In Honor of Burger King

A friend just told me that the Burger Kings in her area have veggie burgers. In response to this news, I want to honor Burger King's commitment to irony. Please enjoy the photo to your left. Yes, that's a defibrillator. Of course, this is a Burger King near Philadelphia. Here we are buried in cheese steak-lined coffins.

Recalling the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts

Let me tell you about a dream I had last night--no doubt inspired by this artistically-fulfilling summer I'm having. I was my seventeen-year-old self leafing through a book of poetry in a classroom at Mercyhurst college. It was a sunny afternoon sometime during my five-week enrollment in the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. In the book I found a poem that directly spoke to the project I'm working on now--a poem that I actually only found two months ago. It was a moment of two realities coming together at a critical place in my past. All at once I was overjoyed--yet at peace. I woke up, made coffee, and recalled that the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, actually none of the Pennsylvania Governor's Schools of Excellence, are in existence any more at any college in Pennsylvania. The program was terminated in 2009. I won't get into the politics of it here; I just want to note how successful it was. I can't name a single alum from PGSA not doing something amazing right now in the Arts or Sciences. The creative and problem-solving skills taught there served the students well. It's a loss to our state--to our nation--that that incubator for high school students with merit (not money) is no longer with us. As issues of money and art swirl in my head these days, I post this with the hope that a few of you PGSA alumni might post a short tale about an important/critical moment from your time there. Bittersweet nostalgia? Perhaps. Or maybe we'll have the schools back someday soon. Cheers.

Preparations Continue

The show I'm working on with Angela Colasanti (pronounced Cola-Sahntee) is going well. Saturday was a productive day. We tied-off the loose ends of design in the morning. That left us all afternoon to build.






And build we did. It's quite a wonderful change to work on something creative by using old-fashioned elbow grease rather than fingers on a keyboard.







Plus, all of the pieces in the show will have some amount of recycled product in them. Sure I use recycled paper in my printer, but there's nothing like scavenging for materials. Yes, old fence slats. I like the symbolism. More about that at the show.

Flirtation amidst Foreboding

This poem by CJ Evans, "Even the Smallest Paradise," impresses the hell out of me. I love the compression--love it. I love the way Evans focuses our attention in this narrative on the small trappings of order and decorum--and contrasts them to the larger symbols of change (and it doesn't seem like a good change) from the skies. The society that these trappings help symbolize is soon to be upset. Yes, we've all seen this scene in war films/action films dozens of times--often overwrought and often flavored with a hint of "They're about to get theirs!" But, here, we have Evans evoking something similar but more complex (do these people deserve what's coming?), in what, how long is this, 75 words? Wonderful. Thanks, Poetry Daily. And, thank you, Indiana Review.

Life on Mars

I've always been in love with space exploration. If I had possessed the discipline for overcoming the challenges I faced in the math classroom, I would have loved to work as an engineer in the aerospace industry.

I imagine that in an alternate reality, this Marshall exists. This would be a more mathematically-disciplined Marshall, who places his time and energy into an object that left the shores of Earth. Asleep, he would often have fitful dreams about the mission/about the object. Awake, he would follow the mission closely and he would often smile considering what knowledge humanity was adding to its universities, it colleges, it schools--considering how humanity was exploring for exploration's sake.

In this reality, I held onto space exploration only as a news item or long-form article that catches my attention and demands to be read over breakfast, or at lunch. I decided years ago to put my intellectual energies--small as they are--into writing. I found that I got a fair amount of pleasure in struggling to find the write words to express myself accurately. I learned to whittle long and ugly expressions, into ones short and elegant. I studied poetry. I studied how to teach writing. I used these skills to make a living. What it would have been like to work for NASA or JPL? I don't know, but I think about it.

I think about it mostly when I talk to my brother. My brother works in a lab that studies the ways in which light affects the endocrine system. The lab gets some funding, sometimes, from those organizations I mentioned. My brother even constructed a moonlight machine. It simulates, roughly he would say, the wavelength of light on the moon's surface--as though you stood there. He's not in space no, but I envy him. A moonlight machine.

All of this is to explain how excited I was to hear poet Tracy K. Smith read from her latest book, Life on Mars, last Friday on the PBS Newshour. Poetry. Space. I think I squealed. I love Smith's work for reasons that I won't go into here, and I know that's not much of a pitch, but I encourage you to buy and read her books. Jeffrey Brown interviewed her for a great segment. Here's video of the segment, and this link is web-only content of Smith reading her poems and talking about her work. As the shuttle program closes over the next few days, please re-consider the line between good art and good science. They share at least two qualities: discipline and exploration.

Spectacular Splitleaves Press

For me, one of the best things to come out of Drexel's Week of Writing during the last week in May, was the chance to meet the head of Splitleaves Press. (We got a chance to chat at Ladder 15 during Philadelphia's first Literary Death Match--organized by Painted Bride Quarterly.) Splitleaves is a new independent press in Philly. It's small, but it's doing good things and publishing cool releases. The truth is, a graphic designer that truly understands printing can take a good collection of poems and make it great. This press understands that. And, this press understands that the future of poetry isn't necessarily at chain bookstores, SP's work is carried at independent bookstores across the city. Bravo to Splitleaves Press.

A Week Since Ai Weiwei's Release, and Where Are Things?

Yesterday, the Newshour's Jeffrey Brown posted this interview with filmmaker Alison Klayman. Her upcoming documentary film on Ai has given her some access to the artist, and she has some updates on his situation.

It's better, he's out of detention, but it's still not good. According to the website of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (I found this group in an article by Human Rights Watch) this was most likely part of a larger crackdown against activists, writers, lawyers in light of fears of a jasmine-style revolution taking hold in China.

A friend of mine once asked me if individuals can suffer from paranoia, why not state entities? What would that look like?

Sorry folks, but as Independence Day approaches my mind is on liberty and human rights.