WhimsyLand

There's another great Q&A session with my favorite wise-guy Bob Hicok at Smartish Pace.  Here's a sample:

D.R. from Germany: I think poetry would be more prominent if there were a way to attach a commercial to it, but that doesn't seem possible. Do you think that dooms poetry or saves it?

Bob Hicok: Mortuary ads seem a natural.

Bob's just gotten his bio up at poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.  There's a page where you can find a poem by Movement, Theme or Media Type.  This kind of cracks me up.  I can just imagine waking up in the middle of the night and craving a poem of the Dark Room Collective genre about Chanukah and now knowing just where to go.

There's little in the way of a catalog more decadent than one from Dean & Deluca.  Not that I can afford much from it except on Christmas, when I send D&D baskets to my best clients.  Should you hit the lottery, here's some items you might want to try:  2 pounds of Fresh Florida Gulf Shrimp, $95;  Humboldt Fog chevre, $26;  4 pound New Zealand rack of venison, $140; 3 one-ounce jars of Iranian Imperial, Asetra and Seuruga caviar, $675; Chicken Pot Pie, $14;  Aceto Balsamico di Moderna (vinegar), aged 25 years, $180; Coconut Layer Cake, $55.

This month's Poetry has contributors from their A-List (Kay Ryan, W. S. Merwin, Geoffrey Hill, A. F. Moritz, John Koethe) alongside J. Allyn Rosser, Stefi Weisburd, David Mason, Rebecca Hoogs, Kathleen Lynch.  As much as I've heard about Hill, I don't know much about his work, and was pleasantly surprised with his informality and observation, reminiscent of Goldbarth.  Stefi Weisburd's Mittelschmerz Near Menopause was so good that I was surprised to find it in these normally staid pages: "The moon wishes in my ear / then the astral shearing // along the body's guy-wires. / I lumber through the day's // dregs accruing in the pelvic / pit.  I want to drown // in bed, birth the damn cabbages / ...".  Everything else was competent and fairly narrative.  Merwin sounded like Merwin, which is a kind of diction I've never quite understood the point of.  Brian Phillips reviews two of Geoffrey Hill's books in this same issue, Without Title and Scenes from Comus.  Kay Ryan, who is every bit as good a prose writer as poet, pens A Consideration of Poetry, touching on a number of points, including how the hidden nonsense in poetry gives it "much of its secret irresistibility".  D.H. Tracy provides balanced (no, not "Fox balanced") and generally favorable reviews of books by Brian Swann, Pattiann Rogers, Geoffrey Brock, Richard Howard, Marilyn Nelson, William Logan,  Kay Ryan, and Anne Stevenson.  The Letters to the Editor include, as usual, roughly equal numbers of people who love or hate what Poetry has been doing lately.