One of my New Year's resolutions was to read more poetry, but with starting a new job, squeezing a new fat body into old skinny clothes, and having meltdowns over Sweet Pea falling in love with the babysister he has for 8 hours a week and completely forgetting about me - who has time to read? I do, however, have time to watch poetry when it is as awesome as this animated version of Eric Belieu's all too true poem titled "When at a Certain Party in NYC."
And here is the poem in print because it's that good that you've got to experience it twice:
When At a Certain Party In NYC
Wherever you’re from sucks,
and
wherever you grew up sucks,
and everyone here lives in a
converted
chocolate factory or deconsecrated church
without an ugly lamp
or souvenir coffee cup
in sight, but only carefully edited
objets
like
the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen
that looks like an
industrial age dildo, and
when you rifle through the bathroom
cabinet
looking for a spare tampon, you discover
that even their toothpaste is
somehow more
desirable than yours. And later you go
with a world famous
critic to eat a plate
of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from
Sweden
and the roll is conceived to look like
“a strand of pearls around a white
throat,” and is
so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself
impossible
to eat. And your friend back home—-
who says the pioneers who first
settled
the great asphalt parking lot of our
middle, were not in fact
heroic, but really
the chubby ones who lacked the imagination
to go all
the way to California—it could be that
she’s on to something. Because, admit
it,
when you look at the people on these streets,
the razor-blade women
with their strategic bones
and the men wearing Amish pants
with
interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you
will never cut it
anywhere that constitutes
a
where, that even ordering a pint of tuna
salad in
a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt.
So when you see
the dogs on the high-rise elevators
practically tweaking, panting all the way
down
from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on
with their long
planned business of snuffling
garbage or peeing on something to which all
day
they’ve been looking forward, what you want is
to be on the fastest
Conestoga home, where the other
losers live and where the tasteless azaleas
are,
as we speak, half-heartedly exploding.
Erin Belieu
from
32 Poems, Fall/Winter 2009 via
Little Epic Against Oblivion
An atlas is probably one of those books that is quickly, and sadly, becoming a relic from a time before the Internet. That is a shame because I feel as though a well done children's atlas can appeal to the reluctant reader and the bookworm. It is the ultimate "fact book", as my 5-year-old would say, and can provide the answers to so many questions about the globe.
