UPS

Poem: "Why I Have A Crush On You, UPS Man"by Alice N. Persons, from Don't Be A Stranger.
© Sheltering Pines Press, 2007.

you bring me all the things I order
are never in a bad mood
always have a jaunty wave as you drive away
look good in your brown shorts
we have an ideal uncomplicated relationship
you're like a cute boyfriend with great legs
who always brings the perfect present
(why, it's just what I've always wanted!)
and then is considerate enough to go away
oh, UPS Man, let's hop in your clean brown truck and elope !

ditch your job, I'll ditch mine
let's hit the road for Brownsville
and tempt each other
with all the luscious brown foods —
roast beef, dark chocolate,
brownies, Guinness, homemade pumpernickel, molasses cookies
I'll make you my mama's bourbon pecan pie
we'll give all the packages to kind looking strangers
live in a cozy wood cabin
with a brown dog or two
and a black and brown tabby
I'm serious, UPS Man. Let's do it.
Where do I sign?


Fron The Writer's Almanac

William Carlos Williams

The New World of William Carlos Williams

FEBRUARY 23, 2012

Adam Kirsch in the New York Review of Books

Today it would be hard to find a reader of poetry who would not acknowledge William Carlos Williams as one of the major American modernists, a peer of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound. His place in anthologies and on college reading lists is secure. 

Lisa Larsen/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

William Carlos Williams at his house in Rutherford, New Jersey, 1954

Possibly no modern American poem is more widely known than Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” that tiny epiphany:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

This is not Williams’s best or most important poem, but it does illustrate some crucial aspects of his art. In his Autobiography (1951), Williams explains that his goal as a writer is to capture the “immediacy” of experience: “It is an identifiable thing, and its characteristic, its chief character is that it is sure, all of a piece and, as I have said, instant and perfect: it comes, it is there, and it vanishes. But I have seen it, clearly. I have seen it.” This is just what he does with the wheelbarrow, the rainwater, and the chickens: trivial in themselves, their sheer uninsistent presence strikes the reader as somehow disclosing the very essence of being. Williams himself, not given to making high claims for his own work, considered this poem “quite perfect”: “the sight impressed me as about the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon.”

To continue reading this article Click Here.

THE BALL

The author of this poem, Wislawa Szymborska, died February 1, 2012 at age 88.  She won the Nobel prize in literature in 1996.

THE BALL

As long as nothing can be known for sure

(no signals have been picked up yet),

as long as Earth is still unlike

the nearer and more distant planets,

as long as there's neither hide nor hair

of other grasses graced by other winds,

of other treetops bearing other crowns,

other animals as well-grounded as our own,

as long as only the local echo

has been known to speak in syllables,

as long as we still haven't heard word

of better or worse mozarts,

platos, edisons somewhere,

as long as our inhuman crimes

are still committed only between humans,

as long as our kindness

is still incomparable,

peerless even in its imperfection,

as long as our heads packed with illusions

still pass for the only heads so packed,

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone

still raise voices to high heavens ----

let's act like very special guests of honor

at the district-firemen's ball,

dance to the beat of the local oompah band,

and pretend that it's the ball

to end all balls.

I can't speak for others ----

for me this is

misery and happiness enough:

just this sleepy backwater

where even the stars have time to burn

while winking at us

unintentionally.

-WislawaSzymborska

(pronounced vees-WAH-wah sheem-BOR-ska)

(Translated, from the Polish, by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.)

Guppy to Guillotin: The Namesakes of Words

Guppy to Guillotin: The Namesakes of Words

All Things Considered, February 9, 2008 · For author Philip Dodd, a simple trivia question sent him on a quest that crossed oceans and spanned continents.

The question: What fish was named for a West Indian clergyman?

The answer is in the title of Dodd's new book, The Reverend Guppy's Aquarium: From Joseph P. Frisbie to Roy Jacuzzi, How Everyday Items Were Named for Extraordinary People. From Guppy himself, who was quite a character, to the Earl of Sandwich and instrument-maker Adolphe Sax, Dodd delves into the lives of those who left their names deeply embedded in the English language.

Tracing the paths of these often unwitting heroes, Dodd's travels took him from Texas — where he met the notorious cattle rancher Samuel Maverick — to Trinidad, where he found the spot where naturalist Robert Lechmere Guppy found his now-famous freshwater fish. Though many of his subjects are long dead, Dodd also found people still alive, well and brimming with ideas, including inventor Roy Jacuzzi, who lives in California.

Some of the stories Dodd discovered were tragic. He tells the sad family story behind the Mercedes, which was named for the young daughter of Emil Jellinek, an entrepreneur who commissioned the first Mercedes cars. Jellinek lost his fortune in the war and died a broken man in 1918.

Andrea Seabrook spoke with Dodd about the stories behind some of the characters who give the English language its color.

To listen to the interview CLick Here.

Don't Look Back

Don't Look Back
by Kay Ryan


This is not
a problem
for the neckless.
Fish cannot
recklessly
swivel their heads
to check
on their fry;
no one expects
this. They are
torpedoes of 
disinterest,
compact capsules
that rely 
on the odds
for survival,

unfollowed by
the exact and modest
number or goslings
the S-necked
goose is—
who if she
looks back
acknowledges losses
and if she does not
also loses.


"Don't Look Back" by Kay Ryan, from Say Uncle. © Grove Press, 2000. 


From the Writer's Almanac

Furiously saying goodbye

I had thought the tumors...


by Grace Paley
from Fidelity. © Etruscan Press, 2008.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.


I had thought the tumors
on my spine would kill me but
the tumors on my head seem to be
extraordinary competitive this week.


For the past twenty or thirty years
I have eaten the freshest most
organic and colorful fruits and
vegetables I did not drink I
did drink one small glass of red
wine with dinner nearly every day
as suggested by The New York Times
I should have taken longer walks but
obviously I have done something wrong

I don't mean morally or ethically or
geographically I did not live near
a nuclear graveyard or under a coal
stack nor did I allow my children
to do so I lived in a city no worse
than any other great and famous city I
lived one story above a street that led
cabs and ambulances to the local hospital
that didn't seem so bad and was
often convenient


In any event I am
already old and therefore a little ashamed
to have written this poem full
of complaints against mortality which
biological fact I have been constructed for
to hand on to my children and grand—
children as I received it from my
dear mother and father and beloved
grandmother who all
ah if I remember it
were in great pain at leaving
and were furiously saying goodbye


From the Writer's Almanac

Pettifog

pettifog - argue over petty things; 
bicker, brabble, squabble, niggle, quibble

Origin: 1605–15;  back formation from pettifogger,  equivalent to petty  + fogger  < Middle Low German voger  or Middle Dutch voeger  one who arranges things; akin to Old English gefōg  a joining


Supply and demand are, alas, two things I find no uses for, Econometric processes to me are just an awful bore; I use my mathematics skill to pettifog my treatises, And use my flair for jargon-speak to obfuscate my sophistries.