Breaking my record for concerts attended in one year (which I set last year)

In 2023, I went to 73 concerts. By the end of August 2024, I'd gone to seventy concerts, and I assumed I'd break my record in September. However, I only went to three concerts the whole month. At the end of September, I was planning to attend four concerts in three days, and two more at the beginning of October, but I came down with a bad cold that flattened me for ten days, and I haven't made it to any concerts since, as I've been catching up with everything. Tonight at the Bird's Eye in Basel, though, I'll be at my record-breaking seventy-fourth concert this year, the Matthias Spillman Trio. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 October 2024)

“Sense was breaking through”: Andrew Bird’s musical setting for Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (Fr340)

On 26 October 2022, singer-songwriter Andrew Bird released a recording of his setting of Emily Dickinson's poem "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (Fr340), featuring singer Phoebe Bridgers. The arrangement begins with just Bird on guitar and vocals for the first the three lines, at the end of which bassist Tony Berg enters and Bridgers harmonizes the fourth line: "That Sense was breaking through". It's as if the bass and the second voice are that "sense" that "breaks through". And at the end of the song, when Bird repeats the poem's opening stanza, the spare instrumentation returns, but then he sings that line unaccompanied, and the sense breaks through again. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 October 2024)

 

Performing “Apparently with no surprise” (Fr1661): The theatricality of Emily Dickinson

In an essay I discussed with my students last week, Brenda Wineapple characterizes Emily Dickinson as "original, difficult, theatrical, perceptive, witty". We found the idea of Dickinson's theatricality especially helpful in discussing the late poem "Apparently with no surprise" (Fr1661, 1884), which we even performed with three students and me playing the roles of the "happy Flower", the "Frost", the "Sun", and the "Approving God":  "Apparently with no surprise / To any happy Flower / The Frost beheads it at it's play - / In accidental power - / The blonde Assassin passes on - / The Sun proceeds unmoved / To measure off another Day / For an Approving God." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 October 2024) 

Donald Trump demonizing “illegal immigrants”, all immigrants, naturalized citizens, and all citizens who oppose him

Ever since he began campaigning for President in June 2015, Donald Trump has demonized immigrants to the United States – mostly those he considers "illegal", but sometimes also those who enter the country legally. On Friday, 11 October, though, Trump's advisor Stephen Miller called for "denaturalization" of immigrants who have successfully applied for and received United States citizenship. And yesterday, on Fox News, Trump even called for the National Guard or the military to be used against those citizens he sees as "radical left lunatics." As I noted after a burst of similar rhetoric from Trump last November, anyone who opposes him can become an object of the violence he calls for. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 October 2024)

 

• I take the recent points from this post by Heather Cox Richardson.
• My post from 14 November 2023.

Metrical variation in Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023)

Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023) begins with dactyls: "Seated alone at the edge of the bed". The poem is in couplets, so the second line could balance that tetrameter with dactylic trimeter, but it turns to troches instead: "grasp the finest fabric first". That could establish a pattern for the poem: alternating lines of dactylic and trochaic tetrameter. But Hayes's third line shifts to iambs: "the shrunken sock or silk softest to touch". "Softest" is a trochaic substitution, but that's not unknown in iambic pentameter lines. The continuous movement between several meters in Hayes's poem models how "free verse" can make use of variable metrical effects. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 October 2024)

 

  

Terrance Hayes’s poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm”, PechaKucha, proper names, and Isamu Noguchi

Terrance Hayes calls his poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm" (from "So To Speak", 2023) "an analogue PechaKucha", a Japanese presentation form that involves making twenty-second statements about twenty slides. In my Contemporary Poetry seminar, we discussed the proper names in Hayes's poem: Kafka, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Matisse, Picasso, Hitchcock, and Isamu Noguchi. As none of us had heard of Noguchi before, I gave the students two minutes to prepare a twenty-second statement about what the poem says about him, and then called on students at random to make their statements. Afterwards, we looked him up: Noguchi (1904-1988) was an Usonian artist, furniture designer, and landscape architect. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 October 2024)

[Hayes’s poem is online, but he revised it considerably for book publication, so here’s the poem as it appears in “So To Speak”]

Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm

Terrance Hayes, "So To Speak", 33-36

 

An Analogue PechaKucha, 2020

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

It appears I will never be remembered

as a great singer nor extravagant eater.

Either I am standing or I am dreaming.

Or I am standing near the mouth of a theater.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

One early & deeply progressive symptom

of the Kafka Virus: a stream of movies seeps

into the shell of the infected individual's sleeping.

Dream factors greatly in the disease.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I accept I may never get over the ways my mother

loved me poorly. She is close to god in me.

On a planet without surefire

gods & mythologies, there is family.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Inside the stream of Whitney Houston's

voice, Dionne Warwick warns,

"You're gonna need me one

day. You're gonna want me back in your arms."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

There are no ugly people, only expressions

of uglinessm when the mouth is set

this way or that. It's best to think of time

the way a miser thinks of money.

 

¯\_(' ')_/¯

Matisse liked to have the nude near to see her,

but Picasso liked to close his eyes upon her.

What I remember of 1987, is mostly what I remember

of '88 except with different deaths & births.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

If you watch Hitchcock's Vertigo

the other way round, you may notice 

inside the movie is a whole other movie

told from the point of view of the young lady.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Each new pair of glasses assures things

never look the same, but several glasses

of liquor can create the same feeling.

Balance the morass & the molasses of jackasses.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

Even where I doubt the presence of God 

I am awed by the scale of creation. 

Any science suggesting all that happens

is coincidence, is nonsense.

 

\_('.')_/¯

"Intrepidation." "Misfortunate." "Ya-licious."

"Holy smoked turkey." "Attack of the third dimension."

I continue to half believe a fourth s

resides somewhere inside the word obsession.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Clap for a low back country road 

like a tree talking below a constellation.

A low back river talking twilight 

with the leaves clapping below a constellation.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Often right after taking a photo you immediately

crop or color the image so it seems

the doctored thing is the memory.

I'm not saying you have to lie to dream.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

I stream the sequel to a terrible disaster

movie where the protagonist searches for a lover

with the support of characters who meet catastrophe

helping the main character.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

The gun is lowered but then a toe

or two in the boot is shot & when the shoe

comes off, there's a hole a grandchild or two

a generation or two later can put a finger through.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Before the sleeping dream,

we are told to keep nickels in the glasses

of wine by our beds. The virus seems

to have some relationship to cash.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Clap for Tetris, the video game

that teaches you the most geometry for life.

Stacks of boxes of books, closets of hangers

and monster angels and historical fabrics.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I was struck by the sky of my South

Carolina. It made my mouth ache.

I was old by the time I heard the prophet

Isaiah used to preach naked.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Ghost, the loss that broke you was so

ubiquitous, I failed to see it lingering in the ether

like the misspelled affections that go

undetected by both letter writer & letter reader.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Often I confuse Vivamus, moriendum est,

which means "Let us live, for we must die,"

with Bibamus, moriendum est which means "Let

us drink, for we must die."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Isamu Noguchi sculpted the marrow

of a black stone into bamboo & planted husks

of live bamboo shoots to guard it. I know

this ragged clock waits to be clogged with dust.

 

The magnificent career of Rafael Nadal

Early on, Rafael Nadal made this Roger Federer fan suffer by beating him at the French Open four years running (2005 in the semifinal; 2006 to 2008 in the final). But I learned to appreciate Nadal's compelling style, especially on the clay courts at Roland Garros, with his fourteen titles, 112 wins, and only four losses. Even though his clay-court style had been around for seventeen years by the time he last won it in 2022, only three players ever figured how to beat him there: Robin Söderling (2009), Novak Djokovic (2015 and 2021), and Alexander Zverev (2023, when Nadal was suffering from the injuries that have now ended his career). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 October 2024)