November 22, 2009
Category: Poets | 1 Comment »

Read this excellent poem recently featured in The New Yorker Fathers and Sons

October 8, 2009
Category: Language | No Comments »

Once, I thought the two methods of communicating–telling it slant or saying it plain–were mutually exclusive. If you’re saying something plainly using familiar syntax and common vocabulary, you cannot also be telling it slant after Emily Dickinson’s advice: “tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” But I’ve reconsidered. They key is Dickinson’s next line: “success in circuit lies,” or, in other words, be creative and strategic with your message. Telling it slant need not mean be obscure, opaque, shifty.

My criteria for a good poem is that it teaches and delights me. Further, the more people a particular poem succeeds in teaching and delighting, the better it is. I grant the importance of certain inbred, academic professional poems, but those poems and poets are perverse and often baffling. I prefer to champion what you might call Folk Poetry–the kinds of poems that are pithy, familiar, eager to enrich an average day.

In the context of Folk Poetry, I understand saying it plain to mean “the poem is accessible, you won’t walk away shaking your head” and I understand telling it slant to mean “vary a common theme, come to the idea from an unusual direction, shed a new light.” The best Folk poems teach and delight many people by being slant and plain in the senses I’ve described. They take you through terrain you know, then they nudge you onto the frontier; they extend your imagination, but they do so from within your existing faculties.

Tyler tells it slant. The painting is Squire Jack Porter.

October 1, 2009
Category: Books | No Comments »

You should enjoy a book or contemplate it. Many excellent books provide fodder for both activities, though C.S. Lewis says that enjoyment and contemplation cannot occur simultaneously. Suffice to say, your soul should reflect a healthy balance.

I like to imagine the author of my book sitting across from me in a chair that suits his personality. Wing back. Rocker. Bar stool. Folding. Bean bag. Stump. Witness stand. Et al.

Story or lecture: use your pen. Take notes. Scribble. Doodle. Make lists. Cross-reference. Look up vocabulary. Breakage of pace is a lame reason not to learn definitions. I keep two indices in the back blank pages. One for vocab, another for ideas or phrases I want to add to my mental furniture. Whatever you do, be able to give an account for the books you finish. Someone worthy of being quoted on a library card said, “the end of reading is not more books, it is more life.”

Note on vocabulary: the larger your vocabulary, the more meaningfully you can share experience with other people because you are able to call more thing by their proper names. Walk away from aggressive disarticulation….ness.

Another man said: literary experience mends the wounds without inhibiting the privilege of individuality. I recommend reading Experiment in Criticism in which said man deftly argues for judging a book based on how it is read instead of by who reads it.

Leave a trail through the book in case you get lost along the way and need to figure out where you drifted. Draw a map in case you become lost in the author’s neck of the woods on a future adventure. Write your name in the book. John Adams received his first book at the age of 12 and was so pleased with it he wrote his name it in–six times.

Ty on How to Read a Book

September 25, 2009
Category: Human Nature | No Comments »

Eat an apple, write an ode, put a tin pot on your head. Johnny walked the frontier planting orchards.

Video: Johnny Appleseed, American Folk Hero

September 24, 2009
Category: Human Nature | 4 Comments »

Reading and traveling outside wealthy, industrialized nations are two ways of learning one thing. Everyone fixing their eyes to this post lives in a soft age. This is a blessing in that you don’t have to fight for your life, offer sacrifices to stern gods for your crops, or burn your furniture to stay warm. This is a curse in that to temper your spirit you must arrest the norm and find hard, pure things. Whitman knew something about this and sang of barbaric yawps across rooftops. Dylan Thomas raged against the dying of the light. Of course, there are means besides poetry to suck the marrow out of life. Every now and then I catch glimpses of hard, pure things. But it takes guts to probe those moments instead of passing them by. It helps to be trained a certain way. To be hard (strong, honorable, attentive to beauty, sacrificial, curious, honest, deliberate, eloquent, wise), it takes a desire not to be soft.

When I think of rites of passage, I think of turning 16 and getting my driver’s license. For some reason I think of bar mitzvahs, though I’ve never been within a stone’s throw of one. I think of legal drinks on 21st birthdays. Fraternity hazing? Walking across a stage in a gown. Cheaper auto insurance when I turn 25. That Chris Farley ninja movie when he spills boiling water all over the other ninjas. These are rites watered-down. They don’t confer manhood in a clear way.

Rites of passage can help train souls to be a healthy hard. I am for formal rites of passage for boys. Any culture at any time will suffer if they fail to confer manhood to their boys. A culture will also suffer if they succeed in conferring a perverted or soppy expectation of what it means to be a man.

Fathers should conduct ceremonies and serve drinks, measure wits, take marks, celebrate the coming of age, give a speech, blow a horn, tell his son what is expected of him as a young man, and not in the manner of a bureaucratic tome of regulations. Rather let him present his son with something akin to an honor code. Whereas an excellent man is prudent, a good employee can follow rules; the distinction is that wisdom transforms obedience. If I want to raise a good man, I ought to be a good man. I will show my son what it looks like to be hard, to care about magnanimity and about beauty.

Ty on Rites of Passage

September 22, 2009
Category: Poets | 7 Comments »

“PoemaDay is a much needed poetic manna for our souls. Hearty congratulations on her first birthday.” ~Mako Fujimura, Founder & Creative Director of the International Arts Movement

“Congratulations to PoemaDay on the happy occasion of its first anniversary. PoemaDay helps fill a huge and important gap in literary culture by bringing the best of poetry easily to its audience. I hope its excellent offerings prove as habit-forming as a morning cup of coffee to people eager to stay fully alert and alive each day.” ~Dana Gioia, prize-winning poet & former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

“PoemaDay like all the best things–bread, water, sunlight–is beautifully unassuming but vital, part of the good life. Accomplished with Davey Talbot’s characteristic cool, warmth (those two things are not incompatible) and intelligence, PoemaDay has quietly enriched my working days these last twelve months and hugely extended my knowledge and enjoyment of poetry.” ~Michael Ward, author, Chaplain of St Peter’s College, Oxford & Associate Editor, PoemaDay

“Happy birthday to PoemaDay with thanks for all these rich images and phrases that feed the soul, a most essential daily bread.” ~Malcolm Guite, poet, singer-songwriter, author & Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge

September 22, 2009
Category: Language | No Comments »

The other week my beloved friend Tyler Blanski and I were talking about our lagging blogs. So we devised a plan. Each one of us wrote 10 prompts then we spliced our lists and agreed to blog on the same prompt every day or every other day. That’s what we’re up to, and ya’ll should bounce back and forth to see what we are up to. Ty blogs at by the rivers, not the highways and while you are there, don’t miss his Out From the Darkness album which he just put up for download, gratis. Our next three prompts are: Rites of Passage, How to Read a Book and Tell it Slant or Say it Plain.