Tom Waits to publish book of poetry

Tom Waits, a singer whose appearance often resembles someone who forages trash cans for a living, is to publish his first book of poetry.

The Guardian reports Waits is to publish his first book of verse, in collaboration with photographer Michael O'Brien. Hard Ground is described as a portrait of homelessness, combining Waits's words with images of people who "live on the hard ground".

This is a publishing debut for Waits, a songwriter who, after 40 years, dozens of film appearances and about 20 albums, has noticeably avoided committing himself to print. In a 1975 interview, according to TwentyFourBit, he said "poetry is a very dangerous word". "I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet," he said.

"So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue."

See - http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/23/tom-waits-first-book-poetry?CMP=twt_fd

A poem for Thanksgiving

Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

To Autumn - John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Tara Powell

Tara Powell finds it hard to contain her excitement. She has been writing poems for as long as she can remember from her schooldays in Elizabeth City to her adulthood in academia at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, but her new book “Physical Science” is her first free-standing publication and a milestone in her development as a poet.

Although her career has taken her south, her roots and family remain in Elizabeth City. On Saturday she hosted a book signing at Page after Page.

Powell is an Assistant Professor of English and Southern Studies in her sixth year at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She sees the effect of poetry on her students on a daily basis, and believes it can play an important part in their lives.

“My teacher Alan Shapiro once told me that poetry couldn’t undo the Holocaust or bring his brother back to life, but that what it could do was be a tool for helping him to live in the world in which those things had happened to the people he cared about,” Powell said, referring to the professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

While some students struggle with poetry, it was an organic process for Powell.

“I can’t tell you when I started writing poems because I don’t remember when I wasn’t doing it,” she said.

When she started writing in Elizabeth City in the early 1980s, her parents and teachers quickly recognized her talent.

“I’m pretty sure I was presenting them to my teachers at JC Sawyer from as soon as I knew my letters,” she said. Her poetry developed at Northeastern High School.

“My high school English teacher in Elizabeth City, Judy Boyer, gave me a book called ‘Wildwood Flower’ to read by this wonderful poet Kathryn Stripling Byer who later became the North Carolina Poet Laureate,” Powell recalled.

“Those poems weren’t high-sounding flowery stuff about a world way away from the one I lived in, but they were these incredible poems in the voice of a mountain woman, just telling about her life, the way I had known real people talk about real life,” Powell said.

The work of Byer helped her discover poetry wasn’t just about Wordsworth and Blake. “I realized that poetry wasn’t just trying to sound like people from 200 years ago, but it was right now, in our every day life, in finding the music in the people’s voices around us and in our own lives,” she said.

She has been avidly reading poets from the Carolinas ever since as she moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and on to Columbia.

“Physical Science” is a chapbook, a small manuscript of stories or poems, about half the length of a regular-sized book of poems. “It’s a little book in terms of size, but it means a lot to me,” said Powell.

In best traditions of the metaphysical poets, “Physical Science” draws on principles of physics and natural science in a thoroughly modern setting.

Powell says it’s about relationships between men and women and “all the mistakes you go through to figure out what’s really worth having and is going to work for your life, and how it’s not about what works for others, but what works for you, and that’s OK.”

“A lot of the poems in it are inspired by principles of physics and natural science and how the rules of how we relate to each other turn out to be a little like the rules of the universe, far more mysterious than we wish they were,” she said.

The collection is the culmination of a decade of work.

“Some of the poems have a lot of me in them and others are mostly imagined experiences, but either way they reflect some of the issues of coming of age as a modern woman and figuring out how love fits into my life,” Powell said.

The little book is “tightly knit around that idea of science becoming a way of exploring human relationships,” Powell said.

“The sequence just seemed most powerful standing alone. I was thrilled when the editors of Finishing Line Press thought so, too..”

Powell’s poems are intense and full of a bittersweet energy and tension between the sexes. In Growing Season she writes. “One morning soon, she will kiss his lips, then gouge—like rain—his eyes.”

And homely Carolina themes are woven in with darker allusions to subjects such as original sin.

“Before butter or flour, there was stolen fruit,” Powell writes in “Evolution.”

And there is science and sex interwoven as in the powerful metaphor at the start of Chrysanthemums. “A CAT scan is like that, riding a hot, sexy rush into a grave.”

One of Powell’s more complex poems is called “Poincaré’s Conjecture” and refers to a mathematical theorem about the characterization of the three dimensional sphere.

“Math tells us what takes shape is just material, that the sphere of my life is just like yours, emerging on one horizon and rolling across the Carolina blue to sink into the other,” she writes.

And “Love Song for Stephen W. Hawking” is a break from the meters of many of Powell’s other poems, a dark and earthy piece that seems on the face of it, to have little to do with the British scientist who argued the Big Bang, rather than a divine being, created the universe.

It all started with a quote by Hawking, Powell explained. The scientist had said chocolate and love made life worth living.

At 34-years-old, Powell is hopeful she has more collections of poetry ahead of her. She has another book of prose about contemporary southern writing coming out next year, has published many essays and poems in journals and newspapers and online magazines over the past 15 years.

Verse of the Day

In the sunny orchard-closes,
While the warblers sing and swing,
Care not whether blustering Autumn
Break the promises of Spring ;
Rose and white the apple-blossom
Hides you from the sultry sky;
Let it flutter, blown and scattered,
On the meadows by-and-by.

In the Orchard, Henrik Ibsen

Verse of the Day

The wind tapped like a tired man,
And like a host, "Come in,"
I boldly answered; entered then
My residence within

The Wind, Emily Dickinson

Verse of the Day

But now I have drunk thy sweet salt tears,
And though thou pour more I'll depart;
My picture vanished, vanish fears
That I can be endamaged by that art.

Witchcraft by a Picture, John Donne