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Monday, May 01, 2006

Any More Poetry Requests?

Seeing as I have recording equipment until Thursday, are there any more requests for poems to be read aloud? I'm planning on doing a bunch anyway, to stockpile, but I'll do any reasonable request. Length isn't much of an issue this week — the amount of time your ass can stand to sit and listen is the only real limit.

10 comments:

John said...

Nope. I'd consider "The Bells" to be a completely unreasonable request. You have an evil streak in you.

John said...

Thank you, especially for the suggestion about kids' poems. I'll get to recording some of that stuff this evening.

John said...

"And what's that Lorca(?) one with the blood blooming out of the dead man's head?"

Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias?

...Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing...

If that's the one you mean, I wouldn't mind taking another run at it.

John said...

Yep, I did it before. Had to do it in sections because of audioblogger's time constraints. I may do it again. Would be nice to have a better quality version that's all of a piece, even more so since lately a lot of visitors to this site have arrived via searches for Lament....

Anonymous said...

Hey John,

How about some Hughes? "View of a Pig"? "Pike"? "Dehorning"?

Z

John said...

Pike sounds good. I'll give it a go after the ballgame tonight.

John said...

I feel asleep watching the game.

I think I'll do all three and post them today.

John said...

Fell asleep, I mean. Perhaps I feel still half-asleep now.

Anonymous said...

Didn't watch the game, but followed it on MLB Gameday. Seemed like a hard one to fall asleep in front of. Doc's making me nervous this year--and the pen seems pretty weak after Speier and Ryan. Hope Towers shows some signs of turning it around tonight...

Looking forward to hearing the Hughes. I don't know how anyone can read his best poems and still claim that he wasn't a poet of the very first rank. Although I guess if you're a dedicated Larkinite Movement type, it would be pretty hard to buy anything from someone like Hughes. His Ovid versions are top-notch, too.

Must get around to hooking my laptop up to my lousy dial-up connection one of these days. Got to hear the nifty new recordings at the library the other day, but for some reason the older audio-blog posts didn't want to cooperate.

John said...

Yeah, the audioblogger posts (or audiobooger, as I'm starting to call it in my head) cause problems for me too. I had to copy and paste the URLs into a media player.

Be no argument from me about Hughes.

The Jays ... I was exhausted by the time last night's game started. I have no worries about Halladay. He'll be fine. His only real bad inning was the third; his first-pitch fastballs were straying over the middle of the plate, and the Red Sox batters were jumping on them. His velocity was fine, his movement was fine, he just had a slight lapse in pitch selection and location.

I don't worry so much about the bullpen as when the real Alex Rios is going to show up (it was a real bad idea he had last night, trying to steal third). Hopefully, he won't revert to last year's version but, instead, will find a point somewhere between it and what he's done so far this year. Seeing a few more pitches, and taking an occasional walk wouldn't hurt him at all.

The offence itself won't be this good all season; Rios, Hillenbrand, Frankie the Cat, Wells, and Reed "I sure got hustle, but really, I'm overextended as more than a fourth outfielder" Johnson will all slow down, but Overbay, Hill and Adams will pick up a bit. They will be a decent hitting team.

Towers, all he has to offer really is control. If he ain't hitting his spots, he's gonna be hit hard.