WhimsyLand

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.