"The bulk of the book is a long, narrative poem. The Romantic poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge conceived a plan to found a Pantisocratic (egalitarian) community in America; the plan came to nothing, but Muldoon imagines what would have happened if they had gone ahead. Encounters with North American Indians are mingled with political ( Read more... )

It's one of my constant points of irritation that I really love art galleries, yet live in a city when the main gallery is chock a block with the one school of art I really despise: the Pre-Raphaelites.

I was getting my rant on over g-chat to a friend about why Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a dick and how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were barely ( Read more... )

National Poetry Month #7

Today's is by Tom Leonard. He's mostly familiar to anyone who sat an English Lit GCSE in the early '00s and had one of those grim AQA anthologies. I read one of his poems there age approx. 15 and promptly forgot all about him, and only remembered his name when getting quite into James Kelman recently-- they're part of the ( Read more... )

National Poetry Month #6 ( Read more... )

Easter 1916
WB Yeats
I

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around ( Read more... )

Formspring me, I'm a glutton for punishment.

Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.

by Sharon Olds

After Marcus Licinius Crassus
defeated the army of Spartacus,
he crucified 6,000 men.
That is what the records say,
as if he drove in the 18,000
nails himself. I wonder how
he felt, that day, if he went outside   
among them, if he walked that human   
woods. I think he stayed in his tent   
( Read more... )

Afternoon, ducks. I was going to post a different Causley poem (Timothy Winters, which I used to love when I was little and just remembered existed), but as it's Good Friday this one seemed more appropriate:

Ballad of the Breadman
Charles Causley

Mary stood in the kitchen
Baking a loaf of bread.
An angel flew in the window
‘We’ve a job for you,’ he ( Read more... )

It's April, which means it's National Poetry Month. I'm going to post a poem every day like I did last year-- I enjoyed it last time around. And as  I've left my job (finally) I'm going to have some free time. (I have had about three days off in the last five months that weren't weekends.)

Indian Boy Love Song #1
by Sherman Alexie

Everyone I have ( Read more... )

I HAVE JOINED A ROLLER DERBY LEAGUE.

Skeptics at the back form a line.