U.S. TO BE DIVIDED BY 18-FOOT WALL

I'm not making this up. Of course, the Conservancy doesn't discuss the effects on people with family on both sides, or the unfortunate symbolism:

http://www.nature.org/wherewework/northamerica/states/texas/features/art26909.html

So what happened to raising taxes on people making more than $250,000 a year

I was about to be outraged about something, but I forgot what it was . . .

Agoos' Property

I Read Julie Agoos’ Property (Ausable) this week. Fairly representational narrative poems about New England, written in loose blank verse: hmm . . . who does this remind me of . . .

Actually, the book diverges from Frost in some important ways, and that has made all the difference. First, the narratives end rather abruptly – almost in media res, just as the story gets going. I like that, b/c stories ought to make you think about why they end – and begin – where and as they do. Not only does one have to piece together a narrative from the shorter poems, one also has to think beyond the ending.

In addition, these poems actually deal with history. With actual history, I mean – tho sometimes quotes are transported into totally different historical contexts. As I’ve said in these pages before, it’s hard to write about the Pequot War, for instance, without some readers’ thinking of Susan Howe, and these are definitely not Howe poems: for one thing, they really do tell stories, albeit slant (the “Reading of the Pequot War,” for instance, fast-forwards to later anti-immigrant sentiment at the end).

The best thing in the book is the long poem “Deposition,” composed of 21 “transcripts” – really snippets of imagined cross-examination in a trial. Not only does Agoos maintain her more-or-less consistent blank-verse template, she also (at the same time) presents an Altman-esque rendering of people talking over one another and at cross purposes:

Q: I mean, where had they emigrated from?

From?

Q: Where were they from?

What –

Q: Place.

- place? – Or did you mean –

Q: Where had they come from?

Attorney for the Defense: Let the witness answer.

-- what the last place was?

Q: Yes.

And that’s the entirety of “Transcript II”; some of these exchanges are worthy of Howard Baker and John Dean’s during the Watergate hearings. “Deposition” is not a Reznikoff deposition – indeed, it reads more like a mystery novel.

At other points in Property, the verse sounds a little (little) like North of Boston:

[they] should have foreseen, the signs all in
as they always are after the fact,
when the story becomes like the story again
of the universe starting: never before
was there something like this, at no time, no sir, ask anyone.

There are worse things to sound like. The transcript poems are worth the price of admission.

New CRICKET ONLINE REVIEW

The new Cricket Online Review (V:1) is up - with work by Richard Kostelanetz, Geof Huth, David-Baptiste Chirot, and o yeah me.

Lydick Mastering the Dream

Read an interesting book recently – Mastering the Dream, by Kelly Lydick. It’s published by Mary Burger and Second Story Press, which you should become acquainted with, if you’re interested in innovative narrative forms. Lydick’s book, for instance, alternates between first person (journal entries and dream narratives), second person (letters to self), and (in the second half of the book), third-person narration. All in prose (except for some poems in the letters), interspersed with single quotes from rabbis on otherwise blank pages. Taken together, it forms a story of the protagonist, “Marie,” who seems to be recovering from a suicide attempt, a failed love, but, more importantly, a generalized desire to connect the metaphysical dots (“technically, it is a fallacy to try to look for constellations on my body [freckles], because the mirror shows only the reverse image. // Shin. Mem. Aleph.”). Those last (reversed), “[a]ccording to some mystics . . . comprise what are known as the three ‘mother letters’” – analogous to A-U-M, one gathers. Thesis-antithesis-synthesis, solid-liquid-gas.

In any case, Aleph-Mem-Shin spells “yesternight,” a word that haunts the book. Thankfully, there’s no final word or how-to mysticism here. In fact, you the reader are asked to connect the dots of the story and the reflections (if I may) that punctuate the story. I’m finding it hard to quote anything – I didn’t underline, as is my wont – and many of the sentences describe the sort of routine thoughts that make up one’s day – if one thinks about things like being and non-being. I’d call the writing “simply good.”

If the universe is 99.9% empty space, then “[m]y identity is part of the 0.1% of matter.” Worth bearing in mind. Try tracing the space occupied by your body, for instance: “I try to meditate, Aleph, Mem, Shin, but it’s difficult to do looking only at the ink on the mirror instead of my body.”

If this were a real review (or universe), there would be an ending somewhere.

"The sum total of our thoughts creates the world."
- Cecilia Vicuña

"The world is everything that happens to me."
- Jean-Michel Espitallier

This may just about encapsulate SloPo v. Flarf

What if someone thought they were booking a reading with Laura Moriarity the novelist, and got Laura Moriarity the poet? Or vice versa?

I was talking about this possiblity with a student today, who suggested we invite the poet LM and have a joint reading with the novelist LM. Big Tent indeed!

Off to Busch Stadium for the Cards v. Giants game tomorrow. Hopefully they'll split the series, in spite of my being there to jinx them (with the "luck of the Irish" - an ironical phrase if there ever was one).

Barrett's Boston

One of the other books that I started reading on the Airbus that I thought was going down was Kevin White, by Ed Barrett (from Pressed Wafer), the first volume of a multi-part project re: Boston. I really liked the writing, in these prose poems - the movement from one thought/image to the next, often within the same sentence, and the rapid shifts between registers of language.

It also made me wish I knew more about Boston. The poems are as dense with allusions to Bostonia as they are imaginatively nimble. I know who Nomar Garciaparra is ("No-mah"). And Fanny Howe and John Wieners (tho these two function more as personages than historical people). But, unlike Nomar, a lot of it got past me. I mean, I'm sure I could write a series of poems about Memphis, full of Dancin' Jimmys and Henry Loebs and Little Laura Dukeses, going to hear the Klitz at the Well, blah blah blah, and the people my age back home might get a kick out of it, and the rest of you would be going wtf is he talking about.

Not that that's a bad thing. I don't know if Kevin White is Slow Poetry, but it is LoPo (local poetry). There's something attractive about really well-written poems directed to a local audience - and if the rest of us don't get it - well, spend more time in Beantown, dammit!

All of which is to say that maybe the "prose poem novel" is not (as the back cover suggests) the appropriate generic label. At least the novel part. There are recurrent personages and images, but it's hard to connect the dots. (I'm currently reading Sherre Myers' Green Ink Wings [Elixir], which, altho discontinuous - and multi-genre - clearly involves the same 4 main characters)

Nonetheless, there are some persons I "know" (like the Virgin Mary and the Prodigal Son), from the section entitled "The Big Dig":

"Underworlds right under our noses, intelligence gathering without recognition or knowledge. ProdigalSon15_22 posts his blog on Luke.com, but even that gets boring: JPEGS of harlots, slopping pigs under the entry 'I went to Harvard for this?' online predators who want to meet on the Fenway. It gets old, there's no heartbeat in Google's 0 and 1 digital iambic to carry DNA over fiber optic cable, wireless broadband packets arrowing out of the sky right into your inner chamber with its kneeling post. The good son studies Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, Mary's face turned to the side in neither disbelief nor wonder. That's how to react, Mickey Roache instructs the Boston PD. Mary was a true cop."

I dunno . . . I think that's pretty good, myself . . .

Big Christian Trip

". . . if I cannot be the good citizen, I will settle for the money" - Christian Peet

So, like I said, I read Christian Peet's Big American Trip (Shearsman Books 2009) on the way back from Las Vegas, which both was and wasn't the best time to read it. Was, in the sense that LV concentrates a lot of the America the postcard-writing protagonist of the book travels through and reveals, from Seattle to Brooklyn. Wasn't, b/c we were flying through thunderstorms and I thought I was going to die. One wants to read something more - well, comforting - at a moment like that.

(BTW, a major American literary event occurred in the comments to my last post - viz., Mr. P. wrote a new "post" from Las Vegas (of the Mind, anyhow). Really. Check it - it's good.)

So, since this is a book description and not a book review, I feel no compulsion to connect my thoughts - and frankly, I think it's bad form to do so, on a blog.

- A propos the epigraph, there are so many quotable quotes, it's not funny. Actually, some of them are quite funny, now that I think of it.

- It's horizontal - I mean "landscape." It's composed of postcards. Some of them are addressed to real organizations (did you really send them, C? - like Lazlo Toth?), but we never see the pictures on the other side.

- Some of the postcards have what look like "real" descriptions on the top - e.g., from "Downtown Big Timber, MT" ("And how is city 'Big Timber' with no tree?")

- Some don't

- The terms "restrictive" and "nonrestrictive" take on political and grammatical meaning at once, in this book. It is overrun by aliens.

- Lyrics from Foreigner song: "Whale, I'm HOP LOADED/ Czech in sea// Zygote a viva/ or 103" Who knew.

- Echoes of other American boy-poets on the road (sans !!'s):

Montana of the God spiteful, my hooded destiny . . .
Montana, you are difficult to see. You are wet
crystals of sun. Montana of Clark Forks
and no end of miles. Montana, I am not to cry.

or:

I am tired without one more day a home.
I am tired without one more day a friend.

My home, which is not the house, does not exist.

- It's all in Plain English, with some in Spanish, French, and German.

- It ends with "the agreement of the bodega" in "The Nation of Brooklyn." Unfortunately, the Orthogonian Flyovers (or Drivepasts) are part of the same political nation (cf. Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein). A trip from Wichita to Lincoln might be real different, for instance. Worth bearing in mind.

- Lots of appropriated material (with 3-postcard bibliography) - we like that, here at Blog of Myself(s).

- The font bugs - all caps, and someone's idea of handwriting. Too bad it isn't real Peet handwriting. Second edition, maybe.

- I really like the "raw" feel of it. Reminds me of G. Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook. Only shorter (postcards v. notebooks).

- It's a drive. It's always a drive. And:

The Drive is "Welcome to" and "Thank You"

The Drive is bison disappear to the hills.

The Drive is abandoned, condom in the rest area

The Drive is no backyard hill or stump

The Drive is find the long definition home

The Drive is steel & tar & oil & gas & coffee

The Drive is under the weather as under the law

The Drive is beyond me

The Drive is Heartland into stone

- No more description, kids - time to get the book and read it.

Vegas vagaries

The Las Vegas airport produces the same kind of chaotic, disorienting distraction that is also produced by the casinos.

We talked about budget cuts to higher education - in a casino.

I saw my first chukar.

I read Christian Peet's Big American Trip on my small American trip. I plan to do a book description soon.

My room had a padded vinyl headboard and motorized drapes. I think this was supposed to suggest sexiness, rather than a mental institution. The mirror was supposed to have a television in it, but there wasn't a remote, and I didn't bother to ask for it, so all I could see was myself, which wasn't very entertaining or unique, from my point of view.

There is a palpable class hierarchy amongst casinos. I was at the Flamingo, which seems to have a distinctly working/lower-middle class, racially mixed clientele. Walking through the Wynn (new, lush) one could feel the money - Dior, Rolex, Swarovski - lots of Japanese people, not many African-Americans. Less pink w/ brass fixtures, more burnt orange and wood paneling.

The weather was better in the Mojave Desert than it is in Kansas.

The sins in "Sin City" are theft and stupidity. In this way, it is like the global economy, only moreso. Not original, but it bears repeating.

Why would anyone expect a senator from Nevada to be morally upstanding? Didn't you see Godfather II??

The greatest thing about Vegas: being able to sit in an easy chair and watch 5 baseball games at once.

I saw Liberace's pink turkey-feather cape. And his Czar Nicholas collection. That's what all Americans aspire to. The Czar, not the turkey, I mean.

Do you always wait for the longest day of the year, and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it.

Why waste all that perfectly good Colorado River water in the Gulf of California, when it could be spewing forth in fountains to the strains of "Blue Danube" or "Viva Las Vegas"??

Firefox Ak's album Madame, Madame! is a great Denver airport soundtrack.

If you are underground, it doesn't matter where you are.