Once he sealed a roast turkey with polyurethane, hoping it would last through a play’s entire run.

– wonderful LAT article on East West’s prop master Ken Takemoto. Via ArtsJournal.

Just because you figure out how to do something once – discover a way to shape a poem around this image or that experience – doesn’t mean you ever get to do it that way again. The writer is always starting over, and if you think you know what you’re doing, you’re probably damned. This is the source of a wellspring of youth, of artistic energy, of the will to keep going. And it’s also damnably hard, and daunting.

– Mark Doty, interviewed in Seattlest. Part
I. Part II. Via Bookslut.

So, in my occasional editing work, I find that I am getting really bored with the following words: improve, educate, strategy, method, solution, result.* All from Planet Grantspeak. I suggest that we make something up, pretending to be half a German speaker and half Shakespeare. If anyone can think of a good new coinage for any of those words, we can all start using it, and then it will be in common usage, and available to the grantspeakers. Thank you for your help.

The suggestion of already existing synonyms is, of course, also appreciated, but I’d much rather that we make up new words.

*I try, whenever possible, to avoid “outcome.”

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.

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.

you cannot embed music files in WP without a $20 space upgrade. I guess it makes sense, considering how long I’ve been freeloading here. But I’m not going to do it now. I’m creating a free PBWiki for the class instead.

to see if I can embed an MP3 file in a post without breaking a nail.

It made me think about whether, as an author, you can […] expose your nonfictional self as a joke or a fraud or an embarrassment or a nonentity or an animal. And I think you can’t, because there is always also the author part of you, who gets the surprise explosion of stories, essays, poems crashing into you and cracking you open, like unexpected sex with Zeus when he’s a lightning bolt. It might be pleasant and erotic, or it might be a bruising assault that leaves you hunched in the corner clutching your bottle of whiskey and praying to deities you don’t believe in. Either way, you’re less a “manipulated object” and more conduit for spectacular energy.

– Elizabeth Bachner on Michael Greenberg (Bookslut)

Make Up For A Bad Poem With An Epigraph*.

One disgruntled parent sent an e-mail after a Snicket reading which read: “I was hoping that my kids would learn something about the writing process and all I got was ego and performance from you.”

.”And I thought,” says Handler, “That is the writing process. You’ve got ego and performance and that’s pretty much all there is. It’s you thinking that you have a story to tell, and it’s performance, which is going out and doing it. The rest of it is just ink and paper.”

– old salon interview w. snicket/handler

Ketchup:
1) Saw EURYDICE again over the weekend – this is the show at Single Carrot on North Ave where I got to do a chorus workshop for the Stones. This was the third time I’ve seen it. Closing weekend is sold out.

2) I had the opportunity to read some of my poems on Monday, which was fun. I read five depressing poems and one funny one. It was, I would argue, both egotistical and performative. The funny one, I realized, was sort of related to a poem I wrote for me, X, and A to read aloud at the end of TASP2 (2001), titled “I’m So Gone, I’m Not Even Here.”** Not in subject matter or form, but in funny. What kind of poet would I be if I had read five funny poems and one depressing one? A more popular one, I suppose.

3) And today I led a workshop at a high school in Towson on – yes! Greek choruses! This time in the Ted Hughes version of Agammemnon. Every time I get to do that, it makes everything worth it.

* By the way, an epigraph is the quote at the beginning of the poem, and an epigram is a catchy phrase, like this one: “Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris. / Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.” Thank you, Wikipedia, I mean Catullus.

**I wonder if a copy of that thing is buried somewhere in the one remaining box of papers I have yet to unpack.