has been mostly due to the fact that Missy came home.
🙂
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Don’t forget GotPoetry Live tomorrow night:
The Off-9 Collective of McKendry Fils-Aime, Sam Teitel, Cassandra de Alba, and Kate Richardson will be our feature.
GotPoetry Live
@ Blue State Coffee
300 Thayer Street
Providence, RI
7:30 sign up
8:00-10:00 open room/feature performer
Hope to see you there!
Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test…
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It revolutionized European art and inspired changes in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as Analytic Cubism. It was both radical and influential as a short but highly significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 mainly in France. In its second phase, Synthetic Cubism, (using synthetic materials in the art) the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919.
People that chose Cubist paintings as their favorite art form tend to be very individualized people. They are more extroverted and less afraid of speaking their opinions then other people. They tend to be progressive and are very forward thinking. As the cubist painting is like looking into a shattered mirror where you can see different angles of the images, the people that prefer these paintings like looking at all angles of a problem. These people are intelligent and they are the transformers of our generation. They look beyond what is seen into what things could become. They are ready to leave the ideas of the past behind and look at what the future has to offer.
Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy
Although I don’t think of myself as extroverted. No comment on the rest, but I knew I’d end up with a skew toward Cubism and Abstract work.
theryk got an email and the owners like us…
From his LJ:
I just got the noticification that Blue State Coffee wants us to continue our poetry series. Good crowds, good words and a growing community. Thank you Adam Stone and Stephen Dobyns (as well as all the open mic readers) for showing the venue what we had in mind.
They like us and they want us to stay!
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And thank you to everyone who’s been coming out over the last two weeks — you made it work. We’re back in business.
Bear cub shot dead, covered with Obama signs.
"Inappropriate."
Personally, I reserve that word for things like farting in church, but I suppose it means different things to different people. Killing an animal and then draping it in the campaign signs of a Presidential candidate could be considered inappropriate in some quarters, I guess. But since John McCain has reprimanded John Lewis for his inappropriate suggestion that the current atmosphere is reminiscent of the days of lynchings and such, I may be out of line, as well, in suggesting that the wanton killing of an animal and using its carcass as a threat to his opponent might be anything more than inappropriate behavior.
I sure hope we don’t get to see anything stronger than such inappropriate behavior before the election, don’t you?
At a flea market. a a table
where a fat man was selling
bootleg tapes of the Hot 100
of the moment,
I purchased the malleus,
one of the bones of the inner ear,
that had once belonged to
Rene Descartes.
I took it home, varnished it,
drilled a hole in it,
hung it on a gold wire,
then stuck it in my own left ear,
where it shone
like a profane ruby
in the sun.
Whenever I’m driving,
it knocks against my head
in time with the radio:
"Lolli, Lolli, pop that body,"
and the like.
Sometimes it drowns out
my own ear’s efforts
to translate the world around me,
claiming that the music
doesn’t match the message
it’s always preached, and that
I’m missing the point:
"I think, therefore I am," it bangs
again and again, a prisoner hoping
to make contact with a fellow inmate.
"This isn’t thinking. All this body stuff.
All this noise about what doesn’t think at all.
Sacre bleu, and zut alors!" I just nod my head
and smile, bob along to the tunes.
Not everything needs forethought. Not everything
bothers to carry meaning with it. "Low Low Low Low
Low Low Low." Yeah, that’s the ticket.
I think, most of the time, and so I am,
most of the time. Sometimes, though,
I haven’t got a thoughtful bone in my body
and I want to turn it off, that knocking
at my ear that tells me that four hundred years
of the demands of rational thought ought to be enough
for me. Sometimes, body and beat matter more,
and I refuse to believe that because I’m not thinking,
I’ve ceased to exist.
Dobyns has written what is absolutely the best poem ever about lighting your farts. No, I’m not kidding. He referenced Lorca in the introduction to it, fer Chrissakes…
Excellent feature, great open mike, and all around good stuff. Thanks to all who came out.
Next week: the Off-9 Collective (Kate Richardson, Sam Teitel, McKendry Fils-Aime, and Cassandra de Alba) will be the collective feature. Come down and get crazy with the Cheez-Whiz. Or something like that.
My recent poem, "carve," seems to be getting a decent reception from folks…so I took another step with it: there’s a recording of it up on my Myspace page.
Amazing how easy this recording thing is nowadays…I used to fiddle with analog stuff back in the day, but digital makes it all so much easier. Hope you enjoy.
A young man once told me
that to write poems
about poetry
is a foolish aim.
Hey, I said,
I can’t help it
if you won’t push
your limits.
The other day
I ripped a plywood plank in half
with a jigsaw. I made a shelf
to hold books, and that was good;
but to deny that there was a pleasure
in the vibration from the tool, to deny that
there was suffering in the splinters that flew
from the cut, to deny that the books on the shelf are better
and more present for me because
I can tell you of the work I put into
keeping them safe, that would be
a lie.
You tell me to keep it to myself,
I say: if another person learns
to rip plywood in pursuit
of a better life, a life
that celebrates the chase
for meaning in every way,
I’m never going to stop
saying that it matters
how the pen hits the paper,
how the words receive their charges.
I’m never going to stop saying it.
You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to;
you don’t have to do anything at all
except tell your own stories of acting and
reacting. There’s a reason I love the doing,
the craft: it reminds me
that work is the one thing
that separates me from
death, that keeps me aware
of how this flow
makes me human. It’s all
worth speaking of.
Everything is an act of poetry,
even the writing of a poem.
Best laid plans and all that: meeting got canceled when I was in transit. Then, other plans went up in the air for good reason.
So, I hit B&N and picked up, after much browsing, the newest Li-Young Lee book. I’m such a creature of habit. But it’s a good habit.
Dinner tonight at Lea and Victor’s, then.
how are you?
Busy day today — headed out to TJX for a lunch meeting on an old project, just to help out someone; then home later.
Bunny Wailer in the AM…a good way to start.
this morning
we were archerfish
and bluebird,
cat
and swallowtail,
monument
and fountain,
abstract and concrete.
we were marble,
clay, steel, flame,
building up
and carving away.
brancusi
and calder,
rounding off,
grounding, then
suspending
and floating.
making love is nothing
if not sculpture:
surface is paramount,
with a glimpse of
the potentials within
to lead us on.
our hands swerving
and smoothing, gliding
up over the ribs
with varying pressure,
applying thumbs
to tease out the nipples.
here is where we bend
back, here is where we
create the arched neck,
here is where we
mold the open mouth,
there is so much time
needed for each lip,
so much care needed
to give the hips their crests,
to choose
the ridge for each cheek.
but we are not stone and bronze.
we move —
plastic now, animated now,
stillness swiftly swept up in frenetic once again —
so we work again, picking up the tools,
seeking the next beings, the next interiors;
this time cat and bluebird, swallowtail
and archerfish, nevelson
and rodin, or, better still, nameless before
the possibilities of a new elgin frieze.
there is animal in me:
you will find it. there is
goddess in you:
I swear,
I will find it.
I found this for under 50 bucks used this week. Mint condition; waiting for the right moment to begin listening in large chunks.
9 CD set with all the collateral materials in mint condition??? Too unreal.
GotPoetry Live host Ryk McIntyre comes into Wormtown for a visit!
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This week the Poets’ Asylum welcomes member of the 2008 Worcester Slam team, Ryk McIntyre, as our feature. He is a co-host at The Cantab Poetry Reading in Cambridge, MA and GotPoetry Live! in Providence, RI. He has toured nationally and in Canada, opening for acts as varied as Leon Redbone, Andrei Codrescu and Jim Carroll. McIntyre read at venues such as Boston’s ICA, New York’s New School and Lollapalooza 1994. He was featured at the very first "Legends Of Slam" showcase reading at NPS 2006. He has been published in Short-Fuse- An Anthology Of New Fusion Poets, 100 Poets Against The New World Order, Nth Magazine and The Worcester Review.
Please join us at Jumpin’ Juice and Java (335 Chandler Street, Worcester). The reading starts at 6:00 p.m.. No cover; please throw some money in the bucket to support the features.
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And on November 9th, Faro and I roll into the Asylum for a Duende show. Don’t know if we’ll have new merch (I doubt it) but we’ll have new stuff for ya.
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On Tuesday, October 21, GotPoetry Live at Blue State Coffee, 300 Thayer St., Providence, our feature will be Stephen Dobyns, nationally renowned and multiply published and awarded and honored and all that stuff poet. Get there by 7:30 or so to sign up to read; reading runs 8-10 with a hat pass for the feature.
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On November 2, I’ll be one of a number of poets reading at the second annual November 3rd Club showcase at the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC. (From the official announcement: "Victor D. Infante hosts a night of poetry & politics to celebrate the "November 3rd Club" online literary journal of political writing. Readers include Patricia Smith, Alicia Ostriker, Marty McConnell, Tara Betts, Kirpal Gordon, Tony Brown, Skip Shea, Madeline Artenberg, Iris Schwartz, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Michael Cirelli and Lea Deschenes. Seriously. That’s not a reading. That’s agod-damned revolution. "
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And after the Duende show on the 9th, I’ll be winging my way out to Columbus, Ohio for a solo show at Kafe Kerouac on November 12.
Details for gigs show up on my Myspace page as I get em. Still hunting for more, so let me know…
that requires a lot of attention and time.
We’ll see if it pays off, but for now, a trifle inspired by "This American Life."
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Fishin’ Without Dale
dale carnegie said:
"i am fond of strawberries and cream.
when i go fishing, i bait the hook
with a worm. fish like worms.
it is immaterial that i prefer
strawberries and cream.
i give the fish what they want
if i want to catch fish."
which explains a lot
about why i’m who i am —
a clumsy-ass mystic
with few friends,
no influence to speak of,
and not much hope
of achieving either.
.
right now, for instance,
i’m sitting in a rowboat
with a canoe paddle
and a pocket fisherman.
there’s a strawberry
on the end of the line
and i just dumped a whole quart
of coffeemate,
a pack of organic cigarettes,
and a copy of "the cloud of unknowing"
over the side.
sound crazy? maybe.
but god only knows
what marvelous,
sensualist being
i’m gonna pull in.
Dark Matter 