pole vaulting skills

HTML Giant has this fantastic entry on moves in contemporary poetry. They're so right on. These are the trends. Sadly, I blindly follow more than half of them while writing. It's probably best to break some of these habits once conscious of them.

Headlines

I finished reviewing Allison Benis White's Self Portrait with Crayon. It will be in H_NGM_N's next issue.

Wrote a decent poem with drop lines the other day.

Audrey will begin crawling any day now. At five and a half months, she smiles at strangers and grabs everything. She would eat pizza, drink wine and coffee, and talk on cell phones if she could.

Danna and I found the BEST baby-carrying contraption. It's called an ERGO (see picture).

My farflung, online writer's group will meet up this summer in late July. I'm pretty excited to meet everyone in person. My vote for location is Baltimore. We'll see.

My pal Phil Estes has a poem up at Frigg.

After six months of drinking dark roast coffees exclusively, I'm giving light roasts a chance.

Plain Spoke

I just got an acceptance from Plain Spoke. The poems I've seen in this journal rock and are close to my aesthetic, so I'm psyched to find out they wanted a poem from my Notes for a Memoir series.

Here's what New Pages has to say about the little journal.

"the world exists nowhere but within us"

I've really enjoyed the prose poem sequence from Rilke in the fall issue of The Paris Review. He wrote it as a 22-year-old...such strong juvenilia attests to his possibly being the best poet of the 20th Century.

I love how this passage moves between the metaphors of engraving a watch or compass (with the verb "etch") and plowing a field (with the noun "furrow") to situate the always already here presences of these personages:

You cannot hold anything against this calm and tranquil occupation: the story of Zoroaster, that of Plato, that of Jesus Christ and Columbus and Leonardo and Napoleon and many more, did need to get written. In other words, these stories wrote themselves, so to speak. Every one of this cast of characters etched a furrow in the great gray brain of the earth, and we all carry a miniature reproduction of this archetypal brain within us, like a pocket watch or the small round pill of a compass that shows where the sun rises over a worthy citizen’s belly. (the italics are mine)

What a masterful move. You have to hate him a little.

Headlines

Got two poems picked up by Main Street Rag.

Am excited to review Self-Portrait With Crayon by Allison Benis White for an online journal. Her poems defy expectation in the most genuine way.

Am officially in a music rut. Need new music. I miss new music. Recommendations?

Having drinks with Phil tonight. Phil writes poems and takes the writing of them as seriously as I do.

Like most people, I'm looking forward to eating too much turkey and pie.

Will start a workout regimin soon.

A Complaint

Okay, I'm so bored with poems about Odysseus. For that matter, can you think of a duller topic for a poem than Greek myths? Sure, Sissyphus rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity is a powerful metaphor, but who wants to reimagine it in a poem knowing it's a thinly guised comparison to the poet's cycles of expectation and disappointment? You can count me out.

Sometimes you feel like a list

1. August Kleinzhaler. New to his work, I have recently read and enjoyed his Sleeping it Off in Rapid City. His lines build neighborhoods of complexity one concrete image at a time. He's unaffraid to drop in pop cultural artifacts and strange personal references (take, for example, Stinky Phil, a bully from his New Jersey childhood). His verse moves down the page so effortlessly...he not only makes the making of a poem look easy but he also makes brilliance look easy. A couple of years ago he openly criticized Garrison Keilor's wholesome Lake Woebegone approach to poetry: “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.” This sealed the deal for me.

2. Richard Buckner. His 2006 album Meadow sounds like this late autumn landscape's orange, brown and gray in the muted light. To mix metaphor,the songs comb the beaches of loss and heartbreak. The lyrics scuttle along like shells in a low tide, the waters of his gorgeous voice pulls one image out of the sand only to cover it with another.

3. 2009. It will come to an end in 56 days. If you count 2000 as the first year of the new millenium, we have worked ourselves a decade into the century. If you're old like me, you might agree that this is the first decade that has passed with the swiftness of a couple of years.

4. Sufjan Stevens. He has finally given up on his 50 states project. I don't know whether to be disappointed or relieved that he has worked through this delusion. While it was an obviously impossible undertaking, we have to be glad his psychiatrist held off on prescribing lithium for as long as he did. The Michigan and Illinois albums were like these grand middle school independent study projects. Something we had learned from and have proudly kept over the years.

5. Midtown Kansas City. Needing more space and a landlord willing to make repairs, we have moved back to Midtown after having lived in neighborhoods to the Northeast for the past year and a half. Again, I'm digging Midtwon's mashup of decay and splendor. An abadoned redbrick colonade here and a well-kept shirtwaist there. The sleek highrises along the Plaza boulevards with excellent views of the crumbling Midtown infrastructure. Not one but two Lexuses idling in a left turn lane. A man posted at the tip of the traffic island with a sign that reads "Out of work. Out of luck. Everything Helps." It's all good.