(Paul Simon once said that the "lie la lies" were a failure of poetic imagination. Could you imagine this song without them?)
2. This is an interesting set of profiles from The Academy of American Poets: 6 Poets, 6 Questions
3. This is a short poem for a long day:
blessing the boats
Lucille Clifton
(at St. Mary's)
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
Hey, a poetry Monday!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the O'Shaughnessy interview; I'd never heard of her until yesterday when I read a review of her latest book in a two-week-old New Yorker. And now here she is again; clearly, attention must be paid.
I got home from work today just as a rainstorm was ending. And in the pair of sugar maples in the yard across the street, a whole flock of birds was expressing its opinion of the matter, loudly. Not sure what kind; I don't have the eyesight for birdwatching. Anyway, I was rather enjoying the cacophony, when the man from the next house came out, began banging a trashcan lid, and kept it up until the flock took off in disgust.
So, if I can as usual give you a poem for a poem, in their honor:
"Grackles on Montrose" by Mark Doty
Eight o’clock, warm Houston night, and in the parking lot
the grackles hold forth royally, in thick trees on the lip of traffic,
and either they’re oblivious to the street-rush
and come-and-go at the Kroger or else they actually like it,
our hurry a useful counter to their tintinnabulation.
Now one’s doing the Really Creaky Hinge, making it last a long time;
now Drop the Tin Can, glissando, then Limping Siren,
then it’s back to the Hinge done with a caesura
midstream, so it becomes a Recalcitrant Double Entry.
What are they up to, these late, randy singers,
who seem to shiver the whole tree in pleasure
when somebody gets off a really fierce line,
aerial gang of pirate deejays remixing their sonics
above the median strip all up and down the block
from here to the Taco Cabana? They sample Bad Brakes,
they do Tea Kettle in Hell, Slidewhistle into Car Alarm,
Firecracker with a Bright Report, and every feathered body—
how many of them are there, obscured by dense green?
seems to cackle over that one, incendiary rippling, pure
delight, imperious and impure singing: the city’s traffic in tongues,
I love it when you comment with a poem. It makes my day -- which is good, because today's a 3-cup-of-coffee kind of day.
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