My Favorite Live Nude Poetry Book I Read in 2012

It's Thomas Patrick Levy's Please Don't Leave Me Scarlett Johannson. 

Give it a purchase and a nice review somewhere. Here's why:

O Scarlett I couldn’t look you in the eyes at the diner because you were wearing your apron like a too-small bath towel and I just knew you had a blue Chevy S-10 in the parking lot and my god you were certainly the sexiest person I’ve ever seen carrying a slice of pie to a booth in the back room and even then I knew that you were not real but I kept wiping these drops of coffee off my chin and kept looking around as if there were someone other than you to look at and finally when I left you came after me moving in a rush that smelled of purple candy and when I turned around you were already in your truck and the radio was already moaning MY HEART IS IN MY SHOES and your small fingers were holding a cigarette out the open window and you left me alone with the spatter of wetness your truck’s exhaust left on the cement and I swear the spatter was in the shape of Tom Waits’s face

And Scarlett never mind the run-down motels I’ll drive all night and you can hang your pretty toes out the window while the shadows swallow around us and the only light for miles is the candle my car holds out before us with one hand covering the flame and god you know how I love to hear you sing even when you’re singing THEY BROKE ALL THE WINDOWS so please sing yourself to sleep and let that cold wind come around you like a hush kept so frail and when you get too cold we’ll park in the shadow of an evergreen and you can rest your body against my car’s warm hood

And Scarlett once I watched a man on youtube photoshop your body in reverse and the dress he made you wear I swear was made of thin orange threads of my sweat and I swear to god I couldn’t open my eyes but each frame touched me like the wet of your tongue which makes shapes that can’t exist around my ear and I swear to god sometimes I sleep and dream you don’t exist and when I wake up in your bed there is a veil draped down like an arc of wedding light burst through the ceiling and on the radio I hear your voice and on the radio I see the way you crawl around and I see your knees bare as yellow fields by the freeways and I see your knees crushed carrot-raw on wet hairs of carpet and still each frame is so dark I have to light a candle when we kiss

Jack Gilbert Dead

I heard about this on a poetry listserv from one his close friends.  It doesn't seem to have hit the mainstream media yet. This is a fairly recent article by John Penner celebrating the collected poems. It's a sad damned day for me.

BERKELEY — In a spacious, humane skilled-nursing home, a man sits with his elderly neighbors arrayed in their wheelchairs as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald sing. Several guests arrive to see the man, and after the last note of "Cheek to Cheek," one of them takes up a microphone and reads a poem.

The reader, startled by a resident's pained moans of distress, stumbles over a word or two of "Looking at Pittsburgh From Paris." He finishes, and the man brightens in his chair and points at his heart, mouthing to a visitor holding his arm, "Me?"

Yes, Jack Gilbert. That's yours.

The poet is 87 and small in his wheelchair, mostly unable to talk, his brain diminished by disease. He is dying. But as for anyone with Alzheimer's or its variants, the end has not come quickly. It is a long receding. More.

Poem Draft

Eggs from Anywhere

The codicil to my third will (the official one) reads:

One, don't give nothing to anybody. Take the money

in cash and throw it under the mud-packed wheels

of your car in the bumfuckingest place you can find.

If you can find a place that was on reality TV, cool.

Two, don't eat the nachos from Chili's or the eggs

from anywhere; they are related in that ingestion

might kill a weak woman or a tweaker man. I wish

the birds would not twitter in my ear when I make

decisions. It's fucked up enough in here. I wish for

you, number three, the magic number, that all the days

of your life you will find roses in the tassels of your horse's

mane billowing out into better metaphor and a landslide

of clean fill that temblors down the back roads

of the choked creeks that yield orange rocks, no fish

but the pretty stones stained with runoff and the greasy

pizza pieces left over by a million students who sit on the banks

stoned thinking that they're feeding the fish; god knows

the fish don't eat that shit either. Back to number four,

I'm afraid. I'm afraid all the time. I sit in my closet floor

and caparison myself to no avail. The world wants my body,

I say, and slam the door. Monopoly and Risk fall on my

head, and the little man in the top hat runs into the other

room to fuck my wife. Is that all? the voices say. It simply

can't be all. But that's the thing itself. This IS ALL you get.

A New Draft, First in a While

Will disappear in a few days:

*poof*

Modern and Contemporary Poetry with Al Filreis

This is what's going to occupy some of my time for the next couple months. Over 30K people are enrolled in this free class. Check it out.

https://class.coursera.org/modernpoetry/class/index

Poetry Publishing in the Post Publisher World

Thanks to Anny Ballardini, for bringing this to my attention.

Dead-tree publishing has been in a quiet, lumbering crisis for many years now. Publishers are understandably confused over their role in a world that exchanges information freely and is stocked with e-book readers and high-tech print-on-demand services provided by some of the largest book sellers in the world. Writers are beginning to challenge the notion that a traditional publishing house is some beneficent entity that must be courted and deferred to. Even the idea of the publishing house, a disjointed amalgam of money lender, talent scout, editor, manager, publicist, ad company and printer, seems challengeable now in a way that would have seemed inconceivable twenty years ago.

But nowhere is the entrenched hold the traditional publisher deeper and more enduring than the field of poetry. While ersatz fan-fiction tops the best-seller lists for mass-market paperbacks, poetry, even in a crass or bastardized form, is largely absent from the mass market altogether.
It’s an open secret that people don’t buy poetry. Some small exception is made for those poets humorous, famous, or dead enough, but by and large the rule holds true. There is not a large publisher in America for which contemporary, literary poetry is an important commercial concern.

Food for Thought: Women Who Write Poetry and Poetry Criticism (Roundtable)

I am intimidated by poetry criticism because I've spent most of my adult life reading fiction and sometimes writing about fiction. As I age, I've been reading much more poetry and much more poetry criticism, which, given my relative lack of experience with the forms, has left me formulating (what seem to me to be) dumb questions, and trying like mad to find answers that make sense. One of the things I've thought about consistently is the role gender and sex play in my reading and in the litworld at large.

Nearly all of my favorite poets are women (my favorite fiction writers are almost exclusively male), usually somewhat combative as regards sexual and gender roles, and aggressively intellectual (and is that a complex idea?? that the women I reference would pillory me for as merely another example of sexism?? like, why can't women be aggressive in the same way that men seem so comfortable with without being labelled as shrill or dykey or, well, you get the point? at least that answer's easy enough).

This roundtable discussion at the Best American Poetry blog points me in different directions, both by suggesting poets I'm not familiar with and more importantly, tweaking my insecurities as a poet and reader of criticism by pointing out how much I don't know about my chosen field and its ready complications.

Here are links to the participants: Sina Queyras, Elisa Gabbert, Shanna Compton, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place and Danielle Pafunda,moderated by Sandra Simonds. I'm going to tag a number of my favorite poets as well to see if they feel motivated to weigh in.

Sandra Simonds: For years, much was made of the male-dominated blog comment fields. I’m thinking particularly of Ron Silliman’s blog. It seems like currently group-run blogs are very popular—HTML Giant, Montevidayo and the Rumpus immediately come to mind. The comment fields still seem to be the “front lines” of poetry engagement. Are they still as male-dominated in these forums as they were during the “Silliman-era”? If so, can you hypothesize as to why? 

Elisa Gabbert: It really depends on the blog, who runs it and the kind of environment they create. I’ve seen plenty of blogs/websites that create a “safe” atmosphere for women, mostly by being quite obviously by, for, and about women – see The Hairpin or Jezebel. Her Kind, the new VIDA blog, seems to be an attempt to create a similar space for women writers specifically.

The problem here, such as there is one, is that comment fields turn into a middle-school dance, with the girls huddled in one corner and the boys on the other. The “boys” don’t want to read and comment on the “girl” blogs because they’re either not interested or know they’re not supposed to be; the “girls” don’t want to comment on the “boy” blogs because the “boys” do their best to scare them away. The comments on HTML Giant, for example, are still dominated by young men, though the regular crew seems less aggressively aggressive than they used to be. Even on my blog (I’m the only author, I’m a professed feminist, and I am very welcoming to women who comment), I probably get two or three comments from men to every comment I get from a woman.

I’m ambivalent about this reluctance of women to speak. On the one hand, I understand that they don’t want to get caught up in online arguments (it’s easy to fall into a hole and let it ruin your day) or risk being attacked, which is a very real risk. (Identify as a feminist online and you will be called stupid, whiny, boring, irrational, a bitch, a cunt, a dyke, a man-hater; you will be accused of being on PMS and needing to get laid; you may even be outright threatened with assault, rape, or murder.) On the other, if nobody speaks, then people remain ignorant. Speaking up to asshole idiots in comment fields is tough work and often pretty thankless, but I’m so grateful when I see someone else doing that work – it sets an example, it reminds us that everyone and everything doesn’t suck. I’m not always up for it, but when I am, I try to be that person who points out the logical fallacies and (conscious or unconscious) bias in dumb sexist arguments, knowing that someone out there will be silently thanking me.

There’s also, of course, the fact that women on average work more hours than men for less pay, so, a lot of them probably just don’t have time for the Internet, or can’t justify spending their Internet time in such a manner.

The entire discussion,in case you didn't get the first link: http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/08/women-who-write-poetry-criticism-roundtable.html