A Poem from my Favorite Canadian

This is Police Gazette by Leonard Cohen, from a collection of his works titled "Flowers for Hitler". I intend on verbally reciting this and adding it to the Harriet/Poetry Foundation Soundcloud:
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My grandfather slams the silver goblet down.
He clears a silence
in the family talk
to comment on the wine.

It's hot. Jesus is dying of heat.
There he lies on the wall
of the sordid courtroom
trying to get air into his armpits.
Judge runs a finger
between neck and collar --
hands the sentence down.

Love me this first day of June.
I'd rather sleep with ashes
than priestly wisdom.
Of all the lonely places in the world
this is best
where debris is human.
I kiss the precious ashes
that fall from fiery flesh.
On these familiar shapes
I lay my kisses down.

Hitler is alive.
He is fourteen years old.
He does not shave.
He wants to be an architect.

The first star tonight
insanely high, virgin, calm.
I have one hour of peace
before the documented planets
burn me down.

Link to Silliman's and Harriet Poetry

Here's a pair of sites that revolve around the world of poets and poetry with news, discussions, and links to readings and other related media:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.ca/

On the note of Silliman, here's a page off of one of his sites that displays strictly Modern American Poetry of his choosing:

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/online_poems.htm

Fiddling Around with the iPad Poetry Apps

The first app I randomly entered was Werdsmith, a poetry creation assistance app. My first impression of it was quite underwhelming. The few relatively nifty features it had were:

- (Terrible) word prediction when trying to complete sentences, but it's fun to predict what it'll suggest to you next.

- Word definition lookup.

- "Idea" to "project" transitions whose purpose and usefulness I've yet to discover.

- Word count goals which can be followed using a pie chart presented next to your list of ideas, or a thin bar that changes in size relative to your advancement in the prescribed word count.

Nevertheless, I did manage to start a poem in the app out of the sheer disappointment and apathy I felt towards it which luckily, I managed to harness into a muse. 

Following that, POETRY was an absolute delight. It's a poetry reference app and it does exactly that using an ingenious method that combines subjects of you choice by spinning two "wheels" of separate topics so that you can combine ones to your mood and specificity's content. You can also randomize the feature by simply tapping on "spin", if you're feeling particularly adventurous and vapid at any given time.

Spine Sonnet is fun as well, serving as what appears to be a random phrase and/or prose generator that can build a poem or novella extremely quickly and efficiently from what it seems. One simply taps on a phrase they find favorable, and the program immediately draws up another list of phrases to continue the supposed train of thought. Ideal for those who are bereft of any and all literary creativity and habitual users of mind altering substances.

Visual Poetry takes a poem you've written or are in the process of writing and tacks on a template that can be customized to alter the entire look of the poem presentation. Font, background, sentence structure, and color are all interchangeable. Specific words can be highlighted in separate colors as well. Effectively, pretty much all the basic tools are here for you to share your poetic yawns on a social networking site and become another cheesy excuse for an "artwork" that might or not be passed around the internet for people to stare at and reinforce their ever growing sense of misanthrope with.

Lastly, Verses Poetry aims to achieve a similar goal to Spine Sonnet with a more interactive word-for-word experience. You can mock up words and using a few categories such as "old school" and "new school", and play around with the amount of words being displayed on your poetry mosaic. The general feeling that prevailed throughout my time with the app was something along the lines of "Sure, why not."