Reciting Poetry Aloud
Over the last couple of days, I have been seeing articles about how quirky one becomes when one lives alone. How we solitary singles are prone to talking to our pets & stuffed animals, how we never close the bathroom door and sing/dance with free abandon. We are weird, eccentric and darn right, proud of it.
My number one quirk is that I like to recite poetry aloud!
I have collected poetry since I was a teenager and could not afford to spend money on books. Above are just two of my poetry collections; they are my earliest binders. There was no public photocopier at my high school (or in my small town) so any poem I wanted to keep I had to copy out by hand. My handwriting then was very tiny, precise and neat. I was happy to get a typewriter for my 16th birthday because it meant I could now type out the poems!
I love the sounds of words. The rhythm of a poem soothes my soul. I can still recite many of the first poems I learned. When I went to school memorization was mandatory.
I often whisper Georgie Starbuck Galbraith’s “Full Moon Song” when I’m feeling lovelorn. However, I can never remember the first verse.
Was ever the moon that didn’t wane?
Yet tonight the moon is full,
And the heart is richer that chances pain
Than the heart in cotton wool.Then what, my love, if your love is brief?
Tonight you are mine to kiss,
And better a century of grief
Than never an hour of bliss.
I’ve always tended to remember only the best bits of a poem; for me, these bits usually tend to be maudlin.
… What you hope for
Is that at some point of the pointless journey,
Indoors or out, and when you least expect it,
Right in the middle of your stride, like that,
So neatly that you never feel a thing,
The kind assassin Sleep will draw a bead
And blow your brains out.
The full text of this poem, Walking to Sleep by Richard Wilbur, is much longer. Excuse me for a moment well I go read it aloud! Aha, I see now why I only copied part – this poem does not flow smoothly off my tongue.
I’ve been trying to memorize The Shooting of Dan McGrew for decades.
I want to write poems like this. Poems that trip merrily off the tongue. Poems that last for centuries.
Poems like those of Marge Piercy or Dorothy Parker.
I do write poems (occasionally inspired by others’ words).
I wrote a poem which uses these two lines…
She’s dipped her quill in ink
That runs from the heart – blood red.
I thought I borrowed the exact words from Dorothy’s “For A Lady Who Must Write Verse”. I Didn’t. I took her idea and spun it around for my own purpose.
I just spend over two hours trying to find the source of those two lines that I thought I had copied perfectly from a poem. It took me an hour to recall the poet (Dorothy Parker) and two hours to go through my stuff. I knew I should have started at the end. I knew when I wrote the poem and where and where my original poem was but I got sucked into thinking Google would make it easy to find (hah). I’m a librarian, I should know better.
I want to recite with such passion as to make women weep.
I want to inspire as these women do at Spoken Words.
Alone, in my apartment, I can. I do.
Opening Jars : An Elderly Rant
I am old. I am feeling old. This winter, my right knee has been acting up almost every day. This is new. It used to be that my right knee would on occasion (once a year maybe) freeze up on me. I would baby it a day or two and than I would be fine. But this year! Arthritis runs in the family and my mom has had both her knees replaced and I really don’t want to go there (not for decades). Oh my achy bones! Everybody (all together now) say, with a sigh, “Poor me.”
My body has never been perfect. I was a scrawny kid and an iron-deficient teen. From the age of thirteen on, it was almost a given that I would sprain an ankle sometime during the year. The one constant in my first aid arsenal is a tension bandage and I know (without thinking about it) the best treatment for a sprained ankle – RICE it; that is, Rest, Ice, Compress, and Elevate.
Getting older is annoying in the littlest ways. What I know about my body changes daily and I had just started to figure it out. Finally, my body was getting enough iron and my monthlies were fairly regular. Now it’s like I’m back at the beginning as the pain/annoyance factor equals how my body reacted when my monthly cycle started. All the literature I read says that this means I’m entering Peri-menopause (o joy, o fun).
I didn’t want to be this type of little old lady – complaining of all my aches and pains and concerned about ice and falls.
When I was in my late twenties, I lived downtown on Third Avenue. I was in the right-side front apartment on the third floor. A little old lady lived in the left-side front apartment on the first floor. The apartment building mostly consisted of university students who moved in in September and out in April.
About once a week, this little old lady (click on the link to learn more) would trudge up to my apartment and knock on the door. She would stand there with a can and non-electric can opener (see pictures) and say “please, could you”. She didn’t say much else. Even though I found her annoying, I helped when I could. I was young. I was callous. I preferred to solve my own problems and let others solve theirs. I just wanted to be left alone! Hopefully, I didn’t convey that attitude to her. I’m sure it was hard enough, for her, to just ask for help.
Top View of my manual can opener
Now I have the captain’s voice from Wall-E echoing “Man-u-al”.
Bottom View of my manual can opener
I also understand why everyone else owns an electric can opener.
Jars & cans have become a weekly annoyance. Commercial jars are not just hard to open they are also annoying as one must first remove a plastic seal before commencing to twist the lid off. At least with my mom’s canning jars all I usually have to do is soak them (upside down) in about two inches of hot water and they’ll open right up.
I have found that turning a jar upside down and banging on the counter will break the seal but I’m always worried that I’ll also break the jar and then I’ll have a mess to clean up. My first solution is always to bang on the edges of a stuck lid with the handle of a dinner knife hard enough to leave dents. Again, this usually breaks the seal and I then can open the jar.
I may be old and weak but I still have my smarts (tapping my head).
I’m starting to get it. Why old people are always going around muttering annoyingly, I mean.
This is now me. A cranky, annoyed old lady muttering evilly half under her breath about the things she no longer finds easy to do (like opening a jar or getting a pill out of a new package for the headaches that simple tasks cause).
Which is better than the alternative (which would be – not getting older)!
😉
Winter Shines
It’s officially Winter: the groundhog has made his prediction. According to Gainer the Gopher, we Saskatchewanians will soon see the end of winter. Though, honestly, here in Saskatchewan, no matter what the groundhog says we know Winter will last at least another six to eight weeks. Snow on my birthday, at the beginning of April, is common.
Which is why, perhaps, we are fans of the winter festival. What else is there to do as Winter drags on but revel in the bliss of all that is divine about this sparkling, cold season?
In Saskatoon, WinterShines 2012 is running from Jan 28th to Feb 12th…
For the last couple of years, the festival center has been at the Farmers Market site. Ice sculptures abound. I’m not a big fan of ice sculptures. I prefer snow sculptures as they mold better and it is easier to tell what they are. Plus, ice sculptures seem more hoity-tooty. Aren’t these google images, of snow sculptures, amazing?
As for these Birds of Prey (my title for them), are they eagles or griffins? Labels would have been nice or the opportunity to get close enough to touch; I a fan of touch and close-up photographs. I like to zoom in and try to capture the tiniest details (impossible to do at this distance with my point & shoot camera).
I’m assuming this is a duck or perhaps a Canadian Goose. I’m sure it’s even more nondescript this weekend (I took these pictures last Saturday when the ice sculptures were newly carved). We’ve had a week of warm, melting inducing temperatures since then.
What I liked best about photographing the sculptures was trying to catch the reflections from the every changing spotlights. Here we have blue…
The sculpture, I think, is a jousting knight which has no Saskatchewan connection. If you’re going to do an ice sculpture for our Wintershines shouldn’t you try to connect with us?
Here we have reflections both Orange & Yellow verging towards the Tangerine perhaps. And who is this woman supposed to be or is she a mermaid? I can’t tell.
I’m a little crabby today, aren’t I?
I’ll try not to be so crabby.
I loved this idea, coloured children’s blocks carved out of the ice. The children loved it too. It was very hard to get a picture that showcased the colourful blocks as they were consistently being used.
This is my second favourite picture. Sun. Sun. Shiny, happy sun. Saskatoon Shines is one of our local mascots. Sun was also hard to get a picture of as it was always moving and surrounded by children. Doesn’t it make you want to smile back at it? Isn’t Sun looking so warm and happy?
I think crabby me is gone.
🙂
Go out, enjoy Winter Festivals where ever you are and don’t be wary to visit Saskatoon in every delightful season.
I’m just glad we don’t even consider a polar bear swim.
Solitary Spinster 
Prince Charming
February 12, 2012 at 8:15 am (Book Commentary) (books, fairy tales, Kristine Grayson, love, prince charming, Valentines, very meta, wicked stepmother, Wickedly Charming)
“Not that he was famous here in the Greater World – he wasn’t (unless you counted that whole Prince Charming thing [every girl was looking for one, or so he was told]). ” (p. 18)
I just finished a book that was very meta. In a genre that I haven’t read in decades. I had the library put a hold on the book, not understanding completely what genre it was, because of a review I read recently. I think the review was in The Walrus which is a Canadian Arts & Culture based magazine. The Walrus article was about the Harlequin publishing empire – which should have given me a clue to the genre of the book. I read (and enjoyed) a lot of Harlequins when I was in my early teens and knew nothing of romance and love. I very seldom read romances now!
What led me astray was the fairy tale premise. I’m a sucker for a good fairy tale retelling (no matter the genre [be it young adult, mystery, children or urban fantasy]).
Fairy tales are trying to be next big thing. No, people/publishers/movie makers are trying to force fairy tales into being the next big thing. They’ve made all the money they can off the vampires.
Just look at television where Grimm and Once Upon A Time are vying for attention. Look at movies over the last few years – there has been tales about Red Riding Hood, The Beast and (soon) two versions of Snow White.
I like Grimm best but then I’m a mystery, cop show fan. Once Upon A Time is too soap opera, that is, too much night-time soap opera. There are too many pretty people.
It’s my opinion why the fairy tale genre doesn’t quite make the the transition from page to screen. It gets prettied up too much. In Beastly, a take on Beauty and the Beast, the beast is too pretty – his descent into beastliness makes him look romantically dangerous not ugly.
What I liked best about this re-telling was that the book was itself a romance for book geeks (very meta).
I could spend the whole blog just quoting what I enjoyed most.
Quotes that spoke to my core beliefs, like these:
“Books opened minds. Books expanded horizons. Books didn’t brainwash.” (p.59)
“We need to know that all kinds of books exist. Books that make us fall in love. Books that scare us. Books that are so full of lies they make us angry.” (p. 71)
The story grabbed me from the first page. I loved that the Greater World was represented by Los Angeles and referenced Disneyland. I loved the idea of multitude mythical Kingdoms. I’d love to read more about the various side characters, such as Griselda, the witch with the Gingerbread house.
The opening scene is a book fair. I’ve never attended one but always have wanted to (mostly for the free books just like Charming). We meet our main characters immediately – Prince Charming, now a book seller and Mellie, evil stepmother to Snow White and leader of PETA.
No, not that PETA.
This PETA – People for the Ethical Treatment of Archetypes. You know what I mean? What comes to mind when I say Hansel & Gretel, Cinderella, evil stepmothers, or wicked witch of the west?
Or Prince Charming. We all have different definitions of how our Prince Charming would look and act. This book describes mine almost to the T – I desire a mature man who worships books as much as I do.
A man who knows of what I talk about when I reference Grimm’s Cinderella against Disney. I am a dilettante connoisseur of fairy tales – I’ve read the originals, the poetry, the criticisms and every re-telling I can find. I read, it’s what I do best.
Maybe, because I am like these fairy tale characters, I don’t feel complete if I’m not searching.
“… everyone in fairy tales is searching for something spectacular, something important..” (p. 232)
Mellie (Melvina), Snow White’s stepmother, hates books; she considers them lies and abominations. Prince Charming (divorced from Ella and raising his two young girls away from his father’s old fashioned chauvinist Kingdom) lives for books, worships books and beyond that, understands the power of stories.
“Books had been his retreat since boyhood. He loved hiding in imaginary worlds.” (p.6)
Of course, these two are going to be attracted to each other.
At first, Mellie, a practiced listener, can only rant about the damage that fairy tales have done to her reputation and her life. Books, that tell lies, must be banned.
Prince Charming (Dave, yes Dave) explains how Mellie can use books to change peoples’ impression of her and the archetype of the evil stepmother; how books can be used for PR here in the Greater World. It has, after all, worked for Vampires. Vampires went from being seen as bad/evil to being seen as sexy. For an example, go watch Vampires Diaries and see all the romantic, to die for pretty vampires dressing up in magnificent gowns and going to balls while also attending high school (so realistic – yes, that is sarcasm).
After all, it worked for the Wicked Witch, even though:
“… She wasn’t that misunderstood. She had a lot of very powerful magic, a terrible temper, and a willingness to take her anger out on anyone who got in her way.” (p. 87)
Thus, an idea is born. And a Romance brews.
The book, itself, is divided into four sections. We have The Idea, The Rough Draft (the largest section), The Final Manuscript, and The Book. Which, in book speak, could be idea, exposition (the largest section), conflict and resolution?
One major setting the author gives us a glimpse into presents a stereotypical writing world as writers, would be writers, screen writers and wanna be writers converge in a LA coffee shop.
This story is not just a romance between two people; it is also a romance between reader and writer as set in a book-laden Magical Kingdom.
For me, one of the best surprises was discovered on the copyright page where the true writer is revealed. A woman whose writings I’ve enjoyed reading before; a woman who, maybe, has made me enjoy the stereotypical romance story once again.
Looking for something to read this Valentine’s Day?
Plus, Harlequin has free e-books here. Want something racier- go here.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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