Entries tagged with poetry

Entry tags:

poetry

reading: "Insult to Injury"

This poem appears in George Bilgere's 2024 chapbook, Cheap Motels of My Youth, and also online at Rattle.com. The narrator, a man in his sixties, comes across the air gun he used to shoot at cans when he was a teen, and tries it out on "a volume of poetry, slim,/ but not slim enough,/ by a poet I never liked":

The pellet, as it happens,
made it farther than I ever did,
stopping on page sixty-two

... at which point I cackled at the savagery and decided to post about it here.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Stephen Paxton cello sonatas

Entry tags:

sonnets and cake

I don't hop on my personal Twitter accounts regularly anymore (professionally ScienceTwitter is still a thing, but the students are more visible on Instagram, and I'm working out systems to post more frequently on and direct more traffic to the department website), but I peeked in this morning, when Paisley Rekdal posted on what makes a sonnet a sonnet. Tl;dr: it's the volta...

The discussion naturally brought forward other sonnets, among them Sam Cha's Motherfuckers talking shit about American sonnets.

( story a-sprawling / cake baked and frosted )

ETA: today's rabbit hole - discovering how the pinyin for "u" with the third tone will appear with the caron to the right of the u regardless of copy-pasting versions of it with the caron directly over the u, typing in unicodes, etc. Ah, typesetting/coding. And it's good to be reminded that the u+haček in Baltic/Slavic languages is a different critter.

Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Bartoli singing Steffani's "Non plus me ligate"

Entry tags:

poetry

a fist in the air

Erica Reid's "The Raft" is a banger. Two excerpts:

....we are all drowning these days, are we not? Don't you wake up
feeling you've reached your limit, that the worst must be past,
only to discover you're at the top of a spiritual Guggenheim,
a cool, white spiral of descent still awaiting you?

... No matter who you are, your very life
is rebellion, your love is a fist in the air.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Sofia Kourtesis, "Madres"

Entry tags:

poetry

recent-ish reading (poetry)

Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees, Giraffes Can't Dance (Orchard, 1999). A rhyming picture book about Gerald, a giraffe who's mocked mercilessly for poor dancing, but finds the right music with the help of a kind cricket. (This hits a very personal note for me, as someone who was made fun of in junior high for not knowing how to dance. Which, as noted elsewhere, is no longer the case.)

Arthur Russell, At the Car Wash (Rattle, 2023). A chapbook by a New Jersey attorney and landlord, about his youth and family in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The poems that stood out to me were "New Year's Eve," about his mother ("'You guys' was an actual color of light in her eyes"); "The Heavier Stone," which begins with "My dad died eight years ago. / Our relationship has improved a lot since then"; and "Unencumbered," a long poem about what we carry:

... I've learned that emotion conducts
some memories to the left and others to the right;
that feelings brand events for keeps
and segregate archival stuff from what
is only "by the way." The more that you remember,
the more there is of life, the more of time there is;
but time gathers in the past and drags you
back by the belt;
and when I think of how much trouble
I have had with emotion, I remind myself
of a stop sign in a hurricane...

Coincidentally, Russell wrote today's "Poets Respond" feature - "Gravity in Jerusalem."

(Coincident because I'm typing this while waiting for my phone to finish recharging so I can venture out to Novelette and the book shop in hopes of wrapping up [so to speak] this year's Christmas shopping. That was the plan yesterday, but tornado sirens woke me from my nap, so.)

In Rattle's Fall 2023 issue, José A. Alcántara's "To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God" bears witness both to unbelief and faith.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Margo Price, "Strays"

Entry tags:

The WORLD KEEPS... / QUEEN OF PHYSICS / INK

A poem punched me in the face earlier tonight. I stopped by Novelette in search of a birthday gift for a friend. On opening Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), these lines in "I Have Bad News and Bad News, Which Do You Want First" hit me:

One week ago, my mother had two COVID patients.
Now, she has thirty. What? I say. When did that happen?
though when's not the question I mean.

COVID has been around long enough to show up in printed books of poetry distributed by mainstream publishers. Goddamn.

The library is about to reclaim its copy of Queen of Physics: How Wu Chien Shiung Helped Unlock the Secrets of the Atom (Union Square, 2019), a picture book with text by Teresa Robeson and illustrations by Rebecca Huang. Robeson is Chinese-Canadian-American and a mentee of Jane Yolen, none of which I knew while reading the book. I had encountered Wu's face and name via the 2021 Forever stamp in her honor, but hadn't remembered anything else about her before now. The book is well done.

The back pain and foot injury are still significantly (and literally) cramping my style, but I did venture out, masked, to a dance presentation last Saturday that included an in-progress version of Ink, choreographed by Jen-Jen Lin. I spent much of the evening pondering how I might draw the dance -- cobalt blue and yellow light stands, dancers in black and red on a black surface, the swooping white ribbon of Jen-Jen's solo -- and while I have not put pencil or marker to paper since leaving the studio, dwelling on the lines did engrave them a shade deeper in my memory.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Music: The National, "Tropic Morning News"

Entry tags:

poetry

Richard Brautigan, ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT

This book was published in 1970 by Delacorte (Seymour Lawrence imprint). The woman on the cover reminds me of tennis player Kim Clijsters, and the photo is my favorite part of the book.

Poems I bookmarked while getting ready to return the book, in their entirety:

Critical Can Opener

There is something wrong
with this poem. Can you
find it?

Lions Are Growing like Yellow Roses on the Wind

Lions are growing like yellow roses on the wind
and we turn gracefully in the medieval garden
of their roaring blossoms.
Oh, I want to turn.
Oh, I am turning.
Oh, I have turned.
Thank you.

April 7, 1969

I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this
poem.

All Secrets of Past Tense Have Just Come My Way

All secrets of past tense have just come my way,
but I still don't know what I'm going to do
next.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Hilliard Ensemble, Gesualdo madrigals

Entry tags:

harpischord,
poetry

our heart's joy reclineth

The budget-minding gods have smiled on me lately. A pair of eight-pound hand weights at a yard sale for $2. The Bärenreiter score of L'incoronazione di Poppea for $4.50.

And, a playable-enough harpsichord for $500:

This has been good fortune in several respects: I had planned a trip to Virginia in November to attend a ball and try out two other instruments (if they were still available by then), but the timing hadn't been ideal and got borked entirely by some other obligations. I am way less jittery about learning how to maintain and repair an "entry-level" instrument than I would be with something costing thousands of dollars. Collecting it made for a lovely road trip with the BYM, who was a very good sport about all the driving and hauling and has been both entertainingly curious and notably entertained (so to speak) by our new acquisition (Why is this piece in 6/2? What you just played isn't on the page, what the heck? [Adventures in figured bass!]). And Frank Hubbard's Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making is quite entertaining. I read the beginning of Ralph Kirkpatrick's foreword aloud to the BYM; he's a motorcycle mechanic, and it definitely resonated with him:

At some time in the late 1940s, on the occasion of a concert in Cambridge, I was told of two graduate students in English at Harvard who had built what I believe was a clavichord. Such reports usually arrive with an invitation to inspect a cherished and totally unplayable instrument. Having contrived politely to dodge the invitation, I never found out what the qualities of this instrument might have been.

In other news, three of my poems appear in the new issue of Tabula Rasa, with "Learning Curve" as an Editor's Choice.

Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Aaron Tveit covering "Shut Up and Dance"

Entry tags:

warm, real, and keen

[The subject line's from Thomas Hardy's "The Phantom Horsewoman."]

Shuffling to my study at 2:30 am to get a poem out of my head hasn't happened in a good long while. I'm not thrilled about the timing, but I should be able to sneak in a disco nap before I have to drive anywhere, and there are worse fates than communing with Thomas Hardy (while looking up rondeaux and triolets) and the indoor rose over a mug of valerian-camomile tea.

I do not need a Maestro Wu knife, but I am glad to know about it. (Via Grub Street's profile of Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry, in Brooklyn. The blades are "forged from scrap metal and bombshells that mainland China fired on Taiwan.")

A new word to me, via Joelle Taylor: lemniscate. She highlights it as one of the six words that summarise her.

Dwelling on this a bit: the first six words that come to mind for myself form a portrait of whom I want to be, not an accurate resume of me as I am. So I shall make myself another mug of tea and then snatch some sleep, with an eye towards the former. (Not that I'm inclined to write specifically about me in my poems these days, but amused, buff, calm, dangerous, elegant, glorious lend themselves to better arrangements of words, and sleep is a means...

In peering at the news: I am laughing immoderately at Russ Jones's characterisation of Jacob Rees-Mogg as "the harrowing outcome of a bout of hate-sex between a Dalek and a bassoon" (and, predictably, someone in the replies has already protested that that's unfair to bassoons; h/t

aunty_marion).

I have not been paying attention to Wimbledon. I do miss some of the craic, but my current headspace would rather dwell on transplanting tomato and pepper seedlings and spreading pine straw, so that's what's happening between coding, corresponding, and tumbling into lakes.

Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Jesus & Mary Chain covering "Alphabet City"

Entry tags:

poetry

say now, Tennessee

[The subject line's from Prince's "Alphabet City," which also has "Put the right letters together and make a bettеr day"...]

Look, even Spanish Duolingo's nudging me to find my pobiz (or at least po-blog) groove again:

Lin in Duolingo Spanish asks:Are you going to chat with your girlfriend about her poem?

Lin in Duolingo Spanish asks:Are you going to chat with your girlfriend about her poem?

My big brother and bro-in-law participated in #LexPoMo last month. You can see their pieces at these links:

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/eric-willis-lexpomo-2022/
(I especially love the start of TWW #2)

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/steve-meadows-2022/
("Summer Job Resume" FTW)

Tabula Rasa's publishing three of my poems soon-ish.

Going to write and read tonight after I get through garden chores and service prep (and probably some jamming with Monteverdi and Josquin). On my table: Joelle Taylor's C+nto & Othered Poems and Andrea Gibson's Take Me With You

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: The Regrettes, "Monday"

Entry tags:

Hey, I'm still alive

*looks around*
God, what an unholy mess.
*redacts rest of commentary*

The subject line's from "Monday," by The Regrettes. An upside to having a dental appointment this morning was catching mid-morning tunes at WNXP, ranging from ELO's "Showdown" and Prince doing "When You Were Mine" to Rex Orange County's "Keep It Up" and some bangers not on the playlist.

Recent reading included the 2021 Rattle Young Poets Anthology. I particularly liked Natalia Chepel's "Semantics," and her bio.

A friend sent me Alexander McCall Smith's What W.H. Auden Can Do for You a few eons ago, and this passage stood out to me a few weeks ago:

I find Auden's life absorbing because it is very unlike the life of those poets who appear to have done nothing but frequent academia. How can one write convincingly of life if one has seen only so small a slice of it? Hemingway asked that question and went off to preclude its application to him by hunting and deep-sea fishing, all fueled by copious quantities of whisky. Auden spoke in his earlier poems of the truly strong man but well understood that one did not become truly strong by doing the sort of things recommended by Hemingway. Rather, he traveled; first to Berlin, where he spent a great deal of time catching up on sexual opportunities harder to encounter in the more prudish climate of England. Berlin was all about sexual freedom, but it was also about politicization, and by the time he returned to England, his previously proclaimed views on the separation of poetry and politics had changed. Then there was the trip to Iceland he did with Louis MacNeice, the trip to Spain during the Civil War, and the journey to China to investigate the conflict with Japan. These were not the actions of a man who intended to live his life in a literary ivory tower; these were the actions of a man who was struggling with a central moral question that most of us face: to what extent should we seek private peace or follow public duty? The world is a vale of tears and always has been. We may withdraw from it and cultivate a private garden of civility and the arts--a temptation that is often strong; or we may face up to uncomfortable realities and work to bring about justice in society. Auden's life and example illustrates the struggle between these two options; significantly, it offers comfort for us whichever way our choice may lead us.

Another thing I liked about this morning's outing was being behind a car with a microscope decal and the plate "GUTGIRL."

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Gabriella Laberge covering "Goodbye My Lover"

Entry tags:

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost

Today's subject line is from the middle of Robert Frost's "October," which has these lines near the middle:

Oh hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.

The days seem so brief indeed. This poem ends with grapes, which sent me to another Frost poem -- "Wild Grapes" -- that knocked me off my feet, so to speak, when I first read it back in grade school:

I said I had the tree. It wasn't true.
The opposite was true. The tree had me.
The minute it was left with me alone
It caught me up as if I were the fish
And it the fishpole.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: James Graham, "Och Òin Mo Chailinn"

Entry tags:

O if I were Scotland I would turn my back

The subject line's from Adrian Mitchell's "After the Third Election of Thatcher," which continues:

. . . and climb on my horse and ride away
And if I were Wales I would turn my back
And climb on my horse and ride away . . .

This is in the collection Blue Coffee: Poems, 1985 - 1996, which has this opposite the table of contents:

EDUCATIONAL HEALTH WARNING

None of the work in this or any other of my books is to be used in connection with any examination whatsoever. Reduce the size of classes in State schools to twelve and I might reconsider.

Today's household misadventure was a result of following directions: the recipe said to use a food processor to pulverize ginger in boiling water. Ow. I'm irritated not only at the mess, but by the fact that I'd already experienced this mishap before, when attempting to puree soup. On a less grouchy note, I have used up the aging ginger in the fridge, and there will be ginger-orange jello soon.

The rain let up now and then a few times today. I took breaks from the Scottish show to tug at weeds, thin out mallows, and tie up stems, as one of the "Sky's the Limit" rose bushes has become a rose sprawl. It is also producing red instead of yellow flowers this year.

Also entertaining: the Christmas cactus closest to the cyclamen now has a new bud.

My recent bathtub reading included the October 2001 issue of Sculpture, which included Anne Barclay Morgan's interview of Westen Charles. The installation that interested me most was Retirement. The artist provided some background:

I tossed the magazine into recycling after I was done . . . and then dug it out a day or three later, wanting to reread the description after seeing Patty Seyburn's Ode to John Hinkles, Junior and Senior, which begins:

A man filled the thumb hole of his favorite
bowling ball with his father’s ashes,
then bowled a perfect game.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Claud, "Guard Down"

Entry tags:

music,
poetry

as radiant as a bridge

The subject line is from Abbie Huston Evans's "To E.D. in July," which Mary featured at Vary the Line a couple of years ago. I posted a new entry there a few days ago, about a 16th-century Chinese poet responding to a bitter 11th-century quatrain about idiocracy.

What is radiant, and available to you until 6 p.m. CDT on March 30: the Ailey All-Access video (10 minutes long) of Judith Jamison's A Case of You. So good. So gorgeous . . .

Watch on YouTube

And then, if you're in the mood to dwell with the song a while longer, there's Leanne Shapton's Joni Mitchell grocery list . . .

And when I meant to blog the Shapton piece, a season or two ago, this was on my mental turntable as well:

Watch on YouTube

And, as long as I'm missing Live from Here, here's what came to mind when WNXP played the original "Waltz #2" yesterday afternoon:

Watch on YouTube

Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Jean Ferrat, "Le bilan"

Entry tags:

New leaves are like eyebrows

The subject line's from a Willow Branch Song by Ch'ien Ch'ien-yi (1582 - 1664; translated by Irving Yucheng Lo). The full verse:

A crescent moon hangs on the tip of the willows,
New leaves are like eyebrows, the moon's like a hook.
Wait till the moon is round and reflected in a mirror
To lift from my eyebrows ten thousand layers of grief.

I generally try not to be around people the week of St. Patrick's Day. It's the anniversary of my mother's death, and today is the anniversary of Mama Nancy's death, plus even years outside of pandemics it's mid-term and not-quite-close-enough-to-the-end-of-the-quarter and almost everyone is so tired of winter and more than a little frayed.

Taking the whole week off wasn't feasible this year; to stay logged off on Wednesday, I worked until 4 a.m. that morning, and I'll be marking 40+ pages of proofs this weekend as well. But it did feel good and right to do some deep cleaning that afternoon, which included tossing out scraps of paper with topics I'd meant to blog about, but the moment(um) had faded (George Clooney's love of writing/receiving letters, contemporary songs about dementia/memory loss, the Megan Rapinoe/Sue Bird feature in GQ . . .).

Nashville journalist Natasha Senjanovic has an invitation for y'all:

It's been ages since a Diary Collective update, but I'm starting back up again, and want to know what people are proudest of about themselves in this incredibly difficult year. But @tedtoons turned the tables, like the emotional ninja that he is. https://t.co/fvQTpQraAn
— Natasha Senjanovic (@nsenjanovic) March 14, 2021

You can hear me talking about bao and Duolingo and reading "Climb" at https://www.bestofpossibleworlds.com/audio.

Also recently published: "Truth and Dare," at Autumn Sky.

Finally - written ten years ago, and published the following spring:

Measured Extravagance is out of print, but if you'd like a copy, send me proof of a donation ($6 or more) to NAPAWF, Tupelo Pres, or Postcards to Voters, and I'll beam a PDF to you.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Girls in Trouble, "So Many Ways We Can Hide"

Entry tags:

inventory

Some things I miss:

dancing, including waltzing and being dipped

locking in tight harmonies with other singers

trying new-to-me bars and eavesdropping on / chatting with whomever at them

spur-of-the-moment visits to Cheekwood

hell, unplanned all-the-things

printing proofs without having to assess whether putting my personal printer through it is worth the expense/time/wear-and-tear

swimming

striding around downtown in tailored dresses and heels

Asheville, Philadelphia, and the Triangle

buying just enough meat and produce for a few days

ocean kayaking being a near prospect

same with the show I was cast in more than a year ago

Some things I have been enjoying:

working through the winter in pj bottoms and sheep slippers instead of tights and boots

making cards to send to voters and others

nattering with the BYM about horse categorization, Trixie Belden, and other nonsense

getting a better handle on passé composé (and becoming legendary in the process, ha!)

trying new-to-me recipes, including Fannie Farmer's Swedish bread

needing less than one tank of gas per month

the Vagabond Tabby's Mother of Crows soap

the Christmas cacti and cyclamen, which are still producing blooms

shiny Innovation stamps

Some recent poems, at the 30/30 project:

"Tilting at Mushrooms," about Lowell labor organizer (and later Philadelphian) Sarah Bagley

"Clear," about languages I don't even remotely have a grip on

"Bounce," in memory of a choreographer and a theatre techie

"Tug," because I'm in Asheville and/or Princeton/Philadelphia most Februaries

"Twenty Seconds," prompted by a German pig-farming regulation

"Lightening Up," because Shrove Tuesday was nigh

"The Ides of February," because it was more interesting reading about Romans than trying to come up with something related to historical or festive events tied to the 15th

"As Cowards Remain, So Dumb and Grayer Gray," because I wanted to write something metrical, and Emily Dickinson's valentines are demented

Current Location: Nashville

Entry tags:

my poems,
poetry

villanelle

Wrote a couple of poems in rage last week.
Autumn Sky Poetry Daily published one of them yesterday:
https://autumnskypoetrydaily.com/2020/10/28/thrice-and-once-tis-time-tis-time-by-peg-duthie/

Speaking of villanelles, ours is a household where my spouse associates the term with Killing Eve rather than iambic hexameters. These days, when Jodie Comer is mentioned, my mind immediately goes to her marvelous reading of a Vita Sackville-West letter (h/t

rebellion_bear):

Watch on YouTube

Current Mood: I am vengeance
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Rejean Brunet's "La Maison de Glace"

Entry tags:

mooncake bunnies

brown sugar tea au lait mooncake packaging

I'm such a sucker for kawaii packaging. I hadn't planned on buying more mooncakes this season, having already splurged on two boxes and a CAAN festival feast last month. But, BUNNIES!!!

(The cakes are gorgeous, so I placated my household budget gods by designating three of the four as gifts to colleagues/family. And I subsequently received a box of four from a vegetarian friend who had purchased them before realizing that they contained lard.)

Autumn Sky Poetry Daily published my poem "Vinegar" this week.

Herding deliverables to their destinations has been grueling, and I missed dances, chats, and services this week. And an alternate service I attended for a few minutes was off-key enough that on five hours of sleep across two days, I couldn't take it. On an un-whiny note, though, it's indeed a silver lining to have multiple options for all three, and to be able to catch some of the recordings later. This week's video sessions also included London Art Week's webinar on 15th-century frames, whose presenters in turn recommended Closer to Van Eyck, which may be of interest to the medieval/Renaissance, restoration/conservation, and interactive programming nerds who happen to be reading this. Today's dance (hosted by Iowa English Country Dance) included "Hazelfern Place," which I had not encountered before, and a breakout-room craic with dancers/musicians in Atlanta (with bonus rubber chicken) and Bristol (UK).

Pounding through piles of pages (and spending hours de-snarling some tech tangles) also meant not restocking on groceries until today, so we'd run out of eggs, bacon, waffles, lettuce, and other staples by this morning. But I was able to produce Uncle Nearest jello cups and deviled eggs for a tiny outdoor gathering, and spiced banana muffins to cover a couple of breakfasts, so go me. I have more work and correspondence to whale through tonight, but first I'm going to make chili with some of the tomatoes I grew:

The green bananas are to help ripen the green fruit I'll have to bring in early because of rodents or frost. speaking of which. . .

The BYM (gestures toward scrabbling in the walls): Can you do something about that squirrel?
Me: Burgoo.
The BYM (shouts at the scrabbling): Hear that, mf? KENTUCKY IS IN THE HOUSE.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Latterday Lizards playing "Knives and Forks"

Entry tags:

I've always wanted brook trout / for breakfast

The subject line, which I typed into this window two days ago, is from Raymond Carver's "Looking for Work." It incurred a sudden jones for pan-fried fish, which I hadn't planned on cooking, and the canned tuna in the pantry wasn't going to address that, nor the tofu-fish cakes in the freezer, and moaning about bar-crowding putzes wasn't going to make me feel better, so I closed my laptop and wrote postcards instead.

Had I started this entry this morning, the subject line probably would have been "The letter A was once an inverted cow's head," from Arthur Sze's "Water Calligraphy" (username=okrablossom, there's zucchini in there as well, albeit as in a frittata rather than as frites). I just posted some notes about Sze (and other translators) over at Vary the Line.

On Saturday afternoon, I ate at a restaurant for the first time since March 13 -- a fried "chicken" sandwich with fries, washed down with a sorrel drink and ginger beer, at Vege-licious, a vegan soul food joint adjacent to Fisk University. The three of us spread out across two picnic tables behind the restaurant. (The heat index had reached 102 F by that point, so there was no competition for the seats -- there was a steady stream of takeout traffic, but only one other group of diners, at the opposite end of the large tent.) This was after a taping at Hadley Park for this event (co-sponsored by NMAAM, FUUN, and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Huntsville):

I sing alto in the quartet; it was our first time singing together as a quartet, and the soprano's first time singing one-to-a-part ever. We did well, all things considered, and Patrick is well worth listening to. Register at https://bit.ly/323IZwn to view the webinar this Saturday.

This may be the year I learn to can vegetables, as there are now forty tomato plants in place in the yard, and another dozen or so waiting for me to clear ground, and a handful of cuttings from the starters that looked too far gone to tend to further.

I have coaxed some vetch into sprouting on a formerly barren strip next to the porch. The balloon flowers are fantastic right now, the zinnias are admired by passers-by, and I'm harvesting a few peppers each night.

Current Location: Nashville
Current Music: Clean Bandit/Zara Larsson, "Symphony"

Entry tags:

poetry

"In the version where I am wrong, we keep going."

Today's subject line is from Laura Passin's poem "We the Destroyers."

Poetic Medicine published my poem "Eichengrün in Terezín, 1944" today.

I didn't learn about Eichengrün during my 2009 visit to the Czech Republic, but later, when I started reading more about pharmacy practice and research (Diarmuid Jeffreys's Aspirin: The Story of a Wonder Drug was a source of some of the details in my poem).

I was in Prague/Terezin primarily to sing, but there was much to see, including this tribute to a journalist imprisoned in Buchenwald:

And also this cage over a well, apparently to protect the water from would-be poisoners:

I did carve out some time for writing during that trip, as stated in my one of my Southern Legitimacy Statements for Dead Mule. The poem mentioned in that bio became The Language of Waiting. (If you want a copy with proper apostrophes, as opposed to the Wordpress in DM's archives, there's always my book...)

The bar where I worked at that poem:

Going through some albums and notes from that trip reminded me of how much I've forgotten about it. But I do remember my favorite building:

Current Music: Mandolin Orange, "Wolves"

Entry tags:

"Thank you for being a car"

Charmed by: picture books about mail-critters, including Angela Cronk's Monster Mail (disclosure: I'm one of the book's backers) and Marianne Dubuc's Mr. Postmouse books.

Starting the month with:

remembering how my iron works (oh hi, reset button)

not remembering how to update my website

skipping the gym (something in my back twanging hard)

not listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me (I cannot take any more takes on cults this week)

enjoying some garlic I pickled back in November (the plague has been knocking out colleagues left and right...)

not engaging further with a forum troll ("Never wrestle with a pig...")

planning a crockpot full of Slap chili for a company cookoff. (A friend gave me a spice mix called "Slap Ya Mama" which I am doctoring into my "Slap the Patriarchy" variation. Because.)

Just read: Shiv Ramdas's And Now His Lordship Is Laughing (short story; h/t Mary)

Also reading: the Wildsam field guide to Charleston

Rehearsing: Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium, which the chamber choir read on Wednesday and will perform tomorrow (February 2), along with Gwyneth Walker's Prayer of Compassion. Services are broadcast and archived on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVB2xDLhfjQnrXx-2zWmfeA/featured

Ahead:

Poetic Medicine plans to publish "Eichengrun in Terezin" later this winter

Grand Magnolia: immersive theater at Oz Nashville this June. I'm in the cast! [The subject line is what was said to me at the end of the callback audition, which included creating scenes inspired by the story of the first interracial wedding in Chattanooga -- in particular, the blockade set up by friends of the couple to prevent disruptions. Hence me channeling a Buick Skylark getting bumped into and sinking down as its tires flattened out ...]