Just a quick note to tell you that if you haven't read or aren't currently reading James Tate's "Memoir of the Hawk," than you're dumb.

Dummy.

I'm kidding, but you should read this book. I haven't read enough of Tate to say that this is the definitive collection in his body of work, but just reading this book you get the sense that he was firing on all cylinders here. No poem seems, well, almost no poem, is easily overlooked...feels like something you've seen before. By this time Tate's shtick is well known: the crafting of odd or alternate universes out of everyday phrases and places. However, I do think of this book as being the essential example of that ideal.

Anyway, I gotta go to work.