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