Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I’ve been doing it for a while, so of course I’ve realized

that poetry is fairly universally despised

Poetry is like the Nickelback of literary genres.  At some point people started making jokes about how much they hated it, and at some point it became the cool thing to say, and now lots of people hate poetry without even knowing what it is.

Which is part of the problem.  Even people who call themselves poets don’t agree on what it is, much less what it should be.

Should it rhyme?  Well, I think it should, but I’m in the minority.  Also, if you say that only rhyming poetry is poetry, what do you call that other stuff, you know, where people string a lot of words together, have illogical juxtapositions which they pass off as metaphors, and say something about their lousy childhoods and swans dying in the canals, but don’t rhyme or have much of a point, really.
Songs rhyme, advertising jingles and greeting cards often rhyme, but a lot of people don’t consider those poetry.

You’ve either got to allow that to be called poetry, and the people writing that sort of thing, who are legion, do, or else come up with a different term, which shouldn’t be too difficult, being poets and all, but nooooo…..

Should it always make sense?  Well, I think it should, but I’m apparently  I’m in the minority there, too.  Of course, there have been classical gems like Jabberwocky which are deliberate nonsense, but that’s different.  The Jabberwocky used a lot of words which aren’t precisely English, but it told a story, a story within a story, and was highly entertaining to boot.

These are the things  I  try for in my poetry, though.  Rhyming and making sense.  Meter, too.  Meter’s important, but there’s nothing I really have to say about it.

A publication called ‘Business Insider’ had the headline today ‘Clinton and Sanders Hold Huge Rallies on Same Night.’  That sound fair and balanced…until you realize that Bernie’s rally, in Washington Square Park, drew almost 50,000 people (27,000 in the park, which is crowded.  Wahington Square is really a square, and not a big park at all, and another 20,000 at the fringes of the park.
Hillary, on the other hand, spoke to 1,300 people.   I suppose you could  say 1,300 is a huge gathering – if it’s for a Labor Day BBQ in your back yard.  It would be a huge gathering if you were  having a yard sale.  It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a huge rally, as far as political rallies go.

This kind of lying headline is what we’ve come to expect, so we’ll just have to keep spreading everything via social media and hope word gets out.  Here is a clip of the speech, if you’re interested.  It’s kind  of awesome.

Went with Helena and Isabel  to the eye doctor this morning, it was just an eye test for Isabel and she  doesn’t need glasses, so that’s good.
I had a proofreading I had to finish for Helena for work and managed to complete that while sitting in  the waiting room – nearly perfect timing and  every  job done is a small victory.

Fairly crowded  tram so we were standing.  One stop before Palmovka and the tram didn’t seem to be going anywhere.  People were getting  up and leaving.  We didn’t know what  the problem was but decided that Palmovka was easy walking distance, so we got off.  As we walked past the front car, the door was open and there was a woman lying on  the floor.  Well dressed, elderly, so not a drunken homeless person.  Maybe a heart attack.  What’s kind of surprising, what with riding public transportation 3 or 4 times every day, and hundreds of people all around, is that it  doesn’t happen more often.  Haven’t heard the news, hope she gets through it O.K.  As we walked to Palmovka, we heard the ambulances coming behind us.
Helena went to work, Isabel and I caught the 16 to her school, or within easy walking distance.  It’s nice to come from a different direction occasionally.  Since it was such a warm spring day, I didn’t choose the Metro going back, either.  I  walked across Riegerovy Sady and  caught  the  bus to  Florenc.  Gave a couple of small coins to a gypsy man, playing Elvis’ ‘Are You Lonely Tonight’ on the accordion and when I hear that  song I think of this video, with Elvis cracking up on stage while singing  that song, and I looked up  at the sky and thought of how everything is connected, in time and space.

Had most of a poem written in my head by the time I got home, something I’ve been turning  around in my head for about a week, and it finally came together.  By me, that is the  definition of a productive day.

My adult student canceled, the two little girls were kind of bad but no worse than usual, no one burst out crying and they  didn’t actually refuse to participate in the lesson.  They maybe even  learned a few  new  words.
And that’s about it for today.

This is cool: NASA’s most ambitious program ever and they are known for ambitious programs.  The idea is to send a robot probe into the Alpha-Centauri solar system – actually a whole bunch of robot probes, each one about the size of a mobile phone.  Even the ship to carry them there won’t need to be so big.  They don’t need to worry about life support or anything.

The whole thing, they reckon, would take about 50 years, from launch to receiving back pictures and other data.  The price tag is estimated at $10 billion, which sounds like a lot, but it’s only a quarter of what Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, made off the Iraq War.  There are probably a hundred or two individuals on  Earth who could finance it out of pocket, and some of them are space buffs.

And what we’d learn from the mission would be priceless.  First of all, how to do it.  If we can send robot probes to Alpha Centauri, we’ll be able to send robot probes to anywhere.  If life actually common throughout the universe, then there is a good chance we’ll find it there.  If we don’t, then we’ll be able to compare the planets there to what we’ve got here and figure out ‘why not?’  Either way, it would bring us closer to first contact.

And that, IMO, is a worthwhile goal.

Bill de Blasio, Hillary Clinton, and a black actor from the play “Hamilton”, told an extremely dumb, racist joke at a fund raiser last night in New York.  As much as I dislike Hillary, I just can’t figure out why.

Epic Fail

Bill de Blasio has more credit with  black people than any white politician in the United States, or at least he did until now.  It’s one thing to say “I’ve got black friends” and it’s entirely another to say “My wife is black.  My  kids are black.”  Also, there was that time he said, “Hey, we’ve got a problem here with the police murdering black people all the time and I’m worried about it because my son is a black teenager.”  The Police Union was outraged, and turned their backs on  him. (literally)

So, maybe he thought he could pull off a joke like this.  He couldn’t.

Hillary Clinton should also have known better.  But she  didn’t.

Here’s the joke:  Hillary thanked de Blasio for his endorsement and then said “Took you long enough.”  That wasn’t the joke but, really, if they’d had any sense, they’d have left it  right there.  It started to get less funny real quick.

De Blasio said “I was on C.P. time.”  (which could stand for ‘colored person time.’)  The crowd gasped.  The actor (dressed in period costume, as a house  slave) said “I don’t appreciate jokes like that” and Hillary got the punchline “Cautious politician time.”  See, it wasn’t really a joke about colored people at all.

Well, that was Paula Deen’s defense.  Another incident it reminds me of was the time Letterman made a joke about one of the guys in his band, something about being dressed like a lawn jockey, that led to a walkout, followed by a very profuse apology.

I guess they will say in their defense that it was a reference to the Broadway play, “Hamilton.”  Great.  They make jokes that only make sense to people who can afford Broadway tickets.  You don’t find many people making minimum wage in those audiences.
I suppose Hillary figured that she could get away with it, talking to the Inner Circle (Really.  The group that sponsored the event is called ‘The Inner Circle,’ and their members are New York journalists.)  Once again, she seems to have forgotten the existence of video cameras and YouTube.

The bizarre thing is, with the stakes so high and the race so tight, that she would do something so monumentally stupid.  She really is a lousy, tone-deaf campaigner.  It was an unforced error, much like Ben Carson’s comment about the pyramids being used as grain silos.

Just out of nowhere, for no reason at all, something stupid.