Vincento looks unhappy in his radioactive suit; not

Even the dragon of rainbow hexagons can brighten

His day, even by offering a hexagon of gelatinous

Fruit-flavored delight.

Fuchsia Groan (pictured left) is the official Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost Poetic Maiden in Distress for National Poetry Month, April 2012.  We shall contemplate her loveliness and write fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with the Spenserian rhyme scheme of abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee.  Quills at the ready?  Dip them in India ink and write!

While you are busy doing that, I will tell you what is on the show this week.   Iowa Poet Laureate Mary Swander, if you recall, visited our fair field in February.  I shall play the first half hour of her reading this week, and then follow up next week with a conclusion.

Also on my mind is a forthcoming show (or trio of shows) featuring Robert Dana who was Iowa Poet Laureate before Mary.  As the bard said, "Stayeth Tuned."

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no

Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Seamus Heaney (born 13 April 1939) is an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, he now resides in Dublin.

As well as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney has received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999).  He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996. Heaney's personal papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.

Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age".

Pull My Daisy

From Wikipedia

This article is about the short film. For the poem of the same name, see Pull My Daisy (poem).

Pull My Daisy (1959) is a short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso, artists Larry Rivers (Milo) and Alice Neel (bishop's mother), musician David Amram, actors Richard Bellamy (Bishop) and Delphine Seyrig (Milo's wife), dancer[1] Sally Gross (bishop's sister), and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-young son.

The plastic crumbles and the walls fall in
The sidewalk's melting I begin to spin
You know where I'm going and
You know where I've been
My mind's exploding like it's never been
The sidewalk's melting I begin to spin
I can't look down, I might fall in
I'm looking up but I'm feeling down
I'm standing still but still falling down
The plastic crumbles and the walls fall in
The sidewalk's melting I begin to spin
I'm looking up but I'm feeling down
I'm standing still but still falling down
On the stares that lead to Nowhere
I'm staring into Nowhere
On the stares that lead to Nowhere

--Lydia Lunch

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from SO-CALLED SONNETS by Rock L'Orange:

The Hamster Boxing Title Match

between Rafael "Boom-Boom" Valesquez

and Edward "Bazooka" O'Brien

has been postponed.  

Stay tuned for your regularly scheduled poetical rant:

Monkeys chant,

Bukowski moans about how much

he hates the human race,

Kerouac wanders the North Beach district,

and we end it all with the melancholy musings

of John Coltrane. 

Happy Valentine's, Ghostkateers!

Iowa State Poet Laureate Mary Swander will be giving a reading at the MUM Library North Lounge at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012. There will be a reception for the author afterwards and refreshments will be served. This event has been made possible through funding from Humanities Iowa.  Click here to listen to audio of the reading.

In 2009, Governor Chet Culver appointed Mary Swander the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa. Her most recent work is a book of poetry, The Girls on the Roof (Turning Point/Word Tech, 2009), a Mississippi River flood narrative. Swander has worked with the Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre to create a performance piece of The Girls for the stage. Currently, Swander is also touring her play Farmscape, a docudrama capturing the changing rural environment. She is the co-founder of Agarts, a national group designed to explore the intersection of the arts and agriculture, and is developing a website, The Iowa Literary Community, where anyone with an Iowa connection can post poetry and other pieces of writing.