from an email list i'm on...


went to the a's game the other day and took susan schultz's And Then Something Happened with me. bill told me it was rude to read at the game and then refused to answer any of my questions about the game if i wasn't going to pay attention. but i read some of it anyway and then finished it today. it opens with a beautiful poem. i'm having this moment where i go that is a beautiful poem sometimes. had it the other night also when walking down the street with walter and he showed me some translations he was doing of a korean woman poet whose name i have forgotten. i had lost that emotion for some reason. maybe too many poems in my life with the mfa program. but i'm glad to now read something and think what a beautiful poem again.

carol's book is out also. i had read it before but reread in it randomly the other day. still struck by the use of the proper name, a sort of calling out, in it. a trance induction?

in both something is happening that questions what sort of thinking can be done in the poem. susan's book asks this question directly:

And what if the poem actually is
the cause of our confusions, not outlet
or even inlay, the taut mosaic
of a million tiles that absorbs logic
like a sponge? Then to write the poem
is to participate in the problem
of expression raised to the nth degree,
and I become a conscious thief,
ransacking the hoard for words to fling
against a wall where syntax
and semantics fill their own
agenda.

kevin killian has that blurb of yedda's crop where he writes "In the future, historians will look back and wonder why the year 2003 marked a paradigm shift for poetry." i keep thinking about whether this is true or not. and i think that he has got something. is it 2003? 2002? 2001? i'm not sure. but there is something, maybe paradigm shift and maybe not, that seems to be switching where poetry keeps asking why poetry of its self. i seem to remember there being another killian blurb where he says something like so and so's work is like so much work of his/her contemporaries b/c it wants to say something. (sorry i can't remember it better.) and i wonder if there is something about wanting to say something in these books but also constant questioning of this desire. war shows up in both carol's and susan's work over and over.

ben's small pound book here also in my thoughts.

then got beth anderson's book Overboard today but haven't had a chance to read it yet
but looking forward to that.