Halvard Johnson's The Perfection of Mozart's Third Eye

Via Ron Silliman:

Read Halvard Johnson's Sonnets. I don't know him from Adam, honestly, except through Facebook first and then the idle clickthrough to work I enjoyed. But I like his poems. That's too many links in those few words. Oh well--here's one more: Chalk Editions.

I haven't read the entire thing yet, just enough to know they're very good poems, and it's a mammoth 200-some pages, so I have a lot to look forward to. Here's an early favorite.

Elegy Just in Case

A public life is what he led. Baseball, not books, gave him
ballast. A ball launched out of the Polo Grounds in 1951
lodged in his head, which fondled its curves and seams
when there was nothing else worth thinking about.

Holy relics of memory, taken down from the shelves, change
hands quietly, among the finer calibrations of kinesthetic
fervor. Mystery or metaphysics. Could you choose just one?

Next to impossible, an over-the-shoulder catch on the centerfield
track. No longer any need to say what might have happened,
rolling down the drainpipe of history, truly lost for all time.
Taking discontinuity for granted, he angled for the sidelines,

watching it go, its generosity noticed only by those not blinded
by the late afternoon sun. Over the fence, in his neighbor’s
yard, hearing a strange sound, wondering what it was.

His homepage is here.

Comments

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Mike James

The River’s Architecture for Louis McKee, d. 11/21/11 The river has a shape you follow with your whole body: shoulder, footstep, and ear- those who know how to listen hear how river wind is like breath, alive in lung and line. Mike James makes his home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He has published in hundreds of magazines, large and small, and has performed his poetry at universities and other venues throughout the country. He has published over 20 collections and has served as visiting writer at the University of Maine, Fort Kent. His recent new and selected poems, Portable Light: Poems 1991-2021, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His last collection, Back Alley Saints at the Tiki Bar, was published in April by Redhawk. He currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, TN.

Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared. His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years. James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t

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