The title of this post corresponds to a volume of poetry released by Brian Turner, a US Army infantry man who served in Iraq. He blogs at HomeFires at the NY Times.
Thanks to things like the BDR and my job bookselling, I took this book out of the Amazon box yesterday afternoon and can immediately count on my fingers the 4 or 5 Photoshop techniques used to come up with this…less than innovative cover. I can sort of see what the designer was going for, but it falls flat due to a complete lack of complexity. I think it would have worked better if we could discern details from the cover in the soldier’s face, isn’t detail from a shared experience part of poetry? Sure, the poet obscures to give an impression (hence the cover and ‘oil paint’ filter settings) but lets get a little bit more complex. I mean, I could do this cover, given stock photos, if about 30 minutes and that’s assuming I don’t already have Photoshop installed and I have to go look up the title because I lost the paper it was written down on for me. i hate to be disparaging but I think if I see exactly how the designer did all of this and that it would take me (not a professional designer) 5 minutes to complete it strikes me as at the very least lazy and more distressing, wholly uninspired. I just hope the poetry beneath this fairly crappy cover surpasses it. More on that later.
Archive for the ‘poetry’ Category
Here, Bullet: the cover
Saturday, October 13th, 2007Lines from the 57 bus.
Sunday, October 7th, 2007Morning,
the season having shifted overnight.
There’s a patchy greyness
moving swiftly through the sky,
brushing a thin, chill mist
over the pavement, onto the leaves.
Buildings in the distance dissolve
into geometries, cool winds
scatter junk and new-dead leaves.
I can feel the season begin in earnest.
The energy of a switch thrown,
from heat and thunder to the
subtler: winds, leaves, descent.
I ignore the bus’s constant rattle,
focusing on, instead, a breath,
breath exhaled in the shedding of leaves.
Composed initially while waiting for the bus this morning and while on it.
recorded in it’s first draft 8:15AM-8:23AM.
(Many breaks in the composition were forced on me by the driver’s overzealous application of both breaks and accelerator.)
The posted version represents an expansion and elaboration from the original 11 lines in one stanza.
Please forgive my sophomoric efforts here, it’s an enjoyable pursuit.
music as poetry?
Thursday, October 4th, 2007Here’s a question for all of the English scholars in the room. Why aren’t music lyrics analyzed and subjected to the same sort of critical rigor and scrutiny as poetry. There is undoubtedly a larger audience for academic work on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or Radiohead’s OK, Computer than there is for the collected works of Billy Collins, Wilfred Owen or probably even someone like Allen Ginsberg, though I speak without any authority on the latter because I haven’t read him at all. Why aren’t English Departments devoting time to these sorts of things? Why isn’t there a field of professional academics on music lyrics as literature? Is it the form? What then do we make of poetry set to music? Does singing of a poem remove it from literature? Does it somehow become a less intellectualized thing and a thing to only be experienced as emotion? Where do we place hip-hop? Does Snoop-Dogg make use of metrical variation? Will I ever stop asking questions on a blog that isn’t read (by more than a 1/2 dozen people) and go write a paper on Aeschylus’ Oresteia?
(This is a topic I will need, like so many others, return to with more thought and vigor at a later date.)
My Weekly Book Purchase #1: Billy Collins’ The Trouble With Poetry
Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 
My roommate Mike has been buying an album per week via iTunes’ DRM free Mp3s on Sunday afternoons. I’ve decided to follow his example and buy a book per week my last day of work for the ‘week’ on Monday. I’ll add a post in a couple of days when I finish this book with some more of my thoughts on it.
So far I like Collins’ little upturns from ordinary to extraordinary or the opposite toward the end of the poems. This little rise in the poem is what makes it satisfying for me in reading it. I’ve read the first 3 poems in this thin volume and so far I like what I’ve seen. It seems to me like Collins’ eye on the world is like a kid playing with the zoom lens on his father’s camera. He spends a lot of time zoomed in as far away or as close from what he’s analyzing as he can only shift the frame of your vision as quickly as possible to maximize this change in perspective. These shifts in perspective and focus lead to the poem finishing on a note and leaves the reader with “oh! well would you look at that.” This thought is not always just what Collins brings to mind through showing the reader something, often it is the voice of the poem remarking on a thing and how it relates to the poet. It’s nice to read a poet that stays within some boundaries, Collins seems as he says himself in the introductory poem “to sit in the kitchen/and mention with a pen” this is not the poetry of romantics walking Tinturn Abbey, not Frost pausing in a snow covered wood, Collins so far seems to stay indoors in contemplation and this feels like a modern, normal thing to do. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the volume.
Clouds over The Charles
Wednesday, March 15th, 2006Beauty lies not only in cloudless blue skies.
It can be found in the movement of storms.
The shadow
Raining and Walking.
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006I wrote a ridiculously long poem after a longer walk in the rain this evening.
I don’t have a topic for my paper for History class yet. I still have plenty of time.
I will find a topic before I go to sleep tonight. It may be a late night. I have been very tired today, I don’t feel like i should be this tired, maybe things are weighing more heavily on me then I’ll admit. I hope not though. I had more tests done on my kidney over the break. My deformed one is working at 50% of what it should be.
I’m taking an anti-biotic to prevent infection.
St. Patrick’s Day is Friday.
Some friends are coming into town.
This paper will be done by then.
I’ll go watch a play Saturday.
You don’t really care, but it’s nice to numerate what will be happening, makes it easier to take in. Maybe i’ll post the poem. It’s not too bad, not sure if i want loads of people to read it or what. If you’re really sneaky you might find it anyway.
Music: Radiohead: Kid A, Amnesiac.