Yep — that’s right. Three of my poems have been published in the Winter 2014 edition of Open Palm Print, a small literary print journal based in mid-Michigan. It’s a publication put together with obvious love and care and you can order a copy online so you don’t have to live in the Mitten to treat your eyes to the wonderful work it contains. It probably helps, though.
The three poems in question — Riding in Cars with Werewolves, Not All Hamsters Die in Unusual Circumstances, and Press Conference for a Missing Son — were all written within days of each other during last year’s National Poetry Writing Month. Or NaPoWriMo for short. Or NaPo for even shorter. NaPo is a bit of a misnomer as it is an International event where poets from around the globe commit to writing a new poem every day throughout the month of April. 2013 was my first attempt at NaPo and while I didn’t manage to hit the target of thirty, I managed fifteen new poems and I count that as something of a success. As a result, my list of Titles I’d Really Like to Use at Some Point took a serious hit.
The thing about NaPo is that it forces you to find inspiration from sources one would probably overlook and it really means that anything remotely approaching a kernel of an idea has to be popped and bathed in sweet, sweet buttery drizzle. It’s amazing what comes out at the end of this process. Of course, not all of the fifteen make the grade but I’m happy with enough of them to convince me this was a worthwhile endeavor and this year, twelve days in, I have eleven poems down.
Press Conference is without a doubt the most solemn of the trio and was inspired by such an event I saw on the local news, the finer points of which I’ve long forgotten. What I do remember about that real-life conference was the strange things the mother said about her missing son. There was nothing particularly controversial, but there were some odd details mentioned, things that probably meant quite a bit to the poor woman. Either way, it highlighted to me the various ways we deal with stress and some of the words that leap from brain to mouth without filter under these extraordinary circumstances.
Hamsters is far more light-hearted. The previous day’s poem — No Long Books — was about the (continued) impending demise of my elderly dog and still in that cheery frame of mind, I set about writing something of a eulogy to a beloved family pet. Because they seem to frequently pass on as a result of various household accidents, I imagined that such an impassioned speech about lowly Brer Hamster may be quite amusing, even more so if the hamster in question’s passing was unusually devoid of drama. It just died. I toyed with, and ultimately dismissed, the idea of having a goldfish being the focus but ended up using it as a punctuation point to a poem later in the month. For your information, that goldfish also died. Baked in a plastic bag. Lovely.
The last poem — Werewolves — is a spin on the whole Twilight nonsense and tells the tale of a father coming to terms with the fact that his teenage daughter is dating a supernatural hairy beast and planning on inviting him over for dinner. This title sat on my list for more than a year and is basically a rip-off of the 2001 Drew Barrymore movie, Riding in Cars with Boys. I’m particularly happy with the outcome of this one and there are some individual lines I’m rather surprised that I managed to write: the vampirish “those pale high school boys/ who led their Xbox Lives/ buried in windowless basements/ shrinking from daylight/ to feed a 64-bit bloodlust” and the dual meaning that’s found in “They’d understand each other’s cycles” probably being my picks of the bunch.
So there you have it. Three poems. An embarrassment of riches.
You can order a copy of Open Palm Print at four bucks a pop and check out a preview of an edition by heading over to http://www.openpalmprint.com/.
Remember the good old days? You know, when every movie didn’t need to be a comic-book tie-in? Yeah, so do I.
Anyway. Marching on.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the latest in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of Marvel comic-book translations, which judging from the accompanying trailers (Guardians of the Galaxy, and the unbearably pretentious sounding X-Men: Days of Futures Past) is being mined for all its worth. Surprisingly, for me at least, this outing isn’t all that bad. It has a strong story and is well enough acted by a cast who have no qualms at some of the ridiculous lines the team of writers insists they say.
Set a couple of years after the Battle of New York, Captain America aka Steve Rogers (a ridiculously buff Chris Evans) is settling quite nicely into contemporary life with his wee notebook of pop culture things he needs to look up on the internets. Along with Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johannson), he’s sent off to rescue hostages, including members of SHIELD from a ship in the Indian Ocean. Once there, it seems like head good guy, Nick Storm (Samuel L. Jackson) has given Romanoff a sub-mission of her own — to steal some data on a USB stick from the ship’s computer that will eventually prove that some members of SHIELD aren’t perhaps the good guys we’ve been led to believe. All this happens with a backdrop of surveillance and approved drone strikes as SHIELD plans to launch three really, really big helicarriers (innocuously titled Operation Insight) into the air that can read a terrorist’s DNA remotely and so has a capability of taking out anyone on the planet it deems to be a target. What could possibly go wrong?
It’s a storyline very much of the age and asks the question if a society can ever be free once it’s surrendered its liberty. “Trust no one,” Cap is instructed once the bad guys start coming out of the woodwork and while Cap and Romanoff run around trying to decrypt the data on the USB stick, it maintains a very credible level of paranoia while not taking itself so seriously that it can’t laugh at itself. The cameo from Stan Lee is great and there’s a grave stone inscription that pleasingly nods its head to an indirectly related movie that will surely coax a smile from those who spot it. Visually as well, it’s very strong. Those helicarriers really are exceptionally big indeed and when one of them is accidentally backs into a skyscraper, it’s difficult not to be impressed before thinking about the insurance costs.
It’s not all good news, though.
Robert Redford is oddly distracting as the head bad guy, his wrinkled face now providing a shocking counterpoint to a head of hair that would be quite at home in One Direction.
It’s also very, very long. Not in terms of the whole — it tips the scales at 136 minutes, which isn’t all that extravagant these days — but in its component parts. Pretty much every scene feels a good minute or two longer than it needs to be. The opening movement where SHIELD storms the ship in the Indian Ocean goes on for so long that I developed scurvy. The scene where Cap is sitting at an old friend’s bedside felt like visiting hour at the hospital. And do we really need to see a thousand nameless evil henchmen shooting at the shield (rather than Captain America’s kneecaps, for example) every time a fight scene breaks out? Wouldn’t nine hundred do?
Perhaps most damning, for a movie which seems to be based around freedom and due process, it’s a little contradictory that one of the characters who bestows these values shoots a bad guy through the heart when surely he could’ve been arrested and tried, essentially stamping on the moral compass that had guided the movie up to that point. Did I say “little”? I meant “entirely”.
But for yet another comic book movie, it’s entertaining enough to get pass marks, even if it does insist you sit through to the end of the credits for a ten second scene that isn’t worth the wait but will have fanboys and girls squeeing in delight because it’s the done thing.
Words. Sentences. Stuff. 