At any rate on the way home it occurred to me that the slow demise of the newspaper industry (my old journalism teacher in college, Lee Smith, a by-then-retired former newspaperman used to tell us that tv news really began the work of reducing the citizenry’s reliance on things like multiple editions of papers per day) could kill off the New York Post and I’d have to find another source for terms such as “cheese eating surrender monkeys” to put into poems. I mean, the internet version of the paper is nice and free and all, or mostly free, but I’m less likely to read it as opposed to scanning it as if it were a photograph containing certain points of significance to get loopy with. I learned at an early age to read the newspaper backwards – this, incidentally, led me to instinctively “get” the value of studying any language-based composition from back to front unit by unit (sentence by sentence, clause by clause, word by word, etc) as imparted in instruction manuals for teaching remedial English and comp. – but that pleasure is somewhat negated on-line, though I suppose it’s possible to replicate through some mildly masochistic plodding of course.

Speaking of portals, I have this terrific issue of Callaloo from 1999 (vol. 22 no. 2) that has repeatedly been useful to me through its features on Lorenzo Thomas and Will Alexander along with some very fine essay and interview work by Harryette Mullen. The interview Mullen conducts with Alexander is really great: fluid, funny, searching, and idiosyncratic the way a long conversation between friendly minds might be (Mullen: We all tend to be separated into our various boxes / Alexander: I just want to throw the box away). It’s also especially important to me to have access to an in-person conversation between two poets whose work is radically different from one another and who both openly admire each other’s work. While her essay focuses mainly on Alexander’s book Asia & Haiti, I have recently found Mullen’s descriptive terms vis-à-vis Alexander’s use of hypotaxis (syntactic subordination of one clause or construction to another) to be useful in discussing the title poem from Exobiology as Goddess, a book published five years after the feature in Callaloo.

Mullen muses on WA’s hypotaxis to the point of recasting it as “hyperhypotaxis” and figuring it’s attractive at least in part because it can “accommodate lavishly expansive sentence construction” as well as the many fields of knowledge to which Alexander has access. I started teaching Alexander’s work this year, and while it’s a challenge for me to do so – I tend to feel like his poems know far more than I can convey, for starters, though that should probably be the case for any material one might teach ­– I have found the undergrad writing students I’m working with to be quite open to Alexander’s incantatory ranging from pre-history to post-existence. In fact, we read the poem Exobiology As Goddess, which is fifty pages long, in one sitting a few weeks ago, person-by-person, page-by-page. The poem fuses language from exobiology, geography, Egyptian mythology and paleontology, among other subjects, into a clause-driven swirl that actually has a lot of space in it (double-spaced lines as well as a feeling of an aerial view stretching across the work) and reads fairly quickly once you let yourself go. It does at times feel like one long continuous and insistently rhythmic sentence-as-vehicle.

I’m hesitant to quote from the poem because I’m inclined to believe that you need to take the whole trip and I’m not interested in choosing lines at the moment and when I did begin to I wound up typing up the first five pages of the poem and that’s just not going to work. But there are his poems on this site, as you can find through an author search, and there are recordings of his readings over at Penn Sound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Alexander-Will.php) and that’s plenty. Actually, screw it, have a few lines from the middle:

If I say two poles of wheat

or a series of Minoan grain invictas

none of this projects her mirage

exchanged through fertility by scansion

by evanescent radii

by thought as magnetic migration

say I ignited the earth as a failing covenant of thoughts

Solea would erupt

closing her form

within neutron delay

within vibrational microbe as essence

& because we vibrate

we are odd rotational deltas

as gathered oblivious ice

sparked by summoned meta-concentration

There’s this other bit of his writing in Callaloo that I’m currently fixated on, though: a short personal essay entitled “My Interior Vita” that I’m finding to be valuable and kind (even though I need some of that garish quotidian the way an elm needs to get high). This is the third of seven paragraphs in the piece, and I’ll leave things here:

“For me, language by its very operation is alchemical, mesmeric, totalic in the way that it condenses and at the same time proves capable of leaping the boundaries of genre. Be it the drama, the poem, the essay, the novel, language operates at a level of concentration modulated by the necessity of the character or the circumstance which is speaking. My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that here-to-fore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.”

When I do come across the 5-10% of poets who know how to illuminate their poems at a reading, without getting in their own way…I’m grateful to have been a witness. Creeley was an amazing between-poem talker, and Will’s mantle, functioning as sage-storyteller…showed me another side to the fine art of settling into your work. I felt it was a master class in astral projection, in accepting density as lineage. The operative parable for me, how poetry is a difficult art form to listen to, maybe related to his particular work and its wealth of trajectories…(the word-scapes in his new book, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, the seepage that drenches the poet during the poem’s genesis, is incredibly rich)…but I imagine he meant poetry in general. 

 And so he says, his solution at a reading is to contain the work. To frame/re-frame its context without giving it away. To sort of create a buffer between the intensity of the work by talking about the one plane of reality, before diving into the next.  Aware of each plane equally, the challenging one, shifting…depending on alignment.

 And I realized that’s something I attempt when I spend hours preparing for a reading, choosing the trajectory within my time slot, the vibration of material being the dynamic that drives the reading. But a speaker in touch with his many hemispheres can perform that sort of delicate dance without losing focus. I felt he was determined to impart on us a deeper, fluid note beneath his tone. His drive, mesmerizing, as poem gave way to filter.

 But maybe this cushioning relates to a more mystical writing, one that knows body as vehicle more than witness. Anyway, just a thought about getting lost in preparation when the work tells you what you need…and when the need speaks louder.

That said, I would like to build on the conversation that gathered a few angles in the comments on Douglas Oliver’s letter. My feeling is that prosody in performance (and taking off on Doug’s sense of this we can include public performance and private readings both aloud and internally of a poem under this umbrella), if it’s unchained from any particular polemic or prejudice, can be a connective thread of discussion across poetries that might be radically different. The difficulty is often in finding a solid opening question, so I’ll try one with the understanding (and hope!) that most answers will by necessity be various: how do you – you being anyone reading this who reads or writes – begin to hear in your practice of reading and/or writing? Or how do you think you begin to hear?  My own angle on this is slanted towards the writing side of the question, but I’m interested in any possible take. For my part I often, but not always, look for a single sound, usually a consonant or two, to begin writing with or against. That listening for a sound might be something like an attempt to get near Doug’s “smallest possible unit” of the poem-in-formation (though what I hear to begin with isn’t necessarily a stress point), but I also understand it as part of a working desire to find a sonic point of beginning that is not yet bound to a particular tone of voice. This is when I am looking for a way to begin and don’t have an idea, a subject, a line, a text, a work in progress, etc., to be clear about it. And I’m not assuming that hearing begins when writing begins. In fact, there are many times when I’m quite conscious that I’m listening before I begin writing. Anyway, this is a different kind of attempt at beginning, so please take it from here and change it as you like……

So we can say: “The ‘neutral’ or ‘unmarked’ tune is that which the words would assume for an average voice in a given dialect when no special emphasis is given to the line, providing there were absolute agreement between different readers about the semantic, emotional and syntactical interpretation.” Just because there can’t be absolute agreement doesn’t mean that very often we don’t have such close agreement that we begin to sense the possibility of a perfect tune.

This implies to me, against much that is fashionable in literature today, that it does make sense to talk of people being able to read poetry better than others. There is no need for this to be in the least anti-democratic, because my statement also acknowledges that other interpretations will yield other tunes; but there again the notion of a better or worse reader will arise.

I needed to take such trouble over what may seem a minor point because I couldn’t reform the description of prosody unless I could put into it some secure-ish notion of the melody of a given poem. My prosodic reform begins with a redefinition of what a poetic stress is. All poetic music in any language, just about, depend upon duration, stress (or rhythm), and melody (intonation). Stress seems to happen in an instant of time that we may click with our fingers. Duration is its paradoxical bedfellow because everything that makes a syllable seem to carry a heavy stress takes time to happen. I have given many lectures testing out the following definition of stress before audiences, mostly by playing them the same blues song and asking them what causes a certain syllable to carry stress. As much as possible, I don’t influence their replies.

By common consensus we find at least one or two, often more, of the following elements as reasons why we think a syllable bears a stress. The basic model to bear in mind is like this:

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

… past of stress stress pause future of the stress

From everything audiences say the following can be factors in making us think a stress is heavy or light:

1. The sound: pitch (melody), duration, loudness, and voice quality. Since the stress happens in a notional instant of time – without content – duration is also the element that gives stress its content.

2. The main assignment of the position of a heavy stress is from abstract metrical pattern (if used) – or other poetic forms of patterning – plus linguistic factors, including the natural individual word-stress, the main information focus in the sentence (very important), syntax, etc.

3. In actual performance, 1 and 2 are combined with how important the meaning of the word is and how important is its emotional significance. A stress is a moment when we think we have unified the sound, the meaning, the emotional significance, and the functioning of the word within the sentence, into a single moment when all these come together into a single “beat”.

4. In practice, this gets more complex than I have time to go into. For example, audiences always agree that the pause after the word “Blues” affects our sense of how stressed the word is. How quick the syllables are before counts; how quick they are afterwards counts. The fact that “Blues” is part of the title (meaning) or that it is “blued” in the singing (emotional significance, plus voice quality) are part of the reasons why we think it is stressed. And so on.

5. All that is unified in the beat needs time to develop in the past or the future of the stress, or otherwise we have no time to make the comparisons which tell us whether a word is high or low in pitch or in loudness, important in meaning, emotionally significant, and so on. The past of the stress and the future are therefore read back both ways by the mind on to a single moment when we think the stress had occurred in the immediate past.

–––––––––––––> <––––––––––––––

past of the stress stress pause future of the stress

Backwater Blues done caused me to pack my things and go.

6. All this boils down to saying that the stress is the smallest moment in a poem when we perceive the developing artistic form. For poems I’d define form principally as a unity between sound, meaning, and emotional significance. I accept that forms are never perfect: again, I’m not reactionary. But someone has to explain why an audience when it sings along knows exactly at what moment to clap and knows when it gets the beat slightly “off”. It is not a moment of exact mathematical interval between the beats, but a much more mysterious interval which depends upon a formal perception.

7. Edgar Allen Poe thought metrics was like mathematics. In a way so do I, except that it is a mathematics of durations and pitches which has to take account of our emotional response to meaning.

Once stress has been redefined, it can also be seen as the sliding point where the instant of time through which the sounds have passed is united with duration. That is, it is also the moment when we unite the individual (and ineffable) instant of form into the ongoing processes of form. And we do that by reading durations of time both ways (past and future) on to that instant.

You can think of the instant as quantum-like if you wish. This is why I keep saying “notional instant” and “instant” – it’s an ancient philosophical problem whether we can bring an instant of time into consciousness. We can’t.

Then we may build up a hierarchy of formal development in the poem, considered in its ideal (ineffable) formal perfection:

The stress unites change (notional instant) and flow, but has to be anchored down in time before we can appreciate this. We anchor it in the syllable. The syllables unite into words and poetic lines, phrases, sentences, cadences, stanzas, and so on. Again, described in ideal perfection, the poem would then meet the Romantic poet’s ideal: the union of the part (stress) with the whole (the poem) within the one form, a form which gives “delight”.

Of course poems never do this perfectly and much experimental poetry is designed to allow them to do it as little as possible, by forbidding closure. But the forbidding of closure presupposes closure, so that avant-garde forms or art are always in tension with traditional forms; and much of their interest stems from that. We are, however, in a new era of space-time mathematics and our descriptions of the human mind are, in tandem, changing. This doesn’t mean that the human mind itself has changed much, perhaps….

Love,

Doug

Tue, July 2, 1996

Dear Anselm

You asked me to describe the basic themes of Poetry and Narrative in Performance: it’s a very dense, technical book, so I’m just going to describe those themes which relate to poetry, not to fiction.

My central concentration is upon the idea that a poem has a possible infinity of meanings depending upon the individual response of readers. Allied to that, does it make any sense to say that a poem has a particular music natural to it – since, again, a multitude of readers when reading it give it a different music? Is it elitist to say that any reader’s version of the poem is superior to anyone else’s and is even the poet’s own version subject to this? Such an ideology fits in with all manner of other kinds of philosophy which are currently fashionable: multi-culturalism with its insistence that no-one’s culture can be challenged without taking up an elitist or power-driven position; anti-foundationalist philosophy, which states that there are no truths external to language and to our individual expressions of them: that both truths and the “self” therefore are social constructions and have no warrant outside language.

This line of philosophy starts with Wittgenstein, and runs through Heidegger, Derrida, to people like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. Rorty, in particular, has promoted a new form of pragmatic philosophy which ran very hot at the time I wrote the book – and even today the new philosophy books bought by the American Library in Paris carry that stamp: they’re about Nietzche, Dewey, Rorty, and “anti-foundationalism”.

I’m not reactionary about this: I believe 100% in the multi-cultural attitude and almost entirely (with one vital reservation) in the notion that truth is a socially constructed entity which is difficult, perhaps impossible, to extricate from its imprisonment in language. However, if no one reading of a poem is better than any other reading (an obvious nonsense), then all my own readings of my own poems are as good as any other readings! And if that were true, I could never improve either my reading or my writing of my own poems. And if a given reading is superior there would have to be, I think, some generally shared notion of what a good reading consists in. The idea of an external standard of truth comes very near us then, though it is not quite reached. I am more interested in the fact that we nearly reach it than in the fact that we don’t finally do reach it; and that is a difference between me and the anti-foundationalists.

So I have this reservation: there is a crucial distinction between describing an experience and performing it. There is a similar distinction between trying to fix Truth into a single description (which would be wrong) and half-sensing a perfect truthfulness as a possibility hidden within our actions (performances). The first kind of Truth would be dogmatic and religious; the second kind is a non-existent entity which nevertheless seems to guide us – a real mystery in fact.

If I describe my “self” I see it as a social entity: if I “perform” my “self” by being it, it is something more mysterious. Similarly, if I try to describe the tune of a poem I can’t without seeking a consensus in society about what tune it should be. If I perform the poem, then, for that moment, there is only one tune that I’m trying to make. The description is public and subject to all the problems of truth as socially constructed. The performance is private, interior, and almost indescribable. In poetry, by “performance” I mean that moment when the poem is first written down (created), or read out loud by a reader or “performed” silently in the reader’s head.

What I have done is to get different readers to record performances of the same poem by reading into linguistic machinery with electrodes round their necks. The results basically give a graph of:

1. the rise and fall of the voice (the intonation)
2. plus the speed at which the sounds travel (duration)
3. plus the presence of any pauses in the reading
4. plus the patterns created by those stretches of sound when the larynx (voice box, adam’s apple) is continuously sounding (during the speaking of vowels and voiced consonants) and those other shorter moments when unvoiced consonants occur. In the following words, I have underlined the voiced parts when the voice-box is sounding:

buzzing wasp

Try it: b and z make your voicebox vibrate, w is made only with
the lips and air, and so are sp.

The significance of point 4 is that we are able to make the tune of a song or a poem only when the voice box is sounding: it is in the throat that we make the fundamental frequency of the voice, and it is in higher parts of the vocal apparatus that we make all the higher frequencies. The ear chooses to regard only the fundamental frequency as the tune. This has been much neglected in the study of poetry, in my view. Stretches of continuous voicing affect the pace of a poem and also such questions as the continuousness of a held thought or awareness. My favourite line to show this is from Wyatt:

So unwarily was never no man caught
With steadfast look upon a goodly face…

where the whole of that first segment shows up as continuously voiced and helps to convey an expression of continuous rapture at the sight of the beautiful face before the word caught raps at the end of the line to catch our attention back again. (The w, by the way, is strictly unvoiced but the nasalization of the n can just about maintain the voicing while the lips are forming the w.) The role of voicing in a poem is never talked about by anyone, but I believe I have shown it is complex in its effects.

So I’ve made all these recordings and compared the results from the different readers. They were asked not to read “dramatically” but to feel for the neutral music of the words. There is, in fact, some old work by a German linguist, Sievers, showing that it is possible to identify the neutral music.

Then, in some of my experiments especially, I have asked audiences of, say 20-30 people, to identify the “best” readings, so that I can escape, as much as possible, my own subjective, “elitist” judgments about which are good and which are bad readings. This is the social consensus I’ve talked of.

I have then developed a complicated method for comparing the graphs of these “best” readers and measuring them against those of “worst” readers. The basic results are these:

(a) It is important first of all to make sure there is a broad consensus
about how to interpret the meaning of a poem

(b) If a poem is orthodox metrically, inexperienced readers generally find it
easier to decide what tune to give it.

(c) When performing orthodox, clear poems, the “best” readers tend to
create markedly similar tunes. The “worst” readers typically read
with a flat intonation or give a unorthodox interpretation
of meaning. This does not alter (c).

(d) Talented alternative versions of the tune are possible, but will be
perceived as “dramatic” or unusual in some allied way.

(e) If a poem is very experimental in its prosody, inexperienced readers
may mess up in reading it. Again, this does not alter the convincing
evidence from (c) that it does make sense to talk of a neutral tune for
a poem, providing the reader knows how to interpret it.

People sometimes think I’m being Platonic: claiming that there is a perfect tune that arises within the performance like an Ideal form. In fact, I believe that this perfect tune is ineffable, which is the same as saying it doesn’t quite exist. Nevertheless we sense it as a possibility.

The Poetry Foundation cordially invites all kids and grown-ups to the following events with our Children’s Poet Laureates, past and present:

“The Chicago Reading” with Mary Ann Hoberman
Wednesday, October 7 at 6:45
Ida Noyes Hall (The Cloister Club)
University of Chicago
1212 East 59th Street, Chicago
(Reception and book signing follows; free and open to the public)

Current Children’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman will give a free reading to children and their parents on October 7. The winner of the National Book Award, the National Council of Teachers of English Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, a Society of School Librarians International Best Book award, and a National Parenting Publications Awards gold medal, she has most recently published an anthology of more than one hundred poems, The Tree That Time Built. She’s collected one hundred of her favorite poems in The Llama Who Had No Pajama. Other popular titles include Strawberry Hill, Hoberman’s first novel; The Seven Silly Eaters; and the You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You series.

The premiere of “Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant,” a concert based on the book by Jack Prelutsky:

Wednesday, November 4 at 9:45 a.m. and 11:45 a.m.
Thursday, November 5 at 9:45 a.m. and 11:45 a.m.
Sunday, November 8, at 2 p.m.

San Diego Symphony
1245 7th Avenue, San Diego

What do you get when you mix music and poetry? And what do you get when you mix a tuba with a baboon? Learn the answers to these questions (and more) during this concert based on Jack Prelutsky’s “Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant,” where animals and objects have been scrambled together to create entirely new creatures.

Prelutsky served as the Poetry Foundation’s Children’s Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2008. He has written more than 40 children’s books, often working with well-known illustrators such as Garth Williams, Arnold Lobel, and Marilyn Hafner. Prelutsky has also edited collections of poetry for children, including The 20th Century Children’s Poetry Treasury (1999). Jack Prelutsky lives in Washington state with his wife, Carolyn; they have no children, but they do have pets.

Co-sponsored with the National Endowment for the Arts, the JP Morgan Chase Foundation and the Living History Centre. For more information click here.

Both events are sponsored by The Poetry Foundation. Call (312) 799-8010 with any questions.

ADVANCING FEMINIST POETICS & ACTIVISM
DAY 1
So, the conference—ADFEMPO has drawn together a remarkable and wildly ranging crew of writers and thinkers. The conference takes place over two days at CUNY GC, Thursday, September 24th, and Friday, September 25th. Thursday’s opening plenary started a bit late as we sorted through the tech difficulties, consolidating the audio/visual components of the opening plenary onto one windows-running Macbook. As the chair of the opening panel, which featured Meta DuEwa Jones, John Keene, Julie Patton, and Evie Shockley, I was excited about the opportunity to pick up threads of various conversations that I’ve had one-on-one with each of these writers. The chance for us to puzzle through a few things in a group conversation. (Next time I’ll make sure to emphasize the import of open and opening conversations between and among the panel and the audience, between the us that is made. We had an hour to cover years worth of territory, so were a bit rushed. The second panel of the afternoon was chaired by Laura Elrick and poets Ammiel Alcalay, Cathy Park Hong, Anne Waldman, and Rachel Zolf. The final plenary consisted of readings and performances by Kathleen Fraser, Erica Hunt, and Eileen Myles. They were a wonderful and nourishing mix of voices that brought questions of belonging, family (made and chosen), bodies (sex and sexed), waste and the wasted, and what words do. This weekend, I’ll post more detailed comments, some of the conference remarks, as well as audio and video clips.

Day two begins later this morning at 10 AM. Here’s a link to the impossible and terrific conference schedule: http://belladonnaseries.org/adfemposchedule.html

Participants spotted on the Program and in Thursday’s audiences. Emily Abendroth, Ammiel Alcalay, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Emily Beall, Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tamiko Beyer, Cecilia Biagini, Julia Bloch, Pamela S. Booker, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Louis Bury, David Buuck, Angela Carr, Margaret Carson, CAConrad, Ching-In Chen, Mónica de la Torre, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Sarah Dowling, Rachel Blau DuPlessis,Marcella Durand, Kate Eichhorn, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Laura Elrick, Zhang Er, Marilou Esguerra, Jennifer Firestone, Dahlia Fischbein, Kass Fleisher, Kathleen Fraser, Corey Frost, Sarah Gambito, Rosario Garcia-Montero, Nada Gordon, Dana Greene, Monica Hand, Duriel Harris, Carla Harryman, Jeanne Heuving, Kythe Heller, David Henderson, Laura Hinton, Jen Hofer, Cathy Park Hong, Christine Hume, Erica Hunt, Brenda Iijima, The Institute for Domestic Research (IDR: Jacqueline Leggat, Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart), Laura Jaramillo, Meta DuEwa Jones, Angela Joosse, Bhanu Kapil, erica kaufman, John Keene, Dulcinea Lara, Ann Lauterbach, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Majena Mafe, Jill Magi, Anna Moschovakis, Laura Mullen, Eileen Myles, Bob Perelman, Michelle Naka Pierce, Janet Neigh, Hoa Nguyen, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Akilah Oliver, Tom Orange, Justin Parks, Soham Patel, Julie Patton, Sandra Payne, Tim Peterson, Vanessa Place, Kristin Prevallet, Sina Queyras, Joan Retallack, Evelyn Reilly, Margaret Rhee, Kim Rosenfield, Jennifer Russo, Trish Salah, Metta Sama, Kaia Sand, Jennifer Scappettone, Tyler T. Schmidt, Gail Scott, Francie Shaw, James Sherry, Evie Shockley, Sally Silvers, Laura Smith, Linda Sormin, Leah Souffrant, Jane Sprague, Patricia Spears Jones, Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël), Christine Anne Stewart, Stephanie Strickland, Michelle Taransky, Torino: Cecilia Biagini, Dahlia Fischbein, Rosario García-Montero, Rodrigo Toscano, Jacqueline Turner, Chris Tysh, Divya Victor, danielle vogel, Anne Waldman, Christine Wertheim, Kathy Westwater, Simone White, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Rita Wong, Lila Zemborain, Rachel Zolf, Steven Zultanski

Molly Young and David Noriega read Michael Gizzi’s New Depths of Deadpan.

Now and then I think I have something of use to say about poetry as a category, but generally I’m much happier talking about poems. What attracted me to poetry in the first place, I think, was its prizing of instances, its radical recognition that the purse seine of theory inevitably lets slip millions of particular minnows. (And, to tax the metaphor, sometimes catches different fish than those wished for.)

So, without further ado, a poem! By Rachel Loden!

Well, wait, a little more ado. I choose to post a poem from Loden’s second book, Dick of the Dead (Ahsata, 2009) in celebration of a remarkable event which occurred last week: She gave a poetry reading for the first time in . . . well, let’s just say a long time. You can read about that here.

I loved Loden’s first book, Hotel Imperium, which I reviewed here back in 2000. In Dick of the Dead she’s up to some familiar and some fresh tricks. Sly puns, deft references, barbed wit, and an overall . . . I guess I want to call it mischeviousness, abound.

OK, here you go. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do. (Oh, forgive my pedantry: I just want to remind those of you who grew up with The Simpsons that “Milhous” was the M. in “Richard M. Nixon” well before Bart’s friend “Milhouse” came into our lives.)

MILHOUS AS KING OF THE GHOSTS

A cold cellar-hole at the end of the day,
When faithless pretenders cover the sun
And nothing is left but my candidacy—

There was dead Checkers with her list of slights,
Slow tongue, green bile, black list, white mind
And April, cruel as rumors of my demise.

To be, on the lawns, where no helicopter lands,
Without that preening statuette of dog,
That dog surrendered to the moon;

And to feel that the light is a Key Biscayne light
In which everything is lofted up to the elect
And no returns need be tallied;

Then there is no use in counting. It comes of itself;
All the blue votes turning a brilliant red,
Even in Chicago. The wind moves on the lawns

And moves in myself. The last Iowa sweetcorn
Is for me, the snows of New Hampshire drift up
Into an empire of self that knows no boundaries,

I become an empire that fills the oleaginous pipelines
Of the earth. The bitch is still yapping
By gravestone-light and I am whipped high, whipped

Up, sculpted higher and higher, cool as a sphinx—
I sit with my head like a Rushmore in space
And the scrofulous hound smelling blood on my wings.

Isn’t that gorgeous? Now I knew exactly what you’d want to read next, so to save you GoogleTime(tm) (call me, Google, if you want to negotiate), here it is:

A RABBIT AS KING OF THE GHOSTS

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

I’d be glad to know what you think of either of these poems, and I guess I’m particularly keen to hear what you think characterizes the relationship between them. Loden often does “covers” like this; it’s one of the things that most intrigues me about her work.

OK, if that GIF is too annoying, just tell me, and I’ll take it down. Would be a shame, tho.

Adrian Matejka’s second book of poems, Mixology, was published as part of last year’s National Poetry Series, and I’ve finally gotten around to picking it up and checking it out. I knew Adrian very briefly when we both lived in Carbondale, Illinois, in 2001. He had a radio show on the local independent station WDBX (then 700 watts; since upgraded to 3000), and he asked me to come on the show and read some poems. I’d done this sort of thing before, on a poetry show on Madison, Wisconsin’s indy station, the venerable WORT. But Adrian’s show was a little different.

When I arrived at the studio, Adrian explained that while I read my poems, he was going to play music in the background. In other words, he was to be the DJ, and I the MC. Frankly friends I freaked. As we got into it, though, I found myself really enjoying it. I would never claim to have skillz as an MC, but fortunately Adrian’s an excellent DJ, so the end result didn’t sound half bad.

I think.

I could be wrong.

I’m probably wrong.

I’ve many times before and since thought about adding music, or still or moving imagery, or other sorts of aesthetic enhancements, to my poetry reading schtick. Doesn’t it seem like kind of a no-brainer, in this age of collage, pastiche, inter- and extra-disciplinarity? Studio artists are all over this; the Venice and Whitney biennials are always full of film, sound, text, dance, and theater in addition to painting, sculpture, and photographs. Yes, surely, yes yes yes, there are many poets who mix, collaborate, boundary-cross, draw, dance, sing. But be honest: If, when you go to a poetry reading, the reader says just a sec, I gotta fire up the laptop projector / plug in the mp3 player / unpack my sax / put on my costume / etc., don’t you cringe a little in anticipation, hoping s/he isn’t about to make a fool of him or herself? Don’t you? I do. Why do I?

Anyway, my thanks to Adrian for making me feel like Rakim for that one hour in Carbondale, long ago. Here’s a poem from Mixology. Actually, this is the version that was in Prairie Schooner. It’s a little different in the book. Is it cool that we just like post all sorts of copyrighted material on here, bosses? More mixology, I guess.

WHEELS OF STEEL

I got me two songs instead
of eyes—all swollen and blacked

out like the day after a lost fight.
Two jigsaws spinning, buzzing

the backdrop for woodshop
or emcee, bar mitzvah or afterset.

It’s Run DMC rocking without
a band, but not without me.

Two rims spinning after the car
stops. Baby, I’m the little lenses

in the bifocals if they were on pulleys.
I’m the Wizard of Oz if Oz

was a fish fry in July. Call me
Master of the Cracked Fingers.

One song spins forward, the other
back to repeat itself: Every day

I’m hustlin’. Every day I’m hustlin’.
Baby, I’m the layaway payment

on a Ferris wheel. My songs orbit
parking lots and rent parties

like the crazy lady’s eyes
when she finds out her lover man

already left. One of my songs
spins backward, while the other

plays forward like sugar mixing
in to make the grape. My songs

are the pinwheels for this parade
of moonwalks and uprocks.