A Time-Warner representative called the house Friday morning, just a few hours after I put in my trouble report. She said that some of their people had been working on the problem, and wanted to know if our connection was back up. Wendy, who was at home to take the call, checked and verified that […]

A bookend for the end of the month: another poem that I understand much better now than when I first read it:
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to start a poetry reading group.

Rain
Edward Thomas
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to subscribe to the Academy of American […]

Once upon a time, back when we were in school at Auburn, Wendy gave me a Sandra Boynton card that looked something like the one you see here. On its cover are animals arranged in four rows:

On the first row are a hippopotamus, a bird, and a pair of effiminate sheep. On the second row; […]

The Red Couch has an interesting post about a restaurant, Horsefeathers, that runs a weblog. Interesting name for a restaurant. I guess Duck Soup and Animal Crackers were taken.

Chicago
Carl Sandburg
            Hog Butcher for the World,
            Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
            Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
            Stormy, husky, brawling,
            City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I […]

Here’s something I learned about through the Flickr blog: a fascinating experiment in poetry. Somehow, the result is disappointing, probably because it’s fairly bland compared to the art on all the preceding pages. Try it and see what you think.

Drones and Chants
Norman Finkelstein
In memory of Armand Schwerner
All night long they turned the wheels,
picked up the sound and passed it on
All night long we listened to the music,
all night there was thunder among the hills
All night and day the words were spoken,
each word inscribed and traced to its origin
All night and day the words were […]

Another project I worked on this past weekend was the deck: finishing the trim work, and putting in more decorative gravel.
Trim work: a box to hide the concrete footer and sonotube, and a facia piece to hide the bracket.
What the deck looks like with the trim work finished.

In back of the real
Allen Ginsberg
railroad yard in San Jose
              I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
              and sat on a bench
near the switchman’s shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
              the asphalt highway
—the dread hay flower
              I thought—It had a
brittle black stem and
              corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus’ inchlong
              crown, and a sailed
dry center cotten tuft
              like a used […]

In the foreword to his 1977 collection Essays of E. B. White, the famous author wrote “The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.” In 1995, I put this quote on the first personal web site I ever […]

I just love these short Japanese poems. This one also out of One Hundred More Poems From the Japanese:
The lower leaves of the trees
Tangle the sunset in dusk.
Awe spreads with
The summer twilight.
       -Sone No Yoshitada
One way to observe National Poetry Month is to start a commonplace book. I have a commonplace book - I keep it […]