1. Burn, Witch, Burn
2. The Innocents
3. Rosemary’s Baby
4. Damien: Omen II. The Omen Omen III: The Final Conflict
5. The Haunting
6. I Walked with a Zombie

Classically creepy:

1. The Spiral Staircase
2. Curse of the Demon
3. Peeping Tom
4. Seance on a Wet Afternoon

Subtly sinister:

1. Don’t Look Now
2. Immortality
3. Cat People

Subtitled terror:

1. A Tale of Two Sisters
2. The Devil’s Backbone
3. Open Your Eyes
4. Les Diaboliques

Campy and satirical scares:

1. Shaun of the Dead
2. The Faculty
3. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
4. Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte
5. Countess Dracula

Simply scared the crap out of me:

1. Something Wicked this Way Comes
2. Carrie
3. The Ring
4. Aliens
5. Dead Calm
6. Wait Until Dark

In addition, I want some reusable shopping bags big enough to carry groceries home. The choices seem endless, but I especially like the following: plain Jane bags like this one, cute, customizable bags like these, a witty, yet globally aware, bag like this one, funny bags like these, or something simple and pretty like this.

I also need a pair of kitchen shears and a kitchen timer, ideally a magnetic one I can stick to the fridge.

I always crave books. In particular, these books: The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir, Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser, The Wives of Henry VII by Antonia Fraser, Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems by Cate Marvin, and The Afflicted Girls by Nicole Cooley.

I’m trying to collect all the DVDs from the Godzilla series. These are next in line: Godzilla Raids Again, Mothra vs. Godzilla, and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.

My ultimate fantasy birthday gift right now is this adorable rabbit gadget.

But I’m pretty easy to please present-wise. I’m happy with a free beer or a birthday mixtape. Atlanta made me a really great mix last year.

[Btw, I took the title of this post from the lyrics to this song by The Bird and the Bee.]

You might like it too:

Of course I also enjoy more intellectual video games, like Civilization or Professor Layton and the Curious Village. I play them all the time. But sometimes when I come home after turning the wheels of capitalism all day I feel like shooting things. Computer generated things. Like zombies. Or aliens. Or Nazis. Or New Yorkers residents of Liberty City. Perhaps this makes me a bad person. Or perhaps, as I’ve always suspected, this makes me a well-adjusted person capable of social interaction. Either way, I’m pleased to report that Grand Theft Auto IV apparently offers gamers the opportunity to kill and to contemplate the American justice system.

See for yourself:

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of GTAIV so Scalia and I can throw down.

Jaquith compiled statistics on poetry submissions “covering clichéd topics,” presumably to discourage poets from submitting any more poems about blood, cats, or poetry to the journal. To his surprise, the math proved that VQR simply adores poems about cats. Although not as much as they adore poems about darkness and water.

Many readers apparently interpreted these findings to mean that VQR prefers the cliché to the new idea. A March 17th update to the original post attempts to clarify things by explaining “that words that would appear to be clichéd don’t preclude a poem that uses them from being good, or worthy of publication.”

Well, duh.

I understand the concept of clichéd topics. I teach introductory poetry workshops quite often, and I’ve taken heat (< --cliché!) from colleagues in the past for banning overly familiar topics — dead grandmothers, girlfriends, suicide — during the first half of the course. I prefer students attempt to write poems about unfamiliar topics, topics they usually consider too banal or too strange for poetic investigation. Eventually I give back their dead, their lovers, and their dark thoughts and let them write what they will. The temporary ban does help them learn the importance of putting a new spin (< --cliché!) on commonly used topics.

What I don’t understand is how words, in and of themselves, can be clichés. At what point did the word “cat” turn into a cliché? Do we blame Carl Sandburg and his tiny fog feet? William Carlos Williams and the jamcloset/flowerpot episode? The genius who turned Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats into a Broadway musical?

If it’s true that familiarity breeds contempt (< --cliché!), then I can certainly see how a word might function as a cliché within the context of a specific body of work by a specific author (I myself have an odd, slightly unfortunate fondness for the word “sparkle.”) or a specific genre. (Think of the word “bodice” as it’s used in romance novels. Or better yet think of the words “heaving bodice.”) But outside of these circumstances can a word in its ordinary usage become cliché?

If so, I hope someone makes a list of such words. My first vote goes to the word “akimbo.”

In January, my dad asked me if I would write a poem to read during the non-traditional ceremony. I agreed but had absolutely no idea what to write. When my sister got married in 2001, I read a poem I had written as my toast. My dad mentioned that poem when he made his request, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had written that poem in my brother’s car as we drove from the church to the reception. Anyway, I didn’t start really worrying about the poem until about February 20th or so. That’s when I went into full panic mode.

Lately, I’ve been working almost exclusively in serial form. I have a (looong) series of poems set in and around a Depression-era carnival. (I began that series in grad school, so it actually predates (prefigures?) Carnivàle.) I have a series of poems about phobias. A series about the Salem witch trials. I just started making notes for a poem about women accused of being Nazi collaborators. And I want to write something about women and human trafficking.

So.

Most of this subject matter seemed inappropriate for a wedding poem. I am not, as I wailed to my sister, a happy happy feel good poet. I had nothing — no idea for a title, no image, no clever line, no subject. So I did what I do best: research. I research poems the way first year law associates research briefs. I Googled “marriage” and “wedding” and “bride” like it was my job. I came up with the following email addressed to my brother and sister (dated 2/22/08):

Do you think Dad and J would be offended by a poem entitled “Wikiwedding” in which I crib every line from information about marriage found on Wikipedia? Seriously. It has come to that, my friends.

My sister’s reply:

Could be sounds hilarious to me.

My brother’s reply (via Facebook):

Maybe you could compare dad to an athlete dying young. And J to some kind of gyre.

Despite this encouragement, I still couldn’t make any progress on the “Stupid. Damn. Wedding. Poem.” So I did the other thing I do best: steal material for poems from pop culture. I remembered an episode of Bones called “The Boneless Bride.” The plot revolves around minghun, a traditional Chinese ritual rarely practiced today. (Although The New York Times did do a story on “ghost brides” in 2006.) The concept of a ghost bride intrigued me, and for a minute, I thought I had finally come up with a workable idea for the “Stupid. Damn. Wedding. Poem.” Then I remembered a very important fact.

It’s my mother who is Chinese. My dad’s Scottish.

Bother.

So back to Google I went. This time I used “Scottish” and “weddings” as my search terms. Eventually, I found this fragment from a ballad by Robert Burns:

Ithers seek they ken na what,
Features, carriage, and a’ that;
Gie me love in her I court,
Love to love maks a’ the sport.

Let love sparkle in her e’e;
Let her lo’e nae man but me;
That’s the tocher-gude I prize,
There the luver’s treasure lies.

I liked Burns’ lyric for two reasons: 1) My dad absolutely worships Robert Burns. 2) It referenced the Gaelic word “tocher-gude,” which translates as “marriage portion” or “dowry.” The dowry idea started me thinking about the Wikipedia entry on marriage (According to Wikipedia, people used to get married for business reasons rather than romantic reasons. Shocking!); about concerned moms and dads in China procuring wives for their dead sons; about arranged marriages; about goats. (Apparently I once read something about a man needing goats for his daughter’s dowry. And so I thought about goats.)

I let these idea coalesce, poured myself a large glass of a very nice Pinot Grigio, and wrote a poem. I stole a fragment from my favorite Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet and used it in the final line and as the title. The final product seemed like something my dad and J would appreciate. At the very least, I knew they would appreciate the fact that the poem was very me. I worried that maybe my grandmother or J’s sister wouldn’t “get it.” But I thought that maybe if I read the Burns fragment first, as an epilogue, it would put my poem in the proper context. So I did. And then I read this:

A Roof Against the Rain

We did not always marry for love.
Marriage began as business, a mode of commerce,
a means of conquest. The right wife provides
heirs, status, income. So a rich man chooses
his bride without ever consulting his heart.

And the poor man, too, for he cannot afford
to dwell on a girl’s pretty face or sweet nature.
Both men must instead consider the count:
the number of cattle, or gold coins, or allies
that he needs. The number he desires.

So wives take lovers. Or their husbands do.
Every consort pays the price. Some are happy.
Some not. But kings die, and countries fall.
Livestock is eaten. Money is spent.
A loveless life lasts as long as any other.

And is our modern world so very different?
We come home to darkened rooms, sleep
between cold sheets, wake to a blinding silence.
We buy, and sell, and collect all the trappings
of civilization. Sex is a biological function,

like eating, or breathing. Love is a myth,
perpetuated by popular culture. And yet
we seek companionship. We long for
the quickened heartbeat, the flushed cheek.
We savor the first kiss, the next meeting.

We will the phone to ring, linger over coffee
with strangers, wanting to become friends,
wanting to hold hands in the dark, wanting
the happier life, where marriage is a choice,
and love a refuge, a roof against the rain.

The end.