I, like most, have mixed feelings about MJ, but his music was the soundtrack of my childhood.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
The King of Pop
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Go Cubs Go!!
We had a great time at the Cubs game on Saturday. Ramirez hit a home run to win it in extras!
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Half Acre Beer Co.
Looks like there is a new microbrewery in Chicago!!! Half Acre Beer Co. has a blog. I have always been bewildered at the lack of microbreweries in Chicago. Can't wait to try it!
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Evanston Library Peregrine Falcons
I saw a Peregrine Falcon flying around the library yesterday so it must be time to check out the falcon cam.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Monday, March 02, 2009
Quote O' The Day
"One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas," - Rush Limbaugh.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
More Bob Marley Poems please!
Here's one from Waccamaw
by David Kirby
These Arms of Mine
Sometimes interviewers want to know whatdead people I’d like to have dinner with,
but my answer to that is nobody;
I mean, I wouldn’t mind following Dante around
and see who he talks to and where he shops and what
his writing schedule is, but can you imagine
trying to have a conversation with Dante?
Yeah, he wrote the greatest poem ever,
but his world view would be totally different from mine,
plus his temper was supposed to have been terrible.
Shakespeare wouldn’t say anything, probably;
he’d be storing up bits for his next play. Whitman
would probably talk your head off, and then
you’d be bored and not like his work as much as you
used to. No, I don’t want to have dinner with anybody.
But if you’re serious about time travel, I’d like
to go to Jamaica in 1967 and be sitting at a table
and drinking a Red Stripe in the after-hours club
where Bob Marley is playing, and Otis Redding,
who is touring the island, comes in “like a god,”
according to eyewitness accounts, and Bob Marley
looks up and begins to sing “These Arms of Mine.”
Wow. I tell you, I wouldn’t be myself.
I’d be Troilus or Tristan or Lancelot,
crying my eyes out for Cressida or Isolde
or Guinevere. She’d be on the battlements
of a castle in Troy or Wales or England,
all beautiful and sad-eyed, and I’d be clanking
up a storm as I drop my lance and brush
my visor back and pound the table with my mailed fist
while all the rastas look at me and say “I and I a-go
cool out wit’ a spliff, mon!” But my arms
are burning, burning from wanting you
and wanting, wanting to hold you because
I need me somebody, somebody to treat me right,
oh, I need your woman’s loving arms to hold me tight.
And I . . . I . . . I need . . . I need your . . . I need
your tender lips, and if you would let these arms,
if you would let these arms of mine, oh, if you would
just let them hold you, oh, how grateful I would be.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Submit your poetry using the new fangled intranets!
Here's a list of links to poetry journals that have some kind of easy submission program or accept email submissions. This is mainly for me (so I can be lazy) but you all can look too.
After Hours (email)
Agni
American Poetry Journal (email)
Anti- (email)
The Baltimore Review
Barn Owl Review (email)
Bat City Review
Bateau
Barrelhouse
Black Clock (email)
Blue Earth Review
Born Magazine (email)
Boston Review
Buffalo Carp (email)
Caesura (email)
Caketrain (email)
Coconut (email)
Columbia: A Journal
Copper Nickel (email)
Crazyhorse
Dossier (email)
Diagram
Diode (email)
Drunken Boat
Ep;phany
Fence
42opus
Gargoyle
Greatcoat (email)
Gulf Stream
Hawk and Handsaw (email)
The Hollins Critic
Indiana Review
Keyhole Magazine
Kenyon Review
The Literary Review
The Lumberyard (email)
The MacGuffin (email)
Many Mountains Moving
Massachusetts Review (fee)
Meridian (Fee)
Missouri Review (Fee)
National Poetry Review (email)
Naugatuck River Review (email)
New Madrid
New Orleans Review
Ninth Letter
Pebble Lake Review (email)
Ploughshares
Poetry
Post Road Magazine (email)
A Public Space
Puerto Del Sol
Quarterly West
The Raintown Review (email)
Rattle (email)
Redactions (email)
redivider (email)
Reed Magazine
Sentence (email)
Spinning Jenny (email)
Terrain.org
Third Coast
Tiferet
Tin House
upstreet
Valparaiso Poetry Review (email)
Versal
Virginia Quarterly Review
Waccamaw
West Branch
Whiskey Island Magazine (email)
Windfall Pacific Northwest (email)
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Food
Wouldn't it be nice if all food was brought to us like this? Is there any possible way to end the mass production of foodstuff and at the same time feed everyone?
At Marlow & Daughters, all of the butchering is done in plain sight. “We do this out on the floor because we want you to see the difference,” Mr. Mylan said. “We can tell you it’s all local, and it’s all pastured, and buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, but until you take out a whole animal and put it on the table people have no idea what it means to bring really good meat into the city and break it down.”
Brooklyn's New Culinary Movement
Friday, February 20, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Quote O' the Day
"You know, the last thing that I think we're looking for at this juncture is advice on fiscal integrity or ethics from Karl Rove. I've never seen anything really like it . . . [former White House chief of staff] Andy Card saying that we were somehow denigrating the presidency because people were wearing short sleeves in the Oval Office. We're wearing short sleeves because we have to roll up our sleeves and clean up the mess that we inherited," - David Axelrod.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Longish Poem Thing
I've been working on this woodpecker poem for years now and it is all I can seem to work on. I tell myself I need to write and all I can do is write in some way toward this poem. It started in a class called Collage and Collaboration. We would do cut-ups and well, all kinds of things. I'm not really a fan of collage or collaboration in general, but it was fun to get out of my normal way of writing. So for my final project in this class I found many different quotes and bits of other poems that had something to do with extinction and interwove them with stuff I had written. I had a few poems already, but I mostly wrote from the quotes.
About this time there were reports of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas so much of the poem was geared toward the IBWO. I had always been intrigued with the IBWO and hearing that it might be back excited me. But that was about it. The class ended. I titled the poem "Notes On Extinction" and went about my business.
But then I got a call from a friend, a world class birder, who had taken a trip down the Choctawhatchee River and had seen an IBWO. Now, if it had been anyone else I would have laughed in their face, but instead I started planning a trip to the Florida panhandle. So I get down there, camp, kayak, listen, watch, camp, kayak, so on and on and out of nowhere I hear a double knock, and then another and that's it (A double-knock should be distinct to IBWO). I drove home to Chicago and have had that double-knock knocking in my skull ever since. So now I have about a thousand different thoughts for this poem and I can't seem to make it work. 
I keep thinking that maybe I need to go back, that I need to see the place again to gain some kind of perspective. I think that where I want to go with this poem is where I want to go with my poetry. I feel like if I can break through all of these ideas into something bigger I will have done something, but the chances are actually pretty slim for that happening. Which is ok with me. I enjoy writing this so it isn't like it is all for nothing.
Here are some quotes I have interspersed throughout the poem-thing.
"The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is." --Annie Dillard from Pilgrim
Saw,
Eastward and over the cypress swamp, the dawn,
Redder than meat, break;
And the large bird,
Long neck outthrust, wings crooked to scull air, moved
In a slow calligraphy, crank, flat, and black against
The color of God’s blood spilt . .
--Robert Penn Warren
". . . men came to Funk Island to kill auks solely for their feathers.
The crews built stone corrals into which they herded hapless Great Auks. Each summer, men boiled vats of water and threw the live birds in to loosen the feathers for plucking; that accomplished, the corpses were either thrown to the wayside or used as oily fuel for the fires. . ." from Hope is a Thing with Feathers
Behind the nothing & number of what
We are, the billboards’ blank amnesias,
That wake of all we were still trembles:
First nakedness & summer & that hush,
Its hymen no more than a cuticle
Of cattails bordering a marsh,
And beyond it, the hem of the darkest wood.
--Larry Levis
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” -- Yahweh
and so on and on
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