Mark Strand on political poetry and rap

Am not the hugest fan of Strand, but for the most part I'm with him on this one. Most political poems are, indeed, ephemera. And what he says of rap is quite apt.

Discovered via the website of the Poetry Foundation.

One more

The Carpenters, yet again: "Hurting Each Other," 1971.

(I really like Karen's voice on this one ...)

Tracy Chapman

"You're the One," live, November 2003:

Song: "Good-bye, little yellow bird"

A nineteen-year-old Angela Lansbury as Sibyl Vane in the 1945 film version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray:

Another YouTube

The Carpenters perform Ave Maria, 1978.

Another quiz

You Are 4% Texas

Damn Yankee! You think the sun comes up just to hear you crow.

How Texas Are You?

I may be a damn Yankee, but even I know enough never to eat a cowpie.

The 1970s

Testing my ability to post a YouTube video. If it works, you should see/hear the Carpenters sing "Only Yesterday":

Quiz

You Are 70% Tortured Genius

You are smart. Brilliant in fact. And while it's a blessing, it's also a curse. Your head is filled with everything - grand ideas, insufferable worries, and a good deal of angst.

Are You a Tortured Genius?

Via Oblique House.

An Orthodox akathist hymn

From Glory to God for All Things.

This is poetry, and more than poetry ... although perhaps it is irreverent to speak of such an inspired hymn as merely poetry.

Still nauseating after all these years

Amiri Baraka.

Via poetryfoundation.org ... a site with a generous archive of poetry (see their "Poetry Tool"), but elsewhere in the site, we see an unfortunate tendency to promote ... well, the most charitable description would be "cacophonous communards of cultural catastrophe."

Charles Simic

New US poet laureate.

His bio, and links to some of his poems.

A confession: He's not my favorite poet.

Cummings
from his letters

there once was a cuntry of owe
such lofty ideals that no
man ever could mension
(imagine the tention)
what might have offended jane dough