Friday, October 24, 2008
Poetry and Medicine at JAMA
Great news, everyone, three of my poems were accepted this week for publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association. I am tickled, of course. Feel like I've given birth to triplets! This certainly took some of the sting out of having to watch and root for the Phillies this postseason. Cheers!
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Poetry: The Sound of the Stock Market Crashing
Christ Among the Moneychangers, 1929
by William Logan
Among shivering bankers the coin went false,
and on damp walls the shreds of tapestry
repented the cost of flowers under glass,
the foul pool swollen with fish, small vanities
whose scales were weighed out coolly in silk thread.
The stink of plaster corrupts the polychrome
and carp convert in secret to the cause
of wall-eyed ancestors flaking under crests
now mangy lions rise rampant to protect,
their hair shirts still acrawl with louse and worm.
The raggled matrix of an hour’s peace
cannot reform crude factions of a state
never alone except among the mad,
who on their knees vomited up pale blood
that splashed like taxes on the flagstones.
Sumptuous deaths in the shade of politics,
and then the posthumous careers, the charter bus,
the cure of hunting hawks and not their masters.
William Logan, “Christ among the Moneychangers, 1929” from Vain Empires. Copyright © 1998 by William Logan. Reprinted with the permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. For online information about other Penguin Group (USA) books and authors, see www.penguin.com.Source: Vain Empires (1998).
This and other poems can be found in the substantial Archive at The Poetry Foundation.
by William Logan
Among shivering bankers the coin went false,
and on damp walls the shreds of tapestry
repented the cost of flowers under glass,
the foul pool swollen with fish, small vanities
whose scales were weighed out coolly in silk thread.
The stink of plaster corrupts the polychrome
and carp convert in secret to the cause
of wall-eyed ancestors flaking under crests
now mangy lions rise rampant to protect,
their hair shirts still acrawl with louse and worm.
The raggled matrix of an hour’s peace
cannot reform crude factions of a state
never alone except among the mad,
who on their knees vomited up pale blood
that splashed like taxes on the flagstones.
Sumptuous deaths in the shade of politics,
and then the posthumous careers, the charter bus,
the cure of hunting hawks and not their masters.
William Logan, “Christ among the Moneychangers, 1929” from Vain Empires. Copyright © 1998 by William Logan. Reprinted with the permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. For online information about other Penguin Group (USA) books and authors, see www.penguin.com.Source: Vain Empires (1998).
This and other poems can be found in the substantial Archive at The Poetry Foundation.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Poets Save the Economy, and Sarah Palin's Words to Nowhere
Couldn't resist reading this piece in The Onion, NEA Funds Construction of $1.3 Billion Poem. I think this is the best use of federal funds that I've heard in weeks, don't you?
Are we having fun yet? EVERYONE who loves to play with language, and especially those nutty folks who love to study language is having a blast with Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In Slate magazine, Hart Seeley examines the Poetry in the Governor's words, while Kitty Burns Florey (which I think may be a pseudonym for my 6th Grade English Teacher) makes a noble attempt to Diagram Sarah Palin's sentences. Enjoy!
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