WhimsyLand

That Dean Young seems to be everywhere at once, as Bob Hicok did a couple of years ago.  His intelligent face, partially racooned by Polo shades, stares back at you with a Mona Lisa smile on the cover of APR.  I am a little overdosed on DY, having re-read elegy on toy piano after making my way through Primitive Mentor.  APR's "Special Supplement" is dedicated to eight of his poems, a couple of which I quite liked, such as "Lucifer":

You can read almost anything
about angels, how they bite off
the heads first, copulate with tigers,
tortured Miles Davis until he stuck
a mute in his trumpet to torture them back.

In a rare use of good judgment, APR also has a good poet with a good poem on the back cover, Yusef Komunyakaa with "The Towers" (Yes, dear son / dead, but not gone, / some were good, ordinary / people who loved a pinch of salt / on a slice of melon.".  The issue has some fascinating letters from Whitman written on the Civil War battlefield (courtesy of Mark Rudman), and some poems written by Frank Stafford during the four years that he worked in the Civilian Public Service as a conscientious objector during WW II.  Many of you are in awe of Stafford, but I've read dozens of his poems and, frankly, I don't understand the attraction − even given the 60 years of progress.  It's probably my loss.  Other poets in this issue include Lewis Warsh, Arda Collins, Aaron Fagan, John Kinsella, Michael Dickman, Garrett Hongo, Harold Schweizer, Jennifer K. Knox, and Komunyakaa with two poems besides his back-page coup.

I found Shira Dentz's "Marsupium" interesting:  "A girl of freezing ice in my stomach:  a papoose: / sticky; skinning my meat. // see-through ice / at my caverns // a tongue wider than eagle wings".  Many of the rest read as the usual lineated prose we come to expect from APR.  It's actually difficult to figure out how APR chooses poets/poems.  The conspiracy theorists claim that it's a matter of connections and who has the most ink that year.  Lucky for us, that occasionally leads to poems by Gabe Gudding or Lucie Brock-Broido or Dean Young.  Too often, regrettably, the poems are like the beginning of Garrett Hongo's "55", which I will get to in a moment but I want you to know that I have nothing against Mr. Hongo and I'm sure he's a perfectly terrific human being, so don't flood my inbox with various defenses:  "I'd thought my life was too unfocused and without cause compared to Kubota's / Too pampered and leisurely compared to my father, who worked until he dropped, / Dragon from the sky, laid out like he was asleep in the ER where he died, heart stopped mid-sentence speaking to the Filipino nurse at Gardena Memorial, Not catty-corner and a block away from where hustlers took up their spots at the velvet, five-draw tables."  I suppose I don't really consider this poetry, except that I have an iron-clad rule that a poem is anything a poet says it is.  Also, I've played poker many times in one of those Gardena establishments of which he speaks, so I connect with the venue.  Yes, I admit the occasional bouts of alliteration, but is this a poem that could have been better expressed as a short story?  or flash fiction?  or, God forbid, a diary entry?  Oh, well, I suppose I've nixed any remaining chance I ever had obtain publication in APR.

BTW, Junie tells me that the first of the new House episodes is on tonight.  Ah, my favorite curmudgeon back in form.  Don't call me between 8 and 9 PM.

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Alongside the many poetry books, Sweet Junie also provided me with a small pile of popular science magazines last week.  Here's the latest from NewScience and Seed:

• Ecoactivists are concerned with the overharvesting of freshwater snakes in Cambodia, a recent phenomenon resulting from the decline in fish that were the previous prey of the locals.  The snakes are sold to alligator farms in Southeast Asia and are the community's only source of income.

• Russian industrialists are claiming a gas and oil rich-patch under the North Pole, claiming that the area is a "natural extension" of Russian territory because of a thin ridge they say extends from their eastern Arctic shelf

• The race to produce synthetic life continues.  Craig Ventnor of Human Genome Project fame, has transplanted synthetic genetic material in a bacterium that then reproduced in quantity.  Other researchers call this a development that is just short of "synthetic life" and are attempting to produce simple bacteria completely from synthesized material.

• Almost one-quarter of the earth's natural resources are now consumed by humans.  The largest concern is that the recent switch from fossil fuel to bio-fuel will only make matters worse.

• Some cosmologists believe that the singularity that is the result of the Big Crunch, and the starting point of any discussion of the Big Bang, may actually cycle, producing successive universes over trillions of years.  One researcher (Martin Bojowald) believes that most or all of the information about the prior universes is lost in the process, producing new universes with "amnesia" about prior incarnations.

• Experiments show that when rats benefit from the kindness of strangers, they begin to act similarly.

• All modern housecats have descended from one species of Near Eastern wildcat.

• A Japanese researcher believes that most animal pathogens evolved from bacteria found around deep-sea vents.

• Many space scientists are uneasy with NASA's ill-conceived plan to deflect threatening mini-asteroids with nuclear explosions.

• Privacy groups are concerned with potential abuses by the government in tracking individuals by means of their cell phones.

• You have the same number of neck vertebrae as a giraffe.

• Every living creature gets about a billion hearbeats.  Small animals consume their lives faster.


 

I'm still reading Gabe's Rhode Island Notebook at odd times and enjoying it.  Meanwhile, I'm considering another poetry adventure.  More on that later.

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I always love reading the Acknowledgements at the end of Dean Young's books.  The list can include Fence, APR, Gettysburg Review, Octopus, Paris Review, and Threepenny Review − an assortment of publications that you would normally assume represented at least three different poets of competing poetic aesthetics.  I don't think Primitive Mentor is my favorite Young book (that might be elegy on toy piano, but I haven't read his early books yet so I'm not sure).  Junie thought that Primitive Mentor was a bit darker than we expect from Young, and I thought it was somehow chattier than elegy.  There are plenty of chuckles to be had, of course . . . this from Admissions Policy: 

We thought we might be able to close
the school for people with pieces missing
for the summer but no one would graduate,
they wouldn't put on their black capes
and throw their mortarboards in the air.
More and more kept showing up, partially,
obviously worthy of admission.  One
of our most promising freshmen didn't have a skull,
his brains held together by, you guessed it,
duct tape. 

While I'm on Deans, I've received another Dean & Deluca catalog, this one purportedly just in time for Mother's Day, assuming your mother likes $150 cakes in the shape of a handbag and/or $500 tins of caviar.  As with the $4,000 patio furniture in the Frontgate catalog, I'm always left wondering who buys this stuff.  Not that it isn't delicious-looking:  the assortment of 12 scones ($65), the sour cream walnut coffee cake ($50), the 6-pound lamb crown roast ($310).  The catalog does tend to give me good (if artery-clogging) ideas, though.  Why spend $80 on a dozen bacon-wrapped scallops when I can whip them out in 15 minutes for a fifth of that?  I admit to liking the charcuterie page, not that I ever eat sausage and ham outside of Spain, but I do actually love that stuff.  I've already told you the story of watching the foundry guys in Spain packing whole Serrano hams in suitcases to bring home, but now you can buy pretty much the same thing at latienda.com, so there's no need.  La Tienda actually has a much better assortment of authentic tapas, and at less than half the price. 

Well, I've eaten the last of my 4-day pasta.  Time to make some paella, I suppose.  I have a little sausage and chicken left, some frozen giant scallops, a handful of shrimp, and the usual (red peppers, artichokes, fresh-frozen peas).  I really have to ask Alejandro to send me more saffron, though.  Between the saffron that I use and the saffron I give to friends, I'm getting to the end of what was once a good-sized plastic treasure trove box of it.

See you tomorrow.

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Derek and I drove 900 miles the first day, stopping only for breakfast which indeed included a large plateful of fried eggs and ham.  By 8 PM, we were still 200 miles from Chicago and decided that enough was enough for one long day.  Thus ensued the hunt for a motel, which (as usual) involved stopping at a MacDonald's long enough to fire up my laptop, paying $2.50 for WiFi, and combing through motel offerings in that part of the country where Iowa borders Illinois.  It's not clear there are any actual cities there, as all of the Travelocity entries were sited in the Quad-Cities Area, none of which I knew the names for (and still didn't after sleeping a night in one of their Holiday Inns).  The next morning, we headed out early and made it to The Loop early enough to have breakfast at The Orange and still make Derek's noon class.  I spent the duration of his classroom time driving around Chicago trying to reorient myself, eventually landing at a new Whole Foods store on Roosevelt that wasn't there the last time I hit the City of Wind.  And it was a killerbee example of WF with a salad bar affair for shrimp, roasted vegetables, gelato and a half-dozen other scrumptious offerings.  In the end, I just bought a $3 toothbrush and a $4 tube of Tom's (of Vermont) toothpaste, which was the least expensive oral hygiene products available.  I picked up Der and headed back to WF to help Der and Max stock up on such staples as granola, trail mix, and gourmet tomato sauce, meanwhile acquiring the fixings for the dinner I wanted to fix them.  The latter consisted of a huge chicken that almost certainly ran free all her life dining on the best nature has to offer and died at a ripe age happy to add her moist flesh to our repast.  The chicken was baked in a medium oven surrounded by carrots, shallots, celery, onion slices and red peppers, which were not only delicious, but a wonderful collection to send the bird off to her next phase in the cycle of the reborn.  I won't dwell on the cleanup phase of the night's festivities, wherein I mopped up enough accumulated goo to actually find the oven and stovetop, as I remember my own college days still too vividly.  Der and I had one more great meal at Eleven, a diner near Columbia that seems to specialize in lox & bagels, brisket and matzo but admits to being far from kosher, seeing as their dinner special was a double pork chop.  For the record, Der had the "Tom Waits 2 AM Special", which consisted of this huge pile of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns, pancakes, marble rye toast, and I can't remember what else.  After a few hugs, I was off to Eau Claire, getting on I-94 a few short blocks away, as I-94 is exactly the interstate that runs by Junie's home.  Little did I know, and of course being a guy I didn't actually look at a map, that I-94 takes off in three or four directions, one of which is Milwaukee, whose skyline I was enjoying when it occurred to me that I was probably a little east of where I wanted to be.  Fast forward through a new route via Madison, arriving at Junie's, two days of tiling the bathroom while trying to recreate that scene from Ghost with Junie and tiling grout, the official handoff of the Subaru to the Junie Clan, and a pleasant NWA flight with my sweet one back to Colorado. 

Sweet Junie presented me with a treasure trove (as they say on What Do You Know) of poetry books, including Dean Young's Primitive Mentor, TT's Complex Sleep, and Gabe Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook.  I haven't had a lot of time with any of them, but have read enough to know that I will like them all (I'm actually halfway through Primitive Mentor, as I can read it in random order).  I am only 10 pages into Gabe's work and love it already, even though I tend to like my poetry to be poetry and my fiction to be fiction.  Here's an excerpt from the first page:

The Ford Expedition is an abomination.  Great day teaching at ISU today except for the one kid hunched at his desk:  the sand-dollars of his sleep hanging under his eyes kept clacking in the small breezes of his mouth weather.  I woke him and explained that eye-sleep constitutes a type of guano.

I also have a couple of poetry journals to read, including the Poetry that arrived today with 3 (!) of Seth's poems in it and a dueling-banjo review of Alice Oswald.  More tomorrow.  I'm not traveling, work has slowed down, Junie has (sniff, sniff) gone back to Wisconsin, and I have no reason not to be your trusted correspondent again.

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The Atlantic:  Jonathan Rauch write (yet another) stirring endorsement of McCain's true conservatism.  Social scientists find that "happiness" declines from 25 to middle age, and then picks up again.  Latino gangs have proliferated throughout the US as the deportation of illegal aliens has increased (they go home, convert more followers, and come back).  Tom Casten believes that 10% of American energy needs can be met by recycling "junk energy" that is regularly "thrown away" by industry in the form of steam output and natural gas blowoff.  A long article on the future of Israel that seems a little more doom and gloom than I am able to believe (e.g., "Will Israel Survive?").  Jello Man Bill Cosby travels the country advising black men on conservative values (but, he's still a Democrat).  Al Franken might just win the Minnesota senatorial seat if he doesn't blow up and stops wrestling hecklers to the ground.  There's also a poem by CDY.

Harper's:  Lapham rants eloquently about how much worse off we are than when US delegates to the 1997 Davos Conference could brag about record surpluses and world-wide economic dominance.  A decent poem by Thomas Lux (The Utopian Wars:  "Amish raiding party attacks a Quaker / settlement at Muddy Crossing").  Another poem by Frederick Seidel ("Boys").  Wendell Berry tells us that our days of unlimited consumption are over (judging from Atlantic and Harper's, they're taking Poetry Month seriously).  A sobering article by Kevin Phillips that details how the government's numbers have been increasingly cooked since the 1950's:  inflation is actually higher than we think, GDP gain is much lower, unemployment is 50% higher than reported, and it's the fault of Democrats as much as Republicans.  From The Index:  2008 will be the first US presidential election between two sitting senators, and the three remaining candidates have co-sponsored 86 bills together since 2005;  Obama is outpacing McCain in donations from military personnel 10 to 9;  since 2002, 62,000 people in Silicon Valley earning $30K and $80K lost their jobs and 66,000 new jobs have been created at less than $30K;  23% of Britons believe that Winston Churchill was a mythical figure;  70% of all Chinese cancer cases are pollution-related; only 4% of the earth's oceans have been unharmed by human activity;  a Japanese cosmetics company allows 3 days of paid leave for "heartache".

Barrow Street:  Poets I recognize include MJB, Sandra Beasley, Laura Cronk, Denise Duhamel, Annie Finch, Rachel Hadas, David Lehman, Phillis Levin, Campbell McGrath, D. Nurske, Eugene Ostashevsky, Maura Stanton, and Jillian Weise.  Sadly, I have little to report as the volume seemed to lack the usual high-quality spunk and irreverence that I've come to expect from BS.  There were a few good lines, though.  Bergen Hutaff, "poverty":  "I wanted a blow job / you ordered me / a $9 muffin / from room service.";  Cynthia Lowen, "Poultry Department":  "The chickens are stuffed with giblet bags, / but none are paired with their own heart".  Now, we all know it should be "none is", but see what a Poetic License lets you do?  Dayna Kurtz entire poem, "Question #3": " Why would a person / want to write another poem / praising the moon / so full of itself in the sky?"

Actually, I quite like moons in poems.  I put them in all the time.  The chapbook manuscript describing my years with Junie is called Claire de Lune, for example.  I consider using a moon in a poem one of poetry's great challenges, considering that all the easy metaphors have been long used up.

Still packing.  The speakers fit OK, as does the subwoofer.  My suitcase is in the trunk, the iPod-to-FM thingy is plugged into what used to be a cigarette lighter.  It probably has a new name now.  I'm used to that, as I owned a succession of British cars and slowly adapted to calling their parts and pieces boots and bonnets and I used spanners to change tires.  Der will be ready to leave at 6 AM and we will have breakfast in the restaurant just over the Nebraska line, where I will have 3 eggs and bacon and hash browns or maybe ham and perhaps tomato slices, breaking all the dietary rules like a good poet.  Once Chicago is in the rear-view mirror, I'll be heading to see Junie, who you can just see waving to you from the small dot in the upper right-hand corner marked "Eau Claire".

Talk to you in a bit.

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I know it's a little silly, but I swear that a latte tastes better when you have a great crema pattern on the top.  I always give mega mad props to the baristas at Brewing Mart who always make great latte art.  Thanks to Junie for the link to the competition.

Believe it or not, I'm still getting submissions to the Futility Review.

As I am a member of a lot of poetry organizations (AWP, AAP, . . . ), I generally receive copies of the major prize winners.  Sadly, I am seldom very interested in them, which may say more about me than the poets and their poetry.  There are exceptions, of course, such as the quite amazing Whitman winner, Madonna Anno Domini, by Joshua Clover ( I also liked TT's Invisible Bride and Ben Doyle's Radio, Radio).  I can now add another major prize winner to my list of books that are excellent, Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda Shaughnessy, which has just won the James Laughlin award for best second book.  It's rather strange and wonderful, filled with startlement and head-snapping diction.  Here's some selections:

I'm Over the Moon:  "I don't like what the moon is supposed to do. / Confuse me, ovulate me, / spoon-feed me longing"

Why is the Color of Snow:  "What kind of poetry is all question, anyway? / Each question leads to an iceburn, / snownova, a single bed spinning in space."

Spring in Space:  A Lecture:  "So much fabric has been worn away / just by wishing it. // Under your costume I'm naked and the pretty / wind for cooling // the south salts me everywhere."

A Brown Age:  " Summer took every one of my / dresses while I was having / them perfumed; // summer wore them every day / so I was naked and living in a cave / where frugivores // snuffled in the melonflesh."

Wow.  I love finding a poet who makes me wish I had written what I just read.

Gotta go for now.  More tomorrow and I'll have more time to write on the road (oddly enough).  Reports on Colorado Review, Barrow Street, ZYZZYVA and more to come.

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That's the title of a great album by Alison Krauss, in case you wondered.  Yes, I've been indisposed, more's the pity.  I did hear from CDY with amazing new stats on the increased number of submissions to The New England Review which pushed it up a level to a 6 on the "toughness scale" on the Difficulty Rating.  I have to explain all the time that a) I'm not the sole source of these determinations and b) it's not about quality or superiority or Godliness, it's just difficulty.  By which I mean, if you want to submit your poem packet, this is a rough measure of your likelihood of getting accepted.  It depends upon the level of competition (are you and Bob Hicok vying for a slot?), the number of submissions they receive, and the number of poems they publish for a year.  The last reason is one reason Threepenny Review is ranked so highly, for example.

I have to mention (well, I don't have to, but I'm gonna)  that two poets from the recent issue of Many Mountains Moving have appeared on Verse Daily:  D. Antwan Stewart and  Joseph Lease.

For the record, I have new copies of Colorado Review, Barrow Street, and ZYZZYVA to report on, which I will do tomorrow, come hell or high water.  Also synopses of very good issues of The Atlantic and Harpers.

I'm leaving Monday with Derek for Chicago.  This week, alongside my usual 75-hour work week when Junie's not in town, I've managed to read submissions and get ready for the trip.  This entailed undoing the damage to the Standard Green Boulder Outback which was inflicted in a precise manner as detailed by my son Ky in a response to a recent post (Derek busted the door, Eileen busted the bumper).  I just got the little beastlette back from Valley Subaru after chatting up the mechanic who worked on it.  He says the little guy is in great shape mechanically and has another 150,000 miles on him, should we take due care.  That's good news as I will be driving it to Chicago and then to Eau Claire to add its diversity to the the Junie Family Auto Borg.  I am making a list, which shows how serious I am about the trip, as I never make lists if I can help it, trusting to the heavenly angels and my ability to recover from adversity.  I've gone back and forth about the "all sales final" thing with Klipsch and actually received new speakers for Der, which will consume probably half the storage space.  I've found my old subwoofer and Cath has found my old amp at her house, so that gets packed in.  Then, there's supplies for the road:  snacks and Izzies and fresh fruit and maybe a bottle of wine for when we hit the Iowa Holiday Inn.  Der will be scouring my house and Cath's for old stuff to throw up on eBay:  subsets of his giant comics collection, figurines that tie into popular online megamultiplay games, perhaps swords and other battle gear they got from me in a pliable moment.  I'll be a day or two on Chicago and then on to Eau Claire to be with Sweet Junie for a couple of days (probably fixing household annoyances and luxuriating Panera's for breakfast), then back to Colorado with Junie on Northwest, assuming they haven't gone bankrupt like everybody else.

More tomorrow.  Gotta throw some big scallops in the three-day paella and find a bottle of Tempranillo.

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