Paul Foster Johnson: If experimental poetry were a Prince song it would be this one. This ballad has no verse and no chorus, but uses a meandering vocal line to tell the fragmented story of an affair with a witty waitress called “Dorothy Parker.” The vocals and the drums propel the track forward and push the watery keyboards and synth bass into the background. It’s a pared-down sound for a song about nerds flirting awkwardly. Dorothy makes fun of Prince for ordering fruit cocktail, insists on taking communal baths with their pants on, and sings along with Joni Mitchell on the radio. For his part, Prince thinks of his encounter with Dorothy as an escape from his purple rainy baggage, and learns to self-sooth by re-enacting the bathing-with-pants-on scene until “all the fighting stopped.” Their quirky romance is embalmed in the coolness of Prince’s minimal funk.
Frank Stanford, it’s your birthday.
tonight the gars on the trees are swords in the hands of knights
the stars are like twenty-seven dancing russians and the wind
is I am waving goodbye
Abe’s Peanut just released a set of postcards for kids with poems by Timothy Donnelly (featuring this card, Edna the Echidna, and Floyd the Airborne Hydroid, among others) and clip art by me.
Today, in 1913, Ezra Pound published this poem:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Harlem by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore - and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
