Category Archives: Bandwagons

National Blog Posting Month, Reading

I wrote a poem, took a big gulp of courage and hit publish

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BlogHer is having a poetry contest, and so at quiet time today I wrote a sestina. Beyond being a lovely word on its own, a sestina is a kind of strict but also not terribly structured form of poetry.

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

(Poets.org)

I have a hard time keeping the end words straight through all six stanzas (and the envoi!), so I used this handy-dandy Sestina-O-Matic template generator to help me. You give it your six words, and it churns out something that looks a lot like this, except with your own words and more lines:

# Use the template below to create a sestina.
# Your job: replace the ‘…’ with poetic greatness!
# Each line should end with the word shown below. …

# Stanza 1
… popsicle
… turkey
… peppermint
… abrigado
… munificence
… elk

# Stanza 2
… elk
… popsicle
… munificence
… turkey
… abrigado
… peppermint

and so on, etc.

Anyway, I sat on the couch and wrote this. It is, of course, mostly about the cats and also my socks. I haven’t written a poem in a lot of years. Be gentle.

Yesterday and Today and Tomorrow

Every soft surface trumpets it: “Here be cats.”
White fur everywhere bringing to bear
my best efforts to eliminate that ruff silhouette.
They’re alert at the window for every fly-by bird,
and in the floor my bunched-up socks
transmorgify now to toys. Like ducks to water.

Every morning I fill two little dishes with water.
Who was it that said that about the fog and the cats’
feet never met my cats. Those little fur socks
are stiff and strong and hard to bear,
digging and kneading bones hollow as birds’,
soft swift paws sharp as a silhouette.

On the mantel: A pair of silhouettes;
Five vases and not a drop of water;
one white ceramic discount bird;
knick-knacks that could pass for cats’
toys; and a single forge-fired black bear.
It’s maybe the only place I don’t leave my socks.

That habit of leaving my socks
everywhere bothers him. His silhouette
steels but I know he’ll silently bear
witness to my carelessness. And he’ll water
the plants and me and the kids and the cats
and never complain. He always has been a good bird.

The front yard will be covered with birds.
I tried to save his hat and now my socks
are sodden. The kids and the cats
are in the basement, their silhouettes
dark against the fluorescents. I’m water-
logged again and it’s almost, almost more than I can bear.

Last fall there was a small black bear
wandering our neighborhood. He was burred,
I’d imagine, half-starved and looking for water.
My feet can hardly stand the stricture, those socks,
and day by day my sofa-softened silhouette
repulses some but seems to entice the cats.

It’s genetic, I think, this preference for bare feet over socks.
A bird floats on the wind, paints across the grass his silhouette
and no longer yowling for water they become truly feral cats.

Mighty List, Screen time

That Toto song is not in “Out of Africa” at all

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I rented “Out of Africa” about a week before I actually watched it.

“Do you know how long that is?” Rockford asked. I am not a fan of lengthy cinema. “It’s like 3 hours long.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” he said. “A long time ago. It’s … kind of boring.”

I think he must’ve watched it back when he considered “Red Heat” high cinema. Rockford almost always has an opinion about movies, but it’s rarely just that it was “boring.” That one tends to have its sole provenance in my critique wheel box.

“Out of Africa” is a languid movie, by which I don’t necessarily mean boring, really, just that it’s an excellent film for watching while you convalesce on your couch while an early-spring breeze gently stirs your curtains.

A few things thoughts I had while watching “Out of Africa”:

  • Africa looks so beautiful in this movie. I never really pictured it as lush before, but it definitely looks lush here.
  • Robert Redford. Also does not look too shabby here.
  • My sister-in-law looks like Meryl Streep.
  • Meryl’s accent was somewhat distracting.

    I probably wouldn’t watch it again, but I didn’t hate watching “Out of Africa.” (Is that a ringing endorsement or what?)

    • Mighty List, Screen time

    I’ve come to realize that everyone in “Rebecca” annoys me

    Before we get into this, please be aware that it might get spoilerish in here.

    Everyone at the seaside manor Manderly lives under the shadow of the dead Rebecca de Winter, which turns mousey little second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine) into even more of a mouse. Such a sad little creature, in fact, that she doesn’t even get to have a first name. Nor does she get to play tennis, because the “dashing” Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) tosses her racquet into the bushes and makes her go for a drive when they meet in Monte Carlo a few days before the the second-worst marriage proposal in film history. (The very worst was Rocky’s.)

    I was never a fan of Maxim in Daphne de Maurier’s novel, and that feeling held fast when I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of “Rebecca” on Friday night. Olivier’s portrayal of Maxim de Winter put me in mind of a mostly-less-violent Ike Turner. I can never quite tell whether de Winter is supposed to be an attractive lead or just a moody jerk.

    Hitchcock’s hand in the 1940 Best Picture winner shows in the lighting, the moodiness and the proliferation of creepy creepers, chief among them the gliding, lingerie-obsessed Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) — she’s a thoroughly freaky study in weirdoism and psychological abuse — and the sleazy cheesy Jack Favell (George Sanders).

    I think the moral of this story is never marry a wealthy recently widowed dude with a pencil-thin mustache. He’s bound to have baggage.