Honda Pavarotti

Honda Pavarotti
by Tony Hoagland

I'm driving on the dark highway
when the opera singer on the radio
opens his great mouth
and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.

So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs
as I steer through the galleries
of one dilated Italian syllable
after another. I love the passages in which

the rich flood of the baritone
strains out against the walls of the esophagus,
and I love the pauses
in which I hear the tenor's flesh labor to inhale

enough oxygen to take the next plummet
up into the chasm of the violins.
In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer
is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs

while his head and legs keep kicking.
In part of the song, it sounds as if he is
standing in the middle of a coliseum,
swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail,

the empire of gravity
conquered by the empire of aerodynamics,
the citadel of pride in flames
and the citizens of weakness
celebrating their defeat in chorus,

joy and suffering made one at last,
joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be,
though I know the woman he is singing for
is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him,
though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic
and his mismanagement of money is legendary,
as I know I have squandered
most of my own life

in a haze of trivial distractions,
and that I will continue to waste it.
But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore,
because no place I could arrive at

is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience
but to which experience will never measure up.
And that dark and soaring fact
is enough to make me renounce the whole world

or fall in love with it forever. 

"Honda Pavarotti" by Tony Hoagland, from Donkey Gospel. © Graywolf Press, 1998

Billy Collins' Birthday

March 22 is the birthday of the best-selling poet Billy Collins, (books by this author) born in Queens, New York (1941). He thinks that too much modern poetry lacks humor. He said: "It's the fault of the Romantics, who eliminated humor from poetry. Shakespeare's hilarious, Chau-cer's hilarious. The Romantics killed off humor, and they also eliminated sex, things which were replaced by landscape. I thought that was a pretty bad trade-off, so I'm trying to write about humor and landscape, and occasionally sex."

He was in his 40s when he published his first book, The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988), and he has become one of the country's most popular poets. His book Sailing Alone Around the Room (2000) has sold almost 200,000 copies, more than any other book of poetry in this century. His collection Ballistics came out in 2008.



Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

"Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins, from The Apple That Astonished Paris. © University of Arkansas Press, 1996

From The Writer's Almanac

Word For the Day: boustrophedon

boustrophedon \boo-struh-FEED-n\, noun:

an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right.

This, they call the boustrophedon form because it mimics the back-and-forth pacing of an ox tied to a tether.
-- Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

Elsa suddenly recalls a word from the recesses of her memory: boustrophedon, scripts written in alternating directions.
-- Jennifer Vanderbes, Easter Island 

This ancient form of writing is named for an ancient form of farming and literally translates as "to turn like an ox while plowing." Derived from the Greek boûs for "ox," and strophē meaning "to turn," boustrophedon describes a snake-like motion in which a line of text doubles back on itself as it descends a page.

Five White Birds

Five White Birds
by Catharine Savage Brosman

Having seared the sky, the sun—a brazier—
smolders through the crumbling clouds
upriver; to the east, rich mounds of smoky
vapors, signifying rain tomorrow, drift on.
Five white birds rise suddenly, fanned out,
flushing from a maze of roofs and gardens

well below my windows, topping mushroom-
rounded oak trees and the heady sycamores.
Riding on contingency, the birds with ease
glide upward, bodies turned to movement,
backlit from the final sun rays on the scrim
of sky and thought, as flashes of pure being—

foreseeing, passing, leaving all one ecstasy.
Drawing light against the indigo of evening,
they separate a moment, fingers spreading
from a palm, then close together to compact
their various motions into one white wedge,
which flies along the river now, accentuating

giant cranes, the beaks of freighters moored
among the Harmony Street wharves. I watch
the light reflected on sleek forms, which dip,
then disappear, a note, a point, a nothingness.
The swept effect remains, a smoothing-over
of asperities, a pentimento that refines the day,

its painted infelicities recolored in the silver
twilight. So one is, and is not, what has passed,
windy patterns on deep, loamy grasses, stilled
at dusk, a watermark of images upon the mind,
wings beating for a glassy moment in desire—
a gesture's meaning as the shaken air resounds.

Five White Birds by Catharine Savage Brosman • from Under the Pergola • Louisiana State University Press

Gun Suicide & Homicide

Extracted from “The Hidden Brain” by Shankar Vedantam

Public Health researcher John Violanti compared the risk of suicide in three stressful professions: police officers, firefighters and military personnel.  He studied 8.5 million death certificates in 28 states.  Military personnel and police officers had four times the risk as firefighters; black police officers had five times the risk; and white women police officers twelve times the risk.  The central difference was that police officers and military personnel carry guns and firefighters don’t.  The guns didn’t cause the suicide but provided a means.

From the American Journal of Epidemiology Volume 160 Issue 10 November 15, 2004 Linda L. Dahlberg, Robin M. Ikeda, and Marcie-jo Kresnow: Guns in the Home and Risk of aViolent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study.

Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home. They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home. Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different method . Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.

From "The Hidden Brain"

People who have guns in their homes are at greater risk of being shot and killed than people who do not have guns.  They are not safer as a result of owning a gun.  The combined risk of accidents, suicide and domestic violence dwarfs the risk of homicide in the hands of a stranger.  Each year in the US nearly twice as many people kill themselves as are murdered.

The Fish

The Fish
by Billy Collins

As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.

I feel sorry for you., it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.

And I feel sorry for you, too—
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh—
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.

And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced not only with chilled wine
and lemon slices but with compassion and sorrow

even after the waiter removed my plate
with the head of the fish still staring
and the barrel vault of its delicate bones
terribly exposed, save for a shroud of parsley. 

"The Fish" by Billy Collins, from Ballistics. © Random House, 2010. 

Year’s End

Year’s End
by Ted Kooser

Now the seasons are closing their files
on each of us, the heavy drawers
full of certificates rolling back
into the tree trunks, a few old papers
flocking away. Someone we loved
has fallen from our thoughts,
making a little, glittering splash
like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.
Otherwise, not much has happened;
we fell in love again, finding
that one red feather on the wind. 

"Year's End" by Ted Kooser, from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.