“Truman Capote used to like to play a game he invented called International Daisy Chain, best attempted, he felt, when drunk. The chain was formed through the connection of people who had had affairs with people who then went on to have affairs with other people: He claimed to have been able to construct one such chain from Cab Calloway to Adolf Hitler.”

 

 – Joseph Epstein

 

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This much I know. Just as I’m about to make that right turn
off Province Line Road
I meet another beat-up Volvo
carrying a load

 

of hay. (More accurately, a bale of Lucerne
on the roof rack,
a bale of Lucerne or fescue or alfalfa.)
My hands are raw. I’m itching to cut the twine, to unpack

 

that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.
It must be ten o’clock. There’s still enough light
(not least from the glow

 

of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain
that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight
from those hot and heavy box-pleats. This much, at least, I know.

 

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1. The one from Moby Dick, from whence all others flow
2. Walter F. Starbuck, main character of Vonnegut’s novel Jailbird — an indicted co-conspirator
3. Katee Sackhoff in the new Battlestar Galactica.
4. Starbucks, a small Seattle coffeehouse named after the Moby Dick character
5. Dirk Benedict, cigar-smoking horndog in the original Battlestar Galactica.

 

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Neat But Not Clean (1973)

 

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80% of all galaxies are spiral shaped.

 

The number of seconds since the Big Bang is one followed by 17 zeros. Whilst the number of atoms in the Universe is one followed by 100 zeros.

 

When Coca-Cola was first sold in China, they used characters that would sound like “Coca-Cola” when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was “Bite the wax tadpole.” It did not sell well.

 

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1. Seventy-four years before National Poetry Month was invented, he began his best-known poem with the words “April is the cruelest month.”

 

2. First poet to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1901).

 

3. Ohio-born high-school dropout whose father invented candy Life-Savers.

 

4. She wrote that a poem “makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, . . . I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.”

 

5. The last poet to win a Nobel Prize for Literature (1996), she wrote “in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.”

 

6. Singer-songwriter who is the current Poet Laureate of Texas.

 

7. Dublin-born and now Stanford-based, this poet’s work expands on the confessional tradition of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich.

 

8. He said (to an annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association): “If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live.”

 

9. Irish poet who wrote, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”

 

10. U.S. senator (R-Maine, 1979-97), Defense secretary (1997-2001), novelist and poet.

 

11. He described poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

 

12. In his elegy to Yeats, he wrote “poetry makes nothing happen.”

 

13. Her four titles in the top 10 have been on the poetry best-sellers list for a combined 180 weeks.

 

14. This San Francisco-born professional New Englander wrote, “Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.”

 

15. Physician-poet who wrote: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

 

16. This Seattle-based poet-performer has won the National Poetry Slam individual title for the past two years.

 

17. Chilean Nobel Laureate who wrote “peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.”

 

18. The first woman and only American to win the Neustadt Prize for Literature, she split her time between Cambridge and Brazil and was described by James Merrill in a dedication as “our principal national treasure.”

 

19. The daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother, this San Antonio poet writes about the details of daily life, her experiences and perspective as an Arab-American, and the tragedy of the Middle East.

 

20. His poem “Trivia” (1716) advises about coping with the hazards of walking the mean streets of 18th century London.

 

Tom Mayo teaches “Law, Literature & Medicine” at SMU’s Dedman School of Law and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.

 

The answers: 1) T.S. Eliot; 2) Sully Prudhomme; 3 Hart Crane; 4) Emily Dickinson; 5) Wislawa Szymborska; 6) Red Steagall; 7) Eavan Boland; 8) John F. Kennedy; 9) William Butler Yeats; 10) William Cohen; 11) Percy Byshe Shelley; 12) W.H. Auden; 13) Mary Oliver; 14) Robert Frost; 15) William Carlos Williams; 16) Anis Mojgani; 17) Pablo Neruda; 18) Elizabeth Bishop; 19) Naomi Shihab Nye; 20) John Gay.

 

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John Milton, Trent Reznor, and the “Madness of Poets”:

 

 

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Destroyers Off Jutland
Reginald McIntosh Cleveland
 
“If lost hounds could speak when they cast up next day after an unchecked night among the wild life of the dark they would talk much as our destroyers do.” – Rudyard Kipling

 

They had hot scent across the spumy sea,
Gehenna and her sister, swift Shaitan,
That in the pack, with Goblin, Eblis ran
And many a couple more, full cry, foot-free.
The dog-fox and his brood were fain to flee,
But bare of fang and dangerous to the van
That pressed them close. So when the kill began
Some hounds were lame and some died splendidly.
But from the dusk along the Skagerack,
Until dawn loomed upon the Reef of Horn 
    And the last fox had slunk back to his earth,
They kept the great traditions of the pack,
Staunch-hearted through the hunt, as they were born, 
    These hounds that England suckled at the birth.

 

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“The New York Observer did a brief write-up about the event that you can read here.

 

 

 Follow the link, if for no other reason, than to see the awesome graphic they did for the article of a soldier furiously blogging amid a combat firestorm. I’ve never done a reading and I’ve never been part of a panel. Most the guys on the panel had something to so with the anthology Operation Homecoming and its accompanying documentary that aired on PBS. Watch the trailer for the doc here– it looks pretty cool. 

 

 

It includes Colby Buzzell, another blogger-author whose writing you may like if you like mine.”

 

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Is John Fago out there anywhere? Does anyone know how to find him? How about Steve Diamond?

 

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“Is Paris Hilton glamorous? She meets all the criteria. She’s young, shiny, obscenely rich and reckless. She does precisely as she likes. She’s an heiress. Old money! (Mature, anyway.) She is pure, uncompromised artifice. Noel Coward or Preston Sturges could have made her up – if it weren’t for the sex tape. And the hamburger ad. And the album. And her mother. What does it mean to be glamorous anymore? What did it mean in the first place? Is Jessica Simpson glamorous when she’s playing Daisy Duke? Is she glamorous as herself, eating tuna out of the can? Or is she glamorous only when she’s posing for InStyle, in-styled within an inch of her life?” – Carina Chocano

 

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“The concept of song has gone out of contemporary poetry for the time being, and has been out of contemporary poetry for a long while. And all those attributes, like rhyme, complexity, or rigidity of meter, have gone. If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.” – Derek Walcott, The New Yorker, 9 February 2004

 

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E-Verse Radio town you really have to visit:

 

Lawyersville, New York

 

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The eager note on my door said “Call me,”
call when you get in!” so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and

 

headed straight for the door.  It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

 

Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame!  What a host, so zealous!  And he was

 

there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs.  I did appreciate it.  There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.

 

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A gang of hoodlums.

 

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“The works of self-taught artist Henry Darger are the definition of that slightly condescending critical category known as the ‘interesting.’ You look at his phantasmagoric paintings, of naked little girls running through violent, lurid landscapes, and you think, this is fascinating. You read extracts from his 15,000-page novel, In the Realms of the Unreal, and you think, how bizarre, how odd, how interesting. Darger, who worked in total obscurity his entire life, painting, writing, and noting in detail every facet of the weather in Chicago, has emerged since his death in 1973 as one of this country’s best-known ‘outsider’ artists. His paintings sell for prices that insider artists would envy. His life and work are subject to the flattering scrutiny of art historians, graduate students, and biographers. And yet if you put aside the story of Henry Darger’s life — the tragedy, the loneliness, the immense, secret productivity — and focus only on the work of Darger, all the adjectives that come to mind have a frustrating, slippery, elusive quality: It is curious, odd, creepy, bizarre. But does anyone find it moving?” – Philip Kennicott

 

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“And what about (the) Pearly Gates for a top position? Thinking about that I also recall Peter Sellers doing a very funny portrait of a  gangster called ‘Pearly’ Gates in some old 60’s comedy…

 

 

 

“Another phone tune is Wilson Pickett’s B side of ‘Mustang Sally.’ I can’t recall the number.”

 

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More clip shows while Paul is in Australia.

 

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