Rad Geek People's Daily – Art and Literature

Article posted 23 October 2020 What I’ve Been Reading: Kim Addonizio, “Chicken” (2004) posted 7am / revised 3pm 10 November 2020

From The Best American Poetry: 2004, eds. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, pp. 15-16. I’m not always convinced that the title of this anthology is strictly accurate. But this one is probably my favorite poem in the collection.

Chicken

Why did she cross the road?
She should have stayed in her little cage,
shat upon by her sisters above her,
shitting on her sisters below her.

God knows how she got out.
God sees everything. God has his eye
on the chicken, making her break
like the convict headed for the river,

sloshing his way through the water
to throw off the dogs, raising
his arms to starlight to praise
whatever isn’t locked in a cell.

He’ll make it to a farmhouse
where kind people will feed him.
They’ll bring green beans and bread,
home-brewed hops. They’ll bring

the chicken the farmer found
by the side of the road, dazed
from being clipped by a pickup,
whose delicate brain stem

he snapped with a twist,
whose asshole his wife stuffed
with rosemary and a lemon wedge.
Everything has its fate,

but only God knows what that is.
The spirit of the chicken will enter the convict.
Sometimes, in his boxy apartment,
listening to his neighbors above him,

annoying his neighbors below him,
he’ll feel a terrible hunger
and an overwhelming urge
to jab his head at the television over and over.

— Kim Addonizio (2004)
from Five Points

Article posted 16 October 2020 What I’ve Been Reading: Rita Dove, “All Souls'” (2004) posted 3pm

From The Best American Poetry: 2004, eds. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, pp. 73-74.

All Souls’

Starting up behind them,
all the voices of those they had named:
mink, gander, and marmoset,
crow and cockatiel.
Even the duck-billed platypus,
of late so quiet in its bed,
sent out a feeble cry signifying
grief and confusion, et cetera.

Of course the world had changed
for good. As it would from now on
every day, with every twitch and blink.
Now that change was de rigueur,
man would discover desire, then yearn
for what he would learn to call
distraction. This was the true loss.
And yet in that first

unchanging instant,
the two souls
standing outside the gates
(no more than a break in the hedge;
how had they missed it?) were not
thinking. Already the din was fading.
Before them, a silence
larger than all their ignorance

yawned, and this they walked into
until it was all they knew. In time
they hunkered down to business,
filling the world with sighs–
these anonymous, pompous creatures,
heads tilted as if straining
to make out the words to a song
played long ago, in a foreign land.

— Rita Dove (2004)
from The New Yorker

Rad Geek, to-day: Article posted 22 February 2017 @ 7am / revised 10pm

Black Mirror S03E01, “Nosedive.” Well,

okay, I guess,

whatever.

Rad Geek, to-day: Article posted 19 February 2017 @ 7pm / revised 2pm 22 February 2017

To-night: time for some melancholy country and Zelazny, Trumps of Doom.

Rad Geek, to-day: Article posted 17 September 2016 @ 10am

WHAT I’M READING: My weekend reads this weekend are mostly history, on the antebellum South and race and Texas and Tejanidad. More to come on that later. In the meantime though, also some reading on Tolkien and fantasy literature:

Shared Article from Uisio

J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inheritance of Myth - Uisio - Online Maga…

May 14, 2016 In 1939, as the Nazi shadow stretched across Europe, a linguist named J.R.R. Tolkien delivered a lecture at the University of St. Andr…

uisio.com