Dulce et Decorum Est — National Poetry Month

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

by Wilfred Owen
courtesy War Poetry

Mid-Term Break — National Poetry Month

Mid-Term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble,'
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

by Seamus Heaney

courtesy BuzzFeed and Poem Hunter

National Poetry Month: The Naming of Cats, Audibly

Welcome to National Poetry Month — and what better way than to start with poetry and cats? Here is an audio recording of T.S. Eliot reading one of his most famous and beloved poems: The Naming of Cats. (Read along with the poem included below.)

The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

- by T.S. Eliot

Courtesy All Poetry

More Dennis Hopper, More Poetry

I love the sound of his voice, so I give you: Dennis Hopper reading from Letters from a Young Poet by Ranier Maria Rilke. Enjoy!

Hedgehog in the Fog

Enjoy this lovely, award-winning video, "Hedgehog in the Fog," by Yuriy Norshteyn.

"Citizen Journalist" and Responsibility

The rise of "citizen journalists" is a double-edged sword.

For every video of an innocent person beaten by the police will be the fired federal worker accused of racism.

It is not the act of posting or writing that makes one a journalist, but the act of responsible reporting.

By assuming that mantle with a blog or a camera, you are responsible for the information you post.  Don't just claim to want the truth, seek it: ask multiple sources for information and actually report it.  Examine the facts and ask the hard questions.  Don't just run with a "too good to be true" video — there's no such thing.

Be a skeptic.

Oh, and verify, verify, verify.

Even journalists on reputable media get it wrong.  I would like to blame that on the immediacy that technology affords us, but it's always user error.  Technology is a tool.  It's the people who make it reliable and useful, and in the end it's the reponsibility of the media to get it right before they let it go.

Joy Nash, Hero

I have a new hero: Joy Nash.

Watch her videos. See if she doesn't make you just a little more proud of smart women.

Totally Awesome
A Fat Rant
Fat Rant 3: Staircase Wit

Chris' Top Five Time Spenders — er, Web Sites

The following Web sites have no real redeeming qualities.

Having said that, I have been known to spend hours there. In fact, I'm sure I could have written the Great American Novel (had I been so inclined) in the time I have spent at these sites. I share them with you so you also can spend hours pursuing amusement on the Internet.

1. Best of Craigslist
These are for real. Honest-to-goodness people wrote these, probably not with the intention of them winding up on this site — but thank heavens they did. Read them aloud, if you can. Frankly, I'm too busy gasping and laughing to finish a sentence. It gives me inspiration.

2. List Universe
I cannot read just one. (Thanks, JFrater!) Nope, I open multiple tabs with multiple lists, then choose more lists from the "suggested lists" at the end of the lists. Lost yet? You will be, in wonder, when you visit this site. Don't say I didn't warn you!

3. Lord of the Peeps: Fellowship of the Peeps
I don't eat Peeps. They amuse me and remind me of my friends, the Strolling Peeps. And I am a Lord of the Rings fanatic. Put these together and you have a site that amazes me how adults spend time with dioramas and marshmallow treats.

4. CuteOverload
I tamed a roomful of possible enemy combatants with the photos and videos of kittens, puppies and, yes, hedgehogs on this Web site. (Where do you think the obsession started?) This site has added many words to my lexicon, including nom, Caturday, 'tocks and Bunday. There are some days when I leave this Web site visible on the South Monitor at work because I need dabs of cuteness during the day. I also "borrow" many of the photos for screensavers — and like watching the faces of people in a meeting as they look over my shoulder at some of the cutest photos on the planet popping up on my monitors. Thanks, Meg!

5. YouTube
I know I am not alone in this obsession. How else can a woman of the '80s watch music videos? Nickelback and Weird Al Yankovic post their videos on this site, and I am eternally grateful. (So do Britney Spears and Fergie, but they're my secret indulgences — shhhh!) And yet it's so much more. I have watched Miss South Carolina 2007 embarrass herself, I have watched Matt dance in front of the Taj Mahal and dance with tribesmen in Papau, New Guinea, I have watched Jordan dance in my hometown (in tribute to Matt), I have watched Uni the Hedgehog. I could go on and on, but you get the gist. Type in any word and there's a video for it. Go ahead and try it.

What are some of your favorite sites?

Ponies and Poetry

On April 3, 1860, the short-lived Pony Express was launched. A mere 16 months later, it was obsolete, thanks to Western Union.

Nearly a century and a half later, we have a new kind of instant message. How many times have you checked your e-mail, impatient for a response to the message you sent mere moments ago?

In honor of those who risked life and limb to get the mail through, I share with you a poem by W. H. Auden.

By the way, you simply must check out the short film on YouTube that features the author reading this poem. It's incredible.

Night Mail

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Thro' sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver's eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman's restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro' southern uplands with northern mails.

Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro' the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

by W. H. Auden
(with special thanks to Sovereignty)

YouTube and Doing the Right Thing

If you want to see anything that has been video recorded, chances are it's on YouTube.

Many people who actually own the videos post them themselves on the YouTube Web site, including Weird Al Yankovic, the Dixie Chicks and Britney Spears.

Nickelback's record label also has posted a couple of their videos, including "Rock Star" (censored and not) and "If Everyone Cared." (I have recommended in the past that you listen to Nickelback. I hope you did. If not, please stop what you're doing right now and watch "If Everyone Cared." You don't have to be a fan to appreciate the call to character. You will be moved by what the band encourages.)

Not everyone owns the videos they posted, which is a shame. If it's not yours, it's not yours to give away.

The Internet is a big place — and if you want to hear and see free video and audio clips, there are plenty of legal ways to do it. I watched/listened to Fergie on Yahoo for months before I purchased "Fergalicious" (then soon after purchased the "clean" versions of the songs I liked). I continue to listen to Shakira to determine if I want to purchase her latest disc. If I'm not sure if I want the entire disc, I take the safe route and purchase the singles on iTunes.

Sometimes, posting videos seems harmless — after all, if you're not making any money, what's the harm? You tell yourself you're actually helping to sell the album if you post pictures of your pre-teen cousins dancing to "Hips Don't Lie" by the Chipmunks — people will go buy it now, you tell yourself. The thing is, rationalization doesn't make it right. It's still not yours to give away.

So watch what's legal, do what's right. And go watch "If Everyone Cared." Let me know when you do, and let me know what you thought of it.