I'm Practicing Your Name

Sorry for the silence. My family has upped-sticks (again) and we have moved across town to a new home where there is no internet connection yet. On top of the disorientation that comes with a relocation, I'm also being rather busy at the moment, so I will catch up with you soon.

Looked up an old favourite for your listening pleasure this weekend. Enjoy :-)

Wordled Poems

I Sing The Body Electric, Walt Whitman



City Elegies, Robert Pinsky

(Hat tip to Bibliobibuli)

Video: My Set At KL Poetry Slam 3

I am not sure how many performances I have done since that first reading in Seksan last year... this is probably the eighth one, and I am starting to feel comfortable in my stage shoes. I was a nervous wreck during the first slam, but this time around I felt quite relaxed. After a year of writing, I have my basic set of material now from which more would certainly evolve. So let me work on my voice before I go on to movement, but progress is slow when night after night one works alone, always unsure of one's self until it comes to the final test. "Art is born out of humiliation", said Auden, and from this I take courage. I know that, one day, in time I would deliver the performance I know I am capable of.

There be pretty days ahead. Stay with me.

"Why I Am Not A Painter"

Why I Am Not A Painter
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANCES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Hylas And The Nymphs

This is 'Hylas and the Nymphs', based on a painting by JW Waterhouse in 1896.


And now we can embed graffiti out of Facebook! Click play and see this drawing being made.