Song in my head when I wake up

Anyone who hasn't heard Mindy Smith's "One Moment More" album is missing a beautiful voice rendering some excellent songs. I don't know why, but I keep hearing her "Down in Flames" in my head when I wake up.

I don't usually take chances
Most would easily agree
Something in your eyes
Is saying you can ease my heartache
I have a hurting inside
And I know you're just a stranger
If you cannot understand
There's too many times
I've lost my chance to talk with an angel
Too many to count

And life's so hard
It's the little things that seem to be getting me today, yeah
Life's so hard
But I'm doing what I can not to be getting down
While I'm going down in flames
Going down in flames

I would tell you I am happy
If I wasn't so damn sad
And the loneliness both overwhelms and keeps me empty
That's how it's been for a while

And life's so hard
It's the little things that seem to be getting me today, yeah
Life's so hard
But I'm doing what I can not to be getting down
While I'm going down in flames
Going down in flames

I need some direction
I need someone to listen
Someone to tell me that they know

That life's so hard
It's the little things that seem to be saving me today, yeah
Life's so hard
And I'm doing what I can
Oh, yeah, I'm doing what I can
Hey, I'm doing what I can
Putting out yeah
Putting out the flames

Submariners Do It Deeper

I never went underway on the Philly, but I was onboard for about an hour when it was at Electric Boat in Groton, CT. What does this have to do with poetry? I've written some poems about my time in the Navy, including Gays in the Military

Hartford Courant
September 22, 2005

Sub Officers Disciplined

By Associated Press

GROTON -- The commander of a U.S. nuclear submarine that collided with a Turkish cargo ship in the Persian Gulf this month was relieved of command Wednesday and two other officers were reassigned, the Navy said.

Cmdr. Steven M. Oxholm put the submarine in a hazardous situation, a Navy investigation found, and he received a letter of reprimand. The Groton-based USS Philadelphia was traveling on the surface of the Gulf Sept. 5 when it slammed into the bulk carrier M/V Yaso Aysen.

Citing a lack of confidence in Oxholm's ability to command, Rear Adm. John Bird relieved him of his duties. Oxholm will return to Submarine Group Two, based in Groton, for a new assignment.

Nobody was injured and the damage was minor. It was the U.S. Navy's second collision with a civilian vessel in the Gulf in 14 months.

Capt. Robert J. Brennan replaced Oxholm as commander of the Philadelphia, which has a crew of 125.

The boat is expected to return to sea.

Howl at fifty

OK, I admit, I've only read the first few lines of Howl. They were good lines, but at a point it all just started feeling tedious. I'd like to look it up in my Ginsberg Collected, but I can't find it right now. I think it's a kind of poem whose existence I approve of in theory even though I don't have the patience to endure its actuality. In other words, "Yea performance poetry!" Ok, whatever. Here's the story

Howl at fifty

If you're wondering how I'm finding these poetry articles, I have my personalized Google homepage searching for poet poetry poem on Google News.

The Equinox

I got notification in the mail yesterday that one of my sestinas was accepted by The Equinox literary magazine. The Equinox is eclectic, with the goal of offering a forum to the many voices of the Western Mass region, even at the risk of some cacophony. Simple charm or complete angst--and all points between--are equally considered. In your face, McSweeney's, you bloody bahstids.

What does it mean to be a poet in our time

I haven't read this entire interview with Charles Bernstein (he's evidently a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, which doesn't automatically endear him to me), but I love this line:

As James Sherry once remarked, if you take a sheet of plain white paper, perhaps it’s worth a penny, but if you write a poem on it, it’s worth nothing.

I'd say, well, yeah, especially if it's a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem!

Set List

Here's my set list from the open reading at the Arms Library in Shelburne Falls, Friday, September 17, 2005:

• Workplace Romance
  
• Enlightenment
  
• Petrified Forest
  
• Terminal
  
• Animal Dramedy
  

Current song stuck in my head: 4:35 AM by Gemma Hayes. Looking forward to her new album.

What Next?

I have four recently-published books in front of me that I'm trying to decide which I'll read first. They are

• The Wounded Surgeon by Adam Kirsch (a critical look at Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz and Plath)
  
• The First Poets by Michael Schmidt (Lives of the ancient Greek poets)
  
• Paul Celan Selections by Pierre Joris
  
• Pizza Poems by Renata Dumitrascu
  

I'm just wondering if anyone who reads this has a preference for any of these books...(?)

Simply Lasting

I finished this book about Jane Kenyon a couple weeks ago. It is a poignant telling of her life, as well as an informative look at her poetry. Still, the line that most sticks with me from the book is by Wendell Berry:

Those who are living and writing at a given time are not just isolated poetry dispensers more or less equivalent to soft-drink machines, awaiting the small change of critical approval.

Feeling as a Foreign Language

I read this book by Alice Fulton about a couple months ago. There is much I like throughout the book, including her discussion of fractal poetics, an analysis of Dickinson, and her defense of abstractions. I believe it was in this book that she complained of so many poems sounding like "polished gossip" and that so many poems were more about emotions than ideas, but, since I can't track those lines down right now, I could be wrong. Still, a thought-provoking book.

A Concert of Tenses

I read this book by Tess Gallagher several weeks ago. There is much I like throughout the book. Here's just a sample:

The young writers know that NEA awards and other contests are judged by other poets, so biting the wrong hand could mean no fellowship, no publication, no readings, no teaching job. This may partially explain the slack-hearted, overintricate manuevers in which a writer examines a poet's work only on its own ground but does not take it farther into the arena of what is being done by others.

She quotes Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text "The text you write must prove to me it desires me."

The Unemployed Fortune-Teller

I read this book by Charles Simic a few weeks ago. The one line that really sticks with me from the book is "The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination."

Heteronyms

Speaking of heteronyms... The last two years I've written a sestina and submitted it to McSweeney's, to the response of "it's not right for us." This is compounded by my having seen/heard McSweeney's founder David Eggers speak. He uttered every line as if it was inherently witty, which it wasn't. I've decided my sestina next time around will use heteronyms as the end words. Heteronyms, if you don't know and don't want to bother looking it up, are words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently, e.g. "wind" (a breeze, or to wind a watch) or "minute" (a small amount of time, or a small particle.) Then when I get the "it's not right for us" I can console myself with the thought that "they just don't know how to appreciate heteronyms, the poor dumb bastards." A concern: if I had a sestina accepted by McSweeney's, would it mean my work had deteriorated into pretentiousness?

The Book of Disquiet

Years ago I tried reading "Reveries of a Solitary Walker" by Rousseau. He was so hypersensitively obsessive about every psychic ache and pain that I actually got sick from reading it. I tried reading it again in a bookstore recently and the nausea returned. Now, from that, you would think my trying to read a book entitled "The Book of Disquiet" would have me hurling into my lap. But, oddly, I find myself unmoved. And I'm wondering why. I think it's because Pessoa seems to be forced in his pronouncements, as if he's trying to convince the reader how contrary, unique, creative and sensitive he is. So I'm not sure what my ultimate verdict on him is.

Well, of course he seems forced. He wrote under several personas (he called them heteronyms), so posturing was something he willfully did. But was he sincere in his posturing, was he a complex man of multiple sincerities, or was he trying for effect? One of his lines is "It's possible to feel life as a sickness in the stomach, the very existence of one's soul as a muscular discomfort." And this before the rise of existentialism. But after Dostoevsky.

Anyway, there are some intersections between his thought and mine. In flipping through the book I see one or two thoughts that seem to be represented in my poems. I'm not sure yet if the intesection covers more than just a small area.

Weird Poems/Weird Poets: A Miscellany

I really enjoyed Jack Anders' article on Weird Poems/Weird Poets on MiPOesias, particularly the part on Georg Trakl. He quotes from the 20 Poems of Georg Trakl translated by Robert Bly and James Wright. He quotes from their introduction:

The poems of Georg Trakl have a magnificent silence in them. It is very rare that he himself talks–for the most part he allows the images to speak for him. Most of the images, anyway, are images of silent things. In a good poem made by Trakl images follow one another in a way that is somehow stately.

Wallace Stevens : Words Chosen out of Desire

I recently finished reading Wallace Stevens : Words Chosen out of Desire by Helen Vendler. It changed my perception of him from an aloof obscurantist into a poet of melancholic desire. It's a short book which reveals his harshness, desire, secrecies and perfection of magnitude. He could be harsh with himself, he desired even as a septuagenarian, his secrecies were: using "he" or "she" instead of "I"; burying the emotional heart of a poem in the middle instead of stating it in the beginning or end; placing the context of the poem in his own work as well as his predecessors (particularly Keats); misleading titles; and his allusiveness. The final chapter covers Stevens' handling of the orders of magnitude between body, mind, garments, environment and nature. It illustrates how he reimagined the differences of magnitude between these elements in successive poems, culminating in The River of Rivers in Connecticut (which I happen to cross twice daily on my commute.) Included are some quotes from Stevens' Opus Posthumous, which prompted me to want to check that out, too.

My vote for favorite Vendler sentence in this book is on page 58: "If there is no medium of verbal solubility, perhaps one can only imagine two immiscible liquids with a metonymic impermeability." It seems that every book I've read of hers is usually very clearly written, but has one trademark sentence like that in it. I love it!

Approaching Poetry

I really like this description of a poem in Approaching Poetry by Stacy Tartar Esch

"I think of a poem as being like a really tightly packed suitcase. This is the analogy: you're going on a vacation. A long weekend vacation, and you're not sure what to bring. So you throw just about everything you own into a tightly packed, barely closed little weekend- sized suitcase, which provides a nice neat boundary around all your stuff, holding it in place. But now imagine you need to get out your sweatshirt because your best friend needs to borrow it. You know the suitcase is all neatly packed, and it will be a disaster trying to find that thing, but you say, go ahead, you open it up. You can find, it yours. To me, that best friend is like a reader coming to a great poem. The poem is that impossibly stuffed-tight suitcase and the reader wants something from it. And the very minute that reader makes the slightest move to open the latch or the zipper-whoosh!-everything that's been stuffed in comes flying out. That's like the meaning flying out in every direction when we start to analyze rich poetry. It can be that emotionally, intellectually volcanic. It's amazing." -- Stacy Tartar Esch

Critical Reading

Professor John Lye's CRITICAL READING: A GUIDE

The Mystique of the Difficult Poem

Do you ever wrestle with clarity? Here is Steve Kowit's take on The Mystique of the Difficult Poem. Includes some Jorie Graham bashing and Robinson Jeffers boosting.

my daughter snapped this when half my hair was sticking straight up in the wind! 

Polishing Only the Nose

The first issue of The November 3rd Club is active. My poem, Polishing Only the Nose of the Bronze Statue of Christ is in there.