Blue Light and Catapults
Blue light paints day end.
Dima, my Russian buddy, would put something like that in an email.
Russians tend to drop articles and avoid prepositions. I've noticed over
the last couple of years that a large percentage of poets do, too. I don't
know why, maybe something they learn in one of those classes I've never had.
I'm all for concision, but often this sounds as overly poetic to my ear as
saturated alliteration or mixed imagery. Could be me, of course.
The cover of this month's APR (well, actually Mar/Apr, God forbid we
should get a magazine bearing a month equaling the one in which we currently
reside) has a very retro B&W picture of Spencer Reece, who has written a
touching and engaging article called Two Hospice Essays. By curious
coincidence, we also received a submission this week from a Christian poet with
some work I thought highly of. In these days of liberal rage against the
excesses of the Religious Right, it's somehow satisfying to listen to people of
quiet faith − like my own Sweet Junie. But,
I digress. Much of APR is filled with chatty poems of urbanity
"I knew people who knew people who knew Gertrude Stein and said they helped
themselves to cake, it's my thirty-fifth birthday and some old friends are
visiting, some would call this heaven − a teenage
girl half-naked in the grass, I love my life, she says, but really I would like
to be elsewhere, last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened, you
know, the way bodies do after spending the afternoon having sex." That was
a collage of lines from poems by Bruce Smith, Ed Skoog, Beth Bachmann, D. Nurske,
and Matthew Dickman. It was an unfair sample, but I also found that I had
to skip four or five poets who just wouldn't play the game. One was
Joyelle McSweeney with a rather amazing translation of the Aeneid that
transports the protagonist to Texas. Another was Hai Zi with two poems
translated by Ye Chun ("Those who grow up on wheat / hold big bowls in the
moonlight / In the bowls, the moon / and wheat / are soundless"). Another
was Thomas Lux, who will always get my respect for writing the quite amazing and
short poem about the dead brother and sister wheeling toward a town under siege.
Another was Our Own Reb Livingston with two short poems ("Together with the
Apron whose house infiltrated, her meadow ravaged by tomatoes"). Another
was Kevin Prufer who was poetry editor of Pleiades (maybe still is) and whose
work I like ("And the shopping center said, give me, give me.").
Kazim Ali has his usual excellent take on things poetic, this time From the
Open Sea: Body and Lyric in the Poetry of Jane Cooper. Two very
nice poems by the recently departed Grace Paley. Workroom by
Clayton Eshleman. Reginald Gibbons completes his essay on Apophatic
Poetics. Mark Rudman tackles William Carlos Williams in America (Part
One), which was quite excellent.
More tomorrow.