Music Mondays (5/30/2011): Jim Carroll and Silver Jews

Sorry this is a day late.

"Fragment: Little N.Y. Ode"

by Jim Carroll

I sleep on a tar roof

scream my songs

into lazy floods of stars...

a white powder paddles through blood and heart

and

the sound returns

pure and easy...

this city is on my side

--from Living at the Movies

***

"Random Rules"

by Silver Jews

--from American Water

Music Mondays (5/23/2011): Dylan Thomas and The Builders and the Butchers

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

by Dylan Thomas

Light Breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea tuns, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;

Where no seed stirs,

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,

Bright as a fig;

Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea;

Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

Spout to the rod

Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,

Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;

Day lights the bone;

Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin

The winter's robes;

The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where smell in the rain;

When logics die,

The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

--from Selected Poems, 1934-1952

***

"Golden and Green"

by The Builders and the Butchers

--from the album, Salvation is a Deep Dark Well

**Update - New Flood Pics as of 5/19/2011** River Crested - Greenville

**UPDATE - New Pics**

These next few were sent to me today

***

Pics from Earlier in the week:

So yesterday, the River finally crested in Greenville at 64.5. Here are the most recent pics.

Our House:

Our Cabin at Archer Island:

Tim Fite-Maniac with a guitar

Tim Fite is a songwriter, performer, artist, all around creative person.

I just wanted to share some of his music.

You can download all of his albums from his website. Spend some time there. Lots of strange things going on.

Watch the full video at Baeblemusic.com

River Crested 64.5 Greenville

So yesterday, the River finally crested in Greenville at 64.5. Here are the most recent pics.

Our House:

Our Cabin at Archer Island:

Music Mondays (5/16/2011): Catullus and Living Colour

Catullus

"XIV"

Did I not love you more than my eyes,

Calvus you joker, then that gift

I'd hate you with Vatinian hatred.

What have I done to you or said

That you should pip me with all these poets?

May Gods brings curses on the client

Who sent you such profanities.

And if, as I suspect, this choice new

Gift to you is from schoolmaster Sulla,

Then I'm not sorry but delighted

That you hard work has not been wasted.

Great Gods, a damned awful little book

For you to send to your Catullus

To kill him outright on that day

Of all days best--the Saturnalia.

No, you won't get away with it,

Clever dick. When it's dawn I'll run

To the bookstalls, pick up all the poison--

Suffenus, Cauesius and Aquinus--

And pay you back with pains like them.

Meanwhile goodbye, be off with you,

Back where you brought your faulty feet from,

Curse of our time, appalling poets!

--from Catullus, The Complete Poems. Trans. by Guy Lee, 1990

***

Living Colour

"Cult of Personality"

--from Vivid, release 1989

New Publication: Word Riot 10th Anniversary Anthology

I am happy to announce that Word Riot picked up my poem, "Lefty's Lament," for its 10th Anniversary Anthology. "Lefty's Lament" is based on the song "Poncho and Lefty" by Townes Van Zandt.

More info: TBA

New Flood Pics of Our House (May 10, 2011)

My Uncle was able to get in and take some photos of our house. I talked to Dad yesterday and he said the water is now at the countertops on the third flood.

These are from our Family house on Lake Ferguson, which is directly fed from the Mississippi River

***

This next picture was sent to me. I believe it is from the Tunica area. While we are in the middle of great human tragedy, please remember that tons of wildlife are being displaced. There has been numerous sighting of wildlife in the cities and on top of levees. Please don't be foolish towards these animals.

Poetry Digital Center Archive

Poetry Digital Center Archive

I stumbled across this site today. It is full of recordings! They are from the 50's. Not only can you stream the readings, but download the mp3 as well.

Favorites:

Theodore Roethke: Feb. 25, 1954

William Carlos Williams: May 19, 1955

From the website:

About This Collection

Poetry Center Digital Archive makes available significant portions of early audio recordings from the Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives collection, supplemented by select archival texts and images. New files will be added incrementally as recordings are prepared and as we proceed through the collection from the 1950s onward.

The Poetry Center, founded at San Francisco State College (now SFSU) in 1954 by English professor Ruth Witt-Diamant, has been recording and archiving tapes of its public events for nearly six decades. We have compiled and maintained one of the most significant public collections in the USA of original recorded performances by poets and related writers reading their work. In 1974, poet Kathleen Fraser, serving as director, created within the Poetry Center, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Poetry Archives. This collection, together with the Poetry Center housed within the SFSU College of Humanities (Department of Creative Writing), today holds over 4,000 hours of unique original audio and video master-recordings, 1954–present – an inestimable cultural asset.

An Evening of Poetry at the White House (update with Video Links)

**Update: Follow the link to Harriet (the blog for Poetry Foundation)

for more on last night's festivities and video clips**

Tonight was a live streaming from the White House. Mrs. Obama hosted a poetry night and earlier in the day, hosted a poetry workshop.

The reading was live streaming from the White House. It was an excellent event that had all types of poetry, including musicians and performers. The show ended with Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers putting music (bluegrass) to an Auden poem. I think my favorite reading tonight was Billy Collins.

Link for Mrs. Obama's remarks at afternoon poetry workshop.

Here are a few screen shots I captured:

You Don't see this everyday

National Jukebox - Library of Congress

This is wonderful. Please visit the site. Tons of great music

Taken from site:

The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings.

At launch, the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others.

National Jukebox LOC

Music Mondays (5/9/2011): Denis Johnson and Otis Redding

"Street Scene"

by Denis Johnson

Everything is water:

the pigeon trying to work his mutilated

wing; the crowd that draws a brand of peace

from his circular dance before the theater;

the woman in the aluminum hat who rises

out of the sidewalk on an elevator softly

through metal doors that part above her like water--

telling myself that no one can walk on the water,

nobody can take these little ones softly

enough against his chest. The flood rises

and the pigeons show us how to die before the theater,

where terror is only the aftermath of peace

full of sharks, the mutilated

surface over the falling deep, only water.

--from the collection, The Veil

***

Otis Redding

"You Don't Miss Your Water" from Otis Blue

Flood 2011 - Pictures and Videos (updated 5/10/2011)

This is an interview my father did with local WXVT. Please follow the link and click on the video "Greenville Flooding." At 1:25 you see a good look at the house so far. You can notice the porch that wraps around the house is already falling in.

"Greenville Flooding" Interview from WXVT

***

This picture was taken by Lisa Weathers. Neighbors used a gravel barge to load up furniture and haul it down to the waterfront where moving trucks could take it to storage.

***

Some new pics:

So the water is completely submerged our bottom story. It is in the 2nd and looks to be in the 3rd soon.

Leading up to the 2011 Flood

"If you are lucky enough to live by water, you're lucky enough."

That proverb hung in our downstairs bathroom.

Well, I am sure most have heard or seen the news that the Mississippi River is taking a toll on the river folks. My town, Greenville, MS, is getting hit hard. There is a deep history of the river flooding the area: 1927, 1973, 2008, and the present. I wanted to post a few pics of our house. We live on Lake Ferguson, which is directly fed from the Mississippi River.

This is our house in 2005

This is our house in 2006

This is our house in 2008 (the water crested at 57.8)

The 2008 flood gutted our first two floors (including kitchen and living room). Here are some pics after the waters had left:

We rebuilt the kitchen and living room (and raised it higher). These pictures are taken from Easter of 2011. This day we just received word that the river would crest at least at 60 Feet.

Today, May 7, the river is at 58.3 in Greenville. It is scheduled to crest at 64.5 on May 17. This means water will be in the upper floor. I hope to have new pics up soon. The Levee Patrol has deemed it illegal to be on the Levee after this weekend, so we will just have to wait and see.

To check the flood level, please visit The National Weather Service River Forecast for the Lower Mississippi.

Music Mondays (5/5/2011): Shelly and Bush

A LAMENT

by: Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)

WORLD! O life! O time!

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more -- oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,

Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight

No more -- oh, never more!

***