thought processes

I've taken down the controversial one. I said in the comments there that I hadn't thought enough about the potentially public nature of this and the more I think about that, it - like anything else that matters - gets more complex. Much as the comments developed that post, they don't always show.

Blood

Just reached 20 units - two and a half people full.

http://www.blood.co.uk/

Muldoon on the Colbert Report

spotted on The Rumpus:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Paul Muldoon
www.colbertnation.com

A shower of bird-notes

I've been hanging on to have a good reason for a 200th post, which this is, and the fact of being two years married either today or tomorrow (depending on whether you believe the registry office or the humanist event) is that reason. And it conveniently ties in with George Szirtes writing about a family wedding with a good phrasing of the reasons behind my urges for the ceremony:

It's not a religious service: it's architecture of ritual around the act of taking the vows, exchanging rings, kissing, and signing the book. [...] But there is something in the solemnity, the witnessing, the ceremonial, the sheer culminating joy and playfulness of it that works. All poets at heart are ritualists and anti-ritualists at the same time. Form and spirit as concord. An ancient metaphor.

whole post here.

J would be nauseated and embarrassed if I put properly romantic splurge here, as my first thought suggested. But I'm sure I can praise the architecture of the ritual that still covers us, how we set our own structure up, aware the tradition but not beholden to it, and can be grateful for its continuing joy.

(title from 'A Marriage', RS Thomas; years still passing.)

no, it's an esprit de mots

Here's me trying to resist the creek-without-a-Padel pun - in part because of today's Questionable Content - so list of three people who didn't:

• Up the creek without a Padel
• Up the creek without a Padel
• Padel up the creek

The last of these, a Telegraph blog, cites the email she sent alongside the denial of having said anything of the kind - and without endorsing sexual harassment, it's possible to enjoy the consonance of "Padel" and "petard".

-=o=-

Additional: the Times has invited poetic responses to the story. One of these has both the creek-Padel joke and an emoticon.

gardening advice

One of the links to the side there is to a poem I made - "wrote" isn't quite the word for something this collagey - out of claims for herb robert as a magical miracle cure for everything; a friend just sent me back there, as a more botanically-minded person has left a comment that it shouldn't be taken as gardening advice. Apparently the weed is taking over West Washington's forests and outcompeting local plants. I should probably say, therefore, that the poem wasn't intended as gardening advice and anyone considering planting a plant sometimes known as "stinky bob" shouldn't take the poem as a recommendation.

lilygilt pleasures

My review of Eric Miller's The Day in Moss is up at Todd Swift's Eyewear magazine today! The gist of it being that every received opinion I've been entertaining about what contemporary poetry ought to be tells me I should have liked it less than I did. More there.