Send me your suggestion for the Rod McKuen look-alike contest. Nominate the famous poet whose poems, cut into short snippets might reasonably be confused with short snippets of McKuen. I've done Merwin and Rich so far...

I'm reading Steve Tills' Behave and David Perry's Range Finder. Thanks to both authors for sending me these books.

E l s e w h e r e

Happy birthday to Gary. I'm guessing he's 44, because that's how old I'm turning in about a month, and I think he's of similar age.

"Anything your reader can do for himself leave to him." LW.

Yes!

Rod McKuen or Adrienne Rich? [ain't I'm bad]

a)

Sleeping with you after
weeks apart how normal
yet after midnight
to turn and slide my arm
along your thigh
drawn up in sleep
what delicate amaze


b)


Take a strand of your hair
on my fingers let it fall
across the pillow lift to my nostrils
inhale your body entire


c)

Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart

d)

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You've kissed my hair
to wake me.

e)

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

A high-school teacher from Spain writes me, in an email:

"Soy un lector de poesía norteamericana. Más: tengo a la poesía norteamericana y a la tradición de la modernidad en esa literatura: Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., los objetivistas de los 30 (Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, Niedecker), los proyectivistas de "Black Mountain" (Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Dorn, Levertov), la escuela de Nueva York (Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch), pero también a los confesionales como Berryman, Lowell y últimamente James Merrill, tengo a todos ellos como parte de un santuario privado, una colección de "diferencias" de las que el viejo "Ezra" es la divinidad tutelar, el objeto sagrado y cuasi ritual."

"I am a reader of American poetry. What is more, I hold American poetry and the modern tradition in this poetry.... blah, blah... I hold all of them as part of a private sanctuary, a collection of 'differences' among which old 'Ezra' is the presiding divinity, the sacred and almost ritual object."

I wish some of our university professors were as well read. Hell, I wish I myself could spell "Zukofsky" "Niedecker," "Reznikoff," and "Merrill" with consistent accuracy. At least I won't write "Alan Ginzburg" and "John Ashberry."

"But new rhythms seem arhythmical at first."

From another email from David Shapiro.

Aaron Tieger, who is moving to Ithaca, got the mean score on the JMACT. He gets an email attachment of Minor Poets of the New York School. Gary Sullivan at one time had the mean score, so he also received one. Jack, with a score of 100 (I'm giving him the snuck question too, since he revealed spontaneous preference for that form), will also get the attachment. And Jason, with the low score. There's a good chance he'll be indifferent to the book. If anyone else wants it, I will send it along, even if you didn't play along. It is still looking for a publisher.

From an email from David Shapiro, who thinks I know a bit about rhythm: "There seem to be no minor poets in Kansas." Thanks, David.

Perloff on Lowell

On page 6 of this article, Marjorie Perloff once again uses the phrase "iambic pentameter" as shorthand for "regular meter":

"... the insistent iambic pentameter acts as mnemonic device:

Whenéver he léft a jób,

He gót a smárter cár."

[sigh]

st*rnosedmole: "Somehow, I got stuck with the job of reading the VIP's talk, and for some reason, he had written the entire thing in Cyrillic letters, and his transliteration from the Roman alphabet to the Cyrillic roundly sucked, which caused my reading to be a little stilted and halting. This annoyed the VIP greatly and he kept shifting around in his seat like he really needed to pee, getting angrier with every slowdown. It all came to a head, however, when I got to the part of his speech where he talked about blogs he really liked and he mentioned Bemsha Swing, but his ridiculous spelling in Cyrillic rendered it more like Veemcha Schwee, which my tongue of course tripped over. I left my dream with the VIP having a ridiculous hissyfit as I held his crappy Cyrillic notes up to the crowd as a vindication of my struggle.

Veemcha Schwee!"

"There is no such thing as too much cilantro."

I just thought that would make a good title for a poem by me or even you. Feel free to use it, no strings attached.

In case it had escaped you, I really like Clark Coolidge's poetry.

What makes Henry cranky

"Ron Silliman, Steve Evans specialize in denouncing the Dominant Mainstream.

This just makes me depressed.  All these pigeonholes & lists."

 The best remedy is just to promote, as eloquently as possible, one's own vision of poetry. That's what Ron is doing 9 days out of 10, and what I try to do on my best days. Steve's lists are exhausting, but not negative (by and large.) I feel that just by putting some poems by Coolidge (or whoever) out there for public discussion I am implicitly denouncing the "mainstream"--by showing one alternative to it. I don't believe anyone who's lived with challenging contemporary poetry like this for a few years would go back to Billy Collins. Once in a while I give into my urge to bash something, but I usually wait a bit to see if this urge will fade.