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Month: October 2018

Music and Cocktails: (Don’t Fear) the Reaper

Music and Cocktails: (Don’t Fear) the Reaper

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I usually don’t name my cocktail after the song itself, but today is Halloween after all, and this is one of the greatest song titles ever, so I decided to make an exception. “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” was released by Blue Oyster Cult in 1976 as part of their Agents of Fortune album. It charted as high as number 12 here in the U.S. and Rolling Stone Magazine actually went on to name it Song of the Year. Prior to that, Blue Oyster Cult was exactly what their name suggested: a cult rock …

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Poetry in a Glass: Toothed Moon Rising

Poetry in a Glass: Toothed Moon Rising

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Since it’s Halloween week, I became fairly obsessed with the idea of finding a poem for you today that would meet certain requirements. It had to be fairly high up on the creepiness scale, it had to convey the way in which the suddenly vacant landscape of autumn can be just a little bit unsettling, and it had to contain a ghost or haunting of some sort. That was a tall order, and I searched and searched before I found “All Hallows,” written by Louise Gluck, a Pulitzer prize-winning contemporary poet born in 1943 whose careful use of imagery and sparse language truly captures the feeling of both the holiday and the season. I’d never read it before, but it has lingered with me over the last few days, and I knew it would be perfect for today’s post. I was so fascinated by this poem, in fact, that I quickly ordered a collection of Gluck’s poetry so that I could read more.  …

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Friday Musings: Finding Nuance

Friday Musings: Finding Nuance

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There are certain words in the English language that fascinate me. Cadence is one of them. I wrote an entire blog post about the particular and pleasing rhythm that certain people have when they speak or write. I suggested that I thought it was also possible for there to be cadence in life. I love the word somnambulism too, otherwise known as sleepwalking, and one of the words most likely to cause someone to lose in a spelling bee. I did not write a blog post about …

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Music and Cocktails: Corkscrew to My Heart

Music and Cocktails: Corkscrew to My Heart

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Bob Dylan’s 1975 Blood on the Tracks album has always been one of his most puzzling. The mystery begins the moment we try to delve into its meaning. Is it truly his attempt to deal with the break-up of his marriage, or is it not related to that at all? Jakob Dylan, his son, has been quoted as saying, “When I’m listening to ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ I’m grooving along just like you. But when I’m listening to ‘Blood on the Tracks,’ that’s about my parents.” Yet Dylan …

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Poetry in a Glass: Always Wrong to the Light

Poetry in a Glass: Always Wrong to the Light

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A few weeks back I wrote a post about the poem “Mirror” by Sylvia Plath, in which I talked about the difficulty we sometimes have with seeing our own reflection, especially if we’re not being true to ourselves. Our poem for today, “For Once, Then, Something,” is one that was originally written by Robert Frost in 1920 for Harper’s Magazine, and then was later included in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poems called New Hampshire, published in 1923. Like “Mirror,” Frost’s …

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