October 31, 2005
Of Blogs and Boards
Seth, whose birthday was
yesterday, received wonderful news that he's had work accepted by Colorado
Review. In the past 4 weeks, he's had acceptances from Iowa Review,
AGNI, Verse, Notre Dame Review and Sycamore Review
— which is a hell of run for just about anyone.
A few short years ago, we were both on the staff of the
Alsop Review,
one of the top half-dozen poetry boards on the Internet, and commonly known as
The Shark Tank. Before that we'd been lowly board members, looking up to
the board heavyweights like Tony
Robinson and Claudia Grinnell.
Other blogmates I met at the AR or another board include
Rebecca,
Suzanne,
Patricia,
Steve,
Paul,
Teresa,
Ann Marie, and
Paula. I first read G.C.
Waldrep somewhere in the board-world too, I think, perhaps at Melic Review.
The poetry boards competed for regular contributors, and patrons tended to
wander off for a while, landing at
Eratosphere, Web Del Sol's
Writer's Block, Didi's MiPo, or any
one of a dozen or more critique sites.
Poetry workshop boards were not really the predecessor of poetry blogs.
The traditions are different — at least in the sense that the blogging community
seems much more supportive of each other's work. This is, perhaps, a good
thing (to wax Marthaesque for a moment). On the other hand, the blunt
instrument which is the poetry board gets one attention (like a brick to the
head), and makes you think about your preconceived notions of what is good
poetry. It is virtually impossible, for example, to post a poem on a
quality poetry board and not receive some negative critique. The
rules of etiquette on boards requires that one respond with grace under fire, to
agree that there are different value systems for this kind of work, to
demur instead of defend. In fact, becoming defensive is the first sign
that the poet has lost control of the dialogue. Poetry blogs feel
much more like real-life (RL) workshops, where most of the comments are non-confrontative
and the impulse is to view each work as an example of an individuality not yet
understood.
I first encountered the RL workshop at the Napa Valley Writers Conference,
spending a week with Mary Jo Bang and a dozen poets in our group. I'm sure
that fact that MJB is a kind, sensitive, and highly experienced instructor (as
well as an outstanding poet) contributed to the sense that we had entered into a
Poetic Non-Aggression Pact. I still found the experience extremely odd,
chafing against the norm in my desire to deem a poem unfit to be even
considered, rolling my eyes at blatant banalities, tapping my pencil on the
table at the 43d stanza of an epic about the Oregon coastline. Whereupon MJB asked for initial impressions, and I said "too damned long",
at which point she
smiled and threatened banishment in the corner. (Fair Disclosure:
I applied to NVWC again this year and was not asked back).
I do wonder, though, in a very approximate way, whether this is a difference in
poetic dialogue akin to the pseudowar between capitalist and Marxist
sensibilities. On the poetry boards, the whole point was to post a poem
that convinced the majority that you deserved to be treated with greater
respect; to make a statement that was wholly contained within the poem posted;
to offer no explanation, no motivation and certainly no theory of poetics that
could not be deduced from the poem itself. You had one shot: the
poem. If you defended it, you lost. If you explained it, you lost.
The overriding notion was: this is the poem. If I could paraphrase
it, or explicate it, or rationalize it, then it would itself be
deficient.
The boards also tended to focus on tactics, where blog reviews virtually ignore
anything but strategy. As evidence, read this by Dan Chiasson (referred to
by a subsequent correspondent as mainstream) on Josh's blog:
To Helena Concerning Dan Chiasson
The water at the bottom of the river, way down, the coldest
darkest water: if that water were your only drinking water
what would you do: thirst forever? Or drink the freezing water?
If A, send me a postcard from la-la land, where
Mom bays like a donkey and Dad is an oil slick,
because that's where dehydration takes you, fast.
If B, I'd buy the biggest wool parka I could find
and put it where the sun don't shine—otherwise
you'll feel a subzero chill no mug of tea will thaw.
I chose B, and now it's winter, and I'm outside your door
like a baby seal on an ice island, waiting
to be clubbed or saved by a Green New Zealander.
Come out. When Dan beats off again, when
he drifts away the way he always does, come out:
zip up that pantsuit and rescue me from my Horatian
sense of humor! There's a great jazz bar nearby
that doesn't charge a cover. They will play
only the nine jazz songs we know, over and over.
And the world will narrow the way it always does
when we're together, only nine jazz songs
ever written, and we know every one by heart.
And if some kid from the local jazz college walks in
and starts playing the tenth song, that's when
we get our clubs and club him like a baby seal
Josh has some nice things to say about the
piece. My first impulse is to begin the microcritique: Where is the
refrain value in all those waters, Dan? It's La-La Land, Dan, and I
wouldn't invoke it this early. Lose the ",fast". No need for "wool",
and lame break on "find". "where the sun don't shine"??? You didn't
REALLY use "where the sun don't shine", did you? Lose the whole next
stanza, which is not only derivative, but distracting, except to tie in the
final stanza which is nearly useless. We're introducing masturbation in S5
for ... what reason? As it doesn't play into the succeeding text in the
slightest and comes off (no pun intended) as a faux poetic mid-life rally?
Exclamation marks, Dan — remember, you only get 4
for a lifetime of poems. No, Dan, "they will only play / the nine
jazz songs we know ...". The penultimate stanza is worst than
throat-clearing, it's stalling for time. If you have to write "local jazz
college", a phrase with two modifiers and we still haven't placed the venue, why
not just say "if some kid from Berklee". OK, I have a serious question.
Is there ANY excuse for using two forms of "club" in the final line? "we
get our CLUBS and CLUB him like a baby fucking seal?". Are you
serious, Dan? You actually thought about this poem and edited it for a
while and considered the consequences before posting it to This Poetry Board?
See what I mean? Take No Prisoners. That's what I miss in this
Blogworld. And I like Dan Chiasson. I respect his reviews in
Poetry. I have read poems of his that I thought were killerbee.
Makes no matter. This one sucked. And please don't get
me started on the hundreds of poems that Ron has posted to exuberant acclaim.
Posted by jbahr at 07:31 PM | Comments (8)
Indictment Disconnect
Rush Limbaugh: After Two Years, No Original CIA Leak Crime; It's the Left That's Hypocritical on Perjury
William Kristol:
And then, of course, on Friday, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year
investigation came to an underwhelming conclusion with the indictment of Vice
President Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby--not for any underlying crime
but for impeding the investigation through perjury and false statements. . . . The
wrongdoing leads in no way beyond this one individual and what he allegedly said
to FBI investigators and the grand jury. There was no conspiracy, high level or
otherwise, at the White House, or involving the Defense Department or the State
Department--all scenarios that enemies of the administration had been
fantasizing about for months.
GOP Bloggers: Just one problem... the corruption conspiracy
of outing an undercover agent never existed. And the indictment that's
expected today will show that... or rather the lack of any indictment for
revealing an undercover agent's identity will show it. Sure, the Left is likely
to cheer gleefully when an indictment comes down today against Scooter Libby,
but the absence of an indictment for actually outing an undercover agent will
reveal that this was never a story to begin with. Let's remember Wilson's
trip actually
bolstered the
administration's claims about Iraq-Niger. Let's remember Valerie Plame
wasn't undercover anyway.
Let's remember this non-story was manufactured by the Left, then touted by the
Left, and will ultimately be revised by the Left. Prepare yourself for the chant
to change from "evil, corrupt administration outs undercover agents as payback"
to "evil, corrupt administration lies to grand juries".
Powerline: If Ms. Plame didn't want her identity out, she shouldn't
have gotten her husband a secret mission and then allowed him to wage a public
campaign against the president's foreign policy. The leading prevaricator in
this case is Mr. Wilson himself. He has accused Mr. Bush of falsely leading
America to war.
Patrick Fitzgerald, announcing the indictment:
And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?
Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray? And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.
As you sit here now, if you're asking me what his motives were, I can't tell you; we haven't charged it. So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.
I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an
obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge. This is a very serious
matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter.
But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security
was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely
important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury
and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.
Posted by jbahr at 09:49 AM
| Comments (1)
Thanks to Kevin (new to my
blogroll) for pointing out Time's 100
best
novels from 1923 to present. Any list like this is probably silly for
a number of reasons, but if you have to have one, would you really include P.K.
Dick's Ubik and not Frank Herbert's Dune (they got Neuromancer
right, at least)? They've got Pynchon on there twice, but Crying
of Lot 49 instead of V? And as much as I like Zadie Smith, I
would have given White Teeth another decade before including it, ditto
Infinite Jest, ditto Blind Assassin (and I love Atwood).
Posted by jbahr at 07:10 AM
| Comments (2)
I was just reading where Exxon broke the world's record for one-quarter of
net profit. $10 billion. That's one quarter. After tax.
It reminded me how big the auto and oil companies were when I was a kid, so I
looked up who the big boys are now and, surprise! Of the top
12 largest
companies in the world in terms of revenue, 6 are oil companies and 4 are
auto companies. Walmart just squeaks by Chevron for total revenue, but
it's nowhere near as profitable. The 12th Big Boy is General Electric.
Maybe things haven't changed that much.
Posted by jbahr at 07:07 AM
| Comments (0)
Posted by jbahr at 10:55 AM
| Comments (0)
Everybody is finding out what their blog is worth, but
nobody knows what it means. I need more sex and violence in my
blog if I'm every going to break $50,000.October 30, 2005
Fiction and Fan Bases
Matthew reminds me that
there's poetry all around us. For years, I "collected" the names for
salons, the most widely punned institution on the planet. You know:
Hairport, Tressed To Kill, Curl Up and Dye. My other great pop-cultural
love was bad Japanese translations. At the time I was a Vice President for
one of the three great Seiko companies, running a company called CET for them in
Garden Grove, CA., to provide software for their 4-user small business
microcomputer system. I was, in fact, the only Vice President in
the conglomerate because everybody else was Japanese and fit somewhere into the
Kaicho, Shacho, Torishimariyaku, Bucho, Kacho,
Kakaricho hierarchy. They didn't know where to fit me in,
nor exactly how low to bow, so they took the easy way out. At that time,
Japan was dominating world trade, and Tokyo was the most expensive city in the
world (the value of the Imperial Palace grounds exceeded that of all NYC
commercial real estate). Walking down the Ginza, you'd see shop windows
with stylish manikins wearing $3,000 suits and a sign that said "The Excellent
Collection: Humanly Adult". The outstanding restaurant in The Hotel
Okura had what appeared to be diarrhea on the menu, which was their best shot at
spelling paella. I loved their names (Hashimoto, Tanaka,
Furusho), many of which meant things like mulberry mountain or
bright warrior. After ordering the stuffed Shitake that night, I told
my boss Furusho-san that we had these in the states, and what was the proper
translation. He said "mushroom".
I read an article somewhere (Poets & Writers?) where fictioneers were
opining on their fan base, a perfectly reasonable discussion, I suppose,
but not something you hear a lot about in poetry. I'm not talking about
the ongoing poetry sniping, where preferences seem to be a mixture of loyalty
oath, tribal warfare and group hug. I mean the hundreds of thousands of
people who buy and read poetry books (formal, pastoral, confessional, ...), but
aren't in grad school studying the influence of Laura Riding Jackson on
Zukofsky's bathroom habits. How would you describe your fan base?
Speaking of formalism, here's the only sonnet I ever had published:
Pinocchio in New Mexico
He leans his back against the wheeled workshop
regarding figures rendered white and stiff
on morning rock. He's old, a sideshow prop
beneath balloons above the petroglyph.
Within the wagon now, the carver sings.
The puppet boy declined the gift three times
to keep his rectitude, long life, the rings
of fine Genoan ash providing rhymes
to make a girl in Santa Fe ask why
he wouldn’t drink with her, his lipless mouth
half-cocked, his splintered arms, his legs awry,
his stumble to the door, the long walk south
to this gitano camp, this cactus sea,
the hovering hearts, the blue uncertainty.
October 28, 2005
Science Friday
A couple of bloggers were trying out the verb "Miered", as in "getting Borked",
but it won't stick. Too many people on both sides of the aisle were
uncomfortable
with
Harriet's apparently amazing incompetence at anything resembling Constitutional
law. One funny line from The Wonkette: "What I'll regret most now that
Harriet Miers has withdrawn ... Is that no Senator will be able to publicly ask
her what I feel is the most important question that's arisen since this whole
matter began. How does she get her hair to do that?? Seriously. Is there
some tiny system of levees and inclined planes stapled to her head that we just
can't see?"
Jim is lining up
Jordan Davis doppelgangers.
He's also has been ragging on Sweet Billy in the always-funny What The Hell Is
Up With Your Author's Photo: "He's funny and his poems don't hurt your
eyes. They make you feel smart and warm all over, like drinking a decent
scotch. And that's all America wants." Speaking of brand names:
AT&T used to be so big that James Coburn made a movie that featured The Phone
Company as the vast evil empire that was actually running everything.
Then, it looked like the local calling business was a drag, so AT&T spun half a
dozen companies and hundreds of thousands of employees, known as the Baby Bells
(SBC, Bell South, etc.). Fast forward 15 years and the long-distance biz
is the pits and AT&T, once one of the largest companies in the world and "the
stock for widows and orphans", gets purchased by its former Baby, SBC, who then,
recognizing the value of a great name, announces today that they're changing
their name to . . . you guessed it, AT&T.
Which got me to thinking about the Poetry Foundation's $100 million. Well,
actually more like $75 million, I think, because of the bank trustee's incompetence.
Still, that's enough dough that the interest would easily fund the
budgets of the top 200 literary magazines in America. What the hell does a
literary outfit do with all that money? Well, one thing is give out
a bunch of literary awards. And they did kick in $10K for the Emily
Dickinson competition I placed in. But, wouldn't you at least buy out the
rights to poetry.org, for example?
Joshua was riffing on a
model of poetry/poetics/poets that postulates a 3-dimensional space in which the
axes are characteristics such as "tradition/innovation", a thought I've had (and
even mentioned here) a number of times. Apparently, the inspiration for
the post was
Robert Archambeau (who I've just added to the blogroll), who was commenting
on Jonathan's SOQ-PA dichotomy, as I was last week. As I've mentioned
before, there is a statistical procedure for teasing out underlying axes of
discrimination (multidimensional scaling), but it would take getting lots of
input from poets in the form of poet-pair ranks (e.g., "Is Billy Collins closer
to Charles Simic than Sharon Olds is to Jorie Graham?). Henry objects to the objectification.
While there are a couple of thousand
Bahrs in the US, there are apparently only hundreds of
Behrles.
An interesting
article
in Wired discusses the use of wasps as high-performance detectors to
sniff out explosives, buried bodies, crop disease and other odors for which we
now use dogs — at the price of a few pennies per
wasp and a 20-minute training session. The wasps are given a whiff of what
you want detected and then treated to sugar water. Within as little as 10
minutes the wasps are trained and able to smell a few parts per billion of a
particular target odor.
I'm off to Wisconsin to see Junie. Hope you all have a nice weekend.
October 27, 2005
Harry and Harper's
Richard Siken, Yale Younger Series award-winning author of Crush, is now
blogging. Welcome to
this strange world, Richard.
Only 22 days until the next Harry Potter movie
(including an IMAX release), with the quite excellent
Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort. I can't figure out how
they will continue to reconcile Hermione's average looks and wildass hair with
the increasingly lovely Emma Watson, who's playing her.
I've been listening to American Patriot Radio this week, during the NPR pledge
breaks. This station plays a wild mix of shows including serious gun guys,
gold bugs, herbal health proponents, biblically-inspired Yeshua worship groups,
and far-right commentators. Just like you learned in history class, the
far right has a lot in common with the far left. The majority of the
broadcasters are livid over the Patriot Act, the erosion of Constitutional protections,
the hegemony of Corporate Fascism, and other aspects of the New World Order.
Bush is trashed on a regular basis, and even the War in Iraq is considered by
most to have been a bad idea.
Harper's is a little duller than usual this month. Article excerpts
include: an interview with a Chinese professional mourner (originally
printed in Paris Review); stories told by Chinese, Romanian and
Indonesian Ultima Online players who work for a firm that collects their game
gold and sell it at auction for cash; the "pitch script" of University Degree
Program, a degree mill that has sold more than 200,000 bachelor, masters and PhD
degrees and was recently shut down by the FTC; the heavily edited version of the
U.N Summit Agreement that John Bolton's team submitted, gutting references to
multilateralism, nuclear disarmament, debt relief, and long-term funding for
research. There's an excellent review of Joan Didion's The Year of
Magical Thinking by Jennifer Szalai, and a retrospective on Pulitzer-prize
winning author James Agee. In Valkyries Over Iraq, Lawrence
Weschler discusses war movies, "... gnawing at this problem of whether it's even
possible to imagine creating an anti-war movie, or whether any depiction of war
in film necessarily lends itself to military-pornographic exploitation".
William Pfaff pens What We've Lost: George W. Bush and the price of
torture. Harper's Index includes the following tidbits: The
percentage of Americans living in poverty has increased every year for the last
four; an erotic Harry Potter fan-fiction site gets almost 200,000 hits a day;
the FBI has gone from number 128 to number 10 in the rank of "ideal employers"
in the last year; 63 journalists were killed in 20 years of Vietnam
warfare and 71 have been killed in Iraq since March, 2003.
October 26, 2005
Humpity-Hump
~~~
My blog is worth
$47,421.36.
How much is your blog worth?
Everyone from Seth to
Horatio the Unicorn is waiting
breathlessly for the indictment of ... well, somebody, damn it.
I was just over at CDY's place, reading about his lack of enthusiasm for
Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. I had this great
high-school biology teacher, Mr. Ailstock, who took me on as a sophomore in high
school as a lab assistant. We raised fruit flies like crazy in a big
aquarium. We didn't try to do any kind of
Mendelian
genetics, just slapped one of them between a couple of slides and looked at the
differences among them. Sometime during the year, I found a black widow
spider egg, and Mr. Ailstock insisted that we turn our attention to Lactrodectus
mactans. We waited patiently for the little critters to hatch, and one day
they did, a zillion little colorful striped spiderettes. We tweezered two
or three of them each into test tubes and, after the siblings got tired of
eating each other, started supplementing their diet with fruit flies.
When they were big enough, Mr. Ailstock pulled out this honeycombed packing
material and placed dozens of the vialed black widows into the web of packing
material. We sent them all of via parcel post to a friend of his who
milked them for their incredibly strong webbing, which he sold to rifle sight
makers who used it for crosshairs. I'm sure things are much different now.
News from the Blog-o-sphere: Zachary Chartoff has an excellent
summary
of upcoming poetry competitions, though rumor has it that the Zoo Press contests
(e.g., Paris Review Prize) may be in some doubt. By the by,
Many Mountains Moving
is extending its poetry book contest, which I can give you my personal guarantee
is on the up and up. Nice to see that
Deborah's back, we were beginning to
worry. Also, haven't heard from
Pack Bringley since late August, and I enjoy his posts. Ditto,
David, though he's only
two weeks late. Tricia
hasn't been hilarious since July. Lots of people have noted the excellent
post by Josh about careerism and
professionalism. Shanna
is on MiPo radio. How and where does
Jordan take all those great pix?
Paul was a bad person.
Ginger discusses inside-outism.
Rebecca has gone all Kandinski-ish.
Tony is reading with Lisa.
Nick is bored with facts.
Sabrina celebrates
panda-mates.
The funniest ad on Wonkette this week is: "Rick Santorum, one of the
finest minds of the 13th century."
Posted by jbahr at 07:37 PM | Comments (2)
October 24, 2005
Monday Love
You gotta love it. Kay Hutchison (who was herself
indicted in
1993) says Rove, Libby, et al. shouldn't have to resign if their indictments are
"only" as a result of perjury or obstruction of justice, and not anything
serious. The Weekly Standard says accusations leveled against DeLay,
Libby, Rove and Frist are a result of "a comprehensive strategy of
criminalization had been implemented to inflict defeat on conservatives who seek
to govern as conservatives." A Wall Street Journal editorial expresses the
same indignation. Are these the same people who impeached a president
for lying about a blowjob?
~~~
I just ordered a 3-pack of poetry books by Aase Berg,
Lara Glenum, and Arielle Greenberg
from Action Books, and you can
too.
I should also add that Lara's PhD, specializing
in Modernism and the Historical Avant-Garde, post-modern aesthetics, and
theories of the sublime and the grotesque, is going to be way cooler than
mine.
I also received
Kirsten Kaschock's
Unfathoms from Slope Editions, but haven't got any further than reading the
back-cover blurbs and noting that the lovely Ms. Kaschock has cut her hair (I'll
report back soon, though). While driving down to Colorado Springs to have
lunch with Ally and John, I
listened to
Bill Collins Live, which was recorded during a Public Radio benefit.
Bill Murray is the MC. I know some of you have an inexplicable hatred for
Sweet Billy (as Murray calls him), but if you take the whole CD as standup
comedy, it was pretty good.
~~~
John Updike is on the cover of Poets & Writers, looking eerily like the
evil Cigarette-Smoking Man on X Files. This is actually a dual-booby issue
(hmm, make that a quad-booby issue), as Fence has a big ad with their now-famous
Suicide Girl cover, and it appears
again in the Literary MagNet section. The article also has nice things to
say about Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Clock,
Ninth Letter, and Eleven Eleven. (The latter three aren't in my
litmag database,
so I'd better get hopping). The Contester reports on Bin
Ramke's decision to step down as editor of the Contemporary Poetry Series,
partly because of his disgust over allegations of connections between Series
judges and contestants. That Glittering Possibility "Eighteen poets
who made their mark in 2005", and highlights Andrea Baker, Christian Barter,
Geoff Bouvier, Leslie Bumstead, Victoria Chang, Geri Doran, K.E. Duffin, Thomas
Sayers Ellis, Dana Goodyear, Sarah Gridley, Tyehimba Jess, Corinne Lee, Sheryl
Luna, Rusty Morrison, Matthew Shenoda, Laura Sims, Mark Sullivan, and Catherine
Wing. Most of the poets have recently won first-book competitions.
I never read the fiction-oriented articles, so sue me.
~~~
I was definitely going to AWP Austin, and then I wasn't, but now I think I am.
Anybody need a witty know-it-all for a panel?
~~~
The ever-confident, usually-smirking Steve Jobs is on the cover of Time.
After you read the interview/article, you know why this bright S.O.B has been
successful (and also why 3 of my buddies who worked for him couldn't stand his
ass). A wonderful sidebar remembrance for Simon Wiesenthal, whose quiet
persistence put 1,000 ex-Nazis in jail. Amazing: a full-page ad for
Rush Limbaugh, "America's Anchorman", heavily Photoshopped, no doubt.
Conservative conspiracy theorists speculate that Commander in Chief's
Geena Davis doubles as a campaign ad for a Hillary Clinton presidency. New
Orleans mayor Ray Nagin gets mixed reviews in Can New Orleans Do Better?
Nightmare in the Mountains provides excellent coverage (including
topographical maps) of the South Asia Earthquake, which has now claimed almost
55,000 lives. In Professor of Death, An insurgent Iraqi terrorist
leader supplies details and a video training tape on tactics and recruitment.
Major food companies are rushing to eliminate trans-fat in their products (Kraft
tried 200 recipes until it got the New Oreo right). Depending upon how you
qualify them, we might have dozens of extra planets to name, Kuiper Belt objects
that orbit the sun like Pluto (and at least one, Xena, that is bigger).
New trading exchanges to mitigate risks are expanding to the point where, one
day, you may be able to use markets to hedge anything (presidential elections,
terrorists attacks, the next American Idol). NEC's PaPeRo "personal partner"
doubles as a baby sitter, and can talk, read, sing, take orders and remember
names and faces.
~~~
I just noticed that
The Wonkette made the same connection. She also quotes Kay Bailey Hutchison: "Look at Martha Stewart, for instance, " she said on Meet the Press, "where they couldn't find a crime and they indict on something that she said about something that wasn't a crime."
Umm. Didn't Martha go to prison?
Posted by jbahr at 09:28 AM | Comments (1)
October 21, 2005
Secrets of a Slush-Piler
Until recently, I've spent the last seven years critiquing poetry on online
boards, commenting in some detail on thousands of poems. I've also read
through initial submissions for a number of print and online magazines. If
you want really good advice from the editor of a top literary journal, read some
of CDY's suggestions. I'm here to tell you what the first reader wants.
First off, don't send your submission in one of those giant 9x11 envelopes.
Not only does it scream "Bush League", the manuscript is often mistaken for a
fiction submission. Next suggestion: write "Reply Only" on your
return SASE, so we can feel OK about not sending back the 12 pages of poems you
sent. This doesn't bother the big boys, since they invariably just send
you back a small mimeographed rejection notice without comment, but the rest of
us can't figure out how to put your monster sub into that business envelope.
Third: please, please don't make your return SASE those little 3x6
envelopes that you send condolences in. Fourth: If you're going to
tell me your life story on the cover letter, it had better be damned
interesting, like the guy who was born on the Equator and moved with his parents
to a small Micronesian island who captured, raised and exported squid until they
were run out of town by the locals who thought they worshipped the local version
of Satan and ended up in Queens running a French restaurant. Fifth:
It's never a bad ploy to mention casually that you are a poetry reviewer for a
major litmag. We won't know the difference, and it's a good chance you'll
make it on to Second Read. Seventh: If you place a cardstock replica
of the promo they used at The Ruminator Bookstore for your last poetry book to
get our attention, it's probably going to confuse us more than anything.
Eighth:
Unless you are very skilled, your titles are going to suck. Consider using
Frank's Title Service, I do.
OK, on to actual poetry. Here's some things that come to mind
immediately:
1. Just as with exclamation points, every poet has a lifetime limit on the
number of times cunt is used in a poem.
2. Don't ever, ever, start a poem with "I remember".
3. You don't have to list all your credit. All 67 of them, including the
local horticultural newsletter and your high school awards.
4. You can mention that the last time we wrote back that we thought your work
needed "more magic", and that you've tried to put "more magic" into your work,
but the chances are that that reader is no longer with us.
5. If you
have to explain what a poem is about, one of three things has happened, and none
of them is a good thing.
6. We have a strict limit of 10 similes per poem.
7. If you don't know what in media res means, you should.
8. Onomatopoeia is to poetry like sunbathing is to skin cancer.
9. A mediocre poem is no less mediocre because each word is a single
line.
10. Avoid sending a packet of poems, each of which has a sandpiper playing a
major role.
11. Nobody wants to read about old people making love. Even old people.
12. It is generally not a wise strategy to use phrases that were,
coincidentally, the principal refrain of a Superbowl commercial.
None of this advice applies to my friends and blogmates, of course, all of
whom are wonderful poets and savvy competitors.
Posted by jbahr at 08:30 PM | Comments (10)
October 20, 2005
Pretty Good News
Posted by jbahr at 04:19 PM | Comments (21)
October 17, 2005
Two Gabes
I was
watching the World Series of Poker last night, which was the perfect
counterpoint to the hours of submission-reading I had just finished. Three
or four relatively famous actors were on the floor playing (including Toby
Maquire), and Gabe Kaplan was at the final table. Kaplan played the lead
role in "Welcome Back, Kotter", the sitcom that launched the career of John
Travolta. Gabe is now an old guy with a beard and gray hair, but he came
within a couple of hands of winning the tournament (he placed second).
Speaking of which, Jilly has
signed up for the online Poker Blogger Championship.
~~~
CDY is right. There isn't
much that's funnier in the blogworld than
Jim's "What the Hell Is Up With
Your Author Photo?" series. But, what I really admire is
Jim's editing of (sometimes quite famous) poems. Partly because it takes
balls, and usually because I agree with the edits.
~~~
Kelli rightly points out that it's
a little weird that the National Book Award finalists are all old guys.
She also points us to a good list
of recently published poetry books. ¤ Excellent
post by Joshua on the
relative avalanche of poetry-related articles (but no poetry) in the NYT
(""Poetry" has become a category revered only in proportion to its absence.")
¤ Another reason I love
Rebecca: a professional
violinist who listens to the Doors, Pixies, Circle Jerks, and Sex Pistols
before concerts. ¤
Tony Robinson is up at
No Tell Motel ¤
I love the Avenging Unicorn at
Katey's place. ¤ As I was getting
ready to understand the objects and methods involved in MS Outlook VBA-based
models, I was reading Die Cloud's
much more interesting post on objectification: "Theory and poetics
are great tools to fool someone into thinking that poetry can be objectified.
The German word "Gegenstand" tells us what an object really is: something that
stands against us; something that is apart from us. But a poem, both written and
read, happens internally. It can be talked about, clumsily. That does not mean
that a poem is ineffable, or difficult, or transcendent, or closer to any sort
of truth than, say, a toilet brush. But being composed of language, and thus
being ultimately self-referential in a way that a toilet brush isn't, a poem
tries to eff the ineffable." ¤
Our local Gabe on Roosevelt
and the Dixie Chicks.
~~~
Good Atlantic issue this month, with a lead article on A.Q. Khan, the
egocentric scientist who spied, stole, and connived to bring The Bomb to
Pakistan, and then went on to spread nuclear technology to the world's worst
rogues. Richard Clarke notes that, just before the 2004 election, the Bush
Administration made sure that preparations were more than adequate in Florida
for Hurricane Frances. Nobel Laureate and econ prof Joseph Stiglitz
reminds us once again why Bush's desire to privatize Social Security is
stupid, and convincingly argues why it provides better returns than every
free-market alternative that has been tried in other countries. Chevron
reminds us that "The world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel
discovered", though we would probably disagree what the policy implications are.
What Would Zimbabwe Do? notes the rising use of international
comparativism on the Supreme Court. The London bookies give odds on Nobel
Peace Prize candidates: 11:4 for Viktor Yushchenko, 7:1 for Bono, 14:1 for
Colin Powell, 16:1 for Bob Geldof, and at the rear, 250:1 for Blair and Bush.
Declare War advises that Congress grow some cojones and stop
letting the Executive Branch wage war without Congressional declaration (where are
all those strict Constitutionalist Republicans on this?) Frenchman
Bernard-Henri Levy continues with the fifth in the series In The Footsteps of
Tocqueville, asserting that the Democratic Party is a black hole and
pillorying David Brock (however contrite) as the sleazy opportunist he is.
Eye-opening series of articles on college admissions, which goes a long way to
explaining why tuition has risen much faster than inflation for decades.
P. J. O'Rourke in a funny article about his time on the maiden flight of the
gigantic Airbus A380, a plane that weighs 1.235 million pounds at take-off, and
could comfortably seat the entire U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, the
Cabinet, and still have room for a couple of football teams.
Posted by jbahr at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)
October 16, 2005
South Asian Earthquake Relief
The death toll from the recent South Asian earthquake now exceeds 40,000 and is growing. Hundreds of thousands are injured and millions are homeless. Relief in the form of shelter, clothing and food is an immediate need, as many of the affected areas are approaching winter conditions. Please consider donating anything you can to The International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, the Disaster's Emergency Committee, and other NGOs.
Posted by jbahr at 08:17 AM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2005
The New Ignorance
Suppose you were asked to
place all the people of our great nation in two camps: Sophisticated or
Redneck, Hardworking or Indigent, Spiritual or Soulless, Loving or
Sociopathic. How would your respond? Knowing the general sensibilities of my
fellow bloggers, I would guess that you would say: Hey, it’s not that simple.
And of course it’s not.
Unless we’re talking about poetry. Then, a sentient subset of our blogging
community draws the battle lines as if the End Were Near and the Rapture were
about to sort everyone into two neat piles. Witness a recent post by the
otherwise intelligent Jonathan:
As for whether you're quietude or post-avant, Laurel Snyder, a simple test is
whether you prefer
Norman Dubie, C.K. Williams, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Sandra Gilbert, James
Dickey, Howard Moss, Robert Pinsky, Norman Finklestein, Charles Wright, Charles
Simic...
or
Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, Tony Towle, Bernadette Mayer, Ronald Johnson, Jess
Mynes, Nada Gordon, Lisa Jarnot...
Most people, if they've read contemporary poetry at all, will have a strong
inclination toward one or the other side. If you like poets on both lists
equally, then you are a true eclectic. There is no cure, unfortunately. The
symptoms can be managed to maintain a good quality of life.
This is turning Occam’s
Razor into a blunt instrument. My grad school mentor, Wally Ryder, once told me
that we can’t help it if we’re stupid, but being ignorant is a matter of
choice. Let’s take a little test. Here’s a short, random list of accomplished
poets:
Oni Buchanan
Mark McMorris
G.C. Waldrep
Olena K. Davis
Dean Young
Gabe Gudding
Lara Glenum
Bob Hicok
Claudia Grinnell
Mary Jo Bang
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Sabrina Orah Mark
Albert Goldbarth
Heidi Lynn Staples
I defy anyone to find a
single dimension of comparison that would split these poets into two neat
groups. And yet, it happens once a week on the sites on my blogroll, starting
with Ron, and progressing down to the Disciples Fighting Quietude. I
sometimes get the feeling that only novelists know what’s up. As you work your
way down through short fiction to poetry, the whole evaluative system devolves
into tribalism, willing time and time again to throw out what we have learned to
pimp for our buds.
Let me say this as simply
as possible. We all know what bad poetry looks like. It’s 98% of what you
would read if you visited personal websites, perused the supermarket greeting
card aisle, or taught creative writing in high school. We also know what
passable poetry looks like, the kind that is mainly published in moments of
weakness by lesser literary lights and even occasionally by our better litmags
when their solicited poet comes back with the results of a night’s effort. All
the rest has to pass the test of good poetry. It has a great storyline. It
appeals to the ethnic/sexual/political/spiritual/ecological appetites of a given
editor. It has musicality, rhythm, spatial coherence. It startles by means of
simile or line break. It harbors multiple meanings. It gathers itself into a
force that, at the same time, advances one idea, while acknowledging the
opposite. Each line is a quiet argument, but the whole is a tumult of import.
It is plainspoken in a way to leads to authenticity. It laughs at itself, and
so permits us to laugh our ourselves. It transports us to a time or place, and
lays out a despair that we can either ignore or embrace.
I am beginning to
wonder if poetics tends to corrupt poetry. I used to be able to say that the
only thing I know about poetry is, occasionally, how to write it. I can
remember thinking that poetry was the last meritocracy. I’m not so sure now.
Posted by jbahr at 09:36 PM | Comments (13)
October 13, 2005
Thoizday (Nyuck, Nyuck, Nyuck)
There's some funny stuff over at Bill Maher's
site, where
he calls for some New Rules:
New Rule: You can only kill the number-two man in Al Qaeda once.
According to the White House, we've killed the number-two man in Al Qaeda about
nine times now. He's not a terrorist. It turns out he's a zombie. We're fighting
them over in Transylvania so we don't have to fight them here.
New Rule: Just because we have an obligation to rebuild New Orleans
doesn't mean we have to put it back in the same place. For $200 billion, we
could put the French Quarter on the moon. Why don't we put it someplace it can
stay out of harm and do some good? After all, New Orleans is the Big Easy, and a
lot of America is uptight. Which is why I say we put New Orleans in Kansas.
New Rule: Michael Brown must un-resign so he can be publicly fired. We
are not letting you off that easy, Brownie. You can't just slink off midway
through your service. This is FEMA, not the Texas Air National Guard.
Stuff like that.
~~~
Steve and Jessie have posted a
baby registry, and links to
where you can have a little gift sent to their soon-to-arrive. I wish
Deborah,
Suzanne,
Laurel, and
Reb would follow suit (did
I miss someone?). I'd like to get something for the young'uns but it feels
a little creepy to write for a mailing address from bloggers I like and admire,
but don't know that well. This baby registry thing solves the
problem.
~~~
Joshua mentions an
article by Fred Kaplan that
discusses Nobel Laureate Thomas C. Schelling's work in game theory, and the
practical limitations to it that arose when Schelling consulted to McNamara and
things didn't work out so well in the Vietnam War. I took a lot of Game
Theory in grad school, mainly because Melvin Dresher, one of its major
theorists, was teaching the courses. Dresher was not only a very nice old
man, he had also known John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, who wrote the
ground-breaking Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.
Anyone who had actually spoken to the genius polymath von Neumann was an object
of adoration those days, and I was impressionable. Dresher took a liking
to me, and passed on a bit of sound publishing advice: when you can't
figure out any other way to support your research hypotheses, make up some
citation in an obscure Asian journal of your own devise. Some simple
aspects of game theory are sound (and, perhaps, obvious), such as the idea of
the zero-sum game, and the
Prisoner's Dilemma.
Like a lot of economic theory and social science, human beings' behavior tends
to be perversely resistant to complete characterization. A good example is
the well-known result that almost all higher life forms (including mammals,
including us), tend to get motivated to adopt a specific behavior if reward and
punishment is somewhat random.
~~~
Is it my imagination or are there a lot of poets living in the Minneapolis/St.
Paul region? I mean, out of proportion to the population. Also, why
so many literary journals in the St. Louis area? Ditto, the proportion
thing. I mean, Columbus, Detroit, San Diego, Jacksonville, ... all of them
have larger populations.
I read something somewhere that reminded me of an old joke: "How do you
make a small fortune in the literary press biz? Start with a large
fortune."
Craig Teicher mentions that
he's seen a pre-publication copy of Louise Glück's
next book and thinks it's better than anything since The Wild Iris.
There is a killer lineup at miPOradio,
including poetry reading, interviews and a lot more.
New addition to the blogroll: Zachary Jean Chartkoff, hailing from
Lansing, Michigan.
Posted by jbahr at 07:57 AM | Comments (3)
October 11, 2005
Mapping My Peeps
SiteMeter
has a "world map" button that you can click to find out where visitors come
from. The geographical distribution of folks who end up here tends to look
about the same every day — a few Coloradans, a few Bay Area people, a
smattering of visitors from the central states, and a crawl of folks down the
Eastern seaboard. I don't ever seem to find people from Alaska or Hawaii,
or the interior northwest states (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, the Dakotas).
Considering that there's 20 million people in Southern California, I don't see
many visitors from there, either. I must have Midwest Appeal (insert
smiley-face emoticon). As I don't know who any of these people are, I will
just imagine it's AG checking in from Kansas, Ramke from Denver, Jorie from
Boston, and Lehman from NY.
~~~
Worth has a lead article detailing how "a growing number of heirs are
successfully wresting their fortunes from incompetent trustees". All you
trust-fund babies out there should pick it up. An interesting article on
the world-wide shortage of fresh water. Coffee (amazingly enough) is among
the crops causing the problem (it takes 160 liters of water to produce the beans
for an average sized latté). A survey
of the "wealthy in America" shows that 55% are Republican (duh), 23% are
Democrats and the rest are independent. 40% of the study's participants are
under 40, 81% are male, and less than 10% inherited their money. Why buy a
used Gulfstream for $30 million, when you can upgrade a low-mileage Boeing 727
into a flying condo for less than $25 million? This month's "Passion
Investments" includes daguerreotypes, a market which has "moved to the forefront
of the photography market" from flea-market sensibility to six-figure prices.
Prime examples from the 1840's can now reach almost a million dollars at
auction. Also hot are Western-style cutting horses, if you're of an equine
bent. Advertisers include: Vegas888 with luxury condominiums from
$600K to $10 million ¤ Fractional ownership of an
82' yacht ¤ Silver Oak cabernet sauvignon
¤ Bray's Island, SC, "where your home is a
plantation" ¤ Hästens, "the world's finest
beds and mattresses", the latter from $2,000 to $15,000.
~~~
Time's lead article is "The Battle Over Gay Teens" (conservatives want to
straighten them out, liberals want to turn them into activists). Time
asks "Is Delay Done?" (we can only hope so) in an article that details the
Republican leadership in disarray and a long conservative to-do list that is now
in jeopardy. Alberto Gonzales ducks the answers in Ten Questions,
even refusing to name his favorite Supreme Court justice of all time.
A quote from Bill Maher: "David Hasselhoff has released a rap album.
My God, haven't black people suffered enough?" In case you hadn't heard,
FEMA agreed to pay Carnival Cruise Lines $236 million to shelter Katrina
victims, which works out to $2,550 a week (a week's cruise is normally $599).
I bet nobody's drinking Hurricanes. Afghanistan, once thought to have
"turned the corner on terror" is getting deadlier each month for the U.S.
military, as decentralized power among the warlords helps the Taliban's efforts.
Five careers that will survive outsourcing? geologist, physical fitness
trainer, trucker, nursing, financial planner. Want to carry a Cole Haan,
Coach or Versace purse to a party, but don't want to part with all that dough?
You can rent one for the night from
Bag, Borrow or Steal. Bass fishing is a commercial success, and bass
fishing tournaments now pay as much as $1 million to the winning angler.
Remember Smell-O-Vision from Looney Tunes? Samsung is packing Intimate
Blue scent in with some electronics products to create a "sensory identity".
Time loves Wallace & Gromit.
~~~
There was a meme
going around a while back. I wanted to change it to "7 Things I Want To
UnDo Before I Die", but it occurred to me that I would be too embarrassed to
actually list them.
Posted by jbahr at 08:15 AM | Comments (8)
October 10, 2005
Rambling, Gambling
I spent a couple of hours watching the World Poker Tournament (WPT), which is
(curiously) on the Travel Channel. There are hundreds of good-sized poker
tournaments now-a-days, many more than the original Binion's World Series of Poker
— a franchise that was purchased by Harrah's in
2004. The WPT takes place on a cruise ship, and hosts what appeared to be
hundreds of players. The final table of six players were guaranteed at
least $200,000 in prizes, with the top two players winning over $1 million each.
In the old days, professional poker players were older guys with names like
Amarillo Slim, and the big games ran the gamut from stud to Omaha-8 Hi/Lo.
In the WPT I watched, 3 of the 6 finalists were still in college, and Texas
Hold'em seems to be the only poker game on earth now. All of the
televised tournaments on the Travel Channel and ESPN have "pocket card" cameras
(so you can see hole cards), and instant calculations of winning probabilities
for each player at each stage of the hand. What is so addicting about
these tournaments is the behavior of the players. Nothing beats getting
good cards, but betting strategies have a profound affect on the chances of
winning. In the course of an hour, you can build a decent psychological
model of each player. The atmosphere is one of civilized warfare
(particularly in no-limit), and the size and timing of bets and calls are used
to bully, cajole and feign submission.
I played a lot of poker in college. And I was in college a long time,
switching schools, changing majors, and obtaining one degree after another, so
that amounted to a lot of cardplay. My friend Bruce and I played a lot of
poker in the USC Student Activity Center, which was the refuge for minorities
and undesirables who couldn't or didn't want to join fraternities (there weren't
many girls there). We played so much poker that we eventually invented
dozens of variations just to keep from getting bored. "Norton" was named
after my dorm at Pomona College and involved receiving 7 cards, as in draw,
arranging them face down on the table and exposing one with every betting round
until there were only two left unexposed. "Morgan" was named after an Arab
kid who visited the bathroom periodically to urinate on his hand for luck.
Morgan was a 5-card draw, Hi/Lo, roll'em, with three community cards.
Occasionally, Bruce and I would venture down to Gardena, which was the only site
of casinos in Southern California. California law had established that
draw poker was a game of skill, which made it possible for the Gardena casinos
to offer a variety of 5-card draw games (hi and low), and some Asian draw-type
games. After Bruce received his MBA with honors, he went to work for an
HMO for a year, and then decided to play poker for a living (which he does to
this day).
~~~
I have joined the editorial staff of Many
Mountains Moving, a Colorado literary journal that has published Yusef
Komunyakaa, W.S. Merwin, James Tipton, and many other fine poets in the last
decade. In the last couple of years, the operations have been in some
degree of disarray, due to health problems of the founder. Jeffery Lee and
Erik Nilsen are at the helm now, and we're
determined to get production back on schedule, read through the backlog of
submissions in the next couple of weeks, and complete the publication of MMM
poetry manuscript winner Patrick Lawler (Feeding the Fear of the Earth).
We are currently accepting manuscripts for the
MMM Poetry Book Contest
($25 fee)and the MMM Poetry and Flash Fiction Contest ($10 fee). The fees
aren't inexpensive, but we are sending each submitter the last two issues of MMM
to soften the blow. Next week, I'll be playing the Mountain States role of
CDY (sans the baccarat and bath
products), reading through a zillion submissions and helping organize the
production schedule of work that we have accepted in the past 18 months, so we
can get back to authors.
~~~
There's a corollary to Groucho's Law (I wouldn't want to be in any club that
would accept me) that applies to literary submission. When I get to know
someone pretty well in the literary world (say, Tony Robinson or CDY), I feel,
well, weird, submitting to a publication with which they're associated (The
Canary and New England Review). I certainly don't mean to imply
that my friends can't be completely objective — in fact, I know they must be, as
the poetry world is too small not to get material from friends and
acquaintances. It's probably just stubbornness on my part. If I
don't stop making friends, though, I'm going to run out of places to submit.
~~~
I received a nice, fat copy of Alaska Quarterly Review. The
lead-off section, Chechnya: A Decade of War is a fascinating (if
grim) collection of photos and accompanying text. Nonfiction and a novella
are followed by short fiction and a dramatic piece. There's a sizeable
section of poetry including work by Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Peter Cooley,
Grace Paley and Ellen Bass.
BusinessWeek reports on more shenanigans in the Current Administration:
the Commerce Department produced a study of offshoring that detailed advantages
and disadvantages to business and the American public. Top political
appointees in the department scrubbed the report of most of the disadvantages.
Business leaders expressed concern that Congress's latest bill to extend
daylight savings time has the unintended consequence that hundreds of millions
of PCs will switch to DST at the wrong moment — which affects security camera
installations, financial market systems, and other time-sensitive automation.
Cash-strapped municipalities are converting sections of highways to toll roads,
and even selling existing toll roads to foreign buyers. Rising inventories
of unsold new houses is another sign that the house market boom may be coming to
an end. The population of rural counties continues to explode with
exurbs, (generally two-income families) who live in large houses on large
lots at a considerable distance from urban centers (for example, NPR announced
that Greeley, Colorado was among the fastest growing cities in America.
Greeley!). Exurbs are getting killed with price hikes in heating and
transportation costs, and some experts predict that the exodus from the cities
may reverse itself in the next decade. Small cars are hot, 18% of the U.S.
market, up from 13% a year ago. In a move that surely makes Microsoft
nervous, Sun and Google have announced plans to market each other's products and
services. ESPN CEO George Bodenheimer has created an empire in sports that
seems unchallenged. Once mighty Kodak continues to close plants and lay
off workers as the conversion from film to digital takes its toll.
.
~~~
CDY's blog has a back-reference from the
Emerging Writers Network,
which in turn has some discussion about "mid-list authors", which is roughly
defined as
¤ At least three books published
¤ Great critical reception – be it awards,
non-stop good reviews, etc.
¤ Sales numbers not lending towards
inclusion on the NYT Best Seller lists
The focus is on fiction writers, of course, but I wonder which poets would be
considered "mid-list", and which "best sellers". It's very unusual for a
poetry book to sell more than a couple of thousand copies, which is what a
fiction mid-lister might sell in a month or less. Robert Gray states there
is no such thing as a mid-list author, just readers and writers (dammit).
I think that summarizes the feelings of most of the poets' community.
Maybe it's not so bad that almost nobody can make money in this thing.
~~~
Joyce Carol Oates is apparently on the short list for the (delayed) Nobel Prize
for Literature. Am I the only one who thinks her an odd choice?
~~~
Thanks to Die Cloud for pointing out
The Rude Pundit, who is indeed rude, but funny, and obviously smart and
well-read. His latest entry is:
Conservative Takedown Friday -
Three For One
Why Rush Limbaugh Ought To Be
Force-Fed His Own Liposuctioned Fat, Part 714"
Posted by jbahr at 08:57 AM | Comments (7)
October 06, 2005
Hump Plus One
Another photo of the Wisconsin roadside.
~~~
I made a conscious effort today to visit blogs that I have missed in the past
month. Kristy, poet and
publisher of
Wicked Alice, has some additional comments on the wide range of aesthetics
found in online journals. ¤
Ana relates her recent reading of the obituary of Franzi Groszmann, believed
to be the last of surviving mothers who put their children on the
Kindertransport to escape Nazi persecution.
¤ A. D.'s got a new 'stache and is
looking pretty buff. ¤
Clayton
weighs in on Jonathan's question "Is 'total absorption in poetry' benign?"
¤ Phil's got these cool slider bars
that lets you play what's in his shuffle lineup. ¤
Catherine's parrot ate her shift key. ¤ From
Nada: "Trying
to trivialize a cat is like trying to trivialize a woman"
¤ Jude, who lives in the
Canadian rain forest, records her submission experiences.
¤ Chris writes 20 poems in 48
hours. ¤
Amy is going to be the
poetry editor for KSU's Touchstones.
¤
~~~
What looks like a fall great
recipe for ham from the folks at Cook's Illustrated. You start with a
fresh ham and brine it in Coca-Cola.
~~~
The Wonkette continues to crack me up.
I imagine her as a potty-mouthed, tongue-studded Will Rogers (though she
actually looks quite respectable in photos), the
liberal's
answer to Ann Coulter. Typical of her hijinks is the Wonkette's recent
write-in
contest to determine who Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers looks most like
(it's a tie between Strangers with Candy star Jerri Blank, and Emperor
Palpatine). Here's a few marvelous random cheap shots from this week:
"Let's review what we know what we know about Harriet Miers so far: She's a
60-year-old single born again Christian man-eater and a dithering, detail- (and
birthday-)obsessed crony who could probably dress herself better in the dark.
None of that, of course, answers the question foremost on the, uhm, minds of
Wonkette readers: Where does she stand on ass-fucking?"
¤ "... the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly
approved the McCain-Graham amendment to the military spending bill prohibiting
"cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of military detainees. The
wracking sobs of Alberto Gonzales were audible from down the street."
¤ "Whoa. First rock-ribbed Tory George
Will
denounces Harriet Miers as an unqualified hack, and now impeachment
cheerleader Ann Coulter
decries her as a
blot on the noble tradition of conservative legal philosophy. Hear the
loudmouthed stick-figure roar" ¤ "We're
still reeling from Judy Miller's Houdini routine, simultaneously the least
surprising and most galling prison break since Ford pardoned Nixon. Her
source -- Scooter Libby -- signed a waiver allowing her to testify in Plame
investigation a year ago, and the proof that Miller sought that waiver was
"real" came with Libby saying, uhm, yes, it's real. Good stuff, we thought, but
what's a book about being a journalist martyr without sleeping on cement and not
being able to watch CNN?"
Posted by jbahr at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)
October 05, 2005
I Be Back
I've spent a wonderful couple of days in Wisconsin with Junie
— driving to Bayfield, wandering through the
National Forests, and generally getting re-astounded at the fall colors and
wildlife. Having lived almost 20 years in L.A. and 15 years in Colorado, I
forget how beautiful large parts of the country are where those fly-over people
live.
~~~
Not that I didn't miss reading the blogs. A discussion seems to have
evolved regarding Dylan, including comments by
Jonathan.
Joshua
cracked me up with this: "oh come off it. Eveyone hates Boomers.
The thing is, they weren't the conspiratorial force driving Bob Dylan '63, and
to confuse Dylan-worship with the aesthetic object of, say, "Masters of War" is
drivel. I'm all for blaming Boomers, and what they should be blamed for is
clinging to the particular story of "enduring genius" when what they mean is
"enduring demographic omnipotence"; or, even more absurd, dreaming the tale of
"genius recovered"; one can see why this would be a salutary delusion for a
nation of sixty-year olds nervously watching their own world-historical
relevance fade in the rear-view, leaving nothing but masturbatory fantasies
starring a cherry Mustang and Norah Jones. No, really, after being lost since
"the Sixties," you can just get it back and show those whippersnappers
how it's done!"
I fear for my world-historical relevance! But, seriously, you have to
wonder about the precision of a term that applies to me, Lyn Hejinian and George
Bush. Not to mention I've always felt that Boomers born close to the 1945
birth boundary turned out differently than those closer to 1955 birthdates.
My older sister listened to Bo Diddley, drove a Vespa, and got kicked off the
high-school bus for chewing gum. I sat through one tense night of the
Vietnam War draft lottery listening to the White Album. My younger sister
wanted Elton John to play at her wedding. Ya know?
~~~
Things that surprised me upon returning to BlogLand:
Θ
Seth hasn't commented on the nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers,
selected largely, it appears, for her loyalty over dozens (hundreds?) of
better-qualified candidates.
Θ
CDY hasn't played baccarat since I
left.
Θ How much I liked the short poems that
Tony linked me to.
Θ That Zach is already in
Nebraska.
Θ
Eduardo doesn't have a new dreamy
poet to supplant Ronald Palmer.
Θ That Caterina still blogs when I thought she
was a zillionaire now.
Θ The title to Hannah's new poem (Take
Heede The Bees That Be Nearly In Swarme, and it's a good kinda surprise).
Θ That Henry agrees with
Ange (and I with both of them).
~~~
Speaking of Henry, he's written the smartest thing I've read all morning (which
is to say, the thing with which I most agree):
I don't deny the pervasive & insidious presence of injustice & evil. Nor the
forces of conformity & exploitation which structure & process the social reality
we inhabit. But I question whether the appropriate interpretation of this
reality is a purely econo-political one. That is I think of injustice and
inequality - & the seemingly entrenched patterns of oppression which they assume
- as symptoms, rather than causes.
Taken as causes, the logic leads to the denunciation of
bourgeois property rights, capitalism, the rule of law, democratic institutions,
private enterprise, and so on; it leads to the moral disenfranchisement of
independent cultural activity (academia, art, literature) - its chastisement for
complicity in the "system" (cf. Ohmann's analysis).
If taken as symptoms, the entrenched injustices and inequalities
of various nations & societies may have very different systemic
shapes & developments; there may be no simple "answer" (Marxist, socialist,
nationalist, ethnic, religious, etc.) which provides utopian solutions to the
underlying causes : ie. the greed, selfishness, bigotry,
aggression, malice, hatred, cowardice, fraudulence, intellectual/moral blindness
of human beings, persons, individuals.
Posted by jbahr at 08:35 AM | Comments (3)
October 01, 2005
That Town Up There By The Lake There
The
weather has been obscenely beautiful this week, mostly in the 70's, no rain and
blue skies until the evening, when clouds start to roll in from the mountains.
~~~
I am so jealous that Rebecca
(and
Tony,
Adam, and
Daniel)
had an acceptance from Forklift, Ohio, which is one great
publication. They've never taken so much as a recipe from me, and Rebecca
got a poem and a culinary plug for figs.
Some posts from our academic bloggers (usually those in the grips of a PhD
program) make my head hurt, as if I had entered the throbbing, humming engine
room of a huge vessel. I rather took to
Tony's "sloppy post", however,
which seemed honest, spontaneous, and thoughtful. There's a section that
goes: And it seems clear the online poetry world swings very
heavily towards the post-avant. You know, Mark Strand, Louise Gluck, Robert
Hass, Tony Hoagland: these people don't have blogs, don't edit online magazines,
don't really publish online. Ron Silliman, Nick Piombino, Barrett Watten,
Juliana Spahr, Lisa Jarnot: these people do. //
The fact that a majority of the online journals, blogs and sites lean 'post
avant' might seem just like a possibly curious fact to some of us, but I think
this fact will actually enact a fundamental shift when those who are now just
coming to poetry (at least those doing it partly or mostly online) become more
established and start throwing their weight around in terms who they read,
publish, teach, etc.
That got me thinking about BlogLand and the illusion of self-selection.
Is the online world really that much more progressive? The dozens of
poetry boards I've participated in don't seem to be. Nor do many of the
older eZines (Blue Moon
Review, Perihelion,
Big Bridge), although they do
seem to have larger percentage of what
Steve would call elliptical verse. The top 100 journals seem to carry
a bit more post avant work, but for the most part (as Tony points out),
PA verse lives in its own little ghetto of literary publication, much of it
web-based. There are so many cross-referential posts and intra-blogger
cheerleading (which, by the way, is a good thing) that we may be generalizing
our anthill to real life (which to most poets is Ploughshares, AWP, and
the Bollingen).
~~~
I'm off to see my sweetie in Wisconsin. We're going to drive up and spend
a day or two in Bayfield, a small and beautiful town on Lake Superior, which
calls itself the Gateway to the Apostle Islands. The last time we were
there, we took the last ferry of the year across the 4-mile passage to the major
island. Halfway across, it occurred to me to ask how the residents of the
island get back to Bayfield during the rest of the year. Ferryman:
"They drive". Me: "Four miles across the freaking lake?!"
Ferryman: "Well, of course, they wait for the snowplow to clear it first".
Me: "The SNOWPLOW?!".
Apparently it gets pretty cold up there.
Posted by jbahr at 08:39 AM | Comments (3)