WhimsyLand

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.