Poem in October

A supremely beautiful poem. The best thing is to hear Dylan Thomas himself reading it.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

Father Foster explains it all...

...to Bill Maher. (Listen here on NPR, if you can stand the smarminess. I honestly found it amusing.) While filming his silly anti-religion movie, Maher went to the Vatican and ran into none other than... Reggie Foster, everyone's favorite Latin Lover! Fr. Foster took him up to his office, all the while making scandalous comments and telling "bad jokes in Latin." What really made me laugh was that Bill Maher carried away the impression that all the Vatican clergy are like Fr. Foster! (What a thought.)

Happy Birthday, Virgil!

I am reading the Aeneid from the beginning, and I'm on Book Three now. Sorry, Virgil, but I'm glad you weren't able to burn it.

Dappled Things is out.

I truly believe writing saves the world. Books saved my life when I was drinking: I’m not sure I would have survived if not through what was basically my only connection to reality: literature. - Heather King

Get it right here! I particularly recommend the interview with Heather King. It's like morning air and dew on the grass. Very clear and real. As for poetry, J.B. Toner's sonnet, "Drinking with Lucifer," is blackly funny and has a few great lines: "The absinthe of an abdicated will," oooo... Another sonnet, "That My Kitchen is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Extinguisher," is a highly alarming peek into a bachelor's kitchen, alarmingly bespattered with alliteration and other Hopkinsian flourishes. Joseph O'Brien's "Our Father" is a wonderful sketch of fatherhood as embodied in an Irish cop from Jersey City. And there is a villanelle by Amamda Griswold about the Gaderene demoniac which packs a punch. There's a lot of passion in this issue! Watch out for "The Game of Sean McTeague," though; it made me seasick. Eleanor Donlon took her usual Benson-esque melodrama and grafted it onto "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." The result is utterly ridiculous.

The Anti-Muses

A.E. Stallings is on to them.

Like the Muses, they are attracted to talent and promising projects, and the presence of several at once probably means you are on to something big. Still, they can frustrate or even destroy the most inspired tender new poem, and send the poet into despair, alcoholism, or flash fiction. The more we know about them, the better.

My favorites are Tripsichore (She of two left feet) and Hyperbole, goddess of blurbs. May they be far from me!