The Best American Poetry

The View from the Cuckoo's Nest [by Simon Barraclough]

Huffy Henry blogged      the day (Berryman)

I used to write a blog, five years ago, called Fallout. After a year or so, we fell out.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to blog (D.H. Lawrence)

I have a new blog called Mo’ Worse Blues but so far has only one entry announcing that more entries will follow soon. That’s been up for about a month. I will attend to it soon, I will.

For a long time I used to blog early (Proust)

But it will have to wait till after my vacation here; my week away in a blog cabin.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these entries must show. (Dickens)

Thinking of cabins and woods, while I neglect my own blog and set up here I feel a little like a cuckoo – albeit a (so far) welcome and cordially invited cuckoo – typing its way out of the shell.

Soul, wilt though blog again? (Dickinson)

I’m already perched quite high (here’s a photo of yesterday’s sunset, looking over The City)

but the view from the eyrie can seem dismal at times. Nations disintegrate; those who ‘do not wish to get embroiled in the conflict’ deliberately embroil themselves in the conflict; our party of power, which I detest, is compelled to ape a smaller, similarly detestable party in an effort to cling to its pseudo-mandate; buildings are collapsing around our desire for cheap produce; the British 1970s and 80s are under arrest for unspeakable acts; and poachers have picked Mozambique clean of its glorious rhinos.

But fretting in public like this makes me feel faintly absurd, like Proust’s Madame de Guermantes:

“I supposed that, since she was always dabbling in politics, she intended to show that she was afraid of war, as one day when she had appeared at the dinner table so pensive, barely replying in monosyllables, upon somebody's inquiring timidly what was the cause of her anxiety, she had answered with a grave air: ‘I am anxious about China.’” (The Fugitive)

So instead I will focus on cuckooness for now. First, a cuckoo that speaks with the voice of Ted Hughes (with perhaps a touch of Al Pacino doing Shakespeare):

Hooha! Hooha!

Dizzying Milkymaids with innuendo...

 

O Orphan of orphans! O moon-witted

Ill-bred dud-hawk!

Cavorting on pylons, you and your witch moll!

(From A Primer of Birds, 1981)

And one of Scottish poet Richard Price’s many wonderful birds, this one flying in a prose poem pattern: 

Cuckoo

It’s an uplifting call and when you hear it spring is coming, sure enough, resurrection, promise kept. But I’m not comfortable. That’s no life for her and it’s no life for anyone else mixed up in the whole business. The parents think the chick is just like them, and it’s a hero when it gets bigger. Then it’s all me me me, eating its brothers out of home and house, breaking its foster-mother’s heart as sure as. I can’t speak to her about it, and she won’t get help. She says: every one of my children is like a little Jesus, and that makes me…God.

(From Lucky Day, Carcanet 2005)

For the rest of the week I’ll be flitting in and out of the nest and will bring back some juicy scraps from the London poetry scene, among other things. But now it’s time to roost.

Affective Poetics and Narrative Need, Part I [by Leslie Heywood]

The recent “neuro-revolution” in poetics has tended to replicate the privilege granted to cognition over affect in other areas of neuroscience.  What is most important, from this perspective, is the prefrontal cortex and its attendant brain systems:  those most linked to tertiary processes, the “higher” forms of reasoning that are unique to the human brain, the kind of meta-critical capacity that distinguishes us from our dogs and dolphins, elephants and apes.

Research in neuroscience has been guilty of the same biases until recently.  The term cognitive neuroscience was often taken to describe all brain processes, as if all brain processes were cognitive, primarily because of the assumption that emotion is regulated by cognition and that cognitive processes occur first, structuring the emotion in fundamental ways.  “Cognitive gating mechanisms” were seen to inhibit emotion and determine its expression, thus representing emotion as raw material that is only given its form through cognitive processing—emotions are viewed in cognitive terms.

 This is called a “top down” model of information processing.  However, the most recent advances in neuroscience tell a different story, one that makes a convincing argument for a “bottoms up” model, and one that has wide implications for poetics and the value we have granted to the cognitive over the affective.  Any such attempt to purge affect and narrative is doomed to failure, since it ignores the indissociable relation between affect and cognition, emotion and reason, biology and culture, the brain and the mind.  As current neuroscience has spelled out in some detail in its theories of “functional connectivity,” the one is not possible without the other.[i] 

Instead, “brain-behavior processes” are the products of interaction effects between each, neural circuits that include the control functions of the primary process emotional states themselves.  In fact, recent advances in affective neuroscience argue for “more realistic models that incorporate dynamic properties and bidirectional interactive multi-way communications.”[ii] Instead of occurring through a top-down hierarchy in which cognition occurs first and is the controlling mechanism, neural activity has recently been shown to occur bidirectionally in multiple regions. Furthermore, as the phylogentically oldest part of our brains, the affective systems are most linked to fundamental survival mechanisms that “provide a necessary foundation for higher functions to operate” (Cromwell and Panksepp 2032). 

Crucially, these are the systems shared across all mammalian brains, and point to an affective experiential universality across all mammalian species, including humans.  From a neuroevolutionary perspective, the affective remains fundamental.  It is not a matter of cognition always generating a behavioral response, for instance, such as reader response.  In fact, quite often, it is the more fundamental processes that inform behavior, those “from the gut” responses linked to the embodied, “so powerful it gives me the chills” effect in aesthetic response—a response in the autonomic nervous system triggered by adrenaline. 

With this new information, it’s time to examine the interaction effects, the feedback loops between affect and cognition in poetics.  An affective neuropoetics would, like Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, proceed from the bottom up, locating the roots of our motivations and aesthetic response in the primary affective processes. 

A wonderful example of what I am talking about is Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poem “Watching the Pelican Die,” first published in Prairie Schooner and forthcoming in The Silence in the Empty House (NYQ Books. 2013).   The embodiment of what I have posited here as a site of the interactions between the affective and the cognitive, the poem enacts what, in her own aesthetic theory, Gillan has termed the dialogue between “the cave” and “the crow,” which are the metaphorical representations of affect and cognition.[iii]  For Gillan, the privilege historically granted “the crow”—the social discourses and systems of valuation associated with scientific rationalism, tertiary process cognition, and the masculine—has served to devalue the embodied, the feminine, and the emotional that represents “the cave”—precisely those primary process affects that Panksepp has empirically situated as the very basis of and possibility for the cognitive.  The “cave” in Gillan is the equivalent to affective brain processes in Panksepp, and is similarly fundamental:

Watching the Pelican Die 

On TV, I watch the pelican with its mouth wide open,

its wings and body coated with oil.  Is it screaming?  I do not hear

the sound and since this is a photograph, I don’t know if it was caught

in that mouth-stretched howl when it died or if it’s howling

in recognition that it cannot survive the thick coat

of oil that bears it down. 

 

The ladies who take care of you when I’m gone tell me you

are having trouble.  “His hands,” they say, “his hands.”  When I

come home, I see that your hands have turned black

at the tips and I see that the ends of your fingers

have been eaten away.  I watch the dead bird in the Gulf

floating on top of the water, its legs stiff and straight in the air,

its body drained of all motion, all light.

 

The next day I take you to the doctor; he tells us he will have

to operate to remove the gangrenous flesh.

 

The announcer on CNN says BP didn’t want the photographer

to take pictures of the dying birds covered as they are

with the black slick of oil.  “They were hoping,” he says,

“that the birds would sink and the evidence

would be swallowed by the ocean.” 

 

In the late afternoon, I hear my daughter cry out. I rush to see

what has happened, and you are stretched out on the bed,

your body so thin you look like a boy. You do not move. 

I call 911 and the ambulance takes you to the hospital. 

 

BP is trying to put a cap on the spewing oil rig; the CEO

keeps saying, it’s no problem. Clumps of oil wash ashore

and float on the surface of the water.  The beach is littered

with dead fish and birds. 

 

At the hospital, they want to know whether we want

extraordinary measures.  “No,” I say.  “He has a living will.” 

We hover around while they admit you.  You have forgotten

how to speak.  Mostly you lie in bed, staring into a space

above our heads. 

 

In my mind I see that screaming bird, its mouth wide open,

a picture of torment and despair. 

 

I reach out to hold your hand, stroke your forehead. “Dennis,”

I call out, “Dennis.”  You do not hear me.  The doctor comes in

to see you.  “Well,” he says, “he should have been dead five years

ago.  What did you expect?  You shouldn’t have taken such

good care of him.” 

 

“We did everything we could,” the BP president says, looking

directly at the camera.  “It’s not such a calamity,” says

the governor of Louisiana.  “We don’t need to stop

deep water drilling.  Our economy will collapse if we do.” 

We stand around your hospital bed.  My brother comes in

and says he’ll try a stronger antibiotic.  “It’s bad,” he says,

but he waits until we are in the hall to tell me.

 

The social worker says, “You should put him in a nursing

home.”  My brother says, “You kept him home all this time. 

If he gets a little stronger, I’ll let him go home and he’ll be

around the things he knows.” 

 

The doctor comes in and says, “He’s not going to make it.”

The social worker admonishes us with her bag

of common sense.  She does not love you.  We take you home. 

I sit next to you and hold your hand. 

 

The MSNBC reporter stands on the beach in a hurricane

and picks up a huge glob of oil with a stick.  “Look,” she says,

“look,” and drips the oil on the white sand.  She is shaking

with fury at such destruction. Dead birds float behind her. 

 

“I’m in so much pain,” you say, though you have not complained

before.  Althea feeds you a jar of baby applesauce.  You open

your mouth and accept the food.  When I see the pelican

on TV with its mouth wide open in horror, I remember you

as you lay dying.  On the Gulf, the earth and the sea

are being destroyed, just as you were by the disease that finally

defeated you after you struggled against it for all those years. 

 

Some things are bigger than all of us.  We cannot defeat

them.  If there is enough carelessness and greed in the world

even the ocean can be destroyed, and you, who fought

against this illness with such courage, even you

cannot survive, the blackened tips of your fingers, the oil

heavy on the birds feathers, the birds dead and floating on

the surface that gradually sink and disappear. 

 

Astonishing in the depth of its representation of the levels of brain processing, “Watching the Pelican Die” moves from affect to emotion to memory to cognition and back down the chain, establishing the affective basis for human behavior and relations and showing how cognition, when detached from the other levels of processing, can be responsible for destroying the very things it relies upon most—the basic attachment mechanisms of relationships (Panksepp’s “CARE” system), on the one hand, and the biology of ecology, and the relationship between the basic levels of the ecosystem, on the other.  The movement in the poem between the grief the narrator experiences (the basic affective system that Panksepp terms Panic/Grief) and the ways that grief resonates throughout the larger cultural landscape of destruction and loss is a quintessential example of a narrative poetics that embodies and demonstrates the principles of affective neuroscience. In Gillan’s poem we have one of the most bidirectional representations of the relationship between affect and cognition, the cave and the crow, that I’ve seen in contemporary poetry.   As Gillan puts it, “poems hide in a place deep inside you that I call the cave . .  . In the cave are all your memories . . . Every person you’ve ever known or loved or hated everything you are afraid of in the world and in yourself.  In the cave is your rage and your fury and your passion” (Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, 13).
 In neuroscientific terms, Gillan’s “cave” is affect, the primary process affective  brain systems that underlie secondary processes like memory and cultural learning.  Affect is the bedrock poets draw upon, and it is informed by the reactions in the ANS & CNS that neuroscientist Stephen Porges, in his "Polyvagal Theory," calls “neuroception.”

Tomorrow I will discuss the seven basic affective systems in further detail, especially as they are instantiated in the work of the poet Joe Weil. Later posts will explore Polyvagal Theory, its concept of “neuroception” and the vagal ventral complex that links the heart, face, and brain.  Using this work from affective neuroscience, I will discuss the movement from neurophysiology to affect to aesthetics by way of Panksepp’s seven affective systems in conjunction with the Polyvagal Theory and its implications for memory and how creative writers use it via the work of poets Gary Soto, Bruce Snider, Jack Bedell, Vivian Shipley, and James Reese.  The work of all these poets and the affective neuroscience that helps explain their aesthetic projects will be linked to the need for narrative poetics, and narrative as one of our most interactive, bidirectional brain processes.

Games Poets Play [by Heather Christle]

This evening I was reading this post on The Hairpin, all about "low-effort toddler games" like "Do You Like My Hat?" and "Hide Things in Your Clothes," and it reminded me of a passage from the children's book Pinky Pye, wherein a cat types up a list of suggested games:

 

The very clever cat then goes on to explain more complicated games, which you might enjoy reading (beginning on page 118).

And this led me to thinking of all the games I've played with poet friends, which now I will tell you how to play, in case you find yourself with guests or selves to entertain this weekend.

1. Game of First Lines

This is just like Balderdash, only instead of inventing definitions for obscure words, you invent first lines for titles. Pull a literary journal off the shelf, open to the first poem, read the title aloud, and then have your friends write down a convincing option for a first line, while you write down the actual one. Gather them all together, read them out loud, and have everyone guess which is real. Points to anyone who guesses right, or whose line manages to fool someone. Or don't keep track of points. Then pass the journal to the next person, so you get a chance to invent.

2. Game of Following the Rules of Vasko Popa's Game Poems

I just made this up, but I think it would end in tears. Here is how you play "Seducer"

One caresses the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And motions him coyly with her leg

Another kisses the keyhole
Keeps kissing it and how 
Until the keyhole returns the kiss

A third one stands to the side
Watches the other two
And shakes and shakes his head

Until his head drops off

3. Game of Not Listening

When you are stuck in an audience listening to someone who is dull or going on for too long, write down words and phrases she says, in order, but very selectively, so that by the time she finishes you have a much better speech she could have made had she only known how to edit herself. Extra points if you arrange her own words into an entirely different subject.

4. Game of Constant Similes

Pretend that every time someone says "like" as filler (of the "um" variety) he is embarking on making a simile it is your job to understand.

5. Game of Stacking Books

This game I borrowed from Matthea Harvey, who borrowed it from the artist Nina Katchadourian. Go to a place full of books. Find titles you'd like to arrange into a poem. Stack them in an order that pleases you. Depending on whether or not you think the place is trying to keep the books in a different order, you might consider leaving them there for someone to discover. Or take a picture.

6. Game of "Life of Game"

Listen to Loren Goodman.

7. Game of Thinking of Something

Think of something. Tell your friends you are thinking of something. See if they can guess what it is. If you are not with friends, try just thinking of something.

Those are all of the games I know. I'm lying. Those are half of them, but I am trying to raise my level of mysteriousness, which is part of a game I'm not telling you about.

--Heather Christle

 

I Be Monsters [by Tomás Q. Morin]

When I was an undergraduate with limitless energy and cranking out poems left and right for my workshop classes, all I wrote about was my family. There were poems about everything from my grandfather’s hands to the years he spent working in a field. Even the paisley print of one of my grandmother’s shirts made it into a poem. As did my brother, mother and father, even a certain rude classmate whose name or face I can no longer remember made an appearance as a giant rat.

Some of these poems, in spite of how poorly made they were, brought my mother to tears when she read them because there we were, our family, our struggles, on a piece of paper. It was a record, albeit a weak one, that we had lived and suffered and were still here.

Take all the records the government could use to prove someone’s existence (deeds, bills, social security card, pay stubs, etc.) and they would say little more than my family had lived on a certain street and used X number of watts of electricity to power our washer and microwave and the TV that once the day’s robberies and Reagan’s pearls of ignorance had been reported by news anchors and Johnny Carson had bid us goodnight, began broadcasting pure static snow all through the night until the morning brought the national anthem and our beautiful, waving flag. None of this ever made it into my poems back then because I was, in my ignorance, mining what I knew and being a third-rate Confessional.

Later, when I was a graduate student and I had run out of things to write about in my life, I tried slipping into the lives of others and liked it, so much so in fact, I never tried to put myself in a poem again, aside from the minor personal detail I might secretly slip in like my tendency to mumble or my awful memory, details no one would ever know unless I pointed them out. What’s more, I tried to hide these details in scenes that might be filled with Johnny Carson and images of patriotism sitting snugly beside a microwave dinner.

I was, to put it simply, trying to obliterate myself in my poetry so that I could make up stories about people and places and things that were far more interesting than I was, stories that might help a reader meet someone new or travel somewhere different. In Lord Jim, Conrad writes, “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” Conrad had it easy, as do most writers of fiction, in that if a reader could be made “to see” something, she would most likely not think the character who spoke about writing and seeing was Conrad himself, just as no one I know has ever mistaken Huckleberry Finn for Twain or Gatsby for Fitzgerald.

And yet, it is our burden as poets is it not, to be confused for our speakers, even if they be of a different age or gender or species, all of which was the subject of conversation while my family and I passed turkey and dressing and peach wine during Thanksgiving. Try as I might, I could not convince them that the book I had written and whose poems they had carefully read—a thousand blessings on their heads for that—was not written by a 200 year old half man/half bear who had moonlighted as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a Soviet scientist, a preacher, and countless other things.

Having to choose between thinking that I could spin a really good yarn or that I was a centuries-old hybrid creature living among them, they happily picked the latter, a choice which delights me to no end because it is just one more of a thousand masks I am happy to accept and wear and for which I will always gladly give thanks. 

Fear and beauty in July [by Emma Trelles]

South Florida is the coolest part of the country right now, which is kind of spooky but not so much that I won't take that news as a bizarro blessing. Outside the rain is delicate and softens the world to gray and insistent green. I'd like to make a bouquet of grass or wrap its thick pelt around my shoulders. I'd like to hide in it for a while. My desk is beside floor to ceiling windows and I perch here like an invisible finch, never tiring of the view of trees and tennis courts, inlet and boats, the parking lot, the delivery trucks, recycling and garbage bins slicked clean. The windows sound great, right? But not so much when there's a hurricane. I've watched them bow, glass like lungs taking in and expelling air. If you have lived in Florida all your life, you usually don't evacuate for any storm rated category 3 or under. You are filled with equal parts savvy and foolishness.  I watched Katrina through these windows, days before anyone knew the fear and suffering that would accompany her.  We haven't had any hurricanes this season, not yet, so I can delay thinking about the 42 year old panes busting open, or buying water, sardines, and batteries, or losing hours to the local TV meteorologists. They call themselves storm trackers but I think they are sinister geometry buffs because they love nothing more than conjuring cones and grids and oddly pulled shapes that resemble lethal amoebas or a noxious taffy.

Instead of all that, I get to sit here and ignore deadlines, maybe take my umbrella to the park across the street. There's a hawk that lives there. We named him Joseph, after a bygone mayor of the little city where we live. This summer, Joseph has been observed grooming his wings, lunching on the small and feathered (his beak makes fine cutlery), and terrorizing the mockingbirds who also live in the park but are not so afraid of him that they won't dive-bomb his head in protest. Sometimes I walk through the park listening to the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, my summer anthem album, a gospel record, really, if you think about it. I sing "You Can Get It If You Really Want" and "Many Rivers to Cross."  I  hum "Sitting in Limbo."  Sometimes I stand beneath the canopy of a royal poinciana, which, when in bloom, hazes the space beneath it to a watery and pale red. This summer, I've been working and looking for work, doing and waiting, thinking maybe I should worry more, or less. There's no silencing the reel. I've been keeping modest lists: Go to bank. Call doctor. Hawk, storm, faith, here.

We Require Our Animals by Ada Limón

“You ask of my Companions. Hills – sir – and the Sundown, and a Dog large as myself." Emily Dickinson

 

You can’t spell poet without the word pet. This is the terrible first line I’ve been trying to avoid all morning, apparently to no avail.  Somehow, amidst all the big ideas that I keep hoping to talk about here in my wee week at the BAP blog, the very small idea of pets keeps biting my ankles and begging to be taken out.  (Perhaps this is because my dog is doing that very same thing at the moment.)

Let me begin by saying that up until last month, I never knew Emily Dickinson had a dog and for some reason that seemingly innocuous bit of information changed me. We have this idea of her, Ms. Dickinson, sitting alone in a small room rearranging words and stowing them away in the pocket of her stark white dress, while the much less common image is of a woman walking far out into the wild meadows of Amherst with her large dog, Carlo, bounding happily next to her. What changed me when I learned this? My first thought was, “Oh, she wasn’t alone at all!” It gave me a palpable thrill.

As writers, we often spend many seemingly selfish hours in one place living inside the mind trying to shut out outside stimulation. This can sometimes wreak havoc on our social lives, our relationships, even, at times, our humanity. However, as a much-needed antidote to that required solitude, many of us have turned to one of the universe’s most generous offerings…animals. They work, and this is no small feat, to return us to the real world again and again, showing us our own animal-selves, softening our cruel self-judgments, bringing us outside of our own egos, and unraveling the day into something more tangible and take-able.

I think of my dear friend Jennifer L. Knox, whose lovely first bird, Ichi the Killer, flew the coup of the living this weekend, and how instrumental he was to her life as a writer, how much joy such a small-winged thing offered her in the hours she worked hard to finish her new novel. It’s difficult to show just how much gratitude we have to the animals in our lives, our muses, and necessary distractions. I tell you, my dog makes me get up and go outside and walk among the living, even when I desperately don’t want to. As Emily Dickinson’s dog must have. “Interact with the living!” they say. "Play with me! Play with life!"  And we, being their servants, do as we are told, and so we suffer less, and live a little more.

Check out this site here with all these lovely writers and their furry foils. As Billy Collin's tells his students (I'm paraphrasing), "Put a dog in your poems, it'll be a bright break from your own self absorbtion."

And so, in honor of Ichi the Killer, ("'Hope' is the thing with feathers - that perches in the soul") and to all our pets past and present, this post is only to show a small kernel of gratitude for how our animals, who may not always make us better writers, at least try to make us better animals alive in the world. 

The Dogs are Howling, Allen (by Laura Orem)

An Italian greyhound being "stacked" prior to a going-over by the judge.

The 136rd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is going on right now at Madison Square Garden. Purebred dogs of all shapes and sizes compete to be judged "Best in Show" and have their names engraved on the big trophy. It may seem confusing - how do you compare a chihuahua and a Great Dane? - but the dogs aren't really judged against each other. They are measured by their breed standard, compiled by the breed's parent club, which describes the ideal specimen of that dog.   The closer a particular dog gets to perfection, the higher the chance of being chosen "Best in Show."  But there are also those indefinable characteristics of personality and sparkle, that make the judging so exciting. It isn't always about the numbers.

2011 Best in Show Winner: Scottish Deerhound Grand Champion Foxcliffe Hickory Wind. (Hickory to you and me.)

The annual WKC show also introduces new breeds to the American audience. Of course, most of these breeds aren't "new" at all; in fact, many have been around for thousands of years, but they may be unfamiliar here. To be a recognized breed in the US, the parent breed club must make an application to the American Kennel Club, proving a sustainable US population with responsible breeding practices. There are six new breeds this year: the American English Coonhound, the Cesky Terrier, the Entelbucher Mountain Dog, the Finnish Lapphund, the Norwegian Lundehund, and - take a deep breath before attempting to pronounce this one - the Xoloitzcuintli (left). The "Show-Lo," as its called for short, can be traced back to the ancient Aztecs and is the national dog of Mexico. You may know it as the "Mexican hairless." 

All dogs begin in their breed competition. The winners of each breed go on to their group competition. Groups are made up of breeds with similar purposes or jobs. The AKC recognizes seven: the Terriers (self-explanatory), the Herding Group (German shepherds, border collies, corgis, etc.), the Working Group (mastiffs, Rottweilers, etc.), the Hounds (everything from dachshunds to Irish wolfhounds); the Sporting Group (setters, spaniels, and retrievers); the Toy Group (little guys bred solely for companionship); and the Non-Sporting Group (everyone else who doesn't fit into any of the other groups). The winners of each group go on to the Best in Show competition; the winner here is literally the top dog.

Toy poodles being judged in their breed competition.

One of the fun parts of watching the WKC show is hearing the dogs' registry names. Like the names of racehorses, these names reflect the ancestry of a particular dog. At Westminster, they are proceeded by the word "Champion;" to be a Champion, a dog must have earned at least 15 points (depending on placement) at AKC sanctioned dog shows. Only dogs with this distinction can be entered at the WKC show.  But all of these dogs are also family pets. It's kind of impossible to holler, "Come back here, Champion Oreo Cookie of Royal Nabisco," so of course, all the dogs have "call names." Sometimes they are diminuitives of their registry names (like Cookie or Biscuit for above); sometimes not (like Sport or Butch). For example, growing up I had a registered German shepherd. His registry name was "Conrad Von Dornberg." We called him Atlas.

The registry names can be pretty pretentious. With this in mind, Slate has posted a little quiz. Can you identify which of these is the real name of a WKC group winner and which is a real line from Allen Ginsberg's Howl? I got 15 out of 15 (I teach Howl regularly, so I had an advantage). No cheating - and let me know how you did. Make your puppy proud.

Ginsberg or Canine?

Tune into the USA channel tonight at 8pm to watch the last three group competitions and root for Best in Show.

I Apologize for My Dreams by Jerry Williams

Some twenty years ago, I was living alone in an East Hollywood apartment (directly across the street from the world headquarters of the Church of Scientology). One night as I tried to sleep, somebody’s dog commenced barking and never stopped. Subsequent nights I lay awake, trembling with anger, as the beast beat its giant wings inside a steel echo chamber. I experimented with earplugs, but they couldn’t shut out the constant, insidious yapping that pierced through the din of sirens and police helicopters and babies crying. Was this annoying debacle the owner’s fault? The Humane Society’s? Was it the smog? I worried that repetitive noise and sleeplessness might drive me crazy. I didn’t want to end up like a half-assed Son of Sam.

For weeks, I canvassed the neighborhood. I scanned backyards and peered under cars, staked out dumpsters and vacant lots. I grabbed people on the street and asked if they had any idea whose dog wouldn’t shut the hell up. “What dog?” was all they said. If I did find the owner, I planned to tell him I’d overheard a Scientologist announce that she wanted to call the police and, though the racket didn’t bother me, I felt obliged to warn him to muzzle the pooch. Brave, I know. But I never located the dog or the owner. Meanwhile, the barking got so loud it seemed to be coming from above.

Exhausted from lack of rest, I slogged through my days. At night I collapsed onto the Murphy bed and willed myself to sleep, but eventually the barking invaded my dreams. Had I kept a dream journal during my early-twenties, the following entry might have appeared: I drive to a sporting goods store and buy a thirty-four-ounce Louisville Slugger—the Pete Rose model. Bring the bat home and take practice swings in the kitchen as I wait for darkness to fall. Put on dark clothes and sneak out the back door of the apartment building. I follow the sound of howling through the neighborhood, struck by how sharp my senses are. I can actually smell fur. I see a house with a fenced-in yard. Approach the front of the house. No lights on. I make my way towards the back yard. Sure the animal is there. Suddenly the dog starts to whine and yelp, and when I turn the corner I am confronted by a man whacking the canine repeatedly with a baseball bat. He’s wearing dark clothes and curses at the dog as he beats it. The dog is defenseless, tied to a post. I know the man will not stop until the animal is dead. There’s a doghouse in the foreground. I lower my bat and walk away.

Months passed. That crazy barking curse contributed to my decision to get out of Los Angeles and move back east. I would love to say that I finally spotted a black and gray German Shepherd poised on the roof of the Church of Scientology, untouchable, clamoring mercilessly from his rampart. But life is rarely so artful, so ludicrous. All I have is this mysterious aural virus in my memory.

Do you know about Anthony McCann? [by Jeremy Schmall]

I had the supreme pleasure of reading with McCann a couple of weeks ago at KGB, though I'd first heard him read in 2006 at the New School, along with Noelle Kocot and Joshua Beckman. I remember feeling astonished, and utterly so, by all three of them. The night felt *important*—and not just to me—but to POETRY, whatever that is.

McCann has a new book just out from Wave Books, called "I Heart Your Fate," and it's really, truly incredible. Reading it is like wading into the Adriatic Sea on an overcast July morning and feeling something slimy grip around your calf—so you look down and feel relieved that (of course, haha) it's just seaweed—then you realize it's actually *not* just seaweed, but rather the pulsing tentacle of some creature so slobbery and horrifying not even your own mother would believe your description of it. That is, if you lived to tell them, which you won't. Sucked under, friend, into the unforgiving brine.

Then someone, a gorgeous and close acquaintance, calls to you from the sand (near the beach blanket and umbrella) that THE HOT DOGS ARE READY, or that YOU SHOULD REALLY PUT SUNSCREEN ON. And you realize it *was* just seaweed, but your heart is pounding and legs are shaking and maybe just to be safe, you think to yourself, it's a good idea to stay out of the water awhile. Then when you get back to the beach towel it's the most brilliant beach towel you've ever seen and your gorgeous acquaintance is so gorgeous it's hard to believe you're both the same animal and you eat four hot dogs in a row without bothering to squirt them with ketchup and you stare up at the shimmering cloud cover and make secret promises to God.

 Anyway, that's what reading McCann's book is kind of like. Maybe it's not for everybody, but I'd bet you'd like it

Here's a clip of him reading from it (warning, one of the poems prominently features a VAGINA):

 

There's More Than Art at Tibor de Nagy (by Laura Orem)

Yesterday, Stacey, Leslie McGrath, and I visited the Tibor de Nagy Gallery to see the last day of the "Painters and Poets" exhibit. As we were standing there chatting, we were joined by this fellow: Lucas, the resident gallery pup.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course, Lucas isn't the only reason to visit Tibor, but he's definitely one of the main attractions. How many other Shih Tzus do you know who are experts in Abstract Expressionism?