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Friday Notebook 04.01.2011
Just one lone quatrain in the old notebook this crazy-busy week: “Rats can’t vomit.“Thus are the curled lipsof the Wall Street bankersalways impeccably dry. So let me offer up another sample from one of my old notebooks. This particular poem, written with my old friend Joe Nigg in mind, is riddled with mixed metaphors that make it unsuccessfully baroque—but I still like the playful music of it, pretty much…. Lexicomania for Joe Nigg We labor with language, our honed witsflashing like sewing needles in a sweatshop.But it’s no sweat. We like it. It keeps uskeen and intensely busy.Read More
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Equinoctial
I’m queueing this to post at 9:21 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time—the official 2011 vernal equinox. Enjoy! Another Equinox Spring snow: why mention it? Spring wind: same old, same old. Tulips poking out blunt red tongues.Gossiping birds on the wet porch rail. Of course, sappiness floods my veins— “force that through the green fuse” and all. I love getting caught up in the tale’s plot;but the denouement darkens its theme: The planet giveth and taketh away.So I hail the season sotto voce, minding the Master’s voice:“ Easy, you know, does it, son….” I like this one, though it’s self-indulgent.Read More
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Friday Notebook 03.11.2011
Further Adventures of K. I’ve saddled an enormous cockroach,and here I am clattering across the desert griton his back— his back a hard, glossy brown—digging my spurs into his armor now and then,now and then glancing back at the billowing cloudhis skinny feet keep kicking up. The sunis setting now, making the floating dust a vastsmear of red across the sierras. Now and thenI pat the creature’s armored head, stroke his feelers.“Good boy, Max,” I croon. His answer never wavers:“Like a dog.” * So many are like gulls thriving on garbage, on contagion.Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.25.2011
I’ve laid low all week long, trying to get caught up after our trip to Mexico. And since the only notebook entry I have to offer is political, not poetical, I’ll resurrect an old unpublished poem for your a(be)musement. First, the politics—on the uprisings in Tunis, Egypt, and Libya: When Capitalism faces revolution, it forgets all about “creative destruction” and begins stammering about “stability” and the dangers of democracy in the hands of The Other.Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.18.2011
[I found a scrap of paper under my car seat with these lines scrawled on it, from last summer, as I recall] A chirring fires up in the locust treeas if a hand switched on a lamp of sound. * The tyrant resigns and flees.The ancient square throbswith exultant crowds. Reportersfor State TV recant the liesthey told all those years,and are forgiven. Far away,the tyrant has wrapped himselfin a cloak of rage and fear-sweat;he smells like his subjects didfor three decades.Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.11.2011
waning moon—stars coming backthat were never gone * “Even the buzz of a mosquito is a communication.” —Róbert Gál (in New European Poets) * Coffeeshop Sunday Morning sun tangled upin a stranger’s hair;her intelligence tangled upin the book she’s reading;and I—— * Ritual Meloxicam to soothe the angry disk between L2 and L3, pinched and bulging like a bitten tongue. Prilosec to save the stomach from the ravage of Meloxicam and to keep down the Resveratrol (an oblong lump of compressed soot said to keep the blood vessels pliant and cancer at bay).Read More
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Friday Notebook 02.04.2011
In the perhaps vain hope of liberating some potentially interesting jots from the well of my notebook, I’m launching Friday Notebook. (Applause. Fireworks whistling in the background.) The impulse for this comes from thinking about fragments, for which I have that thank Ian Hamilton Finlay (as quoted on Jerome Rothenberg’s Poetry and Poetics blog) and John Latta’s musings on Roland Barthes at Isola di Rifiuti. I feel that fragments are only fragments by reference to an imaginal wholeness; without the imaginal wholeness they are nothing but debris.Read More
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Minus 13
I keep meaning to post these links and keep forgetting. But now that we’re snowed in—or, to be more accurate, frozen in (it’s minus 13 degrees here in Indian Hills as I write)—I have a moment free from “real” work to make the recommendation.Read More
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A Blogger’s Notebook 13
ANOTHER PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING BOOK OF POEMS I don’t know which is more humiliating. That I read itstraight through in one sitting, grinning and grievingin all the right places.Read More
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In a Bleak Year-End Mood, the Poet Tips His Hat to a 16th Century Colleague
Thomas Nashe in leg irons A Litany for the Wheeling Year with apologies to Thomas Nashe Again a grim old year is turning.Again the fires of war are burning.Again the poor cough up their lives.Again rich men adorn their wives.The moon’s balsamic, a sleepy eye.We stare drunkenly up and sigh. Who’ll have mercy on us? Not the CEO of Goldman.Not the gangsters in the Forum.Not the grinning, bailed-out bankers.Not the pundits hyping rancor.The moon looks inward toward midnight.We stare drunkenly up and sigh. Who’ll be honest with us? Look at how our God-dreams kill us.Look at how our wills are will-less.Look at…Read More