Last night I got a call inviting me to present a lecture for a group retreat in Wisconsin next month. And they actually want to pay me. Not the kind of honorarium great celebrities like Al Franken and Dale Brown get, but actual money for talking to a crowd about Vikings.

The group is called Norden Folk, which (to me) has a kind of sinister sound. However, I’m informed that the backbone of the group is university professors of Scandinavian descent. So I have a strong feeling that, if I have political problems with anybody at the event, it won’t because they’re Aryan supremacists.

Speaking of Vikings, reader Dave Lull sent me to this video, by way of The Centered Librarian. It appears to be a film of the special effects a Danish museum is using to tell the story of a runestone in its collection.

However, I do have to nitpick a little and point out that, under usual conditions, swords don’t float.

Otherwise it’s nice.

Finally, this little video by way of The RiffTrax Blog. Somebody is manipulating the photos of dead poets to make them look (sort of) like they’re reading their poems.

Is it me, or is that just creepy?

I think we ought to mention that today is John Milton’s 400th birthday. Thanks to Mickey McLean at World Magazine for reminding me. Though I’m afraid my card will be late.

And yes, I have read Paradise Lost. Also Samson Agonistes.

But that was in college. I’m not sure anything read for a college class really qualifies on one’s Life Reading List.

U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins doesn’t hide things like lesser poets do, according to poet Stephen Dunn. “He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered.” Read some of his work on this author’s blog, and note this poem on Poets.org called, “Introduction to Poetry.”

“. . . But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.”

Do people care about poetry anymore? Do they want only to know what a poet is trying to say and care nothing about beautiful words? [HT to SB]

Here’s a painful, honest poem from Langston Hughes.

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

. . .

I am the man who never got ahead,

The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream

In the Old World while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,

That even yet its mighty daring sings

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That’s made America the land it has become.

O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas

In search of what I meant to be my home–

For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,

And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came

To build a “homeland of the free.”

Todd Boss, a graduate of St. Olaf Collage and Twin Cities local poet, has landed a publishing deal with Norton. He sounds like my kind of guy.

“I write for farmers, factory workers, all those in my immediate circle,” he said. “I am writing about day-to-day life, the struggles of being a human being and love and all the troubadour kinds of things. I’m not writing about the Greek myths. I don’t have to impress the academy, the university professors, because I don’t work with them.”

Norton editor Carol Houck Smith said Boss’ hardcover debut is extraordinary, especially since she usually learns of first-time poets after they’ve won an award or prize. “Yellowrocket” was the first book she’s worked on that didn’t come through that route.