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Showing posts with label Valerie Valdes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Valerie Valdes. Show all posts

Friday, February 10, 2012

Toylit For February 10, 2012


Toylit For February 10, 2012

Science Failure, The Victory of Failure, and The Psychology of Victory and Failure.

Featuring:

Elegy for Sisyphus, Obituary for Roger Boisjoly, by Valerie Valdes

Miles of Human Files, On Social Media Millionaires, by Khakjaan Wessington

Papier Mâché Jihad, #twitterfoundpoem, by Khakjaan Wessington

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Elegy for Sisyphus [Today's News Poem, by Valerie Valdes, February 10, 2012]


Elegy for Sisyphus [Today's News Poem, February 10, 2012]


in memoriam, Roger Boisjoly

He rolled boulders off his lawn for hours
every day until his muscles were chained
to exhaustion, until sleep stayed precariously
balanced in his grasp instead of falling
downhill like a punishment for his failure.
"We were talking to the right people," he said, but
seven astronauts were dead, their faces replayed
nonstop on news channels as the shuttle exploded
every time he closed his eyes. Cancer
finally killed what guilt tried to crush: a good man
shouldering the weight of his own impotence.
For almost thirty years he pushed
other engineers to do more, say more, to swear
on words binding as the Styx, where he now waits
quietly for the ferryman to row him across, to a field
green as a Florida summer, with no stones in sight.

"The NASA officials on a conference call didn't want to hear it. The shuttle program managers were desperate to prove they could launch reliably. When do you want me to launch, one of them said, next April? A year later, Boisjoly suffered from disabling headaches. He moved boulders off his lawn all day so he'd be exhausted enough to sleep at night. And he huddled in the corner of a couch, thin and tearful, his arms folded tight, ready to speak out."




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Miles of Human Files [Today's News Poem, February 10, 2012]


Miles of Human Files [Today's News Poem, February 10, 2012]

A loneliness file: apartment, an isle—
Classified, epic, layered with red brick.
If the marquee calls in the hall of halls
As wind does battle with door-frame rattles,
Watch the water non-water monitor
And touch the unknown; the fleeting, the flown.
Burn your mascara, corneas, era.
You have indexed lusts and electron busts
And changed the texture of surface: sex-pure,
Gloss and odious—flaws and hideous.

“Imagine looking for a house in San Francisco or one of the nicer parts of Silicon Valley, which are already among the most expensive parts of the country. Now imagine having to bid against a legion of newly minted Facebook millionaires.”


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Saturday, April 02, 2011

Tales From The CombatWords Arena. 26.75 More Hours of Combat Left!

http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/combatwords-april-1-2011-nostalgia.html

If you've been avoiding CombatWords because you are threatened by the idea of competitive writing, maybe you should be. I want you to note the timestamps for this combat after you admire the quality of the offered samples. If you can't take the heat, that's cool, but consider being an anonymous chicken and critiquing the comps. I mean, you might bring up valid points, but trust me, nobody is going to feel threatened by someone too scared to step into the arena him or herself.

Onyxsupersonics (April 1, 2011 4:52 PM PST http://onyxsupersonics.blogspot.com/):
"my first trip to philadelphia, my first trip to new york, when i saw guernica at moma, my first flight to london ... i always thought i could do it again and it would be even better ... sometimes i did it again and it was, sometimes i did it again and it wasn't, but usually i couldn't and i'll never know whether it would've been or wouldn't have been ... "

Valerie Valdes (April 1, 2011 5:32 PM PST http://candleinsunshine.com/asthemoonclimbs/):
""In Cuba, it wasn't like this"
was the common joke
when something bad happened
in America."

Amalia Dillin (April 1, 2011 6:42 PM PST http://blog.amaliadillin.com/):
"My cousins and I jockeyed for the center seat, crawling over one another, climbing, twisting. The hammock twisted and one of them was hanging upside down on the outside, clinging like a monkey. We helped him back in, pulling him up like a sailors dragging a drowned man from the sea. "

Steven Marty Grant (April 1, 2011 7:30 PM PST http://roomspimp.blogspot.com/):
"Of course I know
I fought with her too
but those battlefields
are green and over grown;
Appomattox, Utah beach,
Hue City. "

Seann McCollum (April 2, 2011 11:34 AM PST http://carrioncall.blogspot.com/):
"In all the years since the weekend you
“didn’t sleep with” that fellow
you met at GothFest at the Trocadero"

I can't sit this one out--looks too fun. It's an extra good combat this week which is why you should try it out. I respect anyone willing to fall flat on his or her face in public, even if not for the quality of composition.

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Saturday, March 05, 2011

Tales From the Combatwords Arena: Randomness

Anton Gourman (http://forpuck.wordpress.com/) won last week's Combatwords, so he selected this week's topic. You can see him win here: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-25-2011-friendship.html

Read this week's combat here: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/03/combatwords-march-4-2011-randomness.html

Valerie Valdes http://candleinsunshine.com/asthemoonclimbs/:
""When the time comes, choose
the top one." Lucky numbers
six, nine, forty-two."

Amalia Dillin http://blog.amaliadillin.com/:
"I am Europa, and this bull is my god. Zeus, Poseidon, Jehovah, Allah, Odin, Thor, or Amun-Ra. He leans into my touch, and I am blessed. I am alive. I am electric."

Seann McCollum http://carrioncall.blogspot.com/:
"Instructions tumble from your unclenched fist.
Each word can be interpreted six ways..."

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Friday, February 11, 2011

Savage Disobedience [Combatwords Poem, from February 4, 2011]. Also, Combatwords JUST started.

Savage Disobedience [Combatwords Poem, from February 4, 2011]
From: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-4-2011-mischief.html
Wanna play? Go here: http://combatwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/combatwords-february-11-2011-sales.html The game is aggressive or tame, depending on the readers and players.

How does it feel to attract the whole mob?
Web intersections by hand and bike rage
Circles around you. They're calling; you come
Reaching for drivers like you—they've had it.
One of them swings at the crowd with truck door.
Missing, he leaps to the street and flings bikes
Out of the way and the crowd's confused. Pride
Strays to an anger—you call out, "hold hands
Break for the light and the traffic shall pass."
Spirits of violence giggle, slap off
Glasses and push you; they're balling threats, fists.
Shouldn't pedestrians trump their bike ride?
Shouldn't a carefully argued speech sway
Cyclists protesting cars... is it you?

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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Progress [Guest News Poem, by Valerie Valdes, July 21, 2010]

Progress [Guest News Poem, by Valerie Valdes, July 21, 2010]

A process unending, as slow as a glacier
receding from valleys left fertile behind it.
So chickens are born from Jurassic ancestors,
a commonplace phoenix with eons-old ashes.
But mankind believed he had already finished
the circular race that each creature is running
in small, ceaseless circles concentrically soaring
up toward that pinnacle: nature’s perfection.
To find human footsteps deflowering virginal
forests instead of revisiting pathways
worn down by familiar forms of a phenotype
reduces exclusive to merely conventional.
As mountains are scaled, each believed to be tallest,
beyond them clouds part to reveal peaks much higher.
* * * * *
Adventures in Very Recent Evolution (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html)
"Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.
“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany."
--Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, July 19, 2010

The very talented Valerie Valdes maintains her own site here: http://candleinsunshine.com/asthemoonclimbs/ and you should read it when you're done here

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