Marly Youmans's Blog, page 98

Reading and dreaming by Glimmerglass

The Feckless Marketer
I become one of MaryBoxley Bullington's
exuberant people... 

Shakespeare and Sendak
Here's a clip from Stephen Greenblatt's lovely New York Times article on Shakespeare and Sendak:

But it is not in the early comedies nor in the great middle tragedies that I feel the most intimate connection between Shakespeare’s work and Sendak’s sensibility: it is in those strange late

Northern Lights

Northern Lights x 2






Here's a new digital picture by my daughter Rebecca, who finished up a second year in filmmaking at Bard College and is soon going off to The Center for Cartoon Studies. Northern Lights. See more here. To go with it, here's a poem of mine (published last April) that has to do with the northern lights. There's a podcast of my reading of the poem as well.



He lives in a

Snowy morning with books

Nemo

Mike and I rolled from bed at five to shovel snow and send your youngest off to Syracuse for a wrestling tournament, as he wanted to see the seniors wrestle in sectionals. My brain is full of light, fluffy stars this morning . . .

Reading Yeats's Ghosts: a few quotes from Yeats I did not recall

I began to wonder whether I have and always have had some nervous weakness inherited from my

Snow. Birds. Thaliad.

ONE SOUTHERNER, ONE BROODY SKY

It has snowed in the night. It will snow more. The sky sags, weighty and entirely serious with snow. Assorted corvids have appeared, making punctuation marks in all the whiteness. The positively multitudinous sparrows and one chickadee are in the rugosa ravel again, darting back and forth from rose canes to feeder. They know the kestrel is coming, and the snow as

The teeth of Richard III

The owl shriek'd at thy birth,—an evil sign;
The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees;

The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top,
And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.
Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain,
And, yet brought forth less than a mother's hope,
To wit, an indigested and deformed lump,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly

Marly goes Lightspeed

The story is illustrated by Galen Dara.




Read at Lightspeed


"Prologomenon to the Adventures of Childe Phoenix" (short story) is up at Lightspeed. Many thanks to writers and publishers Gavin Grant and Kelly Link for its original print publication in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (2007), and to Lightspeed editor John Joseph Adams for asking to reprint the story. (John Crowley also has a

The nun and the public self

He must practice; he must work hard; he must sacrifice mere pleasure to the demands of art; he must be, in a sense, both single-minded and monastic. Unless he is a polymath of the most formidable proportions, he cannot afford or support a second career as a public figure.
Sissman adds:
In a word, the serious writer must take serious vows if he is to concentrate on his chief aim. A vow of silence

Spam wars

Instead of watching the Ravens, first national team to be named for a poem, I am trying out comment moderation as a way of getting rid of both spam and the need for word verification. Let me know if you hate it (just as you let me know that you hated word verification!) Hello to moderation, good-by to the old warnings:

Here you will find no pesky word verification, no wait for moderation. If

Groundhog Day / Candlemas

Punxsutawney Phil says spring is coming, the demented little hog!

You may celebrate Candlemas or Groundhog Day with a free ebook of Jennifer Reeser's poetry here.

Unworldliness

Fra Angelico (1395-1455) Annunciatory angel
Here's an account of the "sublime exhibition"
where I encountered this angel in 2005.

Rose at five to roust a boy for a faraway wrestling tournament and dry the singlet (ah! forgot.) The world is still deep-blue-and-night-on-snow. I've had a number of reasons of late to remember how strange it is to be an artist of any kind--how odd my concerns look