“they can’t be anything else”

She … turned to me and said that by being in bed with me she was also doing something she had never done before, which was sleep with a man who was Chinese. I thought of telling her that I was helping her do something I had never done before, which was sleep with someone who was Chinese … A Chinese woman once told me that many people want to have an interracial relationship once, but few want to have more than one. Suppose, I told her, all your relationships are interracial, they can’t be anything else because of who your parents were. In my case, a mixture of Chinese and English. In her case, a mixture of Chinese and German.

source: My Symptoms, a collection of short stories by John Yau

The Gay Agenda: Killng and the Straitjacket

[T]hey want to win the right to mimic the institutional straitjacket of state-controlled marriage, and to openly join the armed forces in state-sanctioned killing.

That’s historian & playwright Martin Duberman in his recent Waiting to Land: a (mostly) political memoir, 1985-2008. The “they” would be “the national gay organizations [or] most gay people – who’ve expressed no wish for a radical analysis of class nor a radical alliance with straight left-wingers.” Or both, gay organizations and most gay people. Duberman does mean both, doesn’t he?

This formulation of the goals of marriage equality and of the eradication of sexual orientation discrimination in government employment (including the military, at last) is the bitterest and most sarcastic I’ve seen, though the critique is not unfamiliar. Or, rather, the “left-winger” opposition to the military and to the patriarchal family structure enforced by traditional marriage and family law is familiar. The critique is muddled.

When gay people marry legally are they “mimic[king] the institutional straitjacket of state-controlled marriage” or being bound by it? The language smacks of the old stereotype of a gay or lesbian couple having to sort by gender role. Which is the Man, which the Woman? Seems beneath a longtime gay activist, theorist and historian like Duberman. Same sex marriage is only possible where marriages are egalitarian. If one partner must be subjugated to the other, as has been the traditional assumption in patriarchal marriage (woman subjugated to the man), how would that be applied in a same sex household? Is this where the mimicking comes in?

As to the military, I may be a passivist, of all things. I can’t say as I approve of the armed forces, certainly not in the business of killing to enforce U.S. hegemony (or “interests,” as it’s so often put). But, as with that queer “mimic,” there’s a word in Duberman’s formulation that gets me, “openly.” Should we remove it, what do we have? “They want to win the right to … join the armed forces in state-sanctioned killing.” I’m not sure there’s any right currently to join the armed forces. Is there? If you don’t match what the military is looking for, physically, say, the military doesn’t have to take you. You’ve no right to be a soldier. Now let’s try the sentence another way: “They want to win the right to [live] openly [even in] the armed forces” where they are currently serving in secret. Gay people have always been in the armed forces (usually secretly), performing “state-sanctioned killing,” among other things. What Duberman would do is what, end state-sanctioned killing? And how does singling out gay careerists for career destruction serve this end? It’s always good to destroy a soldier’s career because soldiering is immoral and if this burden falls extra hard on gays, well, that’ll help the cause, because the no state-sanctioned killing cause needs soldiers and who better than the aggrieved gay (former) member of the armed services? That suggests it’s best when the state hurts people, we want the state to hurt people, for it is from encouraging the institution to hurt people that the opposition to the institution gains strength.

I wonder if that’s true.

Judging by the behavior of the civilian police in the smiting of the Occupy protesters, including gays and women hasn’t gentled paramilitary culture. So it would be silly of me to suggest that allowing gays to serve openly would serve any kind of peacenik purpose. I am angered by anti-gay military policies for two main reasons. The first would be those directly harmed by the policy, the people who are attacked by the institution for no reason other than prejudice and judeo-christian conventions, the blackmail power it gives to harassers (protest your treatment and you will be fingered as a lez and lose your career and your harasser will go unpunished), the culture of internal suspicion and spying. The second would be the legitimizing effect of military service. If gay people are honored as soldiers, their families honored, there will no longer be an honored place in the foundational institutions of the United States for the official designation of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals as inferior, substandard, suspect.

I don’t expect magic to come from that. If the draft came back I wouldn’t celebrate the fact that gays would be rounded up along with everyone else. They would be anyway, of course. As they always have. Sure, a few would get out of it by asserting their homosexuality, if homosexuality remained a disqualification for service. But if the military needs bodies, it takes them. Later, when you’re not needed, that’s when the anti-gay policy becomes convenient. You’re tossed out and denied benefits you’ve earned, your separation paperwork declares you unfit (even if you fought as well as anybody) - and civilian employers, unsurprisingly, have been known to discriminate against morally unfit people.

There is one other thing I’d like to mention. Though military service and marriage may or may not be the most important priorities for a gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender movement, they do seem to be the fights the right-wingers have been most eager to engage, partly as a money-raising tool. Not to fight these battles would be to abandon the field to the hating religionists. Would that be wise?

The Wizard of Oz did not run for president

From Debt: the first 5,000 years by David Graeber:

L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.” As an attempt to create a new myth, Baum’s story was remarkably effective. As political propaganda, less so. William Jennings Bryan failed in three attempts to win the presidency, the silver standard was never adopted, and few nowadays even remember what The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was originally supposed to be about.

David Graeber follows up on this passage from the main text in the notes section at the back of the book:

Baum never admitted that the book had a political subtext, but even those who doubt he put one in intentionally … admit that such a meaning was quickly attributed to it – there were already explicit political references in the stage version of 1902, only two years after the book’s original publication.

Perhaps, the most incontrovertible piece of evidence for Wizard’s being a political allegory is this:

Dorothy represents Teddy Roosevelt, since syllabically, “dor-o-thee” is the same as “thee-o-dor,” only backwards.

In his bibliography David Graeber gives the following sources for the above:

Littlefield, Henry. 1963. “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” American Quarterly 16 (1): 47-98.

Rockoff, Hugh. 1990. “The ‘Wizard of Oz’ as a Monetary Allegory.” Journal of Political Economy 98 (4): 739-760.

Parker, David B. 1994. “The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a ‘Parable on Populism.’” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 14: 49-63.

Taylor, Quentin P. 2005. “Money and Politics in the Land of Oz.” The Independent Review 9 (3): 413-426.

I learned from Graeber’s Debt and I admire his devotion to tracking down this story – four sources! – but what I learned from Debt was not this nonsense about The Wizard of Oz. I was going to slap Graeber around myself but then I happened upon this passage in Paul R. Bienvenue’s The Book Collector’s Guide to L. Frank Baum and Oz:

The impact of [The Wizard of Oz] on American culture was felt almost immediately. The front page of The Syracuse Sunday Herald printed what may have been the first Wizard of Oz-inspired political cartoon on January 20, 1901 [four months after the book was published], and the story continues to be a favorite of cartoonists today. Critics were quick to ascribe symbolic and political meanings to the story : an early review revealed that ‘under the sweet simplicity of the tale for children is a satiric allegory on modern history for big people,’ with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion representing Russia, Germany, and Great Britain. Over half a century later, the ‘Populist Parable’ theory of The Wizard of Oz, designed by Henry Littlefield as a simple tool for teaching high school American history, would become dogma to academics worldwide, in spite of later protestations from Littlefield himself that it had no basis in fact.

Paul Bienvenue’s sources:

The review that claimed the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion “were originally supposed to” represent European nations was published in The Beacon (Boston), Sept. 1900.

Littlefield, Henry M., “The Wizard of Allegory,” The Baum Bugle v. 36: 1, Spring 1992, p.24; see also Michael Gessel, “Tale of a Parable,” p. 19-23 of the same issue. The Baum Bugle is the official publication of the International Wizard of Oz Club. I’ve been a member myself since 1980.

Perhaps, Mr Graeber, L. Frank Baum never “admitted” he wrote a political allegory in The Wizard of Oz, not because he didn’t, but because as allegory it was meant to be broad and child-like. Check your paper today (if you still get a paper) and see if a political cartoonist hasn’t taken advantage of the simple allegorical possibilities of Brainless, Heartless, and Cowardly. Or the humbug wizard hiding behind a screen. What was the story originally supposed to be about? Not William Jennings Bryan.

Best Poems of 2003

Tachibana Akemi ….. 2 poems beginning “Happiness is”
Wakayama Bokusui ….. “Look at the mountain …”
Yosa Buson ….. 3 haiku
Chiyojo ….. 2 hokku
Billy Collins ….. The Best Cigarette & Budapest
Gregory Corso ….. Dialogue – 2 Dollmakers
Lucille Lang Day ….. from Field Notes: “Sea Slugs”
Jean Follain ….. October Thoughts
Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser ….. 10 poems from Braided Creek
Ozaki Hosai ….. “Carved into Buddha’s form …”
Kobayashi Issa ….. 7 haiku
Jakuren ….. “Loneliness has no special color …”
George Oppen ….. from Twenty-Six Fragments
Priest Saigyo ….. “At the roadside” & “The deep snow that” & “Ice wedged fast” & “In a hailstorm” & “Today again”
Senryu by anonymous poets ….. 5 senryu
Princess Shikishi ….. “Would there were other means of consolation …”
Fujiwara no Shunzei ….. One-Sided Love
Tanigawa Gan ….. Morning in a Foreign Land
Natsume Seibi ….. “Once when my five-year-old daughter was out playing …”
Shigeji Tsuboi ….. Balloon
Masaoka Shiki ….. 3 haiku
Ishikawa Takuboku ….. 2 haiku
a Tsukeai, an anonymous ‘linking’ poem ….. “I made her wet …”
John Yau ….. A Sheaf of Pleasant Voices
Ishihara Yoshiro ….. Song of the Ringing in the Ear
Kinoshita Yuji ….. Late Summer

Since 1989 I’ve been collecting poems. The best poems are the poems I like best, not just the poems I like, admire, think are done well, but the poems I want to spend time with and look forward to returning to because they strike something inside me that might, for all I know, be peculiar to me. Not so peculiar that someone else didn’t write the poem, but unique enough that just cuz I think it’s great it don’t mean everybody else will. So. The best poems are the ones that work best for me. No surprise, eh? It’s not like there’s objective criteria, you know.

With “The Best Poems of 2003” I am exposing the last of the contents of the looseleaf binder that I’ve been filling up for the last 12 years.

These are the other eleven:

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

The Best Poems of 2002

The Best Poems of 2001

The Best Poems of 2000

Best Poems of 2002

Anonymous ….. Li Sons D’un Cornet
Guillaume Apollinaire ….. There Is
Janine Canan ….. from Travels: “The crayfish has gotten huge”
Marc Cohen ….. Stairway Beach
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore ….. The Roses of Saadi
Emily Dickinson ….. “I reason, Earth is short” & “Is Bliss then, such Abyss” & “Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat?” & “We grow accustomed to the Dark”
Annie Dillard ….. The Hunter
words from the Hmong language …. txij txej, etc.
Marc Elihu Hofstadter ….. The Nap & Poetry & A Sunday Afternoon in January
Miroslav Holub ….. Interferon
Kobayashi Issa ….. 9 haiku
Valery Larbaud ….. The Gift of Himself
Salvador Diaz Miron ….. The Example
Pierre Reverdy ….. Air
Sappho ….. “heart” (a fragment)
Tristan Tzara ….. Epidermis of the Night-time Growth
John Updike ….. Dog’s Death
W. B. Yeats ….. He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

As I read a book of poems I keep placemarks handy. When I read a poem that really impresses me I pop in a placemark so I can easily find the poem for a revisit. If after rereading the poem several times it still strikes a personal chord, such that I don’t want to leave it behind, look forward to reading it again, and find the physical discomfort and hassle of copying the work out by hand a mild form of payment for something that will give me pleasure for years to come, the poem shows up in a list of “Best Poems” for whatever year I found it. I have filled a few looseleaf binders with these poems. The years 2000 through 2011 fill one such binder.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

The Best Poems of 2001

The Best Poems of 2000

Best Poems of 2001

Rafael Alberti ….. The Dead Angels
Yehuda Amichai ….. The Narrow Valley
Paul Celan ….. “Husks of the finite …”
Gunter Eich ….. A Mixture of Routes
an Eskimo song ….. The Word-Fisher
Edward Field ….. To My Country
Louise Gluck ….. Screened Porch
Thom Gunn ….. In the Post Office ….. A Young Novelist
Lyn Hejinian ….. from Nights
Brad Leithauser ….. On a Seaside Mountain
Richard McCann ….. Nights of 1990
Leslie Norris ….. The Pit Ponies
Marlene Pearson ….. To Document a 20-second Hug …
Julien Poirier ….. “Slow astronauts are obliged”
Joanna Sondheim ….. “breeze within”
Alfonso Quijada Urias ….. There’s an Orange Tree Out There
Victor Valle ….. Teofilo
Alice Walker ….. from African Images: “A strange noise!” & “The native women”
Ray A. Young Bear ….. Always Is He Criticized

I heard Louise Gluck read “Screened Porch” this spring. She read in UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series. I was only able to make half of her hour reading as it was on my lunch break and getting up the hill from the public library where I work took ten minutes hoofing. It was a little strange hearing her say words I’ve repeated to myself many times, as though she had snuck the poem out of a place I’d thought hidden.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

The Best Poems of 2000

Best Poems of 2000

Anonymous ….. haiku
Gary Aspenberg ….. “Homeopathic Poem I”
Basho ….. haiku
Buson ….. haiku
Blaise Cendrars ….. “Fish Cove”
Chiyo-ni ….. haiku
Clark Coolidge ….. “Combed Through the Ballardian Perspex” and “The Image Links” and “On the Light”
Russell Edson ….. “For Many Years”
Jorie Graham ….. “Opulence"
Ha Jin ….. “A General’s Comments on a Politician”
Robert Hass ….. “Layover”
David Ignatow ….. “Circling the Silence” and “Staying Alive”
Ikkyu ….. “something in us always wants to cry out”
Robinson Jeffers ….. “Cremation”
Samuel Johnson ….. “asylum”
haiku ….. Joso
Anna Karnienska ….. “A Prayer That Will Be Answered”
Philip Levine ….. “The Mortal Words of Zweik”
Federico Garcia Lorca ….. “Rundown Church”
Bronislaw Maj ….. “A Leaf”
Czeslaw Milosz ….. “One Life”
Mo Fei ….. “Stuck in Place” and “Young Prophet”
Robert Morgan ….. “Bellrope”
Po Chu-i ….. “Evening Rain” and “Sick and Old, Same as Ever”
Lawrence Raab ….. “Sudden Appearance of a Monster at a Window”
Shang Qin ….. “Electric Lock”
a Southern Bushman song ….. “The Day We Die”
Wnag Ping ….. “Of Flesh and Spirit”
Yang Lian ….. “An Elegy for Poetry”
Zhang Zhen ….. “Deep into Smaland”
Zhen Danyi ….. “Poem”
Zou Jingzhi ….. “Old Bowl”

Listmania! Some people like lists. Me? Not a huge fan. Even when I’m sympathetic to the purposes of the lists. I’m exposing my “Best Poems” lists on the blog more because I have them than that I need to wave them around. I ought to be writing something about these. But I always feel like my expounding on poetry is redundant at best. If I think the poem is great stuff I should hand it to you and you would have opportunity to judge for yourself. On the other hand, why should you care what I think is good?

The above is the contents page for the poems I hand-copied from various sources in the year 2000. Occasionally I’ve told a poet about capturing his poem and tried to convey my reasons. I recall telling Robert Hass that I’d copied out “Layover.” It was at one of his readings. What was he supposed to say? I think he nodded, said, “Oh,” in that mild noncommittal way he has.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2009

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

The Best Poems of 2009

Anonymous ….. “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “We Shall Overcome”
Benjamin Franklin ….. from “Poor Richard’s Almanack”
Gintaras Grajauskas ….. “World in Your Pocket”
Kaylin Haught ….. “God Says Yes to Me”
Lee Hays and Pete Seeger ….. “If I Had a Hammer”
Marc Elihu Hofstadter ….. “Black Angel”
Emma Lazarus ….. “The New Colossus”
Percy Montross ….. “Clementine”
Geoffrey G. O’Brien ….. “Old War Injury”
Plato ….. “Socrates to His Lover”

plus haiku by Keiho

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2010

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

Coincidence

A few days ago I’m reading before bed like usual. I read some pages from a book, then I put it down and pick up another, go a few pages further into that one. In Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense, his essays on current poetry, I come across a discussion of the way the Australian poet John Tranter has mined “Dover Beach” to create some poems of his own. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” ends thus:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

So I put aside Close Calls with Nonsense and pick up Gregory Benford’s science fiction novel Timescape. The characters hear noises out in the garage so go to investigate. They surprise some thieves and one of our heroes brandishes a fireplace poker.

Markham swung the poker back and forth in front of him. The men seemed paralyzed by the sound of it. In the gloom they could not tell how close it came. Markham could not judge the distance either. Ignorant armies clash by night, he thought giddily.

So, hey, that was fun, going from one book to another and encountering the same line of poetry in two different contexts.

Then I remembered that a few days previous I had read Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” in its entirety in an anthology edited by Robert Bly, News of the Universe: poems of twofold consciousness, a book I’m still working my way through.

update:
There’s one more item. I’ve been reading another anthology, The Cento: a collection of collage poems, edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford. As Welford explains, “A cento is a collage-poem composed of lines lifted from other sources – often … from great poets of the past.” I came across the placemark last night (2/5/12). I’d put it in a couple days after the Close Calls/Timescape incident. Maybe I was prepared by that, making it seemed natural when in a contribution by David Lehman I came across this:

… To begin the morning right,
The small rain down can rain

Where ignorant armies clash by night
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Glenn Ingersoll reading from a Roger story, plus some Fact poems

Louis Cuneo has uploaded to youtube selections from the Touch of the Poet series, which took place in the basement of the UC Berkeley Art Museum. This is me reading from a notebook. The video announces itself as documenting a 1997 reading then seems to change its mind and say it's 1998. I can't remember myself, but I may be able to get the correct date from a diary. Not that it matters so much. The chapbook I read from at the end is one Kent put together on the computer at home.

The Best Poems of 2010

Steven J. Bernstein ….. “Murdered in the Middle of the Dance”
Walid Bitar ….. “A Moral Climate”
Sargon Boulus ….. “How Middle-Eastern Singing Was Born”
John Cage ….. from “Themes and Variations”
Heidi E. Cooper ….. “untitled”
Najwari Darwish ….. “Clouds”
Michael Davidson ….. “Thinking the Alps”
Lucille Lang Day ….. “In Praise of Jellyfish” and “Near Kibbutz Nir David”
Andrew Demcak ….. “Postcard”
Dmitry Golynko-Volfson ….. “Passing the Church of the French Consulate”
Ko Un ….. from “Flowers of a Moment”
Alexander Kushner ….. “Memoirs”
Ann Lauterbach ….. “Clamor”
Rachida Madani ….. from “Tales of a Severed Head”
Thylias Moss ….. “The Lynching”
Rea Nikonova ….. “312 steps …”
Michael Palmer ….. “Voice and Address”
Po Chu I ….. “Sleeplessness”
Vasko Popa ….. “The Starry Snail” from “Heaven’s Ring”
Samih Al-Qasim ….. from “An Inquest”
Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez ….. “Sing Sing Sits Up the River”
Sohrab Sepehri ….. “At the Hamlet of Golestaneh”
John Oliver Simon ….. “Caminos” and “El Canto” and “Endecasilabos” and “Jade”
Patricia Smith ….. “Annie Pearl Smith Discovers Moonlight”
Jeet Thayil ….. “Spiritus Mundi”
Alexandr Ulanov ….. “Untitled”
Keith Waldrop ….. “Wandering Curves”
Wang Shih Ch’eng ….. “The Red-Petaled Plum”
Marjorie Welish ….. “Skin”
Adam Zagajewski ….. “At Daybreak”

plus haiku by Buson, Seibi

In the links below I talked about how my “best poems” lists come about, so if you’ve Googled yourself or some other obscure poet and come here all unknowing, but really want to know, do a little link diving.

The Best Poems of 2011

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

pile of reading

Timescape by Gregory Benford
This science fiction novel was published in 1980. I remember reading a review of it, probably in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I don’t remember the review being an all out rave, but it was positive enough for me to pick Timescape off the shelf at the paperback book exchange in Sebastopol when I had credit to use. The book then sat in a box in the closet for years. I brought it to Berkeley when I cleared out my mother’s house. It’s okay. I’m about halfway through. Characters living in 1998 are trying to send messages via tachyons to characters living in 1963, hoping the folks in ’63 will manage to head off some of the fomenting ecological disasters of the late ‘90s. I read another SF novel recently that was set in a year that came and went. Benford doesn’t fill his 1998 with spaceships the way Frederic Brown did.

If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter
A collection of essays, the ones I’ve read so far recounting memories of a sissy boy childhood and awakening gay sexual feelings. “First” describes a car ride in which the five-year-old Ryan proposes to his five-year-old beloved, Ben. That’s what people in love do, they get married, right?

Close Calls with Nonsense: reading new poetry essays by Stephen Burt
Twenty years ago I swore off reading critical essays because I was reading all these critical essays in order to find out what I should be reading but rarely actually reading the works the essays were written about. That’s what you do when you’re an intellectual, read thinkers writing about art. Right? No more reading about fiction or poetry, I sternly directed myself. You must devote your reading time to the poetry or fiction that these critical thinkers are thinking critically about. It was a good choice. I gave myself permission very recently to read essays again. Since I’ve been reading without the help of the judgments of others I have developed judgments of my own so when I read a critic, Stephen Burt in this case, I have confidence in my own opinions and have some perspective on the critic’s take. I’ve read a few of the contemporary poets Burt talks about here – D.A. Powell, August Kleinzahler, Rae Armantrout – but mostly not – Liz Waldner, Laura Kasischke, H.L. Hix. I don’t know what I’ll take away from this book, exactly. On the whole I think it better I go back to reading poetry to the exclusion of people talking about poetry. It only matters so much what others think. If Burt loves somebody I care not for, so what?

Paradiso Diaspora poems by John Yau
John Yau is a favorite. I just read a selected by him. Liking this one less, the writing seems slacker, but there are lots of fun lines. “[T]hose of us perched in the back rows, and there are far more of us than there are seats, can’t tell which entrance in the hours erected by the sky’s solid façade might prove useful should the mounting chatter take a turn for the worse …”

The Wounded Alphabet: poems collected and new, 1953-1983 by George Hitchcock
Both Yau and Hitchcock ply surrealistic bayous. Yau is playful and shifts from serious to goofy over the course of a poem (or a line). Hitchcock doesn’t do fun. He’s all serious, often in that melodramatic tone I associate with 19th century verse. “[S]omewhere in the years outside these walls / A boy, shivering, dives in a golden river // Still searching for a bit of porcelain, / White, in the shape of a fish.”

The Cento: a collection of collage poems edited by Theresa Malphrus Welford
The poems I crafted from titles owned by the UC Berkeley library would fit well in here.

News of the Universe: poems of twofold consciousness chosen and introduced by Robert Bly
A Sierra Club publication that wants to be more ambitious that just being a collection of nature poems. I understand there’s a new edition available, but I’m reading the old one which was given to me by my first landlady in Berkeley.

Drama: an actor’s education by John Lithgow
This memoir can be fun, can be a bit much. “In the towns, the streets are eerily empty. The carousel in Oak Bluffs is shuttered and silent. As the days pass, all signs of human life disappear from the windswept beaches, leaving them desolate and melancholy.” The streets can’t just be empty, they have to be “eerily empty.” The beaches without humans on them are necessarily “melancholy”? Drama, indeed.

From Hell a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
I was going to read this someday. When I saw that the West Branch copy had been misshelved at Central I decided I would be doing the library a favor by checking it out so that when it came back it could be directed to the owning location. Alan Moore is interesting. I don’t always love his stuff. In fact, I often find it a tad overwritten. And Eddie Campbell’s art is a bit scratchy and stiff. But I don’t doubt this is worth reading, even if I did see the forgettable movie version (Moore hates all movie adaptations of his work) and don’t care about Jack the Ripper.

The Best Poems of 2011

Anita Barrows ….. “The Ancestors”
Guy Bennett …. “Poem after Josef Sudek” and “Condensed Poem” and “Necessary Poem”
Molly Fisk ….. “Red River” and “This is the Story of My Life”
Angela Weld Grimke ….. “Tenebris”
Paul Guest ….. “Elba”
Judith Herzberg ….. “Kinneret”
Rachel Korn ….. “From Here to There”
Donna M. Lane ….. “Pajamas”
Nicanor Parra ….. “A Man”
Gyorgy Petri ….. “I Am Stuck, Lord, on Your Hook”
Edouard Roditi ….. “The Paths of Prayer”
Harvey Shapiro ….. “Like a Beach”
Leonora Speyer ….. “The Ladder”
Anna Swir ….. “He Was Lucky”
Julia Vinograd ….. “Street Musician”
Stanislaw Wygodski ….. “Winter Journey”

plus haiku by John Brandi (2), Margaret Chula (2), Cid Corman (2), Raffael de Gruttola, Diane di Prima, Bernard Lionel Einbond, David Elliott, Sandra Fuhringer, Christopher Herold (3), Brent Partridge, Alan Pizzarelli, Jane Reichhold, Frank K. Robinson, Alexis Rotella (2), Edith Shiffert, Ruby Spriggs, Tom Tico, Anita Virgil

Did you make my list of the Best Poems of 2011? If you did, yay for you, I guess. If you didn’t, well, maybe I didn’t read any of your poems.

The list is a favorites list, which poems I liked best of those read in 2011.

I keep a stack of placemarks ready whenever I’m reading poetry. If a poem strikes me just right, I pop a placemark into the book so I can revisit. If, after several rereadings, I decide it’s a poem I don’t want to leave behind, I hand copy the poem and slip it into a 3-ring binder. I’ve been doing this for about 24 years so I’ve got some fat binders.The one I’ve been filling for the last twelve years has finally gotten too tight, so I’m moving it to the archive shelf and starting anew.

On the first of the year I read aloud all the poems I’ve collected over the previous year. Usually I’m reading to myself, in case you were wondering. This year Kent listened in. Of course, he had his own opinions and wasn’t afraid to question my choices. If you want your tastes reflected, friends, fill your own notebooks. On the whole, though, he seemed to enjoy it, even tearing up over Donna Lane’s “Pajamas.”

I haven’t posted a “Best Poems” list since 2008, so I have 2009 and 2010 to share with you folks. Yes, I had favorites those years, too.

The Best Poems of 2008

The Best Poems of 2007

The Best Poems of 2006

The Best Poems of 2005

The Best Poems of 2004

a tale of two Burroughses

Tarzan fascinated me and inspired a lifelong love of Africa, its people, and its wildlife. … When I first read Tarzan, going to Africa became an imperative. And I also desperately wanted to be able to communicate with animals as my hero did. Edgar Rice Burroughs never set foot in Africa (in fact, William S. Burroughs has probably been a more reliable guide to me), and his descriptions bear no relation to what it actually looks like, or what it’s like to live there …

So the book that set Tony Fitzjohn on his way to becoming the main assistant to George Adamson in the camp Adamson set up to return orphaned and failed pet lions to the wild in Kenya was a book that bore “no relation” to reality … There’s something about the magic of the imagination, eh? Africa is more accessible than Barsoom!

There’s something else in the quote I’m going to point out. I read several books at once and it’s not uncommon for me to turn from one book, a book on lions, say, to another set in an entirely different milieu, U.S. indie rock, maybe, and in that same reading period find the different books talk about the same thing. William S. Burroughs, in this case. In my January First post I quote from Bob Mould. He stole a book from the library, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. A Brit who ends up a lion caretaker in Africa and an upstate NYer who ends up a rock star were both into William Burroughs.

source: Born Wild: the extraordinary story of one man’s passion for Africa by Tony Fitzjohn

“the ground had become impregnated with urine”

[L]ions are not particular about where they urinate. They will do it lying, sitting or standing, at any time and in any place, although they are most particular about where they defecate and will always move well away from their sleeping places. It is quite possible that their free and easy habits of urination have a definite purpose. Lion urine appears to be an insect repellent as I noticed this to be the case of Elsa and her sisters; their small night enclosure became heavily infested by fleas, but after a time, when the ground had become impregnated with urine, the fleas disappeared.

source: A Lifetime with Lions by George Adamson

According to Masters & Johnson

I’d heard that Masters & Johnson, the sex researchers, had studied gay people, but that their final report was riddled with homophobia. In her book on sex research Mary Roach reads the M&J report and lets us know, not only is it flawed by homophobia, the gay people come off as better lovers than hets.

They ‘tended to move slowly … and to linger at … [each] stage of stimulative response, making each step in tension increment something to be appreciated …’ They teased each other ‘in an obvious effort to prolong the stimulatee’s high levels of sexual excitation.’

Those are some of Roach’s excerpts from Masters & Johnson, thus Roach’s elisions and interpolation. Some of the couples were singles randomly assigned by the researchers. For the shy among us, you might note that all the couples, male/male, female/female, and female/male, performed under lights in a lab while being observed. All must have been pretty confident about their ability to showcase their skills.

According to Masters & Johnson a woman would get about as turned on by her female lover’s arousal as by anything happening exclusive to herself. This, you might or might not be surprised to learn, was not the case with hets. The goal in het sex is climax, with both boys and girls trying to push their partners to rapid release. M&J call this “goal orientation, … trying to get something done,” with main focus on the genitals, and by that I mean the penis.

Meanwhile, the homosexual men lavished attention on their partners’ entire bodies. And the gay men, like the gay women, were adept at the tease.

The gay lovers “talked far more easily, often, and openly about what they did and didn’t enjoy. Gay men and women simply seemed more comfortable in the world of sex.”

And the homophobia? Where did that come in? “Masters & Johnson spent the second half of the book touting a therapy for helping homosexuals convert to heterosexuality.” Oh. One can see how that would overshadow the research’s positives.

source: Bonk: the curious coupling of science and sex by Mary Roach

“Smoking … the timepiece of my life”

I started smoking a pack a day at the beginning of college, and by the end, I was up to three packs a day. Smoking had become both the centerpiece and timepiece of my life. Every cigarette was six minutes long, and I could practically mark out the whole day with smoking, like a sundial. Six minutes on, nine minutes off. Repeat sixty times a day.

When I came across this passage in Bob Mould’s new memoir I was surprised. Here was a reason for smoking that had never occurred to me. Cigarette as timepiece!

I remember being delighted the first time I was given candy cigarettes. I could mime the grown-ups at last. I could playact the mystery of smoking. It wasn’t very good candy. And I wasn’t that picky about candy! Fiddling with the candy cigarette told me nothing about what would make one want to suck smoke and stink up their clothes. I did like fire. And cigarette lighters. Having permission to set little fires all day everywhere seemed seductive.

When my brother told me he’d been secretly smoking cigarettes I pestered him to explain what he got out of it. The explanation didn’t sound sufficient. Something about a waky buzz? I tried, smoking at least one cigarette sitting behind a bush near the little league bleachers. When it made me sick I was told that’s what happens to everybody, but you get over that. Plus there’s something cool about it because the people who smoke are cool. Oh? My stepmother was cool? I liked her all right. But, I don’t know, cool?

source: See a Little Light: the trail of rage and melody by Bob Mould with Michael Azerrad

another memoir, another library thief

During the day, my work-study job was at the library. I would move quietly through the stacks, restocking the returned books and observing people studying quietly – or discreetly pleasuring themselves in an obscure alcove. It happened all the time. I also lifted the library’s lone copy of Naked Lunch for my personal collection.

source: See a Little Light: the trail of rage and melody by Bob Mould with Michael Azerrad

compare to our last library thief

“Ambassadors of affable storms honor my effigy”

Thanks, George Hitchcock, for giving me the title of this last post of 2011. The words are from his poem “My Days and Nights,” which appears in The Wounded Alphabet: Poems Collected and New, 1953-1983. See you all in Twelve!

“a matter of common report”

I have to quote this excerpt from the medieval guidebook to the prosecution of witches, Malleus Maleficarium. The author takes as a given that everybody knows about “those witches who … sometimes collect male organs [yes, penises] in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report[.]” (The ellipsis is in the original excerpt.)

source: Bonk: the curious coupling of science and sex by Mary Roach