Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

…but see, I’ve got this thing.

I’m completely, utterly addicted to McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, the website offshoot of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. The stuff they publish is just freaking hilarious. And brilliant. You probably already know this. But in case you don’t, you should check this out. This too. Oh, and this one.

I checked in today to see what was new, and lo behold, it’s an excellent essay: “How To Be A Bullfighter” by Sarah Walker. And – it has a POEM in it. Yay! I get to share it with you for Poetry Friday!

I know, I’m stretching here. But isn’t Poetry Friday supposed to be about sharing works that you love? And discovering new voices?

Look, if you aren’t already reading McSweeney’s, I feel bad for you, and I want to help, okay?

Fine. So. Okay then.

Here’s an excerpt from “How To Be A Bullfighter,” including the prayer poem:

Now you have to say a prayer over the pile of sand that was once the bull in order to honor your brave adversary. It should be in acrostic-poem form, of course, and go something like this:

Bull:
Understand that I
Like bulls but I
Love killing them more than I like them,
although I seriously did like you. Amen.

The bull’s ghost will understand this and respect your honesty and it will not haunt you. If you fail to say the acrostic prayer, the bull will most certainly terrorize you from the afterlife for the rest of your days.

Now please read the rest of the essay. And thank you for indulging me.

*Update: Kelly’s got the Poetry Friday Round-Up at Big A little a. And she approved this post as an actual Poetry Friday entry. All is good.*

This photo today is compliments of my mother, Beverly Walker, who takes some really gorgeous nature shots, and it’s just one of many beautiful photographs she’s snapped. And I thank her for letting me borrow it for our blog today.

When I look at her photography — whether it’s of a sunset or, in this case, an insect getting all the nourishment it needs from the nectar of a flower — it feels like someone is reminding me to slow down, to want less, that we with our busy lives are foolish to be burdened with worry, though I suppose it’s our nature as humans. You know, the lilies of the field and all that stuff (that’s a lame attempt to quote Lucy in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” when she says, “you know, deck them halls and all that stuff” . . . but, well, that wasn’t very effective, since I had to explain it).

Anyway, that brings me to my Poetry Friday entry for today. I had to go look this poem up; I had written it down around this time about two years ago, and I’m glad I did. It communicates what I’m trying to say, the thoughts that go through my mind when someone as talented as my mom captures a moment like you see above:

Stop being holy, forget being prudent,
It’ll be a hundred times better for everyone.
Stop being altruistic, forget being righteous,
people will remember what family feeling is.
Stop planning, forget making a profit,
there won’t be any thieves and robbers.

But even these three rules
Needn’t be followed; what works reliably
is to know the raw silk,
hold the uncut wood.
Need little,
want less.
Forget the rules.
Be untroubled.

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, “Raw Silk and Uncut Wood,” translated by Ursula K. LeGuin

cloudscome over at a wrung sponge has more butterflies fluttering by for you. Go see.

*** This week’s roundup is hosted by MsMac at Check It Out. So, um… check it out.***

(Sorry for the overly-large pic, but I couldn’t resist. It’s so spooky.)

So, hello there. Long time no blog. I was supposed to be covering for Jules’s blog vacation this week, but as you may have heard, I moved last week and things didn’t exactly go according to plan. Here’s a few highlights:

* The U-Haul truck we rented was too small, and we had to take it back. Of course, there weren’t any larger ones available on such short notice.

* The movers we hired to help us load said U-Haul graciously worked out a deal to move us in one of their trucks, complete with unloading at the end. Money we didn’t expect to spend, but at this point it seemed like the answer to a prayer. And it even gave us an extra day to finish packing, which we needed.

* Then… they got lost on the way to Ithaca, and because we’d forgotten to exchange cell phone numbers with the mover-guys the husband and I spent a couple of hours sitting in our empty new apartment wondering if, say, the truck blew up, or they’d driven off a mountain…

* Right after they did finally pull up (yay!), a thunderstorm started (crap!).

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{Note: Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is over here at Mentor Texts & More}.

Yes, in the buff. Nudey camp! Nudey camp!

(Just trying to get your attention again).

But really, there is a bit of Uncle Shelby’s bare bum in this book.

Seriously now, I was drawn to the New Books shelf at my local library last week, only to see this new release, Playboy’s Silverstein Around the World (Simon & Schuster, May 2007), complete with a foreword by none other than Hugh Hefner (the reverent and well-crafted introduction having been written by Mitch Myers, who — according to this link — maintains the Shel Silverstein Archive in Chicago). Yes, this is for those of you who may like Silverstein’s children’s poetry — even if just a little — but would perhaps like to see another side of him, the adult-oriented side (he was a screenwriter, songwriter, playwright, and more — writing both plays and screenplays with none other than David Mamet), the as-far-away-as-possible-from-The-Creator-of-The-Giving-Tree side. And, since more of his children’s work — and very little of his work for adults — is in print, this is a fascinating look at Silverstein and his globe-trotting ways. Ultimately, Silverstein’s travel write-ups for Playboy were “overtly autobiographical, ” as Myers writes, so it’s quite the insightful look into Silverstein and a bit of his life for approximately five years.

Hefner explains in the foreword that he met Silverstein in 1956 after Silverstein had just returned to the U.S. from military duty in Japan. He brought his drawings to the Playboy office, at that time a fledgling magazine, hoping to get some work as a cartoonist. Despite being hired and having success at the magazine and much camaraderie with Hefner and the other cartoonists — LeRoy Neiman, to name one — Shel wanted to return to Japan (“I had been in Japan and I’d been a star,” Silverstein recalled. “Now I was nothing. I had already sold stuff to Playboy and felt very good about it–and even that wasn’t enough”). When Shel told Hefner about his plans to leave, Hefner’s offer was for him to draw while there; indeed, Hefner had the idea that Shel would be Playboy’s “traveling representative, sending back recollections in the forms of cartoons.” And he wanted Shel to include himself in the cartoons, something he was reluctant — but eventually agreed — to do.

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The hardest part about leaving Cambridge, besides the excellent friends, and the ridiculously adorable preschoolers in my storytimes, and the great patrons I’ve had the pleasure of serving… besides all that, the hardest thing is that I feel like I’ve just barely experienced it at all. For most of the four years I’ve been here I’ve been working full-time, and getting my MLIS, and for a while there I had a part-time job in addition to the full-time gig. So, I’ve been busy. And now that I’m leaving, I’m suddenly aware of all this stuff I’ve never done here. I still feel like a recent arrival, not a proper Cantabridgian. And I’m a little sad about it. It makes me feel like… well, like this haiku by Bashō:

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.

Like I’m already missing Cambridge, even though I haven’t actually left yet. Ah well. Maybe I’ll get better acquainted with Ithaca.

I am particularly excited this Poetry Friday to be sharing some song lyrics with you. The Innocence Mission is one of my top-five favorite bands. I won’t get into the many reasons why, since this blog is about literature and not music, but suffice it to say they are true originals and a rarity in the music business, composing lyrics — a great deal of them written by lead singer, Karen Peris — that are the gorgeous, distilled stuff of poetry. Their CDs are not the ones you want to choose the day you want to rock out; this is solitary music of “muted majesty,” as this review puts it well: there is a “durable, slow-burn beauty {to} their work . . . {a} softness of touch– a light that rarely feels lite.” At first glance/first listen, their musical creations are spare, slight. But, like stumbling upon an Emily Dickinson poem and reading and re-reading it, you start to see that the songs have a great deal of beauty to offer on many, many rewarding levels. This review puts it nicely: “Intimate, quiet, poetic and wistful, Karen Peris’ songs very genuinely offer a glimpse into an earlier, more innocent and childlike time. Or maybe they just embody a world very different from the too very busy, wired and weird urban existence that I know all too well . . . the whole of the record {their latest one} . . . feels as though it is floating in another realm, one not too burdened with the daily challenges of modern existence, even as it reflects on an early morning flight.” I find myself turning to their music quite a bit; I need it to replenish me (and then there are other moods, and I need this sometimes, but I digress).

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This week’s happy accident: I got a catalog from a nonprofit literary press, Milkweed Editions. And in said catalog I find a book of poetry from an author who is totally new to me, Éireann Lorsung. Already I’m in love with the title – Music For Landing Planes By – and the cover art, “Plenty” by Jennifer Davis. And the blurb mentions Lorsung’s website, ohbara.com, where she sells her handmade crafts and clothing. So I checked it out. The clothes and pillows are cute, in an Anthropologie kind of way. And she makes these shadow-box things that look like this, which I like very much.

But the real happy accident here is that, in the book’s description in the catalog, they include a complete poem, “Dressmaker.” And… wow. I’m reminded again what it is poetry can do better than any other medium. The imagery is firmly grounded in the tangible and everyday – cloth, pins, scissors. This, plus the terseness of the phrases, the almost argumentative tone, gives the poem a raw elemental feel that perfectly underscores the theme. Here’s a taste:

Nothing touches like tan velvet touches
the palm. Now the cracks come, because what gives
without taking?–Doesn’t exist. Say

you forget what is lanolin, what is raw about fleece
uncarded & unwashed. Say the silver feel
of charmeuse lines your sleep. You’ve lost

what there was before pins & needles, sound
a scissors makes through cloth on a hardwood floor,
thick waist of the dressmaker’s dummy…

Read the rest here. And another poem, “Volans,” is here. Now I’m off to find her book…

{Note: Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is over here at The Simple and the Ordinary}.

STAR, STAR, STAR. I’m giving this book a huge STAR! I. love. this. anthology (and my goodness, isn’t Jane Yolen prolific? I know we all know this, but the amount of good books this woman churns out amazes me so much that I have to mention it again). Here we have a first book of poetry for the wee-est of children, the poems having been collected by Yolen and the very tall poet Andrew Fusek Peters. And the anthology is graced with illustrations by POLLY DUNBAR, one of my favorites (who has one of the best illustrator websites EVER). Yes, I’m yelling a lot here, ’cause I’m tellin’ ya, this is one very handsome and entertaining book that works on every single level — completely engaging poetry for young children, excellent design, and Dunbar’s captivating, exuberant illustrations. There are over sixty poems here, including poetry from Langston Hughes, Lilian Moore, Lee Bennett Hopkins, Gertrude Stein, Jack Prelutsky, Michael Rosen (the latest and fifth British children’s laureate; thanks to Big A little a for the link), Robert Louis Stevenson, Rosemary Wells, Myra Cohn Livingston, and much more (including poetry from our compilers and a traditional British street rhyme thrown in for good measure). Read the rest of this entry �

{Note: Today’s Poetry Friday round-up is over here at HipWriterMama}.

What a lovely surprise! Yesterday I received a gift from friend and former Cybils Poetry Nominating committee member Elaine of Wild Rose Reader. It’s a signed copy of Twist: Yoga Poems by Janet S. Wong, illustrated by Julie Paschkis. How sweet is that?

If you haven’t already perused this lovely little title, you need to treat yourself. Each brief free-verse poem is inspired by a specific yoga pose, and uses child-friendly imagery to link the name of the pose to the body movement. “Cobra,” for example, “pushes… up from damp soil. / She lifts herself higher, / to dry out her heart.” It’s a great concept, and I think a child who is beginning to learn yoga would enjoy Wong’s ability to personify the poses.

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Oh, what are the odds? I popped over to the Poetry 180 site to look for a poem to post, and clicked on this one because I liked the title and it sounded, you know, springy… And what do I find: a poem about a girl dressed like a daffodil. The very day after Jules reviewed Daffodil, Crocodile – a picture book about a girl named Daffodil who drops the girly-girl bit and runs around pretending to be a crocodile for a while. Coincidence? I think not…

The character first appeared in Jenkins’s Daffodil (FSG/Frances Foster, 2004), a great story in which triplet girls, all named after flowers, rebel against their mother’s habit of dressing them in poufy concoctions color-coded to their names. Daffodil, naturally, is always forced to wear yellow – until she’s finally allowed to choose her own cherry-red pant suit. I like this girl. It’s no surprise to me that in her second book she’s accessorizing with a papier-mache crocodile head.

It’s fun to think about girls like Daffodil while reading this poem, “Because You Left Me a Handful of Daffodils” by Max Garland. I bet the narrator, so intimidated (and physically hindered) by this lovely girl in her layers of crinoline, has no idea what a cage that dress can be for a girl.

She wore a dress based upon the principle
of the daffodil: puffed sleeves,
inflated bodice, profusion
of frills along the shoulder blades
and hemline.

A dress based upon the principle of girl
as flower; everything unfolding, spilling
outward and downward: ribbon, stole,
corsage, sash.

…And escorting her down the runway
was a losing battle, trying to march
down among the full, thick folds
of crinoline, into the barrage of her
father’s flashbulbs, wading
the backwash of her mother’s
perfume…

Read the poem in its entirety here.