Monday, July 27, 2009

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Random

I've been reading Mark Strand's The Weather of Words and enjoying it immensely, which is to say, you might like it, too. Perhaps. I'm not going to presume. However, here's a small sample from the essay, Introduction to the Best American Poetry 1991.

"Hearing poems read, like reading them, is different from other encounters with language. Nothing else we read prepares us for poetry...

"We are better prepared for reading fiction because most of what it tells us is already known. In a poem, most of what is said is neither known or unknown. The world of things or the world of experience that may have given rise to the poem usually dissolves into the background. It is as if the poem were replacing that world as a way of establishing its own primacy, oddly asserting itself over the world."

Anyway, you might like to check it out. I'm mulling over the ideas of known and unknown, replacing the world, primacy...

I bought it used from Amazon and was amused to find that when it arrived it had a little Post-It note stuck to the cover that said "Random."

Friday, July 24, 2009

Woo-Hoo!

Nancy Botkin has a chapbook, In Waves, coming out from March Street Press sometime this fall! Wonderful!

Monday, July 20, 2009

Could Be

Q. Sir, do you know what mental anguish is?
A. Is it like a temple or something like that?

Friday, July 17, 2009

Late Cretaceous

Say the hummingbird's a homewrecker

Spider-cropped and furious

How else to account for

The missing orbs

The white fields of porches

Heather filling the salvage yard

Friday, July 03, 2009

The Great American Interchange

The woman in the leopard print dress
Wants you to believe

It's all natural

The American lion much larger
13,000 years ago

(and living)

Long legs parting

The American Serengeti

Great gods of evolution!

(and silicone)

I believe--

In extinction

In the futility of calling God
Good in the particular

(or of calling)

In the wireless clicking of the centipede

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Bicycle Day

April 19, 20-

The neighbors are having at it
And you see in their moment

Your moment

Swallowed and skittered
Could have made scene

Dark matter is thought to make up
Twenty-three percent of the universe

No one sees it

Fixation falls on the brilliant
Noctilucent clouds

Later you wrote

God's leveling the playing field

Tunguska minus
Eighty million trees

My Hidden Track - I Gave Her My Heart, She Gave Me A Pen

Is this cool or what?