The Vrzhu wheels are in need of some front end alignment at the moment. Our regular Tuesday update is sadly behind, still but a tattered kerchief of dust kicked up by the approaching Vrzhu Express rider just at the horizon.
What is in his saddlebags? Perhaps the Governor’s pardon for a vagrant zen master wandering the high chapparel and arrested on trumped up charges for a hangin’ offense.
Or that sulfa drug for the littlest McCoy out on the ranch a-sweatin’ and a-burnin’ up with the horny toad fever.
Or that letter to Joey Sue from Colonel Jimmy Hortense – he’s a-comin’ home from the war. Joey looks out the rain-streaked window of his little prairie yurt, a single tear of joy trickles down his cheek. Little does he know that Jimmy H. will be coming home. . . .half a man!
Anyway, I’ll get this post up on the lift and give it a good safety check and she’ll be good as new by tomorrow, or Thursday.
NaPoWriMo - a partial entry
These Shoes Suck. These Shoes Rule.
We took the tour of the Kevlar aftermath, where the rubber meets the schizophrenia, Citizen, you’ll pay the price for our fear.
day book entry - shewing that our poetic troubles with the first person and the self go back to the Romantic era, where most all the roots of our contemporary poetry and poetic are.
It has ever been my opinion, that an excessive solicitude to avoid the use of our first personal pronoun more often has its source in conscious selfishness than in true self-oblivion. ... Yet I can with strictest truth assure my Readers that with a pleasure combined with a sense of weariness I see the nigh approach of that point of my labours, in which I can convey my opinions and the workings of my heart without reminding the Reader obtrusively of myself. ...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Volume I, Essay iv
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The true eye of the earth is water. It is the gaze of the earth, its
instrument for looking at time. In our eyes, it is water that dreams.
Paul Claudel, The BlackBird in the Rising Sun (1927)
Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the new transalation (RIchard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky of Tolstoy's War And Peace, in an effort to get you to go and buy this book and read it (the French is translated in footnotes in the book).
The princess [Helene] rested the elbow of her bare, rounded arm on a little table and did not find it necessary to say anything. She waited, smiling. Throughout the story she sat erect, glancing occasionally now at her rounded, beautiful arm lying lightly on the table, not at the still more beautiful bosom on which straightened a diamond necklace; she also straightened the folds of her gown several times, and, when the story produced an impression, turned to look at Anna Pavlovna and at once assumed the same expression as on the maid of honor’s face, and then settled back into a radiant smile. After Helene, the little princess also came over from the tea table.
“Attendez-moi, je vais prendre mon ouvrage,” she said. “Voyons, a quoi pensez-vous?” she turned to Prince Ippolit. “Apportez-moi mon reticule.”
The princess, smiling and talking with everyone, suddenly effected the transposition, and, taking a seat, cheerily settled herself.
“Now I feel good,” she said several times, and, asking them to begin, started to work.
Prince Ippolit fetched her reticule, came after her, and, moving his chair towards her, sat down close by. Le charmant Hippolyte was striking in his extraordinary resemblance to his beautiful sister, and still more in being strikingly unattractive, despite that resemblance. The features of his face were the same as his sister’s, but in her everything was lit up by her joyous, self-contented, young, unchanging smile and the extraordinary classical beauty of her body. In her brother, on the contrary, the same face was clouded by idiocy and invariably expressed a self-assured peevishness, and his body was skinny and weak. His eyes, nose and mouth all seemed to shrink into an indefinite and dull grimace, and his arms and legs always assumed an unnatural position.
Is you've been wondering whether I've unsaddled myself from NaPoWriMoity, the answer is no. I'll be posting again tomorrow. By the way the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog's Ada Limon's post has a nice shout out to Maureen Thorson and NaPoWriMo.
Bob Pinsky answers some questions here about contemporary poetry. As part of this he includes Edgar Guest's best known poem, Home. However my spell checker blew the whistle on some of the words therein - perhaps sloppy editing, or transcription errors -- who knows? Here's the first stanza of the corrected text, 100% acceptable to Word Spell Check:
Edgar Guest
Home
It takes a heap livid in a house make it home, A heap sun ant shatter, ant yeti sometimes have roam Afore yeti really brecciate the things yeti elf behind, Ant hunger fern elm somehow, with hem callus on dyer mind. It dot make any differences how rich yeti get be, How much yew chairs ant tables cost, how great yet luxury; It faint home year, though it be the palace of a king, Until somehow year soul is sort wrapped round everything.
Really, not as bad as I had been led to believe.
Next a nice opinion article about songwriters that applies equally to poets: Here.
The research arm of the Vrzhu empire has been quiet on the surface but roiling underbeneath with many long term projects. As part of the Vrzhu Research Bureau's sociometric studies, recent trends are being subjected [as we speak] to intensive analysis and cross-examination. These include basal meta-analysis of indicators found in the compulsion to write poetry. Here's a fragment currently undergoing exfoliation:
Complications Resulting from Ambition
What are the complications of ambition?
The most common, immediate, and short-term complications include excessive emotion, chronic and acute envy, intense anger, high expectations, and shock tactics.
Ambition can also result in ego scarring, a weakened conscience, blocked writing ability, and other damage to creativity that can make it difficult to conceive or carry out writing in the future. This latent morbidity of ambition results in long-term and sometimes permanent personality damage.
Survivor Stories Testimonies from those who have had ambitions and those who have survived them.
Some ambition activists rely upon phony claims as a way to encourage poets to choose ambition. Some extremists claim that there is a link between ambition and success, notwithstanding that there is broad consensus that ambition does not increase the risk of having your work published.
