Random Acts Of Poetry And Other Attempts At Humor

Do you need some lumpy, red, all-purpose glue to hold your life together? Do you need a new perspective on filing your income tax return this year? Have you ever wondered if there are aliens from space living at the South Pole? Do you wish people were kinder to each other? Did you know that Betsy Ross had three husbands and five daughters? Do you know what a carbuncle is? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, please, take a few moments to enter a strange world. Let your mind wander through the nooks and crannies of the ridiculous and the sublime. This might be just the escape from your screens that you’ve been waiting for. Consider dropping a copy of this book at your doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room. The folks there need a smile or a good laugh right about now. Do you know someone who has everything already? They don’t have this. Do you have a friend who needs a laugh? This book can only make your friendship stronger.

Camus’s Meursault and Thelma and Louise meet up under the blazing sun. Vexed by the ‘unremarkable star’ that ‘presses’ Camus’s Meursault to commit murder, Because the Sun considers the blazing sun as a material symbol of ambient violence – violence absorbed like heat and fired at the nearest victim. Likewise, as a friendship between women confronts gendered aggression in Thelma and Louise, the sun becomes the repository of pain, the high noon that pushes us through desert after desert. Because the Sun’s pastiche of voices embodies both stylistic and formal relentlessness by teasing out tonalities that blend and merge into each other, generating a blinding effect, like looking into the sun. “Breathless and death defying, the poems in Because the Sun are high-wire work. They sway above us in a blazing light of Burgoyne’s making. It is so rare that a book of poems is both a tuning fork for our minds as well as a balm for our bodies. But that is exactly what happens page after page in this blazing book.” —Michael Dickman, author of Days & Days “This beautiful work wraps Camus’s The Stranger in a poetics concerning erasure/+ hope. Out of the titular Sun’s burning punctum burst telling shards of what is erased by Camus’s remarkable construction of whiteness in-the-masculine: the dead ‘Arab,’ the female body’s interminable violations – but also its warming, even blinding capacity for consequential pleasures.” —Gail Scott, author of Heroine “Sarah Burgoyne begins with the sun and ends with flowers. In between is a complicated exploration of what it means to exist within a tradition that is Camus, Rimbaud, Blake. Taking her cue from Sara Ahmed, she notices how hard it is to challenge this tradition and yet that it matters to do it anyway.” —Juliana Spahr, author of That Winter the Wolf Came

Take a break from the fast life and breathe. Exercise your mind and let it paint a picture. Read a poem a day and ask yourself if and how it applies to you. Random Acts of Poetry is titled appropriately as that was just the way it happened - randomly. I have categorized my poems into nine topics in various forms and disciplines. Subjects include philosophy, humor, science and math, religion, politics, family, death, temptation and mental illness. Most poems are free verse, but there is at least one of the following: limerick, haiku, sonnet, and acrostic. I hope at least one speaks to you personally and makes you go 'hmmm.' My hopes and intentions are that anyone who reads these poems might experience some enjoyment, perspective, and appreciation of the content. If you come across a term with which you are not familiar, I encourage you to knock on the internet door or visit a library to learn more. Consider it a type of Easter egg hunt. There are lots of Easter eggs in this book. Please remember that these thoughts are from an engineering mind dabbling into the art of poetry.

Modern poetry, at least according to the current consensus, is difficult and often depressing. But as Humor in Modern American Poetry shows, modern poetry is full of humorous moments, from comic verse published in popular magazines to the absurd juxtapositions of The Cantos. The essays in this collection show that humor is as essential to the serious work of William Carlos Williams as it is to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley. For the writers in this volume, the point of humor is not to provide "comic relief,†? a brief counterpoint to the poem's more serious themes; humor is central to the poems' projects. These poets use humor to claim their own poetic authority; to re-define literary tradition; to show what audience they are writing for; to make political attacks; and, perhaps most surprisingly, to promote sympathy among their readers. The essays in this book include single-author studies, discussions of literary circles, and theories of form. Taken together, they help to begin a new conversation about modernist poetry, one that treats its lighthearted moments not as decorative but as substantive. Humor defines groups and marks social boundaries, but it also leads us to transgress those boundaries; it forges ties between the writer and the reader, blurs the line between public and private, and becomes a spur to self-awareness.

American poets' theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets' theater's key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets' Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets' theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience's role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.

Serving as a comprehensive introduction for those who are just starting to watch, while also providing long-time viewers with an episode-by-episode guide to the entire eight seasons, this book is a must-have addition to any Stargate SG-1 fan's library.

The "World" in Robert Lee Brewer's Solving the World's Problems is a slippery world ... where chaos always hovers near, where we are (and should be) "splashing around in dark puddles." And one feels a bit dizzy reading these poems because (while always clear, always full of meaning) they come at reality slantwise so that nothing is quite the same and the reader comes away with a new way of looking at the ordinary objects and events of life. The poems are brim-full of surprises and delights, twists in the language, double-meanings of words, leaps of thought and imagination, interesting line-breaks. There are love and relationship poems, dream poems, poems of life in the modern world. And always the sense (as he writes) of "pulling the world closer to me/leaves falling to the ground/ birds flying south." I read these once, twice with great enjoyment. I will go back to them often. -Patricia Fargnoli, former Poet Laureate of New Hampshire and author of Then, Something