July 10, 2009

Twending Tweets, 7/3 – 7/10

Here are the five most-followed links from my Twitter stream, according to HootSuite. You can follow @mhartford for similar things.

Three Found Haiku from the Found Poetry Project: McDonald’s, the YMCA, and Beverly, MA, through a poet’s eye
Geek the library: how does your library bring out your inner geek?
Partially Clips: This is Not a Metaphor: from way back in May–talking animals = parable
James Kelman rues Booker prize win from Times Online: also from May, James Kelman reflects on the negative aspects of winning the Booker in 1994 for his phenomenal novel How Late It Was, How Late (if you haven’t read this novel yet, you must; it’s the best adult read-aloud since Ulysses, but make sure the weens are abed: it contains 4,000+ occurrences of a solid Anglo-Saxon word starting with “F” worth at least 13 Scrabble points)
Authors lobby UK government for statutory school libraries from the Guardian: Philip Pullman, Michael Rosen and Francesca Simon petition for universal access to quality public school libraries; and, to paraphrase Sammy from Mr. Kelman’s book, for f*** sake, why shouldn’t all kids have access to a f***ing library?

April 6, 2009

a haiku for Eleanor Arnason

Vultures circle low,
seeking Winter’s thawed corpses;
birds return in Spring.

One of my favorite science fiction writers is Eleanor Arnason; if you haven’t read her, I highly recommend the short stories The Grammarian’s Five Daughters and Knapsack Poems, and the novel Ring of Swords. Her work is smart and insightful, very much in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin.

Also smart and insightful is her occasional blog, where she writes about science fiction, politics, economics, and nature. She lives in Minneapolis, so her observations about the changing seasons are a treat for me to read; she notices things that I don’t.

Today she noticed that the vultures had returned to the skies over our rivers, and offhandedly noted that “[i]t calls for a haiku, but I can’t think of one right now.” Though I’ve noted with my recent string of juvenilia that I gave up poetry about twenty years ago, I managed to come up with a little something, which I’ve inflicted above.