January 31, 2005
Submissions Response Database
Oh, I know, I said that I was leaving for San Jose, and I am later ...
I wanted to mention that the Submissions Response Database has almost 1,700 entries from participating poets now. There, you can get a reasonable idea of how long your litmag submission will be out before you get a response.
Thanks to the dozens of poets who continue to help with this project. If you'd like to add your submissions response data to the database, drop me an email here.
Posted by jbahr at 07:27 AM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2005
Sunday Morning
There is a month's worth of
Poetry Debates, Manifestos & Criticism at the The Academy of
American Poets's website -- just click on one of the calendar dates in the
upper-left-hand corner to see each article.
Josh Corey pointed me to the most
recent Tayson article on Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass,
which Tayson uses as a jumping off point to argue against Language Poetry.
Kasey and
Jonathan also have posted
comments on the article. In general, I agree with Kasey that wondering
about whether Whitman would have supported LangPo is a lot like those "What
Would Jesus Drive?" arguments.
~~~
Steve Schroeder has informed me via a comment that
Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetry
will also have an entry selected for the 2005 Best American Poetry.
Keeping track
of BAP is an
avocation of mine, so I'd appreciate it if anyone knew of any other upcoming
selections.
~~~
I've been reading with outright delight
Dean Young's
most recent book,
Skid. I've noticed Young's work in the widest array of litmags
imaginable -- Threepenny Review, Gettysburg Review,
Ploughshares, American Letters and Commentary, Conduit,
jubilat, Volt -- which is no little consolation to a poet (like me)
who tends to write all over the aesthetic map. The best blurb on the back
of this Pitt Poetry Series book is by Tony Hoagland, to whom Dean is devoted,
judging from the way that Hoagland's name is invoked in a couple of poems in
Skid. Having just finished Hoagland's What Narcissism Means To Me
so recently, I was surprised to find how Skid succeeds in so many
ways where WNMTM fails. Dean's quirkiness seems unforced, his
surreal poems seem quite believable, his personal anecdotes seem ironically
removed. Even his titles are killerbee. I also don't care for
longish poems much, but most of the work in Skid tends to be multi-page and I
didn't mind at all. Here's the opening from the excellent Sources of
the Delaware:
I love you he said but saying it
took twenty years
so it was like listening to mountains grow.
I love you she says fifty times into a balloon
then releases the balloon into a room
whose volume she calculated to fit
the breath it would take to read
the complete works of Charlotte Bronte aloud.
This poem is (amazingly enough) a marvelous exploration of love and the
ecological ruin of the Delaware River. And this opening, from the very
funny Lives of the Mind:
I wake in pjs crenellated and
badged
my head full of 18th century French
battle strategies. My god! I'm Napolean!
What can I possibly say to my creative
writing class now? How stop Heather
from deliquescing when I explain why
Ed thought her poem about her grandfather's
funeral was about a fashion show?
Young invokes himself by name a lot in his poetry, using the third-person
detachment to demonstrate his peculiarity and perverseness in ways that, in the
end, just makes you like him all the more (this, from Sunflower):
When Dean Young vacuums he hears
not just times' winged whatchamacallit
hurrying near but some sort of music
that isn't the motor or the attic
or the sucked-up spider's hosannas
or his mother pounded into a rectangle
or what's inside him breaking
Young manages to be profound and profane at the same time in some quite
wonderful way ("Don't think for one fucking instant / that I don't have a broken
heart"). His titles are somehow strange or funny, yet unaffected (I Can
Hardly Be Considered A Reliable Witness, Chest Pains of the Romantic Poets,
What A Good Horse I Have, Not In Any Ha Ha Way). He
certainly reminds me of Gabe
Gudding, another Pitt Poetry winner, but in a strange way, he also brings to
mind Alberth Goldbarth by taking the reader, turn by turn, out to the periphery
and then back again. I like this guy. I like the fact that there is
clearly a heart beating in him ( from Even Funnier Looking Now):
Your friends all thought you were crazy.
My friends all thought I was crazy.
The names of the Aztec gods were on one page,
serotonin uptake inhibitors on the other.
You fell in the street carrying a pumpkin.
I walked home alone in the snow.
I broke my hand.
Your light meter was in my glove box.
~~~
Whims is so tickled to have his own logo on Kasey M.'s
Lime Tree.
Now, if I can just get Didi to do
one of those great portraits of Whimsy with an attitude.
~~~
Miscellany from the BlogRoll: I'd like to plug the excellent
The Page again, which
Steve Burt
lauded on his blog recently.
Tony Robinson is the first victim in
Reb's Thieving Blog Poem
Series. C. Dale provides a
good take on voice. Tony Tost
has a nice, short article on
Lyn Hejinian's My Life.
Ana likes Franz.
Jim continues his Ron Is Ron and
Purple Ninja comix. Jilly reminds
us that Auden
reminds us that "poetry makes nothing happen."
AnnMarie continues her Morse
Code Poetry. Jeannine
finishes her essay on Wordsworth.
Nada serves up an exotic veggie dish.
Lisa Jarnot is
interviewed.
Paul scores with Crazyhorse.
Tom has lived everywhere.
Heidi reviews Patrick Herron
for Verse.
Scoplaw rides bikes in the winter.
Joy sings in Honolulu.
Posted by jbahr at 08:57 AM | Comments (10)
January 29, 2005
BAP Shows Good Sense
Congratulations to 32 Poems for landing two berths in the next Best American Poetry.
I know what happens when a journal gets in BAP. I'm bumping 32 Poems up to a Difficulty Level 4 now to avoid the rush. I admit that I was hesitating, in large part, due to the Groucho Effect.
Great going, Deborah. You, too, John.
~~~~~~~
Congratulations also to New England Review, and C. Dale Young. Two poems were also selected from NER for inclusion in BAP 2005.
~~~
I just heard that Victoria Chang will be included in Best American Poetry 2005. Her poem is Seven Changs, originally published in the Michigan Poetry Review. Way to go, Victoria.
Posted by jbahr at 12:59 PM | Comments (3)
Thirty-Something
I have just remembered an
article I had read
about Helen Vendler by a reference to it by
Jordan Davis via Jonathan
Mayhew. In it, Vendler is characterized as wandering the earth
asking people if they know of any major 30-year-old poets she should read.
"And they all say, 'Not really.' I don't know if we're in a lull. There are
competent poets, but nobody taking the world by storm the way Ginsberg did, or
Lowell did. I worry about it.
I find this interesting, because I must constantly resist a hardening of my
own literary arteries. Junie helps, of course, by slapping me upside the
head occasionally with comments about poets whom I might not normally read
(e.g., Carl Phillips, Oni Buchanan, Mark McMorris). One could note that
Ms. Vendler is now past the 70-year mark, which might account for a certain
aversion to current experimental work. On the other hand, Marjorie Perloff
is also past 70, and continues to champion the elliptical.
Setting 30 years of age as the first criterion for Ms. Vendler's Diogenesian
quest seems misguided. Jorie Graham, one of Ms. Vendler's many
"discoveries", published her first book, Hybrid of Plants and of Ghosts,
in her early 30's. Seamus Heaney, another of Graham's favorite poets, was
a relatively obscure member of the Northern School until his early 30's.
John Ashbery's Some Trees which was selected for the Yale Younger Poets
Series when he was 29, and it was years before Ms. Vendler began to champion
him. Even Robert Lowell didn't "take the world by storm" until
after his first
book, Lord Weary's Castle, was published when he was 29. Ginsberg first read Howl to a group of enthusiastic poets when he was 29, and he was 30 when Howl and Other Poems was published with an introduction by William Carlos Williams.
Jordan, and the crew at The Constant
Critic ("brought to by Fence"), don't have seem to have any aversion
to lauding the work of young poets -- though the TCC staff reviews older post-avant
poets with equal enthusiasm. Of course, showing up in TCC isn't going to
get you a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize, but it's a nice start.
Posted by jbahr at 12:51 PM | Comments (2)
January 28, 2005
More Mish-Mash
Am I
the only one who feels guilty failing to blog-post for a few days? Work
has been a bear, and reading Tony Hoagland didn't help. I also felt guilty
about this last bottle of expensive wine I had laying on its side in the
basement. It retails for $300-400 and it occurred to me that I'd feel
better selling it and sending the money to charity than imbibing it at two bucks
a sip. It turns out that eBay won't let you sell wine, but there are
plenty of other wine auction sites for a 1988 Chateau d'Yquem. Don't even
ask what happened to my Vega Sicilia, Chateaux Margaux and Penfold Grange
Hermitage, because the answer will be that I drank them, one night at a time, when
my Resistance Was Futile.
I wanted to mention to all my poet friends that Seth and Virginia are making
a serious effort at producing a first-class literary journal at
The New Hampshire Review.
I'll be reading for TNHR also, so send your best work. Now, you're going
to say: But, what IS my best work? And would you recognize it?
And you would be right, but send it anyway.
No sooner had I written up the review of my last Rolling Stone
when another one came flying over the transom. Johnny Depp is on the
cover, looking twenty-something as usual, which is pretty amazing for a guy
who's 41. There's a long article on the case against Michael Jackson and
it doesn't look good for the one-gloved wonder. Apparently Bush did show
up at the inaugural rock show, and congratulated all the musicians
there, tactfully ignoring Fuel singer Brett Scallion's earlier greeting:
"Welcome to the greatest fucking country in the world!" Courtney Love has
regained legal custody of her daughter after passing enough successive drug
tests. Nice shots of right whales on the Patagonian coast of
Argentina (there were an estimated 300,000 of them 3 centuries ago, now there
are about 3,000). Tim Dickinson predicts The Unmentionable in The
Return of the Draft, noting that almost half of all fighting troops are now
Reservists and National Guard, and that Armed Services recruitment has
plummeted.
Speaking of which, Time's cover article is How Soon Can We
Get Out? And the answer is 1) As soon as freedom has blossomed, or 2)
As soon as the Iraqi security forces are trained, or 3) As soon as 70% of the
voting public wants out. Time has 10 Questions for former D.C. mayor
Marion Barry, including about his drug rehab, which he ducks twice. The
U.S. State Department has upped the award to $50 million for information leading
to the capture of OBL, and kicked off a new advertising campaign in the Afghan
borderlands. The new Airbus A380 carries 800 people and Virgin Air is
talking about bringing back cocktail lounges in the upper deck. "Charming
Machiavellian" Richard Hatch, winner of the first Survivor season, has been
charged with tax evasion. A growing number of high-level Republicans,
including House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas, are hesitant to go along
with the gutting of Social Security. Former EPA chief and Republican
Christine Todd Whitman has a new book with the Lesley Gore-ian title, It's My
Party Too, in which she takes on social fundamentalists. Microsoft and
Intel are moving a lot of high-end research offshore (also SAP, Yahoo, and
Cisco) where software developers work for a fraction of the salary of those in
the U.S. Realtor commissions are sure to follow the reductions that have
occurred in the travel and securities brokerage business, ultimately dropping
from the 6-7% range down to 3% as Internet-based firms become serious
competition for Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and ReMax. Green Day's
American Idiot, is touted at 5-to-1 to win a Grammy. Am I the only one
who hates those ads where famous people I don't recognize wear those stupid milk
mustaches?
Wired features the hot new browser,
Firefox, which I've used
and is really as good as they say (and fast, and currently virus-immune).
Poets will be happy to hear that "right-brainers" will prosper as left-brain
jobs get sent offshore and a new Conceptual Age requires more organic thinkers.
Two Canadians built a light-powered tricycle that does 20 miles an hour. A
NASA draft report for a manned Mars mission suggests that endive, lentils,
chickpeas and swiss chard be grown for the oxygen assist and to augment the
astronaut's Tang-and-jerky diet -- sparking a number of chefs to send in recipes
including Savory Survival Combo and Space Salad. The Ridiculous
Scenario Handbook illustrates 180 DIY projects, including "how to create a
backpack out of women's stockings." Henk carry-on luggage features
titanium-and-rubber wheels and a durable carbon-fiber frame, starting at
$20,000. Peter Schwarts and Spencer Reiss argue that the only way to
reverse global warming is with many, many more "pebble-bed" nuclear reactors.
I did end up reading almost all of Tony Hoagland's What Narcissism Means
to Me, and I was rather disappointed with the rest of the book, after my
initial reaction from a small sample. Many of the poem's confessional
whiny-ness are unredeemed by Hoagland's wit. Most of my reading took place
in Idaho Springs, a favorite mountain-town stop off the Interstate on the way to
the main Colorado ski resort area. I was waiting for my mom and dad, who
spend month every year skiing up there, between jaunts to Hawaii, trips for
Alaskan salmon fishing and weight-lifting events (my dad is trying to break the
combined-weight record for an 80-year old). It's been so warm in Colorado
the past week that it almost balanced out the fact that Blue Shield cancelled my
health insurance because the company I worked for two years ago went out
of business. I had apparently not read the fine print on the COBRA
agreement, and Blue Shield curiously failed to inform me that I was not covered.
I found out after scheduling a slew of medical appointments for checkups and
such, and was told I was uncovered. Sheesh, does this country need
universal medical coverage or what?
I'm off to San Jose on a consulting assignment next week, and Dima, one of my
Russian cohorts, will be going early to set up the work we'll be doing (new
computer product bring-up). I'd like to visit a poet buddy or two, if I
have time (as there are lots of you in the Bay Area), but we'll see if time
permits. Which reminds me,
Dancing Bear, of KKUP-Cupertino fame, has uploaded more poetry-radio-show
audio files to our server, and you can now listen to
Debra Bruce,
Meg Schoerke,
Adrienne Torf & June Jordan,
and Ravi Shankar.
Albert Flynn Desilva, Mary Jo Bang and other notables will be reading at on
Sunday, February 6th, at Pt. Reyes Books, but I'll already be back home by then,
as Junie is flying in from Wisconsin to keep our long-distance romance alive.
I'll be cooking from that fabulous Spanish cookbook she gave me, and reading
poetry on the back deck with a glass of sherry, if weather permits.
You all have a nice weekend.
Posted by jbahr at 03:29 PM | Comments (4)
January 24, 2005
In The Mail This Week - Continued
I've gotten another one of those offers from Continental Airlines to convert
my odd frequent flyer mileage into magazine subscriptions. I already
get a dozen non-poetry magazines a month, but I'm adding another five. The
alternative is that the mileage just expires.
My sister got me a subscription to Rolling Stone for Christmas
(which my children think is the geriatric version of Spin). I read
last month's RS on the plane to hear their picks for the 500 Greatest
Songs of All Time, which started with Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone and
progressed relatively predictably through the Beatles', Rolling Stones', Led Zep,
and Motown hits in the top 20. This month, readers have written in to
complain about the bands/songs that were excluded, including The Grateful Dead
and Steely Dan. Other readers thought that the past was over-represented
vis a vis the recent (too many Beatles hits, not enough Beastie Boys).
CD sales were up last year slightly after two years of decline, but it was a
terrible year for concerts (disappointing attendance at shows for Incubus, Norah
Jones, Fleetwood Mac, and Kiss, to name a few) -- with high ticket prices and
too many competing shows to blame. The five top-grossing tours (in
order) were Prince, Celine Dion, Madonna, Metallica, Bette Midler and Van Halen.
Sir Roger Daltrey, frontman for The Who, was knighted. Lisa Marie has sold
the Elvis Empire (name, rights and Graceland) for $100 million to an investor
who envisions Elvis-themed entertainment in Las Vegas, Japan and Europe.
Sting was caught mastering tantric snowboarding dressed in Prada Sport. RS
considers Ashlee Simpson's Orange Bowl halftime song a "total masterpiece of
teen Christian-porn pop." RS readers picked U2's How to Dismantle an
Atomic Bomb as the #1 album of the years, while RS critics picked Kanye
West's The College Dropout. There's a surprisingly good article,
The Fake Crisis, on the President's attempt to dismantle Social Security (if
Social Security exhausts its surplus 47 years from now, it will be far less
under-funded than the current US budget).
Harper's reports that 14 of the 17 Nicaraguan regional capitals
are now controlled by the Sandinista Party. North Korean state television
listed some of the titles that prominent international leaders use to address
Kim Jong-Il, including "Eternal Bosom of Hot Love", "Humankind's Greatest
Musical Genius", and "World's Greatest Writer." A conservative Christian
organization continues to promote America's Providential History, which
details the various times when God has directly intervened in America's history,
and debunks the "environmental crisis" by noting that "all the 5 billion people
on earth could live in the state of Texas in single-family homes with front and
back yards and be fed by production in the rest of the United States."
Program materials for the federally funded high-school abstinence programs
explain that "deep inside every man is a knight in shining armor" and that too
much help by a "princess" can lessen a man's confidence. Clone Your
Troubles Away details the state of animal cloning, driven by the potential
profits in pet replication, and increasing the number of champion bucks (which
hunters will pay $20,000 to shoot). Shanghai is the City of Tomorrow and a
"fantasy of architectural grandiosity." A review of Suketu Mehta's
Maximum City synopsizes the book's description of Bombay's endemic violence
and government corruption -- noting that the entire city is for sale, starting
with the police force. Short-fiction writer and Conjunctions editor
Ben Marcus has a great short piece called Children, Cover Your Eyes:
"Maps of the dead called snowdrifts gathered in the mountains. An obituary
water called rain fell everywhere ..."
Tony Hoagland had been residing with an impish grin on the back What
Narcissism Means To Me too long, so I read a few poems to Junie last
night. I was fully expecting a sort of Billy-Collins-with-a-smirk, but we
were both very pleasantly surprised. These poems are probably WAY too
accessible for some tastes, but there is a self-deprecating seriousness to many
of these poems to accompany Hoagland's considerable way with words. I have
also begun reading Brigit Pegeen Kelly's The Orchard (a finalist
in the National Book Critics Circle prize). BP Kelly has been recommended
by many poets across a spectrum of aesthetics, so I was interested to see what
was up. The publisher is BOA, whose selections usually tend to be a little
emotional for my tastes, but I haven't been disappointed with the first third of
the book so far. Kelly tends to allegory, mainly narrative with a
conscious use of refrain. At times, she employs a little more overt sonics
than I usually care for, at times the phrasing is a little flat. It's a
good mix, though, and there are some very nice lines:
Now I bend over and with my foot turn up a stone,
And there they are: the armies of pale creatures who
Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth.
There is no feeling of self-consciousness in this work that features the
flora of the orchard, as well as lots of dogs, birds, and horses (many
metaphorical). It's pretty wonderful work, and, once again, I wonder if a
man could have written it.
Ms. Kelly also shows up in Fall 2004 edition of The Journal of The
Academy of American Poets, which I mysteriously received only last week.
Kelly is one of the poets whose books are featured in the Poems from Ten
Surprising Recent Books section, which also includes books by Mary Jo Bang,
Christine Hume, Caroline Knox, Thylias Moss, Srikanth Reddy, Cole Swensen,
Catherine Wagner, Mark Wunderlich and Andrew Zawaki. In the lead article,
Richard Howard discusses the work of Donald Justice with him -- a transcript
intended to help literature instructors teach contemporary poetry. A
section on the recently deceased Czeslaw Milosz includes three poems and a
discussion of his work by Robert Hass and Jennifer Ludden. Robert Creeley
and Michael Morse contribute pieces On Music and Poetic Composition (F
is for fragment, our cultural bellwether. Find it in the sound bite, the
jump cut, the sample, the appropriated image or text: "A glimpse suffices
to trigger an entirety," says Cole Swensen). The Emerging Poets
section includes a number of new talents, introduced by more mature talents:
Janet Holmes introduces Kerri Webster, Paul Hoover introduces Roxane Beth
Johnson, D. A. Powell introduces Patricia Hartnett, Claudia Rankine introduces
(fellow weblogger) Sabrina Orah Mark.
I've read a lot of Sabrina's fine work on the web, and the poems in the Journal
are nicely representative. Each "introducer" also provides a poem.
There is the translated work of Giuseppe Ungaretti, and a short review by Henri
Cole of Geri Doran's Resin, which won the 2004 Whitman Award accompanied by 3
striking poems by Ms. Doran, including the short The Cedar of Lebanon:
What I meant when I said the wildness
had leached out of me
like it leached out of the pear trees
in their old, old rows in the orchard
up at Powell Butte
was that water can wick you dry.
A final section, In Memoriam, provides a small sampling of poems by
Cid Corman, Thom Gunn, and Frederick Morgan.
Posted by jbahr at 01:40 PM | Comments (4)
January 20, 2005
In The Mail This Week
The cover of Time is dedicated to Twixters, those "young adults who
live off their parents, bounce from job to job, and hop from mate to mate,"
which sounds like a pretty good life to me. The article "Is There Really A
Crisis?" details why there is, in fact, no particular problem with Social
Security -- or at least no problem that minor adjustments couldn't fix.
You don't have to read between the lines much to understand that the "crisis" is
one that the Bush Administration has created to "fix" with one more plank of the
"Ownership Society", in its ongoing attempt to tear down various aspects of the
New Deal. The huge pending deficit in Medicare IS a serious
problem, but no word from the Bushies on that problem. Time has 10
questions for Deepak Chopra, the physician-turned-guru, including "Is it true
that you make $20 million a year?", to which he answers: yes, but my lifestyle
is not extravagant except for always flying first-class. Toyota has
renamed its recently-introduced Celica Tsunami to the "Celica Sport Package".
The inauguration star power will include Hilary Duff, Gary Sinise, Dennis Hopper
and Lyle Lovett. PETA is taking furs that have been turned in to the group
and giving them to the homeless. Can Iraq's Election Be Saved?
doesn't hold out much hope for a successful and orderly election -- no
candidates for office have announced themselves to avoid being assasinated and
all the politicking takes place under party banners. DVDs of old TV shows
is big business, amounting to more than $2 billion last year, thanks to Jerry,
Jessica and Homer. The Venturi Fetish is a battery-driven luxury car that
zips from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds and costs $686,000. The Hispanic consumer
market is big and getting bigger, as the Hispanic population approaches 50
million Americans. The new best-selling diet book is French Woman Don't
Get Fat by French woman Mireille Guiliano (eat small portions of great food
while sipping wine).
The Atlantic Monthly focuses on Terror with an article by Richard Clarke,
America Attacked: The Sequel and one by James Fallows, How We Could Have
Stopped It. These articles provide details of what we're doing wrong
and what it will cost us. The best example is the inane, $4 billion TSA
budget that Clarke and Fallows consider a complete waste of money. The
most serious problem going unaddressed is the fact that there are still 30,000
nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and not enough time and money spent
on securing them. Chuck Todd opines that Clinton and Clintonism has hurt
the Democratic Party badly, even as it was good for the two-term president.
Even without Bush, Europe would be distancing itself from the US -- no fear of
Soviet invasion and a fast-growing population of Muslims and Africans is
widening the rift. After being a humorous apologist for conservatives for
all these years, P. J. O'Rourke deplores the recent American Jobs Creation Act
that solved a $5 billion WTO problem by creating $140 billion in tax breaks for
business (including $10 billion for tobacco growers, and a tax write-off for
studios that seek locations in America if the script calls for it to look
American). A British betting site is giving odds on which Harry Potter
character will be the next to die (it's 3-to-1 for Cho Chang). When asked
what single thing they would want on a desert island, 64% of American
respondents chose the Internet over books, TV, radio, cell phones and
newspapers. The French enjoy the highest frequency of sex, while the
British spend the most time in foreplay. Murdoch may have foisted Ollie
North and O'Reilly on us, but it's also created the most important TV programs
in the past 30 years (e.g., The Simpsons and reality shows). Nice, safe
poetry by Geri Doran, D. Nurkse, Maxine Kumin and Linda Bierds.
The AWP Writer's Chronicle has too many articles on fiction writing to
hold much interest for me. Leslie Ullman talks about The Personal Poem as
Sacred Space, giving examples from Linda Pastan (lots of domestic
transcendence), Jane Kenyon (I prefer Hall pining after the dead Kenyon), and
Jack Gilbert (nice and quirky, actually). There's a good section on
writers' conferences, including the Napa Valley Writers' Conference that I
attended last summer (BTW, C. Dale Young will be an instructor this year).
Spin reviews 62 New Bands You Need To Hear Now!, which includes The
Killers, Giant Drag, and I Am Kloot. Connie Hamzy details her 30 years as
a groupie, boasting of intimacy with Ringo Starr, Neil Diamond and the entire
cast of the L.A. Guns. The San Francisco Zoo is again holding its annual
Valentine's Day Sex Tour. Spin captions a shot of André
3000 with: "Gang sign or carpal tunnel syndrome?" Gwen Stefani tours
with her Harajuku girls. The coolest heavy metal albums of all time
include releases by Led Zeppelin, Metallica, System of a Down, AC/DC, Black
Sabbath, Guns N' Roses and Converge. Did you know that Liberace had
his lover surgically altered to look like him?
Aubrey de Grey discusses how to defeat aging in this month's MIT
Technology Review, including strategies to eliminate cell degeneration and
stopping the accumulation of junk inside and outside of our cells. David
Talbot argues that ISPs must self-regulate to stop the growing usefulness of the
Internet to terrorists (who use it for communication and money-raising through
scams). Jason Lohn, a NASA computer scientist, is using an algorithm that
mirrors natural selection to solve difficult problems such as optimal antenna
design. James Heath, a Cal Tech physicist, believes that nanotechnology
(specifically, tiny silicon wires) can be used to sniff out pre-cancerous
conditions. Michigan State researcher Anil Jain is merging fingerprinting,
face recognition and iris scans to develop a foolproof identification
technology. One of Britain's leading philosophers is skeptical that
neurobiology can tell us anything about self-consciousness.
Posted by jbahr at 07:14 AM | Comments (1)
January 14, 2005
The Fruits of Houlihan
I have been reading with interest some outstanding pieces by members on the
blogroll. The posts were motivated by Joan Houlihan's piece on BAP 2004
— and/or others' responses to it, and/or the
defense of Bruce Andrews (whom JH trashed) —
and wend their way through a discussion of organic-vs.-inorganic poetry (a
delineation that Josh attributes to Peter Bürger).
First off, there's my old buddy Scoplaw
with a long, thoughtful explanation of where Joan has gone wrong in her analysis
(principally through disingenuous argument). Scoplaw starts the piece with
a short primer on LangPo, the wellspring of Houlihan's angst:
Langpo ... consciously subverted the expected narrative expectations in
poetry by foregrounding the language itself in an effort to create a mode of
expression which by its very nature would critique the conventions of bourgeois
society ...More broadly, such writings were seen as challenging and undermining
the traditional western conception of communication as a speaker communicating
an (often written) message to a listener through a neutral and apolitical medium
(language); the language poets would argue that in actuality a large number of
assumptions and social conventions entered into the process to shape our
understanding. By consciously undermining these assumptions, Langpo was thought
subvert the hierarchy of the (meaning controlling) writer and the passive
(influenced) reader.
Though Scoplaw doesn't believe that LangPo has achieved its stated goals, he
still disagrees with Houlihan's analysis and her indictment of Hejinian for the
following reasons: 1) Lehman never really expects the "best American
poetry" to be represented (it is, after all, a commercial venture) 2)
Lehman picked Hejinian to continue his "rounding out" of the series'
editors-of-competing-aesthetics, and it doesn't matter whether she believes in
"bestness" or not 3) poems such as Bruce Andrews' are working when
they are incomparable to traditional narrative work 4) it's likely that Hejinian
did, in fact, have standards for selection in BAP, but chose not to express them
5) ultimately, Houlihan subverts her editorial integrity by equating
(historically left-leaning) elliptical poets with a kind of fundamentalism.
Hannah Craig neatly points out a retort of Oren Izenberg on "Joan's roundtable discussion on avant and post-avant writing": ...when she asks "Can you find pleasure in a poem that does not display some kind of organization and context, however loosely constructed? In other words, do you enjoy reading a collection of individual, unconnected lines?" and the utterly brilliant response from one Oren Izenberg is, "No, I don't believe I would get pleasure out of a collection of individual, unconnected lines. Fortunately for me, I've never encountered one, and neither have you. '"
Josh Corey explains at length his
view of what constitutes "inorganic-ness" and goes so far as to rate literary
publications on a scale of 1 (most organic) to 6 (most inorganic)
— although the scale seems rather
inorganically skewed if Fence only gets a 3. I think
C.
Dale Young agrees: Maybe NER
is a 2. I have never thought of my magazine this way, but then again, I am
always so busy I rarely compare it to other magazines. I guess I am now curious.
Where does a Kenyon Review or a
Threepenny Review fit?
VOLT?.
Josh believes that "the pleasures of the inorganic ... require an education that
most people don't bother to seek out" and "The more educated you are, the less
content you are apt to be with the way things are" (and, yes, this is a little
out of context — please read the
entire post). I had to smile because this smacked of the kind of elitist
argument that Jonathan Mayhew
is apt to forward — which sounds, of course,
like a pejorative characterization, but by which I mean a stance posited by
those few who have read the books and taken the courses and thought a lot about
the arc of poetic history (the you-can't-skip-a-step hypothesis).
Kasey
Mohammad adds, rather elegantly:
This in the context of his larger discussion of the "organic" vs. the
"inorganic" in poetry, or let's say modes of poetry based on the illusion of
direct communication of transparent (i.e. familiar) meanings between a unified
speaker and a (presumably also unified) listener, vs. modes of poetry that often
take as their starting point the subversion or denial of such direct lines of
contact between writing and reading subjects. The organic approach is distrusted
by the avant-garde inorganicists because it relies on passive subscription to
the dominant values that determine what gets counted as authentic, realistic, or
beautiful; the inorganic approach is distrusted by the establishment organicists
because (among other reasons) it resists evaluation along the lines prescribed
for writing in the dominant poetic tradition (i.e. formally conservative and/or
discursively "natural" composition).
Curiously enough, I have often heard something like the opposite position
used to justify the merits of inorganic verse.
Tim Peterson responded to my last
post with: Quite a few of the poets in the school that Houlihan would
put down believe they are practicing a mimesis of our contemporary experience,
which is partly virtual at this point and in which direct confrontation with
nature plays a decreased role.
Now, you can't have it both ways, can you? Either The Clash and Get
Shorty and Peewee Herman and Gameboys have acclimated us to appreciate the
chaos of inorganic poetry, or it's an taste acquired by those who have passed
on and through conventional modes of poetic expression.
Mike Snider decided to take no
prisoners in his response to all this:
Can it be true both that students are "readers unused to any poetic
writing at all, for whom any such writing would be equally opaque" and that
Shelley is "soothing and familiar"? Can it be true both that, to read Andrews,
you need "[c]ontext that a critic might provide, that being the critic's job."
and that reading Andrews is "not difficult in the least once you shed a few
prejudices"? If so, is that all critics do? Would getting high work just as
well? The real problem with poets like Silliman and Andrews is that their chosen
forms so curtail the complexity of what they can say that, after a few minutes,
everybody who's willing to wade through the surface crap gets it. And the joke's
over. It's boring. After about 10 pages it's stupefying. ... This is
the big lie. Poetry does not require the intervention of critics, and you can't
have it both ways. You can't claim that Shelley is just as incomprehensible as
Andrews's drivel and at the same time claim that if only that carpenter who
enjoys Shelley had read L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theory she'd enjoy Andrews, too.
I have to admit, that cracked me up. Kasey responded in a comment with
considerable grace:
... I think it's absolutely the case that the average beginning lit
student will have an easier time "getting" the Silliman and Andrews passages
than the Shelley and Tennyson ones. Mike, you said that all that's needed is a
dictionary for understanding of the two latter, but that's just not true: you
also need, for starters, some mythological background, you need the ability to
negotiate the sometimes archaic syntax (an ability that comes from reading still
older poetry, like Shakespeare), and perhaps most importantly, you need to know
how a modern reader can make relevant to his/her concerns what is being said in
such heightened, quaintly (to modern ears) rhetorical language. With the two
former, on the other hand, the diction is pretty familiar, with the exception of
a couple of oddball coinages on Andrews' part, and even those don't present
major obstacles in the context of the whole. All you need to know to
"appreciate" them, at least at first, is that language about mostly recognizable
contemporary topics is deliberately being "made strange," and from there there
are any number of ways to think and feel about it.
On a related note, Henry Gould
responds in a general way to views of
Ron Silliman:
We share an admiration for the modern poets of the early 20th century; we
share an indifference toward much of the free-verse 1st-person anecdotal lyric
poetry of the American 70s. But where the language poets - and related trends
toward overt textuality in postmodernism - built a movement on the complete
rejection of "the lyrical subject" - I move in another direction. If it
were up to me, I would rescue rather than reject the "lyric I", by drawing on
the resources of tradition in a broader sense than that offered by the
20th-cent. avant-garde ... poetry is not simply text. It is not even a mode of
language, merely. As I understand it, poetry, and narrative, and drama find
their mutual root in human action. The modes of literature
branch from their resemblance, their re-enactment, their intellectual and
aesthetic re-shaping, of thought-&-action. Here is where a
poetic style accomplishes its syntheses : people, voices, represented in very
particular, recognizable landscapes and events. How different this perspective
from that offered by the tortured "texts" and mannered "discourses" we know so
well! Lyrics in which "speakers" address us in all strangeness - yet grounded,
believable, in some sense - dramatic. I think of an art
which finds a way to harmonize with & interpret the context & conditions of the
world(s) within which it exists : so that you can see & feel & recognize
experiences which the language evokes.
Tony Tost weighs in with what
Josh rightly calls a moving post about poetic discovery and the end of
apprenticeship, excerpted here:
The main idea being for me to make myself vulnerable and changeable by
what I try to write; writing being the means to attempt a perfection of verbs
(big verbs like seeing, thinking, feeling, faking) ... If one view of myself is
a collection of verbs, and the quality of those verbs, then I do think reading
and writing poetry can be a means of being altered. I think Mayhew would
agree that a reviewer would ideally not only look at a piece closely with all
the reviewer’s faculties and assumptions, but also with an openness that would
render a reviewer vulnerable to having her or his faculties and assumptions
about art altered. I think that is what causes the strong reaction to Houlihan –
she looks at work outside her present system and refuses to have her system
altered by what she finds. A counter example of this would be Guy
Davenport ... I was rather
appalled by Silliman’s
dismissal of Davenport, ... It seems from my perspective to be similar (on a
smaller scale) to Joan Houlihan’s reactions to the Best American Poetry...: both
seem to me to demonstrate an unwillingness to fully enter territory where one’s
values/aesthetics/assumptions are not confirmed. I think there’s a
symbiotic relationship between the life and the work; for a serious artist at
some point the life and the work transform each other ... I would think that the
ideal is for the mutually transformative relationship between the life and work
to be continual. A definition of artistic stagnation could very well be when an
artist’s life and her/his work merely confirm each other. (There's a great
deal more, and I urge you to read the entire post).
Whew. That was a lot of intellectual horsepower engaged in an
interesting, if divisive, issue. Here's what I think (even though Junie
says I don't have to have an opinion on everything):
- Joan's views on elliptical poetry would be less contentious if she didn't
give the impression that it (or any form of literary expression) is a threat
to other poetic texts.
- It is no more possible for a poem to carry all its meaning prepackaged
than it is for it to be an empty vessel. If it is the latter, then, for
me, it is no longer a poem in which I'm interested (although I will
immediately agree that a poem is anything the poet says is one).
- I believe that a poet is obligated by the intention of communicating, and
that poetry should be evocative to be successful (though the forms of
evocation may be almost anything -- intellectual, spiritual, emotional, et
cetera).
- There is an unstated (and probably unrecognized) contextual frame that
accompanies much of the inorganic poetry that most organic poets find
difficult: the allusory bias toward the world of literature, and in
particular, poetics. To be appreciated, elliptical verse often demands a
steeping in past poets, past schools, past projects
— all of them literary in nature.
The more that poets are forged in academia, the more of this we're going to
see.
- The desire that many have expressed —
that poetry might affect one's life and vice versa
— is a singularly poetic notion. If
a poet is purely projecting, that is, explicating his thoughts without
any desire for backwash, is this a lesser form of poetry? Must
appreciating poetry require knowing a lot about poetry (and, yes, I've heard
this as many countless times as you), or is general knowledge enough.
Can you just have read Gravity's Rainbow and Candide and Moby Dick and Don
Quixote?
- There is more to this argument than a battle of aesthetics. As young
(mainly MFA) poets become more elliptical in their poetic behavior, and their
supporters become more entrenched as editors, publishers, and competition
judges, there is a sense of conspiracy (and literary rout) that grows in the
minds of the organicists. Joan touches on this to some degree, but a
better expression of paranoia can be found at
Foetry.
- Kasey's position (and he's not alone in holding it) that we must reject a
passive subscription to the dominant values is a view held by
Goths that are in the process of killing all the Senators and taking seats in
the Forum. Lynn Henijian, Bin Ramke, Donald Revell, Cole Swensen and
many other are busy making sure, through manuscript and literary journal
acceptance decisions, a new dominant value prevails.
- A quick gender tally of the participants in this discussion leads me to
believe that, while we're arguing, the women are off writing poetry (and in
Reb's case, also making
a baby).
- I still consider poetry to be the closest thing to a meritocracy of any of
the worlds in which I reside. Let's hope it stays that way.
Posted by jbahr at 12:57 PM | Comments (10)
January 10, 2005
Pray Tell
Joan Houlihan is
out with the 9th in her Boston Comment series, How Contemporary
American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem, this time with with some
less-than-kind words to say about Best American Poetry 2004 (thanks to
Jonathan for pointing out its
availability). The volume, for those of you who don't follow
BAP, was guest edited by Lyn Hejinian and has been the subject of discussion on
the blogs this fall. Joan continues the extended expression of her dislike
for the most elliptical of elliptical verse "[a]fter a year of
metaphorical rocks with unintelligible notes affixed to them crashing through my
window with the tire-squeal of the Winter-Wolff-Skanky-Possum gang still ringing
in my ears." This article is a little shorter than usual, though
articulate as always, and humorous in places. Bruce Andrews and Mark
Bibbins come in for a drubbing, as excerpts from their BAP contributions serve
to illustrate Houlihan's recurring theme: much post-avant work is
un-ken-able, and thus, incomparable. It's a short step to Houlihan's next
corollary: poetry which cannot be compared cannot be considered "best" in
any sense that would justify its inclusion in BAP.
The article's title, Best American Liturgy, derives from Houlihan's
contention that poetry like that of Andrews and Bibbins "verges on a kind of
liturgy, comes with its own form of worship and its own tenets of faith."
She regards the assessment of post avant work as a "paranormal enterprise" --
that is, "You get it, or you don't". Houlihan also faults Hejinian for
ducking the question of "Best-ness", by avoiding any discussion of standards in
her editorial introduction to the volume ("If there is no 'best', then every
poet is as good as every other poet. Everybody gets a gold star [and] why
... isn't this anthology tens of thousands of pages in length?" I have to
admit to some sympathy with this argument, having read Hejinian's introduction
and the introduction by David Lehman, the series editor ("do they just worship
in churches too far apart to hear each other?"). Personally, it would be a
bit more honest to simply admit what is always true about BAP: 70% of the
volume is pre-allocated to America's most popular poets and the remaining space
is filled by poets whom the guest editor admires (for a detailed analysis, see my
article).
Thus, in a volume that champions the post-post-modern, you still find Billy
Collins, Rita Dove, and Robert Pinsky.
Opinions about Joan and her views will be divided, I'm sure, as usual.
Jonathan says, for example: "This essay illustrates to perfection the
principle that praise and dispraise, in the complete absence of perception
are largely worthless. We don't learn anything except that she doesn't like it"
-- a statement with which I respectfully disagree. In a number of
articles (e.g.,
here),
Houlihan has gone out of her way to give examples of poems that she believes are
little different than noise. She defines "basic standards relating to the
craft of writing" and applies them. Her dislike for "this kind of stuff"
differs only in degree from the many poets (some of whom have weighed in on
their blogs) who are frustrated by the difficulty (or impossibility) of
extracting anything from the strangest of elliptical work (music,
meaning, ephiphany, ...). I think, at the core, this is an aesthetic that
requires something like the suspension of disbelief.
~~~~~~
Since writing this, this morning, I see that Crag Hill also has some words on the subject.
Also Mike Snider and Rake's Progress.
And Josh, who says (this is an excerpt, please read the entire post for details):
The overall title for Houlihan's essay series, "How Contemporary American Poets Are Denaturing the Poem," basically contains the key to it, and the simplest rejoinder to it would be, "You say that like it's a bad thing." In that title Houlihan hits upon the whole organic/inorganic debate that I took up in December ... To recap, the argument here stems from my reading of Peter Börger's book Theory of the Avant-Garde, from which I derived the notions of the organic artwork or poem as that in which all of its parts are subordinated to the whole—to the poem's poemness—while in the nonorganic poem the parts are not so subordinated—the whole, goal, or telos of the poem is exterior to it, located in "reality." ...Whatever the demerits of Houlihan's position as a critic, as a reader we have to take her seriously (it's clear that she represents a large number of angry, befuddled readers).
Posted by jbahr at 12:48 PM | Comments (10)
January 09, 2005
Birthday
I'm taking my birthday off. Happy birthday to Kelli, too.
Posted by jbahr at 03:22 PM | Comments (9)
January 06, 2005
Morning Mish-Mash
I followed a few links and ended up at a review of the 2004 BAP that was pretty interesting (you may have to sign up to read it). A short synopsis: "Considering that the Best American series is about as mainstream as poetry gets, it's tempting to view Hejinian's editorship as a signal that the guerrilla fighters are now riding into town to become sheriffs."
I've updated my
print
publications database page with recent contributions from poets kind enough
to send along new litmag details. You can also download the database in MS
Excel or Rich Text Format (RTF). The latter is readable by MS Wordpad or
the Macintosh editor.
Fifteen years ago, I started playing Nintendo with my sons, then ages 3 and
5. We were living in Belgium at the time, and it took us months to finish
the first version of Legend of Zelda. My mom would fax us maps and
cheat-sheets she would find in California gaming shops. Over the years, we
bought various new models of Nintendo play stations and worked on the successive
versions of Zelda, often to the exclusion of the kid's homework or my take-home
work. This Christmas, the kids and I bought the newest Zelda, a GameCube
and a memory module for $99. I have to admit that it's still a wonderful
time sink. We're currently off looking for Heavy Boots and a Master Sword.
There's an outstanding site called The
Page that I had not run across previously. It has links-and-excerpts
to literary articles and a list of poems recently published online. The
irascible and articulate August Kleinzahler is interviewed in a couple of
places. In
The Poetry Symposium, Sharon Olds, Sapphire, James Fenton, Mary Carr, Robert Pinsky, Jim Harrison, Jorie Graham and John Ashbery discuss the one book of the last 25 years
that "meant the most to them. There's a also great shot of Yusef Komunyakaa, Harold Bloom, Deborah Garrison, Paul
Muldoon, John Ashbery and Jorie Graham.
I've read with interest, over the past few months, bloggers (and their
commenters) argue that an MFA is increasingly valueless in obtaining a
tenure-track teaching position (e.g.,
Tom on
Eduardo's blog). When I was teaching, first in a School of Business
and then in the Computer Science Department, I can remember my colleagues and I
grumbling that the people over in Fine Arts only needed Masters' degrees (and
the usual publications & committee work) to obtain tenure. There are
certainly a lot of Creative Writing profs now that hold MFAs as a terminal
degree, but there are also a lot of poets on the bloglist working on their PhD's
(I think I counted 4 or 5 at one time). I've only recently seen PhD's in
Creative Writing offered, so I assume that you had to switch over to English Lit
in the past (but not now?). I'd be interested in what the difference in
coursework is, and what a dissertation/thesis would look. For a PhD in
Creative Writing, does one have to create a "work of art" for a dissertation, in
the spirit of past requirements for Fine Arts programs?
I'm way behind on my reading, a result of putting a lot of poetry books on my
Amazon wishlist for Christmas. I was already re-reading
Gabe Gudding's A Defense of
Poetry and Ben Doyle's Radio, Radio looking for more good lines to
turn into titles. Next up is Dean Young's Skid, Brigit Pegeen
Kelly's The Orchard, and Bob Hicok's Insomnia. I'm also
paging through the giant Poetry Anthology 1912-2002 from the Poetry
litmag folks.
Time has some pretty chilling photos from the Tsunami. So many
dead children who look as if they're sleeping. Hundreds of body bags
weighted down with blocks of dry ice. Half-naked people floating in a
canal. There are currently over 4,000 Americans reported missing by
friends and relatives -- more than the death toll of 9/11. I wonder if the
US would have been as self-centeredly obsessed with the War on Terror if this
ghastly disaster had happened shortly after September 11th.
Posted by jbahr at 08:48 AM | Comments (7)
January 05, 2005
Poet's Notebook
Eduardo has challenged his readers to open up their notebooks and post the contents. The noted poet and editor, C. Dale Young responded, followed closely by Laurel and Fionnaigh.
My reaction was: Notebook!? We're supposed to have a notebook!?
This was approximately Andrew's response, as well, but that didn't make me feel any better. Eduardo, for example, has an interesting melange of observations, questions to himself, words to remember for future poems. I've looked around for scraps of paper, but all I've been able to find is a short list of titles that I'd like to use. Actually, a very short list, which includes the single title "Every child's a walking reliquary", that I cribbed from one of G.C. Waldrep's poems.
Since I can't talk much more about notebooks, I'll tell you a little about the recent issue of Poets & Writers. Daniel Nester contributes The Confessions of a Sestinas Editor, which explains how Daniel became McSweeney's web editor for sestinas, that bizarre and wonderful 39-line linked poetry form. There's an article on the dearth of short-story prizes and competitions (many fewer than in poetry, for example). No Tell Motel gets mentioned in the Literary MagNet section. There's a long and fascinating article on John Gardner, the one time fiction superstar and moralizer on literary writing. W. T. Pfefferle continues his Poets on Place series with an interview with Alan Shapiro. On the facing page is an ad for the Kentucky Women Writers Conference which will feature "Louise Glück reading with her apprentice Dana Levin." Her apprentice? After a few years, does Dana become a journeywoman? In Catching Up With Poet Richard Wilbur, we hear about what we would expect from "America's greatest living traditional poet": there are too many litmags, too much mediocre work getting published, and too much dominance by free verse. Wilbur's discussion of his writing method is interesting (he can spend an entire day on single line), as is the fact that he would prefer to throw a poem away instead of revising. Clayton Eshleman pens a retrospective of his relationship with Cid Corman (which wasn't all roses). The Gettysburg Review announces a summer workshop sited on the French Riviera ($675, excluding airfare and accommodations), and Kay Murray discusses the effect of the Patriot Act on literary work. Jane Ciabattari discusses undergraduate creative writing programs at Knox College, Oberlin, and Sarah Lawrence. There's the usual fat section at the back with competition and workshop ads, and a handy submissions calendar for January and February.
Posted by jbahr at 10:09 AM | Comments (5)
January 03, 2005
In The Mail This Week
The current American Poetry Review has a picture of Antonin Artaud on
the cover, looking like your average homeless white male. Clayton Eshleman
has collaborated with Bernard Bador to translate some "undiscovered poems".
I don't know if that means Eshleman has little or no command of French or if,
like Merwin and Ashbery, he's conversational. As my ex-wife of many years
once told me, nobody should translate literature into anything
other than his/her native tongue (the target language). Other than that,
one would expect a poet-translator to have a reasonable command of the source
language (in this case French). I'm not sure that's the case, as I see
many translations by poets I'm not sure have source language skills (the worst
example being Bly). The two Artaud poems (I Spit on the Innate Christ
and To Be Christ Is Not To Be Jesus Christ) are long pieces with
relatively short lines and decidedly creative indentation. The style is
prosy, prescriptive, and moderately irreverent:
The story of the Eucharistic queer descended
from god's adulterated sperm made my heart
sweat enough,
my spirit shit,
so I want to mention it
for the part that concerns me
and which I would say is
the main one,
the rest being
only kitchen gossip
There are also lots of donkey farts, filthy yeasts, bed sores and buboes, and
strange language ("Shonauch aumal / ato not me / romé
/ sabu") that looks Latinate, but which I don't recognize. Eshleman also
provides a separate article, A Note on Antonin Artaud.
I am always amazed that, even with as much
poetry and PoBiz reading as I do, there are still many noted poets of whom I
have never heard. For example: Jean Valentine. I've heard of
her now, as she just won the National Book Award for Poetry, but otherwise, she
would be in the vast collection of poets with awards and fellowships and 8 books
whose name doesn't ring a bell. Ms. Valentine has 14 poems in APR
this time, generally 8 to 12 short lines each, some narrative verse, some
staccato, such as Mattresses on the floor:
Mattress on the floor
My protectors blue
Mary and little Buddha
two incense sticks
standing in the beach sand
in a yogurt cup
Alicia Ostriker provides a very interesting and erudite (and heavily
footnoted) article called Ecclesiastes as Witness: A Personal Essay, a
Book of the Bible that she calls "The most brilliantly pessimistic tract of all
time, a dense mix of prose and poetry, [containing] a treasure of quotations
rivaling Shakespeare." Ms. Ostriker contrasts the Torah and King James
versions with what is known from historical biblical study, and how translation
over time has changed the literal and literary sense of this book.
John Updike has two poems of the type one has
come to expect from the famous novelist -- a few good images, a decent ear for
music, generally domestic scenes (one poem is an elegy for Payne Stewart, the
pro golfer whose private jet crashed last year). Seven poems by Alan Dugan
(who died in 2003) occupy a couple of pages, in a style that conservative poets
call "lineated prose" (from Cop-Shooting: On a Newspaper Photograph: "She
just shot him, in the Daily News, / and who can blame her? He, / a sitting cop,
and she, a good, / big-hearted woman with a noble flaw.") I was befuddled
by one of Mary Leader's three poems, Husbandry:
"Honey? I think maybe we should move this coleus ... Honey?"
"What?"
"I said I think we might want to move this coleus."
"Okay."
"Because I know it said partial sun or partial shade or whatever but I'm just
not sure it likes it behind that rock."
"I said 'okay'"
That's the whole poem. Reginald Shepard, lately the editor of
The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, weighs in with one longish
lyrical narrative that isn't at all reminiscent of the work in the anthology:
"You write things down in your sleep / you can't remember when you wake up, /
casting off doubts like rowboats into low surf/ ..."
Other poets in this issue include: Martha Kinney ("I do not want the ham
I want to be heard / I want the woods. / I want the birds."), Ross Gay, who is a
basketball coach and Cave Canem fellow, Elaine Sexton (more lyrical narrative),
Margo Tamez (largely narrative), and Ira Sadoff on the back cover (pretty good
stuff: "The skull, when it's not whistling / like a kettle, is stocking up
/ on unshelved tremors: we can only unfold"). John Yau discusses
Bruce Conner in Poetry in Motion. Robert Pinsky provides five poems
and an explanation of one of them, Louie Louie, which has nothing to do
with the sixties' rock classic.
Posted by jbahr at 12:10 PM | Comments (3)