The Best American Poetry

Last Amsterdam Blog [by Rachel Shukert]

This is my last Amsterdam blog, so I hope you'll forgive me if I wax slightly philosophical about the nature of the internet and poetry.  I'm extremely interested in what the internet gives us and what it takes away, in regards to art, writing, etc.  On the one hand, it makes it that we never have to remember anything anymore.  Facts no longer imprint themselves on their brain the way they once did...I feel like I've hardly learned anything in a permanent way since 1999.  This is probably very bad for the imagination. 

However, Computer World can give back in unexpected ways.  The internet generates its own poetry, and is open to many poetical experiments.  For example, I had a phase where I would type random words together into Google--bicycle, unicorn, penis--like some kind of oracle and then contruct poems out of the mangled, ephemeral phrases that came back to me.  A couple of examples:

Allow me to explain;
I don’t mind being used for sex
In Thailand with five eleven year old girls
And I understand that if my
Son is to be rich and successful, he
Must become Jewish
But Kiefer Sutherland is one goddamned fucked up
Piece of dick-sucking shit
Because he doesn’t represent me or my
Writing style anymore.

Or

It is good that you enlighten people about Harry Potter for
That doll was meant to serve the
Sexual needs of the German Fighting Man.
That’s why I wouldn’t let that kid
Invade a vampire’s anus or an
Ultra black Christian single personalized
Beer mug. 
Try the Gay Man’s Ass Burgers—oh no--
It wasn’t a question. It’s no longer just a choice
Whether to have a light beer or a beer in the butt chicken
But the good news is you have your mother’s eyes.

Or

Moira Egan, Guest Blogger August 24-30

This week, we welcome Moira Egan as our guest blogger.  Moira will be sending dispatches from Rome. Welcome, Moira!

When in Rome [by Moira Egan]

Rome in August is a lot like New York in August: everyone leaves. You get that lovely, quiet feeling of having the city to yourself—and a slightly smaller handful of out-of-town visitors. In New York, you can be seated much more quickly—or at all—in your favorite restaurant, or one you’ve always wanted to try.

But in Rome, when I say everyone leaves, I pretty much mean it. EVERYONE leaves. Just about every Roman escapes to his/her requisite and hard-earned two-to-four weeks by the sea. The businesses they run are left behind, metal gates pulled down and padlocked, and, peeling in the summer heat, hastily scribbled signs informing of reopening dates. Our favorite restaurant, Ditirambo (yep, that’s Italian for Dithyramb) is, at the moment, closed. The butcher shop downstairs, where we buy not only meat, but also wine, eggs, bread, and cheese, is closed. The pet shop where we can find Iris’s mature-indoor cat food and clumpy kitty litter: closed. (Happily, they will open again on Monday.) The neighborhood “bar” where you get your mid-morning shot of caffè macchiato: also closed. Even the smaller supermarkets close. The other day we needed to buy matches, and managed to find a tabaccaio that stays open during this period. These are the small shops where you can buy not only cigarettes, but bus tickets, Kleenex, gum, and sometimes small Catholic knick-knacks for your home as well. All of the above were available in abundance, but the store was out of matches. The tabaccaio shopgirl joked that the driver of the match truck must also be on vacation.

So, though it’s slightly harder to find what you need (or want) in Rome in August, it’s oh-so much quieter. We live right on the ambulance path of two major hospitals, so we still get the scary loud Mweh-MWEH Mweh_MWEH of the sirens, though, for now, less frequently. But the politicians who careen through town, speeding through traffic lights guided by their escorts of six carabinieri cars with sirens on full-blare: they’re on vacation. Fewer buses are running, many many fewer cars: ah, it feels like a month in the country. Well, almost. And for deeper quiet, the churches of course are still open, maintaining their regular-season hours of approximately 8-12 in the morning, and then again 4-7 p.m., or so. It’s always nice to sit in the cool and visit with the likes of Michelangelo, Bernini, Caravaggio, Mattia Preti, et al.

You might well think that another way to stay cool and enjoy yourself in August, and maybe even learn something, would be to go the movies. And during the rest of the year, there are at least two or three

Letter to Harwood and Lehman from Livingston

Bill Hayward writes to us from big sky country.  He adds that the text accompanying the photo is from "the big timber police report in the big timber paper...that is  in  big timber, montana. "  Thanks, Bill.

--sdh

Bruce Covey presents Anne Boyer

This week’s BAP poem from Coconut marks the fourth appearance for Anne Boyer’s “You Will Want Like Cowboys”:  1. In Coconut 4; 2. In Best of the Net 2006; and 3. In her 2008 Coffee House collection Romance of the Happy Workers.  Anne is so incredibly everywhere & all at once: A way-cool blogger with a frenetic following; guitarist in her own band; brilliant painter/collagist; co-editor (with Kasey Mohammad) of the journal Abraham Lincoln; teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute; author of chapbooks; single mother to her daughter Hazel & cat Ulysses.  Anne’s Issue 4 poems have received more hits than any other poems in the history of Coconut, and for good reason:  “Cowboys” begins with a repetitive riff on wanting, moving from a focus on the rhetoric of desire through the intangible (“ecstatic”) before landing in local, bodily, everyday Kansas.  Along the way there are references both to Goya and to Browning, a restlessness organized by association and fever.  I’d intended to solicit work from Anne — she’s one of my very favorite poets — but she beat me to it.  Everyone likes Anne’s poems!  You will too!

-- Bruce Covey

You Will Want Like Cowboys

I will want like splinters,

astonished spit, also like alphabets and minnows.

You will want at smallness,

also squirreling across the wire.

Wantings in the wilderness!

What did you think,

words?

You've seen it all before.

That's my last duchess—

all I want I've learned from her.

I want all I've learned from her.

Like Goya and church

you will fever like derangement.

You will lick no less

the ecstatic, and you will grow no more

accustomed to this dirty purse

than I to breathlessness

or pavement.

There is Kansas in the wilderness.

There is not cloudy.

All day the fingering, there your gaze,

there I will saddle up

the pillow, buckle, bobbin, tongue

I wanted from.

-- Anne Boyer

Also...[by Rachel Shukert]

Yesterday I had the opportunity to screen the film You Don't Mess With the Zohan in a theater full of Dutch and Germans.  The experience was every bit as discomfiting as it sounds.  I won't go into to too much detail, as I have to save it for a column, but let's just say this: I'm not sure a lot of people here are quite ready to laugh at Jews yet, although they certainly have no trouble using them for football mascots. 

Is this how the Indians feel?

Another Day, Another 5000 meters [by Rachel Shukert]

Another day, another marathon Olympics watching session (I guess we won't be able to say that much longer.)  The Dutch press are making a very big deal about Tia Hellebaut, the 6 foot tall Belgian high jumper who unexpectedly won gold in the high jump, beating out the heavily favored Croatian (and as I kept pretending, pickle heiress) Blanka Vlasic.  (By the way, I have a friend who is an actual pickle heiress, which might be the best kind of heiress to be.  Have you ever thought about that?  I mean, if you were an heiress, what kind would you like to be?  You'd want it to be something distinctive by not embarrassing.  Nobody wants to be constantly referred to in the press as "the Catheter Heiress" or "The Anal Suppository Heiress."  Pickle heiress is perfect.  Anyway.)

I've noticed something else in the European coverage of the games--there's no human interest stories, and I actually miss them.  How can I care about this person if I don't see slow motion footage of the bleak Ukranian orphanage where they first learned to pole vault?  Or hear about how their blind father drove them seven hours each way to Tashkent's only diving complex, until they became an American citizen just three hours before the Games officially began?  (I take that back.  Apparently it's Bahrain and Qatar that were giving citizenships out like candy just before the games.)

But the Europeans do something else.  Just before the start of a long race, they pan over the faces of each competitor.  More than pan--they hold a close-up of each of their faces for several seconds. And what you see there really tells you all you need to know.  Faces are amazing, and theirs are no exception; every hue from everywhere in the world.  And contained therein: fear, pride, fatalism, disbelief, or some combination of all three.  They all look so different, yet so utterly alike.  A moment like that is bigger than everyone.  And I think that's what the Olympics are really about, n'est-ce pas?

Also, China really should have invested in a better wind machine.  Everyone's flag looks like shit when they turn it on.  Hell, they could have borrowed one from Beyonce.  She's got plenty. 

Ricks on Dylan

I've been reading Christopher Ricks's book on Bob Dylan's lyrics, and I wonder how Dylan aficionados feel about it and especially about the discrepancy between style of critic and style of songwriter.

Ricks is probably the most talented practitioner of old-fashioned "close reading" that we have. His books on Milton, Keats, Eliot offer brilliant line-by-line analysis of great poems. "Dylan's Visions of Sin" shares much with his previous books: passionate advocacy of the writer, clever puns and allusions in every sentence, a controlling concept to organize and unify the book (T. S. Eliot and "prejudice," Dylan and "sin"). Thus, for example, "Positively 4th Street" becomes a condemnation of a former friend guilty of the sin of envy. It is exciting that Ricks has the same ardor for Dylan as for Eliot and Samuel Beckett.

The style of analysis and expression is so characteristic of Ricks -- logical, linear despite pirouettes, "English" -- and so seemingly antithetical to Dylan's non-analytical, non-linear, "American" manner that you can't help noting the incongruity.

Opinions, anyone?

-- DL

Robert Byrd: our most (or only) poetic Senator

Few contemporary politicians have any real feeling for poetry. There are some exceptions. Clinton gave Monica a copy of Leaves of Grass. And here the Senator from West Virgina recites:

The following could have been scripted by S. Beckett --

The Fallacy of Irreversible Trends

Even experienced stock investors fall for the fallacy of irreversible trends: the assumption that a trend will continue indefinitely.  When the market is going up (as in the late 1990s), people assume it will continue to go up, and that's when speculators enter the scene and even cabdrivers have a hot tip for you. That's the moment to get out.

Right now, because of the glut of overvalued homes, the credit crunch, the mess in Iraq, and the downturn in the economy, most of us assume -- extrapolating from current trends --that oil and gold will keep going up and the dollar will sink to new depths.

But trends are reversible. Change happens, not only because of the implementation of structural improvements but because the stock market reflects not today's conditions but a best-guess estimate of what things will be like in six months.

A correction in the commodity market this past week resulted in oil dropping to $113 a barrel. Nevertheless, Goldman Sachs has forecast a price of $149 by the end of the year. They're the smart guys and what they say will probably happen. So don't see your Exxon or your Chevron just yet.

But keep in mind that the incentive to create a non-petroleum-based energy source has never been greater, and consider this prediction: the liquid natural resource that will prove most scarce in the ninety two years left in this century is likely to be not oil but fresh water.

Water utilities are worth a look, especially those with decent balance sheets offering dividends a point or more above money market rates.