Morning drive time...

This morning I was driving I-70 into the city - Cathy is working crosswords and comes upon a clue:  Versifier.  She cracks up when she realizes the answer is poet. She proclaims, "Mike the versifier!"  Sometimes I suppose humor is like a metaphor that not everyone understands.

An Evening of Harold Pinter's Poetry - benefit for the Homeless in LA

This Wednesday, Julian Sands will channel a spirit. The British actor, known for his performances in “Warlock,” “Room With a View” and “24,” presents an evening of Harold Pinter’s poetry on Dec. 9 at the Odyssey Theatre. The reading will benefit the homeless of L.A.

It’s a role Sands couldn’t refuse. In 2007, Pinter himself was planning to read the poems at a women’s shelter in London, but illness had weakened his speaking voice. He asked Sands to take over—and then proceeded to coach the actor on every line and pause.

“He was feeling his mortality very keenly and wanted these poems to reveal his interior,” remembers Sands.

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Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy uses Christmas verse to attack British society - Times Online

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy uses Christmas verse to attack British society - Times Online


ON the first day of Christmas there is no partridge or pear tree but just a buzzard on a branch watching a British soldier far from home.

This is the ode to Christmas in Britain from our new poet laureate. Carol Ann Duffy uses her festive offering as a stinging commentary on much that is wrong in the country and the world today.


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Sunday slipping away

I'm ready to call it a night and settle in with a book to read for a short while. Ah, if I could just pull a nice bottle of Chardonnay of the shelf and pour a small glass. Instead, I'll just sip on the last of my warming cup of coffee.

I watched an episode of Modern Family on ABC tonight and it cracked me up. I've never seen it before and it was pretty funny.


I've thought about some new years resolutions today. I'm not big on new years resolutions but I've got a couple of things on my mind that I'll blog about later in the week.

I did crank out another set of poetry submissions today... a task that is not on my list of fun things to do, but I've resolved this fall to get better about it. Going back to a time when I was persistent, the results were truly positive.

Sadly, I feel the weekend like sand in an hour glass down to a final trickle of granules.

Heard a good metaphor lately?

I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors.  So what, you say… that’s what poets do. But metaphors, which so often gets a bad rap from people who don’t particularly care for poetry, are pretty common within our everyday language.  In the movie As Good as it Gets, Jack Nicholson utters this line, “People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.”  Yes, the irony makes for a good laugh. So the question I have is do we tend to overuse metaphor in everyday communications? Do people really recognize metaphor in use outside of poetic device?  Let’s go a step further and just say for instance that it has become  overused in everyday language, would that diminish its value in poetry?

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Poetry book by ‘Bostonian’ Poe sets auction record - BostonHerald.com

Poetry book by ‘Bostonian’ Poe sets auction record - BostonHerald.com:

"NEW YORK — A rare copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s first book has sold for $662,500, smashing the previous record price for American literature.
The copy of 'Tamerlane and Other Poems' had been estimated to sell Friday for between $500,000 and $700,000 at Christie’s auction house in New York City.
The previous record is believed to be $250,000 for a copy of the same book sold nearly two decades ago."

Your Brain on Poetry

 

 Travis Nichols, the Editor at the Poetry Foundation has a really intriguing piece in the Huffington Post this week about poetry and the brain.  Pictured on the left is Henry Molaison who affectionately was known to many involved in his life as just H.M. 

 

Late last year Molaison passed away.  Molaison’s claim to fame relates to his memory capacity, or lack thereof.  I won’t go into the entire history, but he underwent brain surgery in the 1950’s and as a result had the inability to form new memories.  During his post surgery years, he was studied profusely in search for clues to our memory process. Even in death, medical science has turned to his brain for more answers to the mystery of how and where memories are created as well as retrieved.  Scientists hope to be able to map the memory process by observing slices of M.H.’s brain.

 

Nichols claims that what Dr. Jacopo Annese, who is doing the slicing is exploring the greatest poetic mystery of all time. Nichols talks about some poetry that is less about telling stories and more about using poetry that engages a readers brain while he/she is reading, that utilizes sound patterns or other techniques to create Cognitive Poetics.

 

Nichols uses the example of an poet not just saying, “When I made out with so-and-so, I did the happy dance!” Instead, that poet would use language that would allow a particularly attentive reader go beyond by just reading, but come to experience their mind doing the happy dance, thus creating a memory associated with it.

 

Nichols sees this kind of writing as experimental, which he notes is not unlike the path Dr. Annese is pursuing.

 

Read Nichols’ story here. 

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