WhimsyLand

I received the June issue of Poetry today and wondered immediately if I was losing time like beach sand through a pocket hole.  Didn't I just receive an issue of Poetry a week ago?  Still, I sat in the garage in the only good chair and drank my wine and read.  My God, I thought, I like this stuff.  That's when it dawned on me how different this new blog feels.  Uncommitted.  Uninformed.  Unconnected.  I don't have my old blogroll, so I don't look up my friends.  I don't know what Jimmy is up to.  I don't know how CDY's post-wedding feeling lean to.  I can't appreciate Jordan's view of NYC, Joshua's take on world event, what flowers Suzanne is planting, what escapades Rebecca is up to.  I don't have a hit-meter, so I don't know who's checking in or from where. 

I'm luxuriating in ignorance.  It's wonderful.  You should try it.

As for this month's Poetry, Wiman allows as how it's all about poetry, no prose.  That's true except for the Letters to the Editor, which serves as such a mercurial barometer of poetic tastes that you'd be hard put to exclude it.  Marie Kinzie starts off with a long poetic sequence (atypical for Poetry) from California Sorrow (is there 1 poet in 100 who celebrates joy?) which I found quite readable.  Eliot and Koch and Daryl Hine and ED and Henry Thoreau and Emily Hale and even Henry James make an appearance and though I didn't love it, it was serviceable as Hercule Poirot might describe a pair of English shoes.  Joshua Mehigan is up next with Cold Turkey, which might be a pantoum but in my current state I don't care enough to look it up.  I liked "The god is gone tonight".  Kay Ryan, a Poetry workhorse, offers up a couple of small gems.  Dana Levin seems, as usual, over her head, but then I've never been able to understand what the responsibilities are of being of Glück's Apprentice.  I liked Robin Robertson's small Homewards with its close "I dreamt I was the needle in a compass / some orienteer bore through the forest with a spinning heart". Bruce Smith's Starring John Wayne was OK, and I liked the simplicity of Michael Chitwood's Don't Complain, which starred trees, bees, fruit, winged seeds and spunk.  Marianne Boruch actually pulls off yet another Moon Poem, followed by a quite nice The Body, which is alternatively, section by section, excellent ("bones — femur, spine, / the tribe of them") and derivative ("the first thing / in the morning the eye longs to see").  I liked Eamon Grennan's Signland for its mix of music and strangeness ("The signs are not propitious, though locked / two-by-two in turquoise glimmerflight / the dragon and damsel-flies rise and fall, / thrusting and trusting each other / over water").  Nice effort by John Hodgen called High Summer whose storyline involves barn-full of amputees and Whitman who conjures up visions of sweethearts for each of them who would "kiss them into silence / the way that he had, / would name their little boys after him, would set them out walking, / sun-colored, in circles / little Whitmans, dizzy in the wheatfields ...".  W. S. Di Piero has a poem of a similar theme, 1864, describing the dead boys in a "O'Sullivan's photograph" (Gettysburg?  Antietam?) that segues into modern times. 

OK, not a sabbatical actually.  Just a respite.