Bear with me here

I'm posting one of my favorite poems ever, which is self-evidently brilliant. It's by Catullus, the Roman poet--who is incredibly funny and irreverent and incredible to hear and experience in Latin--and i'll post it in Latin and English (my translation, though it's not too much to translate). Note to defray looking pompous: it's not like I can just pick up Latin poems and read them like Parade (eww, why did I think of THAT!?) but despite the work they have their particular beauty. A lot of the time it's not nearly as satisfying as reading in English but I encourage you to explore the textures of this poem because frankly it's short and something about it makes it just as visceral in Latin as poetry in my native language tends to be.

85
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.


I hate and i love. You ask, perhaps, why i do this.
I do not know; but i feel it happening and am tormented.

The online text i used pointed out something i hadn't thought of: the poem has 8 verbs, no nouns, no adjectives. Hadn't thought of it like that. DEAL WITH IT CATE BLANCHETT!

The Decision is Final

I will be an M.A. student in the English Dept. at Lehigh University in the fall. HOO-RAAAY FOOR MEEEE. I'm pretty excited about it, but I've also got a fancy fancy frozen pizza that needs to be put in an oven, so... Sounds like a fancy celebratory dinner to me.

poem-st (that's poem and post)

three minutes ago i sent an email
to o sweet flowery roses
and you should, too
because you can get a whole shit ton of bling if you do before april 1st and you make sure you send in a good
poem.

Gee, wasn't that purty? Seriously, there's a literal bag of jewels up fo' grabs at O Sweet Flowery Roses. All you have to do is write about TEMPTATION. Who knows, maybe you could be the winner of the DJANGO (the Dazzlingly Jewel'd And, Naturally, Gloriously Official) award...

Poetry Foundation

This is pretty basic stuff, but the Poetry Foundation is a kickass place. They've got one of my favorite podcasts, Poetry Off The Shelf as well as some great archives of poetry. They've got a lot of copyrighted work up there, which is pretty cool since chumps like me can't really get away with posting work by Li-Young Lee or Stephen Dobyns since they're both very much alive and very much protected by all sorts of laws. Luckily, I can link to the cool kids like the Poetry Foundation who can do it.

So, enjoy those two links and enjoy the Poetry Foundation website. Rawr!

GMH Mondays

Every Monday, I'd like to begin sharing with you a poem from one of my all-time favorites, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I'm not even going to start by describing it. If you've read it already, you know, and if you haven't read it, start now.

The Windhover
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

What continually astounds me about Gerard Manley Hopkins is the familiarity of his rhythms; aside from some odd vocabulary, he writes in a way that feels almost natural. It's not that his style matches how anybody talks these days, but there's something nearly contemporary in his writing, in the way that word rhythm and alliteration foreground metrical organization. Speaking of which, to anyone who ever said the sonnet form is restrictive: clearly you just aren't trying hard enough, because THAT was actually a sonnet.

O Sweet Flowery Roses

I'd like to take a sec to introduce y'all to O Sweet Flowery Roses, a BLORNAL (blog-journal) that is, as they say, dedicated to preserving the fun in poetry. To paint you a picture, this is the sort of wonderful place that is literally giving out a bag of jewels as a special prize for their DJANGO award. Which, by the way, has a submission deadline of April 1st so if you're keen on getting your mitts on those jewels, get your poems in there quickly! OSFR represents a lot of the good things going on outside of the world of extremely selective literary journals. While they have their place, it's good to know that there are also warm & inviting friends of poetry out there looking to find poem from all sorts of people.

Be sure to also have a look through their archives for some real interesting reads!

I'm going to be off on a trip down to CT and then to PA so no updating for a bit. I'll check in when I can.

Local Updatez!

Two quick bits of Portland news. I don't know anything about either of these authors but this sounds pretty good. Longfellow Books (in Monument Square) is having readings tomorrow (Thursday the 19th) and Friday the 20th. Tomorrow night is John Manderino, whose memoir Crying at the Movies tells his personal tale through the movies he grew up watching. It sounds like a pretty funny way of identifying, especially considering how important public consumption of film and music has become.

Friday night they host Patrick Tracey, the author of Stalking Irish Madness:
Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia. This one sounds like some really beautiful, poignant stuff. I'm going to be out of town this weekend, but hopefully I'll still be around Friday night to go see this. Support your bookstores and authors, Portland!

Tea & Oranges

Tea & Oranges is "a collective of thinkers, poets, painters, singers, and lovers" run out of Gorham, Maine. They have oodles of free downloads by incredible musicians in the Maine/New York/Vermont area as well as fun things like stickers & buttons. All of the members of Tea & Oranges are thoughtful, beautiful, independent musicians making music simply for the love of doing so.

The collective also plans to release two books of poems in the coming months, written by me and Joanna Moyer-Battick and illustrated by the cofounders Milo Moyer-Battick and Jakob Battick.

This music has serious guts & soul and I think great music and great poetry can blur the lines between the two, so I strongly suggest downloading the free EP series "Early Flowers" and having a listen for yourself. The most recent release is by Border Towns, the brother-sister duo Natalie and Kennie Farrigan. Speaking of blurring the lines between song & poem, check out the demo "I'm Nobody" on their Myspace, a beautiful reimagining of the Dickinson poem.

Free music that feeds poetic hunger. What more could you want?

Format Change. New Everything.

I've gutted all the posts & shifted around the organizing idea: now we're starting fresh. I'd like to start with a tribute to the TBTL 10s metablog which got me motivated enough to dust this behemoth off one more time. The metablog is an aggregator of some pretty spiffy folks writing great blogs all over the country. Thanks for coming up with that shits, Jamie. You can (or soon will be able to) find some of the TBTL bloggers in my blogroll.

For those not familiar, TBTL is a radio show run by the fantastic Luke Burbank and his longtime/#1 friends Jen Andrews & Sean DeTore, out of the Seattle radio station KIRO. Never having been to Seattle--or anywhere near it--I happened upon the show anyway and strongly suggest it if you in any way enjoy Mr. T, funny & mundane stories, dreamfights, Hot Cheetos, or the glory that was Arrested Development. It's too much to explain. Just try it.

I'll be posting now mostly about poetry & authors as well as putting up a few of my poems now & then, but expect to see the insignificant details of my life more or less on display. To new beginnings.