_Earth Day Suite_ is ready for your downloading pleasure!

My (e)chap, Earth Day Suite, is now availble for download (free) from Beard of Bees press.

I got yer nature poetry - RIGHT HERE!

While you're at the site, check out some of the other fine chaps on display - including those by that lovable poetry-bot Gnoetry - whose poems are, to this pre-post-human author, scarily good.

Letter to a Young Poet

Dear Young Poet,

You need to know:
I don't care about your exotic vacation locale,
or your feelings about the peasants there.
I don't care what happened to your pet.
I don't care about your sex life.
I know that's hard to believe.

I don't want your vatic nuggets of wisdom,
esp. that one? - at the end of your poem?
Even when you're old enough
to dispense them plausibly,
leave it to the self-help books
and checkout-line philosophers, ok?

Please don't talk to me in present tense
unless you are transcribing something
actually happening as you write.
If you're writing while it's actually happening,
please get a life. . . . Especially a sex life
(look, if you were raised Catholic, we know for sure
it's not as fascinating as you're making it sound).

Don't tell me what I do ("you do this, you do that").
You're not here.
I know what I do, and that's not it.

And don't use foreign words if you can help it.
Esp. when describing your exotic vacation locale.
OK, you went to high school. We know.
You don't have to tell me anything
about yourself to make me feel sorry for you.

If you "weird up" a confessional poem,
it's a weirded-up confessional poem.
Everyone will know this
(writing confessional poetry in 2010
is like writing "thee" and "thou" in 1968
in a poem w/rhyme and meter -
so if you do it, do it proudly).

Feel free to use "thee" and "thou."
Think of it as "Post-TheeThou" poetry.

And then and then you don't
have to think about line
breaks at all. Or you could go back
to writing stories in prose.

O yeah and BTW it's like
what we imagine knowledge to be, b/c
I have wasted my life
reading poems
that have already been written before.

Thank you very much for your consideration.
Please do not hesitate to contact me
if I can be of any further assistance.

Touche, Olson

" . . . life itself's
Beauty which all forever so long as there is
a human race like flowers and, I suppose,
other animals -- they too must know something
of what it is to love, to be alive, to have
life, to be on the sweetness of Earth herself,
great Goddess we take for granted, God the Father so much
more the strain of our beings, she the sweetness
we arrive in pursuit of . . . "

Inaugural Poetry as it Ought to Be

Even representational, personal, narrative poets were gagging, as it turns out.

In workshops, I do an exercise on the first day. Everyone free-writes (incl. me) for 10-15 min. Then, we count the number of words we've written. Then, we underline the words, phrases, sentences we like most, and cross out those we like least. The goal is to arrive at one half (or fewer) of the number of words of the original free-write.

Then I have them go home and make a poem out of what's left, and bring it to class. When they do, I have them count the number of words and - you guessed it - cut out half.

It seemed to me that Elizabeth Alexander could have benefited from this exercise.

In any case, I thought there were some sort of interesting phrases & lines in the poem, but that about half of it was pretty boring.

So, I rewrote it. [ahem.]

Praise the Day

We walk past, catching each other’s
eyes, or not, about to speak –

All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din.

Someone is repairing things that need it.

Someone makes music:

a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

We encounter each other in words

spiny or smooth, whispered, declaimed,
words to re-consider.

We want to find a place

where we will be safe.
Say it plain: many died for this day:
Sing the names of them that brought us here,

picked the cotton, or lettuce –

praise for every hand-lettered sign
under widening light at kitchen tables.

In today’s sharp sparkling winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun,
on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

"Eve Even Christmas" and "Nursing Slaughter Spirit"

Some timely poems by me at 3by3by3.

Xmas? Bah, Xbox! Loden's _Hotel Imperium_? Three apposable thumbs up!

"When you spoke of the utility of suffering, I knew it was because you heard your death up on the roof like Santa's sleigh and now you wanted me to give it to you as a present."

Thus begins Rachel Loden's prose poem "Carnal Acknowledgments," from her book Hotel Imperium (U of Georgia P, 1999). I'm ashamed to say I haven't read these poems in this collected form until now, but glad I did. Makes me look forward to the next installment, Dick of the Dead (!), forthcoming from Ahsahta. Many of the poems are indeed Nixonesque, e.g., "Bride of Tricky D.," which begins with a news item about the dog Checkers being reinterred near his former owner, and ends thusly:

" . . . 'Let's
slip the Constitution, Richard,

cut red ribbon on the virgin
century. Teach me tonight . . . .' I find

his fierce beard lovely and the shadows
long. Asleep with Pat & Checkers

by his side . . . 'We could do it,'
he'll say, 'but it would be wrong.'"

Checkers. You know, as in the Checkers Speech? Illegal campaign contributions? Red scare? Well, kids, once upon a time, there was this thing called Watergate . . . Actually, many of the poems do come with endnotes, but this one doesn't. The quote at the end, of course, is what Nixon's former Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, tells the Senate Select Committee investigating the Watergate break-in that he (Nixon) said after agreeing to pay hush money to the burglars, now in prison, but that he never really said. Got it?

Anyway, I like these poems b/c they are a kind of shadow image or muscle memory of politics and pop culture of mid-20th c.-America, and since I already feel like an embalmed relic of that era, I like reading them. Indeed, a lot of these poems seem to be spoken from beyond the grave, or from the political unconscious (a fine distinction, nowadays). I dig the combination of gravitas and wackiness in tone - & elegance and total surprise, in terms of form. The tone and form of some poems reminds me a little of the poetry of the era they're about, but the content has a lot more in common with Peter Gizzi than Randal Jarrell. Or Underworld in verse. Only shorter.

Reason to Concelebrate(?)

Here (yes, there) is proof positive that you should be careful about what you "publish" on your blog.

Essay on the Allegorical Uses of Syntax

for bpNichol (and others)

The capitalization of Gneiss
Exiled from the capital
Capitol the capital of Speedy

Plot more than scheme
Story more than plot
History more read than blue

Poetry being at a dead
End time being til no
One listens to poetry save

Golden crowned sparrow
Spavined fools gold
Arrow downed having

Running while spitting
Pissing altogether winds
Digging remember hind

Objects known by shadow
Play deep reality plow
Down use values fucked

Up rock chuck hawk chalks
Up subject verbs object
To capitalize on plot schemes

Poems than none other is
looks at it when reading
Don’t say jay nay pa stop

An H say

Personal Poem

Every day I become more like me.
I’m about to be killed, right?

damaged persons never forgive(n) - ?
More on this theme later.

Your money will run out before
your life, making suicide

unnecessary. In the mean time,
don’t touch me I’m radioactive

with a half-ass life
60 million years.

forced march

And now, an entirely pastoral interlude, entitled, "Spring Comes to Kansastan."

daffodils! -- /
an easter egg under-
no fool a dirty golfball

* * *
jonquils! -- /
here they call them daffodils /
back home
this happened weeks ago

* * *
all poetry books --> quietude
save those
used to break things /

paper-backs
took care of that

* * *

KIM ROSA:
1964-2006:
Doctoral Student
Dedicated Family Advocate

FRANK GURTHER:
July 20, 1918-Nov. 9, 1979
"A Man with Great Integrity
and a Friend to All"

AND LUCKIER:

Ice Age Spring Break

When than spring April
draft of age hath
parsed to the root
value of all glaciers,
retreat man far south,
caves of Iraqi Qum
beach of South Padre
longen folk goon wild,
pills grim ages wrack
shiny faces every races
have got a friend in
Coke ’s the real / god
can’t see the folks
beneath the new faces:
breakers make white foam
(“semen of the gods”),
be excellent to each
another party on dudes.

An A.W.P.-themed Poem

THE SAME POEM

Like maybe we're all writing it? Like how everybody points out the word she almost wrote instead? Like everybody's talking about Cornell boxes? Like miniaturization would save us? Like homophonic procedures cured the security pageant? Like excess for access? Like everyone's unique but me?

Or how you read the sign as "piso mojito" & think you've drunk too much? Or see the sheets of rain in Times Sq. & think of Ridley Scott? And can't stop it? Like it were your poem? This has been going on for years. Like brevity for bit? Or how everyone grows young when the old folks give up & go home?

The addictable play of forms - how a logo imparts its power if you wear it? Like swoop for swoosh? Like your poem on the ticker, the jumbotron, the crawl? Like maybe it is, by someone else? Like parapraxis were the new metonymy? Aw shit I meant parataxis. And?