Poetry

The English language has a rich tradition of songs celebrating the joys of orgasm. Here are just a few examples. Sumer Is Icumen In (anon., 13th century) Come Again (John Dowland, 1597) Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (Charles Wesley, 1745) Come, Thou Fount Of Every Blessing (Robert Robinson, 1757) Come, Ye Disconsolate (Thomas Moore, 1816) Oh Come, All Ye Faithful (English lyrics Frederick Oakley, 1841) Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel (English lyrics Neale & Coffin mid-1800s) Someday My Prince Will Come (from the 1937 animated Disney feature Snow White) Come Dance With Me (sung by Frank…

The lyrics to Dusty Springfield's 1970 song ”Spooky” are slightly odd. They have a woman describing her relationship with a fickle, unreliable, flirtatious man. ”Love's kind of crazy with a spooky little boy like you”. She constantly finds him winking with his “little eye” at other women. “I get confused and I don't know where I stand / But then you smile and hold my hand.” On the other hand, she won't give him a straight answer when he tries to ask her out. For the time definitely, and largely to a 2014 audience as well I believe, the gender roles in the lyrics are confusing. This is…

In your room Where time stands still Or moves at your will Will you let the morning come soon As we dance to the Masochism Tango I ache for the touch of your lips, dear But much more for the touch of your whips, dear There'll be times When my crimes Will seem almost unforgivable I give in to sin Because you have to make this life livable As we dance to the Masochism Tango You caught my nose In your left castanet, love I can feel the pain yet, love Every time I hear drums And I envy the rose That you held in your teeth, love Strangelove Will you take the pain I will give to you Again and again…

"This one will look like a jellybean," the session director warns us. "Or, you know, when you empty a hole punch? The circles of paper that fall out? One of those." She's talking about Neptune, and I am about to step, carefully, up a ladder painted industrial yellow and wheeled into place in front of the centenarian eyepiece of the 60" Hale telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory, incidentally the very place where Edwin Hubble, in 1925, discovered that our galaxy was not the entirety of the Universe, and later, that our Universe was expanding. A jellybean, a piece of confetti: it seems her…

I'm bothered by odd redundancy in an 80s song lyric. Millas mirakel advises us that "It is better to light the fire of life than to never be allowed to be yourself". Yes, and? That turn of phrase should compare two undesirable things, like "It is better to lose one toe than to lose both eyes." Here Milla, who I might add is overall a strangely schoolmasterly and archaic pop lyricist, is basically saying "It is better to win the lottery than to lose both eyes." This is why we shouldn't have freedom of speech.

Now this is how you sell pens! The squaw had disappeared into the thick under growth, leaving a track Queen Elizabeth I 2010 Mont Blanc Limited Edition White Rollerball like a hippo in the snow. Bud could have overtaken her, of course, and he could have made her take the baby back again. But he could not face the thought of it. He made no move at all toward pursuit, but instead he turned his face toward mont blanc boheme bleu Alpine, with some vague intention of turning the baby over to the hotel woman montblanc hemingway there and getting the authorities to hunt up its parents. It was plain…

I've been following Californian rock singer and guitarist Ethan Miller off and on since Comets on Fire's 2002 album Field Recordings from the Sun. I love his singing and psychedelic song writing. And so recently the song "Nomads" from the 2008 album Magnificent Fiend (with Miller's current band Howlin' Rain) has been playing in my head. I couldn't quite make sense of the lyrics, so I checked on-line, and found them (perhaps predictably) to be stonerishly meandering. But also bluntly self-referential in a way that is either really stupid or neatly self-ironic. You be the judge, Dear Reader.…

In Memoriam, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws…

Under glass, a bare forest of pins held down an army of insects in ragged rows. . . --"The Expression of Emotion in Man and Insects," by Debora Greger (read the full poem at the Atlantic)

Before you get your tickets for SB 5.0 make sure that you'll be in town for the world's first Synthetic Biology Slam!

Roxana Robinson, a fiction writer, recently described her writing process in an interview with the New York Times. Writing a story, she said, is "incredibly exhilarating. . . . It's like doing a cliff dive, the kind that only works when the wave hits just right. You stand on top, poised and fearful, looking at what lies below: you must start your dive when the wave has withdrawn, and there's nothing beneath you but sand and stone. You take a deep breath and throw yourself over, hoping that, by the time you hit, the wave will be back, wild and churning, and full of boiling energy. It's kind…

I recently learned that one of my advisors and mentors is not only a great scientist, but also a poet. This poem was written a few years ago for his biotech company's clean-up day poetry contest and won him a $5 gift certificate to Dunkin Donuts. I think it's actually quite good and deserves more attention than that so I'm reproducing it here, with permission from the author. Squeal by Jeff Way (with apologies to Allen Ginsberg): I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cleanliness, crazed drooling wrapped in lab coats, dragging themselves through the late-night fluorescent…

"Association, juxtaposition, metaphor is how the poet can go further than the scientist in addressing systems. The poet can legitimately juxtapose kelp beds with junkyards. Or to get really technical, reflect the water reservoir system for a large city in the linguistic structure of repetitive water-associated words in a poem. And poets right now are the only scientist-artists who can do these sorts of associations and get away with them--all other disciplines, such as biology, oceanography, mathematics are obligated to separate their ideas into discrete topics. You're not really allowed to…

I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids. When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, whom I do not hesitate to call a genius and an Elder God, has written a Lovecraftian poem on the same theme (in all likelihood quite independently of that 1986 pewter giggle-shudder item). Hear Norm perform the poem on the Drabblecast's Christmas Special! 'Twas the Night By Norm Sherman 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the edifice…

One of the songs my old band played was a tune that Anders had written to a poem by Hermann Hesse. It's in his 1927 novel Steppenwolf and treats one of the central themes of the book, the idea that immortal genius (such as that of Mozart or Goethe, Hesse felt) might exist on a plane immeasurably far above everyday human life. Writing the book, Hesse was close to suicide from trying to live alone on this rarefied plane. The novel describes his alter ego's return to the simple mortal pleasures of earthbound humanity. Anders used the 1932 Swedish translation by Sven Stolpe (or was the poetry in…

Happy Holidays from my friends Finn and Gunilla with winter photos of their farm.

When I turned 25 my friend Sanna gave me a little poetry anthology that I have since treasured. Kathryn & Ross Petras's Very Bad Poetry (1997) is a lovely read. One of the versifiers most voluminously represented there is W.T. McGonagall (1830-1902). After quoting his words, "The most startling incident in my life was the time I discovered myself to be a poet", the Petrases comment, "Many people in his native Dundee, Scotland, apparently disagreed with his discovery." Here is McGonagall's "The Death of Lord and Lady Dalhousie". Alas! Lord and Lady Dalhousie are dead, and buried at last,…

Junior, who is a digital native and knows way more about current net fads than I do, turned me on to the multi-talented Neil Cicierega and his band Lemon Demon. Excellent synth pop that should hit the sweet spot of any Apples in Stereo fan. I know it hit mine! Here are the beautifully clever and happy-sad lyrics to the Lemon Demon tune "Amnesia Was Her Name" that has been playing in my head lately. It's from the 2008 album View Monster. Amnesia was her name By Neil Cicierega Amnesia was her name, she had beautiful eyes And every word she said, it was a little surprise Can't remember when I…

A re-run from 12 December 2006. Tomorrow's the feast-day of St Lucy, and my son's school started off the celebrations a day early. So this afternoon, along with a lot of other parents, I had saffron buns and watched kids in Ku Klux Klan and Santa outfits form a long line and sing Christmas carols. One end of the line was mostly a few bars ahead of the other. As a pretty recent tradition, the morning of 13 December is celebrated in Sweden with quite a bit of ceremony. It involves white-robed, predominantly young female carolers led by a candle-crowned girl, performing a specialised repertoire…

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book…