summer song

In a summer of spearmint
& sinuous heat, books
dismantled on the hearth,
our heart beats one two
for an emergent emergency,
forms come from each plaint
of this chest & that.

Ain't got no Florida up in this grave, today. Great men perch along fenceposts with condors, buzzards, bald eagles,

& other connoisseurs of carrion.

Crawl at me like a Stutz Bear-Cat, Jim. Sum up the summer with a frothy refreshment.

What's black & white
& read all over?

A few months ago, it was a newspaper, & the answer was the answer to my daughter's favorite riddle, because she's only four & she'd never seen a newspaper until I showed her one last week.

"Daddy, that's not red!"

But it was.


Summer of Sharknado & Northeast heatwave. Summer my friend sent a book out into the world.

Summer of chest heaves & miniature donuts.

June was wet & melancholic,
July is hot & patriotic.
August will be august & sincere.


Sincerely, severely,

Anthony Robinson

Carmine Appice is on That Metal Show right now. He still looks exactly like he did 25 years ago. He wrote a drum tech column for Hit Parader or Circus--one of the big "rock and metal" magazines of the 1980s.

In 2003, in the baggage claim of the St Louis airport, I stood next to him and he looked exactly like you'd expect an aging rock star to look--or, specifically--how you'd expect Carmine Appice to look: skinny, dressed in black, sleeveless leather vest, 1970s Mick Ronson hair, *that mustache*.

I was there for poetry. He was there for rock and roll. I wanted to tell him I liked his music but I didn't know his music. I just knew that he was the drum guy in Circus magazine. And you know, he looked like that.

Don't go to St. Louis for poetry. Don't go there if you're looking for a Pepsi. Don't go there for a girl--really don't go there for that.

In my variously limited travels across our Great Nation, disappointing trips many, I try to find something notable or interesting to file away to tell someone about when I need small talk. In St. Louis, I didn't get a Pepsi, got burned by a girl, spent a weekend drunk on bourbon in a Ramada inn, ordering expensive room service and a strange form of pizza prevalent in St. Louis involving a crackery crust and a strange processed cheese, watching James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal on the cable television act out master and servant stuff, less sexy than stylized. So that's what I remember about STL. That and Sadam Hussein was found in a spider hole that weekend. And I wrote two poems. And at the reading I gave, the Indian kid from the spelling bee movie "Spellbound" was there. I don't know if he liked the reading.

NO OUTLET

Receding to brown: day
swept over precision attacks

my fan base is on board
as the last train leaves

& your heart is an expanse
of flowered bandwidth:

don't stop the crocus
or the golden finch

each part once embedded,
numbered, now pried loose

from the fence post
but I cannot push

the water through the gate.

BROADSIDES

I'm making broadsides of my poems (limited edition of 1). That's right--one poem per person, each poem different. I'll only make 25. First come, first served. It'll be autographed and printed on fancy paper. Five American dollars each. Paypal at antrobin AT gmail DOT com.

A SPRING DEVOTIONAL

I am a civil engineer on a crumbling bridge
that spans the lake near the house
where you used to live
growing up in a reed waste fine smooth things
to brighten the interior are spidering
away the life

*

I am a keep in a copse the woods
a reminder of bullets & forks while rattles
clamber outreach in a plastic gallows
forgetfulness does not excuse us rather from
the insides it redeems
giant rhododenron savior of back yards
split fences foment here a resolution
for the scarlet tanager
non-native solutions to overcome
this burgeoning prayerbook
how can we know how to live

THE BUILDER

I always look
for the birds
in your poems
she sd & I sd
this isn't text
speak this is
Creeley speak this
is Pound speak
& I sd watch out
all that etc.
but she smiled
& there was a bird
in my head & a bird
in my back pocket
& the world
was suddenly made
of bridges over low
rivers & these poems
your aviary

first new draft in nearly a month

Stop signs circum-
navigate my wife I mean
my life I

mean something was scurrying out
back in the alley last night &

I’m sure it was a raccoon
or a coal miner from another era, a Rural Indiana or something or

A call girl with many numbers, digitized Pi because how else
is it spelled? Thrushes fluffing, danced away

from bushes smoked out
with high school communications on high

said The President & The Prime
Minister indivisible but by one & himself

because we are on the brink of something huge
& largely insignificant:

These are days. Remember a sea
of six-year-olds—

Remember your spoon, your coffee cup,
your curlicue.

5-Minute Poem for Gregory Crosby

MATERIAL COMPONENTS

He is a “man
of substance”
they say but what
substance:
ichor, sluice,
& bitumen,
Trammeled, pilloried
slicks of …

*

Reflect
something un
toward, master
of no art,

holder, to some
degree, a handy
bit o’ something
human. Sounds
so dirty.

We have an inter
section, a vow I’ll meet
you at the second
staple, buried head-
down in the fold.

Another Five-Minute Poem

Here's another Five-Minute Poem, written for my friend, Jess H. I met Jess about 15 years ago. We were fast friends for several months. Then we had a falling out of sorts, a falling out that neither of us really remembers. Details are foggy and undetailed. No matter. We've recently reconnected. She's a single mom living in Memphis, and she sent me some Memphis coffee beans. I sent her this poem.


The South (ern California girl) Remembers

You are not a memory
but the realization

of a lapse some century
in the making, a bottle-
red explosion,

like a Chinese finger
trap, my song-filled trial
& error come back to haunt.

Some field makes a BBQ pit
you standing next & over
a page behind the stand-still.

Your child is crawling inside
the television not to escape
but to find a place to sit.

The world sings a fine motion
without words, smoke rings
making haloes around

the people over there, everyday
messengers who dress like us.

More of that Old Sincerity: The Origin Myth

From the archives of Geneva Convention, August 2005.

* * *

Some More Notes on the NS

We're here, some of us are queer, and we aren't going anywhere.

The New Sincerity had its genesis in December of 2004. It began when I met Andrew Mister in San Francisco's Tenderloin district and proceeded to drink him under the table. He lost concentration during our last couple of rounds as he was trying to chat up a girl at the bar. I maintained focus on drinking my beer and whiskey. A photo-documentary of this event lives in the archives. After drinking, I had Thai food at a nearby all-night eatery. I left Andrew at the bar.

We talked a lot of shit about poetry we didn't like between drinks. We also sang David Bowie's "Life on Mars," though we couldn't remember all the lyrics. We watched a drag show. We almost broke a table. We also talked about what we wanted in contemporary poetry. Frank O'Hara said that only a few poets were more interesting than the movies. We believe that only a few poets are more interesting than David Bowie. At least right now. We're hoping to pull a few more New Sincerists out of the closet, those who are afraid of losing post-avant cred, or appearing too sentimental. Sentimental means "relating to sentiment." Sentiment means "feeling." We feel, dig?

Before our drinking battle, we exchanged manuscripts. The next morning, hung over and sipping Emergen-C, we read the poems and discovered that each of us was the other's favorite new poet. We seemed to see eye to eye on matters poetical. We wrote the sorts of poems that we wanted to read. We continued our correspondence and friendship. We began to notice other poets who seemed to want the same things from contemporary poetry--Joseph Massey, Charlie Jensen, Reb Livingston, Gina Myers, Laurel Snyder. Jeff Bahr, though not a New Sincerist, photoshopped a NS teeshirt on himself. Josh Hanson criticized us. Lots of other people just don't care. So it goes.

The New Sincerity went public in the late spring and early summer of 2005. I began writing little blips about it on my blog. In early July of 2005, Joe Massey wrote a controversial manifesto. Since then, not a day in the blogosphere goes by without a mention of the NS. I like this. It means people are paying attention. Not everyone agrees with us and that is okay. There are a number of skeptics. That too is okay.

We are not going anywhere. But we promise not to take over your town.

Response to Adam Jameson and commenters.

Over at HTML Giant, A D Jameson continues his discussion of the old New Sincerity.  Or, more properly, his discussion of 2nd Wave "New Sincerity" as exemplified by Tao Lin, Matt Hart, etc.

I tried to post a comment to the thread, but my internet is hamster wheel-powered so sometimes things don't work.  So I'll try posting it here.  To read the original piece, go to HTML Giant.

Andy, Joe, and I didn't invent the term. Its origins are in music, architecture, and some other shit I don't remember.  And it wasn't leading anything--I think when Andy first suggested the term (to me, over beers, and not in any prescriptive way) he was talking about Joshua Beckman's book, the one with the poem "Block Island."  

Here's what happened.  In the summer of 2005, I was complaining on my blog about the poetic Latino Mafia that wanted me to write more poems about tortillas. I was also involved in a cross-blog conversation with Jonathan Mayhew concerning "period styles" of contemporary poetry. In a dashed-off post one afternoon I briefly talked about a few period styles, and joked that I should start or become part of The Tortilla School.   Then, as an afterthought I mentioned that Andy used the term "New Sincerity" to describe the sort of poetry we thought we were writing or that we admired in others.  

(He and I had just begun work on a series of poems that would be published as a chapbook by Boku Books in late 2005, called finally, "Here's To You" but at that point had the working title "Don't Get Me Started."  It no longer exists, as far as I know--I guess poems there could be seen as early examples of this particular strain of "New Sincerity."  We were clearly guided by Ted Berrigan, as the poems state.  And I have the pills and Pepsi to prove it.)

Part of what I was interested in at the time was using the "innovations" of the past generation(s) to write poetry that was more than irony or distrust of language.  There was of course, more to it, but that was where I had staked my little plot of ground.

A few posts followed my initial posts (mostly as responses to comment box comments).  Then in early July, Joe emailed me his Manifesto (which I believe he also posted on his Livejournal at the time).  We had a good laugh and thought that was it.   

I continued to blog about the newly minted "New Sincerity" throughout the summer, and Joe did the same from time to time in his live journal.  Andy didn't have a blog at the time. But he was still writing poems then--we all were. 

Here's an important point.  The main reason the NS became anything at all is that in 2005, poets read blogs.  Blogging was the main source of online poetry community.  Facebook, I think, really killed all that.  Without the blogging culture of the time, this wouldn't be an issue.

Finally, as I ramble, I'd like to refer back to the last sentence of the paragraph before the paragraph before this one.  The manifestos, the blog posts, all of that were, as you've noted, pretty ephemeral.  I'd like to think that if folks want to talk about the "NS" they'd look to the poems at the center of all the talk.  So far, that's not been done much--or, in my opinion, at least not enough.

Tony Robinson

**

Update @ 7:00 pm PDT:    Aaron Belz tweets:

@bluecanaryruth It does too still exist. Nice piece, Tony. twitter.com/aaronbelz/stat…

— aaron belz (@aaronbelz) June 5, 2012

post-Sincerity poetics found here

I have resisted making this a poetry blog mainly because nobody reads poetry blogs anymore.  They are like PDAs and pagers and 64 oz. bottles of malt liquor.

A dodo bird with a pager and half-gallon of Olde English?   Priceless.

*

But, I had this to say about this thing I saw:

In this paper, Jennifer Ashton, Professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, makes the common error of characterizing the New Sincerity (the short-lived "movement"--you decide if it's "fake" or not) as a reaction against Language Poetry. Of course it's nothing of the sort and a little research would have corrected this. It also would have complicated it, I suppose.

Thanks to Adam D. Adam D Jameson for directing me to this.

You know, they say the proof is in the pudding or something, and one thing I've noticed is that in the many papers that have been written about or that include the New Sincerity, the actual poetry of the originators is rarely invoked. Instead, the poet-critic invariably focuses on the work of what I'll term here (for the first time, I believe) Second Wave Sincerists. While the critic is free to do as he or she pleases, it seems that any serious study would want to examine all the documents available to them rather than cherry pick a few blog posts as an intro to talk about something else...

Socio-economics of Poesy, Pt. 1

About a dozen years ago, I ran into a now-famous poet in the poetry aisle of our local used bookstore.  Or rather, he ran into me.  I was paging through a copy of James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover when the fellow turned to me and began making small talk.  After a couple of moments he glanced down at the book in my hand and said, "Huh. James Merrill.  I won't read him.  He was a millionaire.  What does a millionaire know about life?"

*

Are there any poets you won't read because external details of the poet's life turn you off?  Besides Ezra Pound.

Still Here

I've been away for ten days for no reason in particular--all 3 of you who read this blog may have noticed.   Or maybe not.

*

Still working my through George R. R. Martin's Clash of Kings.  I'm almost finished and look forward to discussing it with Bennet.

*

It's been a pretty bleak week and a half here--a lot of slushy snow and rain.  We're in the midst of that long winter stretch that always brings on the doldrums.  That and my daughter's third birthday this past weekend have made for not a lot on my plate aside from brooding and too much sleeping.

*

All that said, I hope to get back to my Dream Songs discussion with Bennet over the next few days.  One of us is supposed to pick a poem to discuss next, though I'm not sure we are any further along in the process of setting down any actual "rules" than we were a week or ten days ago. If I have time this evening--or rather, inclination, I may attempt a look at Dream Song #28, one of the relatively few with an "actual" title:  "Snow Line."   Watch this space for it.

In the meantime, you can read my responses to Bennet's initial two posts in his comment boxes.

*

David Antin, Brief Weather, The "Writing Life" or Lack Thereof

I stumbled upon (and I urge you to take this figure of speech literally--if you could see my apartment at the time, you'd understand--400 square feet, two small bookshelves and over a thousand books makes literally stumbling over books a frequent occurrence) Conversation with David Antin, by David Antin and Charles Bernstein somewhere at the end of 2006 or beginning of 2007.   I had just finished something of a milestone year--both poetically and personally.  I didn't know when I picked it up that it would play a role in fundamentally altering my own "writing life."

I spent the spring of 2006 writing the poems that would eventually be collected in Brief Weather and I Guess A Sort of Vision; I began in March at the request of Betsy Wheeler, who accosted me at the Garden Party in Austin and asked to publish a book of mine.  Christ!  I guess I had to write a book.

The origins of that slim collection involve an airplane, my then-girlfriend Laura, and a book of sudoku puzzles.  There was also the now infamous make-out party in the Austin Hilton lobby, complete with stolen wine (I won't reveal what now-famous children's book author stole the wine by insisting on using me as a pack mule because I happened to be wandering around the Hilton with a backpack--but you can probably guess. It's okay--I don't feel guilty, as we were robbing the Poetry Foundation, at a "private party" that we just crashed).  There was the kindness of James Hall, who chauffered Laura and I around a bit.  There was the squalid apartment we spent four days in among piles of dirty beer cans, garbage, and a bathroom with one towel, one wet towel   There was the Nordic Venezuelan named Virgilio who spent the entire weekend locked away in a back room, drinking gallon jugs of Carlo Rossi and watching extreme sports videos.  There was The Princess Bride and the still-awful Star Wars Episode 1.  There was also the dissolution of my romantic relationship of the past year.  Yeah, that thing.

As soon as I returned to Oregon, I began writing every day, sometimes just a few lines; other days I'd knock out two or three drafts.  My method of working was very deliberate--each poem was made of nine lines, and they were assembled consecutively.   That is, I wrote each poem one line at a time, and line 2 always followed line 1.  There was no line re-shuffling allowed.  I'd often stop mid-poem to walk down the street for coffee, a journey that almost always involved being dive-bombed by starlings who resented my taking up residence in what was obviously their apartment.

I finished a batch of about 40 poems in around 6 weeks' time.  I sent them off to Betsy that summer, and she responded with extremely generous commentary, all handwritten and beautifully understated yet enthusiastic.  She focused her editorial chops into honing my 40 poems into a 27-poem machine.  This was expected, as the numerology of the project required 27 poems, no more no less. I published 8 of these poems prior to that in Court Green, under the dubious title "Aviary Evacuation Plan."  Betsy re-titled my collection Brief Weather..., which was a stroke of minor genius.  I had, at this point, ditched the bird title, and was leaning toward Cold Front which strikes me today as a terrible name for my little book. 

The book came out in November. I gave a single reading in Portland attended by very few people. I don't think a single person bought a book that night.  I lost my camera. I remember drinking a lot of wine.  Then I don't remember.

*

What I'm building toward here is the 3 year gap in my writing life that began soon after the book's publication and soon after I picked up Antin and Bernstein's book-length conversation.  By March of 2007, exactly one year after I'd begun the project, I had completed the FULL 81 poems--actually, there are a few stragglers in there...so closer to 90, but if it ever sees the light of publication, I will of course trim away nine of those bad boys.

And then I stopped.  I can't pinpoint when and how it all went down or why.  I just remember reading the give and take between Antin and Bernsteinn, and being thrown a bit for a not-unpleasant but still somewhat jarring loop. Antin's talk-poems and his discussion of his poetics and practice are all a bit dream-like in their logic but fiercely intelligent.  I got to the point where I began to think that if David Antin is a poet, I don't know if I want to be a poet.  I didn't know if I could be a poet any longer.

And then the vagaries of a life ill-lived invaded, happened. Suddenly I had new priorities, a new  relationship, a series of episodes (fits? brief respites from sanity?) of mental and emotional self-reckoning and evaluation.  Not only did I stop writing but I also quite reading poetry mostly (save the weekly editorial meetings at the NWR that were then, unbeknownst to most of us poetry editors, in their final days).  I quit sending poems out to editors.  I shut down.  And I was strangely okay with that.

Life came on full-strength and I was, for a time, a very destructive force.  (Wallace Stevens in his odd little poem, wrote that Poetry is a Destructive Force--he had a point.  It had turned me into a bitter, often resentful little person.) I hurt a lot of people, made a lot of mistakes, and then, inexplicably, was blessed with a beautiful daughter amidst all the madness, the general ickiness I had made my life.

That daughter, now almost three years old, is the reason I returned to writing.  I'm still in the nascent stages of my "re-arrival" onto whatever "scene" it is I have wandered into. Trying to figure it all out by writing through the pain and mess that still lingers, and yes, also the joy. Especially the joy.

I never quite manage to end where I began, but I try.  Here's David Antin:

             . . . i had always had mixed feelings

        about being considered a poet        "if robert lowell is a
        poet i don't want to be a poet         if robert frost was
        poet i don't want to be a poet        if socrates was a poet
            ill consider it"

Dreaming, I am.

What a way to start a book of poems, huh?

Are you ready to begin, Bennet?

pseudo-chapbook

I'm assembling most of the small poems I've written over the past year into a small collection.  And I'm posting some of them here.

So here's one.

*
SETTLERS

The world keeps opening and falling over,
spilling through something I can't identify,
can't countenance and yet cling to
because love has taken over my chest.

It's hard to breathe here but breathe we must
mon frere.   And you're not really my brother
but I don't think that's the point. The point
is this:            we can take it with us. 

Conventional wisdom is conventional because
frankly, it's stupid.   God laughs at people
like us.  Probably because we're not all
that smart.  Neither is she.   Probably.

If you were Neil Young and I were David Bowie
perhaps we'd make love in an alley, or fuck
on a pile of trash.  I think in this, we would
be at our most beautiful.

I was going to make this a sonnet but I'm way
over the line limit.  A piece of paper that
has been shot through with these words cannot,
in any way, make sense to the commoner.

We are not common.  We are dumb little people.
We've spent our collective life smiling
at other people less fortunate, if only because
we can.   I'll take a taxi cab to the next state.

Please don't follow me.  I'll only hurt you
and fuck your friends. Don't worry: I'll only
be dead as long as it takes for the ferry
to reach the next island. Then: trees, grain.

Challenging Readers: A Review of a Review: James Crews reviewing Wayne Miller in New Pages

In recent pages of New Pages, poet James Crews reviews Wayne Miller's The City, Our City (Milkweed Editions, September 2011) with a "critical" eye that manages to clumsily bypass the actual poetry and instead seems to proffer, once again, a very old argument about how and why poetry should do what it does and how a poet fails by being "inaccessible." (Which, in much poetry reviewing means "writing not like I do.")

[I should state outright that I haven't yet read Miller's book, and have only a passing familiarity with his work. Before enountering this review, I had never heard of James Crews but have learned through Google that he was born and educated in the mid-west, recently won a book prize of some sort, and now resides in Portland, Oregon, where he does something, I guess, to do with poetry. If there is any personal politics informing this review, I know nothing of them.  Similarly, as I have no association with either of these poets, my review here is based solely upon, well, the review I'm reviewing.  Still following?   I mention this because in future posts, I will be writing about poets and poetry with whom I have a personal connection or some personal stake--I'll note these connections when necessary.]

Crews begins with a declaration that, while appearing descriptive, is actually a prescription for what poetry should not do:

The principal aim of The City, Our City, [. . .] is to construct a difficult, philosophical poetics that most audiences will have trouble wrestling into meaning.

The assured tone here is admirable; the sentiment is not--not because it's empirically wrong in any sense, or not even because our reviewer presumes to know "the principal aim," or not even because it makes a sweeping assumption about "most audiences," but because it fails to communicate anything other than a vague disdain for a poetry concerned with the rather nebulous project of "difficult, philosophical poetics," that the equally nebulous readers collectively known here as "most audiences," will find too difficult. This is a sentiment that can't be empirically correct or incorrect, as it doesn't deal with concrete concepts, but abstract ideas that stand in for that which we find yucky. Dig? (I'll leave alone the slightly problematic use of the word "poetics" here to describe not "poetics" per se, but simply poetry.)

To put it another way, we have heard this argument before, and it is almost completely devoid of meaning, saying no more than poetry we don't like or can't make mean a certain way (our way, the normal way) is poetry to be avoided, or at least not worth much of our time. Crews proceeds to posit this imaginary audience as one that will not tolerate being "turned off," but may not mind being "unsettled" as long as there's a payoff. So far, our imagined readership here is a cipher, a null. What reader does like being turned off?  Part of this book's objective, we're told, is to almost turn off the fake readers, while unsettling perhaps a bit too much. I guess it does both.  And that's a real bummer.

Finally, Crews faintly praises Miller's "remarkable skill" and as an example, quotes a passage from a poem he deems "successful" because, at least in part, it "establish[es] a scene and context in which his [Miller's] talent begins to shine."  Less-than-adroit turn of phrase aside, this seems reasonable.   Here's the passage:

The sound of the wind--but the wind
has no sound, we hear
only the vibrations
of whatever it touches. How silent
this room would be
without the creaking trees...

My own first impression is that it recalls Stevens and early Ashbery, though stripped a bit of the mystery characteristic of say "The Snow Man" or "Some Trees."  Crews praises the language here because it "appeals to the ear" (whose ear, I ask?  I listen to Black Metal a fair amount of the time. My mother likes New Country) and "has the power to change how we think of something as simple as the wind." Okay, Crews.  Let's get this straight.  This language has "power."  Awesome.  I hate wimpy language. And it can change how we think about the wind.  Crews has never, it seems, been caught in a windstorm, or even noticed that an errant gust can indeed make trees creak, strip them of limbs, and so forth.   What Crews praises here is not the power of language to change anything but the fact that this language is quite direct--nothing here to think too hard about.  That might, after all, ruin our fun, unsettle us too much, and ultimately, turn us off.

He praises another piece because its title, "Those Boys," is "helpful" in indicating what the poem is about.  If only he had named ALL the poems so helpfully!  It might then even be suitable for your mother's book club.

Crews finally turns to the real work of the review which is to show all the ways in which Miller's poems do not work, the myriad strategies they employ in a deliberate attempt to turn off the imaginary reader.  In a preface to a section of a (watch:  this is important) poem that is untitled and "illogically broken up," Crews bemoans the inspecificity of it all.  This poem has no title, and it fails to "locate readers in a specific time and place" and the sky is falling but you forget to pencil in the sky! To disrupt, he helpfully reminds us, one first must establish stability.  (In this case, I guess this would start with giving the poem a title.)  Then, he says, the poet may stray.  Before I turn to that poem, I'd like to point out this observation he makes a paragraph earlier about a poem he does like, one he calls a "gorgeous, affecting elegy, which stays with the reader."  The poem places the speaker and his father in a large city, and, Crews tells us "Miller does not even need to specify the place here [. . .] he creates a vast literal and emotional landscape."  Mmmmkay.  And a bit later he sternly instructs us:  "Writers cannot have it both ways [!]" (overenthusiastic punctuation mine).

The poem ultimately fails because the reader isn't told which city this is, can't tell if it actually exists (London?) or is fictional (Mordor?).  Oh, and some of the poems are allusive. Some of them have notes. (Insert groan and sigh here.)  Crews looks out for the little guy when he opines that most readers, even avid readers of poetry, won't have the patience to read the notes simply to understand the poem. And, you know, the notes aren't all that good anyway.  We are still left "scratching our heads."

So I've tried to cobble together a rough crib sheet for Crews' anti-philosophical poetics.  Think of it as A Few Donts for an Imagiste, a century later.

1. Don't be philosphical. Whatever that actually means.

2. Names, people!  Titles.  Poems with titles, good.  No titles, bad.

3. Places.  See 2 above.  Disregard this rule if your poem is about your dad.

4. Your language should have the "power to change!"

5. The poem must not successfully resist the intelligence.  In fact, it should require very little intelligence. And please don't bore the reader with notes, references, allusions.  "The reader" has been at work all day, his feet are killing him, and he needs to get dinner on the table by 6 pm.

6. Address, whenever possible, other poets condescendingly by referring to them by way of backhanded compliments.  For example, "young writer" is a good one.  This is really fun if you are actually younger than the poet you're reviewing.

7. Disregard #6 as it is really a handy tip not for the poet but for the reviewer.

8. Five O' Clock shadow is always sexy.

*

I could go on.  I could conjure some clumsy metaphors about frozen food vs. homemade pot pies, or draw parellels between James Crews and Simon Cowell.   Instead, I'll end with two quotes.  The first is the entire final paragraph of the review.  The second is, (thanks John B. for looking these up), a pair of lines by James Crews himself.

*

One hopes that, in future volumes, Miller will find ways of including more readers by crafting poems that are both accessible and complex, both heart-wrenching and intellectually astute at the same time. A poet need not be obscure or detached to make work that challenges readers. He can choose to invite us into a piece, to share the wonder of experiencing our world more deeply.

*


Her mouth pondered the sweet crush of wet grass
as I approached.

--James Crews, "Palomino"

Poet Career Watch 2012

In these partly sunny days of stutter and fumble, of graceful recoveries, of 53 year old Madonna, poets are still having poet careers.

Yesterday's sporting event had commercials.   Now our poets are writing copy for multi-million dollar advertisements for the automotive industry.  OUR. Use your pronouns wisely.  It's OUR country, kids.

Perhaps this is a future model for young poets. Face it--very few practitioners, famous relatives or not, are going to make a living doing this.  Get on TV as often as you can, even if it's just a crowd shot. Play bit parts in film. Write slogans for the Edsel. Wedge your profile into national magazines; if you have a semi-lurid and or titillating story about a famous dead person, by all means, serve it forth.

Another for the New Sequence

Poem as Tentative Question, Derivative, Annotation on Youth

We are not driven to belief by sadness,

but to sadness by belief, that

occupier on the broken rock wall

that limns a village, two or three young people

gather, mill, outliers in a land of bright plastic,

in this world of coffee cups, zip drives,

& too many fighter jets. Or not enough fighter

jets—it's become so hard

to tell: to tell anything anymore is a grave &

heavy program. Ochre sun, beleaguered former

General, tell me what we need to further wind

down that corridor, what happens in the hazard

lanes. My daughter doesn't ask these questions;

she doesn't have to yet, but it's raining

down to broken. Visibility at an all time nothing

but “I told you so,” & “just shut up and hold on.”