I feel a bit more explanation is due...I was actually on my way to check it out one last time before I graduated when I bumped into a friend and absentmindedly walked out of the library. As we all know, in most cases an alarm would have gone off, only this day it didn't. I was in my car before I even realized I still had it in my hands. And, as I was the only person to have checked the book out since it began circulating in 1976...I just kept it.

Am I bad person? I kind of feel like I am...

Microwavable Review: Brandon Shimoda's "The Inland Sea"

The Inland Sea is 450 km (280 mi) long from east to west. The width from south to north varies from 15 to 55 km (9.3 to 34 mi). In most places, the water is relatively shallow. The average depth is 37.3 m (122 ft); the greatest depth is 105 m (344 ft). It is also the kick-ass new chapbook by Brandon Shimoda.

Beautifully written, the book basically comes down to this: Shimoda's poems fill in the steps left between our history and our present. Well, specifically his history and his present, but the desire to do so is quite universal. Shimoda's book begins with the recognition that we often know nothing of ourselves/our fore-bearers, and what we do know is usually the Sparknotes version, and that this is unacceptable: "makes no difference in times like these/ without bothering to unfold the map/ or take it from its sleeve..." From this point, Shimoda is writing a history worthy of the circumstances.

The nuts and bolts of the book are just as equally admirable. These poems, like the stories they tell, are reconstructions, much like that second set of instructions that come with LEGO sets. The pieces are all still there, and what they make is something new, but acutely familiar. There are little rhythmic runs in the poems that remind us of Coleridge. There are bits that read like haiku. There is even some flash fiction thrown in for good measure. What's significant about this though, is the emphasis it puts, purposefully or not, on how we express narratives, and perhaps more so, the weight we put on one type over another: What makes a credible narrative?

Shimoda's book is full of very beautiful things, even the tragedy of atomic warfare is made beautiful, as can be seen in the poem, IRRADIANT, "In one week from now/ you will be seen anew/ though the light will catch/ you incorrectly." Many poets color violence in pretty shades of pink and yellow in order to talk about it, but Shimoda ups the game not by simply making it prettier, no, he goes out and makes it more interesting. The result? We stop and consider these events all the more. We make them ours. Their effects becoming a part of our consciousnesses, our lives.

Well played, Brandon Shimoda, well played...

Sometimes I take pictures when I walk my dog. Some guy talking to himself threw me a strange look last night when I was taking these. I have shaky hands (all the amphetamines) and have to set the camera down so I can get non blurry pictures. I bet that does look weird. Especially since I have my dog with me, and she doesn't like taking pictures.

I hope no one minds me throwing up my sad and worried pictures here. If I can get into the habit, I might start a separate blog for them, but in the time being...your welcome.

Flurry. Blurry. Slurry.

It's snowing right now. It's also November, so it still seems quaint. Come March this story will have a completely different ending...

I drank, and am currently still drinking, too much coffee this morning. You know how I know? My stomach is making sleepy cow noises...or horny cow noises, maybe. I don't know much about cows. But I did draw this picture of a cow. I know a lot about cow meat. When I was younger, and my parents made the grand claim as to having bought half a cow, I started wondering about halving cows. I came to the conclusion that the only fair way to halve a cow is to go right down the middle. I found out later that the halving of cows is not that exact of a science; it's not like splitting a soda. It turns out it's more like splitting a Popsicle...

So, I live in Chicago...proper. I've been downtown only once in the last 6 weeks. Is this weird? I mean, I can see downtown from my house, but then, I guess you can see downtown from Indiana, so I guess that doesn't hold water... Anyway, I think the combination of being both poor and lazy has made downtown a bit of a hassle. Do you live in Chicago? Do you go downtown much?

I watched Jodi Foster's "Home for the Holidays" last night. I think that might be the greatest holiday movie ever. It represents, perfectly, that mix of dread and excitement we all have about going home... It's like when you screw up at work and then spend the next few days praying nobody notices; it's only good when it isn't bad.

I've been reading, rereading in some cases, the poetics anthology, "20th Century American Poetics." It was the last book I "previewed" when I was still teaching. If I ever teach again I think I'm going to use this book. It's range is broad, covering the Modernists, Post-Modernists, and people in between and after, but it's focus is direct. Here's a secret: I love modernists. My favorites in this collection are Williams, Pound and Moore. Stevens, I think, comes across as a little dry. Too dry. Jack Spicer's bit on performance is great, and I would have loved to have seen him screaming his poetry in a bar.

Speaking of Spicer. Have I ever told you about the letters to James Alexander of his in jubilat 5? They are amazing. I'm on my 3rd copy of that magazine. I keep giving it away. Well, lending it out and never getting it back. I wonder if these letters will be in his collected. Do you know? Will they? I hope so... These letters taught me the importance (for me and my poetry) of content over form, and how to write love poems in a non-Romantic world.

My new bio: B.J. Love makes spreadsheets. He also manipulates them. He shares this relationship with many other things as well; facts, sandwiches and poems. His poems are often good, though more frequently, not good enough. As a child he stole candy. As an adult he pleads the 5th.

The Science of Museums

Okay, so I've said this before, but I think Johannes Gorranson is going to change the way poetry functions in academia.

As of today there are two truths to contemporary poetry: One, it is an active, practiced art form relegated to the academic pursuit of literary study, or English Departments, meaning that poets write in the same places they study, which, by proxy alone, stunts creative possibilities/desires. Two, it burdens the "teaching" of poetry with teaching, a mandated curriculum that must be approved by heads of departments, that is often too instructional and controlled and often times functions more as an apprenticeship rather than a space to grow a distinct voice. Donald Hall has written about this many times over the years, as have others, but Gorranson is one of the first to offer remedies, or in the very least, the beginnings of remedies.

He says:
One way to move beyond this impasse is to pose student-centered, problem-based challenges, in which student have to read up on poets and writers in order to solve a problem in their own ways, based on their own views and interests. For example, you give them a bunch of ideas about performance and some performances and you leave it to them to figure out what a performance should do and how to do that. The teacher is according to this model more of a guide and less of an authority who imparts knowledge. But you have to abandon the set idea of what good poetry (or craft, form) is.

The problem he poses in that last sentence is a formidable one and the question that arises from it is kung-fu master in nature: How does one teach without teaching? I think in many cases the answer can be found in the workshop.

In workshops we are encouraged to get the "bottom" of things, and then we are told what that bottom is, what effective criticism is, therefore, and as Gorranson mentions in his post, a single set of issues is continually brought up and the author then trains him/herself to write around those issues. Nobody likes harsh criticism, or criticism at all come to think of it, and whenever confronted with it, we do whatever we can do to avoid it, becoming creatures of a pattern, all cut from the same cloth.

I really like Gorranson's decision to throw a bunch of successful examples out in front your students (whether you like them or not), and let them decide for themselves. I appreciate what my writerly education gave me, but all I read was Marilyn Hacker and I hated Marilyn Hacker from day one, but was constantly given her to read as an example of what poetry should strive to be. I didn't want to be that and most of the criticisms I received throughout that time were regarding control. I learned control, but hated my poems...

Anyway, talk about rambling...

Influences...Books...and more

Here's the "final" list of schools I'm applying to:

1. Iowa
2. UMass Amherst
3. Arkansas
4. Illinois
5. Minnesota
6. Brown

It's been a long, not so awesome week...bits & pieces

The morning following the election was kick-ass. Everything else pretty much sucked, like a drafty window sucks, or your freezer as it tries to re-compress itself.

Here a few things that don't suck:

• Justin Marks' interview here. Though his aesthetics make me feel derivative, they are everything I want my press to be.
• Speaking of my press, I've thrown a bit of coal onto the fire and am now working on layout and design. It's all very primordial, but I'm hoping have something ready to ship for the holidays.

• I've started reading Ted Berrigan's Collected Poems. A smattering of my favorite lines thus far: "Her rule was grand it twists like a boulevard." "This man hates his aunt so he licks her feet/Laughing at her brilliant comas of goo..." "Tear down your undies let me see some lunch..." The best thing about Berrigan that I've realized is his preference to use words as an artistic medium...thoroughly. He will often place words in his poems in a very atmospheric manner, their function and existence not based solely on the advancement of a textual meaning; like a splash of read on an otherwise dark canvas, they are there to cause separation from the text, or to realign your focus, or both (think flying over the city you live in).

All for now...

Context, Content, Puptent, Blatent

I read this today in The Smithsonian and it reminded me, not so much of the outcome of Frank Stanford's Estate, but of the circumstances surrounding it:

Much Ado About Dickinson
Amherst, Massachusetts—For decades after Emily Dickinson's death in 1886 at age 55, her family battled over her literary legacy. "My Verse Is Alive," an exhibition at the Emily Dickinson Museum through 2009, brings the feud to life.

Dickinson, who never married, left behind nearly 1,800 unpublished poems. The family entrusted them to her brother Austin's wife, Susan, but she was slow to edit them. It was Austin's mistress, a young neighbor named Mabel Loomis Todd, who first arranged to publish some of the poems, in 1890. The ensuing family dispute, fueled by the scandalous affair, created bitterness for generations. By the 1960s, Todd's heirs had transferred about half of the works to Amherst College and Dickinson's had given the rest to Harvard. Even "ordinary town residents seemed to take sides" in the flap, says museum director Jane Wald. "Strong loyalties persisted into the 1990s."

Founded in 2003, the museum includes the 1813 Federal-style residence where the poet lived and Austin's house next-door. At Emily's, pore over photographs, scrapbooks and replicas of manuscripts and letters. Here, too, is the typewriter Todd used to transcribe and edit the poems. It's haunting to visit where the poet worked—a corner bedroom as spare as her verse, reflecting perhaps the "solitude of space....that polar privacy" she wrote about in an 1855 poem....

I don't know the details of the C.D.Wright/Ginny Stanford relationship, but it occurs to me that this might be a reference in which to begin speaking about it, i.e., the complexities of intellectual estates and how ownership of these properties can sometimes overshadow the work itself and how the executors of said estates can develop extremely personal relationships with the work, perhaps even more so than what they had with the actual person.

I think it also speaks to the real life blurriness of the lines between creative control and profiteering (think 2pac), and creative control and hording. Though it's easy to dig up plenty of these examples, one that seems to be working quite well is Ronald Johnson/Peter O'Leary; Johnson's work is readily available and the reasoning behind that seems, at least to me, to be simply to keep Johnson's work readily available (great forward to Johnson's "Knitting Poems" in jubilat 12).

Granted, being a literary executor can become a life's pursuit all on its own, and granted, it means being able to overcome the emotional connection with the art in order to become a student of it, and granted, you would thereby lose a good portion of your personal connection to the artist, but it seems to me that there is no shortage of interest in Stanford's work (nor has there been in some time). So, one must ask why, and I think this story regarding Dickinson helps to shine some light on the subject.

Election Day Pt. 3

Walking the dog as almost President-Elect Obama's neighbor

Election Day Pt. 2

Election Day Pt.1

I was uploading these pictures as the Obama's motorcade went by. I voted after Louis Farrakhan and before Obama. This is a weird neighborhood. These helicopters watched me vote. Now I must go to work...

Post Halloween/Pre Election Hangover

In case you missed it, Halloween was this weekend. My wife painstakingly created a spot-on Veruca Salt costume. She asked me to go as Mike TV. I instead went as our nation's next president, Baracktimus Prime...he seems to have the electorate convinced that what we need, in times like these, is a tranformer.

I also finally got around to reading Daniel Borzutzky's "The Ecstasy of Capitulation." There is something to be said about the use of the non-vital line as a space-maker in poems. That's not to say that the poems in this collection are riddled with wasted lines, but much like the asides we use in conversation to buy us a bit of time, there are lines in his poems that seem to give you a bit of breathing room, a chance to collect your thoughts. The main praise I can heap on this book though, is that its funny. And unlike many satires this day and age, Borzutzky's satire is cutting, but only to make pieces bite sized and a little easier to swallow.

There are new issues of DIAGRAM and FOU up.

Tomorrow, I'll be voting at the same polling place as the Obama's. I think I might just hang around until they show up. I'll probably chat it up with the homeless guys that sit in front of that church, they think I'm funny, but not because I try. Anyway, I'll be glad when this whole thing is over. Real glad. I woke up this morning to a helicopter hovering above my building and it wasn't one of those silent ones from "Conspiracy Theory."

Series A is this week. So is Dr. Joshua Marie Wilkinson's Chicago Poetry Convocation. You should probably make plans for at least one, and if I might try to persuade you, the CPC has a free lunch.