Bits: Reading Around

Some things I liked this week:
Terrance Hayes has two good poems in the January/February 2008 APR; you can read “Support the Troops” here,
which I liked, and I liked even more “The Shepherd” which is a surprising riff on James Dickey’s “The Sheep Child,” on sheep and on fathers. It’s hard to give a sense in an excerpt of the building of urgency via digression in this 50+ line poem, but here’s a chunk from the middle.
Whenever my parents fought, my father would drive me
to the dollar movies to watch and forget the movies.
The rain left stripes on our faces. The news
of another sheep’s death was often on my mind.
The story of how sheep fall in love with moonlight;
how sheep go astray and are bruised.
My father sometimes burned upon the sofa
like a campfire and a dry whimper
broke from him…
I liked Charles Bernstein’s poem, "All the Whiskey in Heaven," in the March 3 issue of The Nation. (You have to be a Nation subscriber to read the whole poem, but you can see the first half of it, in any case.) He does very funny parodies and he sometimes does this strange and fascinating other thing, which is to write poems which are deliberately creakily-written, but which get to you anyway. It’s a little like watching a juggler who, in a display of fake clumsiness, sometimes almost drops a plate or two the more to impress you when he starts juggling the flaming sticks. This one is a sometimes not-quite-semi-rhyming-except-where-it-perfectly-rhymes Valentine’s Day ode. It’s half parody and half sincere, and the more interesting for being both.

There are certain words that are never used in speech, which you only find in newspaper articles. “Don,” as in “put on,” is one of them. Over the weekend, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Karen Heller covered a Philadelphia Museum of Art gala in honor of the Frida Kahlo show opening there today, and talked about the traditional Mexican costumes people were wearing, and apparently none of them got dressed. Instead, they “donned” outfits.
I had a thing for Frida Kahlo 20 years ago when I was in college. I still like her paintings, but prefer Diego Rivera these days, I think. I was really annoyed by that Frida Kahlo movie a couple of years ago. The paintings that dissolved into real life actor scenes—that was a cool effect, but the framing of life-into-art-into-life never went anywhere beyond special effects. Much worse, the movie treated Kahlo as if all her problems were lovelife-problems, with her art as incidental, as if she had no artistic quandaries. Are female artists more likely to be reduced to biographies? Certainly, for example, Sylvia Plath is. I’m not sure she’d have quite as big a reputation if people read her without knowing anything about her. Though “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” are both topnotch poems.
I’m delighted to read in the March/April issue of Poets &Writers that one of my favorite poets, August Kleinzahler, has a new New & Selected coming out in April, Sleeping it Off in Rapid City. P&W reprints a poem from the collection, “Shoot the Freak,” which contains the phrase “hiphop Lubavitch punks”!
Speaking of my favorite poets, has anyone read any poems by Thylias Moss anywhere since Tokyo Butter came out? I saw her at Drexel University in Philly about a year ago—quite a performance. Don’t miss her if you get a chance.
Mary Oliver has a collection coming out in April too, says P&W. The poem they reprint features pickerel. Also a turtle. And some ducks.