Darrell Epp

 

My first book-length poetry collection, entitled Imaginary Maps, has just been published by Signature Editions (www.signature-editions.com).

 

Here are some samples:

 

Valentine

 

one mirror

batteries not included.

a staircase of smoke

 

ascending into nowhere.

the dreams of a cloud.

a surgeon removes a

 

tumor while blindfolded.

you want a baby but have

to settle for a spider plant.

 

the stars look so cute from

the balcony, up close they’re

spinning screaming hells.

 

when we run out of words

we realize we don’t need

words. let’s stay in tonight,

this town is full of pickpockets.

 

For John Wayne

 

black and white movie

in which a cowboy hat

 

stalks and eventually

blows away his bank-

 

robbing twin brother.

the hats are cool but it’s

 

the supporting characters

i really notice: the empty

 

shot glasses (hats drink

straight from the bottle),

 

pistols that giggle

to each other when the

 

sheriff isn’t looking,

sweaty garter belts,

 

the mob of grandfather

clocks chattering with

 

both hands over their faces.

 

This Absence

 

trees with leaves like tin foil,

the ache of yesterday’s

pleasures remembered,

plus all the rest of it tied

up in a boy scout knot.

 

clear skies and days that

end with a ‘y’ so far away,

life is harder than it looks.

this absence will outlive

me, nothing ever ends.

 

Kissing Piranhas

 

‘it’s not what you meant to do,

 it’s what you did that i don’t like’

is what you say in front of the bingo

parlor and hey, how many bingo

 

parlors does one downtown need?

the cars all wish they were horses.

the trains wish they were mighty

godzillas. and what do you wish?

 

to be a cockroach, with your bones

on the outside, your thin skin under

a hard shell? that might work better

for you than zoloft and/or placebos,

 

but i’m no doctor. piranhas french-

kiss in the water that’s risen to my

knees and i’m not going anywhere:

everybody knows i was here first.

 

 

 

If you want to buy a copy (thank you very much, by the way) here’s the link to buy it on Amazon :

 

http://www.amazon.ca/Imaginary-Maps-Darrell-Epp/dp/1897109326/ref=sr_1_2/181-2502493-9456256?ie=UTF8&qid=1249587685&sr=8-2

 

If you want to read my book for free, please ask your local library to order a copy.

 

If you would like a review copy, contact the publisher at signature@allstream.net.

 

If you want to talk to me about it, contact me at darrellepp@hotmail.com

Most extrasolar planet detection relies on measuring gravitational tugs. The SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) is different. These folks use two observatories, one in the Canary Islands (Queens University) and one in South Africa (Keele University) to search for the infinitesimally small dimming of a star’s light that occurs when a planet orbits in front of it. The SuperWASP factory has discovered 10 new planets in the last 6 months, bringing the total up to 270! Keep up the great work, SuperWASP! www.superwasp.org

http://www.superwasp.org/gallery/images/M31close.gif

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/world/middleeast/16iran.html?ex=1365998400&en=fdae3c6ec7e8dce1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120752549042393619.html?mod=opinion_main_review_and_outlooks#

Bonus Feature: Homer!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Winslow_Homer_004.jpg

Soon you will be the shield behind which marches the enduring message of our revolution. There is no greater duty, no greater honour…Hold that honour as dearly as your country holds you. Hold it as dearly as do those who have already been called to the battle. Hold it as if it were your greatest treasure. Because it is. It is. Whatever sacrifices you must bear, you will know a happiness far more sublime than pleasure…My warrior days were long ago, but not so long ago that I have forgotten their purpose and their reward.

And here he is paying tribute to Reagan: http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/dialogue/mccain.html

Bonus feature: Homer! http://www.wsu.edu:8080/%7edee/MINOA/HOMER.HTM

http://reason.com/news/show/125163.html

     It turns out Mark Steyn was right on target when he noted in his book America Alone that people always tend to worry about the wrong things. A generation was terrified by Paul Ehrlich’s ‘population bomb,’ and yet every single available model shows global population plateauing/declining by mid-century at the latest. Population stability requires each woman to bear an average of 2.1 children. The EU’s average is 1.5, and Japan’s is 1.3. This trend towards a lack of consumers/producers/teachers/leaders/etc. in the western world should rather inevitably trigger all sorts of economic and social upheaval.

     This article I’ve linked to rather delicately omits half of the tale: while a third of German, Swiss and Austrian women have zero children, the story is dramatically reversed in the more rowdier parts of the globe, like, say, Waziristan, where the fertility rate is over 6.5. This seems to point out a structural flaw in the arguments of the ‘save-the-earth’ folks. Humans are not profitably viewed as economic entities, or as mere carbon-footprint-generators, but as individuals with distinct personalities who make personal choices based on their personal values. Isn’t the question not simply ‘how many’ people there are, but what sort of people they are, and how they think and behave? The regions that are truly experiencing a population explosion demonstrate scant interest in ideas like sustainable growth and carbon sequestration (never mind the socio-political ideals I happen to cherish, pithy encapsulated by James Madison in the Bill Of Rights). How sensible a long-term strategy is it for the David Suzuki/Al Gore types to admonish us to protect ‘the future’ by remaining childless and minimizing our footprint as we timidly sit still waiting for the Reaper, when all this does is ensure that in half a century’s time, there won’t be any environmentalists around? By outsourcing the chore of childbirth, aren’t the enlightened ‘experts,’ in the long view, simply forfeiting the game to the other side?

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=476DB33C-C190-4E63-ADD8-271F6186C3A7

“The Constitution represented not a grant of power from rulers to the people ruled–as with King John’s grant of the Magna Charta at Runnymede in 1215–but a grant of power by the people to the government they had created. No other national government before that time was based upon such a concept. Until then, monarchs rules by divine right and their subjects had only those privileges which their rulers saw fit to bestow upon them. The work of those fifty-five men in at Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 marked the beginning of the end of the divine right of kings as well as many of the rigid class distinctions that went along with it.”

http://jco.usfca.edu/tragic.html  and http://jco.usfca.edu/karamazov.html I really enjoyed these two essays about The Possessed and Karmazov, but try to pick up a copy of Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead if you haven’t read it already. I’ve always loved that fictionalized memoir of his time in prison. I loved the way it captures the soul-crushing monotony of prison, its vivid characterizations and its gorgeous writing. Dostoyevsky had become involved in a revolutionary plot and was sentence to death after the plan was easily foiled. They put him before a firing squad, the men raised their rifles, aimed, and then announced they’d just been kidding (?!) and instead gave him a decade of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. Needless to say this experience made quite an impression on the man the fine novelist Turgenev called ‘the nastiest Christian I ever met.” Turgenev was a less brilliant writer but led a more conventionally ’successful’ life. After many a gambling binge, Dostoyevsky would show up at his house, smelly and disheveled, to ask for a ‘loan.’ Ivan and Fyodor would end up acting out an awkward scene of patho and humiliation worthy of inclusion in a Dostoevsky novel…Joseph Conrad wasn’t as impressed by Karamazov as Joyce Carol Oates. He described it as “an impossible lump of valuable matter. It’s terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating. Moreover, I don’t know what Dostoevsky stands for or reveals, but I do know that he is too Russian for me. It sounds like some fierce mouthings of prehistoric ages.” Meanwhile Albert Einstein said “Dostovesky gives me more than any scientist.”

“You’re a gentleman,” they used to say to him. “You shouldn’t have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that’s no occupation for a gentleman.”

 ”If it were not for Christ’s Church, indeed there would be no restraint on the criminal in his evildoing, and no punishment for it later, real punishment, that is, not a mechanical one such as has just been mentioned, which only chafes the heart in most cases, but a real punishment, the only real, the only frightening and appeasing punishment, which lies in the acknowledgement of one’s own conscience.”

“Gentlemen, we’re all cruel, we’re all monsters, we all make men weep, and mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now, of all that I am the lowest reptile! I’ve sworn to amend, and every day I’ve done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! but the thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public shame; I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I shall be purified, gentlemen?”

“Is there suffering on this new earth? On our earth we can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love.”

“I am a f–king steamroller and I’ll roll over you or anybody else.”  –Eliot, Spitzer, in a 2007 conversation with assemblyman Jim Tedisco

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/eliot_spitzers_emperors_club.html

Meanwhile, Iraqi Christians are being martyred…

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=28805b73-fd9d-467b-98da-3d0772322a0f&k=9195&p=1

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They call them ‘books.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/03/06/do0604.xml

And hey, here’s Jonathan Yardley talking about one of my favourite books, a weird masterpiece by Conrad called ‘Victory.’

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/08/AR2005050800989.html