& here I was just feeling relieved

. . . at not having tripped over any

(there's not another poet for miles, here)

(tho I did peep Paul Muldoon in Princeton)

& then, daytimes, three days per week, the Hudson & East Rivers like moats

me bobbing among, vicariously internettin, skipping readings.

maybe next week.

--

also: increasingly impatient with poems being overly poemy

or poemish. too much like poems. including mine.

(i see ron also appreciates poems that "show their seams," which i believe i (probably erroneously) will go ahead & take the credit for coining, since it's now in vogue & will surely surely make me famous & rich.)

poets should be more than Ben Stiller in that movie with his signature look,

& not a series of poses. what, that's news? no.

__

but: here're some poems that don't have such troubles,

those in day poems by mel nichols.

they're really too short to quote, lest i type out the whole thin chap to say what i mean,

but when the first began

it is blue there

roof pulls away from the

folding the curtain the sky

not a rose a folding a not

tremble bird in fuchsia

tongue pink bride

tangled in a white tunnel [. . .]

i forgot all about being on the train & even the existence of trains, tracks, night, places to go.

you could get one here.

also, i am reading Tom Raworth's Caller & Other Pieces from same; more about that later.

__

also:

"As soon as you put a name to something, a lot of times people get turned off: 'Oh, that's what that is,' and they don't want to know about it anymore. You can see that they would be disturbed. But at the same time, if you don't know what you are looking at, you'd be surprised how beautiful things are,"

said David Lynch, in the NYT Style Magazine

--

also:
I received Court Green 4 (which I am not in, no, so it was a nice surprise, thank you, Chicago), & so far have liked Judith Kroll (just to see her, one of my teachers from UT, twice recently, where's she been?), the first few lines of Judith Taylor's poem especially, before it began to go patchworky: "Sometimes she is irritated with her thing.//Some days she is a poet wearing a pink bra./Some days she is a pink bra." James Grinwis has some fine bits too, "the campus like a huge white carcass" & "Academy of the fist-sized bruise" though I have a prejudice against souls; I suppose it's my upbringing. Still. (I do collect by bits--somebody called me on it once. I think it was Jordan.) & Maggie Smith's poem "Let's Not Have a Meeting," well, I'm just going to borrow it whole:

Let's Not Have a Meeting

Let's not have a meeting
on how to have more effective meetings.
Somewhere it is just turning to summer.
Clouds click into place and begin
the business of raining. It's that precise.
Then the birch is a violin. Then the light
above the kitchen sink is a beehive.
There are too many sounds.
Let's not have a meeting to name them.
I'm busy making a life. It could be the wrong life.
Then all of the work will have been for nothing.
You shouldn't have driven. There is no breathalyzer
for sadness. Somewhere it is already summer,
and ivy has claimed half the houses. Here it is fall,
and my tree is the only one on the street
still with leaves. You shouldn't have.

About which I will just say, I love it, despite lines ten, eleven, and the word sadness. & Susie Timmons's "Arson" is also (really) a keeper, tho I think her longer lines should have been indented after the wraps, especially since she has shorter lines later--but this is not the poem's fault, just typesetting [so pull yr window out wide now for this stolen, unless the blockquotes ruin it, then use /]:

"I kept going closer and closer until I could feel the heat from the fire warming my face /
one of the firemen told me to move back, and I said /
it's an instinct, I just feel drawn to it. He said, I know. but you have to move back, you could get hurt /
but the fire was so warm and alive, a hot crazy animal.

I could read a whole book of that stuff. I also liked Jo McDougall's "One Horse Store" but am unprepared to say why.
I stopped at Elaine Equi's "Unisex Cologne" catalog copy poem (huh, appealing to my dayjob, it works, whaddaya kno): " BLACK FOREST [...] Makes anytime/feel like the middle of the night."

I haven't yet gotten into the political poem dossier. No telling how that will go, due to my own predisposition not to like my news and poems mixed. Eh, don't quote me, & knowing Court Green I'm liable to be proven wrong (again).

Info. (But the website is mistaken. #4 is the political dossier issues. #3 was the bouts-rimes.)