WhimsyLand

Miró has been out drawing in the Colorado sky again.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  Poetry, 32 Poems and jubilat.  The rest of the verse in Poetry was servicable.  I didn't cotton much to Dana Levin's Refuge Field, but it's probably my aversion to serious, breathless verse, not that it wasn't competent ("a diamond tent, how the adepts / pupate / among bones — // saying I who fear dying, I who fear / being dead — ").  Geoffrey Hill's In Memoriam: Gillian Rose was chatty and interesting ("There is a kind of sanity that hates weddings / but bears an intelligence of grief / in its own kind. ..").  Mary Ruefle, reported buddy of Tate and Young, cracked me up with The Bunny Gives Us a Lesson in Eternity ("We are a sad people, without hats. / The history of our nation is tragically benign. / We like to watch the rabbits screwing in the graveyard.").  I'll discuss the prose section of Poetry tomorrow.

I just noticed that in the back of 32 Poems, I'm listed as on the R&D Board, along with Jeannine Gailey and David Vincenti.  Wow, cool, seems like I should get on the ball and do something technical soonish.   CDY is on the Board of Directors which makes a lot of sense.  John Poch is still the Editor, but I actually thought he was on sabbatical in France or something.  In any event, there is a lot of good work, a fair amount of quasi-formal work (including that of my Alsop-mate Teresa Coe).  Also blogmate Steven Schroeder with From the Margins ("My eyes are blue butter- / flies on a shimmering / windshield, voice the buzz / of a bug in my ear. ...").  Lydia Davis offers up two prose poems which sit in juxtaposition in my mind to those by Sarah Manguso in jubilat for some reason, this from Men:  "There are also men in this world.  Sometimes we forget, and think there are only women — endless hills and plains of unresisting women.  We make little jokes and comfort each other ...".

jubilat is unrelenting too-too.  It seems to have collected in Volume 12 All The Right People, including (gasp) John Ashbery.  Most of the poetry is of the non-temporal variety where actions take place and things pop up and it's all tied together with metaphor or musicality, or in some cases neither.  Typical, perhaps, is Monica Fambrough's I Love Them As I'm Defying Them :  "I am the new colt. / I took the creamery road to the palace. / I took the chill-knob to be polished. / It was a lonely way/ ... / I am in it now alone. / I am precious like rosacea. / I stand for youth on my new knees / and I carried this flag the whole way. // I am several. / I am not harmless. I am small horses."   There's a lot of that going on, which is probably why they've rejected me a dozen times in the last 5 years.  Kazim Ali & Claudia Rankine & Kirsten Kaschock & Karen Volkman & Caroline Knox & Danielle Pafunda & you just have to wonder what their Xmas card list looks like.  Speaking of Caroline Knox, she contributes Salad, which describes some pretty inventive pre-prandial art forms as recipes.  Alessandra Lynch offers up the interesting One Day I Was Watching the Birds ("The spit-polish grackles and the blackbirds with their bright razors / tucked in each wing, and the purple finch / disoriented, absent minded / ...")  Somewhere in the middle is a fascinating collection of the amateurish sketches of Stevie Smith.  I know that a lot of my readers have a fondness and respect for Sarah Manguso, but I can't figure out what she's doing with the 3 short prose poems that start on page 86.  They seem like reverse-chic versions of poetic work, Girl Scout diary entries, but maybe that's what she's going for.  This from 5: "Realizing  I couldn't stay in the choir unless I recovered from my crush on the countertenor, I decided to cure myself.  I would focus on what most ignited my desire, and by flooding my consciousness, render the countertenor powerless over me. ..."  Most of the poems strike me as conversations I've encountered after strolling from the bar to a small group who are in the middle of some intense discussion about something of which I am totally ignorant.  Which might be exactly right, come to think of it.

Dear rat's ass:  I know I'm an amateur.  I'm OK with being a civilian in a world of MFAs.  I was balancing my checkbook today while listening to the completely unredeemable Phantom of the Opera CD with the London cast, tears rolling down my face while Sarah sang to Michael.  I know I should have been listening to Kind of Blue and writing.  Preferably with a beret on, one of which I actually have, although I admit to acquiring it in Bilbao where everybody wears one when they're not bombing something.

Oh, well.  More tomorrow, I suppose.  I should take a shot of the homage to MJB that consists of a framed set of 3 broadsides and the first page of Louise in Love that she illustrated for me.