WhimsyLand

There was a time when getting an article in the Communications of the ACM would have thrilled me even more than the prospect of landing a spot in Paris Review would today.  Communications is the flagship journal of the Association of Computing Machinery, and the articles can range over the entire spectrum of the computing sciences as the ACM has specialized journals for each specialty (e.g., The ACM journal for Evolutionary Computation).  Interesting items in this months Communications includes:  A company has sold a number of ShoeScanners to airports, a device which can detect explosives in shoes within 8 seconds;  WiFi access on airlines should be available by 2007, at a cost of about $10;  several cities are planning to obtain GPS data from commercial vehicles to anticipate and react to pending traffic jams; Nike has announced the Air Zoom, which will send data about distance, pace, time and calories expended via Bluetooth to your iPod Nano;  researchers find that most "disk wiper" programs wouldn't clean up enough to eliminate forensic evidence;  a British company has a product that lets your cell phone "listen" to a part of an MP3 or ringtone and identifies it so you can buy it for yourself;  new software is very good at listening to music and producing scores;  lots of research is underway in the development of systems that associate biometric data acquired at your computer (via fingerprints or iris scans) with marketing data.

The Academy of American Poets kindly sent me a copy of the latest Whitman Award winner, Mary Rose O'Reilley's Half Wild.  One thing that I've noticed over the years is the degree to which the winners of the Whitman echo the aesthetic sensibilities of that year's judge.  And why not, I suppose, a judge gets only one shot to encourage a specific type of artistic expression in a competition as prestigious as the Whitman.  In any event, I think if you had a list which included, for example, Henri Cole, C. D. Wright, Susan Howe, Jorie Graham, Robert Pinsky and Yusef Komunyakaa, and then were given the inner pages of 6 Whitman winners, most poets could connect the dots.   No less so with Ms. O'Reilley's work, which has much of the soft, serious, spiritual/pastoral, mainly plainspoken overtones of Mary Oliver's work, this year's judge.  O'Reilly is an English professor at the University of St. Thomas, a Catholic university in the Twin Cities.  She professes to be active in the Quaker ministry and a lay practitioner of Buddhist precepts.  A quick Google gives you links to reviews by Spirituality Practice, quakerbooks.org, and spiritualityhealth.com, which should give you a hint.  Her picture on the back of the book, cable-knit sweater, kind but serious visage, about my age I would guess, strikes me as an unpretentious poet's photo, a nice lady who is probably someone's favorite aunt.  Ms. O'Reilley has written 5 previous books of essays (but none of poetry), and the credits for the poems in this book are rather thin.  Not to worry, though, the work in this book is engaging and readable.  One thing that I like about it is that there are almost 60 poems in 60 pages.  Like me, here's a gal who knows how to get in and get out.  Even at a page apiece, the poems tend to be short, sometimes only a couple of words per line and often leaving a lot of white space below the close.  This isn't really my most favorite kind of verse, but I'll give you an idea of some of the ones I liked:

Scenes of the Crimes Photos:  "I know / the trajectory / of this crumpled doll / to the bathroom floor".

L'Enfant sauvage :  "The men who came to see / the wild boy in his cage / had groomed themselves / as carefully as chimps. / They wore their wives / upon their arms / like guns."

Abandoned Farmhouse :  " .. // The house has no will this winter / to cover her face from the wind / ..."

The Gods Keep Descending:  "Just carrying in the groceries / you can lose everything."

Home Farm:  "After some time / blackberry vines gather / around your table."

We Keep Asking the Prairie:  "I'm drawn into the clearing, / a remnant prairie skirted in oaks / now in their brown season."

Bees in Autumn:  "..// At this season, the bees seem old, / solving as though on thick limbs / the problem of chicory. ..."

Driving West:  "Books lean / from their shelves / like children wanting to get in the car,"

Speaking in Tongues:  "I go to church every Sunday / though I don't believe a word of it,"

There are poems that seem, well, unredeemable sappy ("Listen — I've seen / wind stir the hair of the dead at Belsen").  There is rampant anthropomorphism: wildlife, livestock, even stones.  There is a Lot of Romantic Notions about exotic climes, peoples and situations.  There are times when I wish the language was more down to earth ("Sometimes I don't know whether I'm dreaming my dreams / or yours, or just leaning back quiescent"), and places where I wish Ms. O'Reilley had not succumbed to the temptation to explain everything for us (e.g. "Crows fly over the scholar's garden. / He wants them to be ravens,"   OK, so far so good, then:  "longs to see the thick beak and the intelligent eye, a bird poised for conversation").  I'm sure that Ms. O'Reilley is probably a good writer, someone who can turn a phrase and keep me engaged.  But, I expect more from a poet — I want to be part of the dialogue, to watch the poet stop short so that I can finish the sentence with my own wild imagination.  Not every poet does, of course, and that is what makes horse races.

A propos of nothing, I was listening to an interview of Robin Williams on Fresh Air.  I can't be the only one on the planet who wishes that he would stop after he has been funny for 15 seconds, and shut the f*ck up, because he's not funny for the next 15 seconds, he's that hammer in the old Excedrin commercials.  Which is what I meant about poetry in the review above.  Not everybody can be Dean Young, but there's no reason we can't keep on trying.

By the way, I cheated and looked in on Joshua Clover's blog, another Whitman winner.  Christ, he's still brilliant.  It makes me want to break my summer vows and check in with all the insanely talented people on my prior blogroll.  It's such a slippery slope.  I'd start blogwalking.  And caring about how Rebecca is doing with her music and Art.  And whether Eduardo is keeping up his end of his joint blog.  And whether Jimmy has exceeded his prior limits of cartoonish outrageousness.  And how Jordan keeps finding engaging 320x240 shots of The City.  You know, sucked into the vortex again.

See you soon.