Bristling Without Ecstasy

Was up at 3:45 Am this morning and to the airport and now in Houston awaiting my next flight. I realize that as an adult I have flown so much that I fly without thinking that much about it. This is a very disturbing realization for me!


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Spent 3 hours on the flight here working on the book ms. I am getting closer. Getting close. Starting to feel really good about it again, like I did when I sent it to my editor last year. Funny how that works. When I sent it I thought it was done. But within days, I knew it wasn't. I am completely neurotic. I know.


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"I've never been completely sure what I think about Marianne Moore's celebrated poem "Poetry." Apparently, Moore had similar feelings—revising the poem many times across the span of five decades."

(Robert Pinsky discusses Marianne Moore, via SLATE)


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"Can you name an art form that millions practice, but is widely believed to be difficult, boring and on its last legs? That’s right: poetry. Pundits have been writing its obituary for decades — "Poetry is dead. Does anybody really care?" asked Newsweek snarkily in May."

(Katha Pollitt, via Women on the Web"


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My head is swimming with Thom Gunn's poems. Yup, I am teaching The Man with Night Sweats at Warren Wilson shortly. Gunn's work always makes me antsy, slightly paranoid, and bristly.


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Clue: Caligula


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Anonymous

"Several dozen people marched outside the Tarrant County Courthouse on Sunday to protest arrests made at a gay bar over the weekend.

Protesters said they want to know why Fort Worth police officers and Texas Alcohol Beverage Commission agents used what the protesters described as excessive force when arresting seven patrons at the Rainbow Lounge early Sunday."

(40 years after Stonewall and stuff like this is still happening!)


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Posting here will be light in the coming two weeks. I will be in Asheville teaching and, well, from past experience, I know I won't have much time to post. That said, you know the next Caption Contest will be coming soon. And I just know many of you can't wait! Haha.


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"One benefit of being a poet -- as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host -- is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.

The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city's finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi's) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one."

(Michael Judge, from the Wall Street Journal)


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"'It was the bard wot won it." Will that be the historians' judgment on Ireland's second referendum on the Lisbon treaty, planned for early October? Will the future of Europe be decided by the voice of a poet?

In a rare and moving intervention, Ireland's greatest living poet, Seamus Heaney, has come out plainly for a yes to the Lisbon treaty and raised the whole debate to a different level."

(from the Guardian)


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Clue: Chicken. Head. Cut. Off!


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Happy PRIDE!

"It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places."

(Frank Rick discusses gay civil rights in the NYT)


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Today marks the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Read a little more about them in the link above. And today is also the day of the monstrous Pride Parade and Celebration here in San Francisco. The Pride Parade here is gigantic. It goes on for hours and hours. Here is a glimpse of last year's Parade. When I read the article above, I was struck by the fact that in 40 years, despite making some strides, how far behind we are in terms of equal rights.


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And because I still believe that much of the difficulty some folks have about marriage equality is the fact they cannot seem to understand it is about love, has always been about love (not sex), here is my small act of defiance. Yes, defiance. I know most do not view me as a political poet, but my views on what makes for political poetry aren't simple nor are they straightforward. Anyway, no time for preaching. Just time to share a poem about love.


THE BRIDGE

for Jacob Bertrand


I love. Wouldn’t we all like to start
a poem with “I love…”? I would.
I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines
in the word “parallel,” love how

words sometimes mirror what they mean.
I love mirrors and that stupid tale
about Narcissus. I suppose
there is some Narcissism in that.

You know, Narcissism, what you
remind me to avoid almost all the time.
Yeah, I love Narcissism. I do.
But what I really love is ice cream.

Remember how I told you
no amount of ice cream can survive
a week in my freezer. You didn’t believe me,
did you? No, you didn’t. But you know now

how true that is. I love
that you know my Achilles heel
is none other than ice cream—
so chilly, so common.

And I love fountain pens. I mean
I just love them. Cleaning them,
filling them with ink, fills me
with a kind of joy, even if joy

is so 1950. I know, no one talks about
joy anymore. It is even more taboo
than love. And so, of course, I love joy.
I love the way joy sounds as it exits

your mouth. You know, the word joy.
How joyous is that. It makes me think
of bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions.
I love the way the mind runs

that pathway from bubbles to dandelions.
Yes, I love a lot. And right here,
walking down this street,
I love the way we make

a bridge, a suspension bridge
—almost as beautiful as the
Golden Gate Bridge—swaying
as we walk hand in hand.


--C. DALE YOUNG
(appeared originally in TriQuarterly, forthcoming in my next book, TORN)



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Clue: Reading


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Machines

"Say the words "literary magazine" to anyone—your mom, your coworkers, a random librarian—and watch as they try to conceive of some way to end the conversation. Besides the words "self-published autobiography," there are very few other ways to quickly batter to death a discussion with even the most ardent of bookish nerds. There are many reasons for this, but the main thing is that everyone knows the only people who buy literary magazines are aspiring authors who want to be published in literary magazines. The never-ending MFA-program loop disgusts and bores just about everyone who's not related, in one way or another, with the out-of-touch academic literary-fiction machine."

(Paul Constant, from The Stranger)


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"The 1995 nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult gave rise to Haruki Murakami's first non-fiction work, Underground, and now the novelist has admitted that they also inspired his new novel 1Q84."

(from the Guardian)


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Um, even at age 10 Anderson Cooper was going to Studio 54? Jesus.




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I have a lot of stuff to do this weekend before I leave town next Tuesday morning. I am feeling the crunch.


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Clue: Just Rewards


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Michael Jackson Dead

"Michael Jackson has passed away after suffering a heart attack at his Los Angeles home. Paramedics arrived on the scene but were unable to revive him in the ambulance or at the hospital."

(from TMZ, via Gawker)


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I am kind of in shock by this. He was only 50.


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Project Verse Week 2

Did you miss Project Verse this week? I did, but have caught up now. The comments section is hilarious with various contestants "discussing" the judges! Excellent. Guest Judge this week was Andrew Demcak. Next week's guest judge is Matthew Hittinger.


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Rainbow?

"Check out any high school or college poetry anthology, and you’ll likely find Elizabeth Bishop’s classic “The Fish”. As one of American literature’s most popular poems, “The Fish” is arguably the classic American poem about angling and how the sport can restore our souls. Its popularity in classrooms throughout the country is not only a testament to fishing, but also the lessons we can learn from such venerable fishing tales."

(Chris Justice examines a poem from a fisherman's point of view, from Pop Matters)


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"As I was rereading “The Autobiography” by Benjamin Franklin, I was reminded of Franklin’s shockingly condescending view towards poetry. Apparently, he associated it with effeminate artifice or European dandyism, and he even referred to an associate who wrote verse (James Ralph) as a “pretty poet.”

He only saw it as a good way to beginning word learning tool (something akin to a modern Dora or Dr. Seuss books) and nothing more. He made his feelings clear when he wrote “I aproprov’d the amusing oneself with Poetry now and then as far as to improve one’s language, but no further.”

(from the SF Examiner)


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"Married same-sex couples will be counted as such in 2010, Census Bureau officials said, reversing a decision of the Bush administration."

(from the NYT)


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"Block's Open Letter to Quiet Light debuts at number 24, arriving just behind the brothers Dickman (Michael at number 22, Matthew at 23, respectively), and just ahead of Jorie Graham."

(the Poetry Foundation finally updated its bestseller list)


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Clue: Penalty box


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Town Crier

Congratulations to R.J. Gibson, winner of this year's Robin Becker Chapbook Prize.


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Out of Control

Um, what? Has Burger King lost its mind? Well, the folks over at D-listed thinks BK has more than lost its mind...



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Five Stars

"Elsevier officials said Monday that it was a mistake for the publishing giant's marketing division to offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes & Noble."

(from Inside Higher Ed)


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"One of the reasons people don't read as much poetry anymore is the fault of the poets," he said. "It's not the public's fault. There's an awful lot of bad poetry out there. I'd say about 87 percent of the poetry in America isn't worth reading."

(Billy Collins quoted in a news feature from The Norman Transcript)


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"There are, of course, limitations. But what jumps out at least for this reader is that, with 74 contributors, this collection is much, much shorter than it could have been. Further, there seems to be an overwhelming emphasis on poets who teach creative writing. Over 50 of the poets included currently teach writing, a number that would have been higher had there not been several emeritae faculty and two dead poets in the collection.³ Schools with multiple faculty included are UCLA, UNLV, Berkeley, Mills, San Francisco State, Bard, Brown, U. Mass Amherst, the University of Denver, Princeton and the University of Iowa. Twelve of the poets here either currently teach in the Bay Area, or have done so in the not too distant past. In a world with at least 20,000 English-language poets & some 808 degree-granting writing programs, there simply aren’t enough jobs in colleges for poets for this to be a statistical accident."

(Ron Silliman discusses American Hybrid)


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"Colum McCann — an Irish-born, Manhattan-dwelling novelist you should know a lot more about — is one of those restless authors constantly in search of new territory (Dancer fictionalized the life of Nureyev, Zoli the story of an itinerant Romani singer). He hadn’t set a novel in New York since 1998’s This Side of Brightness, about homeless people living in subway tunnels, until September 11 made him go back. But his sprawling, lyrical new book, Let the Great World Spin, takes place almost entirely in 1974, hardly a banner year for the city, around the time of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. McCann spoke to Vulture about his search for seventies hookers, the 9/11 “grief machine,” and his Don DeLillo worship."


(from New York Magazine)


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Clue: Mariner


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Issues

I was away over the weekend. Jacob and I went up to Lake Tahoe with my parents, who were in town visiting. But I am back. And without further adieu, here we go...


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"“Accessible” is something we should all hope for with public buildings, true, but when talking about art, people should be run out of town for saying it, and people should be embarrassed to have someone say it about their work. One works hard (hopefully) at one’s art. And any reader should be furious at the condescending nature of someone writing of a book that it is “accessible.” “Don’t worry,” it’s saying, “even YOU can get it!” One person’s “accessible” is another’s “crass commercialism.”"

(John Gallaher via his blog)


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"But for me, at least, I don't ever believe that will happen to me, so I don't care as much, if that makes sense. Some may call me self-effacing or insecure, but I think I'm more realistic. Sure, in my lifetime, I might write a book like this, but I don't aim to make other people happy while I'm writing, so when it gets out, if some people like it, that makes me happy enough. For me, poetry isn't as much about the audience. I think other genres I write are."

(Victoria Chang via her blog)


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"A poem starts for me in many different ways, sometimes it is an image, other times it is a phrase. More often than not it is some obsession that wants to be released, some gnawing thing that keeps returning to live in my chest. A buzzing thing that wants to be listened to, heard, coaxed out into the open."

(Ada Limon interviewed in the SF Examiner)


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I am not going to discuss the Perez Hilton beating. I am not.


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Vampire-Con decides to be inclusive in its ads. I'd say I was pretty surprised by this! I don't know many conventions that even acknowledge gay men much less create an ad for them...

(link via Fanboys of the Universe)


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Clue: Wheel


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