Whimsy Speaks Again

Ellen DeGeneres was a real treat as the MC of last night's Oscars:  funny and relaxed.  As Time noted in a recent editorial, the same Americans who turned out to vote for gay marriage bans seem to cotton to this engaging lesbian.  The old maxim is still true:  never share the stage with kids or an animal act.  11-year old Abigail Breslin stole the show a couple of times, including her shepherding of Jaden Smith through a couple of presentations.  Other notes I jotted down at the time:  A lot of people seemed to have stopped aging 10-20 years ago, including Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, James Taylor, and Meryl Streep.  Some look like they're at death's door including Jack Nicholson and Peter O'Toole.  Yikes, is that Randy Newman?  He looks like he's aged 40 years in the last 20.  Did Cameron Diaz overdose on cheek Botox?  Ben Affleck remains famous for being famous.  Why does Nicholson think he has to make faces every time the camera is on him?  Cate Blanchette is the most gorgeous ungorgeous woman on the planet.  Is that Jerry Seinfeld yawning discretely in his seat?  Will Farrell, Jack Black and John C. Reilly are very funny.  Wahlberg is buff.  I can't turn the TV on without seeing another Gyllenhaal, this time Maggie.  How does Robert Downey Jr. get his hair to do that? OMIGOD, it's Celine Dion.  Please, just shoot me now.  Someone should strip off her clothes and artificial skin to reveal the robotic iron lungs and lisping rubber lips.

Kasey has a terrific take on torque and its relationship to poetry.  I never connected moment and moment until now, keeping the two definitions in their respective brain halves.  Kasey notes that poetic torque can be viewed "In a more figurative sense, as a way of talking about a poem's ability to dodge readerly expectations".  This reminds me of an exercise MJB had us do once, in which we had to consciously replace words in our poetry with other words at least one degree of distance from them.  And then there's the venerable torque of enjambment, particularly those delicious examples where you leave one line with definite expectations, only to be headwhacked in the next line by a completely valid but different association. 

I love the word atelier.

The cover of this month's Harper's touts Parties of God:  The Bush Doctrine and the Rise of Islamic Democracy.  Needless to say, the Bushies fail to anticipate the unintended consequences in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, and are backpedaling now on exporting democracy to the poor unwashed masses.  Lapham is back with an editorial blaming the "myth of apocalypse" for fueling our imperial ambitions.  Rafil Kroll-Zaidi discusses Robert Fagles' new translation of Virgil's (or, if you like Vergil's) Aeneid, and its role as successor to Homer's epics.  There's a short story by Wendell Berry.  Findings notes the cheap and unpatentable DCA happens to kill almost all cancers, but it's hard for Big Pharma to make money on, so don't hold your breath;  men who father only daughters are more likely to develop prostate cancer;  those who win Nobel prizes live on an average of two years longer than those who are just nominated; dark matter may be the "scaffolding that allows ordinary matter to clump together";  all black diamonds may have originated in outer space and arrived here as meteorites.  From the Index:  1 in 8 Iraqis have fled their home since 2002;  38% of US military personnel think we should send more troops to Iraq;  Americans have spent more than they make for the last 20 months, the only example of this behavior since the Depression;  marijuana is the top cash crop in 12 states;  Iran's tourism ministry pays travel agents $20 for every American visitor and $10 for each Asian visitor;  25% of all Girls Gone Wild footage is shot in the month of March.

From Trouble in Paradise:  "Rand, I'm tired. How would you like to be the Boss for a while?'"

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We're almost back to normal on the Front Range.

I don't know why, but for some reason I thought Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids was a book of essays.  I was cruising through The Great American Pinup and saw a review and got straightened out.  If the rest of the book is as good as Valiant en Abyme, I need to go order a copy right now.   Check out the musicality, metaphor and imagination in this excerpt:

Valiant en Abyme

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,
These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,
Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight,
Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’s foot,
Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert
It’s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind
Starts its restless sweeping of white-flower dust across the lintel,
Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep
At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing
On its way out. Prince Valiant vowed to sew the horizons
Into a single idea, to put on the blue dress of distance,
 
MJB News:  Mary Jo Bang has a new book, Elegy, coming out in October from Graywolf.  I also note that she has a chapbook, Her Head in a Rabbit Hole, out from Delirium Press.  Ms. Bang will be holding a workshop in Seattle in April.  If you're in the area, it is great opportunity, as she is an excellent instructor.  Also a surprisingly tender and moving poem of hers here (Enclosure).

Dilbert:  This cracked me up.  Catbert, Evil Director of Human Resources:  "The new company health plan is Google.  From now on, employees must use Google to diagnose their own illnesses". 


Anne-Marie Cusac's Silkie, winner of the Annual Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Award, is now available at MMM's online store.  Patrick Lawler, the judge this year, notes:  Anne-Marie Cusac captures a time when animals and human beings share desires and inhabit the same skins.

I discover New Places In Exactly Three Blogroll Jumps:  Cute Overload — that says it all, actually.  Anything But Poetry has this slick blogroll that give you a small pop-up preview of what the site looks like.  Jen Tyne reviews The Tranparent Dinner, by Christine Hamm.  Nice artwork at Amy's place.  The Life & Times of the Blind-Winger Jones, with an entry My beginnings, Tightarse and pipe-smoking lesbians.

I found out how little I know about PHP this weekend.  When you've been programming as long as I have, you just figure there's not much you're going to run into that you haven't seen before.  It's a little like having taken Latin in high school, grown up in an Italian speaking household, had a German nanny, lived in France for 5 years, and did your graduate work in Spain.  You arrive one day in Turkey and just before you speak, you think, "how hard can this be?"  Google comes to the rescue most of the time.  I can generally find a tutorial on basic syntax (e.g., how do single-quote strings differ from double-quote strings) and look for functions that do what I want them to.  If you know C, C++, Java, Visual Basic and SQL, for example, you're probably not going to be run off by Yet Another Language.  In my case (and stop me if I start sounding like Jonathan), I started with BASIC, moved onto FORTRAN and IBM Assembly Language, and then wandered through LISP, SNOBOL, and ADA.  I taught C, C++, Perl, COBOL and relational databases at one point.  Also Data Structures & Algorithms and Object-Oriented Design.  I wrote two compilers, a feat that, while extremely cool at the time, is in less demand in these days of GNU and Visual Studio.  In fact, as in business, there has been a consolidation of computer languages.  C still rules in the Linux/UNIX world, and in most of embedded systems.  Java and its variants vie with variants of Visual Basic for client-side code.  C++ and Visual Basic power most Windows applications.  PHP, Cold Fusion and other web server adjunct languages compete with .NET (which, in turn, represents C# and VB) for server-side languages.  There are still pockets of computing that use LISP and SmallTalk variants, but these elegant languages tend to dominate in the academic ghettos of AI and related fields. 

But, I digress.  The interesting thing about programming is that you can usually get some pretty quick feedback.  It's a phenomenon akin to the advice that to learn a (natural) language, go spend time in the country and don't be shy and make a lot of mistakes.  I'm not sure that learning to write poetry well is all that different.  I read a lot of poetry by a wide variety of authors, learned the forms and practiced the discipline.  I also spent a lot of time on poetry boards posting my latest and listening carefully to the advice.  I'm really amazed when I hear about poets who sit in their study all day and write for months without any feedback.  I would be stimulus-starved.  In any event, there are certainly differences among the works of, say, Mary Oliver, Albert Goldbarth, and Rae Armantrout.  It is as if they are writing, as we say in CompSci, for different problem domains.  The language they use invokes its power to greater or lesser extents, depending upon the context, or if you prefer, the Reader Response of their usual audience.

 
More tomorrow.  I have to pace myself.

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My grand-niece, Gracie, turned three.  Here she is helping to bake her own birthday cake.  Only the women in my family can bake worth a damn.

I've read about a lot of fantasy literary journals, but the Shit Creek Review is actually publishing.

Valentine's Day News:  "scientists believe that when you fall in love, the ventral tegmental floods the caudate with dopamine."  Sigh, isn't that romantic?  From CNN:  "Researchers who wanted to find out why it is not only taboo to kiss your sister, but also disgusting, said Wednesday ..."  Among Women's 10 Favorite Romantic Movies is Braveheart (!?).  Researchers have linked vasectomies with higher risk of dementia.  Zoos around the country are holding special Valentine's Day tours (Wild Love at the Zoo, Jungle Love, Woo at the Zoo) so visitors can learn about the sex lives of animals.

Funniest headline from The Onion:  "Nation's Joggers Sick of Finding Dead Bodies".

My son, Kyle, is apparently a complete wizard at The Spoils.  He has completely dominated the competition and expects to win the Regionals and go on to the Nationals.  I'm sure this amazing skill at tournament card games has at least a little bit to do with the amount of poker that he, Der and I played when they were kids.


Dean and Deluca have outdone themselves again with their latest catalog of epicurean goodies.  Valentine fare include: Kimono Chocolates (left) that come in flavors such as Apricote Bask, Soy Salt, and Pampered Pecan, each adorned by "elegant vintage kimono designs";  Bonnet Truffles, shaped like Easter bonnets; Shoe and Purse Cookies, hand-decorated in stylish icing; Mini Coconut Cakes with roasted coconut, lemon curd and white chocolate whisk.  D&D's specialty cakes include The Handbag Cakes, which come in "brown leather" or "pink fabric", and look just like, well, handbags, though they're made out of cake and icing.  The New York Cheesecake looks pretty wonderful, and is one of the least expensive things in the catalog at $40 for a two-pound cake.  I'd pass on the Americana Cookies ($40 for oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, ginger, and double fudge chip), and just let Junie bake me up a batch.  For breakfast, they have signature teas and coffees, and an assortment of H&H bagels, $36 for 24.  In this catalog, they've started listing my favorite Spanish starting dishes:  Lomo Iberico (cured pork loin), Manchego (the ubiquitous and multifaceted cheese from La Mancha), Chorizo Pamplona, and mojama, an unbelievably powerful and delicious steak of tuna cured in sea salt.  In their new wine section, they feature a number of little-known and mostly reasonable vintages.  When you're placing your order, make sure to sign up for a chance to win a trip to the Culinary Institute of America's Boot Camp.                                                                                                                                                                              

Rebecca Cures The Common Cold And Other Stories. 

Dusie, seemingly based in Switzerland, a small press for dusi/e chapbooks,  as well as Dusie, the online poetry journal, lists her favorite poetry books of 2006 (pretty eclectic).

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My contribution this week is largely derivative.  To some extent,  this is because I have work I could do, but don't cotton to it much, so I don't have enough time to do a proper blog entry, and plenty of time to visit other blogs and suck the juice out of their respective oranges.

It's been a long time since I visited Simon DeDeo's rhubarb is susan.  Simon is a astrophysicist and poet, and an amateur poetry reviewer, to boot.  No wonder I like him.  In further googling, I ran across this funny piece of his, just perfect for Valentine's Day.  In addition to his poetic output, he also collaborated on General Relativistic Constraints on Emission Models of Anomalous X-Ray Pulsars, which sounds pretty avant garde.

I have also missed visiting The Great American Pinup, particularly their ranking in January of the best poetry blogs (with numerous criteria that exclude most poetry blogs as candidates). 

From the looks of it, J. Martin of Immaculate Conniption (and other suitable anagrams) is a Coloradan.  As of last November, he had 16 book manuscripts out to presses and contests.  Why can't I have that kind of perserverance?

Do you deserve your high school diploma?  Yes, I got 100%.

Steve Evans of (the quite amazing) Third Factory has compiled the lists of 2006 favorites of 46 contributors. 

Gina's the only person I know who's had work in both the Georgia Review and Fence.  It puts a dent in my Aesthetic Constellation Hypothesis.

Jeannine got a nice rejection letter from The Atlantic.  Wow.

Hey, Henry's back.  Or maybe he never left. 

Watch Matthew write a poem.

Sean conducts a most excellent interview with Letitia Trent.

Ron surpassed his millionth visitor.

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I have been so lazy today, getting done about 10% of what I expected this morning.  So I'm just going to ramble, if that's OK with you.

I didn't even know there was a Best American Erotica.

News from the Scooter Libby trial:  Everybody outed Plame.



This is for my son, Derek, who wanted to know what Japanese tube hotels looked like.  On a not completely unrelated topic, how does Lee Ann get those octopus sushi to look so lifelike?

I hadn't seen Poetics Academy before.  There's an interesting post about literary host institutions which includes a description of how miserable it is to be an adjunct now-a-days.  When I was as USC, I was a teaching assistant. for 3-4 years.  I got lots of tuition remission, good pay, a desk and good working conditions.  Apparently, things have changed a lot.

An interesting coincidence in target art between Richard and Katey's sites.

Rebecca is in the middle of her annual Silvia Plath Bake-Off.  I've read the rules carefully and nowhere does it state you have to put your head in the oven.  Still, I don't bake worth a damn, so I'll just drool over the recipes, and say "patissiere" a couple of times over the phone to Junie in my sexiest, guttural, pouting French accent.

The Astonishing Kay, whom I didn't know before today, has a link to William Gibson's blog, which I didn't know existed either.  I've probably read Neuromancer 5 times.

For all my tech background, I'm really a pretty miserable web design type.  For example, Kate has this composite picture of a compass, key, and a milo stalk.  They appear to be sitting right on the page, and even have shadows.  Wow.

I've been trying to bridge three degrees of remove between myself and those with whom I am unacquainted.  This involves visiting the blog of someone I do know, then clicking on a blogroll entry whom I don't know, and then doing it again twice.  This way, I ended up at The Blog of Henry David Thoreau. 

You all have a nice night and I'll try not to be such a slacker tomorrow.

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I've recovered Whimsy Speaks from 2004 and 2005.  Though the database was corrupted in a system crash, the HTML remained.  See the sidebar.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who sees similarities between poker and poetry.

Tricia is doing Marianne Moore for February's theme.

Eyewitnesses have reported that Anna Nicole Smith was touring Iraq promoting the Trim Spa line of weight-loss products at the time of her demise. She is survived by the United States, its anemic culture, and its sociopathic attitude toward the loss of human life. She will be missed. - Mr. Tong Bliss.

Peter Pereira will be judging the Three Candles book contest. 

Check out Steven's Poetry Database.  In another post Steven was positing the existence of poets who are famous for being famous.  You know, the Ben Afflecks of poetry.

Maureen is designing broadsides for the BAP series.

Anna lists the nomineees for Lesbian Poetry, which includes Thirst by Mary Oliver, which made me do a double-take.

Collin washes his cell phone.

I went to Kevin's weblog and there was a place to click-and-donate which said "Hi, Jeffery Bahr, Help a brotha out".  Wow, like a scene from Harvey. 

The world cannot be saved, in any of the several senses of the word. And to save the world would be to stop it, to fix it in place and time, to drain it of what makes it world: motion, flux, action. - Reginald Shepherd

Nice pix at Gina's place.

fuck the new blogger, i hate change, morbid sense of humor.

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Ever since Howard Junker fired up ZYZZYVASPEAKS, I've been wondering who else besides Whimsy is out there speaking.  So far, I've found The Bull Speaks, The Omnipotent Poobah Speaks, Koz Speaks, Last One Speaks, One Happy Dog Speaks, The Banana Who Speaks, EEK Speaks, and Samantha Speaks.  More to come.

The cover story for Atlantic is the story of the pursuit and capture of "Asia's most wanted terrorist", Abu Sabaya.  It's His Party promotes the notion that Bush's combination of conservatism and big government will trickle down to the next generation of Republicans.  Notable dates coming up include:  March 4th, Estonians conduct the world's first parliamentary election via the Internet; March 6th, Guns N' Roses release Chinese Democracy, 13 years and $13 million in the making; March 11th, daylight savings time begins.  From Primary Sources:  livestock account for 18% of greenhouse emissions through feed manufacture, deforestation and flatulence.  Americans continue to add to the list of things that are "a necessity", including 29% who can't live without high-speed Internet.  Researchers say that tobacco industry-funded anti-smoking advertising actually increases the propensity to light up.  Harsher prison conditions actually increase the likelihood that convicts will offend again.  The population decline in Europe is getting worse.  The Ten-Cent Solution reports the efficacy of very inexpensive private schools in Third World countries.  One-Man Stan is a funny take on the recently deceased screwball dictator of Turkmenistan.  Books reviews include one of That Sweet Enemy by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, and includes the observation that the Franco-British conflicts between 1689 and 1815 were "the first real world war", claiming 2 million lives in dozens of countries.  Poems by Wislawa Szymborska and Campbell McGrath.

I wrote a love letter to Junie today, for delivery on or about the 14th.  I think it's the first time I've written a letter by hand since the last missive I sent her some years ago.  That letter made it into a poem that I read at the Chicago AWP, as runner-up in a Swink contest. 

I received a nice email from a relatively famous youngish poet whose work I have admired for years.  I have met three of the 20 richest men in the world and I don't remember anything particularly exhilarating about it (of course, they were much younger and not yet billionaires).  But, get me hand-shake distance from a famous poet and my heart goes aflutter.  At the New Orleans AWP, I actually kept a "spotting list", as a bird watcher might.  There's a scoring system involved, so sitting in the audience when Billy Collins recites doesn't get you as many points as accosting Alberto Rios in the hallway (as I did) and remembering one of his book titles and that he was once in BAP.  At the Napa Valley Workshop, I was able to speak frequently with Brenda Hillman and Arthur Sze (and of course, my instructor and idol, MJB), but it seems like cheating to buy your way in.  I would like to bump into Lyn Hejinian at Whole Foods, for example, and pretend I didn't know who she was and make some small talk about the quality of the salmon filets.  Or bump into Sharon Olds  at the checkout line of Bed, Bath and Beyond and comment on her choice of linen.  In short, I'd rather meet Lucie Brock-Broido than Steven Segal, even though I once put them both in the same poem.  Of course, the poem's close is more fun if you've heard the anecdote.

See you tomorrow.

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Domestic Cleaning Device News (pure poets can skip this part):  Well, I bought another vacuum cleaner, confirming Sweet Junie's belief that I have a fetish regarding these things.  I was tooling around Best Buy and ran into an open-box special on a red Infinity Cyclone, which is a kind of Dyson knockoff that gets pretty good reviews.  It was marked down from $229 to $199 to $119 and I couldn't help myself.  It is a very good cleaner, with a quickdraw wand and attachments a la Dyson.  Now, I have a vacuum cleaner for each floor, and a small Red Devil minivac for the stairs.  One would think that I can't really use another one, right?  Mwahahahahah.  I recently also bought an Oxo sponge mop.  I own a lot of Oxo stuff (ladles, salad spinners, vegetable peelers, et cetera) because they're generally durable, ergonomic, and intelligently designed.  Also, my ex Cath was babysitted in Yellow Springs by Tucker Viemeister who went on to be an industrial designer and is responsible for a lot of the Oxo product designs.  Tucker, BTW, is named after Preston Tucker, president of the much-lauded Tucker Corporation, one of the last attempts of breaking into the high-volume car business, and had innovations such as a center headlight that could be pointed at its target, but I digress.  The Oxo mop is a disaster, while costing 2 times what a normal high-end floor mop costs.  Any attempt to move the mop other than back and forth causes the head to fall off.  Moving the lever into squeeze position and then slightly beyond has the same effect.  I should probably just put it in a long FedEx box and send it back to them.

I have too many spices.  It's a result of years of acquisition from the times when I hosted the occasional party, and Faye and Warren would come over every Friday, and my kids were around to appreciate home-cooked food.  I've got something like 6 bottles of cumin, for example.  Then there's the huge CostCo flagons of Italian Herbs and real Bay Leaves.  Not to mention four unopened bottles of WhatsThisHere sauce.  I'm short on saffron (having missed out on Spain trips the last couple of years), but I'm long on mustard powder and dill weed.  Anyway, the point is that I'm willing to ship some of it to you if you need a spice and herb starter kit.  It's never too late for a poet to find out how close culinary preparation is to literary expression.  I mean, just ask Tony.  The first 3 people to respond via email gets a mini-spice-and-herb selection via UPS.  It's jbahr-at-set-software-services.com, if you've forgotten.

I've been putting this off, for some reason.  I found out recently that my buddy Warren died in December from prostate cancer.  It's just like the bastard not to call me when the pain of the metastasized progeny found his other organs.  I ran a couple of companies with him, and marveled at his unique combination of intelligence, sense of humor and willingness to tackle difficult challenges.  Warren used to say that he was musically eclectic because he liked both Country and Western.  He worked his way up from box-car unloader to fourth-level manager at IBM, managing even in those years when they took away his driver's license for repeated DUI's.  Warren was my friend and I wrote exactly one poem about him.  Bless you, buddy.
 

Porchlight

Warren lights a Camel stub
on the rude glow
of charcoal racked to smoke
turkey, feet up. He's one wife
up on me, two beers, a dog.

Black clouds roll
out of Kansas kicking wind
that scatters envelopes. One boot
lands on a scented letter. He bends
to read it to me through
his silvered half-frames.

It's like all the others, working
a cowboy who spits his teeth
into his hand and rubs his gums.

I'm gonna get married again
he says. I move the ashtray
under his forearm, plaid flannel
on Semper Fi, moths dot
the yellow screen,
stars pop.

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Pet Peeve #1432:  Deutsche Bank:  A Passion to Perform.  Microsoft:  Your Potential. Our Passion. Sony PlayStation:  Ten years of passion.  Mazda: Passion For The Road.  Crest Electronics:  A Passion For Perfection.  Fiat:  Driven By Passion.  Bridgestone Tires:  Passion For Excellence.  — Dear Corporate Advertising People:  Please get a life.  "Passion" is when you can hear your own heartbeat, get the nervous jitters, involuntarily run your tongue across your lips, giggle, groan, lust, and long for.  It's not the way you get tires made or loans renegotiated or software developed.

~~~

The new Swink has taken the early lead for the 2007 Award for Whimsicality.  The issue is a big (6x10), fat, beautiful journal with a provocative orange cover and slick layout.  The interior is very professional, from the artwork to the font choice, and makes me feel like I've bought a book that somebody cared about.  Contributors include Seth Abramson, Michelle Bitting, Kristy Bowen, Rick Bursky, Sarah Fay, Lisa Glatt, Pete Jensen, Sarah Maclay, Elizabeth Scanlon, Zachary Schomburg, and Charles Harper Webb, among others.  Here's some of the chimerical verse that I particularly liked:

Rick Bursky, The Disappearance:   "He woke from a nap and discovered / the sky disappeared.  Clouds, / homeless, draped on trees."

Seth Abramson, Go Six Go Nine: "Today she said today after work can we / pretend you're only /     a carpenter?"

Elizabeth Rees, Dig:  "...// Soon the birds were replaced by bats, the trees collapsed / inside their skins to bear up for another sleepless night".

Chad Reynolds, Culture Abhors Nature, Nature Abhors Victor:  ".. // Meanwhile mousy couples are showing off / on thrift-store couches.  Victor lights / a cigarette and slouches in the smoke"

Kristy Bowen, The Migrations:  "Once again, I am somehow wearing the wrong dress / for this dream, carrying a jar with its feather and spool // of light-blue thread."

Carrie Fountain, Burn Lake 2:  "We found a duck, a mallard, dead / on the shore, head split, eyes loose, // yet when someone poked it with a stick / it shuddered suddenly"

Elizabeth Scanlon, Hippocampal:  ".., who the hell knows all, / it is terrible to know // you were their undoing, their remaking, / gunshot to their Camelot."

Zachary Schomberg, Full of Knives: "My back is full of knives.  There are notes growing brittle around the blades.  The world grows dark now around two.  The plants can be heard growing in the corners."

~~~

Sweet Junie (my passion) has left me for the icy hell that is Wisconsin right now, mixed metaphors aside.  She'll be back, of course, and so will I.  See you tomorrow.

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Jonathan has had some interesting things to say about poetry recently.  Here's one:  Having insights about the poetry you read turns out to be harder than expected. In other words, having insights that can actually be articulated intelligently.  I've often encountered poems for which I thought that there was nothing more to say than was already in the poem.  This may be another way of saying that the poem was fully accomplished. 

And this:  A lot of lyric poetry is the mimesis of an imaginary self. Styles of self-presentation, stylized selves. From here comes the illusion that the author's biography is at all relevant to the reading of lyric poetry. Yet all the facets of personality that are relevant are already there in the mimesis of the self. Suppose the stylized self is narcisissist, brooding, and reckless. Well, if we found that the biographical self of the author is also narcissist, brooding, and reckless, we might be tempted to say, "Aha, I've found the explanation." A moment's reflection is enough to conclude, though, that this explanation is tautological. Suppose we find that the biographical subject is a nicer or meaner person than the lyric subject. This doesn't explain anything either, obviously, though it might help to dispel the biographical illusion.

That got me thinking about poets whose work engenders a sense of the author:  Bob Hicok, John Ashbery, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, and others.  There are many poets whose work I love that don't normally leave an autobiographical afterglow:  Mary Jo Bang, Dean Young, Ted Hughes.  The style (High Modern vs. Flarf, for example) is a factor, which is closely related to the narrative or temporal sense of the verse.  Even pure story-telling (or pure descriptive) poetry can leave you with the feeling that you know how the world looks through the poet's eyes.  I find it difficult not to be at least slightly moved by verse.  It's like trying to read Franz Wright without getting depressed.

~~~~~~

I heard Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman recently on NPR, just after the devastating report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Regarding carbon caps on American industry, he said:  “The U.S. economy is not something to be experimented with, in my judgment.”  Let's see, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates 17 times in recent years.  We will have spent at least half a trillion dollars on the Iraq fiasco by the end of the year.  Taxes were cut radically in the two terms.  CAFTA was passed.  Energy and drug companies were handed huge windfalls and subsidies.  The looming Social Security and Medicare crises were ignored.  The ratio of CEO income to average worker has tripled to 400.  The middle class has shrunk, poverty numbers are up, and the gap between rich and poor has widened substantially.  And we don't want to experiment with the economy?  Instead, we'd rather experiment with the planet that sustains human life?  Estimated world-wide cost of the predicted one meter rise in sea level is in the trillions of dollars.  That doesn't count ecological costs.  If something really bad happens — like a shift in the Gulf Stream and the rapid cooling of Europe, you don't even want to think about the consequences.

Interesting BlogQuotes

The challenge facing the poet is then to translate a personal, subjective experience of language/reality into a textual message that will communicate itself, however incompletely, to another reader, by means other than simple reportage. This challenge is always doomed to at least partial failure, and hence the chimerical aspect of poetry in general. - Kasey.

Jonathan Mayhew was in one of my dreams last night. He was screaming something about Jesus from a bullhorn while pacing at the edge of Golden Gate Park. - CDY

In our degraded democracy, self-interests are more common than deeply felt and realized principles, so it’s not really surprising to see this situation extended to poetry. - Dale.

The roast comes from a long & ignominious tradition in America. Some say that The Roast, rather than jazz, is the one true American art form. - Sharon.

Thomson bought Delmar and then Aspen. Harcourt bought Academic Press and Mosby, joining them up with previous acquisition Saunders. Then Thomson and Reed-Elsevier divvied up Harcourt. //  Between 1999 and 2003, ten different customers of my company became two. That consolidation created an “oligopoly.” Unlike a monopoly, which is capitalism taken to its logical (and disastrous) extreme on the supply side, an oligopoly is capitalism taken to its extreme by a limited number of buyers. - David

The everyone who agrees Firstborn was THE bad book are all of Gluck's critics, and Gluck herself. No one else understands what the hell any of these people is talking about. They're too busy trying to catch the pieces of the baby. - Another David

In his complaint about the territorialization of the American poetry scene I hear another version of the tension between particular and universal: in our urge to carve up the fictional universe of poetry into conceptual categories (post-avant, School of Quietude), individual-existential-actual poems are being lost. Of course you can't actually recognize/represent a post-avant/SoQ poem on its own existential terms: you need the categorical cues most of us are all too eager to provide. - Joshua

Words always obscure the face behind them, but the Academy of American Poets has apparently determined that the ghost within American poetry is Karl Marx. A little late to the party, but — welcome!  - The Other Joshua

I find I have to sit with Wright's poems for a long time before I can move on to the next. I'm so used to -- trained to -- consume poems, burn through them, look for the irreducible spark doubting its presence.  - Jordan

Posted by jbahr at 03:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sweet Junie's in town, so I'm not blogging like I'm wont to.  We have had snow on the ground for a record 7 weeks and the high was about 35 today.  Still, that's 40 degrees warmer than the high in Eau Claire, so she's happy.

There's some nice work in Cimarron Review.  Contributors include Mike White, Bruce Covey, Eric Trethewey, E.G. Burrow, and John Ashbery.  Yes, that Ashbery, I was surprised, too.  Cimarron Review's general editorial aesthetic strikes me as similar to that of Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Crab Orchard Review and, not surprisingly, the bios of the poets include these and similar journals.  I tend to think of litmags as stars in disparate constellations, and a meticulous reading of journal bios tends to support this thesis.  There's a constellation anchored by Fence, for example, and another whose brightest star is the Boston Review.  (Pleiades, is of course, it's own star system).  But, I digress.  I loved the bios in CR.  One contributor Joseph Richie is 16 years old and "hangs out at coffee shops with weird and shady characters".  Julie King, an MFA from Queens University, stars in "B" horror films.  The somewhat conservative critic Adam Kirsch pens a poem in blank verse, something I usually view as daring nowadays when successful.  Hilary Sideris contributes three pretty damned funny pet poems (I hope they were meant to be), including Adult Short-Haired Domestic Male, which starts out "Tonight I tried to kill him / when he knocked from the table, / on purpose, my last glass / of pinot noir.  Threw him on the fire / escape ...".  Intriguing enjambment, of course, and a few other tricks up her sleeve in Custody and Baby.  A lot of the work in the issue is chatty, narrative and descriptive, and most is quite readable.  Ashbery stands out, as always, by being chatty and urbane, while leaving purposely breadcrumbs to places he never ends up:  "... Imagine a movie that is the same / as someone's life, same length, same ratings. // ... // How do you judge when it's more than / half over?  As pastel tundra / crowds in from all sides like a mandala/ ..."

If you wonder what the rich do with all their money, one thing must be purchasing wine.  The 100 best wineries in the world have been able to raise their prices repeatedly to the point where they are beyond the reach of even upper-middle class on expense accounts.  The 2005 futures (that is, wine which you won't receive for another year and you can't drink until 2010) are running $200 to $600 for the French first and second growths. Lafite Rothschild, Mouton Rothschild, Margaux, Haut Brion and La Tour run about $600 a bottle, while Cheval Blanc and Yquem are close to $700.  Futures prices for the world renown Pomerol, Chateau Petrus, are almost $3,000 a bottle.   It won't do you much good to look to prior good years, either.  The case of 1985 Chateau Margaux that I bought (and subsequently drank) in 1997 now retails for $550 a bottle.  The long-gone case of 1982 Penfold's Grange Hermitage would now set me back $275 a bottle.  I guess it's good that I drank those wonderful wines when they were a lot cheaper.  If I had them now, I'd probably get a case of the guilts, sell them, donate some to charity and put the rest in my IRA.

More tomorrow. 

Posted by jbahr at 06:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)