ted burke
the voyage of the snarky
Ted Burke
- Location
- San Diego, California,
- Birthday
- July 15
- Title
- Bookseller, writer, musician
- Bio
- Bookseller, musician, writer and poet living and working in San Diego, California. His writing has appeared in the San Diego Reader, Kicks, San Diego Door, Roadwork, Revolt in Style,and City Works.His poems have been included in the anthologies Small Rain: 8 poets from San Diego (1996,DG Wills Books),Ocean Hiway: eight poets in San Diego (1981,Wild Mustard Press) , and is the author of many chapbooks, including Hand Grenade, Open Every Window,No One Home and City Times,limited editions published by his own Old House Press.
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “I wonder why you bother
to ponder the distinction
between a
fiction created to
h…”
October 23, 2009 08:12PM - “It's not the actual
movies I'm talking about, it's
the
theory, which can be
dry…”
October 23, 2009 12:22PM - “Is anthropomorphism
never appropriate?
For
cartoons,yes, and
mythology.
As a
proj…”
October 23, 2009 12:33AM - “You're a jerk”
October 09, 2009 04:11PM - “The snarky are those who
snark.”
September 16, 2009 02:26PM
Ted Burke's Links
- New list
- Salon
- New York Times
- Slate.com
- The Nation
- Like it or not
NOVEMBER 23, 2009 4:18PM
Paul Blackburn and the Hard Gaze
NOVEMBER 21, 2009 12:24AM
san francisco
lost again in alley scrubs
seeking a straight path
among inclining bricks
buildings odd and sharp
as needles loom over
us all braving a short walk home,
canyons of cracked asphalt
and singular puddles
alive with oil cans
and rainbows that
spread out in decaying circles
concentric and amorphous at once,
greased a…
seeking a straight path
among inclining bricks
buildings odd and sharp
as needles loom over
us all braving a short walk home,
canyons of cracked asphalt
and singular puddles
alive with oil cans
and rainbows that
spread out in decaying circles
concentric and amorphous at once,
greased a…
NOVEMBER 18, 2009 1:10PM
Slaves to do These Things: Amy King
Slaves to do These Things
poems by Amy King
Amy King's writing are at once brainy yet coursing with a perceptable sensuality, are among the best of the post-mo
dernist,
post-Language, post-confessional style where we have. She is a
writer who has surmounted the collective, generationally situated…
poems by Amy King
Amy King's writing are at once brainy yet coursing with a perceptable sensuality, are among the best of the post-mo
dernist,
post-Language, post-confessional style where we have. She is a
writer who has surmounted the collective, generationally situated…
NOVEMBER 17, 2009 3:12PM
Wehle's Tales
"Consciousness" by Ellen Wehle takes us, it seems , to the backstage area of our awake personalities, the place where our prop-worthy similes and figures of speech are readied and positioned, the hope being that the word combinations match the shape and tone of what the eyes perce
ived.
Better,/…
The urge to convert the unruly undulations of our collectivized
speech into a hard, condensed verbal thing that makes the dull, if
loud noise of lazy inference has crept it's way into a few poet's
habit of phrase. We come to Wyn Cooper's poem in Slate, Daily… Read full post »
NOVEMBER 14, 2009 6:45PM
Spirituality after all the hair cuts
There are times in the middle of the afternoon after I've finished
what I think is an inspired poem when I have the momentary
sensation--fleet! is the world--that all those wonderful metaphors
and inverted oppositions were given to me by God Himself. I've been
sober for twenty years, though, and I…
NOVEMBER 13, 2009 10:29AM
Twitter poetry
The commercial has a Twitter addict gleefully thumbing his message "I am sitting on the porch", and it seemed to me , momentarily, we might entering a time of New Brevity, with language being composed less of phrases that build their way to more complex meanings and more by lexical equivalents/…
NOVEMBER 12, 2009 2:06PM
From the captain's tower
T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound weren't friends of democracy,but they did
their own style of the mash up --classical and pop styles and a
preferring a diffusion of coherence rather than writing a series of
unifying metaphors--in ways that would better express their idea of
the fracturing of reality and the…
NOVEMBER 11, 2009 2:29PM
Home
I am lesser than the sum of
the parts |
you found for me
after the trains arrived
and the ships rolled in
with waves brown
with old dreams
and dead fish,
medals for my chest
and steel for my knees
that never buckled
nor knelt before
strange aromas
of cash reward.
I kept my nerve
and protected
the shelves
that held…
the parts |
you found for me
after the trains arrived
and the ships rolled in
with waves brown
with old dreams
and dead fish,
medals for my chest
and steel for my knees
that never buckled
nor knelt before
strange aromas
of cash reward.
I kept my nerve
and protected
the shelves
that held…
NOVEMBER 11, 2009 2:24PM
a paragraph with general praise for David Lehman
I enjoy David Lehman's mosaics of place names, mad jazz and
painterly effect; there is an fabulous improvisation in his lines
that performs an activity I think is poetry's core province, which
is testing language's ability to accommodate experience and offer
up perception in a manner that merits a se…
NOVEMBER 9, 2009 11:52PM
Put out that damned cigarette
I quit smoking eleven years ago, and one of the great things about
it is that I am no longer compelled to feign being the ardent
sensualist who insists on exploiting every appetite and sensation
our nerve endings can stand, and neither is there the need to
wallow in libertarian sophistry…
NOVEMBER 9, 2009 6:46PM
Three women
So these are the faces
of your summers and falls
that have gone by
like billboards
zooming by in passenger car windows,
your daughters
bought funny hats
and baggy jeans,
you walked
where trees and canyons
met with canyon walls,
three women framed
by sunsets
and early dew or frost
conditioned with respective deca…
of your summers and falls
that have gone by
like billboards
zooming by in passenger car windows,
your daughters
bought funny hats
and baggy jeans,
you walked
where trees and canyons
met with canyon walls,
three women framed
by sunsets
and early dew or frost
conditioned with respective deca…
NOVEMBER 9, 2009 4:06PM
Who needs heroes
Allan Ginsberg , as much as anyone, influenced me to get a
typewriter and strive to write poems that cut through what I
perceived, in teenage fashion, to be the falseness of cultural
norms . His counter cultural assimilation of all things that ran
contrary to the middle class life I…
NOVEMBER 7, 2009 10:31PM
Distances made swiftly
Distances
Philippe Jaccottet
Swifts turn in the heights of the air;
higher still turn the invisible stars.
When day withdraws to the ends of the earth
their fires shine on a dark expanse of sand.
We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,
from sta… Read full post »
NOVEMBER 7, 2009 10:15PM
A Neruda poem I like
I'm not a Neruda fan, since it seems most of his poems are self-referencing slices of two-faced baloney, but recently a friend posted a small gem he’d written , Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market I was rather taken with. It shines because it is very/…
NOVEMBER 7, 2009 8:30PM
Hecht's hammer
A little guilt mongering is just what you need to deliver several stanzas of applause ready morality. Anthony Hecht loves to bask in the glow of Points Already Made.The idea seems to be that even with the advance of decades since a horrific event, later generations still bear a moral responsib/…
NOVEMBER 6, 2009 1:49PM
The joys of reading Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett is every bit the off hand and fresh-phrasing poet Billy Collins wants to be, and it's his particular genius to write in such a way that he hears what is truly and spontaneously poetic in actual speech and yet has the sense to contain the vernacular with real cadence/…
NOVEMBER 4, 2009 2:56AM
Big Idea, or a bunch of small ones hidden in the details?
Steinbeck is of the generation that arrives just after the
Muckrakers,Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, who
thought that fiction was something of a
sociological/anthropological tool in getting at the skewed
relations between races and classes in a capitalist economy. Some
larger truth, di…
NOVEMBER 3, 2009 1:14PM
Sadly typing
The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there were an expiration date on grief.Yes, one moves on with their life and tries to have new experiences and adventures, but poets, like anyone else, get older, and the longer view on their life/…
NOVEMBER 3, 2009 1:11AM
Some prose on not writing
So many would be poets, critics and furiously scribbling
visionaries and spell-check philosophers are, at this minute, this
very second that you take to read this sentence, gnashing their
teeth, cracking their knuckles, running their fingertips over the
surface of their keyboard as if to start a cade…
OCTOBER 31, 2009 3:46PM
NORTON BUFFALO, RIP
1951-October
30,2009
Norton Buffalo was one of the best harmonica players on the planet, a skillful, fluid and fleet player at home with blues, folk and country idioms, and was a monster chromatic harmonica player above it all. He made a lasting impression on my own playing since the early Seve/… Read full post »
Norton Buffalo was one of the best harmonica players on the planet, a skillful, fluid and fleet player at home with blues, folk and country idioms, and was a monster chromatic harmonica player above it all. He made a lasting impression on my own playing since the early Seve/… Read full post »
OCTOBER 31, 2009 10:12AM
Note on a bad poem
Someone with whom I've argued with for years on Slate's Poems
Fray forum some months ago posted an "original" "poem" , requesting
, without qualification, any and all crtical comments. The poem was
a cryptic attempt to merge science and math into a presentable
metaphorical system, the result being, I… Read full post »
OCTOBER 30, 2009 9:45AM
Oliver Douglas gets a clue
Great writing provokes arguments decades after it first appeared, which we can see in David Roderick's poem "Thoreau's Beans". We witness someone realizing that work is, after all, merely work.The way this poem proceeds is rapid and sharp, like the shovel or the hoe digging at a hard earth, an/…
OCTOBER 29, 2009 12:34AM
The modernist divide
Ben Friedlander thinks that Marianne
Moore is the center of American poetry's modernist resurgence,
not Eliot or the storied Ezra Pound. He has no problem ignoring the
names text books , lecturers and earnest undergraduates insist as
being embedded, in place, in order. He responds to what he likes, n…
OCTOBER 27, 2009 4:42PM
Customers who give resentments
Sometimes you run into a left hook that's intended for your chin that someone else thinks you deserve. The aggravating thing is being accused of things that were the furthest from your mind. I remember eight years ago when I worked at the customer service desk of a college bookstor… Read full post »
Verbal Remedy
John Hughes
Dorinda Fox
Paul Levinson
Joan Walsh
Karen Templer
Salon.com