| Starpoet Newsletter Vol. IX, No. XII |
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| News - Newsletters | |
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Saturday, 22 March 2008 | |
 The Starpoet Newsletter
Volume IX, No. XII Spring officially yesterday arrived
Today my brother celebrates his birthday
One less than I have
Being his big sister
Has certain advantages
Being older isn't one of them
Still
When we reach a century Eighteen months will matter little
Except that I
Will be there first Little Brother.
Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2008 C. E.
  Easter Sunday in Western Christianity. Osiris too has risen, much to the consternation of Rome.
Who are all these people
And why are they on my planet?
LJT
it's all about me
Poet Talk with Lisa Jain
Sometimes it seems I’ve devoured
An entire Shakespearean primer That threatens to erupt and control me If ever I let my guard down. Better that than copying any New Yorker poets
Or those chap book geniuses popular at Universities: Would I let Sappho swallow me whole Than follow that road most chosen. In a hundred years a small handful of us
Will be remembered outside of dilettante expertise; In four hundred, from Shakespeare to me, Only the luck few will survive to be Ever living for another day. Lisa Jain Thompson
March 2008 and something we don't want to talk about
Between Words and Action
We will not be out of
We couldn’t move the soldiers that fast Without looking like another Nam bug-out And leaving all our equipment behind. Somebody needs to do the hard math and count
The bodies -- American, Sunni, Kurd, Shia, and Afghan -- should we suddenly withdraw back into the safety Of a well feathered nest: we broke it, we own it, Until we all put it all back together again. Lisa Jain Thompson
March 2008 Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke,
chasing memories
Arthur C
Born
The first science fiction I ever bought
Was Sands of Mars by Arthur Clarke, In San Francisco, on vacation, With my mother and my grandparents While my father stayed in Not fond of big city relaxation. I must have been about ten,
Certainly no older than eleven or twelve, The paperback had small print And I remember asking my mother If I could have money to buy it. I had probably read Heinlein by then:
I devoured my library’s shelves, First the children’s, shortly after the adult’s Until I had run out of science fiction And went searching for other sources. I remember the cover, black background
With a painting of a red sanded planet, “The Sands of Mars” blazoned across the top And Arthur C. Clark prominently below -- I believe it cost me thirty-five cents For a memory that will last my lifetime. Lisa Jain Thompson
Born Died March 2008 In addition to his huge output of fiction and scientific books, Arthur C. Clarke left us with Three Laws.
1. If a scientist says that something is possible, then he is almost certainly right: if he says it is impossible, he is most probably wrong.
2. The limits of the possible can only be found by going beyond them into the impossible.
we, my doctor and I, have discovered I have a sinus infection.
either that or the plague.
Soft focus drifting
In to and out of reality, Hundred pound arms And half ton legs Dragging on mind and body.
No fire, no energy, Awake or Asleep,
Dead or Alive, Interchangeable states Passing for Life. Lisa Jain Thompson Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign. Then answer this, Senator: If [the Reverend Jeremiah] Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright's rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?
The extenuation of black hate speech as a product of white racism, is not new. It's the Jesse Jackson politics of racial grievance, expressed in Ivy League diction and Harvard Law nuance. That's why the speech made so many liberal commentators swoon: It bathed them in racial guilt while flattering their intellectual pretensions. An unbeatable combination.
-- Charles Krauthammer
it seems like I've had it forever
Some Bloody Morning
Body turned demanding traitor, Lisa Jain Thompson
March 2008
New ideas pass through three periods:
1) It can't be done.
2) It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing.
3) I knew it was a good idea all along!
-- Sir Arthur C. Clarke
music critic
R & R
Paul is this muddled old man
Seduced into marriage and divorce; John died a rock and roll death, Never dealing with aging foolishness. To this day, Paul remains British,
Music hall and knighthood; John was and is American, Working class and scruffy. One was all charming cleverness,
Touching and sometimes cloying; The other, a well paid rebel, Defyingly intellectual. The music tells it all.
Lisa Jain Thompson
March 2008 rumination
Circle of Life
Another day, Lisa Jain Thompson
March 2008 Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating
as reading sex manuals without the software. -- Sir Arthur C. Clarke
 L. A. Woman
Dahlia
Split smile, split body,
Ripper removal of everything important, Just another young woman in the Looking to hang her star in Hollywoodland, A fairytale gone wrong, like so many are. Headlines and gossip,
Vicarious photographs and highly sourced rumors That today would be videos twenty-four seven on cable, Running competitively with the latest on Britney And naked pictures of this year’s American Idols. We’ve come a long way in sixty years
That we don’t even notice what we’ve become, Feeding on faceless conversations and woebegone images, While we mark days off a calendar of cute puppies and kittens. Lisa Jain Thompson
March 2008  The Poet Starpoet
Stability of the Random Variable
It is highly improbable that I am Sappho Even less so, I would be bard and globe,
Or whoever wrote what would become good folios, To arise from the seldom and vagrant desperate inkpot, Double stirred by the muses for their various amusements, Re-blotting a little Lisa Jain Thompson
March 2008 If a virtual particle exists a moment too long,
Shit happens And Border Collies come out the other end.
LJT
 Copyright © Lisa Jain Thompson 1995-2008. Further distribution of this newsletter in its entirety is authorized. Email your letters and postcards or visit her contact page at the Starpoet website |
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, 22 March 2008 ) | |
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