Words of War

Jake joined others tonight for the Words of War benefit for Headstrong, a non-profit organization that provides cost-free and bureaucracy-free mental health care treatment to Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with PTSD and TBI.

 A good crowd came out for an evening of spoken word for a great cause.

Jake was all smiles with  decorated veteran and  the Executive Director of the Headstrong Project, Zach Iscol.

Jake reading Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est




Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918

Wilfred Owen is recognized as the greatest English poet of the First World War. The poem was written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1920. The poem is known for its horrific imagery and condemnation of war. It was drafted at Craiglockhart in the first half of October 1917 and later revised, probably at Scarborough but possibly Ripon, between January and March 1918. The earliest surviving manuscript is dated 8 October 1917 and addressed to his mother, Susan Owen, with the message "Here is a gas poem done yesterday, (which is not private, but not final)".

Poetic License

Jake joined the Academy of American Poets  for The 11th Annual Poetry & the Creative Mind, tonight at Lincoln Center.

 
 The event had artists and public figures reading their favorite poems.  Jake was a last minute addition to the line up that included Jan Abumrad, Jake's buddy Mario Batali, Dick Cavett, Patricia Clarkson, Tyne Daly, Glen Hansard, National Student Poet Claire Lee, Stew, Rose Styron, Amber Tamblyn, Calvin Trillin, and Kathleen Turner.

Did Jake read a favorite poems from childhood?  Or one he grew to love as an adult?  Speaking of love, perhaps a sonnet? Something by Neruda?

A poem for someone he loves?  Or a poem shared to him by someone who loves him?  A poem passed down and one he continues to pass on?

 Or did he mix it up with a limerick about a man from Nantucket?  Something Seussical or perhaps Silversteinish? An ode to Kale?

  Was it something deep and soulful?  Or a rhythmic rhyme?   Could he have picked a poem from his Pops? 

Sharing poetry is sharing one's self.  That place where the soul is touched.  What will Jake's poem reveal about him.

The events celebrates National Poetry Month, established by the Academy in 1996 and now is the largest literary celebration in the world. Proceeds from tonight allow the Academy to donate free classroom materials to thousands of schools and libraries across the country.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.


I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.


I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:
where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. 

Pablo Neruda

Out Spotlight CVIX

Today's Out Spotlight is poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was a major poetic voice of the rebellious Jazz Age. And has been hailed as the greatest

female poet since Sappho of ancient Greece.

Born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892 Millay and her two sisters were raised by her mother, Cora, in an unconventional family from which her father Henry was asked to leave when she was seven by her mother at least in part because of his gambling. Her mother encouraged her daughters to be ambitious and self-sufficient, teaching them an appreciation of music and literature from an early age.

Millay's first known lover, Floyd Dell, reported that "'Her mother had expected a son, and when the child was a girl, she brought her up, she told me, like a son--to be self-reliant and fearless and ambitious.'"

In 1912, at her mother's urging, twenty year old Millay entered her poem "Renascence" into a contest, winning fourth place and publication in The Lyric Year. In the immediate aftermath of The Lyric Year, a wealthy woman named Caroline B. Dow heard Millay reciting her poetry and playing the piano at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, and was so impressed that she offered to pay for her education at Vassar College There, she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater.

While playing the lead in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page at Vassar, she was approached by the British actress Edith Wynne Matthison, who, excited by the performance, came backstage to kiss Millay and invite her to her summer home. Millay felt great passion in the kiss and the two exchanged letters, providing one of her few known straightforward pronouncements of lesbian love:

"You wrote me a beautiful letter,--I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was.--I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love. . . . When you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to You."

Millay also had several relationships with other women while at Vassar. In 1917, the year of her graduation, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. At the request of Vassar's drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women.

In January 1921 she went to Paris, where she met sculptor Thelma Wood, with whom she had a romantic relationship. Millay, whose friends called her "Vincent," then moved to New York's Greenwich Village, where she led a notoriously Bohemian life. She lived in the nine-foot-wide attic of the house owned by the Cherry Lane Theater that was renowned for being the smallest in New York City. She wrote anything she could find an editor willing to accept. She and the other writers of Greenwich Village were, according to Millay herself, "very, very poor and very, very merry."

She joined the Provincetown Players in their early days, and befriended writers such as Witter Bynner, Edmund Wilson, Susan Glaspell, and Floyd Dell, who asked for Millay's hand in marriage. She refused a proposal from Dell, who wanted to cure her of her "Sapphic tendencies," believing that marriage would confine her to traditional female roles. She was openly bisexual having a series of affairs with men or women, expressing not only her belief that love was temporary but also an unwillingness to commit to a man or woman.

Millay published A Few Figs from Thistles in 1920, a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923 her fourth volume of poems, The Harp Weaver, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She was the first woman to be so honored for poetry. Poet Laurette Robert Frost viewed her as his most serious competitor and feared she would be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters ahead of him.

In addition to publishing three plays in verse, Millay also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King's Henchman in 1927. In 1943 she was awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. She was the sixth recipient of that honor, and the second woman.

Millay married Eugen Boissevain, a self-proclaimed feminist and widower of Inez Milholland, in 1923. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage Millay's literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which Millay grew quite famous. According to her own accounts, the couple acted liked two bachelors, remaining "sexually open" throughout their twenty-six-year marriage.

Biographers have speculated that Millay found in Boissevain the mother she had yearned for since childhood; however, Boissevain, though attending to Millay's needs, did not foster the independent spirit typical of her younger years.

Once at a cocktail party, Millay discussed her recurrent headaches with a psychologist who asked her about her attraction to women. Millay exclaimed, "'Oh, you mean I'm homosexual! Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what's that got to do with my headache?'" They were married until Boissevain's death in 1949. Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950.

Excerpt of "Renascence" from Renascence and Other Poems:

"All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood."

Poet(ic inspiration) and Didn't Know it

Gray days with wind and rain leads to big cups of coffee reading, some art, lots of music and discovery of new things.


Poet Sharon Mesmer wrote this and posted it on her blog back in October of 2006.

Jake Gyllenhaal's Dog

The ghost of a dog coffeepot foretold:
Jake Gyllenhaal has two cats and my parents have three cats
and I got a second dog.

All it takes to start a new religion
is resentment and a pot of cold coffee
and Jake Gyllenhaal walking his dog.

It's funny that people find other people getting coffee really interesting,
or walking their dogs in the dog park —
welcome to Christian Carnivore ‘04:

with only the occasional torn-up slipper and scattered
hieroglyphic chapters
as proof that any human beings ever lived there,
the dog coffeepot became a sign that,
for the poor, coffee is always already over.
Didn’t Thomas Jefferson predict that would happen
once dark bilious vapors began to define the character
of our dogs?

Hey! Aren't we supposed to just have good things happen to us?
Jake Gyllenhall’s dog is as much of a dog as that Brazilian double-bagger
Giselle Bundchen’s dog,
and I’d really like to know
how shepherds do it with their dogs.

Kim’s sharing spirit has done a great job in telling us about some of the things
that shepherds do with their dogs.

What is the difference between Christianity and all other religions?
The answer is that Dr. Bob is mind blowing.
So consider the story of Ben Stiller and Jake Gyllenhaal:
they got their eyes checked and their dogs autoclaved.

How did Jake Gyllenhaal’s dog get way up there on that fence post anyway?
That black poodle-looking dog had a rocking a cool 'fro
and dog food heaped with Pepto-Bismol.

What is the "abomination that causes desolation" in Mark 13:14?
The daily news, the conflicting messages in the world
and the longing for another man’s funky dung.

Humans in zoos, cross breeding —
it’s evolutionists vs creationists and I’ll be pooping on both
and from beneath the dirty hood comes an awkward
I love you on the sofa in the dark:

It was Jesus weeping as Jake Gyllenhaal returned
from Dramatic Dog Walk/Smoothie Excursion.
It's all over.
The dog has been walked
and the smoothie is just a distant memory.

Pappa G has written about, Ms. Mesmer has written too, and do you think Jake has inspired a Southern poet who has blogged some of his poetic license before?