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Showing posts from June, 2013

“What if I said you’re all of these” – Michael Sharkey

Two Sonnets Ten Talk: or, Ten to the Dozen What if I said you’re all of these “Yeah whatever can I run round the block?” A singular wonder, a soft breeze, You leave us all timeless, even the clock. So embarrassing to hear that stuff. You change the subject with questions “What’s new?” and “How do you spell ‘enough’?” Homework, piano, plus other suggestions. All’s not as it seems, while we’re on it, As you rebuff praise and cut to the chase. A week later you ask how’s the sonnet While you put a bookmark in place. “You know,” you say, “it starts (if you please) ‘What if I said you’re all of these?’” Questionnaire: Please Limit Answers to One Hundred Words What if I said you’re all of these? When did it start? When will it end? What is asked for on our knees? Where’s the safest address to send? Why are there things that words can’t say?

Bloomsday and Dear Dirty Dublin

In the New York Times this week John Williams reports: Today is Bloomsday, when readers worldwide celebrate Leopold Bloom’s Dublin wanderings on June 16, 1904, in James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. To mark the event I asked a few notable fans of Joyce’s masterwork for memories of their own Bloomsdays. The novelist Colm Toibin recalled a June 16 several years ago when he took a break from working at home in Dublin to food shop. Forgetting it was Bloomsday, he came across a group of literary celebrants outside a pub. “I had two plastic bags of groceries,” Toibin said. “When the crowd asked me who I was, I expressed puzzlement. They presumed I was masquerading as a character from the book, and were trying to think who had two bags of groceries in ‘Ulysses.’ In the end, I used a term with which Joyce might have not been familiar — I called them ‘a shower of wankers’ — and slowly made my way home and got on with my day’s work.” This is a carefully articulated position, not as it ap