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Poem of the Week (11/28/2010)
“Tonight I Can Write…”
by Pablo Neruda
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The Identity of Betty Rubble
Another installment from the Betty & Wilma series. This one serves as a followup to the previous piece. Hope you enjoy!
-J
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The Identity of Betty Rubble
The robberies so far had been calculated risks and calculated successes. A dozen small miracles or feats of fate had transpired to get Wilma and Betty and Fred and Barney away cleanly each time—clean being a relative term. There were descriptions of them in a few newspapers and a little expose had run on television back in Bedrock, calling them the “Bedrock Bandits.” And now that they were four robberies deep maybe a few bastions of law and order here and there were beginning to catch wind of their spree, but the media, somehow, still seemed in the dark. Or maybe they just had bigger fish to fry. Dinosaurs were disappearing by the herdful of late and there seemed to be more theories than assholes and, thankfully, the assholes were good at taking up airtime and keeping little things like small town bank robberies to themselves.
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The Return of the Infamous Wilma & Betty
Next weekend (January 30th) I’ll once again be co-hosting the next installment of “The Cure for the Common Reading” with my good friend Justin Edge. Last time, I posted the opening section of my piece for folks to preview and everyone seemed to enjoy that. So here we go again!
This time (in honor of my good friend Bill Shipman) I’ll be offering up another installment of the infamous “Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty” series. This time the girls are armed and, therefore, even more dangerous than usual!
But you gotta come out to Jengo’s (814 Princess Street) at 7:00 on Saturday to find out how the girls got to this point and, more importantly, what happens next! 🙂
The Further Adventures of Wilma & Betty:
Episode X: How It Does or Does Not End
It was 4:59 on a Friday afternoon and outside the 1st National Bank of Bedrock the sky was gray. A steady, dreary rain was falling. The two women just did make it through the front door of the bank as the clock struck 5 pm. The security guard pulled the door shut behind them and closed the lock home.
He was a young, broad-shouldered boy. Reminiscent of a young Dennis Quaidstone.
To be sure, he was a handsome boy. A handsome boy that might some day ripen into a handsome man—if his life was long enough and hard enough and he made just enough bad decisions.
“You ladies got lucky,” the young guard said, smiling a perfect smile.
Betty grinned, looking both guilty and disingenuous.
Wilma sighed. “Yes,” she said. “We did get lucky.” She smiled her apology. “I wish I could say the same for you.”
Then she pulled out her pistol and shot the young guard just above the knee.
He crumpled with a scream.
“Here we go,” Wilma said.
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Poster design by Subpar Design
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Poetry Talk with Bryan Dietrich (Part 2)
As promised, here is part two of my interview with poet Bryan Dietrich. In typical fashion, Bryan amazes.
JM: Talk to me a little more about the sonnet crown. Your history with it, your experiences, your thoughts on its challenges, pitfalls, blind alleys, etc.
BD: The crown is a form I first discovered in graduate school. I was reading entries for the Southern California Anthology when I came across a sequence of poems that blew me away. I recognized them as sonnets, and there were seven of them, but I didn’t know at the time that this was a recognized form. I’m not even sure that I noticed the repetition of lines. It wasn’t until I passed this particular piece on to the head of the program, and he said, “Oh, a crown,” that I had any idea. All I knew was that each of the parts seemed grander than the whole. Even without knowing the form, I had instinctively intuited how each movement, each individual sonnet, built upon a common theme and came to a kind of resolution no single sonnet could have accomplished alone.
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