Grammar monkey

I've always hated the term "grammar nazi." Comparing grammarians with people who tried to wipe out the Jews is a little over the top if you ask me. "Grammar monkey," on the other hand, is a term I can get behind. And science is on my side.

(Via Slog).

Richard Wohlfeil in Metro Times

Travis R. Wright profiles Detroit poet Richard Wohlfeil in Metro Times.

Writes Wright, "It's hard to fault the guy for being turned on by reading poetry enough to make it his art. After all, poetry is the epitome of thankless art."

Word.

Kids [change your screensaver to] the darndest things

I'm not a fan of scatological humor. And yet, I find this Married to the Sea comic funny. Maybe it's because this is totally something I could imagine my brother doing when we were younger. Or maybe it's because I'm going to be the mother of a boy soon and all of the books I've read say that boys love that kind of thing. Though, in my defense, I don't find the fart joke aspect of this funny, it's the technological cluelessness that makes me laugh. Because that will probably be me some day.


marriedtothesea.com

Monkeys and cats, BFFs 4-evr

First there was Koko the gorilla and her cat All Ball (Koko named him herself, digging the fact that "all" and "ball" rhymed).

Koko's story, no doubt, influenced Anthony Browne's children's book Little Beauty in which a gorilla befriends a kitten. My dad gave the book to me and my wife last month as a gift for our son-to-be (soon, people, soon). Little Beauty is a good book, but also kind of weird. And by weird, I mean not what you'd expect in a kids' book. It isn't one you can read to a kid (at least not to a kid who can talk) without that kid asking, "Why did the gorilla get so angry?" Anger, of course, isn't a bad thing in kids books (there are many written on that subject alone), it's just that the only answer I have for this particular question about this particular book is "I don't know." The gorilla in the book has a scary and violent freakout that comes out of nowhere. Granted, he doesn't hurt his kitty friend, but he does destroy a TV with his fists.

Then again, kids are pretty expert when it comes to random freakouts. So maybe they all totally get it. Also, according to the Guardian UK, "Browne's greatest strength [as a children's illustrator] is his willingness to let the darkness in."

Speaking of dark and random, have you ever seen a monkey kissing a cat on the mouth? Well, now you can, thanks to Videogum. Let me just say, that's one patient cat. Also, don't keep monkeys as pets even if the monkey is your cat's boyfriend.

"Smack [Your] Bitch Up"

I am not a marriage counselor, but I think maybe my neighbor should not call his wife a bitch so much. Also he should maybe not threaten to "punch you in the fucking mouth." Especially not while he's holding their infant son in his carrier. But then, I'm no child psychologist, either.

Domestic Violence

1.

It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.

Everything changed the year that we got married.
And after that we moved out to the suburbs.
How young we were, how ignorant, how ready
to think the only history was our own.

And there was a couple who quarreled into the night,
Their voices high, sharp:
nothing is ever entirely
right in the lives of those who love each other.


2.

In that season suddenly our island
Broke out its old sores for all to see.
We saw them too.
We stood there wondering how

the salt horizons and the Dublin hills,
the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes
we thought we knew
had been made to shiver

into our ancient twelve by fifteen television
which gave them back as gray and grayer tears
and killings, killings, killings,
then moonlight-colored funerals:

nothing we said
not then, not later,
fathomed what it is
is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other.


3.

And if the provenance of memory is
only that—remember, not atone—
and if I can be safe in
the weak spring light in that kitchen, then

why is there another kitchen, spring light
always darkening in it and
a woman whispering to a man
over and over what else could we have done?


4.

We failed our moment or our moment failed us.
The times were grand in size and we were small.
Why do I write that
when I don't believe it?

We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one.
Children were born and raised here
and are gone,
including ours.

As for that couple did we ever
find out who they were
and did we want to?
I think we know. I think we always knew.


(Eavan Boland, from Domestic Violence, 2007 W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.)

No Ho Ho's for monkey

Want to live to be 100? Stop eating Ho Ho's. It works for monkeys.*






*I may be simplifying the issue a bit.

More on David Berman's scribblings

I've already made my feelings known about David Berman's foray into cartoons, but his book of them is written up by Ed Park on the Poetry Foundation site. There's also a slideshow of some of Berman's drawings (including the Oklahoma one at left, which is the best of what I've seen thus far).

Park writes, "A cynic might see The Portable February as a quickie offering scraped from the bottom of the barrel, especially as it’s being released by Berman’s record label, Drag City, in the wake of his recent surprise announcement dissolving the Silver Jews."

Well, I guess I'm a cynic. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy Berman has a cheerleader, I just think it's a wee bit hyperbolic to call these drawings "a skeletal Magritte." Just sayin'.

More Michael Jackson poetry

From the Awl, passed along by my sister Laura who was very adamant I give her public credit for this since she's the one who wrote the poem in question. May God bless her, indeed.

Barbara Hamby gets Satanic!

I just finished Barbara Hamby's Babel. One of my favorite poems from it, "Ode on Satan's Power," is all about Satan. Read it via Verse Daily.

The Ghazals of Obama

So, Obama reads Urdu poetry. Or at least he tells people that when he's talking to the Pakistani press. But hell, even if it's all talk (probably isn't), it's still impressive on a PR level (I doubt George W. even knows, or cares, that Urdu poetry exists).

In Pakistan it's not unusual for poetry readings to attract thousands of people. In the United States a poetry reading could easily attract thousands of people -- if the reading was also the Super Bowl.

A lot of Urdu poems are ghazals. I was introduced to the ghazal in Keith Taylor's prosody class at UofM. I even wrote a few of them. Granted, I took my own liberties with the form's rules. I also didn't write in Urdu.

Keith recommended the book The Ghazals of Ghalib, edited by Aijaz Ahmad (1971 Columbia University Press). In it Ahmad does literal translations of Ghalib's work and then American poets including Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, and W.S. Merwin, do interpretation of those translations. It's a pretty cool project.

Here's one of Ahmad's literal translations of the third ghazal in the book:

Simplicity of our desires! Meaning that
Again we remember her who cast a spell on our eyes.

Life could have passed anyway!
Why did we remember the way on which you tread.

Again, my thoughts go to your street!
But, I remember the heart (my heart) that has been lost (there).

What utter wilderness it is!
Seeing the desert, I remember my house.

In my boyhood (boyishness), Asad, I had once lifted a stone (to throw) at Majnoon;
But, immediately, I remembered my own head.


(-Mirza Ghalib, translated by Aijaz Ahmad fromThe Ghazals of Ghalib, 1971 Columbia University Press).

The last couplet is my favorite and I think it is a fitting one for Obama. Certainly one he should keep in mind as Commander in Chief.

Re: Obama's Urdu poetry love, Jon Stewart is unimpressed.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Barbara Hamby's monkey brain

Proving that monkeys and poetry are often intertwined, I just started reading Barbara Hamby's book Babel tonight and the second poem in the collection, "The Mockingbird on the Buddha," contains the lines: "he's my enemy, / my Einstein, my ever-loving monkey boy, every monkey thought / I blame on him."

You can read the whole poem at the Superstition Review.

Incidentally, I also read American Widow by Alissa Torres tonight and it featured a panel in which Torres refers to her husband-to-be as "monkey boy," then six pages later there's this line from Pablo Neruda: "You will remember that leaping stream / Where sweet aromas rose and trembled."

The Neruda poem exists online, but I can't vouch for its translation or authenticity having never read the poem before.

Kidney stones: just say no

My twin sister Laura has had kidney stones for years, ever since we were in high school I do believe. I, on the other hand, have managed to escape this fate. Until yesterday. I will spare you the details, except to say it was the worst pain of my life. And wouldn't you know it, my friend and fellow poet Amanda Carver was having kidney stone fun of her own at the exact same time. And so I think it's appropriate to post "The Teacher" by Hilarie Jones since she mentions "the exquisite / painful shape of kidney stones." It's also appropriate because it's from a book of writing by nurse poets, which is what Amanda wants to be when she grows up.

The Teacher

I was twenty-six the first time I held
a human heart in my hand.

It was sixty-four and heavier than I expected,
its chambers slack;
and I was stupidly surprised
at how cold it was.

It was the middle of the third week
before I could look at her face,
before I could spend more than an hour
learning the secrets of cirrhosis,
the dark truth of diabetes, the black lungs
of the Marlboro woman, the exquisite
painful shape of kidney stones,
without eating an entire box of Altoids
to smother the smell of formaldehyde.

After seeing her face, I could not help
but wonder if she had a favorite color;
if she hated beets,
or loved country music before her hearing
faded, or learned to read
before cataracts placed her in perpetual twilight.
I wondered if her mother had once been happy
when she'd come home from school
or if she'd ever had a valentine from a secret admirer.

In the weeks that followed, I would
drive the highways, scanning billboards.
I would see her face, her eyes
squinting away the cigarette smoke,
or she would turn up at the bus stop
pushing a grocery cart of empty
beer cans and soda bottles. I wondered
if that was how she'd paid for all those smokes
or if the scars of repeated infections in her womb
spoke to a more universal currency.

Did she die, I wondered, in a cardboard box
under the Burnside Bridge, nursing a bottle
of strawberry wine, telling herself
she felt a little warmer now,
or in the Good Faith Shelter,
her few belongings safe under the sheet
held to her faltering heart?
Or in the emergency room, lying
on a wheeled gurney, the pitiless
lights above, the gauzy curtains around?

Did she ever wonder what it all was for?

I wish I could have told her in those days
what I've now come to know: that
it was for this--the baring
of her body on the stainless steel table--
that I might come to know its secrets
and, knowing them, might listen
to the machine-shop hum of aortic stenosis
in an old woman's chest, smile a little to myself
and, in gratitude to her who taught me,

put away my stethoscope, turn to my patient
and say Let's talk about your heart.

(Hilarie Jones, from Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer, 2002 University of Iowa Press.)

Yo' mama wears combat boots. Walt Whitman wears Levi's

Because if Whitman were alive today, he'd want his ass to look good.

Via Towelroad.

David Berman, please go back to poetry or music

In January I lamented the break up of the Silver Jews, David Berman's sad core rock outfit while at the same time expressing a hope that Berman would put out another book. Well, I got my wish. Kind of. He's putting another book out, only it isn't a book of poetry. The Portable February is out now via Drag City.

As Pitchfork describes it, "The slim volume collects Berman's single-panel cartoons/study-hall doodles, and it presents them essentially without any sort of context, one freehand absurdity after another." They also call it "absolutely ridiculous." They provide a sample of the cartoons from the book, including the one I have included here.

My feelings about this project can best be summed up via a discussion on my Facebook page between my sister Laura and Austin musician Nick Hennies:

Laura: Looks like [Berman's] not as good at cartoons as he is at poetry...
Nick: But he's famous... that means he's good at everything, right? No reason we shouldn't publish/release every single little thing he does for the rest of his life.
Laura: I think Pitchfork is being too kind calling the cartoons “absolutely ridiculous.” I mean, if I was hanging out at his house and saw one of these cartoons on like, a doodle pad next to his phone, I wouldn’t pick it up and say, “Dave, did you draw this? This is absolutely ridiculous.” Because if you like to doodle when you’re on the phone, that’s fine! My Grandma Bea used to do it. But now that he’s put them in a book and is actually expecting people to pay real cash money for them, calling them absolutely ridiculous is just too mild.
Nick: I remember seeing an issue of Arthur (I think it was Arthur, anyway) with a bunch of Berman drawings from a few years back and thinking "Nobody would be publishing these if they weren't drawn by David Berman." Thank god there's a whole book now. :P

I am still holding out hope for the poems.

Michael Jackson's "Liberian Girl" video

I'm not going to lie, I always thought "Liberian Girl" was "Librarian Girl." But give me a break, I was 11 when it came out. In any case, Videogum has an excellent post about the video:

"In the outpouring of reminiscences about Michael Jackson's life and career over the past few days, it has been mostly overlooked that in 1989, he built a private celebrity menagerie, and he put all of the celebrities in there so that he could watch them mingle. Seriously, all of them."

See how many you can name (I'll give you one of them: Bubbles).

Michael Jackson - New Music - More Music Videos