WhimsyLand

I'm going to give Poetry and The Atlantic a rest for a day, as I received a new Notre Dame Review on Friday.  It's a nice, fat 225 pages featuring (among others) Kelli Russell Agodon, Nin Andrews, Mary Jo Bang, James Doyle, Beth Ann Fennelly, Debora Greger, Chris Ransick, Anis Shivani, Charles SImic, and Buzz Spector.  The issue intersperses nonfiction and articles (which the NDR labels biography, memoir, essay and review) among large swaths of poetry, which I quite like.  The volume starts out nicely with Herbert Leibowitz relating WCW's last years.  The remaining articles are all well-written and read-worthy, including Joseph Buttigieg's essay on the brilliant and much-maligned Edward Said.  MJB's poem, "No Exit", is from her recent book, Elegy.  Simic does a good imitation of Simic.   Poems I liked included Carmen Firan's "Last Impression", Jason Tandon's strange and engaging "Flight" ("No one was going around killing anybody. / The town was always in the sun. / I packed nothing"), Kelli's smile-inducing "What the Universe Makes of Lingerie" ("It's impossible to see a black bra / directly as no light can escape from it;"), James Doyle's eerie pair ("The Long View Just Keeps Treading Water": The priests nailed down the island. / Their cassocks were solid / with salt, gills from the reef, residue").  I was also taken by Anne Heidi's disjunctive, but weirdly coherent poems, this from "Greenwax":  "Every time a jungle ruby / I've found it the mother / says in the butcher's book.").  Lea Graham has a series of "crush" poems, this from "Crush #90":  "Something of a mystery.  Heels' click / & echo, before step's hitch, musing:  this crowd's / vine black off to their brandies or supper,".

My buddy Malinda Miller is reading on Dona's poetry program in Fort Collins.  You can listen in at 6 PM MDT, here.

Well, we received boxes and boxes of the new Many Mountains Moving Volume VIII (which is also something like issue number 17).  I spent most of yesterday morning getting 100 copies mailed out to contributors, libraries and friends of MMM.  That amounts to rotating through a large stack of Tyvek envelopes, methodically applying a) our standard Media Mail label, b) our logo and return address, c) one $2.00, one 10-cent stamp, one 3-cent stamp, c) the labels that I've generated using Word's mail merge and our database.  The Tyvek envelopes are a little more expensive than standard ones, but they're indestructible and I don't have to worry about a journal arriving all beaten up.  My mailman Mike is my hero because he never complains when I drive around the neighborhood, track him down, and load the back of his little mail-carrier vehicle with boxes of mailers.

I don't like daylight saving time, as I am an early bird.  Recent studies show it's completely useless.  In fact, energy consumption is slightly greater, as the effect of greater air conditioner use offsets reductions in early morning light and other energy uses.  It's OK though, I'll get over it, I always do.  They're not going to change back to normalcy.  DST is an institution, like the color of Good 'n Plenties.

I made a delicious stew yesterday.  Safeway had a sale on Christopher Ranch shallots, big and pink and fresh.  I sliced up five of those big suckers and sautéed them with diced red pepper and garlic.  Then, added a big standard-sized box of button mushrooms slices (separately sautéed) , a big can of diced tomatoes, a half (small) can of tomato paste, Italian herbs (dried parsley, oregano, thyme, rosemary), and a half-cup of red wine (actually the delicious Greg Normal Merlot-Cabernet).  It bubbled for an hour, reduced a bit, and was heaven topped with a little Lite sour cream.  I might add a few splashes of Tabasco and a double-dose of Worchester sauce next time.  I tried using a minimal amount of olive oil for the sauté step as possible, just to see how little I could get away with, and the answer is about a tablespoon or 100 calories, if you do the batch slowly.  Not too bad for a whole pot of stew.

Rebecca's artwork on Flickr is amazing.

I can never get over Joshua's reviews of C&W alongside his erudition and compelling prose on matters more urbane. 

I just read on CDY's blog that MJB's Elegy won the National Book Critics' Award in Poetry.  I recently wrote a review of Elegy for Colorado Review and it was one of the most difficult literary endeavors I've ever tried.

See you tomorrow.