Whimsy Speaks Again

I'm really busy nowadays with projects, which is a good thing as Martha would say.  Business runs hot, warm, and cool throughout the year, with the expected direct effect upon my finances.  So, when projects are hopping, it's not the time to run all over town looking for BAP.  Thus, my order today at Amazon.  Amazingly, the paperback edition was only $10.88, which is a pretty healthy discount from the $16.00 cover this early in the BAP season.  Eventually, I'll get the hardcover, too, for my world-class BAP collection (pictures to follow, one day soon).  Jim continues to be funny, but I actually think that some of the poems he's panning have redeeming qualities.  There are some good lines in Hass's The Problem of Describing Color (If she tells fortunes with a deck of fallen leaves) and I like the close.  Simic's work was just fine if you like Simic's dark, sparse style.  Eamon Grennan's The Curve was an interesting, prosy work.  Wrigley's Religion wasn't to my taste, but most work seldom is.  I dunno, seems like a stretch to be hammering these poems out of all the potentially mushy walk-on-the-beach, long-lost-lover, mythological allusion laden work that must be in BAP.  And what's wrong with short poems (another JB annoyance)? I bet that out of the 40 or 50 print credits I have, only one or two span more than a page.  My motto is:  Get in, say what you have to say, and get out.  It's harder than it looks, and another reason I like Hass's poem.  Could be me, of course.

This month's Poetry features Anne Stevenson, D. A. Powell, Michael Heffernan, Paisley Rekdal, Natalie Shapero, Peter Kline, Galway Kinnell, Kevin McFadden, Christopher Middleton, Christine Garren, Linda Bierds, B.J. Ward, Jacob Polley, and Molly McQuade.  Most of these poets I've heard of, but as usual, the work I liked best tended to be from those whom I did not recognize.  The rest tended to be doing more of what Jimmy was encouraging, namely going on much too long to flesh out a single idea.  Though I didn't cotton much to Powell's "glaucous-winged gulls drafting" in meditations upon the meaning of the line "clams on the halfshell and rollerskates" in the song "good times" by chic (whew), I did like "who could have guessed love's a palpable thing:  a dark splotch / of kelp in the shoals".  Also, "the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself" in corydon & alexis, redux.  Rekdal's poem Post-Romantic was an OK first-person narrative, until I hit the word "limning", which is right up there with BC's cicadas for ruining my poetic experience.  I seriously dug Natalie Sheppard's Contact High:  "Bisect / an octave, and you're left with air, fat flounce. / They go /  ... / ... like money / he produces from his coat. / O, smoke ring home. O, how do you call an ounce / an O."  I generally like Galway Kinnell, but this month's offerings didn't do much for me ("Judith moves like a dancer / on sea-swells, in a cloud / of the dust and ashes of this ardent man").  Kevin McFadden was mostly whimsy, which you would think I would like, but was so-so on it.  I remember liking Christing Garren's first book, but these poems seem way, way too serious and architected with short lines for emphasis that doesn't seem deserved, The Donor:  "you see then — she gives life // just as your god did with his son — after death, give life // now the surgeons empty her // and take her eyes".  BJ Ward's Cuckoldom is equally whimsical to the work of McFadden and readable, as was Molly McQuade's The Octopus ("A senior ranking octopus / on the lam from the ocean / in a dull American aquarium / refuses to answer our summons").  Dan Chiasson does his Eight Takes and likes Josh Clover's The Totality for Kids (which I have to remember to put on my buy list), Linda Gregg's In the Middle Distance, Conor O'Callaghan's Fiction, is amused by John Bricuth's As Long As It's Big, and affected by Rodney Jones' Salutation Blues.  Jane Hirshfield ("Hirshfield ... has made a career of recommending thought-gimmicks to rid ourselves of consciousness") and Mary Karr ("There has never been a style more gilded with workshop aptness") don't get off as easily. 

See you tomorrow.