Hopkins on Brindling, With Poetry Lesson

A brief poetry lesson, with the poem I’m thinking about this morning.

Click to read more ...

Verses Extemporized To A Painter With Whom He Had Lunch

(All in good fun.)

Your canvases, Terry, are white as a virgin,

and places for ochre and cobalt to merge in.

But attach some importance in the future, I beg

to the fact that a sausage is not like a leg.

Nor (I must argue) is the bridge of a nose

Built like a bridge tapered down to a hose.

The hand that you’ve painted is much like a fan,

the head in the shape of a watering can.

Your coloring’s brilliant, your brushwork a dream;

composition is heavenly, subject’s a scream.

But your form is the thing that has stuck in my craw:

you’ve learned how to paint before learning to draw.

New Poem

My new poem, Crazy Stalkers: On The Weaknesses of Men.

My poems have been moved to a poetry section, available from the navigation bar above.  Please do check in often, or watch the Twitter Feed for new posts.

Reorganization: Where Have All The Poems Gone?

Owing to some clutter lately in the blogs, I’ve elected to move all of my own poetry to the attic, where it can rage and set things on fire without disturbing the tranquility of RipChurch’s mission, whatever the hell that is.  In the navigation bar under the banner, there’s a link to my poetry if you’re one of the thousands of screaming teenaged girls who comes here to read that.  If you’re looking for a poem that was formerly in this blog, it will have moved there.

You should be able to follow the poetry pages on Networked Blogs as well, if you have nothing better to do than Facebook.

The downside is that the poetry’s tags are no longer contained in the main blog’s tags.  Thus, if you’re interested in Autism, your tag-click will no longer yield up my poetry on that topic.  Unfortunately my host, Squarespace, does not yet make it possible to search tags across separate blogs. 

But it seems to me preferrable not to let poetry, which is not appealing to everybody, swamp RipChurch’s main goals.   Naturally, I except the Haiku Movie Reviews: there are limits beyond which I will not go.

Which is to provide a Google portal for searches for M.C. Hammer.

Adrienne Rich: May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012

Lots of poets of good calibre have passed away since I started writing Riparian Church. 

Adrienne Rich makes a special mark on me. 

Click to read more ...

Scottish Air

A little doggerel I wrote on a postcard in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, after I sang it extemporaneously to myself while doing dishes in a whiskey-soaked Irish brogue. I sang it in a brogue, I mean: the dishes were not so soaked. Subsequently made into a goofy song that I introduced as “An old Scottish fiddle tune that I wrote last week.” I can’t for the life of me think whether I wrote it for somebody or was just mucking around, but the evidence points to just mucking around. I found myself playing it tonight.

Click to read more ...

Grief

I have Christian friends who insist that death is not an occasion for grief because nothing is lost in God.  I have atheist friends who insist the same thing but for the opposite reason, because no form is substantial in nature.

My answer to both is of two syllables, beginning and ending with fricatives.

Click to read more ...

Emily Dickinson Sits In With Us

Everybody should read Emily Dickinson.  If we all have to die, we should all see things as she did, at least once in our life. 

Click to read more ...

The Male Mouse Will Not Depart: My Father And Mad Christopher Smart

 

Christopher Smart.  The anthologies tell us, "From 1757-63 he lived in various asylums. Among the symptoms of his insanity were his sudden compulsions to pray in public, at any time or place. His marriage collapsed in 1759."

What his madness was, I do not understand.

What his clarity was, that I can help you with.

Click to read more ...

Truth and Language

A poetic statement is designed to offer an invitation into, not a statement about, the writer’s internal state.

And in that sense it’s more like a religion or myth than it is like an “opinion.”

Click to read more ...