WhimsyLand

Congratulations to Paul for the well-deserved honor.

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Another shot at Jonathan's challenge:

In tender endlessness
Snow, faultless salt
He lost his loincloth.

The color white. He walks
Over a Dover carpet made
of splayed glade.

Without eyes or thumbs
He suffers, Sebastian,
But arrows never leave the quiver

In the haloed endlessness
How to wonder of a wound
His exit left.

Snow, the salt of God weeping
In the end of endlessness

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From an article about St. Sebastian:  "And the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks".

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Absorbent and yellow and porous is he:  That always cracks me up.  It's my happy phrase, because it usually means my treadmill time is up.

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The new APR arrived with Susan Mitchell on the cover looking like a windswept Pinky Tuscadero.  Her first poem (of Six Poems) is a flurry of assonance:  "where the earth is beaten to mud rain- / pummeled they scud and scrum in / ponds at the edges of rain slum down".  The ubiquitous Kazim Ali speaks to Faith and Silence, describes his first experience praying in a language he could hardly speak, and links this to an interesting article on poetry and ineffability.  Pablo Medina and Mark Statman translate Four Poems by Federico García Lorca (I've left a comment on Jonathan's blog to get his take).  There's an ad for the MFA program at The New School that includes Liam Rector as faculty − two pages away from an In Memoriam section for him.  Philip Schultz with The Idea of California, a poem that strikes me more as flash fiction.  Stefi Weisburd's Descent of Man has enough device use to overcome the Latinates and tilt toward prose, and is also pretty inventive ("An entirely new species of fish / is discovered, silver and adhering / to minivans, some specimens even / appear in their native Greek").  Reginald Gibbons discusses apophatic poetics (yes, I had to look it up:  "pertaining to knowledge obtained through negation"), which is like freeing the poem from a marble block of words.  Joanne Dominique Dwyer with Four Poems, a few of which I rather liked ("The birds peck and peck, but the ice remains / an impenetrable obstacle to thirst. / I can see why lovers commit suicide together. / And why you enter me with such abandon  − / a blind man's stick tap, tapping").  John Felstiner proposes "getting the environmental news from poems", upon which so much depends.  Jason Schneiderman with Four Poems, cleverly repetitious pieces that made me smile ("The Dead // do not speak / That is what // makes them / dead. . . . ").  Silvia Curbelo on The Great Elsewhere, one of the Writing Beyond the Desk series.  L. S. Asekoff with a long poem called Freedom Hill, poem set in Maryland and NYC "at the end of the American Century".  Leonard Gontarek with Three Poems ("Leaked shadow, dripped leaves.  Rich shadow. / Deer wandering from their thrones. / skywriting in stunning / AM. . . . ")  Poetry reviewer D. H. Tracy with Vanitas: Globe.  Beth Ann Fennelly with I Provide for You, Boy Child, Like God, ("and like God, I will cast you out.").  Four Poems of Oliverio Girondo, translated by Daniel Coudriet.  Ira Sadoff with History Matters:  A Minority Report which wends it way through cultural cross-breeding and the works of Komunyakaa, Mullen, Dickinson, and Notley.  Five Poems by Jerzy Jarniewicz translated by Marit MacArthur.  Paul Hoover and Clayton Eshleman make short appearances.  Gerrit Henry with Five Poems that Ron would like:  The Confessions of Gerrit II, "I don't own a microwave oven, / Like everyone else I know and love."  Paul Muldoon converses with Jason Shinder on Byron.  Mitchell Goodman takes the prize for most explanatory title with Song for Saint Lucy and for My Grandfather, Abraham Rush.  Donald Revell on the back page with Crickets in memory of Barbara Guest ("A canyon in the air. / A cloud to stand on: / I needed them. / And each, my Soul, / Like that mountain on the sun").

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This is how to enjoy flying again:  Book a suite on an A380 for $50,000.  The suite comes with a double bed.  Dom Perignon and lobster are thrown in.

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Just because the Red Sox crushed the Rockies last night doesn't mean you're right, Ron!  Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a!