I’m about to make my first trip to campus in the pouring rain. Boo on the bus system. Boo on having to teach while wet. I need some cheer.

Oh, here’s some:

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

–James Tate

I had the chance to read Roy Fisher’s City for the first time today. It’s surprising that while the book received some attention in the US, Fisher went largely ignored in England at the time of its publication and didn’t gain any real notoriety until the 1980’s in his home country. The poems seem to have a restrained horror to them, along the lines of Weldon Kees but less inwardly-focused. I can’t speak to the kilter of England in the 1960’s, my deep suspicion is that Fisher was more resonant here because of the trail that several other American poets in the 1950’s blazed for him when dealing with the disjunctive experiences of World War II.

My chief interest in Fisher lies in his ability to mix the language of postwar devastation and industrial cityscape with the stillness that James Longenbach lobbies for in his essay “Purity, Stillness, and Restraint.” Fisher has dulled the experience of war, dulled the memory of war, but has left stark the effect of war, creating a visual collage that suggests in far more powerful terms than it shows.

Re: snarkiness on listservs– if your name sounds like a delicious beverage, I love you!

One is always finding neat tidbits in
Jilly Dybka’s delightful Poetry Hut blog. Today V for Vendetta meets Milton: Stephen Fry has written The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. This might just be the next book about poetry that I read.

It’s now been almost a week since I’ve been able to sit down and read a book cover to cover, but the distractions I’ve been encountering are coming to an end and I expect to be able to get some good reading done as soon as tomorrow night. Thank heavens. Roy Fisher’s The Long and Short of It arrived by mail this weekend and, while I don’t think I’ll read it all in one sitting, I do look forward to giving it several hours of my time. When Reg Gibbons and I spent some time discussing scientific language, Fisher’s name was the first to pop out of his mouth when we began talking about cityscapes. And cityscapes have been on my mind incessantly since Gilles Trehin’s Urville arrived a few weeks ago. (Amazon is already deeply discounting it. It’s well worth the $17 they’re charging… simply beautiful.)

Stumbling through the usual literary miscellany, I found a curious interpretation of Weldon Kees’ “For My Daughter” that I simply hadn’t considered. It’s less disconcerting than the readings I had brought to the table, but now that I’ve seen it articulated, it seems so obvious and I feel quite foolish. I’m of two minds about the lesson I might learn from this. I’d been keenly influenced by the tone and character of all of Kees’ work when reading “For My Daughter,” so I brought the darker interpretation with me. That’s not hard with Kees. So, I must be mindful that each poem should be read in more strict isolation. But the reading I stumbled across was clearly based not only on the text (it is fully supported by the text), but on Kees’ personal history as well. (Until today, I knew only what I had read in Donald Justice’s foreword and introduction in The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees.) Which is the more reliable indicator, if one is to be selected, when attempting to contextualize a poet’s work– other texts, or biographical information? Well, of course, the correct answer is “either,” “both,” or “nothing– the text is the only context you will need.”

I’ll be teaching “For My Daughter,” but thankfully, I won’t need to belabor the poem’s meaning, since I’ll be using it as a rather stunning example of how a sonnet can chew the head clean off of a reader.

In an attempt to get some higher-bitrate rips of my Beatles catalog into iTunes, but fool the program into thinking that the files weren’t new, just updated versions of tracks already in its database, I managed to delete the 45MB file that contained all of my ratings and play count information. Well, not delete it– that would be recoverable. Rather, I managed to overwrite the file. I consider this the same thing as entering a fugue state and erasing all annotations from the margins of my books. Well, I would, if I wrote in my books, but it drives me batty to write in books even though I know it would be a good thing for me to do. Of all of the lame OCD traits to end up with, I get one that could one day significantly hinder my progress as a poet.

–David Ignatow

Poetry Daily has a twisted “pretty trees” poem– I wanted to give up about fifteen lines in and am glad I didn’t.

Jeffrey Harrison– “The Names of Things”

This link will only work today, and today’s almost up, particularly for bloggers. So check the archives by date for today’s poem or check by author.

Is Matthea Harvey the best prose poet currently writing in English? I spent the evening reading Sad Little Breathing Machine (in the bathtub, of all places; mind you, I’d never share that information if it weren’t salient for ironic purposes), and to my mind, Harvey’s prose poems are some of the most delightful and instructive I’ve read since I picked up Zbigniew Herbert’s Selected Poems.

There’s a quickening of the pulse when Harvey abandons the line break, because she embraces ersatz narrative, explodes the abstract then gives it form. It’s not uncommon to see the wave-particles of metalanguage walking hand in hand down Main Street with a human husband in these poems, to see it unshackle the range of emotion available to all language then restrain it with linguistic convention. And as she unbuckles sentences from their structures, she makes light of the play; it has the effect of reinforcing the need for the very structures from which she pretends to have unburdened her prose.

I wrote to Amy Minton the other day that there is a new mythology being constructed now; I left out the idea that perhaps this must always be true. But our current myth-building happens in an age where fact is so easily transmitted across distance, and where faslehood can so easily be debunked. It seems, then, that magics are a necessary condition of modern myth, as today’s technology could only have been perceived by earlier generations as a form of magic. That which we cannot yet explain, though we believe it or know it intuitively, is one of these magics; another is the modern ability to make things misbehave– genomes, molecules, our own brains. Harvey’s prose poetry seems to tap both of these modern magics, weaving a narrative sense around the things which we cannot logically call sensible. In this way, her work is observation and omen in one.

It’s official now, so I can tell those of you who have been wondering why I have been curiously silent on e-mail the past week or so: I have been hard at work! I’ll be teaching an Introduction to Poetry class at UNC this fall… I start my course on August 24.

I worked so hard after leaving the high school English classroom to reform myself, but apparently I just can’t shake the urge to seek out young minds and fill them with thoughts about poetry. If you’ve been reading along with this blog, you’ve seen some of the poems I’ve been thinking about a great deal over the past few days; you can probably surmise that many of those have found their way into my syllabus.

I’ve long held that the greatest way you could possibly ever thank the teachers who shaped you (short of immense fiscal remuneration, which I will also gladly accept in the future) is to take what you have learned, expand upon it, and teach it with passion equal to or greater than that of your teachers. I’ve been very lucky over the years to be paired with like-minded instructors on many levels, friends and teachers who share my peculiar interests and understand and support some of my poetic obsessions. In the past few months, before the opportunity to teach at UNC arose, I found myself increasingly grateful to the teachers who shared their wisdom about poetry with me. I am infinitely more grateful to them now, and hope to do justice to their teaching over the next semester.

–Donald Justice

Tony Hoagland’s “Texaco” in this summer’s Threepenny Review. How did I miss this when it came out?