This poem from Sharon Olds, while very serious, makes me laugh. I shared a room with a brother who snored like a chainsaw . . .
My Father Snoring
by: Sharon Olds
my father snoring, the great, dark
clotted mucus rising in his nose and
falling, like coils of seaweed a wave
brings in and takes back. The clogged roar
filled the house. Even down in the kitchen,
in the drawers, the knives and forks hummed with that
distant throbbing. But in my room
next to theirs, it was so loud
I could feel myself inside his body,
lifted on the knotted rope of his life
and lowered again, into the narrow
dark well, its amber walls
slick around my torso, the smell of bourbon
rich as sputum. He lay like a felled
beast all night and sounded his thick
buried stoppered call, like a cry for
help. And no one ever came:
there were none of his kind around there anywhere.
So, this afternoon at the library, I received an email from Arts Midwest, an organization that oversees, among other things, National Endowment for the Arts Big Read grants. Ostensibly, the email said that all federal grants (including those from the NEA) have been put on "pause" until they are reviewed.
That means that drawing down funds from the $16,600 NEA Big Read grant that I was awarded for the library has been (temporarily, I hope) suspended until further notice.
Now, the NEA Big Read will go on in March. At the beginning of the year, fearing that something like this was coming down the pipeline, I drew down funds from the NEA to pay for a good portion of the scheduled events. However, I will still be lacking around $5,000 of the promised grant until the "review" is completed. (The library is currently working on a game plan to ensure the Big Read will happen in full.)
Art is essential to a free-thinking society. Take away art and all that's left is propaganda. And maybe Adam Sandler movies.
I'm not going to get all political here. All I want to say is that we are living in dangerous times in the United States. If you're a citizen of the United States, write your representatives in Congress, raise your voice, don't be silenced.
Saint Marty wrote a Pollock tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
Today is the birthday of painter Jackson Pollock. Pollock was well-known for his drip paintings, where he would splash many colors of paint onto large canvases he had placed on the floor. Write a poem inspired by this style of painting or by the wild style of a Pollock painting. Maybe dribble words across the page or splatter one color throughout your poem. Or write an ekphrastic poem (an ekphrastic poem describes, comments on, and/or dramatizes a work or works of visual art) about one of his paintings or a unique image you see in it.
NOTE (from playground.poetry.blog):
The Pollok is a rather obscure and fairly eccentric poetry form invented by poet and art critic John Yau to pay tribute to the American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. It is a fourteen-line poem with the rather unusual requirement that the first line must be a quotation by the artist. The remaining thirteen lines consist strictly of words from Pollock's quote, the idea being to splatter words repeatedly on the page like he famously did with paint on his canvases . . . Interestingly, another one of the rules of writing a pollock is to break the rules any time you feel like it (much like Pollock did with his painting). So it is more than permissible to substitute one of your favorite quotes by someone else for the Pollock quotation . . .
Convergence (a Pollock)
by: Martin Achatz
Each age finds its own technique.
Each technique finds age,
finds each its own
age. Age each age,
technique each technique,
own each its.
Own age. Own finds.
Own each technique.
Its, its, its, its own.
Age technique, tech each age.
Ow age! Ech age!
In age find sage.
Teach ache. Teach tech.
Fin. Town. Fin. Age. Fin.
