Billy Collins
“A Question About Birds”
Horoscopes for the Dead
This is the concluding stanza:
Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?
I admire the alliteration in that epithet the “tireless little translator”. The poem’s speaker raises a very interesting question as to whether birds understand each other across species. I suspect warning cries carry over but mating calls might not. : )
And so for day 2962
20.01.2015
An ending line applied like a glaze —
[…]
The poetry of pottery is scientific,
hidden in the nomenclature of clay.
Listen to this.
Hydrous silicate of alumina.
Sonnet L’abbé
“Lesson from the Neolithic Era”
A Strange Relief
And so for day 2961
19.01.2015
Robert Bly:
It can change everything.
It can make the darkness shine.
It’s the light switch for the whole country.
Robin Fulton:
It can change everything
it can make the darkness shine.
It is a switch for the whole country.
Little differences like not specifying that it’s a “light switch” and the use of an indefinite article (”a”) means that there may be other switches for other purposes to be found by other people including the current and future readers.
The peculiar punctuation and capitalization in the Robin Fulton version is from the poem as quoted in the New York Times obituary
Same punctuation and capitalization as the version in the The great enigma : new collected poems. Line break as switch?! Fulton is following the Swedish (Den kan förvandla allt / den kan få mörkret att lysa.) The immediate context is of a stone among stones nestled in moss in a forest. A path led here to the stone and here leads on to a shift in the poet’s punctuation practice. Upon the line break depends departure… a punctum.
And so for day 2960
18.01.2015
A whiff …
As a beautiful flower that is full of hue but lacks fragrance, even so fruitless is the well-spoken word of one who does not practice it.
from The Dharmapada in Walpola Rahula What the Buddha Taught
A further sniff …
Every flower has a scent. As humans we may not be able to smell them all. But in time we can smell the rotting flowers.
And so for day 2958
17.01.2015
Cain supplies notes to the effect that “Stanzas” is an allusive referential reduction of “Rooms” by Gertrude Stein. He tips his hat to Steve McCaffery’s homolinguistic translations of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Every way Oakly).
In a tour de force Cain alludes to two passages from Whitman in his singular reduction of Stein.
Gertrude Stein
Rooms
Tender Buttons
Nothing aiming is a flower, if flowers are abundant then they are lilac, if they are not they are white in the center.
Stephen Cain
Stanzas
False Friends
Floral foul shot, Whitman’s multitudes, pearly pistils.
Walt Whitman for the lilacs and multitudes:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
This bit from Song of Myself
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Cain’s own line contains multitudes. A pearl handed “pistol” lurks homolinguistically within the line given the “shot” that fires it off. And the botanical basketball may just come home to roost after its foul/fowl shot.
And so for day 2957
16.01.2015
Gary Thomas Morse
Safety Sand
from Section 3 of “Safe Spaces”
call to mind an occasion
when tintin lets you down
when tintinnabulations of
“bakhtinian carnivalesque”
(not to mention
rings
within ethnohistory mug)
leave a tinny echo
or a taste of tin
I am distracted by the rings in the mug cupped by parentheses ; sitting with the stain of coffee circles? just an old stained tin mug? but ethnohistory? A little help from this newly discovered artefact
Ah it’s echo history!
And so for day 2956
15.01.2015
From the introduction
Pleasure and fun, once widespread, even defining qualities of the site, can now feel like acts of resistance.
From the conclusion (last sentence)
By holding on to and choosing to amplify joyful expression, play, and sociable intimacy, we may yet find ways to reaffirm and rediscover the positive power of social connection that digital media platforms continue to afford — if only we can hear each other over the noise.
Prime example from the hashtag chapter of the book
These “serious” uses of the hashtag sit uneasily alongside, and sometimes arise from, more entertainment- and play-oriented practices. It is difficult to imagine #blacklivesmatter escalating as it did had “Black Twitter” not been well established already, in large part through creative, joyful uses of the hashtag feature. As Brock, Florini, and others have shown, early on Twitter was disproportionately popular among Black Americans, who found in it a mode of sociality that resonated with historical forms of language play, especially “signifyin.”
Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Bayn
Twitter: A Biography
And so for day 2955
14.01.2015
Robyn Sarah
“Ask the Poem: On Teaching Poetry”
Little Eurekas: A Decade’s Thoughts on Poetry
To inspire the kids, I brought in sheaves of my own favorite poems to read aloud. Teachers’ jaws dropped at what I passed around to their second and third and fourth graders: poems by Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Theodore Roethke; translations from the Russian of Yevtushenko, the Spanish of Garcia Lorca, the Hebrew of Yehuda Amichai, the Chinese of Tu Fu. The kids loved it. They picked up poetic figures instinctively and put them to immediate use in their own poems. They surprised themselves, their teachers, and me.
Wonderful anecdote and telling succession of those that become amazed: the kids, the teachers, the poet (me) and us (me).
And so for day 2954
13.01.2015
Torn from its context and all the better for it:
First of all poems aren’t postcards to send home.
Anne Sexton
Paris Review Interview
1971
Resonates way beyond its context: a response to an interviewer who asked why more poems hadn’t been produced from a trip to Europe.
And so for day 2953
12.01.2015
Small cumulative actions…
But the fact is that those little signs of care and attention we are all so good at in the early stages don’t become one iota less important with time.
William Sieghart
The Poetry Pharmacy Returns
Introduction to a poem by Rumi translated by Daniel Ladinsky “Here is a relationship booster”.
And so for day 2952
11.01.2015
