I'm so tired I can hardly think. I had a cold last week I never recovered fully from.

A sea-shell's shifting rhythm. Naked people dying in the snow. Humans have no need for protective layers of shell. Yes we do. The leopard in the tree will not hunt us. Why should that be? Is religious belief a light-weight gas in us, making us float, as Frost suggested? Then why do we sink in the slightest bog? Is it the pavement holds us up? What blessèd asphalt is this? Gravel thrown up at a window, never breaking the pane.

***

That's section XII of a suite I'm writing called "Sunday Morning." To read more of it I suggest you subscribe to "The Hat."

Here's a collective blog, Marsh Hawk Blog, that was uknown to me. Please, Eileen, nobody calls me "Dr. Mayhew"!

I left Blanchot off my list of formative readings, along with Frost, Reverdy, Dickinson, Kafka. Byron's Don Juan made a big impact on me, at about the same time as I read Ko and The Duplications. And James Joyce, how could I forget that? Even though I never made it all the way through Ulysses until Grad School, I read the opening chapter at least 10 times. Same with Proust, I think the opening 50 pages of Swann's Way has been extremely influential on me, read in both languages.

How to speak Spanish.

I've noticed something recently: that intonation and rhythm are almost as important as getting the individual phonemes right. That is, you can get all the individual sounds correct yet still sound horrible. There is a basic, simple rule for Spanish intonation. Start at a low pitch, when you get to the first accented syllable of the phrase, go to higher pitch, and MAINTAIN THIS PITCH until the final accented syllable of the phrase, then drop down again for remaining unaccented syllables. (Or raise the voice to an even high pitch for yes-no question.)

Ron Silliman at the Hall Center.

Anyone reading this in the Kansas City/Lawrence Kansas area please don't forget the upcoming Ron Silliman events. Mark Monday, October 4 on your calendars.

Kit Robinson, "The 3D Matchmove Artist"

This one's a thumbs up. A poem with lots of verbal energy. Robinson is one of those hidden poets, not the best-known even among his own group but by no means second rate.

Ed Roberson, "Ideas Gray Suits Bowler Hats Baal"

Great title, redolent of Magritte. Yet the poem itself is curiously flat, as though the title itself were the main point of it. Put another way, if you announced a competition to write the best possible poem with this title, this poem would not win.

tributary is the most interesting blog among my more recent discoveries.

And how could I have forgotten Raymond Roussel, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews? The Alexandrian Quartet? etc...

A selective history of my reading might be of interest, at least to myself. It's from the point of view of what I remember now; hence anything forgettable or relatively unimportant from present viewpoint drops by the wayside. These are readings that formed me. Don't write in and say, "I'm surprised you never read _______ ." I probably did. I'm talking about books or authors I read either repeatedly or obsessively at some point, or made lasting impression. The order is chronological.

A.A. Milne. Dr. Seuss. Curious George. Beverly Cleary.

The King James Bible. World History, Encyclopedia Brown, Greek Mythology. Poe. Of Human Bondage! Tolkien. Werner Jaeger. Peanuts.

Rod McKuen, Cummings, Williams, Stevens. Vonnegut; Bradbury, Potok; Jack London; Humphrey Clinker. X.J. Kennedy's Introduction to Poetry. Shaking the Pumpkin. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Howl.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Paradise Lost. Yeats, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Levertov, John Berryman, Roethke, etc... Henry Miller.

Updike, Bellow, Roth, Salinger, Singer, Henry James, Carson McCullers. Catch 22. The Cave. André Breton. Learned rules of French prosody from High School teacher.

Flann O'Brien. Henry Green. Anthony Powell. Gilbert Sorrentino. Beckett. Sukenick. Barthelme. Gertrude Stein.

[I'm up to college now]

Latin Poets: Catullus, Horace. Modern Spanish poetry (basically everything.) Galdós. Unamuno. Neruda and Vallejo. Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, other "Minor Poets of the New York School." James Wright and James Tate. Attended poetry readings by Spender, Eberhart, Bly, anyone else who passed through the campus. Thom Gunn.

García Márquez, Cortázar. The rest of the Latin American "boom" novelists. Juan Rulfo.

Spicer, Bronk. Borges. Cervantes. Antin. Sophocles. Barthes. Kenneth Burke. Literary theory galore (I must be in grad school now, where I read the least).

After Grad school:

More of everything above, plus Shakespeare Sonnets, Lezama Lima, Bronk, Schuyler, Ceravolo. Japanese poetry. Kerouac. Barbara Guest. Language poetry, especially RS. Coolidge. Scalapino, Susan Howe. Wittgenstein. Gamoneda. Valente. Contemporary women poets of Spain (Isla Correyero, Lola Velasco, etc...). Post avant-garde poets my own age and younger. Edmund White. Soseki. David Shapiro. Blanca Varela... and the list goes on...

***

So if you wonder why I seem to have supercilious attitude toward Billy Collins, now you know. There is such a thing a being a better, more experienced reader than someone else, of being a more "studied" poet. It doesn't make me more talented, unfortunately.

Carl Rakosi, "In the First Circle of Limbo"

"Put some wit / and compassion / into this pen!" No need for that, he already has enough. The guy's, like, 101 years old and can still kick Robert Pinsky's butt.

Robert Pinsky, "Samba"

This poem is trying to capture the vibrancy of the multi-cultural city by evoking typical "multicultural" street experiences. But Pinsky is talking "about" it rather than "doing" it. It is not a bad poem for Pinsky, but it still doesn't quite make it.