Stuff


It's sunny out, a day to travel weatherwise, so of
course there are crowds. John Gallaher posted books
he likes recently. Everytime I think I know what
I like by definition everything changes. It's because
I can't go at it that way, backwards, with criteria
first. I like Rick Lyon's Bell 8. I like Kenneth Koch's
"You Were Wearing": "I said, 'Let's go outside
a while.' Then we went onto the porch and sat on the
Abraham Lincoln swing./You sat on the eyes, mouth,
and beard part, and I sat on the knees./ In the yard
across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage
can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king
George the Third." Everyone go out and buy and read
Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It is pure. It is oddly
uplifting. It's the beginning of the world, and it's nothing
like what we think about when we ponder books or films
about the end/beginning of the world. Yes, there is
a cooked baby, some small horrors tucked into the
corners of this slender nightmare. That's not what
you remember though. I read it in a few hours,
the best novel I've read since Housekeeping and in odd
ways the books are similar. They are both about Nature
in essential ways. I'm teaching an advanced poetry class
in the Spring and I'm using individual books for it,
but once again I feel frustrated for lack of an anthology
that is any good at all (contemporary poetry anthology).
I've been enjoying Oliver de la Paz's Names Above
Houses, the way the small stories seem adrift on water,
each landscape (with people) caught in a ball of slow
dazzling light, the way the ground and the sky are felt
in every "frame." And I do want to say frame. Sometimes
students bring light to life because an authenticity opens
up in the relationship art makes possible, and this has
happened with Talia Reed, whose complexity as a person
and a poet seems bottomless. Also, Vince Bauters, who
is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery thing
in poetry. (He's reading Tony Hoagland and Christine Hume,
and loving both, not knowing quite yet you're supposed
to go for one or the other.) Mix poetry and people and you
get involved in a conversation that runs deep. Not the worst way
to begin to understand the world and its myriad paradoxes
(some politicians should write some poems, and I mean
some Flarf or some long image driven narratives, or at least
read in Seidel's new book the poem "Dick and Fred" and try
to imagine why a man might write that poem in this moment
in time). I didn't get an NEA, again. I'm reading in February at
The Box Factory in St. Joseph, Michigan. Dana Roeser is
reading in February at IUSB. Louise Mathias is speaking
soon to Sarah Maclay's class at Loyola. Joyelle McSweeney
now lives in South Bend and I need to meet her, possibly at
Lulu's sometime. Walter Lab is painting his heart out
in California. Greg Cleary is plotting birds in Michigan.
Bret Favre is still playing football and won't retire. Please
retire! But as Greg says "All he's got to do at home is blow
up beaver dams and mow the lawn."