WhimsyLand

I was out getting victuals for a staff meeting of A Certain Literary Journal to take place this afternoon when I spotted these sunflowers.  For the first five decades, I would have thought nothing of them, except that Der had the artistic instincts and presence of mind to pick a few and bring them to our last dinner get-together.  So, I drove home, found a pair of kitchen shears and a serviceable vase, and did the same.  We are apparently never too old to learn new tricks.  Meanwhile, Frank of the now famous Frank's Title Service was explaining to our poet's email loop how A Governor for Your Flippancy got its name.  In my one and only 5-day stint of poetry education, I was blessed to have Mary Jo Bang as the instructing poet.  Somewhere in the analysis of my work, she intimated that I needed to put the brakes on my impulse to wax whimsical in the middle of a poem.  This was duly communicated by means of daily reports to my poetry buddies, Frank included.  Thus spracht the muse that offered up the perfect title to a perfect poem.

The new Barrow Street is out (Summer 2006 issue) and looking mighty fine.  I would have been in this one, I think, but Do The Math was already taken and I had to decline their acceptance.  Isn't that the way it always goes?  Barrow Street is one of my sentimental favorites because they were the first decent litmag ever to take a poem of mine.  It was called Girl Gives Birth to Trilobite, and the first time I had ever used Frank's Title Service to spiff up that part of the poem.  After they accepted GGBTT, I submitted faithfully to them every 3 weeks until I got a letter pleading with me to stop the onslaught. 

One thing I like about Barrow Street is their mix of quirky, serious, conventional and PoMo offerings.  They always seem to have new names and faces bookending the Names I Know, who this time are Timothy Liu, Erin Belieu, Phillis Levin, and Jay Wright.  OKAY, the truth is I'm stalling for time.  I have the damned issue somewhere among the stacks of other books and journals, properly earmarked with the poems I liked.  I promise to replace this and the previous sentence with real commentary as soon as I find it.

I also received the latest Notre Dame Review this week, noting Michael Harper, Floyd Skloot, Brian Henry on the back page.  First up is our own prolific Seth Abramson, which is curious as the poems are not arranged alphabetically by author.  I always find Seth's work unhurried, articulate and intelligent, as in this from Moses Gets Central Air:  "... So it is done — /        a jetty for a playmate / a heap of crooning popinjays for a parasol, / the whole lot gleaned away, / on a tether of air, pinched from a cloud".  I like quite a few others, here's a sample:  John J. Ronan, Dying Aside ("... / Even as the news becomes fast fabric, the day / sly and subtle science coldly prognosed: dead as the dickens —  sooner than (your fervent hope) / much, much later. ..."), Jeff Schiff, Misery ("... / god's own faux crow /    picking and pulling at something/        it cannot see"), Wayne Miller, A History of War ("... / the men boiled leather for nutrients, / learned to eat rats / that had eaten their fallen.  And then / Our Side won on the widescreen T.V."), Michelle Detorie, Bibliomancy ("... / Sewn hips flossed with sex.  Sail-sex / lifted like a satin mast— sail blue"), Askold Skalsky, Recursive Gloom ("Boltzmann claimed time for everything / in a perpetual universe: improbable / configurations arise to interrupt / equilibria with the random jiggle / of atoms, iron pellets in a cosmic pot."), Anis Shivani, The Last Weeks of George Orwell ("... / When England next burns with missionary / zeal, lease the thumbed-up Bibles to football / hooligans, for they'll be charmed to carry / the queen's arms all the way to Albert Hall").  The next section is chock-a-block with poetry book reviews, including works by John Kinsella (Brian Henry reviewing), Roy Fisher (Peter Robinson reviewing), and an intriguing match-up of Dana Gioia's Nosferatu and Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime (Joe Francis Doerr reviewing).  Jayne E. Marek curiously groups Pattiann Rogers, Beth Ann Fennelly and Mary Jo Bang into one comparative review.  The deliciously outré and inventive MJB gets the nod as "the most creative and elliptical" of the three for her ekphrastic work, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon.