You always said, “Dear, let’s live together until our hair turns gray and die on the same day.” How could you pass away without me? Who should I and our little boy listen to and how should we live? How could you go ahead of me?
How did you bring your heart to me and how did I bring my heart to you? Whenever we lay down together you always told me, “Dear, do other people cherish and love each other like we do? Are they really like us?” How could you leave all that behind and go ahead of me?
I just cannot live without you. I just want to go to you…
Read the rest. If you can bear it. I need to go cling to Scott for a while.
Our Round Buildings, Square Buildings reading took us to the Flatiron Building, which led to the Chrysler Building (cue “Hard Knock Life”), the Empire State Building, the old and new Manhattan skylines, and much discussion along the way. I got a bit homesick for NYC. Somewhere around here I have a copy of a letter I wrote to friends back home during my first year in New York—a long description of the view from the top of one of the Twin Towers. Ouch. It would be a good thing to post tomorrow, if I could find it, but them’s slim odds.
A friend posted a caterpillar pic on Facebook, looking for an ID. Beanie was game, and we wound up meandering around this ID site for a good long while. Didn’t find our friend’s critter, but I learned a whole lot about ghost moths…
Rilla is interested in French, which led to an hour on YouTube this afternoon, listening to French children’s songs (and marveling at their unabashed gruesomeness, some of them). It all began with Alouette:
Little lark, nice lark, I am plucking you?! Who knew? (French speakers, that’s who.) Oh, the belly laughs this generated.
Many videos later, we discovered the Most Persistent Earworm of All Time.
Les crocrocro, les crocrocro, les crocodiles will be haunting my dreams tonight.
In 1997 the AAF started this program to provide blind children a free Braille book every month from a popular children’s reading series. The books are for the children to keep and collect for as long as they want them. The titles published every month are the same titles that are available in bookstores and public libraries everywhere. In the past ten years over one hundred seventy titles from popular children’s reading series were distributed to thousands of blind children.
You may remember Holly and her son Hank from my GeekMom piece on their fight for Hank to receive Braille instruction in school.
Unbelievably awesome. Our beloved old library in Crozet, VA, housed up until now in a tiny ex-train-depot, has just moved to brand new quarters several blocks away. How did they move the books? The citizens of Crozet lined up and passed them hand to hand.
Over three hundred volunteers showed up to help the books along their way.
Here’s a photo essay. My pal Sarah H. and her daughters are among the helpers! What a gorgeous thing for a community to do.
Feels like my “Caught My Eye” sidebar is bursting at the seams these days. So much so that things get pushed off the page before anyone gets a chance to see them. Here’s a rundown of recent links:
Looking forward to exploring this collection. I once had the the pleasure of chauffeuring Robert Pinsky from Charlotte, NC, to Greensboro. We talked about gardens (I confessed my habit of planting imaginary gardens everywhere I went—sizing up people’s yards and deciding what I’d do with them) and, yes, poetry. I’ve always meant to write a poem about it. One of these days I might get around to doing it.
“It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.”
“I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.”
“Moore, as I understand her project, champions both clarity and complexity, rejecting the shallow notion that they are opposites. Scorning a middlebrow reduction of everything into easy chunks, she also scorns obfuscation and evasive cop-outs. Tacitly impatient with complacency and bluffing, deriding the flea-bitten critic, unsettling the too-ordinary reader, she sets forth an art that is irritable, attentive, and memorably fluid.”
(Obviously I went on a bit of a Marianne Moore rabbit trail.)
“The Los Angeles Times has issued a call for poems. I’ve longed for such a moment. It seems a natural marriage, not just because newspapers and poetry both seem to be involved in the same meta-conversation of their respective survivability and relevance in an iWorld, but because the news and poetry both should be considered daily. ”
• Free course: Man and Mammoth in the Carolinas. (Scroll down for links to video & teacher/student guides. Aimed at middle-school students. Yep, the Carolinas are a long way from the Pacific coast, but I’m enjoying these videos with my gang.)
