The Animals I've Trapped Have All Become My Pets

Born 2/20

1726
William Prescott
soldier: American Revolutionary War d: 1795

1829
Joseph Jefferson
actor d: 1905

1902
Ansel Adams
photographer d: 1984

1904
Aleksei [Nikolevich] Kosygin
Soviet premier d: 1980

1910
Carl Stotz
Father of Little League d: 1992

1914
John Daly
Emmy Award-winning reporter, TV host d: 1991

1915
Chick [Melvin] Harbert
golf

1924
Gloria Vanderbilt
fashion designer

1925
Robert Altman
director

1926
Bob Richards
Olympic Gold Medalist pole-vaulter

1927
Sidney Poitier
Academy Award-winning actor

1928
Roy [Elroy Leon] Face
baseball

1929
Amanda Blake [Beverly Neill]
actress d: 1989

1930
Patricia Smith
actress

1934
Bobby [Robert William] Unser
race car driver, Indianapolis 500 winner

1937
Roger Penske
race car driver

1937
Nancy Wilson
singer

1941
Buffy [Beverly] Sainte-Marie
singer, songwriter

1941
Clyde Wright
baseball

1942
Phil [Philip Anthony] Esposito
hockey

1942
Mitch McConnell
U.S. Senator

1946
Sandy Duncan
dancer, actress

1946
J. [Jerome] Geils
guitarist

1946
Brenda Blethyn
actress

1947
Peter Strauss
actor

1948
Pierre Bouchard
hockey

1949
Jennifer O'Neill
actress

1950
Walter Becker
musician, bassist

1951
Edward Albert
actor

1951
Randy California [Wolfe]
singer, musician

1954
Patty Hearst [Shaw]
publishing heiress, actress

1958
James Wilby
actor

1963
Charles Barkley
basketball

1963
Ian Brown
singer

1963
Ron Eldard
actor

1964
French Stewart
actor

1966
Cindy Crawford
supermodel

1967
Kurt [Donald] Cobain
musician, singer d: 1994

1967
Andrew Shue
actor

1967
Lili Taylor
actress

I am excited about The Fairy Tale Review. As evinced by my own editorial endeavors, I am a fan of the "concept" project. I think coming at the editorial process through an arbitrary lens helps to lift one out of subconscious biases and prejudices. E.g. in the example of FTR we see work by "mainstream" types like Addonizio and also the likes of Sara Veglahn (who is one of my personal favorite poets--not that being liked by me makes one non-"mainstream," but you get my drift.) By contextualizing the work, one can look at the individual offerings and delve deeper into the ways in which they achieve their various ends, which is a nice, active reading process. Which is not to say that there isn't a need for the cadre-journals (after all one ultimately wants to be among friends) but it is good to mill friendly-like in the public square with one's "peers" at times, and I think journals like this one are a good place for that to happen.

Happy Louis Zukofsky day!

4.
VALENTINE

This
is
not
more
snow
to
fall

but
a
gust
of
the
softest--
bending

down
the
wood
of
gardens'
branches
into

a
girls
and
boys
pastoral,
old

years
not
to
wink
looks,
middle

life
to
chase,
it's
musical

--Louis Zukofsky

"Oops, Sorry , I thought you were Iran for a second, there."

Further proof that the Keystone KKKops who've abducted this country shouldn't be allowed to handle firearms, let alone invade a sovereign nation. Truth is more moronic than fiction. Good luck with that Exit Strategy, Elmer Fudd.

For Francesca Woodman #12
[New York 1979-1980]

Are a melted fable

taffeta of organs

tricksters their eyes
    fall like peppermints

I is for Everyone

    F is

Lethe            the O

Crystalline egg

the river that licks
    the cerebellum clean

are sugar or salt
dirt or dusk

    the cells of my blood
    are pennies

For Francesca Woodman #11
[Providence, RI, 1975-1978]

DAM   MEM
NAT   ORI
IO    AE

Mars Needs Women

The submissions I have received thusfar for My Spaceship are extremely skewed toward denizens of the Red Planet. I suppose that's what I get for selecting a source text aimed at preadolescent boys. But still, if you happen to have never been a preadolescent boy and are considering submitting something, I encourage you to do so!

Had to re-encounter Bishop after about 10 years for a class, the poems and prose. Never having been a fan of the poems, it was interesting to note that I enjoyed the prose a fair amount. Bishop is most effective when she is afforeded the time to develop the emotional weight of the recollections she deals in. By means of explicit description and the rhythm of the narrative, she is able to charge the descriptions with the intimacy she wants to instill the reader. In the poems, she has less space to do this, consequently, the lines must bear too much weight.

What in the prose comes across as tenacious recollection in the poems gives a sense instead of rote nostalgia. The prose feels more "improvisational" than the meticulously wrought poems. The poems feel clinical in their crystalline order. E.g. "Sestina" is artfully constructed--putting forth a seamless narrative in the mold of what is essentially a lyric form--best at announcing its own artifice. Many poets use the sestina to convey the obsessive character of intense recollection--to my mind this is a misapplication of the form as the real character of memory belies the conscious manipulation of a form like the sestina. The narrative quality in "Sestina" is a kind of artifice, but the evident charade seems to run counter to the poet's evident desire to express "the truth as it was."

To my mind, poetry is the messenger of forgetfulness, absolution and the plasticity of the conscious mind and the resulting plasticity of recollection. I do not believe in truth or nostaglia. This seems to run counter to the epic tradition, however, to which poets like Bishop are most closely aligned.

It appears necessary to identify two governing impetuses for poems: those that are primarily narrative (agents of memory) and those that are primarily lyric (agents of forgetting). The Styx and the Lethe. It is perhaps a subjective judgment to state that poetry's most native role is the latter, however. Under close scrutiny the entire dichotomy breaks down--as in the Chinese tradition where there is no prose/poetry duality--merely specific terms for specific kinds of writing with a certain style of representing (or not representing).

In this light, the category of "prose poem" becomes much more broad--referring not only to poems without arbitrary linebreaks, but also to those which represent mimetically like prose does, that tell a story in "realtime"--the elegiac narrative tradition (Silliman's Quietude)--which has become the measure against which verse has been compared for the past 40 years or so, most likely since the New Critics and the Confessionals. (Doctor and Patient).

Once upon a time Sean Cole, Xtina Strong, Cate Marvin and I were all in a poetry workshop together (Aaron Tieger would later be in workshops with Xtina and I, though I don't remember if he ever had one with Cate and Sean in it). Seriously. There weren't even any fistfights, at least as I recall. We were all very different then, though.

Though it is interesting to note who stayed in touch with whom, have done publishing projects which included the others. I suppose there's no accounting for the tenacity of any given person's memory vis a vis legitimacy and dangerousness.

Say hello to our friends across the pond at Zafusy.

It has been a busy week, I have a whole week of blogs to catch up on!