phrases of the moon — sound it out...

“[...] What happens next is interesting because it shows us something about the conjunction of pause and pitch-lowering that allows us to hear that an item is being placed in parentheses by a speaker. On each side of the word 'phrase' the poet leaves a pause of about half a second, and, while keeping her volume levels consistent (peaking in the 75 to 85 dB range), she sharply decreases her tone (creating that 'U' shape in the pitch transcript, see above). Having established this pattern with her voicing of 'phrase,' she reproduces it for 'moon,' placing a .325 second pause before and a .465 second pause after it, and dropping her pitch by about 100Hz while voicing the vowel. [click on the graphs for MOON and PHRASE]

     By contrast, when she voices the very similar vowel in the first syllable of 'movement' less than two seconds later, she holds her pitch in the 160-170 level (her norm), rising toward 220Hz on the unstressed final syllable to realize the interrogative pitch pattern operative in English.”

– POETRY IS THE LIPSTICK OF NOISE
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Short. Sweet.

"What exactly is a short short story, I wondered, as I opened Ethel Rohan's second story collection, Goodnight Nobody. Are her micro fictions, most between three and five pages, sawed-off longer stories to be read with the same expectation for plot, character development, setting and illumination that I hold for longer stories? Or are these flashes to be read like poetry, with an eye and ear for rhythm, extremity and intensity, an experience of the words?

     Rohan's bright, engaging fictions immerse us in the lives of characters from her native Ireland to her adopted home of San Francisco, and points in between. Some satisfied my criteria for stories, some for poetry, while the most successful contained elements of both."
— Audrey Ferber, San Francisco Chronicle
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Buy this book here...

graduation

"The great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño liked to argue, plausibly enough, that poetry is a higher calling than fiction.

     He also liked to argue, with no plausibility at all, that he was a better poet than a novelist. 'The poetry,' he said, 'makes me blush less.' Like so many writers, Bolaño (1953-2003) was an unreliable guide to his own oeuvre.
     His collected verse, now in a plump, handsome bilingual volume called The Unknown University, has flecks of the intense pleasures contained in his best novels: The Savage Detectives (1998), By Night in Chile (2000) and 2666 (2004). But you will need to pan for these, like someone searching for gold in a river bottom.

     Bolaño died too young, of liver disease, at 50. Before his death he had time to begin compiling this volume and to give it its title."
— Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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Buy all of Roberto Bolaño's books here...

The King James Bible — 400 Years Old This Year

Bentham King James Bible (1762)

"When [The King James Bible] appeared, moreover, it was already familiar, in the sense that it borrowed freely from William Tyndale’s great translation of a century before. Deliberately, and with commendable modesty, the members of King James’s translation committees said they did not seek 'to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better'. [...]
     In both his time [William Tyndale's] and theirs this was a modern translation, the living language of streets, docks, workshops, fields. Ancient Israel and Jacobean England went easily together. The original writers of the books of the Old Testament knew about pruning trees, putting on armour, drawing water, the readying of horses for battle and the laying of stones for a wall; and in the King James all these activities are still evidently familiar, the jargon easy, and the language light. “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward”, runs the wonderful phrase in Job 5: 7, and we are at a blacksmith’s door in an English village, watching hammer strike anvil, or kicking a rolling log on our own cottage hearth." — More Intelligent Life
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First page of the Gospel of Saint John,
from the 1526 Peter Schoeffer printing of William
Tyndale's English translation of the Bible
—Wikipedia Commons

"[Tyndale] was tried on a charge of heresy in 1536 and condemned to death, despite Thomas Cromwell's intercession on his behalf. Tyndale 'was strangled to death while tied at the stake, and then his dead body was burned'. Tyndale's final words, spoken 'at the stake with a fervent zeal, and a loud voice, were reported as "Lord! Open the King of England's eyes."' [...] Within four years, at the same king's behest, four English translations of the Bible were published in England [...] All were based on Tyndale's work." — Wikipedia
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Canadian Giants of the Twentieth Century (1) Leonard Cohen

From: The Musical Box

"A Canadian poet, Cohen became one of pop’s most unlikely heroes during the heart of the late ‘60s psychedelic movement. But his music wasn’t at all psychedelic. It was understated, fanciful, modestly stylish and somewhat distant. Cohen was (and still is) a bohemian Bob Dylan - a wordsmith that conveys an epic emotive sweep with his lyrics even though he has been bestowed with a singing voice of seemingly limited technical range. Yet like Dylan’s now-haggard wail, Cohen’s now-raspy baritone only enhances the conversational intimacies and drama of his songs." — Walter Tunis, The Musical Box
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His Novels:

This edition, published by Bantam Books, New York (1967)

Again, this edition published by Bantam Books, New York (1971)











"Cohen's writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, is '...like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it.'" — Wikipedia
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Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

From: "Hallelujah" (on Various Positions, Leonard Cohen's seventh studio album, [1984])
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Richard Greene — Winner of the 2010 Governor General's Award for Poetry

"Boxing the Compass is a poetry collection of mid-life reassessments that also makes room for the martyrdom of Saint Polycarp, tone-deaf church choirs, the last of the Newfoundland whalers, and vividly remembered Portuguese fishermen. Spiritually searching and intellectually rich, Richard Greene's third book—which ranges from intimate to ironic to satiric—shuns easy answers in poems of unfashionable eloquence comprised of colloquial textures, clear-eyed narratives, political subtexts, and no-nonsense introspection." — from www.mcnallyrobinson.com



For a sample of Richard Greene's poetry, go to this site...
and get a front row seat to hear him read at the Festival on Sunday, May 29, 2011.