Short Takes on Two Recent Books

The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Each poem in this book is comprised of three speakers, the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog, and each speaker always speaks in this order, although the Dog does not always get the last word, so to speak.  The Old Woman speaks of human concerns, the Tulip is the voice of Beauty, and the Dog speaks for the animal.  Yet they also speak of what they are, woman, flower, dog, just themselves, if those selves could all cogently speak. The trio discuss God, Love, Death, the nature of Man.  I thought I'd had other books by Ostriker on my shelf, but I can't find any now.  I do remember using her book Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America when writing some papers in grad school. This one will remain on my shelf--I love the interplay of the three voices, how their conversations open up the world, and how, when you listen to speakers who are good at arguing their case, your loyalties and opinions shift and change like leaves in the wind.

Here is one of the shorter poems in this collection:

Soften and Melt

The man man made me soften and melt
said the old woman.

The bee made me shiver like a rag
said the dark red tulip.

The bitch made me push
said the dog.



Bay of Angels, by Diane Wakoski


Why do we chew again and again on the bones of old wrongs?  Why are we (are some of us, many of us, most of us?) haunted by old love, love gone wrong, ancient betrayals, decades-old heartbreak?  This can be true, I think, even if our present is relatively happy and drama-free.  Wakoski examines her past with movies and myth as her companions, finding tropes in both that twine and echo in her own life.  In the last section of the book, "The Lady of Light Meets the Shadow Boy," she writes poems that are inspired by a new friendship/mentorship with the poet Matthew Dickman, yet these poems, too, are meditations on the past, and what both poets share from it. I am always in awe of Wakoksi's catalog of imagery: the natural world, the urban environment, jewels, cloth, flowers, cinema, the qualities of light, as well as her ear for prosody and her skill with line-breaks. This collection, along with her previous book, The Diamond Dog, indicate to me another flowering in this poet's career.  Some of the fieceness of her earlier work is not here, but she has replaced anger (which was exciting) with a hard-won wisdom (calmer, but perhaps more beautiful.)  I look forward to her work, always.

Here's the third stanza of "Some Beauty Needs a Dimness." The poet is describing how a winter scene would be different if the sun were out:

                                                Now the 
gold and green and orange snow blowers and shovels
would come out, a reminder of
worldly destruction; the kids in red gloves would
dirty the world with snowballs, the car mufflers
would blow out a column of asserive, lively particles,
some perhaps staining the snow blue. Even the light itself would be
cheerful and lose its sonority.
Edward Weston's pepppers -- wouldn't you shudder
if they were green? Would you ever want to see a Greta Garbo 
film in color?

Pretending to be Morpheus: An Short Interview with Dave Awl

I've known writer/performer Dave Awl since the late 1990s, when I used to see him as part of the famed Neo-Futurist ensemble and their long-running Two Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind evening of 30 plays in 60 minutes. I have always appreciated his work, both the plays, monologues, songs, and skits from TMLMTBGB, and printed work from journals and his collection of poetry and prose, What the Sea Means, and was reminded of that fact when I saw he'd been featured recently in the on-line journal Escape Into Life. Dave was kind enough to respond to some questions that occurred to me after reading this lovely batch of work.  (I originally typed "lovely bath" of work, which also seems apt--one bathes in his work and emerges warm, refreshed, and clean, ready for the day or the night to startle and begin.)

Lives of the Spiders: Can you talk a bit about your process with the Night Diary poems? Do you compose drafts late at night while you are already (still) up, or do these writings stem from those middle of the night "oh crap I woke up and can't get back to sleep" times?

Dave Awl:  I do often find myself writing poems at two or three a.m -- it's a natural writing time for me, when my inhibitions and my guard are down and things flow a little more freely. But it's not a requirement, and I write by day sometimes, too ... I'm pretty sure I scribbled some of my first Night Diaries poems down in my spiral notebook while riding the bus in broad daylight.

The main idea behind the Night Diaries poems was that I wanted to try writing poems that followed the strange logic and surreal thought processes of dreams -- kind of like dreaming out loud into my notebook or keyboard while fully awake. I had been studying Jung for years, taking classes at the Jung Institute in Evanston, and keeping a dream journal for a while before I wrote the first Night Diaries poems. But rather than turning my dreams themselves into poems, I wanted to try to consciously write like the part of my brain that makes up my dreams. Pretending to be Morpheus, for a few minutes at a time.

LOTS: Do you consider yourself to be a "night person?" What associations or tendencies do you have with writing at night that might not be true of writing in the brazen light of day?

DA: Yes, I'm very much a nocturnal person. I've always found nighttime peaceful and relaxing, and it's when a lot of the most fun things happen. Night is when all the fabulous monsters come out. I like that nighttime is less crowded ... my literary hero and eventual friend Russell Hoban used to say that as an artist you need empty spaces in which to create, and I think at night there are more empty spaces to write into. It's easier to be imaginative at night, too. To steal a line from a performance piece I once did on this subject, non sequiturs and useful twists of expression breed in the moonlight.

And I think of this lovely line from Russell Hoban's novel The Medusa Frequency: "At three o’clock in the morning the moments patter like rain on the roof of night; the silence is a road to anywhere."

LOTS:  The titles of these works in Escape Into Life indicate more material--of there's a "Night Diary 82" one would assume there's a "Night Diary 1" and a "Night Diary 81."  Other poems found on-line, such as "Film Loop #12" for example, would lead one to consider the existence of other Film Loop poems. Do you have an archive of Night Diary entries?  And if so, can you quote from another of those entries for the readers of Lives of the Spiders?  (Dave's answer, after the break.)

Introduction to the Best Words from the Short Biographies of Poets in "The Best American Poetry 2013"

These best words, taken from the biographies of poets in this year's Best American Poetry volume, were selected by a panel of linguists and crossword puzzle dignitaries from across the nation, and in two cases, (Senegal and Norway) overseas. Meetings, taking place over a contentious three days in Iowa City, only nearly avoided violence--the verb advocates were adamant in their ongoing quest for better representation, while the noun contingent, as usual, argued for the primacy of persons, places, and things. Thankfully, the question of whether or not any one biographical note may contribute more than one word to our annual list seems to at last be laid to rest. A rare majority opinion of the delegates decided once and for all that one word and one word only may be selected from any contributor's biography, no matter how worthy and attention-getting accompanying words in the note might be.

Any such list, is, at its heart, a tad arbitrary. Nonetheless, the panelists feel we've been able to latch on to an acre of the  national poetic landscape, reflecting the varied and various responses of poets who have been asked to describe their own works. Interestingly enough, this is the first year that two words beginning with the prefix "un" have made the list, and they happen to appear side by side. This is also the fourth year in the past five that the word grandmother has been so honored.

The editors wish to thank the National Endowment for Noun Appreciation, the Smitherton and Aptly Adverb Coalition, and the Society of Thesauri Development for their on-going and much-needed support. Special thanks and recognition are due to Thaddeus (last name Jones?) the bartender at the Deadwood Tavern, for his fortitude and patience as we work out some form of payment plan that does not involve the authorities. The check is not yet in the mail, but we expect to hear back from the fine folks at the Guggenheim Foundation any day now, at which time a final settling of accounts can be made.

Without further ado, the list:

magpies.  soldier.  echo.  enlightenment.  collections.  nagging.  violence.  faceless.  risk.  

accumulation.  enemies.  leaven.  numbered.  grace.  compost.  confusion.  skipped.  prissy.  born.

loneliness.  dopplegangers.  tonic.  pagan.  numerous.  hiding.  residencies.  puberty.  dire.

flight.  laugh.  sisters.  elopement.  secret.  voyage.  bedrooms.  luck.  impossible.  glamour.

ladder.  hurt.  proximity.  horse.  code.  craving.  crime.  decipher.  birdbath.  baffles.  rapidly.

sheep.  doorframe.  sacrament.  speaker.  therefore.  absence.  suitor.  meander.  castaway.

taverns.  openness.  choose.  grandmother.  road.  everywhere.  seduction.  bedtime.  suffering.  

mortal.  concrete.  unfolding.  uncomfortable.  betrothal.   grateful.

The things one comes across in the dark wooded internet

Lynn Emmanuel's work, for example.  I have liked her prose poetry work, it has such an affinity and response to Gertrude Stein. Here she's in a more lyric mode, and she does it oh so well.

I also found our recently that my mentor and friend Diane Wakoski has a new book just out from Anhinga Press. I've ordered my copy, and hope it is en route.

Meanwhile, in Germany, poet Sarah Sloat discovers that she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For the second poem, if you follow the link.

Contemporary surrealist Eric Baus has a new book coming soon.  I think these might be in it.


Dorothea Lasky curates a poetry reading series in Brooklyn.  I'm not excited enough by this news to simply take off to Brooklyn, but you'd better believe the next time that work or friendship brings me to NYC I'll be eager to see if the trip coincides with a night when this takes place.


In a final and mostly self-serving entry, I'll say that I have some prose poems in New World Writing.  Did I say that already here?  That's OK, repetition is a form of music.  And I just re-read these and I'm still fond of them.

Spring Reading: A Partial List

1. In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys, poetry by Campbell McGrath.

I bought this after seeing him read at the Harold Washington Library a Couple of weeks back. I love his long Whitmanesque lines, and many of his prose poems.  I am not enamored, and I am never enamored, of his poems or anyone's poems about poems and the writing of poems.  I want every poet everywhere to be limited to one poem about the writing of poetry in her lifetime. Write more than that, obviously, but then alter, obscure, and otherwise hid the origin of the poem.  Too much preaching to a choir of one, the self.  Too much  self-inflation.  I believe we must believe we are doing some of the most important business anywhere when writing a poem, and I believe we ought to never say that aloud. So when I run into stanza like:

But the poem one is about to start,
the poem one is going to write
immediately, very soon, perhaps next March,
is like a foghorn calling mournfully in the night.

It makes me cranky.  I feel like the poet has just gone ahead and admitted that no one cares about poetry but other people writing poetry.  That may well be true, but do we have to have that fact pushed in our faces like a grapefruit? It does seem to me that this "poems about writing poetry" phase happens as some poets, often poets of certain renown, begin to age.  Call it the Billy Collins syndrome. I like some of Mr. Collins' work just fine, but he has a lot of these "watch me write a poem" poems.

Thankfully, Mr. McGrath, has plenty in this collection to admire and enjoy. One of the standouts is "Sugar or Blood." He read it masterfully at the reading.  And indeed, on one level it is about a poet's task and responsibility in the world:

I realize that I have never said plainly most of what I truly believe,
I have shied from difficulty and misstated my deepest fears,
I have not borne full witness to the suffering in the streets of the cities
     I love,
I have not waled a picket line against the tyranny of greed,
I have been wily and evasive even on behalf of art, 
I have not praised the movies in tones equal to the rapture
I have known there...

But if gives place and purchase to a reader who is not firmly placed in the realm of poetry.
McGrath could have said:

My poems never say plainly most of what I truly believe,
My poems shy from difficulty and misstate my deepest fears...  and so on.  I'm glad he didn't.

2. Metaphysical Dog: Poems, by Frank Bidart

An aging master, still at the top of his form.  I'm not sure who else in American poetry can construct a poem on the page with such grace, care and beauty in the making, and linebreaks that are at once both inevitable and surprising. In these poems he is not using the persona poems he made his name with--the persona here is a "Frank Bidart" who is lonely, broken-hearted, lion-hearted, determined to continue to wrestle with hard truths and the unsayable, which nevertheless he continues to say. "Poem Ending With a Sentence by Heath Ledger" is one of the best things I've ever read.  

3. City of Your Final Destination, a novel by Peter Cameron.

It's such a pleasure, sometimes, to read a novel you have read several times before. Like spending time with a well-known friend. I love this book, about a grad student who travels to Uruguay in an attempt to convince the executors of an obscure writer's estate to grant him permission to write the authorized biography. The grad student, Omar, is from Tehran originally, his family moved to Toronto, and now he lives in Kansas. The executors are the dead writer's wife, his mistress, who lived with the wife after her pregnancy, and the dead writer's gay brother. Omar's arrival is a stone thrown into a pond, and the depiction of the ripples is touching, tender, and funny. Cameron spares his characters not at all, but he loves them enough to make us love them too. His prose has the strength of early Hemingway: to use plank-plain sentences and construct something not showy, but utilitarian and beautiful.

I Love the Part in Aaron's Smith's New Book of Poetry

I love the part in Aaron Smith's new book Appetites called "I Love the Part," a long list poem indebted to Joe Brainard and David Trinidad, and the spirit of Frank O'Hara. It's an homage to movies, popular culture, to the gods and goddesses of cinema and how much we desire them. I can imagine, years in the future,  creative writing instructors all over the country assigning their students to write "I love the part" poems about the movies they love, just as we now assign "I remember" poems based on Joe Brainard's book of that name.

For the record, I just rented "Looper," and I love the part where Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis sit across from each other in an otherwise empty diner.  They are each playing the same man--30 years apart. Willis has been sent back to the past to be killed by an assassin, who is in the case himself, the younger version played by Gordon-Levitt. I wanted them to hug or something, but each despises the other, as we often despise our younger or older selves.

Click on this link for another poem from Appetites.  And click here for a brief but stirring defense and cheer for the power of personal narrative in poetry from Mr. Smith.

News from the First Few Days of the Year

I have three new poems up at Right Hand Pointing.  They all originate a small notebook I write in now and then on my morning commute on the train. When I filled one notebook up I looked through it to see where poems might be working to be born.

While poking around the RHP site I found this digital chapbook by Jeanie Tomasko and liked the poems a lot. Recommended for those of you who don't mind God walking into a poem and taking the whole contraption over.

Here's another Helen Adam video, because I am a bit obsessed.  (I love how she rolls her R's in Rat and Roach in this song.) I also found some sound files to listen to this weekend--Helen at Naropa both reading and lecturing.

"And what were they anyway, sprigs of grass, things of blue?"

I have been interested in whatever poet Mary Ruefle might have to say ever since I discovered her book A Little White Shadow,  a poetry collection that was the facsimile of a small novel that she herself found in a thrift store and with the aid of white-out, used to reveal small, beautiful, and disquieting poems. Now from Wave Books we have her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, a book I've dropped everything else for.  You can find more of her erasure works on her website, and I bet you'll want to rush out and find the perfect book that you can use to simultaneously obscure and uncover.  It is in the corner of the junk shop, it lives at the bottom of a box at the next garage sale you see.

Here she speaks in the lecture "Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World."

There is a world that poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

Her lecture "I Remember, I Remember" is the best homage and
riff on Joe Brainard's I Remember that I can remember:

I remember reading Rilke's Duine Elegies again and again and again, until I "got" them, until something burst over me like a flood, and I remember, once again, weeping and weeping with a book in my hands.

Pickles

I wrote a poem on the train this morning. I'll wait a few days to look at it again, with new eyes. I have a feeling it's not very good. But that's ok. It felt right, to have my pen and notebook in front of me, and feel like the words were flowing out smoothly. The other day I taught a writing workshop with two little girls in the bookstore where I work. They were sisters, and the youngest wanted to write a story with chapters. I took dictation, each chapter was named for an animal and a sentence or two long. "Chapter Two. Tigers. The tiger is very pretty and wants to go to the store. His favorite food is pickles. His name is Pickles, too."

I had been talking about words, about falling in love with individual words; we wrote words down on post-its and put them on a word-tree. I think I knew right there, writing down the word "pickles" and smiling because who could not love that word, that I was back into poetry. Like swimming again, like water, like waves. It's been a while, and I felt great, diving back into the word pool.

Selections from a Commuter's Notebook

1. Mornings
when the first
cottonwood

seeds flurry down across
May
lawns and

gather at curbsides and
among the yellow
irises, mornings

like this--Night
forgot
to take in the moon,

it remains
a white stone
in the pool of the sky.


2. Morning
is what the starlings
discuss

as they pick at the chaff
of the newly
mown lawn, while

ambling dogs, grey
of muzzle, sniff
the weed beds

for news: summer,
dare we say it, becomes
general

and insistent
in this patch
of the world. God

cracks the knuckles
of his grass
stained hands.

3. The Lawn
of Rosehill
Cemetery already

gone flat
and golden though
it's not yet July--

In this encampment,
do you hear a murmured
conversation

from the pup tents of the dead?

Paging George Abend

I am delighted to have work included in the current issue of Right Hand Pointing.  Always a fine journal to page through.

I also got a copy of the recent Bluestem in the mail--I love having my work at on line journals, but to have the mailman bring me a journal in the mail, and there's the issue, with my name in print, and my bio in the back--well, it's still very gratifying to me, and somehow still more exciting than seeing a poem up on line. Not to knock on line work--Bluestem also published my ode to a snowy night on their web version.You can hear me read it to you there, in case you are too tired to focus on the words on the screen.

Sarah Jane Sloat has some of her poems exploring invented typefaces up at Used Furniture Review. When I read these, it reminded me of her wine descriptions, and made me wish I'd thought of a series like this before she did.  But then, Sarah's writing is so elegant that I guess I can just be glad that she wrote them; my job is just to share the love.

In other news, I got a copy of Lew Welch's recently reissued Collected Poems, Ring of Bone.  Welch is one of the lesser know poets of the Beat/San Francisco Renaissance era, and I'm very happy to be reading and re-reading these poems.  He was a friend of Gary Snyder's, wrote about his affinity for Gertrude Stein, and in his work paid homage to great poets of China and Japan. I'll try and post more about him when I've gone through the book a couple more times.

Ok, I'm off to NYC for the big bookselling conference--flying out at 6 AM tomorrow morning--so I'll leave with this:

     John said, "Then I met that short fat guy with the 

     neat little beard, with a name like dawn."

     "You mean George Abend?"

     "Yeah."

      Abend means evening."

                                         Lew Welch, from "Circle Poems" in Ring of Bone.

Three Reviews (in the form of plays) of "50 American Plays" by Matthew and Michael Dickman

 The Fourth of July

MATTHEW DICKMAN.
          Wonder twins--power of absurdity.

MICHAEL DICKMAN.
          Wonder twins--power of brevity.

MATTHEW DICKMAN.
           Wonder twins-- power of vaguely political leftist polemics.

 MICHAEL DICKMAN.
          And fun, wonder twin.  Don't forget it was fun to write.

MATTHEW DICKMAN.
          Activate wonder twin power!

MICHAEL DICKMAN.
          Activate wonder twin power!


(They touch power rings and immediately explode into a finale of Fourth of July fireworks)



Castor and Pollux Consider the Moon

CASTOR:
          Wasn't there an oil named after me?

POLLUX.
          We are boxers, and horsemen.  And sailors.

CASTOR.
           Do I get to be the immortal one this time?

POLLUX.
          We are twins, and so share our immortality.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
          (Having just arrived from Idaho)
          I'll box both of you at once. Greek pussies.

CASTOR.
          He thinks he's the immortal one.

POLLUX.
          Maybe he is.  But we are the divine twins, born of the silver moon!

CASTOR.
          That was an egg.

POLLUX.
           No, no, I'm sure it was the moon.  Our glittery mother!

CASTOR.
          Our mother was a princess who was raped by a swan.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY.
          Are we going to talk about the past or are we going to drink like men?
          (Whispers)
          It's like they are going to start making out at any minute.

POLLUX.
          You so badly want to see that.  But we are talking about our mother.
           Isn't there some tradition where people thought she was the moon?

CASTOR.
          In at least one tradition Ernest Hemingway is actually Zeus.


POLLUX.
            Yes, Hemingway's tradition. Listen, we will box you if you take the form of a swan.



Vignette

(Two men walk in to a bar. Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein are drinking there in silence, companionably.)

MAN #1.
          Hey, aren't you Gertrude Stein?  What are you doing back in America?

GERTRUDE STEIN.
          America is not in America.  America is an idea kept under a gentleman's cap. America is a cupful of brass tacks, in a lady's handbag.
(She sips her creme de menthe, and coughs)
          America, go touch yourself with your atom bomb.

MAN #2.
          Allen Ginsberg--that woman is stealing your line.  And she isn't even saying it right!

GINSBERG.
          (Taking his head off the pillow of his arms)
          That's no woman, that's my wife!

(Frank O'Hara walks briskly across the stage in search of a martini)

MAN #1.
          Frank O'Hara in the bar too?  What are the chances?

MAN #2.
          Frank O'Hara is on stage in all of these plays. Or sometimes behind the scenery, prompting our lines. That reminds me.  (He goes over to the jukebox and selects a song)

          (When "Chances Are" begins playing, the two men look at Stein and Ginsberg, now deep in quiet conversation.  They shrug, and begin to dance with each other.)


         

Getting Rough With the Good China: A Bit About the Work of Carl Phillips

I used to be enthralled with the work of poet Carl Phillips.  His poems often seemed to be loose translations from fragments of the ancient Greek, and I loved their broken beauty, like pottery in shards. Speaking of pottery in shards, just after I wrote that I opened up his 1992 collection In the Blood to these lines:

I can picture him

getting rough with the good china,

how I'll feel about that.

                                             (from the poem "Goods")

After some years I stopped buying his books, which appear with a frequency other poets might envy.  His subject, nearly always, is desire, and more than that, the ineffable quality of desire: why do we want what we want, and how to describe it? Whether the "it" be sex, or power, the will to dominate or the need to be dominated, the longing for love--these things are, if we are honest, nearly indescribable in language, and Phillips so often resorted to the indeterminate: "as if" or "it seemed as if". Despite the fact that I agree that desire--what we desire, how desire functions, what desire means--despite the fact that I agree that these are topics are nearly impossible to describe, how a landscape evokes feeling, why a certain sight makes us gasp, or feel pain, or regret, why the sight of a stranger can evoke such alarming lust, despite the fact that I agree that all of this is nearly impossible to talk about, I tired of Phillips' recognition and embrace of this difficulty, in the form of refusing to make a declaration.

In a 2010 interview in he says, "There was a review that talked about how my sentences are constantly self-questioning and doubting, as if that were something weird. But that’s simply how I am in real life, whether on the page or in a supermarket."

I think I wanted him to bluster, and pose, and state something like a fact.

A whistling old man

Something I discovered while looking at the poetry shelves at the bookstore where I work: Richard Wright, the famed author of Native Son, turned to haiku during the last 18 months of his life, and wrote over 4,000 of them. In the introduction to Haiku: The Last Poems of an American Icon, his daughter recalls, "I remember how he would hang pages and pages of them up, as if to dry, on long metal rods strung across the narrow office area of his tiny sunless studio in Paris, like the abstract still-life photographs he used to compose and develop himself at the beginning of his Paris exile."

Here are three of the 817 haiku in the current collection:

     A long winter rain:
A whistling old man whittles
     A dream on a stick.

      In the summer lake,
The moon gives a long shiver,
    Then swells round again.

     A spring sky so clear
That you feel you are seeing
     Into tomorrow.

In the General Excitement, Gratitude, and Pride Department

Things have been very busy here at Lives of The Spiders.  Three of the prose poems from my Artistic Statement series just went live at kill author. Three spider poems, two of recent vintage and one (An Unknown Species) that was written in the late 1990s were just published by THIS magazine. And the fine folks at THIS saw fit to nominate that poem for a Pushcart Prize.  I have always been both proud and baffled by that poem--it came out of nowhere and was not similar to anything I'd written before. I think it was one of the first things I wrote where I used something, a quote in this case, as a diving board, to jump into the not known, as close to the unconscious as I can get, and just write what wanted to be written.

I'd like to thank the Academy.  And the editors.  And also Bill Yarrow, who met me at a reading and suggested I send some poems to THIS. Excuse me, I'm off to make some metaphors or hammer some bricks or drink some champagne or something.

Keep an eye on this space. In late December or early January I'll be announcing an exciting new phase of Lives of the Spiders.  More webs!  Different weavings!  And an invitation to join in some writing mischief.

Three Recommendations

1. The collection The Last Skin, by Barbara Ras.  A bookseller friend at Women and Children First Bookstore steered me toward Ras's collection Bite Every Sorrow, and I found this one in a used bookstore in Wicker Park.  Whether speaking of grief, or describing a foreign landscape, Ras is always surprising, vivid, inventive. In her longer, roiling poems she channels Whitman, or at least bows to his influence and sings along with his hymns to the vastness and variety of the world.  Here's the end of the poem "Sitka Cemetery"

     The shadows of eagles made imperfect crosses on the ground,

     and I confess I've crossed myself enough to last a lifetime.

     If I had a pencil, I would have broken it

     in two and left one half on the grave of a mother, the other,

     on the grave of a child.

2. The City, Our City, by Wayne Miller.

Miller manages to make his City any city, your city, a city both contemporary and eternal.  The City, loud, bawdy, bold, commercial, impersonal, intimate---it's all here, in many forms.  I wish I had written this book.


From "The Beautiful City (In 32 Strokes)"

     (4) Shadows of winter

     branches stamped through the blinds,

     (5) and then the last remaining leaf begins to ring.

               

3. Every time I read an edition of The Best American Poetry I look and see the age of the poets.  They all used to be so old.  And I thought I had time to be on those pages, someday.  Now many of the poets are so young, and while I am nearly fifty I do not feel old, not in my stupidly boyish and impressionable heart, at any rate.  I still hope to be in these pages one day, even if I don't care nearly as much one way or the other, and the envy is mostly overruled by enjoyment and admiration. To quote Jennifer Grotz in "Poppies,"

     But now it is still light and the blackbirds are singing

     as if their voices are the only scissors left in this world.

Today I Have Registered on the Retina of a Street Cabbie’s Horse

Windy City Queer, an anthology edited by Kathie Bergquist, has just been published by University of Wisconsin Press.  I enjoyed the release party at Women and Children First books store very much.  I was delighted to read with other contributors to the book, including Sharon Bridgforth, Gregg Shaprio, Achy Obejas, and Goldie Goldbloom.  If I had to pick a favorite among the readings, (all fine writers and readers) I'd say that Goldie's was it--she is shy, I think, but her slight nervousness fit so well with the tone of the story she read.  If you get a chance, read her novel The Paperbark Shoe. Set in Australia in WW II, the odd, hapless, and wonderful characters reminded me of the work of Carson McCullers as well as earlier John Irving.  I am eager to read (or hear) more of her work.

I read my poem from the anthology.  In support of all the work that went into the anthology, I'd ask for you to buy it, or check it out of your library--I like my piece in it just fine, but there's much to enjoy and ponder in the book in addition to my short poem. You can read the other one I performed the night of the release party after the jump.  It's a bit of a crowd-pleaser, but I like the "I-do-this, I do-that Frank O'Hara quality of it, and feel happy that the first draft's dashed off feel (I did write it there in the park) remains after its many revisions.

Monday Grab-Bag

The online journal Right Hand Pointing has a fine double-issue up, wherein every poem is titled with the name of an American State.  Go USA!  And go on with your bad selves reading these cool works.

There's a writing contest associated with The new "One Book, One Chicago" pick.  It's judged by Stuart Dybek.  Not a big prize monetarily, but a lot of glory. I think I am going to enter it as an assignment to myself to write a new short-short.  You should too!

I am very much infatuated with two poets recently features at Escape Into Life: Charles Rafferty and Jeannine Hall Gailey.  As always with this gem of an online magazine, the accompanying artwork is strange and lovely and evocative.  And I wish I did not know this, but the site just started a store devoted to the artwork shown on its pages. 

Faithful readers (the entire trio of you) may remember how I raved about the new Tim Dlugos collection,  A Fast Life, edited by David Trinidad.  Here's some more insightful commentary about Dlugos' work.  Here are two more of Tim's poems.

Speaking of Mr. Trinidad, here's a place where you can read his poem "The Late Show" and either listen to or read the text of a conversation he had with Robert Politio.

Finally, I know I am so late to the party on this one, but I have to say that I am bowled over by the inventiveness, the beauty, and the pleasure-in-language zing that is all between the covers of Jennifer Karmin's aaaaaaaaaaalice.  My favorite sections are the ones that riff off of text found in Beginning Japanese Part 2.

Two Poems now at La Petite Zine

I'm very happy to announce the publication of two poems in the new issue of La Petite Zine.  I'm in good company here.  I especially like the work of Sarah Rose Nordgren and Nate Pritts. I need to re-read the rest of the work.  The two poems the editors accepted are at least a decade old, and I've tried to get them published numerous times.  Each has been altered since its first "final" draft, but not a lot.  Just goes to show, persistence, it pays.

Also got word yesterday that a prose poem from the "Artistic Statement" series will appear in an upcoming edition of The Prose-Poem Project. My fiendish plans to conquer the poetry kingdom continue.