Cosmic? Perhaps. Unprecedented? Not
to the old women sitting in the sun,
the old men planted in cafes till noon
or midnight taking in the human scene,
connoisseurs of past-passing-and-to-come.
These watchers locate in their repertory
mythic fragments of some kindred story
and draw them dripping out of memory’s well.
– from Rachel Hadas’s poem “The Chorus.” I can’t believe I didn’t know it existed until now. The whole thing is online here. This, incidentally, came for a search for an appropriate Oscar-night poem: Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s preachy “The Actor” was the worst of what I waded through first.
Author Archives: weinberg
geometry
many happy returns of the day, Z. Star.
It continues to be a pleasure to share the galaxy with you.
1158
Best Witchcraft is Geometry
To the magician’s mind –
His ordinary acts are feats
To thinking of mankind –
Emily Dickinson
speaking of theater,
I just saw Playing Dead at SCT for the second time. It’s a wonderful show, and it only has one more weekend.
Tomorrow, I am holding a small, informal meeting of some student lyricists and composers, with the hope of fostering collaboration between them. If it goes well, I am hoping we can meet now and again over a long period of time, and that our meetings can be a place to share work in progress. This project is something I’ve had in mind since teaching the intersession class on musical theater lyrics. I didn’t expect that it would come into existence at the same time as several other theater projects, but I am happy it is happening. And I am also pleased to give you the catchphrase: “A lot of people talk about fostering new American musicals, but I’m DOING something about it.”
Actually, lots of other people are doing things about it, too. Like SSDC, and various festivals in New York, and theaters all over this country who fund the expensive process of the development of new musicals. Maybe I’m just getting on the bandwagon. Like T- Pain.
()
Scattergories: (1) The vagaries of syllabi have me in a biRichardal weekend: Hugo, who you will remember from the POET FOUND IN THAW, and Wilbur, Mr. Pyrrhic Spondee, himself. (2) I am going to a production meeting, the first one in a long time. I understand that you don’t have to come out of retirement if you’ve never entered it. The Cat and Fiddle it’s not, but we will still manage to meet about something related to production. (3) Don’t call it a salad: couscous, cucumbers, green peppers, raisins, and chopped peanuts. And a lot of lemon juice and pepper. And with wilted spinach and leftover chopped-up potatoes on top of it. Add more lemon juice. (4) Free puntitle: “Blank Hearse.” I am going to give one away every Saturday.
heart’s crayon
AT MOORDITCH
“Now,” said the voice of lock and window-bar,
“You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality.”
“Things have,” I said, “a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring books.”
“Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,”
Said the sad hallways, “you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.”
“This cannot be the world,” I said. “Nor will it,
Till the heart’s crayon spangle and fulfill it.”
– Richard “Poet” Wilbur, from Mayflies
writing routine…
what writing routine? At the recent frustration of my latest ability to make a writing schedule for myself, to have an “office,” to have a “desk,” to have set hours of the day in which to write, as everyone says you ought… I have decided to give up. I have never, ever been able to establish a routine, and every time I do, I end up disrupting it. It must be the case that my routine is to not have a routine. For example, right now, there is a half-ironed shirt on the board, and a half-read poem in a book. And this…thing. And also there’s a line of a poem that I’m going to write down really soon.
I did once have a writing routine. First semester, freshman year, I laid on my bed with my head and arms hanging off the mattress, laptop on a chair just below mattress level, and typed. I did this every night, I wrote an enormous many-legged piece of rhymed freshmanalia in that position. It was probably not good for my neck, or my eyes. But it got the job done. After finishing that piece, I decided it was not good to allow myself to write in that position any more. Since then, however – no writing routine. None.
Oh, there was also the “routine” where I could only finish writing projects by staying up all night. Once I discovered that staying up all night existed, I wrote every single creative assignment and paper in that format, for three and a half years of college, until I realized that wasn’t going to work for a thesis.
I don’t remember what the line of the poem was. It had seven syllables and ended with something like “but not to me” and had the verb “to say” in it.
Maybe one day I will be the kind of writer who wakes up every day and runs five sonnets before breakfast. Until then, though, I’m going to enjoy being the kind of writer who writes for too many hours one day and none for the next three. You can’t tell me it’s not more fun this way.
the cold corpus of fine print
DEATH THE OXFORD DON
Sole heir to a distinguished laureate,
I serve as guardian to his grand estate,
And grudgingly admit the unwashed herds
To the ten-point mausoleum of his words.
Acquiring over years the appetite
And feeding habits of a parasite,
I live off the cold corpus of fine print,
Habited with black robes and heart of flint,
The word made flesh for me and me alone.
I knaw and knaw the satisfactory bone.
– Anthony Hecht, from his book Flight Among The Tombs. This poem is part of a sequence of poems called “The Presumptions of Death,” with Death speaking in the voices of different professions and personae (Death the Film Director, Death the Painter, Death the Hypocrite, etc.) , and accompanying woodcuts by Leonard Baskin.
the most relevant question
I love that question, “What is your work now?” That should be a question I ask myself every day — a question we should ask of each other every day. It’s beautiful and the most relevant question a human being can ask. Not “Are you happy?”, as I used to think; one’s happiness is largely a condition of one’s having real work to do.
– Poet Jason Koo interviewed in the Feb 2010 Bookslut. Here is a link to two of his poems in Shampoo, “Shopping with Mayakovsky” and “I Just Got Out Of A Serious Relationship.” From the latter:
[…]
Instead of giving me some good old-fashioned
Attention he’d stare into my colander all night long
Trying to count the number of holes. “Honey,
I think I see some constellations!” He’d bring this
Lunacy into the bedroom, saying, Little Dipper,
Big Dipper … and as if that weren’t bad enough, he took
My six-volume Modern Library box set of Proust
And drew Garfield cartoons all over the margins.
Imagine Gilberte strolling down the Champs-Elysées
And Garfield stuffing himself with lasagna at her side…
missed connections poems
the NYT has placement-checked some anonymous person (or persons) who put line breaks into Missed Connections postings on Craigslist.
The titian haired girl who brushes her teeth after smoking cigarettes
I hope you started your painting.
I hope you began your photo essay.
I hope you’re not spending your nights
trying to find clever means
of getting your hands on Xanax.
I hope you’re not living out
in the Alaskan wilderness.
I hope you’re hurting a little less.
characterized by sentimental vulgarity
Well, theatre, and opera in particular, has been characterised by sentimental vulgarity, by exorbitance and the belief that, in order for it to be entertaining, in order for it to be diverting, for the the audience to be taken out of itself, it must do something that is in fact different from what they see in real life. I think that the most exciting thing is to have your attentions drawn to something that you overlooked in real life.
– Opera director Jonathan Miller interviewed at theartsdesk.com. Via AJ. The article’s got a great section on his attempts to bring American English pronounciation into opera (Donizetti):
…they suddenly realised that American English is not a degenerate form of received English, it’s simply another form of English. They kept on saying at the beginning, oh, well, the ‘rs’ will violate the resonance and the pronunciation. I said it won’t at all!
Dara Weinberg 