I started taking the Emily Dickinson Harvard online course a few weeks ago. While flipping through my Dickinson anthology, Final Harvest (it wasn’t), I came across a poem I had marked in college as having been in the movie Sophie’s Choice. Remember the scene where Meryl Streep goes into the big, intimidating library looking for Dickinson’s poems and mispronounces her name and then faints?
At least that’s how I remember it from the time I rented the cassette from Movies To Go. Later, she quotes this poem:
“Ample make this Bed–
Make this Bed with Awe–
In it wait til Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.
Be it Mattress straight–
Be its Pillow round–
Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground—"
(1891)
Monsieur Big Bang and I joined our local food co/op this year. How happy was I to find a poem in the September newsletter? Very! It was a piece by a well-known ABQ poet, Hakim Bellamy. The newsletter is doing a series of his poems in partnership with the Santa Fe Art Institute around food justice, food security, food deserts (like local reservations and barrios). Find out more at: http://sfai.org/food-justice/ and http://sfai.org/residencies/food-justice-residents/.
Here are two excerpts:
“Back when medicine men
and medicine women
could not save someone’s life
without seeing how they live.”
and
“…there is no time for hunting and gathering
between Bob’s Burgers and bus tops."
You can read the full poem on page 4 of the newsletter’s online version: http://issuu.com/lamontanitacoop/docs/september_2015_cc
Television!
Sometimes it’s good to look at what your competition is doing. If you don’t think TV is really your competition, (you’re so over it), listen to what this literary-lover has to say about TV today in this article form The New York Times.
Some poets I know love to keep insisting TV is the eternal boob tube. And two minutes later they lament about poetry's low readership, never noticing how out of touch they come across. Television: has so much changed or have people finally figured it out? You’re not competing with BAD television, your competing with GOOD television!
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