ei: Arab poetry's sometimes subversive answer to "American Idol"

ei: Arab poetry's sometimes subversive answer to "American Idol":

"Perhaps the only thing that is as hard as translating Arab poetry to other languages is trying to explain to non-Arabs the extent of poetry's popularity, importance and Arabs' strong attachment to it. Whereas poetry in America has been largely reduced to a ceremonial eccentricity that survives thanks to grants and subsidies from fanatics who care about it too much, in the Arab world it remains amongst the most popular forms of both literature and entertainment. Whereas America's top poets may struggle to fill a small Barnes & Noble store for a reading, Palestine's Mahmoud Darwish has filled football stadiums with thousands of fans eager to hear his unique recital of his powerful poems. And while in America a good poetry collection can expect to sell some 2,000 copies, in the Arab world the poems of pre-Islamic era poets are still widely read today in their original words, as are those from the different Islamic eras leading to the present." [Full Story]

Bits from my Journal...

• It (curling) is far more physical than one might imagine.
• If boiled with water / The broth ascribes / to thinly veiled life / The taste of which fall flat
• The presence of that hauntingly empty feeling with the close of baseball season, is setting in.
• It is pretty much an established fact that I was small at birth... and that at some point when she (mom) was holding me I slid into the pocket of her robe.
• ...A bronze vagina / commemorating all that is, / but purely ornamental
• Like concrete in a sinus passage / my head is filled with reflective guilt

Zoom in before decide what it is

The more I look at people I believe that individually we are quite unique. However, by lumping us all together that uniqueness is replaced by a murky mass.

I think it really helps to bring things in tight and take a look before you zoom back out and look at the big picture. True in life as well as poetry.

Weekend Recap...

I was excited to learn that Kim Addonizio will be coming to town in November for a reading. How cool is that?!

Meanwhile, I've been working on drafts of a new poem this weekend.

This, in addition to visiting my mother, taking my wife's computer work station apart and moving it upstairs and reassembling it and running shopping errands.

Earlier this evening I did some reading and editing as well. Oh, I'm also bemoaning to fact that the baseball season is coming to an end. [sigh]

Oh, I tried a blog exercise of randomly clicking on one of the blogs in my sidebar, then doing the same on that blog, and on and on till I went six deep. Sort of a six degrees of separation. Kind of interesting to see where it leads.

Savoring California's poetry scene

And so they sat, occasionally scribbling in their ever-present notebooks, as Robert Hass considered California's shaping fires, Victoria Chang channeled downbeat women and Diem Jones spoke in a hypnotic cadence punctuated by an accompanying guitar and the crowd's appreciative "Hmmmmms." - San Jose Mercury News [story]

Saturday afternoon....

"Tears roll silently down the hill in neutral."

Why your mind should not meander when driving

You ever wake up and have a crazy notion about something? Okay, mine actually came during the drive into work. For some ungodly reason I thought, I should write a memoir. What has possessed me to think this I don’t really know. In fact, possessed might be a good way to view it.

I have had an interest in doing sort of a biographical poem at some point and have actually made some stabs at it, but they have all been drafts that have gone nowhere. My vision of the poem was much more abstract in nature (surprise!) and it's likely that unless someone knew me extremely well, they would perhaps not even recognize me in the poem.

Getting back to the memoir, it’s not that I lead a life that people are just dying to read about; in fact my contemplation of this is largely for personal reflection. The only way it would be remotely interesting to others was if it were written by David Sedaris.