So I nudged Amy Winehouse's "Cherry" into a song for TNB's wonderful Zara Potts. What's even more reckless is that I bowed to pressure to record it, so after much fun and frustration with Garage Band loops (new territory for me), and fighting a midsummer frog in the throat, here's what I came up with.
Lyrics:
Her name is Zara.
We’ve just met,
but already she knows us better than you.
She understands us, after all these years,
And she travels all around to meet the crew.
Maybe you could shoot those stills
If you was made of lens and film.
Her eye embraces ups and downs
Her photos light life in their bounds
Just when I seek to make amends
So I got me a new best friend
With a pick-up that puts you to shame,
and Zara is her name.
And when we’re lone-ly
Zara’s there
and she plays along while we sing out our blues
I could be crying,
and you don’t care
You won’t make us smile, you’re stubborn as a mule.
Maybe you could shoot those stills
If you was made of lens and film.
You might think I’ve
gone too far
I’m talking ’bout
Our photo star.
Love poetry? Hate poetry? Just don't get what it's about? Come join the discussion, "Poetry for the Nervous, Vol 1."
Beside the Stanley Kunitz and Lenrie Peters pieces I lead with in the original post, there have been numerous others listed, discussed and quoted in the comments. Just in the first couple of days we have Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Kipling, Edward Lear, Stevie Smith, Lewis Carroll, Plath, Pound, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, G.M. Hopkins, Louis MacNeice, W.D. Snodgrass, Auden, Opie & Opie, C. Day Lewis, Spender, Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Christopher Okigbo, James Reeves, Yeats, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Whitman, Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, Mallarmé, Symons, Hulme, H.D., Aldington, cummings, Meera Bai, Tony Hoagland, Philip Levine, John Clare, Sydney, Shelley, Donne, Hass, Bukowski, Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Pavlova and Geoff Kagan Trenchard.
Also, mentions of personalities connected to poetry such as Artistotle, Peter Levi, Marjorie Perloff and Garrison Keillor, a shot out to New Zealand poets Allen Curnow, Bill Manhire, Janet Frame and James K. Baxter, and even musicians including Bob Dylan and Jefferson Airplane, Talib Kweli and M.F. Doom.
I'm always tickled by the near-May-Day snows we get here in the Boulder area, and in 2005 I even wrote a poem (a bagatelle, really) "May Day Flakes" when we got a good 8 inches at the end of April. This morning we got a dusting, making it the latest in the year I've seen snow in the backyard. Early last week we got a few inches.
Our winters are generally so mild (though this past one was rougher than most) that my Nigerian blood doesn't curdle over at such oddities. In fact, we always get so much sun that all the snow is usually gone by afternoon of the day. Pico-season. Peek-a-boo season.
Just a quick note to folks who've subscribed to this Weblog. Most of my entries from now on will be to copia.posterous.com, a revival of an older joint Weblog with my brother, Chimezie. If you find whatever I have to say interesting, I think you'll enjoy even more the combination of our posts. http://copia.posterous.com/
I expect that's why I know better than to ever give a daughter that name, even though it's so gorgeous. Ἑρμιόνη, daughter of Helen and Menelaus, abandoned, according in Sappho's non-nonsense phrasing, by Helen who had found τό κάλλιστον, what she best loved, elsewhere. A gorgeous name that evokes both utter beauty and utter despair of abandonment. And not one to be pronounced in such an dreadfully unmusical manner.
See also: "Notes on my Sappho translation"
"Boulder is the greenest, best educated, and most beautiful town you'll find. Levels of community participation in projects, of entrepreneurship, of educational attainment, and of national and international engagement are extraordinary here. Come to enjoy our town, and to help us benefit from a fully modern network so we can continue to do our part to make the world a better place. :) "
Thursday February 25, 2010, 2:00pm at Transcorp Hilton, Abuja http://x.ogbuji.net/abujabooklaunch2010
For Valentines day, a poem I wrote for Lori in 1995. I don't usually write sonnets, because the history of their use and abuse makes it hard to avoid tyranny of the form over the sense. In this case, it really did come to me naturally that way, and though I't's not for me to judge, I don't think imposes itself to be read as a sonnet.
If you want something else to read this Valentines day, try "Asunder", a marvelous love story by Nnedi Okorafor, in her own inimitable style.
