"I didn't evolve from you..."

I stumbled upon this clip while searching for old Victoria Jackson skits. Jan Hooks+monkey=awesome.

It's true.

Monkeys are gross. But so are humans.

"Y'all took the wrong evolutionary branch for real."

Tell 'em, little monkey. Tell 'em.

Mo' grapes, Mo cuteness

Mo the Sloth is going to be 10 years old on April 1. Stop on over at the Organization For Bat Conservation (The Bat Zone) to say hi. And bring some grapes.

Sleeping Lisa, will you ever wake up?

Sleeping Lisa, the world's soundest sleeper, has new adventures daily. She's all the rage in photos of sleeping people with their own Tumblr sites.

Monkey money and Ferlinghetti apologies

I just discovered Damn You Auto Correct and have been laughing so hard I am in pain.

"Aunt Madelyn At The White Sale" by Alice Fulton

Again on the hunt for poems for my class and I re-read Alice Fulton's "Aunt Madelyn At The White Sale." Feels like a very fitting poem today since it was the funeral for my grandmother. I've never attended a funeral in the winter before. I've always wondered how they manage. How do they dig out the ground? With machines, I know. Still. Winter resists burial. But then, in the spring it's too wet. In the summer, too hot. There's no good time to die, I guess.

Elizabeth Bishop liked ladies, man

For the record, Elizabeth Bishop was a lesbian. Not sure why William Logan got all cagey about it in a review of a book of Bishop's letters in the New York Times. Also, didn't they just publish a book of Bishop letters? Is every napkin she ever scrawled on eventually going to be published? I'm just saying, people are kind of obsessed with her. She was a fine poet, yes, but I have a hard enough time keeping up with my email let alone sitting down to pour over Bishop's missives.

Oh, and about the lesbian omission thing in the Times. John Aravosis tells us why it matters:

"We're not even able to marry in most of this country, and the few marriages we do have aren't recognized by the federal government, and thus are not granted any of the 1,100 or so federal rights that accrue to married couples. The fact that one of the most famous American poets was lesbian is a big deal."

I guess Logan didn't have a little voice in his head imploring him to "Write it."

Via America Blog Gay.

"Heaven for Helen" by Mark Doty

My Grandma Helen passed away yesterday. Today I was combing through poetry looking for poems for my class to read and came across Mary Doty's "Heaven for Helen." I'd read this before but -- I don't want to say I'd forgotten it, because that's not accurate, exactly. But it seems like a serendipitous reunion to read it today.

Heaven for Helen

Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness—

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower's thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we're to become part of it all,
won't our paradise also involve

participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas

along the interstate at night?
We'll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:

a hell we've made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.

But that's me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that's what there were to experience.

Perhaps that's why she's a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger

world of things it won't be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see
I have devoted myself to affirmation,

when I should have kept my eyes on the ground.

(Mark Doty, from School of the Arts, 2005 HarperCollins.)

"Dream of Ink Brush Calligraphy" by Karen An-hwei Lee

I'm thinking this might be a good poem to get my students talking about form and its relationship to meaning.

"Dream of Ink Brush Calligraphy" by Karen An-hwei Lee from the Nov. 2010 issue of Poetry Magazine.

The Sloffice

Best reader comment ever: "Just another episode of The Sloffice."

Poetry doth not protest too much

From the New York Times:

"Egypt’s revolution is a contest of ultimatums — chaos and revolution, freedom and submission — but its arena of Tahrir Square becomes quieter at night, the cacophony of rebellion giving way to a stage of poetry, performance and politics."

A good argument, I think, for poetry's continuing relevance.

Walking upright is the first step in the gorilla world domination plan

They're going to take over now. You know that, right?

Best TV news host commentary ever, by the way. Way to go, guys. Keep it real.

Loughner poetry connection

So Jared Loughner, the guy who attempted to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, took a community college "advanced poetry writing class." Will the media soon be dissecting his poems like they did the writings of the Virginia Tech killer? After all, we're already "reading into" Loughner's favorite books. Mention of his poetry, though not flattering ones, are being reported as news.

"Several people who knew Loughner at community college said he did not seem especially political, but was socially awkward. He laughed at the wrong things, made inappropriate comments. Most students sat away from him in class.


'He made a lot of the people really uncomfortable, especially the girls in the class,' said Steven Cates, who attended an advanced poetry writing class with Loughner at Pima Community College last spring. Though he struck up a superficial friendship with Loughner, he said a group of other students went to the teacher to complain about Loughner at one point.


Another poetry student, Don Coorough, said Loughner read a 'kind of a bland' poem about going to the gym in wild "poetry slam" style — 'grabbing his crotch and jumping around the room.'


When other students read their poems, meanwhile, Coorough said Loughner 'would laugh at things that you wouldn't laugh at.' After one woman read a poem about abortion, 'he was turning all shades of red and laughing,' and said, 'Wow, she's just like a terrorist, she killed a baby,' Coorough said.


'He appeared to be to me an emotional cripple or an emotional child,' Coorough said. 'He lacked compassion, he lacked understanding and he lacked an ability to connect."

Outshined by a dark cloud

Yeah. I think having Anne Sexton as a mom would mess anyone up. Her daughter Linda already chronicled her childhood in Searching for Mercy Street. Now she's published Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, about her grown-up life. And it's a sad one. From the New York Times review we learn that she gets super depressed. She tries to kill herself at least twice. Her husband leaves her. Nobody will publish her novel.

I don't plan to read the book. The Times review was enough for me. It ends by comparing Linda to her mom. The verdict: Linda's not as sad and she's not as good. Ouch. Read it for yourself:

"Even when she was sickest, Anne Sexton managed to create a vibrant world around herself, never losing her status as a figure to be reckoned with. But Linda Sexton seems utterly marooned when her modest dream of 'normal' family life evaporates and her writing career stalls. When she recovers, the scene expands only to include the men she meets through an online dating Web site. There is a surprising blandness to her sensibility, and her cause isn’t helped by overwrought language ('I was once again left shivering in the draft of everyone’s disapproval, dancing like a marionette in rhythm to the old black tune that had haunted my life ever since my mother first kicked me out of the house when I was 2') and hackneyed therapy-speak ('My continuing therapy with Barbara Ballinger had developed into the strong support I needed as I worked to examine the feelings I had about my mother’s suicide and to tear them apart').

But this book looks into the workings of the suicidal mind in a way that isn’t easily forgotten, raising provocative questions about how we approach and treat the severely mentally ill. Sexton paints suicide as a deadly disease mechanism: only the care of other people can save its victims, but those victims become experts at driving other people away."