Well, the anti-Jonathan Mayhew blog is officially up at notjonathanmayhew.blogspot.com Of course, if I had done it myself it would refute myself much better. The most Jim B. can come up with is jokes about living in Kansas and getting haircuts.

I'm jealous I don't have an anti Jonathan Mayhew blog to contradict my every statement. That would make me extremely important! In fact I'm going to start one myself under a pseudonym unless I can convince some loser with extra time on his hands to do it for me. Any volunteers?

A few days of no blogging, Friday through Monday p.m. Going to San Diego to escape the cold.

The state of receptivity needed to become open to a new writer. I felt it yesterday as a took Fanny Howe's books to a coffee shop and devoured them. There is a stage when you are still deciding how good a writer is. A subsequent stage when you already know and can begin actually to READ. I was bowled over by Howe; I won't apologize for excess of enthusiasm. The aptness of the details is what got to me, both in novels and poems. Good writing, carefully crafted, but not dry or etiolated. Traditional virtues like "well-drawn characters" combined with an avant-garde edge.

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I don't think the idea of a "creep" school is the best approach to writers like Lisa Jarnot, Moxley, Stroffolino, Mullens. An unuseful ideological projection, whether wielded by those promoting or questioning writers of this generation.

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Anonymous back of head in student newspaper, getting hair cut.

At the library I found several books by Fanny Howe. I read about a third of "In the Middle of Nowhere," a good straightforward novel published in 1984. "The Lives of the Spirit": I'm not sure what this book is. Prose poems, short stories? "The Deep North" looks promising. "The Quietist" has some funky illustrations, pencil drawings by Italo Scanga, and contains much material missing from the Selected Poems. The version that appears there seems sanitized, almost sterile in comparison. She's gotten rid of all the prose bit, for one. The 1992 collection "The End" contains the amazing poem "Veteran" and others I haven't got to yet. The morning was spent reading not half-bad dissertation on Mexican poetry, and clicking every every hour or so on equanimity to see if there were any new posts.

Haircut at the student union, photographed and interviewed by student reporter, as though college professor getting haircut were big news. "Well, I was walking by after lunch, and needed a haircut..."

If I were writing an anti-war poem, it would include no references to war. I always thought it was "cheating" to actually mention the subject of the poem! Way too obvious for my evil self. Kenneth Koch's "The Pleasures of Peace" is an anti-war poem in the form of a "pro peace" poem. See also his poems about World War II in New Addresses.

Whatever happened to British culture? This from the BBC:

"The BBC is launching a search for a poem for the nation in the spirit of the classic hymn Jerusalem.

The BBCi online competition ends on 31 May, after which a panel of judges - including eminent poets - will select a shortlist for National Poetry Day on 9 October.

"We want a poem for Britain," said Daisy Goodwin, the host of BBC Two's Essential Poems, a five-part series which begins on Friday.

"We're looking for a poem of our times, one that might be set to music and sung at weddings, on football terraces or in school assembly."

"Great poetry is furniture for the mind," she added."

Evil Self: That poets against the war site demonstrates an utter contempt for the art form. More than 9,000 poems with very few actual POEMS. How depressing!

Virtuous Self: Contempt for the art form? I think you're putting your aesthetic preferences above the anti-war effort. You have your priorities reversed. I find it deeply moving to find so many poems written by professional poets of varying styles, by high school kids, by ordinary citizens. And there are fine poems by Fanny Howe... John Gallaher's "When the bomb went off" is not too bad either. I could give other examples.

Evil Self: I agree about those particular poems, but what do poets as a class have to contribute to the opposition to war? If they are no longer acting as poets, that is, if they write badly, mistreating the language, then they are no longer "poets" except in the sentimental sense of the term. Poetry is supposed to be a defense against mediocre, sentimental, and slack uses of language. Did the language writers write in vain? Weren't they supposed to do away with simplistic political poetry once and for all?

Virtuous Self: Sure, but most people don't really care about some minor schism within the poetry world. You're making this into a professional issue when it is really a civic matter. Poets have a duty to speak, like other citizens. They might express themselves through poems or through statements of conscience. And poems are a good way for young people to express themselves as well, whether or not they are "real poets" according to your elitist definition.

Evil Self: The opposition to mediocre uses of language is a civic duty as well, and that is precisely the social function of poets. You trivialize the issue when you characterize it as some minor turf battle. Isn't evil just as much a function of banality and laziness than of actual malice? Also, why do you always get to be the virtuous one? What makes my position so evil?

Virtuous Self: I guess that's because you intellectualize everything and paralyze yourself, so that you end up undermining the opposition to evil.

Evil Self: That's just who I am, I suppose. Someone has to take the "devil's advocate" position to keep everyone else honest. If we just throw our support behind the banalization of poetry we end up losing integrity, another form of virtue. The integrity of the art form is really the only thing that poet's can claim as their own....

(And so they argued as the shadows fell... )

Jordan Davis on the "approval bind" made me realize I have constructed this blog as a device to gain approval, ingratiate myself through obnoxiousness. Keep that approval and reciprocal attentiveness coming! I am the least difficult of men.

I used to have this narcissistic friend, who fed my own narcissism. I was uncomfortable with anyone admiring me that much, but I should have been even more uncomfortable.

If every new line has to be coherent with the preceding poem, yet unpredictable, I find it difficult to write poems of more than six or seven lines. Too many more than that either start falling into predictable pattern, or strain coherence too severely.

American poets who don't know even a single foreign language well enough to actually read poetry... I'm always taken aback by this, since I always wanted to learn as many languages as I could. Akiko taught me enough Japanese so that I can at least tell which word is which in a Basho poem (in romaji). My German is weak. I can read most Romance languages to varying degrees... French, Portuguese, and Catalan fairly well. Italian much less. Not to mention Spanish. I used to read Latin fairly well but it's fallen off quite a bit.

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Here is that Fanny Howe quote, from "O'Clock,"

"A full Irish breakfast
consists of sausage, black pudding, brown bread,
butter, jam, and some kind of egg.
The tea bag is dropped
into a stainless steel pot
and your pour steamed water on it."

Reading Silliman's summary of an essay by Heriberto that I have not myself read. I have the impression, reading Mexican blogs in Spanish, that the actual reality is much messier, the terms like mainstream and avant-garde do not necessarily mean the same thing in Mexico that they do here. Paz, basically, is a "high-modernist" poet. What if T.S Eliot had been a quasi-surrealist poet and had lived until 1990, maintaining his privileged position until the very end? Mexico never had its New American Poetry in the 1960s, which may be why Heriberto is translating American poetry and poetics into Spanish. There are prominent poets after Paz, of course, like David Huerta and Coral Bracho, but these are not really avant-garde writers. There is now quite a bit going on under the surface; I'm reading a good dissertation on Mexican poetry as we speak, which has taught me quite a bit. For me, Mexican poetry seems too self-contained, too cut off from the rest of Latin America. I hope I'm wrong about that.

When Yépez writes in English, I feel he is writing for "us." While he says very similar things in his Spanish blog, the sense of audience is completely different. I get much more of a sense of his daily life in Spanish, whereas in English he gives a more "sanitized" version of himself.

There is also micronationalism, a conflict between the traditional center of power (Mexico D.F) and regional writers, especially from the border states. The fact that poets have traditionally relied on the government to fund their books means poetry has traditionally been in bed with political power. Until recently, of course, one political party, the PRI, had a complete lock on power.

Ken Irby just stopped by my table in the cafeteria as I was drinking my morning coffee to tell me that Maurice Blanchot had died. For me an essential writer. Irby rarely stops to talk, though I see him quite a bit either here on campus or at Border's. He is not unfriendly in the least; there is just some barrier I haven't been able to cross.

Reading John Ernhardt's blog a little while back, I realized that I had always taken Spicer line about Charles de Gaulle being assasinated "before the Yankees winning the pennant" too literally. I thought that the assasination of de Gaulle was part of the prediction, not a statement of the "when pigs can fly" variety. I was about to write John to point out how he had misread the line when I realized that his reading was in fact the more plausible one. He kept asking himself why Spicer didn't think the Yankees would do well, when I thought the poem was saying that the Yankees would in fact clinch--after de Gaulle's death! I realized I can be very literal minded--not necessarily a bad thing I hope. In my defense I can only say that Ernhardt's discussion of how the Yankees actually did that year is equally literal minded.