Happy November!

Item 1 – Just in case we have another long break between posts, here is a link that will pass some time – The Longest Poem in the World courtesy of Twitter. It collects people’s tweets and splices them together in rhymed couplets, creating sometimes charming and always ephemeral results. Couplet of the moment:

Just stay positive and positive things will come…
were the but naked women and all the food at, hmmm???

Item 2 – American Life in Poetry. This is a weekly column written by p.otw.org favorite Ted Kooser. He features young and mostly unknown poets and couples it with a short musing of his own. A recent-ish column caught my eye due to the event it references.

It’s likely that if you found the original handwritten manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, “The Waste Land,” you wouldn’t be able to trade it for a candy bar at the Quick Shop on your corner. Here’s a poem by David Lee Garrison of Ohio about how unsuccessfully classical music fits into a subway.

Bach in the DC Subway

As an experiment,
The Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sang to the station
about why we should bother
to live.

A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.

and a video of Joshua Bell, the Bach-performing violinist in 2007.