Talk Talk

Jack-o-lantern

I think pumpkin carving is an art...well, okay, a craft, anyway.  Here's one that says Happy Halloween. Visit my Art Blog to see another.

poetic email response to a poem

4443, 2743

 by Carol Saba

 

for Mary Cornish    

 

She makes the craft

look so easy,

almost prosy,

doesn't she?

But it's

definitely poetry

and sounds so nice

read aloud.

:-)

 

 

Numbers

Mary Cornish

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition--
add two cups of milk and stir--
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication's school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Even subtraction is never loss,
just addition somewhere else:
five sparrows take away two,
the two in someone else's
garden now.

There's an amplitude to long division,
as it opens Chinese take-out
box by paper box,
inside every folded cookie
a new fortune.

And I never fail to be surprised
by the gift of an odd remainder,
footloose at the end:
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
with three remaining.

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
two Italians off to the sea,
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.

 

from Poetry magazine
Volume CLXXVI, Number 3, June 2000

Copyright 2000 by The Modern Poetry Association.

Joe and Peej

But I'm not trying to hide them, hah.

Daydreaming

This is another photo (see last post) about obscurity and personality (well, to me at least.)

This is son #1, Patrick.

Moonlight

I was trying to get a photo of my son before it got too dark: I was on the porch and he was rowing out to the motorboat. I have to call it "Joe in the Moonlight."

Dear Peter,

What was that you said to me last week? Everyone's a comic? The book case you thought I might also like(below)

has a serious disadvantage. It would make my slightly messy house even worse.

But, hey, thanks for thinking of me.

Your friend,
Carol

Book Case

You wouldn't think a librarian could possibly like this book case. I mean, how could you put the books in Dewey Decimal order? But I love it! And who needs Dewey here? It only holds 50 or 60 books anyway.

Technically, it's not really a book case but an indoor/outdoor shelving system. Here's how DWR markets it:

The inspiration for Opus Shelving (2000) came to designer Sean Yoo during a trip to Pompeii. While walking through the streets of the archaeological site, the designer was struck by a Roman wall-building technique known as “opus incertum,” which is characterized by a distinctively erratic combination of blocks. Yoo went on to observe this layout of elements elsewhere, from dried-up lake beds in the deserts of Las Vegas to the sidewalks of Los Angeles. He took this familiar pattern and adapted it into shelving that’s made from 100% recyclable expanded polypropylene – the same material chosen for motorcycle helmets due to its light weight and durability.

Opus was chosen by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Design Museum of Milan to be included in the I.DoT 2006–2007, a juried exhibition that selects, certifies and promotes the best of contemporary Italian design for a traveling exhibition. Made in Italy. 

                                

Email

I read way more reviews of books than actual books. Often the review renders the read unnecessary. I find out that the book is just not going to be that good, or the review was so good it told me all I wanted to know. For whatever reason, I sometimes prefer the review (short, pithy, and pointed) to the book anyway. They do after all, have different subject matters.

Janet Malcolm recently reviewed in the NYROB Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home
by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe. Here's my favorite paragraph from her review:

On the face of it, an email and a letter are the same thing: a piece of writing addressed to one or several persons. But letter-writing was never the fraught activity that email-writing is. Shipley and Schwalbe believe that the trouble derives from a fundamental flaw in email for which the user has to compensate:

If you don't consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won't automatically be conveyed. Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties.

I love that idea--that there is no 'universal default tone.' As a poet, I am most interested in the tone of a piece. And I often wonder how best to convey the right tone in my writing. But even better is the 'blank screen' idea. Hah! and OMG! I better be careful:-)

Charlie Harper

I love mid-century modernism. This is a serigraph I am thinking about buying.