"Memorial Day 1950" FOH:
Through all that surgery I thought
I had a lot to say, and named several last things
Gertrude Stein hadn't had time for; but then
the war was over, those things had survived
and even when you're scared art is no dictionary
"Mother and Poet" EBB (1862)
5
To teach them... It stings there! _I_ made them indeed
Speak plain the word _country_. _I_ taught them, no doubt,
That a country's a thing men should die for at need.
_I_ prated of liberty, rights, and about
The tyrant cast out.
"In Memoriam A. H. H." (1850)
5
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er.
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
"Praise Song for the Day" (E.A. 1.20.09)
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, _Take out your pencils. Begin_.
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.
I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
Some live by _love thy neighbor as thyself_,
others by _first do no harm_ or _take no more
than you need_. What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
A Real Compsy One, in celebration of my Annotated Bibliographing.
Well, y'all, I'll tell you: I've been working in the office this week, and it feels purty dang good to be doing the research like I love to do. A development -- in a beautiful embrace of all things academic -- my annotated bibliography of secondary sources, growing like the weeds that are my lawn and the children that are my heart. My favorite entry, here presented for you (especially Hillary Brown) because it was a delightful surprise amid some boring bookaroos. Also because I have the only copy of the book in town, and I'm not planning on parting with it... yet. So read! And most importantly email me your thoughts!
So here it is, MLAed and everything (except for spacing. Thanks an effing lot, html.):
Disher, Maurice Willson. Blood and Thunder: The Mid-Victorian Melodrama and its Origins. London: Frederick Muller LTD, 1949.
First: “Puff Preliminary” provides a great start: odd, interesting, charmingly hilarious. Anti- the “coldly contemplative eye,” this author introduces an “academic spirit” giving a “rash attempt to chart imagination… [that’s] heavily engaged, like your own, in the struggle to grow up” (5).
Prologue: “Popular Imagination in the melodrama and penny dreadful” – likens spurious ideas to counterfeit (or “queer”) coinage, in that “it came into currency unquestioned, was vouched for by responsible persons, and could not be exposed as counterfeit without upsetting everybody’s reckoning.” “Queer it undoubtedly is,” he writes, “for it has always been interpreted to mean, not a universal contempt for worldly advantages but the reverse—a belief that virtue, though held to be its own reward, is not so unprofitable financially as might be supposed… THE COUNTERFEIT IDEA? the general abuse of “popular fiction” (11-12). Authors also to blame, for dipping from the “stock-pot from which each drew out much and put in little or nothing at all.” (12) Fiction = a brew, in which “there is, or was, a powerful uniformity of wishes” (12). BELIEF IN “Virtue Triumphant”… “There is no parting the two strains, moral and political, in the imagination of the nineteenth-century masses. They are hopelessly entangled” (13). Great Quote: “Democracy shaped its own entertainments at a time when the vogue of Virtue Triumphant was at its height and they took their pattern from it. This merging is the freak of human nature we call melodrama, a word at present denoting self-righteous emotionalism that recalls a bygone, exaggerated style of acting” (14). “Here are Virtue Triumphant’s attendant errors: confusion between sacred and profane, between worldly and spiritual advancement, between self-interest and self-sacrifice, and other hypocrisies which create a peculiar insensibility to the absurd. All this is known as Victorianism and vulgarly supposed to have been brought about through Queen Victoria’s influence” (14). “Victorianism owes less to Queen Victoria than to Madame de Maintenon, that paragon of rigid and affluent piety, desperately clutching shreds of outward grandeur to cover the shame of early vagabondage” (15). “Such typical Victorians as Darwin and Ruskin tried to make popular opinion more adult, but in vain” (15).
So here it is, MLAed and everything (except for spacing. Thanks an effing lot, html.):
Disher, Maurice Willson. Blood and Thunder: The Mid-Victorian Melodrama and its Origins. London: Frederick Muller LTD, 1949.
First: “Puff Preliminary” provides a great start: odd, interesting, charmingly hilarious. Anti- the “coldly contemplative eye,” this author introduces an “academic spirit” giving a “rash attempt to chart imagination… [that’s] heavily engaged, like your own, in the struggle to grow up” (5).
Prologue: “Popular Imagination in the melodrama and penny dreadful” – likens spurious ideas to counterfeit (or “queer”) coinage, in that “it came into currency unquestioned, was vouched for by responsible persons, and could not be exposed as counterfeit without upsetting everybody’s reckoning.” “Queer it undoubtedly is,” he writes, “for it has always been interpreted to mean, not a universal contempt for worldly advantages but the reverse—a belief that virtue, though held to be its own reward, is not so unprofitable financially as might be supposed… THE COUNTERFEIT IDEA? the general abuse of “popular fiction” (11-12). Authors also to blame, for dipping from the “stock-pot from which each drew out much and put in little or nothing at all.” (12) Fiction = a brew, in which “there is, or was, a powerful uniformity of wishes” (12). BELIEF IN “Virtue Triumphant”… “There is no parting the two strains, moral and political, in the imagination of the nineteenth-century masses. They are hopelessly entangled” (13). Great Quote: “Democracy shaped its own entertainments at a time when the vogue of Virtue Triumphant was at its height and they took their pattern from it. This merging is the freak of human nature we call melodrama, a word at present denoting self-righteous emotionalism that recalls a bygone, exaggerated style of acting” (14). “Here are Virtue Triumphant’s attendant errors: confusion between sacred and profane, between worldly and spiritual advancement, between self-interest and self-sacrifice, and other hypocrisies which create a peculiar insensibility to the absurd. All this is known as Victorianism and vulgarly supposed to have been brought about through Queen Victoria’s influence” (14). “Victorianism owes less to Queen Victoria than to Madame de Maintenon, that paragon of rigid and affluent piety, desperately clutching shreds of outward grandeur to cover the shame of early vagabondage” (15). “Such typical Victorians as Darwin and Ruskin tried to make popular opinion more adult, but in vain” (15).
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Pockets on Fire, or, "Thanks, Chuck!"
I wrote you a poem and gave it to you,
and it was the most beautiful thing I felt
until
You wrote me a poem and gave it to me.
Then another, signed and dated:
Chuck 2010
#pocketsfullofpoems/hearts
and it was the most beautiful thing I felt
until
You wrote me a poem and gave it to me.
Then another, signed and dated:
Chuck 2010
#pocketsfullofpoems/hearts
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