Whimsy Speaks

June 30, 2005

Poetry Amuses

Even if, in that stony lower-left part of your soul reserved for all things Quiet, you hate Poetry, you really have to go out and get this month's issue. It's the Humor Issue.  It's a break from the deadly serious Business of Poetry.  It's a self-mocking tribute.  It's Kenneth Koch's epigraph on Jonathan's blog.   It's Andrew Hudgins and Billy Collins and Albert Goldbarth and Bob Hicok and David Kirby and All The Usual Suspects, but making faces  It's Joel Brouwer's bio, stating "Joel Brouwer is the nom de plume of the maggot that ate Bertolt Brecht's spleen." It's Dean Young doing Ten Takes on fictional books, including his review of Scrotal Oboe, by Mary Leelou Louless (Yawn Younger Poet Series, $0.15/yard).  It's Michael Lewis on How To Make a Killing from Poetry:  A Six Point Plan of Attack.  For God's sake, it's Louise cracking a smile.   In short, it's hilarious. 

An entire year's subscription price is what Kay Ryan's article is worth.  Maybe two years.  Kay was engaged by the editors to document her first foray into that consummate tribal gathering, titled "I Go To AWP".  Some excerpts:

I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers conferences.  ... I don't like orchestral music.  I don't like team sports.  Make mine ... the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from;  you can't tell the difference when they're side by side.

I have a weak character. ... I love to love ouzo with ouzo lovers.  ... this weakness concerns me going to AWP.  If I'm exposed to the enthusiasm of others, I know that I am capable of betraying my deepest convictions, ... hostility to instruction, horror at groupthink.  How am I going to remember:  these people are THE SPAWN OF THE DEVIL?  They will seem like individuals, not deadly white threads of the great creative writing fungus.

What we have here before us is the exhilaration of BULK:  bulk bags, bulk panels, bulk poets.  Even though this is Canada, we are having an American experience.  Attendees who use American institutions such as Costco won't have a problem.  They already know how to handle things like AWP.  They already know about proportion.

The Bookfair:  There are venerable names and new ones. ...  Some of these journals I've had dealings with for decades.  Slow dealings ...[getting] my poems back (usually all of them) they would look new to me ... maybe like children getting off the bus from their first day of school.  ... It slowed me down.  If I'd gotten these poems back at email speed, say, they wouldn't have been away long enough for me to lose hope the way you need to.

My First Panel Experience:  The draped and elevated table of the panel setup looks like the Last Supper but with just water glasses.  The question to be addressed by our panel is, How does the creative writing teacher stay creative?  These creative writing teachers ... resort frequently to various forms of the word "mentor", both noun and verb. ... Nor are they confused by the verb "to workshop".  As easily and comfortably as I might say, "We started sanding the table", do these creative writing teachers say, "We started workshopping the poems."

Lunch Break:  I met up with Dorianne Laux at the sonnet panel.  In spite of my abstract contempt for everyone in attendance here, I am on the functional level delighted ... to see this person whom I know and like.  ... This is all so distressing.

Where are the Poet-Critics (9:00 - 10:15):  Herb Leibowitz, who edits Parnassus, was supposed to be on this panel. ... He edited an essay of mine for his magazine, and he was so fussy that it seemed like a grooming ritual from another hemisphere ...  Herb Leibowitz didn't show, but ... Linda Gregerson spoke of the importance of poet-critics in a precise and strenuous manner that I appreciated very much.  It makes you automatically feel that what they are saying matters.  ... We have to listen to so many dumb people, it's a pleasure to watch somebody's brain working like that.

More really funny stuff.  I hope you get an issue, even if you have to read it standing up in a bookstore, even if you have to steal it.

 

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June 28, 2005

Pleiades 25:2

I seldom enjoy a literary journal as much as I have the new Pleiades, which I received as a contributor (but that's not why I love this issue).   It's edited by Kevin Prufer, big and beautiful, filled with a magnificent mix of poetry and commentary.  The poets whose work is on display vary between much-published icons and first-acceptance newbies.  Although the poetry tends toward the narrative, the substrata are as varied as you would expect from the creations of G.C. Waldrep, Mông-Lan and Ethan Paquin.  In other words, this is subversive narrative, the kind of storytelling that rubs discordant notions together, in the hope of illuminating small truths. 

Of the many fine poems, here are some works that I particularly enjoyed:  Maria Hummel writes about God in three poems, this from Theory of Wrists: "History says Christ got nailed / low through the wrists, / but most art depicts his hands / bleeding.  The hand has a place / for a nail, a hollow of sky above blue / branches. ...".    Alan Michael Parker, Monday Sonnet:  "The nut-brown spider slung between // the Suburu antenna and / the myrtle tree // has left one wing of the fly / exposed, her breakfast buzzing still".    Robin Reagler, Dream Manifesto:  "One blink and then a thousand bats fly out of the notches. //  Night slips black sequins under their wings."  Victoria Chang, Man in the White Truck:  "... how orange the earth is there, // so extraordinarily fire.  And I wonder / why I am not on your list of the ten most stolen, // welding my dress into a prison.  They are wrong / who said you have no heart:  it is beating you to death."  Teresa Ballard, Sacrifice, Leaves, and Whippoorwills:  "Orange enters the green / crawls to the edge of a leaf / until it becomes fire, / a word falling / from the fingers of trees." G. C. Waldrep, Who Was Scheherazade:  "My job was to pick rocks.  From his field.  In lieu of rent.  But the rocks were all limestone and were crawling with tiny fossils of various crustaceans & cephalopods & wavy ferny things that lookked like plants to me but, on second thought, probably weren't, probably weren't plants at all but animals in the same way that a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable."  Lara Glenum,  In the Gynecological Museum: "How I wish the lacy valentine had not been flocked out in mongoose / pelt?  I'd never have come.  I rode in on the horse named // Exhibit A.  The doctor inoculated me against pink-eyed rabbits.  A / key turned in my petticoats.  'Your hair needs cutting', he said,"  Other fine work by Maria Hummel, Colette Inez, Charlie Smith, Don Pagis, Nadine Meyer, Ethan Paquin, Justin Courter, Alan Michael Parker, David Wagoner, Judith Taylor, John Gallagher, Jeanne Larsen, Sean Singer, David Dodd Lee, Brian Teare, Matthew Cooperman, Marilyn Hacker, Young Smith, Hadara Bar-Navad, Mông-Lan, Walter Bargen, and Jim Daniels.

This issue also gives me kind of joy only obtainable by reading review after article after review with which one agrees.  A case in point is Mark Halliday's two contributions.  (long parenthetical remark:  I first ran across Mark Halliday in a review of a book by Wayne Dodd, where I found Halliday making a good deal of sense with a great deal of wit:  "Stevens has such charisma he can lure a reader into agreeing that the most urgent questions of our lives are ontological (what is real?)–or epistemological (how can we know?), since ontology always morphs into epistemology as soon as it is under stress. When I step back from reading Stevens, it’s as if I shake off a drug and remember that actually in my life the urgent puzzles bypass the ontological and hover in the moral and the psychological: Who am I, as a distinct individual, trying to be? Why? What is the right life for me? What do I owe to other people? What should I do with my memories?" ).  Halliday's first piece is a pseudo-biographical send-up of the post-avant called Vexing Praxis/Hocus Nexus, in which he bemoans the usurpation of poetry's edge by Smankeyism in the struggle of RRR's (real resistant radicality) EDH (experimentalist defamiliarizing hyperfracture) against CGGHIC (corporate global glutinous Halliburton imperialist capitalism).  Halliday's second contribution is a review of Brian Henry's On James Tate, in which Halliday quite reasonably asks why none of Tate's critical detractors (e.g., Cal Bedient, Mark Jarman, Adam Kirsch) were included among the nine essays and 13 reviews — essays and reviews with a good deal of "verbosely vacuous praise".  It's clear that Halliday stands with me on the matter of Tate:  "Imagine a high school English class in eternity.  ... Who is the boy in the back row, constantly fidgeting and wise-cracking?  It's Jim Tate.  He is burning the textbook with a cigarette lighter.  Next to him sits John Ashbery, writing a pantoum in French.  Tate talks without raising his hand, and makes the class giggle.  Ashbery raises his hand and says things that sound very smart, but no one understands him.  Both boys are terrible bored, but Ashbery is amused by his boredom, while Tate is enraged by it."  In reviewing the chapters by Lee Upton, Donald Revell, Charles Simic, Carolyne Wright, and others, Halliday occasionally sidles off to make his own amusing observations:  "Our capitalist America, I know it's confusing.  But is it terribly confusing?  Are we desperate and shattered and utterly bewildered?  It is convenient to say so, sometimes;  it justifies some easy gestures. ... You can get tenure at a university if you learn to say 'We are totally screwed' in complicated enough ways."  This is a splendid review, one that contrasts (and often contests) the views of many significant poets with Halliday's considerable study of Tate's oeuvre.

Michael Theune's Faux, Flawed, Failed:  Alice Fulton's Fuzzy Poetry and Poetics isn't nearly as vitriolic as the title suggests, though Theune does make his opinion obvious in the article:  "Fulton repeatedly makes clear that fractal poetry is the poetry of the between. ...At first, Fulton's theory sounds promising, ... [a] real departure from the organic theories of poetry, ... The trouble with Fulton's theory is that none of this happens.  Instead, Fulton makes a mess of things, bleeding her potentially interesting theory dry by turning it into at best a lightweight surrealism or at worst a trite descriptive tool."  Jerry Harp's review of Donald Justice's Collected Poems provides a great deal of interesting biographical detail alongside thoughtful and generally laudatory commentary.

Just when I thought the volume couldn't get any better, I encountered the last fifty pages of short book reviews, beginning with Cecily Iddings glowing take on Mary Jo Bang's ekphrastic wonderment, The Eye Like a Strange Balloon ("Scenes, ideas, narrative, and lyric are all provisional ... Apprehension is, at its best, an ecstasy that disrupts ordinary ways of seeing").  Janet Holmes reviews Raymond McDaniel's Murder (a violet): "Like a stem cell or the fragment of a fractal image, ... Murder (a violet) is constructed ... so that even the smallest fragment makes possible the reconstruction of the entirety".  Joan Houlihan gives a positive review for Christine Hume's Alaskaphrenia.  Sally Ball synopsizes Ilya Kaminsky's wonderful Dancing in Odessa.  Craig Morgan Teicher could be channeling my thoughts in his bemused and generally favorable review of Heidi Lynn Staples' Guess Can Gallop, a killerbee collection that includes "her air flowed / down past her ask, till he flipped the hare off // her shoulders and that drove him Why old? // till he wanted to no Everything ...".  Thirteen additional reviews of books by Rachel Hadas, Uwe Johnson, David Lehman, Ray Gonzalez, Kim Bridgford, Allyson Shaw, Celia Bland, Paul Fattaruso (Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf, what a great title), H.L. Hix, Maurice Manning, Hermine Meinhard, H. E. Francis, Anne Winters, Rachel Zucker, and Van Jordan.

Posted by jbahr at 08:09 AM | Comments (2)

June 27, 2005

More Roundup

BusinessWeek features The Best Product Design 2005 Award Winners, including the Jeep Hurricane (it can drive sideways), the JetBlue Self-Service Kiosk, the Alienware ALX water-cooled gaming computer, and the Design Directions Solemates (inexpensive sandals made from recycled paper).  The race is on among startup firms to set the standards for WiMax, wide-band wireless Internet access that will make cell-phone cinema and mobile blogging viable.  The Big 6 accounting firms are increasingly hiring offshore.  After a century of surviving the competition of other media, newspapers appear to be losing significant classified and ad revenue to Internet-based publications.  Wind and solar-based energy production will both rise 30% or more in 2005.  PartyGaming, a Gibraltar-based online gaming company whose sites are in violation of U.S. federal law, is set to go public in the largest British IPO in a decade.  The Renault Logan, priced at 5,000 Euros and targeted at the Eastern European market, has sparked significant demand in Western Europe, as well.  Cable operators will begin testing software that determines age, gender and product interests by analyzing the viewer's program mix, with the intention of using the information to hyper-target specific ads to specific customers. 

Time's cover article is China's New Revolution, detailing the rapid growth of the country's western cities, and the growing disparity between urban and rural incomes.  Jamaican Asafa Powell is now the fastest man alive, setting a new record for the 100-meter dash.  In a typically smart move, Southest Airlines hedged oil prices two years ago, and now pays $26 a barrel for jet fuel, compared to an industry average in the 40's.  The gap between high GDP growth rates of some countries (e.g., Spain, Ireland and Finland) and low growth rates of others (e.g., Germany, France, Netherlands) puts the Euro at risk as a common European currency.  There is growing controversy over the claims that Air Force Academy faculty and administration are participating in rampant evangelical Christian proselytizing, aided by the many conservative Christian groups in neighboring Colorado Springs.  Indie retailers are taking Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill off their shelves to protest her exclusive deal with Starbuck's for the acoustic version of the album.

Poets & Writer's features James Frey on the cover, and an article by Daniel Nester concerning his drug rehab and publication of best-selling A Million Little Pieces.  The NEA and the Poetry Foundation (think, Poetry magazine) are funding the National Poetry Recitation Contests to promote poetry in high schools.  The Contester discusses the recent outing of Alan Cordle and contributions of foetry.com, as well as the CLMP's new code of ethics.  In Small Press Points, Wings Press, who has published Naomi Shihab Nye, Donald Hall and Virgil Suarez, gets a mention.  Literary MagNet notes the new hip look for Poetry and Southern Review, while plugging a number of small journals (Swivel, Ninth Letter, 6x6, Black Clock).  The coming publication of A Wild Perfection:  The Selected Letters of James Wright, motivates an article on his life and times.  Anselm Berrigan, author with his mother Alice Notley and brother Edmund of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, remembers Robert Creeley.  W. S. Merwin is looking pretty good as he approaches 80, in an article discussing his work over the past 50 years.  Two articles on fiction writers and a synopsis of debut fiction writers that I didn't read.  David Calef discusses Myths We Live By, But Shouldn't (e.g., Less is more, and Write about what you know).  45 pages of classifieds listing grants & awards, conferences & residencies, and job possibilities.

For more roundup-in-comic-form, see Jim Behrle's blog, which mentions a Parisian Hermes store that refused entry to Oprah, prompting her to call the firm's president, and to vow never to return.

 

Posted by jbahr at 06:27 AM | Comments (0)

June 26, 2005

Sunday Roundup

From Queue, a publication of the Association of Computing Machinery:  the latest thing is ransomware, a virus that encrypts your files and then tells you where to wire funds, at which point they will decrypt your files back to their originals.

The current issue of APR sports the smiling face of Brenda Hillman.  I first met Ms. Hillman at the Napa Valley Writer's Conference last summer, and at her first reading, I was struck immediately with the notion that she was the grown-up version of the little red-haired girl that Charlie Brown was always fawning over.  Hillman was a very popular and gregarious instructor, always surrounded by her students during meals, and very approachable to the rest of us.  She reads with a great deal of energy and good humor, in a voice that is rather tremulous and urgent.  The 13 poems she contributes in this issue are mainly short, spread-out pieces, excepting String Theory Sutra, which is a long double-column poem in which each side of the page plays against the other (from Dust Acolytes:  "Who   has   come?   What ironfoot   iliad / girl aproaches   the PS's,   her weathers /  locked   in grey flame?   A steep / scent   sends   energy back   through the / fate myth ...").  Carol Muske-Dukes with three poems (from Camilla:  "My father first threw me across water, / an infant, pinned to a javelin.  In the warrior / dream of the risen body, heaven is a precinct").  Liz Rosenberg with three poems (from Among the Dead: "They are swelling / by leaps and bounds, the ranks of the dead — / Peter the tailor, and Mr. Papastrat our kindly landlord / who grew a garden of Eden from an old coffee tin,").  Ira Sadoff discusses The Spiritualization of American Poetry, noting how often recently he has noticed a wide variety of poets motivating their work with religious or spiritual themes (Jorie Graham, Cal Bedient, Olena K. Davis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Li-Young Lee, Franz Wright, ...), and then moves on to discuss poetic spirituality in 20th century work, and (oddly) the anti-Semitism of  Eliot.  Emily Fragos with two poems (from Lazarus, Come Out: "The sisters are wailing, quite beside themselves with something new. / The pale Christ, lanky as a long-distance runner, seems half-amazed / at what he has done. ...").  A translation of Kazuko Shiraishi's Travel Is a Dream You Do Not Come Out Of.  Three poems by Stephen Dobyns in that trademark earthy, engaging, slightly creepy voice (from Learning to Cope:  "Adrift on his back in the tub, the boy detects / the tip of his pre-pubescent prick as it pokes up / above the surface of the water not unlike / the conning tower of U-boat Number 88 / during its mad flight for Buenos Aires after // the German defeat.  he too, the boy thinks").  Terri Witek discusses her writing venue and habits in Writing Light.  A Selection of Letters includes 12 letters from James Wright to publishers and poets (James Dickey, Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Robert Bly), including travelogue entries, entreaties, apologies, humor, and discussions of craft.  Selections from The Triumph of Agriculture by Nikolai Zabolotsky, translated from Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky.  In the Friends of APR column, Jeffery Bahr shows up between John Ashbery and David C. Baldus.  Tony Hoagland with Summer:  "God moves mysterious thunderheads over the towns and office buildings, / cracks them open like raw eggs.  The north has critical humidity. / The south plucks at its sweaty clothes.  The weatherman says it's August").  Two poems by Stephen Dunn (from In the Open Field: That man in the field staring at the sky / without the excuse of a dog / or a rifle — there must be a reason / why I've put him there.").  Five poems by Raymond Keen (from Ixion:  "Someone is always dying of cancer, Someone is always reading The New York Times / After your mother died, / We found love letters in the attic.").  Four poems by Anatoly Naiman (from Crater:  "In December nineteen ninety-nine / we stood on the rim of a snow-white / crater.  Who's the 'we' in mind? / From Peter a bunch of guys / (two or three, maybe five) / surrounding a hole in the haze.")  Mark Rudman discusses D. H. Lawrence.  Creeley's The Rain on the back cover:  " All night the sound had / come back again, / and again falls / this quiet, persistent rain. // What am I to do with myself / that must be remembered / insisted upon / so often? ...").

I was reading book reviews in Rain Taxi, and came across a review of Kasey Mohammad's Deer Head Nation by Aaron Kunin, which prompted me to take it down from the shelf and browse.  I was struck again by how different are the voices of some poet's work, vis a vis their prose and discussion (e.g., Kasey's amusing flarf vs. his articulate and thoughtful commentary).  Other poets strike me as discordant in their various modes of expression (Olena K. Davis, Mary Jo Bang, Ron Silliman, Jordan Davis, John Poch), as if they change into someone new upon picking up a poetry pen.  Other poets, particularly those from Ron's SOQ, tend to write poetry in concert with their musings in articles, interviews and blog entries (Bob Hicok, G.C. Waldrep, Victoria Chang).  I have been cruising through the works of Bertrand Russell and Richard Feynman recently, and was also struck by how these giants of science and mathematics can set aside their symbols and write important, interesting prose.  It occurs to me that in the hard sciences (as opposed to the social sciences) progress (and publication) is, in the main, a function of standing on the last chap's shoulders and reaching a little higher.  This phenomenon has a superficial similarity with literary scholarship.  Still, practicing scientist seldom care about the personal lives, or even motivating circumstances of their predecessors.  When I first started reading and writing seriously, I was struck by the degree to which much poetry is incestuous (filled with allusions of every literary kind, written in a kind of cross-bred voice).  Why are there so many more poems about Leda and The Swan than pole-vaulting or breast-feeding, I wondered?  I still do, but I'm getting over it.

By coincidence, Mike Snider points out an outstanding interview with Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher and mathematical historian, which includes the long-standing differences in the beliefs of Wittgenstein and Gödel.  An excerpt:

"So you can do your mathematics and stay out of the meta-discussion. This is probably a pretty common attitude among mathematicians. And in some sense it's a natural attitude. When you're working within the discipline you're doing what can be done within that discipline. The fish doesn't have to be an expert on the nature of water. That's true in other field, too, say in physics. Physicists who disagree radically on the interpretation of physical theories—some thinking they're descriptive of an objective physical reality, others thinking theories are just instruments for predictions—can collaborate qua physicists, can employ the same physical theories to get out scientific results, whether theoretical or applied. Your day-to-day work as a physicist isn't necessarily going to be changed one way or the other because of your meta-view of what physics is; and your day-to-day life as a mathematician isn't necessarily going to be changed by your meta-view of what mathematics is. You don't even have to have a meta-view. Gödel's theorems only matter if you're interested in those meta- questions and to be a mathematician you don't necessarily have to be interested in those questions."

Harper's lead article is The Great American Pork Barrel:  how "earmarks", last-minute insertions into bills for targeted funding to special interests, has grown to the point that the last omnibus bill contained 11,772 separate earmarks, totaling tens of billions of dollars.  These earmarks are almost never debated, and their authors are almost always anonymous, owing to the long-standing tradition of not publishing the minutes of committee negotiations.  The lobbyist industry, which now includes 240 former members of Congress, spent $3 billion last year changing minds (and, more often, just writing the legislation they wanted in the first place).    In Mighty White of You, Jack Hitt, with even-handedness and wit, presents the scientific arguments behind the theories that Europeans may have preceded the Asian ancestors of Native Americans, landing thousands of years prior to the migration across the Bering Strait.  In the rather depressing Doing Time, Lynn Freed discusses "my years in the creative-writing gulag", detailing the many frustrations and anxieties of a writer/instructor.  From Harper's Index:  A single jumbo jet, flying round-trip to Europe daily, produces 210,000 tons of carbon dioxide;  52% of U.S. traffic accidents are on two-lane roads;  145 planets outside our solar system have been discovered since 1995; seven of the nine Founding Fathers denied the divinity of Jesus;  more terrorist attacks occurred in India last year than Iraq;  the first non-Christian in the line of Presidential succession is number 16 on the list.

From Friday's WSJ:  China's 3d largest oil company ups its bid for Unocal, in competition with Chevron, vowing to keep all U.S. workers on the payroll, and to divest itself of U.S.-based oil properties (most of the Unocal's customers and oil-producing assets are in Asia).  Oil prices hit $60 a barrel, and the Dow lost 166 points.  Rumsfeld opposes an Iraq pullout schedule, and Senator Kennedy urged him to resign.  The Naples Winter Wine Festival broke the Napa Valley Wine Auction's charity-raising record, prompting the NVWA to "refocus" by tripling the attendance tickets and hiring Jay Leno as the M.C.  As the Republican-led house promises to cut its funding by $100 million, an ex-Republican Party chief is named head of the Public Broadcasting system, sparking concerns that the programming will lean farther right.  On July 4th, the Deep Impact space probe will fire a "washing machine-sized" impact module at the Tempel 1 comet to determine what the comet's interior looks like.  New young-adult books include stories with themes troublesome to some parents, from incest to binge drinking.  Thumbs down for the movie remake of Bewitched, starring Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman.  WSJ asks:  why don't we have more airport wine bars?

Posted by jbahr at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

June 23, 2005

It's Too Darn Hot

The new Melic Review is up with some dynamite poetry by Molly Arden, David Ayers, Laura Cronk, Richard Epstein, Patricia Lockwood, Albany Meath, Matthew Shindell, and Zach Schomburg.  Kudos to Claudia Grinnell for the design and artwork, and all the authors for solid work in this eclectic issue.  Don't miss Patricia's pose with the dead baby and cabernet.

I made it home last night from the Bay Area, to find that it was still 80 degrees at 9 PM, a very unusual weather scenario for the high desert, where the temperatures usually drop like a rock when the sun sets.  40 years after first hearing my parents play the soundtrack from Kiss Me, Kate, I thought "It's too darned hot".   I found within the mountain of mail a couple of announcements for poetry book contests, including the Margie Poetry Book Award, won by Christopher Burawa (judge, Beckian Fritz Goldberg) and the Cleveland State University First Book Competition, won by Troy Jollimore (judge, Billy Collins).  I noted that our blogmate Laurel Snyder was a finalist in the former (congratulations, Laurel). 

Among the rest of the mail was today's WSJ with a few interesting items:  Theater chains Loews and AMC are merging in hopes that Size Matters.  Theater attendance continues to drift downwards as box office revenue is stagnant (and only level because of large recent increases in ticket prices).  Consider that box office revenue this year is about $4 billion, while DVD sales are 5 times that.  General Mills is about to unleash a national ad campaign touting the health benefits of eating breakfast (in other words, Trix and Cocoa Puffs).  Mattel is auditioning for a Real Live Barbie to serve as the brand's spokesperson.  GE has announced that it will make its vice-chairman pay for the company jet for any personal trips that exceed $200,000 a year.  Krispy Kreme, once a darling of the stock market and now in the tank, ousted its top 6 executives.  Duke University told thousand of hospital patients that they run no risk of infection, even though the surgical tools used in their procedures were accidentally washed in hydraulic fluid.  Dems and Republicans are close to agreement on an estate tax bill that would reduce the levy to 15% on those with estates larger than $5 to $15 million (I'm so relieved).  Samsung has the refrigerator for you:  $3,500 and it comes with a detachable LCD screen that not only tells you the temperature of the vegetable crisper, it also serves as a radio, TV and memo pad.  From Inc.:  the legendary Malcolm Bricklin, the man who introduced his own brand, the Yugo, and the Subaru to the U.S., has the exclusive contract to market China's 7th largest auto manufacturer's cars in North America, including a roadster "of Lexus quality", styled by the same Italian design firm responsible for two Ferrari models, and all for $19,000.

BusinessWeek's cover is all about Old People who are smart and productive and you should keep them, American Industry (one interviewee said: "Once I got gray hair, people actually listened to me").   GM's sales suck on the coasts, so the top brass intends to run more Spanish ads, sweeten lease deals, and push the Pontiac and Saturn roadsters.  McDonald's continues its healthy theme by introducing a new line of McKids trike, bike, skates and skateboard products.  The real estate boom has been prolonged by innovative financing:  over 40% of all real estate loans in San Diego, Atlanta, San Francisco, Denver, Oakland, San Jose, Phoenix, and Seattle were interest-only last year.  Japanese anime is hot worldwide, and 3 of the top 5 top-grossing films in Japanese history were anime (the other two were Harry Potter and Titanic).  Societe Generale, with whom I banked when I lived in Belgium, runs this completely bizarre ad now with a businessman striding across a skyscraper-strewn landscape wearing bright red, oversized, and-your-little-dog-too, track shoes from hell.  The Downside to China's Buildup cautions that all this phenomenal increase in China's production (semiconductors, petrochemicals, steel, autos) will create a worldwide glut on the market if its own economy doesn't grow at a rate that it can buy all the stuff being produced.  The evangelicals love them:  stem-cells from umbilical cord blood (no glob of  64 completely undifferentiated cells, which might eventually be human,  had to die in the making of this story) might be able to replace embryonic stem-cells for a large number of treatments, and ViacCell is betting the $20 million they were funded by Amgen to prove it.  Dov Charney, the guy who runs American Apparel, has a mustache that wraps around the back of his head, appears in his own ads, and is at the top of a fast growing business built on "pro-labor policies, racy ads, and sexually-charged culture".  The hard-charging CEO of Marvel Enterprises, Avi Arad, was an Israeli soldier, a rental-car agent, and a toy designer.  Ten pages on how to diversify your portfolio with REITs, global investments, and commodity plays when all you really want to do is pay off your student loans. 

It's been 6 weeks since I even thought about writing a poem.  I'm wondering if it's a sabbatical or a cold-turkey sort of arrangement.  If "writers write", what's happening when you don't?  On my left, there are the luminaries mixing it up in literary theory/history/practice.  On my right, there are the really talented poets who apparently feel so much more than I about almost everything, and aren't ashamed to write about it.  Dead ahead is a phalanx of poets hip and glossy and weirdass and allover, slipping sly winks to one another in a kind of 21st century contextual ASL.  I think this particular malaise grew out of submitting to book contests.  I was perfectly happy getting accepted in a large variety of respectable journals.  Hmm.  Maybe I should go back to doing that.  But, I digress.

The new The Hat 6, edited by Jordan Davis and Chris Edgar, arrived with almost 200 pages of modern verse from many fine poets, many of whom are familiar to me:  Joshua Clover, Peter Gizzi, Nada Gordon, Henry Gould, Mark Halliday, David Lehman, Sarah Manguso, Jonathan Mayhew, Ray McDaniel, Kasey Mohammad, Daniel Nester, Michael Schiavo, Aaron Tieger, Tony Tost, Catherine Wagner, G.C. Waldrep, Alli Warren.  I have only run through it once, back to front, which permits me to enjoy the poets in reverse alphabetical order, with the exception of Amy Edgar (who contributes a one-page comic) and John Yohe, who appear to have been tacked on after Magdalena Zurawski.  It is impossible to characterize uniformly such a wide variety of work, but it's fair to say that there is a lot of what was called microfiction or prose poetry, before its it was so prevalent.  Also, many works of disjunctive, imagistic neosurrealism.  Also, a few pieces that sound like an overheard conversation, and a couple that sound like email responses to a question you didn't ask (from Gary Sullivan's Poem:  "I mean / I'm not trying to say / the penny caused the / puking and diarrhea / but that we probably want / to reexamine this whole / penny = good luck bull- / shit.").  I don't feel qualified to critique much of the interesting work in The Hat, but I can say that it is an entertaining read, with pieces juxtaposed to provide a sense traveling somewhere (which is all the more curious, as the poems' placement was entirely based upon the poets' last names).   I liked the weird inner logic of Ordinary Time by Justin Lacour ("You were always stating the obvious / crying "Skullduggery!" / when the monastery's yard sale / proves to be a red herring."), and the humorous work of Ange Mlinko (from Outwitting Boy Scouts: "It's woodsy. / Ain't edelweiss, ain't from Uruguay.  Didn't originate in Fiji. / Whence the papaya?  Whither the capybara?  / A spongiform innocence wonders.").  G.C. Waldrep's thoughtful passages and immaculate diction please me, as usual (from Ocean City, New Jersey, 1989:  "There are only two human figures in all of America / and I have already seen them.  Everything else is socks and recognizance, / flutter and mood.  A color wheel comes in handy.").  Roger Sedart's Picnic was interesting ("Tea is to saffron as kneeling on the rug / is to a history of kings on the road / erecting tents, roasting lambs, etc.").  Henry Gould's excerpt from Dove Street was a satisfying mix of musicality and careful word choice ("A faint gray pencil-sketch   my mother made   decades ago / floats in a blue corner:  two redhead brothers   like twins / almost an octave   Guillem & Giacomo   sit   parallel").  Jonathan Mayhew's Sunday Morning was all the more enjoyable for knowing a little how his mind works and of his respect for David Shapiro ("VI.  In Spicer's tragic Jew-baiting Calvinism, in Duncan's Theosophy, Ginsberg's sunflower vision, Basho's old pond, in Howe's Irish breakfast, ..., in the friendship of David and Jonathan, ¿qué salvación me espera?").  There are many other works of considerable merit, and I recommend you drop $12 here, where you can also read what Josh Corey, John Latta, Gary Norris and Ron Silliman have to say about this "ecstatic and meditative" issue.

Posted by jbahr at 07:26 AM | Comments (1)

June 19, 2005

How Now, Middle Brow?

Ange began a discussion of The MiddleBrow in a post of perfectly balanced irony, to which John and Henry (whose blog has been resurrected from the RIP list) commented, and which spurred Jonathan to reflect on the phenomenon, which spawned additional commentary by Harry and  Amanda.   David Brooks (who is not without his detractors, here and here) thinks it was killed in the 60's.  Good examples of middlebrow shamelessly borrowed from these writers include:  Starbucks, Terri Gross, The New Yorker, and Masterpiece Theatre.  I'd like to think that there is actually low-middlebrow and hi-middlebrow, and that I tend to fit in the latter category.  I know I'm just not sufficiently well-informed about The Arts to rate much higher than that.  Which is to say, I really enjoyed the Phantom of Opera CD (London cast), and I just know that Andrew Lloyd Webber barely makes it into low-middlebrow (and almost misses that on the basis of Cats).  I also love my heavy copper-bottomed Martha Stewart skillet that I got at K-Mart.  I like Impressionists, but then everybody likes Impressionists.  Just go to any museum and count the number of people standing in front of a Monet, Renoir, or Cézanne.  Does that make their work middlebrow?  Pynchon used to be hip, but maybe he's high-middlebrow now.  Maybe DeLillo, too.   Jazz may be eclectic, but Diana Krall is probably middlebrow, right?  Don't even ask about Norah Jones.  Most lyrical narrative poetry nowadays seems browless, that is, without pretension, but maybe within our frame, Merwin, Simic, and Glück are middlebrow.  You think?

Well, just found out that I have to fly back to the Undisclosed Site via SFO.  Talk to you later this week.

Posted by jbahr at 12:55 PM | Comments (1)

June 18, 2005

Wisconsin Weekend

The Huntsville airport is the ultimate in astronauts-and-spaceship motif, considering how small it is (12 gates), but very modern and with the friendliest TSA personnel I've ever run into.  For some reason, the Delta auto-checkin kiosk decided I was better off changing my Minneapolis flight to one that involved hopping through Cincinnati, and who am I to complain?  It shaved another two hours off my trip, which almost makes up for the horrendous journey getting there.  The first hop was uneventful, and I landed at the Cincinnati airport, one which seems ridiculously large for a city that size.  They did, however, have a Peet's Coffee Store, which was a delightful surprise.  I almost missed boarding the next flight, waiting 20 minutes in a 5-person line to get a Quizno Toasted Tuna Sub at the slowest fast-food place I have ever visited in my entire life.  At some point, when the nice young lady was carefully arranging the tomato slices with a precision usually reserved for Lexus engine rebuilds, I lost it and told her that I didn't need the sandwich run through the broiler, the complimentary pickle, or the laser-like sub bisection, I just needed the damned sandwich, tossed $10 on the counter and ran to the gate.  I know, I'm getting irascible in my dotage.  I then flew over a couple of Great Lakes, landed at MSP, grabbed a Hertz, and drove to Eau Claire. 

OK, that seems like a normal blog entry:  anecdotes and random bitching.  Hah, you thought I was done, but I've decided to join Reb in taking a courageous stand in the Blogger's Right to Post Trivial Personal Information.  I know that there are poets who object to this, and who never discuss their personal life.  Of course, these are often the same people who write poems admitting to fantasies about sex with under-aged Komodo dragons.  Here's a quick list of things you may not know about me:

1.  I was once a partner in a firm whose 4 principals had been married a cumulative total of 14 times.

2.  I once played contract bridge in ACBL clubs 4 times a week and had enough placings to earn 15 Red Masterpoints, though I haven't played bridge now in 30 years.

3.  The last literature class I had was in high school.

4.  I built treehouses as a kid, and played football and basketball in high school.  I worked construction and humped furniture as a teenager.  I pole-vaulted in high school and college, and have skiied for 15 years.  I've never broken as much as a finger.

5.  My father's side of the family comes from Minnesota, but they all moved to California in the 30's, including my great-uncle who died in a highway accident driving here in his Huppmobile.

6.  Two years before winning a National Merit Scholarship, my mother was hiding my report cards so my father wouldn't blow up at my mediocre grades.

7.  I am among the 25% of humanity who sneezes when looking at the sun, an affliction called "photic sneeze reflex", a hereditary trait, whose actual workings are unknown, though it is thought that pupillary light and sneeze reflects may take similar nerve paths.

8.  On a dare, I once did shots of sake laced with the scales of the (extremely toxic) pufferfish.  My lips were numb for 12 hours.

9.  Two LAPD officers once visited me to discuss an offer of money I had unwittingly made to a hit man to murder a friend's wife, thinking that I was helping him with his legal expenses (the hit man was an undercover agent).

10.  The majority of the atoms in my body, most of them heavier than helium, were formed by the explosion of a supernova.

Slim pickings on the happenings front, as most of my news has come from the USA Today that I found in front of my motel room door.  Time has a lead article on Gitmo, including excerpts from a inside-the-wire military report on the interrogation of Detainee 063, the purported "20th hijacker".  DNC Chair Howard Dean's inflammatory excesses (e.g., the G.O.P is "pretty much a white, Christian party") continues to cause mainstream Dems to avoid him like the plague, but he's raising a million dollars a week anyway (the Republicans are raising twice that, however).  Coach travel gets worse, but major airlines are competing for first and business-class customers with in-flight gifts, including Savile Row travel bags and Prada fragrance kits.  Joe Klein is annoyed with Bush's annoying insistence on refusing to talk straight about Iraq.  Nuclear plants are understaffed with enough security to deflect 9/11-size terrorist forces.  Spanish teen idol Rafael Nadal, who hails from Majorca, stormed the French Open in his continuing dominance of men's tennis.  The hottest fashions on the runway are from Chloé.  Guess who is Head Counselor at Camp Mariah for underprivileged city kids? 

MIT Technology Review reports that Intel may have a new silicon laser process that could add decades to Moore's Law (which states that processing power doubles every 24 months).  Ancient texts recorded on everything from clay to papyrus have survived thousands of years, but modern media has a lifetime that measures in the decades, spurring the National Archives and Records Administration to figure out how to transcribe and preserve the trillions of bytes of information for which they are responsible.  British researchers have reported that "pushy information", such as Blackberry-powered email, is so disruptive that it effectively reduces an employee's IQ by 10%.  California universities and public institutions receive almost $200 million yearly in patent and licensing revenue from work done there.  Forensic technology has advanced to the state that, God forbid, should a terrorist explode a nuclear device somewhere, scientists could almost certainly pinpoint the facility that it came from.  Genetic researchers are studying the population of a small Micronesian island, almost all of whose inhabitants are obese.  Their bishops over the years have permitted small amounts of technology in daily life, and the Amish have remained efficient  (fiberglass buggies, air-powered compound miter saws) while keeping to their principles.  Jonas Salk may be associated with the defeat of polio, but it was Albert Sabin's oral vaccine that actually did the job.  Medical researchers report, again, that the placebo effect is real, even placebo pain drugs, even placebo surgery.

Posted by jbahr at 04:38 PM | Comments (1)

June 15, 2005

United We Stand

Well, that was a long day.  I left DIA this morning for Huntsville, AL to attend a meeting tomorrow, which is, of course, now today.  Denver is one of United's hubs, so I thought that was the easiest way to get there, with a single stop in Charlotte, where, alas, I would be a little late for the Carborro Poetry Festival.  My flight out was both overbooked and late, so they booked me on a flight to Chicago, which was also late.  After sitting on the ground for an hour, we finally took off and one tour through the White Stripes CD again and a chicken wrap later, I arrived in O'Hare just in time to have missed my connection to Charlotte, but there was another flight in an hour.  That flight was overbooked, too, so they put me on a flight to Birmingham "which is only 70 miles from Huntsville".  I seem to have driven 90 miles in my Hertz rental, however, stopping to call Junie with an update at a ZStop convenience store, where I got a Coke to accompany the radio pleasures on the drive.  My cell phone charger didn't work in this particular Buick, so I was unable to call in to Rick and Bubba's show and try for the Giant Bag of Stuff that was up for grabs.  There was no NPR to be found, so I listened to a station that replayed audio tracks from Seinfeld, and then King of the Hill.  Without a cell phone, I had to resort to cruising Downtown Huntsville until I found first Williams Street, and then my motel, right next to the Von Braun Conference Center or something.  It was after midnight on a weekday, but there was still a lobby filled with people drinking and smoking and chatting.  Must be a friendly town.  More tomorrow after a little sleep.

Posted by jbahr at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2005

Over, In, and Out

I made it home last night about midnight, after two hours on a UAL flight where they bumped me inexplicably (well, not so mysterious, really, but Junie isn't talking) into Business Class.  I've decided one should not try to drink free Chardonnay, read Oryx and Crake, and listen to Get Behind Me, Satan all at the same time.  In the two windows where electronic devices are forbidden, I read The Economist, a mag that Frank loves and which is similar to Business Week, only English-er.  Tomorrow morning, I'm flying to Huntsville, Alabama for a meeting.  Most of what I know about Huntsville comes from making airplane and motel rez's, and staring at the birds-eye view that mapquest provides to see how far my Hertz rental will be taking me from the airport to the motel to the client site.  The only other thing that I know about Huntsville is that the U.S. Government built a German village there in 1945 to accommodate Werner Von Braun and the other rocket scientists that we scooped up just ahead of the Russians.  It's no wonder that the largest splotch on mapquest is the Redstone Arsenal.

Speaking of The Economist, the lead article is on eBay, the quintessential dot.com company, now 10 years old.  The founder, Pierre Omidyar, who gave the running of the company to the extremely competent Meg Whitman, now lives in California and France, and is worth $10 billion.   eBay's stock has taken a hit recently when analysts noticed that it was only growing at 30% per year, but its many smart moves (acquisition of PayPal, establishing a global presence) still makes it the .com stock to watch.  Bolivia has "descended into chaos" as thousand of protesters demand the nationalization of the country's oil and gas (a decidedly un-globalist atttitude).  Brazil's quasi-socialists mercurial president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (whom his buds call "Lula"), conceded to a probe of his government allies, who seem to be taking or making payoffs.  That Suddenly Nice and Frail Old Man, Augusto Pinochet, having avoided charges of institutional murder for decades, faces charges of tax evasion on $17 million in money that somehow got into his foreign accounts.  India and Pakistan took a break from threatening to obliterate each other by nuclear means, and agreed to work on a pipeline that would bring natural gas from Iran to South Asia.  Syria's leader-who-coincidently-was-son-of-the-last-brutal-dictator Bashar Assad "appeared to resist pressure for real reform".   Google overtook Time Warner as the world's most valuable media company.  "Footwear imports" from China rose 681% in the first four months of 2004.  Conservatives deride judges who cite foreign precedents, but Supreme Court justices occasionally cite them, a practice that was common in the first century of our country's history.  Democrats are finding that "just saying no" to everything the Bush Administration proposes has gained them a lot of political advantage. In the Bizarro World which is the U.S. Supreme Court, all the liberals and moderates struck down states's rights in matters of medical marijuana.  North Korea, in what has been called "a lull in insult diplomacy", has agreed to think about returning to talks about its nuclear future, whatever that means.  Turnout in the next election of Iran's presidency is expected to be low, as disgruntled urbanites boycott to express dissatisfaction with ruling mullahs who have the constitutional rights to overrule, well, just about everything.  Many Eastern European current and wannabe members of the EU are cheering for the comatose European Constitution, hoping that the EU throws a little more money their way.  Many Italians want to return to the lire, which by all accounts, would be a frigging financial disaster.  Product placement is growing hugely in video games.  MIT scientists have proposed that the US launch a fleet of barges with giant ex-cold war bomber jet engines, to sail to the Caribbean and blast hot air upwards, thus attenuating hurricanes.  Dutch engineers are having success building bridges inexpensively and quickly out of plastics.  Software which models human systems tries to predict side effects of new drugs.  Modern art, including many of works in MOMA and The Getty is slowly deteriorating.  The UK is increasingly turning to highway tolls and urban entry fees to reduce traffic.  Though South Korea has made extraordinary strides in technology recently, the country's inept economic policies have led to stagnant growth.  Everybody seems to be writing a book about how Important China is, or how Dangerous, or how its Place in the World is Inevitable (coincidentally, I read that China and India accounted for 70% of the world's GDP 800 years ago).  One of the most gifted surgeons in the world died last month.  He was Hamilton Naki, a black man in apartheid South Africa, and he was the only person that Christiaan Barnard trusted to remove the heart from a donor, to be transplanted in another person.

Posted by jbahr at 09:01 PM | Comments (1)

June 12, 2005

From An Undisclosed Site

I know it's been Wednesday since I checked in, but I'm at a Secure Site in the Bay Area, working on the hush-hush project I mentioned earlier.  You know, I-could-tell-you-but-then-I'd-have-to-kill-you.  The bring-up venue is Casa Paulsen, overlooking a valley whose details are hopefully unrecognizable.  I brought Ilya's Dancing in Odessa, and Victoria's Circle, and have so far barely managed to read a Motorola DSP manual three times.  My normal work schedule is 4 AM to 6 PM, with a few breaks for this and that (a donut run in the morning, a quick trip for a USB cable).  At 6 PM, we pretty much quit for the day and break out the Bicyclette Chardonnay, a little gem imported by Gallo.  Every time I take a run down the hill, I manage to just avoid flattening the ground squirrels who feel a need to run across the road exactly as I'm at the bend.  I have also just missed a doe and her 5 fawns, 4 or 5 barn cats, and a dozen jackrabbits.  The sky is filled with megavultures (honestly, 6 fee wing spans, if they're an inch).  I haven't seen any coyotes, nor the rare cougar, but I'm told they're up here, too.  That's a lot of animals for a semi-rural spot 10 minutes from a major Silicon Valley freeway, at least for a guy from Colorado, where the animal life tends to be wildest on University Hill in Boulder. 

I'll try to catch you up on Global Events, but all of the news is at least 5 days old.  Wired's cover is all about Spielberg and War of the Worlds, a movie that more than one critic hopes is the savior of a dull summer movie season, and which took a grand total of 72 days to shoot.  More dumb Microsoft Office Dinosaur-Head ads.  An announcement of the new fuel-efficient H3 (I can just imagine), which they dub the Nano-Hummer.  A recent study shows that the greatest number of 9/11 survivors were those that Questioned Authority and just got the hell of out one Twin Tower or the other.  So much for Smiley and The Circus:  Britain's spooks are soon to be centralized in a huge donut-shaped edgeless Pentagon in Cheltenham.  Robert Rodriguez promised his son a good story, and delivered in this summer's low-budget film Sharkboy and Lavagirl, and his son even gets to star.  The Perfect Child's complete formation costs approximately $800,000 if you include baby yoga, Chinese lessons, a decade of music instruction, orthodontia, private academies (natch), and prep classes.   And that doesn't include the $200K in college expenses.  The newest entry to the open source movement is T-shirts at Threadless.com, a company that will take your JPEG upload and make a shirt out of it.  A Sutter, California high-school faces massive parent resistance to their plan of tagging all students with RFID monitors (they said it would help attendance-taking).  The newest thing in commuter aviation is the M400 Skycar, a VTOL craft that can do 350 MHP and is powered by alcohol.  Peter Lynds, a college dropout from New Zealand, is getting serious attention from the academic community regarding his premise that time is basically an illusion.  If New York wins the bid for the 2012 Olympics, the total price tag for the Olympic Village, stadia, Broadcast Center, communications infrastructure and security will exceed $10 billion.  Contenders include the front runner Paris with expected outlays of $9 billion, London ($6.3 billion), Moscow ($11.8 billion), and Madrid ($3.6 billion).  Dreamworks has only had one hit title (Shrek), but they're making more animated films faster than Pixar, with a larger gross profit. 

Time's cover exclaims "Lose That Spare Tire", which seem hopelessly retro.  Ten Questions for Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident (as many of the Occupied Territories inhabitants appear to be) who quit Sharon's Cabinet over the pullout in the Gaza Strip (quote:  "I have very serious criticsms of Amnesty [International]".)  Rumors abound that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, lead of "al-Qaida in Iraq" (could you, in your worst moments, think up a more suck-up name?) may be injured or dead.  There are well-informed fears that this fire season could be the worst in a decade, and many trained firefighters are National Guardsmen in Iraq.  Gay and lesbian tourism accounted for 10% of the $88 billion Americans spent last year abroad.  Nobody knows who killed the vastly popular Lebanese leader, Rafiq Hariri, but his death has managed to galvanize the country as his politicking never did.  Jimmy Wales invented Wikipedia, the People's Encyclopedia, a work significantly larger than the Britannica, and all done through volunteer work.  An Amish man takes 18,425 steps a day on average, compared to a national average of 5,000.  Good review for Cinderella Man, Ron Howard's film version of James J. Braddock, the nobody who famously beat boxing great Max Baer.  Tom Cruise has now been a star longer than Humphrey Bogart.

Spin, whose cover is adorned with a pensive shot of My Chemical Romance, got paid by Microsoft for the same Start Something Sonic ad that The Evil Empire ran in Wired.  Lollapalooza is back after canceling last summer with $35 tickets, Dashboard Confessional, Pixies, and Weezer.  The Game explains his tats.  The Backstreet Boys play to small groups of screaming Manhattan fans.  Norwegian black metallists are Fjord Tough, responsible for exploits including church-burning, inter-band stabbings, cranium-fracture by sheep head, prison escape, and particularly messy suicide-by-shotgun.  Other Norwegians include hit pop singer Annie (Lilia Berge Strand) who is, well, a doll.  Why the strange Irish Cillian Murphy might make a good Batman.  Spin turns 20 next month (imagine).  Chuck Klosterman reminds us that though Michael Jackson appears to be strange, a lot of this weirdness is something we just blame him for, and after all, his surname is pretty normal.  Liam and Noel Gallagher note that, after 30, "the hangovers take a little bit longer to shift".  Sleater-Kinney insist that their music is not girly, cheery or happy (oh, darn).  Some good surfing shots from Costa Rica.  Excellent pics from the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin.  Bono with That Look every 3rd page.  Real-Life Rock Tales where Kelly Osbourne Sticks It To A Pup (a real yawn, shame on you, Spin).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Much to my surprise ...


You are John Ashbery. People love your work but have no idea why, really. You are respected by all kinds of scholars and poets. Even artists like you.

Which Famous Modern American Poet Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Posted by jbahr at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2005

Effing Hump Day

Victoria Chang's Circle, Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa, and the third issue of effing magazine all arrived today.  I'll be reading Victoria ( I just SO want to call her Vicky) and Ilya's (I actually have another Ilya working for me out of Perm, Russia) books on the plane.  Scott Pierce's  effing magazine cover is goldfish on green, with a scribbly back cover that lists Ken Rumble, Jim Berhle, Hoa Nguyen, Denise Szymczak, kari edwards, Alli Warren,  Tony Tost, Marcus Slease, Ann Marie Eldon and Juliana Spahr, and that's only the poet I recognize (apologies to the rest of you).  My first impression?  When you don't have the tools, experience or context to differentiate, there's a sameness that sets in, as it might with Sinatra, Elvis Costello, or No Doubt.  This accounts, of course, for what conventionalist would say is Ron Silliman's tin ear when it comes to sorting out the large range of poetry in the SOQ.  At some point, you fall in love with all of it, and the distinctions become clear.  In the meantime, Jim's lines from Active Driveway, Always In Use:

blueberry queen wanted
to be left with prowler breath
my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
but what *is* flesh

sounds remarkably like Brad Flis's Phono-Apples:

Forget this apricot
I whispered to the childborn
optica in a frenzy.
device of no reason

but, of course, the similarity is in the mind of the reader.  And if the reader isn't listening hard enough, or taking in the overriding metaphor, or even reading to the end of the piece when All Things Are Resolved?  effing magazine's poetry is, by the way, interrupted by disturbing and quite perfect collages of wrought faces and dead-eyed dolls and face-laden sofas and clowns with head springs.  There's a wonderful interview with Juliana Spahr that violates every interviewer dictate.  Scott asks about the relationship between lyric and lang Po, and Juliana says:  "I think their relationship is not going so well although they seemed to have stopped yelling at each other.  But I don't think they'll be dating much soon".  And I love the poet's bios.  This is not the last four pages of the Kenyon Review.  Poets admit to lives which involve changing copier toner, looking for an adequate MFA, surviving earthquakes, evolving from their identical twin.  Their credits ramble through Skanky Possum, Mudlark, Taint, Antennae, Shampoo, Typo.  The crowd includes a Whitman winner, some somebodies, and a lot of Who's Thats.  I liked Ann Marie's Skin Sonnet ("watch mary-faced (t)his dripjewel crosses east / spit furls androgynously (kneads to kneel)"), but I would have like to have seen one of her Morse Code poems.  I liked Hoa Nguyen's vignettes ("I'm sorry for you      sad marigolds rain pummeled / We have a "perfect" sky now    as cardinals / and mockingbirds become the birds of suburbs").   Alli Warren's poems made me laugh in a few places.  Farid Matuk's long Immigrants was very engaging: ("We were dusty, we were lovely, we were turned around.  /  Believe we learned to lie about the things left in our pockets.").  Yeah, very nice work.  You should go order one.

I can't keep up with Time.  I think it comes twice a week now, and this week's cover is Why We're Going Gaga Over Real Estate (disillusionment with stocks, easy credit, everybody's doing it).  The hottest markets have the following gains over the past 5 years:  DC:  108%, California: 103%, Rhode Island: 98%, Nevada: 85%, Hawaii: 83%, Florida: 81%, Maryland: 78%, New Jersey: 77%, New Hampshire: 73%, Massachusetts: 72%).  Prices have lagged in Utah, Indiana, Nebraska, Mississipi, and Tennesee (no wonder the Red states are pissed at us).  Danica Patrick, the first woman to every hold the lead in the Indy 500, answers 10 Questions.  Porter Goss, head of the CIA, has been replaced on all important intelligence meetings by new Intelligence SuperChief John Negroponte.  Anurag Kashyap, 13 years old and hailing from Poway, CA, won the 2005 National Spelling Bee with A-p-p-o-g-g-i-a-t-u-r-a.  The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of former Big 5 accounting firm, Arthur Andersen.  You can be a billionaire for a week by timesharing Ferraris ($15,000 for 7 weeks a year), megayachts ($500,000 for a week), and vineyards ($135,000 lets you plant, harvest and crush your plot at Napa Valley Reserve).  Jonathan Edwards is hosting major liberal bloggers in his runup to the 2008 Presidential campaign.  The highest price for a 20th century US stamp, the "inverted Jenny" (Scott C3a, of which I've seen a few in my 2 years as a rare stamp dealer), was achieved last week at auction for $525,000. A long article on Mark Felt, AKA Deep Throat:  why he outed himself and how much influence, ultimately, he had on Nixon's downfall.  The ruling mullahs have made an implicit deal with young Iranians, loosening the restrictions on lifestyle (fast cars and nightclubs abound) in return for unquestioned authority on national matters.  Starbucks, now a major music retailer, is testing "media bars" in its coffee joints, where customers can download and burn custom CDs.  The fast food giants are competing fiercely for your dollars, introducing  healthy, megafat, downsized, and/or exotic items on the menu weekly.  The New Thing is farms that raise heritage breeds for sale to upscale groceries and farmer's markets:  Katandin lambs, Highland beef cattle, Plymouth Rock hens, and red wattle pigs.  The Time critics don't care much for the new Batman movie, or Coldplay's abysmal lyrics.  Researchers have found that persons "newly and madly" in love have extremely high levels of dopamine, the neurotransmitter also involved in addiction.

~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm off to San Jose this morning.  I'll be some days at Casa Paulsen, working with Dave on the bring-up of new hardware (a consumer product, and all very hush-hush).  I think I'm all packed, but I don't worry about it anymore, I just buy stuff on the other end. Which accounts for all this underwear. Talk to you all later this week.

Posted by jbahr at 05:55 AM | Comments (1)

June 07, 2005

Tuesday News

Two days of the WSJ, a good source of news, if you can stomach their editorials:  Apple is expected to announce that it will use Intel processors in their Macintosh products, a stunning shift in strategy as the firm struggles to compete with Dell and other large Wintel providers.  Online brokerage house consolidation continues (like everything else?) as E*Trade makes an offer to merge with Ameritrade.  Iraqi prosecutors levied a dozen charges of crimes against humanity against Saddam Hussein (who is defended by a star-studded array of Arab attorneys, including Mohamar Khadafii's daughter).  Hezbollah swept all 24 seats in the Lebanon's southern district (what happens to the "blossoming democracy" theory when "terrorists" win free and fair elections?).  Upward mobility is eroding fast among entry-level employees of U.S. companies because of outsourcing and a decline in in-house training.  Times have never been worse for the Iowa Pork Queen, due to a shrinking budget, waning interest, and decline of the family farm.  The U.S. made a lot of friends upset this week, by listing Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the U.A.E as traffickers in humans.  In yet another display of protest in a former Soviet Central Asian republic, 10,000 protestors marched in Baku to demonstrate against the Aliev dynasty that controls Azerbaijan.  The jury is out on Michael Jackson.  J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, arguably the most successful literary phenomenon of all time with 250 million books sold worldwide and no end in sight, is personally managing the release of Book 6, completing bypassing the media by holding a single press conference to be attended by devotees.  The nation's snack food producers are creating more one-handed food (e.g., Yoplait's Go-Gurt and Campbell's Soup at Hand) for commuters.  The IOC is reportedly favoring Paris over NYC for the 2012 Summer Olympics.  Pope Benedict XVI restated his opposition to abortion, "artificial" birth control, and same-sex marriages.  Again.  The Russian military are responsible for as many as 10% of the kidnappings in Chechnya.  UPS has apparently lost a Citigroup Financial box of computer tapes with personal information on almost 4 million people.  Background checks which include FBI fingerprint processing is increasingly common for job applicants, as companies (and even charities) try to comply with dozens of security-related laws passed federally and locally.  Depending upon the definition, mental illness affects 25% of all Americans. 

The cover of BusinessWeek screams "Sinkhole:  How public pensions promises are draining state and city budgets".  States, counties, and municipalities are getting killed (metaphorically) from concessions made public employee unions in the Roaring 90's, which has led to large increases in property taxes, and cuts in schools and welfare programs.   Mortgage fraud is rapidly on the rise as applicants fib about their income to qualify for homes in rising housing markets.  Sales of digital cameras are expected to drop precipitously as other camera-equipped phones and PDA's hit the market.  Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins is betting that cell-phone based games will make his company, Digital Chocolate, a big success.  After a decade of hype, the biotech industry is beginning to show stunning success in combating cancer, lupus, obesity and nicotine addiction.  The Bush Administration has started applying serious diplomatic pressure to get China to revalue its currency against the dollar, as the trade deficit rapidly approaches $200 billion.  Web use is exploding in China, and U.S. firms (Yahoo, Google, MSN)  are doing deals with local companies to get into the action.  Labor groups are gearing up for a fight as the Bush Administration prepares to weaken the 1993 Family & Medical Leave Act.  There's a large and rapid exit from 401(k) programs, as wage-earners direct their savings (if any) to more flexible IRA programs and real estate investments.  Robert Brooks, founder of Hooters, founded Hooters Air two years ago (flying to 11 cities) and is planning a potato chip line, a men's magazine, and Las Vegas hotel and casino.  His rationale?  "This brand has legs".

The Dave Matthews Band pose in baseball gear on the cover of Rolling Stone.  They are one of the dozen hot acts hoping for a revival of the concert season, and like Green Day, are becoming increasingly political in their message.   System of a Down new Mezmerize stormed to the top of charts, selling almost half a million copies in its first week.  Legendary record producer, Phil Spector, showed up for his murder trial in a new afro.  Linkin Park, angry at a lack of marketing money, is suing to get out of their Warner Music Group contract.  So far, the Stones, Paul McCartney, Springsteen and U2 have devised ways to get cheap tickets to their fans, and all the schemes have been foiled by well-organized, well-financed scalping firms (the best tickets for the Stones' tour now fetch $6,500).  The music industry has sued over 11,000 "copyright violators", often suing the parents of minors for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and settling for $2,000 to $3,000 to make a point.  Courtney Love has been asked by what's left of The Doors to front the band.  In the article, An Epidemic Failure, Geraldine Sealey makes that case that the Bush Administration is woefully behind on funding its promised $15 billion AIDS program, and is increasingly tying money to abstinence programs.  A long, detailed, poignant article on the work of Marla Ruzicka, a humanitarian aid worker in her own NGO, who died in a car bomb this April.  Steve Nash, point guard for the Phoenix Suns, is the League's first white MVP in a decade, and only the second one under 6'6" in the past 40 years.  RS gives the White Stripes' Get Behind Me Satan 4 and a half stars, and Rob Sheffield says "If you happen to be a rock band, and you don't happen to be one of the White Stripes, it so sucks to be you right now".

Posted by jbahr at 08:20 AM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2005

Monday, Monday

Tony has written a very thoughtful mini-essay on craft, in response to Jonathan's comments on The Ten Questions.  I love Tony's idea of the New Sincerity.  Tony has joined with Joshua Edwards and Nick Twemlow to produce another outstanding issue of The Canary.  I just spend the better part of two hours reading through it on the back deck with the sun going down beneath the Rockies.  It starts off, as usual, with poetry — no editorials, no excuses, no synopses.  The work is uniformly good, in some cases outstanding, edgy without a single instance of being gratuitously weird.  Irreverent, political, compressed, quasi-formal, ironic narrative, even concrete (from Joseph Campana).  It seems like a work of broad consensus, demonstrating a wide variety of intelligence, negotiated among three nicely differing editors.  Here are a few for which I made notes in the margin:   Fanny Howe's Tonight or Never demonstrates her ability to turn a phrase and stop us in our tracks, simultaneously;  Lisa Jarnot has an interesting piece (Pope's Iliad), a single stanza of seven I4 couplets; Trey Sager serves up an iamb-sparse free-verse sonnet in Ad Hoc Anagrammatic 2-Sonnet Attack, and then (I think) writes a second one using the letters from the first;  Peter Jay Shippy offers 3 fascinating poems (one only a line long)  that skirt the boundaries of nonsense, but end up leaving a pleasant gestalt;  two instructive extracts from The Glass Age, by Cole Swensen; Abraham Smith with two short-lined Behrlesque reflections; Aaron Tieger's plainspoken Friday; Laurel Snyder's smile-provoking You'd Come To My House If I Were Sleeping ("Naked.  If I were naked with naked Britney Spears"); Jake Berry's disturbing, metaphorical war poems; Susan M. Schultz's prose poems, one a mini-vignette (Mother), one a mini-essay (The Late Capitalist); two reflective narrative pieces by Danielle Pafunda; Dale Smith's ornithology in cascading triples (The Birds At My Window); punchy, political work by Claudia Keelan (Little Elegies); two articulate, reflective poems by G.C. Waldrep (The God-Merchants, Structure To Keep The Ball Off The Ground); four poems of spare triplets by Hank Lazer; the aforementioned concrete poem pair (A and H), by Joseph Compana; a kind of extended villanelle (oops, Jonathan says it's a pantoum) by David Trinidad on Bette Davis (Hack, Hack, Sween Has-Been); some wonderful bee poems by Julianne Buchsbaum (but, then, I love bee poems); two strange and compelling Matrix-inspired pieces (both titled Sonnet to Morpheus).  There is additional work by Dan Beachy-Quick, John Witte, Rachel Zucker, Sawako Nakayasu, Jason Lynn, Suzanne Buffam, Jess Mynes, Joanna Klink, Paul Naylor, Tod Marshall, Robyn Schiff and a dozen more fine poets.

My new Cook's Illustrated has illustrations of six kinds of cucumbers on the back cover (cornichon, garden, English, Mediterranean, Japanese, lemon), and Notes to the Reader that includes the advice that you do eat the ash on ash-covered goat cheese.  The best way to store celery is (amazingly) wrapped in aluminum foil.  A bundle of dried corn husks makes a good BBQ basting brush.  The best pork loin for grilling is the blade-end roast, brined for 3 hours and rubbed with oil and spices (brown on high heat on both sides, then move to the side of the grill and cover).  Outstanding aioli can be made in 10 minutes with (non-virgin) olive oil, pressed garlic, egg yolks, salt, pepper, and a touch of sugar.  I would never have thought to grill pizza, but there's 5 pages on how to do it successfully.  An outstanding recipe for "pulled chicken" that uses inexpensive chicken leg meat and rivals the best pulled pork.  All-Clad wins to top spot in CI's cookware review, but the much less expensive Wolfgang Puck's Bistro skillets are close.  Thai Chile Beef at Home made from blade steak (you'll need to find fish sauce and Thai chili garlic paste).  I'll just have to try the Veggie Burgers Worth the Trouble, hand made with lentils, bulgur, mushrooms, celery, onions, garlic, leek, and cashews.  How to get a yellow cake to support an entire quart of blueberries in Improving Blueberry Buckle.  The top-rated oven mitt is the Kool-Tek "protective apparel" mitt at $21.95, but the Parvin Flameguard is almost as good at $8.40.  When shopping for saffron (sure, in this country?), look for bright, red threads.  Custard is a little easier to get right with the Williams-Sonoma whisk, with a thermometer built in and readable from the handle.

Time's cover has philanthropist/uber-Satan Bill peeking out from behind an X-Box 360.  After losing a billion dollars on the venture, Microsoft has a hit with a high-performance, media-ready, networked game console.  The CIA President's Daily Brief is getting an overhaul by new chief Negroponte, after criticism of its pre-Iraq War failings.  Hillary agrees point-for-point with Newt Gingrich on health-care reform (will wonders never cease?).   Nobody knows what to think about Adrianna Huffington's left-leaning huffingtonpost.com.  French Women Don't Get Fat is a huge best-seller, but recent studies show that French women are getting fat for the same reasons we are (less time for shopping, more processed food).  Eighteen states have banned AWOL (Alcohol WithOut Liquid), a contraption that delivers aerosol licker by inhalation.  52% of American employees say they would give up their morning coffee to be able to surf on non-work websites.  A U.S. District Court struck down Nebraska's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.  Bipartisan Congressional support for stem-cell research is growing fast, and may reverse Bush's current restrictions.  Conservative ex-warrior Ariel Sharon is gambling his legacy on the decision to evacuate settlements from the Gaza Strip.  "Exposed to male pheromones, the gay man's hypothalamus lights up like a woman's".  The King Tut tour is preparing for Take Two.  Dave Chappell discusses why he postponed his 3d season with a soul-searching trip to South Africa.  Ex-Charlie's Angel (and still damned attractive) Cheryl Ladd writes the Guide to Golfing with the Boys.

Posted by jbahr at 07:41 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

Nine More Questions

Jonathan's Ten Questions apparently spurred John Litzenberg to create another list of nine questions.  Unlike the prior set of ten, I found these to be easy to answer.  Jonathan's questions, after all, required a degree of consideration inconsistent with whimsicality.  Who in God's name can keep up with Kasey, Josh, Ron, Jordan, and others (and, of course, Jonathan) when the questions are one of real poetic inquiry?  I've often said that the only thing I know about poetry is, occasionally, how to write it.  So I gave John's questions a shot:

1. Do you write with the intent of submitting (and getting published)? Is that your primary objective in writing poetry (publishing to print media, or online journals, or other outlets [i.e., contests, prizes, etc.])?

My primary objective in writing poetry has changed in the short time, perhaps 7 years, since I first began writing.  I started writing poetry to a woman with whom I was infatuated, and the habit persisted, even though the relationship did not.  The succeeding two or three years was devoted to "writing my life", and the unfortunate consumers of my introspection were the kind and relatively skilled cohabitants of an online poetry workshop.  The core group moved from one poetry board to another, experimenting, arguing, comparing notes.  Poetry boards generally require that one critique an order of magnitude more often than one posts new work, and the construction of thousands of critiques was itself quite an education.  Eventually, the group arrived at one of the toughest poetry board, and I found myself piqued that the Poetry Powers voiced the same complaints about my work time after time.  To make a long story short, that is what led to publication - the desire to find out if what I was writing was actually worth the time for anyone to read other than my close group of friends.  The ensuing 3 years was a flurry of submission, filled with all the mistakes one makes at the outset -- over submitting and pushing out work that isn't ready.  At some point, I was satisfied that my work was of middling publishable quality -- nothing picked up by Kenyon Review or Ploughshares, but showing up regularly in respectable journals with relatively high standards.  In the past two years, I have been much more interested in writing across a wider range of expression:  prose poems, relatively elliptical verse, poems that embed scientific ideas, some formal works.  I don't believe that publication is, in itself, any longer the principal motivator.  That being said, I also feel that I have hit a strange kind of glass ceiling, and I'm not sure what the cause is.  Of course, it could simply be that I am not yet skilled enough to compete with truly outstanding talent.

2. If submittal/publishing is not your primary objective, is there another outlet (regular public poetry readings, religious liturgy, slams, literary camaraderie/competition) for which you tend to write?

I had a lot of fun reading at a local literary salon, and have occasionally been asked to read work at poetry get-togethers (generally at libraries and coffee shops).  Longmont, Colorado is not, of course, the Bay Area or Greater New York, so the venues are scarce for social poetry.

3. Do you write poetry for other reasons (i.e., personal confessional, celebration of special events, academic requirement, etc.)? How much of what you write is for these "personal" uses, as opposed to ultimately for "audience" consumption?

In the final analysis, I think I write because my professional life is quite linear and hard-edged.  Having a beer and writing for three or four hours is a wonderful antidote to writing computer programs and managing a small consulting business.  I am consistently impressed how poetry makes me more authentic than I could ever hope to be in normal discourse.  It is as if you are writing the truth as fast as you can. 

4. In any case, what percentage of your "audience" is other poets, versus non-poets?

I once mentioned to someone that at the pinnacle of success as a poet, your mother still won't have heard of you.  I think it's pretty well understood that we're writing for each other. 

5. As relates to audience, what is the level at which you seek to connect with them (i.e., artistic, intellectual, emotional, political, spiritual, etc.), once you have them identified? Does "connecting" to your audience even matter?

I have written a few ironic political poems, but most of my work is an attempt to reconcile the very rational world in which I live with the subtle emotional reality that is so much more in play with other poets.  I have written a few ekphrastic poems, but the art was a starting point, not a powerful inspiration.  I am, sadly not very spiritual.  That leaves intellectual, I suppose.  I am fond of tightly encoded poems, poems with a lot of subtle punch, interwoven themes and startling juxtaposition.  I love music and cadence, but it has to be harnessed to a notion of substance. 

6. As you explore those different aspects of yourself through your poetry, does that change your audience, make it larger or smaller, alienate it, etc.?

Jonathan Mayhew aptly noted that our audience is sufficiently small that we dare not alienate it.  As I have moved from lyrical narrative to more overtly complex verse, I have certainly noticed many individuals in my prior audience (those who cohabitate the poetry board on which I post) have expressed a sense of betrayal.  In this sad business of poetry, it seems that everything you write is a confirmation of the work of those who write like you (or think they do), and every change in your focus or tactics becomes a threat to that unstated consensus. 

7. What percentage of the "audience" for your poetry would you consider your friends or even acquaintances, if any?

I would like to believe that everyone who runs across something I write is a potential friend.  My actual poet friends run to the dozens, far fewer than read my blog every week (and many of those just want to catch up on the world's events).  In point of fact, many of my closest poet friends are nonplussed by my work and regularly express a lack of comfort in its direction.  Because I am a relentless litmag submitter, I can sometimes win a poetic argument by getting published.  But, in the end, I still wonder if they're not right, and whether publication has become like judging a man's moral worth on the basis of his election to the Senate.

8. In terms of well-crafted, do you think that craft (that is, skill of the poet in whatever genre or form they have chosen) is typically the criteria used in determining what is or is not published in the above? Or is it more likely to be what is considered "good" poetry by academia and its associated publishing press?

I stand on record that I think the poetry world has too much craft and too little guile.  Partly, that is because I have always had, even before writing poetry, a decent capability to turn a phrase.  So do the writers of ad copy and commercial jingles.  In the final analysis, I think that poetry is a sufficiently important endeavor that the craft should be honey pot that draws the reader to more important matters.  These "matters" should be the many layered substrates of the text:  the impossible complexities of love, the many forms of worship, the unvarnished grandeur of the natural world. 

I am not longer certain by what criteria academe, and its many poetry organs, adjudicate among poetry offerings.  This is a subset of the quandary regarding my current glass ceiling.  I am guilty as charged when it comes to writing to the intended audience, be it Denver Quarterly, ALC, or Volt.  I consider it a challenge to express myself in a manner consistent with their preferred patois.  It doesn't feel like selling out.  It feels like learning a new language.

9. What is more important to you as a poet, assuming that you can only pick at most two of the following: that you be widely read, widely known, widely admired, widely quoted, or well-paid?

I think Jonathan beat me to the punch on this one, too.  I think that "widely read, widely known, widely admired, widely quoted" characterizes less than 500 poets in America.  The rest of us email our friends to see if they tripped across us in the latest New Concordia Review.  As for "well-paid", I left academia 25 years ago to escape the income level and endless committee meetings that define university professorship.  Billy Collins is, I believe, the most highly paid poet in America, or was not that long ago.  His book's sales, selling in the tens of thousands, constituted about two hours revenue of any top 10 trashy novel you find at Borders.  In short, this is either a silly question, or disingenuous.  Billy Crystal in Throw Momma From The Train, and hundreds of worthies before him said it best:  writers write.

Posted by jbahr at 09:09 PM | Comments (0)

Ten Good Questions

I am luxuriating in the process of reading blog entries in broad swaths, owing to my absence from the blogosphere last week.  Jonathan has again stoked the intellectual fires of Our Little World by posing a series of questions about poetics (or perhaps, metapoetics), the answers to which cleverly manage to position the responder on a map of literary beliefs.   The Questions ask "how well have you read?", "what camp are you in?", "should we have Leaders and did we pick them wisely?", "do you have any other hobbies?", "why so sad?", "are we using the right hymn book?", and "what if the hokey-pokey is what it's all about?". 

I'm joking, of course, as the questions, originally directed to Ron Silliman, are more serious.  In fact, filled with enough brow-furling solemnity that I was thrown off by Question 7 ("Are humor, irony, and wit (in whatever combination) a sine qua non? ...").  Various interesting people provided a wide range of articulate responses, including Henry's cheese poem past, Allen's take on hero-worship ("I mean, it's fine that Harold Bloom exists to provide canon advice, but I reserve the right to consider him a goofypants"), Nick's thoughts on total poetic self-absorption (benign in the short run, that is, less than a decade), Synth's surreal response to Question 2 ("Clipped ballet salad under house lights banging retrogressively"), and Kasey's neat sidestep to Poem vs. Project ("Chicken, meet egg.).  After six months of Meme Madness ("which Teletubby are you?"), this was a delightful and thought-provoking prodding of imagination.

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Yet Another Retraction, Correction, Emendment:  In another recurrence of Humpty Dumpty's Disease, I characterized Peter Campion's piece in Poetry as "curmudgeonly", by which I meant "filled with delicious Dickensian wickedness", a term that Merriam-Webster defines as "full of resentment and stubborn notions" — something that I didn't mean at all.

~~~~~~~

From the pages of the Wall Street Journal:  The Fed's interest rate hike last month may be its last for a while, as the Greenspan Gang believe that inflation is whipped;  average home prices nationwide grew another 2.2% last quarter, but were disproportionately higher in coastal states;  the Dutch dealt a death blow to the European Constitution, on the heels of the French non vote;  in another break with the Bush Administration, California governor Schwarzenegger set lower targets for greenhouse-gas emissions; China hints that it may veto the expansion of the U.N. Security Council to include (possibly) Germany, India, and Japan;  North Korea is so fearful of a coming famine that it has ordered millions of urban workers into the fields on weekends;  after 30 years, the identity of Deep Throat (W. Mark Felt), the anonymous source credited with bringing down the Nixon Administration, was discovered by a conservative corporate litigator;  Viagra may impair vision ("if your eyes are blurry for more than 4 hours, call your doctor");  a new vaccine for shingles, the painful skin-ailment form of chicken pox, shows promise;  sales of goat in U.S. restaurants have soared;  tolerance by Party leaders of China's 45 million Christians (mainly Protestant, and up from 6 million 25 years ago) is wearing thin; an E.U. study says that European children are unheathily fat;  the trend toward "wireless homes" isn't accelerating as predicted, owing to cellular plan costs, patchy service, and inferior line quality;  Jaws, The Movie, will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a special-edition DVD this summer. .

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J.P. Dancing Bear has three more Out of Our Mind radio show available for listening via streaming media:

OOM with Jennifer Michael Hecht - Part I

OOM with Jennifer Michael Hecht - Part II

OOM with Peter Streckfus - Part I

OOM with Peter Streckfus - Part II

OOM with Jason Carney - Part I

OOM with Jason Carney - Part II

OOM with Mark Yakich - Part I

OOM with Mark Yakich - Part II

OOM with Lynne Knight

OOM with Emily Rosko

OOM with Richard Beban

OOM with Debra Bruce

OOM with Meg Schoerke

OOM with Adrienne Torf & June Jordan

OOM with Ravi Shankar

OOM with Tina Chang

OOM with In A Fine Frenzy Anthology

OOM with Adrianne Marcus

Posted by jbahr at 07:40 AM | Comments (1)