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| Knife-ier than I thought they'd be. #extradeadly |
And I wore my new green velvet chelsea boots for the first time:
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| shiny! |
Also, I wore tights for the first time. First Tights Day is kind of a big deal around here.
I got some grading done. Well, a little grading.
At the end of the day, the historian and I made the epic journey out of the house on a school night. Degree of difficulty: medium difficulty, because, firstly, it was raining, and secondly, we're edging upon The Great Darkness, wherein it's dark by 6 or so, and basically because (thirdly) we're mammals, The Great Darkness means it's time to hibernate, I think? Anyway, we braved our most primal evolutionary natures and went out to a poetry reading, where I got to hear one of my favorite poets, Campbell McGrath.
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| Campbell McGrath. |
I first read Campbell McGrath when I was reading an issue of BOMB on an airplane. The article had an interview and a couple of poems from American Noise. Those poems shook me up. I thought, I have got to read this book!
I told Campbell McGrath this story, like a rank fangirl, tonight when I met him briefly after the reading. Oh well. What exactly was I supposed to say? I loved your villanelle about Charlie Parker. I could have said that, because I did, I really did.
Also, I could have tried to strike up a conversation about poetry in America, whithersoever it may be going, syntax, line breaks, rhythm, and so forth. The prose poem. Or I could have simply recited this poem, which electrified me on that plane and continues to set a buzz going in my nerves to this day:
Untitled
Box cars and electric guitars; ospreys, oceans,
glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn
kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck, casual
traffic, nothing at all; nighthawks of the twenty-four
hour donut shops; maples enflamed by the sugars
of autumn; aspens lilting, sap yellow and viridian;
concrete communion of the clover leaves and
interchanges; psalms; sorrow; gold mines, zydeco,
alfalfa, 14th Street; sheets of rain across the hills
of Antietam; weedy bundles of black-eyed Susans
in the vacant lots of Baltimore; smell of eggs and
bacon at Denny’s, outside Flagstaff, 4 am;
bindlestiffs; broken glass; the solitary drifter; the
sprinklers of suburbia; protest rallies, rocket
launches, traffic jams, swap meets; the Home
Shopping Network hawking cubic zirconium; song
of the chainsaw and the crack of the bat; wheels
of progress and mastery; tug boats, billboards, fog
horns, folk songs; pinball machines and
mechanical hearts; brave words spoken in
ignorance; dance music from the Union Hall; knots
of migrant workers like buoys among waves or
beads in the green weave of strawberry fields
around Watsonville; the faithful touched by
tongues of flame in the Elvis cathedrals of Vegas;
wildflowers and anthracite; smokestacks and
sequoias; avenues of bowling alleys and flamingo
tattoos; car alarms, windmills, wedding bells, the
blues.
glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn
kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck, casual
traffic, nothing at all; nighthawks of the twenty-four
hour donut shops; maples enflamed by the sugars
of autumn; aspens lilting, sap yellow and viridian;
concrete communion of the clover leaves and
interchanges; psalms; sorrow; gold mines, zydeco,
alfalfa, 14th Street; sheets of rain across the hills
of Antietam; weedy bundles of black-eyed Susans
in the vacant lots of Baltimore; smell of eggs and
bacon at Denny’s, outside Flagstaff, 4 am;
bindlestiffs; broken glass; the solitary drifter; the
sprinklers of suburbia; protest rallies, rocket
launches, traffic jams, swap meets; the Home
Shopping Network hawking cubic zirconium; song
of the chainsaw and the crack of the bat; wheels
of progress and mastery; tug boats, billboards, fog
horns, folk songs; pinball machines and
mechanical hearts; brave words spoken in
ignorance; dance music from the Union Hall; knots
of migrant workers like buoys among waves or
beads in the green weave of strawberry fields
around Watsonville; the faithful touched by
tongues of flame in the Elvis cathedrals of Vegas;
wildflowers and anthracite; smokestacks and
sequoias; avenues of bowling alleys and flamingo
tattoos; car alarms, windmills, wedding bells, the
blues.
