The Vegetable Orchestra

'Police are not generally associated with poetry'

From Portland Police Department read original poems at Thin Blue Lines by Danica Koenig

It is not often you get to hear the police officers of your city pouring out their souls in poetry they wrote, but on Thursday March 5 at the Portland Public Library the citizens of Portland got a chance to hear the members of the Portland Police Department read poetry they had written about what it is like to be a police officer.

The poetry reading, "Thin Blue Lines," was part of the Arts & Equity Initiative, which is a targeted arts project in which public officials improve their city through the arts.

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Some of the poems dealt with some pretty heavy material; one that was read by local poet Michael Macklin who worked with an officer was about the difficult situations police officers find themselves in and how it affects them.

One line read, "One crack bust, a suicide, then silence."

Later the poem asked the question, "How do you protect your heart?"

A couple of the poems incorporated real questions and comments kids of the police officers had asked.

One of the lines from the poem read by Michael Macklin was, "Who are the bad guys, Dad? How do you know? Who do you trust?"

In a particularly moving poem Don Hayden put together a series of questions his son had asked him and used it as his poem, all of them perfectly capturing that balance of childhood curiosity and fear toward police officers.

"Hey dad, put any bad guys in jail today?"

"Hey dad, are you going to put me in jail?"

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A Quartet in motion, with ‘Howl’ and other poetry

Artists from different disciplines have long been inspired by one another's works, often with remarkable results. But both words and music suffer in Lee Hyla's “Howl,” a string quartet written in 1993 to accompany Allen Ginsberg's 1956 poem of that name.

A performance on Friday at Zankel Hall by the stellar Brentano String Quartet made me want to scream. The ensemble — Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violinists; Misha Amory, violist; and Nina Lee, cellist — played Mr. Hyla's work against a recording of Ginsberg reading his colorful rant at the status quo, a major work of the Beat Generation.

A poem as long and as dense as “Howl” — whose myriad vivid images are crammed into long run-on sentences — is ill suited for simultaneous musical accompaniment. Music and words seem engaged here in a cacophonous battle with no clear victor.

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'Live Nude Girl': Earning a living unclothed

"...In her book, Live Nude Girl, Rooney raises the philosophical and personal concerns of posing for art, and makes a distinction between nudity and nakedness.

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'The first thirty seconds of nudity are always the most jarring, charged for me and for those who are looking at me, at least if it is a class or artist who has never seen me naked, never worked with me in the past. The disrobing is a gentle shock, a surprise, a kind of eyewash, and the instant is electrified, more vivid than those that preceded it and those that will come after. My nudity might seem unreal, as if it can't really be happening, as if this strange other person can't possibly be presenting herself without a stitch and letting her body be drawn. So too might my nudity feel hyper-real, as if this person is the most three-dimensional object in space, vulnerable in her nakedness, but powerful in her command of the entire room's studious and uninterrupted attention. But after these first few seconds, the flamboyance and the frisson seem to settle a bit, and the artists get down to the task at hand, which is not merely to gawk or to watch or to gaze, but to transmit from their eyes to the model, to their hands, to the page or the canvas or the clay the image they hope to render over the course of those three short hours.' ..."

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At UN, Greece's Bakoyannis called "Not Ready for Prime Time" by some: Sri what?

Matthew Russell Lee reports for Inner City Press at the UN: News Analysis

UNITED NATIONS, February 28 -- Dora Bakoyannis, the foreign minister of Greece, was unable on Friday to comment on the 2000 civilians killed this year in Sri Lanka. She came to speak to the Press outside the UN Security Council, which was holding a three-part session on the OSCE, peacebuilding and Sri Lanka. Inner City Press asked for her or Greece's position on Sri Lanka, the debate on which in the Council has concerned the right of a government to kill civilians while fighting a separatist or terrorist group.

"I will not comment on that," Minister Bakoyannis said, "I have to catch up with it." Video here, from Minute 5:01. Several Greek observers shook their heads, some embarrassed, some judgmental. Not ready for prime time was the verdict, they said.

Beyond such intra-Greek critique, the larger question which we hope going forward to explore is, Does a foreign ministry such as Greece's only take an interest in conflicts outside of their region while they are on the UN Security Council, or are aspiring for a seat?

When asked if Russia building military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia would be helpful to her and the OSCE's attempts to keep a OSCE mission in these areas, Ms. Bakoyannis answered only that it "should be discussed within the OSCE." Video here, from Minute 4:54.

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