I think the new BG is the best scifi series ever, and I've found a wonderful man that likes it too that I've been emailing and chatting with.  He asked me the big Cylon question, "Do humans deserve to survive?,"and here's my reply:

Ok, the BIG question.  The question itself has the presumption that survival is on a merit system.  Is the fittest most deserving of survival?  And is that the most morally, physically, or intellectually fit?  Because of my vested interest, I think we do deserve to survive, as much as any other species that I'm currently aware of.  I suppose I have a Catholic bias (I'm a bitter former Catholic) in that I believe that everyone has inherent worth that status or behavior cannot change.  Rich or poor, guilty or innocent, fat or thin, we are invested with life by some agency that deemed us worthy to exist.  Whether that agent is science, a divine entity, or dumb luck, I trust it more than any judge or jury, and certainly more than Cylons who, even if created by the most intelligent humans, are created by a flawed creator--and not flawed as in Original Sin, but flawed by limited perception.  Which brings up the question, if we are made in the image of God and we are flawed, is God's image flawed or our perception of his image?  Could it be that we are perfect little flesh machines whose only purpose is to reproduce and die so that we survive as a species?

What do you think?

current mood: contemplative

Today's poem is from To a Fault, just published by W. W. Norton & Company. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Read more about this book. The Bearhug by Nick Laird It’s not as if I’m intending on spending the rest of my life doing this: besuited, rebooted, filing to work, this poem a fishbone in my briefcase. The scaffolding clinging to St Paul’s is less urban ivy than skin, peeling off. A singular sprinkler shaking his head spits at the newsprint of birdshit. It’s going unread: Gooseberry Poptarts, stale wheaten bread, Nutella and toothpaste. An open-armed crane turns to embrace the aeroplanes passing above. I hadn’t the foggiest notion. Imagine: me, munching cardboard and rubbish, but that’s just what they meant when they said, Come in, you’re dead-beat, take the weight off your paws, you’re a big weary grizzly with a hook through his mouth, here, have some of this love.

April 19, 2006

Today's poem is from Wind in a Box, just published by Penguin. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Read more about this book.

The Blue Terrance
by Terrance Hayes

If you subtract the minor losses,
you can return to your childhood too:
the blackboard chalked with crosses,

the math teacher's toe ring. You
can be the black boy not even the buck-
toothed girls took a liking to:

the match box, these bones in their funk
machine, this thumb worn smooth
as the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump.

Thump. Everything I hold takes root.
I remember what the world was like before
I heard the tide humping the shore smooth,

and the lyrics asking: How long has your door
been closed? I remember a garter belt wrung
like a snake around a thigh in the shadows

of a wedding gown before it was flung
out into the bluest part of the night.
Suppose you were nothing but a song

in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipe
sweat from the brow of a righteous woman,
but all you owned was a dirty rag? That's why

the blues will never go out of fashion:
their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of
consequence; that's why when they call, Boy, you're in

trouble. Especially if you love as I love
falling to the earth. Especially if you're a little bit
high strung and a little bit gutted balloon. I love

watching the sky regret nothing but its
self, though only my lover knows it to be so,
and only after watching me sit

and stare off past Heaven. I love the word No
for its prudence, but I love the romantic
who submits finally to sex in a burning row-

house more. That's why nothing's more romantic
than working your teeth through
the muscle. Nothing's more romantic

than the way good love can take leave of you.
That's why I'm so doggone lonesome, Baby,
yes, I'm lonesome and I'm blue.

current mood: bored

Today's poem is from Howl on Trial, just published by City Lights Publishers. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Read more about this book.

excerpt from "Howl"
by Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
       madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
       looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
       connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
       ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
       up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
       cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
       contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
       saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
       ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
       hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
       among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
       publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
       skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
       ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
       to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
       Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
       Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
       torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
       cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and
       lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
       Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
       tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
       dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
       storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
       blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
       vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
       lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
       ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
       until the noise of wheels and children brought
       them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
       battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
       in the drear light of Zoo...

current mood: enthralled

	The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth-Century Elegy edited by Lynn Strongin
	At their most mournful, with praise and love and raw emotion, poets throughout time have put their grief to paper. The elegy and its inherent drama---the inevitable struggle between love and death---are showcased in The Sorrow Psalms, a collection of twentieth-century elegies edited by poet Lynn Strongin. Divided into five thematic sections, the elegies convey the impact of death and its aftermath; focus on the loss of family, lovers, and dear friends; contend with the loss of a child; deal with violent death; and seek to look beyond death to find some kind of resolution. The traditional stages of grieving---denial, anger, depression, and acceptance---are evident, either singly in the expression of one profound emotion or all at once, in these elegies. Strongin's introduction explains the origins of the elegy and its evolution through the twentieth century. Format: Paperback Publication Date: 6/1/2006 Price: $24.95
University of Iowa Press is a proud sponsor of National Poetry Month See other new books from University of Iowa Press Go >
	What Came to Me by Jane Kenyon I took the last dusty piece of china out of the barrel. It was your gravy boat, with a hard, brown drop of gravy still on the porcelain lip. I grieved for you then as I never had before. From The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth-Century Elegy edited by Lynn Strongin. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

current mood: pensive

You're Lolita!

by Vladimir Nabokov

Considered by most to be depraved and immoral, you are obsessed with
sex. What really tantalizes you is that which deviates from societal standards in every
way, though you admit that this probably isn't the best and you're not sure what causes
this desire. Nonetheless, you've done some pretty nefarious things in your life, and
probably gotten caught for them. The names have been changed, but the problems are real.
Please stay away from children.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

current mood: confused

Today's poem is from The Aerialist by Victoria Hallerman, just published by Bright Hill Press. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Find out more about Bright Hill Press

To find out more about the Academy of American Poets and its programs, including National Poetry Month, visit www.poets.org.
 

 In honor of National Poetry Month,
the Academy of American Poets brings you Poem-a-Day.


Aerialist
by Victoria Hallerman

Her life is the wire—she can never come down.
Sometimes she stops and sits on it to eat,
even sleeps there, her whole body stretched
as the wire is stretched. In sleep
she keeps her balance,
feet curled like a monkey’s
the habit of grasping:

she has never fallen.
She never will, not entirely.
Once in a while a slip
causes her to hang for a moment by her hands.
It isn’t the danger of falling that slices through her dreams
but the wire itself, drawing
a line through her body,
leaving a mark on the soles of her feet,

her buttocks, her back.
If she were to cut the wire (she dreams of this)
the sky would break like a mirror into the sea
and nothing would be whole again.
Virgin of the Apocalypse standing on a crescent moon,
she is keeping
Heaven and Earth apart.

In my MFA program, we send a packet consisting of 5 poems and a couple of essays every 3 - 4 weeks to our mentor.  I'm working on the last one of this semester.  Which sounds more interesting for a short essay?  Rainer Maria Rilke and Laurie Anderson:  Elegies and Angels or Laurie Anderson:  Narrative Collagist.

current mood: busy