Black Past

I just ran across this great site:

http://www.blackpast.org/

Duke Takes The "A" Train

A nice video--for Black History Month or any month--of Duke Ellington playing "Take the A Train":

Duke Ellington

William Blake and Soccer

Below is a link to a great short film on youtube that combines football (of the soccer variety) and the poetry of William Blake. I think you'll like this:


Blake Press Conference

"Awful Library Books": A Most Amusing Blog

A link on the The Scrapper Poet's blog alerted me to the amusing blog, "Awful Library Books," which I hope you'll enjoy, too:

ALB

Eugene Lipscomb

As I was getting ready to have a couple friends over for the Super Bowl (more chat than Super Bowl, truth to tell), I thought, for some reason, of Randall Jarrell's elegy for the professional football player Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, who played professionally for Baltimore, L.A., and Pittsburgh teams but who died of a heroin overdose in 1963. I don't think that in '63 I was really much aware of professional football, but I distinctly remember the name "Big Daddy Lipscomb," which I found enchanting, partly for the sound of it.

Anyway, below is a link to Jarrell's poem, "Say Goodbye to Big Daddy." The page starts with a sports poems by William Carlos Williams, so you just have to scroll down a bit once you're there.

Big Daddy Lipscomb Poem

Errant

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Errant

A wayward knight came into our
time zone. He was diminutive,
in need of a bath, and not
that great a horseman. We recycled
his armor, found a good home
for his nag, got him some job-
training: financial sector. Last
we heard, he'd been hired by
an Internet start-up called
errant.netcomorg.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Sequioadendron Giganteum

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Sequoiadendron Giganteum

From a classroom in the building on a knoll,
I look across, see the Sequoiadendron giganteum,
a shaggy green profile foregrounding faint gray
distant Cascades and clouds rippled like a tide.

The tree's A-shape's improvised upon by growth--
something like shoulders protrude there thirty
feet from the top. And near the top, there's a gap
in boughs, where the trunk looks like a thread.

Then, askew, a few wee branches appear, a tiny
comic feathery cap, a frivolous dash, a perfect
flaw. Of course, Sequoiadendron giganteum has
nothing to tell us we haven't told ourselves.

It has nothing to do with us, but has this nothing
at such a grand and unrushed pace, we're tempted
to be quiet, simply to stare at this other thing,
this individuality of tree that encompasses its

species and thinks nothing, thinks nothing of ours.


Link to info

Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen was one of the first literary stars of what's known now as the Harlem Renaissance (circa 1919-1934), and although his reputation dwindled after that, it recovered, and he is arguably one of the best lyric poets the U.S. has produced. His sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel," is perfect, blending a formal but contemporary idiom with the form and crafting a superb "argument" about race, color, theology, and existentialism--without ever getting heavy, and with a light ironic touch. It's just one of those poems you can admire forever.

There's a nice anthology of Cullen's poetry--and one novel--edited by Gerald Early: My Soul's High Song.

Eventually, Cullen pursued middle-school teaching as a career--in Harlem, where James Baldwin was one of his students.

Here is a link to more information about Cullen:

Countee

Recycling Message

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Recycling Message


Without reading it
carefully, I just
recycled in the black
tub a postcard sent
to me and others
reminding us to live
more greenly.



Copyright 2010

Fine Poem By Joe Salerno

At "Rinabeana's" site, I found a fine poem by Joe Salerno, "Poetry Is the Art of Not Succeeding":

Poem

Black History Month Begins

...And a happy Black History Month to you. What a good idea historian and professor Carter G. Woodson had way back when.

I thought I'd mention two worthy anthologies of African American poetry: African American Poetry: An Anthology 1773-1927, edited by Joan R. Sherman and James M. Bell--from Dover Books, for two dollars (new). And Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of African American Poetry Since 1945, edited by Michael Harper and Anthony Walton, from Back Bay Books. --Oops, this apparently leaves a gap between 1927 and 1945, so you might look at Oxford's anthology of African American poetry.

Follow Chekhov On Twitter

I suspected that, eventually, Anton Chekhov would get on Twitter. Lo and behold, he is:

Chekhov on Twitter

This particular twitterer tweets quotations from Chekhov's work and observations about Russia and Russians.

Chekhov would have appreciated the imposed frugality of word-choice Twitter imposes.

The River of January

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The River of January


How wonderful it must have been
to find a river in January, when
they were hot, and they
were experiencing explorer’s
despair at the start of the 16th
century, and people who
lived there and had
already found the river looked
at them as if they too, had
been discovered already.

Probably I won’t find a river.
Are there any left to find?
I could find one already found
and rename it, except I might
be tempted to name it the
River of January, and that
wouldn’t do. So I’ll put on
a carnival hat in the Northern
Hemisphere, turn a faucet
on and off, and think of Rio
De Janeiro, flowing there
below its continent’s leading
edge, which tips toward
ocean and Africa. Promises
to oneself are easy to make,

especially when one’s wearing
a carnival hat. I promise myself
that one day I’ll fly to the River
of January, and look at it. And just
look at it and say, Rio De Janeiro.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom