tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178137137090856297.post7784876728014398009..comments2023-08-08T09:18:39.913-05:00Comments on Country Girl / City Girl: Ode on a Moonpiewineandroastshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10706227811429388824noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178137137090856297.post-77090749208644784302010-09-03T14:31:52.244-05:002010-09-03T14:31:52.244-05:00My credit card is waiting for the day when "P...My credit card is waiting for the day when "Poem me, bitches" t-shirts go on sale.Baby Boynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178137137090856297.post-84741823827241341712010-09-02T16:26:05.111-05:002010-09-02T16:26:05.111-05:00I love poetry (sorry).
I recommend Billy Collin...I love poetry (sorry). <br /><br /><br />I recommend Billy Collins.<br />Get "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems" -$10 well spent. <br />I go sit down and leaf through and read and read, and life is good.<br /><br />Here a few of my favorites (by far not all):<br /><br /><br />Morning<br /><br />BY BILLY COLLINS<br /><br />Why do we bother with the rest of the day,<br />the swale of the afternoon,<br />the sudden dip into evening,<br /><br />then night with his notorious perfumes,<br />his many-pointed stars?<br /><br />This is the best—<br />throwing off the light covers,<br />feet on the cold floor,<br />and buzzing around the house on espresso—<br /><br />maybe a splash of water on the face,<br />a palmful of vitamins—<br />but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,<br /><br />dictionary and atlas open on the rug,<br />the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,<br />a cello on the radio,<br /><br />and, if necessary, the windows—<br />trees fifty, a hundred years old<br />out there,<br />heavy clouds on the way<br />and the lawn steaming like a horse<br />in the early morning.<br /><br />or<br /><br />Marginalia<br /><br /> Sometimes the notes are ferocious,<br />skirmishes against the author<br />raging along the borders of every page<br />in tiny black script.<br />If I could just get my hands on you,<br />Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,<br />they seem to say,<br />I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.<br /><br />Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -<br />"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -<br />that kind of thing.<br />I remember once looking up from my reading,<br />my thumb as a bookmark,<br />trying to imagine what the person must look like<br />why wrote "Don't be a ninny"<br />alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.<br /><br />Students are more modest<br />needing to leave only their splayed footprints<br />along the shore of the page.<br />One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.<br />Another notes the presence of "Irony"<br />fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.<br /><br />Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,<br />Hands cupped around their mouths.<br />"Absolutely," they shout<br />to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.<br />"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"<br />Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points<br />rain down along the sidelines.<br /><br />And if you have managed to graduate from college<br />without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"<br />in a margin, perhaps now<br />is the time to take one step forward.<br /><br />We have all seized the white perimeter as our own<br />and reached for a pen if only to show<br />we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;<br />we pressed a thought into the wayside,<br />planted an impression along the verge.<br /><br />Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria<br />jotted along the borders of the Gospels<br />brief asides about the pains of copying,<br />a bird signing near their window,<br />or the sunlight that illuminated their page-<br />anonymous men catching a ride into the future<br />on a vessel more lasting than themselves.<br /><br />And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,<br />they say, until you have read him<br />enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.<br /><br />Yet the one I think of most often,<br />the one that dangles from me like a locket,<br />was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye<br />I borrowed from the local library<br />one slow, hot summer.<br />I was just beginning high school then,<br />reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,<br />and I cannot tell you<br />how vastly my loneliness was deepened,<br />how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,<br />when I found on one page<br /><br />A few greasy looking smears<br />and next to them, written in soft pencil-<br />by a beautiful girl, I could tell,<br />whom I would never meet-<br />"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."Merisihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16781937797213521146noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178137137090856297.post-62386426086483588542010-09-02T13:00:43.158-05:002010-09-02T13:00:43.158-05:00Another one of the bizarre things that CG and I ha...Another one of the bizarre things that CG and I have in semi-common. Like mustard ;) I started college part-time when I was 16, in a program for gifted children. And I was so damn gifted I graduated when I was 32. And then went ANOTHER 16 years. Doesn't pay well but you meet a lot of cool people!Country Girlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11831442592233150729noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178137137090856297.post-61286453646895196722010-09-01T18:18:45.215-05:002010-09-01T18:18:45.215-05:00I tried rhyming the poem i had to write in class t...I tried rhyming the poem i had to write in class today. It was la-ame. Like, 7th grade lame. ::rolls eyes::wineandroastshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10706227811429388824noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178137137090856297.post-61081746945274762642010-09-01T11:16:38.614-05:002010-09-01T11:16:38.614-05:00I totally agree with you! That's why I think D...I totally agree with you! That's why I think Dr. Suess is the greatest poet EVER! If he didn't have a word to rhyme, he'd just make one up. <br />"If you'd never been born, then you might be an Isn't! <br />An Isn't has no fun at all. No, he disn't." <br />— Dr. SeussComet Girlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03429373886329201429noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-178137137090856297.post-82449110066829467912010-08-31T20:42:51.723-05:002010-08-31T20:42:51.723-05:00I hate poetry. It should RHYME, for beginners. And...I hate poetry. It should RHYME, for beginners. And it should MAKE SENSE, for more beginners. I still have the textbook from Leatrice Timmons in oh, say...19-eight-something. And the good stuff, which you DO have to read a bunch to get, is still good stuff. Obviously, a demon child from hell has carried off my book. Damnit.Country Girlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11831442592233150729noreply@blogger.com