Immortality

... of a tenuous, minor, sort. I'm mentioned in a footnote in Seth Michael Perlow's doctoral dissertation:

70 I am grateful to Charles O. Hartman for his email correspondence about DIASTEXT and to Ron Starr for making an online engine for diastic reading, along with a description of the process, which have disappeared since the time of writing. Hartman discusses his programs for computer poetry in Virtual Muse (1996).

Heavy Metal in Hijabs

From Indonesia, Voice of Baceprot, playing "The Enemy of Earth is You."

More on the band from Reuters.

And, finally, "Hysteria."

Bullies & Destruction

“You can’t beat a bully at his own games. And I’m not talking about one particular bully here; it’s energy. You have to out-create the destruction—it’s the only way.”
—Tori Amos

Poet John Ashbery Dies Age 90

They Dream Only of America
John Ashbery

They dream only of America
To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass:
“This honey is delicious
Though it burns the throat.”

And hiding from darkness in barns
They can be grownups now
And the murderer’s ash tray is more easily–
The lake a lilac cube.

He holds a key in his right hand.
“Please,” he asked willingly.
He is thirty years old.
That was before

We could drive hundreds of miles
At night through dandelions.
When his headache grew worse we
Stopped at a wire filling station.

Now he cared only about signs.
Was the cigar a sign?
And what about the key?
He went slowly into the bedroom.

“I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen
Against the living room table. What is it to be back
Beside the bed? There is nothing to do
For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.

And I am lost without you.”

Obituary in The Guardian.

Shorter Donald Trump

"Afghanistan is Dari for Vietnam."

Syllabics

Extended and interesting discussion of syllabic poetry in Poetry Daily's Prose Feature this week. I had always heard it dismissed as being inconsistent with the accentual structure of English. And any successes with it attributed to accident. But the article points to many more examples than Marianne Moore. And it's interesting to see it as a route several poets followed to get to free verse.

Thank You, Mike Leach

A big shout-out to Mike Leach, Washington State University head coach, who gave personal testimony in Lynden on May 7 about the tragic effects of concussions in collegiate football.