Poem of the week: If

Happy birthday, Rudyard Kipling, born this day in 1865.

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Poem of the Week: Consent

The Singularity

ReasonTV did an interview with Vernor Vinge, the San Diego State University math professor and sci-fi novelist who came up with the idea of singularity in his 1993 essay “The Coming Technological Singularity,” in which he wrote “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

Mostly I am posting this because Estes is freaked out by the singularity, even though it’s kind of silly.

This is a pretty awesome rumination on the concept, how it has affected the newer, more diverse generation of sci-fi writers, and how their ideas of identity and gender make it almost obsolete.

Poem of the Week: Ex Machina

Book Rec: Up for Renewal

Earlier this summer, I had the privilege of attending an event with several wonderful women writers, including Cathy Alter.  I should say up front, in the interest of full disclosure, that I liked Cathy–a lot– when I met her.  She’s funny, self-deprecating, thoughtful, and very warm.  This is a good thing, because if I hadn’t gotten such a positive impression of her, I probably never would have picked up her memoir, Up for Renewal.  The premise: Alter, in the wake of a divorce and in the middle of several bad decisions, decides to give her life over to magazines for advice.  Not just any magazines, though: she turns to the gurus of women’s magazines, from O to Real Simple to Cosmo, plus about a dozen others.

It will surprise no one to know that I’m not a big fan of so-called women’s magazines.  Sometimes they’re fun to flip through, but much like Sex and the City or a jumbo candy bar, the sugar rush tends to wear off and leave me feeling sick.  Women are so much more than sex and fashion, and yet a look at the newsstands would have you believe that all us ladies have a couple primary goals: 1) drop some weight, 2) so we can have mindblowing sex (mindblowing for our male partners, anyway), 3) and also, get this season’s hottest look on the cheap.  Ugh.

So I was skeptical of the idea that women’s magazines could serve as a self-help guide.  And yet, Cathy Alter made it work.  Key to her success is that she wanted to make serious changes in her life; the magazines provided tips and some framework, but they weren’t the catalyst.  She could have picked another genre of magazine and probably gotten to the same results, albeit perhaps not quite as hilariously.

Alter’s candor, humor, and distinctive voice make the memoir an incredibly engaging read. As it happened, I read the book during a three-week road trip, and I got to the chapter on “Roughing It”– in which Alter conquers some demons by camping out  for the first time– as I was getting ready for a week in a tent.  The chapter provided only some of my many laugh-out loud moments while reading.

Good for: a summer read that’s fun, but not all fluff.  There’s serious insight to be found, and a level of self-reflective honesty that’s rare even in the memoir genre.

But is it just for girls?  Mmm, maybe.  I read a few sections aloud to my boyfriend, and he laughed, but I imagine the typical male reader wouldn’t find as much that resonates with his own experience as I did.

Excerpt:

This month I would jump into unfamiliar waters [...] There was something really transformational in taking an active role in my life.  To do this, I had to get out of my comfort zone, away from my laptop, away from my merlot and must-see television.

I had to go camping.

It was an idea that I had been batting around since Karl invited me to join him and a few of his friends in Monterey, California, to watch the American leg of the MotoGP, an around-the-world race on motorcycles.  To defray the cost of the trip, the group was going to camp on the sanctioned grounds of the racetrack, which they had reserved for the low, low price of forty dollars.

With a complete lack of experience with the great outdoors, I wasn’t just getting out of my comfort zone–I was excommunicating it entirely.  But the giddy realization that Karl wanted to spend three solid days with me overrode any fears I had about bathing in a lake or cooking beans over an open flame–that’s what you did when you camped, right?

Only after I accepted the invitation did the compound subject of tent and me really sink in.

‘Does he realize he’s camping with the princess and the pea?’ was my mother’s response upon hearing my plans.  She urged me to inform Karl that most Jews prefer hot and cold running water and toilets that flush. ‘Tell him you want to stay in a five-star hotel.’

Poem of the Week: In the Mushroom Summer

Poem of the Week: July in Washington

Poem of the Week: Do Not Make Things Too Easy

Don’t Feel Like Reading to Your Kid? Let Samuel L. Jackson do it.

Poem of the Week: Girl Riding a Horse in a Field of Sunflowers

I love the simple yet evocative language in this poem.

Poem of the Week: More Than Enough

Friday Funny: Kurt Vonnegut draws the shapes of stories

Poem of the Week: won’t you celebrate with me

Poem of the Week: In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden

Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart
Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and
Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves
That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and
Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down
I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence
And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that
They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense
In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear
She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without
It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when
You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of
A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets
So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds
With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter
About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on
The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp
I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry
If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire
So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them
To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

Poem of the Week: Spring

Today, a slightly less cheery take on the springtime-themed poem.

Spring

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Poem of the Week: Today

Today

By Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

National Poetry Month, in 140 characters or less

NPR’s Tell Me More show is celebrating National Poetry Month by encouraging listeners to write “twitter poems” and posting them on Twitter with the hashtag #TMMPoetry.  If your tweet-poem stands out, you might be contacted to record your poem for the show.

So, if you’ve been meaning to do some creative writing but haven’t found the time, here’s your chance.  Everyone has time to dash off 140 poetic characters, right?  Plus, there’s the potential for minor fame and glory.  Do it!  And then post your poem in the comments, too.  Here are some examples to get you started:

melissarholm The last time he held me he said “You feel good.” Thinking this was a question, I answered “No.”

IamtheStrider #tmmpoetry..when i set foot outside my personal world i strive to remember my life jacket to keep from being drowned in the now

InVinceWil you are / a journey and / a destination. I have / maps, a legend and a canteen / of rum #cinquain #tmmpoetry

Happy National Poetry Month!

If I read a book (and) it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only ways I know it.  Is there any other way?

~Emily Dickinson

Poem of the Week: The Cherry Tree

Just as every winter I’m surprised at the chill, each spring somehow manages to catch me off-guard, even though it comes right around the same time every year.  This week has been cold and rather gray, but I find myself gaping at the sudden bursts of color on trees so recently barren.  It’s a pleasant form of amnesia, this annual surprise at the changing of season for the better.

The Cherry Tree

by David Wagoner

Out of the nursery and into the garden
where it rooted and survived its first hard winter,
then a few years of freedom while it blossomed,
put out its first tentative branches, withstood
the insects and the poisons for insects,
developed strange ideas about its height
and suffered the pruning of its quirks and clutters,
its self-indulgent thrusts
and the infighting of stems at cross purposes
year after year.  Each April it forgot
why it couldn’t do what it had to do,
and always after blossoms, fruit, and leaf-fall,
was shown once more what simply couldn’t happen.

Its oldest branches now, the survivors carved
by knife blades, rain, and wind, are sending shoots
straight up, blood red, into the light again.

Spring Break Book Reviews

I was on vacation last week, which meant I spent large chunks of each day reading.  After a dreary winter during which I couldn’t contemplate any Serious Fiction and turned instead to Robert Parker’s Spenser detective novels (a great diversion), I came back around and read a few novels.  Now that it’s starting to look like spring, what with the blooming trees and daffodils, I’m ready to handle fictional angst in a way I wasn’t for the last few months.  So, here’s what I read:

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

Quiz to help you determine whether you might like  this book:

a) Do you like poetry?

b) Do you enjoy books where very little in the way of plot actually happens?

That’s it.  It’s a short quiz.  If you answered no to either question, this is probably not the book for you.  If you said yes to both, chances are you might enjoy it.  You might learn something about poetry, too.  And if nothing else, the book is full of these weird and wonderful moments, as in the following two excerpts:

God I wish I was a canoe.  Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn’t because I’m still on the tree.

There’s something narcissistic in the phrase “collected poems.”  Who’s collecting them?  The poet.  How hard is that?  That’s not a real collection.  Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection.  Or if he’d collected editions of Festus, the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey–that would be an achievement.  But collecting your own poems?  What’s so  great about that?  And mixing and mingling them in with some new?  New and Collected Poems?  Oh, well!  Good job.  Nice going.

The narrator of The Anthologist is a schlubby, past-middle-aged, largely unsuccessful poet.  He putters around, and pines after his ex, and muses on rhyme schemes and his favorite poets.  The most dramatic thing that happens is a rather mundane finger injury.  But the character is likable and clever, with frequent enough moments of insight that I didn’t mind at all how little happened over the course of the story.  I read the book in two days (before I went on break actually, so it’s an especially fast read), and I liked it quite a lot.  It’s also put me in the mood for National Poetry Month, which starts in a few days.

Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

Little Bee is a wholly different reading experience from The Anthologist– though coincidentally, both involve finger injuries.  Cleave’s novel is very readable and compelling, but it is by no means a light read; actually, I think “harrowing” would be an accurate descriptor.  The book is told in alternating chapters by two different narrators– a teenage Nigerian girl, and an upperclass British magazine editor, whose lives improbably intersect in what turns out to be a life-changing encounter for both of them.  While at times the book is hard to read because of the dark subject matter, its seriousness is punctuated with levity, particularly in the form of a Batman costume-clad little boy named Charlie (who, for instance, walks in on his parents having sex and asks “Is you fighting baddies?”).  I very highly recommend Little Bee

Good for: a weekend when you won’t have to put the book down much, because you won’t want to.  An entirely absorbing literary experience.

Not so good for: light beach reading, this is not.  I read this on vacation and kind of raced to finish it so I could move on to something a little more frivolous, even though it was a beautifully written, remarkable book.

Imperfect Birds, by Anne Lamott

I’ve mentioned Anne Lamott here before.  She’s wonderful– funny, irreverent, charming, liberal.  Imperfect Birds is her latest book, and her first novel in several years.  I have to say, I like her nonfiction better.  Her honest voice  comes through so strong in her essays that something seems lost through the filter of fiction, but at the same time, this was a very good read.

Selected quotation: “Some of the young men converging at the kiosk had cultivated the look of homelessness, but without the inconvenience and hardship: car keys dangled from their belts as they drank four-dollar lattes. Some looked like star athletes, because they were or had been. But you saw a feral, dark energy in some of the young here”

Themes: teenage drug use, parental worries, non-traditional faith, parent-child relationships

Good for: making you feel better about your own youthful indiscretions, maybe, because at least you weren’t abusing that many different illegal substances?  Making your parents realize they didn’t have it that bad, raising you, maybe?

Bad for: prospective parents, for whom the message seems to be something along the lines of “even if you do your best, your kid will probably hate you and be an ungrateful, dishonest asshole for most of his/her adolescence.”