Category Archives: Baltimore

Baltimore, poetry, quotes

Let us go back to snow

Yesterday, walking home, white flowers over a tree I last remembered covered in white snow. It’s a good enough reason for Richard Hugo’s snow poem, which I didn’t know in the time of the last blizzard. It’s April, it’s warm, students in sundresses.

SNOW POEM

To write a snow poem you must ignore the snow
falling outside your window.

You must think snow, the word as a snotty owl
high on the telephone pole

glowering down and your forehead damp with fear
under the glare

of the owl who now is mating. On rare days
we remember the toy

owl we buried under the compost heap,
white sky passing above, warm chirp

of wren and the avenging hawk.
That was summer. Let us go back

to snow and forget that damn fool lecture
I gave last winter.

Well, then: here is your window.
The storm outside. Outside, the dead dove drifting.

– Richard Hugo

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Baltimore, theater

Single Carrot Presents: Blue Water, Black Sails

A free semi-staged reading of a new play, written by Matthew Smith (MFA – Poetry, Johns Hopkins)

This new drama imagines the last days of life on a ship of condemned Athenian youths sailing to Crete to be eaten by the Minotaur. Blue Water, Black Sails asks us to consider under what conditions we remain human and whether fidelity, sexual or scriptural, can retain meaning in the absence of hope.

Directed by Dara Weinberg
with Nathan Cooper, Genevieve de Mahy, Nathan Fulton, and Kaveh Haerian
and featuring musical guests Anne-Marie Thompson and Patrick Franklin

Saturday, March 27, at 2:30 PM and Wednesday, March 31, at 7:30 PM

Performances at Single Carrot Theatre. Both readings are free and expected to be full, please arrive 15 minutes prior to performance time. No reservations. Free parking in rear lot on Howard Street.

Call 443-844-9253 with any questions.

We hope that you’ll join us for this FREE reading of a new work!

www.singlecarrot.com

twitter.com/singlecarrot

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Baltimore, gradschool, poetry

continue to walk in the world

with snow boots. Still navigating knee-deep curving trenches through the snowbanks of Charles Village, some so narrow you have to walk like you’re on a balance beam. The snow sits on the ground. But we’re back on campus, at last. It’s great to have classes again: theory, seminar, reading series, the whole nine. I even got into a practice room tonight.

We never know what we have lost, or what we have found.
We are only ourselves, and that promise.
Continue to walk in the world. Yes, love it!

He continued to walk in the world.

– RPW, from “Audubon: A Vision”

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Baltimore, poetry

the frolic architecture of the snow

Snow day IV. No classes. Here’s another snowpoem, by Emerson, that would have been more appropriate for yesterday around 1 pm. By now, late afternoon, the snow has stopped falling and has begun melting, and the roads and sidewalks are becoming more navigable. Nous sommes restless.

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

  Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Baltimore

Snow day 3

The street is plowed, and a snow-topped taxi and #3 bus just sped south on Saint Paul at something like usual velocity: but the sidewalks, the steps, are all buried again. Looks like less than six inches: nothing like the 20 inches of Snowpocalypse I, but it’s still coming down.

A lone hooded figure, beating its hands about its face like trying to cast away a demon (not my simile, but I don’t remember where I read it) struggles north on the opposite side of the street, wearing a backpack. And now, someone else, walking a bewildered black Lab puppy that runs in circles.

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Baltimore

snow day 2

No classes, again. The campus would be accessible easily by those of us who can walk to it: the problem is vehicle and wheel access.

Working from home and from the neighborhood coffeeshops, which are all closing at 5 in anticipation of the upcoming onslaught. Frequenting the raided supermarket, where certain distributors have come through, and others, not. The block of sidewalk in front of my house is navigable by a path etched through the foot-high bank of snow: it is only wide enough for one person to pass at a time. The cars drive through similar trenches, just wide enough for one car. St. Paul is down to one lane. Good thing it’s a one-way street. I imagine the bigger streets, like York Road, have been plowed, but I haven’t been off of these two blocks in three days to see.

More snow to come this evening.

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Baltimore, music

time for you and time for me

It was a slow snow day:
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

– Paul Simon, “The Boy In The Bubble,” Graceland. Happy snow day, Hopkins.

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Baltimore, poetry

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)

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Baltimore, gradschool, theater

and if I say to you tomorrow

Working on the intersession course on musical theater. We’re going to watch films and write lyrics and imitations: the lyricist is the lens for most of the interpretation. It starts on January 4th, and runs the 4th-22nd, before spring semester commences. My class is full. I’m very interested to see what kind of students have signed up for it.

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