Whimsy Speaks Again

There's something tragically wrong about the carnage in Lebanon. Oh, I know it's politically correct to say Israel and Lebanon, but get serious, it's been a 10-to-1 death toll since the get-go, and that's counting Israeli combat personnel. Those of the 750,000 rural southern Lebanese who didn't know enough to flee, after watching the leaflets drop from the sky, to non-Shiite, non-rural areas of their country are now cited in the Israeli and American press as "potential Hezbolla sympathizers", which apparently is enough to assuage our guilt over the hundreds of dead women and children. The Hezbolla militants are numbered in the thousands, armed with second-world armaments. The Israelis called up more than that many reserves just this week, have spy drones circling Tyre that are more sophisticated than their enemy's rockets, and tanks, battle armor, artillery and aircraft that are one generation behind their aid donors (that's us). Not to mention a nuclear arsenal that is in the world's top 10 collection of unthinkable devastation. 20 Congressional Democrats actually threatened to boycott the Iraqi Prime Minister's speech over his denunciation of Israel's excesses. It makes me ashamed of the only party I've ever registered for, and that only recently, if they think the "Jewish Vote" can be bought as if it were the Religious Right.

I watched Schindler's List the other night. There's that scene where the SS line up three Jewish resistance members front to back to be shot with a rifle to save on ammunition. And the camp's weeping naked women on parade. And the mothers and daughters being led to the showers. And the young female architect who is shot in the back of the head for arguing about the construction of housing. And the young child picked off by the camp commander on his balcony, just for fun. I'm sure that if these things didn't happen, things equally horrific did. I can remember how sleep evaded me for weeks the first time I saw the film. The bad guys were all wearing black, but in real life there is no color for political expediency and no limits to a persecution complex. There is no greater irony in my lifetime than watching a nation slowly adopt the means of those who would have destroyed it.

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I'm celebrating our nation's 750th birthday a little late, as it occurred apparently on July 25th.  Derek, my son-in-Chicago, took this shot standing lakeside.  It seems that July has just blown by.  Junie and I took the grand tour of the Western Slope, the part of Colorado where all the rivers flow toward California.  We planned it so that we would end up with John and Ally in Walsenberg, which entailed a route including:  Longmont to Idaho Springs to Keystone over Independence Pass to Leadville to Aspen (stop for the night) to Basalt to Glenwood Springs to Rifle to Parachute to Grand Junction to Montrose to the Black Canyon to Telluride to Ouray (stop for the night) to Silverton to Durango to Ignacio (lunch in the South Ute casino) to Pagosa Springs to Del Norte to Alamosa to Walsenburg (stop for the night) back up I-25 to home.  The towns we missed included Mayday, Keyhole, Paradox, Eureka, Powderhorn, Bachelor, and Logtown.  A lot of what we saw looked like this:



There were spots in the mountain valleys that were idyllic, green and cool, but a lot of the territory on the Slope is high desert.  Everywhere we went, I checked out the listings in the windows of the local real estate agents.  Aspen topped the price list with homes going for $1,000 to $2,000 per square foot (yes, a nice little 1,400 square-foot house might run $2.5 million).  Not that you have to live full-time in Aspen — the Ritz-Carlton was selling condominium timeshares, $450K for 10 days of occupancy per year.  Homes in Ouray and Telluride were not quite so astronomical, only running $500 to $1,000 per square foot.  Of course, that's still 4 or 5 times what real estate goes for in most of Boulder County.  Ouray was a little gem, and like most of the mountain towns, grew up around local mining activity.  Telluride was also enjoyable, smaller and more casual than Aspen, but still sophisticated (Lyle Lovett was playing that weekend). 

The rest of the world seems to be getting on about as usual.   The whole country appears to be simmering in miserable weather (even in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the heat index is over 100).  Meanwhile, Israel is doing its best to recapture the Pariah State of the Year honors.   I got a pleasant letter from Hilda Raz telling me that I did not win the PS Book Prize Competition.  The good news is that Paul Guest did for his Notes for My Body Double, and that Charles Jensen was among the finalists.  Other glad tidings include NPR's poll that shows the Republicans might actually lose the House in the fall.

I received a copy of Mississippi Review that included Ann Guzzardi, Beverly Burch, David Tucker, Duffie Taylor, Jen Currin, Lisa Bower, Susan Roberts and my friend J. P. Dancing Bear as poetry contributors.  I rather liked the strangeness and precision of Jen Currin's With the Blue of Your Breath: "A deity on orange pillows / picks the exact chocolate, / knows how much healing coffee. // Astounding patience as we bark and lick at the stars. // ... // The rain talking back — // You make the lamp musical. // You make us ignorant in our grammar vests."  I have no idea why I'm receiving Missouri Review, by the by.



As opposed to the Colorado Review.  I know why I'm receiving that.  Because I once sat kitty-corner across from Stephanie G'Schwind, the current Editor, on a plane down to the New Orleans AWP.  I chatted with her then and later at the show, and even later when she was a speaker at the Many Mountains Moving salon.  On every occasion she has proved to be knowledgeable, competent and gorgeous.  It's little wonder that when she drops me a note telling me that my subscription is running out that I re-enlist for another two years.  The fortunate thing is that CR is quite a good literary journal, with the distinction of having both Jorie Graham and Donald Revell as Poetry Editors.  Oh, I know, you're thinking that everything published ends up either Southwestern pastoral/spiritual or brainy/eclectic narrative, but , actually, it doesn't.  This issue (Summer 2006, XXXIII/2) is a perfect example and I was quite taken with many of the pieces.  Most have an element of oddity and the virtue of unpredictability.  Here's a bit of each of the poets:

Rachel Abramowitz, Interior:  "Because I hate leaving / I sew myself inside the couch / And wait for the kitchen knife / To find me" (I love sight alliteration).

Samuel Amadon, Leather or Hazmat, Soon & Skillful:  "... None of the children have bicycles.  Even // our apples are mined with pits.  Chance / may yet provide us boxes.  I'd close mine".

Audrey Bohanan, Ever-Missing:  "... One of many / such Chicken Towns with its child of factory / process, blue damage-dye effluent, ...".

René Char, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson, Evadne:  "Summer and our life, we were fused / Fields devoured the hues of your perfumed clothes/ ...".

Darin Ciccotelli, [Nonlovers, We Were Caught]: "...// Tissues, like disheveled carnations, / on the floor, / long after the strums / to dry our hair."

Maureen Clark, Variable Moon: "If I could say anything to you / I'd say pomegranate // sapphire      lily / tornado // the few exotic words I know."

Stephanie Cleveland, A Painter of Sweet, Blank Beauty:  "... My hands mapped out a portly ex-marine.  I wanted his hairbrush, and frozen eggs."

Cynthia Cruz, Toby: ".. / Someone's mother's pick-up parked / With a glue-sniffing family / Of kids inside.  And everyone is dead / In my America."

James Doyle, Cage for Sound: "The mockingbird is built up / from bones so thin / rain cracks on its way through."

Haines Eason, Seven Eyes the Stone: "Dissolving, I woke to you against the morning, I / watched some thing of you with the window, with / ..."

Chris Forhan, Once:  "Once, a black panic of birds scattering from a tree.  / Some finger flicked them."

Juan Carlos Galeano, translated by James Kimbrell and Rebecca Morgan, An Apparition Arrives at our House with an Infant Apparition:  "..// My wife and I do what we can.  We add our bones to / the kettle; we sweeten the side dishes; we ask the soup to / allow lucky numbers into the mix".

Hillary Gravendyk, Sun Plough:  "middle country wavers in white air / over lengths of rust, suppled in the white of it / . hot flag of grass"

Jeff Gundy, Damselfly:  "..// I wait a whole minute and a black damselfly crosses the creek /       and the world begins again and again."

Kate Hall, Watching a Leaf Fall I Cannot See:  "At the market, the man with his hand / in the boy's mouth is missing."

Derek Henderson, From "Towards a Biography of Sudek's Notebook.": "Speak, please, / with seven beats of the vein in your wrist,"

Laura Kasischke, The Punishment:  "O moral / and spiritual emptiness, remember / me. I // will never be / such a girl again. ..."

Jesse Lee Kercheval, Black Night:  "A night ago night / was smothered with / ash & husk / piled on the roof like / negative snow."

Kyle Little, Pink Scooter:  ".. Pink / in the way new things are often / Pink, blood — not magic, just rising / to the top.  I rode it always."

Lisa Markowitz, Word Court:  "Most hear the Real in / The Quiet.  Touching life / Takes the backseat in existing, it seems."

Tod Marshall, For the Virgin Pines to Make Much Sky:  "Gather ye may / Gather body and shadow and castings of shadows / Gather ye bodies while ye may"

J. Michael Martinez, Portrait of an Iris:  "You are       porcelain pretty one     little word cupshaped / tracing seasons    still holding no branches"

James McCorkle, In Time:  "Watching, the verdant / Return, /          to see, seeing, it stems"

Daniel Morris, Jo Dimo and Ma Mo Go Pomo:  "Joe DiMo dumps Ma Mo after // the director orders / the subway underneath // ..."

Brendan O'Connor, Not To Mention:  "Our grandparents got channels / peculiar to the Hoek Farm / region, private broadcasts / emanating from between rows/ ..."

Carol Phifer, Mind Travel:  "A hundred umbrellas unfold / beneath a million points / of water, slim trajectories."

John Poch, Valle Vidal:  "Like a cutthroat / in a meadow stream, / I look up through a disturbance. / And I see you, / looking through a disturbance, / a cutthroat."

D. A. Powell, Gospel on the Dial, with Intermittent Static:  "that bough, emissary of shade, /       held off the rain we quivered under"

Jonathan Rice, Constellarium:  What I Remember: "About them, nobody was sure.  They were / quiet from Sunday school to the morning // ..."

Chas Speck, Light Carried by Water, Light Carried by Flies:  "All the light of this winter in this boot mark of snow.  / All the dirt of this city in these two soles."

Sarah Vap, Cold Red Tiles, Red-Hot Bath. : "Hallucination / when I come: Imposters // moving through the desert, and up the mouth of the world."

Jasmine Dreame Wagner, 1985 The Book of Sand:  "— Yes, Principal, I have ventured out of bounds. / I twisted the swing until the steel chain broke / and the globe has come unscrewed / on account of my wandering hands"  (I also like the quote by Georg Cantor, the 19th century mathematician who invented set theory)

G. C. Waldrep, Apostrophe to the Memory of Benjamin Britten:  "I shall now speak about kittens".  (This cracked me up.  You go, GC).

Mike White, And:  "    bringing the sky // to bear /         on our conversations // you pointed, and // the pigeons / ..."

Nancy White, The Porch:  "You have a cereal bowl, large, / cream-colored, with a green rim, / one of the following painted on the bottom: / eggplant, head of lettuce, parsnip, pumpkin // ..."

Joshua Marie Wilkinson, From "The Book of Falling Asleep in the Bathtub & Snow":  "Three days /     since I found / the clawhammer in the mailbox / .."

Devon Wootten, Coma:  "O sharpening edge, innermost / dark ring of the other star // ..."

Linda Young, Forty-One Weeks:  "All right, I'll be straight.  When you live in / a wilderness of water, your body / becomes a wilderness of water ..."

One of the most interesting pieces was a cover letter by Amy Newman to Donald Revell, which was published in its entirety as a poem.  I don't know if this speaks to the ingenuity of Ms. Newman or the sense of humor of M. Revell.  It begins "Please consider the enclosed poems for publication in Colorado Review.  They are from my manuscript, X = Pawn Capture, a lyrical study of chess as my grandfather invented it:  a game not of skill but of worry."  It was a brilliant selection.

One of the unusual revelations of the Western Slope trip was the degree to which dogs have replaced whining children as the Preferred Small Mammal of Accompaniment.  There were dogs on leashes, dogs on sidewalks, even a pair of Pekinese in a baby-carriage in Aspen.  All the mountain towns seem to cotton to them, installing leash posts and leaving bowls of water out for the pups while Mom and Dad are shopping.  I find it completely weird.

If you're wondering what the next picture is, it's a red door set in the middle of a mountain.  It's at the end of a short road just outside of Ouray, which by the way, is pronounced "You-Ray", with the accent on the second syllable if the local are any judge of things.  Of course, residents of the Illinois town of Cairo, back as far as Mark Twain, pronounce it "Kyro", so go figure.  Anyway, the door probably opens up into a mine that is tapped out at this point.

Derek is home from college for four weeks, and during that time, my House Elf, though I don't make him wear the required pillow case.  Der's making spending money for next year doing all the things that I never get around to, like water-blasting the backyard fence and painting it.  This week called for the Painting of the Downstairs Bathroom.  Junie, Der and I agonized over countless paint chips from the local Lowe's (did you know that Christopher Lowell, Martha Stewart, and Nickelodeon all have paint brands?), and ended up with Tropical Punch.  However, just before I was about to buy a can, I changed my mind.  I chose Happenstance, which somehow seems like something I can live with.

Speaking of cuisine (OK, not the smoothest segue), I'm making Curry for the Fam-Fam tomorrow.  Kyle's GF is a vegetarian so it's will be with vegetable stock and shrimp.  The basic recipe comes from Joy of Cooking, my copy of which is showing the strains and stains of 30 years of use (and my birthday is January 9th, hint, hint).  The basic recipe is:  sauté one big onion and one big Granny Smith apple, both of which have been Cuisinarted up into something less than mush but more than chunks.  Add two big T of flour, one little T of lemon zest, and the Secret Curry Powder, which is NOT that stuff called curry powder on the spice aisle at Safeway.  It is, in fact:

2 ounces of  coriander, turmeric, fenugreek, ginger powder
1/4 ounce of cayenne pepper, black pepper and white pepper
3 ounces of cumin (ground or whole)
Two cinnamon sticks
1 ounce of mustard powder or mustard seed
1.5 ounces of cardamom seeds and poppy seeds
3-4 whole cloves

Actually, it's all a crapshoot.  I like more cumin and often substitute dry chiles of various kinds for the cayenne.  The ginger, cumin, cardamom, turmeric (for the classic yellow tint), and coriander are a must.  You could actually leave out all chile, but you need just a little bit of heat for all that stock.  I have a special coffee grinder that is all stained and nasty that I use for grinding up the curry powder ingredients, but you could use the powdered stuff in the first place.  If you do grind everything up, don't reduce it to dust, leave a bit of chunk.  Once the apple and onion mixture is simmering nicely, add the curry powder.  Let it sauté for 3-5 minutes on low, then add the stock.  Swanson's low-cal chicken stock is just fine and will assuage your guilt about cholesterol and any other worries of the day.  Now, add 3-4 tablespoons of flour that have been stirred into a cup of the hot mixture.  Let it steep and bubble (toil and trouble) for 20 minutes.  Then, you need to "correct the seasoning", which is chef-speak for putting more of what you like into the brew, which in my case, is always more cumin.   At this point, you can add uncooked shrimp (they'll only take a couple of minutes to get pink), or cooked chicken pieces.  I like to use everything left over from a Thanksgiving turkey this way.  You can also try cooked lamb, but it's not my favorite.  Vegetarians might try using par-boiled cauliflower or baby potatoes in lieu of meat.

You can now put it in the fridge for up to a day or two.  Just before serving, heat it up, and add enough half-and-half or cream to give it a smooth sheen and cut the edge on the chile components.  I like to add a teaspoon or two of fresh lemon zest at this point.  Some people swear by dry sherry at the last moment.

When the big Curry Event is on, cook up a whole lot of sticky Japanese rice (actually, nowadays it's all US-grown, like California Rose) and get going on the condiments.  I usually serve the following in little cups:  3-4 kinds of chutney (OK, in a rush, I just let the diners scoop teaspoonfuls out of the jar), sliced almonds, mandarin orange slices, chopped celery, sliced bananas, raisins, shredded coconut, chopped red peppers, sliced hot-house cucumbers (regular cukes are OK), and whatever else sounds good to you. 

OK, I haven't done sufficient penance for my sins of desertion, but I'm a peg up.  See you soon.

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I was chuckling at The Car Guys while I drove to Walmart.  Yes, the demon retailers.  Every month or two I wander over to the new SuperCenter for kicks.  Sometimes, I drive over there to get a disk drive on a Sunday night, for example (they're open 24/7).  Considering how much they're contributing to lower wages and benefits, I should probably not go at all, but ...  It is amazing how much cheaper some things are there.  I just bought a 12' A ladder for the express purpose of putting a light bulb in my garage, something that has been out for four or five years (I know, typical whimsical male behavior).  I paid $120 for it at Lowe's and found similar ladders at WM for under $80.  Many items aren't any cheaper than getting them on sale at Safeway or Home Depot, which is what I usually do, but sometimes the pricing is surreally low.  I went in for coffee filters and kitty litter.  I walked out with an orbital sander, a new broom, 20 pounds of Purina Kitten Chow, two big buckets of kitty litter, a 12-pack of Coke for the occasional visiting son, and two 3-packs of those fluorescent light-bulbs that last forever (heck, I may never have to replace the garage light again).  I forgot the coffee filters because I'm one of those people who hate lists, and also one of those people whose mind goes blank when it is assaulted by an entire of store of Stuff You Don't Really Need.  Anyway, going back, I listened to the last part of Click and Clack, including a discussion of When A Car Is Technically Dead.  The Boys decided it was when the cost for safety-related repairs cost more than the next clunker you intend buying.  My '90 Lexus now has 205,000 miles and almost everyone thinks I should get a new car.  I figure it still looks pretty good when I wax it up, the leather is OK, and it works like a Lexus:  17-way power seats, individual reading lamps in the back seat, excellent retracting moon roof, good handling, zero-to-sixty in 8 seconds, and top end of about 130 (I can personally guarantee that it can do 115).  Besides, any decent car is going to cost $300 a month, and I could subscribe to more than 20 literary journals for that.  Of course, the Lexus is bloody expensive to fix when something breaks.  Not like my first car, which was a black 1960-something Ford, black and boxy.  Nor my second car, a Sunbeam Tiger 289, whose balding tires spun out all over Baltimore.  More like my third car, the 1959 Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite.  It was a convertible with an 800 CC engine, drove like a bumper car, almost killed me doing a 360 across 3 lanes of the San Diego Freeway, and actually ended its life as the world's largest flower pot parked outside my condo in Palos Verdes (I filled it with 8 bags of compost and planted geraniums).  Basically, everything I drove until 1975 was Unsafe At Any Speed.  When I lived in Manhattan Beach, I had a 1965 Jag Roadster (0-to-60 in 5.9 seconds, top speed 140) which was a waste if I wasn't driving up Pacific Coast Highway.  Next up was my dad's 1972 Cadillac, converted to run on natural gas, and roughly the size of a small asteroid.  Then the Mazda RX7, which was a fast little number even though the rotary engine was the size of a sewing machine.  I had to drive all the way out to Hemet to find one, as they were on allocation and being sold for $2000 over list.  Then, the VW Rabbit with a monster stereo that played a lot of Boston.  Then, the Audi 500, the Mazda 6, the Audi 200 I drove all over Europe at never less than 200 KHP and usually more, the Buick that my boss at the foundry gave me, the Jeep Cherokee, the green Subaru Outback (just like the 10,000 other ones in Boulder), and then the Lexus.  That's a dozen cars and I bet I'm forgetting two or three.  Anyway, I don't really need a car.  The one I have is just fine.  Until it needs a $2,000 catalytic converter subsystem.  Don't even ask about a new engine, I've priced them.  $18,000 and that doesn't include installation.  Which brings me back to The Car Guys.  They had some new show staff today, including the Car Talk Air Traffic Controller, Ulanda U. Lucky.  

I quickly re-read the Hard series by Dan Simmons this weekend:  Hard Case, Hard Freeze, and Hard as Nails.  The protagonist is a bad boy ex-PI who served 12 years in Attica for the homicide of the thugs who killed his partner.  Pretty good middle-brow action-mystery from the author of world-class horror, science fiction, and alternative history.  I've mentioned before the Ilium/Olympos books he penned recently, which have recently been the object of a movie deal.  It's about time.  God knows why the Hyperion series, whose first effort won the Hugo and Nebula, hasn't been converted to widescreen and DVD.  Dan actually lives in my home town, and rumor has it there's an 8' metal sculpture of the Shrike in his back yard.  I've driven by his modest home in the Old Town part of Longmont, but I suspect, with the kind of income his royalties must bring in now, he's always somewhere else researching books.  The "Hard" series, for example, demonstrates a knowledge of Buffalo that you would expect of a native.  Not bad for an ex-high school literature teacher, who has clearly shown that writing is writing.

I love the Shell commercial with the pole vaulter, but only because you don't see a lot of pole vaulters on TV.  This guy does a righteous job hitting the box, nice upswing and good inversion, but he's probably only clearing 12 or 13 feet, judging from the height of the guys standing by the pit to catch the pole.  I did 12'4" to set the record at AHS in 1967, and a couple of feet more at Pomona College.  That's when I transferred to Johns Hopkins, where my interest turned to computer science and tournament bridge.  They're clearing 20 feet now, thanks to faster and stronger vaulters, and better fiberglass. 

We had a litmag get-together today.  For journals that don't have university funding, it's probably the same all over the country.  Stuffing envelopes.  Getting back issue orders out.  Doling out the postage.  Estimating the next year's budget and comparing it against the publication schedule.  Finalizing the judging on various competitions.  God bless the volunteers.  If anything defines Labor Of Love, it's the small presses all over the nation, doing what they do one year at a time.

Well, you've wasted another perfectly good 10 minutes listening to Whimsy.  Our producer is Wem Wonder.  Our menu advisor is Ballpark Frank.   Our spiritual director is Morticia Tricia de Professori.  Our personal trainer is Ally Oop.  Our astrologer is Junie Moon.  Our accounts receivable specialist is Hannah Ovah Dedoe. 

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We're over the hump (that's the summer solstice for you Wiccans) and the days will be getting shorter now.  On the other hand, when summer runs its course, we'll be off to the races and most literary journals will be accepting submissions again.  Speaking of which, I received a nice letter from Stephen Corey of The Georgia Review, apologizing for the delay in submissions response — not that much time had passed, actually, but I wanted to mention the courtesy and attention to detail implied by the letter.  My only other interesting incoming was a case of 2000 Chateau Potensac, which I found on the Internet for about half of what it usually goes for.  The sticker on the box said that the recipient had to be 21 and not intoxicated at the time of delivery.  This was not a problem as the only thing I drink during the day is coffee and the occasional Beck near-beer.  Which reminds me that my favorite commercial this week is the one in which the Jamaican guy says his beer is good for ugly people and hands a Red Stripe to a pasty Caucasian fellow and then says "Hooray, Beer!".  Red Stripe's motto is "helping our white friends dance for over 70 years", which seriously cracks me up.

Poets and Writers features novelists Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart on the cover and an article on confronting your second book.  Whoa, looks like Claremont Graduate University has a new first-book competition, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, with prize money of $10,000.  Brenda Hillman is judging the prestigious APR Honickman First Book Prize.  The Poetic Appraisal discusses The Poetry Foundation's survey that shows poetry is more popular than ever (or something).  It turns out that this enthusiasm is generally for older works (think, The Raven), but Rebecca Wolff thinks that keeping poetry for the poets is OK ("This is one of the things that makes ... poetry ... so compelling ... It is truly arcane.  It's a secret-magic-invisible world".  The NBA is teaming up with Penguin Books to promote literacy.  Literary MagNet discusses good gimmicks:  The Gettysburg Review passes out travel clocks at AWP, Prairie Schooner is promoting their Flyover Fiction series with balsa wood airplane giveaways, and Harpur Palate has included an edible poem by Cole Swensen in their "Food, Hunger , and Appetite" issue.  Poet and art dealer Reagan Upshaw recommends beauty as the requirement of lasting poems in Verse to Last.   There are a number of fiction-oriented articles that I passed on, and a helpful piece by Sue Bowness on designing a writer's website.

See you again in a day or two.

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I was wandering the aisles of the Used Book Emporium on Longmont's Main Street last weekend and, while Junie was deciding between two books on reconciling spirituality and rationalism, I found a hardback copy of Bad Boy Brawly Brown for $4.  Not a bad for a minor work by Walter Mosley.  Not exactly A Little Yellow Dog, but enjoyable enough.  Junie flew home, more's the pity, and I started reading the poetry publications that had backed up, and watching more poker tournaments.  I down-clicked through a hundred Dish Network channels and found another 2005 World Series of Poker episode, which upon hitting the ENTER key, ended up being the 5th game of the NBA finals between Dallas and Miami.  It only took 5 minutes to be completely mesmerized. 

I probably spent more time playing basketball than sleeping between the ages of 13 and 19.  I'd finish weeding my dad's strawberry patch and run up to the basketball court at Annandale HS to play pickup with friends like Tom Becker, who sent a "are you the same Jeff Bahr" email earlier this year and now lives in France with wife and children, but I digress.  When I was a little older, I'd drive to Ft. Belvoir and play ball in the base gyms with anybody who was interested in a pickup half-court game.  By the time I was a sophomore, I was probably good enough to make the freshman team.  When I was a junior, I might have made the JV team, but I was already playing football and pole-vaulting, so roundball stayed a pleasurable diversion.  However, I'm getting ahead of myself, or perhaps, behind myself.  The NBA game was phenomenal with neither team getting more than a couple of points ahead of the other.  The next night I watched the 6th game, which was even better than the 5th (it turns out I was watching everything days later on ESPN Classic).  Shaq was the senior statesman and Dwyane Wade was remarkable, looping bank shots off the glass from 12 feet out, in a kind of game I remember vividly similar to my days on the courts when nobody attempted 18-foot jump shots.  And, Alonzo Mourning!  Let me ask you.  If you chose to hide behind a poetic pseudonym, could you pick a better name than Alonzo Mourning?  And he was fabulous.  Fast forward a couple of days and I turned on the TV to find the channel still remaining on ESPN Classic.  The show was "5 Reason You Can't Blame:  Dennis Rodman For Being A Bad Boy".  My buddy Kevin always detested the Bulls, so I had heard my fill about Jordan, Pippen and, of course, Rodman, the best power forward in the NBA at the time.  He was also head-butting refs, dating Madonna and dressing up in frilly wedding duds at the time, which was mainly what the program was about.  Fast-forward again through his difficult childhood, indoctrination by the Pistons ("I'll call the brute squad." "I'm on the brute squad." "You ARE the brute squad!" ), loss of a coach father-figure, seething anger at being underpaid (in his best year, he made 5 times more with product endorsements than his NBA salary).  That's when I turned off the TV and started reading APR, and turned immediately to the article on Olena Kalytiak Davis.

I had been intrigued by Ms. Davis after reading her outrageously wonderful Six Apologies, Lord, and then her somewhat more subdued first award-winning book, And Her Soul Out Of Nothing, and finally Shattered Sonnets, Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunities.  O.K. was one of those poets without portfolio that pop up in the damnedest places:  a short article mentioning her profession as "Alaskan attorney".  A review with a picture of her and her children sitting on a sofa, she recently divorced if I remember.  A dozen readers extolling her hypnotic talents as a reader.  A self-extinguishing blog on poetryfoundation.org that was cryptic and wondrous.  She didn't show up at any AWP I ever attended or sign up to be an Academy chancellor.  She didn't mince words, either in spoken interviews or written word.  She is so bad.

In this recent APR, Ira Sadoff likens OK to Charlie Parker as an artist who extends the medium:  "Her work admits crossing out, Freudian slips, IM-type talk, and archaic diction".  She is simultaneously "confessional" and "post-modern", which is as best as any of us can do to corral the unpennable Ms. Davis.  Few modern poets have OK's ability to combine raw emotion with such perfectly placed interludes of erudition and elegance.  You have to pay a LOT of attention when you're reading Davis's work.  There will be Shakespearean allusions slapped up against a line by Dickinson followed by wordplay worthy of Heidi Lynn Staples or Matthea Harvey.  She is earthier than Anne Carson, but no less profound, ruder than Graham, but no less intelligent.  She's one of those poets for whom it is worth getting up in the morning, if you know what I mean.  Bob Hicok and Dean Young are others, but they've already gotten enough ink here.

As for the rest of APR:  there is a picture of Judith Hall that is so beautiful, you'd swear they scanned it off a 13th-century tapestry.  And I was enchanted by her work, which seldom accompanies my first gander at an APR photo.  This from Jewels Under the Bed:  "Amethysts under the bed, or anima. / Bringing from under the bed the broken pet. / Cold carpet of course and cold / Dark and dreamless sleep and dust."  Also the quite excellent The Giant and the Cypresses ("If God were "everywhere," one of them argued, / Smoking with the others after work") and A Book Cut and Left in the Forest.  Ralph Angel translates Garcia Lorca's Poema del cante jondo out of Spanish, which is perhaps a bit puzzling as he admits that "can speak it somewhat", but there's a long distinguished history of poetry translators being deficient in the language of the original.  The poems themselves are the usual dramatic, repetitive verse that you can either take as genius or drivel ("He lay dead in the street / with a dagger in his chest. / Nobody knew who he was. / How the street lamp flickered!").  Katie Ford contributes four poems, including The Shape of Us ("Perhaps our difficult loneliness / was not give to us / but was ours by mistake / like an early theory of the world/ ...").  I found that I liked these works well enough, but didn't trust them, somehow.  Four poems also by Stephen Dunn that were, variously, too subdued and then too ambitious for my tastes (What I Might Say If I Could:  "You're a Hutu with a machete, a Serb with orders, / you're one more body in a grave they made you dig").  MacArthur genius Lucia Perillo has five poems on page, chatty and reflective.  Steven Antinoff discusses Spiritual Atheism, which I mainly didn't understand (it's best I leave these matters to Junie anyway).  David Semanki provides four poems with short lines of staccato exposition, including two poems titled Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry ("The holiday was lonely / without you / & the left lung / aching much.")  Susan Stewart offers up Dante and the Poetry of Meeting (I hope there isn't going to be a quiz on that one).  Rebecca Seiferle gives us the spatially distributed The Fragments of Hölderlin, an intriguing collage of dialogue, description and declaration.  Ken Fontenot is up next with two charming, rambling works (Any Father Speaks:  "Every fish — poor; but the trees do get better in spring. / We say: along these particular lines.  Still, we mean: / along any lines that will allow us to get what we want").  Reginald Gibbons discusses the work of Hélène Cixous, among others.  Kathryn Starbuck closes the issue with Griefmania ("... Following orders, I sped / this featherweight frailty down / the hall, playing bumper cars"). 

Well, back to work.  I really need to figure out whether a mono or stereo stream is getting to the equalizer module.

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