The Funny Poem

Tennessee Williams brings the yucks

The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.

I started doing something in December, so I think I got it in just under the wire so it can’t be called a “New Year's resolution.” I’m a big fan of making changes all year round, but I actually go out of my way to avoid them around January 1st because then there’s all this silly outside pressure that we don’t need to progress as people.

But this isn’t about change; it’s about poetry. Specifically my own intake of it and how I said that when I wake up, before I check e-mail, before I look at Twitter and even before I sit down and meditate, I’m going to read some poetry. All I have to do is go to the Poetry Foundation website and I’ve got countless poems to pick from, so I just try to be as random as possible. I’d mostly stayed away from poets I was familiar with because the key is discovery. But the other day, I found myself doing a little after-hours poetry reading (that is: poetry at lunch) and ended up on the page for all the Tennessee Williams content the Poetry Foundation has to offer up. I came upon the poem “Life Story” and couldn’t stop laughing at it. Since I’m a fan of the Poetry Foundation, New Directions, which published much of Williams’ work and also not break copyright laws, you’ll just have to click the link to read the poem. But trust me, it’s pretty good.

Other little bits:

• If you’re in Brooklyn, Emily and I tried Al Badawi last night. I haven’t made it out to Bay Ridge to try their other restaurant, Ayat, but the chicken shawarma I had last night was top-tier shawarma. Highly suggest. Here’s Robert Sietsema’s Eater review of Al Badawi from last month.

• “Do you understand why people still seek fame, even though it seems so clear now that even micro-fame is micro-traumatizing us?” - Emily Gould on “Fame.”

• They’re still power lunching in L.A.

• I’ve always thought Julia Cameron was one of those fascinating writers a lot of people might be familiar with because of one big book (in her case, The Artist's Way) but maybe don’t know much more about her. That’s a shame considering she was a part of the New Journalism group of writers who Nora Ephron said “wrote the best ledes in America,” so it was great to see Rachel Syme talk with her for The New Yorker.

• And I wrote about style illustrators like Mr. Slowboy and Dick Carroll for my latest at GQ.