City Full of Stories

After the Storm, a City Full of Stories. This article from the New York Times follows what happened to an assortment of New Yorkers who have been featured in the Times' regular Character Study column.

I'll Wait

Poetry Friday: Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?

From the first time I heard this song in the TV movie of "Cinderella," I loved it. On one level, I suppose, it's just a silly ditty, but the questions it asks are deeper than that. In addition to the questions that Cinderella and the prince ask each other about whether they are inventing what they see in each other (answer: probably, since you've only known each other for ten minutes), there is the question of what makes us love. Why do we love people, places and things? Is it because of their inherent beauty? Or do we see the beauty in people, places, and things as we grow to love them? Of course, the answer is yes. There's something beautiful that attracts our notice, but as we grow in love, we see more and more that someone who wasn't paying such close attention would miss completely.

Attachment theory tells us that the love between parents and their infants is a sort of dance. Our babies are beautiful, so we coo over them and cuddle them. They respond by being even more adorable, "attachment-promoting behavior," as it's called. We in turn love them even more.

Aren't all loves kind of the same way? In romantic love or friendship, something about us is noticed and appreciated, and we respond by doing more of whatever the other person liked. We reach a point, with people we love, where we don't even see what they look like any more. We just see a face that is familiar and dear. 

C.S. Lewis wrote about friendship:

..."Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other people; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing."

But enough philosophizing...here are three videos of this song, and the lyrics as well. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Do I Love You Because You're Beautiful?
by Rodgers and Hammerstein

Do I love you because you're beautiful
Or are you beautiful because I love you?
Am I making believe I see in you
A girl too lovely to be really true?
Do I want you because you're wonderful
Or are you wonderful because I want you?
Are you the sweet invention of lover's dream
Or are you really as beautiful as you seem?

 Am I making believe I see in you
A man too perfect to be really true?
Do I want you because you're wonderful
Or are you wonderful because I want you?
Are you the sweet invention of lover's dream
Or are you really as wonderful as you seem?

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Reading Update

The four books I'll review in this post were all assigned for my Adolescent Literature class.  I've enjoyed taking a class with so much fun reading!

Book #32 for 2012 was Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi.  It's scarily appropriate with its "city-killer" hurricanes, which go up to Category 6.  (These days, in case you aren't a hurricane-watcher, the maximum is 5.)  The book is set in the Gulf Coast region of a future United States, where New Orleans, along with Orleans II, is drowned and replaced by Mississippi Metropolitan (MissMet), which they didn't call Orleans III because "even the most ardent supporters of the drowned city gave up on the spectacularly bad luck enjoyed by places called 'Orleans.'"  Nailer, the protagonist, works salvage on abandoned ships and lives like many teenagers do today in large third-world cities.  He doesn't really know or think about other lives until he and his friend Pima find a rich girl whose fancy boat has been washed ashore during a hurricane.  This dystopic novel is exciting and action-packed, but also full of thought-provoking ideas about whether we are doomed to remain in the world into which we're born.  Here's an interesting interview with Bacigalupi where he talks about writing YA science fiction, whether his books are really dystopias, and how what he writes connects with what's already going on in the world.

Book #33 was not originally written as a YA novel; it was chosen for an Alex Award, given to books written for adults but judged to be especially appealing to teenagers.  It's called Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline, and it's the first novel I've ever read that is basically set on the internet.  Wade is a teenager living in 2044, a time when most people spend most of their time on the OASIS, which stands for Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation.  One of the creators of the OASIS has died and left a will in which he gives vague and confusing instructions to find an Easter Egg which he has hidden in the system.  Whoever finds it will inherit his entire estate.  He has filled the hunt with references to his teenage years, the 1980s.  This starts a worldwide craze for studying eighties lore, but when the book opens, nobody has made much progress in finding the egg.  But that is about to change.  Cline obviously had so much fun writing this book that you have to enjoy it too.  I did find myself wondering who, exactly, his target audience was, since there are so many references to the eighties, which I remember very well, thank you very much, but which to my students seem like prehistory.  But this book has sold amazingly and there is even a movie in the works, so it must be understandable even if you never saw War Games and don't know what PacMan is.  You can see  Cline's blog here, and once again, he's having so much fun that it really is endearing, especially if, like me, you like geeks quite a bit.

Book #34 is a new favorite of mine.  I've already shared it with a class, my seventh graders.  It's called Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai, and it's the story of Lai's own childhood journey from Saigon in 1975 to Alabama.  Written in incredibly spare and yet evocative free verse, the story makes Saigon and Alabama come alive, as well as the characters, especially Ha, who narrates the book.  She's not always so grateful to be a refugee, and it's not easy for her to adjust to her new life.  As the mother of some earthquake refugees myself, I found myself identifying with Ha's mother!




Book #35 is another one that the author enjoyed writing, The Notorious Benedict Arnold, by Steve Sheinkin.  Sheinkin includes an afterword full of his sources, and writes, "I've been fascinated by Benedict Arnold's story for years and have long wanted to write my own version - I'm convinced it's one of the best action/adventure tales in American history.  In preparation, I compiled an absurdly large collection of books about Arnold, not to mention plays, historical prints, and other Arnold items I probably shouldn't have spent my money on."  C'mon, don't you like Sheinkin already?  He's clearly obsessed by his subject matter.  And his book is really a wonderful biography of Arnold, written like a novel.   Here's Sheinkin's website.

Coming soon: books #36-#39. 

This post is linked to the November 10th Saturday Review of Books.

Promises, Promises

I was looking back at past posts about President Obama, and I found this link that I shared back in 2008. It's called the Obameter, and it keeps track of the campaign promises that the President has kept, compromised on, broken, or stalled. Twenty percent of the promises are rated "in the works." There's more detail, too, on each individual issue. You can browse the promises in several different ways.

And here's an excerpt from Obama's speech last night:

"It's not small, it's big. It's important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won't change after tonight, and it shouldn't. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today."

The speech ended like this:

"I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We're not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America."

I hope it's true, and I'm praying for the President in the big job he has ahead of him.

Election Day

I guess we know who Big Bird would vote for.

Voting

Like everyone else, I am very ready for this election season to be over.  It has dragged on as long as I can remember.  Was there ever a time before these men were arguing with each other and everyone I know was arguing too?

But as much as I dislike the polarization we've seen during this election, I can't be cynical about voting.   I think about people around the world who have no voice in their government; I think about the photos of eager first-time voters lining up across the hills in South Africa in 1994; I think about women in the United States who fought for years for the right to vote.

Source: http://qu301southafrica.com

Voting is a privilege, and I hope my American readers will go vote tomorrow.  I sent off my absentee ballot last week.  I admit that it gives me a thrill every single time I vote, even though my first election was -- ahem -- a long time ago.

Sunday Night

The problem with getting an extra hour of sleep last night is darkness coming early, depressingly, this evening. The problem with having two short weeks (hurricane days off, All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day) is that Sunday night comes, and tomorrow morning is Monday, and there's a five-day work week ahead.

Yeah, feeling a little gloomy, since it's dark and Novembery and we haven't had city electricity since yesterday afternoon (not the result of the hurricane, just the way things are). And I'm maybe just a teeny bit sleep-deprived in spite of the extra hour, because our neighbors had an all night bash last night complete with drumming until four AM.

 I'll try to be a bit more uplifting tomorrow.

Amy Wilentz on Sandy

I just recently found out that Amy Wilentz, author of the gorgeously written and controversial The Rainy Season, has a blog. I know I will be reading it regularly, because she writes so wonderfully and apologizes (in the post I'm quoting below) for being so Haiticentric. "I can't help it," she admits. Here she is on Hurricane Sandy. This is just a short excerpt from a much longer post, and she's also provided (in a separate post) the photo she refers to. Click on the link at the end to read the whole thing.  

"So when I look at the picture of a crowded gas station in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, ... I feel that I have been here before; I’ve been in that gas station so many times, only it was always in Haiti, and no one ever cared. In fact, no one really minded: in Haiti, gasoline shortages are habitual, just part of the program of underdevelopment — Haiti can run out of gas nationally because a tanker is delayed. One becomes rather insouciant and even fatalistic about it. It’s perfectly normal to say that you couldn’t get to an appointment because you ran out of gas or because you were delayed at the gas station for hours. Often you borrow someone else’s car that has more gas, if your meeting is really urgent.
And in Haiti, people who are standing in line picking up gas for distant empty cars don’t have those nice handy red gasoline holders to fill up; they have old vegetable oil bottles or dilapidated white buckets. (Did you know some gasoline is pink? I learned that in Haiti.) Also the cars that converged on gas stations in Port-au-Prince or in the provincial towns (in inefficient circles and wedges resembling the pattern at the Brooklyn station above), are not recent models. Suffice it to say that it is not surprising to look down while riding in a Haitian “taxi” and see the roadbed passing beneath your feet as if you were the aptly named Barney Rubble.

Also, by the way, hospitals have always had huge power problems in Haiti, all the time. I loved reading about how Bellevue hospital dealt with Sandy; it was so Haitian — the bucket lines, going up and down stairs on foot, without elevators, rushing oxygen tanks first to one bedside and then the next.  Welcome to the world as it is."

Here's the whole post.

And here's an article from the Atlantic on the hurricane damage in Haiti.

Poetry Friday: Another Hurricane Poem

Amy from The Poem Farm posted this poem, by a Puerto Rican poet, on Facebook this week. It was perfect for us, drying out from the storm, and I hope it doesn't seem frivolous if you're in New Jersey or New York. Believe me, I don't make light of hurricanes, this or any other. The latest statistics show that there were 157 deaths from this storm, and 51 of them were in Haiti. The damage doesn't have such high cost estimates here because people don't start off with as much to lose. All that said, I love this poem, especially the last line, so be sure to click through to read that.

Problems with Hurricanes
by Victor Hernández Cruz

 A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise
or the water.
I'll tell you he said:
it's the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.

How would your family feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.

Here's the rest.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

It's November! (Reading Update post)

It's November again, and since I have been a blogging slacker for the last several months (if it weren't for Poetry Friday, I would hardly post anything at all), I decided to try NaBloPoMo again this year.  Apparently this isn't really a thing any more; it's become more of a year-round challenge, and the official website just says something about "the birthday of this project." Never mind!  I will go by the rules I've followed for the last couple of years, which are, simply, to post something, anything, every day of November.

Since my last Reading Update post, I have read sixteen books, so I'm going to split those up over several posts and put one up whenever I have a day when I have nothing else to post.  I have time to do that today because we have All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day off from school. 

So here goes:

I actually read book #28 at the beginning of the summer but had somehow missed it in my blog list.  Ashfall, by Mike Mullin, is the kind of book that gives you nightmares.  In most dystopic novels, there is enough improbability (and part of that is the futuristic setting) that the reader can maintain some distance.  This book, however, is unblinkingly realistic, and set in the present day.  Did you know there is a massive volcano under Yellowstone?  I didn't.  Did you know what kind of results there could be if it were to erupt?  I didn't, but now I do.  Alex is forced to call upon all of his resources to survive the journey to find his parents.  On the way he meets Darla, and their growing dependence on each other is portrayed in an incredibly unsentimental, yet touching way.  You can read the first two chapters for free here, at the author's website, and you can also find previews of the second book, which came out a couple of weeks ago, and which I haven't read yet.  Having experienced an earthquake myself, and being immersed right now, like everyone else, in coverage from Hurricane Sandy, I am very much aware that this world is full of huge forces that are completely beyond our control.  This book reinforced that awareness.  Even so, I do recommend it for the way it draws you in from the first page, its believable characters, and its picture of human beings surviving because they have to, and even with a bit of hope in the midst of all the bleakness.

Book #29 was A Guide to the Birds of East Africa, by Nicholas Drayson. Many reviews have compared this book to Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books. It was reminiscent of those books, and it also reminded me of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson.  Like Alexander McCall Smith's books, this one has an African setting that is not riddled with misery (though there are some glimpses of the problems of contemporary Nairobi), and like Helen Simonson's novel, there's a romance (or is there?) between non-youthful characters.  This was as light and amusing as the previous book was dark and terrifying.

Book #30 was another Alan Gregory book, Higher Authority, by Stephen White. Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist who somehow is around a whole lot of murders. His girlfriend (wife in later books) is a DA, so that explains some of the mayhem that surrounds him, but seriously, he makes psychology seem like a very dangerous profession. Like most of the murder mysteries I read (mostly just Stephen White, P.D. James, and Elizabeth George), I like these books for the character development and relationships. I often forget the details of the murder plot immediately after reading them. This one had the additional interest of its exploration (mostly negative) of Mormonism.

The next bunch of books were assigned for a class I'm taking in Adolescent Literature.  One of the best things about taking a class or joining a book group is getting introduced to a stack of new authors and titles.  Some of these I wouldn't have chosen myself, but I'm glad I read all of them.  The professor chose many award-winners from the last couple of years.  Book #31 was especially excellent, and I recommend it highly.  It's called  Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science, by Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos.  This is one of those books that made me see the world differently and made connections between disparate elements in my thinking.  There's a major Haiti component to the history of sugar, which explains part of my interest, but I was also fascinated to learn that the history of sugar is the history of slavery and industrialization and revolution.  Because human beings crave sweetness, the world changed.  I see abolitionism in a new light after reading this, as well; yes, abolitionists went without sugar in their tea to urge an end to slavery, but if a new way of producing sugar (from beets) hadn't been developed, would we still have the evils of plantation slavery?  Our craving for sweetness continues unabated.  This book reads like an action-packed novel.  You can see the authors' website here.

Coming soon: books #32 - #35!
This post is linked to the November 3rd Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Siblings

School is called off today for the second day as we are pounded by Hurricane Sandy.  She's not hitting us directly, but we are getting an unbelievable amount of rain.  The latest I heard was that nine people have died in Haiti as a result.

I found this poem about hurricanes.  Be sure to click through and read about the others that year - including the most famous one, perhaps ever, Katrina.

Siblings

By Patricia Smith

Hurricanes, 2005

Arlene learned to dance backwards in heels that were too high.

Bret prayed for a shaggy mustache made of mud and hair.

Cindy just couldn’t keep her windy legs together.

Dennis never learned to swim.

Emily whispered her gusts into a thousand skins.

Franklin, farsighted and anxious, bumbled villages.

Gert spat her matronly name against a city’s flat face.

Harvey hurled a wailing child high.

Irene, the baby girl, threw pounding tantrums.

Here's the rest.
And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: The List

I read the poem in this post earlier this week with my eighth graders, and later in the same day saw this blog post linked on Facebook (it's a list of the "Ten books you absolutely must read" and includes such items as "every single book by your favourite author" and "the one that a friend recommends").  Both express my view that people should read what they enjoy.  I have read books before because they were good for me, or because I wanted to be able to say I had read them, and there's nothing inherently wrong with those things, but reading is also a great pleasure, and I want to enjoy it.  I don't believe that there is some list of books everyone should read.  Everyone should read the Bible (because there's so much in it that is so amazing), but other than that, people's lists are, and should be, idiosyncratic.

Here's Naomi Shihab Nye's take on that:

The List
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A man told me he had calculated
the exact number of books
he would be able to read before he died
by figuring the average number
of books he read per month
and his probable earth span,
(averaging how long
his dad and grandpa had lived,
adding on a few years since he
exercised more than they did).
Then he made a list of necessary books,
nonfiction mostly, history, philosophy,
fiction, and poetry from different time periods
so there wouldn’t be large gaps in his mind.
He had given up frivolous reading entirely.
There are only so many days.

Oh, I felt sad to hear such an organized plan.
What about the books that aren’t written yet,
the books his friends might recommend
that aren’t on the list,
the yummy magazine that might fall
into his hand at a silly moment after all?
What about the mystery search
through the delectable library shelves?
I felt the heartbeat of forgotten precious books
calling for his hand.

Here's today's roundup, hosted by the lovely Irene Latham, who is celebrating her new book. Congratulations, Irene! And I'm so sorry I never sent you a couplet for the zoo poem. When you're too busy to write a couplet, you are too busy.

Poetry Friday: About Education

I am too busy these days.  I can tell because I'm not writing, I'm not blogging, and this week I didn't even read the Poetry Friday posts until Thursday evening (and I just skimmed a few).  I'm teaching and taking a class.  My grades are due next Wednesday, too, and teachers need no more information than that. 

Here's a poem for this week.  It seems appropriate.

To David, About His Education

By Howard Nemerov
 

The world is full of mostly invisible things,

And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,

Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,

Things like the square root of Everest

Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,

Or whether the law of the excluded middle

Applies west of the Rockies. For these

And the like reasons, you have to go to school

And study books and listen to what you are told,

And sometimes try to remember. Though I don’t know

What you will do with the mean annual rainfall

On Plato’s Republic, or the calorie content

Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be

Good for you, and you will have to learn them

In order to become one of the grown-ups

Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,

But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world

Under his hat, which is where it belongs,

And teaches small children to do this in their turn.


Today's roundup is here.

Poetry Friday: October

October where I live brings some slightly cooler weather, but nothing like the drama of autumn in the north.  Here's Paul Laurence Dunbar on October, who is "whole-hearted, happy, careless, free."  Here's to October living this weekend!

October

OCTOBER is the treasurer of the year,
And all the months pay bounty to her
store;
The fields and orchards still their tribute bear,
And fill her brimming coffers more and more.
But she, with youthful lavishness,
Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress,
And decks herself in garments bold
Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.
She heedeth not how swift the hours fly,
But smiles and sings her happy life along;
She only sees above a shining sky;
She only hears the breezes' voice in song.
Her garments trail the woodlands through,
And gather pearls of early dew
That sparkle, till the roguish Sun
Creeps up and steals them every one.
But what cares she that jewels should be lost,
When all of Nature's bounteous wealth is
hers?
Though princely fortunes may have been their
cost,
Not one regret her calm demeanor stirs.
Whole-hearted, happy, careless, free,
She lives her life out joyously,
Nor cares when Frost stalks o'er her way
And turns her auburn locks to gray.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Earthquake Poem

After the earthquake I wrote here, here and here about hearing my friend Magalie Boyer on the radio, being interviewed on the American Public Media show The Story. Hers was one of the respectful, loving, and deeply sorrowful voices coming out of Haiti in those terrible days, an articulate Haitian woman speaking her sadness about what had happened to her country. 

This week Magalie shared a poem with me that she wrote about the earthquake, and I immediately begged her to let me share it for Poetry Friday. Here it is.


Postmortem
by Magalie Boyer

Some things we lost in the earthquake:

The Ministry of Planification and of External Cooperation and the Ministry of Public Health

The Ministry of Finance and of the Economy and the Palais de Justice

The Primature and the DGI

The National Palace

Canado

Sainte Trinite and Sacre Coeur

The Wesleyan Church of Carrefour-feuilles

Maxo’s records, complete with his new-born picture, from Chancerelle

And Mario, who was 17 and albino

Marie-Lucie, a nursing student, Marie-Lucie and her 98 classmates

The habit of hearing harmony in the city’s cacophony

(As if the ensemble of tap-taps and 4x4s could be a choir!)

Our casual relationship with rank misery

The ability to match our tears to our grief

Jacmel’s invincibility

The mask of sufficiency

The fig leaf of society


 Here is today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Elizabeth Alexander 2

I'm back with Elizabeth Alexander today, after finishing listening to the podcast I linked to last week. Again, I enjoyed learning more about Alexander than that she was the poet who read a poem at Obama's inauguration. I loved so many of the things that Alexander had to say, and the poems that she read, that I had to feature her once more. Here she is on poetry as a poor people's art:

"So but I think poetry — you know, what I also like to continue what a number of writers — Lucille Clifton, Wanda Coleman — they've talked about poetry as an art form that is a poor peoples' art form, which is to say you don't need — you can't write a novel without a lot of time to yourself. They don't get written any other way. But I love how these women talk about how you can snatch time to make a poem. That doesn't mean that they aren't hard to make, but it means that they are like grass or flowers coming up in the sidewalk cracks. Wanda Coleman says, 'I can start a poem if I'm waiting on line. Poor people spend a lot of time waiting on line. I couldn't write a novel waiting on line, but I could start a poem waiting on line.' Lucille Clifton says, 'The best conditions for me to write poetry are at the kitchen table, one kid's got the measles, another two kids are smacking each other. You know, life is going on around me.' And not only is that the stuff of the poems, but also that she can snatch little tiny snippets of space for the poems. She had six children and she was very, very funny. She said, 'Why do you think my poems are so short?' Because that's what results when you're grabbing time like that. But, I mean, they are incredibly, powerfully meditative, amazing, amazing poems. So I think that there's a way that poetry — you don't make any money from writing it and you don't need any money to make it."

I liked this quote because I have been feeling lately as though I don't have time for poetry - for any of my own writing, really. Of course I'm teaching poems to my students, but I'm also grading their work and taking an online graduate class, and that doesn't leave much time for thinking and creating. But I need to "snatch little tiny snippets of space" more often. Later she talks about writing with a newborn:

"You just realize like, well, if you're gonna do it, just do it. Don't even think about doing it. Don't talk about doing it. Just do it. So actually, it was with my first child and nursing in the middle of the night and being, of course, so tired, but also wonderfully unguarded. I found that actually being that tired was fantastic for my poetry because I had no filters. You know, I'd have the baby in one arm and it would be three in the morning and I'd write some things down on any scrap of paper. I just grabbed the time I had."

Speaking of birth, here's the beginning of Alexander's poem "Neonatology."

Neonatology

 by Elizabeth Alexander

Giving birth is like jazz, something from silence,
then all of it. Long, elegant boats,
blood-boiling sunshine, human cargo, a handmade kite —

Postpartum.
No longer a celebrity, pregnant lady, expectant.
It has happened; you are here...

Here's the rest.


And with the combination of poverty and birth, I have to share this post too, written by my friend Beth McHoul. Yes, giving birth is like jazz, in all its improvisation and beauty and joy, but for too many women around the world, giving birth is terribly dangerous. Here's a poem I wrote about a scene I witnessed in Port-au-Prince right after the US election when Obama became president.

 November 7, 2008, Port-au-Prince

The Friday after the US election
 We were driving home on Delmas
And I saw a little family:
A man carrying a newborn with infinite gentleness
And a woman walking slowly behind him.
She had the doughy belly of recent childbirth.
My body felt that familiar soreness as I watched her.

Some women are pushed to the curb In a wheelchair
After the hardest work they'll ever do
And then helped carefully into a car
With a car seat awaiting the floppy-headed baby
And driven by a husband who tries to avoid every bump in the road.
This one walked home
With a towel tied around her waist
To hide any evidence of postpartum bleeding.

I wondered as we passed if she had named her baby Obama?
I wondered what his life would be like
With such a strong mother
And with a father who carried him home
With so much love and pride.

 by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Alexander says about poetry,

"I think that one of the great things about poetry, and many black women poets have written about this, that human beings have always made song. Communities, tribes, peoples, have always told each other the story of who they are in song."

This week, Elizabeth Alexander and Beth McHoul and Haiti have me thinking about poetry and song, birth and death, life and loss.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Elizabeth Alexander

Yesterday I started listening to a podcast featuring Elizabeth Alexander (you can find the podcast here), and I heard her read her poem "Ars Poetica #100:I Believe." When I went to her website to look for the text, I also found another that I liked even better. It's called "African Leave-Taking Disorder." I grew up in Africa and have witnessed this "disorder" many times, and even developed it myself. Far from being a disorder, it's a wonderful feature of the deep, satisfying relationships that people have with each other in traditional African culture, where hurry is not valued, and people matter more than things or events.

The poem begins like this:

Ars Poetica #28: African Leave-Taking Disorder

The talk is good. The two friends linger
at the door. Urban crickets sing with them.

There is no after the supper and talk.
The talk is good. These two friends linger

at the door, half in, half out, ‘til one
decides to walk the other home. And so

they walk, more talk, the new doorstep, the
nightgowned wife who shakes her head and smiles

from the bedroom window as the men talk
in love and the crickets sing along.

You can read the rest here.

The only Elizabeth Alexander poem I had ever heard or read before this podcast was her inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day". When Obama was inaugurated, I searched out all the poems that have been read at inaugurations (there aren't many) and read them with my eighth graders. After listening to the lovely conversation in the podcast (I'm still not finished; I'm listening to the one that's an hour and a half long, and I just can't ride the exercise bike that long), I am sure I am going to be seeking out more of her work.

Here's today's roundup.

Have a great weekend. Here's hoping you develop "African leave-taking disorder," and spend some time in deep, satisfying conversation.

Poetry Friday: The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

Last week I posted a poem my son shared with me; this week it's one from my daughter.

The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

by Albert Goldbarth

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Here's the rest.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

More After the Storm

“I put the baby under a table, and we tried to go under the bed, but there was water coming up from the floor,” said Ms. Millien, 35. “In past storms we could stand in the corners where the leaks are not too bad to stay dry, but with this storm there were no corners, there was no escape.”

from this New York Times article.

It's been a week since Isaac paid us a visit. I spent most of last Saturday sleeping, since I had spent most of Friday night awake. Our aftermath, as I wrote in an earlier post, involved cleaning up fallen branches and dealing with electrical and internet outages. We still don't have electricity back properly, though it's been on for five minutes here and there. Our neighborhood is full of the sounds of many generators. Anyone who can afford it here owns a generator, since power cuts are so common even when no storm has passed through. Our generator is running now, and it's loud and smelly, and I am so thankful for it.

But I never had to put a baby under a table, and I never had to stand in the corner to stay dry, and although it felt like the windows might blow out, I never thought my roof would blow off. And I don't live in a tent. And I know every single minute that the world isn't fair, and that I am outrageously privileged.