Major Jackson and Philadelphia

Have you heard of the poet Major Jackson? He is originally from the city of Philadelphia and has won numerous awards and fellowships for his absolutely wonderful poetry. Check out this piece below about Philadelphia and then come in and get your hands on our last copy of Hoops, his second collection of poetry that features Philly throughout the entire book.


Letter to Brooks: Spring Garden


by Major Jackson
1
When you have forgotten (to bring into
Play that fragrant morsel of rhetoric,
Crisp as autumnal air), when you
Have forgotten, say, sunlit corners, brick
Full of skyline, rowhomes, smokestacks,
Billboards, littered rooftops & wondered
What bread wrappers reflect of our hunger,

2
When you have forgotten wide-brimmed hats,
Sunday back-seat leather rides & church,
The doorlock like a silver cane, the broad backs
Swaying or the great moan deep churning,
& the shimmer flick of flat sticks, the lurch
Forward, skip, hands up Aileyesque drop,
When you have forgotten the meaningful bop,

3
Hustlers and their care-what-may, blas�
Ballet and flight, when you have forgotten
Scruffy yards, miniature escapes, the way
Laundry lines strung up sag like shortened
Smiles, when you have forgotten the Fish Man
Barking his catch in inches up the street
“I’ve got porgies. I’ve got trout. Feeesh

4
Man,” or his scoop and chain scale,
His belief in shad and amberjack; when
You have forgotten Ajax and tin pails,
Blue crystals frothing on marble front
Steps Saturday mornings, or the garden
Of old men playing checkers, the curbs
White-washed like two lines out to the burbs,

5
Or the hopscotch squares painted new
In the street, the pitter-patter of feet
Landing on rhymes. “How do you
Like the weather, girls? All in together, girls,
January, February, March, April... ”
The jump ropes’ portentous looming,
Their great, aching love blooming.

6
When you have forgotten packs of grape-
Flavored Now & Laters, the squares
Of sugar flattening on the tongue, the elation
You felt reaching into the corner-store jar,
Grasping a handful of Blow Pops, candy bars
With names you didn’t recognize but came
To learn. All the turf battles. All the war games.

7
When you have forgotten popsicle stick
Races along the curb and hydrant fights,
Then, retrieve this letter from your stack
I’ve sent by clairvoyant post & read by light,
For it brought me as much longing and delight.
This week’s Father’s Day; I’ve a long ride to Philly.
I’ll give this to Gramps, then head to Black Lily.

A Sugarless World

A lovely reading tonight with author James Magruder, a playwright and award-winning translator who lives in Baltimore. Here's an excerpt from the novel:

I guess I had a "collect 'em all" personality. Every week in 1973 a four-inch president, from Washington in a blue and gold Continental Army uniform to Nixon in a gray suit and tie, went on sale for forty cents at the Jewel food store. On the shelf above the shelf with my miniature liquor bottles, the thirty-six chief executives lined up like beauty contestants on a set of molded Styrofoam risers, with four Greek columns notched into the back row for a more republican effect. I was the class shrimp in grade school, so Madison, the shortest president, was my favorite. Taft was the fattest, buried in a piano crate.

Check out more from the main character Rick Lahrem in Magruder's story which talks about coming out, coming-of-age, and coming-to Jesus.

Community Book Review: The Wasted Vigil

The Wasted Vigil By Nadeem Aslam.

For folks whom Kite Runner was not depressing or complex or poetic enough.

Wasted Vigil literally nails its symbolism to the ceiling in the form of a library. The books were put there by a woman driven mad by years of Afghan wars, but the method is crudely effective, the Taliban don't notice them. Other metaphors are similarly fraught, the house also features paintings devoted to the 6 senses covered over by mud, a giant Buddha's head that weeps tears, and a collection of inhabitants who range from Afghanistans' would-be occupiers (British, Russian, American) to its current inhabitants, themselves an Al-Qaeda former Bagram detainee and a female schoolteacher.
All of this weight threatens to overwhelm the storyline which is basically flashbacks, hanging out, and gathering menace.

The poetic language, historic sweep, and admirable dialectic of blame (between colonizers and colonized) more or less sustain things, and we enjoy our time spent with these shattered people. My only complaint is the women are either dead, disappeared, or going back to Russia which serves to make them a moew little two dimensional then the agonizing, suffering, and also dying men.


Reviewed by Jesse Bacon

A Measure of Truth About Liar

How exciting to have Justine Larbalestier round off her Liar tour with a visit to Philadelphia!

Justine admired the Big Blue Marble (in fact, her publicist declared intention to take up lodging on a comfy chair and not go back to New York), tried kiwi berries for the first time, and talked with us about the writing of her newest book, which was composed in small scenes and then shuffled around and retrofitted. She described the process as akin to working with a jigsaw puzzle -- if what one did when moving a jigsaw puzzle piece was to violently lop off the sticky-out bits and "grow new wings" to make it fit in the new place.

Throughout its writing, Liar grew in ways Justine hadn't foreseen. It turns out that her earliest ideas for the book involved its being a lighthearted comedy (which, to be fair, did make us laugh). She spoke about how hard she worked to make different interpretations equally probable, and she told us about being surprised by readers' interpretations that hadn't occurred to her at all. She spoke about race and gender issues, and she described her careful work to make sure her teen-aged New Yorker narrator didn't sound Australian -- and her chagrin that no one had noticed. (Which speaks to how well she succeeded, of course.)

There were a lot of interesting and insightful questions, and, curiously, no discussions of Justine's boots, just her books. Also, she writes on her blog of her Scott Westerfeld impressions, and they really are impressive: the one she did last night made it seem as though he was really there! Oh, wait -- he was really there.

I was particularly impressed with her answer to a question of Maleka's about writing characters who have significantly different backgrounds from the author. She said, as she has elsewhere, that you can't be afraid of people getting mad at you for misrepresentation, because anyone whose writing gets published will find readers getting mad at them for something. But she made it clear that she doesn't mean one should ignore the critics; she means that one should expect the critics, and then listen to the criticism and learn from it.

Justine Larbalestier blogs at justinelarbalestier.com/blog/.
Here is her website's Liar page.

Lise Funderburg Visits!

What a wonderful and warm visit by our neighbor and author of the memoir Pig Candy which was the Women of the World book club's selection of the month. We had a great discussion of the book with people asking Lise about her father's behaviors, journalism, whether they still had the farm and the fish pond, why she didn't put the death scene at the end of the book, and more. Lise mentioned thinking about doing a personal writing workshop in the Mt. Airy area, so be on the look out for more information. And if you haven't yet read this social history/memoir, get up on it. It's more than just succulent pig meat.

Your Children Are The Gurus.

This past Sunday morning we had the honor of hosting Lama Willa Miller, ordained in Tibetan Buddhism. She led a short meditation practice from her new book, Everyday Dharma: Seven Weeks To Finding the Buddha in You, read an allegory about looking within yourself, and led a discussion about staying in the present moment, the differences between Tibetan Buddhism and other Buddhist practices, and more. It was a wonderful presentation filled with knowledge that folks could really use every day.

I asked her about meditating within the context of living with three young children under the age of four. Where is the peace within the storm of preschool tantrums? Her response? Look to your children as gurus. They are the perfect teachers of patience, having an open heart, and just being in the present moment. She's so right. It just took that reminder to really have it sink in. And when you're not learning from them? Take a few minutes to steal away and create your own meditation. She says even two minutes will allow you to reboot yourself.

A Taste of Poetry Aloud and Alive

Missed Poetry Aloud and Alive tonight? (It's every fourth Friday of the month at 7:15pm.) Here's a taste of what went down by excellent local poet Steve Burke:


Doubting Thomas On The Bus

Cake-walking down the sidewalk, a zaftig young woman witnessing to whatever lyric is surging through her headphones,
carrying her away down Broad Street, where traffic thickly flows.
Music is a manifestation of something that can be believed in.
Revelation is something that's hard to keep to yourself. She is filled.
Maybe she is singing also, but for now I am deafened by glass
and she blinded by ecstasy-her left hand raised and pulled back,
raised again, the fingers of that hand opening then closing
as if breathing, or as if stretched up to a closet shelf, grasping for
something unseen, something lost, something that belongs to her.

-Steve Burke