Review

Robert Creeley,
sage green crayon,
whose poetry
is Peter Pan,

whose voice might age,
be truth, but told:
against the grain,
does not get old.

By verse I mean
not to insult,
just to suggest
that magics jolt

thru such ample
space of words
that hold sudden,
timeless turns

thru the secret
world not so—
the not not secret
world of we know.

           —July 8, 2004

The Age of Vinyl

Dioxins from Louisiana
manufacturing plants
migrate on the winds
and concentrate
in Great Lakes fish.
Dioxins are found
in hazardous concentrations
in the tissues of whales
and arctic polar bears.
Dioxins concentrate in
breast milk to the point
that human infants now
receive high doses, orders
of magnitude greater than
those of the average adult.
The most potent synthetic
carcinogen ever tested
in laboratory animals.
A dioxin cloud hung
over lower Manhattan.

Fire Sale

Fire Sale, originally uploaded by nobodyintherain.

Things To Do This Week In Utah

"RIP YOUR STRIP" Let the Utah Rivers Council
show you how to xeriscape your parking strip
and save water at the same time.

PORCUPINE HILL CLIMB - raise money for cancer
research at the Porcupine Pub & Grill. Meet
at 10:30 a.m. back at the grill
for an awards ceremony and a breakfast.

learn the basics of photography

RED BUTTE GARDEN "Splash!"

INDIGO GIRLS
SOLD OUT.
hang around to see
if anything
becomes available.

explore the art of Egypt, Greece and Rome
Utah Museum of Fine Arts,
410 Campus Center Drive
$100.

IN THE PARK Intertribal pow-wow demonstrations

Learn how to make sourdough egg muffins at noon

make animal-themed puppets for the County Fair

Pick up a wish list at the children's desk.

let those wacky scientists from Mad Science
show you how to discover science stuff
in your own backyard

Bring your coolers and blankets or low-rider chairs.

Mark your calendars for
high school reunion
at the Homestead Resort

sign up for classes with master magician
self-defense awareness workshop

Who Cares About Literature Anyway?

Poems which start out by referencing the act of writing are easily dismissed as too self-involved and usually have to be fairly well-written to be published. This is especially true when the poem's arguably provocative thesis is quickly dispensed with because of faulty memory, though the rest of the poem's images purport to offer figurative support. When the poem proceeds into cleverness and an even clunkier rhythm than it started out with, a reasonable mind would think that even a fringe literary magazine would pass on it. Throw in a weather report, a platitude, and a brave but unsuccessful attempt to retrieve an image from cliche-ville, and most certainly the poem is destined for a fistful of rejections and, at best (if the circumstances are right) publication in the juvenilia section of the late poet's collected works, perhaps on the strength of its humorous final stanza—even though, there too, the lineation is questionable. But none of this applies for established poets, in which case, the poem will appear in a respected-by-most biannual poetry journal. If it were only that, I wouldn't be writing this. But what's more, the poem, in this case Franz Wright's "Publication Date" will be selected for the Poetry 180 program ("a poem a day for american [sic] high schools"—all lowercase: so contemporary, so cool) so that the nation's youth can be subjected to poor writing and equate that with poetry for the rest of their lives. Yee-hah. Go poet laureates! Keep fighting the good fight.

All poets have their clunkers—and if I can be considered a poet it's despite the fact that most-if-not-all of my poems have been just that—but there's no excuse for whichever editor (is this still Billy's gig?) selected the poem for such a high-profile space—and for pedagogical purposes to boot. Then again, some readers really like this poem. When Wright's latest book was reviewed in The Harvard Crimson, the poem was highlighted for its "slapstick desperation" and the reviewer finds the poem a hoot. Last year, poet Peter Pereira felt compelled to post the poem on his blog. (But then, Pereira's next book is titled What's Written on the Body and the judgement of any poet who would use that for a book title after Jeanette Winterson's brilliant novel Written on the Body is at least suspect.)

Anyway, if all the poets who stand around lamenting the lack of poetry readers, young and old, really want to get kids, at least, interested, then they should start a campaign to ban it. Just ban poetry books from ever being on school grounds: automatic suspension for any student caught with On Earth or Ring of Fire. But be clear that rock star poetry doesn't count under the ban, to help avoid confusion. Also, be sure to demand that rating labels be placed on all poetry and poetry-related book covers. You may have to wait a few years for the stigma to fade, but then watch: The loot will accrue in stacks and rolls.

Chicks Flushing, But I Can't Eat a Grouse

Poetry Daily has posted an awesomely bad poem today about flushing birds. I can only imagine that "Furniture of the World" was published in the Boston Review because the author resides in Cambridge. Perhaps she met somebody? It's funny how PD reports that a poem is selected "for its literary quality"? I thought PD was trying to attract new readers of poetry, not send them scurrying away? (Stop trying already! All of you!)

It's not clear whether the birds are being flushed or if they're actually doing the flushing themselves. Maybe it's a metaphor, you know, like there's a bunch of chicks in the lady's room that I'm spying on. That, at least, might explain why I fall to my knees. And I have to assume she's talking to me, since the "you" of the poem isn't defined at all, not even hinted at (I'll take hinted at!) as being herself or some lover or other friend or relative or enemy. Maybe the birds are simply turning red, and the poet just didn't care that many readers will laugh at the first line as they initially read the opening words to the sound of a toilet. The poet won't deign to say why the bird would be turning red; but it's too bad she couldn't at least specify what bird it was, that could clear things up. Bird specificity shows up in the next line, though, with "a hazel grouse" I couldn't eat for some reason. (I don't normally eat a whole fowl anyway, just a breast usually.) Do American restaurants serve hazel grouse? Why not a bigger grouse? Why not a kind of turkey or chicken or duck? I'd love to cook somebody's goose. But at lest she tells me why I couldn't eat a grouse for what I make of the chicks flushing the lady's room; it's because of "the soft berth of [my] own / great reliable outcome." Apparently I have a soft "spot" reserved for the ship of the things that I almost always do. Or maybe the berth is a bed to bunk in once my day is done? Who knows? In the real world something is configured in order to meet certain requirements. In this poem I configure myself "out of the quiet blood of beasts" (although quiet blood would seem to be blood of the dead, but even still: my dad was not quiet, and: are you calling my mom a beast?) so that I may be a toy. Why would I make myself into a toy? Aren't there better ways to become mild as a giraffe? Is this there to reassure me that I'm only a peeping tom with my "discrete, unrequired interest" in the flushing chicks. That being "mild" I'm really harmless, not a stalker, or a rapist. Well, jeez, that's nice to know. Did I really have to configure myself to do that? Are you sure I didn't have any help? Ah well, just cut out a phrase from a catalog and stick it over the words. There, we have a poem. Let's just hope somebody doesn't "tie [it] to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it."

Berman's Poet Nicknames

With NFL training camps still a few weeks away from "kicking off," Chris Berman, ESPN's self-annointed football swami, was kind enough to take some time to email me his "top ten" contemporary American poet nicknames. I'm not sure why the list goes to thirteen. Is he two-upping Nigel Tufnel? Alluding to Wallace "Even" Stevens? I didn't ask.

John "Lightning And" Ashbery

Charles "Burn, Baby," Bernstein

Louise "I'm Rubber, You're" Glück

Lisa "Anecdote Of The" Jarnot

Michael "Hi, I'm Troy" McClure

Laura "Call Me Dean" Moriarty

Eileen "I Can See For Miles And" Myles

Alice "She Loves Me, She Loves Me" Notley

Hoa "You Know, You Just Can't" Nguyen

Linda "The Past Is" Pastan

Kit "Here's To You, Mrs." Robinson

Mark "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon The" Strand

Anne "Another Brick In The" Waldman

Look It, A Fragment

Vaughn composed her first poem last fall. She was a few months shy of her second birthday, and KC was at work. Vaughn was doing well speaking-wise, already stringing sentences together with relative ease, so I figured why not ask her if she wanted to write a poem. Excited, she said yes and grabbed my pen. I found another pen as she spoke the first line or two. But no sooner had I jotted down the lines in her oversized art pad, her mind was onto something else: setting up a party for her stuffed animals. I decided I would keep writing down whatever she said. After a few lines, she became curious, came over and looked down at what I was writing. The poetry idea was on again. She spoke a few, unprompted lines about the moon and Sharma (our cat). Then she went back to her stuffed-animal party. I continued writing down whatever she said; soon she returned again to see what I was doing. She swayed herself around a bit, then declaimed a few, final lines. I titled the poem "Look It," since those words (obviously they "should be" "Look At") started three lines, including the last two. When KC got home from work later that afternoon, it was a great surprise. Not just the project itself, but also the flow, the rhythm, and the interesting way it captured Vaughn's stream of consciousness. We talked about how we had to type up the poem. We talked about it again later in the week. And later in the month. And then the next month. Unfortunately we never did type it up, and of course the art pad became pretty mangled as fall turned to winter turned to spring. Eventually it was tossed. Now what's funny is how we sometimes will struggle to remember a phrase or an image—grasping at fragments, then holding onto them, repeating them slowly as if to get some sense of the forgotten work to which they once belonged. It's not unlike reading fragments of Anacreon or Sappho. "Look it my pen everybody. / Look it my pen."

Clock Radio

Modern digital alarm clocks
typically featured a radio alarm
as well as a beeping or buzzing
alarm, allowing a sleeper to awaken
to music or news rather than harsh
noise. Most offered a "snooze button,"
a large button on the top that stopped
the alarm and set it to ring again
a short time later. Some alarm clocks
also had a "sleep" button, which turned
the radio on for a set amount of time,
typically one hour. This was useful
for people who liked to fall asleep
with the radio on. Later digital clock
radios often used a battery backup
to maintain the time in the event
of a power outage. Without this feature
digital clocks would reset themselves
incorrectly when power was restored,
causing the alarm trigger to fail.

People Who Died

With my father's-day twenty-percent-off coupon and seven five-dollar reward certificates in hand I was finally able to afford The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan—a fifty-dollar book for seven and change: not too shabby. He's been a favorite poet ever since I first came across his work about twelve years ago. I actually had to bring my copy of his Selected Poems into one of my undergraduate poetry workshops so the professor could familiarize herself. She wasn't all that impressed—you know, his poems didn't fit the workshop model all that well. Hard to believe that was nine years ago already. In the one graduate poetry writing course I finished, none of the other fifteen or so students had even heard of Ted (one or two people at least knew the anti-Vietnam War protester, Daniel Berrigan, and thought I meant him). Even that class was already six years ago: the excuse there, I guess, is that it was a small, state school filled with evening students who, mostly, had real jobs and families to raise during the day. Three years before that I had quickly dropped out of a "top-twenty" MFA program: cost too much to stick around and find out what their excuse was. (Yeah, Silliman's blog post yesterday about unread grad students may have stirred up some bitterness; maybe I should meditate later. ) Anyway, somewhere back there my point was going to be that Berrigan's Collected Poems was sorely needed, not just for dedicated readers, many of whom like me were too young to dig his poems when he was still kickin, but so that more people can see what he was all about, that he's not so easily dismissed, and so that more workshop leaders from now on might be spared the embarrassment of not being hip to his words.

But I was a little surprised by Alice Notely's note to Ted's most well-known poem, "People Who Died," even if what relative notoriety it has is due to the Jim Carroll song." She reports: "Ted considered that with this work he had invented a form which anyone might use to write a poem. That is, every person has a list of 'people who died.' Jim Carroll took Ted at his word and wrote and recorded a song called 'People Who Died,' which is his own list of dead friends." If that's true, Ted's heart is, as usual, in a real cool place, but he didn't invent the form in question. A poem that's primarily a list of people who have died was written at least once before Ted did it (and perhaps there's an even earlier instance I'm not aware of). César Vallejo's "La violencia de las horas" was written about thirty or so years before "People Who Died." Check out the link and you can get a feel for the poem even if you don't really know Spanish. Just as the Carroll song is cool, but not as good as Ted's poem, so Ted's poem is cool, but not as good as Vallejo's. From the limited resources on hand, I can't tell if the Vallejo poem would have been known to Ted—who very well could have come to the form on his own. He just wasn't the first.

Seems like this kind of thing happens with New York School poets. I remember reading a Paul Auster quote where he called Joe Brainard's I Remember "totally original." I love Brainard's poem, and Auster is downright brilliant, but at one point in his poem "Tortoise Shout," D. H. Lawrence repeats "I remember" at the beginning of eight out of ten lines. There's a coincidence involved in that "Tortoise Shout" happened to be one of the poems I read when I was first waking up to "real" poetry (it was in one of those old Oscar Williams anthologies, Little Treasury of Modern Poetry I think—equipped with photos of the poets in back and everything), so the resonance was loud when I came across the Brainard poem. But I just always pictured Joe tinkering with and taking off from the Lawrence piece, and so could never see it as truly original. Maybe I'm too literal. Still, I can see there being something innovative in the cumulative effect of the Brainard poem, maybe more content-related than form-related, unless the form in question is the comprising of a book.

And hasn't some student somewhere yet written a publishable-quality thesis on all that Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery lifted from Apollinaire? (And considering his supreme importance isn't Apollinaire—maybe along with Reverday— becoming the most overlooked of the important French avant-garde poets? Or maybe I just haven't been paying attention lately, which is true, I haven't.) Heck, even the students Silliman blogged about could connect these dots: you don't need to be all that enterprising: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris have given a head start by highlighting Apollinaire's this-and-that-ness in the selections they chose for Poems for the Millennium. (Critics loved to peg Ted as a Frank O'Hara knock off, but he no more built on O'Hara than O'Hara built on Apollinaire.) After that, just grab a copy of Alcools and try to find what doesn't presage the better part of Ashbery's most acclaimed/anthologized work.