Let's begin with Sarah Palin.

This week, Hart Seely offers up examples of the Alaska governor's poetry on Slate, prefacing it with this analysis:

"In campaign interviews, the governor, mother, and maverick GOP vice presidential candidate has chosen to bypass the media filter and speak directly to fans through her intensely personal verses, spoken poems that drill into the vagaries of modern life as if they were oil deposits beneath a government-protected tundra."

Because self-nominations are not accepted.

Because I'm dirty, mean and mighty unclean. I'm a wanted man, Public enemy number one. Understand. So lock up your daughter n' lock up your wife. Lock up your back door and run for your life. The man is back in town. So don't you mess me 'round. 'Cause I'm T.N.T. I'm dynamite. T.N.T. And I'll win that fight. T.N.T. I'm a power load. T.N.T. Watch me explode.

Because I used to be the owner and manager of an automobile dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, called “Saab Cape Cod.” It and I went out of business 33 years ago. The Saab then as now was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature. Old Norwegian proverb: “Swedes have short dicks but long memories.” I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize.

Because my amazon.com sales rank, #315, 882, is too high.

It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat and despair,” Anne Waldman comments in the introduction to the anthology Civil Disobedience: Poetics & Politics in Action
 (Coffee House Press, 2004). Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman.

Order through Small Press Distribution or hambrose13@hotmail.com

In "Doctor Brodie's Report," a 1970 short story by Borges, there's an Amazon tribe with no notion of cause and effect and no sense of the past. N. T. di Giovanni translates, "Since they lack the capacity to fashion the simplest object, the Yahoos regard such ornaments [produced elsewhere] as natural. To the tribe my hut was a tree, despite the fact that many of them saw me construct it and even lent me their aid. Among a number of other items, I had in my possession a watch, a cork helmet, a mariner's compass, and a Bible. The Yahoos stared at them, weighed them in their hands, and wanted to know where I had found them." And, "The words 'Our Father,' owning to the fact that they have no notion of fatherhood, left them puzzled. They cannot, it seems, accept a cause so remote and so unlikely, and are therefore uncomprehending that an act carried out several months before may bear relation to the birth of a child."

The Yahoos' numerical system stops at four. "On their fingers they count thus: one, two, three, four, many. Infinity begins at the thumb." Yet even more stingy and sublime are the real life Warlpiris, Australian aborigines whose language only allows for one, two, then many. Eternity snaps into being with one's middle finger. There's also the Pirahas. Numbering less than 350 souls, this Amazon tribe has no creation myths, no fairy tales, no arts, not even tattooing, no words for colors and no numbers except hói, which means either "one," "few" or "small." Compared to the 112 phonemes of Taa (spoken in Botswana and Namibia), 40 of English, 30 of Italian, the Piraha language only has ten. They also have no concept of the past. According to linguist Daniel Everett, the Pirahas believe that "everything is the same, things always are," and nothing matters but the present.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word "hybrid" comes from the Latin hibrida - the offspring of a tame sow and wild boar. There are lots of citations of Darwin, but we won't go there; now, I'm not the guy who just finished reading the entire OED, but it looks to me as though the word has fewer citations from poets than almost any other I can find. It's quite curious, then, to find Cole Swensen disputing the notion of a fundamental division in American poetry, and proposing that "the model of binary opposition is no longer the most accurate one and that, while extremes remain, and everywhere we find complex aesthetic and ideological differences, the contemporary moment is dominated by rich writings that cannot be categorized, and that hybridize core attributes of previous 'camps' in diverse and unprecedented ways."

I received the following email from Stephen McLaughlin this afternoon, who asked me to post this here:

"One morning about a month ago, I received a message from the Poetics List that began something like 'Announcing Issue 1 of Broken Caterpillar. Featuring new poems by . . . followed by a list of 45 poets' names. I'd seen one of them on Silliman's blogroll, but the rest were just flat names. Barely names -- ethereal text strings. Keep in mind that I receive hundreds of these announcements per year.

I should note, at this point, that I fully support small press publishing and small press writing -- but when you step back (as has been discussed on Ron's blog among other places), the larger picture is funny. Funny as in ha-ha, not nyah-nyah.

So I started a collection of poet names. Once I had around 1500, I asked my friend Jim Carpenter to send me a batch of 5,000 poems composed by Erika T. Carter, his ludicrously advanced poetry generation software. These poems aren't simply random cutups of randomly selected texts. As you can see by reading them, they each have a thematic & stylistic unity unparalleled (so far as I know) in the field of algorithmic poetry generation. As numerous commentors have noted, it's difficult to tell whether some of these things were written by man or machine. Surprisingly, many of the poems in the magazine are actually 'good.' Sort of.

I then wrote a little script to combine my lists of poets and my list of poems and create the LaTeX code I used to generate the PDF itself. A fast and simple process.

My list of poets, I should note, was compiled by hand. Every name was copied and pasted from one of several online sources. The script I wrote removed 99% of duplicate names from my final list, but, naturally, a few repeats got through. For example, 'Bob Cobbing' and 'Bob Cobbing' would be considered different names. Furthermore, there are numerous inappropriate (non-poet) inclusions, as well as many outrageous exclusions. For my part, I find it numbingly hilarious to read blog comments in which people sincerely complain about their or their friends' names' exclusion from an anthology that doesn't exist.

I've also made a followup post here: http://www.forgodot.com/2008/10/issue-1-
polite-clarification.html"

Stephen McLaughlin
Rotterdam, NL

1. COSMIC BLOOM

Someone told me recently that I was ‘one big metaphor’. They had a point.

One of my brothers has a PhD in astrophysics. I once asked him how his research was going and he replied, ‘It’s been a good month. I got a result.’ What was it? ‘Twenty-five million light years plus or minus twenty-five million light years.’ Fifteen years later, I am still thinking about what that might mean.

He was sent out to an observatory in the Australian desert to observe his particular corner of the cosmos. It rained for the first time in a hundred years and the skies were so cloudy that he could not see his stars. Meanwhile, flowers that hadn’t been seen for a century were emerging outside the observatory door. The desert was in bloom.

How was I going to resist this? Even though IT DIDN’T MEAN ANYTHING. And how could I properly understand what he was doing when I did not have the required maths?

Writing poems is as much about learning what is not enough, what is not the poem, as it is about retaining susceptibility (and you do need the courage of imagination to let yourself dis-integrate so that, like Frost, you arrive in the world of the poem as if you had ‘materialised from cloud or risen out of the ground’).

The more something speaks to you of poetry, the more you must search for, and find, whatever it is about the desert/cosmos/bloom fandango that speaks of you.

When he first introduced the current group of Harriet bloggers, Nick T. mentioned that I was in Berkeley. This is only partly correct. I study (or whatever it is that PhD students do) in/at Berkeley, but I live and write in Oakland.

(from Oaklandish)

Give money me, take friendship whoso list,

For friends are gone, come once adversity,

When money yet remaineth safe in chest,

That quickly can thee bring from misery;

Fair face show friends when riches do abound;

Come time of proof, farewell, they must away;

Believe me well, they are not to be found

If God but send thee once a lowering day.

Gold never starts aside, but in distress,

Finds ways enough to ease thine heaviness.

--"Of Money" by Barnabe Googe