WhimsyLand

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.