Humor

The Academy Of American Poets recently announced their mobile poetry website, complete with numerous poems arranged by theme or occasion and by form. Now, if anyone accuses you of being shallow, you can call up Paul Celan’s “Fugue of Death” on your iPhone, recite a few lines, and quickly prove them wrong.

Ack! It has been the equivalent of about a decade in blogging time since my last post. And now, it has come to this: pens. I have been through my share of felt-tip, rollerball, and fountain pens over time. As you can imagine, once in awhile a well-meaning acquaintance or relation, armed with the recent discovery that I write poetry, will bequeath a gilt and feathered writing implement to yours truly. Though I am, at heart, a pen pragmatist, I like dark writing and a touch of flair. That is why, even though I mostly type straight in to a plain text document on my laptop, when it does come time to put ink to paper, the Pilot Varsity is my newest top choice. Cheap, tough, light, and fluid — what’s not to like in this fountain pen? It travels well in pocket with nominal leakage, marks dark, and moves quickly. The only hiccups I’ve had are in trying to furiously scribble out words — an impulsive bad habit for any writer, where a simple strikethrough will suffice in case one changes one’s mind back to favoring the original word or phrase. In short, this pen supports all my best habits, and discourages my impetuous ones. Where else can you get that for three bucks and change?

We sheltered in John Keats’s house this afternoon. (“Hampstead isn’t far; we won’t need our rain wear!”) Poignant, to see the couch on which he retired, the view he contemplated, toward the end of his short life. More fodder for my thinking on poetic tradition: apparently he wrote poems in the pages of his Complete Works of Shakespeare as well as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Talk about responding when the inspiration strikes… Afterward, I barely managed to roll back through The Heath after a phenomenal Indian food meal on High Street. No doubt ghee is now seeping from my pores. And on that note, I’m off to write some gritty laments on the back pages of the Larry Levis book I brought along.

(Or, A History Of My Web Presence, With Nods To
Robert Pinsky And The 14th Century Samurai Creed)

When frames were in vogue,
my address bar remained constant.
When full-page graphics were in,
you could see my big head for miles.
I never used a black background,
I made trendiness my enemy.
When blogs were in fashion,
my thoughts became chronological.
I do not own an island in Second Life,
I make imagination my island.
When no-one hits my website,
detachment is my unique visitor.

This is, or course, the work for which Stephen Fry was granted an honorary doctorate from Oxbridge in the field of Transubstantive Metalanguage:


Thank you, Doctor Fry.

Valerie passed on this link to neatorama’s short list of famous writers who worked in the buff. The great thing about both software programming and creative writing is that clothing choice (and the choice to wear clothing at all) is completely optional.

The most striking feature of Marvin Bell’s craft talk during the Pacific University MFA Winter residency was his closing remark about the three traits of the artist. Here is what I wrote down:

1. A disregard for convention
   
2. A strong inner direction
   
3. A love of challenges

I have been meditating on these qualities ever since, seeing where I can, for example, wipe the dust of adoration from my eyes and transcend old lyric devices. Then it occurred to me that our cat, Miranda, exemplifies all three traits in abundance throughout her daily life.

Michael tagged me with a meme involving flipping to page 123 of the nearest book at hand. Apparently he got it from Ivy. It chagrins me to discover that none of the five books currently resting on my desk reach as far as a page 123. On further inspection, four of those five books happen to be by Pulitzer Prize winning poets. The fifth is by Joe.

I deeply regret to inform you that my illustrious colleague Eric Mack has revealed the real secret to my success.

This doesn’t just apply to technology, folks. Any poem I attempt that takes more than two minutes to write gets likewise round-filed. Clearly, haiku is about all I have time for, and usually without all that restrictive syllable-counting nonsense.

Speed poetry, like speed chess? Now there’s a perverse thought.

This post took 1:56.

Including the Dewey Decimal System.