acknowledgments

A book of poetry almost always includes an acknowledgments page, where the poet thanks magazines for publishing poems that are now being collected. I read two recent books by good poets, and looking over the lists of their prior publications I see few magazines appear on both— wait, I see no overlap at all. Huh. That’s interesting in its own way.  

Poet #1: 

The Adroit Journal

BODY Poetry

Beloit Poetry Journal

Colorado Review

Diode

Frontier Poetry

Gulf Stream Magazine

Harpur Palate

H.O.W. Journal

Indiana Review

LAMBDA Literary’s Poetry Spotlight

The Los Angeles Review

The Missouri Review

Narrative Magazine

Nashville Review

New South 

Nimrod International Journal 

Ninth Letter

North American Review

Passages North

Thrush Poetry Journal

Tinderbox Poetry Journal 

Tupelo Quarterly

Waxwing

West Trade Review

Poet #1’s book is out from BOA Editions.

Poet #2:

Wise Owl

Old Red Kimono

Avant Appalachia

Tenth Muse

Clamor

Pulsar

San Antonio Review

Schuykill Valley Review

Steam Ticket

Lullwater Review

Uppagas

Amulet

Whistling Shade

NOD Magazine

US1 Worksheets

Umbrella Factory

Door Is A Jar

California Quarterly

Pinyon Review

Isotrope

Kennings

Bethlehem Writer’s Roundtable

Havik

Illya’s Honey

Off Course

Firelight

EKL Review

Abbey

South Florida Poetry Journal

Floyd County Moonshine

Shot Glass Journal

Suisin Valley Review

Poetry Superhighway

Chronopolis

Lost Pilots

Adelaide Literary Magazine

Fourth and Sycamore 

Triggerfish

Trajectory

Blueline

Doubly Mad

Cool Beans Lit

In Between Hangovers

Perceptions

La Presa

Poet #2’s book is out from Cyberwit.

The magazines publishing Poet #1 are mostly known to me. I published in one of them. Many of the others have declined my poems. These are relatively high prestige venues. Poet #1 hasn’t hit the heights of Poetry Magazine or Paris Review, but the magazines he lists are very competitive. If you look at the names in a current issue you will recognize some — that is, if you recognize the names of contemporary poets. 

Many of the magazines publishing Poet #2 are unfamiliar. I have published in four of them and been rejected by a few others. I will look up more of them, curious to see what they’re like. Some have such fun names! Old Red Kimono, Whistling Shade, Umbrella Factory. Wouldn’t telling people I have a poem in Umbrella Factory get their attention more than telling them I had a poem in Indiana Review? Indiana Review is a handsome, perfect-bound, digest-sized literary magazine, the kind of product that, as a baby poet, I remember awe-fully flipping through at the newsstand or library. Whereas Umbrella Factory (I just looked it up) is web-only. Umbrella Factory’s latest issue has six writers in it, so they must be pretty picky, even if I don’t know them as “prestige.” But then, I don’t recognize the names of any of the six.  

Based on these lists, which poet would you rather be, Poet #1 or Poet #2.

The careerist in me (yes, he’s still alive, the fucker) says Poet #1. The populist in me says Poet #2. The realist in me would be thrilled to be either. 

word of the day: autochthonous

word: autochthonous 

context: 

“as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective.”

definition (Merriam-Webster):

 

1: INDIGENOUS, NATIVE

an autochthonous people

autochthonous plants

2: formed or originating in the place where found

autochthonous rock

an autochthonous infection

*

You really need to know the meaning of today’s word in order to understand Walt Whitman’s assertion. The context is enough to figure it out, but it is helpful to have a dictionary pin it down. Merriam-Webster gives the etymology too:

auto-, meaning "self," and chthōn, meaning "earth."

That’s from the Greek. The first use of autochthonous appears here: “English literary critic William Taylor [wrote] in 1805: ‘The English have this great predilection for autochthonous bread and butter’ (rather than French bread, one might safely presume).”

There's more autochthonous song in America than in Whitman's time. But are Americans less "defective"? It's nice to think so. 

source:

The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of Walt Whitman

edited by James E. Miller Jr

1959. Riverside Editions / Houghton Mifflin, Boston

“the air was full of the sounds of other boys”

Three of the founding members of the British rock band Genesis — Peter Gabriel, Paul Rutherford, and Tony Banks — went to boarding school together. 

“Gabriel later recalled his first night in a new dormitory: ‘The air was full of the sounds of other boys either crying or masturbating or both.’”

You’re not supposed to let that get out, are you? There’s some talk in a Mojo Magazine article about how “public school,” as they term it in Britain, with its cliques and bullies and aggressive teachers, yet also with its escapes of literature and drama, was the origin of the Genesis project, which mixed R&B and opera, Motown and psychedelia — and crying and masturbating? What could be more formative?

source: 

“Alpha and Omega”

by Mark Blake

Mojo Magazine

n. 377, April 2025

mitigate the damage

In his book on unheralded work done by federal employees, Michael Lewis drops this nugget:

“Police officers who had just come from an emotionally fraught situation — a suicide, or a domestic abuse call in which a child was involved — were more likely to use excessive force. … ‘Dispatch sent them right back out without time to decompress,’ said DJ [Patil].”

Cops are human. Cops are as human as anybody else. When they behave badly they do so in a human way, not an alien, unknowable, monstrous way. For those who study human behavior, what leads a human to act violently? It can be something as simple as this. The officer was stressed out. He saw the world as a damaging place, looked at people and saw hurters. He took out on the next person the hurt that he’d just seen. Perhaps he didn’t consciously consider how his outlook had been affected by what he had to witness (or worse). Given a rest after a traumatic experience, given a chance “to decompress,” perhaps to talk to someone, express his shock and look over the hurt that had settled in him, dealt with that hurt some, he would be less likely to become one who causes pain.

Police officers should be well rested. Most of the time on the job is probably dull. But when it isn’t, bad shit can pile up on you. It sounds like requiring downtime after traumatic events would be good policy. We don’t want those who work in public safety to become dangers themselves. We don’t want them to become dangers to themselves. 

source:

The Fifth Risk

by Michael Lewis

2018. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

Kill a Dog, Run a Country

When Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, bragged in her autobiography about shooting a pet dog for misbehavior — and because she wasn’t competent to train it well — her luster as a possible vice presidential pick for Donald Trump dimmed somewhat. Whether Trump ever really thought of her that way, the felon does seem to have approved of Noem’s treatment of dogs, likely seeing it as a good model for the treatment of human beings. After the felon took back the White House he moved Noem over from South Dakota to the Department of Homeland Security. 

Well after the election I finally skipped through an October issue of The San Francisco Bay Times, a free paper for the GLBT community that I sometimes bring home. In her “Fortnight in Review” column Ann Rostow highlights another instance of Republican dog killing. 

“Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and what The Advocate calls ‘the architect of Project 2025’ … beat his neighbor’s noisy dog to death and told several people about it back in 2004. According to The Guardian, one of Roberts’ former colleagues at New Mexico State remembers the event:

‘[Roberts] was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty .. that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly, and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem.’

… The neighbor [told The Guardian that his dog], Loca, vanished during the same time period. … [Ann Rostow adds: T]here was a time when a strong rumor like this one would lead other news organizations to investigate and possibly cause a scandal … These days it’s just water under the bridge.”

I don’t remember having come across the Roberts dog-killing story before I saw it in Ann Rostow’s column, not at the time she wrote about it, nor in the months since.  

I have been driven mad by a neighbor’s barking dog (and a dog named “Loca” would be a crazy-making dog, you’d think). I sympathize with anyone who suffers the experience. Tempting as it is, however, killing is not the appropriate solution. It really isn’t. You have decisions to make in life. The person who chooses to beat a dog to death with a shovel is not a person one should trust. The person who brags about it? He does not have good judgment or a good heart. 

And here we are. Kevin Roberts wrote the blueprint for the destruction of the US government. I don’t know that Elon Musk with his Orwellian Department of Governmental Efficiency is following Roberts’ blueprint or just attacking at whim, but the two men are kindred. I haven’t heard about any dog killings by Musk. Is that just because I haven’t been paying attention? 

This is a link to the article at the Guardian (they even include a picture of Loca): 

“Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a dog with a shovel” 

you can’t hear him if you aren’t there, but if you are there …

I love the tender crooning of Caetano Veloso. He’s a Brazilian superstar. He was playing a month ago in Oakland and I missed it. Tickets were expensive, but mainly I think I just wasn’t feeling it. I wanted to be fully there, and I didn’t think I would be. It wouldn’t have been hard to get my body there, but even that seemed more than I could do.

In the latest Songlines magazine the guitarist Marc Ribot, who has played with Veloso, says:

“If you want to hear Caetano sing, listen to a record, because you go to the concerts and he’s so well-loved that all the Brazilians just sing and shout along with it. You can’t hear him at all."  

 

source: “Beginner’s Guide: Marc Ribot”

Songlines #203, December 2024 

top or bottom?

“A white child born into the upper-income quintile was five times more likely to stay there than fall to the bottom. A black child born into the upper-income quintile was as likely to fall to the bottom as to remain rich.”

The federal government collects a lot of information, what Michael Lewis calls, “big pools of raw facts.” In his book on the career civil service, Lewis profiles people who rarely get any publicity, who aren’t paid a whole lot, but who regularly tackle incredibly difficult problems, people who sometimes get amazing things done. During the Obama administration DJ Patil was tasked with making that “big pool of raw facts” available to the public, especially “people who could make new sense of it.” 

As one example Lewis talks about what was learned concerning the distribution of wealth in this country. “A team of researchers at Stanford … used newly accessible data from the Internal Revenue Service … to study Americans across generations and the census data [let them] compare [Americans] by race, gender, or whichever trait [the researchers] wished to isolate.” The data showed that younger generations aren’t improving their lives the way older generations did. “Every year, the economic future of an American child was a bit less bright. And the big reason was not lower rates of economic growth but the increasingly unequal distribution of money.” The rich were getting richer — and that trend only seems to be getting faster. 

Sounds familiar, mostly. The lines about race that I quote at the top of this post surprised me, however. Yes, I knew advantages are disproportionately distributed — that is, white people get more of them. But a rich family has advantages, whatever the family’s skin color. Money gives you opportunities, connections, education, a cushion in emergencies. Whether or not that’s the same across all races, it can’t be so very different, right? Money is money. That any rich kid could be as likely to become poor (“fall to the bottom”) as to remain rich strikes me as hard to believe. There are quintiles in between rich and poor, after all. Wouldn’t a rich kid — even a rich black kid — be more likely to drop a quintile or two or three rather than drop all the way to the bottom fifth? I mean, dropping from the top to the bottom — that’s a long way to fall. Still, the data sounds alarming — such a dramatic difference in lived experience for blacks versus whites, even among the wealthiest.  

source:

The Fifth Risk

by Michael Lewis

2018. W. W. Norton & Co., New York

fires

“How do we comprehend the stars? In our system, you know, our galaxy — and the next galaxy? But all over there are things happening, not just here on our little planet. I think it’s really useful to think about it, because then if a fire wipes out these paintings, it’s not such a huge, big deal; it’s not so big.”

That’s Jan Wurm, a painter, in conversation with Richard Whittaker. 

A fire is wiping out swathes of Los Angeles as I write. According to a Forbes breaking news update, “At least 2,000 homes, businesses and other buildings have been destroyed … so far.”

A friend, a painter, tells me that he burned one hundred paintings. He says his friends were horrified. “Give them to us,” they told him. He shakes his head. “You know, the paintings weren’t really good. I looked at them. I decided they weren’t good. Once I’d burned them I felt relieved. I think it was the right thing.”

It was the covid shutdown that prompted him to do this, he says. He had time to look over his archive and burning presented a way to clear things out. 

I confess I was a bit stunned. I am not a burner. I have friends who have burned diaries — one tells me she regrets that now. I have a friend who burns the drafts of her poems. Read biographies and you come across people who’ve burned their correspondence. The burning of diaries and correspondence is motivated at least partly by shame or the fear that secrets will be made public, burning a permanent hiding. 

Was there anything of that in my painter friend’s choice to burn his works? He paints frequently so he has many paintings. He did not burn everything. Does he still have hundreds of unburnt paintings? 

Much is being lost in Los Angeles. All that loss is involuntary. I look at my shelves of diaries and working notebooks, magazines in which my poems appear, and I know it’s possible that a fire could tear through Berkeley and turn them all to ash. I think about building a fire proof vault. I think about scanning everything, save it digitally — in the cloud? It’s a big job. It’s the sort of mindless job somebody could be hired to do. But then they’d be privy to all my secrets! 

When I go through Kent’s things I put aside his writings. Little of it is art. It’s primarily employment law educational materials, newsletters, memos. Some of it is clever, even witty, with Kent trying to make the subject matter fun enough to keep people awake. 

What to do with this stuff? 

The purging of fire can relieve one of the responsibility of dealing with it all. If it’s all gone, there’s nothing more to worry about. Fire or no, one could just walk away, let fate take it. Usually that means some stranger carting it all to the dump. In a galaxy in which stars explode and planets are shredded by black holes, what’s a few paintings, a few poems? 

Jan Wurm says, “One of the reasons I love drawing so much is that it is inherently impermanent. It’s on a piece of paper that’s going to fall apart, and that’s the end of it. It’s very liberating because, in a sense, what you’re doing doesn’t really matter. So you can do anything.”

source:

“The Social Contract — a conversation with Jan Wurm”

Works & Conversations, n.43

(a magazine)

Richard Whittaker, editor 

Best Poems of 2024

I write poetry. I read a lot of poetry, too. If you glanced over yesterday’s post, the list of titles read last year, you saw many poetry titles, maybe even a poet or two you’ve heard of. I finished a collection by Walt Whitman, for instance. I plucked it from Kent’s bookshelf and started reading it in 2023. I read slowly and I read several books at once, so it often takes me a long time to get to the end of a heavier book. No Whitman poems appear in the list I am posting today — not because I have chosen against declaring any of them “best.” Rather, I haven’t spent enough time with individual poems yet. Likely some will show up among the 2025 “Best Poems.” We’ll see. In any case, that’s my method. When reading a book of poems I keep handy a stack of placemarks. If I want to reread a poem, I slide in a placemark. I come back to the poem, read it again and again. If I decide it’s something I don’t want to leave behind I hand copy it and save it in a three-ring binder. I have tried to figure out what my criteria are, without much success. I like sounds. I like transformations. I like double meanings. I like humor. I like surprise. I dislike poem-as-wisdom. Given the same sources, a different reader would choose different favorites. A “best” list by you, would not be mine. 

Tim Długos   …..   Incredible Risks

Tim Dlugos   …..   Nerves

Tim Dlugos   …..   To Clear Things Up, Scott

Tim Dlugos   …..   Wall Street Sauna

Federico Garcia Lorca   …..   Landscape of the Vomiting Multitude

Hsin Ch’i-chu   …..   En Route to Po-shan

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz   …..   Divine Laura, my life was always yours

Jacqueline Kudler   …..   January 2007

Lu Chi   …..   from Rhymeprose on Literature 

Oktay Rifat   …..   In the Street