Push-Pin Glory

Hurricanes:

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:11:00 +0000

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When I was young, a loved one said, “LB, you are a hurricane.” It was part-compliment and part-insult. You know the sort. My hair, my heart, my spirit, all of that approaching and retreating: the reasoning pinned behind the smile and joke. I was wild enough to laugh and undercut the tension, ignore the razored truth.

When I was not so young, I nearly lost my best friend to that wild mess in NOLA. Even later, I lived in that glorious city and felt her hum well after the fact. Violence punctures so much. It wasn’t the carcass districts or wards. It was the people. The rocking chair in the middle of a lot. It was the stain water and oil left. It was the lots that old men sat in, and the stories people clipped between classifieds-like post office updates.

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"Hymn to a Hurricane"
by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

For the grace of fingers that could not grasp edges,
corners, or anchors. For hands that were too wet
to bridge the chasm of inches or rope. For the wrist
and its bending digits, for the drowned infants
who floated like wood past the dark hulls
of their mothers' bodies.

For the days-old corpses of women and men
whose wheelchairs became graves. For children
who were too shocked to speak their identities;
for the ghosts of their voices that haunt the flag
to which they were taught to pledge allegiance.

For the rainbows that assembled in their waters
diseased with gasoline and blood. For the voices
whose rage thundered like thunder inside the stadium
because they refused the musky death of animals.

For the men who fired guns at helicopters that passed over
their own nearly submerged heads. Over and over the blades whirred
promises of water and bread and help while mothers and daughters,
brothers and fathers drowned, their lives devoured by neglect.

Lives gave up on the living and floated to dark, drier islands.
Torrents rose over broken levees. Dead cattle bobbed along
interstates. Highways unfurled into ribbons and graves. The President
remained on vacation. The Secretary of State shopped for shoes.

For Charmaine Neville who commandeered down Canal Street
while storefronts shattered and bodies were raped. Helpless fists pounded
the bus window like bullets. For the junkies who needed something
stronger than death or a dream to placate their addictions.
For the residents who refused to abandon the corpse of New Orleans.

For a husband who could not save his entire family
because he only had two hands. For their house split
in half by water. For his wife’s last words: you can’t hold on
and hold me. For the absence of God as she dropped his hands
and gave herself like a petal to the gulf.

For her son who understood, as he climbed onto the roof
by the help of two trembling hands, that his father, only
a man and not a god, could not save his mother's life
from something as inexplicable as water.

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How Am I Doing, Really -- Jane Yolen

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:15:00 +0000

How Am I Doing, Really?

You do not want me to answer that,
for it would mean peeling back my skin
splitting open my chest bones,
revealing a heart that still beats
though it is half the size it once was.
It would mean sawing off the top of my skull
and shaking out pieces of my brain
which hardly functions right, left
are memories, the latest ones first,
like daguerreotypes nestled in a velvet lining,
you dead on the bed, your head to one side,
mouth open, an image that is with me always.

How am I doing, really? Really well
on the outside, so that everyone seeing me
murmurs, "So brave, so astonishing,"
while inside I am climbing onto that last bed,
spooning my body around yours,
and dying even more slowly than you did.

--Jane Yolen

Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/balladsofmirth/

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:53:00 +0000

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I'm pinning things on Pinterest: addicting. Clickity Click: http://pinterest.com/balladsofmirth/

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It just sneaks up on you, those carefully controlled experiences, &

they explode on you so that you've got a whole lot of beauty and grit on your heart and mind.

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I accidentally ate the whole thing

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:57:00 +0000

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My weekends in Boston are full. I saw the 13- and 14-year olds I mentor thrive in our leadership program, visited with a former staff member & snarked about his stoop kid life – Hey Arnold reference FTW – celebrated a friend’s birthday, ran around in the snow – lazy Halloween costume due to sickness: Freudian Slip – had an awkward-funny cab ride with my best friend & roommate, visited Pawtucket, played spoons & managed only to bruise my thumb (the usual tackling/table-turning did not happen) & more. I’m looking forward to Monday – maybe the only person in the world who is – because I have nothing planned aside from working from home.

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From Mental Floss’s “14 More Words without Englsh Equivalents.”

1. Shemomedjamo (Georgian)
You know when you’re really full, but your meal is just so delicious, you can’t stop eating it? The Georgians feel your pain. This word means, “I accidentally ate the whole thing.”

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There is light in darkness, you just have to find it.

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:10:00 +0000

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“There is light in darkness, you just have to find it.”

-- bell hooks

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Eve's Sestina for Adam -- Lucy Anderton

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:55:00 +0000

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Eve's Sestina for Adam

Lucy Anderton

I wanted the blood from the lip you'd bite
open for me. I wanted the soft back
of your knee that glowed like an otter's eye,
the flag of hair you'd throw out through the wild
sky, singing praises to Him through the air.
Clearly put, I was not born to be one

more pretty poppy in that garden. One
more handful of fruit just for you to bite,
a patch of dirt where you could plant your heirs.
I was a song you had to put your back
into. The first born fairy. Artless, wild
and bare. And I wanted more than my eye

Click for the Rest of the Poem

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The Pianist

Artist = Lim Heng Swee

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Love is an action -- bell hooks

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 04:20:00 +0000

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Love is an action.

-- bell hooks

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siken's reckless prayer

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 17:34:00 +0000

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"you've discovered something you

don't even have a name for."

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the soil turns with its vocabulary

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 18:42:00 +0000

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Postscript

It’s not words we need tonight, but the antidote
to what has already been said. Yes, there’s a man
sitting lakeside in an idling car. Yes, there’s
a slug crossing a road in the rain, and a drugstore
where people sway like tropical leaves—in a wind
that thinks of antibacterial soap and condoms,
a two liter of coke. Yes, my father is dying
and the soil turns with its vocabulary
of beetles, its glistening, diamond vowels. Yes,
any face is a temporary face, and God knows
enough about when the mangoes must turn red,
when the garbage man must wake in the dark.
Here. There. A bowl left out in the rain. We fill it
with so many thoughts. As if afraid to merely live
in love. As if even this fear belonged to us.

Sam Taylor

via Grammatolatry

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Poetry & Texting -- Carol Ann Duffy

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:06:00 +0000

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"The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text," says Carol Ann Duffy. "It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form."

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heavenly body speaks for

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 22:02:00 +0000

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from Alabama Inmate Notes | Richard Hamilton

The job is taxing clanking on the bars we all agree we need some new work boots and yet and more over we need a new outlook Sir it is one hundred degrees in here and the air is obscene as well as our knees hurt where our heavenly body speaks to us and nothing Sir to scratch our dreams on the wall with and there Sir is another rape another fucking suicide goes underreported and guards scream bust your head if you buck and some of us live Sir in San Francisco where the smells are all kind brown and blue musk that in our dreams fuses railroad a chain of events Sir that lead here and suppose us dead and deserving we all agree we have families we hurt in real life we step out of line we talk shit eat watermelon on Independence Day as well as find our handcuffs birdcalls women or booze until the sun goes down our feet bar after bar Sir as the clanking renews itself as we take lint from the laundry room to cot with us we all agree as we ink we blot out we meld we murder we assemble for chow with each clanking bar our heavenly body speaks of.

***Click to Read the Rest of the Poem***

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We’re human beings, my son, almost birds, public heroes and secrets

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:56:00 +0000

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GODZILLA IN MEXICO

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You’d just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid.
When it left, death didn’t even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

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Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:31:00 +0000

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Oh, Jeanette Winterson. I remember reading three or four of her books for a class I took in college: "How Writing Is Written." Eye-opening, really: her perspective or vision is sharp and slightly off-kilter. There's brilliance there: contained but not, as she writes, containable.

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All I Want Is You

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 06:38:00 +0000

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Every spot I've laid my head has been temporary -- I've known this. Every year, I pack my things -- sometimes neat and tight in a suitcase & sometimes half-hazard and without organization. I am constantly moving. At camp, I only half-unpack. In New Orleans, I unpacked but then left half of my things in boxes because I knew summer would come.

This year, I move in with my best friend of 16 years. We're headed to Brighton, and if it goes well, there's the possibility that it could be more than a year. I may sublet the place during the summer but could still leave things. I might work on the business of building a life.

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I bumped this song all summer.

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FFFFOUND!

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:48:00 +0000

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Does anyone have a FFFFound Invite?

I've been in love with the website for SO long & would love to register....

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Never Give Up

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:09:00 +0000

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Are you lurking? Are you reading?

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Flickr
via

Observando

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Day 1 of Session 3 at Camp: rain from the moment we wake. It pours and pours. My hair's frizzing, my staff t-shirt is drenched, and I am doing my best to smile at each parent and child I greet.

We swim every single day, and there was hesitation about what to do on this first day. We always swim. We always conduct swim tests.

I'm old-school. I was raised with the notion, "camp will always run." My role models pushed me when I needed to be pushed. They threw my cautious 19-year-old self into the deep-end & it worked because I knew they'd save me if I drowned. It worked because I respected them enough and cared for the kids to make just about anything work.

My poor staff: we told them all to come down dressed to swim. The swim tests would happen. Camp would run.

I knew I had an amazing staff all summer -- hard-working, positive, and loyal -- but they proved it to me on days when things were hard but we lifted one another up. That Free Swim was one of my favorites of the summer. People dove into the water -- staff, kids, teens. We literally danced in the rain. From Day 1, you could feel that sense of family. We are a never-ending web of tight knots.

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Avoid Dilution

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 05:31:00 +0000

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"Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.” -- Annie Dillard

When I was in middle and high school, I often felt like I had to hide the fire inside of me. Intellectual curiosity, sadly, didn't seem a priority of my peers. To express love or to ask for a better world wasn't the norm. I spent too many idle years working retail jobs in a town run dry. I spent too many hours in a high school where students sat in lines and listened to teachers. I spent too many hours hiding my interests.

I could have gone to a State school, seen high school folks, & become a high school English teacher.
I could have gone to community college and saved SO MUCH MONEY -- hello, free ride.
I could have stayed in New York.

Instead, I stumbled my way to a small liberal arts school in Roanoke, Virginia: Hollins University.

The first year was overwhelming: surrounded with intelligent and creative women. I swear, that dining hall was as much a classroom as any other. Harder, too, because friends will push you to the edge of the cliff and ask you the toughest questions.

Hollins taught me many important lessons. One of the most important was to claim my passions, to feel deeply and understand why, and to act.

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Annie Dillard: A Good Life

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:33:00 +0000

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“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.” -- Annie Dillard

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Laura Kasischke & Tunnels Galore

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 02:40:00 +0000

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Круг

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Mushrooms

Like silent naked monks huddled
around an old tree stump, having
spun themselves in the night
out of thought and nothingness—

And God so pleased with their silence
He grants them teeth and tongues.

Like us.

How long have you been gone?
A child’s hot tears on my bare arms.

-- Laura Kasischke

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Review of Skirt Full of Black -- Sun Yung Shin

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Skirt Full of BlackSun Yung Shin

What happens in a world where language fails us? Sun Yung Shin’s poetry collection, Skirt Full of Black, fills in the gaps between language and between the past and present by crafting poems that dip from many pots. Shin’s eye is a critical one: This poet is definitely conscious of the social ramifications of not only her poems but also of different cultures’ practices, the news, traditions, and faerie tales. The poems in this collection are like a collage: there are different voices, material, and subject matter. What unites the pieces of these poems is their critical gaze: nothing escape’s this poet’s eye. The world seems open for the taking and for examination.

From the beginning, Shin’s intentions are loud and clear: the first poem, “Macro-Altaic,” takes on assimilation and “the color of death, Western clothing.” This poem maps the collection’s journey, and its attempts to make sense of what is lost between languages and what is lost at the cost of assimilation. In this first poem, Shin writes: “Date on the red book from Korea, year prior to birth, folk tales, year of gestation, folk tales, year a maternal body with double interior.” Time is marked in Korea’s color – red – and the past is referenced, as is the feminine and its misrepresentation. Shin’s work in this collection is focused around the “double interior” of language: Through a collage of perspective, the poems address what is missing, neglected, and/or oppressed.

And yet, with all the differences between English and Korean, there are still boundaries. In the collection’s first poem, Shin addresses this: “…not easy to draw boundaries in any language between what is a word and what is not a word and Korean is no exception.” What is and what is not are two dichotomies that exist in each language. This idea aligns to what is implied about each culture’s treatment of women: they are told what they can and can not be. She writes in “Flower I, Stamen and Pollen”:

Even the knot of her shadow reckoned him starlet, sparrow, hummingbird.

Her youngest older brother. His devotion was positively medieval.
Sanctified. Gilt. He had made a deaf rope of roots and her mute mouth

stained abundant with the prophecy of berries. A replica of paradise. Their

mother’s womb he scraped clean. Red-empty-red. Her favorite lineage.

Women are protected only to be used as a vessel, for their womb. The poem is as gruesome in its imagery as Grimm faerie tales. However, instead of the old faerie tales that were used to warn women against leaving or disobeying their parents or husbands, this faerie tale is a feminist response to a life of oppression, a life of control.

The major accomplishment of this poetry collection is the collection’s fifth section, “Vestibulary.” Here, Shin takes the Korean language (hangul and the old Romanization) and creates poems inspired by the traditional meanings, sounds, and associations of this language. Language is notoriously biased, notoriously linked to the patriarchy (historically made for men by men), but Shin takes this language on and gives each character, a story, a new life.

Women and their ethnicity are recurring subject matters: Shin gives women their voices and throws a spotlight on the generalizations of ethnic groups. Sometimes these spotlights seem to drown out their subjects. Like someone screaming from a rooftop, the reader can sometimes nod their head with frustration and mouth, “I get it; I get it.” Shin is at her best when she attacks subjects in a creative fashion and through metaphor.

It is in this section that Shin that her politics and poetics learn how to work off of one another make sweet music together. It is here where the collection’s ideas come together and coalesce. “Vestibulary” is a true accomplishment: part dictionary, part critique, part association, and a blending of perspective and culture, this piece of the collection is strong because it touches on many things at once. Here, Korean culture can meet Western culture. Here, what can not be explained by one language can be explained through their combination.

The pieces of “Vestibulary” touch not only on the literally meaning of the Korean language but also its look. Many of the poems take on the shape or allude to the shape of the Korean characters. For example, “kiyek,” is a poem based on a Korean character that looks very much like an upside-down “L” (and looks something like this: ┐). Here, Shin writes:

stained raw your lover’s knee,

precipice;

scythe, raw grain;

late, wet harvest;

half-chair in silhouette.

The poem’s language alludes not only to Korean culture and the tug-of-war relationship between English and Korean (i.e. “the half-chair in silhouette”), but the poem’s spacing and line-length links strongly to the character’s look: its shape and the thickness of its line.
Forever in limbo, Shin makes sense of the world through purposeful collision. English and Korean come together without losing their individuality. That’s not to say that this collection doesn’t explore the multitude of issues involved when two cultures not only compete for standing but oppress its members. The poems in this piece are loud with their discussion of

What one language can express, another can not, and Shin asks for more language, another language to speak for things that are unspeakable. In “Half the Business,” she writes:

We should all have two languages, one of our childhood, and one of our
deathbed.
God, let those two be the same.
No more songs about bureaucrats, armies, a confetti of human hair.

Shin asks for a language that can shrug off the confines of the patriarchy, a history of misogyny. Additionally, Shin seems tired of what has been said again and again in the same languages. The poem continues with “Every woman a scholar dissecting her own body, eating her own words / until the end of words.” Here, language again is linked to the oppression of women. To study language, to be scholar, one must “eat her own words,” one must see the limits of language. This love-hate relationship is one that is key to the poems in this collection, key to Shin’s plight. A poet may love language, but as a woman, language is as oppressive as anything else in the world. As someone balancing two languages – Korean and English – the struggle is even more complex.

Shin’s poetry collection is a revolving door of perspective. Like a skilled juggler, Shin flips the coins again and again to peer in on the reflections, the differences and the similarities. What is a poet to do when language fails her gender, her ethnicity? This poet takes the languages that have failed in the past and combines them. The resulting collage of perspective and language tackles its subject matter head on. Though the subject matter of these poems is loud and ablaze with a critical eye, the poems do not lack in sound play or form. Shin marries her poetics and politics, and the resulting poems will challenge a reader’s ear and assumptions. Language may have its limitations or its issues redemption is possible.

Review = Galatea Resurrects

Donate to Crossroads for Kids!

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 21:23:00 +0000

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It would mean the world to me if you all would donate to Crossroads for Kids. We're riding in the Rodman Ride -- kids, teens, and staff alike -- and all money we raise will be matched by the Rodman Ride.

I'm also selling raffle tickets for $10. Prizes include: 2 Pairs of Boston Bruins, New England Patriots, Boston Red Sox, and Boston Celtics tickets. If you'd like one, shoot me an email! :)

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Review of Gold Star Road -- Richard Hoffman

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:44:00 +0000

Gold Star Road

Richard Hoffman

Barrow Street Press

The poems in Richard Hoffman’s poetry collection, Gold Star Road, run the a gauntlet of emotions: there’s everything from tender to angry to those poems that seem to question and mourn what has been lost or what could be lost. Hoffman’s politics are pinned to his poems like medallions but unlike many political poets who jab the point until it’s bloody and hard to see, Hoffman’s work is full of rantings and politicking but the human experiences affected by it all. Winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, the book’s title refers to streets found throughout the world, streets with the greatest amount of combat fatalities The poems in this book are not only a space to talk about such tragedies but to honor the people ticked off as numbers, those who aren’t’ always named.

Hoffman is no bleeding heart liberal. Instead, he approaches the end of civilizations with an honesty that sometimes seems rare in poetry. The matter-of-fact voice of these poems examines a world where people lack not only water and other necessities but also love and compassion.

One of the more moving poems in the collection hits on the media’s presentation of war, the romanticization of violence. In “Broadcast,” a “one-legged man in the caftan said, / in his own tongue, that after the war, / the armies left their landmines in the fields. / The translator told the camera that the / enemy, retreating, had mined the roads.”

The people with the most wisdom are not those lecturing or those parading down avenues with their newspapers tucked under their arms. Instead, the everyday person is celebrated as the wisest. These poems are a tribute to the blue collar worker. For example, in “Summer Job,” Hoffman writes:

“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss

once told me, “ is that they don’t know nothing

till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”

he said, “ he gets to middle age;--and by the way,

he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until

he’s forty, forty-five, and then give him five

more years till that craziness peters out, and now

he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains

to himself that life is made of time, that time

is what’s all about. Aha! he says. And then

he either blows his brains out, gets religion,

or settles down to some major-league depression.

Make yourself useful. Hand me that three –eights

torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”

Here, both the summer job’s boss and the poet tackle navel gazing – the biggest complaint of intellectuals and politicians – and gets to work schooling the “you” in the poem. Life is boiled down to a list of choices and to the effects of those choices. Hoffman isn’t naïve enough to believe the choices are clear-cut, but he’s a brilliant enough poet to know that life’s truest lessons are often tucked where you least expect them.

When dealing with politics, it’s normal to have a few missteps. After all, the points are often blunt and bloody and to the informed reader, they can seem too loud for the moments they circle. For example, in, “Bosnia Aftermath,” Hoffman writes that “…a man or woman / only knows the story / hope tells, or fear, and often chooses wrong.” The statement seems to blunt for a poet of this caliber, too obvious.

The poem’s most accomplished moments are those that are sly, where the politics are written in the margins of a particularly beautiful book. In the title poem, Hoffman’s line breaks layer the poem the politics and tragedies that drive the book. For example, near the end of the poem, he talks about how “The sun is up and the newspaper lies / folded on the table….” This break says more than what the most blatant of narratives could say: that what we know as fact could just as well be fiction.

The end of the title poems call for hope. Hoffman writes: “chicken wire. Some begged: Please / give us something to say we believe / so we can go about our business.” The reader will find they yearn as much as the poet for truth, for the golden light at the end of the tunnel. The poems are moving, especially those that zero in on some of the most unlikely of heroes: the first objector of the Iraq war – a man who would be later convicted of desertion – and the doorman who opens door after door for the rich. Hoffman gives us hope that we can “mend our selfish lives” while traveling these gold stars of roads.

Book Lover T-shirt -- Threadless

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 04:13:00 +0000

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WANT THIS BOOK LOVER T-SHIRT

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Moira Egan, Smoke

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 22:09:00 +0000

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““If you were smoke,” he said, “you’d be the smoke
that rages from a forest fire, close
and wild and dangerous.” Here ends the quote,
but not the source of it, and me morose
because I’ve always tried to be the smoke
that billows gentle in the temple, joss
or sandalwood, the incense that’s the yoke
to help us get to god. For me, the clos-
est feeling to religion is the smoke
my body gives off when it gets too close
to someone else. And right back to the joke:
I torch the temple by mistake, confess
my smoking gun is still my one desire
for one who’ll feed the flames and love my fire.”

-- Moira Egan, Smoke
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Sound of the Sea -- Threadless

noreply@blogger.com (LBeezee) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:11:00 +0000

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"Sounds of the Sea"

Cutest T-shirt from Threadless!

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