Nurjahan Boulden

Hard times require furious dancing.
~Alice Walker

Instead of music today, we have dance. The YouTube algorhithm has been known to lead folks down some shady paths, but it did me a favor earlier this year. Belly dancer and teacher Nurjahan Boulden popped up in my suggestions, and after watching her for a while, I wanted to try too. It felt a bit ridiculous because belly dance seemed like a young person's activity, but Nurjahan is encouraging to everyone:





Belly dance as a cultural practice
Nurjahan belly dances a certain way but she discourages disrespecting other styles/practices

Start to attach

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
~Plutarch

Happy Poetry Friday! How have you been? I'm getting ready to celebrate my parents' 55th anniversary next week. Today, we have a fun-to-read-aloud poem from the magazine Stone Soup (100% written and illustrated by kids ages 6-13)

sparks from a bonfire

A lot of nature with a little bit of red
By Ethan Issadore, Age 11

A lot of nature with a little bit of red,
And that is to be said.
Trees and forests for miles on end.
I forget the cityscape, but I try to pretend.
The branches start to bend,
And then there is a crack.
The fire starts to sizzle and glow, like preparing an attack.
We huddle around the fire,
Though we have one more desire.
At least we do not need to “brrr.”
We collect the ingredients and start to stir.
The fire grows higher and higher...

read the rest here

************

Marcie Flinchum Atkins has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Marcie!

The Journey

in 1897, [Elizabeth Shippen Green] took up illustration study formally with the venerable Howard Pyle at the Drexel school. Her favorite teachers, Pyle, Anshutz, and Vonnoh, were the same teachers whom influenced Maxfield Parrish at the same august art institutions.
~National Museum of American Illustration

For Art Thursday, an illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green.

The Journey
Illustration for a series of poems by Josephine Preston Peabody entitled "The Little Past," Dec. 1903
by Elizabeth Shippen Green

Never Been Small

We all should get to feel like there's something powerful and beautiful about who we are.
~Shonda Rhimes

For Music Monday, Jennarie with Never Been Small:

Bill Withers

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

Bill Withers and his daughter Corey

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

*****************

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

The honey harvest

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

Dew dresses

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).

****************

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

A herd

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

Spinning 'round again

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:

let there be mountains singing in all directions

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

***************

Gregory Orr:



***************

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

Leonora Carrington

[Leonora] Carrington made history in 2005 when her painting Juggler (1954) sold at auction for $713,000, which was believed to be the highest price paid for a work by a living Surrealist artist. Throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, she was the subject of many exhibitions in Mexico and the United States—and after 1990 in England as well. When she died at age 94, Carrington was believed to be the last of the Surrealists.
~Noami Blumberg for Britannica

For Art Thursday, sculptures by surrealist Leonora Carrington. She is particularly known for her paintings (and stories) but I wanted to focus on these cool pieces:

Sculpture in Germany
by Leonora Carrington
photo by sebaso

Sculpture from the studio of Leonora Carrington
photo by Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México

Sculpture from the studio of Leonora Carrington
photo by Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México

Sculpture from the studio of Leonora Carrington
photo by Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México

Sculpture from the studio of Leonora Carrington
photo by Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México

Sculpture from the studio of Leonora Carrington
photo by Secretaría de Cultura Ciudad de México

P.S. There's a children's book about her!

P.S. My 4th of July song.

My darling, my love

Will you come with me or settled be?
~’Stór, A Stór, A Ghrá

For Music Monday, the Friel Sisters with a traditional Irish song: