Poem

You can find a recent poem by me HERE at Branta Magazine.
Enjoy.

Oh,ooo say can you read?

If so, and you want that just so terrific book of short stories, The Granta Book of American Short Story is just that book. No I don't still think it's 1992. There have been attempts at putting together anthologies since, of various success. What makes this book so good is the careful selection by Richard Ford. Certainly I share his full-of-words vision, at least when I'm not heading toward literary Minimalism. Read Mary Robison and then Barry Hannah to get the blood pumping. We need reprinted volumes of their short stories.

What really caught my eye tonight was a slick little forward in Existere by Delan Hamasoor (vol.29,1). Delan says that the novel has become, in today's society, a novelty. The Editor goes on to say that a poem online does not have the substantiality it does on the page. Poems "demand separation from the clangourous [sic] din of pop culture." Hear, hear.

I'd love to have been on the jury of the Victoria Butler Book Prize this year. Patrick Lane's Red Dog Red Dog was up against Patricia Young's Here Come the Moonbathers. Is there something in the water of Victoria? Fortunately I do not have to do anything but enjoy both.

This past month I've been winding my way through Moonbathers. Wrong verb, but no verb will encapsulate this experience. Airstream was a stunner for nailing imagery, a gun found in the sand starts off one story. Think intensification and reification. Moonbathers is like getting beaten up by a delicious bully, in slow motion. Every movement is exquisite, every slam feels so brutally satisfying. This is, in my opinion, by far her best collection of work.

I think of the book as having three parts. The first consists of repeating line poems (not as in a ghazal however). In this regard, they recollect for me the poems that Stephen Watson based upon the oral tales of the /Xam Bushmen. Young's poems move forward while revisiting previous stanzas. The sense when reading is one of filmic looping combined with solid images:

A man in high boots strides over the grass.
Slap of a cricket bat, wood against pig haunch.
A dog runs the edge of the field,
the crow riding its back like a small black queen.

Slap of a cricket bat, wood against pig haunch.
And everyone's cheering like it's afternoon football.
The crow riding the dog's back is a small black queen.
My cousin turns to me and we kiss like movie stars.

Simile turns metaphor, repetitions are intensified or broadened. Such historical reflections, such miraculous invention.

The second part contains miscellaneous poems without the repetition or any particular formal unification. Changes of pace are provided by a couple of longer poems and a few that shift to prose. One poem opens in a Ted Hughesian manner:

Mice are haunted by beauty but have no time for it.

We think back to the start of Ted's: Mice are funny little creatures/you nearly don't see them

Oh but this is Patricia Young, subtle, sharp thaumaturge who will break arms and eyes with a single thought. Her mice are not such trembling nibblers. She continues:

Too busy gorging and shitting and eluding/capture or death. Smart little buggers,/
and cute too, though non-discriminating./There's nothing they won't sink their pointy//teeth into, including shoe polish and soap. /Your average mouse spends its high-octane/life shuffling off this mortal coil.

The final kickers to the book are a response to Affonso Roman DeSant'Anna's Letter to the Dead -- this is Young's letter from the dead, and a peaen to poetry and giving up poetry. They're worth memorizing. You may ask, what do the dead say? They say brilliant things evidently. Here are a few:

We manage fine without digestive tracts, pornography.

We like our indifference toward winning or losing,/our extreme position on fossil fuels.

No need for sledgehammers or private detectives.

It seems like a decent enough place. In Praise of Poetry contains it's own zingers:

It began to spit rain./Out of nowhere an undertaker appeared./It was a poetic moment

An ironic moment too, evidently, and a cliche moment, and a playful moment. She writes a haiku about it, rhymes a few five syllable words and quits. It all becomes so wonderfully hermeneutic and full of what Gadamer would define as serious play. And finally:

I quit cold turkey but I was hardly the first or most original.

Ok, I'm not one who craves personal meetings with writers, (although I would have liked to meet Anthony Burgess...or not) but if I had a list of those I'd like to meet, Young would top it. Do I momentarily idolize? Maybe, but read Moonbathers and you'll understand why.

Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine is now out. I have a story in it titled Little White Squirel Angel.

Writer Alison Potstra says: It's "about a reality-show addicted obese woman, written in 'whitetrash' vernacular [that] makes a funny, yet disturbing comment on American culture."

It's now in bookstores. Do you have your copy?

Thriller in the Mist

Artist Josh Azzarella has taken Michael Jackson's Thriller, has digitally deleted all the people, and leaves us with a video showing only the background to ambient music. It's odd and interesting. Check it out now because I'm betting it won't be on the net very long. http://www.thefunkof40000years.com/

in between the sheets

an unfortunate reading of in between the sheets by Ian McEwan.

There's a point, I guess, that writers reach where whatever they cough into a hankie is taken as green gold. Do we believe reviewers are goggle eyed over fame or do we believe they're a breed of mucus-lickers? Oh but wait, a careful reading of the review blurbs shows no mention of THIS book. Of course not because four of the seven stories rise to mundane. The remaining three are way undercooked. One of the four could be three pages but it runs on for twenty like a hideous shaggy dog story. I'm guessing the author doesn't like to do much revision, but being another codified brit badboy and probably self-canonized genius, I suppose he doesn't feel the need. Final rating: beckoning beds sometimes contain bugs. Back away.

On a positive note -- If you like theory like I do, try out this: The Poetics of Prose $4.48 used at Amazon. Tzvetan Todorov is one of the major theorists along with Shklovsky and he's worth every penny of that four forty eight. He writes, "Yet like every science, linguistics often proceeds by reduction and simplification of its object in order to manipulate it more readily..." Todorov takes on formalism and its antecedents, he examines the topology of detective fiction as a means later to discuss genre and its problems more generally, he discusses the quest and secret of narrative and digs into the ghosts of Henry James in a way that makes me want to rush right out and get a collection. Perhaps his chapter "How to Read?" is less than satisfying in 2009 (the book is from 1977) but like most terrific literary theorists, there is much for adoration and speculation.