Whimsy Speaks Again

It was Providence that the first televised poker tournament I shared with Junie was the WPT Bad Boy competition.  Perfect.  The completely insufferable Tony G was crowing in all of his Aussieness about how many other players he'd knocked out.  Mike "The Mouth" Matusow was positively taciturn in comparison.  Phil "The Brat" Hellmuth couldn't get a word in edgewise.  Junie dutifully asked about what beat what and where was The River.  Wonderful stuff, but then we started the Memoirs of a Geisha DVD.  We had inadvertently chosen one Academy Award nominee after another:  Crash, Capote, Walk The Line and then this.  And now you're expecting an edgy, unexpected take from left field on each of them, like I was some kind of Silliman.  Better you should just look up The Filthy Critic, who is a hell of a lot funnier and actually watches the whole movie without taking more-wine-from-the-fridge breaks.  OK, you want a sampler?  Capote was engaging and I enjoyed the undercurrents of comparison between the amoral behavior of Truman and his killer buddy.  I loved Walk The Line pretty much all the way through.  Phoenix deserved two Oscars for a channeling of The Man In Black so convincing that, even with a so-so voice, I swear I was watching Johnny all over again.  Which is not to say that Reese was chopped liver.  She did a terrific job, but as Junie noted, Carter had bigger boobs and sounded less like an Emory sorority girl.  Geisha was pretty and I liked seeing Ziyi Zhang and Michelle Yeoh again, as I've seen Crouching Tiger about ten times (it ties the lead with Amelie as the film I've watched most with subtitles). OK, it was hard to follow the plot, and why were more than half the actors Chinese and a few other problems, but what do expect from a movie rendition of a Asian romance novel?  Which brings me to Crash.  You know, the movie that won the Academy Award for Best F*cking Picture?  I could stand it for exactly 23 minutes.  Junie was apparently timing me.  What was wrong with it?  Well, in the first 23 minutes, everything.  And I knew if I watched more of it, somebody would actually act or one of the characters would step out of a 2-dimensional world, or the Hollywood version of the L.A. race problem would transcend some hack writer's version for the fly-over people, or every single single opportunity to engage in visual preachiness would be avoided.  Or something.  But, I wasn't waiting, we drove back to Blockbusters.

Which for no particular reason brings me to the recent Peotry issue.  Sure, many of the blogmates whom I have put into suspended animation are now standing on their wobbly wooden desk chairs and booing.  But you know what?  It's goddam funny.  I mean to me.  Goldbarth blew their cover by actually inserting into his poem their solicitation of funny poets (he ends up bemoaning the line-rate, given all the bucks they have).  Dean Young.  Bob Hicok.  Billy Collins.  Daisy Fried.  These are very funny people, even when they're dealing from the top of the deck.  I'm only going to give you a sampler, then more in my next installment, so you still have time to run over to Borders and sit in one of their "I'm only browing" chairs by the magazine rack and read for yourself.  BC does a good job of skewering Irish poets from pick-someone to Heaney:  "Then, I hear the ghost-clink of milk bottle / on the rough threshold".  Young doesn't have to stretch much to contribute three poems, including "Poem On A Theme By Tony Hoagland":  "I have a big erection.  /  Most of the mythology goes into it."  There's a Charles Atlas knockoff cartoon on page 285, where the skinny guy who's getting sand kicked into his face gets an MFA and studies up and comes back to the workshop all buff and "Wanna wanna gringa toon lee's way bend a gog!"  Updike on colonscopies.  Muldoon and half the others trying to find rhymes for sex positions.  Joan Murray with the only poem that made me LOL:

We Old Dudes

We old dudes.  We
White shoes.  We

Golf ball.  We
Eat mall.  We

Soak teeth.  We
Palm Beach.  We

Vote Red.  We
Soon Dead.

I will be instantly sued by a zillion Poetry lawyers for the umbrage, but there it is.  David Mason does a Disturbed Paradelle, that curious and fictional form invented by BC.  Andrew Hudgins does good, and Rebecca Hoogs is very funny in Another Plot Cliché ("My dear, you are the high-speed car chase, and I, / I am the sheet of glass being carefully carried / across the street by two employees of Acme Moving/ ...") even if it does remind me of BC's Litany.  BH with If wishing made it so:  "I am the tallest sprinkler of parabolic flow. / I keep a fist in each of my fingers."  Then the reviews, the want ads, the contributors' notes (Maira Kalman / Loves her mailman / But not too much.).  I'll give you some more next time.  Meanwhile, steal this book.  It will make you happy.  If it doesn't make you happy, you probably aren't ready to be happy.

 

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I am so hopelessly middlebrow, a term I found used frequently in a 55 year-old Poetry review, so I guess it's an affliction with some provenance.  I ran out of things to read, as my scheme of turning United frequent flier miles into magazines went awry somewhere last month.  This propelled me to the local Borders on Sunday, because the much less expensive used book store on Main Street was closed, just like the pawn shop, the framing store, and the Ares Thrift Store that surround it (the Pump House Brew Pub was open, however).  Longmont Main Street looks like Boulder's Pearl Street did 25 years ago, and probably a lot like Main Street in your town, if your town is somewhere in Iowa.  There are no-name coffee spots attempting to be Starbucks, bagel stores that double as Mexican bakeries, auto parts outlets, a Duncan's Donuts, a combination coin and jewelry store, at least 3 music stores that vie with the pawn shops for the mid-range guitar accessory consumer, a place that promises You Can Sing, a place that sells nothing but vacuum cleaners.  I'm sure that in 20 years, the block will be littered with Il Fornaio restaurants and Banana Republics. 

Anyway, all I was looking for at the used book store was more Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries, which I figured at 15-20 years old, would be selling for half of their original cover price.  Alas, I was transported to the nicer side of Longmont, then sucked into the Chain Bookstore vortex, navigating by the latest best-sellers at the main table, variously adorned by dragons, blood-dripped scalpels, and Famous People On Television.  I did find a new Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, which I snapped up in a heartbeat, as I love the idea of a Englishman writing terrific escapist stories about an ex-Military Police drifter.  There was a Walter Mosley Easy Rawlins mystery in the discount tray that I hadn't read and, yes, I did find a couple of Brother Cadfael books under $7 each.  The poetry section, which Junie and I have scanned assiduously since the store opened, seemed to have settled down to Mostly The Same Famous Poets.  This included blasts from the past (Rimbaud, Neruda, Frost, Eliot (3 copies of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, no wastelands),Poe, Dickinson, oh you know), the Accessible Big Names (Hirshfield, Collins, Giovanni, Angelou), lots of anthologies (including an interesting one that included pictures and poems, poets whom I had only barely heard of, poets whom everyone has heard of, and Carl Phillips, whose inclusion almost got me to buy the thing), and a very strange assortment of poetry books that resided on the shelves only, I think, because of daring on the part of the Poetry Department Buyer and lack of interest on the part of the Longmont clientele.  For example, there was no work by Mary Jo Bang (which I would have snapped up just to make them refill the hole with more of the dear lady), but there were two copies of The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by August Kleinzahler, that curmudgeonly soul who was recently trying to drill a new orifice for Garrison Keillor.  There were three or four books by Galway Kinnell, which I thought showed a lot of class, an equal number of Komunyakaa,  and the expected scattering of Pinsky, Hass, and Heaney (though, curiously no Walcott, as long as we're mentioning Nobel Laureates).  I ended up buying another Ann Carson book.  There was a book of essays filled with the original Greek that I avoided, as well as Autobiography of Red, which I had read — in fact, I think I read it aloud to Junie on our first trip to Bayfield, but I digress.  Honestly, there was a time when I could stand in front of Ms. Zaller's class and sight-translate "Omnia Gaulia es divisa en tres partes", but those days are long gone and Greek isn't anything like that, more like the street signs when I lived in Teheran.  In any event,  I bought the erudite Ms. Carson's Plainwater, which is a delightful collection of poetry and essays that doesn't seem to be on Amazon, when you prime the search pump with the appropriate Carsonesque effluvia.  I'm only a little bit through it, so you'll have to wait for a take, and besides, Junie wants to weigh in, too.  I was also looking for a non-fiction book about the Real Historical Jesus by a guy I'd heard chatting on All Things Considered, but Junie swears that I already own the book and even discussed it with her, so I'll wait until she shows up tomorrow and we can go hunting through the many bookshelves until we find it tucked away somewhere.

Today, I received another Dean and De Luca catalog and a recent issue of Poetry.  Well, actually Peotry, as it's the humor issue and they decided to take some license, and why not when you have eight figures to throw around.  More on that when I get to it, and I'll probably get a few chuckles out of it and, yet again, be thrown out of the Official Avant Garde Crowd.  Dean and De Luca is the usual decadence-on-glossy, with a cover page strewn with the steamed results of a clam bake.  Inside this issue you are given the opportunity to buy the Traditional Clambake© for $120, which includes lobsters, clams, potatoes, corn and seaweed, but not the Seafood Steamer©, which will set you back another $60.  If it's just lobster you crave, there's always the 2-pound tub of lobster salad and 8 old-fashioned rolls for $130.  Just like last time, there are various combinations of wild and fresh salmon varieties, at prices that would make you think you paid to give birth to them.  Soft-shell crabs, like the ones that I had on sandwiches for $1.50 when I went to Johns Hopkins, come to you straight from the Chesapeake, $90 for a dozen.  Meat never goes out of style, unless you're on Junie's diet, which seems to involve a lot of walnuts and berries, and D&D has all you'd want:  Leg of lamb, $70;  four prime Porterhouses, $200.  God forbid you should just wander over to Chipotle's.  Get a half-dozen Carnitas Turnovers for $48 or 48 Southwestern Hors D'oeuvres for $55 (Portobello Mushroom and Herb Empeñadas, Chile con Queso Tortilla Trumpets, et cetera).  $250 Japanese knives, $145 racks of herb tubes, dozens of Extra Virgin Oil bottles that cost more than a good Bordeaux, a complete set of household tools molded from dark chocolate.   The funniest entry was the burlap bag of Virginia peanuts, roasted in the shell, humble at only $28.  I love this magazine, if only for the imagining of who buys this stuff.

OK, gotta get some work done.  My client who makes the World's Only Self-Playing Audiobook needs the next release to work without the glitches that currently inhabit, like those gremlins in the WWII Bugs Bunny cartoon, the software that I've so far delivered.  And, of course, I have to give the Peotry a good reading.

See you in a bit.

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I hate to post so soon after the last entry, lest everyone start expecting something other than Summertime Whimsy.  Actually, I have no idea if anybody is reading nowadays, anyway, except for a nice note from Jordan.  BTW, the last of the second session of The Million Poems Show was yesterday at the Bowery Poetry Club, and I hope you made it there to hear Jordan, JJ Appleton, and Bob Holman.  Jordan would like to remind everyone who he is, what goes on at the show, and what it looks like, in case you're interested.

I managed to restore the proper links to my personal site.  It turns out, naturally, that when I switched domain providers, there was a one-month fracas between Enom and the new guys.  In any event, those of you who were not able to enter data into the Poetry Submissions Database now can.  My apologies for the screwup to the 4 dozen of you who have been so diligent, including the three Famous Poets who show up, you know who you are.

I'm still awaiting the contributor's copy for the last literary journal that I was blessed to be in (Verse), but Brian assures me that the issue will be Real Soon Now.  This is abbreviated to RSN in the computer biz, as it is so often used.  Much like RTFM, which if you're not in tech support means Read The F*cking Manual.  But, I digress.

I received a copy of Crab Orchard Review's Volume 11, No. 1 today, though frankly I'm not quite sure why.  I may have entered their First Book Contest at some point, which is actually quite likely considering the shotgun approach I had to contests in the past 3-4 years.  This volume features winners of their fiction, poetry, and literary non-fiction competitions.  I suppose literary non-fiction is a surrogate term for creative non-fiction and meant to distinguish the work from my last minor work, Project Hurricane Software and Firmware Engineering Design Specification.  I've mostly read the poetry so far, though I may dip into the fiction, as I'm curiously bored with re-reading a Walter Mosley mystery featuring Fearless Jones.  This came on the heels of knocking off three Brother Cadfael mysteries, which were much better than I remember when I first read them 15 years ago.  But, of course, I digress again.

The poetry in this COR tends toward the fragile and self-conscious.  There's a surfeit of remembrance and botany, which is OK when the foils are in place.  I was looking, as usual, for poetry I didn't feel that I had read before (or perhaps dozens of times before).  I liked the work of Joelle Biele, even given the seeming conventionality of topics.  This from From Ocracoke:  The sky was gray and sharp, a rusted hinge, / and the boat was the size and color / of a taken-down door.  We left with books".  Her other poems, Edisto, Elsewhere and Off Eastham had an admirable matter-of-factness matched with an eye for detail.  Tom Clark had a couple of nice pieces, including November of the Plague Year ("Unwilling to turn and glimpse the blind exorcist's face, / Unconditional suspenders of disbelief, / Back -to-Normals shop to live, drive to shop").  You have to think about what Tom is really getting out, which I quite like.  Annette Spaulding-Convy has one entry, An Ex-Nun Resurrects the Dating God, which could have failed in a number of places for a number of reasons and never did.  Sandy Tseng contributed five or six poems, so I guess they like her.  Me, too.  This from Final Letter:  "With it comes the salt that clings to everything: / our mouths thirsty for hours afterward.  It's in the food we eat. / The meat that wants to return to the bone clumps in the pan, / and we sprinkle salt over it to signify finality".  There are quite a few death, dying and hospital poems that mainly depressed me, and the usual poems that take their riff from Jazz greats or Famous Poets.  Oh, yeah, I liked Dwaine Rieves' Three Months After:  " Strung about his belly, the scar's mathematics / score their Congo red, suture sockets / empty, cat gut dissolved.  On this visit / ...".  I have to admit that if there was grief, hunger or longing in the first few lines, I probably didn't get through the rest of the poem, but I've had enough of the real thing in my own life, so you may feel differently.  There was probably the usual amount of metaphorical flights of fancy, but nothing bonkers enough to comment on.  You know?  At some point, you just want someone to completely let loose with simile, not the same tame affectations.  I'm looking for "the moon was a rude scar from an old war on the flesh of the penitent" or something equally weird but better thought out. 

I'll see if I can't find some more stuff I like.  See you then.

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This weekend was largely devoted to MI-4, the execution of a surprise birthday party for Cath, my friend, ex-wife and mother of my children.  Our sons and I had made her believe that we were unavailable for her birthday on Sunday:  Kyle gaming, Derek at school in Chicago, me having to work.  Meanwhile, Kyle was helping with the subterfuge, Derek was getting classes out of the way to be able to fly in, and I was back-channeling Cath's friends in the interpreting/translating community about how and where we would show up.  A couple of dozen of us rendezvous'd outside Adriana's house, where Cath and her good friend Jodie were having a small birthday lunch.  We perched on the sidewalk behind our cars like that scene from The Birds until the moment when Ruth led the procession, playing the guitar and leading a round of the Spanish Happy Birthday Song, which I lip-synched.  The first time I met Cath, she was keeping a conversation going  in both directions simultaneously among three Spaniards and three Americans, none of whom spoke of word of the others' language.  So the fact that Cath was speechless was a minor wonder.  Many bottles of good Spanish wine later(Coto de Imaz, Pesquera, ...) , we all went home.  I was mainly recuperating yesterday.

The latest issue of Poetry I've received has a subdued monochrome cover with a rendering of Pegasus.  There was quite a lot to like in the issue, though.  John Berryman had 8 poems.  I liked The Cage and a couple of others.  This passage from From The Black Book:   "Grandfather, sleepless in a room upstairs / Seldom came down; so when they tript him down / We wept.  The blind light sang about his ears, / Later we heard.  Brother had pull.  In pairs / He, some slept upon stone."  Lloyd Frankenberg contributes Jerusalem.   William Jay Smith offers up three poems, one of which is called For A Deaf Angora Cat:  "The jungle lies about you, and the ground / Is measured by your stealthy step, the sound / of birds extinct in pure, autumnal flight. / What centuries of breeding, ah, poor dear".  Then, Cynthia Pickard and Hanson Kellogg, the latter with this from Four Disinterested Parties:  "Alcohol offers dimensions and a vanishing point; / Benzedrine qualifies the metaphors. / I am alone and the ten thousand / Pressed against me, hip, thigh, breast and the seeking fingers".  Next up is Grace Baer Hollowell, then Catherine Davis with a bunch of poems, this from Arachne: An Ode:  "You weave a secret snare / That shudders at a touch / And hangs upon the air, / Yet seems not anywhere,".  Norma Farber, the famous vocalist, has a single poem, Inform Yourself Completely.  The Opinion section has an essay called Homage to St.-John Perse.  The Reviews section includes The Heresy of Paraphrase, and interesting and seemingly competent review of C. M. Brown's The Creative Experiment, which discusses parallels among the literary work of Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, Pasternak, Eliot, Garcia Lorca, and Cavafy.  There's a mixed review of H.D.'s By Avon River and The Travelers by Henry Rago, "whose poems have appeared here and there for years" (sounds familiar).  Frank Jones  contrasts four recent books on Goethe, Paul Goodman looks at The New Romanticism, Richard Eberhart comments on The Labyrinth by Edwin Muir, and John Holmes takes a look at 20 years of Edouard Roditi's work.  News Notes bemoans the fact that a number of small presses have "folded":  "To the average reader, the term probably connotes a heavy collapse, as of brick walls falling.  But the editor is more likely to think of paper softly slipping from a shelf, of thousands of proofs, pages and pages of manuscript, bills and files and letters, all settling to a level mound, heavier than leaves, thicker than snow".  Poetry notes that the 25 Books Received includes Elegies by Muriel Rukeyser.

OK, I know the gig is up for most of you.  The volume of Poetry was hand-carried by Derek from a Chicago bookfair on the plane to give to me for an early Father's Day present.  It was published in the month and year of my birth, January 1950.  An amazing 80% of the volume was metrical, and the work was mostly competent but not anything to get your blood running.  Something to remember when you wish for the good old days when Poetry was avant garde. 

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When I'm not working lately, I'm watching one of the dozen poker shows on cable.  There's ESPN Classic episodes of the past World Series of Poker.  There's the ongoing World Poker Tournament competitions, featuring players in small Paris clubs or mid-sized riverboat venues or, in one case, all of the players sitting in shorts playing on a lanai somewhere in the Caribbean.  There's the Heads-Up tournaments and High Stakes Poker, the latter MC'd by Gabe Kaplan, the star of Welcome Back, Kotter.  Very funny guy.  Wry wit, obvious knowledge of both the players and poker — which should be no surprise as that's how he made his living for a couple of decades after his sitcom folded. 

Oh, sure, I'm reading poetry.  For some reason, though, I haven't gotten as many journals in the past month, probably the school break syndrome.  I've also been re-reading poetry manuscript contest entries, as we head into the final days of selection.  It's a different feeling than reading poetry submissions, something I've also done a lot of.  You receive a manuscript from someone and you just know (OK, barring a few contest master blasters) that this is probably the longest and most important thing that they have ever written.  At some level, it doesn't matter that they haven't mastered the art.  There's a lot of "remembering" and family and similes regarding this particular glacier or that particular levee.  Many of the manuscripts tell terrific stories, like the person who wrote the history of his entire family from slave ship to the 1930's.  Many manuscripts strike me as probably the most honest thing the person has ever said about his/her life, ambitions, passions, disappointments.  Some manuscripts have a quirky ingenuity that gets them into the 2d or 3d read pile.  It's clear that fully 90% of them have no idea what's going on in the Larger Poetry World.

Which brings me back to poker.  In the past 3 years, the World Series of Poker has been won by complete unknowns.  It is a grueling 5-day free-market exercise in psychological combat.  Past accomplishments mean nothing.  The winners have included two Internet players and an unknown Aussie.  Before the competition begins, these people are called Dead Money by the poker illuminati.

Imagine this happening in the 20 top poetry book competitions.  Someone winning a competition out of sheer writing ability, unassociated with any School, un-championed by any practitioner of a particular sub-genre, with a blank Acknowledgements page.  I don't know if it's a fair comparison or not.  Do we rely upon Dead Money in major contests?  Do we fully expect 800 of the $25 checks to fund the enterprise with no real chance of winning?  I'm still thinking about it. 

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