The Best American Poetry

Tangled Web

Listeners to NPR and readers of the Boston Phoenix have long enjoyed and profited from Lloyd Schwartz’s music criticism, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. I personally am in his debt for recommendations he has made over the years. (On Lloyd's recommendation I bought, for example, a CD called Broadway Showstoppers, in which under John McGlinn’s direction opera singers give their full-bodied renditions of "Tea for Two," "Swanee," "Who," "Dancing in the Dark," "Come to the Moon," "All The Things You Are," and other terrific songs.) Schwartz is also a distinguished poet, author of several acclaimed books of poetry, editor of a significant volume about Elizabeth Bishop. His work has appeared in many outstanding magazines and been anthologized in The Best American Poetry.

Because of things he has written as a guest blogger here, Lloyd has now been attacked on the "Exhibitionist," the Boston Globe blog. The focus of the attack is that Schwartz’s poems have been set to music by six young composers who are composition fellows at the Tanglewood Music Center this summer. Schwartz’s sin is that he has accepted an invitation to visit the center to hear the pieces performed and to work with the young composers. This, says his accuser, may compromise Schwartz’s objectivity as a critic of any Boston Symphony Orchestra event now or in the future.

The charge is preposterous. The custom of putting up a distinguished visitor, and paying that person a modest honorarium to give a talk or to work with students, is routine and unobjectionable. Character assassination is an unfortunate element of the blogosphere, and any attempt to impugn the integrity of Lloyd Schwartz is despicable. Is it possible that the Globe blogger has it in for a writer for a rival newspaper, the smaller, fiercely independent Phoenix?

-- DL

"I Like Americans" (by Ernest Hemingway)

Ernest Hemingway (Milan, 1918)

I Like Americans

I like Americans.
They are so unlike Canadians.
They do not take their policemen seriously.
They come to Montreal to drink.
Not to criticize.
They claim they won the war.
But they know at heart that they didn't.
They have such respect for Englishmen.
They like to live abroad.
They do not brag about how they take baths.
But they take them.
Their teeth are so good.
And they wear B.V.D.'s all the year round.
I wish they didn't brag about it.
They have the second best navy in the world.
But they never mention it.
They would like to have Henry Ford for president.
But they will not elect him.
They saw through Bill Bryan.
They have gotten tired of Billy Sunday.
Their men have such funny hair cuts.
They are hard to suck in on Europe.
They have been there once.
They produced Barney Google, Mutt and Jeff.
And Jiggs.
They do not hang lady murderers.
They put them in vaudeville.
They read the Saturday Evening Post
And believe in Santa Claus.
When they make money
They make a lot of money.
They are fine people.

-- Ernest Hemingway

originally signed "By a Foreigner" when published in the Toronto Star Weekly in 1923.

Movie Moment - 84 Charing Cross Road (1987)

-- sdh

Bring on the schmaltz! (by Mitch Sisskind)

I remember how Kenneth Koch used to say that if poetry isn't as much fun or as exciting as something else, why bother with it? Why not spend your time on what really moves you? It's not that simple of course, but i'm always interested by the fact that literally millions of people watch videos of kittens on youtube and are hugely affected by them. there's one kitten clip that's had 11 million views. if only it were possible to do something with poetry that could get a tiny fraction of that energy. I can watch 28 minutes of John Ashbery. But I'm peculiar.

And let me hasten to add that I too like kitten videos -- and indeed I like good schmaltz of all kinds. One of my interests is videos of attractive women singing Leonard Cohen's song, 'Halleluljah.' The best example of this was by a Dutch girl who suddenly disappeared for some reason. But there are still plenty of others left:

The all time best version is by K.D. Laing. Really incredible. This German girl isn't too great but she's trying.

Lastly, it isn't really a kitten video but in different versions this one has been seen by about 10 million people. They write in and say how they were moved to tears by it. They're tremendously excited and stimulated. When Ashbery memorably wrote, "Mild effects are the result" he wasn't referring to kittens!
(Caution: unless you really like schmaltz, I recommend playing this without the sound.)

Thanks for the Good Times [by Reb Livingston]

My week of guest blogging comes to a close. I had a lot of fun interviewing poets and sharing poet dreams. During this week I dreamed of four poets already included in my Dream Poet Anthology and added one more to the list: John Ashbery.

In this dream Ashbery was lying in bed discussing how difficulty/complexity were superior to the plainspoken. I argued there's a place for both, but he must have convinced me otherwise because I conceded with a diss to a too-long Broadway show. Then my son started wrestling with Ashbery. Ashbery tried to teach him how to play "Uncle" but my son was a bit too aggressive because Hulk Hogan had already taught him how to play. I commented that Hulk Hogan wasn't so smart and Ashbery agreed.

Today at 5 p.m. EST I will be interviewed on the Joe Milford Poetry Show. If you aren't able to listen to the live airing, that's OK, it'll be archived and you can listen at your leisure. You really should listen. I have an adorable Pittsburgh accent.

And if you feel like you just can't live without me, don't fret, I keep a personal poetry blog here.

Abe says man you must be puttin me on

Abe says man you must be puttin me on

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"

Abe says, "Man you must be puttin' me on"

Compare to "Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest" (Genesis, 22:2).

In Dylan’s lines the key word is the vernacular "Man" cutting god down to size. The god in Dylan's song is a diminished thing reigning over a diminished universe. Any son will do for the desired sacrifice. Note the sacred individuality of the biblical Isaac: "thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest."

You can do what you want Abe, but

The next time you see me comin' you better run

Compare to the biblical Abraham: "God will provide" (Genesis 22:8). God, all action no talk, makes no threats. Abe has faith equal to doubt. The rest is silence.

But now we're on highway 61, the dawn of a noisy new age, 1961, with a handsome new president and a short-lived new frontier, it's over and we're visiting, revisiting if not revising it, and JFK has given way to LBJ how many kids did you kill today -- it's time for VIETNAM -- and Abe, successor to honest Abe, who freed the slaves -- Abe clears his throat:

Abe say "Where do you want this killing done?" '

God say "Out on Highway 61."

And God directs traffic.

And grammar go out window.

And young Isaac is not content with observing the fire and wood and noting the absence of the lamb for the offering.

Young Isaac doesn't want to work for Maggie's brother no more.

He is tired of working for the white man boss and when he thinks of the stream he wants to cross to cool his feet in the heat of a summer day he thinks of death, gambling, and the Mississippi River.

He is tired of bullshit friends who have a lot of nerve and just want to be on the side that's winning.

He has done his share of quarreling in the captain's tower. He has read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. And he knows what is happening (the vandals took the handles) though he doesn't know something is. A strange man, Mr. Jones, Isaac Jones that is.

-- DL

Slumming in Stockholm [by Ming Holden]

The Mongolian-based Luce Scholar Ming Holden attended the first-ever “Writers and Literary Translators International Congress” in Stockholnm and took notes in the form of quotations from the speakers. She transcribed them with the intent of using them in an essay, but the more she looked at the quotations the more she felt that the lines speak for themselves. Here’s a baker’s dozen. Among the speakers were Jamaica Kincaid, Mats Sodurland, Nawal El Saadawi, Ana Menendez, Sasa Stanislic, and Philip Pullman.

<< It's not right to die before you've told the end of a story. >>

<< The salvation of human beings is found in dialogue. >>

<< That early morning hour -- known as [the] hour of the moon – [is] when most people die. >>

<< We cannot read translations of music, which is why I'm so frustrated when I read translations of my book. It's not MY book. >>

<< The problem with identity [is that] any group of people that wants to exploit us has to define us. >>

<< Pure identity means racism.  We are all mixed. >>

<< They call me a postcolonial African writer -- as if colonialism is finished! >>

<< If you don’t love yourself you cannot write.  Creativity is related to loving yourself. Getting rid of taboos. Getting rid of shame. >>

<< Condoleezza Rice comes to our region every day. And she is a woman, biologically. >>

<< There is censorship from the government.  But also there is censorship inside you.  Your fear. >>

<< Every day I get up and think about (my family in Antigua), and at the end of the day I say to myself, 'And I never want to see them again.' >>

<< I want to understand more than I want to explain. >>

<< In cinema, for the first time you could see time passing without the intervention of language. >>

<< You don’t become an artist of any profession if you don’t know how to work when not inspired.  People ask me, where do your ideas come from?  And I say I don’t know but I know where they come to: my desk. And if I'm not there they go away again. >>

-- Ming Holden

We're going to hear from Ming again in a couple of weeks, when she and other ex-pats will blog about their experiences in Mongolia, the land of Chingiss, steppes, gers, and much poetry.

The Kalashnikover Rebbe: "Why do the righteous suffer?"

This is the first video I made and the lighting is terrible. I look like Prune Face! However, I am going to suppress my vanity and post this clip because it does impart an authentic Talmudic lesson. It's a lesson, however, that includes Swiftian layers of irony and ambiguity. The suffering of innocent beings is the most important question that any spiritual system needs to address. Here's what the Talmud says.

The Collinses of Summer versus the Spirits of December

<<

Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in his favorite chair.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

>>

"America's Busiest Poet" (by Sarah Fay)

For Time Magazine's blog, Sarah Fay interviewed laureates former, recent, and new to get a handle on what Kay Ryan's life will be like as US Poet Laureate.

America's Busiest Poet

by Sarah Fay

(Wednesday, July 23, 2008)

Kay Ryan is named Poet Laureate of the United States.

photo credit: Jennifer Loring / Library of Congress / AP

When the Library of Congress announced Kay Ryan as its pick for 16th Poet Laureate Consultant last week, the poetry community went all atwitter. Mention the title "poet laureate" outside the poetry community and you'll find it has an appeal that's, well, poetic. But even cognoscenti who can rattle off the rhyme scheme of a sonnet in their sleep might be hard pressed to answer the question: what exactly does the poet laureate do?

Click here to continue reading Sarah Fay's piece on Kay Ryan's appointment.

The Dylan Watch (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

David Lehman asked me to “talk about the opening of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ in relation to the chapter in Genesis that is its source. This re-telling of Abraham's ‘binding’ of Isaac reminds me a little of Wilfred Owen's poem in which the massacred soldiers of World War One are the victims of a bloodthirsty god and an obedient Abraham on Mount Moriah.”

            

The Owen poem is “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” The poem draws a parallel between the well-known Biblical story (Genesis 22:1-19) in which Abraham feels called to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, but an angel stops the sacrifice.

The ending of the poem departs from the Biblical text.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Owen’s bitterness stems from his view that the older generation of European leaders sacrificed the youth of Europe rather than any national pride.

In “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan finds a contemporary version of Mount Mariah in American life. Highway 61 is a place where people who kill their own children, losers, con men, incestuous parents, and warmongers go for safety. It is a place where American values have been sacrificed in the name of lust and power and greed.

The real Highway 61 runs from New Orleans to Minnesota. Before 1991, it went through Duluth, where Dylan was born. Additionally, in Dylan’s song, God tells Abraham, “Kill me a son.” Dylan’s real father was named Abraham, so the story is not abstract to him.

There is an irony to both the Owen and Dylan references. The Biblical text was written to protest the common practice of sacrificing the firstborn son by showing that such a practice was counter to God’s moral code. Unfortunately, the historical context has been lost and its moral progress has come to be seen as a near act of barbarity. Still, despite the inaccurate comparisons by both Owen and Dylan, their larger points remain poignant. How often have governments refused to admit mistakes but resorted to violence in which the young die? And how far does one have to look to see decency sacrified on the altar of desire?

-- Lawrence J. Epstein

"In Defense of Babel" (by Lee Upton)

In Defense of Babel

                              --for Alastair Noble

When the sniper’s eye from paradise

fastened on the tower,

sand exploded and gushed into

a whirlwind of shrieks.

In Babel’s place rose
the libraries, cell by cell,

words stacked like

bees crawling on honeycombs,

where even Edgar Allan Poe

sits down at his heart

and boards up his words.

In a flurry year to year

some little god must crawl,

dismantling installations.

And yet the body makes a language

even of its spasms.

In every climate

words rise to the top of

the coiled stairs in the skull,

paradise’s gate.

Knock there. 

Speak and be misunderstood.

-- Lee Upton

Jill Alexander Essbaum Interviews Reb Livingston [by Reb Livingston]

Jill once dreamed that we shared a hotel room which is something we also did in real life. I remember waking up in that hotel room (in real life) and telling her about a dream involving her, Bruce Covey and stuffed monkeys. Jill may have had other dreams involving me, but hasn’t told me about them. Probably because they involve a penis.

Reb Livingston is author of Your Ten Favorite Words, Pterodactyls Soar Again and co-author (with Ravi Shankar) of Wanton Textiles. With Molly Arden she co-edits the Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel anthology series. She’s the editor of No Tell Motel and publisher of No Tell Books. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and incredibly good-looking son.

Jill: Congrats! You've just been made chairwoman of the NEA. Appropriate funds!

Reb: Before there’s any fund appropriating I will request a constitutional amendment to change the title of the office to Poetry Czarina. Once that important task is accomplished I will inform the administration that the entire NEA budget will be used to cover my travel and to commission the focus group of all focus groups to figure out why nobody fucking cares about poetry. Of course it will be a sham focus group and the reports will be written by myself from my hotel room paid by your tax dollars after a night of heavy drinking at one of those exclusive VIP AWP parties. Unbeknownst to most in the government (a Top Peanut Butter & Jelly Poet clearance will be required) the funds will be diverted into the construction of a massive underground city called RebbiePoHoville. Any poet who signs his/her allegiance and commissions a (flattering) mural of my image (no smaller than 50x75’) will be permitted to live in this city. When the massive asteroid of 2042 hits the Earth, only the freedom and Czarina-loving U.S. poets will survive. After 1000 years when the atmosphere once again becomes sustainable for human life, the descendants of these poets will emerge to the surface and repopulate.

Al Nussbaum (by mitch sisskind)

Readers of this site know that 'tough guy' writers are my pet peeve. Yes, some writers really were tough: Mickey Spillane, Nelson Algren, Eddie Bunker, Samuel  'Cut Deeper' Johnson, and Thomas Carlyle, to name a few. Cervantes had to be really tough in order to survive his years as a galley slave. Emily Dickinson was also very tough. In fact, she regularly took the train into Boston to participate in bare knuckle boxing matches staged by recent immigrants from Ireland. She boxed  under the name "The Little Wren" and "The Battling Wren."

On the other hand, the punks these days that write about fight clubs and what have you -- they couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag! That's why the discovery of a new and genuinely tough writer is so exciting. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Al Nussbaum!

You can learn about Al Nussbaum at the website devoted to him and his friends: http://alnussbaum.com/  And that's not all! You know how disappointing it is to read about an old time "gun moll" -- but when you Google her image she looks like a rhinoceros? Bonnie Parker was no Faye Dunaway, that's for sure. Well, here again Al Nussbaum delivers. Feast your eyes!

"Jacqueline Ruth Rose was a former waitress from Paoli, Indiana. At age 19, Rose was wanted by the FBI for driving a getaway car in a bank robbery by One Eye Bobby Wilcoxson and Al Nussbaum." Read more about Jacqueline at the Al Nussbaum website. There's even a link to a story by Al Nussbaum himself, written after he got out of prison. It was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

The Trip Not Taken - Quick Muse

<< QuickMuse is a cutting contest, a linguistic jam session, a series of on-the-fly compositions in which some great poets riff away on a randomly picked subject. It's an experiment, QuickMuse, to see if first thoughts are indeed the best ones. >>

On July 6th, QuickMuse gave DL fifteen minutes to respond to the following:

"I regret not having taken up the offer of a Cambridge colleague, a pathologist of proven insight and tact, to try LSD under his supervision. Having experienced no such drug, I remain at a loss to imagine, to conceptualise one of the principal agents of ruin and consolation, of desire and annulment at the anarchic heart of our culture. A 'trip' not taken."   George Steiner,  Errata: An Examined Life

How did he do?  Find out here.

Interview with Ravi Shankar [by Reb Livingston]

Last year I dreamed that one-by-one Ravi's friends approached me to point out that he was rich. My response was "You mean that cheapskate?" followed by anecdotal evidence of a time he failed to pony up cash when it was desperately needed. It was one of those repeating loop dreams, new friend, exact same conversation. But maybe those dream friends were on to something because in April I dreamed that Ravi took me to India to show me a fantastic mansion made almost entirely of glass that his father engineered and built--not only do I consistently dream of poets, as you can discern from my Shafer Hall dream, sometimes I dream of poets' fathers too. Anyway, Ravi really wanted me to be impressed with this spectacle, but I was tired and just wanted to check my e-mail. When I went inside my father was there which surprised me cause he's not the kind of guy who'd take a trip to India. I was concerned what my father would eat since he's a picky eater.

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, a collaborative chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). He has appeared as a commentator on NPR, BBC and Wesleyan Radio and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark's Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.).

Reb: Your most recent books are Wanton Textiles (co-written with me) and Language for a New Century (co-edited with Tina Change and Nathalie Handal). Why do you get so much help putting together books? Wallace Stevens didn't make books with lady poets. Why can't you be more like Wallace Stevens?

Ravi: Well, for starters, Wallace Stevens couldn’t hold his liquor and at holiday parties at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, would mouth off to his officemates, then get his secretary to type up his subsequent letters of apology. I also can’t hold my liquor but I’m very rarely invited to office parties anymore and remember the sound of patent leather loafers on a broadloom with hushed reverence. Unlike Uncle Wally, when I was lurking behind the potted plants and sneaking phone calls from a branflake-colored cubicle, I was a member of a vast, intercontinental art movement never appropriately written about or even properly acknowledged: temp art (circa 1995-2002), that is poems and art made by those subversive workers hired on a temporary basis from pilfered company supplies and scanned, xeroxed and faxed out to fellow temp artists similarly making collages of Post-it Notes, scotch tape and white out, secretly sticking it to the man. Like Mon Oncle, I believed even back then that style is not something applied but something that permeates.

I offer that up as evidence that my collaborative drive is not gender-based, though clearly I must be something of a masochist to work with so many strong women. Poor Ravi, a friend once quipped, he has more wives than he knows what to do with it, but I resisted that analysis, which smelled vaguely of pickled misogyny and envy; rather, say I’m lazier than a three toed sloth on a Lunesta bender (or rather a one-legged man in a percoset-addled haze; but more on that later), that I’m stirred into motion by other minds, am a natural exquisite corpse, filmmaker on a set of words, conjoiner and confabulator both. I’ve written collaborations with Jim Daniels, Monica de la Torré, Vernon Frazer, Camille Dungy, Terri Witek, Sean Thomas Dougherty, among others.

Who’d Wallace Stevens collaborate with? Besides Ernest Hemingway’s fist? The thin men of Haddam, unfortunately, were not really his friends.

Happy Birthday, Joe Lehman

Joe, I hope you're reading this on your day! I wrote it at 104 MacDougal on the day after a visit from you -- in, I think, 1998.

– DL

Every time I hear
a new word I see
a new color, Joe
said in the cab. For
example, I said.
For example, he
said, the word
example is yellow,
brown, olive & a
little white mashed
together. And each
letter of the alphabet
has an age, a sex, &
a personality. H, for
example, is a lavender
girl, fourteen, a friend
of the number 4, who
is also a girl and also
lavender. And I? I
asked. I, he said,
is a genius, white.

-- from The Daily Mirror

And the Winners Are . . .

  Allison Klein and Michelle Paul, both of Brooklyn, who entered this fine ditty in last week's Time Out New York bagel limerick contest:

There was a young woman who boasted,
“At all the brunch parties I’ve hosted,
     no omelettes or tea
     have been served by me—
just plain, poppy and sesame: toasted!”

Of the winning entry, judge David Lehman said, "I like this one because it has the greatest variety of bagels, and I too like mine toasted.  Who would have predicted one hundred years ago that the bagel of NYC would conquer American gastronomy?  But it has done so.  It has kicked ass. Congratulations."

Upon reading the many entries, Lehman was inspired to write:

A German philosopher named Hegel
Made eye contact with a sea gull:
     He brought her bread,
     Which she ate and felt well fed.
But Hegel held out for a bagel.

Read about the Time Out New York contest here. 

Bagel limericks anyone?

-- sdh

Interview with PF Potvin [by Reb Livingston]

There's a theme with my dreams involving PF: funny underpants. I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps because PF doesn't wear underpants. In my book, Your Ten Favorite Words there's a reference to one of these dreams in the poem "No Bra Required." The most recent PF/funny underpants dream happened in March. PF came into my room and asked if I had denim underpants. My response: “Yes, with a zipper going up my ass.” That prompted a good long laugh from both of us.

Michigander PF Potvin is the author of The Attention Lesson (No Tell Books). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Born Magazine, Coconut, Sentence, Sleepingfish, No Tell Motel and elsewhere. He has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Casa Libre en la Solana. He has won many trail marathons and ultras and finished in the top 25 males last year in the international Trail Runner Magazine’s Ultra Race Series. He serves on the deck of the journal Drunken Boat and can be spied at www.pfpotvin.com.

Reb: You're an ultra marathon runner, which I interpret to be "code" for nutballs. Please briefly describe what an ultra marathon is and how it informs/deforms your poetry.

PF: Nutballs — yes, best served on a flaky crumb with soft tangy cheese, think goat or sheep massaged Japanesestyle into letting drip rather than bawling as mechanicals jerk the teats. The Greeks did not invent those rotund delicacies. They lay claim, however, to the marathon, 26.2 miles (42.2 km) of humph and huff, the historic distance run from Marathon to Athens. Ultras certainly existed prior, but few gave names as it was more a matter of throwing gestures or mutterings like “over those peaks” or “across those plains.”

Today an ultra is any race longer than a marathon, typically 50km, 50 miles, or 100 miles in the U.S. Most ultras are run on unpaved roads and trails, although I’ve sweated some races through forests and swamps where the only path is a series of orange ribbons tied above ground on reeds or branches. Unlike road marathons, ultras seem less obsessed with time and personal records and more concerned with challenge and the ever reconnection to the primordial. I mean apart from strangling or being strangled how much closer to baseline humanity can you get than running hour upon hour over glade and dale while stuffing your face with fig bars and the occasional pb & j?

All of which brings us back to reconnecting with the body. One of my former poetry imbibers, Jason Shinder, worked with Allen Ginsberg on Mind Breaths and helped me foster an awareness of everywhere rhythm. When running an ultra I don’t simple feel and experience per the normal; I enter a zone of realized livewire, of pulsethud and stride, of gulp and burp and groan and sigh wherein muscle and vein expand and contract in cadenced exhaustion and the mind flitters in and out of blank as narratives flash on an internal eye and I witness and record and translate into word what is and what I’ve seen and where I’ve been and where I’m going and upon returning I drive those fingers to spill a voice poetic and roll their sounds in mounds of crushed almonds and cashews and when the perfect forms arrive I lay them flat on their spines under the shadow of the moon and step back and wow as they blink themselves dry.

Interview with Bruce Covey [by Reb Livingston]

Bruce is a regular animus figure in my dreams. Often in these dreams we're traveling together. Sometimes we meet at Dunkin Donuts. One time he was present when I birthed a baby in my bedroom. Another time Bruce was my boyfriend and dressed very nicely. We were walking around, holding hands, like people in love often do, when suddenly Bruce was eating pizza and dressed like a slob. I told him it was over as I walked away.

Bruce Covey is Lecturer of Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, where he edits Coconut. He is the author of The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires and Ten Pins, Ten Frames, both from Front Room Publishers (New Haven), and Elapsing Speedway Organism and the forthcoming Glass Is Really a Liquid, both from No Tell Books. His recent poems appear in MiPOesias, Columbia Poetry Review, Verse, Jacket, Parcel, and many other fine journals.

Reb: Elapsing Speedway Organism. What the hell is that supposed to mean and why should anyone care?

Bruce: Hmmm, let's see. I'm not quite sure how to answer, so I've listed five possible responses below.

A. Elapsing—the passing of time. Speedway—a place in which cars race. Organism—a life form. Everyone cares about words!

B. "Elapsing" is an abstract gerund involving time. "Speedway" is a specific noun (although in this case it's an adjective) involving space. "Organism" stands for the life within that space/time, thus implying sequence & narrative. Who wouldn't care about time & space & life?

C. Elapsing: As opposed to a lap-dance, a lap-sing? Speedway: The route one's noble horse travels? Organism: Often misread as "orgasm." Need I comment on the popularity of orgasms?

D. Gnisp Ale spelled backwards. Yaw deeps spelled backwards. Missing groan spelled sideways. Any reflective reader knows the importance of looking backwards.

E. The title contains three of my favorite words. Don't you have a book called Your Ten Favorite Words? & how come there are like 30 different words on the cover? 30 is more than 10.