A bag of leaves

Vaughn returned from Nana's today with a Ziplock full of orange, yellow, and red leaves. I didn't mow the lawn for like the twentieth day in a row—it makes a great pretend jungle. The Cowboys' first team didn't look so hot this time out. Could be a long season, especially if T-New misses significant time. A few things conspired to have me thinking autobiographically today, from Reginald Shepherd's "Working Class Hero" blog post to Kent Johnson's "competence, linguistics, politics & post-avant matters" in the new Absent issue to Lisa Jarnot's post with pros and cons of academia—the universities are packed with worse poets and minds: it's a sad commentary that she hasn't landed a full-time gig by now. Also, up late last night reading how Creeley “never forgot Williams’ contention that ‘the poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity . . .’ ” What have I never forgotten? There must be something substantial at the core.

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

Heretic in the House

Chicago Review's triple-issue, Edward Dorn, American Heretic arrived today, and it's a tome, a striking tome. It will probably be the weekend before I'm able to really sink my teeth into it. About 250 of the 400+ pages are given to the section on Dorn, which besides critical appraisals and memoir, includes a transcript of one of his workshops at Naropa, a 1990 interview, and reprints of rare poems that alone make this 3/4 of a volume worth the price. In his preface, editor Eirik Steinhoff, notes that this issue "is not exactly intended to introduce Dorn," then quotes Robert Creeley: "Not even a sunrise could quite manage that." But Steinhoff's preface itself, in the span of about 15 pages, offers a solid, concise intro for those new to Dorn—not just providing a context, but also flushing out Dorn's geocultural poetics.

After the intro, we get Dorn's "Tribe", which begins with the poetry of origins—"My tribe came from struggling labor / Depression South Eastern Illinois / Just before the southern hills start / To roll toward the coal country"—grows increasingly political, and ends in polemical fireworks while not lapsing from the lyrical.

Then I had a salad for supper, and then I came up here to do this, while KC tired out Vaughn and got her to sleep. Before starting to type though, I happened into Jennifer Dunbar Dorn's "chronicle" of her time working with her late husband on the literary newspaper Rolling Stock, a great little bit of biography that I couldn't put down.

The only other part of CR I've read so far is CSU alum Piotr Gwiazda's fair and balanced review of Robert Pinsky's latest book of criticism. Sympathetic to the book's shortcomings throughout his review, Gwiazda ends with "Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (note the singular) is a graceful, passionate, and somewhat snobbish apologia for poetry in the United States."

In addition to the rest of the Dorn section, I'm looking forward to Andrea Brady's response to New British Poetry (see Mayhew's comment) and new poems by William Fuller.