Bellwether: Poetry

So on Friday I asked, "you know it's National Poetry Month, right?" Wrong. Totally clueless. Somehow, my chorus director managed to pick a selection of poetry-heavy music without really noticing why this might be especially significant in April.

I'm going to channel my exasperation into a meme.

And the meme is:

1.) Go to poets.org
2.) Search on a keyword of your choice. (Keyword search is in the upper right corner of the layout.)
3.) Read a poem in the results. Post the poem, or a link to the poem, in your journal. If it's a long poem, pratice compassion and use a cut.
4.) Post your reaction to the poem in the same post. Anything. One line of emotion or one hundred lines of metrical analysis: tell us what you thought.

To start off: "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100", by Martín Espada. I skimmed this and liked it, but nearly decided to skip because Sept. 11 content still makes people stupid. We will never have historical perspective. However, that's a reaction, so here we are. I like my poetry pretty, and pretty blunt: it needs to hook me on the first reading if I'm going to get interested enough to reread for thematic content. "Alabanza" succeeds on the "pretty" part: "Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked / even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish / rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza."

Alabanza means "praise" in Spanish, according to Babelfish, and Espada's focus is on praising people for doing their ordinary jobs, until life wasn't ordinary, and then it was over. Success on the "pretty blunt" front, for me. The poem is free verse, no rhyme scheme, but a couple words get replayed in context of the core themes: music, praise (alabanza). The heat of the kitchens, ultimately swallowed by cold air. Espada also focuses on Hispanic immigrants to America, which resonates strongly with current events in the US. Alabanza to contemporary poetry, which lets us step back and engage from a different perspective.

(For the curious, I searched on music. Sometime I'm going to do a search on Mars.)

So amuse me, please. Post poetry I would never have found, before I go on a Robert Frost jag again.

Week 3: Fruit isn't Old School

This weekend I cleaned, and condensed three boxes of stuff into two. In the process, I found my dad's old slide rule. So if the world ends, and my TI-83 dies, I am ready for the post-apocalyptic calculating revolution.

( Grapes and a slide rule. )