The Amended Settlement filed in Authors Guild v. Google creates a non-profit Book Rights Registry governed by authors and publishers to oversee the settlement on their behalf. A Fairness Hearing has been scheduled for February 18, 2010; authors have until January 28, 2010 to opt out of the agreement. The SFWA is objecting to (among other things) Google’s potential monopoly, to the opt-out clause, and to leaving the fair use dispute (pdf) unresolved. The ALA, ARL and ACRL have some similar concerns (pdf) and have released a Guide for the Perplexed (pdf). The NWU opposes it; so does the ASJA. (previously, previously).

Mirrored from my post here.

I’m having a bad couple of months what with family illness and the stress of a new job and the car accident on 9-11 that gave me pretty severe whiplash, so my online presence has constricted considerably to what seemed necessary, but I’m coming back now. Things are good, too: I’ve discovered Poetry Free-for-all and have written some solid poems. And have been enjoying Discovery and Mutemath (Peg, this is the band Vienna Teng said she was obsessed with) and xkcd and my homegirl Kate Beaton and my new status as one of the world’s most personable editors.

Anyway I have run across some really fine work while I’ve been quiet here:

• “Shooting Kinesha” by Daisy Fried
• “The Cliffs of Mistake” by Molly Peacock
• “Hangover” by Billy Collins
• “Kol Nidre” by Vary the Line’s own Peg Duthie

Perhaps this has already been done, perhaps it is tasteless, but it is what I needed to write, and I only half believe those detractions may be true. Modified triolets are the only way I can parse the news.

Do you recall when Michael Jackson died?
The crowds, their rhythmic fists, the scenes
of Tehran bleeding in a sea of green?
That Neda Agha-Soltan died
for a democracy the whole world had denied?
We listen but that bridges no divide.
Do you recall when Michael Jackson died?
Tehran, bleeding, in a sea of green.

Since Peg mentioned it, I took a stab at a poem inspired by the feast-bowl.

I’m ambivalent about it, although it felt like real writing.

I stayed to play with shells
to float the leaves downstream
to find what dusk means
to an adult. The darkness twists
its hands around me
covering my every breath
with canine step or howl
the sound of wings on air
the air-shake as the tree
beside me shivers with a predator.
The moon comes up
and in the brightness I see home
until the light fills in
with teeth and claw
and opens wider, grinning, hungry,
singing that all children
taste so beautiful in flight, in fear.

I’ve been reading about Oulipo and n+7 online, and happened upon this article in The Atlantic which talks about it, as well as touching on why Wordsworth is “responsible for the largely mistaken direction of most modern literature” and contains not one but two hilarious rewrites of his “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

We’ve been talking about centos (poems made exclusively from the lines of other poems) over at P&W, so I’ve decided to try my hand at one. I’m not sure about the legality of this for contemporary work (the argument would go rather like the argument over mash-ups, I presume) so I’m only using work in the public domain. I’ve taken liberties with line breaks, punctuation and capitalization.

The Wind

> A gin-damned drunkard’s wan half-witted face
> stared with piteous recognition in fixed eyes.
> The winds from the west all breathed a story;
> I couldn’t understand a word.
> How long I stayed alone with the corpse I never knew.

> What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?
> They pursued it with forks and hope;
> the jaws that bite, the claws that catch,
> the secrets and the signals and the system.
> Laughter out of dead bellies.
> Whose tongue is the wind’s tongue?
> Has it feet like water-lilies?
> Is it a banished soul?

> Essence of winter sleep is on the night.
> I sit and listen to the wind.

Interesting bunch of links about metaphor, the mind-body connection and science over at metafilter.

A short history of metaphor.

Silly metaphors & analogies.

And finally, the very best poem ever written about metaphor: Very Like a Whale by Ogden Nash.

I’m overdue on my fortnightly post. I’m recovering from another bout with my parents telling me my poems don’t make sense to them. I’m learning how to deal with the fact that I keep quitting.

My worries are subjective. They eat into the facts as though they were chocolate chips cookies, Friday afternoon, latch-key kid home and warm. Between the holes: I poet, I dance, I cajole prose from busy and reluctant scientists and engineers for money. (I tend to iambs, once I’ve started.)

I’m here to find out why I love so little poetry. I couldn’t live without writing it but lack appreciation for others’ work.

I recommend most of Nancy Willard’s work, and Emily Dickinson’s, and Constance Merritt’s, and Elizabeth Hadaway’s.

I leave you with lines by Abbie Huston Evans:

—Here, take them, Emily, they hurt

In telling; can you bear

To hear of elderberries, skirt

The coasts of sun and air?

Know all that hurt you once hurts still.

Need any tell you how

Night brings the moon, dawn finds the hill?

Want you such hurting now?

National Endowment For The Arts Funds Construction Of $1.3 Billion Poem ; Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers (via)

Googling “vary the line” brings up this patent description: “A bite indicator is described comprising a body (10) to be mounted on a fishing rod support, a rigid arm (24) pivotably mounted relative to the body (10) and releasably connectable at point spaced from the pivot axis to the line of a fishing rod resting on the support, and means (26) for resiliently applying an adjustable torque to the arm (24) to enable an adjustable force to be applied by the arm to the fishing line.” There’s a poem in there somewhere. Or operating instructions for writing one.