Almost 49 "if all else fails, sharks have a keen sense of hearing"

Yes, tomorrow is my birthday. I have elaborate plans, and several new empty notebooks, for getting my "50th year" off to a good start. Diet, exercise, vitamins. Water. Walking a little, swimming a lot. Keeping a daybook -- half diary, half journal, half sketch book, half PAD -- that's just like me, too many halves. I've been in a tiny email correspondence with Angela, who's raising money for flood victims in the Philippines, and I've started my thesis planning in earnest. Al is being very generous, and gently prodding, and I have to get going before I blow it. I even left a message for Laurie on her 50th birthday -- the actual day. My poetic life is up for grabs -- I plan to catch it myself.

I am happy to have found "What To Do About Sharks" by Vivian Shipley on the AAP website. What a great poem, and I hope to teach it to my 5th graders at Regnart this spring. They've asked me to come back, although I can't imagine where they are getting the money.

I'm intrigued to try to find and read something written by the new Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Herta Mueller (with an umlaut, not an 'e'). I like what the committee said about her: "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed" -- and I love the title of one of her books, at least the English translation, The Land of Green Plums. (Heart-animal is good too)

Herztier, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1994. Published in an English translation by Michael Hofmann as The Land of Green Plums, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1996

I just finished reading Francine Prose's 2000 novel, Blue Angel, which I adored, and kept me good company yesterday while I was home sick -- a cold? swollen throat -- headache -- I think it's more likely Remodel Pneumonia.

Here's a little lovely poem from Heidy Steidlmayer, published in Poetry in 2007. I know, I should have read that issue a while ago, but I am slow. I love the sounds in this poem. And the form. I'm a sucker for sound and shape and poems that have body and not just mind.

Scree

I have seen the arrested
shrub inform the crag with grief.
Lichens crust the rocks with red.
Thorns punctuate the leaf.

Sorrow is not a desert
where one endures the other --
but footing lost and halting
step. And then another.

Working through Boland blogs

I'm starting to do my research for my thesis, and am finding all kinds of interesting blogs about Eavan Boland. Here are two:

Exphrasis: Poetry Inspired by Art and Song of a Reformed Headhunter (Jee Leong Koh) -- the later in particular discusses three poems I've been researching, one about a Degas painting, one about a Renoir painting, and one about an Ingres drawing. Since I'm lazy, I will not post the photos of these artworks, nor reproduce the poems. If you're interested, follow the links. Oh, what the heck, here's the Ingres. I like her clear face, her beautiful skin, her neck, her firmness -- wrapped all up in hasty sketches and ruffles -- a woman in a potato chip.