Ten rules for riding public transportation from a poet.
I can enthusiastically support the first four, at least. Some of the latter ones are a mixture of illegal (at least in DC) and too England-centric.
Monday Morning Staff Meeting – Where The Poets Are
And the hottest new poetry scene is in… Queens.
Or Forklift, Ohio (not a real place).
Sadly, none of these places are Washington, DC or St. Petersburg, Florida.
DC is, perhaps, a little too institutional. Though it’s got a thriving visual arts scene. But the local poetry scene is very slam-centric. There is the Beltway Poetry Journal, but that’s exclusively online and I’m looking for more. I’m just not a slam person, as I’ve said before. I love poetry on the page, even when I read it aloud. Yes, there are the readings at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which I attend religiously, as well the Poet Laureate and other readings at the Library of Congress. But nothing which seems half so interesting as what’s happening elsewhere. But they – the residents of elsewhere – they feel that way too, don’t they?
And Florida is Florida. We elected Rick Scott for governor, for heaven’s sake. The man ran a company that in a very real and tangible way defrauded the taxpayers of this country for billions. You can’t write an elegy that depressingly sad.
Sunday Paper – Don’t Make Poets Angry
Saturday Post – President Heidegger
Columbia University Press & Indie Bookstores
They also give some shout outs to some fine bookstores, including local favorite, Bridge Street Books, and my old haunt, Skylight Books.
I’d once visited University Press Books in Berkeley (though I can’t remember what I bought there) and of course I’ve been to City Lights.
Embarrassingly, I’ve never been to Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa, despite having lived in the Hawkeye state for a political cycle. On my way out of there, I stopped in Iowa City to visit former (then current) Iowa House Minority Leader, Dick Myers (great man; a little crazy, but great). It would have been a perfect opportunity to stop by Prairie Lights and pick up a literary memento, but I never did.
Pacifica Radio Archives
I couldn’t help it. I donated $50 to the Pacifica Radio Archives.
They are trying to digitize all the old reel to reel and cassette tapes before the disintegrate.
They were playing clips of Ray Bradbury speeches and interviews. It was kind of a science fiction hour, and one of the hosts talked about the tape of an interview he did with A.E. Van Vogt (not so long ago, I tracked down a copy of his Weapon Shops of Isher, having read as a teenager a short story that was actually an excerpt from it).
So, I had to do my part to preserve those records.
John Keats
I’ve been carrying around a little leather bound copy of the collected poetry of John Keats. It’s a little smaller than a trade paperback (though larger than a mass market paperback). It’s a beautiful piece of art and not the sort they make anymore. Leastways, I only ever see such things for sale in used bookstores.
My mother-in-law and father-in-law have been in town and the latter and I have been spending a lot of time together.
I don’t speak much Thai and he doesn’t speak a great amount of English (though vastly more than my Thai), but we both like to get out and about and do things. We went to see some museums over the weekend (the Library of Congress’ Jefferson Building and the National Gallery of Art) and I carried that copy of Keats with me, on account of it fitting so nicely into a coat pocket and on account of it always being a good time to read good poetry. When moments presented themselves, I pulled it out, opened it to the section marked by the satiny ribbon, and read snippets of Endymion.
I do wonder that, as the e-books over take books, will books like my Keats come back? As physical books become as much objets d’art as anything else, will little, beautiful things like this come back into fashion? But will that also presage the end of something else? After all, don’t I love my collection of pulpy books, the symbol of a great error of mass publishing and also of mass reading?
Jack Gilbert Died
The poet, Jack Gilbert died. I picked up his Collected Poems after a local blogger recommended him.
Now, I feel kind of bad for not liking very much. Not disliking him nor feeling my time reading him wasted (or, at least, not too much). But just generally not ‘clicking.’ If it had been a first date, I wouldn’t have complained about her to my friends, but neither would I go out with her again.
So maybe I should give him another look, out of guilt. I think the book is still on the floor beside my bed.
They’re All Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
I’m talking about Seth Abramson’s reviews, of course! Nothing but awesome.
But I actually own one of them – Tao Lin’s Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy – and it blew me away (am I sounding like Seth here?).
If you want to know why conceptual and tricksy, flarf-sy poetry can be awesome, but don’t have the patience to read one of Kenneth Goldsmith’s patience testing tomes, check out Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. It has a weird emotional depth that’s hard to explain. And poems about hamsters.
the coffee philosopher 