serving House Books on BAP

Meet the Press Interview with Serving House Books on The Best American Poetry Blog

Interview with Joan Cusack Handler

interview part 1

interview part 2

Okay, one more political comic

One More Comic for the Week in Review

The Week in Review

Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;. . .


Filling Station
BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match! . . .

Ode to a Fart (for Dan)

I was inspired by Dan Dyer's post about fart humor to write the above . . . Apologies to Shelley.

Ode to a Skylark


HAIL to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert—
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest . . .

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'

And all of the Obama fans in the neighborhood are chortling in their joy,their signs still out, one house with balloons. We have slain the Jabberwocky who was trying to whiffle his way into our neck of the tulgey woods.

My Beamish Boy

I Voted!

The Republicans Are Calling Today!

I can't wait for the phone calls to stop! I hear that the Koch brothers are behind the incessant robo-calls. The Koch brothers and every other super pac . . .

Waiting for the Barbarians
C.P. Cavafy


What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.


Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.


Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.


Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.


Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.


Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.


And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

A week ago it was between seventy and eighty degrees every day. People were saying we were having our second August, and sighing happily. I was missing fall, and also missing Maine and the real August.


The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
BY EZRA POUND
After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me.
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Chō-fū-Sa.

The Art of Screwing after Elizabeth Bishop

They say these campaigns are targeted, but I doubt it. I get several calls a day from the Romney campaign. I think everyone in Ohio is being bombarded. The same groups that called yesterday and the day before will call again tomorrow. I fear we are screwed.

Chuck Berry

After another sickening week of endless phone calls, surveys . . .

Are you better off now than you were when Obama took office?

Yes indeed. I felt born again the minute Bush left the White House. And if Obama wins again, I will know I've been saved.

Click.

Jim and I went to see Chuck Berry, a retrospective, in Cleveland. It was off the charts. So many great performers: Ernie Isley, Merle Haggard, Rick Derringer . . . Chuck Berry at 86 was mind-blowing.

Lyrical Maladies