Wallace Stevens birth anniversary

Wallace Stevens | HiLobrow: 

Stevens led what is now celebrated as a quiet personal life: though he once reportedly took a swing at Ernest Hemingway during a Key West fracas, he refused a post at Harvard after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 in order to stay in Hartford. Maybe the citizens of that dull burg better appreciated that a sidewalk ice-cream monarch is “the only emperor” in this fallen realm of ours.

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.



via poetryfoundation.org

The Beast Below - "This is the sound none of you wanted to hear."

The Beast Below (TV story) - Tardis Data Core, the Doctor Who Wiki

Series 5, Story 2 (Overall Series Story #204)

Moffat is good at these Kipling via Heinlein-esque bits of verse. Compare:

We pray for one last landing / On the globe that gave us birth / Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies / And the cool, green hills of Earth.

and

In bed above we're deep asleep / While greater love lies further deep / The dream must end, / The world must know / We all depend on the beast below.

It may be corny, but I guess I'm a sucker for it. We'll see much more of this from Moffat in episodes to come.

The key phrase in Moffat's verse for this story is "greater love." It's about the Star Whale and, therefore -- since Amy's insight is that the Doctor is a kind of Star Whale himself, and it's that insight that allows her to deduce that having the Queen press the 'Abdicate' button won't kill them all -- it's about the Doctor as well.

While I simply adore significant threads of it, I'm not crazy about large chunks of this episode. The Smilers feel like going to well for the uncanny horror of the mechanical toy at least one time too many, the several Star Wars references feel trite and forced, the badass Queen wielding blasters and cracking wise feels like an overworked trope (prescient, in this case, of Series 7's Cleopatra), and, more importantly, I think it's cynical to imply that no more than 1% of the population on that starship every hit the 'Protest' button. It may seem like a nitpick, because I think I would have been OK with a number like 20%, still a minority, but I think it seriously understates our sense of how many people in a total population would be more concerned with justice and fairness than willing to accept a society based on torture.

The ending though, the ending gets it very, very right and is miles better than the rest of the story. Structurally though, it just topples the rest of it. It works to the extent it's a parable about the Doctor, but it fails to the extent it's actually about how societies do this, how everyone is complicit in the existence of sweatshops, slave labor, and wars of aggression but doesn't want to admit it. To tack a happy ending on to a story like that by effectively saying, well, all those slaves would've been willing to do the work anyways, is jarring. Works for the Doctor story, fails dramatically as social commentary. Two very good stories converged here on an ending that only worked for one of them.

But for the one where it did work, oh man, it was very, very good. It's a telling of the story of the Doctor that shows him to be old, and terribly alone, yet forged by all that he's seen and done into a man who's deeply compassionate. His mercurial nature is also put to good use here. He's ready to bring Amy home at one point and so justifiably angry when fumes, "Nobody talk to me. Nobody human has anything to say to me today!" Yet, he's let his anger get the best of him and it takes Amy to recognize the kindness of the beast below. She really earned her stripes in a crucible.

How To Read A Poem

FUNNY WOMEN #102: How To Read A Poem - The Rumpus.net:

J.J. Abrams has made Star Trek into poetry. Suck it, haters.

To fully understand poetry, familiarize yourself with the elements of a poem, such as meter, which is 3.28 feet. Scan the poem, ideally in Photoshop, so you can correct the color balance and add lens flares, etc. Look for any images (from the French images). Images include trees, flowers, moonlight; in some cases all three. Circle each image and write “image” in the margin, so you won’t forget them, as to make them memorable. There are similes and metaphors also (you learned about these in third grade and can disregard them). Some poems rhyme–these are what’s known as old-timey poems.

What is a poem? #philosophy

What is a poem? | OUPblog: 

We are invited to notice what we do when we read something as a poem. Perhaps we scrutinize it for an implied theme (“it’s really about temptation and forgiveness”, for instance); a poem is never “just to say” what it says. 

Philosophical review of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black By Patricia Lockwood

Balloon Pop Outlaw Black By Patricia Lockwood - The Rumpus.net: 

Poetry can explore philosophical ideas that are too abstract or chaotic for the usual grammar of reason. As the moorings of human culture and civilization are dislodged from place and nation and as art culture and consumer culture devour each other in Escherian permutations of natural selection while physicists discover mysteries where they used to derive laws, poetry becomes more relevant as a tool for understanding what is going on around us ... What can we know about the things in our lives? What is the relationship between the thing and its properties? How do things possess their properties? ... Lockwood leverages the philosophical capacity of poetry to explore how mass media, the fluidity of quantum physics, and the idea of precession of simulacra, destabilize the idea of “properties,” and how that destabilization changes the relationship between the things and the properties that define them. Along the way, she writes strange, brilliant, fantastic poems.

This is on my "to read" list, but I haven't got to it yet. It should follow naturally from my current reading of TARDIS Eruditorum though. How can we know Doctor Who? Perhaps Lockwood's poetic examination of Popeye can help us suss mysteries like this out.

Read: "The Last of the Late Great Gorilla-Suit Actors"

White girls can write poetry.

Shaquille O’Neal, Jonathan Safran Foer, and dunking: Where does a poem come from? - Slate Magazine: 

For Shaquille 

Where does a poem come from? I write something bad on a piece of paper, I crumple the piece of paper up, I slam-dunk the paper into the trash. I sink deeper into myself and think. 

The dunk is conceptually exciting. The word itself like the sound of the thing! I'm surprised all poems aren't called “The Dunk”— then everyone would have to be impressed by them. If a poem is called “The Dunk” then very certainly it is one.

The link is to the article about the poem. The link to the poem is at the end of the article.

I have executed the perfect pass: you weren't there when I started it, but you and the ball arrived in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time. That's court vision. It's up to you now to be Malone to my Stockton ... and finish.

Conan Doyle's poetical reply to a critic.

Prior Investigations | Futility Closet: 

So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.

Happy 50th Ian MacKaye

Ian MacKaye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I know Frank Sinatra famously sang about how he did it his way, but did he really? If there's an American musician who's truly blazed his own trail, it's Mr. MacKaye. You can debate what "authenticity" means in the context of music ... to some extent everything is a remix ... I don't think you can dismiss this man (as a scold or a pedant), this music (as just noise, or "not punk"), or this ethos (as rigid, joyless) without losing something essential.





↬

IAN MACKAYE GRANDMA SEND IAN $50 CHECK FOR BIRTHDAY TODAY. IAN NOT ACCEPT ANYTHING MORE THAN $7.

— JADEDPUNKHULK (@JADEDPUNKHULK) April 16, 2012

What in the name of sanity was that? Shoppach's slide-flop.

Kelly Shoppach steals his first base with quite possibly the worst slide ever (VIDEO) | Big League Stew - Yahoo! Sports:

Before Friday, Boston Red Sox catcher Kelly Shoppach had gone 464 games without attempting to steal a base — a length of time that qualified for an active MLB record and dated all the way back to the 31-year-old's big league debut in 2005.

That was awful and brilliant. Brilliantly awful and awfully brilliant. I've seen bad baserunners slide too soon before; but, I don't think ever quite that soon, or in quite so dig-your-knee-into-the-ground-y fashion. The rest is poetry in motion. The most bloody awful poetry, like we imagine Mr. Shankly would've written.

#FF @slennonhugs: Slam poetry just got slamalicious ...

I'm a slam poet. *slams you onto a red wheelbarrow* SORRY I SLAMMED YOUR PLUMS THAT WERE IN THE ICEBOX *slams a copy of Howl on your dick*Sat Mar 24 13:33:37 via web♡Slennon♡
slennonhugs

ᔥ @rare_basement

Pivoting, for no good reason, to poetry tattoos we find this byoot ...

ᔥ ugliesttattoos.com

Horse ecomics

tumblr_m0jvcrpUDy1r8se0eo1_1280.jpg (800�563) 

↬ A.V. Club

POEM FOR J FRANZ

Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes: Poems Are Jokes: POEM FOR J FRANZ:

And they cried for it was called a Kindle,
and they cried for it came to burn books,
and burn all books like a first-growth
.........forest. Made by wizards! And full,
they claim, of magic e-ink, that assembles
itself in the dark like crowds ...

Some alternatives to just blocking people's bizarre public displays ...

The Best Examples Of Mocking Religion On Facebook | Happy Place

Untitled Po(em?)st

A fly on the bathroom mirror.
Glass is smooth and solid, but it isn't and it isn't (or is it and is it?).
The fly reminds you with is it's fragile, powerful legs that there's purchase.
As long as we're at it we might as well remember all those old New England farmhouses
where the glass has gone wavy and is literally puddling, just slowly -- or not.

Our guts are an ecosystem that affect the way we think.
The way we think!
"There is a world inside the world ... "

You don't even know what you know when you know it.
(True fact.)
Our own minds are opaque to us.
But they can be read, by the astute and machines.
It's possible for a technician, and maybe a professional poker player, to know what you're going to do
before you even know you know.

At Jordan Lake, algae bloom and there's a fish kill.
Also, a couple teenage boys stabbed a girl from your town, stabbed her to death;
They stabbed thirty times and leave her body in the water.
One of the boys is in the country illegally, so the murder is politicized.
You wonder if the algae bloom is a symptom of climate change, or improper waste management,
Or the fault of anyone or anything at all.
Now the fish are politicized as well.

When talking to people in China, you wonder what they know and hear about the two Koreas
Lobbing artillery fire at one another.
You don't ask though because they're coworkers and any conversation might be too political.

The sun is a star and
"We are all made of stars ... "
And you wouldn't stab a star, or stardust, but still that girl was killed.

You know this one guy on facebook who's funny as hell.
He was a friend of a friend then, you didn't know how whip smart he was.
But you do now.
You're both made of stars so some stars are funnier than others.

"Little man with a gun in his hand ... "
A guy in Ohio shoots up his neighborhood because he lost his temper.
You bicker with the numbskulls in the comments of the CNN article because ...
Because ... ?
And those deaths,  and his AK-47 -- it's all politicized.
And we are all still
Made out of stars.

"A poem is a list of Things to Do ... "
So this isn't a poem.
Those things, they were already done.

Bit of stretch, but since I just read a (typically) evil/hilarious news item about Virginia Foxx ...

Boston Review — Carol Muske-Dukes: Hate Mail:

Evil crone, born to ruin everything.

... If a pig

Flew out of a tree & rose to become
A blimp—you would write a poem
About it, ignoring the Greater Good,

The hard facts of gravity. You deserve to be
Flattened by the Greater Good—pigs don’t
Fly, yet your arrogance is that of a blimp

Which has long forgotten its place on this earth.
Big arrogance unmoored from its launch pad
Floating free, up with mangy Canadian honkers,

Up with the spy satellites and the ruined
Ozone layer which is, btw, caused by your breath,
Because you were born to ruin everything ...

... I'm imagining this poem was written with Foxx in mind. You just have to substitute "bill" for "poem" to make it work.   

Echoes of Byron in the Gaiman-penned Doctor Who tonight?

Auntie got to select an arm (the other one, not pictured).

The Corsair by George Gordon Lord Byron:

... And unto ears as rugged seem'd a song!
In scatter'd groups upon the golden sand,
They game-carouse-converse-or whet the brand:
Select the arms-to each his blade assign,
And careless eye the blood that dims its shine.
Repair the boat, replace the helm or oar,
While others straggling muse along the shore:
For the wild bird the busy springes set,
Or spread beneath the sun the dripping net:
Gaze where some distant sail a speck supplies
With all the 'thirsting eve of Enterprise ...

Probably a stretch, but still, a character called 'The Corsair' ...

As for the early reviews ...

The A.V. Club  gives it a stamp approval for many of the same reasons I enjoyed it, this was a chance to play with the relationship between The Doctor and the TARDIS, flesh it out, as it were, and it was nicely done. Someone in the comments beat me to pointing out the similarities to "The Brain of Morbius," one of my all-time favorites.

Sepinwall's review doesn't, I think, take into account past references to the TARDIS being a living thing, or at least having a soul/sentience; however, the point that this was an intriguing, if not original, way of exploring the relationship between the lonely Time Lord and his only permanent companion comes across clearly here as well.

I've seen nothing but effusive praise on Twitter, where fans (it seems to me) might be trying to shine Gaiman's knob a bit in hopes of an @ reply. I've also seen some muted, underwhelmed responses that I totally get. I enjoyed the episode, but wasn't blown away by it, and I'd secretly hoped I would be. I do think it's one that will hold up well and perhaps gain from repeated viewing.

Kim Stanley Robinson editing and writing introduction for a collection of Rexroth's Sierra poems

KimStanleyRobinson.info - Upcoming publications: Rexroth in the Sierra:

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) was an American poet whose biography is too rich and varied -- to a newcomer like me -- to be summarized in two-three lines for the purposes of this article. His poetry involved themes of love, sexuality, ecology, sociology, mysticism, he was involved in anarchism, communism, buddhism, taoism, dadaism, wobblies and all kinds of radical and free thinkers groups, he is considered as a founding figure of the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s, he influenced the Beat generation, he translated lots of poems into English and notably Japanese haikus, he mixed his poetry with jazz, he was a pacifist and conscientious objector of World War II ...

This is one of those instances where I'm going to let my KSR fandom drive and read up on a poet that I haven't heard of now.

A bit of Rexroth's "Toward an Organic Philosophy":

The lake is immobile and holds the stars
And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver.
In the shallows the geometrical tendrils of ice
Spread their wonderful mathematics in silence.
All night the eyes of deer shine for an instant
As they cross the radius of my firelight.
In the morning the trail will look like a sheep driveway,
All the tracks will point down to the lower canyon.
“Thus,” says Tyndall, “the concerns of this little place
Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth’s axis,
The chain of dependence which runs through creation,
And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests
Of marmots and of men.”

In Whitman's Pocket, an Imagined Lincoln

In Whitman's Pocket, an Imagined Lincoln - NYTimes.com:

The entries, scribbled hastily in pencil, are a jumble of the immortal and the ephemeral: snatches of verse and strange political visions alongside the name of a patent-medicine brand and the addresses of men and women whom the poet met on his rambles around the city. Here and there are traces of these other hands. One page is filled up with the name “Arthur Henry,” crudely repeated; it is believed that Whitman was teaching a workingman or street tough to write his name.

James Franco's quest to portray every gay poet EVAR.

James Franco on Playing Sailor-Chasing Poet Hart Crane -- Vulture:

Better start working on a Walt Whitman beard.

James Franco wrapped his twenties-set Hart Crane biopic, Broken Tower, on Tuesday morning, he told us at Rob Pruitt’s 2010 Art Awards at Webster Hall on Wednesday night. Though he said he’d originally planned only to direct the film, based on the Paul Marianna biography of the same name, Franco tells us he also played the gay poet, who killed himself at age 32...

It hasn't been that long since he did Ginsberg:

Chacun à son goût (20th Century Poetry edition)

T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture:

Wallace Stevens’s poetry is more beautiful, and Robert Frost’s often more powerful, than Eliot’s, but the latter’s, once read, refuses to leave the mind. How much does memorability matter in literature? A vast deal, I suspect, and in poetry above all. And here, in the realm of the memorable, Eliot has left a greater literary residue than any other poet of the 20th century.

You're welcome to Eliot. To the extent I care for poetry -- admittedly less than is probably warranted -- I'd take Stevens over Eliot every time.