Last night I went to the Albany Poets Presents open mic at Valentine’s here in Albany. A recording of that reading is now available at AlbanyPoets.com. My section starts about 9:45 into the recording, but I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.
Leave a CommentCategory: Poetry
Kooser’s book is aimed at the beginning poet, but anyone could pick up useful ideas about revision, metaphor and simile, and imagining an audience. Kooser’s writing is warm and often funny, and his advice is realistic and practical. This is not a book to read if you’re looking for a quick way to become a famous poet. But if you’re interested in putting in the necessary hours (and hours and hours and hours) needed to turn out respectable writing, Kooser can help you use your time more productively and enjoyably.
Recommended.
Leave a CommentBookshelves
All our bookshelves were made by our fathers,
crafted by calloused hands from woods
soft or hard, fine-grained or no,
fashioned in damp basements or dusty barns
on Saturday afternoons while Black Magic Woman
or Love Me Do played on what used to be the nice radio.
The bookshelves are, like all fathers’ creations, imperfect,
slightly wider at the front,
fitting some books better than others.
In one, there is a pair of hearts carved,
delicate filigree surprising
from a splitter of logs, a man of the earth.
The bookshelves are a framework, intended
by our fathers to be filled with thoughts
of our own choosing, maybe with a gentle nudge
from a “doctor of books.â€
But it is we who must encumber the wood
with our own words, we who must choose
which volumes to stack or lean,
we who receive the hard or soft legacy
cast in simple wood by complex men.
Here’s my contribution to the memory of Monday. For more, read Dan Wilcox’s Birthday Poem, 2009 and his write-up of the event.
Robby Burns’s Hat
Crusty snow beneath our boots
as we watch a limber young poet
scamper atop the McPherson Legacy.
Once settled between Robby’s legs,
he takes the beret — the same one
they used last year —
and balances it on top of Robby’s head.
The last time, it was up there a week before
a less young, but no less limber, poet
found the beret at the base of the Legacy
and rescued it from oblivion, restoring
the cap to its place of honor twelve months later.
And so it goes, year after year, in honor
of the man who started it all, and who
made the trail through the snow that we follow.
Back in the early 90s, I wrote and performed a lot of poetry. It was all very specific to its time and place. Looking back on it, it was mostly crap.
In recent years, I’ve started writing again. In fact, I’m getting serious about it, meaning that I’m actually trying to — gulp — improve and seek out criticism. I’ve been helped a great deal in this effort by some poets from the upstate New York region.
I decided last night to finally go read some poems in public again. And I chose the perfect event — Poets Speak Loud, an annual gathering in tribute to the former dean of the Albany poetry scene, Tom Nattell. You can hear last night’s event in its entirety at albanypoets.com. The site is a great example of how to run a local poetry site. Frequently updated, welcoming of all poets, full of useful features.
The open mic was a lot of fun. I felt very welcomed by the organizers and established poets, several of whom encouraged me to come out again. Little things like that mean a lot. By and large, the quality of the writing was good. There were highlights — Dan Stalter’s hilarious and insightful slam performance, Mary Panza’s reading of Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, and Scott Casale’s sensual reading of a poem about sex. Host Dan Wilcox kept everyone in good spirits and kept the evening moving right along, which is always appreciated.
After the reading, most of the gang walked to Washington Park. One of the poets — I know his name but will leave it out to protect him from prosecution — climbed atop the statue of Robert Burns and put a beret on top in honor of Nattell.
I was curious about the history of the statue. I found this online:
The Robert Burns Statue was erected in 1888 in Washington Park and has an amazing story. One Mary Macpherson, a poor house maid, saved all of her money and donated $30,000 to build what has been called the best statue of Robert Burns in the World and is the second oldest surviving statue of Burns to be created in the United States. It is also one of 20 monuments in the world erected before 1890 in honor of that great Scottish poet. The statue is the largest work ever produced by Charles Calverly, who was born in Albany in 1833. His most complex work was the 16 foot Burns monument, a seated figure cast in bronze, resting on a pedestal of Scottish granite. The statue is formally known as the Macpherson Legacy to the City of Albany.
Google Books has a Harvard publication from 1889 called Historical Sketch of the Burns Statue by R.H. Collyer. You can read it at the Google Books site.
Anyway, check out the podcast. I’m in Part 2.
Leave a CommentThis is essentially Artimage’s script for a BBC Radio production of the Odyssey. He condenses — if that’s the word — the story into a series of conversations between its characters.
The language is both rich and readable, everyday and heroic. Armitage uses the conversations to strike at the core of the story, and to offer a look into the psychology of gods and men.
Despite its much shorter length, this Odyssey manages to retain its epic scope. For those not familiar with the original work, this version may serve as a fine introduction. And for those who are steeped in the classic poem, this Odyssey offers a fresh perspective.
Highly recommended.
Leave a CommentI learned about Arthur Guiterman because several of his poems were included in the Library of America’s book American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse (American Poets Project)
. I was so taken by the poems I read there that I decided to find some of his books online. They’re all out of print, but fairly easy — and relatively inexpensive — to find.
The Mirthful Lyre was published in 1918, when Guiterman was in his late 40s. It’s divided into several sections: Folks And Things; A Few Children; To The Littlest Of All; Fauna And Flora; and All-Out-Doors. Many of the funny poems are in the first section, but I was most impressed and moved by the All-Out-Doors section, Guiterman’s series of love songs about nature.
The nature poems are sensitive and adoring, displaying the poet’s obvious passion for escape from his city life. He seems to be completely at home in the woods, lovingly describing the animal life, the sound of the wind in the trees, and the stillness of travel by canoe.
Guiterman is well worth searching out. Highly recommended.
Leave a CommentIf comedic-philosophical-absurdist-hip-hop-opera poetry is your thing, you’re going to dig DJ Spinoza. I picked this up on the advice of a blog. It’s a fast read, and one that I think will reward repeated attention. This first edition is limited to 1,500 copies, and I’d get one if I were you.
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Last Night I Watched
by Jason Crane
Last night I watched an American president-elect on the television and cried. Next to me was my wife Jennifer, tears running down her cheeks.
Last night I watched the awakening of a nation that had all but given up on its principles and ideals.
Last night I watched Jesse Jackson hold one finger to his trembling lips as he wept, the marathon runner finally crossing the finish line.
Last night I watched John Lewis talk about the unbelievable road from “Whites Only” bathrooms to steel truncheons on the Edmund Pettis Bridge to the steps of the Capitol.
Last night I watched an actor from The Color Purple rest her chin on the shoulder of a friend as she watched an African-American man speak about his future presidency.
Last night I watched an ocean of joyful tears give a gentle lift to the ship that is America.
Last night I watched Walt Whitman as he knelt down and pulled a blade of grass from the rich earth, singing.
Last night I watched as Kenyans danced on dusty ground, arms raised toward the glorious sun.
Last night I watched as a crack opened in the wall, and looking through, I could see the glimmering field of stars.
3 CommentsPoet Gerald Schwartz sent me his thoughts this morning:
For times, then,
All through our lives
We delight in a unity,
The great union,
Of our ventured selves
With what sustains
All possibility. We ride
The swell and are
The surf and with
Changed belief
Inner and outer
We find our talk
Turned to hope:
Our hope into truth:
For a time, early,
We become at home
In you, World.
–Gerald Schwartz
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My sister, mom, dad and friend Kevin at my 2007 birthday shindig.
Here’s a poem I wrote in 2007 after celebrating my birthday with friends and family at Thali, our favorite Indian restaurant in Rochester.
Birthday
by Jason Crane
This is my birthday poem:
Stuffed full of Chicken Makhani,
Squeezing the plastic skull
With its bulging brains.
This is my birthday poem:
Grumpy-faced children
Fight off the smiles
That take over their faces.
This is my birthday poem:
Moving from one end of the
Long table to the other,
A timeline with forks and knives.
This is my birthday poem:
A box of old feelings
Hidden away in the closet,
Buried with new garments.
This is my birthday poem:
Pedaling slowly to Barrington Street,
My young son beside me,
Dodging the potholes.
This is my birthday poem:
Enchiladas and rice
And a dusty courtyard;
Beyond — and old bookstore.
This is my birthday poem:
“Daddy wants jam and bread.”
And knees in my back
Keep me awake in the small hours.
This is my birthday poem:
Tucked in, supine,
Balancing a notebook
On my stuffed belly.
(September 2007)
Leave a CommentPeople react to tragedy in different ways. For Thomas Flynn, a network news reporter covering the 9/11 tragedy as it happened, the story became more than an object to be studied. It became an all-encompassing, life-or-death struggle through the debris-strewn, dust-blind streets of New York.
Seven years later, Flynn tells his tale through the underused medium of the epic poem.
I picked up this book several weeks ago at The Book House, an independent bookstore (!) here in Albany. Today I went back there to have the book signed by its author during his in-store appearance. It turns out that Tom Flynn was born in Albany and still has many connections here.
His book is worth your time.
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