Dearest Bleaders,
How are you? I hope you basking in this august August. The 8th month thinks October is still pissed about the name and the heat is due to its continuing shame. I think of you and hope you are outside, and also inside in a shadow reading.
A city in summer
is a funny place
here, with egg on its face, there
on the edge of the poets' bridge
there are kids on the art
and it is quiet on the high line
which is new.
i've been thinking about poetry books that are largely cerebral engagements but in the meanwhile power two or three punch poems right to your plexis. an american 21st cent poetry book is some weird genre, which works for me, but if there be no rules, yet there is what pleases.
in a book, i want the tasty treats and the bird songs as well as the power ballads, and I am trying to get a bead on what i like regarding proportions. if someone comes in and gets our adrenalin up for them in 4 out of 80 pages, i do like the book better than if we never get up at all, but there are conversation topics that up once brought [sick]* demand considerate attention and part of me says more please, thanks for saving the baby but didn't she have a hat?
*I meant to write sic, as in yes i intentionally cradle my preposition to this Churchillian degree, but then i thought it would be funny to add the k. Henceforth Bleaders please note that [sick] means [sic] but adds an indication that i am being nuts, if you will, on a porpoise [sick].
Because bleaders, I want the hat too. what I mean by the hat in this very rarified use is a nest of poems perhaps more cerebral than the fists, yet still concerned with the emotional peril to which we have been made privy. why? For a feeling of balance, of integration, a sense of having left the meal full. Then again, not all meals are for filling up.
Also, perhaps there are poets who don't write books so much as they publish chapters in what will someday be their collected volumes, which means the emotional joanof (arck) is sometimes going to be 40 days and nights of rain, and sometimes a triumphant monument, and sometimes a spectrum aloft on a sodden sky. (you know what is like is ark and arc and arch? orchard and orchid. it sortof hurts. also i have been writing about Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and the names blur to Stanthony in a way that causes me some irk.) Think that is right? I dunno and request counsel.
Okay, have fun this week! as i say in The Happiness Myth, "It is not enough to come out of the closet, you also have to leave the house." I am talking to you, poet. I assume you bleaders are freaks like me and need encouragement to put down the book and walk into the light, so do it. do it. don't listen to you, listen to me. Go get yer vitamin d for the year.
Most heretically yours,
Jennifer
ps Aren't these white eggplants great?!
Jennifer - great eggplants! Beautiful. I like your sense of what you're looking for in a book of poems. Yes, the hat is important and I don't need too many, sometimes one is enough, if I find myself thinking about it years after having read the book (eg.Katha's Turning Thirty, posted the other day, which I first heard her read, oh, a long time ago, though there was more than one hat in Antarctic Traveller and in Mind-Body). I'm reading Lydia Davis now and there are hats everywhere (also fists). How 'bout you? You're good with hats and fits but where have you found them?
Posted by: Stacey | August 06, 2009 at 08:36 AM
That "fits" is a typo but it somehow makes sense, yes?
Posted by: Stacey | August 06, 2009 at 08:37 AM