junkmail for blankets

concerning stretching your lower lip over your head and swallowing and whether you'll disappear

"The foreign syllables in my [altarboy in training] mouth were delicious--Et coom speery to too awh, Keer ee Ay Ay Lay E Sone. My romance with words was just beginning. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. The cadence and rhyme and alliterative beauty of that phrase made its deeper meaning meaningless. Its rich acoustics were enough for me. I would confess to anything that sounded so good." -- Thomas Lynch, Booking Passage

"How, then, do you find it? In practice, you hear it coming from somebody else, you hear something in another writer's sounds that flows in through your ears and enters the echo-chamber of your head and delights your whole nervous system in such a way that your reaction will be, 'Ah, I wish I had said that, in that particular way.'" -- Seamus Heaney, "Feeling Into Words," Preoccupations

Conversation, tonight at Waffle House, between an elderly man and slightly less than elderly woman, the man speaking first, overheard and well-noted:

"You dump me, you'll be the first."
"You been talkin all night, but you ain't said nothin yet."
"That's cause you don't know what poetry sounds like."

Two years ago, I sent out postcards with some of my favorite poems on them. One of the poems:

"Half Vampire"

Somehow your fangs have disappeared,
and you no longer look spooky.
That's good, because you're just a kid.
Admittedly, a deformed kid, but now
at least less spooky looking. Hey,
perhaps lose the orange soccer jersey.
It does nothing but illuminate your acne.
Don't worry. I was once like you.
I wore squirrels once to school.
Oh, I know it was vanity, and I stopped
to look at myself in the windows
of empty homes, and to pee in hedgerows,
and I took to the art teacher too--
these things are nothing to lose sleep over.
Some people are just this way,
drooling, complicated revolutionaries,
half vampire, half human, half canary.

-- Aaron Belz

Ha!

This is what I would like to do. I would like to send you an envelope with a postcard inside. I would like you to write a poem, inspired by the front, on the back and mail it to me. I would like to display the postcards and their poems on the blog. Whether you'd like your name included on the blog is optional. If you want to join me, send me an e-mail, with your mailing address, by August 19, the day Lorca died, and I will mail you one, and you will mail it back to me by September 25, R.S. Thomas' deathday.

Posted by ghetto monk at August 6, 2005 08:41 PM | TrackBack