Black Mondays: worst decisions of the Supreme Court

from the book log (1/8/89):

Black Mondays: worst decisions of the Supreme Court by Joel D. Joseph, foreword by Justice Thurgood Marshall

I didn’t find [all of] Joseph’s choices equally horrendous but some were undoubtedly spine-chilling.

The International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) chose to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by refusing to unload Soviet goods. An American company which imports Russian wood sued for loss of business. The Supreme Court awarded the company several million dollars to be paid by the ILA. Joseph likens ILA’s boycott to the Boston Tea Party. He gets all puffed up about how there wouldn’t have been a revolution if not for the Boston Tea Party. I didn’t really get the connection. From what I understand about the Boston Tea Party, it was a symbolic violent act that we can all point to and say, “Ah! Something happened!” but it didn’t really have much effect. The Boston Tea Party was violent and would be illegal if it happened today. The boycott of tea by the population brought more results. People just didn’t buy tea for a while because the taxes were so high. I’m not sure the analogy is the appropriate one. I need some clarification as to why the Supreme Court’s decision was so terrible.

The book also contained, very appropriately, the 1986 Georgia sodomy decision in all its awful glory. I think I’ll photocopy the pages.

Thurgood Marshall in his foreword says, “I [do not] find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the framers particularly profound … the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights we hold as fundamental today.” He says, “We the People,” for instance, didn’t mean black men or any women. He contends that the framers’ motives really weren’t too pure. Joel Joseph disagrees some, and in his introduction calls the Constitution “an excellent document.” [Joseph] says, “Most of the problems cited by Justice Marshall stem from those whose duty it is to interpret the Constitution.” He calls for some reforms: “A Constitutional amendment providing for judicial terms of ten years (with five years of additional salary for retirement or for a buffer period) would give judges independence while injecting new energy into the judiciary. An excellent judge could serve ten years at the district court level, ten at the appellate level, and ten at the Supreme Court. No judge would be allowed to be reappointed at the lower two levels. At the Supreme Court reappointment would be reasonable because the Senate exercises careful monitoring of the highest court.” [On the other hand because] the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ is violated by the [way] U.S. Senat[ors are elected, Joseph] propose[s] “the Senate be kept to one hundred [members, with] each state getting at least one.” The other 50, he says, should be apportioned by population. New York would get eight, say, while Wyoming would have to be happy with its one.

Ralph Ginzburg, in an early ‘60s case, ended up going to prison for eight months because he sent through the mails material (magazines) the Supreme Court decided were obscene, were pornography. One book he was convicted for distributing had, before being offered to the general public, been sold to “medical and psychiatric professionals.”

In another chapter Joseph says Congress should amend the postal law so that non-profits & individuals aren’t breaking the law when they put unstamped letters, notes or pamphlets in private mailboxes. He says, as to door-to-door salesmen, cities should not be able to prohibit them tho’ private citizens should be able to post “NO SOLICITORS” signs & expect these to be respected.

He says the Dred Scott decision (keeping the man & his family slaves) helped lead to the Civil War.

And Plessy v. Ferguson. Hmph. It still rankles that Chris & Julie think the Supreme Court justified in their decision. [Chris & Julie were American friends I hung out with on the London trip.] Plessy was arrested when he refused to vacate a “white” railcar. He was 1/8 black. Blacks were allowed to ride in white cars if they were “nurses” of white children. The railways disliked the laws because segregation was “inconvenient and expensive,” Joseph says. Plessy’s lawyer called this Jim Crow law “obnoxious to the fundamental principles of national citizenship, perpetuates involuntary servitude … under the merest pretense of promoting the comfort of passengers on railway trains.” The Supreme Court majority, in its ruling, cited as precedent a decision made before the Civil War.

Then there’s the awful Korematsu case in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of the Gov’t to intern the Japanese Americans.

And the Court’s rulings against the rights of women, even though the Constitution nowhere makes a distinction between male and female. Hm. “one man, one vote”?

A horrible case in 1987: the Creighton family, says the Court, can’t sue the government for barging into & searching their home, assaulting them, all without a warrant, supposedly (tho’ not actually) in hot pursuit.

Joseph ends with the sterilization of Linda McFarlin/Sparkman who got it done without even knowing it (Mom told her it was an appendectomy); and the cases of servicemen dying of cancer who aren’t allowed to sue the government.

A good book.

from the diary (1/10):

I memorized the first four amendments to the U.S. Constitution the other day when I was reading Black Mondays: Worst Decisions of the Supreme Court. The book reprints the Constitution at the end. I finished the book with Peanuts [the cat] in my lap, and he was settled so nicely I dint have the heart to disturb him so I decided to memorize the Bill of Rights. I only got so far as the 4th Amendment & a phrase from the Fifth. I still remember them! How long will it last?

Remarkably I have retained the Second Amendment all the years since. “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” I did not have to look it up, and, yes, I got it right. I think what kept it in my head was the precondition of the “well-regulated militia” to the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” How did this get interpreted to mean otherwise? Cue Joel Joseph: “Most of the problems cited by Justice Marshall stem from those whose duty it is to interpret the Constitution.”

word of the day: enfeoff

context: “There is nowhere to be found in the … present day the kinds of loyalty shown by Tokugawa Hidetada, who on the strength of a firm commitment made in his youth, enfeoffed anew Tamba Nagashige after he was vanquished at the Battle of Sekigahara; or by Naoe Shigetsugi, who remained true to Uesugi Kagekatsu to the very end.”

from a letter by Iwata Jun’ichi, August 20, 1931

definition from OxfordDictionaries.com: (Under the feudal system) give (someone) freehold property or land in exchange for their pledged service.

I’m not so much interested in the definition as in the look. Those three Fs! It feels a little weird in the mouth, too. Oh, according to the list of words with which “enfeoff” rhymes listed at Oxford you don’t pronounce the O. Tsk. Rhymes with beef, belief, brief …

So let’s see if I have this right. The lord, Tokugawa Hidetada, reups the contract of military commander Tamba Nagashige despite leadership that resulted in a rout at some big battle. The lord felt committed to the soldier out of a commitment the lord “made in his youth.” As Iwata refers to this connection in the context of a discussion of homosexuality one might suppose there is a close personal component to that youthful commitment. Whether this heart entanglement led the lord to a poor military decision or if it turned out okay in the end (thanks, love, for getting a word in!), I don’t know. I tried a little light Google research and I’m afraid I don’t feel much more illuminated. Hidetada seems to have had a mixed career after the Battle of Sekigahara but keeping on a defeated military commander wasn’t determinative. So far as I could tell.

source: Partings at Dawn: an anthology of Japanese Gay literature edited by Stephen D. Miller

“there’ll be plenty of time to die in if it comes to that”

Once you understand you can kill yourself whenever you want to, or imagine you’ll find the guts for it when necessary, time ceases to exist and something strange happens. A lifetime seems both too long and too short at the same time. That’s when you realize there’ll be plenty of time to die in if it comes to that, and you learn to tough it out. [Choosing not to kill myself] sounds like solid existential resolve now, but in fact it was cowardice. When I couldn’t pull the trigger, I had to convince myself that living actually took more courage than quitting the game. … I couldn’t think of what I needed to do for myself, and I struggled with the knowledge that I was always going to be alone because I couldn’t figure out what it took to be with another person. The idea of spending the rest of my life without love was killing me. Still, this wasn’t a serious suicide attempt, it was just pushing myself in that direction to see if it made any more sense than the terminal isolation … [A]nxiety and panic attacks [had] followed me into my thirties, and … sometimes drove me to extremes of despair.

That’s Stephen Zanichkowsky writing in his memoir. The skills he developed for coping with an unhappy childhood did not transfer well to adulthood. He got Depressed. It’s not a good place to be in, Depression. If you feel trapped in it, the only way out may seem to be the permanent ending.

Zanichkowsky talks about “courage” in the passage above. “I had to convince myself that living actually took more courage than quitting the game.” He means that the better course is the more courageous? Nobody wants to be thought a coward, even in the grave. “[B]ut in fact [choosing not to kill myself] was cowardice,” he says in the sentence preceding. Courage and cowardice come up frequently in discussions of suicide.

Is it more courageous to live? Or more cowardly?

In the passage I quoted by Chris Stedman last year, the young Stedman also decided not to kill himself. He also talked about cowardice: “I couldn’t will myself to go through with it. I was too afraid.” Unlike Zanichkowsky, Stedman then lists a few things of which he was afraid: “of the selfishness of this act and how my family would react to it; of the physical pain involved; of failing at this, too; but most of all of the fate I was sure would greet me after death.”

Zanichkowsky says he no longer considered himself Catholic and was more bemused by his mother’s fear for his eternal soul (endangered by suicide, you know) than bothered by the notion of a nasty afterlife. Stedman says the afterlife was what scared him most of all. I’ve contemplated suicide; post-death punishment by God has never been a factor in my decisionmaking.

But the opening sentences in the Stephen Zanichkowsky passage say something I don’t recall having heard discussed elsewhere:

Once you understand you can kill yourself whenever you want to, or imagine you’ll find the guts for it when necessary, time ceases to exist and something strange happens. A lifetime seems both too long and too short at the same time. That’s when you realize there’ll be plenty of time to die in if it comes to that, and you learn to tough it out.

Contemplating suicide can be empowering. If you have given yourself permission to kill yourself, you realize you have power, the power to destroy, the power to end all the pain, but, most curiously (for one feeling powerless in the throes of Depression), the power to decide for yourself and the power to act. You will die some day anyway. If the ultimate choice is yours, other options, which may have seemed bad, now just seem different. Different choices. “A lifetime seems both too long and too short at the same time.”

source: Fourteen: growing up alone in a crowd by Stephen Zanichkowsky

Arrowsmith

Sinclair Lewis is better known for Babbit and Elmer Gantry than for Arrowsmith. But I’d heard of him and what I’d heard was good and when you’re picking through the paperbacks and dust-jacket-less hardcovers at the library book sale in Sebastopol you’re faced with a lot of sway-spined best sellers which usually aren’t any good so you choose an author with a rep when you offer up your fifty cents for the good work the Friends do.

So there on the home bookshelf sat the acquisition, taking up the space unread books take up, potential, seemingly limitless opportunity to get around to it, space that might (who knows?) be better used.

The book log entry for Arrowsmith is longer than most. The first paragraph gives a thumbnail of the plot, from beginning to end. It’s not till the second paragraph that one gets to my discontents.

from the book log (1/8/89):

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

This novel took a while to read. And not, I think, just because it is over 400 pages in length. Martin Arrowsmith becomes a doctor during the course of the novel, marries Leora. He attends medical school in the state of Winnemac, goes to practice as a country doctor in Leora’s hometown, Wheatsylvania in “the Dakotas,” moves on to the medium-sized city of Zenith where he works for the Dept of Public Health, on to Chicago for a year as a pathologist in an expensive private clinic, on to New York where he works at the McGurk Institute, a scientific research institute, under the guidance of his old medical school teacher, “pure” scientist, and minor demi-god Max Gottlieb. Martin, Leora, & Sondelius, a worldwide crusader against epidemics, go to the Caribbean island, St. Hubert, to defeat the plague with bacteriophage. Leora dies; Sondelius dies; back in NYC Martin is acclaimed, marries the very rich Joyce Canyon (who was also on St. Hubert during the plague). Eventually Arrowsmith chucks it all to go back to “pure” research in the wilderness with colleague Terry.

The edition also includes an Afterword by Mark Schorer. He calls the ending, “a little fantastic … and quite unpersuasive.” I agree. I thought Martin a boob. I liked him some, found him at least interesting enough to want to know what would happen next. But his addiction to “scientific method” in the midst of the plague was never adequately explained — because the experiments were not perfect [the researchers] couldn’t tell [whether] the bacteriophage was really what was curing people. Yet [sick people] were doing a pretty good job of being cured. This reminds me a bit of the conflict over AIDS treatment. When we’re talking terminal illness, making noises about imperfect controls — meaning some people are not given treatment, treatment is actively withheld — seems pretty ridiculous. No experiment is going to be perfect because there are always going to variables that aren’t considered. If it helps, isn’t that what matters? Even if it just seems to help, that’s important too. My favorite character was Leora. I dint think Martin deserved her. She did annoy me in being rather vacant. I didn’t find Gottlieb as sympathetic as he was supposed to be.

In my recent visits to Sebastopol I’ve found some decent items on the Friends sale table.

Cocteau Twins. Blue Bell Knoll

from the diary (1/5/89): “bought a copy of The Cocteau Twins’ latest Blue Bell Knoll, which was in the used file at the Last Record Store [in Santa Rosa].”

from the book log (1/6/89):

Cocteau Twins. Blue Bell Knoll, a record album

I bought this a few days ago and enjoy playing it. Little of it is danceable, which is one of my big points for buying music, but once I put it on I usually end up sitting down and reading. The music flows around and through me. I like it. It’s not just mood music, but it’s very atmospheric.

Now that music so easily surrounds one, no need to get up and go to the turntable, and now that I can afford it in a way I certainly couldn’t in 1989, I’m more eager for variety than for the one song that makes me spin. Not that I still don’t love a song that gets me on my feet.

In my London semester I made the acquaintance of another gay student, also an American attending in the AIFS program. He liked Cocteau Twins. I said I liked Cocteau Twins, too.

"Cico Buff" is one of the songs from Blue Bell Knoll:

Bill Moyer’s World of Ideas: interview with Vartan Gregorian, librarian of NYPL

from the book log (1/6/89):

Bill Moyer’s World of Ideas. Interview with Vartan Gregorian, chief librarian of the New York Public library. Program on PBS, aired on KQED channel 9, San Francisco.

Excellent interview, one of the best half hours I’ve seen on television — recently, at least! Gregorian is an educator. One idea he advances — class (year-long) with five instructors, like Intro to Cosmos with Astronomer, Biology instructor, Geologist, Historian, etc., exploring the origins of & implications of the Universe. [Gregorian] stressed that with information doubling every five years, a four-year university education can only introduce the world to a student. We need the mental traffic cops to keep there from being informational gridlock in our brains. With ideology & creed falling apart around us we need a clear introduction to how different cultures, peoples, creeds, ideologies have solved problems, have approached the world, have ordered the Universe.

The Vartan Gregorian interview is available online at pbs.org.

Gregorian (from the PBS transcript): “Suppose we taught the history of World War II. Not how American diplomatic historians see it, but European diplomatic, Soviet diplomatic and Asian diplomatic. Suppose they argue about their methodology, archival sources, and this and so forth. Students will not be brainwashed or influenced. Students have to be exposed to varieties, possibilities, but also not to say everything is relativistic, but rather there is common endeavor to honestly seek the truth in order to learn from history.”

I wonder if he ever put the multiple teacher class idea into practice.

Gregorian also asks, if we find humans on Mars, “has Christ risen for them?”

X-Factor #9

from the book log (1/6/89):

X-Factor #39

Ah, God! The end of this INFERNO storyline at last! It has been much too drawn out. Chris Claremont, author of the X-Men is superior to Louise Simonson, writer of X-Factor #39. This issue was just another long fight scene — haven’t we had enough of these? It is revealed that Mr. Sinister did vile things to Scott Summers (Cyclops) back when Scott was newly orphaned. Mr. Sinister may have run an orphanage, but it wasn’t cuz he was a nice guy. The revelations seem absurd rather than revealing. Glad this is over.

*

Have we had enough fight scenes? In a superhero comic? This was rhetorical question?

I’m put in mind of the review of the latest episode of the TV series Gotham that appears in Paste. Eric Walters says, Despite the “stiff acting, subpar writing, [and] overabundance of characters, [Gotham] is worth hanging around for.” A true fanboy!

OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian & Gay Quarterly, Fall 1988

from the book log (1/6/89):

OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian & Gay Quarterly, Fall 1988

The cover story is about the art of Tom of Finland. I’ve been uncomfortable with pornography/erotica for a long time. Because it is so unrealistically idealized, I was distressed by Tom of Finland’s work. Yet if I’m going to be honest I must say that not only is he an accomplished artist, his drawings turn me on. I don’t look like any of the guys who populate his drawings and have no hope of looking like one of them at any future time. It bugs me that I’m turned on by these guys.

This was not my favorite issue of OUT/LOOK, but it did have some good stuff. A very good analysis by Steven Epstein of how our world view, our view of ourselves as a “gay community” or as “polymorphously perverse” reflects on the battle against AIDS. The gay community provides support and organization and enthusiasm and togetherness and seems to promote the perception of AIDS as a gay disease. [On the other hand t]he “it’s not who you are but what you do” [message] puts across safe sex and de-gays the disease while fragmenting the health efforts and hampering togetherness [for gay people].

Also a rundown on teen novels with gay characters/themes.

And the article which infuriated me the most: The pompous & self-righteous Petra Liljesfraund. Any gay person bolstering her case by asserting that the opposition’s concerns are “not based on incontrovertible scientific facts” has poked out her eyes with a stick. She may have some valid points to make about artificial insemination, but her arrogance and defensiveness lead me to doubt it.

OUT/LOOK was a national magazine that addressed the gay community and the issues we deal with in a thoughtful, serious way, less news-of-the-day, more history and theory, and little in the way of fashion spreads or gratuitous hunks. I guess Tom of Finland got in because he’s art and history.

I first saw the work of Tom of Finland in the gay bookstore A Different Light on Castro in San Francisco. As a long-time comics aficionado I recognized comics when I saw it. I’d been reading undergrounds like Zap and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, but Tom of Finland was of another order. Not druggy and wacky but precise, buffed, and strikingly sexual. Not that I couldn’t see that Tom of Finland had a sense of humor, but the gigantic cocks and the bound testicles, the hairless pneumatic muscles, the big boots and gleaming biker helmets, well, all that rather overwhelmed the funny. I still don’t own any Tom of Finland. Not even a postage stamp. I suppose “it bug[ged] me” to be turned on by Tom of Finland because he did not illustrate my ideal of an egalitarian gay community. The rape and bondage rankled. Or maybe just embarrassed. Maybe it was the old superego looking over the shoulder going, What are you looking at! You can’t even think that!

Clearly I hated the article by Petra Liljesfraund. She wrote about artificial insemination. But what did she say? I’m going to take a stab here. I’m guessing Liljesfraund made a case for the right of lesbian mothers to hide from any offspring the origins of donor sperm. Being as I think a person has a right to information about their genetic heritage, I was appalled. Judging by the quote, Liliesfraund claimed she was backed up by “incontrovertible scientific facts.” Considering the many crimes “science” has visited upon the gay community (aversion therapy! homosexuality as mental defect!) the thought that any member of the gay community would offer up science as “incontrovertibl[y]” backing her struck me as ahistorical and willfully naive.

update (4/26/15): Cleaning out a box of old papers I came across the issue of OUT/LOOK under discussion. I found the article by Petra Liljesfraund about the use of anonymous sperm donors, and want to quote from it the context for the line about “incontrovertible scientific facts”:

To say that children conceived through insemination have an inherent need to know the specific identity of their donors is simply opinion at this point. It is a moral claim based on norms of what we should do, in the way that statements such as “menstruating women should not swim” is a moral claim. It is not based on incontrovertible scientific facts.

[Please note the correction in OUT/LOOK Winter 1989: “We regret misspelling the name of the author of ‘Children Without Fathers: Handling the Anonymous Donor Question’ in the Fall 1988 issue. It’s Petra Liljestrand, not Liljesfraund.”]

I doubt I will keep this magazine, even now that I discover I have kept it so many years. One can’t keep everything.

Sonoma Mandala 1988

from the book log (1/5/89):

Sonoma Mandala 1988, the Sonoma State University literary annual

I like the look of this book. Plain green cover, nice stiff paper stock for the pages, nice typography. Although I haven’t read every poem, the quality is high. Since Jayne [McPherson] told me they chose one of the poems I sent for the ’89 issue I hope the quality is comparable to this. Favorite: Greg Mahrer, David R. Evans; I love the last line of Douglas A. Powell’s “silver nitrate”: “My death is. a yellow balloon”

So two book log entries in a row I’ve written about a literary magazine and in both cases I said in the review that I hadn’t yet read all the poems. In the Green Fuse entry I wrote, “I haven’t read [all the poems] yet, but the intensity gets boring.” And in the one above I wrote, “Although I haven’t read every poem, the quality is high.” Why was I writing about a magazine without having read all its poems?

A fit of new-year’s-resolution-itis? I have time now, did I say to myself, so I’ll make note of these now? If I wait I may never get it done!

I’m sure I got to all the poems shortly thereafter. If my opinion had changed I would have updated the book log. Right?

Green Fuse, vol. 9

from the book log (1/4/89):

Green Fuse, vol. 9, a poetry magazine

This magazine is so heavy. So serious, furrowed-brow. It’s got some good stuff in it but, like so many other selections of poetry, after a while I have the feeling they’ve just about all been written by the same person. I haven’t read [all the poems] yet, but the intensity gets boring. I read a few and then they just become blocks of print or I read them and haven’t any idea whether the words are supposed to mean anything or not so I have to stop. One of the ways I judge poetry — “Oh! I wish I’d written that / could have written that!” Liked: Elizabeth Herron, Charles Patterson, Patrick Mikulec, Zel Latner, Michael Emery, Jacqueline Bardsley, (so far). Some of the poems I like I feel a sort of nagging I-wish-there-was-just-a-little-something-more. Also: Amy Trussel.

The mission of Green Fuse, an independent literary magazine produced in my home town of Sebastopol, was to call out the human world for the destruction it visits on the nonhuman. I certainly sympathized with the message. I managed to place a couple poems with the editors, but most of what I sent wasn’t what they were looking for, little of what I write would be. I’m not much of a nature poet, even less of a hectoring poet.

The list of names is interesting. I recognize one of them. Elizabeth Herron was a professor at Sonoma State University, the closest university to Sebastopol. Now that I have a machine-searchable list of my personal anthology I checked to see if any mentioned in the review got included. None.

I have mixed feelings about the judgments. I still want some wit, some play, some surprise in every poem, even those addressing the most serious subjects. Serious themes are not well served by an unremittingly serious tone. The mission of Green Fuse was a serious mission!

As to whether poems come to seem “blocks of print [leaving the reader without] any idea whether the words are supposed to mean anything,” well, I can’t venture a second opinion about the poems in Green Fuse, as I no longer have a copy (or don’t know where a copy could be hiding) but I can say that many a poem I’ve read leaves me wondering at its meaning. This is such a common reaction to contemporary poetry that it has become a rough definition of poetry. If you can’t figure it out but it sounds kind of different, hey, poetry! During the period spammers were filling their emails with seemingly random or collage-like texts to fool the email providers’ spam detectors I saw more than one non-poet friend enthuse about their spam as poetry.

I no longer judge a poem by whether I could have written it. I wonder how long I really did. On the other hand, my personal anthology (see Best Poems of the Year lists) is filled with poems for which I feel a deep sympathy, and I’m sure many, for their style, their choices, their attitude, would not seem out of place in my own oeuvre. Of course, in some cases that’s because I’ve stolen their moves.

Bagdad Cafe

from the book log (1/3/89)

Bagdad Cafe, a movie

Neat-o movie. It was playing in London while I was there, but I held off seeing it cuz there were other movies I thought were less likely to get around here. So here it is at the Plaza [in Petaluma]. And was it good? Oh, we liked it! This German couple fight at the beginning of the movie. Woman (Jasmin) nabs suitcase from car and stalks off down the road to the Bagdad Cafe, service station and motel. Jasmin moves in, cleans up, and teaches Brenda, the proprietress, and her family, magic. And the whole place becomes magic. A great ending, too.

*

I haven’t seen Bagdad Cafe all the way through since the Plaza showing, but if I were shown an unidentified 60 second snip I could probably name it. Bagdad Cafe was distinctive in look and feel. Images stick in my head. The chubby Jasmin dragging her suitcase down the road. The exasperation of Brenda, the proprietress. Whenever I saw CCH Pounder in something I knew I’d seen her first in Bagdad Cafe.

The movie was covered in the gay press for the female friendship of the leads. Were they lovers? Could they have been? I remember being disappointed a bit in that. Perhaps it was “gay vague” before the term was coined? However, the review I wrote shortly after seeing Bagdad Cafe betrays no reservations. Now I’m curious to see it again.

Spike of Bensonhurst

from the book log (1/3/89):

Spike of Bensonhurst, a movie

The only actor I knew was Ernest Borgnine. Geez. Funny movie. As in, strange. Crime pays, criminals as good guys, the mafia makes good. Criminals as “jes folks.” It was funny in the other sense, too, and not predictable. The guy who plays Spike is gorgeous and you get to look at him a lot. Although Spike gets two girls pregnant (one of whom is a real cute Puerto Rican dyke-type) there is no (as in zero) kissy-kissy. Spike’s mother is living with her lesbian lover while his dad does time, having taken the rap for Borgnine, the neighborhood mafia boss. Almost no conventional morality in this movie. I liked it. It’s different. Spike is a boxer; normally this would really turn me off, but the boxing is at a minimum and it’s definitely not a fight movie. Wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

*

I haven’t seen Spike of Bensonhurst since. I remember nothing about it. Looking at sites that track reviews, like the Internet Movie Database and Rotten Tomatoes, I don’t see much activity, though what is there isn’t approving. On the other hand, malibutrash’s comment at imdb agrees with my opinion of the lead: “Sasha Mitchell was so gorgeous … it really hurt to look at him.”

Spike of Bensonhurst is not a book, clearly. But at the beginning I was extra ambitious with the log and made note of movies and record albums and individual issues of comic book series.

Best Poems of 2014

Ingeborg Bachmann ….. Every Day
Ellen Bass ….. Ode to Repetition
Ellen Bass ….. Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One
Ellen Bass ….. Worry
John Elsberg ….. The Stone
John Engels ….. Hummingbird on a Telephone Wire
Kerry Hardie ….. The Avatar
Penny Harter ….. one haiku from Lunar New Year: a Kasen Renku
Jane Hirshfield ….. The Envoy
Jane Hirshfield ….. Evolution & Glass from Seventeen Pebbles
Ted Hughes ….. November
Jusammi Chikako ….. “On this summer night”
Jack Kerouac ….. sixteen haiku
Elizabeth Searle Lamb ….. three haiku
Mirabai ….. The Coffer with the Poisonous Snake
H. D. Moe ….. “Between no dust”
Gregory Orr ….. Domestic Life
Pedro Serrano ….. Inventory
Edward Thomas ….. One Sail at Sea
Manuel Ulacia ….. Arabian Knight

In the new year I like to read aloud all the poems I’ve gathered in the preceding year. Last night I sat on the couch and read to the cats. They showed neither delight nor distress at the words, but I think they liked the company.

I was a little surprised how many times the moon made an appearance. In Ellen Bass’ “Ode to Repetition” the narrator “look[s] out at … the moon rinsing the parked cars.” In the tanka by Jusammi Chikako (tr. E. Cranston), the moon is a visitor who won’t come in: “[I]n the doorway … open after dark, / Stands the moon …” Jack Kerouac sets his evening schedule by the moon (this is the whole poem): “When the moon sinks / down to the power line, / I’ll go in.” Kerouac also spots the “moon in the bird bath.” In Robert Bly’s version of Mirabai’s “The Coffer with the Poisonous Snake” the moon is even more invasive: “[A]round my neck … a string of lovely pearls, each with a moon inside. / My room then was full of moonlight, as if the full moon / Had found its way in through the open window.” H. D. Moe’s moon is more distant: “mirrors become water / swimming as each other until the plow is our lunation.” (A “lunation” is also known as a “lunar month.”) For that matter Penny Harter’s haiku is excerpted from a renku for the “Lunar New Year.” In Edward Thomas’ prose poem night comes in like the tide and “[i]n the moonlight one strange flower glistens, white as a campanula …” (A “campanula” is also known as a “bellflower.”)

It didn’t take long to read what isn’t a large batch of poems. 63 of the titles I read in 2014 contained poetry. Sometimes it happens that way. I read a lot of poetry — and enjoy it — but none of it strikes me in just the right way, that is, in just that way that makes me want to devote my crampy hand to copying it out. Then again when I read the poems in the notebook, the ones I have copied out, I sometimes find myself wondering why that particular poem got in there. I always figure it out somewhere in the reading. Oh yes, that’s why I kept it. Good thing.

This is the second time the Ted Hughes poem (“November”) got marked for possible saving. As I read it over I gradually remembered considering it years back. What stopped me that time? I have to admit it was the gruesome quality of the “keeper’s gibbet,” the bodies of predators (“owls and hawks … weasels … cats, crows”) that the keeper has killed displayed on it. “Some, stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits // In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape, / … hung, chins on chests.” I didn’t like it. Though I fell into the poem’s sensuousness, the rain, the cold, all of it intense and strange, I didn’t want to be confronted by that gibbet and its human vindictiveness. In a later year I copied out a poem in which a human corpse hangs in a gibbet outside the walls of a town. So when I came upon the Hughes poem in 2014 in another book I didn’t feel so skittish about the awful scene. Instead I let Hughes seduce me with the supposed “pride” of the dead, “Patient to outwait these worst days that beat / Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.”

Titles read in 2014

Wolverine & the X-Men: Alpha &Omega Brian Wood
The Scalawagons of Oz John R. Neill
Locke & Key, v.4: Keys to the Kingdom Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
The Word for World is Forest Ursula K. LeGuin
True Rae Armantrout
Locke & Key, v.5: Clockworks Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
Homesick Jason Walz
QU33R: new comics from 33 creators ed. Robert Kirby
Invincible, v.17: What’s Happening Robert Kirkman
Lucky Bucky in Oz John R. Neill
High Risk 2 ed. Amy Scholder & Ira Silverberg
The Certificate Isaac Bashevis Singer
Smarter Than You Think Clive Thompson
Big Plans #2 a mini comic by Aron Nels Steinke
Nobody Uses an Umbrella in Portland a mini comic by Shawn Granton
In the Tall Grass #2 a mini comic by Tessa Brunton
The Runaway in Oz John R. Neill
I Cut My Hair #1 & #2 a mini comic by Lisa Rosalie Eisenberg
Across the Windharp Elizabeth Searle Lamb
The Magical Mimics in Oz Jack Snow
The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame ed. Graham Kolbeins
The Human Line Ellen Bass
Death Kick H. D. Moe
The Shaggy Man of Oz Jack Snow
King Cat #72 John Porcellino
Primahood #1 & #2 mini comics by Tyler Cohen
Invincible, v.18: The Death of Everyone Kirkman & Ottley
Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times Kenneth Koch
My Life Is Poetry ed. Steven Reigns
Rob Kirby’s Snack Pack #1 mini comic by Robert Kirby
King for a Day mini comic by Robert Kirby
One Big Happy Family Lisa Rogak
Mules of Love Ellen Bass
The Honduran Coup: a graphic history Dan Archer & Nikil Saval
Alex a graphic novel by Mark Kalesniko
A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind Alfred Starr Hamilton
Pocket Poems 12 mini broadsides from Mrs Dalloway’s
Barack Obama: the story David Maraniss
The Culture of Make Believe Derrick Jensen
Gulp: adventures on the alimentary canal Mary Roach
Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland Harvey Pekar & Joseph Remnant
Thread Winding in the Loom 1987 CPITS anthology
Escape from Special Miss Lasko-Gross
The Hidden Valley of Oz Rachel Cosgrove
Super Trooper #5 Angela K. Roberts
Slant Greg Bear
The Wicked Witch of Oz Rachel Cosgrove Payes
Reversible Monuments: contemporary Mexican poetry ed. Monica de la Torre & Michael Wiegers
Faithiest Chris Stedman
Of Separateness and Merging Ellen Bass
All That: collected chapbooks Jim McCrary
Dorothy, v.1 Greg Mannino & Mark Masterson
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill Mark Bittner
Gulf Coast, v.24, no.1 winter/spring 2012
For Earthly Survival Ellen Bass
Night Julia Vinograd
Bay Area Poets Coalition Anthology 17 ed. Dale Hermann
Arts and Letters Edmund White
Merry-go-round in Oz Eloise Jarvis McGraw & Lauren Lynn McGraw Wagner
The Bonobo and the Atheist Frans de Waal
The Incredible Double Owen Hill
The Voyeurs Gabrielle Bell
Bug Music: how insects gave us rhythm & noise David Rothenberg
Our Stunning Harvest Ellen Bass
David Chelsea in Love David Chelsea
RASL Jeff Smith
A Simple Revolution: the making of an activist poet Judy Grahn
American Savage Dan Savage
What the Body Told Rafael Campos
Tesserae & other poems John Hollander
The Forbidden Fountain of Oz Eloise & Lauren McGraw
Spinadoodles: the third year Sam Spina
Fourteen Stephen Zanichkowsky
The Rice Room Ben Fong-Torres
The Rundelstone of Oz Eloise McGraw
What If the Moon Didn’t Exist Neil F. Comins
Sky Ward Kazim Ali
Mexican Poetry 20/20 Voices ed. Brandel France de Bravo
Native American Testimony 1999 revision, ed. Peter Nabokov
Asimov’s Science Fiction #457 Feb 2014
Forcing the Spring: inside the fight for marriage equality Jo Becker
Octopus! Katherine Harmon Courage
Of Gravity and Angels Jane Hirshfield
Our Deep Gossip: conversations with gay writers on poetry and desire Christopher Hennessy
Book of Haikus Jack Kerouac
The X-Men, v.5 Arnold Drake & Werner Roth, et al
Neanderthals Rediscovered Dimitra Papagianni & Michael Morse
The Floating Brothel Sian Rees
New Poetry of Mexico ed. Octavio Paz & Mark Strand
Couch Tag Jesse Reklaw
The October Palace Jane Hirshfield
The X-Men, v.6 Roy Thomas & Neal Adams
Saga / Circus Lyn Hejinian
Invincible, v. 19: The War at Home Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley
More Than Peace and Cypresses Cyrus Cassells
Journey into Mystery: Fear Itself Kieron Gillen & Doug Braithwaite
The Oath: the Obama White House and the Supreme Court Jeffrey Toobin
Young Avengers, v.2: Alternative Culture Gillen & McKelvie
Young Avengers, v.3: Mic-Drop Gillen & McKelvie
We Are Here: stories from the BPL Memoir-Writing Workshop ed. Frances Lefkowitz
Journey of the Jihadist Fawaz A. Gerges
Radical Relations Daniel Winunwe Rivers
The Lives of the Heart Jane Hirshfield
Siege: Battlefield Gillen, Reed, Gage, et al
Like a Beggar Ellen Bass
Making Love to Roget’s Wife Ronald Koertge
Avengers: the Children’s Crusade Heinberg & Cheung
The Ozmapolitan of Oz Dick Martin
Locke & Key, v. 6: Alpha & Omega Hill & Rodriguez
The Quiet American Graham Greene
Six Amendments John Paul Stephens
The Giant Garden of Oz Eric Shanower
The Ogre’s Wife Ron Koertge
Blue is the Warmest Color Julie Maroh
Moominpappa’s Memoirs Tove Jansson
Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: selected haiku of Basho tr. David Young
Given Sugar, Given Salt Jane Hirshfield
Pierced by a Ray of Sun ed. Ruth Gordon
Carsick John Waters
Partings at Dawn: an anthology of Japanese gay literature ed. Stephen D. Miller
After Jane Hirshfield
A White Tea Bowl: 100 haiku Mitsu Suzuki
Carnac Guillevic
Catwings, Catwings Return, Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings, Jane on Her Own Ursula K. LeGuin
Paris Is Burning: a queer film classic Lucas Hilderbrand
Come, Thief Jane Hirshfield
Gathering the Bones Together Gregory Orr
Mr. Bluebird Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
My 1980s and other essays Wayne Koestenbaum
fic: why fanfiction is taking over the world Anne Jamison
The Salt Sorcerer of Oz Eric Shanower
Hallucinations Oliver Sacks
Mirabai: ecstatic poems versions by Jane Hirshfield & Robert Bly
Crow Milk Rick Agran
A Book of Women Poets: from antiquity to now ed. Aliki & Willis Barnstone
Gay Soul interviews by Mark Thompson
The Thrill of Living in a Dying Empire #2, Quincy’s Terrible … Blind Date, When Naked Hallway Dudes Attack, Do You Suffer for Your Art? 4 mini comics from Mission Mini Comix
The List mini comic by Maia Kobabe
Childhood mini comic anthology edited by Justin Hall
Tortilla #2 and #3 mini comic by Jaime Crespo
paperdummy #5, 6, 7, and 8 mini comics by Peter S. Conrad
Police Log Comics #2 Owen Cook
Jin & Jam #1 Hellen Jo
Tyranny of the Muse #1 Eddie Wright & Jesse Balmer
The Rabbi’s Cat Joann Sfar
Bonobo Handshake Vanessa Woods
Adam’s Navel Michael Sims
Sinking Creek John Engels
Fourteen Hills 20.1 2014
Two Lines #17: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal 2010
Nine Gates: entering the mind of poetry Jane Hirshfield
Women in Praise of the Sacred ed. Jane Hirshfield
Good Sense & the Faithless Michelle T. Clinton
Walking Across the Pacific Judy Bebelaar
Sudden Dreams George Evans
Oz Before the Rainbow Mark Evan Swartz
Narwhals: arctic whales in a melting world Todd McLeish
Far from the Tree Andrew Solomon
At the Back of the North Wind George MacDonald
Short: an international anthology ed. Alan Ziegler
Revenge: a story of hope Laura Blumenfeld
Barrow Street, v.1, no.2 Sp 1999
The Rabbi’s Cat 2 Joann Sfar
Over the Transom #22 2012
Poetry, v.190, no.3; Poetry, v.197, no.1
Clerks Kevin Smith & Jim Mahfood
Snapshots: 20th century mother-daughter fiction ed. Joyce Carol Oates & Janet Berliner
Poets of Our Time ed. F E S Finn
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls David Sedaris
Treasury of Mini Comics, v.1 ed. Michael Dowers
Poetry, v.197, no.2 Nov 2010
Prime Green: remembering the sixties Robert Stone
In Pharaoh’s Army Tobias Wolff
Horse Ballast Patrick Culliton
Words for Empty and Words for Full Bob Hicok
Holy Terror Terry Eagleton
A Short History of Cambodia John Tully
Bed-Knob and Broomstick Mary Norton
The Cruising Diaries Brontez Purnell
Poetry, v.197, no.3 Dec 2010
Juice Renee Gladman
This in Which George Oppen
Poetry, v.197, no.4 Jan 2011
Angkor & the Khmer Civilization Michael D. Coe
Blobography Brendan Monroe
A Simple Life, A Good Life? Katie Haberman
When We Were Kids mini comic by Andy Warner
Self-Destruction & Self-Growth: a zine Kristen Leckie
The Garden Will Give You A Fat Lip Amy Wright
Adult Contemporary mini comic by Leo Puppytime

Titles in bold I loved.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, part II

from the booklog (1/89):

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

Scott Lipanovich tried to read this book but gave up after page forty or so, thought it too episodic. I’d read in reviews that the main character is bisexual and by the fortieth page he hadn’t done anything so I kept going. And the book hadn’t hooked me up to that point either. Ten or twenty pages later I was reluctant to put it down. The first part of the book the author seems too caught up in his nice prose style to be compelling, later he did the reverse. I wasn’t as enchanted by the supporting character, Cleveland, as everyone in the book seemed to be, so when he went to his doom I didn’t much care. The Art & Arthur & Phlox triangle was interesting and the book was a good page turner.

*

So much for my assertion in the earlier Mysteries of Pittsburgh post that Scott was the one who recommended the book to me. I learned of it through reviews, probably in the gay press.

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, part II

from the booklog (January 1989):

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

I wonder how autobiographical this is. [Pirsig’s book] is a page turner and well-written. I came away not altogether sure what “Phaedrus” had gotten so uptight about & what all that deconstruction of Socrates meant. Sophists had something to do with the Quality that comes before everything. I rather liked some of Phaedrus’ original teaching methods. He threw out the essay-writing textbooks and told his classes, “You know what quality is. Just work on that.” And he didn’t give grades (until the end). The good students, he found, didn’t like grades. I coulda told him that!

*

Some of the above repeats what I wrote in my diary (and which I quoted in the earlier Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance post).

Writing teachers in grade school taught me to loathe essays and the mechanistic crafting of them. In my reading life I’ve come to love the weird things essays often are. In college my professors were usually ready to engage with the weird things I made of my papers.

I’ve started a notebook

from the diary (1/3/89, Tuesday):

I’ve started a notebook in which I comment on books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen, plays, too, I s’pose, tho’ I hafta see one first.

So there it is, the first mention in the diary of the book log. I started Dare I Read with the idea I was going to expose the book log to the world. Here was all this writing already done. Content! as they called it back in the dizzy days of the Internet Bubble. Rainbows everywhere! All you had to do was color them in, and it didn’t really matter what colors you used. People were so desperate to get into the filmy web that anything would do. Just throw it up online and cash the checks as the eyeballs stuck.

Not that I had a mercenary vision for Dare I Read. I didn’t enable Google Ads for years. (I still haven’t made enough to get a check. Google doesn’t send you money until the ad click-thrus generate $100. DIR’s current balance? $14.04. That’s the entirety of the “earnings” for the lifetime of the blog.)

I was writing pretty regularly on my first blog LoveSettlement at the time I started Dare I Read and I wanted space between the creative noodlings and life musings of LuvSet and the book discussions of DIR. Looking back maybe I should just have added the book log to LuvSet and used labels to give the different kinds of posts their due. One blog is more work than I’ve usually managed. In 2009 I wrote all of 149 posts across both blogs. That’s respectable. But with the blogs separate the numbers come out to a less impressive 67 for DIR and 81 for LuvSet. After a big project ended in January 2013 LuvSet went into hibernation; 2014 saw only 2 posts.

My first idea for the book log was ambitious, record everything — books! movies! plays! comic books! When that proved overwhelming I decided I could still keep up the log if I stuck just to books. That is what I’ve done ever since, more or less.

On page one of volume one of the book log: Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh … OK. I guess there will shortly be part II posts on DIR for those books.

Scott Lipanovich

The ex-coworker and writer who recommended Michael Chabon was named Scott Lipanovich. Scott also recommended Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. I read and liked both books. (I do remember being annoyed by the publisher calling Love Medicine a novel as it was clearly a book of short stories.) Now & then over the years I’ve popped Scott’s name into a search engine in hopes of seeing his writing or a publication announcement or something. You see, I never did get a chance to read Scott’s work and I’ve always been curious. My latest search results provide some Lipanovich news. According to an article in SonomaCounty.com Scott has curated an art collection for the eight year old Doyle library. (The Doyle replaced the Plover Library where I worked as a student employee):

[T]he Doyle Library now houses The Doyle Collection, a clutch of 80 artworks by 52 artists, all of who[m] worked either as staff or faculty at the JC since the college’s art department was established in 1950.

Covering 1.5 acres of wall space on the third and fourth floors, these artworks — there are two sculptures, the rest [are] framed — represent the output of the cream of Sonoma County artists for the past 60-plus years and include such surprising names as California funk artist Robert Arneson, painter Maurice Lapp, and the great North Coast naturalist Larry Thomas.

The Doyle Collection is a labor of love curated by library technician Scott Lipanovich, who amassed the donated art works solely at his own expense and during his own volunteer time over the course of two-and-a-half years.

“We have this great building, great natural light, and abundance of flat spaces on the walls,” Lipanovich explains. “It seems only natural to create a great art collection.”

The bohemian.com has another article on Scott’s project:

All the art had to have been made by SRJC faculty and staff who were at the college from 1950 or later. As there was no budget for the project, the work had to be donated. If the artist was alive, he or she would bear the cost of framing; if the artist was not, Lipanovich invariably ended up paying for it himself.

…

He has also been happy to spend Friday through Sunday for nearly three years visiting artists, spending full days viewing their life's work, and coaxing donations. "We only had about seven donation-donations," Lipanovich estimates. "Usually," he smiles, "it was a pursuit."

Such pursuits normally included food and conversation, and perhaps a new friendship. Not a bad way to spend one's long weekends, actually.

"The best part of doing this was the donors," Lipanovich says, referring to the artists he met. "Spending time with the donors and just having lunch. Hanging out. The donors are great."

I have not visited the Doyle Library. The Plover Library must have been torn down in favor of the Doyle. So there’s that you-can’t-go-home-again. I wonder if you can still find the VHS tape of my graduation speech in the collection.

Oh, and Scott? Nice arms!

photo credit: Sara Sanger / Bohemian.com

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

from the diary, January 2, 1989:

"[I] read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh [by Michael Chabon], which is [a novel] about a college student who has an odd summer falling in love with a girl, Phlox, and a boy, Arthur. Not bad."

At 24 I was hoping for something more gay. I remember Mysteries being recommended by a coworker at the Santa Rosa Jr College library. The coworker was a writer; he said he admired Chabon’s prose. Mysteries is a first novel.

These days Chabon’s novels get long waiting lists at the library. Chabon lives in Berkeley, so is a neighbor. I served him once at the circulation desk and he got irritated with me because he was in a hurry and I was doing something too slow, maybe trying to make sure I had his receipts ready and he just wanted his change. Ah, our brushes with celebrity!

Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

from the diary, January 2, 1989:

"I finished Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance yesterday. It was good, though I’m not really sure why the main character (Phaedrus?) took everything so seriously and went mad or what all that deconstruction of Socrates was about. I’m still not sure what a Sophist is, and while I have an idea of what the author [Robert Pirsig] meant when he talked about Quality I’m not at all sure."

The copy of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was left at the house by my dad on one of his visits. I don’t think it was a gift so much as he was done with it and was leaving it. Not that he would have objected to me or my brother reading it, of course. The paperback was water- or sun-warped. It struck me as a Dad kind of book. Philosophy for the casual autodidact.

The Forgotten Forest of Oz

I’m sitting down to write on Christmas Day. It’s been a long time since I quoted from my diary. In the diary I was mining it was December 1988; I’d just gotten back from three months in London, a college semester. I was gradually readjusting to being in Sebastopol, the town I grew up in. Back under Mom’s roof!

On Friday, 12/23, I “bought Eric [Shanower]’s latest [graphic novel] The Forgotten Forest of Oz.”

On Christmas Eve I wrote, “I think I’m a bit stir crazy. I have been inside all day. It’s been raining most of the day. I feel buggy. I finished catching up with my comics. … Eric’s latest is, I am pleased to say, his best so far. Considering my attitudes toward the others that might be faint praise except that I think he really did a creditable job on this one. I only groaned at one or two bits of dialog. It did have me going. Dorothy & the other familiar Oz friends were pretty much superfluous to the story.”

I didn’t leave the house yesterday either. And it wasn’t raining so hard. Ah, 25 years, you haven’t changed me. I read Eric Shanower’s prose novel The Giant Garden of Oz this year, also his collection of short stories, The Salt Sorcerer of Oz. Now I just need to find my copies of Eric’s Oz graphic novels in order to reread those.

I was sick for Christmas in ’88. “Becky called tonight [12/26]. When I told her I’d been sick, she said, ‘Oh, the stomach flu?’ … She said three other people she knows have had it.”

I called a friend from the Gay & Lesbian Student Union and got updated. While I was in London a new member named John wanted to get more involved but Janet and her lover Celeste found him abrasive and seemed to want me to ally against him. I’d been co-president before I left. My ex-co-president, Donna, was “as good as married” to Carol, Janet told me. But Janet “doesn’t think it’ll last. ‘They have to get into a fight before they make love.’”

12/28: “Eric Shanower and David Maxine came to visit today. We got into a rather silly argument about whether a woman can rape a man … We did have some fun talks. About Oz, about what we’ve been doing, about publishing Trot of Oz. I’ve been reading and editing the manuscript tonight.”

Eric & David seemed “good as married,” too. As of 2014 they’ve been together more than 26 years. “The Forgotten Forest of Oz is dedicated to David,” I noted in my diary.

pile of reading

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
I bought an iPad Mini the week we left for Vietnam. I wanted it for its camera, mostly. And I’ve been happier with the iPad camera than with any camera I’ve owned. Imagine being able to see the photo exactly as you’re taking it, the photo as you will see it when you get home from the trip. I grew up snapping photos squinting through a viewfinder that was clearly displaced from the lens. One never knew what was going to come back from the drug store. When you opened the envelope and got your first look at the photos — your precious memories — and saw with horror the lack of focus, the washed out clothes, the cut off heads, the snaps that were entirely black, it made you want to leave the camera in the drawer next time. I taught myself how to use the iPad camera no the fly — and made a bunch of dumb mistakes. But I got better. I bought the iPad Mini for other reasons, too. I didn’t want to lug around a laptop but I wanted a computer, something I could check my email and Facebook on. I thought it would be fun to carry along an ebook library rather than stuff paperbacks into my pack. It’s been my habit on trips to bring used paperback classics, like Dickens, so if I lost a book or dropped it in a puddle it would be no big deal, easily replaced. With the iPad I could download a stack of books and the luggage would be no heavier than without. I checked out one book from the public library just to see if I could (Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris), but I also zipped over to Project Gutenberg — and O! what riches to choose from. All that Dickens! But I downloaded only a couple things. I figured I really wouldn’t be reading that much. I would probably have internet access in Southeast Asia and I could download more there, right? (As insurance I did jam some old New Yorkers into the bottom of the duffel bag. No, I did not read them.) I read the David Sedaris book and enjoyed it. It’s not as good as some of his others, but it’s still fun. I started reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer on the cruise ship on the Tonle Sap River in Cambodia. I read its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, back in the 80s when there was a big sales job about it being The Great American Novel. Huck Finn was okay, but the hype did it no favors, especially in regards to the supposedly anti-racist depiction Nigger Jim, who just seemed to me infantile. Tom Sawyer is good. I’ve never seen a dramatization, but I’m familiar with some of the elements — the most famous fence painting in American literature, the scary Injun Joe. I did see a live-action/cartoon hybrid on TV that continued the adventures of the main characters. I remember at one point Becky Thatcher squeezes through the lungs of some gigantic monster (or maybe our heroes have been shrunk a la Fantastic Voyage). The file I downloaded from Project Gutenberg came out a little strange in that the book is more than 900 pages. At first I thought it must be because of formatting issues, a giant font? But at some point I skipped ahead, accidentally I think, and discovered the book completely duplicated in the second half of those 900 pages. Well, that changed my expectations for the story. I haven’t yet checked to see if something similar happened with the other Gutenberg books.

The Cruising Diaries by Brontez Purnell, illustrated by Janelle Hessig
Anecdotes about queer sex, often anonymous, in all sorts of situations. In a preface Purnell calls it, “a document of a sexually precocious and mis-spent youth told in the style of anti-erotica.”

A Short History of Cambodia: from Empire to Survival by John Tully
I wanted a book that covered everything from Classic Angkor when Cambodia ruled Southeast Asia to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s nadir, and after. I’m not sure “breezy” is the right word for such a history but Tully’s prose is easy to like. Having been to Cambodia myself now I think I’m getting more from this account than I would have if I’d read it before I went.

Bed-Knob and Broomstick by Mary Norton
With my current pile poetry-heavy and with the prose tending to the serious I wanted something easy and fun. A story! I read all Mary Norton’s Borrowers books recently so when I saw Bed-Knob and Broomstick drop down the return slot at the library, I snapped it up. I haven’t seen Disney’s movie version (which makes plural the words in the title). I’m liking the book.

Parthenon West Review issue seven
I’ve been very impressed with earlier issues. This one is good, too. It was published in 2010 and is the newest I’ve seen. According to the Parthenon West website, there is an eighth issue.

Poetry December 2010
Several years ago I read a year of Poetry and was appalled. “If Poetry were poetry I wouldn’t read poetry,” I told friends. The magazine changed editors and I’ve finally read a few of the issues edited by Christian Wiman. Big improvement! I understand Wiman is out now though.

This In Which by George Oppen
These days I want my pile to include at least one book by one poet (alongside the usual anthologies). Having finished a book by Bob Hicok I browsed my library — there are a lot of books in my library that I haven’t read. I pulled Oppen from the shelf and was quickly through the first few pages.

Juice by Renee Gladman
Another short book that I pulled from the shelf upstairs. I’m 15 pages in.

Against Forgetting: twentieth century poetry of witness edited by Carolyn Forche
The big anthology in the pile. Heavy in more than one sense. Considering the subject matter (living through bad shit), I can’t read more than a few pages at a sitting so I expect to be reading Against Forgetting for months.

There are always books hovering near the pile. Should I list it if I haven’t picked it up in weeks? If I’ve not read past the first paragraph? No. I have to draw a line!

word of the day: rort

context: After describing various corrupt practices in the Cambodian army in the early 1970s — superior officers continuing to collect the pay of deceased soldiers (instead of asking for replacement soldiers), army personnel selling materiel to the rebels they were supposedly fighting — historian John Tully says:

These treacherous rorts were costing the treasury almost US$11 million per annum, and cost the lives of countless Khmer soldiers and civilians.

definition (dictionary.com): a dishonest scheme

also, it seems, a rowdy party

word of the day: malmsey

context:

Remembering entering San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1962, Robert Stone sees a place unreal. “[I]t was … profoundly Chinatown in no ethnic sense. Rather, the Polanski sense of a lost and terrifying cityscape; its clinky, clunky exoticism, designed to divert the tourists …” Stone calls Chinatown “so rich and strange … I would not spend another such a night though ‘twere to win a world of happy days (Richard III, act I, scene 4). It was like drowning in a vat of the strangest malmsey.” [my bold]

dictionary.com has a definition: a strong, sweet wine with a strong flavor, originally made in Greece but now made mainly in Madeira.

Apparently, Mr Stone is not the first to imagine drowning in a vat of the stuff:

George, Duke of Clarence, being allowed to choose by what death he would die, chose drowning in malmsey wine (1477).

Stone quote source: Prime Green: remembering the sixties by Robert Stone

Questions about Bests

I have now posted the list of every year of my personal anthology project. (See: Best Poems of the Year.) In January I will post my 2014 list. December is young; who knows what poems I will approve of before the New Year comes?

I’ve wondered about the collection. I made an attempt to categorize the poems so I could answer questions about the whole. That was a project that stalled, but I’m still curious.

How many are translations? From which languages? What translator is represented by more poems than any other?

How many poems are by women? How many by Americans? How many by children? What nationality is most frequently represented?

How many are by people I know?

How many are from a single poet’s collection versus an anthology? How many poets that I first encountered in an anthology did I follow to their own books — and find more poems to love? What poet is represented by more poems than any other? By more lines?

How many are haiku? What’s the longest poem? The second longest?

From what single source did I copy out the largest number of poems? How many are from the Best American Poetry annual?

How many English-language poems pre-date the Twentieth Century? How many of the poets are currently alive? How many were alive when I copied out their poems?

How many did I find in magazines? Which magazine was the best source? How many did I find on the internet? How many did I copy from manuscript (that is, poems that were not published)?

What subjects recur? I know there is a poem about putting down the cat (Billy Collins) and one about putting down the dog (John Updike). Are there any more in that vein? How many poems feature rain? Night? Greek gods? The Christian god?

What about narrative poems versus those that aren’t interested in story? How many of the poems are in traditional form?

Do I have clear favorites? Could I pare the anthology to a Best of the Best? When I started the project I had a real suspicion of Great Poets: Do I still? Do the poems by obscure poets hold up against those by poets universally acclaimed? Do I have obvious biases? Blind spots? Is there an area I’ve neglected?

I can answer some of the questions, provisionally, at least.

The longest poem I’ve copied out is The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll. Because that poem is so long Carroll has a strong start on the competition for poet with most lines. I’ve copied out a few other Carroll poems, too, so add those on. A simple piling up of words does not win Lewis Carroll Favorite Poet. But there probably is no Favorite Poet. Carroll easily places among those I would heartily recommend. I’m sure there are Carroll poems I dislike, but is there any poet who has avoided writing a poem I dislike? I’m not that poet, that’s sure.

I know I’ve neglected pre-Twentieth Century English-language verse. When I try it I usually don’t like it. I will try it again. And, no doubt, again.

I’m going to guess that I’ve copied out more poems by Americans than by any other nationality. Maybe by every other nationality combined. A crunching of numbers would be required to confirm. I certainly have a greater access to American poetry than to any other. Add the fact that I am an American poet and would like to be regarded among them so read my peers and think it important to read my peers.

I seek out poets and read anthologies that look promising. But I also want randomness. I am ready for my next favorite poem to be blowing down the street on a sheet of paper rumpled by a footprint. I am ready for it to be by Alexander Pope on a gilt-edged page.

Best Poems of 2004

Every time I read a book of poems I stuff in the back a batch of placemarks. When I read a poem I quite like, one that I want to revisit, explore, I pop a placemark in next to it. I return to the poem a few times, reading it carefully, sometimes aloud. If after 5 readings or so I still don't want to leave the poem behind I hand copy the poem into a looseleaf notebook. By hand copying the poem I incorporate it into my body of work -- I've written it, after all. At the end of the year I read aloud all the poems I copied out in that year. This year I didn't get around to the reading until Tuesday night. Here's the list of poems:

"Mom told me to grow up and win the Nobel Prize" by Val Gerstle

"I Remember Clearly" by Imre Oravecz

"Theorem" by Walter Conrad Arensberg

"You say, 'I will come'" by Lady Otomo

"My long white hair is framed by green mountains" by Han-shan Te-ch'ing

"mountain sounds carry a chill wisdom" by Shih-Shu

"Written in the Year of the Parrot" by John Yau

"Hangover" by Jeffrey Conway

"A Week in the Life of the Ethnically Indeterminate" by Elena Georgiou

"As From a Quiver of Arrows" by Carl Phillips

"My Body" by Joan Larkin

"The Cow-Boy" by Vicente Huidobro

"Lovely Childhood" by Gottfried Benn

"People" by Hans Arp

two dinosaur haiku, "Fluxist Poem #5", "Friday", "Beautiful Cowards", and "You" by Sparrow

"Instinct" by Edith Sodergran

"Shhh", "Teeth", and "Heaven" by Billy Merrell

"I tie my Hat - I crease by Shawl", "Because I could not stop for Death -", and "Four Trees - upon a solitary Acre -" by Emily Dickinson

[The above originally appeared (and still appears) on my other blog, LoveSettlement. I am now posting it to Dare I Read because the other Best Poems of the Year posts are on Dare I Read and it seems to me nice to have them all accessible under the Best Poems of the Year tag.]

Best Poems of 1999

Amrita ….. “This morning he left as”
Suzanne R. Bowers ….. Please Don’t Wake the Dog
Cumberland Sound Eskimo song ….. Shaman’s Song
John Hollander ….. Beach Whispers
a Hopi song ….. Hopi Virgins Seduced
Langston Hughes ….. Dream Variations
Langston Hughes ….. Hope
Issa ….. four haiku
Avedik Issahakian ….. I Can See Them
Ki no Tsurayuki ….. “On a spring hillside”
from a Kinaalda Racing Song (Navajo) ….. “The breeze coming from her as she runs”
Latvian folk poem ….. “I lost / my mother”
Li Pai (Li Po) …. Pulling a Lotus Flower as a Present
Li Pai (Li Po) ….. The Sound of a Flute Coming from Yellow Crane Tower
a Mide song ….. “In the middle of the sea”
Lin Pu ….. Written While Viewing the River in Autumn
NYC Dept of Health ….. from a partial list of animals banned as pets …
Hamo Sahian ….. Unhappiness
D. A. Powell ….. [between Scott’s asshole and his mouth …]
from the Prakrit ….. 245: “He stood at her door”
from the Prakrit ….. 221: “Her back bears the prints”
from the Prakrit ….. 173: “Lovers should be gentle always”
from the Prakrit ….. 30: “The flood trembles like a woman”
from the Prakrit ….. “the sky has fallen”
from the Prakrit ….. 158: “Though the entire village burned down”
Gertrude Stein ….. Careless Water
Gertrude Stein ….. A Feather
Gertrude Stein ….. Sugar
Su Tung-p’o …. Held Up by Head Winds on the Tz’u-h-chia (#1 of 5)
Arthur Sze ….. from Before Completion: #1
Arthur Sze ….. from Before Completion: #2
Arthur Sze ….. The Silence
from the Rig Veda ….. Creation Hymn
Will Walker ….. Jesus Saith unto Them, Loose him, and let him go
Wang Wei ….. Arriving at Ba Gorge in the Morning
Yamaguchi Seishi ….. one haiku
Natan Zach ….. Here They Come

By 1999 I had been hand copying poems for a personal anthology for ten years. I’d pretty much met my goals for the project — learn what I liked, push myself to learn from what I liked, figure out why I didn’t like stuff, and get comfortable with having my own opinion. I don’t feel defensive about my quirky likes and dislikes, but part of that is because I continue to be open. I don’t say I don’t like that sort of thing and stay away from it. I stay open to every sort of thing, even if, by experience, I’ve found things I like more often here than there.

I like careful description, for instance. I like wild metaphors. I like playful language and language play. I prefer to be told strange things over expected things. I have a sympathy for awkward language and uncertainty. I am less interested in the authoritative voice — although I do like it when it is used subversively. I like humor. I like exaggeration. I like wild claims. I like melancholy. I like a certain amount of bitchiness. I like learning to like something I didn’t like at first. I like immediately connecting, but also want a distant sputter in the line. I like beauty but think ugliness can be beautiful. I like it when the poem says Yes! and No? — No! and Yes? I like liking something and spending time liking it. I like being done with disliking.

Best Poems of 1998

David Alpaugh ….. As We Watch MacNeil-Lehrer
Justin Chin ….. Bar Poem
Justin Chin ….. These Nervous Days
Barbara Drake ….. When the Airplane Stopped
Buson ….. one haiku
Elliot Fried ….. Campground
Donald Hall ….. Letter After a Year
Harry Humes ….. The Butterfly Effect
David Ignatow ….. 52: “I sink back upon the ground”
Issa ….. two haiku
Jesus ….. “A host sent his servant to invite friends to an impromptu dinner party”
Jesus ….. “Ask and receive”
Jesus ….. “If someone strikes your right cheek”
Jesus ….. “What you hear / in darkness”
Czeslaw Milosz ….. Pictures
Czeslaw Milosz ….. A Poetic State
Wislawa Szymborska ….. Elegiac Calculation
Wislawa Szymborska ….. A Moment in Troy
Wislawa Szymborska ….. No Title Required
Taigi ….. one haiku
Shinkichi Takahashi ….. Fish
John Waldman ….. The Water Month
Yang Wan-li ….. Banana Leaves
Yang Wan-li ….. In the Gorge: We Encounter Wind
Yang Wan-li ….. Napping in a Boat
Yang Wan-li ….. On the Way to T’ung-Lu
Yang Wan-li ….. Passing An-Jen by Boat
Yang Wan-li ….. Passing by Waterwheel Bay
Yang Wan-li ….. Passing South Stream Bridge on the Way Home
Yang Wan-li ….. The Pavilion Behind the Temple
Yang Wan-li ….. Walking Along the Seashore
Yuan Chung-tao ….. A Wild Crane
Yuan Chung-tao ….. from Snow at the River Pavilion on Wang Lung-hsu
Yuan Chung-tao ….. The Studio of Ten Thousand Gibbons

In yesterday’s post, Best Poems of 1997, I speculated on why I read so few poems that year. I neglected to note that there have been times I read a lot of poems, but they were poems less likely to show up in a Best collection. I’ve done stints as an editor for a magazine. You’ve gotta read a lot of poems when you’re deciding what goes in a magazine, but most of what you read you’re not going to publish — or think well of. I will say that my criteria for my personal anthology (see list above) are different from my criteria for what’s publishable. For my personal anthology I need a real personal resonance, as well as good writing. When choosing for a magazine I want something striking, something that is made well and that rewards attention. I can be impressed enough to publish without requiring a deep personal connection. In fact, over the years, that’s one of the things I’ve said to myself when rereading a poem I’ve marked for possible hand copying. “It’s really good. I would publish that. But I don’t need to hang onto it.”

There was also a time, when the internet was relatively new, and I was working intermittently, that I devoted several hours a week to poetry bulletin boards — reading and critiquing poets with a variety of skill levels and experience with poetry criticism. That business was both good and bad, but I tried to learn from it, tried to teach myself how to critique usefully — that is, without creating such bad feeling that the poet was blinded to any suggestions or advice. I tried to teach myself to teach in order to see if it would be something I could do, say, for money. Can’t say as I liked it. Not that I think I could never teach, more that I think the better model for me is one of encouraging creation, rather than working to change things that have already been made.

I had experience with the feelings around critiquing (and the effectiveness of critiques) in workshop classes in college. Despite the open nature of the bulletin boards (college workshops are more closed and sometimes not all prospective participants are allowed in), the reactions to critiques — and the quality of critiques — was pretty similar in both bulletin boards and college workshops. I’m not really a fan of the format. On the other hand, it is a way to get eyes (plus college credit?) on what you’d be doing anyway. However readers react to what you’ve written, there will always be somebody who reacts differently from how you’d thought they could. Just seeing that can be useful. Provides perspective.

Best Poems of 1997

Basho ….. eight haiku
Buson ….. four haiku
Emily Dickinson ….. “I heard a fly buzz when I died”
Tim Dlugos ….. At the Point
Tim Dlugos ….. July
Larry Eigner ….. “gutter”
Larry Eigner ….. “a puddle”
Henry Israeli ….. Four a.m. Eastern
Issa ….. three haiku
Matt Jasper ….. The Golden Rule
Dacia Maraini ….. in the palm of my right hand
Simon Mpondo ….. The Season of the Rains
Izumi Shikibu ….. “In this world”
a Yoruba song ….. Three Friends
Ray A. Young Bear ….. Our Bird Aegis

What happened? So few good poems? Did I stop reading poetry?

Yes. I don’t remember why. Burn out?

It’s not that I stopped reading poems entirely. I read more poetry in 1997 than most people in their lives, probably. But I did read a lot fewer than the year before and the year before that.

There have been periods where I haven’t written much poetry either. Part of it is discouragement over its lack of reception in the world. Why write if nobody cares?

Why copy out poems if it’s just effort? If there’s no consequence? I’ve thought about trying to turn my personal anthology into public anthologies, that is, to look for interest among publishers. There are publishers who print anthologies. I know because I read those anthologies. I haven’t ruled out the possibility, but I’m pretty equivocal about it. Would putting together a marketable anthology be a project that would work for me? For anybody else?

I come back to reading and writing poems, even in the absence of outside validation, because poetry has inner rewards — and one spends a lot of time inside. One wants to keep one’s inside healthy. The great outside world has all sorts of notions, many of them nice, many of them mercurial, many of them toxic. If you’ve found something that helps maintain your inner resources, well, it may not work all the time and in every circumstance, but you’ll probably come back to it.

The effort to get work out has not provided reliable reward. That doesn’t mean I don’t want my work out there, that I don’t want readers. I very much do. I have made successful efforts in the past, and I haven’t given up. One of the things I decided to do at Berkeley Zinefest on Saturday was to present myself as a creator, too. I didn’t feel up to renting a table all by myself, but when I stopped in front of someone who had, I started with my little book, Fact. I traded it for what the other writer/artist had done. Only one creator flipped through my book and handed it back as of no interest; some didn’t really look at what they were trading for but seemed to be doing it on principle. I hope everyone who got Fact feels it is of value. I am looking forward to giving attention to the work I got in the exchange.

There have been a few occasions where a poet has discovered that he or she has a poem on one of my Best lists and has thanked me. The list is one way to thank you, poets.

Best Poems of 1996

Chris Burden ….. The Big Wheel
Chris Burden ….. White Light/White Heat
Andre Breton ….. Choose Life
Andre Breton ….. The Deadly Helping Hand
Andre Breton ….. Ghostly Stances
Andre Breton ….. Unbreakable Fishnet
Andre Breton ….. Vigilance
Clark Coolidge ….. Brass Land I Live In
Clark Coolidge ….. Crawlway Heights
Clark Coolidge ….. Early Hours Colors
Clark Coolidge ….. In the Place of Names
Clark Coolidge ….. One of the Quitter’s Obliquities
Laurie Duggan ….. from the Ash Range: 5.1
a Hawaiian song ….. Night Births (from the Kumulipo)
Geoffrey Lehmann ….. from Ross’s Poems: 36
Geoffrey Lehmann ….. from Ross’s Poems: 57
Philip Levine ….. You Can Have It
a Maori geneaology ….. The Genealogy of the Gods from Primal Nothingness
Pablo Neruda ….. Autumn Returns
Pablo Neruda ….. XIV Every Day You Play …
Pablo Neruda ….. Lone Gentleman (a variant translation from the version copied in 1992)
Jacob Nibenegenesabe ….. from the Wishing Bone Cycle
Lance Olsen ….. Stories
a Quechua song ….. “It’s today I’m supposed”
Nicholas Sanz-Gould ….. Sad Sun
Derek Walcott ….. from A Sea-Chantey (see other excerpt copied in 1991)
Judith Wright ….. Skins

Every so often I include in my personal anthology things that aren’t presented as poems. The two Chris Burden items I photocopied from an art book. The descriptions of the art pieces fascinated me. I will also occasionally copy out very brief stories or quotations, a definition, a list, language that achieves poetry and that I think is good company for the poems.

I’m also willing to copy out more than one translation of the same poem if the versions strike me differently. When I read several Sappho books I encountered the same poems translated by different people. In the case of Sappho I don’t think I copied out the same poem in different versions. With Pablo Neruda’s Lone Gentleman, however, each version was excellent but different enough that I didn’t want to lose what either one did.

Best Poems of 1995

A. R. Ammons ….. Going Without Saying
Nechum Bronze ….. A Medieval Jewish Prayer
Robert Browning ….. Meeting at Night
Larry Eigner ….. “big wind in the treetops”
Larry Eigner ….. “steam / pipes / coil”
Larry Eigner ….. “the cat all wet”
Larry Eigner ….. “the needle getting stuck”
Larry Eigner ….. “the wind stirs up”
Larry Eigner ….. “trying to see”
Larry Eigner ….. “What’s that cooking”
Michael Fried ….. The Blue
Gerard Manley Hopkins ….. The Windhover
David Ignatow ….. Autumn
David Ignatow ….. Birds in Winter
W. B. Keckler ….. As Ararat to Ark
Li Ch’ing Chao ….. The Day of Cold Food (a variant translation from the one copied in 1993)
Li Ch’ing Chao ….. Spring Fades
Li Ch’ing Chao ….. Spring in the Women’s Quarter
excerpt from the Mayan Popul Vuh ….. The Murmur at Night
Vladimir Nabukov ….. “Only the birds are able to throw off their shadows.”
Owl Woman (Juana Manwell) ….. from Songs of Owl Woman: The Morning Star
Charles Reznikoff ….. from Testimony (1885-1890): The South (4)
Rainer Maria Rilke ….. The Leper King
Rainer Maria Rilke ….. The Site of the Fire
Shiki ….. two haiku
Izumi Shikibu ….. Night Rain
Paulus Silentiarius ….. “Take off your clothes, my love!”
Wallace Stevens ….. Anecdote of the Jar
Wallace Stevens ….. Dance of the Macabre Mice
Wallace Stevens ….. Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery
Wallace Stevens ….. Sea Surface Full of Clouds
Theodor Storm ….. At the Desk
Alfonsini Storni ….. I’m Going to Sleep
Walt Whitman ….. The Runner
Walt Whitman ….. I Stand and Look

When I read a poem I want to read again, I mark it. Before I move on from the book or magazine where I found it, I read the poem a few times. If I decide I don’t want to leave the poem behind, I hand copy it into a notebook. These are the poems I hand copied in 1995.

What I got at Berkeley Zinefest 2014

The Solstice Submarine a 3D mini comic (with 3D glasses!) by Christopher Joel and Donna Almendrala
published by Macaque Attack
check out solsticesub.com

Blobography an art zine by Brendan Monroe
part of an exhibition presented at Heath Ceramics
check out BrendanMonroe.com

When We Were Kids a mini comic by Andy Warner
published by Irene Comics

Perpetual Nervousness #6 and #6.5, a diary zine by Maira
check out Maira’s tumblr

Self-Destruction and Self-Growth: a zine by Kristen Leckie

I Hugged This Pony Today #happiness comics by Caroline Saddul, Jason Martin and Leo Puppytime
each of the creators has a web destination: Saddul, Martin, Puppytime

Adult Contemporary a mini comic by Leo Puppytime

The Stop and Go Show #1, a mini comic by Leo Puppytime

A Simple Life, A Good Life? a zine/chapbook by Katie Habermas
Grit in Bed

Wet Reckless a book of poems by Cassandra Dallett
Manic D Press

The Cruising Diaries by Brontez Purnell, illustrated by Janelle Hessig
Gimme Action

Thanks, Berkeley Zinefest!

Best Poems of 1994

Akan song ….. Cradle Song
Akan talking drum poem ….. “I carry father, he is too heavy for me”
alta ….. “a car has pulled up outside”
Carlos Drummond de Andrade ….. from Postcards from Ouro Preto: IV: Hotel Toffolo
Anonymous from the Sanskrit ….. “Next morning”
Antler ….. Catching the Sunrise
Antler ….. Childfoot Visitation
Antler ….. Put This in Your Pipe and Smoke It!
Bhavabhuti ….. “Critics scoff”
Patrizia Cavalli ….. “Far from kingdoms”
Alex Cory ….. “The books are hardbound and would kill if dropped”
Larry Eigner ….. “Break the dogfight”
Larry Eigner ….. I will have an image
Larry Eigner ….. Islands
Larry Eigner ….. Letter for Duncan
Larry Eigner ….. Low
Larry Eigner ….. Occasionally
Larry Eigner ….. “shadowy”
Larry Eigner ….. “what time is”
Jean Follain ….. The Secret
Jean Follain ….. “She stops short at something said to her …”
Jean Follain ….. The Students’ Dog
Gajasimha ….. “First time”
Zbigniew Herbert ….. The Return of the Proconsul
Hottentot song ….. Civil War Song
Hottentot song ….. Love Song
David Ignatow ….. 6: “I want a poem that tells itself”
David Ignatow ….. 13: “Why was I born if I have to die”
David Ignatow ….. 14: “I am leaving earth with little knowledge of it”
David Ignatow ….. 52: “The world into which I was born”
Issa ….. three haiku
Linda Johnson ….. Apocalypse
Roberto Juarroz ….. “Use your own hand for a pillow”
Bob Kaufman ….. Song of the Broken Giraffe
Koyukon poem ….. riddle poem (12/J42): “like fine hair”
Mende song ….. On Wealth
Nyanja prayer ….. Prayer for Rain
Tadeusz Rozewicz ….. Leave Us Alone
Rumi ….. The Bottle Is Corked
Rumi ….. 388: “I would love to kiss you.”
Rumi ….. 446: “Today I’m out wandering, turning my skull”
Sherod Santos ….. The Garden Party
Sherod Santos ….. The Palace Hotel at 2 a.m.
Sherod Santos ….. from Three Fragments: #2
Charles Simic ….. Fear
Theognis ….. “You made a mistake in being loved too much”
Theognis ….. “My heart’s uneasy with your love.”
David Trinidad ….. What Ira Said in His Sleep
Tennessee Williams ….. Evening
Barry Yourgrau ….. Golden Years
Barry Yourgrau ….. In the Ice Age
Barry Yourgrau ….. Nursery Tale
Zulu song ….. Song of Those Growing Old

On the Dare I Read blog I react to reading. Sometimes I write about something immediately after reading it. But not usually. Usually I slip a placemark in and write out my thoughts when I get around to it. I got into the habit of multiple placemarks during this personal anthology project. If I read a poem I want to revisit, in goes the placemark. After a few readings, I decide whether I will copy out the poem. The copying is a hassle, but not a big one. Longer poems are bigger hassles. Long poems also have more space to hit wrong notes which can argue against putting up with the hassle. Yes, short poems, you have the advantage when it comes to seizing a page in my book.

Larry Eigner and David Ignatow are poets I was first put off by. Yet here they are, gobbling up pages.

Ignatow is such a sad sack and his poems so prosy that I thought him unbearable and only read a few poems before returning his book to the library. I don’t remember what got me back to him — maybe the challenge? But once I got into him, I found the humor in his depressive poems and their typical brevity made each poem/statement sharper, more piquant than similar sentiments drawn out.

Larry Eigner had a poem wrapped around the exterior walls of the Berkeley Art Museum. I didn’t like it. It didn’t say anything to me. I attended a reading to celebrate the poet partly because a mentor, Paul Mariah, was on the program. There are still many Eigner poems I don’t feel I get — or like — but I discovered settling down with one of Eigner’s books really changed the ambience. I would become absorbed, even if mystified, and move along through a new and different place. I also discovered that there were Eigner poems that I loved all by themselves.

I would also like to note Andrew Schelling’s Dropping the Bow, his collection of translations from ancient Sanskrit. Loved!