Vacation Spot

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Puddle Stamping

Today is a perfect day for puddle stamping!

Gray

Mental illness isn’t a marketable disease. I’m sure there are many celebrities who suffer from it, but we don’t have a celebrity spokesperson. There are no ice bucket challenges for depression. Cancer survivors can proudly show off their scars, but no one wants to see ours. We don’t have a ribbon or color. Anyone want to buy a gray Kitchen-Aid mixer for mental health research? And depression is one of the more acceptable mental illnesses to have. Imagine a 5k run for bipolar and borderline personality disorders.
Article

Repairing Humans

Article
Science Fiction Becomes Science-Fact: Two Strategies for Repairing Humans
New breakthroughs in the field of regenerative medicine are allowing us to live longer, healthier lives.

Let there be Light!

Mayor’s streetlight restoration program hits milestone
August 12, 2014
By
RUSS OLIVO
rolivo@woonsocketcall.com

WOONSOCKET – Never mind the Supermoon: If nighttime seems brighter than usual in your neighborhood lately, chances are it’s because all your street lights are on for the first time in nearly four years.

Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt says more than half the street lights that were dimmed by the previous administration in a money-saving move have been reactivated since late February.

“This is something I’ve really enjoyed doing because it makes people so happy,” said Baldelli-Hunt. “People want to feel safe in their neighborhoods. They want to go out at night. They want to take walks.”

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Memoir: Little Failure

I am reading Gary Shteyngart's memoir and loving it.
Read more here.

Robert Bly

“Each of us deserves to be forgiven. If only for ‘our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat when so many have gone down in this world.’”

Robert Bly, American Poetry Review, September/October 2011

Interview

When Haunted

You have little choice about whether you can listen to those voices. It’s your actions that hang in the balance.
Article

Watermelons by Charles Simic

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

Mood + Muse

When Joseph Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, studied a group of 15 abstract-expressionist painters in the mid-20th century, he found that half of them had some form of mental illness, mostly depression or bipolar disorder; nearly half of these artists failed to live past age 60.

When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.

Article

Poetry in Police Blotter

Here.

Swimming in a Cool Pool

Here.

Risky + Humiliating

My “real life” mostly consists of sitting in my pajamas daydreaming about gangsters and sexy spies while staring out the window at a cat.
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Improv Genius

Article

2 Ruth Stone Poems

Compulsive Organizer

When you. as they say, pass on,
all of your files and categories
will go blind. For who reads
method that figures the invisible
structures of the dead and gone?
Even your cabinets, your hungers,
your decisions to take a bath
or a shower, or use perfume,
will crash into chaos. Order -
exquisitely tuned to your gastric juices,
to your tactile cravings, to the mad
lurches of your infancy, to your need
to consume it all and be forgiven.

Pokeberries

I started out in the Virginia mountains
with my grandma’s pansy bed
and my Aunt Maud’s dandelion wine.
We lived on greens and backfat and biscuits.
My Aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum.
My daddy was a northerner who played drums
and chewed tobacco and gambled.
He married my mama on the rebound.
Who would want an ignorant hill girl with red hair?
They took a Pullman up to Indianapolis
and someone stole my daddy’s wallet.
My whole life has been stained with pokeberries.
No man seemed right for me. I was awkward
until I found a good wood burning stove.
There is no use asking what it means.
With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bone and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.
No amount of knowledge can shake my grandma out of me;
or my Aunt Maud; or my mama, who didn’t just bite an apple
with her big white teeth. She split it in two.

Ruth Stone

I’ve been writing poetry or whatever it is since I was five or six years old, and I couldn’t stop, I never could stop. I don’t know why I did it.… It was like a stream that went along beside me, you know, my life went along here, and I got married and had three kids and did all the things you have to do, and all along the time this stream was going along. And I really didn’t know what it was saying. It just talked to me, and I wrote it down. So I can’t even take much credit for it.
- Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone Foundation

Chard deNiord Poem

THE POLICE

We were in bed when a knock came at the door. Our bed was next to the front door since we had given up our only bedroom to our two children and partitioned off a part of our large living room with standing book cases into a second bedroom for us. It was ten thirty on a Sunday night. The knocks resounded hard and quick. I was reading Czelaw Milosz's The Witness of Poetry in preparation for a seminar the next morning. My wife, Rachel, was reading Soren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony. "Who could that be?" I asked, rising naked from bed and putting on my kimono. I opened the door onto two police officers. "Come in gentlemen," I said. The uniformed men entered and stood over our bed. Rachel pulled the sheet up to her neck. I stood at the end of the bed. "We're here because a Mrs. Little called. She said she's been trying to reach you since yesterday, but the phone's been busy." I picked up the phone by the bed and heard a faint static through the receiver. "The phone is broken," I said. "We got in this evening, officer, from a weekend trip, and haven't used the phone since we got back. Maybe it was that tornado that knocked it out." The policemen stood sheepishly together. Rachel smiled with embarrassment for her mother. I, on the other hand, had a strange impulse to invite the two policemen into bed with us, but said instead, "Would it be too much to ask one of you to call Mrs. Little back to assure her that we are O.K.?" They were kind Midwestern policemen who said they would be happy to do this. I imagined them climbing into bed with us and falling asleep, while we stripped them of their uniforms and put them on ourselves and held their empty weapons to our necks and heads and groins and kissed each other over their veteran bodies while they slept deeply in their exhaustion. We thanked these men for their prompt response to my mother-in-law's concern for us. I wanted also to tell them, You have given me a larger sense of myself as well as assuring me of something I wondered about before, namely the inherent goodness of the police whose abruptness and armed appearance and lack of tact and laconic style I forgave this time because my mother-in-law was concerned about us and had nowhere else to turn except to you. But I knew also that they didn't expect this and probably wouldn't have understood my sentiment exactly. Strangely, what I think they would have understood and probably responded to if their duty had not prevented them from getting too close to their public was an invitation to come to bed with us fully clothed, for it was late, they were tired, and this is what we wanted.

"The Police" published in AGNI 37.
source

Kim Addonizio

Manners by Kim Addonizio, Vol. 40 No. 5 American Poetry Review

Address older people as Sir or Ma’am
unless they drift slowly into your lane
as you aim for the exit ramp.
Don’t call anyone dickhead, fuckface, or ass-hat;
these terms are reserved for ex-boyfriends
or anyone you once let get past second base
and later wished would be sucked into a sinkhole.
Yelling obscenities at the TV is okay,
as long as sports are clearly visible on the screen,
but it’s rude to mutter at the cleaning products in Safeway.
Also rude: mentioning bodily functions.
Therefore, sentiments such as “I went balls to the wall for her”
or “I have to piss like a chick with a pelvic disorder at a kegger contest”
are best left unexpressed.
Don’t’ say “chick,” which is demeaning
to the billions of sentient creatures
jammed in sheds, miserably pecking for millet.
Don’t talk about yourself. Ask questions
of others in order to show your interest.
How do you like my poem so far?
Do you think I’m pretty?
What would you give up to make me happy?
Don’t open your raincoat to display your nakedness.
Fondling a penis in public
is problematic, though Botero’s black sculpture
of a fat man in the Time-Warner building
in New York, his pee-pee rubbed gold,
seems to be an exception.
Please lie to me about your pedophilia
and the permafrost layer.
Stay in bed on bad hair days.
When the pulley of your childhood
unwinds the laundry line of your dysfunction,
here is a list of items to shove deep in the dryer:
disturbed brother’s T-shirt,
depressed mother’s socks and tennis racket,
tie worn by soused father driving the kids home
from McDonald’s Raw Bar. If you refuse
your host’s offer of alcohol, it is best to say,
“I’m so hung over, the very thought of drinking
makes me feel like projectile vomiting,”
or, “No thank you, it interferes with my medications.”
Hold your liquor whenever it is fearful
and lonely, whenever it needs your love.
Don’t interrupt me when I’m battering.
Divorce your cell phone in a romantic restaurant.
Here is an example
of a proper thank-you card:
Thank you for not sharing with me
the extrusions of your vague creative impulse.
Thank you for not believing those lies
everyone spreads about me, and for opening
the door to the next terrifying moment,
and thank you especially for not opening your mouth
while I’m trying to digest my roast chicken.

Chard deNiord Interview

Here

Yes, Bly also asks the question in the interview, “Didn’t we used to have more dogs around here—images are so fantastic aren’t they? You just put them down and they run off on their own somewhere.”

Why did you always lie to me? / I thought I always told the truth? Why did you lie to me? / Because the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth.
- Mark Strand

I’ve got a bird that whistles, I’ve got a bird that sings.
- Bob Dylan

I didn’t send you the pomegranate to write about, / but to eat. / It is from this world where every seed /counts for a day of life.
-Chard deNiord

Defining Teaching

Here