A Coconut Cake From Emily Dickinson: Reclusive Poet, Passionate Baker. [NPR.org] Poet Emily Dickinson withdrew from society for most of her adult life. And yet, she was known to lower a basket full of cakes from the window of the home she rarely left to crowds of expectant children on the street below.
The Poet's House in New York City put on exhibit an original manuscript of a Dickinson cake recipe that contained coconut. That recipe calls for the following ingredients.
1 cup coconut,
2 cups flour,
1 cup sugar,
1/2 cup butter,
1/2 cup milk,
2 eggs,
1/2 teaspoon soda,
1 teaspoon cream of tartar.
posted by Fizz
on Oct 24, 2011 -
25 comments
"
A wonderful brain interprets something differently from what it actually is, but it doesn't mean it's made a mistake. It took the information it had and did it's best job." Those are but two tricks from
Jerry Andrus (1918-2007), self-taught magician and illusionist, and
one of great renown amongst
other magicians. But he was more than a slight-of-hand man: he was also
a poet, philosopher, inventor, humanist, agnostic, and skeptic. There are an impressive number of videos of him online, these are but a few to get you started down the rabbit hole:
Jerry Andrus is visual poetry (Google video /
YT, 28 minutes) ::
Jerry Andrus at the Magic Castle (G.vid, 49 min),
Jerry Andrus at 83 his Optical Illusions (G.vid, 41 min) ::
Jerry Andrus and Ray Hyman on Uri Geller (YT, 26 min) ::
James Randi on Jerry Andrus (YT, 5 min) ::
James Randi - who was Jerry Andrus? ::
James Randi describes Jerry Andrus. The last two clips are from
Rex Young, a young illusionist who has recreated many of Andrus' illusions on his
YouTube channel, and
made some of his own.
posted by filthy light thief
on Sep 12, 2011 -
25 comments
The Xenotext Experiment is
Christian Bök's [
Previously],"nine-year long attempt to create an example of “living poetry.” I have been striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space)."
[Via] [more inside]
posted by Fizz
on Apr 4, 2011 -
25 comments
Anne Spencer (1882-1975) (
video tribute from the State Library of Virginia) was a Harlem Renaissance poet, a gardener, a librarian, and an activist. Her work was influential among her peers and successors - as was her legendary and beloved
garden in Lynchburg, Va, where she lived for her entire adult life. She wrote only 50 known poems - 25 to 35 of which were published in her lifetime - on topics that were important to her - the beauty of nature, racism and equality, and her faith, including
these 8 of her better-known poems ,
Before the Feast of Shushan, and
Lady, Lady. Many of her poems were reprinted in anthologies, but the controversial
White Things (c. 1918, published c. 1923, inspired by a particularly horrible lynching of a pregnant woman) was never reprinted.
[more inside]
posted by julen
on Apr 20, 2010 -
7 comments
April 13th is
Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday, and to celebrate, the Irish press have honored him in many ways. A Catholic from Northern Ireland, his early poems reflected his upbringing on a farm, but his later poems (and time in the States) spoke powerfully of 'the Troubles.' I thought he deserved a mention in the Blue.
[more inside]
posted by dbmcd
on Apr 12, 2009 -
13 comments
Should you find yourself wandering around the city of Leiden, the Netherlands sometime, you may
notice some curious markings on the city's walls.
These
Muurgedichten ("Wall Poems") adorn many of the town's streets
(clickable map), and many English-language poets are represented:
one John Keats, for instance, inside a bookshop;
Dylan Thomas,
E. E. Cummings,
W.B. Yeats, some guy
called William Shakespeare, or this
ode to Charlie Parker by American
William Waring Cuney.
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Apr 5, 2009 -
15 comments
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer..." ShelSilverstein.com bills itself as "the Official Site for Kids" but, if you're familiar with Sheldon Allan Silverstein's
ecclectic career, you don't have to be a kid to enjoy it. Shel was
best known for his books and poetry, but he was also a prolific
songwriter, working extensively with
Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show [sorry, Tripod link]. He also wrote Johnny Cash's hit "
A Boy Named Sue" and was posthumously
inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 2002. More songs and stories
here.
And his amazingly extensive Wikipedia page is here.
posted by amyms
on May 1, 2007 -
13 comments
Eun
oia ("beautiful thinking") is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels.
It is also the title of a
poetry collection by Canadian author Christian Bok. In addition to writing each chapter using only words that contain one vowel, (
Flash presentation of Chapter "E") Bok also
greatly limits himself in other ways.
An amazing accomplishment that won the $40 000 Griffith Poetry Prize in 2002,
Eun
oia is best experienced in its spoken form. (
MP3 links)
(If you don't know Bok's poetry, you still might know his other work. He has also created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon.)
posted by Jaybo
on Jul 22, 2004 -
18 comments
Burns Night. 'Robert Burns: poet and balladeer, Scotland's favourite son and champion of the common people. Each year on January 25, the great man's presumed birthday, Scots everywhere take time out to honour a national icon. Whether it's a full-blown Burns Supper or a quiet night of reading poetry, Burns Night is a night for all Scots.'
More on
the Robert Burns Tribute site.
posted by plep
on Jan 23, 2004 -
3 comments
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
Fifty years ago,
Dylan Thomas - one of the greatest poets of our time -
drank himself to death in New York's Hotel Chelsea at the age of 39.
Swansea, his Welsh hometown, will be commemorating his life all year, culminating in a
festival in the fall.
[more]
posted by madamjujujive
on Jun 18, 2003 -
58 comments
America, America: I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island. A poem from Saadi Youssef, published in this Saturday's Guardian (scroll down past Seamus Heaney):
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani Mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with
butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.
Saadi Youssef was born in 1934 near Basra, Iraq. He is considered to be among the greatest living Arab poets. Youssef has published 25 volumes of poetry, a book of short stories, a novel, four volumes of essays, a memoir, and numerous translations. In addition to being imprisoned for his poetry and politics, he has won numerous literary awards and recognitions. He now lives in London. [more inside]
posted by jokeefe
on Feb 14, 2003 -
8 comments
Do you know River Huston? She's the poet laureate of
Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She is a sometimes
controversial HIV/AIDS educator,
columnist for
POZ, a magazine "founded primarily to get information to HIV positive persons", she authored
A Positive Life; a photo documentary book about women living with HIV. Yes, she is HIV positive, but it changed her life in ways she didn't expect: "It took getting an HIV-positive diagnosis for me to realize I was a
sex goddess. If there is one thing that will improve a girl's sex life it is finding out she has AIDS."
posted by ?!
on Dec 1, 2002 -
0 comments
Positive, by Ian Stephens. Not, perhaps, in the tradition of Day Without Art. But...
Ian Stephens was a poet, musician, and performer from my neighbourhood in Montreal who died in 1996.
posted by mikel
on Dec 1, 2000 -
0 comments
