December 31, 2004
Happy New Year!
I hope that you all have a great 2005. The last year could have been better, but I'm not complaining. I have my resolutions firmly in mind, though no actual plan of action, except for the Big One.
For all of you out there trying to get a manuscript turned into a book, good luck! For you rotten bums who already have a book, but are trying to get the next one out -- Oh hell, good luck to you, too.
For those of you struggling with publication credits, here's hoping that you get accepted by Poetry, Kenyon Review, APR, New American Writing, or the Hudson Review (pick one).
For those of you looking for a full-time academic appointment, good luck and keep your spirits up.
Those of you looking for just any kind of decent paying job (and there are plenty, judging from recent blogroll entries), here's hoping you find that $25K, $50K, $75K, $100K annual salary (pick one, based upon what your wildest imagination), PLUS health care, dental, 3 weeks paid vacation, educational reimbursement, and an espresso machine in the office.
For those of you in California, Florida, Arizona, or some other nice warm state, everyone in the Twin Cities hates you, but Happy New Year, anyway.
For those of you freezing your tail off somewhere else, here are some 2004/2005 Winterizing Tips from The Onion:
1. If your heat is turned off, remember: In a pinch you can cut open your fat spouse and sleep in his/her 98.6° abdominal cavity.
2. Check anti-freeze level if ice build-up becomes a problem in beverages.
3. Be sure to caulk all drafty orifices.
4. If absolutely necessary, it is considered acceptable to slay and eat your dogsled team.
5. Grow thick layer of fur on body.
6. If flying above the Andes Mountains this winter season, bring along plenty of extra Paraguayan soccer players "just in case."
7. Plug up crevices of house with mixture of sheep dung and straw.
8. Save fatty parts of whales and seals to use as fuel.
See you next year.
Posted by jbahr at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)
Sherried Onion Soup with Saffron
I made this recipe from the Spanish cookbook that I mentioned a couple of posts ago. It was absolutely delicious, quick to make, and moderately inexpensive in terms of ingredients.
2 Big T of butter
2 Big T of olive oil
2 large yellow onions
1 garlic clove
1 pinch of saffron threads or powdered saffron
3 ounces of slivered or sliced almonds
3 cups of chicken or vegetable stock
4 Big T of dry sherry
1/2 teaspoon of paprika
1 teaspoon of salt
3 turns of black pepper from a mill
I used pretty much standard Safeway items, except for the saffron, of which I have a large hoard in a small plastic chest, having stocked up at El Corte Ingles on my last trip to Spain. The saffron at the grocery store usually comes in a small packet in a spice bottle and can run from $5 to $12. This soup is probably delicious without the saffron, but it's going to be missing something. The slivered almonds were the usual small bag of Planter's brand on the baking aisle. I used Tio Pepe dry sherry, but any dry sherry should do. I used Safeway brand inexpensive no-fat chicken stock.
Mix the olive oil and butter into a heavy pot and melt. Slice the onions thinly, and dice the garlic, then throw them both into the pot. Cook on low-to-medium heat until the onions are translucent, stirring occasionally -- about 15 minutes. While the onions are cooking, brown the almond slices/slivers by throwing them in a dry skillet on medium heat, swirling them around every once in a while, until they are toasted. When the onions are done, add the saffron to the pot and cook, uncovered for 4 minutes on medium heat, then add the almonds, cooking another 3 minutes. Stir constantly while this is going on. Add the chicken stock and sherry and stir in the salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat, and simmer for 10 minutes.
Pour the soup into a blender or food processor (or one of those cool hand-held bladed blenders that you can just lower into the soup), and process it until it's as smooth as you want it. Pour the soup back into the pan and heat up without boiling. When it's hot, it's ready. Chopped fresh parsley or toasted almond slivers/slices make a nice garnish for the top, but aren't necessary.
This recipe has very little fat or cholesterol (you can even replace the butter with more olive oil), and is surprisingly low-calorie. The soup is also great chilled, and will keep for a week in the refrigerator.
Posted by jbahr at 08:12 AM | Comments (2)
December 30, 2004
An Education
Imagine, if you will, walking into a classroom with one student desk and me
in it. Poems are posted on the corkboard and a projector whirs on a
screen, displaying poetry, critique and commentary. Poets enter from a
back door and read, then retire back whence they came. I'm taking notes,
making faces, cheering at times. Every once in a while I write a
poem on the
whiteboard, and people wander in to make sense of it.
Welcome to my education, one that I missed in my first 45 years. If
this bores you to tears, then please go have a nice cappuccino at the Student
Union and come back in a few years, when I've caught up and the lectures seem
more interesting.
Which brings me to this month's Poetry, which was hiding in the mail
stack under a large issue of APR. The War of Competing Aesthetics
continues with a review by Danielle Chapman on The Iowa Anthology of New
American Poetries, edited by Reginald Shepherd. For the record, I have
ordered the Anthology, but not yet received nor read it. The poets
whose work is featured includes Dan Beachy-Quick, Jasper Bernes, Cynthia Cruz,
Jocelyn Emerson, Michele Glazer, Matthea Harvey, Joan Houlihan, Christine Hume,
Catherine Imbriglio, Joanna Klink, Malinda Markham, Mark McMorris, Jenny
Mueller, Laura Mullen, Amy Newman, Geoffrey Nutter, Tracy Philpot, D. A. Powell,
Heather Ramsdell, Karen Volkman, Lawrence L. White, Sam Witt, Andrew Zawacki and
Rachel Zucker. This seems like a pretty eclectic jumble (which is an
understatement any time you have Houlihan and Volkman in the same volume).
Some of these poets are unfamiliar to me, but I spy some 21st Century lyricists
(Michele Glazer, Mark McMorris), a couple of post avant prose-poets (Karen Volkman, Laura Mullen), an author of critical essays (Catherine
Imbriglio), and one of the critics at
Constant Critic
(Christine Hume). Most of these poets have been published in
journals considered to be progressive: Boston Review, Conjunctions,
Colorado Review, Fence, American Letters and Commentary, Volt, Slope, et al.
For the conspiracy theorists, there's a sizable contingent from the
Iowa-Brown Axis of Power and a number of authors from the Contemporary Poetry
Series juggernaut.
About Danielle Chapman I know almost nothing, except that she's an Assistant
Editor, has done a number of Poetry reviews in the past, and doesn't
Google worth a damn. I know nothing about her artistic frame.
Back to the poets: a pretty good mix, I would think. What does
Ms. Chapman think? "Susan Sontag wrote, Jerking off the universe is
perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about ... [which] might
be taken as an aesthetic declaration by the world-wary, abstraction-happy
theorists collected in this volume." Uh oh. Time for these young'uns
to take a shellacking for eschewing the School of Quietude. And that's
when Ms. Chapman throws us a curveball: "While part of the problem ...
[is] that of obscurity and incomprehensibility ... these poems fail not because
they are too erudite, but because they are narcissistic." The poets use a
"pseudo-scientific, theoretical vocabulary", while claiming "emotional
urgency". The poems are idiosyncratic and the poets suffer by finding
themselves "infinitely fascinating." Ms. Chapman quotes from a
particularly disjunctive poem by Christine Hume ("Panspermia in your baffled ear
once spilled / Sirens splitting night into two / Rained that you had to take
bladders out of yourself") and declares it limited, a product of ambition
that doesn't extend beyond the covers of the Anthology, which itself, is "an
annals of the mutually self-pleasuring," filled with "inside jokes, random
emphases, and self-congratulatory tics that come from being a part of the club."
Ms. Chapman continues with her masturbatory metaphor, deriding the Anthology
works as "language-as-lubricant," and comparing one poem to a mocking imitation
of the Muppets' Swedish Chef. She charges the poets with a "suspicion
toward language and a distrust of emotion", which leads to phrasing like
"bastinado of wind and hail", "quatrefoil sprints", and "chilled pellicle."
She faults the poems as "explanatory tracts about what the Big Hunger
would be" if the poets experienced it. Even Karen's Volkman's sonnets,
which she claims to have enjoyed on first read, are ultimately sub-par because
the poems are "about themselves", and that's simply not enough.
In places, Ms. Chapman sounds like an updated
Joan
Houlihan, who, ironically, is one of the poets in the Anthology: "we can't
say whether blue, black, infinite ... are smart decisions or simply words that
happened to have the right number of syllables." And we as readers can't
make a judgment because "the poems sneakily disallow us ... because the subject
of the poem is the poet's own evasive thought process". Ms. Chapman finds
the Anthology's selections to be all too similar, and all too familiar, cookie-cuttered
from "a Girl Scout handbook on the avant-garde." She contrasts the
artificial nuttiness of these poems to the genuine variety found in the works of
Anne Carson and Olena K. Davis, whose "engagement with language" is "passionate"
instead of "dogmatic."
A few poets earn minor kudos from Ms. Chapman: Harvey for her
imagination, Powell for his imagery, Beachy-Quick for his "great ear". In
the end, though, she claims that "philosophy, not poetry, is the vehicle for
abstract thought" and poetry fails when "thought masters feeling." OK, we
now have an idea of Ms. Chapman's artistic frame. Is it a reasonable one?
Why not. Her arguments aren't the same tired renditions of "hey, can I get
a handle heah?" Her objections aren't solely based upon difficulty.
Of course, we are talking about a review in the journal Poetry, that
Fortress of Quietude, but in the same issue there's a quirky sonnet by Beachy-Quick,
a Jorie-esque piece by Christine Garren, and Goldbarth doing Goldbarth.
With luck, Reginald Shepard will show up in next month's Letters to the Editor
with a rebuttal. Good. I can use all the education I can get.
Posted by jbahr at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2004
Buen Provecho!
God, I love Spanish food. I started a software company in a former life
whose product was wildly popular in Spain. This led to dozens of trips to
Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga, Valencia, Denia and other cities to attend
conferences and give presentations. In a subsequent life, I was director
of technology for a large Belgian copper foundry multinational. One of my
jobs was to load up the billionaire owner's Sabreliner every other week and take
foundry personnel down to Bilbao for cross-foundry training. My expense
allowance was essential unlimited, and the trips amounted to eating all day
(breakfast at 9, mid-day meal at 2, tapas at 6, dinner at 10), accompanied by
bottles and bottles of fabulous Spanish wine (Viña
Ardanza, Vega Sicilia, ...). A typical dinner started with entremeses:
paper-thin slices of cured ham (jamon), rounds of smoked pork back
(lomo), giant white asparagus, prawns and langostinos, wedges
of Manchego cheese, roasted red peppers, small stuffed-and-grilled green
peppers, deep-fried fresh anchovies. Sigh.
Even now-a-days, I get to Spain every couple of years or so, visiting
Alejandro Tarquis, who is still the distributor of our software and a good
friend. He currently retains my holding of 30 cases of Spanish wine that
I've been too lazy to figure out how to get palletized and surface-shipped.
Actually, as the wine has now been in Malaga for 3 or 4 years, it's probably not
30 cases anymore.
Over the years, I've tried to make Spanish dishes, only to remember that I
know the names of certain things solely in Spanish: bocerones,
merluza, vieiras. Other times, I just couldn't find reasonable
substitutes for jamon Serrano or dried salt cod (bacalao).
My sweetie, Junie, gave me for Christmas the best Spanish cookbook in English
that I've ever encountered (Spanish by Pepita Aris, Hermes House, 2003).
It's a step-by-step format with glorious photos of the finished dishes.
One section deals exclusively with the preparation of offal: tripe, pig's
liver, veal kidneys, pork tongue, lamb's feet and tails. There's even a
recipe for grilled lamb's intestine. There are wonderfully gruesome
pictures of slaughtered beasties, including a hare, which is about twice the
size of a rabbit with much darker meat (did you know that Spain gets its name
from Hispania, the name the Romans gave this "land of rabbits"?)
Here's some of the recipes from the book: Banderillas (tapas
where a pickled onion, a cornichon, an olive, an anchovy and capers are arranged
on a toothpick). Sherried Onion Soup with Saffron. Fish
Soup with Orange. Scrambled Eggs with Prawns.
Mushroom, Bean and Chorizo Salad. Spinach with Raisins and Pine Nuts.
Mojete (peppers, onion, tomatoes and olives, broiled and baked).
Escalivada (courgettes, fennel bulb, Spanish onion, peppers and
butternut squash baked over embers). Moros y Cristianos
(Moors and Christians, a mixture of white rice and black beans).
Calderete de Arroz con Allioli (rice cooked in fish stock, served with
garlicky mayonnaise). Bacalao Fritters. Monkfish with
Pimiento and Cream Sauce. Calamares Rellenos (stuffed
squid). Chicken with Spiced Fig. Pechugas de Pichones con
Setas (pigeon breasts with wild mushrooms). Skewered Lamb with
Red Onion Salsa. Ropa Vieja (literally, old clothes,
a stew of beef, chick peas, aubergines, and tomatoes). Rabo de Toro
(bull-tail stew). Honey-baked Figs with Hazelnut Ice Cream.
Crema Catalana (a heavenly cream custard with a glazed sugar
"roof").
Hungry yet? Email me and I'll send you a recipe.
Posted by jbahr at 08:24 AM | Comments (5)
December 27, 2004
Call For LitMags
I was recently surprised to find that there existed a print journal called Tiferet that I don't have in my database. Well, I wasn't actually astounded, as I suspect that there are dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of print publications of which I am unaware. I am shy of a full inventory most likely on the periphery of mainstream poetry -- formalist and neoformalist, post-avant/elliptical, visual poetics, et cetera.
I'd be happy to include any additional print journals that you may wish to suggest. To make a database entry useful, I need the submission guidelines/address. Also helpful would be the web URL, if any, press run, founding date, poets who have been published, and any comments.
To anticipate a question that I've received countless times: "why don't I include online journals?" I have a great deal of respect for many of the journals whose only incarnation is electronic (Perihelion, CWHOBB, Octopus, MIPOesias, et al.) and I've published in many of them. My excuse for excluding online publications is that I have found comparability with print journals to be difficult in the past, particularly in the areas of the "difficulty rating."
That's a weak excuse, of course, and I expect to add online publications at some point.
You can leave your suggested journals in the comments section, or just email me at jbahr@set-software-services.com. Thanks!
Posted by jbahr at 08:00 AM | Comments (2)
December 26, 2004
Aubergine
 |
Other than hopping from blogroll link to blogroll link, where can you find the poetry of Tim Botta, Shanna Compton, Jilly Dybka, Noah Eli Gordon, Paul Guest, Shafer Hall, Geof Huth, Mark Lamoureux, Catherine Meng, K. Silem Mohammed, Daniel Nester, Katey Nicosia, Gary Norris, Anthony Robinson, Michael Schiavo, Matthew Shindell, Laurel Snyder, Aaron Tieger & Wendy Hyman? In the good company of Mark Yakich, Scott McDonald, Michael Helsem, Alan Deniro and others? |
Why, in Aubergine, the small purple-clad volume of poetry edited by Joshua Corey and designed by Aaron Tieger. The concept and execution is delightful -- a terrific mix of poetry styles, modes and lengths, united by a common theme: the beautiful, burgundy, ovoid aubergine. This work is apparently inspired by a discussion between J. D. McClatchy and Dorothea Tanning about the wisdom of ending a poem on the word aubergine. So was born a collection of poetry in which (almost) every poem ends with that very word. Here's a few of many memorable closing lines:
Tim Botta, Fried Flowers of Aubergine: "and think how she loved those fried flowers of aubergine."
Shanna Compton, Purple Heart: "Oh! Bear! Gene!"
Joshua Corey, from Severance Songs: "like language in a heart skinned aubergine."
Julie Dill, Audrey Ostriker Loves Luther Vandross: "luther / heaven / in aubergine suede."
Noah Eli Gordon, Poem: "Fencepost this flowerpot that sad aubergine."
Geof Huth, White with Winter: "as he presents / a handful of aubergine."
Scott McDonald, Untitled: "wicked aubergine"
Kasey Mohammed, Truck Waffles: "Rudolph Giuliani was expected for example / just to go and buy an aubergine"
Katey Nicosia, Mad Apple: "the wicked eye of aubergine."
Anthony Robinson, Obligatory Five-Minute Sonnet on Unrequited Something: "In bed I whisper, 'Fuck me, Mr. Aubergine.'"
Matthew Shindell, Aubergine: "I mean, aubergine."
Maureen Thorson, The aubergine libertine in his green limousine: "decked out in cloth of aubergine."
Mark Yakich, To My Young British Poets: "or try fondling a Japanese aubergine."
Tim Yu, Poem: To Americans Abroad: "aubergine is an eggplant"
What makes this all work is the sense that you're reading a conceptual sestina, as the poems veer off one place and then come back again, sharing some imagery, staking their own ground, varying plot/voice/disjunction/comedy. I don't know how you would follow this with a second volume (or whether one should). Perhaps, a book on the courgette, another Francophonically-named garden prize that chef Tony Robinson insinuated into his piece.
Posted by jbahr at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)
December 25, 2004
Merry Christmas
... even if it's not your holiday of choice or faith. Think of it as a Very Merry Unbirthday, if you wish.
I'm back in Colorado (45 degrees). My kids are in Vermont(30 degrees), my extended family is California (75 degrees), and Junie is in Wisconsin (20 degrees), and everyone seems to be having a bangup day -- I called to find out. The mail has brought me Aubergine (thanks, Josh), 7-11 has provided the beer, and I've rented Life of Brian, so I'm set.
Happy holidays, everyone.
Posted by jbahr at 06:13 PM | Comments (1)
December 23, 2004
Cold Comfort
The good news is that I got to Eau Claire by way of Minneapolis just fine to visit Junie for Christmas. The bad news is that it's really, really cold. Even for a guy from Colorado. I went out this morning to get a missing power cord for my portable, and the sign outside Best Buy said it was -7. At 9:00 AM. Sheesh.
On the shuttlebus, I read the latest Economist while the old gentleman next to me slumped half-asleep on my shoulder. Even though the Economist publishes an American edition, the magazine always leaves the impression of viewing the US from outside its borders. The Economist is the UK's premier voice of capitalism, of course, but it seems to have a less doctrinaire view than its conservative American counterparts. Articles include: The UK, the UN, and the WTO hope to make worldwide poverty reduction a top goal for 2005; Turkey's state-run Muslim infrastructure, paradoxically intended to ensure that Turkey stays secular, may create problems with its strong bid to become an EU member among European who REALLY believe in the separation of church and state (as opposed, for example, to the current US Administration); in, A Modest Proposal, the Economist suggest that servants are the single biggest political problem now (witness the Bernie Kerik
nanny problem) and the answer is obvious: outsource children to 3d world
countries for raising and primary education; A Twelvemonth of Tumult is a
sequence of 12 poems (one for each month) in varying forms of rhyming
stanzas, describing the year (can you imagine seeing THAT in Forbes?);
A Brief History of The End of The World provides a nice summary of End-Times
proponents through history, including a plug for the truly nutty
www.raptureready.com; A Hot
Line to Heaven analyzes the text of President Bush's speeches to determine
how and if he believes his presidency to be divinely inspired; Mexicans
are now the second fattest people in the Western Hemisphere (we're still #1!);
China may scrap its one-child policy as its projected population declines; the
small country of Bhutan, nestled in the Himalayas, measures their Gross National
Happiness and tries to optimize it through a mix of import restrictions, dress
codes, public works, and environmental preservation; freedom of the press
is on the rise worldwide, markedly improved in Africa by the hundreds of small
local radio stations and the introduction of "windup" radios that don't need
batteries; the latest loony cult leaders includes Turkmenistan's Saparmurat
Niyazov, who has declared himself president-for-life, erected dozens of gold
statues of himself around the country, and requires that his book of
philosophical thoughts be placed next to every Koran in the country's mosques;
there are now only a few hundred fluent speakers of Cornish; the good news
is that the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects is unlawful, the bad news
is that it was a UK high court that ruled it, not the US Supreme Court; a
terrific article on the history of graffiti includes a picture of an 800-year
old Viking rune that says "Ingigerth is the most beautiful of women"; The
Business of Survival outlines the world's oldest firms, including Kongo
Gumi, a 1500-year old Japanese hotel, and Antinori, the 650-year old wine maker;
no computer program has ever beaten even a low-ranked master of Go, a 2500-year
old board game that was once dominated by the Japanese, and recently the Chinese
and Koreans.
Posted by jbahr at 08:38 AM | Comments (5)
December 21, 2004
SoQ Revisited
Yesterday, I received, for being a contestant, a copy of Silvia Curbelo's
Ambush, the winner of this year's Main Street Rag's Chapbook Contest.
The poems in this volume are pretty well vetted: ten from APR, two
from Gettysburg Review, two from Notre Dame Review, one from
Crab Orchard Review, and two from litmags that I had never heard of
(which I thought was pretty much impossible at this point): Bloomsbury
Review and Tiferet. The latter I've added to my
database.
The Bloomsbury Review appears to solicit very little poetry, if any, so I'm
leaving it out for now. But, I digress.
I read the first five poems and put the book down. "Omigod. Maybe
I've encountered a perfect example of the School of Quietude," I thought.
Here are some samples from poems in the book:
"Some words open dark wings / inside us. They carry us off"
— Before the Long Silence
"Call it a gift, a simple benediction, / as they move tenderly through the
door" — The Visitors
"It is like fire. / It is a kind of burning. /
Silence moves through it / like breath. It goes nowhere." —
Hearing the News
"It was a wing, it was a kiss. / soft as a word, or as breath"
— Fall
"The day I was born I was / born screaming, weren't we all" —
Birthday Song
"She thought it was green, not / the emerald green of Indian summer"
— Learning to Play Coltrane
"A basket of roses speaks for itself. / Silence is another
thing altogether." — This Poem Is Missing
To be fair, there are passages in this book that aren't as banal as these
("the sky sits in its simple / cage of days"), but most of the work seems
the result of poetic somnambulism. In general, the imagery is tired and
the philosophy is un-thoughtful ("the difference between a mountain / and an
abyss is a question of perspective"). The title poem is actually pretty
good (" ... / the wine with its warm hide. / The lavish hand grenade. The
stars and more. / The clouds, its soft harness"), and the three ekphrastic
poems are hard to judge. OK, I'm done hammering Ms. Curbelo.
Ernest Slyman did Pound one better with a comment he once made: "Never write
anything that you've ever heard anyone say." Of course, there are
exclusions to the rule (intended irony, banality-as-foil), but I've always
thought that Ernest was on to something. I don't want poetry to discuss
last night's soaps or confirm my view of the world. This is what Wally
Ryder used to call "dialogue as echolocation", what happens between cubicles and
over the water cooler.
Posted by jbahr at 07:53 AM | Comments (6)
December 20, 2004
Melic Review
I got an email from Jim Zola and CE Chaffin, reminding me that I'll be the guest editor for the next Melic Review. The last issue was an outstanding collection of poetry, prose and essays which include John Balaban, Jared Carter, Mark Jarman, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Dara Wier, Rae Armantrout, Joshua Corey, Annalynn Hammond, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, to name a few.
Submissions guidelines are available for the next issue, due out in April.
And, while you're at it, think about leaving a little something for Melic at their PayPal site for Christmas. The site is, of course, like most private litmags, operated completely by donations and sweat equity (and there's little enough equity).
Posted by jbahr at 01:32 PM | Comments (1)
Lazy Daze
Work and the holidays are getting in the way of blog-writing. I mean,
where are my priorities? Here's some random items:
Murder, They Wrote: I've mentioned my affection for mysteries,
and the huge collection I have of books in that genre. I was feeling a
little sheepish admitting to the addiction, given all esoteric reading lists
posted by my poetic betters on the blogroll. Well, I'm not alone! It
turns out Ron Silliman (of all
people) has a similar preliction, and recently discussed the work of Walter
Mosley. Then, yesterday, Jim
Behrle mentioned Martha Grimes in passing. Now, if I could only knock
out a wandering, un-framed, post avant long murder-mystery-poem, I might
get famous yet (something starring Lord Peter Whimsey?).
Canary: Where the hell is it? It was yellow and fattish
and sitting on my kitchen table. I'll report back when/if I find it.
Old Yarn:
Eduardo mentions an extremely funny
page of knitted
sexual references.
MIT Technology Review: Some good stuff in this issue,
including a lead article on Google and the need for them to get a little
evil if they're going to stay ahead of The Evil Empire ("Given
Microsoft's ferocity in the past, panic might be a productive first step").
The UK is starting to pull away from the US in stem-cell research, funding and
government support. An interesting article on Wikipedia, its founder Larry
Sanger, the 29,000 Wikipedians who have contributed 380,000 articles in 109
different languages, and why Sanger is leaving (revert wars among the
contributors). There's still a huge Internet bandwidth glut worldwide, and
it won't begin to be used until later this decade. Japan is far out front
of the rest of the world in nanotech research, most notably Mitsubishi.
Jason Epstein wants to digitalize the publishing industry. Technology and
Happiness: "more gadgets don't increase our well-being". A review of
"digital dandies", including the Nokia Vertu Signature cell phone in platinum
and gold for only $32,000.
Chinooks: That's what we call the wind
off the Rockies. Last night, it blew like a sumbitch, throwing the deck
chairs around the back yard. This morning, I noticed that it had blown
over the moderate-sized refrigerator that sits outside the basement door.
Burt Says: Noted critic and poet
Stephen Burt
thinks Chris Nealon may be responsible for the best
book this
season by a young poet.
Title IX: That's what I'm up to, after finding 8 other titles
among the poems of other poets. My new unblocking strategy is to find a
line I like in another poet's work and use it as a title. Titles so far
include: A Leap Implies An Anchorage (Waldrep), O the Crippled
Government of Love (MJ Bang), On Power Lines Perch Clichés (B.
Doyle), and First Accidental Day of Winter (L. Brock-Broido).
Strange Brew: I've sent 5 poems for Didi's contest
next issue,
judged guest edited by Gabe Gudding.
One called Silent Night begins: "Two dogs chew a steak I’ve laced
with Paxil. Earlier, they raced through the back gate and drove off the
low-riders – rumble of percussion, a little Latina leg. The only sign of life
now is that gull on a pillar of snow."
When The Going Gets Tough: the tough go online shopping, and I'm
finally done. Mom gets a cashmere scarf that I found on sale at (of all
places) Neiman-Marcus; Dad gets a Viking figurine made in Norway (his
ancestors); oodles of nieces and nephews get Calphalon pots and pans on sale at
Amazon; my male sibling and brothers in law get a calendar from
Despair, Inc ("There are no stupid
questions, but there are millions of inquisitive idiots"); my sweetie
Junie got a lot of her Amazon wishlist filled; married couple relatives
are getting socko European stuff from
Forzieri; my sons, of course, are asking for money. I can tell you all
this because my relatives never read my blog, and certainly not my poetry.
Time: Ukraine's presidential candidate apparently was
poisoned by a form of dioxin similar to that in Agent Orange -- something he
would be unlikely to ingest without help. 22 years after inventing the PC,
IBM has sold the division to a Chinese company. Mia Hamm has retired at
the ripe old age of 32. The dollar continues to fall in value as the rest
of the world continues to prop our economy with purchases of Treasury bonds --
Asian countries alone have over a trillion dollars in
dollar-denominated instruments (let's hope they don't all sell). If you
stay awake for 20 hours, your reaction time is equal to someone who is illegally
intoxicated (.08% blood alcohol).
Last Days of Rebeccamas: The agnostic among you may want to join
Reb in celebrating
Rebeccamas.
Posted by jbahr at 10:07 AM | Comments (7)
December 14, 2004
Crazy Weather
Today is going to be way too confusing for posting anything coherent
(interviews, online-Xmas-shopping, embedded-coding, Kitty-to-the-vet,
eBay-lot-watching). With your collective permission, I'll just wing it
with some bulleted entries. Too bad I can't just give you a PowerPoint
presentation.
- I've upgraded my pilgrimage estimate to the Orange Level. I've renewed my passport and registered for the AWP Conference. I haven't gotten my tickets yet, which appear to set me back at least $450 from Denver to Vancouver. It's still up in the air whether Junie can take the time off to assist me in schmoozing.
- Received my contributor's copy of 32 Poems today. Deborah is the only editor who ever spells my name correctly. Actually, Deborah is the only person outside a small circle of friends who spells my name correctly, including my mother. This issue contains some very good work by AE Stallings, Marvin Bell, Shafer Hall, David Kirby, Mark Yakich, and my buddy John Jenkinson (The Lark). I was pleased to get the word "whimsy" in my piece. Congratulations to Deborah and John Poch.
- JP Dancing Bear is working to create an audio archive of his past Out of Our Minds show. Currently available for listening are Jennifer Michael Hecht - Part I, Jennifer Michael Hecht - Part II, Peter Streckfus - Part I, Peter Streckfus - Part II, Jason Carney - Part I, Jason Carney - Part II, Mark Yakich - Part I, Mark Yakich - Part II, Lynne Knight, Emily Rosko, Richard Beban, Debra Bruce, and Meg Schoerke.
- I also received a contributor's subscription copy from The Journal, which I haven't had time to read yet, and the latest Poets & Writers (ditto). And Time (ditto). And Scientific American, Spin, Harpers (ditto, ditto, ditto).
- The AWP Writer's Chronicle showed up, containing: an interview with Edward P. Jones; an interesting article by Debra Gingerich on Poets as Mentors (Moore for Bishop, WCW for Levertov, Berryman for Levine); a depressing chart in the Writer's News section, announcing the existence in the AWP JobList of only 393 new academic jobs in 2003-2004, 186 of which are tenure-track; David Lehman on Intelligence Failures which bemoans (yet again) the decline of literature reading (BTW, I heard Lehman on a Prairie Home Companion rerun Sunday doing a skit with Garrison Keillor that was pretty damned funny); Michael Bugeja on email submission protocol and manners, in The Digital Slush Pile; an interview with Annie Finch on Pattern and Poetic Creativity; the usual 8 zillion ads for MFA programs, including an intriguing one for Bath Spa University College.
- I also received a contributor's subscription copy from The Journal, which I haven't had time to read yet, and the latest Poets & Writers (ditto). And Time (ditto). And Scientific American, Spin, Harpers (ditto, ditto, ditto).
- Didi Menendez has issued a call for poems for MIPOesias for an issue dedicated to strange poems. Gabe Gudding is the guest editor, which is absolutely perfect.
- In all my spare time (insert maniacal laugh), I'm reading Houseboat Days again. The shock value has certainly worn off over the years. I'm trying to figure out how Ashbery's influence may have created the viewpoint from which I read, thus reducing his novelty and ability to influence. It's a little daunting to read, with anything like objectivity, a poet that Bloom and Vendler agree is a minor god . My surface, quick from the hip take is always: here's a very bright guy with a good vocabulary, Continental influence, outstanding sass, a decent way with Life Observations, and the occasional enthusiasm for the sound of his own voice. Of course, I like a lot of the work in Houseboat Days. But, there are poems that feel like he just wrote them down and never looked back (which he has apparently admitted to in print somewhere), and others that take 3 or 4 readings to discover the fine structure. There are some of his Noted Poems from this volume that seem preachy (Wet Casements, The Serious Doll, Blue Sonata), overstuffed with pronouns and latinates. There are parts of some longer poems that seem just plain sloppy (middle parts of Melodic Train). There have been Ashbery discussions on the blogroll recently (e.g., Jonathan, Chris), and Mike is doing a survey of Ashbery devotees. I'm amazed to discover that people memorize Ashbery poems (probably because I'm capable of memorizing very little). I've had non-poets astound me by cranking out Prufrock at a moment's notice, but I can't imagine anyone standing up and reciting Daffy Duck in Hollywood at a Christmas party. This probably just shows how little I get out.
Posted by jbahr at 06:39 AM | Comments (3)
December 12, 2004
Make Mine Rare
I was cruising through my Amazon Wishlist, when it dawned on me that some of better-heeled relatives could probably get me a nice signed poetry first edition. I'm not in it for the money, but I did find out recently that my signed first of Ted Hughes' Crow Awakens is selling for well over $500 on Alibris (probably because he was accommodating enough to die while I owned it).
I don't know much about rare books, actually, except what an amazing amount of difference a simple dustcover means to the price. Then, there's condition and foxing and binding and glue intactness and other stuff. I figure it all pretty much works itself into the price on Alibris or eBay anyway.
I started by looking at some fictional works, just to see what they run. My first choice was Thomas Pynchon's. Hmm, bad choice, as even the relatively recent Mason & Dixon fetches $20,000 and V can run over $100,000. Of course, Pynchon has been famously elsewhere all his life, so I suspect signed copies are pretty rare. Next up was Hemingway, which brings the prices down from the stratosphere -- something like between $50 and $5,000. OK, how about poetry?
A signed first edition of Walt Whitman's As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free, and Other Poems? About $9K. Yeats: $1,000 to $5,000. A signed, handwritten manuscript of Plath's The Snowflake Star, about $20K. And unsigned Leaves of Grass for about $1,800. Well, I'm getting a little closer to my price range.
Signed firsts of Frost's various collection run $300 to $1000, Oppen for $100, Larkin for $150. Eliot's signed firsts can be had for as little as $30, and as much as $6000 for rarer works (Poems 1909-1925). You can actually get a signed Marianne Moore for under $20, but a signed first of WCW's Paterson will set you back $750. Signed firsts of Ashbery are as little as $30, though the The Double Dream of Spring runs $450 in dustjacketed hardcover -- about the same range as Creeley's signed firsts. Most poets of the past 30 years are available for under $30 -- not much more than today's poetry books.
Oh, well. As much fun as that was, I know I should just add more poetry books to my Wishlist. There are too few buyers of current poetry as it is.
Posted by jbahr at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)
Poetry and Quietude
I was chatting with my sweetie tonight, who was bemoaning the fact that her
Great Idea for a new website seems so much more articulately expressed in other
articles and online journals by the experts. My feeble advice was that she
should go with her instincts -- create a site where the reader can travel with
you as you discuss and learn about this Great Idea. A good example of this
is would be my subjecting you to my slow grasp of the School of Quietude.
It has only been a year since I first heard about the School of Quietude. I
have tried to catch up in the normal way -- googling SoQ and reading all the
entries by many of the poets on my blogroll. I've read countless posts by
the Usual Suspects, starting with Ron Silliman, of course, and then to Jordan,
Josh, Dale, Tony, Chris -- even the original EA Poe complaint that coined the
term. The best explanation I've seen so far is Ron's
post from earlier this year. Ron suggests that the primary thing that
distinguishes the SoQ is its anonymity -- it's what's left over once we've
neatly dropped 1000 poets into the top of the Pachinko machine and discovered
that they've landed in the pegged brackets labeled Black Mountain, Agrarian,
Projectivist, New Formalist, New York School, Harlem Renaissance. It
acknowledges the historical nature of literary reaction in this country. As an
institutional tradition that has produced writers of significance only at its
margins – Hart Crane, Marianne Moore – the SoQ continues to possess something of
a death grip on financial resources for writing in America while denying its own
existence as a literary movement, a denial that the SoQ enacts by permitting its
practitioners largely to be forgotten once they’ve died.
Poetry from the SoQ fails because it frames. It may have a storyline,
and it always has trajectory. It refuses to let the reader press on
his/her own appliqué of meaning. It is demonstrative, summarizing,
concluding. It tells us what to make of the chatter during the walkabout.
It makes us slaves to the author's intent. It makes us the geese at the
edge of the V. And so on.
My first reaction to the SoQ premise was that the implied derision was just
business-as-usual: which ox is getting gored, what work is getting
peer-reviewed, whose friends are getting tenure. Worse, the whole argument
seemed just liked those of my Generation of Petulance against the reactionaries
some 40 years ago.
My second reaction was: Omigod! Who is among the afflicted?
Besides the obvious Noted Poets, that is. Bob Hicok? Paul Guest?
Victoria Chang? How about AE Stallings? How about me?
Which brings me to this month's issue of Poetry, that bastion of
Quietude. I suppose (as I should approach the works of Collins, Merwin and
Clancy) that I should simply let the entire volume land in the SoQ slot of
vingt-deux noir. Well, that doesn't seem quite fair. Is any
assessment of Poetry offerings an exercise in
distinction-without-a-difference?
I was not familiar with Nancy Winkel, but the woman has a gift for titles:
You People, Hand-Embroidered Mourning Piece for Clara Elisabeth
Kriebel, 1779, and Shut Up and Row, sitting over three very good
pieces of poetry. My initial notes, scribbled on the poems are: not
too shabby, hell yes, and quite nice. The third poem depicts two sisters
on a lake with an urn of an ancestor's ash. It ends with:
The lake extends the largest chalice,
and someone always leans, always
sips. Then: More tears, calls one shore.
More silence, whispers the other, while snow
makes a home for itself everywhere.
I'll skip Reginald Gibbon's duck-and-weave offering in Sky and Hour,
which hit me like Oliver on a bad landline. Someone said recently (God,
I'm bad about attribution) that Dean Young writes all the Ashbery poems that
John
never got around to. Come on, how can you not love this guy?
My nightmares are your confetti
so you may step over the tiny skulls
like a satrap among un-housebroken whippets.
This is not Ashbery. Ashery would have you scurrying to the OED or pulling
out your collegiate French phrase book. That was from "Dear Reader,"
(yes, the comma is part and parcel of the title), followed by Lucerfin,
which is more expansive:
I love you. Dividing words between syl-
ables! Dachshunds! What am I but the inter-
section of these loves? I spend 35 dollars on a CD
of some guy with 15 different guitar in his sharck
with lots of tape delays and loops, a good buy!
Well, I'd be the first to admit that you had to be there. Then,
there's a strangely metric (5/4/4/5 and 4/5/5/5) poem by Anne Rouse which we
will pass over, and a piece some would indict as lineated prose by Stephen Dunn,
and then a poem by Doug Anderson titled Sixty-One that makes me want to
die before I reach that degree of reflection, and another poem by Erin Ferreti
Slattery which ends "the board worn down / to sapling bark; / a life I've been /
unifnishing / from the start" which almost wants to make me sign up to Ron's SoQ
Manifesto.
H.L. Hix is up next with award-winning Titles Of Unusual Size: If
Sixteenth-Century Izkik Ware From Damascus Consists of Fine White Clay Mixed
with Ground Quartz, Then and If the Lena River Runs North, Farther than
the Mississippi Runs South, from the Yablonovsky Mountains that Cradle Lake
Baykal Past the Arctic Circle to the Laptev Sea, Then, which seems like a
pony tricked out once too often. And, besides, the Russian river Amur is
longer, and they're both over 1000 miles shorter than the Nile, but I digress.
Amazingly enough, these are both in the nature of love poems:
somewhere her eyes' hue must have a rival.
In the geothermal prehistory
of pressure under what became Brazil
and the igneous light sharp-sifted by
its facet-concentrated chronicle.
And so on, in both poems, in an orgy of Latinates and devotion, variously.
Gerald Stern serves up a couple of Gerald Stern poems. David Biespiel's
Night Hawks was diverting with its revving up of device a la Brock-Broido or
Bang. It ends:
We are unavailing as lunatics. Our palaver has gone dry,
And gallivanting like the rock wrens, we become in-and-outers, lady-killers,
Mighty as dimes, stymied in the regular pickups of hash, routed,
Left unwinged, in the groan of the unfinished gardens.
Now, here's a poem without a beginning, a middle or an end, I'm thinking.
Does Biespiel escape an SoQ conviction? Ed Skoog supplies two quiet poems
("Even the low clouds' / dark stucco seems applied / by the drowsiest
journeyman") that are narrative, biographical, and guilty-as-charged.
Kevin Simmonds provides a poem on Typhoid Mary that is shorter than the
historical footnote, pithy with short lines in a sort of Simic style without the
chiaroscuro. I was frankly amazed at the banality of Dick Allen's High
Horses ("Way up there, so high and well fed / they seem to be gods / or at
least ridden by gods, / the high horses walk -- so well bred").
Richard Hoffman's Bosnia Aftermath seemed competent, but forgettable
("A trout on a river-bank / knows where the river is; // a fox in a trap /
knows the time, ").
Amy Beeder checks in with Yellow Dress, an equally competent vignette --
one that actually starts out nicely weird ("Girl on a heap of street sweepings
high / as a pyre, laid on snarled wire & dented rim") and ends up less
adventurous ("I am waiting for her mother to find her, still / wearing one white
spotless glove (where is the other?)"). Her Two Poems After Ovid
and Fever seem equally conflicted between the desire to paint and petit confessionalism, but demonstrate a lot of craft (not that I'm sure that
lets anyone off the SoQ hook). David Baker writes an unabashed
story-in-verse, using the tried-and-true strategy of painting the picture (She
squats in the sun to show me wild phlox / in pink-running-to-blue, rue anemone,
masses") against a backdrop of tragedy ("which ridge. Dysfunctional
junctional nevus: / a name like a bad joke for the growth on her skin").
The volume's poetry ends with Mediterranean by Rosanna Warren, an
homage-as-remembrance to her mother that regrettably doesn't rise above most of
the other poems of this ilk, ending with: "it rose again to the tip of my
tongue, and the myster was / not that she walked there, ten years after her
death, // but that she vanished, and let twilight take her place --".
For the record, I found the back-of-the-book to be much less interesting this
month: Poems and Bombs in Baghdad; a treatise on poetic morality by David
Orr; a mixed review of Olds' Strike Sparks by Brenda Wineapple; a short
piece on Michael Donaghy; lots of indignant letters regarding the NEA's
Operation Homecoming.
Time to take stock. May we rightly be filled with fear and loathing?
I mean, these guys have a 100 million bucks with which to advance their cause.
Beats me (I know, I say that a lot), but I've always respected Wiman and there
were poems in this issue that could just as easily been replaced by Armantrout's
Form
or perhaps even
The Fit. We're most likely not going to see Kasey Mohammad or
Lara Glenum in Poetry any time soon (this is where I start getting emails
telling me they've already been published there), but there's a better chance of
that than spotting them in Smartish Pace. And would they care?
In fact, wouldn't they be pilloried by their PA peers?
In any event, the more I read the more confused I get trying to sort out
who's writing in what vein of expression. Cole Swensen's
The
Hand, Photographed doesn't seem any more disjunctive than Jane Mead's
And Then
The Smoke. Revell's
Northeast Corridor
seems no less narrative than Wright's
Nostalgia.
And where do we put Hillman, Rekdal, Poch? Darn. And what do I do
with Tost and Waldrep, mentioned in my last post? Here are poets with
seductively SoQ-seeming allegorical work (not that they're not busy working
their way out to the fringe). Fringe or frontier, I suppose. (Perhaps the
way that Revell used to write work like
Polygamy?)
My old buddy Wally used to say that there are two kinds of people:
those who dichotomize and those who don't. Maybe, I'll just join the
latter group for a while until I sort this all out. Assuming I ever do.
Posted by jbahr at 09:13 AM | Comments (3)
December 10, 2004
Tost, Gudding and Waldrep
Just a quick note on articles I ran across today. Tony and GC's books are two of my favorites this year and are reviewed in the Georgia Review -- look near the end of the article. Gabe and his works (literary and social) are discussed in Pantagraph.
Posted by jbahr at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)
Bookshelves
A number of bloggers have been posting pictures of their bookshelves. I have nine or ten fully loaded bookcases meself, but that includes murder mysteries (fully 4 bookcases), reference (my Britannica takes 3 shelves alone), and a couple of bookcases of God Know What (including a 1945 edition of "How To Clean Anything"). The poetry section looks like this:
I was frankly surprised that I only seem to have a couple of hundred poetry books, and about half that many journals. Junie probably has a large stash of the books we pass back and forth, and there are uncounted numbers of poetry books laying around on flat surfaces in my house. Still, that's a hell of a lot fewer poetry works than Ron Silliman (5,000 and counting), or Jonathan Mayhew. I always have 10-20 poetry books on my Amazon wishlist (otherwise I get ties and socks for birthday/Xmas gifts) and I probably order another 20 books a year. Hmm. I wonder if I'm losing books in airports?
Posted by jbahr at 09:27 AM | Comments (3)
Potato Gallette
This is a lovely, inexpensive side dish for a winter meal.
6 medium Russet or Yukon Gold potatoes
1 stick of butter
1 teaspoon of fresh thyme
A few grinds of pepper, a few pinches of salt
Peel the potatoes and slice them as thin as you're able. I use a 2 mm
slicing blade on a Cuisinart, which creates translucent potatoes slices.
You can use the potato rounds as is, or soak them in cold water, then dry them,
for a gallette that is a little less starchy.
Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter (1/4 of the stick) in a non-stick skillet
and arrange the potato rounds in a concentric pattern, starting at the center
and working your way out. When the gallette is done, you will have a
beautiful golden rosette pattern, if you do this right. Dot the top of this
layer with butter, using about 1/4 of the stick with each layer. Grind a
little fresh pepper and a very small sprinkling of salt on the layer, and then
sprinkle a quarter teaspoon of the fresh thyme.
If you can't get fresh thyme, you can use dried thyme, or even "italian herbs",
which is usually a combination of thyme, rosemary, and oregano. Some
recipes call for fresh rosemary instead of thyme, which is fine if you like the
slightly "tarry" flavor of rosemary. Now, put down another layer of potato
slices and repeat the butter/salt/pepper/thyme application. You will
probably have enough potatoes for 3 or 4 layers, depending upon the size of the
skillet (I use a 10-inch). You don't have to dot the top layer, but a little salt/pepper couldn't hurt.
Now, you want to compress the gallette. Find a pot lid or cake pan that
will fit into the skillet and place it on top of the assembled gallette. I
usually spray the bottom of the pot lid/cake pan with Pam or wipe a little olive
oil on it so that it won't stick. On top of the pot lid or inside the cake
pan, place some thing heavy enough to compress the gallette. I usually use
a couple of big cans of tomatoes, but a 2 1/2 pound round weight from a barbell
works nicely, too. Cook the gallette on medium heat. You want the
bottom to turn out crisp and golden, which usually takes 30-40 minutes,
depending upon how hot your stovetop's medium heat is. When it's done
(it's OK to peek after 25 minutes or so), slide the gallette onto a large plate
and flip it over back into the skillet to cook the other side another 10 to 15
minutes without the weight apparatus. Flipping is a bit of an art. I
have this wonderful ceramic plate with a handle on the bottom and the words "Gira
Tortilla" on it that my ex-wife got me in Spain for flipping Spanish tortillas
(which are actually omelets cut into wedges and served in bars as tapas).
When the gallette is done, slip it out onto a large plate or platter and let
it set for 10 minutes, then cut into wedges, as you would a pie. This is
particularly good with pork chops or grilled chicken.
Posted by jbahr at 08:52 AM | Comments (0)
December 09, 2004
In The Mail This Week
More good stuff in the mail this week, including the most recent issue of Canary
(bright yellow), and my monthly Poetry -- which I'll discuss in separate
posts. Also slick, glossy college PR magazines from Pomona College, Johns
Hopkins University and USC, all of which I attended. Here's a synopsis of
a few more:
The Atlantic Monthly
The letters to the editor are, as usual, every bit as interesting as the
articles (and always more interesting than the poetry). Letters included
responses from all quarters to James Fallows' Bush's Lost Year, an
article that indicts Bush for paying attention to the wrong things (e.g., Iraq)
after 9/11 instead of the right things (e.g., the Israeli/Palestinian problem).
Other Letters addressed College Admissions, Teresa Heinz Kerry, Betting On The
President and the Blakely Decision. In the last of these, a responder
characterizes Antonin Scalia as fat, old, Type A, and losing it.
In How Not to Catch a Terrorist, an anonymous letter from the
intelligence community to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence details
ten decisions, from 1996 to 1999, by intelligence bureaucrats that contributed
to the failure to kill/capture Bin Laden before 9/11. Most of the
decisions cited were the product of agency infighting, inattention, and wrong
priorities. Straight Jacket describes the challenge that the
upcoming Taiwan elections will pose if nationalist candidates win and we are
forced to defend the island against China's increasingly powerful naval force.
Holiday Cheer: Luxembourgers consume more alcohol per year than
anyone (measured in gallons of pure alcohol represented by ingested beer, wine
and liquor) at 3.14 gallons, followed closely by Hungary, the Czech Republic,
and Ireland (for whom God invented booze so they wouldn't rule the world).
Germany tops France, followed by Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, and Denmark.
No wonder those Europeans always seem so happy (when they're not raising hell at
soccer matches). Who's the Gay Simpson? lists the odds given at
PaddyPower.com on which Simpson character will be the first out of the closet.
Patty is top choice (1:1) over Waylon Smithers (11:4), followed by Selma, Moe
and Groundskeeper Willy. Pork with a Point discusses the huge ($265
billion) highway bill. A particularly scary map-assisted piece, Russia's
Loose Nukes, pinpoints the dozens of places where nuclear material has been
either badly stored, unguarded, lost or sold (usually by groups composed of the
Mafia, intelligence operatives, and the military).
Two long feature articles discuss Iran (people, political climate, economics) and
whether Iran will be the next target to neutralize as it approaches the standing
of nuclear power. A particularly interesting section of one article
demonstrates that, even if we wanted them to (and we do), the Israeli Air Force
isn't going to be taking out Iran's nuclear facilities as they did to Iraq in
the late 80's (there are too many of them, too well protected, and not all
located). An ad for ROM, a multi-exercise machine priced at $14,615,
claims to give you a complete workout in 4 minutes a day. Poetry this
month is a single work by Gerald Stern (short and harmless).
Cook's Illustrated
weighs in with some great winter recipes: Pork Chops with Vinegar and
Peppers, Better Chicken Teriyaki, Rethinking Cornbread, Moist and Tender Braised
Brisket, Pasta with Chicken and Broccoli, Better Black Bean Soup, Hearty
Scrambled Eggs, Glazed Winter Root Vegetables, and Perfecting German Chocolate
Cake. As usual, they tell you the dozens of ways that they tried making
each recipe until they perfected it. In the Hearty Scrambled Eggs recipe,
they discuss the physics of better scrambled egg-making, going so far as to
depict the protein strands of various styles. One thing I love about CI is
how they can perfect even the simplest meal (e.g., Pasta with Chicken and
Broccoli) by pointing out where you need fresh ingredients (and when it doesn't
matter), and which steps are critical. In this month's "comparison"
section, they rate cocoa powders (and discuss the merits of Dutch-processing)
and 3-quart sauce pans.
National Geographic
The lead story is the search for planets outside our solar system, accompanied
by some killer photos (130 have been found so far). There's an excellent
article on the Land of Pashtun (where most bettors are placing OBL) with some
beautiful shots of flowering poppy fields. Why is the Titanic
Vanishing? is accompanied by outstanding photos of the main sections of the
wreck (the stern and bow segments are miles apart). A Work-Weary World
compares the number of working days per year, country by country. South
Korea is near the top with 2,350 hours per year and France is near the bottom at
1,431. The US is in the middle with 1,760. That's a hell of a lot
fewer hours than I work, but my brother works for a pharmaceutical company and
gets 5 weeks of vacation, so we must be balancing each other out.
Time
Articles include: an interview with Tom Brokaw;
amendforarnold.com is lobbying to change the Constitution so that Ahnold can
become President; video games newly for sale includes JFK Reloaded
in which you try to recreate the details of the famous assassination, and John
Kerry's Silver Star, where you can ride along with JK on his swift boat
missions; 76% of all women with AIDS live in the African sub-Sahara;
you've probably all heard about the Virgin Mary grilled-cheese sandwich that
sold for $28,000 on eBay, but did you know that a similar iconic sandwich
featuring Hello Kitty sold for $61?; Massacre in the Woods details the
weird and grisly story of Chai Vang killing 6 people in the Wisconsin
hunting-related incident; good article on the Orange Revolution with
pictures of the strangely disfigured Viktor Yushchenko (you don't suppose it was
just late-stage acne?); sales of gift cards (e.g., Starbucks, movie
theatres, department stores) will total over $50 billion this year and $6
billion of the value won't be redeemed; 65 million Americans suffer from
high-blood pressure and the highest percentage of victims are virtually all in
the Red states (probably attributable to the cognitive dissonance of voting
Republican); HarperCollins is publishing the "original" version of Plath's
Ariel, including 12 poems that executor Ted Hughes removed from the first
editions.
Posted by jbahr at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
December 06, 2004
Comments
I just got finished deleting two or three thousand spam comments that were auto-generated by somebody announcing the availability of online gambling/Texas Hold'em/interactive poker.
I don't want to restrict commenters, but I may have to ask y'all to obtain a MovableType TypeKey if this nonsense keeps up.
Posted by jbahr at 07:22 AM | Comments (3)
December 05, 2004
Colorado Review and Impossibility
I received my latest Colorado Review in the mail this week.
Colorado Review is published just down the road from me and CSU has some really
fine poets and fiction writers on faculty, not to mention a first-class
publication editor in Stephanie G’Schwind. First, a
little side-track.
I've been reading, with no little interest, blog-based discussions between
Josh and
Chris on the seemingly never-ending discussion of difficulty (or as
Chris characterizes it, impossibility). Chris suggests:
But is the lazy slack writing, the “bourgeois subjectivity and the I-cry”
(as
Josh put it this morning) of Collins and Pinsky and Simic (to choose three
who are railed against regularly in blogland), really any more lazy and slack
than essentially doing a word-clustering brainstorm and waiting for readers to
take up the banner and proclaim it an exhilarating, mystical composition of
great complexity and “difficulty?” And these aren’t even egregious examples
because, as I said, I think the pieces I am quoting from are significantly less
random and more purposeful than some others to be found in a variety of avant
web publications.
and Josh counters with:
By contrast, in the nonorganic artwork the parts do not form a unity: it
is an assemblage of pieces between which cracks are visible, and the pieces have
some degree of independence from the unity of the total work. The more minimal
(or the less intrusive) the structure of the whole is, the more independence the
parts have, and the "harder" the poem is likely to be—the Andrews poem Chris
quotes is a good example of this. But they never achieve total independence, or
fall into chaos; much of the language of Andrews' poem is recognizable as the
detritus of pop culture mixed with a little theory, and a savage humor acts as
the gel in which the individual pieces float.
Now, these are both only representative excerpts, so I ask you to read their
comments yourself. I will admit that many of Chris's questions arose
unbidden as I was reading the recent issue of The Colorado Review.
On my first read through the poetry section, I found myself stopping only
half a dozen times to smile, or to nod my head in admiration, or to make that
little facial expression with raised eyebrows and frenchified mouth that
connotes appreciation. Mainly, I was befuddled. Mainly, I was taken
back to Mr. Meese, the construction foreman on one of my college jobs, who, when
somebody came back late from lunch with an elaborate excuse, would smile and say:
Sounds like bullshit to me!
As I am wont to do, I did a little inventory: 1) General Smarts:
on basis of my level of poker play and GRE scores, I'm probably not just
short of grey cells 2) Sense of Humor: Puleeze. Trust
me on this one, that ain't it. 3) Familiarity with Modern Canon:
Hmm, think I'm OK there. 4) Axe-To-Grind: I'm not in
PoBiz for the money, or the career, and there are so many poets whom I admire
that write completely different than I -- well, I don't think I'm simply
protecting my aesthetic turf. 5) General Lack of Appreciation for
Non-Organic Artwork: Um. Yeah, I suppose I could be convicted of
that.
In other words, it's one of those damnable acquired tastes. To quote
Josh again:
Anyway, you can see how this would feed into my desire to see poetry
become a field in which all recipients are also producers, since the act of
reading such works directs you not to some organic unity ("this is a poem about
spring," "this is a poem about the war") but to the elements that still have
traces of their multitudinous contexts imprinted upon them (this is the fullest
expression I know of of Pound's logopoeia, the dance of the intellect among
words). The pleasure of this poetry comes from feeling these disparate contexts
rub up against each other in a unity not guaranteed by the poet's intention, a
received tradition, or the subject matter (all facts transcendental to the text)
but by the fact of the poem (the agreement "this is a poem" conferred by the
contexts of reception: a given writer, a given magazine, a given reading space,
etc.) or by the fact of the person (this position is best expressed in a recent
post by
Nick Piombino).
So, once I've read the poem, and even perhaps critiqued it
mentally, I'm responsible for rewriting the damned thing in my own words,
injecting my own experience to achieve a unity that suits me. Sounds like
a lot of work, and I won't even know if I got it right, which is how this
experience differs from, say, the Puzzler at the back of the Atlantic Monthly.
As to "feeling these disparate contexts rub up against each other", isn't
there a more efficient way to achieve this, like taking a long dangerous drive
through Anacostia or clicking really quickly through 107 cable channels?
There are certainly enough example of fragmentary exposition in this issue of
the Colorado Review. Consider, for example, Karen Garthe's Builder's Warp:
My breadfruit, life fan and shield-shape
a true loose garbled
permit
rolls the little visions and marbles
particulars of sound
streaming, hissing the breadfruit
plummets and overreached
why disintegrate, my dog or not yawns,
why not rave and leer newly seeded
the lawn signing my back?
which goes on in much this same vein for another 10 lines or so, and yes, I've
probably excised the Really Important Part that makes this coherent to somebody
other than I. Unlike much of the work in this issue of CR, there is a
pronounced musicality to this piece. But, like much of the poetry in CR,
it is the product of Rorschach, a sort of Magnetic Poetry on a macro scale.
There is the discordance of tense, the dislocation of narrative, some playful
alternatives (my dog or not). Is it mildly entertaining?
Yeah, I suppose so. If I were confronted with 100 poems somewhat like it,
would I know which to accept for publication and which to send back with pink
slips?
Uh, no. Now, most of you would simply suggest that I'm not going to be
replacing Graham and Revell any time soon, and you'd be most certainly correct.
But, how do they make the cut? And, more importantly, how do the CR
screeners sort out what to pass on to Jorie and Donald? Life would be a
lot simpler if I just subscribed to Foetry's conspiratorial theories about
post avant networks and the Power of the Iowa Program. Anyway, back to
the CR. Emily Wilson provides a hauntingly moving poem in Morpho
Terrestre, which begins with:
The butterfly is pinned through its thorax
and from that point the wings read
in canted panels
releasing the stored chromes
the inner mechanics.
The name affixes to earth.
The wings barely do.
This poem is elegant, confident, evocative, subtle. It derives a kind of
power with a lack of showiness. It is neither summarizing in its
conclusion, nor gratuitously cryptic. Ms. Wilson's next poem, Growth
and Form, is more Carl-Phillipsian in its short, muted couplets:
The bittersweet tethers the lilac
training away the festoons
away from the sun, sun in its hamper of clouds
something comes under the protean
rights, weird rights of the fine tent skeleton
which now has the mind full of
These are certainly not poems that Spell Everything Out, but the reader is
rewarded immediately with fine metaphor and gratified after reflection by a mind
that has run ahead of us. I was less compelled by M. Underhill (gender
unspecified), in Thanatos:
Concretize: two from one. The summer the
twin died
she traced my left hand in her sketch book.
Ecriture. Run-off. I left a schemata of me
by the shore. The next year her twin
gave me Tolstoy's Resurrection. I saw her
crying in the kitchen, phenomena all bloodless.
This is a poem that doesn't know if it wants to be narrative or conundrum, a
poem draped with PostPostModern trappings, but ultimately a little lost.
There are more of these plainspoken narratives:
Rumor has it, Saturday night, the fat one held court
from a bridge chair on his lawn, in stretch shorts and a tank top,
with a megaphone (although hardly necessary given his projectile
voice). He took issue with the women on the block, wanting to
(hurt) them, assumed they were part of his daily life but sensing
their fear. So he held his mouth to the cone, big and wide, lips
This constitutes the first 6 of the 9-line poem, Megaphone Man, by MaryJo
Mahoney. The next blogger to nail Collins or Hoagland for flaccid language
and trivial phrasing gets this thrown back at them. Next up is Joshua
Kryah, a proponent of white space. Blue Book starts off:
Sweet thought it came first
by memory, and then
By egress it left tho his hands
Were busy holding it back
He needed prodding this child running about
In his mind this excited child with a flower
In his hand running toward him
and so on for 4 more mundane one-liners. Similar in tone, but more
biographical, is Sandra Kohler's A Deux:
When the alarm goes off, you announce,
"They left the solar system" and wake. All
night I argue with a stranger about the slogan
we've seen -- "He's larger than life." Neither of
us knows who. In the hours before dawn I read
about a dwarf whose birth drove her mother mad.
Something is bound and mute this morning, held
and withheld. You make copies of family photographs
This continues for 12 more lines similar in domestic content, everyday
allusions, odd punctuation and inexplicable breaks on adjectives and
prepositions. Slightly more interesting is Jennifer K. Dick's prose
poem The
Porcupine Effect2 (which is preceded, predictably, by The
Porcupine Effect1 ) that begins:
No way to gaze the synaptic chemistry
problem directly. By implication, learn new proteins that respond to
receptors. Volume of existence smacked down on a group gathered to eat.
After all, they'd feed her throughout the day trying multivitamin soup under
surveillance, waiting for the call on the cellular. "Unfolded", Lynch
reasoned, "that real causality would have to produce the neurotransmitter.
Also, provide a means for vesicles." The problem slid across the common
room tables.
Not her! She'd taken her lover tubs
measuring crackers. White flour collected. Like she was turning to
count them. After a hippocampal slice they would clamp together effects
from the rest of the experiments that were impossible. Who she loved was
on her finger. At the door a stranger, inconsolable.
Ms. Dick is a recent winner of Contemporary Poetry Series, and is currently a
doctoral candidate in Comparative Lit at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. I've read
some interesting work of hers in Canary, but this particular piece seemed
like a bloodless parody of Goldbarth. Perhaps, it's the disconnectedness
that distract me -- and that same foisting of the responsibility of "finding
unity" which makes it perfectly OK, just not my cup of tea. Most of the
rest of the work on this issue of CR leaves me with the impression of having
seen a movie by sitting on my roof, sans audio, and watching a drive-in screen
two blocks away.
By which I mean, it's not so much a matter of difficulty as
distance -- a blurriness that is more likely my poetic myopia than the
writer's intention to mumble. It's not like I don't understand the
words in Barbara Tomash's From "Flying Water":
So help me god her hand on the bible promising to tell
the
truth. Bound up dirty tied with grocery string. Blank, the
ruled lines, the round drawn letters. If she didn't have
words, what did she have? There is no saying. Ugh, ugh,
ugh, gasping childhood coming up out of the water for air.
Shooting up from the bottom of the pool where she swims
holding her breath, each year a little longer.
I will be forgiving and believe that this is a prose poem and that the multiple
breaks on articles isn't an intended device (it's difficult to tell from the
formatting). Still, to me, this is Stein's idea of Oakland. Similarly
perplexing to me was Sarah Mangold's Racetrack and Revenues:
miniature horses giant birds
her own appearance
chalk-white things
people are always talking about
prize money
a whole new vocabulary every night
fleshy and frugal
sophisticated piece of
dresses were not complete
she just wanted to look like
every aisle walked
confirmed her difference
which is reminiscent of Harvey's strategy in Pity The Bathtub, and
reminds me again that I must be missing the poetical boat by not breaking on
preps. I found Ricardo Pau-Llosa's Cellophane, Marlboro Lights
diverting:
Obedient to optics,
the transparent box will not,
like water, bend a shape
that enters it. It is not,
simply put, a translator.
(which reminds me, oddly, of Ben Doyle) and both Junie and I liked the
raucous energy of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to
Escape a Plague, by Carolyn Hembree, which begins:
1. rig your chevy into a time machine:
copper lips copperhead tattoo stag
stiletto. Eyecandy thrusts her hips
thumbs through belt loops -- 1-2-1-2
2 bottles of boone's. chevy bed
unzip studded jeans along the inseam
her tan line -- your indian summer.
2. kill the harbinger at your screen door:
call the oppossum (milk carton in hand)
like a cat, "here thing"
loose a flo
the trick's to aim high
to make that marsup fly.
What seems to be common in most of the poets in this CR issue is their youth.
Many of the biographies indicate that the poets are recent Assistant Profs
somewhere, or have just won their first book award, or are recent MFA grads.
For all the carping heard elsewhere about Ms. Graham's predilection for
advancing Iowa grads and former students (she was apparently the sole poetry
editor this time), I didn't notice any particular pattern in the backgrounds of
the poets, except a mild tilt toward publication credits in post avant
journals, which is to be expected (and there was a fair sprinkling of mainstream
credits as well).
Other than Cole Swensen and Dan Beachy-Quick, I didn't actually recognize the
poets (and Dan is hard to forget), but that's probably more a matter of my
obliviousness than their respective standings in the PoWorld. And I'm
guilty as charged on the matter of laziness According To Josh. I just have
this consumer mentality -- I want it handed to me on a platter, I suppose.
Or perhaps, I just don't recognize the Good Stuff when I see it. I think I
want to be reborn as Jonathan Mayhew, who has no doubts, and just knows
what's good and what isn't.
Posted by jbahr at 08:27 PM | Comments (6)
December 03, 2004
Capricorns
Reb Livingston outed herself as a Capricorn, an affliction that I share along with Jesus Christ and Richard Nixon. This probably explains the nagging guilt when I've gone 2 or 3 days without posting to the web log. Vaguely à propos, I would mention that Reb and Marc have this zany VS site where poets provide versal crit and poetically debate-stated hypothesis and stuff, you just have to go look for yourself. I've actually gotten a few rounds through it and still don't know what I'm doing, or they, but that's OK, it seems to have elicited some pretty fine work. There seems to be no end to the challenges to Established Venues nowadays, and why not?
Either Tony or I is going to get tired of my nodding my head to his site one day, but it is my curse that I contain the same wonderment of Things PoBiz as he when he goes off on somewhere or someone. This week, I am completely down with his take on the discussion at Third Factory, which strikes me as inordinately articulate and simultaneously second-order, as if I were listening to a Belgian discuss the merits of joining the EU, and I only had a journeyman's command of Flemish. If you understand the various antagonists' characterization of Fence at the end of each article, PLEASE email me with a synopsis.
In a small diversion from my pledge not to make this a biographical blog, I will advise you that Kitty is currently OK, having been diagnosed in my absence by my resident Russian as "pretty sick", which prompted a call to my boys to godammit take her to a vet, who diagnosed her as 15 years old and currently a Yellow Cat, an affliction that is caused by liver problems and all the symptoms of the Karen Carpenter. I bought a pound of liver, 15 different cans of Fancy Feast and 6 jars of Gerber's baby food. She ate nearly all of the first two random cans I opened, which is more than she's eaten in the 11 years she's shlepped around, slept on my chest and crept in the kitchen kittydoor with a rabbit bigger than she in her teeth. She still looks like hell, but here's hoping.
She's a Capricorn, too, of course, at least by way of the adoption papers. Not that you ever actually get a glimpse of the 12 constellations, noting Orion and the Big Dipper without really trying, but wondering where the hell Aries might be. It's probably the light pollution from all those Interstates and our short attention span. I used to know where the North Star was. That was when Rock Lobster was in the top 10, and I didn't spend quite as much time watching the horizons.
Posted by jbahr at 08:05 PM | Comments (2)