that the interwobs have provided: Noteflight, an online music notation program that lets you share scores, and For Better For Verse (via Bookslut) an interactive scansion practice website that lets you scan poems and get feedback on your scansion, out of UVA. The world is more efficient now. I especially like that both of them are free and public.
Monthly Archives: February 2010
how many things have become silent?
There is a layer on top of the banisters on the outside stairs that’s as tall as my elbow to my extended fingers, and it’s still falling: little fluffy specks. Not cold, not icy – not yet. But lots and lots of it. So, in the absence of snowplows, here is a snowpoem by RPW.
LOVE RECOGNIZED
There are many things in the world and you
Are one of them. Many things keep happening and
You are one of them, and the happening that
Is you keeps falling like snow
On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until
The streets and the world of wrath are choked with snow.
How many things have become silent? Traffic
Is throttled. The mayor
Has been, clearly, remiss, and the city
Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor
was I — yes, why should this happen to me?
I have always been a law-abiding citizen.
But you, like snow, like love, keep falling.
And it is not certain that the world will not be
Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.
Silence.
– Robert Penn Warren, “Love Recognized,” Now and Then (link is to him reading, in his very dramatic voice)
new and rejected poems
I read on Monday. 7 poems, 4 new, 2 heavily revised, and 1 somewhat revised. Mostly botanical. I was planning, up until right before the reading, to read poems about people sandwiched in between all the plants, and then I cut them all out and only read things that had some vegetable elements.
As before, the most popular poem was the “easy” one, the one I revised the least, and almost cut for being too light and fluffy. Eh. It goes to show, I guess, that things that come easily to you come easily to others, and things you agonize over bear the marks of that agonizing.
Forgive me for not telling you about the reading, Baltimoreans, but I wasn’t ready: I have resolved that for the next two, I will do a better job of being willing to tell people.
and if we’re wrong
The writer Angela Carter was a great friend. They were both “fanatical atheists” and would talk till 4am. The last time they met, Carter said: “Well, goodbye. We may be wrong, and if we’re wrong we might meet again.”
– fab article on painter Gillian Ayres in the Times Online. Via AJ.
Dara Weinberg 