Food Poetry

Enjoy the lovely celebration of food poetry over at Kim O'Donnel's blog, A Mighty Appetite. (Food and poetry: two great tastes that taste great together...)

Here's a food poem of sorts of my own, taken last fall at the Point Reyes, California organic market (oh, how I love tomatoes with a lusty sort of love - I can't wait til they're back in season):


UPDATE 4.20: My friend and frequent poster Letty sent me the following image after reading this post, and feeling a happy food buzz myself after brunch this morning with friends, I had to share it (I love it when people are enthusiastic enough about eating to photograph their meals :)):

Bootleg Shakespeare: Free This Sunday

Presented by the Taffety Punk Theatre Company. From artistic director Marcus Kyd:

Join us on April 20th, 8:00 pm, at Round House Theatre for a free and (more or less) spontaneous production of Shakespeare's HENRY VIII. With the exception of an RSC tour in 1998, this play hasn't been produced in DC for nearly 140 years.

This is the second installment of our BOOTLEG SHAKESPEARE series. What we do is cast all the actors a month in advance. On the day of the performance, we all meet to rehearse (ins and outs, intentions), and at 8:00 we do the play in its entirety for the first and last time.

Round House Theatre Silver Spring is at 8641 Colesville Road, Silver Spring MD 20910. It is next to AFI, two blocks from the Silver Spring Metro on the Red Line.

NOTE: The Taffety Punk site seems to be down at the moment, but for the patient among you, try this link.

After a while, the story that looks the least believable is the past...

Apologies for the long absence - I've been sick and busy, a delightful combination (note sarcasm). But a glass of fresh OJ and a link to Knopf's Poem-a-Day website lifted my spirits this morning, and I wanted to share a poem I particularly enjoyed: "A Phone Call to the Future" by Mary Joe Salter.

The poem begins,

Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past...

...which is an idea that I love: the past, stranger than the future.

Then, after visiting the fifties and contrasting it with today, the poem concludes:

That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

Read the full poem.

American Visionary Arts Museum, and Creative DC's First Video

This weekend I took myself to the American Visionary Arts Museum (AVAM) in Baltimore, which I've been dying to visit - I knew I'd love it, and I did. (If you aren't sure what "visionary arts" means, read this.)

The main exhibit right now is All Faiths Beautiful (through August '08) and includes postcards from the PostSecret project on which a self-proclaimed atheist confesses to secretly believing in God, a preacher's wife confesses to secretly being an atheist, and on and on. The other artwork is just astounding - the materials used, the beliefs expressed... walking through it made me feel completely alive.

Plus, I'm a sucker for quotes, and there were quotes from the likes of Gandhi and Rumi sprinkled throughout (and, actually, an entire room showcasing illustrations inspired by Rumi's poetry, from the new compilation, One Song) - one of my favorites, which I've come across before, was: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience - We are spiritual beings having a human experience." -Pierre Theilhard de Chardin

I took the video below after I left the museum, en route to my car:



It's given me an idea: create a soundscape of DC through a series of videos like this one, where you focus in on an object and just absorb the sounds of the place/moment in time. If you want to create something like this - or already have a video that fits that bill - please link to it in your comments. I'd also love to showcase it here.