April, when spring begins to blossom, is National Poetry Month in the U.S. Let's celebrate both.
See if you can match the poem depicting spring (A - I) with the poet (1 - 9)
The Poems
in Just…
spring when the world is mud…
luscious the little
lame balloonman
Behold, this crocus is a withering flame;
This snowdrop, snow; this apple-blossom's part
To breed the fruit that breeds the serpent's art.
Nay, for these Spring-flowers, turn thy face from them,
Nor stay till on the year's last lily-stem
The white cup shrivels round the golden heart.
Random thoughts
and loneliness trouble me
but I am soothed by the
anticipation of cherry blossoms
and spring rain falling on my hut.
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
A LITTLE madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous scene…
This whole experiment of green,
As if it were his own!
Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring's first flutes and drums…
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils
I remember, I remember
There were ghostly veils and laces…
In the shadowy bowery places…
With lovers' ardent faces
Bending to one another,
Speaking each his part.
They infinitely echo
In the red cave of my heart.
'Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.'
They said to one another.
They spoke, I think, of perils past.
They spoke, I think, of peace at last.
One thing I remember:
Spring came on forever,
Spring came on forever,"
Said the Chinese nightingale.
O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down
Thro' the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!
The letters for the quotation are in the right columns, but they have been put in alphabetical order. Can you reconstruct the quotation? Words may extend more than one line, and only end when you reach a black box. All punctuation has been removed.
Once you have the quote, tell us: What subject is the quotation about, and who said it?
Think you know who said what? Here's your chance to prove it! Listed below is a list of (hopefully!) ten very distinct quotes, all about writing. Below that are the names of ten very different authors. Your goal? Match up the author with their quote!!
So then, he said…
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
"The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it."
"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."
"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say."
"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
"We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print."
"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day."
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense."
"A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
Here's you chance to prove how well you do. Listed below are six questions with six sets of very distinct answers. The challenge here is to match the answers to the appropriate snarker - good luck!!
If you became the leader of your country (ie. President, Prime Minister) what is the first change that you would make?
If you were to get a tattoo would would it be? If you have one, what is it? Where is it?
Other than Toasted Cheese, list three other web sites that you frequently visit.
Which of the seven dwarves would you be?
Which would you most like to have:
your picture on a stamp
your statue in a park
a college named after you
a Nobel Prize
a national holiday in your honor
Answer Set # 1
It's easier for me to write deep than write shallow. Or maybe I just like being obtuse. Either way, I like the freedom of fiction, plus I think that fiction often gets closer to truth than non-fiction does.
I'd remove all reference to foreign monarchs and questionable deities in oaths of office and citizenship, etc.
If I were a president, I wouldn't have to make change, I could put it all on the White House account.
Tattoo would be on Fantasy Island, of course. (De plane! De plane!)
There are other websites??
Snuffy.
Not a), since you have to be dead for a). Maybe not e) either, dunno the rules for that one. You can live and get the others, though. b) would cost you money unless you were dead. e) would cost you BIG money. I guess that leaves d) which would result in your getting money, and you are allowed to be alive to spend it.
Answer Set # 5
Because I get to use all of my creative abilities. Everything and anything I've ever dreamed up can go in them. My past, my perceived future, my present, whatever.
Raise the dollar limit for social programs so that the people that live on the fringe of "have" and "have not" can get the care and attention they deserve.
I don't have one, but I'd like to get the astrological symbol for Aries on the left side of my neck. I kind of also want the symbol for Libra on my wrist.
If you haven't read the first issue of Toasted Cheese, now's the time to check it out. If you have read it, impress everyone one with how close you paid attention. Listed below are passages from each of the seven stories found in Volume One, Issue One. Below that, are the titles of the stories, but they've somehow gotten scrambled up. Arrange the letters to form the proper titles then match them to the appropriate passages.
Passages
So here I wait, 45 minutes later, tapping my French manicure against the leather-wrapped steering wheel, anticipating that green light, seething at Barbie and Ken on their waxed Jet-Ski-Built-For-Two. That snapshot we consumers are allowed to witness of their plastic, imagined lives, interrupted by long, deckled strips of a rippling pool.
"Mama?" Callie whispered. Her mother turned away and hid her face against the icebox, her bobbed hair shaking.
Callie stared at Ellen, then at her mother. What did we do?
"Take them away," her mother hiccuped.
"Are you okay, George?" The teller asked as he counted twenties. "You don't look so well." He initialed the deposit book and handed it back to George.
"Mike and I are going to dance," Aisling says.
Why she is telling me this? She's been dancing all night. I guess I'm supposed to be happy because this is Bio-Mike. "Have fun," I say, dismissing them.
Croissant Woman spotted me watching her. I smiled broadly and waved. Her eyes grew. They resembled lottery balls, flashing the day's numbers from her head. The other woman ducked her head and walked to her car.
I flicked ashes.
"What happens when they don't say goodbye?" I asked.
"I dunno. Some people think they hang around for a while," Heather said.
"I believe what Madam smells is the aromatic almond pesto vinaigrette dressing. A family recipe. Quite safe, I assure you." Jarvis kept his tone soothing. "Mr. Rathskeller would no more poison you than I would, Madam."
Listed below are the beginnings to eight short stories, written by fairly well known authors. Below that, are the endings to the eight stories. Below that, is a list containing the titles of the story as well as the author. The challenge? Figure out which beginning belongs with which ending, as well as the title of the story.
Beginnings
Coal all spent; the bucket empty, the shovel useless; the stove breathing out cold; the room freezing; the leaves outside the window rigid, covered with rime; the sky a silver shield against anyone who looks for help from it.
The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world.
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.
There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck.
When the baby was almost ready to be born, something went wrong and my mother had to go to the hospital two weeks before the expected time.
"The marvellous thing is that it's painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts."
The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind.
The bell rang furiously and, when Miss Parker went to the tube, a furious voice called out in a piercing North of Ireland accent: "Send Farrington here!"
Endings
Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
"It will be enough if we can have wine. It will be plenty." She turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly - like an old woman.
"But, poor devil, poor devil, he's best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking horse to find a winner."
"Oh Pa!" he cried. "Don't beat me, Pa! And I'll… I'll say a Hail Mary for you… I'll say a Hail Mary for you Pa, if you don't beat me… I'll say a Hail Mary…"
I could not really comprehend these things, but I sensed their strangeness, their disarray. I felt that whatever God might love in this world, it was certainly not order.
"You bad woman! I begged you for a shovelful of the worst coal and you would not give me it." And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost forever.
…and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.
The challenge is to identify from what books we pulled these selections as well as the name of the character being introduced. In most examples, this is our first glimpse of the character. For one, it is an eerie foreshadowing that gives us a glimpse of what the character will do through his action. One selection is the character describing himself at a job interview. Two passages have been altered to eliminate character names. You think we want to make this easy?
His left leg was cut off close by the hip and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch, which he managed with wonderful dexterity, hopping about upon it like a bird. He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham - plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling.
Hint: Think of famous characters who used a crutch. Would it help to imagine a parrot on his shoulder?
She got a long pointed nose and a big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it.
Hint: This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is written in dialect-heavy "letters" to God and to the narrator's sister. The character she describes here is her husband's lover.
"I USHERED SOULS INTO THE NEXT WORLD. I WAS THE GRAVE OF ALL HOPE. I WAS THE ULTIMATE REALITY. I WAS THE ASSASSIN AGAINST WHOM NO LOCK WOULD HOLD." (followed by: "Yes, but do you have any particular skills.")
Hint: This science fiction/fantasy character always speaks in all capital letters. He is a recurring character in the author's Discworld Series.
His face was strong - a very strong - aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere… The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years.
Hint: In the many film incarnations, this suave Eurpoean character never wears a mustache, although the teeth always fit this description.
We crowded round and over Miss __'s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child, big enough both to walk and talk - indeed its face looked older than __'s - yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand.
Hint: The name omitted from this Victorian romance's passage is Catherine. A good name to yell across the moors.
She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it wit that wool jersey.
Hint: This character is the epitome of the Lost Generation. The novel has been mentioned in at least one "Absolute Blank" article.
In other words he was a carbon-based bipedal life form descended from an ape. More specifically he was forty, fat and shabby and worked for the local council. Curiously enough though he didn't know it, he was a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan, though intervening generations and racial mixing had so juggled his genes that he had no discernable Mongoloid characteristics, and the only vestiges left in (him) of his mighty ancestry were a pronounced stoutness about the turn and a predilection for little fur hats.
Hint: Perhaps the best known science fiction/fantasy novel, it tells us the meaning of life, which is "42".
But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded into her lap, her true self was poorly concealed. The green eyes in her sweet face were turbulent, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manner had been imposed on her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own
Hint: This was the best selling book of the Depression era and its Southern heroine, described here, was captured brilliantly on film... by an Englishwoman.
Slowly he took off his jacket and untied his tie, watching every move he made as if it were somebody else's movements he were watching. Astonishing how much straighter he was standing now, what a different look there was on his face. It was one of the few times in his life that he felt pleased with himself.
Hint: This character takes over the life of Dickie Greenleaf and gets away with murder. Matt Damon fans might guess this one easily.
The boy had a sharp, delicate face the color of ivory and he seemed to have eyes too big for it. He had also a lot of hair which tumbled over his forehead in heavy locks and made his face seem smaller. He looked like a boy who had been ill, but he was crying more as if he were tired and cross than as if he were in pain
Hint: This boy rediscovers the joy of life, aided by his cousin Mary, some friends and a "magical" place. This is another book adapted for the movies and for the stage, both as a play and a musical