Poem On Your Blog Day

To celebrate the end of National Poetry Month, one blogger has suggested that April 30 be "Poem On Your Blog" day. via MeFi

I blogged the following poem before, but I'm putting it up again... this is by former American poet laureate Billy Collins:

Sonnet

All we need is fourteen lines, well thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
Billy Collins

I was thinking about putting something up by German expressionist Rainer Maria Rilke, who is absoloutely my favorite poet, but didn't. However, I found a nifty Rilke site here (warning: Geocities link), with poems, quotes and a bibliography. Most of the poems on that page seem to be translations by Stephen Mitchell, and his versions are wonderful and highly regarded (although David Young's luminous rendering of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus remains my favorite volume of poetry ever).

Other posts about poem-related program activities on this blog: A comparison of the "poets for the war" and "poets against the war" sites from last December, and some links to sources documenting Bush's Poemgate woes.

I'm alive...

For the moment, at least. Thanks for the calls/emails.

Much ado has been made about Bush's decision to testify in tandem with Cheney before the 9/11 commission. A little known fact: Cheney has also been known to accompany Bush to the bathroom.

The greatest quote from the linked article (as pointed out by Waveflux):

Bush said it was important for him and Cheney to appear together so that commission members could "see our body language... how we work together."

(anyone having read the above "bathroom" comment will no doubt have a most unappealing visual image forming right about now...)

Pale sunlight,
pale the wall.

Love moves away.
The light changes.

I need more grace
than I thought.

from the Rubaiyat of Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), trans. Coleman Barks

OK, so I lied about the hiatus thing...

This evening, the South Beach Gay Men's Chorus participated in a benefit concert for AIDS Project Florida. We were invited by Miami City Ballet, one of the country's major dance companies, and we were featured guests in the ballet THE QUICK-STEP: Unspeakable Jazz Must Go!, a work based on 1920s music and choreographed by MCB artistic director Edward Villella.

This was an exciting project. Vocal arrangements for the instrumental accompaniment didn't exist, so I had to write brand-new arrangements of three songs featured in the ballet (also, there was no sheet music and I had to transcribe all the rhythms and harmonies by ear to ensure that our vocal parts lined up with the accompaniment; this feat isn't quite as difficult as it sounds). I knocked the arrangements out rapidly, and they ended up sounding incredible. We had a small ensemble of 9 men singing (all drawn from the men's chorus), and our vocalists did a great job.

The opportunity to work with an artist of Edward Villella's caliber doesn't come along every day- the gentleman is a National Medal of Arts recipient and was a 1997 Kennedy Center honoree. So the whole experience was an incredible privilege.

Some photos of me in costume, taken during the the cocktail party preceding the performance:

Hiatus

I'll be on hiatus for a little while, for a number of reasons:

1. I'm really busy with other projects.

2. I don't have a lot to write about right now.

I'll probably post a grad school update in the next week, but otherwise don't expect any blogging until later this month, or possibly May.

A couple quick things:

a. If you have not yet seen "War President" by Joe at amleft (and you probably have; it's been on Michael Moore's front page as well as other places), then go see it now. Very powerful.

b. I'm writing songs again. And they are odd, but good. I was up until 2 AM writing a song about frigging Sisyphus, of all things, with references to Sartre and Camus. Yep, I'm a geek.