freddy fabris | renaissance master mechanics

luci shaw | while reading the new yorker

A word flies off the page,
and through an open window in
my imagination, a bird
that got in and cannot leave,
batting wings against
my walls and bookcases, uttering
piteous vowels of sound.

Frenzied, she aims at the light.
It is window glass and it knocks her out.
Seconds later she comes to life
again, still frantic for exit.

I move away quietly, closing
the door of my mind behind me
to lessen the anxiety in the room,
leaving the window wide
open. Later, after sh has
found her freedom
a winged presence remains,
and a feather on the floor.

Next month, maybe other
words will fly in and I'll let them stay
and make their nests and lay
little literary eggs

by Luci Shaw

*

About 13 years ago, Luci Shaw became part of a writers group that I started back in 1992 with Tim Anderson, Karen Cooper, Mike Mason, and Greg McKitrick. In the last while I've started a New Years tradition of bringing in assemblages of words and phrases that caught my attention while reading that year's issues of the New Yorker magazine. A couple months ago Luci brought in this new poem - she invariably has half a dozen or ten new ones every month. So now I think of those magpie poems of mine as nests filled with eggs from a lot of different birds. An index to my found poems from the New Yorker is here. I've done the ones for 2018, but not posted them yet.

darkened cities (“villes enteintes” ) | thierry cohen

hong kong

los angeles

new york

paris

rio

san francisco

sao paulo

shanghai

shanghai

tokyo

"Since 2010, Cohen has devoted himself to a single project - depicting the major cities of the world as they would appear at night without light pollution, or how they would look if we could see the stars. he photographs the world’s major cities, seeking out views that resonate for him and noting the precise time, angle, and latitude and longitude of his exposure. As the world rotates around its axis the stars that would have been visible above a particular city move to deserts, plains, and other places free of light pollution.By noting the precise latitude and angle of his cityscape, Cohen is able to track the earth’s rotation to places of atmospheric clarity like the Mojave, the Sahara, and the Atacama desert. There he sets up his camera to record what is lost to modern urban dwellers. Compositing the two images, Cohen creates a single new image full of resonance and nuance."
twisted sifter

donald trump, poet | aleksandar hemon

JENNIFER

I can’t do that to you,
Jennifer. That’s my Jennifer.
You know how much I liked
her when I first met her.
Then she started to kill me.

But that’s actually not—
wasn’t your fault.
It was somebody
that you were
dealing with that
wasn’t so good.
Right?

I never blamed you for that.
I know the good.
But this one you like,
right, Jennifer?


POCKETS

You’re going to always have
pockets of something.
What—
you’re going to have people,
like the one-armed man
who blew up a restaurant.
You’re going to have pockets.


TREMENDOUS NUMBERS

1
And we have
tremendous—we have
tremendous
numbers to come,
because these are real—
this isn’t like in the old days,
when you had a lot of
numbers that didn’t mean
anything. You have
tremendous potential,
tremendous numbers
to come.

2
Now we’re going to start
bringing numbers down.
We also have tremendous numbers
with regard to hurricanes and fires
and the tremendous forest fires
all over. We had very big numbers,
unexpectedly big numbers.

California does a horrible job
maintaining their forests.
They’re going to have to start doing
a better job or we’re not going
to be paying them. They are doing
a horrible job of maintaining
what they have.

And we had big numbers on
tremendous numbers
with the forest fires

and obviously the hurricane.


THEM

We called
them and let
them know.
They were able to nab
this very vicious gang
of terrorists. They got
them. I assume
they’re someplace right
now
that maybe you
don’t even want to know
about. I don’t know what
they did with
them. O.K.? And
I don’t care.


CHANGE

So no, I have—
I don’t think I have
to do anything. I have a
—you know, I have
—I have had a good—
now, that can
always change,
but I have had
a good relationship
with Kim Jong
Un, and I’m not
saying it won’t
change. It could
change. The whole
situation could
change.


the new yorker | april 27, 2019 | daily shouts

typos, misread, overheard and dreamed #1 | found poem

My mind self muddles:
back shadow,
bone broth blanket,
knee braces made of feathers
with a metal file on her head.

No, gargoyles are not real.
Everybody wants to learn to knit socks.

They call me Quintessential Tommy,
Malcolm Muggleridge,
a calamity of errors.

How many bugs are there?
How needless on all the trees?

Nobody likes hitting whales.
Strangers will sneeze on you.

He quibbles about monikers.
He can’t swallow, either. And when he swallows, birds get in.


by Ron Reed

two watercolours | john ruskin

study of spray of dead oak leaves (1879)

santa maria della spina, pisa; east end (1846/47)

papergirl | jill lepore

The wood-panelled tailgate of the 1972 Oldsmobile station wagon dangled open like a broken jaw, making a wobbly bench on which four kids could sit, eight legs swinging. Every Sunday morning, long before dawn, we’d get yanked out of bed to stuff the car’s way-back with stacks of twine-tied newspapers, clamber onto the tailgate, cut the twine with my mother’s sewing scissors, and ride around town, bouncing along on that bench, while my father shouted out orders from the driver’s seat. “Watch out for the dog!” he’d holler between draws on his pipe. “Inside the screen door!” “Mailbox!” As the car crept along, never stopping, we’d each grab a paper and dash in the dark across icy driveways or dew-drunk grass, crashing, seasonally, into unexpected snowmen. “Back porch!” “Money under the mat!” He kept a list, scrawled on the back of an envelope, taped to the dashboard: the Accounts. “They owe three weeks!” He didn’t need to remind us. We knew each Doberman and every debt. We’d deliver our papers — Worcester Sunday Telegrams — and then run back to the car and scramble onto the tailgate, dropping the coins we’d collected into empty Briggs tobacco tins as we bumped along to the next turn, the newspaper route our Sabbath.

After we’d shoved the last, fat Worcester Sunday Telegram inside the last, unlatched screen door, we’d head home, my father taking turns a little too fast, so that we’d have to clutch at one another and at the lip of the tailgate, to keep from falling off. “Dad, slow down!” we’d squeal, not meaning it. Then he’d make breakfast, hot chocolate with marshmallows in the winter, orange juice from a can of frozen concentrate in the summer, and on my plate I’d make wedges of cantaloupe into Viking ships sailing across a sea of maple syrup from the Coast of Bacon to Pancake Island. After breakfast, we’d dump the money from the tobacco tins onto the kitchen table and count coins, stacking quarters and nickels and dimes into wrappers from the Worcester County Institution for Savings, while my father updated the Accounts, and made the Collection List.

Going collecting was a drag. You had to knock on people’s doors and ask your neighbors for money — “Telegram! Collecting!” — and it was embarrassing, and, half the time, they’d ask you in, and before you knew it you’d be helping out, and it would take all day. “So long as you’re here, could you hold the baby while I take a quick shower?” “Honey, after this, could you bring my mail down to the post office on that cute little bike of yours?” I came to understand that the people who didn’t leave the money under the mat hadn’t forgotten to. They just liked having a kid visit on Sunday afternoon.

The death of a newspaper is sometimes like other deaths. The Mrs. and the Miss, a very, very old woman and her very old daughter, lived in a crooked green house on top of a rise and wore matching housecoats and slippers. The Miss followed the Mrs. around like a puppy, and, if you found them in the parlor reading the paper, the Mrs. would be poring over the opinion pages while the Miss cut pictures out of the funnies. “The Miss can’t think straight,” my father said. “Her head’s scrambled. So be gentle with her. Nothing to be afraid of. Be sure to help them out.” Once when I biked over there, the Miss was standing, keening, noise without words, sound without sense. The Mrs. wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t ever going to move again. I called for help and held the Miss’s hand, waiting for the wail of sirens. I didn’t know what else to do.


excerpted from "Does Journalism Have A Future" by Jill Lepore
The New Yorker, January 28, 2019

althea warren | read

"Read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they'd rather do it than anything else in the world."

Althea Warren, Library Association speech, 1935

*

"The night you promised to go to dinner with the best friend of your foster aunt, just telephone that you have such a bad cold you're afraid she'll catch it. Stay at home instead and gobble Lucy Gayheart in one gulp like a boa constrictor."

Althea's Ways to Achieve Reading

*

from The Library Book, by Susan Orlean

mihaly csikszentmihalyi | picking lice

Baboons who live in the African plains spend about one-third of their life sleeping, and when awake they divide their time between traveling, finding and eating food, and free leisure time - which basically consists in interacting, or grooming each other's fur to pick out lice. As the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown, in thirteenth century French villages the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other's hair. Now, of course, we have television.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

doc savage | complete control of his mind

 

george bernard shaw | a splendid torch

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

found poem 2018 in progress | assembled from the pages of the new yorker

I'm probably going to be a mad scientist,
and make the original recipe for creating life on earth:
the genealogies of English kings,
the birth names of all five Marx brothers,
the Köchel numbers of the major works of Mozart,
the batting averages of the top-ten all-time hitters in both leagues,
the differing effects on Superman of the various colors of Kryptonite.

What are you doing?
I don't mean what are you doing with your life,
or in general,
but what are you doing right now?

I’m reading right now a novel of dragons, know what I’m saying?

All I could think of was underwear, pens, eye drops,
the endangered Japanese night heron and the threatened lakeside daisy,
the prairies lost,
the wetlands lost
the glaciers lost,
the species lost,
the diminishing and despoiling of entire ecosystems,
dump truck,
dump truck in rain.
A very sad list.

I felt relieved to be in a restaurant that wasn't trying too hard to seem like it wasn't trying too hard.
I was hanging out with people who'd say,
"We're having a wine auction!"
Ornery pigeons, opinionated drunk people,
car alarm set off by other car alarm
upstairs neighbors watching "Hellboy II."
Maybe it was during one of those evenings
that he first devised his plan to become a hermit.
I don't blame him.
He had to do it.
He was too nice to people.
They would have eaten him alive if he'd stayed in a well-populated area.

"Oh, Rose, we're sliding!" I called out,
sounding apologetic,
because it appeared that I'd killed us.

Overwintering stink-bugs navigate like nine-year-olds in bumper cars,
making as much noise as possible and banging into everything in sight.

I had never seen color until I saw it in those Skittles.
Their everyday perfection was somehow dumbfounding.

Barker might as well have made a documentary about the upkeep of the Empire State Building
in the months preceding the arrival of King Kong.

The twin brothers in the garden
are savvy scenesters earning punk yuks.

Wonderments consort with clunkers

Writing, like dying,
is one of those things that should be done alone
or not at all.

Jerry Springer--
it's a stretch to call him a host;
how do you host a brawl?
He lies to slander and seduce,
he lies to profit,
and he sometimes lies, it seems,
just because.

The Faroe Islands, an austere, mountainous archipelago marooned in the North Atlantic two hundred miles nort of Scotland, has a landmass of only five hundred and forty square miles, and is sparsely populated with fifty thousand people and seventy thousand sheep. But, looked at another way, the country
It's a slasher-flick variation on the sex lives of ordinary teens,
during a stage when people often take risks because they don't know what they want,
other than for something major to happen.
It's very hard to predict how history will proceed after someone is shot in the head.

photos | greg girard | under vancouver

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