Here's hoping Phillies fans aren't singing this next season:

Facts about Jimmy is track 3 on A Few Small Repairs. I learned about it from the same mix that introduced Morphine to this blog.

Little is more impressive in this world than a well-turned dinosaur simile:

Thank you Helen Hunt Jackson.

The Zocalo editors have assigned me a book called The Googlization of Everything (AND WHY WE SHOULD WORRY) by Siva Vaidhyanathan. As one of the brainwashed billions, I feel myself cringing at the lack of love for the my email service provider. But the man makes some great points (for which I'll be sure to praise him in my forthcoming review). And, more importantly, he has given the world one of the strangest metaphors it has ever known:


Wow, right? 

Gotta love the use of "not unlike," the rarest and spiciest of the simile turns.

I'm still not sure how (or if) a wagon wheel rocks, but I love the microphone, the sideburns that don't fit the suit, and the shot of the ticket stand, the nodding head, and the empty carnival in the background.

That was one of many awesome covers that featured prominently in the muzfest last weekend.

And has anybody else noticed something of a southbound bias in musical train similes? There must be something that happens like a northbound train...

I found these words, scribbled:

morning run in NH

New England heart
sparkling dew
magic mist
endless fence post
squishy mud
expect a rainbow
ferns you want to lick, eat

And turned them into these, an email to the original's author:

morning fun on earth

dew brings the heat
ferns misty in magic mud
endless
like a rainbow
or a fence
posts sparkling
and squishy
to eat

Mr. Stanley, my romantic poetry and travelwriting professor, would tell me that isn't a poem. Not yet, anyway. It's a reaction. An impression. A clever joke (his adjective, one I've never really been able to incorporate). A beginning. A draft.

The poem comes later. When every letter, every comma or capital not included, is a choice. A poem is a poem when it's fully intentional.

Stanley and I argued about that sometimes. What about jazz?, I'd ask. He'd shake his head and write the same comment on every piece of writing I ever gave him: It'll get better if you spend more time on it.

He's certainly more right than I was.

And that, above, is not a poem.

But it does have an alternate title: lick my heart, baby.

This doesn't work. FYI.

But maybe a blog post will...

I'm looking for a song. With lots of do do do dos.

A woman sings it, a singer to whom I remember my mother listening sometimes. Not as much as she listened to Tracy Chapman or Cat Stevens or Sam Cooke. But sometimes, which is kind of a lot.

The song doesn't have many rhymes. Maybe no rhymes at all, actually. That might be its thing: no rhymes. Which, if you happen to be writing a song for me, is probably a thing to avoid. I like rhymes.

Another one of the song's things is that the singer kinda talks it as much as she sings it. Which is an ok thing by me. Much better, in general, than the no rhymes thing.

The song also connects in my mind to In Liverpool. Maybe because Suzanne Vega sings them both. But maybe not.

Also, through In Liverpool, the song lives in a box in my memory with Fee and No Woman, No Cry. All three were on the first mixtape anyone ever gave me.  The do do do do song was not on that mixtape. Nor is this information relevant. I'm taking notes at this point. Notes about that first mixtape...

Fee, I liked immediately and still adore.

No Woman, No Cry I did not like, and that fact STILL blows my mind. It's still embarrassing. And it makes me sad. For myself at age 10 or however old I was. And for everyone else in the world that doesn't love No Woman, No Cry. I was missing out; so are those people.

The mixtape had two sides, each with different labels. One was called Like It's My Job. The other was called Like There's No Tomorrow. Both of those titles referred to peeing. I have to pee like it's my job. I have to pee like there's no tomorrow. Sanna, the babysitter that made me the mix, said those things, and I thought they were hilarious.

I think 10 is embarrassingly old to be answering to a babysitter. I'm pretty sure I thought that at the time too. But I also don't think I was the reason Sanna was around. My sister and cousins are all younger, and she was certainly in more charge of them than me. I think.

Anyway, it's time to wrap this up and post No Woman, No Cry. It's track 5 on Live! And it led off one of the two sides of that mixtape.

Not often you find a simile inside another metaphor. 

Queen does it three times in one song.  And wants to make a supersonic woman out of you.

Don't Stop Me Now is track 12 on Jazz.

Wallace Stevens was an insurance salesman by day and a poet by night.  Like Batman.  Or Cinderella.

He wrote this.  It's called The Motive for Metaphor.

Not an easy poem.

I read it for the first time on Saturday night late.  And then again many times on Sunday.

It first struck me as an attack on metaphor, a condemnation of the imperfection of metaphorical communication, and that worried me.  My impulse was to rush to metaphor's defense.  To write a poem about the poem.  Which I sort of did.  In my own hasty and ridiculous way. 

But we'll save that for another day.  I'm going to try to build it out a bit.  I haven't had a serious go at making a poem happen in a long time.  Be a good exercise for me I think. 

Anyway, while I did get the impression at first that the poet was accusing the person to whom he wrote the poem of hiding in metaphor, I'm not so sure any more.  My dad told me he thought Stevens was calling for more metaphor.  Like Bruce Dickinson at a freestyle battle.  A reading totally opposite to mine.

Which gives me plenty of pause.

And we'll stop there.  Paused and wondering.  More to come sometime soon I'm sure.