This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
[click to continue…]
This I spied in a post over at Helen’s place and it made me laugh. I admire Mr. Babbage’s sentiment for poetry and affiliation to accuracy. How shall the twain meet?
Sir:
In your otherwise beautiful poem ‘The Vision of Sin’ there is a verse which reads – ‘Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.’ It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill …
I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – ‘Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.’ …
The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage”.
(Babbage to Tennyson, 1851)
If you’ve met me, you probably know my politics, which are also easily gleaned from even the most cursory browse through these pages. So in a spirit of multipartisanship, let us enjoy the quipping and the sniping of selected poets on themes political, amatory and existential. Should any of you not get the election-night result you want, these verses are easily adaptable: [click to continue…]
We all know that the internet is for porn, but it is also for poetry. The amount of time I have ignored, more or less, the latter of these two facts is perhaps surprising, given the extent to which my ability to make my living has been contingent on making contentions about poems and poetics. Indeed, my writing life started as poet and prose stylist in equal parts, the adolescent rip-tides of Feelings and Self-Expression driving only slightly off-course my attention to form in both these modes.
[click to continue…]
The señor has been listening to the original version of “Louie Louie”, not The Kingsmen’s famous mumbler, but the one written and sung by Richard Berry. He points out the tender phrasing, the quasi-Jamaican lilt, the simple happy love story it evokes.
Edit: embedding is disabled on the Berry video: go here to see it.
[click to continue…]
DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Linkedin
LiveJournal
Mobypicture
Facebook
Picasa
Google Profiles
Google Reader
Posterous
Other anniversaries
15 January, 2011
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,meta-diarist,O internet,the social round,we are family,writing & research
This baby in a bonnet at a wedding is but tangentially connected to the substance of this post.
The day the baby was six months old, the day on which we headed north to Nelson for a wedding, was also the day on which, seven years earlier, I started these pages. The first posts were a mix of specificity and citations from poetry and pop music. I was living a life that was physically simpler but emotionally a lot more complicated, and I spent the first six months online hashing out that curious mixture of pride, worry and regret that was my slow slide towards thirty. The narratives were peopled by my local friends and I gave them all allusive and largely arch pseudonyms, few of which referred to anything much except the associative linkings of my own whims. Poor Dangermouse particularly disliked his; a random archival tweet this week reminded me that as recently as four years ago he was still demanding I change it (in that case, to a Castilian Ignacio), but I was stubborn, and would not.
[click to continue…]
{ 5 comments }