Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

This is amazing. From the Denver Post photo blog. Here’s the intro to the gallery:

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.

via Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog.

Thanks to T Meneely over at HTML for sharing this!

A few of my poems

at So to Speak.

A Miroslav Holub poem

TWO

Over and over again
it’s a headlong fall
from a crashing Astro-Jet
through the freezing void,
the clouds ripping clothes from limbs
and the deafening Earth coming closer
like a ferocious new formation,
a ball from a schizophrenic cannon.

And suddenly—touching the ground,
and suddenly—transposed,
and suddenly—thrust
into each other
we are
imprints of clay in clay
with crude oil spurting from us
through the riverbed of a home here, home there,
and dripping into the eyes
of vengeful angels
trapped in the doorpost.

And then, there is nothing wrong with us
but night,
and then, there is nothing wrong with us
but morning
and the forsaken glory of aviators
stripped of wings
in an unknown, strange land.

–trans. Stuart Friebert and Dana Hábová

Everyday Poetics

Yesterday  Dad said, “It feels like the sun just dropped a thousand miles.”

Over at the Giant and on the TV

1. My last post on HTMLGiant is called Reading Notes. I’m suddenly reading again, rather than skimming or perusing or half-heartedly mouthing some words on a page.

2. I love my new house, even if I can’t afford to fix it up right now.

3. Watching VH1 music videos for the first time in ages. I feel like an old person. Adam Lambert can sing his ass off, but what the hell is he doing?

H_ngm_n Books is going to publish How Like Foreign Objects!

Have you ever turned a poem into a personal essay? I’m trying to right now. It’s hard.

Banshees

No one seems ever to have seen one; they are less a shape than a wailing that lends horror to the nights of Ireland and (according to Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft) the mountain regions of Scotland. Heard outside one’s window, they herald the death of some member of the family. It is the peculiar privilege of certain lineages of pure Celtic blood—with no trace of Latin, Saxon, or Norse—to hear them. They are also heard in Wales and Brittany. They belong to the race of elves. Their wailing is known as “keening.”

–Borges

Their wailing is known as keening.

Their wailing is known as keening.

Their wailing is known as keening.

Dead Man Walking

I dreamed last night that I shot, and presumably killed, a man who was trying to break into my house. But then in the morning I watched out my window as he got up from the street, got into his car, and drove away. I never saw his face, but I know what he was wearing. Something circa 1972.

Cockroaches

Tonight I came home and made some black-eyed peas and two hard boiled eggs. I sat down to my laptop to watch an episode of Fringe on Hulu. I sat at the coffee table in the living room. I felt a tickling on my back. Then there was a cockroach on my pajama bottoms. I screamed bloody murder and threw my pants across the room. Then the fucker crawled onto my shirt. Once I screamed some more, I ripped my shirt off and stomped on it.

Cockroaches are one of my greatest fears.

My cat is in hiding.

The cockroach disappeared for a while.

I watched a few minutes of Fringe and ate my hard boiled eggs. I turned around, and there it was wriggling on its back at the kitchen doorway.

I killed that fucker and all its white hot guts came oozing out.

Uggh.