Mailed a bunch of books today. I'm glad a lot of people took advantage of the special.
I like Donald Hall's poem, "Meatloaf," in the New Yorker this week and would like to speak intelligently about it (but can't). Like, I like the formal conceit and I'm pretty sure there is more to it than nine syllables in nine stanzas of nine lines -- oh! it's about baseball! -- I think there is also a deliberateness in when Hall changes subjects from Kurt Schwitters to meatloaf to the women -- but it's an extremely easy poem to read and clearly those mystery explorations don't make it more edifying. This stanza here is "all guts, no glory" in the sense that it's baldfaced, sincere, and done so well that it doesn't make me uncomfortable, but then, too, it doesn't really achieve anything in terms of making me get as emotional as he was as a suicide risk (which is nice):
5.
When I was named Poet Laureate,
the kids of Danbury School painted
baseballs on a kitchen chair for me,
with two lines from “Casey at the Bat.”
In fall I lost sixty pounds, and lost
poetry. I studied only “Law
and Order.” My son took from my house
the eight-sided Mossberg .22
my father gave me when I was twelve.
There is a lot of presupposition in those lines, and I like how much he's taking for granted. I also like how regular guy he is and maybe this achieves a lot for poetry that people stop caring about it for a while and just watch TV then become suicide risks? I dunno.
Why am I spending so much time considering a mainstreamer? I'll go read a poem by someone nifty.
Hey, here's one by someone named Christopher Rizzo, which Greying Ghost just re-released apparently in a pamphlet that looks pretty neat.
Untitled
by Christopher Rizzo fr. Naturalistless
Drizzleaf
Hazealous
livellum
herespite
blushillelagh
thornery
majorambling
oakay
Buy the whole book for $3.50.
There's a lot I don't know about that poem, but I like it a lot. Each word is like two words. What is a hillelagh? Am I misreading that stanza because I don't see two words in thornery. It's a crafty poem, and a tricky one, and you have to kind of parse it out like you do with a lot of poems like ee cummings poems, but not all of them, but most of the ones you have to approach like a puzzle I don't like, and yet this one I do.
15 minutes until 36 hours in, how you like me now? How you like me then?
This weekend I leave for a camping trip with my two parents, my two brothers, their two wives and two kids -- and then it's just me. I am only one thing. It doesn't seem fair, but I like it this way. I just hope the kids do not kill me. To be honest, I am not a big kid guy. If you're looking for someone who wants to talk to kids and play with them and stuff, just pass me by. I hope this isn't too square.
I pretty much just want to sit around and read Alaska by James Michener all week. I will read it in the morning by a smoldering fire pit, in the afternoon at a picnic table, in the evening while floating in a kayak, at night in my parents's RV. One day I will carry it up Mt. Ampersand and read it on that guy.
Maybe I'll read The Road too. I hear that's a good one.
8 comments:
A "shillelagh" is a club-- You missed a letter.
And "thornery" is thorn + ornery, I think.
Glad to hear you sold a lot of books, and have fun camping!
Oh man, you nailed it. Thanks Matt.
hey did you mail me my stuff
done
nice mountains
An expansive post for you, good work.
1.) Fuck Nyorker poetry. It 99% sucks.
2.) Spree are the best candy in the fucking mega-verse. I might do a Spree post soon. I LOVE Spree.
3.) All Michener books make great weapons.
S
I read that poem, I also liked it and felt dirty for liking it. It is really good though. It is just impressive.
It's always amusing and equally disconcerting to note how willingly, gleefully, one might even say altruistically, people proclaim their ignorance, their slovenly intellectual condition, and their incapacity to do anything about this stupor they find themselves in, today. That they proclaim it with an equal measure of obliviousness and self-congratulatory fuzziness is remarkable, revealing far more about the breathtaking state of decay in American society as a whole than any particular maggot on the corpse.
shut up, breathe in the night. you sound like a wind bag.
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