Amaud Jamaul Johnson and Reading Aloud

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Sorry some photos are repeats, but they fit the subjects to some extent.













Thanks to Paula at http://dailypensacolaphoto.blogspot.com/ for tipping us off, over a week ago, to Amaud Jamaul Johnson, a poet I did not know. Here are two of my favorites so far, which seem to have at least some connection to recent posts here: the care and feeding of birds and other young, along with cruelty, and the rigors of survival in both the animal and human realms.

From the Fishouse: Amaud Jamaul Johnson: Portion Given

Aesthetics by Amaud Jamaul Johnson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

The subjects here are worth a poem, and I find the images precise, vivid, and tough; I predict they will be memorable.

Mr. Johnson reads well too--no histrionics, slow, steady pacing, and a respect for his own decisions about line and stanza breaks. These are virtues that some serious writers seem to ignore, and I don't know why.

Maybe the event that the idol worshiping majority want is a carny act, or a strip tease, or a soap opera. And someone has clued in the writers and those fawning dilettantes in the audience--but not the curmudgeons, who are present because they care about writing as an improvement upon ramshackle daily utterances delivered at breakneck speed so they can spear straight through the gizzard of what the other guy was trying to say.

Did I get carried away there? Was that excessive?

I can be fine, by the way, with carny acts and strip teases if they're well done. Soap operas, not so much. "Well-done soap opera" is a gash of oxymoron, a bucket of contradiction. It is what they listen to in Hell, where they fill a tin chalice with fava beans, cliches and phony, overwrought gestures. Then they talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk . . . .

In the small sampling I've seen so far, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, rises nicely high above that. The material invites him to descend, but he reigns it in, keeps on the high road. I'll be reading more.


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The Care and Feeding of the Young. Birds.

I just watched a mother goldfinch jam food into the beak of her teeny-bopper son, who, by the way, looked big enough to go out and get his own seeds for brunch.

This spring and summer the difficulty of life as a bird has registered with more clang than usual. Even in the bird welfare state of my back yard, there’s the feral cat to watch out for. A couple of years ago, a hawk showed up twice, sat out back, staring, a breeze in her feathers. The song birds hid for at least two days after my last sighting of the red tail.

For the chickadee and nuthatch, there’s the impressive labor of flying each seed to a branch to pound it open before gulping. (It appears that birds do not chew, so how much pleasure can there be as reward for the work?).


The cardinals aren’t that private or skittish, but there’s still the pounding to go through.

Of course those appealing birds must fight through the hoards of sparrows and squirrels, as common and aggressive as mice.

All of that reminded me of the injured hummingbird video a friend sent yesterday.

YouTube - Peter & Peeps -- Rescued Baby Hummingbird Fed in Hand by Mother

It’s very much a feel-good story, but both the hummer and the goldfinch moms reminded me of the earnest vigor in the parents’ feeding, the avian variation on the old slang, "gag me with a spoon." It really looks like a brief attack on the young, their punishment for begging so shamelessly.

Maybe I’ll remember all this next time.
And as great provider (father?) to all these urchins, there is of course the issue of how much is going on that I don’t see—nurturing, sharing, cuddling, predation, itching, illness, death. About what am I absolutely clueless and how much of it is there?

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MICHIGAN, LATE AUGUST

Year after year, I’m surprised at how early autumn begins.

If you can avoid the Labor Day mayhem on the roads, think about a two-lane trip soon. I'm recently back from a two-lane route of about 150 of the 200 miles from western Michigan to the Detroit suburbs,


and every leg of the 150 was a barge of relief from contemporary hustle, crowding, and obnoxious drivers. The patches of forest and the endless, rolling farm country were magnificent, though I worried about the dessicated corn crop in central Michigan, as if I knew what I was looking at.


Then came the last leg, into the suburbs--a re-immersion, a dunking, in suburban hellfire. Do people honestly think they’re so important that they need to, deserve to, rush like that--to crowd me like that? Who’s going to care if they take an extra five minutes or an hour? Maybe the boss, of course, but I wonder.

Are there any good songs about the joys of the freeway? Did the Wabash Cannonball need eight lanes? Is anybody crowding her? Here’s an oldie I used to worship, maybe still do. It’s about the journey. You can get the destinations on TV.

YouTube - Ian and Sylvia - Four Strong Winds (CBC TV 1986)

Well, if anybody wants some recommendations for routes in southern Indiana, central Ontario, or western Michigan, give me a buzz. I’ve lucked into some this summer. And yes, I planned well, if I say so myself.


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Great Speckled Bird, Beauty and the Beholder

Roy Acuff (1903-1992) was known as the King of Country Music. If you're in a hurry . . . why? But if you must skip ahead, the actual song begins a little beyond the one-minute mark.

YouTube - Roy Acuff - Great Speckled Bird



YouTube - A Female Guinea Fowl Call by farmingfriends.avi

About the photos: A farm in southern Indiana. I heard a sound and thought the car was breaking down. Then the flock appeared.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, "Glory be to God for dappled things."

"The person who is widely credited with coining the saying in its current form is Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), who wrote many books, often under the pseudonym of 'The Duchess'. In Molly Bawn, 1878, there's the line "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", which is the earliest citation of it that I can find in print." (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/59100.html).

And this just in from Wikipedia: Guineafowl have a long history of domestication, mainly involving the Helmeted Guineafowl; in the UK they were usually known as "Gleanies". The young (called "keets") are very small at birth. The keets are kept in a brooder box inside the house until about six weeks of age, before being moved into a proper coop or enclosure. They eat lice, worms, ants, spiders, weedseeds, and ticks while on range or they can also eat chicken layer crumbles (one kind of commercial bird food) while housed in a coop. The cooked flesh of guineafowl resembles chicken in texture, with a flavour somewhere between chicken and turkey.

Keep reading. Quitters never win, and a winner never quits.

"The Great Speckled Bird" is a Southern hymn whose lyrics were written by the Reverend Guy Smith. The song is in the form of AABA and has a 12 bar count. It is based on Jeremiah 12:9, "Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her; come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field, come to devour." It was recorded in 1936 by Roy Acuff. It was also later recorded by Johnny Cash and Kitty Wells (both in 1959), Hank Locklin (1962) . . . .” (Wikipedia).

The tune is the same apparently traditional melody used in the folk song "I Am Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes," originally recorded in the 1920s. The same melody was later used in the 1952 country hit "The Wild Side of Life," sung by Hank Thompson, and the even more successful "answer song" performed by Kitty Wells called "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels."

All four of the songs are in the Banjo52 Hall of Fame.

YouTube - Roy Acuff - Great Speckled Bird

YouTube - Marty Robbins I'm Thinkng Tonight Of My Blue Eyes

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The Collins Kids again, Jacques' "Seven Ages of Man," "Fern Hill"

If you'd rather, feel free to skip to the bottom with Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, for I realize I've gotten carried away with the Collins Kids. It's just that I still cannot figure out how, growing up at the edge of Appalachia, I completely missed them, unless they were just too far west, on an Oklahoma farm, then in California show biz.

Here are some tidbits: Lorrie Collins was Ricky Nelson’s first steady girlfriend (http://www.rockabillyhall.com/CollinsKids1.html.). She also performed with Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. After Lorrie's retirement to motherhood in 1961, “the Collins Kids remained silent until they reunited to much acclaim in 1993. By that time Larry had become a successful producer and writer, penning country classics like ‘Delta Dawn’ and ‘You’re The Reason God Made Oklahoma.’” (www.ponderosastomp.com/).

YouTube - Tanya Tucker-Delta Dawn

YouTube - Collins Kids, Bimbo's, San Francisco, December 1993

YouTube - Collin Kids - Documentary about Lorrie and Larry

So maybe there are some happy endings in the lives of country music artists.

All this leads to the too familiar theme of the stages of life, so here is Jacques (remember to Anglify it to "Jay-Queez," though I never learned why) in Shakespeare's As You Like It, with his Seven Ages of Man speech.

YouTube - "7 Ages of Man" from "As You Like It" (Nicholas Pennell)

And here again is Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill." (Today I'm finding Wordsworth just embarrassingly gassy. The Welshman is concise by comparison.).

Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Tell me where else you're going to find Rockabilly child stars, Shakespeare, and Dylan Thomas under one umbrella, and everybody getting along just fine.

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The Collins Kids and Wordsworth, or Why I Don't Get Rap

Photo: The Young, All Ears.
(near South Haven, Michigan)

Maybe they were on WWVA in Wheeling, WV and Grand Ol' Opry on WSM in Nashville, but somehow I missed the Collins Kids in the 1950s. Thanks to Sandy-- http://www.blogger.com/profile/03307968128182359860--who recently posted about Ricky Nelson's singing sons, I clicked around in a fit of nostalgia and ended up with an introduction to the Collins Kids, a brother and sister act, plus a reacquaintance with the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Brenda Lee, Jack Scott and some others. If you're in the mood for, or actually need, the soft chaos of wandering backward, then click away, not only at my offerings, but also down the right side of "the page" at YouTube. Wow.

YouTube - The Collins Kids-Chantilly Lace

YouTube - collins kids

YouTube - Collin Kids - Documentary about Lorrie and Larry

YouTube - Rick Nelson Garden Party 1985

And in case you're about to complain that there's no poetry today, here are two passages from Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode." Yes, it was fuel for the movie Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;— ...

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;

In the primal sympathy

Which having been must ever be;

In the soothing thoughts that spring

Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

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Wallace Stevens, "Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock." South Haven, Michigan.

I haven't made anyone look at sailboats or the Stevens' poem since Febuary, so quit complaining.

Pretty picture. Menacing poem.
Simple picture. Complex poem.
Comforting picture. Challenging poem, maybe a kind of in your face poem that says, "You ain't no old sailor. An old sailor was a friend of mine. That's right, I knew an old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, and you, Sir, Lord and Lady Lace, in your white night gowns, you are no old sailor. Neither is she or that little lap dog, that little rat terrier feist."

Yin and Yang.

Today's big water is Lake Michigan at the town of South Haven--a touristy but tasteful little burg. I recommend it, especially if the alternative is Ontario's ballyhooed town of Tobermory at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula. In searching for scenes for like these, it was a big disappointment a couple years ago, especially with regard to lodging.

As a native Buckeye, I hate to admit it, but every once in awhile I see what these native Michiganders have to crow about.

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock by Wallace Stevens : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.