After Michael Palmer II

The future will have sharper edges
It will kick the present's butt

It'll have
"one night cheap hotels / and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells"

André Breton will be studying The Commandments of R&B Drumming
Anything's possible, right?

Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson
will get in on the action.

***

Michael Palmer: "Soon"

Soon the present will arrive
at the end of its long voyage

from the Future-Past to Now
weary of the endless nights in cheap motels

in distant nebulae
Will the usual host

of politicians and celebrities
show up for the occasion

or will they huddle out of sight
in confusion and fear

***

This Palmer poem is a little weaker than the other one. I don't like the redundancy of "long voyage" or "distant nebulae." I like the concept of the poem, but not the execution, the actual language. I felt it needed "sharper edges" and something a little more specfiic and astringent. Which politicians would be inserting themselves into the event? I thought immediately of Carter and Jackson, and of course André Breton. I decided to make the T.S. Eliot allusion more explicit. I'm not sure it's really there in the Palmer poem.

New work here from Gina Myers and Raphael Rubinstein,

UPDATE and Jess Mynes. It's already better than Little Emerson. No offense, but at least there are actual poems published in The Duplications. I'm accepting a high percentage, so now's your chance. This is easier than I thought. Only one woman has sent me poems so far, so I need some more female-authored poems. How about it, Nada Gordon, Danielle Pafunda, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer? You are invited to submit.

After Tony Robinson and an Image by JD

Fruit in a child's hand
Fruit from a bowl
The bowl is New Orleans
The fruit cannot be put back in the bowl

What of the cash in the vaults?
Asked the asshole,
What will keep it dry?

How can I use this against my enemies?
Asked the scumbag

Asked the village idiot:
Will this stimulate growth?

Will my knuckle hurt any less?

***

Here is Tony's poem:

New Orleans is shaped like a bowl
a blue bowl is shaped like a city
I've never been to this village nor seen
an orchid up close or blown apart
sideways a strip of photography a row
of houses I've seen two men in a boat
canoeing through the flood oars up
many people are dying in a war across
the big thick-skinned navel orange
we imagine on turtles on bowls my
own sins for which I will burn
in the bowels of the earth for my girl
friend is but a child for the litany
of lies told me is sung by a woman
with a washboard standing at the levee
while the tidewaters come up home
is somewhere yonder a place ungutted
just yet and when you come you never
scream my name just a whelp just shudder
while tree branches remain exactly what
they are while I am with each touch
changing you with each meal sending
you out for someone else when
the mardi gras happens our masks
are see-through when everyone stops dying.

Got testicles?. I do apparently, though the translations I did for Fascicle are of two Lesbian women.

swoonrocket

After Michael Palmer

André Breton has been elected president.
He proclaims La République Surréaliste,

which it already was.
Mentira, mentira, mentira

mutter the jays,
If only they knew!

I've stolen your thunder.
I've stolen the milk from your coffee.

***

Here's the original Palmer poem. I've translated it into "Mayhew"; don't ask me why. That's what I do: create a counterdiscourse when I'm reading. Palmer's beautiful poem deserves better treatment:

THIS

The perfect half-moon
of lies over the capital

Crooks and fools in power what's new
and our search has begun for signs of spring

Maybe those two bluebirds
flashing past the hawthorn yesterday

Against that, the jangle of the spoon in a cup
and a child this day swept out to sea


MP. from "Company of Moths."

Send me your short poem and I'll translate it. I'll rewrite it the way I would have done it, and destroy it in the process.

Minireviews

Company of Moths. Michael Palmer, New Directions, 2005.

I was a little surprised by the James Tate/Charles Simic tone in some of the poems. Palmer comes off as a more intelligent Simic. A lot of the poems feel as though they were translated from the Spanish or Portuguese. Some, in fact, are expicitly indicated as after a particular poet. I tended to translate them "back" as I read. They would work very well in Spnaish with only minimal effort at translation.

It's a very good book. "Sonnet, after Maurice Scèves" is a fine poem. I don't care much for

"A reader writes to complain
that there are no cellphones in my poems..."

I think this tone has already been "done." It's amusing enough, of course. I think there are some lapses of intensity in this book, poems that run out of steam before they are done or that don't seem urgent enough. I'm looking for the 20 pages in the 70 pages. But those other 50 pages keep getting in the way, even though these other pages are also "good." If they were bad it would be easier to find the 20. The 20 pages keeps changing. It is not the same with every reading. Thus I'd have to say there are really 40 pages.

There is a lot that reminds me of David Shapiro. The play with translation. I like this book more than Sun, the only other book by Palmer I own. I suspect it will get better the more I read it.

SONNET

I have two second best fountain pens. They are Watermans, but the kind that costs about $35 dollars. The blue one had been missing for about six months. I thought it permanently gone. Today, the green one disappeared. I thought it was probably in the car, so I went out to look under the driver seat where such things usually drop. I felt around in the dark, and there it was, my pen. But when I got into the house, I realized it was the blue pen that I had lost six months before. The green pen might be in the car, but I don't feel like going back out there right now.

Fascicle is now officially out. Tell me what you think of these poems from Lola Velasco and Amalia Iglesias, translated by me.

Here's the poem in question.

I do like gazpacho, but not other "chilled soups." I like Paul Motian. I don't like Nina Simone or Woody Allen. I don't like Unamuno, though I insist on teaching him. I hate "religiosity," not the same thing as "religion."

My poem about Bill Evans is not in any sense "lightweight" . It is completely sincere and poignant and not meant to be amusing. The anecdote is totally real and the emotions on the surface. I weep whenever I read this poem. However,

the poet does not control reactions to his or her work. If Tony Robinson reads my poem as amusing and lightweight, I can only protest in vain. Plus, how could I compete with David Shapiro? I thought it was an contest for "amateurs."

Maybe there's another Spanish professor who sent in a poem, so there is the possibility that Tony is not referring to my poem at all.

I also like Kevin Killian. Larry Rivers. Michael Magee. Babaganouj. Misspellings on restaurant menus. I like Clark Coolidge. I like The Poker and Carve, Canary and The Hat, Sulfur, Temblor. I like novels written by poets that nobody else knows about. Flann O'Brian. I like sestinas and villanelles and pantoums. The Roots. Leopoldo María Panero and Concha García. I love periodical rooms in libraries. Open stacks. Josephine Miles. Frank Lima. Being the first person to check a book out of the library, when the library has owned the book for 10 years. A section of the library stacks that is difficult to find and that is usually deserted. Count Basie. Modern Drummer magazine. D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy. Poets named "Ron." The Vienna Paradox. Joseph Duemer's bonsai trees. Soundtracks to Charles Bronson movies. Steve McQueen in "Bullit." Gertrude Stein. "Mexico City Blues." Bök. Bach. "Shaking the Pumkin." The Hotel Wentley Poems. 1001 Avant-Garde Plays. I like the pull of displaced quarter-note triplets against a ride cymbal swing beat. Jack DeJohnette and Tony Williams. I like people who love to debate the superiority of the Miles, Coltrane, Chambers, Garland, Jones quintet of the 50s, or the Miles, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter group of the 60s.

I have a hard time reading magazines of poetry. They fragment my attention, already too fragmented. I do like having them and dipping into them at my leisure, but I rarely read them cover to cover.

My first book of poetry
has just been published.
It is over there on the table
lying there on the table,
where is is lying. It has
a beautiful cover and design.
The publishers spent a lot of money
on it and devoted many
man- and woman-hours to it.
The bookstores are ordering copies.
Unfortunately I am a very bad poet and
the book is no good.

--Ron Padgett, "Post-Publication Blues."