Whimsy Speaks Again

They've been building this Thing on a corner piece of land where 119 intersects with what used to be 119, but is now just plain old 3d Street, which coincidentally is also my right turn to go home.  The park or structure or Garden Bizarro or whatever it is starts just about where Longmont officially starts also, so maybe somebody is making a statement.  There are, as you can see, two strange blades that appear to be made out of our vaunted Colorado red rock, but also fringed with green glass.  Surrounding them are what appear to be memorial stones for gophers.  There are also a couple of winding walkways and xeriscaped clumps of this and that.  Every time I pass it all I can think of is that weird crooked fireplace that Beetlejuice was getting married in front of.

Royal Gorge was a lot of fun.  Ally and John and Junie and I wandered around the dinosaur museum, had lunch at a pretty decent Mexican restaurant, and got on the train that takes you down the Gorge.  They have seats in the glass-topped dome cars, but we bought coach seats, as we expected to walk out to the "open car" anyway.  The Open Car is a flat car with some railings and they still let you bring your drinks out there, so why not?  After running down the gorge, getting dive-bombed by a sightseeing chopper, receiving a righteous display of boobs and moon from some passing rafters, and turning back again, we all had dinner at Cañon City's second-best restaurant.  Their first-best, a little French place, was too snooty to stay open on a Sunday, even on Memorial Day weekend.  Just to snub them, most likely, Ally ordered froglegs at the other joint.  All in all, a nice day.

I am so going to grow tomatoes this year.

More tomorrow.  I'm still recovering from post-holiday stress syndrome.

 

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I owe it to CDY for mentioning Jonathan's use of the Amazon Concordance feature.  What's interesting is that books of quite different aesthetics don't look all that different when you look at the ranked concordance.  Compare the concordance, for example, of MJB's Louise in Love with that of CDY's Second Person.  Lots of nice concrete Anglo-Saxon words.  BTW, I am totally stealing CDY's Palatino addiction.

On the topic of Poetry Words, Claudia once said that "shard" was the new "butterfly", and Hannah thinks that "cicadas" may be the new "shards". Of course, those are just the nouns.  For verbs, I'd nominate "limn" and for adjectives "ineluctable", which has the dual disadvantage of being overused and latinate. Speaking of cicadas, THEY'RE BACK!!! (mwah-ha-ha), after a 17 year hiatus.  Not to worry, though, there are plenty of recipes for the critters.

Kasey and Joshua are reviewing films again, which always strikes me as using intellectual howitzers on (mainly) artistic small fry.  On the other hand, the cultural commentary is always interesting, as are the fresh takes on films (new and old).  On the 3d hand, I have been visiting review sites (e.g., Epinions, et al.) to hear what people say about all those informercial products I see on my morning treadmill, so I should talk.  It turns out, not surprisingly, that the various real estate programs end up trying to sell you thousands of dollars of seminars and information that you could get for free using Google.  The Magic Bullet isn't exactly useless, but there are cheaper ways to make guacamole.  Hip Hop Abs is apparently as effective as Yoga Bootie Ballet, but the infomercials that I love in this category are the ones in which you exercise without actually moving.   Greer Childers proposes deep breathing, and then there are the belts that shock your stomach muscles into contraction.  My personal favorite is the creepy Klee Irwin who tells you that, if you only cleanse your colon, you will defy death and become rich.  What's really amazing about these companies is that they get sued by the FTC, pay millions in fines, are staffed and run by a host of felons, and still, every morning, there they are. 

I've got a new Poetry, as you know.  Also a new Colorado Review arrived.  I might talk about them tomorrow.  Or, I may perform a Mega Tea Ceremony on this house to prepare for Junie's arrival tomorrow afternoon.  That involves all the stuff that guys never actually get around to unless company is imminent, such as vacuuming, rug-cleaning, furniture de-fur-ification, refrigerator-detoxifying, bed making, and bathroom-scrubbing.  See you tomorrow.  Maybe.

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I was tickled to hear today that I had a couple of poems accepted by Court Green.  It's a literary journal out of Columbia College, where my son goes to school.  The last issue had Patrick Lawler, Danielle Pafunda, D.A. Powell, G.C., Jean Valentine, and Kirsten Kaschock in it, so I'm expecting to be in good company this time around.

~~~

I have this new Toshiba portable that is in most respects a nice laptop with a big screen and decent performance.  However. It comes with Vista, which I would just as soon wait a while on, but you have no choice nowadays as Microsoft has forced Vista down the throats of every OEM who builds a computer.  I turned it on upstairs to help sort out my manuscript and waited for it to recognize my internal WiFi network, which it didn't.  Now, when Malinda shows up for MMM staff meetings with her Mac portable it says: "Hey, Malinda, I see four WiFi networks and 3 have no security requirements, and which one would you like to connect to, and would you like fries with that?"  My Toshiba just sits there and says there are No Network Connections.  So, I clicked on some stupid icon in the tray and it said, "What kind of network?" and I said Wireless, since for pity's sake, there's nothing plugged in to the wired Ethernet, can't you figure that out?  It said "No Connections", and there was (at 3d glance) a small icon that said "Radar", which I clicked out of frustration and this "the sun and all its planets" thing came up and small white points rushed from the side of the screen and that was that.  That took 20 minutes.  Thank God I happened to pass my mouse over one after rebooting and cursing and whatever.  It said "SSS", which is my network, thank you.  I clicked.  I double-clicked.  After another half-hour, I mistakenly clicked on the Mother Earth symbol in the middle and saw that it was drawing a line as I moved the mouse.  I connected the lines between SSS and Mother Earth and I had Internet.  Loki himself couldn't dream up something as ridiculous and arcane.  Now I know why people buy Mac portables.

The Poetry magazine I received today appears to have A.E. Stallings and Daisy Fried and A. F. Moritz and Craig Arnold and Dana Levin and Joel Brouwer and John Koethe.  It's like Old Home Week.  The amazing, wonderful thing is that is also has work by Ange Mlinko and Mary Jo Bang.  I really like Ange and her work.  I have one room in my house that is essentially an MJB shrine, so you can imagine how I feel about her first contribution to Poetry (you can tell, there's a little asterisk by her name).  Anyway, details tomorrow.

~~~

I'm currently looking at Rockbox, the open source player firmware alternative to the existing software on iPods and other audio players.  Meanwhile, Dima is looking at object module loading under eCos, for situations in which we have very limited DRAM.  Just so's you know I don't spend all my time reading poetry magazines, getting my hair done, and eating bon bons.

~~~

OK, I admit I did watch the season's finale for American Idol, and I'll probably have to turn in my Authentic Liberal ID Card for contributing to Fox's viewing base (not that I don't watch The Simpsons, come to think of it).   Paula stood up and swayed for every song maker, Tony Bennett showed up, the guitarist from Some Famous Metal Band, and all the finalists showed up as backup singers, and Bette Midler doing an aged impression of Bette Midler, and countless pans over to Jeff Foxworthy for some reason (his new show on Fox?).  But Green Day was killerbee.  I love those guys.  I was once in a tiny town outside of Viznar, where Garcia Lorca was executed.  They had sorbete limon in a small freezer, and American cigarettes, and two cassette tapes of American bands.  One was Green Day, so I bought it to listen to, as Alejandro drove me in his Seat across the rest of Spain in what I like to call Air Tarquis.  But, as usual, I digress.  Smokey Robinson still had some of the goods and it's always humorous to watch Simon Cowell play the bad guy.  Blake didn't win and cause me to throw up all over Ms. Emily.  So, all in all, a good night.

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There's an interesting visiting editorial in this month's Queue from the Association of Computing Machinery.  The author reviews the decades-old fight among proponents of different programming languages, and in particular, the devotees of literate programming.  I'm old enough to have programmed in dozens of languages, before C/C++, Java and VB dominated the landscape.  30 years ago, there were still raucous arguments about the relative merits of Ada, LISP, Pascal, Modula and dozens of other dialects.  Luminaries such as Edsger Dijkstra would claim that COBOL "crippled the mind" and that BASIC created "mentally mutilated programmers". 

There are certainly parallels between programs and poems.  One of the reasons that I write clear, commented code is that I may have to go back and understand it some day.  No less my poetry which, on re-reading after a year or two, I wonder what in the hell I was talking about.

~~~

I was laying out pages of my manuscript all over the kitchen table, trying to get Emily to lounge somewhere else and preparing to impose some serious narrative arc on the sucker, when it dawned on me that I didn't know how many pages I should include.  The guidelines to the Emily Dickinson Award says something typical like "48 to 90", but I tend to write shortish poems, so I'm expecting to have about as many poems as pages.  The last time I entered the good folks at the Poetry Foundation dictated that all poems should be double-spaced.  I assumed this was because, not only were the applicants limited to those over 50, the manuscript readers would be members of the same (farsighted) demographic.  But, I digress.  Figuring I could go back to single spacing, I was going to have 4 sections with 15-16 poems each.  I ambled over to my poetry shelf and picked the first recognizable contest winner at hand:  GC Waldrep's Goldbeater's Skin. 

Boy, was that a mistake.   I noted the number of poems and page count, and started reading it again.  I was humbled within the first 5 pages.  It's not only erudite and footnoted and end-paged and allusional.  It's intelligent and unashamed of its vocabulary and outstanding writing, with inventive titles and great closes, and so clearly poetry.  I once read the book cover to cover, taking notes, which I eventually sent to GC.  This time, all the poems that I thought were great I am now awed by.  All the poems I thought were good, I now find exceptional.  Most of the poems that I didn't care for as much, I now believe are really, really good.  It was a Twain moment, where my old dad got smarter as I aged.  My thought for you tonight is, if you want to write better poetry, read better poetry and this will cost you less than a meal at Red Robin's.

There are some many great poems in this book, and such a wealth of great lines, that I can only give you a sample.  I've actually stolen two phrases already as titles to my own poems.  Here a small sampling:

Against the Madness of Crowd:  "Reckon the haste of one wall burning. / There is no thickness there is no terror there is"

Blink: "This bird's too big for the drawer you've opened, / talons deep in the wood like winter sap ..."

Varieties of Religious Experience:  "I want to lie down in a room of blue sand."

Heave-Ho: "if I could lift the cold from the dress form of this present yes"

Confessions of the Mouse King:  "... Our lady of lithography, / each sewn signature, the cutting and the paste / applied in hopes of some organic connection, / as thigh to hip.  In the meantime I pledge my small furnace."

Confessions of the Mouse King:  "The thing is, every child's a walking reliquary ..."

Apocatastasis:  " Perhaps this cold will pass. Perhaps / that bridge was not a harp at all."

Canticle for the Second Sunday in Lent: "To be the son of a poet is to lust in a great circle."

What Begins Bitterly Becomes Another Love Poem:  "What we call patience is only fire again, compressed."

Vendible Aesthetic: "A wild eloquence.  Faint taste of salt on love's split tongue."

It's no wonder that Dean Young, whom I admire immensely, called the work "a fiercely intelligent and fiecely playful interiority that is astonishing".  And another poet whom I respect, Arthur Sze, added "reading these poems renews our recognition of the world's precarious splendor."  From other poets, and for other books, these words would cause eye-rolls as most blurbs do.  Get this book and read it and you'll be a believer.

~~~

The latest news from Derek is he and his buddy Max, the Film Studies student, are in Nice.  They love the hostel, which has an abundance of attractive young women and high-speed Internet.  Their report on Paris, whence they came, was that Everything Was A Fabulous Blur, as they  ... well, I'll let Der say it, probably typing on a keyboard that has a bunch of weird vowels with diacritical marks: "showed up on the first day at 10am (3 am our time) after having been awake since 9am the previous morning and having only gotten about two hours of interrupted sleep on the plane.  Determined to stay up until night time so as to establish a good sleep schedule we walked around for about 9 hours until it started to rain, at which point we sat inside a cafe and stared like zombies out at the people with umbrellas.  The next day we walked about two and a half times the distance that me and diego walked on our most ambitious day... we saw the eiffel tower, the arch de triumph, sacre cour, and the louvre  before walking the 3 miles back south to our hotel....".  As I mentioned, Der & Max are now on the Côte d'Azur and Max is dying to take in the last day of Cannes, where they are hoping to bump into small film makers ordering similar café au lait's and strike up a conversation.  There are no accommodations in Cannes, so they will be taking the train back and forth from Nice, and then moving on to Italy.  Ah, the glories of traveling with a backpack, a yen for adventure, and a parent's emergency-only credit card.

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If you're on the Front Range, consider dropping by the Many Mountains Moving Literary Salon tonight at 7 PM.  It's held in the meeting hall of Boulder's St. John's Episcopal Church and the guest poets tonight are Jeffrey Lee and Aaron Anstett.  After the reading and a break to chat and eat, there's an open-mike session, so bring some work to read. The Salons are always potluck, so join the party and bring some food and/or beverage.  Barb Sorenson, MMM's salon coordinator, and I always bring wine, but a little more wouldn't hurt.  If all that isn't enough to get you there, I'll also be making The World's Best Salmon.

~~~

Hey, I found my retirement home.  The Searles Castle is up for sale at the bargain price of only $15 million.  It has 60,000 square feet, 40 rooms, 36 fireplaces, and a dungeon.  What with the adjoining 61 acres, it would make a great place to start up Breadloaf Lite.

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One arrogant ideological Bush crony gone.  Only a couple of hundred more to go:  "Another former colleague who served with Wolfowitz in four administrations said that "the kinds of problems he got into were predictable for anybody who really knew Paul." Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the source voiced admiration for his intellect but said Wolfowitz "couldn't run a two-car funeral."  He is expected to receive a huge severance package and make lots more money in the future spouting nonsense for the Heritage Foundation.  Actually, all the digraced seem to make out just fine, from Kissinger to Meese.  A whole lot of pigs in a blanket.

As someone noted recently, the phrase "wealthy Presidential candidate" is redundant.  Giuliani would have been the exception that proves the rule, as his net worth was $7,000 six years ago.  Now, he's worth $30 million, from businesses and speech gigs (he charges $100,000 a pop, not including the cost of a private jet and accommodations for his entourage).

Treasure-hunting firm Odyssey Marine Exploration found a shipwreck with treasure expected to net half a billion dollars.  In other news, I found a two-dollar bill that I had used as a bookmark in Ted Hughes' Crow.

~~~

I got my biweekly catalogue from Dean & Deluca, The Icon of the American Epicurean Experience.  I imagine that their actual stores are like Whole Foods on steroids.  Some of the items that you might, in-store in person actually drop a house payment on, seem like unlikely candidates for shipping.  Such as the half-dozen kinds of oysters you get in the D&D oyster pack, 36 in all including Samish Bay European Flat, Steamboat Island Pacific, Toten Inlet Virginica, and Chapman Kumamoto.  That's about three buck an oyster, which is a lot more than the 25 cents I paid in N'Orleans on my last honeymoon.  Also available is the edamame and rice salad, $32 for a 2.25 pound bucket.  You can cook the 4 pieces of 8-ounce wild pacific salmon (only $70) on the D&D Porcelain Table Grill ($260) and serve a nice Chardonnay.  Maybe accompanied by their Corn on The Cob, only $32 for a set of six, but that includes chile lime butter.  The lobster roll combination looks pretty good:  two 12-ounce tubs of lobster salad and eight buns for only $135.  This month they're also running a special on "Succulent Ribs" that run about $15 a pound, and you can take your pick from St. Louis Ribs, Country Spare Ribs, Korean Short Ribs, or Beef Ribs (which is a pretty modest description, seeing as they made from dry-aged Prime beef).  For the summer, D&D is running ads on, well, hamburgers and hot dogs.  Of course, the hot dogs are Wagyu Beef Sausages that will set you back $40 for eight 3-ounce links.  The Deluca Burger is made from 100% source-verified natural beef and runs $30 for four 8-ounce patties, but they do throw in the buns.  If you want to move up, try the D&D Natural Beef Prime Porterhouse, $140 for two 24-ounce steaks.  The rest of the catalog is usual mouthwatering collection of cheeses, wines, sausages, caviar and appetizers.  I was especially amused by the Comfort Food.  You can settle for Chicken Pot Pie at $12, but I loved the idea of D&D Pigs in a Blanket, the perfect hors d'oeuvre for that retro 60's party you always wanted to throw (and only $40 for twelve little piggies).  I just need to work on being the Significant Other of some NeoCon scumbag so I can afford this stuff.

~~~

The current rumor in the Blogosphere is that Gonzo will announce his resignation today at 5PM EDT to miss the news cycle.

~~

My dreams never make any sense and never have anybody I know in them.  My ex is a wonderful, but rather practical, person and her dreams are always like: "I was making bouillabaisse and the front burner went out and the back burner was too small for the special pot, and IT WAS JUST HORRIBLE!".  In my dreams, the mussels would crawl out of the pot and talk to me.  And there wouldn't be anyone around that I know, even Sweet Junie, just a collection of characters that resembled people I knew 30 years ago.  What does it all mean?

~~~

I would love to talk about poetry, but I haven't gotten any journals lately, and I can hardly talk about the MMM submissions.  Maybe I should wander over to Borders or make the Long Drive down to The Tattered Cover and pick up some litmags.  I could work on my manuscript for the Poetry Foundation's contest.  They have a zillion rules about how the submission should be organized, including the attachment of publication dates on every acknowledgment.  By the way, why isn't there an "e" between the "g" and "m" in that word.  But I digress.  How should I know when the damned stuff finally got published?  I get an acceptance and cross another one off the list and wait for word from the publication.  Sometimes it's six months and sometimes it's 3 years.  Prairie Schooner seems to be good at collecting up good work and then waiting forever to publish it, but maybe I was a special case.  Hah!  That reminds me that I had a poem accepted by <name-of-journal-redacted> whose editor is <a-popular-poet-and-blogmate> that never got back to me after the acceptance and I never got a contributor copy.

~~~

I was cruising through Wikipedia, my favorite reference, damn the critics, and found Billy Collins and Ron Silliman and Robert Creeley and C. Dale Young and Bob Hicok and Carl Phillips and Kim Addonizio and Tony Tost and Joshua Clover and the literary journal Shenandoah but not Mary Jo Bang or GC Waldrep or Bin Ramke.  Or of course, me, not that I don't think a lot of people should be in there first.  I should get off my duff and find out how you initiate an article entry.

~~~

I just noticed that my oldest company is now 25 years old, and its product is still selling.  When I invented this thing, there was no IBM PC yet, no MSDOS, and certainly no Windows.  VisiCalc was the most popular software on the planet, and Lotus wasn't invented yet.  Our customers were OEMs like Altos and Honeywell and small firms in Germany who ended up being the reason I moved there for a while.  The funny thing is that all our customers are as old or older as I am.  It's been a race to see whether they drop the product or die before I do.

I promise to read some poetry and get back to you tomorrow.  Oh, I know, I am a fickle correspondent, but I'll try harder this time.

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Paul Wolfowitz, co-architect of the Iraq War, President of the World Bank, and full-time sleezebag, still hasn't quit.  The latest revelation is that Wolfowitz told an HR person at the the Bank, "If they fuck with me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too." Ahh, the typical bravado of the NeoCon Clan, most of whom dodged the draft, spent a lot of time in conservative think-tanks, and lavish their adoration on Dick Cheney.  At least Dick's tough enough to shoot a friend in the face, and then accept his apology for getting between Dick and a bird.

You've probably heard that even that right-wing curmudgeon, John Ashcroft, wouldn't go along with Gonzo's rush to authorize Bush's domestic surveillance program.  Even Ashcroft was appalled and refused to sign up for an activity he considered illegal.  From his hospital bed, where Gonzo and Card visited him. 

A scandal a week.  It just gets better and better.  Actually, Salon has a description of 34 scandals to date.

I'm of two minds about Christopher Hitchens, but I had to admire his take on Falwell:  "The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you will just get yourself called Reverend.  Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?  People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup."

~~~

It's the 16th, which gives me about 30 days to get my manuscript ready for the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award.  I can't figure out how to improve upon my last manuscript which finished somewhere in the top ten last year, but I had better get cracking.  More narrative arc!  Better poems in the first dozen pages!  Close on a winner!  You know, all the usual advice.  If I win, I'm giving the $10K to charity.  That should motivate the poetry gods.

I've received two more literary journals, Barrow Street and Ploughshares, but they were the same issues I received a couple of weeks ago.  They must keep their records by the same methods I do.

Junie will be coming to see me again next week (huzzah).  She and I and Ally and John will drive up to Royal Gorge and thereabouts and take in the scenery and maybe ride a train.  I should actually be better informed about this kind of thing, but I'm a last minute kinda guy.

Derek reported in from Paris, where he and Max have been spending 14 hours a day walking around and taking in the sites.  I have this picture of Cath, Der, Ky and I in front of the Eiffel Tower, but I think Der was one or something, so he wouldn't remember.  The Eiffel Tower is one of those icons that, even though you've seen a zillion pictures and even knew somebody who kept a small replica of it on their dashboard, it's still awe-inspiring.  I wrote a poem once in which La Tour Eiffel played a prominent role.  I can't remember who took it.  I just remember that I was writing math-and-science poems at the time, and this morphed from paradox to narrative.

~~~

I had never watched American Idol until last week, and now I get it.  Blake, Lakisha, Malinda and Jordin.  Barry Gibbs.  A fifty-city tour for the top ten.  Millions of dollars monthly to Simon Fuller. All that merchandise.  Wow, so Fox. It's absolutely brilliant, but in the way that the English mean "brilliant". I'll probably watch tonight, but then, so is CDY, so I'm not exactly in shabby company.

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Well, I didn't blog on the road.  But then, I actually never got on the road.  I didn't take the plane to Cleveland, didn't take the subsequent plane to Chicago, and didn't help Derek and Kyle move All Derek's Stuff from the dorm room.  Having missed the plane to Cleveland for reasons I'll go into at a later date, I then conjured up a plan to drive a rental car 14 hours to Chicago, do the move, and drive 14 hours back to Colorado.  I had all the reservations and maps and places to stop for coffee duly mapquested about the time that Junie, Cath and Derek told me I was nuts.  Which is probably correct, come to think about it.  I also missed seeing Frank, so he will have to continue dominating Chicago's poetry without my sage counsel. 

Harper's has a picture of Our President doffing his Stetson in a pose that just screams "big hat, no cattle".  The main attraction of this month's issue is "Undoing Bush:  How to Repair Eight Years of Sabotage, Bungling and Neglect".  It's a good article, if a little too wild-eyed lefty in places for most people's tastes.  The institutions in need of repair include The Constitution, The Courts, Civil Service, The Environment, Science, The Economy, The Marketplace of Ideas, Intelligence, The Military, and Diplomacy.  In fact, I think that this Administration's historically unique power grab, facilitated by 9/11 and Republican control of both houses, has led to most of this, and "fixing" the various mechanisms of government and national policy is more a matter of getting the checks and balances back than anything else.  Yes, the Constitution has been stressed, but it wasn't defended by the Supreme Court even before the appointment of Alito and Roberts.  The Courts will probably continue their historic progressive path over the coming decades, even with the many Bush appointees.  We've had 26 years of Republican Presidents in the past 38 years, and their judicial appointments, however right-leaning to begin with, seem to head left soon after obtaining a lifetime job.  As for Science, The Environment, Civil Service, and Intelligence, the problem has been an unprecedented policy of appointing political hacks at all levels, and then giving them (in some cases illegal) authority over career management.  Being the optimist that I am, I expect the situation to be corrected in the next few years by Congressional hearings and a slow realization by the American electorate of how broken the system had become.  The Military is stressed, but frankly, it's already too big and the answer is to get all of Congress (including the Democrats) to stop feeding it with money and weapon systems it doesn't need.  Diplomacy will fix itself as soon as we get a rational mix of realpolitik and pursuit of real American ideals in place. ♦  There's an excerpt of a James Tate short story from the Mississippi Review and a poem, The Sea, from the March issue of Poetry (translated and re-constructed by Reginald Gibbons from fragments of a lost work by Sophocles).  ♦ The stats from Harper's Index include:  There's a 32% increase since 2000 in the number of Americans living at less than half the poverty line ; 7 in 10 of the largest metropolitan areas have seen an increase in homicide rates since 2004, and New Orleans is once again #1 ; 12 of the 16 southern states have adult populations where 25% of more are clinically obese ; 13% of all S&P 500 CEOs have homes that are either larger than 10,000 square feet, sit on more than 10 acres, or both ; 1,446,000 new books went on the market last year and 1,123,000 sold less than 99 copies and 483 sold more than 100,000 copies ; the number of hours of leisure time for the average American is now equal to that of Americans in 1900.

I have a couple of Time magazines in front of me, as they come weekly.  Last week's was mainly filled with their 100 Most Influential People in the World, which was patently ridiculous.  In the first place, the majority were American which, as much as we'd like to think so, probably isn't true.  Then there were the actual picks:  Tina Fey and Salma Hayek polled higher than Hillary Clinton, for example.  President Bush wasn't on the list.  I don't like him any more than you do, but he can still order a nuclear strike and the entire Executive branch reports to him.  I'd call that influential. ♦  The recent Time's cover is graced by a picture of Mitt Romney with the caption "Sure, He Looks Like a President".  I suppose because he's white, male, 50-something and relatively handsome.  After that it's all downhill in article after article questioning his flip-flop on social issues and the problems of being a Morman when 25% of the Republican primary voters are Evangelicals.  Jeffery Sachs notes that there are 950 billionaires in the world with a collective net worth of $3.5 trillion.  That exceeds the GDP of most developed nations, including France, Germany, China, and the UK (but not Japan).  If they all decided, as did Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, to give most of it away (leaving plenty for private jets and their own island nations), it would generate approximately $150-200 billion a year in earnings, enough to extend basic health care to the entire world, end massive pandemics, end the digital divide, and provide drinking water for a billion people.  Yeah, like that's gonna happen. 

I just noticed that Kasey, Rebecca, Laurel, and Steven were on the list of Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere.  I was delighted to discover that Jilly and Ron were previous winners.  Even if they did mis-spell Ms. Loudon's first name.

More tomorrow.  I think I'm on a roll.

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I'd like to thank Dona Stein for the opportunity to read on her poetry show.  If you missed it, you can listen to the show here.

~~~

I got a new laptop today and, like every other computer in the store, it was pre-installed with Microsoft Vista (they didn't carry Macs).  Vista vaunted graphics don't impress me much and I find I keep reverting various settings to Classic.  The one thing I've found so far that is REALLY annoying is the degree to which Vista protects you from yourself.  Twice I've tried to copy a file from network drive, only to have Vista tell me that I didn't have permission to do so.  I'm the administrator of the laptop, so I couldn't figure out how that could be until I started googling and found that "you need permission to perform this action" is the result of Vista's new User Account Control.  Microsoft says

"To help prevent malicious programs silent installation and computer-wide infection, Microsoft developed the UAC feature for Windows Vista. Unlike previous versions of Windows, when an administrator logs on to a computer running Windows Vista, the user’s full administrator access token is split into two access tokens: a full administrator access token and a standard user access token. During the logon process, authorization and access control components that identify an administrator are removed, resulting in a standard user access token. The standard user access token is then used to start the desktop, the Explorer.exe process. Because all applications inherit their access control data from the initial launch of the desktop, they all run as a standard user as well."

Well, whatever.  All I know is that I can't copy my own files, and virtually every action requires a confirming button click.  There are ways to disable it, though.  I suspect that after this upcoming trip, I'll just install XP Pro and forget about it. 

~~~

I'm off tomorrow to Ohio and then Chicago to help Der move out of his apartment.  I actually think I'll have more time to blog, but I always think that. 

Posted by jbahr at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a poetry part at Barb's tonight.  She and Malinda, two of my MMM cohorts, arrange these things periodically and people show up.  They bring appetizers from Whole Foods and home-made vegetarian casseroles and yummy desserts and some poetry to read.  Usually, they also bring wine, but Barb says that her home is on some God-Awful precipice just outside of Estes Park, so maybe we should teetotal this one.  Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

I was mentioning how much I always enjoy Barrow Street.  Unlike the journals that unreliable zygote mentioned, their taste in poetry doesn't seem fairly characterized as quirky narrative.  That said, Barrow Street is easily the most whimsical journal I've read.  Just consider the titles in the current issue:  Chiasson's Dream of Elephants, Limbo Babies (1 through 5), The Insomniac's Afterlife, Yockadot, Poked Hambone, The Dictionary Never Tans, Obituary Penciled on a Piece of Drywall Along Highway 55.  These are the kind of inventive headlines I would expect to pay good money for at Frank's Title Service.

The poetry is equally weird, which I mean in the most enthusiastically positive way.  Not gratuitously weird, just nicely strange.  Like Ange said, poetry should be an adventure.  Here are some of poems that I thought were particularly interesting, though I'm leaving out a lot more I liked due to party-time-constraints:

Kim Addonizio, Another Day on Earth:  "Souls were leaving, souls were departing / amid the usual screaming and crying. / A lot of drinks were being tossed back, / a lot of women were thinking about their hair".

Helen Barnard, Chiasson's Dread of Elephants:  "What makes us care so much about animals?  I write "a small rodent heart" / at the end of a line and the teacher writes "sentimental?""

Karen Brennan, Limbo Babies 1:  "..//The Limbo Babies just floated around / for Eternity:  no spelling, no dinner, / no homework."

Lance Larsen, Animals of the Sky:  "Where green flows close, then shags away into field, / grass.  Where it rises from trunk into canopy and combs / the wind, say tree ..."

Tim Yu, The Pursuit of the Scientific Life: "Without a medium through which to propagate.  Cream sodas.  She married into a grateful man, carrying cardboard boxes down to the train station.  We are willing to stipulate bones."

Daniel Liebert, Aphorisms:  "..//A bridge in a dream is not a bridge, but it is not nothing. //...// Time will fix a bad haircut and kill the barber. //...// Ennui is the tree and panic, the ripe fruit."

Sarah Vap, Ease:  "This isn't the ease I have been asking for.  To be limber in response to pale sexual ghosts then going back like those fucking gulls."

Reading through the volume as I typed, I found a lot more I liked, including The Gate of Abraham by D. Nurske.  Oh, well, out of time. 

See you tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I think there's a certain kind of post-NY School poem that's been birthed by the various MFA mills. Say, a poem where you mention a famous pirate, then your favorite brand of organic tator chips, then mention how 'Stewart' hasn't walked the dog yet. But y' know, if the guy from Coldplay says he's really into 'White Light/White Heat', does that have much currency? Alot of these poems, and there are so many of them that there's no need to blame a particular poet, are quirky narrative. Alot of the stuff in Fence, McSweeney's, Jubilat are quirky narrative. Alot of indie films, say those in the post-Wes Anderson mode, qualify as quirky narrative. I should quit my qualms however, because the key word here is narrative. – unreliable zygote

Poetry should be an adventure.  "Speaking eloquently" will get you a sinecure and a dedicated line to your very own espresso machine. – Ange Mlinko, Poetry.

The best poets are wily, not dogmatic. – David Yezzi, Poetry.

Most poetry has too much craft and not enough guile. – me

~~~

I think I'm repeating myself, but I ran across another article on Jonathan Lethem today.  I first read a book by Lethem after picking up Motherless Brooklyn at an airport bookstore.  It's a mystery whose protagonist is "an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark".   He has also written science fiction (Gun With Occasional Music and Fortress of Solitude).  Lethem was awarded a Macarthur Fellowship (AKA the half-million dollar genius award) in 2005.  Interesting guy.

~~~

Congrats to Jordan for an acceptance by Columbia Poetry Review.  My son attends Columbia College (home to CPR).  I'll be flying there next week after a business meeting in Ohio.  Kyle and his sweetie are flying in and the plan is to move All Derek's Stuff from his dorm room to his buddy Max's tiny apartment.  Also on the agenda is a couple of nice meals at the great restaurants in the Loop, and drinks at the same bar in the Palmer House where I met so many poets during AWP.  Cath booked rooms there for Ky and Eileen, and I lucked out using HotWire.com.  Frank (founder of the now-famous Frank's Title Service) will be joining us for at least one meal, and Derek has a gig at the renowned Buddy Guy's Legends on Friday night.  The only hitch in my giddyup is I'm flying out Sunday from Rockford airport, which (according to mapquest) appears to be farther away than Milwaukee. 

~~~

I think Emily woke up with a hangover.

~~~

One of the interesting things about working with other poets on MMM projects is the education I'm receiving from writers whose interactions are devoid of all Internet experience.   Virtually all the workshopping I've done has been on websites.  That, and the thousands of poems I've critiqued online, shaped my values and opinions in ways that I never expected.  Some of the things I've realized include:

• I'm not particularly good at appreciating long poems.  Most of the poems on the dozen poetry boards in which I've participated have been one screen long.
   
• Critiquing online tends to be tactical commentary.  There is very little discussion of poetics because poems are addressed one piece at a time.  As a result, poems that may do well in a sequence or collection, may appear weak. 
   
• There tends to arise "poetry board consensus" about matters of craft.  The good news is that mixed metaphors, tired imagery, ineffective line breaks, unimaginative titles,  and the like get called out regularly.  The bad news is that it becomes somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction among the local literati.
   
• The relative degree of anonymity tends to make the critique quite a bit crueler than were one in a meat-space poetry workshop.  In some ways, I think that's a good thing, that poets should learn to defend their work and develop thick skin (I can't tell you how many times, the Poet Laureate of Some Small State has graced a board with their work, only to get roasted).  On the other hand, there are poets who are just not ready for the kind of unbridled opinion-making that goes on.
   
• It is inevitable that cliques develop, leading to inequities in critique.  I've found a poet's immersion into a particular poetry board is a boot camp experience, and once the hazing period has expired, a much larger degree of slack is granted.  Of course, you have to suffer through the trial period, which is more than some sensitive souls can handle.
   
• Writing to post on a poetry board dramatically speeds up the entire poetry creation process.  You don't meet twice a month with peers.  Instead, you post one or two poems a week and critique dozens more as the coin of participation.  You could argue that this leads to a lower-quality output, but that has not been my experience.  In fact, I started submitting solely to determine if the online process was working, and if the critiques I received (and the suggestions that I incorporated in my work) had any merit.
   
• There is a danger in permitting strong personalities to shape your style.  Still, in the end, I think the experience is worth it.  My friend, Claudia, for example, tended to comment on poetry of mine that she felt was too suburban, or earned its keep too readily with emotional content.  By contorting my next poem to please the strong critters on a board, I found that I learned a variety of lessons, which in some cases led to my refutation of their aesthetic preference.
   
• A lot of participants of the poetry boards that have gone on to prosper in the print world:  Seth Abramson, Rebecca Loudon, Paul Guest, Frank Matagrano, G.C. Waldrep, Claudia Grinnell, Suzanne Frischkorn and many others.  Some (GC and Paul, for example) were already doing fabulously in the print world.  Some continue to post online, some have found other ways to stay engaged.  Blogging appears to be the most popular alternative

I've also found that many Internet-wary poets tend to avoid the poetry Blogosphere.  A poet friend of mine recently mentioned that she found the blogs to be whimsical, divisive, self-centered, chaotic and generally too much like frat parties (I'm paraphrasing).  Personally, I find myself at home among the hundreds of poetry blogs that I read over the year.  I don't always agree with everyone, but I love the mix of personalities and interests, and it's not just about the poetry (think CDY's comments on American Idol, or Paul Guest's fondness for Buffy).  The feeling of camaraderie seems very real to me, whether it's Jordan leaving a comment, or Reb leaving me an email about an editor looking for me, or Joshua telling me to look him up the next time I'm in Berkeley.  I want to believe that we're only a few keystrokes away from each other, not half a continent.  Well, maybe I'll get a chance to see many of you next February.  MMM is planning an AWP bash in NYC and it seems that half the poets in the US are within driving distance.

~~~

Let's all think good thoughts for Jilly.  Gina's shadowed graphic is killerbee.  Aaron Anstett is reading in CO-Springs tomorrow.  Kasey hearts Christopher Lee.  Reb bumps on penis.  Zach: "Octopus Books has extended it's reading period for two more weeks. We'll probably like that mutha so print that mutha off and send it in."  Joshua reviews Grindhouse, Blades of Glory and Shooter.



See you tomorrow.

Posted by jbahr at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So,  I had this theory that being in Wisconsin would lend itself to blogging.  Alas, Junie and I spent most of the time enjoying the spring weather, driving to Madison, doing the Atlantic puzzler and reading poetry. 

~~~

Among the poems I liked most in Poetry: 

Bob Hicok, o my pa-pa:  "Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop. / They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs / and wives ..."

Dora Malech, Treasure Hunting:  "Soon to be a low moon and elsewhere / fire.  Lucky mountain shone copper / but not to pocket.  Not that kind of angel / "

Lucillo Perillo, The Garbo Cloth:  "..//Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds // ..."

There's actually very little poetry in Poetry.  Twenty-seven pages into the issue and you're already at commentary:  Michael Hofmann on Zbigniew Herbert (who I always think was a Secretary of State under Ford or something), Marilyn Robinson on American Religious Poems by Harold Bloom (!) and Jesse Zuba (which sounds strangely like those James Patterson mysteries with Robert Somebody, the latter of whom was the actual ghostwriter).  Exchange is a dialogue between our own Ange Mlinko and David Yezzi, each offering their views on a pair of recent poetry books:  Girly Man by Charles Bernstein, Field Knowledge by Morri Creech. 

The Letters to the Editor were pretty standard fare, but interesting:  Somebody grieves over the lack of formal verse.  Somebody takes D.H. Tracy to task for trivializing Thylias Moss's new book.  Somebody liked that the Valentine's issue was "leavened with comedy".  Somebody loved Alice Oswald's poem in February(me, too).  Someone took issue with Brian Phillip's disdain of Jennifer Michael Hecht's levity. 
 

~~~

I received a new Barrow Street in the mail.  I always love the stuff in BS.  More on that tomorrow.

~~

In case you've never grown mint, you should know that it kicks ass and takes names and dominates whatever plot you plant it in.  Catnip is a form of mint, actually, and does about the same.  I have some in an herb pot and have had to trim back its dozen tendrils and numerous flowering parts.  These I put in a pile on the counter for Emily to luxuriate in.  She's been at it for 30 minutes, and I expect she will have the munchies any time now.

~~~
 

I’ll be reading on KRFC on Dona Stein’s Poetry Show on Sunday, 6 May, at 6PM MDT, 88.9 FM.  Also available via Internet at http://krfcfm.org/stream/.  I haven't read on the radio since being on Bear's Out of Our Mind.  I suppose I'll have to collect up a bunch of radio-friendly, accessible stuff.  Think good thoughts and I'll try not to screw it up. 

 

Posted by jbahr at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)