(isn’t that how religious charities advertise: buy one missal and save a village!)

Maybe if they had invested more in fewer poets,

they wouldn’t be in this fix—

…

*I was certain twelve years ago that the greatest living Argentine poets were Juan Gelman and Olga Orozco. Olga Orozco was an aristocratic poet who piled immensely inventive mythologies, such as about her cat Berenice, into long lines. At seventy-seven she wore bright green eye shadow, like a scarab.

Juan Gelman is a political poet who has lived for over thirty years in exile in Mexico. His son and pregnant daughter in law were disappeared in 1976 by the murderous military, and twenty-three years later, amazingly, Juan found his bright, rebellious granddaughter in Uruguay. His poems jam a universe of hurt and silence into slashes in quatrains oozing with the bittersweetness expressed in music by the tango.

When I ran into Olga Orozco in a haute bar in 1997, she and a friend said “tell Juan to call us while he’s in town. If he doesn’t call us we will cry tears. Tears of velvet.” That last is much better in Spanish: “lágrimas de terciopelo.”

I told a friend that I thought Juan and Olga were the best Argentine poets amnd she said, “¡Pero son de polos opuestos! They’re from opposite camps!” As if that matters from the poerspective of Outside.

Olga Orozco died in 1999. Leaving Juan Gelman. Which doesn’t mean that some youngster won’t show up yesterday and be greater than either.

One strong point for Salt.

Most of the poets they publish are what—

their books don’t sell because

nobody wants to read them.

Funny they haven’t realized that.

…

what cost? i publish p-o-d books for nothing, zilch, zero . . .

yes i understand they’d want to promote their pubs, and send review copies, but they can advertise online for nothing, and how many deadtree reviewing venues are there these days?

they’re crying wolf, it seems to me—

i don’t understand . . .

i had some thoughts about it all a couple days ago:

http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2009/07/university-of-california-press-scandal.html

….

Poetry Wars – Peter Barry.

I have been itching to read this since i first became aware of it.

An account of Eric Mottram’s “treacherous assault on British poetry” in mid 1970’s Earl Court when he wrested editorial control of Poetry Review: the poetry equivalent of a knife fight in a phone booth.

Mottram brought in the near mythical 3:1 sand – cement ratio of mystic Concret Poet Bob Cobbing’s DIY ethos, who put it into practice at the heart and HQ where Her Majesty’s lyric-normal knee benders, outraged that the Concrete crew got to use the photocopier and stationary to roll off their rags – did a vast amount of straight faced deep acting with one another over wine and cheese, not realising the inherent comedy a load of Oxo shoo-ins create with naught but automatic entitlement and a common room ethos with all the professional creative sensibility and sensitivity of traffic wardens.

Sills – Michael OBrien.

I discovered him as i trawled through and intuitively knew from the first poem – this is a senior voice who will lead to lots of eloquence.

The Falls

Nerves, those fine pianos,
plaintive as the applause of palms ;
under the rain the green goes dark,
muted, difficult as desire.
The nights are white pages, the feelings accidental.
In the dream the river runs over stone
to the falls where a girl lies on her side
under the moving water. I see her clearly
through the moving water which descends the stair
to the pool below, whose floor you touch
before you let the water
bear you back to the air.

~

As Hamilton states in: Twenty things I didn’t know before becoming a poetry publisher (2010 Writer’s Handbook):

“Everything is about first lines, the first verse, the first poem. I desperately want to reject you and you have to convince me in the first piece of writing that I shouldn’t…good writing is easy to spot; it takes 4.2 seconds to discover you want to read something. You can certainly spot good writing (it’s what you buy). Anyone can do it. It has no camps, no schools, no special tools or techniques. It’s often startlingly perfect.”

~

The Invention of Poetry – Adam Czerniawski and Iain Higgins.

Polish translation. You can;t beat the central Europeans for delivering aw holly different wordic arrangement than the somewhat insular and homogenised modes of placing words next to one another we fringe Europeans are prone to self-policing and sheparding ourselves into writing.

Under Albany – Ron Silliman

I have always thought Ron(star) writes prose as only the poet can. He has an inherent comedic kernel running through it, which you are either born with or not. A natural comedian. When just being yourself makes others chuckle, in a good way of some warm human dichotomy engineered into the core of your soul and which is shot through everything you do – and from which it is impossible to escape, only embrace and use to your advantage. You do not become the most widely read online poet on the plant if you aint got the magic.

“Within a matter of weeks I am writing “novels,” though, sitting on the narrow bed in the small room I shared with my younger brother, Cliff, longhand tales scrawled into thick notebooks (”The assasination of Hitler”, “Manned rocket flies behind the moon only to disappear”). Within a year I discover I can get out of almost any unpleasant school assignment other than math or wood shop by offering to write a five- or ten- or twenty-page paper on the topic. I never seriously heed a teacher’s syllabus again.”

Evan mentioned Alexander Hutchison’s ‘Scales Dog’, a selected poems covering his four collections over thrity years (not someone who writes to order). It’s a really fantastic book from a poet who should be far better known than he is, as you’ll see if you check out the .pdf extract at the book’s webpage – http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844713301.htm