Reading List 2008: Terror & Robots

Okay, so I finished January's Poetry Book Club book several days ago, but I just realized I have to put it up. My short review: Matthea Harvey Rocks.

You can read a much less abbreviated response to Matthea Harvey's Modern Life (80 pages) in two ways. On January 31, we'll have our Poetry Book Club discussion. And, on the first Tuesday of January, I'll post a more formal review of the book on Read. Write. Poem.

Total For 2008: 1159 pages
Genres: Memoir (1), Essay (1), Graphic Novel (1), Non-Fiction (1), Poetry (1)

Nonsensical Word Soup

A while ago, my brother turned me on to a sight called blather. It's a weird site, but extremely fun to play around with. If you liked Choose Your Own Adventure books or MadLibs pads when you were a kid, then this may be the sight for you. Imagine that the Choose Your Own adventure books were collaboratively written by Mallarme and a stoned high school student and then you could be close.

The premise is pretty simple. The site leads you to a randomly generated word and that word has a collaborative poem written on it. It could be 5 lines it could be 55 lines, you'll never know. Almost every word in the poem is linked to a page with that name, where another collaborative poem was written. You can add a line to any poem that you like, and the program automatically links the individual words to the pages.

Overall, this is very addictive. I will say that some of the pages are very slow loading and I was disappointed to realize that "acid" had the most lines. *Sigh.*

To Curse or Not To Curse

WBAI, a peace and justice radio station in New York City, self-censored earlier this year when they determined they could not risk airing Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem "Howl" on its 50th anniversary. They weren't worried about listener complaint or backlash from a conservative audience. They were concerned about the exorbitant FCC fines for swearing on the air.

The New York Times ran a very interesting editorial in today's paper about this radio station's act, and put it into the larger context of swearing in radio and television. Personally, I feel that the FCC should be putting swearing into a larger context -- if the swear is in an obviously literary work, like Ginsberg's amazing poem, then it should relax. If someone is swearing out of a desire to shock or offend, then fine the *^&%! out of them.

I think this is especially funny, since a few weeks ago I lectured on Howl's original censorship when it was published, 50 years earlier.

So I'm New to This iTunes Thing...

...having just purchased an iPod a month or so ago. (I used a different company's mp3 player until it died.) I typed "poetry" into the podcast directory, and found the coolest video! Of course, I can't figure out how to post it on this blog, so instead I'll just describe it and strongly recommend it. You Internet-savvy folks will surely be able to find it.

The podcast is called "National Champion Performance Poets" and the episode is called "Bao Phi, Doug Kearney, and William Harris 2002 NPS Finals Showcase." The three artists, two poet/speakers and one beat boxer, performed a poem with the refrain "We meet at the crossroads of convenience stores, in a galaxy of bullet proof glass, chanting a battle hymn of broken English." It is a long poem exploring the stereotypes of African Americans and Asian Americans and it is powerful!

I am proud to note that two of the performers are from Minneapolis. Bao Phi is a well-known spoken word poet who is based in Minneapolis. The beat boxer, William Harris, is also from Minneapolis.