So, I have now set up my blog for NaPoWriMo. After thinking about it a great deal, I decided that I’d do it at another site, and I’m probably not going to share that site with people. Is there any need for you to see me in my underwear? No! And seeing the poems that I’ll write over the next month would probably be quite similar.

You can, however, see me at a wrestling match. Several, actually. Blink, and you’ll miss it… though you can see Bill Ferris, Travis Smith, Philip McFee, and Ben Moser at various moments, and you can hear Moser hollerin’ at the rasslers quite a bit. Long live the smart marks.

A book arrived in the mail today from Big Game Books, and it’s awesome. Peruse the list of titles, and let me know if you see one that would automatically appeal to me. Yep, that’s the one I bought. Yep, it’s great. I’ll be placing another order with Big Game pretty soon.

pinnacle /pin-uh-kuhl/ Pronunciation noun, verb, -cled, -cling.
–noun
1. a lofty peak.
2. the highest or culminating point, as of success, power, fame, etc.: the pinnacle of one’s career.
3. any pointed, towering part or formation, as of rock.
4. Architecture. a relatively small, upright structure, commonly terminating in a gable, a pyramid, or a cone, rising above the roof or coping of a building, or capping a tower, buttress, or other projecting architectural member.
–verb (used with object)
5. to place on or as on a pinnacle.
6. to form a pinnacle on; crown.

So, a few weeks ago, Bull City Press published Michael McFee’s The Smallest Talk, a book of one-line poems. Michael and I have traded e-mails about one-line poems for a while now, and he’s agreed to let me publish bits of those conversations here, because they’re kind of fun, and no one talks about one-line poems.

Ross: The Smallest Talk both delights and confounds readers. My favorite responses thus far have been from people who don’t traditionally read poetry, most of whom are very enthusiastic about the book, but ask things like, “Is this allowed? I mean, these poems are only one line. Are they even poems?” What do you think? Is this allowed?

Michael: That’s how I felt when I first read William Matthews’ book of one-line poems An Oar in the Old Water: delighted and confounded. Delighted by the dark wit and concentration and obliquely subversive tone of the poems — they made me inexplicably happy — but also confounded by the fact that they were only one line long. Was such terse impudence allowed in the longwinded chambers of Poetry?

The answer was, and is, yes.

As I kept reading Bill’s book, and started reading other one-liners — by poets in the Greek Anthology millennia ago, by the formalist Yvor Winters, by contemporary imps like A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery and Tom Andrews — I realized that the challenge of composing a complete poem in a single line has intrigued poets for a long time. It looks impossible, but somehow (once you start thinking and writing that way) it’s not; and if the one-liner does its job well, it will do what every other poem does, whether a
tart epigram by Pope or Paradise Lost — that is, create its own entire self-contained verbal world, one to which not a word can be added and from which not a word should be taken.

Poetry is already the smallest talk possible, the most compact and deliberate and charged use of language. A one-line poem simply takes that squeezing of the material as far as it can go on the page and still be a poem.

I’ll post a little more of the conversation every so often. In the meantime, you can see Michael read from The Smallest Talk Saturday, March 31 at 11 AM (McIntyre’s Fine Books in Fearrington Village) or Sunday, April 1 at 3 PM (Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh). Or you can buy the book.

For some reason, when I log into GMail, the sponsored link at the top of the page is “How to end a friendship.” What in my GMail is making the adbots think that I need to end a friendship? If I do, I’m looking at you, Jennings: my lolcatz obsession kept me up all night. When Ladybug and I couldn’t sleep, we grabbed a laptop and scrolled through pages and pages of the things.

To my mind and ear, The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” is perhaps the finest love song ever written, with “God Only Knows” a close second. Growing up, the Beach Boys were all surfin’ tunes and Kokomo, and I really hated them. I remember seeing them perform on some big televised event, and being disgusted that they were neither boys nor beach. (This was before the John Stamos atrocities, even.) But I’ve come to greatly appreciate some of their work from the early/mid-sixties.

It’s fight night in the White household. You should be here to see this. From the freezer to believer.

I’ve tried several times now to enter Henri Cole’s Middle Earth, but apparently, I cannot find the right angle of entry. I do not know if I should be discouraged by now.

My spell-checker in Microsoft Word is broken, perhaps a remnant of my ill-fated attempts to go the way of Open Office.

I’ve been feeling like rotting salmon for a couple of days, so I don’t know that there’s a coherent thought in all of this: I’m listening right now to a mash-up that mixes “Back in Black” with “We Will Rock You” (arguably two of the most overplayed songs in professional sports history, with “Crazy Train” a close third) with a little bit of “Ms. Jackson” thrown in for good measure. Don’t mock me, I got it from Idolator, so it has to be cool, right?

Granted, one can more easily remix music and lay the beat from one song underneath the lyrics to another than one can somehow remix poetry. But it’s sort of a wonder that there’s not a more vibrant culture around borrowing and assembling lines that somehow speak to each other to create something unexpected and new. Sure, it’s a different culture in poetry, one that has been fiercely guarded over the last couple decades. But I wonder if perhaps the next generation of poets will recognize some of the possibilities assemblage presents to poets.

For my part, I’m interested, but haven’t completed an attempt worth showing anyone yet. So, there’s that.

Help us, O Danger Mouse.

I have, of late, had the urge to clean up and throw some things away. I’m just not sure what should go. Everything must go.

I have, of late, had the urge to clean up and throw some things away. I’m just not sure what should go. Everything must go.

All attempts will be made. info

I’m with Jennings. The lolcatz are the greatest thing that has ever happened to teh Intarweb.