A Poem From Back a Ways

I don't have much going poem-wise. I'm prepping two books right now, my collection of stories that will be out soonish, and my novel (endlessly), whose ending I'm rewriting and whose polishing will take forever if I let it. It's been two years now since I 'finished' it. I hope it's worth doing.

Anyway, as promised, a poem I've probably linked before, from Girls with Insurance.

How Terror Might Work for John Smith, IT Guy

With the formless voices that bitch in his ear!
Instructions: cap your appearance off with a balaclava.

No one but the people on the mask's other side
will know. True terror does not require identity

revelation; otherwise one might set goals
for vengeance in one's yearly situation report.

This year was very poor for Terror Investors LLC: little
Jimmy from next door escaped our 23-hour-vigil,

lived to ram candy into sister Suzy's cute dark hair;
Mama had to cut it off. George at the office moved

to a corner suite with high-rise view and a leggy
blonde assistant taking dictation on her knees every day

at 12:15 as you stand by the coffeepot that never
works. Your wife and the coffee-brown pool boy

(ye gods, the hits just keep coming), licking batter sensuously
from the paddle of the Kitchen-Aid mixer you bought her

on anniversary ten: the blowjob anniversary, she said.
Somewhere in Pakistan Osama bin Laden aerates

his blood in an expensive machine as the United
States of Indecency sits on its hands. He laughs in his

beard. Homeland Security can't contain the domestic
rage of the auto industry or the corpse-fucking

of the banking industry. It’s time to go home. The baby
too lies like one dead on the sofa, sleeping off her future.

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

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

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.

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