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Aaron Belz. The Bird Hoverer. 2007. 76 pp.

Keeping with the theme of poets I know personally... I was at Aaron's reading the other day and bought this book. The celebrity poems in the second half are kind of dumb. Dumb in a "good" way, needless to say. Belz's poetic personality is a version of the dumb/intelligent voice of Ron Padgett. I hope he finds a more original "voice" some day, so to speak. Of course this kind of poetry works very well at readings, in the stand-up comic vein.

I've gone through my own phase of wanting to be Ron Padgett too. In a way, that is based on an underestimation of Ron Padgett, the idea that it is easy to do what he does. The danger is that you end up like Tom Clark instead.

The first half of his book I liked better. Not quite as "dumb."

I'm keeping track of the page lengths, so I can then keep an average. I count the number of pages by simply looking at the page at which the last poem in the book ends. At an average of 70, I will read 630,000 pages of poetry.