Dickie Bird,
a damn fine umpire but I must have a word:
known for his comic anecdotes and quirky ways,
ten hours were lost to rain in the first three days.
From Dickie Bird’s obituary.
Category: obituaries
The Lady is a Tramp
It happened incrementally
I needed the dough
I was in a lot of trouble
I went to the library
I needed to come up with 40 bucks
to get my kitty’s, Doris’s, tests back.
I took a couple of Fanny Brice letters
slipped them in my sneakers
sold them to a place called Argosy.
They would pay more for better content.
A big white space at the bottom of a letter
after, ‘yours truly, Fanny Brice’
I got an old typewriter
I wrote a couple of hot sentences
improved the letter and elevated the price.
“I have a hangover out of Gounod’s Faust”
“canny old Kraut remains one of my most cherished friends”
“a bright, talented actress,
quite attractive since she dealt
with her monstrous English overbite.’’
larky and fun and totally cool
Is it absolution she’s seeking, or admiration?
On and off welfare,
a horror beyond my talent to describe
My most enduring memory
is the odour in the elevators:
eau de desperation!
(From Lee Israel, literary forger – obituary. Submitted by Grace Andreacchi)
In no great hurry
In order to build
a career
and be
successful,
one has to be
determined.
One has to be
ambitious.
A window
covered
with raindrops
interests me
more.
Seeing is
a neglected
enterprise.
Taken from the New York Times article, Saul Leiter, Photographer Who Captured New York’s Palette, Dies at 89, The New York Times, 27th November 2013. Submitted by Howie Good.
La vie aux bouts des doigts
Solo and ropeless
Edlinger climbs out
underneath an overhang,
hangs effortlessly off one arm
several hundred feet
off the ground while
dipping the other
into a bag of chalk,
utterly indifferent
to the danger,
before swinging his foot
into a crack above his head
and pulling himself up.
From the obituary of Patrick Edlinger, 15 June 1960 – 16 November 2012, in the Daily Telegraph. Submitted by Angi Holden.
On the surface
Greed probably undid her in the end.
She was said to have taken a bait of uncooked tiger nuts,
which swelled inside her until she floated upwards.
Telltale empty paper bags were found on the bank of the river.
Or she may have been pregnant,
with 300,000 eggs causing complications, or stressed
after so much catching and releasing,
those constant brushes with extinction.
On the line between life and death, at Kingfisher Lake,
she breathed the fatal air and did not sink again.
And there she lay,
like Wisdom drawn up from the deep:
as golden, and as quiet.
(From the obituary of Benson, England’s best loved fish. Submitted by Mat Riches)
Post-Painterly Abstraction
for Helen Frankenthaler
She departed from the romantic search
for the sublime to pursue her own path,
pouring turpentine-thinned paint
in watery washes onto raw canvas
so that it soaked into the fabric weave
becoming one with it.
Her method emphasized flat surface
over illusory depth and the nature of paint,
releasing color from the gestural approach
and romantic rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism,
landscapes looking to many like a large paint rag
casually accidental and incomplete.
From the biography of Helen Frankenthaler in the New York Times. Phrases have been picked from the article and put together, in order, instead of one whole excerpt. Submitted by Jenni B. Baker.
Verbatim Poetry 