WhimsyLand

It occurs to me that one reason I like reading Dean Young is that his poems seem quite like my dreams.  All except that one about the big erection.  I've never had a big erection in a dream.

One of the science magazines that Sweet Junie got for me was Skeptic.  It's an odd magazine with excellent production values.  All kinds of notable people seem to have written in it and generated accolades for it, much like the blurbs we see on the back of every poetry book, even those that get sent to me for review that are simply dreadful.  Skeptic, as I was saying, has excellent production values:  3-D cartoons of Isaac Asimov on the cover, color pics of the cosmos.  Still, there's a strange amateurishness to it, as if the editors want to try just a little too hard to believe that the world is, after all, a rational place and all that spoon-bending just needs to be debunked and right now.  There's a section called the Junior Skeptic, which is sort of like a Boy Scout manual for addressing every young lad and ladette's questions about wishful thinking.  I did like a couple of articles, though, including the detailed coverage of the New Creation Museum that you can read about here.   Our roving skeptical reporter asks question after question disingenuously about the day-to-day operations of the ark:  "How many sheep would a dinosaur need to eat?" and "What exactly do you mean by two of every kind?"  It turns out that Creationist scholars admit that there are WAY too many species to have fit on the ark, no matter how you quibble about the length of a cubit.  Thus, we suppose that the best Noah could have done was to place two of every genus on the ark, not including aquatic animals and various creatures that could have lived on floating islands of vegetation.  The answer to the question of feeding the carnivores (how do you even approach a lion with the day's meal?) is that before the Fall, all animals were herbivores and many of them conveniently did a long stint on a veggie diet until the flood subsided. 

ZYZZYVA's cover shows a US soldier in desert camo arguing with a harpie or something.  There are a zillion ads at the front, which I love, having grown tired of the usual MFA program pleas.  One, for example, is sponsored by Firefly Restaurant that has the motto "Food you eat.", which embodies the sort of brevity and in media res that I like in any kind of literature, including advertisements.   For the record, the poets this issue are Amaranth Borsk, Kate Evans, Michael McClure, Verónica Reyes, Matt Schumacher, and Bucky Sinister, and I think someone may be pulling our leg on that last one.  I thought all of these were decent poems, but I tend to like the fiction better than the poetry in ZYZZYVA.  My loss, no doubt.

The American Poet also showed up this week, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.  Most of the articles are titled "XXX on YYY", which sounds a little inbred to me.  "James Tate on Charles Simic", "Marie Ponsot on Alice Notley", "August Kleinzahler on Sally Van Doren".  It all sound a bit self-congratulatory, but actually the article are interesting and well-written.  I particularly liked the article on Alice Notley, whom I admire for living in Paris and other reasons.  The RE:PRINT section has "Poems from Ten Exciting Books", and includes MJB, Robert Hass, Joanna Kink, Cate Marvin, Carsten Neilsen, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Prageeta Sharma, G. C. Waldrep, and Charles Wright.    Amazing.  I've only reviewed two books in my entire life, and they both made it into American Poet (and certainly, I had nothing to do with that).  Pretty good poetry by Ron Padgett, Heather McHugh, Karen Volkman, and William Shakespeare.