Rehearsals for Retirement?

Well, blog, I’m trying to turn over a new leaf and post more often, even at the risk of becoming inane and boring. Well, more inane and boring, anyway. The summer has been a pretty good one so far. This week my wife and I are “childless”- our youngest is off to Boy Scout camp again and our second-youngest, who has been back home for the summer, is off on a cross-country road trip. So the missus and I planned a two-night getaway at a B&B in Lancaster County, PA. Unfortunately, the owner called us the night before and told us he had air-conditioning problems, so we decided to cancel our plans and spend our three days off at home. It was wonderful, kind of a “rehearsal for retirement” – doing things at an unhurried pace, going out to dinner, sleeping in, puttering around, shopping, even setting up a new bed for ourselves (wink, wink). I could get used to this. No bingo or bus trips yet, though.

Good news in poetry: My poem, “Old Man at Bedtime”, has been nominated for a Best of the Net Award by the online journal Thick with Conviction. It’s one of two poems I’ve written about my late father-in-law, and both have earned me some accolades. I think he’s smiling down on me.

Baseball: How ‘bout them Phillies? Seven games ahead in first place, last time I checked. Let’s hope they can keep the lead and make the playoffs again – and dare I say it – even the World Series, for the second year in a row. (Pardon my skepticism, but as a long-time Phillies fan I’m old enough to remember their colossal collapse of 1964.) Their hitting – especially Rollins – is picking up again after a bit of a slump, and they have a surplus of good starting pitchers all of a sudden. Getting Cliff Lee was a major coup, and that kid Happ is looking like a Rookie of the Year candidate – what a gem he pitched the other night! GM Amaro even suggested they may go to a six-man rotation. It’s a pleasant dilemma when you have to decide whether to keep Jamie Moyer or Pedro Martinez in the rotation. The only weak link is the bullpen – Brad Lidge this year seems like a shadow of his former self.

Music: I just realized that I never posted anything about the XPoNential Music Festival, the annual event I attended about two weeks ago at Wiggins Park in Camden. It’s a 3-day affair, but I went on Saturday (all by myself, it turns out). A bit hot, but a fine day for music. Steve Wynn and Pete Yorn rocked, local bands East Hundred and Illinois were excellent, John Gorka was great as always, The Bacon Brothers were surprisingly good, Yeasayer (see below) were a revelation, local gal Sharon Little was sexy and bluesy, They Might Be Giants were quirky and fun as expected, and The Hold Steady were awesome and rockin’ as expected, till rain shortened their set.

I just downloaded two albums that I’m enjoying:

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by Phoenix – This French band is upbeat, breezy and poppy with a splash of electronica, and the album kicks off with two of the best songs of the year, “Lisztomania” and “1901”. It’s already making a bunch of best-of-the-year lists, and will probably make mine as well.

2. All Hour Cymbals by Yeasayer – I saw these guys at the XPoNential Music Festival this year, and they were impressive, with an eclectic, progressive mix of rock and world music styles, and tight harmonies. This is their debut album from last year, and it too got a lot of favorable reviews. The music is almost impossible to describe, so all I can say is give it a listen.

Poem of the Week: Here’s a summer poem with a slightly erotic edge that appeared previously in Thick with Conviction:

Sultry

On the weekend, you were a steady rain.

Yesterday, when you were mostly cloudy,

it was hard to read your sky.

But today you’re bright sunshine and warm

with a light southerly breeze

and a high in the upper 80’s.

Everything blooms around you

and fragrances follow your path.

I want to meet you on the veranda

as lemonade glasses sweat the afternoon.

Let’s generate a strong Bermuda high.

Tonight, let’s make a little thunder in the bedroom,

and glisten afterward, twisted in dampened sheets.

It’s not your heat, baby,

it’s your humidity.

Readings and Holy Tango II

It’s been an active summer poetry-wise for me. Not only am I beating the drum for my new chapbook (and in case you’ve forgotten, it’s called Breathing Out and is available from Finishing Line Press), but I’ve already done three readings in the past month or so, which for me is pretty busy. “Real life” keeps me from getting out to read more often, which would be weekly if I had a chance. As I mentioned before, my poem “Record Store” was published in the new issue of Philadelphia Poets, and I attended both of the book launch parties. The South Philly reading was great, but the one at Robin’s Bookstore in Center City last night was even better. Despite a stormy evening, there was a very good turnout. I was one of a baker’s dozen of featured poets reading, so I only got to read three of my poems, but they got a big, enthusiastic response, and hopefully I sold a couple of books as well. It was an excellent evening of poetry all around. Kudos to editor Rosemary Cappello for putting together both events, and for an awesome journal.
I also read with Kendall Bell for the Burlington County Poets on the 23rd, and that went very well too. Thanks to Sheila McDonald, Adele Bourne and the rest of the BC Poets for inviting us.

Music: Just got the new albums by Moby (Wait for Me) and Son Volt (American Central Dust). Moby’s album is better than anything he’s done since his 1999 classic, Play. Musically it’s not as varied or adventurous, but the man still knows how to write some gorgeous, cinematic themes. Son Volt’s last effort, The Search, was a bit disappointing after their terrific 2006 release Okemah and the Melody of Riot, but this new one is a solid effort, if a bit mellower than the last two albums.

Poem of the Week: It feels good to say that again. Here is another offering inspired by Francis Heaney’s very funny collection, Holy Tango of Literature. Again, the premise is to take a famous poet’s name and anagram it into a word or phrase that can be a title, then write a poem with that title in the style of that poet. So here’s a poet that everyone knows well:


Dress Us
by Dr. Seuss

“We’re going next week to the Burbletown Ball,”
Said Louie and Zooie McGrundle-O’Grall.
“We need something fancy to catch all their eyes,
So do you have something that’s nice in our size?”
“Oh sure,” said the salesman, a Mr. Galoot,
“Here’s something for you sir, a wonderful suit!
It’s made from the finest Bodinka-cat hide,
with purplish stripes and green lining inside.”
“But the Bodinka-cat’s such a cute little varmint,”
said Louie, “I never would put on this garment.”
“Okay,” said Galoot, “Here’s something for madam,
a red gown spun by the silkworms of Zhaddam.”
“But the silkworms,” said Zooey, “work all day and night,
without any lunch break – I’ve heard of their plight!”
“All right!” huffed Galoot, “I don’t mean to pester,
But look at this rack – it’s all polyester!”
“Oh no, that’s from oil,” Louie said with disgust,
“Non-renewable resource – we must save it – we must!”
“I can’t help you,” Galoot sneered. “You’re both on a mission,
“So now please excuse me – I work on commission!”
So Mr. and Mrs. McGrundle-O’Grall
Finally went to the Burbletown Ball.
They never did really intend be rude,
But they shocked everyone when they came in the nude!

Holy Tango of Literature

I had to share this. The other day I was listening to an audiobook of an American humor collection called Mirth of a Nation, which contained a piece by Francis Heaney consisting of several very funny poetry parodies. Mr. Heaney’s premise is to take the name of a famous poet, anagram his or her name into a word or group of words that could be the title of a poem, then write a poem on that subject in the style of that poet, perhaps parodying one of their more famous poems. Thus, Emily Dickinson becomes “Skinny Domicile”, and T.S. Eliot becomes “Toilets”: “Let us go, then, to the john…” He has collected these poems, and also some short plays by playwrights such as Harold Pinter (“Horrid Planet”), in a book entitled Holy Tango of Literature. (“Holy Tango” is an anagram of “anthology”.) You can find examples from his book here: http://www.yarnivore.com/francis/Holy_Tango.htm

I’ve been intrigued by anagrams in poetry lately, having read Paul Pereira’s collection What’s Written on the Body, which contains a section of poems with anagrams. Those inspired me to write a recent poem entitled “Journal Evening (Loving Near June)”. Mr. Heaney now has inspired me to try my hand at “poet anagram” piece. I selected a favorite poet, Robert Hayden, and my favorite poem of his, “Those Winter Sundays”, as the subject of my parody, even though I parodied this same poem just a few months ago. It turns out Mr. Hayden’s name produces one of the most perfect poet anagrams I’ve seen so far:


The Errand Boy
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too the grocery boy came early
in his supermarket clothes, dressed for the cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from bagging at checkout #4, made
my cupboards full. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear his knocking, yelling,
“Mr. Hayden, are ya home?” he’d call –
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the grocery bill for my house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven through the cold
and scuffed up his shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know,
about how much I should tip him?


Here's another one - it's not a parody of any particular Billy Collins poem, just his style, which, by the way, I admire greatly. I did lift the apple image from one of his poems, though:

Bly’s Ill, Colin
by Billy Collins

It’s not exactly the kind of anagram I would want.
After all, Robert Hayden got “The Errand Boy”,
and T.S. Eliot got “Toilets”. But my name anagrams
into a minimal rearrangement of letters,
barely disguising the source. It must be all those L’s,
a plethora of alliteration that reduces its flexibility,
though it keeps the tongue busy. Well, it will have to do.
I could write something about my friend Robert Bly
and give him some rare disease, like yaws or pellagra,
or maybe Creutzfeldt-Jakob Syndrome.
I could have famous visitors pay their respects,
and I would be the doorman, running interference:
“Yes, Anjelica, I think he’d like to see you now.”
“Sorry, Colin – I mean General Powell – he’s sleeping.”
But that would be silly. Instead, I should just scrap
the title and the whole concept, and write about the apple
which has been on my bedroom floor for three days,
one lone bite in its side, spinning with the rest of my world
around a fat, indolent sun.

Upcoming Readings

I know I've been criminally underusing this blog, but I can't believe I missed the opportunity to promote two upcoming readings:

Thursday July 23 - reading with Kendall Bell (my Quick and Dirty colleague, also the co-editor of Chantarelle's Notebook and publisher of Maverick Duck Press) for the Burlington County Poets, at Burlington County Library, 5 Pioneer Blvd., Westampton NJ, 7-9 p.m.

Wednesday, July 29- reading (with several other poets) at the Philadelphia Poets Vol. 15 Book Launch, 7:00 p.m., Robin’s Books and Moonstone Art Center, 110A S. 13th Street, Philadelphia.

Extra: The Book is Out!

Just got word that my chapbook, "Breathing Out" is now on the Finishing Line Press website. If you're interested, now is the time to order a copy, as advance sales help me to get to a full first printing. Click the link above, then click the "New and Forthcoming Titles" button and scroll down to my name. You can pay by check or credit card. Thanks for your support!

Summertime, Summertime, Sum-sum-summertime...

Anyone remember that old song? It's been an amazingly temperate, and until recently, wet summer so far, and our highlight to this point has been our trip to the Myrtle Beach area - our first visit. We actually stayed in Surfside Beach, just to the south and not quite as congested, though still quite busy. Our timeshare resort was set back in a wooded area, though, and was very nice with lots of amenities including a pool with a "lazy river". We only actually spent one day on the beach (the ocean was delightfully warm), but we found more than enough to do elsewhere, like amusement and water parks, mini-golf, seafood buffet, and activities onsite at the resort. The best place, though, was Brookgreen Gardens, about 1/2 hour south of MB. It's a huge 9000-acre estate which contains beautiful gardens and a wide array of sculptures, mostly in a neo-classic style, all over the grounds. Anna Huntington, who was a sculptor of some renown herself, owned the estate with husband Archer. There is also a zoo with domesticated and wild animals, including foxes, alligators, otters, eagles and others. The weather was near-perfect that week - hot but dry, and no rain in our area the whole time. We'll be back again.
Road trip tip: We discovered the joys of audiobooks on this trip, which is 10 to 11 hours each way by car. We popped them into our CD player and they really helped pass the time. We listened to Marley and Me on the way down, and Bill Bryson's memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, on the way back.

The other highlight of the trip, especially for our youngest son, was reuniting with his half-brothers whom he hadn't seen for about eight years. They both live in South Carolina, and we had a very nice evening with them over dinner in Georgetown.

Poetry: I finally got word from Finishing Line Press that advance sales of my chapbook, Breathing Out, will begin on their website on July 17, through August 28. If you are interested in buying my book, the best thing for me would be to pre-order it online, as these sales will determine whether it goes to a full first printing. Click here for more information.

I've been rather frustrated because I have missed two of the three summer readings hosted by my group, The Quick and Dirty Poets, the last one on July 10th featuring our friend and former member Rachel Bunting. She did make a surprise visit to our group meeting the night before, though, so it was good to see her again. Our next reading features poet Lynn Levin on August 9. Click the link to the right for more information.

Still not producing as much new poetry as I would like, though I'm still doing the weekly Poetic Asides prompts. One of my recent ones was featured a few days later as Pathetic.org's "Poem of the Day". I will include it below.

I've been enjoying Paul Pereira's poetry colleection What's Written on the Body, which includes a section called "Anagrammer", a series of very clever poems that contain a number of anagrams and other wordplay. They inspired me to try one out myself, and I was rather pleased with the results.

Music: Well, the year is half over, and here are my ten favorite albums of 2009 as of today (in alphabetical order:

Animal Colective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Bell X1 - Blue Lights on the Runway
Death Cab for Cutie - The Open Door EP
Decemberists - Hazards of Love
Iron and Wine - Around the Well
Black Joe Lewis the Honeybears - Tell 'em What Your Name Is!
Melody Gardot - My One and Only Thrill
Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
Various Artists - Dark Was the Night
White Rabbits - It's Frightening

I haven't heard the new albums by Moby and Son Volt in their entirety yet, but when I do, I suspect they could crack my top 10.

Poem of the Month: Someday I'll get back to a poem a week, but for now this will do. This is the poem I wrote in response to the prompt, "Write a poem with a title that begins, 'Nobody's Worth...'".

Nobody’s Worth More than $4.50

It’s that exercise they do every so often,
where they break the human body down
to its composite elements and figure out
how much they’re worth in today’s market.

So nobody is literally worth their weight in gold.
And certainly nobody’s worth ten million a year
no matter what team they play on,
no matter what corporation they head.

And I’m sorry, but nobody is really worth billions,
not a sultan or a founder of some electronics empire.
It’s just stuff, and they’re still just
pathetic bags of chemicals.

To some, life is cheap, and nobody is worth anything.
This is where suffering comes in.
But I say all that’s irrelevant. We are priceless,
no matter which way you take us apart.

Shame, Shame...

...on me for not keeping up this blog. My son, who is becoming an estimable poet in his own right and has his own poetry blog, has shamed me into writing tonight. I have no right to whine about lack of readership if I'm not posting more than once a month at most. So I plan to try to put something up at least weekly from now on. I'll try to keep it from getting too inane.

I did in fact finish the Poem-a-Day Challenge run by Robert Brewer on the Poetic Asides blog, which was a huge success with over 25,000 poems entered over the 30 days. The judges will select the 50 best for an e-book publication in July. I even volunteered to help out by reviewing one day's worth of poems (about 800!) and selecting what I thought were the the 50 best for that day, then I sent them off to Robert and Tammy Brewer to cut the list down to five. Those five then go to a "celebrity" judge (one for each day) who selects the best one for that day. Robert and Tammy then select 20 more of their favorites, rounding out the 50 winners.

It's looking like a busy summer poetically for me. Monday night I was featured reader at Barnes and Noble in Marlton, NJ, sponsored by the poetry group there of which I am a long-time member. Next week I am one of the readers for the journal launch of the new issue of Philadelphia Poets (who are publishing my poem, "Record Store"), and in July my friend Kendall Bell and I are featured readers for the Burlington County Poets. Our own group, Quick and Dirty Poets, has our summer series already set with readings in June, July and August. My next-door neighbor has asked me to give a talk on poetry and publication with her writing group soon, and I hope by the end of the summer I will hear something on my chapbook from Finishing Line Press. I've also sent some formal poetry out to a print journal, The Lyric.

I feel badly that I haven't enrolled in any workshops or conferences this year. The Princeton Festival was great, but it didn't offer opportunities for workshop and critique. I skipped the Philadelphia Writers Conference, who have been so good to me these last few years, and I again missed out on the West Chester Poetry Conference, which my friend Anna has attended and raves about. There's also the Rutgers Summer Writing Conference, which a week of commitment (and time off work) and not something I wasn't quite ready for yet. Oh well, there's always next year.

Music: I really like the new album by White Rabbits, It's Frightening. They sound a bit like Spoon, so it's not just coincidence that Britt Daniel of Spoon produced it. Two drummers and a piano up front make it as very percussive and catchy band. Their leadoff track, "Percussion Gun", is one of the most addictive songs of the year - I can't get it out of my brain!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTnZOXs3gOo

I still can't figure how to attach a video directly to the blog. Can someone offer a little tech advice?

Poem of the Month:

National Record Store Day was in April - its purpose is to convince folks to patronize their friendly neighborhood independent record store, a dying breed. Here's a poem I wrote right around the last Record Store celebration in April 2008. This is the poem that will be featured in the new issue of Philadelphia Poets:

Record Store

Brick-and-mortar dinosaur,

endangered species, whose habitat

is encroached by mp3’s,

mail-order websites and big-box

superstores – why am I still drawn

to you, why do I still walk right into

your welcoming mouth? It must be

your organized jumble, alphabetic chaos

of racks and racks of cases and sleeves,

CD’s and vinyl LP’s lined up

like thousands of ribs. What is it

about the air inside you that renders me

amnesiac, forgetting everything else

to do in the world, as I flip methodically

through the rows, searching for treasure?

I could hunt for hours, the stack

of booty growing in my hands –

a used Miles Davis CD, a cut-out

copy of Bach cantatas, a mint-condition

vinyl of Dark Side of the Moon.

If the guy at the register plays

something I like, I could languish

all afternoon.. There’s something

real here, the slightly musty smell

of old records, the rainbow sheen of

the CD surface I inspect for scratches,

the lost art of the gatefold sleeve,

even just the heft of my catch,

that one can never get from watching

the crawling bar on a monitor

and the message, “Download Complete”.