… and my friend Jakes van der Watt does a great job sharing it via his skilled photography.
Here’s yet another shot of dock and boat country. Nice work, Jakes!!!
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Po Yin’s “Riley”
My friend Po Yin is a wonderfully talented artist; I love the expression he’s captured in this painting, “Riley,” an
8″x10″ oil on canvas.
:-D
What’s that mystery movie poem? Ask your favorite flick nerd.
I like Liam Nesson. I like how he portrays quiet, reflective, even self-effacing characters in movies — then just straight up murders everyone when finally provoked. There’s a dichotomy in that that I find beautiful. Even when his body count reaches a third of the population of San Diego, he still comes across as just being so goddam NICE. (I was taken with “Taken.”)
I didn’t laud “The Grey” quite as much as other filmgoers. I really, really liked it, but its message seemed lost on me … is the film telling us it is better to give up? Not to try? Why the various defeatist plot resolutions throughout the film?
Anyway — about the poem. The Internet Movie Data Base message boards tell us that it has countless fans, many of whom ask about its origin. Answer — it was written specifically for the film, my director and screenwriter Joe Carnahan.
Here it is:
Once more into the fray
Into the last good fight I’ll ever know,
Live and diie on this day.
Live and die on this day.
“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost
Celebrate National Poetry Month — here, suggested by a friend, is Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Suspect those bright mornings …
So if you prosper, suspect those bright
Mornings when you whistle with a light
Heart. You are loved; you have never seen
The harbour so still, the park so green,
So many well-fed pigeons upon
Cupolas and triumphal arches,
So many stags and slender ladies
Beside the canals. Remember when
Your climate seems a permanent home
For marvelous creatures and great men,
What griefs and convulsions startled Rome,
Ecbatana, Babylon.
— from W.H. Auden’s “Alonso to Ferdinand,” in “The Sea and the Mirror”
“Confession,” by Eric Robert Nolan
Celebrate National Poetry Month — here is a link to my most popular poem to date, “Confession,” which was published in Dead Beats Literary Blog in October 2013. So many readers liked this one. Just last night I was chatting with a friend in Las Vegas who is a voice actor — he told me that he is actually making a recording of the poem, and will share his own reading of it when he’s created a recording that he’s happy with.
I was initially surprised at the positive reader feedback for “Confession.” The first people I’d shown it to after writing it disliked it; the first publisher to which I’d submitted it emphatically rejected it. Its critical message and sexual imagery are not for everyone.
I remain grateful to Dead Beats for sharing it, and to their readers for letting me know that this piece indeed has a receptive audience. (Dead Beats is such a terrific publisher for edgier or darker poetry.) And thanks, of course, to the generous readers who occasionally drop me a note to let me know they liked the poem.
http://www.deadbeats.eu/post/63481494199/confession-by-eric-robert-nolan
I NEED to befriend a girl named “Faith.”
Because just once I want to call her cell, not get her, and leave her a voicemail message in my best Darth Vader voice:
“I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING.”
“Parched,” by Sean Macro
Celebrate National Poetry Month — here is another great piece by a talented friend of mine across the pond.
Enjoy “Parched” by Mr. Sean Macro:
http://www.deadbeats.eu/post/35280130351/parched-by-sean-macro
Oh, Hannibal, you jus’ cray-cray.
Badass Wiil Graham, corrupted Will Graham, dire wolf references, nightmares haunting Hannibal for once, wonderful acting, Psycho Tony Stark Werewolf, MASON VERGER REFERENCE, Uppham from “Saving Private Ryan.”
Nice one, NBC. This latest episode was wonderful, even despite the glaring absence of Dr. Alana Bloom.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 