Lazy Autumn day. Well, not too lazy. I just bought a new desktop—the laptop was falling apart beneath my fingers—but that means I’m now working at a desk. All the time. I hate to admit this, but I had gotten used to working in bed. Not so great for my posture, but comfortable everywhere else. I’m not the only one having trouble adjusting, though. Daisy is messed up. She’s used to being crammed beside my elbow as I type, and now there isn’t a place for her to sit by me. Which she does not like. At all.
If you’d like to listen to the radio interview from last night, go here. It’s the first sound file at the top of the page (the “water-borne” link)
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Here is a fascinating interview with Yves Bonnefoy, called “Shakespeare and the French Poet” :
The need I felt at the time, a need that hasn’t changed, was to understand what poetry is, and what act of consciousness allows us to recognize it and to free it from ordinary speech. What are the means by which we can help it to exist, both in our words and in our lives? And why, along with the instinctive practice of poetry, is there this need to understand its nature? It’s because this understanding may contribute to an activity that seems to me almost as important as the writing of poetry itself, that is, the thinking we devote to other poets (or painters or any form of artistic creation as it relates to poetry). This kind of thinking allows us to bring together the experiments of many poets and thus to create a kind of poetical brotherhood, which today appears in danger of fragmentation, if not of complete disappearance from the concerns of society. That would be a catastrophic loss.
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Season 2 of Beauty and the Beast has been playing in the background as I work. That, and I’ve been listening to the soundtrack CD, which features music and poetry from the show, as read by Ron Perlman. Good stuff. Better even than I remember, better than a lot of television currently on air. Don’t know, though, if anything like it could ever exist on the networks today. I wonder if the world has become too jaded. Or maybe the people are the same and the television executives have changed. Either way, it still hasn’t lost its shine. Not for me, anyway.
So, just leave a comment below, and you’ll be in the running for your choice of the soundtrack CD, or one of the two seasons from Beauty and the Beast. I’ll draw a name on Wednesday.