best,
Don
Friday, May 16, 2008
Poetry Follies for a Rainy Friday Afternoon
Lunch hour and it's another rainy Friday afternoon in Pittsburgh. As an antidote to all this damp, below is a neat little bit with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, the later doing his very best John Cleese homage. Thanks once again go to Jessa Crispin at Blog of Bookslut for pointing in this direction. Be forewarned: the language envelop is pushed here, so it may not be for the shy or easily flustered linguistically. Enjoy.
best,
Don
best,
Don
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2 comments:
Dear Don:
Amongst other things, I've much enjoyed the "Near Perfect Books Of Poems" project. What an interesting and active exchange. The separate page link is very nice; I like the idea of letting the suggestions flow to something like 100 titles. That would be quite the list!
Two suggestions from readers have prompted me to reread, though I haven't done so yet; those would include "The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster" by Brautigan and "Letters To Yesinin" by Jim Harrison, a most interesting recommendation. I am presently about halfway through Harrison's "Saving Daylight", which I've read twice before. Tough to argue with "Leaves Of Grass"; two years ago at the Roanoke College Rare Books Room I was fortunate enough to hold in my hands a signed first edition copy of Whitman's book. Quite an emotional moment to be honest. Another very interesting submission was the "Collected Poems" of Dylan Thomas; my preference there would be his first book, which I think contained about thirty poems, beginning with "Prologue". But anyway!
Regards!
Jeffery Skeate
Jeffrey:
Many thanks for the note. I've sent you an email response. I'll share some of it here:
Thanks very much for your observations. I'm happy to say that I'm now beginning to get some more responses so hopefully the list will continue to grow over time.
Whitman was my contribution. Funny, how the guy who is into the short poem nominates Whitman, but he is so expansive and all-inclusive and, well, beautiful. He had to be there. As Ginsburg used to say, the father of us all.
I once held in my hand a handwritten letter by Charles Dickens dated the morning of his death. A bookseller was holding on to for his son's college tuition, his son being about 8 at the time. It was possibly the last thing he ever wrote (certainly one of the last things) and I had that wobbly knee feeling you describe so well.
Again, thanks for your participation and enthusiasm.
best,
Don
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