WhimsyLand

Jimmy's latest BAP skewering is Terence Winch's Sex Elegy. The way it starts off reminds me of another multi-mate poem.

Many Mountains Moving will be open to online submissions soon, thanks to some nice software from Devin Emke from One-Story and the folks at CLMP.  CLMP is licensing online submission software for $300 for small literary journals, which is a pretty good deal.  You'll need a server (or ISP) with PHP and MySQL, but virtually all hosting services can support that.  It took me about a half a day to put it up on one of our servers here (Windows Server 2003), and I imagine it's even easier if you have a Linux host.

It's a bad sign when you don't know whether you've blogged about an issue or not.  I'm going to take a chance and say "not", and tell you about the Sep/Oct APR.  Galway Kinnell (he certainly seems to get around recently) has 4 poems of pretty tame stuff.  His third poem, The Walnut, is about the prostate.  Old-guy "gutsy", wistful sex-talk certainly seems to be making the rounds lately.  Sarah Gorham with 3 poems.  I liked Your Retirement, Not Mine ("The bow-tied salesman bearing roses / wants our down payment.  We're an easy mark, / ... / ... while lace pajamas nictate / from a nylon catenary. ...").  Fredrica Wagman had a really long piece from His Secret Little Wife that is one long, long passage of phrases separated by ellipses and pretty much prose, methinks, but then if an author says it's a poem, then it's a poem, as far as I'm concerned.  Taha Muhammad Ali has 5 poems translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin (separately?  in concert?) which are short with shortish lines ("The past dozes beside me / as the ringing does / beneath its grandfather bell.").  John Yau has an interesting article about Jasper John's Preoccupation with ambiguity among a zillion other observations.  Johann Hjalmarsson (there are some strange accent marks I couldn't reproduce) is translated in 5 poems by Christopher Burawa, poems that are relatively chatty and mostly could have been written in Maine or Oregon.  Joan Murray contributes Rear View Mirror ("If you'd seen her there, trying to rise, you'd understand / why I didn't make a sound. ...")  Ross Gay has 2 poems, this from Bringing the Shovel Down: "Because I love you, and beneath the dying stars / have become the delicate pistons threading itself through your chest").  Anne Carson is showing off again with just oodles of classical knowledge in Hekabe, translated from the Greek (natch) and boasting a Cast of Characters, Chorus, and an explanatory introduction longer than most chapbooks.  I might just read it because Agamemnon shows up.  David Roderick with How I Learned Not to Speak ("They were hard and practical people, / and when they said / they were willing to serve me / I took what they had to give: / bowls of rain, / prayer-husks filled with meat").  Maxine Kumin with 2 poems, one (no kidding) on Mulching.  Ira Sadoff with (gulp) 14 poems that were mostly earthy (Incidental:  "It's no accident they find you in the bathroom puking.").  Stanley Plumly with 2 poems, John Yau again with 3, Terese Svoboda with 3 as well ("We mass, so many of us old, / with the old confusions of sex / and swarm, thrust and sting.").  Kathleen Ossip with 2 poems, Randall Potts with 2 also.  John Updike, who actually thinks he's a poet, and shows up in The Atlantic all the time, with the back cover ("In Arizona's drought, even cacti / die; the prickly pears are pancake-flat / with no more rain to plump them up, and blanch / to lavender instead of green.  Iraq / continues like a curtainless bad play.").  Somebody has to break the news to John that adding alliteration and assonance to your prose doesn't make it poetry.

What am I working on this week?  Glad you asked.  A least-squares multiple regression routine wrapped around by a 25-point touchscreen calibration application. 

More tomorrow, most likely.