Particular favorites were Joan Murray’s parodies of Yeats and Hopkins, of which I’ll quote the latter in full (minus special Hopkins accent marks) until somebody tells me to take it down:

Brush and Floss: To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Since your gums are not yet teething?
Teeth, all the ones you lost, you
Miss, especially those front two?
Ah! as the mouth grows older
It will earn a dental folder
Year by year, nor shed a tear
Though mounds of molars disappear;
And yet your mouth will gape in fear.
Oh the horror! child, the pain,
Though dentists jab novocaine,
Nor mouth knows, no nor gums, can say
The last laugh of tooth decay:
It is dentures man was born for,
It’s your baby teeth you mourn for.

I also really liked poems by Todd Boss, of which one, in excerpt, follows (it’s one of those annoying poems whose title is also the first line, but in this case, I forgive it):

How Smokes the Smolder

at neck, at
shoulder, that

stokes a man
as he grows

older. Nothing
rages, nothing

fumes, No one
races through

the rooms,
alarmed. How

It goes on like that for another dozen lines or so, just yanking you down the page in these staccato phrases packed with oddly laconic but visually rich description. It’s really good stuff, really different than a lot of the abstract, boring stuff I’ve read in the pages of Poetry.

I can’t help myself. Another one, in its entirety, from X.J. Kennedy (spacing screwed because I’m too lazy to make it work, though the spacing makes it better):

Blues for Oedipus

Oracle figured
You’d come a cropper,
Kingdom-killin
Mammyjammin
Poppa-bopper!

Gods dished you the shit
Like you deserves –
Now your eyeballs
Danglin
From they optic nerves.

The prose in this edition is good as well. Many bemoan the space the magazine has dedicated to prose and to letters to the editor over the last couple of years, but I’ve really enjoyed this shift (if only because the poetry often escapes me). One thing I really liked the concept if not the execution of in this issue was a brief Q&A with poets about particular poems. There are a half dozen or so of these scattered throughout the issue, and I only wish the editors had selected better poems to publish and do the Q&A on. Still, the idea of an occasional Q&A interests me.

The issue includes funny story/essay things by Naeem Murr (a probably at least partially fictive memoir-type thing about life as a novelist dating a poet) and Michael Lewis (a faux diary entitled “Poetry In Motion: A Diary of the Collapse of the 2006 New York Giants” that’s funny enough to merit a few quotes below; it’s told from the perspective of a presumably fictive Giants trainer).

I lingered outside long enough to hear Eli [Manning] say, “I’m not saying poetry will make us a better football team.” I’m saying it will make us a more meaningful football team.

Finally! I whispered to myself, a little fire! But instead of throwing punches, they just jabbered away at each other. Words, words, words. I didn’t understand all of what was said but one of the assistant coaches filled me in later. It started when Plaxico refused to rhyme or scan, and our center Shaun O’Hara called him “a narcissist who fails to grasp the artistic power of constraints.” That led all the receivers — even Shockey! — to get pissed off. They gathered into a little group in the end zone and mocked the sonnets the O-line has been working on. The O-line screamed that pentameter was the natural length of a spoken English sentence; the receivers screamed back that pentameter was for fat guys who are easily winded and that the poet in peak condition spoke hexameter, if not octameter.

The defense met to talk about their fourth-quarter collapse. One of the coaches asked Mathias what the fuck he was thinking when he just let go of Vince young. “Coach,” says Mathias, “I couldn’t help it. Just when I grabbed hold of him, a clerihew popped into my head.”…

Vince Young
Your Fu is not yet Kung
Your hop ain’t hip, your juke don’t jive
I’m gonna eat your rookie ass alive

It’s hard not to quote the whole fake diary.

One more rave before I close this out. The issue includes a set of mini-essays entitled collectively “Poets We’ve Known,” of which my favorite was a little piece by Sven Birkerts about informal joke-telling gatherings in Boston of Walcott, Heaney, and Brodsky that itself includes most of a joke that made me laugh out loud and try to re-tell it immediately to Mleeka. Then there’s a little essay by recent newsmaker Christopher Hitchens about meeting Auden’s partner shortly after Auden’s death. James Merrill’s former trainer writes to talk about what it was like to guide Merrill through his workout. The only essay I’d remove from the set is by Joseph Epstein, who laments the self-absorption of poets before going on to drop names and establish himself as part of the literary elite as he makes his way through an otherwise pleasant encomium to John Frederick Nims.

And did I mention poems by Edward Hirsch, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Wrigley?

All in all, definitely worth picking up at your local library, if your library happens to carry it, Possibly even worth $5.00 for a back issue.

On the whole, I’ve really liked what Poetry has become over the last few years. The editors seem to be trying to promote a diversity of style and content while engaging the magazine’s audience by accepting and publishing letters to the editor. The annual translation issue is always a treat, as is the annual humor issue. The editors also seem to be interested in hearing new voices. For the next two or three months, they’re considering submissions only from poets previously unpublished within their pages.

Every time a new issue comes in, I’m glad I’ve subscribed.

Of my 12 poems, five are very short, and three are really probably smaller parts of one slightly larger sequence (which still puts me at the nine poems required by today to not be a NaPoWriMo outlaw). Counting the three sequence pieces as one, I’d say that six of the poems are ones that I think I could do something really decent with. There are a couple that I think might actually be pretty good in their current form, though I find it really hard to decide what of my work rises above dismal. It could always be wishful thinking or a difficulty distancing myself enough from what I’m writing to judge it with anything approaching objectivity.

I am going to cheat at NaPoWriMo, I should warn you in advance. The usual drill with these things is that you showcase your work in some forum or on your blog. I’m too embarrassingly shy about the particulars of my interest in poetry to do any such thing. So you’ll be reading none of my stuff here (consider yourself spared the feeling of some obligation to compliment me whether you mean it or not). I rather doubt I’ll open up an anonymous blog to post the stuff at either. For me, this is about doing an exercise that’ll encourage me to write every day whether I feel like it or not and whether I have much to say or not. I should call this MyPoWriMo.

I attended a reading here in Knoxville at Carpe Librum booksellers yesterday that I enjoyed very much. The poet was Asheville Poetry Review editor Keith Flynn, with whom I was unfamiliar but who felt sort of like a distant n-times-removed cousin because of ties he has to some poets and critics with whom I have remote anonymous ties through people I know from my time at UNC. He’s a great reader with a sonorous voice. His pacing is good and his patter between poems entertaining, if verbose (not always a bad thing, though I guess it depends on your perspective). There were only five or six of us in the audience, including his publisher and one of the book store owners, and he read with the enthusiasm he’d have given an audience of hundreds when he could have figured we weren’t worth his bother for the number of books he’d sell. For something like an hour and a half, I sat and listened to him talking and reading (and singing), and it was mostly very enjoyable. I found myself thinking as he spoke and read that there’s a reason we have oral art (whether poems or music or tall tales) and that even poems not designed with their pronunciation particularly in mind probably benefit from a fine reading aloud.

I haven’t had a chance yet to go back and reread any of the poems he read to us, but I was thinking today about his often lengthy patter and how he gave a detailed back story including personal anecdotes for pretty much everything he read. It’s fun to get the back story, of course, because it makes you feel like you’ve got a sort of privileged access to the thought process behind the poem, but I wonder if the poems stand up on their own without the back story, and I’m eager to read them myself and see.

It’s not that I want every little thing spelled out to me, and in fact, I sometimes like things that don’t make sense. My favorite fiction is the sort that you have to piece together over multiple treacherous readings, and I enjoy a good poetic turn of phrase without regard to its meaning. Some poems I find pleasing even if I don’t understand them, but others — the ones that I’m getting at here — make me feel excluded. They demand context without providing it and are thoroughly unsatisfying.

I’ve been tempted of late to provide a lot of exposition in the things I write. Or it’s not that I’m tempted to do so (because I don’t want to, and you’re usually tempted by things you want), but I know that doing so will make what I’m writing very bad, and I don’t know how to get around it. Perhaps, given the many things I’ve read that seem to expect you to read without adequate context, it’s ok just to leave readers hanging. But I have a nagging sense that this isn’t really fair to readers, and I (as if I had readers) wonder if there might not really be a question of audience here. That is, perhaps some art is meant to be private, an expression of something that needs to get out of you but that may not be so meaningful to others and that thus should maybe remain private. Arguably, given that the art is flawed, this sort of thing can’t be really considered art. Or let’s not conflate art and artifice: perhaps because it’s flawed, it lacks artifice along one dimension, however artful it remains along others. In any case, they’re not a sort of art I generally appreciate, and I’m all the more frustrated with this type of poem of late because I’m struggling with the issue in my own work.

So, I put the question to my two loyal readers who might have any interest in this topic at all. If, in order to really get a poem, you have to know that the poet’s aunt was missing a ring finger (a dumb example I just made up), but that detail doesn’t appear in the poem itself, is the poem really fair to the reader?

Via a newfound acquaintance’s blog, I learned this week of NaPoWriMo, a rather less organized and ubiquitous gesture in the same direction. Except that in this case, the medium is poetry. April is National Poetry month (the six people in the world interested in poetry suggest as much, at least), and so April is the month designated for this little endeavor. The project? Write a poem a day each day in April.

On the surface, this seems simple. Roses are red, violets are blue, here’s number one, next, number two. At the very real risk of sounding like an ass, I’m going to suggest that writing poems as something like art tends to take a bit more time and mental investment than it took me to come up with that example. When I was studying this stuff formally in college and liked to puff myself up and feel important about my work, I’d think about Yeats’s quotation to the effect that “a line will take us hours maybe.” If it takes a guy hours to write a single line of poetry, then a poem of more than a few lines must be quite an achievement indeed, right? Therefore my work must be pretty impressive. I guess that’s how it went. I’m sure I was all hand to brow when I thought about Yeats’s line (wonder how many hours he spent on it?) and my contribution to letters. That big digression ventured in order to not seem so pompous now as I probably did when I was younger, I’ll nevertheless propose that writing really tolerably decent poems does take some time. So while a poem a day sounds trivial, for anybody who’s interested in real craft and doesn’t just have a really astounding natural gift for it, writing a poem a day is really pretty darned impressive.

Of course, the original NaNoWriMo stresses quantity over quality. It’s about germination more than about maturation. A fragment or draft a day is somewhat more attainable than a polished nugget of wisdom laid across fine images and tight metaphors a day.

Real life permitting, maybe I’ll try it. I have been more inclined of late to try to write down some little poems (and some bigger ones). I spent two hours tonight on 84 lines that suck but may be a move in a direction toward something that sucks less.

A line will take me 1.43 minutes maybe.

I’m about halfway through Equi’s book (all the way through the new work and into the selected) now and needed a break. The poems are all very accessible, so my needing a break isn’t a matter of having trouble reading them because they’re difficult. If anything, they tend to be lighter than what I’m really aching for these days. Some of the poems are very funny. Take the following:

Perversely Patriotic

Terrorism has ruined
S & M for me.

Now it just seems
like watching
the news.

It’s a laugh-out-loud and pretty biting observation, and I like it a lot, but its lack of heft makes it hard for me to do more than read it a few times, say “oh,” and move on. The observation is memorable but the poetry is not.

Other poems use accessible language but seem neither to mean much nor to be especially artful, and I find these puzzling. For example (excerpted from “1 + 1 = 3″):

Heard
enough
of your silence

Gold
fisheyes
in aquarium glasses

Lightgeist
iceberg
blackboard and cigarette

River
runs
through a bullet

The stanzas each contain lines of one, one, and three words, so she’s imposing structure on her poem. It’s interesting as wordplay in some cases (“lightgeist”) but seems a flirtation with the cliche in others, and I just don’t understand what Equi is doing here or why she or her editors think some of this stuff should get past the editorial chopping block. She’s by her own admission influenced by the New York school and by Eastern forms, and those influences are certainly in evidence within these poems. It’s distinctly possible that my lack of particular interest in the sorts of poetry that influence her colors my reception of her work. In any case, there are enough little “oh, neat” moments that I’ll go back to her book soon, but I predict that I’ll find very little among the pages memorable as poetry. But then, I warmed to Wrigley on a second reading, so perhaps I shouldn’t write her off so quickly.

I read the new poems (about 20 of them) in Wrigley’s new book in one sitting tonight and was bummed when I flipped ahead to see that only a few were left. As I wrote in an earlier review, he writes smoothly and elegantly of rustic things, and he does so in such a way that I feel as if I’ve experienced the thing when in fact I haven’t. As someone who has trouble getting drawn into movies and TV, much less stories and poems, I think it’s quite a gift for someone to write in such an evocative way.

Almost without exception, all of the new poems in Wrigley’s work are satisfying to me. They tell me stories while helping me to think about more abstract things. He writes about the World Trade Center attacks, of forging a river, of the war, of peace, of a couple of disturbing encounters. For all of his seriousness and peacefulness and quiet philosophy, he also tells a funny joke. The poem I’ll quote in its entirety and hope the copyright police will figure is fair use within the context of a review (if not, I’ll cease and desist, etc.) particularly resonated with me, and while it’s not the richest of the poems in the book, it is I think certainly a lovely one:

For One Who Prays For Me

I do not wish to hurt her, who loves me
and who asks for me only every blossom and more,

but in fact, when I say God I mean the wind
and the clouds that are its angels;

I mean the sea and its enormous restraint,
all its fish and krill just the luster of a heavenly gown.

And while it is true there are days when I think
something more must be in the wind than air, still I believe

the afterlife is dirt, but sweet, and heaven’s coming back
in the lewd, bewhiskered tongue of an iris.

Wrigley’s assessment is a little more new-agey than I’m personally willing to go in a literal sense, but boy does he say it nicely. There’s such placidity in those lines, and understated but oddly strong imagery. The phrasing is smooth, the diction entirely within reach. It’s good writing that I can hardly wait to read more of. It’s something to aspire to.

I’ve visited with McFee a few times since leaving college, once at a reading he hosted at an Asheville book store and once or twice on visits to Chapel Hill, but visits have been few and far between. So imagine my pleasure when I got the following announcement in an email today:

Michael McFee will be at Carpe Librum on Saturday, March 17 at 2:00 pm. A well known author and poet, he is a professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of their Creative Writing program.

The book he will be reading from and signing is The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview. Doris Betts did the Foreword.

He has seven or eight poetry collections to his credit and I am not sure how many more books.

Don’t drink green beer, come to Carpe Librum on St. Patrick’s Day.

Provided my impending son doesn’t gum up the works by making a late appearance, I’ll be there for sure. McFee’s a great reader and a very personable guy, and it’s sure to be an engaging event.

You should see one (the poem “Budapest”) embedded in this post. Links to the others that have been posted so far appear below. I’ll definitely be subscribing to this channel on youtube.

• Budapest
• Hunger
• The Best Cigarette
• Some Days
• Now and Then
• Walking Across the Atlantic
• The Dead
• Forgetfulness