Tag Archives: poet

Coffee and Irony 2021 Reading Challenge: Karen Swallow Prior, Tamar Adler, Flannery O’Connor, and Rupi Kaur

books poetry lit December 21, 2020 Leave a comment

Tis the season in which the book world explodes with reading challenges, but since I’m…..passionate? Extra? I wasn’t satisfied with any of the ones I’ve seen, so I made my one. Nothing particularly unusual here, just categories that suit me perfectly – and may suit someone else, who knows? I’ll list the categories first, then a breakdown of which books I’ll be reading for each category.

1. A book about books or reading

2. A book set in Russia

3. A book about food or cooking

4. A book about productivity, organizing, or cleaning

5. Unread book by a favorite author or an author you’ve enjoyed in the past

6. Choose Your Category – I’m doing works by Flannery O’Connor and Wendell Berry, two authors I’ve needed to read for a long time

7. A book of theology

8. A book about a current issue from a Biblical perspective (adoption, human trafficking, poverty, homelessness)

9. A work of philosophy or political thought (this can be very short – there are actually quite a few short books especially in the “political thought” realm)

10. A collection of poems by a single poet

11. A memoir

12. Bonus Choose Your Category – I’m going with a book on creativity or art

*Note: my choices below are linked to Goodreads, partly because it’s by far the most useful way to organize books and to-read lists, and partly because I interned there in college so have a ton of loyalty.

  1. A book about books or reading. Of course this has to be On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books by Karen Swallow Prior, whom I love and follow on all channels (had a moment of such pure delight when the lady herself followed me on Instagram!!).
  2. A book set in Russia – I swear to all reading souls that I will finally finish A Gentleman in Moscow. I swear! It’s a brilliant little book I was just in a Mood when I tried it the first time.
  3. A book about food or cooking. Tamar Adler and Shauna Niequist are the queens of writing about food in a non cookbook form in my opinion, though I have very complicated views of Niequist’s apallingly tone-deaf privileged tone when talking about her life (privilege is a word I rarely use but when she casually mentions staying at hotels all over the world as a child and spending every summer at a lake house as an adult, yet seems to have zero understanding that that alone is a lifestyle unobtainable and foreign to most of us and constantly complains of how hard life is!? It’s hard to put up with. I was a missionary kid and pastor’s kid too: trust me when I say my life did not resemble hers :).

    Having said that, Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace is one of my favorite books not just about food but of all time, so to say I’m excited to dive into her Something Old, Something New: Oysters Rockefeller, Walnut Souffle, and Other Classic Recipes Revisited is an understatement. I’m also preemptively obsessed with The Art of Eating by M.F. K. Fisher so that’s probably on the palette too: here’s a quote.
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How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

art & illustration, books poetry lit January 14, 2020 Leave a comment
Anime girl sitting in the rain illustration (1)
(Illustration by げみ)

HOW TO BE A POET
(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

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Poetry: Text by Carol Ann Duffy

books poetry lit February 23, 2015 1 Comment

I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird.

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Quotidian: Atticus on Poetry

books poetry lit February 10, 2015 Leave a comment

atticus poetry

Poetry: No One Goes to Paris in August

books poetry lit January 20, 2015 Leave a comment

A Montparnasse August
with view of the Cimetière. A yard of bones.

We wake to it. Close curtains to it.
Wake to its lanes. Rows of coffin-stones in varying light.

Walking here. Late with shade low, low, long.
We’re passing through, just passing through
neat aisles of gray mausoleums.

(From Paris. Send this postcard. This one.
Calm water lilies. Water lilies.
Nothing colorless.)

It’s morning. Baudelaire’s tomb.
Tree limbs casting shadow west.

This, a lot of time under a looming sky.
Nobody has time like this.
(Time to go to Le Mandarin for coffee
every day. We’re not complaining.
They bring the milk separate.
Watch the passersby on Saint-Germain.)

Nothing to ponder. This is the plight.
Pause by Pigeon in bed with his wife —
both fully dressed.

Pink flowers, pink flowers,
just beneath de Beauvoir’s name.
When she lived she lived two doors down.
Went south in August.

All of us smell of heat all the time.
We are the living. Oh dear!
There are the dead ones there.
Their thoughts more familiar, though.
Lives finished, nearly clear.
And they make it possible for us to go on living
as we do in their blue shade.

-Clarence Major’s forthcoming Selected Poems

Caffeinated Links: Emma Watson and Miles Teller Costar, 10 Most Anticipated 2015 Poetry Books

books poetry lit January 16, 2015 Leave a comment

Miles-Teller whiplash

Emma Watson and Miles Teller are almost certainly going to star together in Damian Chazelle’s next project, an oldschool MGM-style musical set in LA called La La Land. Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash, which was my favorite movie of 2014 along with Guardians of the Galaxy, just got five Oscar nominations. Emma Watson is one of my favorite people for her fierce, poised, intelligent self, and Miles Teller is my favorite 20-something actor after his knockout, charismatic, incredibly human performance as a drummer prodigy in Whiplash. THIS is a dream. RT

Flavorwire has the 10 Most Anticipated Poetry Books of 2015. “Although many books aren’t slated until later in the first quarter, 2015 is already shaping up to be a major year for American poetry, especially with the return of favorites like Mary Jo Bang, new collected works from masters like Jorie Garaham, and a book from perhaps our greatest living poet, John Ashbery. Add to this mix the rediscovery (or first translation) of forgotten yet undeniably major poets like Alejandra Pizarnik and the arrival of younger poets like Uljana Wolf, and it’s clear that poetry in America is firing on all cylinders.” RT

Flavorwire also killed it with a beautiful retrospective on T.S. Eliot’s quintessential “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.” “Thomas Stearns Eliot began writing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1910, at the age of twenty-two. The poem was published five years later, when Ezra Pound, whom Eliot met and befriended as an expatriate in Europe, sent it to Poetry in Chicago, adding: “This is as good as anything I’ve ever seen.” This year, then, marks the 100 year anniversary of Prufrock’s imaginative journey into the half-deserted streets, the one-night cheap hotels, and the chambers of the sea.” RT

Blinkboxx Books created an infographic of the ages at which famous authors were first published and first hit it big, respectively, and it’s  both fascinating and highly encouraging for aspiring novelists. “Haruki Murakami hitting his stride at 34 with A Wild Sheep Chase and Gabriel Garcia Marquez penning One Hundred Years of Solitude at 41, so don’t give up hope yet—or ever.” RT

Benedict Cumberbatch talks baby names with Ellen Degeneres. RT

This Is the Poem That’s Going to Get Me Out of the Mines

books poetry lit December 20, 2014 Leave a comment

This is one of my favorite prose poems of all time, a transcendentally self-mocking poetic creed that’s a delight from start to finish.

Jonathan did it. He teaches at a university in Washington now.
Or Oregon. I forget. But he said he gets fifty grand a year.
To teach creative writing. That’s like winning the lottery.
I make thirty grand and my lungs are turning into a collection
of twisted lies. I cough more than I think. I asked Jonathan
how he did it and he said he didn’t know. It was like God
napalmed him with luck. He got some award for a poem
about a goddamn lake and suddenly they pay him a thousand
dollars to read for fifty minutes in an auditorium filled
with students who don’t want to be there. I tell him to seriously
tell me how to do it and he said you have to make sure
there’s a lot of mist in the poem, that they can see the mist,
feel the mist, and then just go from there. He says that poets
love mist. They want so much mist in a poem that you can’t
see anything else other than mist and then from that mist
you have something really beautiful peek through and then
something really ugly peek through. But it can’t be too ugly,
he says, or you’re fucked. And he says don’t swear. He says
you want mist and beauty and a touch of ugly

read more

-Ron Riekki, Juked

Ten Years After My Mom Dies I Dance

books poetry lit December 2, 2014 Leave a comment

This poem by Patrick Rosal absolutely knocked my socks off.

The second time I learned
I could take the pain
my six-year-old niece
—with five cavities
humming in her teeth—
led me by the finger
to the foyer and told her dad
to turn up the Pretenders
—Tattooed Love Boys—
so she could shimmy with me
to the same jam
eleven times in a row
in her princess pajamas.

When she’s old enough,
I’ll tell her how
I bargained once with God
because all I knew of grief
was to lean deep
into the gas pedal
to speed down a side road
not a quarter-mile long
after scouring my gut
and fogging my retinas
with half a bottle of cheap scotch.
To those dumb enough
to take the odds against
time, the infinite always says
You lose.

Read more at Four Way Review

Poetry: Kingston, Jamaica. 3am. Passa Passa Dance Party

books poetry lit November 2, 2014 Leave a comment

One good thing about music / when it hits / you feel no pain
—Bob Marley, Trenchtown Rock

When her body is a compass
bearing South, and she is crouched
bare-toed and feckless above steaming pavement
poised to give birth to drum or bass,
Red Bull triggered at the wrist,
hips a bouquet of cackling fingers,
lips two hummingbirds aimed for flight,
the Glock-Nined baby brother
she nursed from croup
with lavender oil and Cat’s Claw bark,
for whom she turned a fist of nothing
into school fees and uniform,
and whom she will bury
in St. Andrew Parish Church Cemetery
once the sun fully rises,
feels more like a brilliant toothache
her tongue worries,
than a tumid and wild devastation.

-Idrissa Simmonds, Crab Creek Review

Poetry: Ithaka

books poetry lit October 30, 2014 Leave a comment

Dear Penelope, do you now sleep among the catacombs?

Scarves of white drift over the Aegean – an altar of bottomless blue.

I have gone to the edge of the world and still cannot find you.

Even the olive trees raise their spangled limbs skyward in longing.

Mother Earth slides her abacus beads, conjures storms quick as curses.

When lightning struck, did the boat protect or beckon the bolt?

Island flowers shut their eyes only when the stars disrobe – hope and sorrow held
within the same root.

She imagines him bright-toothed & swarthy, but her husband is just sunburned & homesick.

So many suitors holding her skeins – she’s woven a trail for her waylaid mariner, long
as his beard and her undoing.

In twenty years she has never asked, What shall I wish for myself?

Odysseus wonders, Do I have the right to return?

Maids cast offerings to the sea: red rose petals and grape leaves, love and wine all that remain.


** The line What shall I wish for myself? is a reworking Mary Oliver’s line What shall I wish for, for myself ?

-Kelly Cressio-Moeller, just published in Thrush Poetry Journal

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