Monday, December 20, 2010

Yet Another Tribute to The Greatest Movie Never Made

Review: Jeff Bridges headlines the triumphant 'True Grit' for the Coen Brothers

The Dallas Morning News


As a longtime fan of Joel and Ethan Coen, one of the things that I have always taken a special delight in is the love they have for language. 

After all, it was a line of dialogue maybe five minutes into the first film of theirs that I saw, 1986's "Raising Arizona," where I fell in love with them:  "Her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."  I still remember reading the script for "Miller's Crossing" a few months before it came out and just reading and re-reading that opening monologue out loud, basking in the cascade of language.  "The Big Lebowski" is like a ballet of profanity, every stammer and shouted swear a perfect punctuation for the unbalanced adventures of the Dude.  "Fargo" makes high comedy of a regional accent, and nobody finds a more adorable way around a sentence than Marge Gunderson.  And in their unproduced adaptation of "To The White Sea," there's an amazing monologue at the beginning, straight out of the James Dickey novel, that I could picture them cackling about as they wrote it. ... (more)

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Best Buy for Literate Person on your List --NOT A COOK BOOK but filled with delicious soul food

 DON'T LEAVE HUNGRY: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review



From Nancy Simpson's "Living Above the Frost Line":

...And now for the "main course," as Guy Owen called them, arranged and introduced by decade, with Smith's usual clarity of style and presentation! As the dust jacket notes, this anthology "charts the development of this influential journal decade by decade, making clear that although it has close ties to a particular region, it has consistently maintained a national scope, publishing poets from all over the United States. SPR’s goal has been to celebrate the poem above all, so although there are poems by major poets here, there are many gems by less famous, perhaps even obscure, writers too. Here are 183 poems by nearly as many poets, from A. R. Ammons, Kathryn Stripling Byer, James Dickey, Mark Doty, Claudia Emerson, David Ignatow, and Carolyn Kizer to Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Howard Nemerov, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, and Charles Wright."

But wait--why rush through a feast? In this first week of National Poetry Month, let's sit back and anticipate what waits for us tomorrow, several poems from this beautiful and generous anthology. And because these few poems I offer will, I hope, serve to whet the appetite for more, here is the publication information and a link to the University of Arkansas Press. (Copied article written by Kathryn Stripling Byer April 1, 2009.)
Want to buy a copy? click on University of Arkansas Press URL
http://www.uapress.com/titles/sp09/smith-dlh.html