Philip Whalen on Penn Sound, 3by3by3, & a Master's Birthday

The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory

A terrific resource that you'll find on the sidebar to the right is Penn Sound. It is a growing archive of live poetry recordings. I was reminded of this site in a recent post by Jessa Crispin on Blog of a Bookslut, when she mentioned some recordings of Philip Whalen. They are a great way to punctuate a rainy Sunday afternoon.

If you're stuck in a writing rut ... writer's block or same old, same old ... one thing you might take a flyer at is 3by3by3; I did. Here's their submission recipe:

Recipe
Pick 3 stories from Google News.
Using only words that occur in the first 3 paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each, no more than 60 characters per line. The 3-word title should use a word from each story.

On the same newsday that your 3 stories were published, send your poem to 3by3by3blog (at) gmail (dot) com. Include links to your 3 stories.

I gave it a go and here is the result. It definitely got the brain waves crackling.

As part of the little Issa section down along the sidebar, there is a link to a .pdf of Robert Hass's 52 page manuscript, Kobayashi Issa: Poems. Here's the poem he opens with, the last poem Issa composed on his deathbed:

a bath when you're born,
a bath when you die,
how stupid.

Finally, speaking of births and deaths, I would be remiss not to mention the birth date of the master of art and shell game purveyor extraordinaire, Salvador Dali. Without him, Freud would have lost his finest envisioner; without him, the fine art of the flim-flam would have been set back half a century; without him that first hit of acid would have been so, uh, normal.

The list of near perfect books of poetry will be in Thursday's regular post.



best,

Don