Wednesday, April 30, 2008

"A Measuring Worm"

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.

It's as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark Omeges meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn't know it,
He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don't know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.


-Richard Wilbur

Monday, April 28, 2008

"The World of the Senses"

What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible.

Now this, the

dreaming breathing body
lying right beside
my own, just think--

at any given instant
it might undergo a change so
enormous that nothing is left of it

but mere object, a thing
to be taken away from me, never
to be seen again, never.

-Franz Wright

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Beginnings of Ten Stories about Ponies



The 2007 edition of The Best American Nonrequired Reading featured an interesting little segment titled "Best American Beginnings of Ten Stories about Ponies." The segment, by Wendy Molyneux, originally appeared in Monkey Bicycle, and is syndicated below for your enjoyment.

1. I saw this pony there, just standing there, just standing in the rain. And that's when I knew I was going to leave my wife.

2. At the time this all happened I was on the run from this mean-ass pony named Chad. I owed Chad thirty thousand dollars, and I was thirty thousand dollars short.

3. I still remember that one hot summer. The way the heat made the cars seem to shimmer as they drove by us on the way to godknowswhere, the way the girls I had known all my life were suddenly women--taller and wiser than us boys--bust most of all I remember that night when we all gathered around the black-and-white TV set to watch as the first pony walked on the moon.

4. On Fridays, the ponies got paid. And after they got paid, they got drunk. And when they got drunk, you bet your ass somebody was going to get hurt or broken.

5. A lot of stuff's been said in the papers lately about what went down at the Federated Bank that afternoon. Some people say we did it for money. Some say we did it for glory. But none of them know the real story of how it started. It started with a little girl who wanted a pony.

6. When that pony walked into my gym and said she wanted to learn how to box, I said no. And I said no for the next thirty days when she walked in asking the same thing. And then, for some reason, on the thirty-second day, I said yes.

7. The street was teeming with people jostling and shouting and waiting for the motorcade to come down the street. And what with all the noise and the excitement and the general chaos, no on thought anything of it when a pony burst past the barricades just as the president's car came into view.

8. No one saw the pony rebellion coming. No one but Brent Steel.

9. Jeremy Chadwick had eaten one hundred corn dogs in one sitting. He had eaten seventeen blueberry pies at the country fair, taking home the blue ribbon. He had eaten an eight pound hamburger, a jar of jalapeños, and a tub of ice cream on a dare in college. One time, to impress a girl, he had even eaten sixteen pennies. But there was this one thing, just one thing, that Jeremy had never eaten.

10. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. And there was this f**king pony, too.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Gotta Love

...that Erykah, Honey.

Standouts from the




The annual Four Bridges Art Festival came to Chattanooga's First Tennessee Pavilion last weekend, as many Noogans know. This year's exhibition, like last year's, displayed a satisfying range of styles and approaches. I saw artists presenting everything from elaborate bird feather masks that looked like a fancy spin on the erotic Eyes Wide Shut masquerade ball motif to antiqued photos of vintage, family-heirloom appliances, such as bulbous metal fans and blenders. In between these interesting oddities were wood carvings, unusual pottery, neon landscape paintings, some fine photography, and the usual array of Americana-revival, "folk art" spin offs (though the "Johnny Cash guy" gets props, of course).

While I don't recall noticing a lack of quality at last year's Four Bridges Festival, this year's event seemed set apart in one simple way. It was my observation that this time around a larger volume of excitingly original works were on display. Though some of my show-going companions hold degrees in art, I won't pretend to be more than a beach chair art appreciator, at best. So our group wasn't exactly a panel of trained critics (though I, of course, may have been the weak link). But when every one us stopped and stared into a certain artist's booth, quietly "oohing" and "aahing" in collective appreciation, it could only mean one thing: that as far as our aesthetic discernment could tell, this was work of rare talent--you know, something you don't see that often, be it inside an art show, gallery exhibit, magazine, or elsewhere.

Of those artists, there are two that I still can't shut up about. The first is Dolan Geiman. The second, Heinrich Toh. I've included some of their selected works below in an effort to say, "hey, if you hear either of these guys is doing a show near you, take a rain check on your dinner plans and go see it."

Both work in mixed media, bringing together stencils, prints, paints, wood, paper, silk-screen, and the like. Geiman is a tad more liberal in his choice of materials, though whatever found object he pulls into his pieces--be it an old extension chord or a broken chair leg--is put to tasteful use, and, in my opinion, always works to an impressive effect. The mixed media bit, however, requires a customary disclaimer. Works of this multifarious sort lose something in the digital transfer that a piece composed solely of paint holds onto more readily: namely, texture. That said, the works of these two gentlemen, when digitalized, still retain their (sometimes arresting) strength as compositions. And on that basis alone, they are worth the time it would take you to scroll down and give them a view:





Butterfly Billboard












Blackbird














Do Re Mi XIV













Aziza III












Montana Matinee












Chesapeake Postcard II














Flight Attendant IV














Uncle Mac's Crab Shack














Field Guide




To purchase or see more of Dolan Geiman's works, go here. I wasn't able to format Heinrich Toh's works to be blog-postable, so be sure to visit his site.

(It goes without saying that all copyright-type props for the works above go to Dolan Geiman)

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Merging the Themes of Robert Hass and Haiku...

...here's a short video recording of Hass reading haikus. I am fully prepared to argue that the haiku he begins with is the greatest poem ever written, in any language.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Haiku...

by Roberta Beary, a runner-up for the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award, and a word about the current state of this ancient form:

"In addition to being a finance attorney in Washington, D.C., Roberta Beary is a haiku poet. As in publishing almost exclusively in journals and anthologies (and calendars!) devoted to the form from publishers like the Haiku Society of America and Red Moon Press. As in having 21 poems in her collection, The Unworn Necklace, that received some kind of honor in various haiku competitions. “thunder,” just to pick one, received the Grand Prize of the Kusamakura International Haiku Competition in 2005 and that same year was a runner-up in the Haiku Calendar Competition:


thunder
the roses shift
into shadow

If slam poets & visual poets go around thinking that nobody takes their genres seriously as literature, haiku poetry has been off the map altogether – a genuinely popular literary art form that receives no attention whatsoever from what Charles Bernstein would call Official Verse Culture unless it is for a new translation of one of the classics, or work by a poet, such as Anselm Hollo, already widely known and respected for writing in other forms. The whole idea of all these contests – not unlike slam competitions – is to create its own alternative institutional universe.

A poem like “thunder” might tell you a lot about a poet like Beary, but almost nothing about this extraordinary book. For one thing, she’s not a fundamentalist on haiku form – this piece has only ten syllables, seven shy the standard 17. Further, with the reiteration of an opening sh right after the caesura of the second line & the start of the poem’s last word, she’s a writer who likes subtle formalities. Finally, and this is sort of traditionally the point of haiku, she likes specificity of detail. As far as this little poem goes, it does very well."


--Ron Silliman

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Frank O'Hara is "Fast Company"


"Poetry is a temporal art, like music, Ohara’s first love. It happens in time; it waxes and wanes, gathers and vanishes. One temptation is to ride the wave, and O’Hara’s poems are better at doing so, are more vigorous, than any 'improvisational' style in American poetry. Yet his real wish is somehow to stop time in its tracks. Time, inscribed upon O’Hara’s brisk syntax and jaunty prosody, hastens every poem of his forward, but the world arrests him with marvels: a liver-sausage sandwich, or the 'glistening torsos' of workmen on their lunch hour, or a display of ceramics by Miró. The poems keep changing gears, revving and slowing, caught between two values they prize equally, hurry and delay. “The only way to be quiet / is to be quick,” he writes. Nobody is quicker than O’Hara, but nobody wishes more to linger in those experiences—sensual, aesthetic, intellectual—which carry their own serene time signatures....His poems, so full of names and places and events, are exquisite ledgers for the tallying of reality. They all attempt to move the vital but fleeting items in Column A—sandwiches and torsos, lunch hours and late nights—into Column B, where works of art stand, 'strong as rocks,'against the ravages of mortality."

-Dan Chiasson

How Robert Hass Sees "Spring"




"[Robert Hass'] genius lies in capturing not a situation but a consciousness of the situation. That shared consciousness is Hass' bridge to his readers, creating an intimate voice that feels open and unguarded--even when it's not. It also imbues Hass' life with a sense of familiarity, if not an outright pang of recognition. From the early poem "Spring":

We bought great ornamental oranges,
Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.
Browsed the bookstores. You
asked mildly, "Bob, who is Ugo Betti?"
A bearded bird-like man
(he looked like a Russian priest
with imperial bearing
and a black ransacked raincoat)
turned to us, cleared
his cultural throat, and
told us both interminably
who Ugo Betti was. The slow
filtering of sun through windows
glazed to gold the silky hair
along your arms. ...

These are not particularly fresh images: The tea is fragrant, the bookstore pedant has a beard, the afternoon light is gold. Hass, a student of the haiku masters, doesn't strain over description. His skill lies in the pacing of thought and images, which mimics the way an afternoon like this settles into memory—down to that distracted glance at the window."

-Nathan Heller

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Ornette





"Coleman may, indeed, be the last great melodist--trafficking in the sphere of irresistibly hummable tunes, alternately happy and sad, that strike us in those unprotected areas of naive pleasure that survive childhood. No better example exists than his standard encore and most celebrated ballad, the 1959 "Lonely Woman," performed at Town Hall in a slightly abbreviated arrangement that underscored the deliciously yearning main melody, which haunts the mind long after the final notes have faded, like the memory of a wonderful idea."

-Gary Giddins Something Else