Little Reviews: Poem for Friday

Emily Dickinson At the Poetry Slam
By Dan Vera

I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house.
It happened like this:

One day she took the train to Boston,
Made her way to the darkened room,
Put her name down in cursive script
and waited her turn.

Poets before her stood and rhymed,
Followed a meter tight and expected,
Outdoing one another in a monotonous clip.

When they read her name aloud
She made her way to the stage
Straightened the papers in her hands –
Pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills

She closed her eyes for a minute,
Took a breath, and began

From her mouth perfect words exploded
Intact formulas of light and darkness
She dared to rhyme with worlds like cochineal
and described the skies like diadem
Obscurely worded incantations filled the room
With an alchemy that made the very molecules quake

The solitary words she handled in her
upstairs room with keen precision
Came rumbling out to make
the electric lights flicker.

40 members of the audience
were treated for hypertension
20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads
had turned a Moses White.

Her second poem erased the memory of every cell phone
In the nightclub,
And by the fourth line of the sixth verse
The grandmother in the upstairs apartment
Had been cured of her rheumatism.

The papers reported the power outages
The area hospitals taxed their emergency generators
And sirens were heard to wail through the night.

Quietly she made her way to the exit.
Walked to the terminal and right back to Amherst.
She never left her room again.
And never read such syllables aloud.

--------

I snicked this from a link from but I didn't write down when.

Am fried from Back to School night -- both the middle school and the high school had to hold it the same night, just like last year when it was a different middle school and an elementary school. So it was a hectic afternoon and evening. Daniel had to go with to the high school because the chorus was performing, but first my mother wanted to take him to have his Bar Mitzvah suit tailored since he's grown several inches since last fall, so she picked him up right after school while I had Adam and his best friend playing here. Then we traded and my mother took Adam for dinner while Daniel rushed to get ready to go sing.

It was very weird being in all of Adam's classrooms because his middle school used to be my junior high school, and it has really changed remarkably little. His science classroom, which was my science classroom more than 25 years ago, has the Periodic Table hanging precisely where it was when I sat there, and the first person I saw when I walked into his homeroom was Julie Greenbaum, who sat next to me in homeroom through my three years of junior high -- her name came just after mine alphabetically and now her son is in my son's English class. Didn't stop me from getting lost on the way to the music classroom, though -- when I was at the school, the four staircases were color-coded, and now they are all painted blue!

No other news really. Trek stuff was new New Voyages plans and the fact that if you buy a Toshiba HD-DVD player for your Star Trek HD-DVD discs when they come out this fall, you can get a free phaser-shaped remote control. Russell Crowe arrives in DC this week to film a thriller with Leonardo DiCaprio for Ridley Scott, and I am trying to decide if it counts as stalking if I should happen to learn from the legitimate press where he is staying and sit and read in the lobby for a few (dozen) hours. I am sad about Pavarotti -- the end of an era. I had two people I know get bad news about elderly relatives today, so I am perversely hoping for superstitious purposes that Pavarotti was the third.