Seemingly overnight-- or more accurately-- the wkend before X-mas wk, a bunch of people got into the holiday spirit & threw up their decors. So the city did end up looking a lot more festive than i thought it would. Anyway, i'm really looking forward to next yr. I have great expectations for myself. Here's a fragment of a poem i started... to be continued @ some point in '09. Or maybe not.
I feel like hatin' on '08
but i won't,
i'd like to start off the
next year
with a dark slate
brushed clean of dust, dirt
the dander of so much
disappointment...
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 15, 2008
City Spirits
I was down in the financial district, a little before 9 this morning, looking for the location of a building i was sent to about a job. When i saw just this horde of people coming from the PATH station down by the world trade center. I was heartended. First, because i was so glad i'm not one of the masses commuting on the PATH. And second, because i was happy to see how many people have managed to hang on to their jobs. Because of all the construction, there were a bunch of traffic cops out in the area, & as soon as the lights turned green, they were blowing their whistles, waving their red flags like bullfighters at the lumbering buses & tailgating cars yelling "go,go, go!" Leaving the impatient crowd, who missed their sprint across the street, chomping at the bit.
It then turned out i've been going the wrong way for, like, twenty mins. So i had to go back down to Wall Street where the National Museum of the American Indian is located. This is one museum i've been really wanting to visit. And i'm going to try to make time someday soon. Anyway, I found this interesting poem on the legend plaque located in front. It captured perfectly how i've always felt about life in NYC. And considering the lost Native Amerian population of New York, and recent discovery down here of the Afican burial ground, it seems fitting.
City Spirits
Whenever I go to
the city I would
always feel a sense
of loss and a sense
of despair. One
day I realized why
I was depressed.
The Earth had
been trapped
underneath the
concrete and
steel. And it was
their cries that
I felt whenever I
came to the city.
By Wil Grant
(Anishinabe)
It then turned out i've been going the wrong way for, like, twenty mins. So i had to go back down to Wall Street where the National Museum of the American Indian is located. This is one museum i've been really wanting to visit. And i'm going to try to make time someday soon. Anyway, I found this interesting poem on the legend plaque located in front. It captured perfectly how i've always felt about life in NYC. And considering the lost Native Amerian population of New York, and recent discovery down here of the Afican burial ground, it seems fitting.
City Spirits
Whenever I go to
the city I would
always feel a sense
of loss and a sense
of despair. One
day I realized why
I was depressed.
The Earth had
been trapped
underneath the
concrete and
steel. And it was
their cries that
I felt whenever I
came to the city.
By Wil Grant
(Anishinabe)
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
Been rding Billy Collins new collection of poems
and all i can say is Whoa! The man has come out swinging in this book. His trademark thoughtfulness is still there but the book is titled after one of the poems where he imagines that " the executed book was a recent collection of poems written by someone of whom I'm not fond... ." Some other poet(s) has obviously pissed him off and that's why he's fired back w/ this bullet to heart. Maybe this other guy/poets, attacked him personally (called him a sissy or old or something). Or even more personally, they said something about B.'s poetry. Because the blood seem to be flowing thru the veins of this collection like whitewater! In Carpe Diem, B. is essentially saying: to *ll with you you dilettantes. I might be old but i'm the modern day 21st century Robert Frost, B *Ach!
Poetic rivalry. Just like hip hop. But, hopefully, w/out the bloodshed.
Poetic rivalry. Just like hip hop. But, hopefully, w/out the bloodshed.
Friday, December 5, 2008
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas?
It wasn't until i overhead two ladies talking & one said how it doesn't look like The Holidays, & last week when I saw the x-mas decors in front of two houses on an otherwise dark block i realize then that i really haven't been seeing much of the x-mas spirit. This wk though i saw a few more decors. But it still wasn't the massive overdo that you would normally see. Maybe, like me, nobody is really into a celebration kind of mood. It's probably that a recession depression has set in.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Not a willful churl
trust me, churl has a will all its own & comes when it pleases. Don't get me wrong, Poetry is still one of the priemiere (it has been around since the beginning of time- badum-ching. Could have resisted that) Lit journal out there & i usu get over my irritation with the editors choice of just completely incomprehensible poetry once i find the hidden gems. As could have predicted, i loved Kevin Young's Bling Bling Blues- a humorous take on hip hop culture (though, what part of hip hop culture isn't funny?), w/ lines like:
...Now my diamond shoes
hurting my feet...
I'd like to thank
God, my agent.(wish God was my agent too!)
My teeth went platinum last week.
And Billy Collins is such a, seemingly, effortless master of drawing people into his world of words - the man usually has me w/ just the title of the poem(e.g Evasive Manuevers). His love of words, finding out the meaning and histories of things, comes across in his work. I like how he reminds me of when I was a just a kid learning to read & letters were a mystery to solve. And he makes me glad that it's so effortless now to know things. But not as easy to capture again childhood wonder. I get the feeling he's just a benevolent buddha of a guy. You just want to bask in those spaces between the meaning of whatever he's saying. It's probably a conscious decision to draw us into his life as gently as possible. And i appreciate the kindness.
...Now my diamond shoes
hurting my feet...
I'd like to thank
God, my agent.(wish God was my agent too!)
My teeth went platinum last week.
And Billy Collins is such a, seemingly, effortless master of drawing people into his world of words - the man usually has me w/ just the title of the poem(e.g Evasive Manuevers). His love of words, finding out the meaning and histories of things, comes across in his work. I like how he reminds me of when I was a just a kid learning to read & letters were a mystery to solve. And he makes me glad that it's so effortless now to know things. But not as easy to capture again childhood wonder. I get the feeling he's just a benevolent buddha of a guy. You just want to bask in those spaces between the meaning of whatever he's saying. It's probably a conscious decision to draw us into his life as gently as possible. And i appreciate the kindness.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Rattle
I hope that Rattle is the new go-to journal for the 21st Century literati. Due to my current unemployment i've been trying to
make my way through the back issues of the less boring literary journals @ the New York Public Library's main branch on 40th St & 5th Av. I've been slogging my thru the July/Aug. '07 issue of Poetry and i guess in the time since i've been busy living hand-to-mouth and not paying attention to the literary journal world this new Q&A form seem to have sprung up (after the poem the writer then do a Q&A format on the attributes of the poem). Well, i'll tell you right now, i was pretty much tired of it after the first two (Poetry's editors seem to have published all the ones that was sent in). But after I read the third one, I was officially done with it-- though the John Brehm grew on me. Why i keep putting up with this journal at all? Beats me.(Well maybe because I wanted to rd whatever Kevin Young and Billy Collins had sent in). But I'm telling you, I'm pretty sick of all the crap i have to slog thru before rding anything that isn't completely tiresome. (Let me say this to cover myself)Not that there aren't some really great poems in it. I'm usually better off rding the fiction and commentaries in the back. Those were all really good. Naeem Murr & Michael Lewis both had really imaginative and humorous pieces. Murr's My Poet, about a fiction writer and his live-in girlfriend whose a poet, and Lewis' faux diary transcription of a frustrated coaching assistant: Poetry In Motion: A Diary of the Collapse of the 2006 New York Giants.... Anyway, this is all just to say that as soon as i get a job I'm going to subscribe to Rattle. In the meantime I need to put a subscription suggestion in w/ the NYPL.
make my way through the back issues of the less boring literary journals @ the New York Public Library's main branch on 40th St & 5th Av. I've been slogging my thru the July/Aug. '07 issue of Poetry and i guess in the time since i've been busy living hand-to-mouth and not paying attention to the literary journal world this new Q&A form seem to have sprung up (after the poem the writer then do a Q&A format on the attributes of the poem). Well, i'll tell you right now, i was pretty much tired of it after the first two (Poetry's editors seem to have published all the ones that was sent in). But after I read the third one, I was officially done with it-- though the John Brehm grew on me. Why i keep putting up with this journal at all? Beats me.(Well maybe because I wanted to rd whatever Kevin Young and Billy Collins had sent in). But I'm telling you, I'm pretty sick of all the crap i have to slog thru before rding anything that isn't completely tiresome. (Let me say this to cover myself)Not that there aren't some really great poems in it. I'm usually better off rding the fiction and commentaries in the back. Those were all really good. Naeem Murr & Michael Lewis both had really imaginative and humorous pieces. Murr's My Poet, about a fiction writer and his live-in girlfriend whose a poet, and Lewis' faux diary transcription of a frustrated coaching assistant: Poetry In Motion: A Diary of the Collapse of the 2006 New York Giants.... Anyway, this is all just to say that as soon as i get a job I'm going to subscribe to Rattle. In the meantime I need to put a subscription suggestion in w/ the NYPL.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
