Gardner is a Groundlings performer and actress whose credits encompass writing and voicing more than one role on Crackle’s Bryan Cranston-produced animated comedy SuperMansion. She next has an assisting position in the feature Life of the Party, written via and starring Melissa McCarthy. (McCarthy took a domestic Emmy for her function as Sean Spicer on SNL this month.) Gardner is repped through TalentWorks and Odenkirk Provissiero.
Null is a Chicago-based musical comedian and improviser hailing from iO Chicago. His credits consist of the 2011 film The Heart: The Final Pulse. UTA reps him.
Additionally, SNL has delivered several new writers for the approaching season, including Sam Jay (Take My Wife), Gary Richardson (The Characters), Erik Marino (Weeds), Andrew Dismukes (Call Me Brother), Steven Castillo (Becoming Red), Claire Friedman and Nimesh Patel (the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner).
SNL returns for its forty-third season this Saturday with host Ryan Gosling and musical guest Jay-Z. The Lorne Michaels-produced sketch collection will continue to hold its national live telecasts all through the imminent season. Emmy winner Alec Stanley Baldwin is about to return inside the most suitable as President Donald Trump.
SNL capped a banner season forty-two by taking home a main nine Emmy wins this year, consisting of cartoon series and cast member Kate McKinnon and McCarthy and 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley.
“Going into the season, I knew I desired to get it right. We notion it’d be the largest selection of our lifetime, and we desired to be in the middle of it,” Michaels advised The Hollywood Reporter after SNL’s large Emmy display. “We lived week to week, and it changed into one of those years wherein the cast rose to any assignment; the writing group of workers and the layout team did. No one stated, ‘We’ve handiest were given two hours.’ The president just did this, and we have to trade it …. This set changed into a united and all one mind, and each person sacrificed and supported every other. That’s great you ever get while you do the form of display like this.”
In the Red Engine Press January 2006 newsletter, “Yarnspinners and Wordweavers,” Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of Tracings, writes:
“Auden thought the purpose of poetry is to disenchant. That may be why I am not much for rhyme or pretty, though I do like food images, especially sweets. I prefer melancholy wistful; if a song is sung, let it discord to keep the reader alert and make him reconsider. Nursery rhymes are for nurseries and sunsets to be viewed firsthand from a bluff, preferably while holding hands with someone handsome. The tendons of the best poetry are politics, introspection, and the abominable snowmen among us tempered–occasionally–by a look back at where we’ve been. Oh, and irony. That’s better than tiramisu and latté for keeping people talking late into the night.”
In the preface to One Hundred and One Famous Poems, published in 1929, editor Roy W. Cook discusses the great need for poetry in the modern industrial age.
While the modern age, with podcasting and blogs, has made poetry more accessible, poetry is also considered frivolous and not lucrative. It’s a shame because Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s poetry can create an air raid sound still and calm. She can let us stand beside an uncle who smells Barbasol and is on his way to war. The subtle message is clear: Stop. Pay attention. Listen.
Most of us wrote poetry in high school, including protests against parents, petitions to teenage crushes, or the usual “my life stinks, what’s the meaning of it all” poems. As adults, we may dribble our wine-and-cappuccino-soaked angst onto the page. Poetry often can’t be beaten as private therapy, and it helped poet Dessa Byrd Reed heal after a car accident. But Reed turned her recovery writings into a passion for poetry that took her to China recently.
Poetry is relevant in today’s text-messaging high-tech world, as evidenced by all the poetry Web sites. It speaks of love, as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnets. It relates to eternal epic truths, as in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It captures the cry of a generation, as in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” It reflects, as in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It makes a cinematic statement about freedom behind bars, as in the movie “Slam.” It speaks of the Divine, as in the poetry of Thich Nhat Hanh. I agree with Carolyn Howard-Johnson that poetry moves us–or it must if we want to move others. Howard-Johnson’s poetry moved Compulsive Reader editor Magdalena Ball to name Tracings to The Compulsive Reader’s list of “Top Ten Reads of 2005.”
Howard-Johnson pokes fun at portraits of poets in poetry magazines but loves poetry:
“So long before you took up a pen, wrote pictures,
you imagined them in liquid blue, the stories of others,
your own.”
It’s easy to get caught up in our stories without understanding them. Howard-Johnson peppers her poetry with images of travel, not just global but time travel. She remarks in “Poetry, Quantum Mechanics, and Other Trifles” that her critique group warns her she complicates her poems with too many layers:
“my ingredients, they Players say, are Featured concealed
behind an Adds opaque pottery bowl;
their matrices misunderstood.
Children we are. No one tells
us the truth of such a grand
dessert.”
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke pointed out the truths of existence in Sonnets to Orpheus, showing us that a young ballet dancer, dead, is not forever gone but is not visible. That’s “the truth of such a grand/dessert.” That’s what poetry is about–revealing, evoking, describing, and thought-provoking. Poetry connects the past with the present and future. Howard-Johnson can visit the historic war museum in Oslo and reflect on war as it affected the world:
“Norway’s fjords shed salty droplets on
faces like my father’s. Round faces. Eyes dilute-blue
like the pale skies above them. Men who fought
as Churchill’s voice crackled through smuggled vacuum
tubes.”
Howard-Johnson considers war as it now affects her family:
“Only days before
I reached this spur, I saw my grandson off to war, alone.
A sacrifice. A trade. For my father, who never marched.”
We feel the sense of place in poetry, but the site is fluid, as in Howard-Johnson’s work–a flight from LAX to Salt Lake City can take her through her own.
