Author Archive
Joel Brouwer
What a marvelous pursuit
Today I come to the end of my hitch as a Harrieteer. My thanks to all at the Poetry Foundation for this opportunity, and to all of you for the lively conversations. I leave you with this short prose/poem by Julio Cortazar. I’ve always loved it, but only recently came to understand that it’s really about blogging.
Joel Brouwer
SpeedReviews(TM)
Poetry magazine people: How many review copies of poetry books do y’all receive? It must be bargeloads, because I’m just one low-rent sometime-freelancer who writes maybe five or six reviews a year, and I get something like, I don’t know, probably six or eight review copies a month. Some from presses, some from the poets themselves. Let there be no doubt about this: I’m wildly grateful to receive this bounty. The sight of a book-sized envelope in my mailbox has always given me a thrill, and I don’t see that state of things changing any time soon. No way, though, will I ever have the opportunity to review but the smallest fraction of these babies, and the unshakeable-no-matter-how-hard-I-try Midwestern Calvinist ethic of my childhood demands I experience guilt over this fact.
Joel Brouwer
Being Here
“Here” at the University of Alabama’s creative writing program we’ve been enjoying this week the company of poet Juliana Spahr. Scare quotes exhaustively (and perhaps exhaustingly) explained after the jump.
Joel Brouwer
Back to Skool
“The folklorist Vladimir Propp thought he was accomplishing something worthwhile by identifying in Russian folktales thirty-one functions and 151 elements, with a mathematical symbol assigned to each.” — Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge
Joel Brouwer
Today
I was deep in the heart of the heart of the country on September 11, 2001, and spent much of the day trying and failing to fight off abstraction, to somehow worm my way into the reality.
Poems can sometimes help with that.
The Poetry Foundation has these poems available for your perusal today. No offense, fine poems, but kind of a weird list, isn’t it?
Joel Brouwer
Boox
Quick: What do these books have in common?
The Venus Hottentot, Elizabeth Alexander
Louise in Love, Mary Jo Bang
Controvertibles, Quan Barry
Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop
Installations, Joe Bonomo
I Remember, Joe Brainard
Centuries, Joel Brouwer
Asphalt Georgics, Hayden Carruth
The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
Blue Front, Martha Collins
The Whole Truth, James Cummins
Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove
Brutal Imagination, Cornelius Eady
Blind Huber, Nick Flynn
Meadowlands, Louise Gluck
Overlord, Jorie Graham
The Quick of It, Eamon Grennan
A Defense of Poetry, Gabriel Gudding
Thaumatrope, Brent Hendricks
Death Tractates, Brenda Hillman
Translating Mo’um, Cathy Park Hong
Macnolia, A. Van Jordan
Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky
Dick of the Dead, Rachel Loden
All Day Permanent Red, Christopher Logue
A Companion for Owls, Maurice Manning
Ultima Thule, Davis McCombs
The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley
Plot, Claudia Rankine
Sonnets to Orpheus, R. M. Rilke
The Return Message, Tessa Rumsey
The Cosmos Trilogy, Frederick Seidel
Dime-Store Alchemy, Charles Simic
Songs for Two Voices, Bruce Smith
Bellocq’s Ophelia, Natasha Trethewey
Late for Work, David Tucker
Here, Bullet, Brian Turner
The Bounty, Derek Walcott
Sestets, Charles Wright
An Aquarium, Jeffrey Yang
Black Maria, Kevin Young
Ready your guess before you click.
Joel Brouwer
Overheard in the hallway
I only smoke when I have too much to do or not enough.
*
Music never makes me cry anymore.
*
All she eats is bananas.
*
“Silence of Lucky.”
*
Is there anything that’s exactly like alcohol but isn’t alcohol?
*
But electricity is the same for everybody.
Joel Brouwer
how give any spice to our truths, to our errors?
When autumn approaches — or rather, when I start to long for its approach, knowing full well it’s still far off — I take my old frenemy E. M. Cioran down from the shelf and prepare to savor Persephone’s desertion. The morsels below are from Anathemas and Admirations. The translation, by Richard Howard, was smartly reviewed by Edmund White back in the day. Happy Saturday!
Joel Brouwer
The old mule delivers the goods
It’s municipal election day where I live. I went by the activity center at a Baptist church to vote on my way to work. Got there early and was first in line when the doors opened at 7:00, so I got to be the very first person to sign in. The poll workers were still drinking their coffee, still a little unclear on the procedures, still a little flusterable: the nice lady, who must have gotten up at 4:00 a.m. to do her meticulous silver hair, kept looking for my name in the registry among the scores of “Browns.” A poll watcher designated by one of the candidates hovered, frowning, alert to the possibility of fraud. But finally I received my ballot, that oddly large sheet, discovering on it, as I knew I would, just one opportunity to make my mark. (The current school board commissioner for district 4, Bryan Chandler, is facing a challenge from newcomer Kelly Horwitz.) I filled in one of the two ovals — right there on the table in front of the workers, not much caring who knew how I was voting — got my “I Voted” sticker from another amazingly coiffed senior, and fed my ballot into a machine, which, to much general consternation among the poll workers, kept spitting the sheet back out, making me wonder if I’d made the right choice, until finally someone pointed out that the poll workers had forgotten to tear off the little perforated receipt along the bottom. Problem solved, vote recorded. Outside, along the sidewalk across the street, beyond the required 30-foot perimeter, supporters for the candidates stood with signs. I suppose they’re working in shifts, since the polls will be open until 7:00 tonight. That’s a long time to stand up for your candidate for school board.
Last fall the NY Times printed a number of poems as part of their election day coverage. This was my favorite of them:
INFOMERCIAL 2
The old mule delivers the goods.
Nugatory diddlings are on the decline.
Stateliness has its day.
There are indeed many encouraging signs
in the weather and in handshakes.
Still there are those who mistake dark clouds
for raffish hucksterism. They have never savored
the elation of an empty crystal ball.
To them I say, seconds will call upon you
in the morning. Tonight there are dreams to be thumbed through
before the complicated, awful business
of summoning beautiful particles after the horse is stolen.
That’s Ashbery, of course. You can hear him read the poem here.
Elsewhere, the election news is not so good. Can’t blame the mules, though. They seem to have performed admirably.
Joel Brouwer
Hoodoo You Love
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens was the fourth book of poetry I ever bought, with a gift certificate to Schuler Books in Grand Rapids I’d been given for a birthday, probably my sixteenth or so. Why that book? I’m not entirely sure.
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