Baugo Bay

trumpet vine and
butterfly bush

chickadee

weeping willow and water from porch

a very quickly snapped photo out the window of lake house.

A POST

The below pics are from yesterday's storms. These were
taken in Muskegon however, in my sister's back yard.

*

I need roomy vehicles and/or trucks because I'm moving
again, hopefully for the last time for a while. I'm moving
from Longfellow Avenue in South Bend to a house on Baugo
Bay (about nine miles away) and I have a somewhat flexible
schedule. I don't have to take one huge trip, but can take
several smaller ones leading up to August 1, which is the
move-in date. The people living there now leave today
though, so . . . This sounds like a weird Craigslist entry.
The point is if you find you JUST HAVE to help out, email
me or something. The other aspect to this is it's gorgeous
enough to have to see. I'm kind of ADD what with all the crap
going on. You may have seen that Carrie Oeding won the
Wolfson Prize, and will be published by 42 Miles Press. It's
an extraordinary book--full of TALK that's poetry. Full of pale
greens and sunlight glistening off the barbecue grille. It's
the first book for the press after a slow start getting things in
place--there were some issues to get ironed out--and it
will appear late next summer, or earlier. Christine
Garren's cahpbook, which was promised long ago, will appear
late summer/early fall. I'm reading, again, A. R. Ammons' Tape
for the Turn of the Year because I hadn't read any Tony
Hoagland for years. I thought maybe something magical
might have taken place since Sweet Ruin, about the time
when I was part of a group deciding if some of Hoagland's poems
should go into an old issue of Passages North. They did,
though not with my blessing. Then I quit reading him. Now
he seems less precious than he did then, less melodramatic,
but if ever there are poems that read as if they are clever, when,
really, they aren't, it's the poems in his new "Late Honda
Dynasty" book (just that title should tip you off). Just buy a
Mark Halliday book for crying out loud. I'm being too harsh. It's
not THAT bad (his poems about race and sex are
especially insightful), but it's certainly not great. I do like some
of Hoagland's essays. And the poems have moments--but they
don't coalesce into anything really unique. I think the Oeding
book takes risks, although in some ways it's about regular
old life in the same way Hoagland's poems are. For one thing
Oeding's book is constructed as if from multiple perspectives,
although it all clearly emanates from a commanding central
consciousness. There's no posturing. The poems never feel arch.
The book isn't preachy, or superior-seeming--it just is.
Sure, you want to say, I know this world. But you also want
to say, I've never quite known anyone like this speaker
(although in many ways it's all of us), and she frightens me
(a little). Now I have no energy left to say something about
Ammons' book, other than I am enjoying the hell out of it
for some of the same reasons. The speaker doesn't always
sound like the coolest (or smartest) guy in the room,
but by page thirty it's clear he is.

*

I've got too many things happening at once. It's like Groundhog
Day for me (the movie), over and over again with the Way-Too-
Much thing.

PORK RINDS

Whatever spilling you may remember--blue trees crashing
__into big Blue Lake,
the dead deer exhaling near the partly evaporated human brain.

All these stupid lawns. I want a drink.

"The sucker is more like a swimming muscle than a kind of fish."

I think they should outlaw animations of blocked arteries,
__he said,
and played with a ring on his middle finger.

Take nature and let it dream in the foyer--you'll always be home.

I return to the deer, and the dead man. I return to it.

I saw a two hour play in Traverse City where all the actors
__simply reacted
to tornadoes onstage. The audience did eventually stop
__screaming.

I HAVE BEEN IN FAR MORE UNCOMFORTABLE
SITUATIONS THAN THIS

Carrie Oeding

To the next person who dislikes me,
let me say it's true a person needs enemies,
and I'm sure you could be a great one,
one who thinks of insults while ironing silk,
one who is never wrinkled.
I'm sure I could stick it to you,
since I'm funny and you're not,
since I can scowl better than a barbecue grill.
Listen, Katherine tells me about her enemies.
She says they're like sweat in a Carolina summer,
spilling down your skin when you pick up a Coke.
She says sometimes they're more fun than eating chips.
She grins and says, Soon one will come around
for you, like my teeth rounding this apple.
The best apple I ever had was like having perfect teeth,
00it was like
comparing an apple to something instead of fucking eating it.
I’m guilty—I compare things to you too.
You could be a person or you could be an apple.
You could scorn me quicker than cavities.
I don't want to place insults next to you,
I want to think of a celery stalk and say you are like it,
but not in an insulting way,
and just think about it for awhile—
You are a sliver,
you are a chessboard,
you are a trampoline, you are—
I don't know, but I say this all to stall awhile,
I say this all with my barbecue scowl that's now a grin.
You are outside my house about to ring.
I am standing in my bathroom brushing my teeth.
Before you touch my doorbell and before we meet,
I should feel something for you
because I still can,
and I think I can't go anywhere and neither can you.


from Diagram

July 3, updated July 8


The heat wave everyone else is plunged into is
raging here. Soon to end though. It's going to be
a long summer. Blueberries are on the tables at the farmers'
market and it makes some sense to eat them in the heat
after an afternoon in strong air-conditioning.

*

I announce the winner of the Wolfson Award on the
42 Miles Poetry blog tomorrow. It's pretty damn
exciting.

*

I'm moving into a small house on a lake, with a yard
that was full of a family of wood ducks the other day.
It has been a while. Brandywine Lake being the last time
I sat on a porch and absorbed the dome of the blue world,
or skated down into it, lighter than air, nice cold lake
water, cattails blowing around in late summer gusts.
I lived there for a while, on that lake, and then lived
on the Paw Paw River, its surrounding woods full
of morel mushrooms and owls. Then it was Hickory
Corners--meadows, meadows, meadows, and birds
and deer, a stone's throw from Gull Lake . . . Now it's
Baugo Bay, with a spot for my kayak. About time.

*

Can't get enough of James Schuyler and Creeley
right now. I haven't purchased the new Schuyler--
the old Collected is good to go through every other year,
as is the Creeley Collected, 1945-1975. These are
two of the best collections of poetry ever published.
I'm teaching Creeley this fall.

*

Nice day in a nice stretch of weather. It turns tropical
tomorrow.