obx

Family vacation is ALL NEXT WEEK. Big beach house. Empty strand. Seafood. Which beach, you ask?

the penguin and the turnip

When a penguin
eats a turnip
and the turnip’s
companion tells
the penguin’s mom,
the penguin gets
in trouble. There
is a principle
at work here,
and it is a principle
you and I should
embrace the way
we embrace
each other in
the slowly closing
iron maiden
of middle age—
not exactly
desperately, but
because we have
nothing better to do.

an overwritten sentence

His unaffected aesthetic is etched in the ether of mysterious traditional and psychedelic folk musics from the British Isle and in an America that disappeared the first time in the ’30s with the Dust Bowl and for the second time in the grimness of mid-’70s determinism in the shadows of post-Vietnam shame and malaise.

(From Allmusic.com’s review of Devendra Banhart’s Niño Rojo.)

torn from an old notebook

This entry in an old notebook is titled “IDEAS.” I do not remember the original context.

1. 1960s - Sexual Revolution

2. 200 B.C. - TEMPLE PROSTITUTES
     Fertility worship

3. 4000 B.C. - cave men + women
     hunting, gathering, mating

4. 1500 Japan - cannibalism +
     pantheism

5. 1789 French Revolution

5. 1940’s Holocaust theme -
     Auschwitz - Hitler

6. The Rape of Nanking - 1934

7. Bangkok 1980s

Of these, only number 6 had a check next to it, so it looks like that idea was the winner.

yale series of younger poets!! yeee-haawww!!!!

Yet another milestone in what is becoming a rather storied poetry-writing career: For the first time ever, a manuscript of mine, Clementines, was not selected for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets! The letter begins, “Unfortunately, your manuscript has not been selected for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Because we receive so many submissions…” blah blah blah. Props to Lindsay Toland, Yale University Press Acquisitions Editor for not beating around the bush, but wouldn’t it be great if a rejection letter simply said

    Dear Contestant,

    Unfortunately, blah blah blah.

    Best Regards,
    Lindsay Toland
    Acquisitions Editorial
    Yale University Press

That would be so cool. I have half a mind to start an Observable chapbook contest just to send such rejection letters. The “unfortunately” is all that matters, guys. Let’s do it. I’m going to do it for 2008-09.

rules for poetry redux

There’s a discussion over at Tony’s blog about my rules for poetry.

belz museum

I’d like to give a reading here.

philip levine on the bird hoverer

First, let me thank you for The Bird Hoverer. I had no idea you could assemble such an interesting collection. I thought it would be one rat f*ck after another & not a whisper of real emotion. But I was wrong. Tada! Not for the first time. It is good to be wrong. Sometimes. [I read the] rave review… I hope you get ten more.

g. k. chesterton says…

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

wisdom poetry

Life is like a dog that
has eaten too many raisins:
you might enjoy watching
the sunrise with it,
but who will comfort you
in the middle of the night?

There is a condo somewhere
in France where, right now,
two people are speaking
words of love to one another
in Italian, and they are people
of the same gender.

I have seen things without
the help of my eyes.
They are spiritual things.
They enter my soul
like older women wearing
towels, fresh from the bath.

Beginnings and endings
are reifications and reifications
only. Even the word
“reification,” though,
is unreal. It is a prank
played on the abyss!

sharkforum

Yet another literary website proves that it has class.

home from vermont studio center

I just stepped out of a time warp. St. Louis hasn’t changed & provides no frame of reference for my month in Vermont. I feel the way Lucy must have felt stepping out of the wardrobe after her big adventure, somehow still playing the same game of hide and seek. All I have are flickr photos to prove it wasn’t a dream. Separate worlds—separate ways, worlds apart—here’s a message for Michael Schiavo:

   Here we stand
   Worlds apart, hearts broken in two, two, two
   Sleepless nights
   Losing ground
   I’m reaching for you, you, you

Maybe alternately we could listen to “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap. Or read The Steak Book. Okay. I can go totally yearbook—

Flat kickball, Sheep’s Hole, squirtgun fights, “chocolate milkshake” at Munchies, Oliver: “dude you dropped trou”, beer pong, Michael’s heavy eyelids and innocent shrug, Barb Delinsky, “you wouldn’t hire a clown to fix a leak in the john”, Gary, cleopatra, athena (etc), Bird-Dog (Texas), Shaggy, 1:30 AM McDonalds run, “an ass just like Saran” (huh?), Barry: “who needs a six pack when you’ve got a keg?”, boring canadians, tenderness of zombies, Frolf at Johnson State College, Grand Union grocery store, Butternut Mountain Farm, PBR from Mobil, pool at Long Trail (”did you see what that M*f* did?”), Al Arsenault’s wife looking down from the sky, Magic Hat, Kahn, Barbara White, “money on the table”. . .

rules for poetry

I wrote these last fall & just reread them, and I think they’re right on… What do you think?

1. It makes sense or at least tries; wherever it doesn’t make sense it’s because it can’t, because something is impeding the rational.

2. It is about love; or about being confused or pursued or pursuing, guilty, in denial, etc. There is a natural distance between the writer, lonely at his desk, and the reader, elsewhere, that the poem attempts to overcome. All poetry is love poetry.

3. It is verbal, which might seem obvious, but I am seeing a lot of poetry that seems not to be aware of this.

4. Its basic unit is the sentence, not the stanza, line, word, phoneme, or letter. I used to think its basic unit was the line. It’s definitely the sentence.

5. It begins somewhere known and ends somewhere unknown; or vice-versa; it has history and memory or hope and a future; this is what makes it progressive.

6. Each line surprises; I learned this in 1991 from the poet Tim Seibles; he was right.

7. It is not impressed with itself; Daniel Kane calls this “I’m-so-cleveritis”; poems aren’t the answer; they aren’t even much.

8. It is for today, not for posterity; Whitman knew this, and so did Emerson: “Thy love afar is spite at home.”

my little rorschach blot

When I first met you,
my little Rorschach blot,
your hair was long
and blondish, you
looked like a girl
who didn’t know when
it was time to go to bed.

But now that I am older
you look like a woman
who knows all too well
not only when bedtime is
but when the trash
must be taken out.
Funny to think that you

are the same Rorschach blot.
I wonder what I will see
in you twenty years hence;
perhaps an old lady
fiddling with my socks,
muttering something about
an eclipse that never happened.

robert herrick’s moat

All men named Belz are competent poets.
Aaron Belz is a man. Therefore,

he is forced to row without an oar
around Robert Herrick’s moat.

Roses are fragrant; orchids are not,
but a thing of beauty is a joy forever,

whether it smells like a sewer
or grandmother’s petal pot.

Therefore, Robert Herrick may or may not
be fragrant and/or a competent poet.

Soiled paper plates are scattered
only where careless people have picnicked.

There are soiled paper plates
scattered about Robert Herrick’s lawn.

Therefore, all men named Belz
that are in this boat will disembark

now and, while trudging through soiled
paper plates, not speak ill of large-nosed

authors who live in moated chateaux
for such talk might cause Robert Herrick

to bristle in his grave. All insulting talk
causes metaphysical poets to bristle in their graves.

Robert Herrick is a metaphysical poet.
Therefore, a man named Belz has no problem

tying himself to a gnarl of roots
while his boat explores the chateau

atop the hill. A man named Belz knows
that if a boat has its own boots

for trudging and is willing to go
do his dirty work for him, he ought

to let it. After all, he has just navigated
still waters oarless, shirtless, hatless,

and he is sun-baked from this business.
It seems noteworthy that under roots that clutch

there is a large amount of stony rubbish.
It seems that T. S. Eliot has been here.

If that’s the case, life may or may not be fair.
While the boat investigates Herrick’s chateau

a man named Belz watches branches grow
and knows that he’s a son of man.

Aaron Belz is a man. Therefore
he wears no hat. He forgot to put on a hat

before he left his apartment.
Therefore he also wears no shirt

and has no oar. Now he has no boat
either. The fire of his gaze causes branches

to wither and roots to shrivel. This
dead tree gives no shelter, thinks he.

I should sit under the shadow of that
red rock, he thinks, pointing to a red rock

nearby. Just then, from a high
turret, an apparition catches his eye.

“Have you seen fear in a handful of dust
yet?” it asks, in a weird sixteenth-century

English accent. “Come up in the captain’s tower,”
it shouts. “Two men, yet to be born,

are fighting up here.” This is illogical,
thinks Aaron Belz. Robert Zimmerman,

although he is a man, is not named Belz;
therefore, he is not necessarily a competent poet

and might not be a competent logician.
This does not mean that he is not a singer-songwriter.