Mac Prose

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 18, 2001 - 10:40 am |
Comments Off

Mac Prose is a great little program that lets your computer generate sentences/poetry. Some recent wisdom from mine:

“The sky suitcase (the evening) has stumbled.”

“While we were the circumstances, what had the aspects of hell improved?”

I found it on the Connecticut College Web page for my old poetry professor, Charles O. Hartman. You can download it here.

Two Firsts

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 14, 2001 - 9:16 am |
Comments Off

One: Jackson can now suck on his own toes, and two: he got his first CD liner notes “thank you” (a first for me, too) on Alastair Green’s latest effort, “A Little Wiser.” Alastair is a Berklee-trained rock guitar god who is currently living down the street in a cute little trailer in his dad’s driveway. His site is now up and running.

Damn!

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 13, 2001 - 10:35 am | ,
Comments Off

Who do I have to bl — er, KNOW to get the comments link to work?

I am totally thinking of applying for editorial work at this place, even though moving to L.A. is pretty much out of the question. But that fits in nicely with my pretending-to-try-to-find-a-job M.O.

Going to Palm Springs tomorrow to visit Jack’s mom, who is recovering from pneumonia. She got kind of choked up on the phone when he told her we were coming, so we’re hoping that a dose of The Peanut will cure her completely.

Edward Dorn is a damned good poet. If you can find a copy of his “Gunslinger,” buy it.

Vaquero

The cowboy stands beneath

a brick-orange moon. The top

of his oblong head is blue, the sheath

of his hips

is too.

In the dark brown night

your delicate cowboy stands quite still.

His plain hands are crossed.

His wrists are embossed white.

In the background night is a house,

has a blue chimney top,

Yi Yi, the cowboy’s eyes

are blue. The top of the sky

is too.

Birth Day

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 12, 2001 - 11:00 am | ,
Comments Off

And to my other friend Steve, who as far as I know does not do yoga, happy birthday!

Here is a Rilke poem that I’ve always liked, translated by Robert Bly. The last line reminds me of something I read recently — “As death is inevitable for the living, so birth is inevitable for the dead.”

I find you in all these things of the world

that I love calmly, like a brother;

in things no one cares for you brood like a seed;

and to powerful things you give an immense power.

Strength plays such a marvelous game –

it moves through the things of the world like a servant,

groping out in roots, tapering in trunks,

and in the treetops like a rising from the dead.

Wow, I forgot how much I like peanut butter.

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 12, 2001 - 10:37 am |
Comments Off

About three years ago I was walking up State Street when I ran into my friend Steve. He was just back from India where he’d been studying ashtanga yoga; his wife had left him; and now he was getting up at 3:45 every morning, riding his bike to the yoga center to do his practice, and then teaching students until 8:30 (the point at which I normally rolled out of bed in those carefree pre-motherhood times). Before we parted Steve said that in India he was often invited to do things by the phrase, “You come.” And thusly he invited me to his yoga class, though it was about six months before I took him up on it. But once I did, let me tell you, ashtanga yoga totally kicked my ass.

So this morning I got up at 5:30, nursed the baby before he had any idea what was going on, put him back in his crib where he passed out again, and went to Steve’s yoga class, which he now teaches with his partner, Michele. I haven’t practiced much since the baby came, and about a third of the way through I thought I was going to faint. I curled up on my mat for a few minutes and thought about crying. But something realigned itself and I got back up and kept going. When I got home Jack was waiting on the sidewalk, talking on the cell phone, holding Jackson (still in pajamas). I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m always slightly relieved that Jack has managed to keep the baby alive while I’m gone.

Warming

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 11, 2001 - 11:12 am | ,
Comments Off

It’s getting so chilly here. e. e. cummings was the first poet I really “got” way back in high school when they were trying to teach me how to write a sentence (in 10th grade, for heaven’s sake! Public education is really a snake pit.). He wrote this in 1923.

O sweet spontaneous

earth how often have

the

doting

fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched

and

poked

thee

, has the naughty thumb

of science prodded

thy

beauty . how

often have religions taken

thee upon their scraggy knees

squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive

gods

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

Comments

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 11, 2001 - 9:58 am |
Comments Off

I had to switch over to another host to get the comments link to work, so, unfortunately, the few responses I had (thank you, Steven) are gone. This new set up should work fine, though, thanks to Snorland. It’s amazing what’s available out there for free.

Coward

  By Eden M. Kennedy | December 10, 2001 - 3:35 pm |
Comments Off

First of all, the comment button is STILL not working, but thanks for the nice e-mails Joe, Brian, and George.

Secondly, I am a total coward. I read this book a couple of weeks ago, Why Did I Ever? by Mary Robison, because (a) she was the wife of one of my writing teachers in college, and (b) I like some of her short stories a lot. So I ordered it from Amazon.com (feeling guilty that I didn’t support my local independent bookseller, but not guilty enough to pay the extra $6). It ended up being kind of a chore to get through, so I went back to Amazon to post my opinion about it, since all the other people who posted there loved it and I thought it would only be fair to add my two cents. So I wrote a snappy little review and submitted it, but then I realized that I don’t have an alias on Amazon and that I would be horribly embarrassed if Mr. Robison, my former teacher, found out that I was broadcasting my opinions about Mrs. Robison’s talents. I mean, I wasn’t in love with him or anything, but I did talk about some strange things with him during office hours and then I wrote him a few magical, mystical letters after I graduated . . . it’s painful to recall, believe me. So if he did happen to read what I wrote, I didn’t want him to think that after all these years I was stalking them or something.

I immediately started scurrying around Amazon looking for a way to give myself an alias, but then I started thinking, how cowardly is that? What have I got to hide? Why don’t I stand behind my opinion? Ultimately I compromised with myself: I took my full name off the review and left my last name, which is my married name, which I didn’t have in college. I’ve been checking every day since I wrote it (last Friday, I think), but it hasn’t been posted yet. Do they have someone reading every single crackpot review on the site to make sure nobody’s writing anything pornographic? They still haven’t found out about this.