You're Stupid, by Jeff Smith-Luedke

Plato was the bee's knees.  So begins this kinetic poetry by Jeff Smith-Luedke, who has eyes for ordinary things and sight for beyond the ordinary.  His tongue, too, has a knack for poetry.  I saw from his channel that his last video was three years ago.  Perhaps he has another one, and perhaps he other such video poems.

X vs O, by Jeff Smith-Luedke

This was another video poem that that colleague pointed me to, five years ago, another smart, clever and deft effort by Jeff Smith-Luedke.  X is for embrace, he said, so hugs.  That was how a handful of women friends signed their notes or messages: xx.  Not xoxo.  Although another handful just wrote kisses.  Rarely xoxo, and never oo.  

Minimalism, by Jeff Smith-Luedke

It was five years that I made an effort to launch Dr. Ron Art, and poetry was one wing in a complex of buildings.  One colleague pointed me to this video, as an example of something I ought to consider: kinetic poetry.  It was way beyond my funds to engage someone to do this for me, so I simply flagged the video for future reference.  Live Movie Maker has since helped me animate my poetry on video, but more modestly so than this effort by Jeff Smith-Luedke.  But I have now come back to this video, simply for the poem itself, which is deft, clever and philosophical.  

Poet Harold Pinter Won Nobel Prize in Literature

Harold Pinter

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005 was awarded to Harold Pinter "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

Reference: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005.

There isn't a specific Nobel Prize for poetry, but out of curiosity I Googled winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature who were poets.  The most recent was Harold Pinter in 2005.  Of course he wasn't just a poet, but also a playwright, screenwriter, actor and director.  I loved his 1978 play `Betrayal and its 1983 film adaptation, starring Jeremy Irons, Patricia Hodge and Ben Kingsley.

I Googled yet again to get a sampling of his poetry, and I liked `American Football (of course): 

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them. 

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears. 

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit! 

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things. 

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it. 

Praise the Lord for all good things. 

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust. 

We did it. 

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

Exactly.

Vijay Seshadri Wins Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Vijay Seshadri

[Vijay] Seshadri is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996); The Long Meadow (2003), which won the James Laughlin Award; and 3 Sections (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Pulitzer committee described the book as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.”

Reference: Vijay Seshadri.

Seshadri recites his poem Bright Copper Kettles evocatively:

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
this is one of my favorite things.
I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
“It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.”
They are diffident and polite.
(Who knew the dead were so polite?)
They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes.
They don’t want to steal my body
and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.
They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,
why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.
One of them shyly offers me a pencil.
The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.
Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music,
the right Reverend Al Green is singing,
“I could never see tomorrow.
I was never told about the sorrow.”

Lovely.

`How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, is a Bee Gees 1971 song, which Al Green sang and included in his 1972 album `Let's Stay Together.

Nathaniel Mackey Wins Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Nathaniel Mackey

In a statement released Tuesday, Poetry magazine editor Don Share said, “The poetry of Nathaniel Mackey continues an American bardic line that unfolds from Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ to H.D.’s ‘Trilogy’ to Olson’s ‘Maximus’ poems, winds through the whole of Robert Duncan’s work and extends beyond all of these. In his poems, but also in his genre-defying serial novel (which has no beginning or end) and in his multifaceted critical writing, Mackey’s words always go where music goes: a brilliant and major accomplishment.”

Reference: Nathaniel Mackey wins $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Sometimes I practice T'ai Chi and meditate to music, and of course music often accompanies me in the car.  I imagine many artists do create their pieces while music plays in the background.  But it's a curious idea, I think, for poetry.  Poetry itself is akin to bringing out the music that is already innate in the words we speak and the language we own.  

Me, I can be anywhere, when I write.  For example, three years ago, I was at the Bahrain International Airport, heading back home to Dubai.  I arrived well ahead of flight time, so I plugged in my laptop, and ended up writing several poems amid the crowd and noise.  I don't listen to music, when I write, as that would be distracting to me.  But whether I'm out and about, and simply sitting quietly at home, I am virtually completely absorbed in writing.  

Music is evocative for me, and it's not that I cannot write to it or with it.  More that, I'd want to be deliberate about it.  That is, make the evocation a purposeful part of whatever I am writing.  

Congratulations to Nathaniel Mackey!  

Here is an audio interview by Curtis Fox, of the Poetry Foundation, last week, where Mackey relates his resonance with music and the story of the failed version of a human race in the word andoumboulouous.  He also recites the poem On Antiphon Island, in which he uses that word.

(3) Kyrkostas and Dockie Read WB Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

When You Are Old, by William Butler Yeats. Recited by Samantha Kyrkostas and Dr. Charles A. "Dockie" Schlegel.

Kyrkostas said that her grandfathers told her: Never stop finding beauty in art, or music, or poetry, because that is what makes us the special creature of God.  To Dockie, it was about mortality.  After she read it, he paused, then recollected Shakespeare saying that poetry soothed the savage beast.  Theirs is a lovely story and journey, with lovely pithy things, like her moving from a village in the Ukraine to Ukrainian Village in Chicago.

This is one of my favorite poems, as Yeats had a way of making simple words sound profoundly beautiful.

(2) Kurt Sepmeier Reads Michael Drayton

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies;
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes—
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!

Idea 61: Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, by Michael Drayton. Recited by Kurt Sepmeier.

Sepmeier talks dispassionately about falling into all that was the Renaissance, then his eyes well up and his voice falters as he relates a breakup. It was a sudden breakup: The couple just stopped talking to each other, leaving him unresolved and no doubt hurting.

(1) Mayor Rahm Emanuel Reads Carl Sandburg

Robert Polito, President of The Poetry Foundation, and Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the US, introduce the Favorite Poem Project.  It's a simple, delightful idea not only for creating a portrait of Chicago we rarely see, but also for revitalizing an art form that goes way back in time.

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 believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
     Bareheaded,
     Shoveling,
     Wrecking,
     Planning,
     Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
          Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Chicago, by Carl Sandburg.  Recited by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Understanding Poetry, by Grant Snider

Reference: Understanding Poetry.

I love Grant Snider's work.  He is our modern-day philosopher, who makes me think of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  He is clever and deft with words, and isn't a bad cartoonist in the least.

Poetry is an art, there is an art in itself to understand it.  The best way to do so, as Snider does so well, is to view it and experience it as a living thing.  Poetry is about metaphor, so grasping it as though it were a metaphor in its own right - that is, as if it were somebody - is the right way to go.