If you're wondering why I haven't been posting much lately, it's because I've been working with students. What kind of students? Consider:

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust--
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

If the above sounds ( Read more... )

Elsewhere on Teh Interwebs, I am engaged in a discussion with a real live Marlovian.

No, not the uber-powerful aliens from Jack L. Chalker's Well World books--those are Markovians.

So why am I chatting with a Marlovian? 
( Read more if you dare... )

I have the urge to write a sonnet.

But it's late, so I think I'll go with something smaller:

The woodpeckers out in the trees
Must feel shame to surprising degrees:
When one stabs something dead,
His whole face turns beet red,
And he eats it where nobody sees.

I ( Read more... )

"What's your favorite poem" is basically a ridiculous question, like "What's your favorite song?"  That said, there are a few that I always come back to in stunned admiration.  Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay"... Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Love Is Not All"... Tu Fu's "Jade Flower Palace"... Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B"... all sorts ( Read more... )

Nobody asked me nicely, but what the heck, I'm feeling generous; here are the songs and artists that were randomly used for my original First Line Poem:

In This Secret Time ("Real by Reel" by XTC)

I don't want to be first in line... ("Mrs. Train" by They Might Be Giants)

Here he comes and there he goes, ("He's a Reptile" by the Soft Boys)
You got to ( Read more... )

Discussion of the inherent meaning or lack thereof in the First Line Poetry meme has led me to try a slightly different version:

Instead of purely random tunes, I picked the artist with the largest number of tracks in my media player and had it pick 21 random songs (one for the title) by that artist.  Since the authorship is the same in every case ( ( Read more... )

Taking a moment away from work to play with this meme sheeped from likeadeuce:

Put your MP3 player on shuffle; write down the first line of the first twenty songs that come up; use the first line of the twenty-first as your title.

Hers was a little heavy on the Broooce.  I've added some punctuation and line breaks, and I've been judicious about where the ( Read more... )

Yesterday morning, while I was insomniating here in my LJ, I was listening to Robyn Hitchcock's Ole Tarantula! album and musing on the structure of popular music albums.

I failed to recognize something far more immediately significant about the song I was hearing.  Check out the opening verse:

A man's gotta know
His limitations, Briggs, or
He will just ( Read more... )