Always an auspicious beginning to toss in a shoe…
if you threw your shoe into the machine of the world
if you have a shoe
if we all threw all the shoes at once,
jammed its great cogs and pistons,
if it groaned and gradually slowed.
[…]
Basma Kavanagh
“Sabotage”
Literary Review of Canada
The cascading anaphora of “if” over the full expanse of this poem does not lead to a “then” — the future is radically open.
And so for day 3042
10.04.2015
Elizabeth David
Italian Food
“Introduction to the Penguin Edition” (1963)
Italy is a place to which you go for a summer holiday. […] And fair enough too, is the food you get in Italian seaside resorts. It is representative of holiday food everywhere in Southern Europe. The hotels and restaurants are crowded. The staffs are overworked. The cooking may have an Italian accent, but the majority of foreign visitors (of whom vast numbers are German and Scandinavian as well as British) would be too suspicious of the unknown to accept genuine regional specialities were they offered. Besides, there is the language difficulty and there is the question of what is suitable or in season during the hot summer months, and for people uprooted from familiar routine and surroundings and therefore peculiarly sensitive to changes of diet. So the cooking is reduced to a general level of international mediocrity. Indifferent beefsteaks, chips, the ubiquitous veal, spaghetti and tomato sauce, the evening broth thickened with pasta, the eternal Bel Paese cheese; and, in the land of fresh figs and peaches, apricots, grapes, and pears, there will be imported bananas for dessert.
To be fair, in the next paragraph, she tars English and French resort cooking with the same brush. And the same concern for regional goodness pervades the prose.
And so for day 3041
09.04.2015
A most magnificent coda:
The earth spins and we, utterly, are spun.
“Of Contour, of Cadence”
Thief in the Interior
Phillip B. Williams
And so for day 3040
08.04.2015
derek beaulieu
“That’s not writing”
The Unbearable Contact with Poets
That’s not writing, that’s just playing around.
That’s not writing, that’s daydreaming.
That’s not writing, that’s showing off.
That’s not writing, that’s keyboarding.
That’s not writing, that’s calligraphy.
There’s more … but that would be telling.
And so for day 3039
07.04.2015
A beautiful recipe, full of charm and inviting one to try one’s hand.
Hashed Brussels Sprouts
Using a most sharp knife, slice the sprouts into small slivers. Sauté them in lots of butter. Add cream if you like. Not healthy, but delicious.
Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd
To Eat: A Country Life
Illustration by Bobbi Angell
And so for day 3038
06.04.2015
Susan Holbrook
ink earl
[check spacing against original]
p. 50 (in the Food section)
easy uver
or
a e c b l
d m r s
p. 62 (in the Art section)
[a mise en abyme]
Erase
an eraser a d
and
sign i t
p. 80 (in the Music section)
art
and
writing
stand
a s ide
p. 109 (in the Nature section)
C hi c a
d d d
And so for day 3037
05.04.2015
bpNicol
Preservation of 1984 First Screening: Computer Poems
THIS POEM SAT DOWN TO WRITE YOU
http://www.vispo.com/bp/index.htm
And so for day 3036
04.04.2015
Phil Hall
Guthrie Clothing: The Poetry of Phil Hall, a Selected Collage
To listen they lean forward kids do
when you read to them they list
they know how to listen
but adults think of things they have to do
they lean back tick off items on a list
while you read it’s to themselves they listen
And so for day 3035
03.04.2015
VERSschmuggel / reVERSible: An Anthology of English Canadian Poetry / Poésie du Québec / Dichtung aus Deutschland
Tristan Malavoy on the poetry of Nancy Hünger
at 46:26
… there is this idea that language is never fully acquired; it can be lost; poetry, the faculty of verbal expression, can evaporate …
And so for day 3034
02.04.2015
Sylvia Legris
Garden Physic
My Dear Love,
How to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology? No quaint, no dainty, no winsome. This smells good, that smells bad, my hands rank with manure. This at least is pure.
–V.
From the sequence “Floral Correspondences” — an imagined correspondence between Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.
I find myself chaffing at the punctuation of the penultimate sentence. I want the hands rank with manure to stand by themselves, out of the calculus of good or bad. This pure.
And so for day 3033
01.04.2015
