5-4-Fri: Poetry-related Stuff

Poetry is the goodness. This Friday, you are treated to five kinds of cool poetry-related content. Alors:

1 - The Poet Laureate. Best. Job. Ever. Annual honorific position with few responsibilities and TONS of street cred in nerdy English circles. My fave living poet is the current, but woefully unraimented, Laureate.

2 - Poet's House. My pal Alison gave me a membership here for my birthday one year and, even though it is far away in NYC, I have kept it up ever since. Congratulations to Lee Briccetti--a poet herself--for making this library cum movement such a success.

3 - Top 500 Poems. Wild Bill Harmon of "No I Won't Sanction Your Dopey Thesis Idea" fame edited this groovy compendium. Waaaay to go, Bill.

4 - Best American Poetry. Series editor David Lehman works with a new editor each year to provide a great guide to the best in American poems. An affordable way to keep up with the happenings.

5 - Norton Anthology. An oldie but a goodie. Impossibly thin vellum paper. Jillions of poems. Used to be two massive volumes. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Buy it/them (or dig them out of the old college boxes).

PS - Want to hear the "raiment" joke? Download the audio file of Kae Ryan's November 1, 2008 reading at the Library of Congress. Oh, and "Please Read the Letter" by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant is also the goodness; now playing on iTunes.

Excellent Quotes: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Periodically, I will post a truly excellent quote from some book or movie that has had an outsized influence on me and taken up vital space in the grey matter that could have been used to memorize the multiplication tables or the sequential order of service of the Presidents of the United States or something similarly useful to getting promoted at work. You will read them. You will agree that they are excellent. Or, woefully for you, Carlton will no longer show you up.

And so, submitted for your perusal:

“Tonight, Gordon pushed the maps in his pocket and strolled back toward his car. Standing under the lights in the mist it had gathered a finely beaded coat of matte moisture on it, and looked like--well, it looked like an extremely expensive Mercedes-Benz. Gordon caught himself, just for a millisecond, wishing that he had something like that, but he was now quite adept at fending off that particular line of thought, which only led off in circles and left him feeling depressed and confused.”
--Adams, Douglas. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Pp. 59-60. Pocket Books: 1987.

PS - I had initially wanted to do my Master’s thesis on the use of Norse mythology in the sequel to this little-read classic by Douglas Adams--The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul--but when I asked “Wild Bill” Harmon, who was universally acknowledged to be willing to advise on just about any fool project, if he would oversee the effort, he looked at me with the gimlet eye and intoned, “Mister iClipse, the Master’s thesis is not an exercise in self-gratification.” Oh, and “Your Sweet Voice” off Matthew Sweet’s 1991 masterpiece, Girlfriend, is a luscious song that I really must draw your attention to; now playing on iTunes.