Here, Bullet

Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet, a collection of poetry from his time in Iraq. I'm so glad Ms. Cannon, our guest speaker on Thursday, chose to share him with us!

http://www.amazon.com/Here-Bullet-Brian-Turner/dp/1882295552

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

"My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mid, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals."

I find this quote from Dorian Gray to be both insulting and amusing, which I think is a very important in good writing. It's about pushing the envelope and stepping on toes to make a point, or get your ideas out there. Oscar Wilde always was a little bit on the abnormal side but he does a pretty good job at this whole writing thing.

- Brittany

I love my Kindle, but this is wrong!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNk0d7XVsrI

The Poet Speaks of Art

A BIG THANK YOU to Sandra Effinger who maintains this web page. A wealth of information on poems about paintings, with links to the poems and thumbnails of the paintings!

http://homepage.mac.com/mseffie/assignments/paintings&poems/titlepage.html

Starry, starry night by Don McLean with Van Gogh paintings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dipFMJckZOM

Prepare to be wowed!

Banned Books Week -- American Library Assoc. Sept. 25-Oct. 2

http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/index.cfm

Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits. The rebels.

The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes - the ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules and

they have no respect for

the status quo. You can praise

them, disagree with them,

quote them, disbelieve them,

glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing that you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

- Jack Kerouac

Beware the goblin shark...

 

lions and tigers and goblin sharks, oh my! (Google images photo credit)

Be specific! Don't give me no stinking trees and flowers-- I want to know it was a hickory tree and a zinnia! Here are some specifics we found in class the other day.

ghost crab, spider crab, long-horn skeleton shrimp, skud (shrimp), strawberry anemone, feather duster, yellow sea whip (sea creatures), goblin shark, nervous shark, bulldog cat shark, bareskin dogfish, sharptooth lemon shark.

wisteria, yucca, candytuft, bleeding heart, lady in the bath, bear's breeches, trumpet vine, african violet, handsome harry, tiny bluet, bloodroot, shadow witch, ladies' tresses, toothache grass, dawnflower, butterwort, clasping milkweed.

destroying angel, meadow puffball, magpie inky cap, freckle-gilled gym, onion-bagel pholiota, dry scaly pholiota, bell morel, bloody tooth, antler jelly, crested coral, lawn mower's mushroom, luscious lactarius, cinnabar chanterelle, gypsy rozites.

lightning whelk, sunray venus, buttercup lucine, half-naked penshell, florida pricklycockle, lettered olive, brown baby-ear, miniature moonsnail, coffeebean trivia, calico clam, true tulip, harlequin miter, Caribbean helmet, eastern mudsnail.

ringed turtle-dove, peach-faced lovebird, sulfur-crested cockatoo, rose-ringed parakeet, piping plover, bushtit, mute swan, laughing gull, yellow-legged gull, cave swallow, ovenbird, rufous hummingbird, snowy owl, rough-legged hawk, magnolia warbler.

we are wordy!

word shack, ba --bee!

Keats, butterflies, and my front yard full of yellow cloudless sulphurs

"I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain."


— John Keats (Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne)
-- cloudless sulphur butterfly photo from http://www.floridahorsebacktrailrides.com/Butterflies.htm

YouTube - Bright Star - A Room Of Butterflies

YouTube - Bright Star - A Room Of Butterflies

This film is about British poet John Keats.

List of banned books that may surprise you

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin made the banned books list. As I mentioned, I'm re-reading that book now. I must not have reached the good parts yet! :) How can someone ban a founding father?

http://www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-08-2010/banned__.html

Walking Weevils by Christopher Marley, Salem Oregon

time for some "light" verse

Be Careful

I'm careful of the words I say,
To keep them soft and sweet,
I never know from day to day
Which ones I'll have to eat.

Anonymous

From The Norton Book of Light Verse, Russell Baker, ed., 1986



Intimates

Don't you care for my love? she said bitterly.

I handed her the mirror, and said:
Please address these questions to the proper person!
Please make all requests to head-quarters!
In all matters of emotional importance
please approach the supreme authority direct!--
So I handed her the mirror.
And she would have broken it over my head,
but she caught sight of her own reflection
and that held her spellbound for two seconds
while I fled.

D. H. Lawrence

from The Norton Book of Light Verse.

a poem by Rochelle Kraut

My Makeup

on my cheeks I wear
the flush of two beers

on my eyes I use
the dark circles of sleepless nights
to great advantage

for lipstick
I wear my lips

from Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia, Pantheon Books, 2005.

you may get tired of this fish

So in "The Fish," by Elizabeth Bishop, that we looked at in class today, I wanted to also point out how specific she is in her images. She doesn't say flower. She says rose, or peony. We want to be specific in our poetry, too.

She counts the number of hooks in the fish's lip. She doesn't say "he had a few old hooks in his lip." She mentions five hooks, counting the wire leader and the swivel. It was a moment frozen in time while she and the fish looked each other over.

But why doesn't she name the variety of fish? Why does she let the fish go?

Does anyone remember the alligator that got hit on Hwy. 17 in front of Dixon High School a few years ago? I'll tell you the story sometime. They estimated that alligator was maybe 80 years old. Why does the fish poem remind me of him?

Good poetry can make us draw associations to events and feelings in our own lives. Even when the poetry is about a very strange fish.

The H-man and more

So many good quotes from Hemingway on writing. Here are two:

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

And,

"Develop a built-in b.s. detector."

Not that I want our blog to be entirely quotes about writing!

Has anyone read Judith Ortiz Cofer's memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood? I like the format. She writes a chapter of memoir, then follows each chapter with one of her own poems.

Billy Collins on the end of a poem

Billy Collins is an American poet born in 1941.  He says:

"By the end of a poem, the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield."

This is taken from Garrison Keillor's anthology, Good Poems, 2002, New York: Viking Penguin.

I like this collection of poems by Keillor, but my collection would be different. I'd include Rita Dove!