From Russian animation studio Toonbox comes this marvelous animation based on a poem by Sasha Svirsky. I don’t understand a word of it but I love the sound of it. I really must find the woman who does the voice-over. She is just magnificent and totally fearless. The drawings are fascinating. The rhythm is catchy. Toonbox does so many of the best animations that I see. They seem to balance their commercial projects with artistic ones very well.
Via Cold Hard Flash
Poet John Ashbery has published a new book of poems called Planisphere. Boy, I hated this guy’s poems a few years ago. But I kept reading them because of some instinct for self-inflicted mental damage. And I kept reading him. Not understanding him at all. But I liked the words as they passed me by. They sort of slide on by you. Smooth, but switching and becoming something totally unexpected, unrelated to what just happened before. His poems sort of shimmer and seem a bit brittle, like glass. When you read this guy you certainly know that you are not reading someone else. He’s in his eighties, but his work seems like a young man’s. He has a gently rebellious foolishness that I greatly admire.
His publisher, Harper Collins, has a preview of his new book that offers quite a few of the poems.
So does this sound like the writing of an eighty-year-old?
I dream of married couples having sex, shopping, everything,
and often get the giggles, staying here,
expecting something new to come along every five seconds.
That’s new to me, I expect others will have heard about it.
B—’s Mysterious Greeting
And here’s the guy:
by Lethe Bashar
The poet is the editor of Escape into Life, arts/culture web-zine and fine art auction. He is also working with an illustrator from Argentina on a graphic novel. Besides that he keeps up an essay-blog, The Blog of Innocence, that covers topics in the arts, social technology, and a general philosophy of life.
This poem was originally posted on Twitter as an experimental project in spontaneous poetry via Twitter with @paulokoba
each night I go to bed
a little bit later
I wake up in the morning
forgetting the past
days add up like coins in my pocket
I’m rich with hours
another little bit has passed
I find another hobby
swear to myself I’ll get healthy
another little bit has passed
I think about the news
write about my views
another little bit has passed
when will this world come to an end?
it seems so eternal right now
by Lethe Bashar
The poet is the editor of Escape into Life, arts/culture web-zine and fine art auction. He is also working with an illustrator from Argentina on a graphic novel. Besides that he keeps up an essay-blog, The Blog of Innocence, that covers topics in the arts, social technology, and a general philosophy of life.
The moth approached me like a blinking eye,
I was having a cigarette in the garage.
The birds squeaked in the far off darkness,
a menacing sound disrupting the night.
I pressed the moth to give me her reasons
for staying up as late as she did–
She continued to blink, and I awaited her answer,
but nothing came.
The birds heckled the darkness and the darkness
heckled back–the chaos persisted but
remained subdued and the neighbors
stayed in bed.
The children, in their warm beds,
were dreaming of magical places,
and I bemoaned my condition
while having my cigarette in the garage.
I thought of summer, which was expected
to come, maybe tomorrow or never,
I figured I’d be sleeping when it did.
I thought of the hours I’d missed.
The moth returned after awhile,
she blinked her wings again and again,
She seemed to know I had a mild fever,
she seemed to know my memories too.
Let me go, I said. Be off. I want to sleep.
I Sing the Body Electric is a poem that celebrates the life of the body and its equal status with the soul. Walt Whitman is probably the greatest poet in the English language since William Shakespeare. Some might argue with this but there is no other poet who so muscularly tore the page to shreds with his wild, raging, soaring, lunatic language. I think Shakespeare would have liked and admired this man because it is only he who is a match for Shakespeare’s fearless destruction and rebuilding of language. I think that great poets always destroy before they create. To read Whitman’s massive lifelong work, Leaves of Grass, is to wake up and realize that poetry is like blood exploding through your body and spraying its meanings and music out all over the city. You cannot read Whitman and be the same as you were before reading him. He is a shock to the system.
He lived from 1819 to 1892 and is often called the father of free verse. His discovery of the loose free form of poetry is an astounding development that is still being worked out. The problem for today is that Whitman still has the hardest punch and could do terrible damage to most poets alive and writing today. It would not be a fair fight.
Here is the great I Sing the Body Electric, from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass book.
Remember to enter a poem in our Little Poetry Contest.
Write a poem for National Poetry Month! Just let your mind wander and write a poem of any kind in the comments area for this post.
Get your poem done by 12:00 am PST Friday April 24, 2009.
Your poem can be any length. It can rhyme or not. Just make a poem and let me read it.
I’ll pick my 3 favorites and do audio versions of them to post right here in the blog.
This painting is of a poor old poet trying to come up with his next poem. Be exactly like him.
