I made you a present for Passover
My brother has a big seder dinner every year for Passover. This year–finally–my kids are big enough to travel all way to Maine for a quick visit, and I don’t have a business trip that is going to get in the way. So we’re going. The catch is that if you’re coming, you have to write (and sing) a Passover-themed song parody. So, yeah, I made this for you. I’m really sorry. On the off chance that you have somehow avoided the original…here you go. Let Us Go, Maybe? So I was talking to El Said life in Egypt was hell Need somewhere else we can dwell, But Pharaoh’s in our way! He says he’ll give us a hand, He says he’s got it all planned He says there’s a promised land, And Pharaoh says “Okay!” Pharaoh’s heart...
Read MoreThere’s this thing called the Internet–Have you heard of it?
President Obama recently said that, “”The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.” So now everyone is arguing about who invented the Internet. I thought we all solved that a few years back when we decided Al Gore did it, but apparently we’re still debating it, so here we go again. There’s a nice piece in the WSJ today by Gordon Crovitz called “Who Really Invented the Internet?” that puts paid to the notion that the Internet is a government invention, and that gives a lot of the credit to private enterprise in the form of Xerox. That’s very cool. And it’s certainly part of the story of the Internet. But my...
Read MorePoems for People who Hate Poetry, Part V
So here is today’s comic at Girls With Slingshots (Warning: while the specific comic reproduced here is completely SFW, the site sometimes isn’t. This is, of course, one of the reasons I love it. But I thought I should warn you before you click.) I do love open-mic night humor. And all that snapping, by the way? That’s not just because we’re so pretentious it hurts to be us, it’s also so we don’t have to put our drinks down, people. Funny comic. Really funny comic. Really funny comic…BUT… One of the challenges for poets is dealing with the inchoate human response to grief. What do you do if–as a poet–your primary way of understanding the world is through writing about it, through forcing your howls of...
Read MoreEt in Arcadia
My friend Steve and I were recently griping about our least- favorite cliches, as one does. He mentioned that he’s driven batty by the romanticization of the past. You know, the folks like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen who list all the horrors of their past and complacently remind one another that, “We were poor..but we were happy….Nah, we were happy because we were poor.” Despite my not-so-secret fondness for stuff in the “Downton Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, swishing petticoats, opera gloves, and oh my god the hats” genre, I’m with Steve on this, particularly as it applies to thinking about progress and human flourishing. It’s true that Samuel Pepys had a rich and interesting life in 17th century in London...
Read MoreThe Post I Don’t Want to Make
I am a private person. There are things I don’t want to share. This is one of them. I don’t want to write this post. You probably don’t want to read it. I’m sorry. I think it’s really important. I. About 20 years ago, I broke up with a guy. That night, after an argument at a party, he decided that the best thing to do would be to storm after me, break down the door to my dorm room, and scream at me some more. He did not put a hand on me. But I had never been so frightened in my life. The size and the violence of his anger and my isolated vulnerability—with the party going on in the next room, no one could hear me yelling at him to go away—I had nightmares every night for weeks. I’ve had them off and on ever since. It could have been so much...
Read MoreLanguage and War
I’m not sure why so much very good poetry came out of WWI, but it did. Perhaps this was the last war that began with some sense of war as a noble, aristocratic adventure. Perhaps it was the disjunction between this romantic vision and the realities of a war whose battles included relatively new technologies like barbed wire, machine guns, tanks, and most famously, poison gas that brought out the poet in so many young soldiers. I’m not sure. What I do know is that the poetry is remarkable and that, most often, it is written against the war. Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is probably the most famous. I want to read it to you, but first I want to tell you this about Owen: He was on the front lines of the war from nearly the day he...
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