Front Garden Pics

My favorite! Cardinal Flower!


A Morning Glory about to unfurl!

Purple Coneflower, Culver's Root, Prairie Blazingstar, Coreopsis, etc...

More Cardinal Flower

Razzball

I've started writing for the fantasy sports site Razzball. I write under the name Doc.

Go Caucasians!

Famous

The King of Pop

I, like most, have mixed feelings about MJ, but his music was the soundtrack of my childhood.

Zion!

Got a few old rolls developed. Zion National Park is probably my favorite place in the world.

Strawberries!

Here are our first strawberries of the season!

Iran

Dottie's Day Out

Give me treats!

Go Cubs Go!!

We had a great time at the Cubs game on Saturday. Ramirez hit a home run to win it in extras!

Getting closer!!!

Half Acre Beer Co.

Looks like there is a new microbrewery in Chicago!!! Half Acre Beer Co. has a blog. I have always been bewildered at the lack of microbreweries in Chicago. Can't wait to try it!

Evanston Library Peregrine Falcons

I saw a Peregrine Falcon flying around the library yesterday so it must be time to check out the falcon cam.

Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat

Quote O' The Day

"One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas," - Rush Limbaugh.

More Bob Marley Poems please!

Here's one from Waccamaw

by David Kirby

These Arms of Mine

Sometimes interviewers want to know what
dead people I’d like to have dinner with,
but my answer to that is nobody;
I mean, I wouldn’t mind following Dante around
and see who he talks to and where he shops and what

his writing schedule is, but can you imagine
trying to have a conversation with Dante?
Yeah, he wrote the greatest poem ever,
but his world view would be totally different from mine,
plus his temper was supposed to have been terrible.

Shakespeare wouldn’t say anything, probably;
he’d be storing up bits for his next play. Whitman
would probably talk your head off, and then
you’d be bored and not like his work as much as you
used to. No, I don’t want to have dinner with anybody.

But if you’re serious about time travel, I’d like
to go to Jamaica in 1967 and be sitting at a table
and drinking a Red Stripe in the after-hours club
where Bob Marley is playing, and Otis Redding,
who is touring the island, comes in “like a god,”

according to eyewitness accounts, and Bob Marley
looks up and begins to sing “These Arms of Mine.”
Wow. I tell you, I wouldn’t be myself.
I’d be Troilus or Tristan or Lancelot,
crying my eyes out for Cressida or Isolde

or Guinevere. She’d be on the battlements
of a castle in Troy or Wales or England,
all beautiful and sad-eyed, and I’d be clanking
up a storm as I drop my lance and brush
my visor back and pound the table with my mailed fist

while all the rastas look at me and say “I and I a-go
cool out wit’ a spliff, mon!” But my arms
are burning, burning from wanting you
and wanting, wanting to hold you because
I need me somebody, somebody to treat me right,

oh, I need your woman’s loving arms to hold me tight.
And I . . . I . . . I need . . . I need your . . . I need
your tender lips, and if you would let these arms,
if you would let these arms of mine, oh, if you would
just let them hold you, oh, how grateful I would be.

Write to your Illinois State Senator

Make it easier to compost food waste in Illinois.

Go here.

Submit your poetry using the new fangled intranets!

Here's a list of links to poetry journals that have some kind of easy submission program or accept email submissions. This is mainly for me (so I can be lazy) but you all can look too.

After Hours (email)
Agni
American Poetry Journal (email)
Anti- (email)
The Baltimore Review
Barn Owl Review (email)
Bat City Review
Bateau
Barrelhouse
Black Clock (email)
Blue Earth Review
Born Magazine (email)
Boston Review
Buffalo Carp (email)
Caesura (email)
Caketrain (email)
Coconut (email)
Columbia: A Journal
Copper Nickel (email)
Crazyhorse
Dossier (email)
Diagram
Diode (email)
Drunken Boat
Ep;phany
Fence
42opus
Gargoyle
Greatcoat (email)
Gulf Stream
Hawk and Handsaw (email)
The Hollins Critic
Indiana Review
Keyhole Magazine
Kenyon Review
The Literary Review
The Lumberyard (email)
The MacGuffin (email)
Many Mountains Moving
Massachusetts Review (fee)
Meridian (Fee)
Missouri Review (Fee)
National Poetry Review (email)
Naugatuck River Review (email)
New Madrid
New Orleans Review
Ninth Letter
Pebble Lake Review (email)
Ploughshares
Poetry
Post Road Magazine (email)
A Public Space
Puerto Del Sol
Quarterly West
The Raintown Review (email)
Rattle (email)
Redactions (email)
redivider (email)
Reed Magazine
Sentence (email)
Spinning Jenny (email)
Terrain.org
Third Coast
Tiferet
Tin House
upstreet
Valparaiso Poetry Review (email)
Versal
Virginia Quarterly Review
Waccamaw
West Branch
Whiskey Island Magazine (email)
Windfall Pacific Northwest (email)

Transparent Head-ed Fish

link and video

Food

Wouldn't it be nice if all food was brought to us like this? Is there any possible way to end the mass production of foodstuff and at the same time feed everyone?

At Marlow & Daughters, all of the butchering is done in plain sight. “We do this out on the floor because we want you to see the difference,” Mr. Mylan said. “We can tell you it’s all local, and it’s all pastured, and buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, but until you take out a whole animal and put it on the table people have no idea what it means to bring really good meat into the city and break it down.”

Brooklyn's New Culinary Movement

Demetri Martin

Important Things with Demetri MartinWed 10:30pm / 9:30c

Power - Parking Fight

Joke of the Day
Stand-Up Comedy

Free Online Games
More Funny Videos

Quote O' the Day

"You know, the last thing that I think we're looking for at this juncture is advice on fiscal integrity or ethics from Karl Rove. I've never seen anything really like it . . . [former White House chief of staff] Andy Card saying that we were somehow denigrating the presidency because people were wearing short sleeves in the Oval Office. We're wearing short sleeves because we have to roll up our sleeves and clean up the mess that we inherited," - David Axelrod.

Steelers Win!!!!!!!

Longish Poem Thing

I've been working on this woodpecker poem for years now and it is all I can seem to work on. I tell myself I need to write and all I can do is write in some way toward this poem. It started in a class called Collage and Collaboration. We would do cut-ups and well, all kinds of things. I'm not really a fan of collage or collaboration in general, but it was fun to get out of my normal way of writing. So for my final project in this class I found many different quotes and bits of other poems that had something to do with extinction and interwove them with stuff I had written. I had a few poems already, but I mostly wrote from the quotes.

About this time there were reports of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in Arkansas so much of the poem was geared toward the IBWO. I had always been intrigued with the IBWO and hearing that it might be back excited me. But that was about it. The class ended. I titled the poem "Notes On Extinction" and went about my business.

But then I got a call from a friend, a world class birder, who had taken a trip down the Choctawhatchee River and had seen an IBWO. Now, if it had been anyone else I would have laughed in their face, but instead I started planning a trip to the Florida panhandle. So I get down there, camp, kayak, listen, watch, camp, kayak, so on and on and out of nowhere I hear a double knock, and then another and that's it (A double-knock should be distinct to IBWO). I drove home to Chicago and have had that double-knock knocking in my skull ever since. So now I have about a thousand different thoughts for this poem and I can't seem to make it work.

I keep thinking that maybe I need to go back, that I need to see the place again to gain some kind of perspective. I think that where I want to go with this poem is where I want to go with my poetry. I feel like if I can break through all of these ideas into something bigger I will have done something, but the chances are actually pretty slim for that happening. Which is ok with me. I enjoy writing this so it isn't like it is all for nothing.

Here are some quotes I have interspersed throughout the poem-thing.

"The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain. This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is." --Annie Dillard from Pilgrim

Saw,
Eastward and over the cypress swamp, the dawn,
Redder than meat, break;
And the large bird,

Long neck outthrust, wings crooked to scull air, moved
In a slow calligraphy, crank, flat, and black against
The color of God’s blood spilt . .
--Robert Penn Warren

". . . men came to Funk Island to kill auks solely for their feathers.
The crews built stone corrals into which they herded hapless Great Auks. Each summer, men boiled vats of water and threw the live birds in to loosen the feathers for plucking; that accomplished, the corpses were either thrown to the wayside or used as oily fuel for the fires. . ." from Hope is a Thing with Feathers

Behind the nothing & number of what
We are, the billboards’ blank amnesias,
That wake of all we were still trembles:
First nakedness & summer & that hush,
Its hymen no more than a cuticle
Of cattails bordering a marsh,
And beyond it, the hem of the darkest wood.
--Larry Levis

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” -- Yahweh

and so on and on

Lake Powell, AZ

Ian Harris has an Ed Abbey inspired poem up at Verse Daily. Congrats Ian!

here

Robert Wrigley

I usually write using the language of the natural world. I think I am often prematurely labeled as a "nature poet," but I don't care because I probably am too quick to label other poets as well. I will continue to write using the images and language that excite me, but what writers use the language and imagery found in the natural world and have transcended that dreaded "Nature Writer" tag?

I have had some amazing examples to learn from; Roethke's "North American Sequence", Keats' "Ode To Autumn" (and others), many James Wright poems, James Dickey's Drowning With Others, Larry Levis' The Widening Spell of the Leaves, Robert Penn Warren's Audubon: A Vision, Robert Olmstead's Stay Here With Me: A Memoir, and many sections of Cormac McCarthy's novels, especially the first part of The Crossing. Their work seems to rise organically and bridge the gap between human and other. That connection or that investigation into that connection is what I feel most great writing contains. But each of these writers evoke in me a visceral response that comes from something else. Is it just the writer saying something true for me? Is it me connecting with another? Is it the music? I want to believe it is something spiritual, magical, what have you, and I think I do. It seems corny to say it like that, but I think going to the edge of corny, sentimental, whatever, is something every writer must do and if you are too afraid to do that you are probably too afraid of what readers think of your writing (like we all are at times).

Recently I've added a new poet, Robert Wrigley, to my list, specifically a sequence in Reign of Snakes called "Earthly Meditations." I just saw that the first section of this work is at the Poetry Foundation's website. This poem is alive with crazy music. It truly is a meditation on the earth. I think if this poem were to accidentally show up in a workshop it would be torn apart. Someone would say, "cut every other word." It is adrift and if it were an essay in my Writing & Rhetoric class I would say it needs to be grounded (Well, really I would be blown away and say you get an A). This poem dares to be torn apart! That is the trouble with how we learn in MFA programs! OK, I won't go there.

I am very happy I found this poem.

Earthly Meditations

The Afterlife

1

Spring, and the first full crop of dandelions gone
to smoke, the lawn lumpish with goldfinches,
hunched in their fluffs, fattened by seed,
alight in the wind-bared peduncular forest.
Little bells, they loop and dive, bend
the delicate birch branches down.
I would enter the sky through the soil
myself, sing up the snail bowers
and go on the lam with the roots.
Licked by filaments, I would lie,
a billion love-mouths to suckle and feed.

Where the river will be next week,
a puddle two trout go savagely dying in.
Notice the bland, Darwinian sand: bone wrack
and tree skin, the ground down moon bowls
of mussels, viral stones dividing like mold.
At twelve, I buried the frog because it was dead
and dug it up because I'd been dreaming—
a fish belly light, a lowly chirruped chorus
of amens. I thought my nights might smell of hell.

Bland, hum-drum, quotidian guilt—
if I've killed one frog, I've killed two.
Saint Rot and the sacraments of maggots:
knowing is humus and sustenance is sex.
It accrues and accrues, it stews
tumorous with delight. Tomorrow's
a shovelful, the spit of the cosmos, one day
the baby's breath is no longer a rose.

More snow pics

The grill in the more protected area in the backyard showed 12.5 inches and the compost bin showed nine inches where there is a little more wind.

Snow, Snow, Snow

The snow is finally tapering off. Not sure how much, but I'd say 8-10 inches.

Gynandromorph Cardinal

Check out this half male, half female cardinal that was found in Rock Island Illinois.

Watch Walmart Spread

Click here

Depressing Poem O' The Day

Miller Williams (Lucinda's pa)

The Old Professor Deals with Death and Dying

Talking around the block with no one near
but me, my sometime friend,
I think of events that punctuate our lives
and how, as a kindness deep in the nature of things,
death brings the sentence to an end.

How many of us, though,
when vessels break and minds misconstrue,
will say inside ourselves that we'd rather be dead
except that we're scared to die?
More than a few,
hardly disturbing the bedsheets, have said—
telling not quite the truth, not quite a lie—
"Lord, I don't want to die. I just want to be dead."

They'd leave living behind and go back to what
they were before they were born. Who can recall
a lot of discomfort in that? Like as not,
we're all of us going to no place at all,
a nowhere with nothing to pay, nothing to do,
no one to do it with and no one to care.
What a crock to have to suffer through
a damned initiation to get only there.

Still we stand at the beds of those who leave us
and cherish the seconds. Still our best dramas
depend on the death scenes, which all the religious
tell us are not periods but commas.

Meet the world’s only immortal animal

here

Vote for Maria!!!!

The Photographic Dictionary

Here

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman: A Filmography

Paging Mr. Salinger

Paging Mr. Salinger

So what has Mr. Salinger been doing for the last 40 years? The question obsesses Salingerologists, of whom there are still a great many, and there are all kinds of theories. He hasn’t written a word. Or he writes all the time and, like Gogol at the end of his life, burns the manuscripts. Or he has volumes and volumes just waiting to be published posthumously.

Joyce Maynard, who lived with Mr. Salinger in the early ’70s, wrote in a 1998 memoir that she had seen shelves of notebooks devoted to the Glass family and believed there were at least two new novels locked away in a safe.