WhimsyLand

I just received Sarah Manguso's The Captain Lands in Paradise today, and read a few poems.  It's decidedly more plain-spoken than I was expecting, but not by any means banal.  This is one of those books that I'm going to have to read quite a bit before I've lowered myself sufficiently into the bathtub.  The blurbs are useless, as usual, even though Sarah has Friends in High Places and they showed up on the back cover:  Mark Levine, Carl Phillips, and Dean Young.  Two of the three of these gentlemen are minor deities as far as Junie and/or I are concerned.  Actually, I don't fault the blurbers, as one has to take one's prose to a higher plane at some point or all blurbs sound alike.  Wait.  They do sound alike.  CP:  "Hers is a startling, disturbing, and original voice".  DY:  "... The Captain Lands in Paradise has an impact that belies its marvelously deft touch".  Levine has the most interesting take:  "The 'paradise' this collection offers is rife with skepticism, comic trapdoors, and grievings:  a familiar place, but not comfortingly so."  Like most well-received books by talented poets, The Captain Lands in Paradise is constructed from unpublished poems and poems published in some of our best literary journals:  American Letters & Commentary, APR, Chicago Review, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The New Republic, Boston Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review.  As someone who has been peddling a manuscript for almost three years, I have to ask:  "Is this a collection of poems written with a thematic arc in mind, individually published over a couple of years, and then mortared together with new poems for connecting tissue?"  In the current world of first-book contests and high barriers to entry, it certainly seems as if a simple collection of poems, published in all the right places, but devoid of any real collective agenda, is doomed.  I have no idea what the answer is.  Anyway, back to you when I've read a lot more.

And I will have to read a lot more, mainly to Sweet Junie, love of my life, who will be showing up at DIA tomorrow, assuming that we don't get a fourth snowstorm.  We got hit with a mini-blizzard today, enough to shut Denver down.  The airport seems to be keeping up with it, and Saturday/Sunday look to be fair and sunny, so we may finally get rid of this mess.  There were teams of loaders and dumptrucks all over Longmont yesterday scooping up tons of snow that had been plowed into 6-foot trapezoidal solids.  God knows where they're taking it all, since by this time it's loaded with road oil and unmentionables.  It's not like you can dump it all into the local reservoir. 

I just got Rebecca's Radish King today.  Pretty wonderful stuff.  Rumor has it that RK has gotten by the first round of judging for the Pulitzer.

I still have the latest APR to read, but I will probably be cleaning the house.  First, for Junie's arrival, and second for a get-together with local poets on Sunday.  I'm the kind of housekeeper who only notices how badly the place has gone to hell when I envision people coming through the front door.  With two long-hair cats, there's hair on every horizontal surface, including large black clumps on the carpets (mainly thanks to Rimbaud, Emily is a much more fastidious groomer).  There's dust to whack off shelved memorabilia, bathrooms to sanitize, the kitchen cabinets to re-Liquid Gold, wine stains on the carpet to Oxidize, new snow to shovel, banisters to scratch-cover.  Oh, you know.  It makes me tired just to think of it.  I'll probably just recruit my son Derek to assist in the redirection of the River Platte through my own personal Augean stables.

More tomorrow.  Gotta go rid the fridge of science experiments.