Whimsy Speaks Again

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.