Yikes, a virus!

Hey, if you are patiently waiting for your poem to arrive from the Adopt a Poem/Abandon a Poem Project, I beg you to be even more patient.  My home computer has a virus, and until I get that all taken care of, I can't be sending out emails to everyone with their new poems to take in and nuture.  So hang on until later in the week!

"I Turn Old Lovers Into Sea Monsters"

"Writing a poem is like transcending space and time, especially if it's based on something true. And they're all sort of true. I turn old lovers in to sea monsters and haunted European forests. It feels like rewriting history the way it happened in some parallel universe. I should have known from the beginning things were going to go wrong"-- Claudia  Lamar, in her introduction to Phantom Kangaroo Number Four.  (I have one of my 13 sentence poems up in issue number five.)

Frankensteined Sentences

I spent a big chunk of today reworking my "13 sentences" manuscript: 64 poems each comprised of 13 sentences, many of those sentences collaged from art magazines and also my own notebooks. Often the sentences are Frankensteined together from various texts, one sentence created from three or four sources.  Then the individual sentences are grouped together and chat awkwardly, like guests at a party.  What I hope is that sometimes, like a party, the mood and flow and vibe come together, and all at once something memorable happens. One section of the manuscript is poems made of sentences that I wrote while watching (often very bad) movies.  I might call this part "The Netflix Notebooks."  Here's one. Most of these sentences were written while watching the movie Away From Her, starring Julie Christie. Like most of the 13 sentence poems, sentences from elsewhere in the manuscript intrude and make themselves known:

The Shadow Horses Will Gallop Away

All the homely and usual tasks, like washing up after dinner, these are things we want to do with a companion.

We could ski across the frozen lake, and lie on our backs in the snow as the moon is rising.

I do not wish to be lonesome and alone, but I go out by myself into this varied blue evening.

Would we miss the horses as they gallop away?

The icy stream approves of the bridge.

To have a bad memory is a tender and lucky thing.

Old hurts fade, a bruise will yellow away from the dark.

In the madhouse it’s always winter, winter light always and tarnished silver afternoons.

Remember a night they were twined in yours: my fingers little monks cloistered in your hands?

Home becomes voices in a cabin in the woods.

Insecurities continued, but we left them on the otherwise deserted top floor.

Now, as much as ever, it’s important to ask yourself, “what is forgiveness?”

Our exhibition also suggested the importance of starlings.

I lost the sense of what yellow means, but found it again in a flower.

I’ve been plagued by gravity and thoughts of being a planet.

Several items to report on the web publication front.  I have been working on a series of prose poems called "Artistic Statements." They are 33 prose pieces derived and in part collaged from artistic statements from painters in New American Paintings No. 69.  One just appeared in Ramshackle Review. Another can be found at The Prose-Poem Project.  I hope to find homes for some of the sibling prose pieces--a lot of them are out in the submission stacks right now.

I also have a poem out in this month's issue of Bluestem Quarterly.  You can even listen to me read it to you, should you so wish.

I am finishing reading two books, mostly reading them on the train. The Cloud Corporation by Timothy Donnelly is the more dense and complicated of the two, and I take my time with each poem.  I'm almost done with Ron Padgett's latest collection, How Long.  These poems are deceptively simple. Some, like the poems paying homage to his grandkid, are warm and plain, no horns or whistles.  Others display a wit not unlike Kenneth Koch's. I hope it's not damning with faint praise to say these poems are likable. Like having a funny and not pretentious guest visiting the living room of your mind, and not overstaying his welcome.

"Something about green torn silk"

Just finished reading and re-reading the new book by Joseph Lease, Testify.  I had been capitvated last year by Broken World, his collection that came out in 2007, and this new book, is thankfully as complex, as beautifully fragmented and musical as the previous volume.  The loops of repetition, a line or phrase or cluster of words repeated, here and there, not randomly but artfully, are always surprising. Here's a section of "Send My Roots Rain."


                (eyes shift

like promises, hair wet, apples and linen, just for today)--a

thunderstorm opens--birches in rain, are we breaking,

decorum slits my mouth, he finds a way to lie-lightning

and flat farms confuse me like wine--wine spills--thief,

thief of souls, thief, thief of light, fine, depression it is,

roast beef, Creature Features and Cheetos, Space Food

Sticks, thin birdsong, you your twin--"there was enough--

there was enough alone in you" your eyes like rain eyes like

rain smile like rain something about green torn silk:

I get excited by the charged immediacy of Lease's language. Riding the train, I look up from one of his poems, I open my notebook and my pen jumps and starts, hiccups, and sings.

Some treasures found whilst strolling around the Internets

I spent much of the day tromping around online with no purpose.  Sort of like watching tv but changing the channel a lot.  But I did find some good things.

Like this story, "Wolves." 

And the work of this young poet, Ocean Voung.  (I am going to order his new book tonight. Even though he has a cool name like Ocean, and I do not.)  Here is one of his poems.


And an interview with Brent Goodman. I followed the interview link to his blog and plan on jumping from there to examples of his published work online.

Facebook also kept me up-to-date on what my friend Kathie is cooking for dinner: "peppery linguine with shrimp, arugula, diced tomatoes, and shaved parmesan."  She tends to post these items on Facebook, and she's probably the best cook I know.  I resist posting my own such foodie reports, like, "Robert is preparing chips on the verge of too stale with the last few scrapings of salsa from the jar and thinking he should have gotten out to the grocery store today."  Because that would be sad.

Here's the title poem of Brent Goodman's debut collection.  I am going to take a walk outside in the fresh real world now.

Snippets of Text From the Small Black Notebook: First Selection

1. Now the stern
father, winter
will not let us
leave
  the table
until every mouthful
  of the season
is done.

2. On the way to work I imagine
the possum to be the issue of a marriage
between a rat and a dog.

3. No action on the playground but the melting
of the snow

4. Speaking of snow, this morning, tracks
on my back porch: nobody
but the racoon has such
  small hands.

5. Sometimes I need to get out of the way and let language have
its fun.  That's what i think the poet Eric Baus
does.

6. Which little house makes you breathe?

7. The air as cold as a drawer of knives in an abandoned North Dakota cabin. The air as cold as
my handful of knives.