Tabatha Yeatts: The Opposite of Indifference

The National Recording Registry is a list of sound recordings that "are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States." The registry was established by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000.
~Wikipedia

Happy Poetry Friday! I heard recently that the Library of Congress added the latest "Sound Recordings of the Year" to their National Recording Registry, including songwriter and singer Bill Withers' Ain't No Sunshine.

Mr. Withers was inspired to write Ain't No Sunshine by a movie! (Days of Wine and Roses, I think)

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
And this house just ain't no home
Anytime she goes away

Bill Withers sounded amazing live. Take a listen:



He didn't write very many songs. I can't remember exactly how he put it, but he said he wrote just enough that he had one when he needed it.

Bill Withers also said, upon being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: "What few songs I wrote during my brief career, there ain't a genre that somebody didn't record them in. I'm not a virtuoso, but I was able to write songs that people could identify with. I don't think I've done bad for a guy from Slab Fork, West Virginia." He thought being from West Virginia encouraged him to write Lean on Me because rural people were more likely to help each other.

About writing Lovely Day:
"The way [co-writer] Skip was, every day was just a lovely day. He was an optimist. If I had sat down with the same music and my collaborator had been somebody else with a different personality, it probably would have caused something else to cross my mind lyrically."



From Just the Two of Us:
We look for love, no time for tears
Wasted water's all that is
And it don't make no flowers grow

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Reflections on the Teche has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Margaret!

To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee—
one clover, and a bee,
and revery.
The revery alone will do,
if bees are few.
– Emily Dickinson

For Art Thursday, The honey harvest by Riccardo Pellegrini. I'm not exactly sure what he's doing here, but it looks like he's not very well-protected!

The honey harvest (1892)
by Riccardo Pellegrini

May you find what you Need here.
~Mon Rovîa


For Music Monday, songs from Mon Rovîa and John Prine. Mon Rovîa says that when he writes songs, "he dials into something within, a process he calls 'downloading from the source,' and song springs out." (Teen Vogue)



John Prine, Fish and Whistle:

From the Latin word for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work collaged entirely from other authors’ verses or passages. In their earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute, such as those by Byzantine empress Eudocia Augusta, which paid homage to Homer.
~Poetry Foundation

Happy Poetry Friday! How was your week?


An inspiring found poem today. Doesn't Elinor Ann Walker do a lovely job of stitching these lines together?

A Cento of Serene Length
by Elinor Ann Walker
title after Gertrude Stein

My body craves dresses, a single seam falling,
flowers swirling in a pattern,
a coral neck scarf. A hand (not mine)
restless under each buffeting layer,

so I alter the pattern to fit a phantom of me,
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths.
I began to feather-stitch a ring around the moon.

I have spread my dreams under your feet,
folded my sorrows. I have. I have...


read the rest here

Sources: Kim Addonizio, Mary Jo Bang, Andrea Blancas Beltran, Victoria Chang, Toi Derricotte, Rachel Hadas, Hazel Hall (more than one line), Saeed Jones, Deborah Paredez, Linda Pastan, Angela Shaw, Anya Silver, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, May Swenson, Chase Twichell, William Butler Yeats (more than one line).

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Robyn Hood Black is hosting the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Robyn!

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
~Stendhal

For Art Thursday, sheep and their people (and a wolf):

Ave Maria crossing the Lake
by Giovanni Segantini

Illustration from Pictures from English Literature
by Thomas Cobb

Shepherd with herd by the water
by Heinrich von Zügel

The Right of Way
by Frederick Walker

Feeding time
by Luigi Chialiva

Shepherd boy with lamb
by Giovanni Segantini

Illustration from An Argosy of Fables
by Paul Bransom

I’m spinning ‘round again
Oh the world inside my head
~Telenova

For Music Monday, Australian band Telenova with "Discothèque Inside My Head":



A bonus video by wise and helpful Rajiv Surendra:

I hate the summer.
~Anne Lamott


If I were to rank the seasons, summer would come in last, due to my being kakotheres ("unfitted to endure summer's heat"). This morning when I was walking the dogs, I tried to think of a word that combines "hot" and "angry" (since "hangry" is already taken). I'm open to suggestions, but in the meantime, here's a poem with a more upbeat take on summer from Manny Loley, who includes some Diné words in his work:

Let There Be
by Manny Loley
for Jaiden Peter Morgan

A good poem
is summer
       my nephew said
     mirage rising
from corn fields
midday
pollen on our tongues
each syllable
flecked with sunbeams
and names not said
shiye’ you should know
the voice isn’t ours alone
    but a dwelling space


read the rest here

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Gregory Orr:



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Bookseedstudio has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Jan!