The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall

Reginald Shepherd has been quiet on his blog because he was seriously ill for weeks—close to death even. My comments on his poems were, unknowingly, made during his illness. I have more comments on them to come, as well as on his essays.

Here's another moment that reminded me of W. G. Sebald, this one from "The Tendency of Dropped Objects to Fall":

..... In exile Andromache's handmaid

builds a miniature Troy with toothpicks
and superglue, with matchsticks
from a story that she read: a helpless glitter
with tinfoil walls and someone

rolls over it in his sleep.

In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald wrote about a man who built a miniature version of the Temple of Jerusalem. There's some information about Sebald's source here.

The building of miniatures with toothpicks reminds me of Brian Phillips's comparison between poetry and shortwave-radio operators, in this essay. Poetry as toothpick temples and Troys?

Karl-Marx-Allee

I'm surely biased by my own experience living out at the end of the former Stalin-Allee on Jessnerstrasse in the former East Berlin in 1991-92, but I enjoyed this poem by John Koethe about his sense of the former East Berlin, "Karl-Marx-Allee."

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Final Round Call for Votes

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, FINAL ROUND

Here are the poems to vote for in the final round of my fourth Daily Poem Project. They are the winners of the twelve rounds from Monday, February 18, to Sunday, May 11 (each week's poems being those that appeared on Poetry Daily that week; week 9 ended in a tie, hence the two poems from that week):

1. Alison Brackenbury's Edward Thomas's Daughter
2. Martha Zweig's Overturn
3. B. T. Shaw's We End, Like Galileo
4. Damian Walford Davies's Plague
5. Mary Jo Salter's Point of View
6. Bill Zavatsky's Ode to the Maker of Odes
7. Marie Howe's The Star Market
8. Adam Zagajewski's In a Little Apartment, translated by Clare Cavanagh
9a. Sidney Wade's Siamo a la Frutta
9b. John Rybicki's Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me
10. Elaine Sexton's Night. Fire
11. Lisa Williams's Horizontally, I Moved
12. Martha Rhodes's Come to Me, His Blood

HOW TO VOTE: Please vote for only ONE poem. You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). (If you read this on Facebook, please vote on my blog and not as a comment on Facebook.) I will post comments as they come in (unless you tell me not to post the comment, of course).

You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

I will not set a particular deadline for you to vote by, as I will be trying to recruit lots of people to vote in this final round. (If you vote, feel free to pass on the call for votes to as many people as you like!) As long as this post does not say that voting is closed, you may still vote! (As of now, Friday, May 23, the voting is still open and I'd love to hear from anyone who is interested!)

If you would like to receive an email announcing the posting of the results, make sure to get me your email address somehow (if it is not available through your blogger profile or the like, say).

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week 12 results

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWELVE RESULTS

The winner of week twelve of my fourth Daily Poem Project is Come to Me, His Blood, by Martha Rhodes, which received 4 votes out of 14 cast. Aaron Baker's The Red Snake came in second with three votes, while three other poems received two votes each!

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for the final round of voting in a few minutes (and hence I will not list the winners of the previous rounds at the end of this message, as I otherwise have done).

Snowdrops and Summer Snowflakes, Drooping

Another moment in Reginald Shepherd's Fata Morgana that caught my attention was this, from the poem "Snowdrops and Summer Snowflakes, Drooping":

The river is silted with sentiments, Ophelia
sings flowers in hell to all the goodnight
ladies martyred to plots ...

That makes this poem a much better version of one I wrote long ago, "Gretchen and Ophelia," which toyed around with the similarities between Gretchen in Goethe's Faust and Ophelia, the way that they die over and over again on stages all over the world.

Where is Hamlet being played tonight? Who is playing Hamlet? Who Ophelia? Where is Faust being played? And who is playing Gretchen? Questions like the claim that somewhere a radio station is playing a Beatles tune as you read this. Which station? What tune? "Things We Said Today" would be my choice.

Shepherd continues with all the things he would give Ophelia, all the flowers, and concludes with this:

... What I wouldn't give
to hear her shut up that infernal singing,
walk out of sullen water open-eyed.

Things Waiting To Be Dangerous

Before Larry Craig brought gay cruising methods to public attention, Reginald Shepherd described them in his poem "Things Waiting To Be Dangerous" (first in the American Poetry Review and then in his book Fata Morgana) and then went some other places, too:

... (Bring it on, the waiting
in a basement stall for someone to sit down,
tap one foot yes, the workmen's overtime

contempt, a waste of spirit and I don't even
drink. Bring all the men in bedrooms
bathrooms backrooms bookstores alleys

who left me unsatisfied, came with me
after all. I miss them now. Bring on my
retrovirus, invisible catastrophe, distracted

palindrome and abstract doom,
another decade's style in sex, or maybe
it was imported, bring me something to drink. Something

gets tired, undresses for bed.)
...

That's quite a parentheses.

Varieties of Reading

In "In Pursuit of Reading," my old friend Don Brown has posted a long and interesting set of reflections on the different modes of reading he has gone through in his life, from his pre-college days (he only went to college at 26) of voracious reading "for himself" though the experiences of various kinds of lists chosen by others in college and grad school to lists he chose when teaching courses and all the reading of student work that he has to do. A fascinating post that I highly recommend.

Taste

Jonathan Mayhew has some sharp thoughts about "taste" here:

The mystery of taste is not why we don't like the same things, but why we ever correspond at all. If taste is subjective, then there's no reason two people would ever agree. So there has to be something in the object itself. It's not just that we like Mozart because we're told it's supposed to be great: the response is genuine.

This reminded me of some claims I made in an essay I think I have linked to before:

Taste is not an individual matter; the idea that "there's no arguing about taste" is backwards: there is only arguing about taste. In fact, tastes are the communal result of argument: our "individual" tastes only develop within a context of differing tastes in which each of us confronts others with our response to works.

Robert Rauschenberg

I have long had a quotation from Robert Rauschenberg as one of the random quotes one gets if one receives an email from me (using random signature files). I found it in a New Yorker profile a while back:

"I don't want a painting to be just an expression of my personality. I feel it ought to be much better than that."

Ms. Baroque has another good one here.

RIP, RR.

At Weep

Reginald Shepherd's poems seem to resonate with other things for me, as in my post on "Even This." The poem "At Weep" (on-line here with several other RS poems) reminded me of one of my favorite books, W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. Here's Shepherd:

Song litters upstate New York maps
with classical towns, Attica, Utica, Syracuse,
Troy, lining the throughways with Latin

and Greek: Ithaca and the other islands
fingering slim lakes.

Here's Sebald (as translated by Michael Hulse):

Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Nineveh—I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned.

I remember driving through the south and passing not only Athens but also Philadelphia and perhaps even a Cleveland! This from someone who spent six years living in a Toledo that is not in Spain. :-)

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week 12 call for Votes

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TWELVE

Here are the poems to vote for in week twelve of my fourth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, May 5, to Sunday, May 11):

78. Come to Me, His Blood, by Martha Rhodes
79. Like Something Christenberry Pictured, by C.D. Wright
80. The Red Snake, by Aaron Baker
81. The Hungry Gap-Time,, by Thomas Lux
82. I Lost My Horse, by Cecily Parks
83. Green Animals, by Michele Glazer
84. A Man is Stalked by a White Arctic Fox, by Jynne Dilling Martin

This is the last week of twelve weeks. Next week, all the winners will be put together for a final vote.

HOW TO VOTE: Please vote for only ONE poem. You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). (If you read this on Facebook, please vote on my blog and not as a comment on Facebook.) I will post comments as they come in (unless you tell me not to post the comment, of course).

You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY SUNDAY, May 18! I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which I will do on the evening of May 18. If you would like to receive an email announcing the posting of the results, make sure to get me your email address somehow (if it is not available through your blogger profile or the like, say).

The winner of week 1 was Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter."
The winner of week 2 was Martha Zweig's "Overturn."
The winner of week 3 was B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo."
The winner of week 4 was Damian Walford Davies's "Plague."
The winner of week 5 was Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View."
The winner of week 6 was Bill Zavatsky's "Ode to the Maker of Odes."
The winner of week 7 was Marie Howe's "The Star Market."
The winner of week 8 was Adam Zagajewski's "In a Little Apartment," translated by Clare Cavanagh
The co-winners of week 9 were Sidney Wade's Siamo a la Frutta and John Rybicki's Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me.
The winner of week 10 was Elaine Sexton's Night. Fire.
The winner of week 11 was Lisa Williams's Horizontally, I Moved.

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week 11 results

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN RESULTS

The winner of week eleven of my fourth Daily Poem Project is Horizontally, I Moved, by Lisa Williams, which received 5 votes out of 14 cast. Two poems tied for second with three votes: Pas de Deux, by Ciaran Carson, and Slept, by Jennifer Chang. (For more on Carson's book, see my post here.)

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week twelve in a few minutes.

Winner of week one: Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter"
Winner of week two: Martha Zweig's "Overturn"
Winner of week three: B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo"
Winner of week four: Damian Walford Davies's "Plague"
Winner of week five: Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View"
Winner of week six: Bill Zavatsky's "Ode to the Maker of Odes"
Winner of week seven: Marie Howe's "The Star Market"
Winner of week eight: Adam Zagajewski's "In a Little Apartment," (tr. Clare Cavanagh)
Co-winner of week nine: John Rybicki's "Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me"
Co-winner of week nine: Sidney Wade's "Siamo a la Frutta"
Winner of week ten: Elaine Sexton's "Night. Fire"

Even This; Eugene

Resonances between poems and songs are often intriguing, especially if I am pretty sure the poem and the song have never met outside my mind.

Here's a phrase from Reginald Shepherd's "Even This," from his book Fata Morgana:

... Keep walking
and the lake finds you,

That recalled Greg Brown's "Eugene," from his CD The Evening Call:

The dog is bound to find me sooner or later
Sometimes you got to not look too hard
Just let the dog find you

*

Both of these are available on-line, but instead of looking them up on-line, you should buy the collection and the album. They are both magnificent.

How People Disappear

As I have noted before, I like the effect when a poem (or story or novel or book of any kind) seems to coincide with whatever is going on around me while I am reading it.

Back in March, while reading Reginald Shepherd's intoxicating collection Fata Morgana, I noted the snow outside when reading these lines from the poem "How People Disappear":

.... Late March
keeps marching in old weather,
another slick of snow to trip
and fall into, another bank
of inconvenient fact.

(To be precise, as I noted in the book, it was March 26, and there was snow on the ground in Basel.)

"How People Disappear" is a brilliant version of a type of poem (death of a parent) that must always somehow circumvent the easy generation of feelings afforded by the sadness of its content. The poet must avoid anything that might seem like a desire for pity, while at the same time articulating the feelings that the experience generated (and making the poem a vehicle for those feelings).

A completely different point about the same poem: I searched for it and found the original publication in the archive on the Ploughshares website. But I also found several copies of the poem at various poem sites (americanpoems.com, plagiarist.com, poemhunter.com). If it weren't on the Ploughshares site (and on Reginald's blog here), then I would feel uncomfortable about using the "illegitimate" sites to refer to it. Or should I steal it from the poem-gathering sites and put it here on my blog? I could ask Reginald (if you read this, Reginald, what do you think?), but I am also wondering how others feel about such republication of poems on-line (not because someone loved your poem and put it on their blog, but because it has been put on an on-line collection of poems that, I assume, does not pay for the rights).

Ivy Alvarez and Jill Alexander Essbaum

Jill Alexander Essbaum (left) and Ivy Alvarez gave an energetic reading in Basel last Monday (May 5), mostly from their books Harlot (JAE) and Mortal (IA). I was pleased to count 16 people in attendance, which is pretty good for an English-language reading in a German-speaking city! I hope that I will be able to organize at least one reading in the fall semester. Thanks to Jill and Ivy for their excellent and compelling performances and to all those who attended for making it worthwhile! (And thanks to Mark for the photo!)

Eyewear: "Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong"

Todd Swift features little ol' me today at Eyewear, with my poem "Thomas Hardy Listens to Louis Armstrong." Thank you, Todd!

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week 11 call for votes

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN

Here are the poems to vote for in week eleven of my fourth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 28, to Sunday, May 4):

71. Question About an Old Question, by John Hollander
72. Pas de Deux, by Ciaran Carson (vote only on the first poem)
73. Belief System, by Jorie Graham
74. Slept, by Jennifer Chang
75. Shopping Urban, by Jane Shore
76. Horizontally, I Moved, by Lisa Williams
77. Sleepless in the cold dark, by Reginald Gibbons

This is the eleventh week of twelve weeks, at the end of which all the winners will be put together for a final vote.

HOW TO VOTE: Please vote for only ONE poem. You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). (If you read this on Facebook, please vote on my blog and not as a comment on Facebook.) I will post comments as they come in (unless you tell me not to post the comment, of course).

You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY SUNDAY, May 11! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which I will do on May 12. If you would like to receive an email announcing the posting of the results, make sure to get me your email address somehow (if it is not available through your blogger profile or the like, say).

The winner of week 1 was Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter."
The winner of week 2 was Martha Zweig's "Overturn."
The winner of week 3 was B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo."
The winner of week 4 was Damian Walford Davies's "Plague."
The winner of week 5 was Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View."
The winner of week 6 was Bill Zavatsky's "Ode to the Maker of Odes."
The winner of week 7 was Marie Howe's "The Star Market."
The winner of week 8 was Adam Zagajewski's "In a Little Apartment," translated by Clare Cavanagh
The co-winners of week 9 were Sidney Wade's Siamo a la Frutta and John Rybicki's Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me.
The winner of week 10 was Elaine Sexton's Night. Fire.

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week 10 results

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK TEN RESULTS

Well, it took me a while to get to it, but here it is:

The winner of week ten of my fourth Daily Poem Project is Night. Fire, by Elaine Sexton, which received 4 votes out of 12 cast. Two poems tied for second with three votes: Grandmother, by Valzhyna Mort (tr. by the author, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Franz Wright), and Treason, by James Tate. I think that was the closest vote yet!

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week eleven in a few minutes.

Winner of week one: Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter"
Winner of week two: Martha Zweig's "Overturn"
Winner of week three: B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo"
Winner of week four: Damian Walford Davies's "Plague"
Winner of week five: Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View"
Winner of week six: Bill Zavatsky's "Ode to the Maker of Odes"
Winner of week seven: Marie Howe's "The Star Market"
Winner of week eight: Adam Zagajewski's "In a Little Apartment," (tr. Clare Cavanagh)
Co-winner of week nine: John Rybicki's "Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me"
Co-winner of week nine: Sidney Wade's "Siamo a la Frutta"

Week 10 vote still open

I'm going out all day, so the voting for week 10 of the Daily Poem Project is still open. Click here to see the call for votes and cast your vote! (Also, I have a tie right now, and I am hoping it will be broken!)

I'll be back in the evening (of Sunday, May 4, "tin soldiers and Nixon coming"; RIP Chris J.) and will post the final results then.