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christmas eve 

we got a new car recently, and the salesman, who lives in Waltham, I forget why, said his friend/neighbour was a Pulitzer Prize poet. reeling in some info that I sponged in my neverending quest to be slightly informed, I guessed Franz Wright. bingo. I've never read his work, but his vituperative prose is 2nd rate, if this chunk is representative. gotta focus that anger, Tex. you know, like a laser. hoping stray schrapnel hits one's foe is inefficient. I don't know why I even bring this up, or why Wright is in such a stew. Waltham's not such a bad town, with the Charles winding thru.

dunno why I haven't put a permanent link to this blog yet. il s'appelle Peter Ciccariello. quite stunning and grand work.

Inferno by Ivan Arguelles (imagine 2 dots over the 'u', I forget the code for that) arrived a couple days ago, Beatitude Press 2005. Arguelles' work is intense, highly wound up but scholarly as well. there's an intersection of the sacred and the profane that's rather startling, Madonna as in Mother of God and as Material Girl. there's a centripetal force to his writing, and expansive outreach at the same time as an inward pull. John Bennett supplies a really nifty intro, to the book and to Arguelles, much better than I'm doing here. I'll just add that Arguelles is a writer who can negotiate the whole Inferno/Purgatory/Paradise trip (the other 2 parts exist but I don't think they're published yet). Bennett also did the cover art, with his totally whack calligraphy & rubber stamp wildness.

we saw Chronicles of Narnia. the ads or trailers that I saw, it looked like LOTR. it has some grandiose moments but is more intimate than anything. I have only read Wardrobe, Witch and Lion in the series, and I did so in my 30s. it was never beloved for me. I didn't dislike the book but wasn't inspired to finish the series. I find the Christian allegory distracting, constant replacement of x with y. it's kind of deflating, too, all these fantastical events and characters turned into sunday school verities. not to say I dislike Lewis, but I think there's the danger of overplaying one's hand when allegory gets going. 1st thought: New Zealand is now established as THE location for fantasy. 2nd thought: oh to be a foley artist. a foley artist is someone who adds explosive sounds to every possible sound on a soundtrack. someone blinks and there's an explosion. seems like nice work. I can't remember what the movie was in the thrilling array of previews, a sucky animated hunk of Disney crap. oh yeah: Curious George. I fear Disney is going to do what they did to Winnie-the-Pooh. don't go: make them stop! and hey, check out this amazingly original plot in another choice upcoming: Queen Latifah has 3 weeks to live so, chuckle, she decides to blow her money on GOOD TIMES. can you imagine the hijinx??? hahahahahahahaha. whew. that's nothing like what the 3 Stooges did in 1939, or those 37 other movies. great twist on St Francis of Assisi's famous rejoinder. gotta see that one. but back to Narnia. it looked good enough. it seemed to lack scale tho. not till the end did we start seeing crowds, e'en tho it's about the world at wr. before that, it didn't seem quite large enough. there were some uneasy moments with the children, Lucy and the faun, Edmund and the Witch: a predation element. Santa Claus handing out weaponry was an interesting touch. all I want for Xmas is an AK47. I don't remember how the books handled that. goes along with the view that our jihad is better than yours. religious Texas Death Match, woo hoo. I remember the phrase 'righteous anger' in Perelandra. you can do anything if you're right. which is certainly common thinking but not exactly challenging to the moral muddle. Aslan seemed merely pompous thru out the movie. okay, he let himself be killed, but he had that covered. that angle seems kinda weak with that other guy as well. if you know death aint death, then dying aint no thing. quod erat demonstratum. so quit being so dramatic about it. Lucy was the most consistently noble of the children but gets pushed to 4th place quickly, and Peter unconvincingly becomes the King of Kingness. he is about 14 steps down from Viggo in terms of born to be king. the White Witch was icky enough, and she handled her swords nicely, but the whole game seemed rigged. I hope your sunday school isn't taking you to a matinee because I think there are holes in that part of the flick. it looked good, mostly. I can get into this stuff actually but when the brain goes back on, it all seems weak. LOTR was eye candy most of the way, but it sure hurt at times. I have little interest in the presumed excesses of King Kong. George Bush is a movie.

by the way, happy anniversary Allen and Beth

you gots to admit Ted Berrigan reading The Sonnets is Niftyville. the intro is fascinating. he's respectful of the masters yet wants to squeeze into the realm himself. that kind of love and fame thing. and very conscious of a thing called being a poet, which he honours with seriousness.

Penn Sound also has Koch (who I don't mean to put in opposition to Berrigan, honest). gosh he has a nice voice. and listen to the audience, you can tell they are ready to laugh. which is a really nice thing. not that every poet should be funny, but that there's an expectaion of pleasure, surprise, energy.

new at Antic View. of course you must check it out.

there's nothing better than linking to someone who just linked to you, and I do so with modest aplomb albeit also as if I've been in the endzone before. so thanks to Eileen Tabios for instigating this excess. dot dot dot. I used to work in a wine store, in fact they let me make displays and create signage and woohoo. I never gave it the rocket science treatment, but still, I thunk about it. so I can criticise the situation. you see the gears working at B&N, with lots of room for Eragon and Hairy Potter, highlights beamed on Jessica Simpson's latest philosophical disquistion, perhaps a cookbook or 3000 to catch the eye, what has William Shatner written another book? and so forth. when it comes to the world of poems for sale, it's a matter of letting the big poetry cartels dictate. way too much poetry lite, like that one: Most Famous American Poems, or some title like that. quality assured poems, as you grit your teeth. a Ted Kooser book was stacked near that end display looking more like a discard (Ted who?) than something exciting and worthy of Christmas of Hannukah overkill. I'd've stuck a sign saying Pullet Surprise on the stack. for those who wanted to get their kid something certifiable. if you wanted to move them books, that is. in other sections of the store, you know why the book is there: Tom Brokaw wrote it, or the cover's cheesy, or Oprah blurbed on it, or the words Stephen King are readily apparent: you know the drill. but in the po section, and it surely is po', you wonder who slept with who to get some of these books on the shelf. I'm not talking qualitative, I'm talking marketing, the lifeblood exercise. it's not like you can't entertain people with Koch and O'Hara. there was a handful of copies of In Memory of my Feelings which, after Beth efforted to remove the plastic wrapper, proved to be O'Hara plus art from famous 60s artists. you only knew this was prime stuff from the $90 price tag. why not underline its yumminess? Lorine Niedecker's was available and her work, if not pizzazzy in the sense that Jennifer Aniston is pizzazzy, is clear and resilient for any honest reader. like, you can read her poems and not feel like they didn't teach you how to read, even tho they did. Bloom's anthology is clearly a piece of crap, he should fire whatever grad student made that selection. it gears up in handy form a good sense of how damn boring poetry is. I'm not talking crummy writing, I'm saying the collection asserts nothing but the bad side of tenure. poetry as the cod liver oil of literature. and so forth. and yet, people want to buy poetry books for their sensitive children, or for their sibling who came back from college all a-buzz, or simply for that certain someone adventurous enough to read something other than the televised brands (did I see some tome cowritten by Ed Asner, a defense of liberalism? you bet I did!). Cambridge still has its sacred Grolier Bookstore, a poetry bookstore, which sounds good but the shopping experience suggests gulag. so B&N, which in its corporate soul just wants to see books fly out the door, should be at least a chance, but it lags with the poetry field. B&N is an egalitarian place: if the product can be productive, it fits. but the store itself should offer some thinking into the mix, instead of waiting for a snob like me to come sniffing. I saw maybe 5 poetry books that I'd get if I had Johnny Damon's potential contract. honest to gosh: too many slump poets, and too little interest by the people in charge of adding sizzle to the steak. how unAmerican. it's a Pickett's charge you suggest, Eileen, but you got the energy. I got your back, for what it's worth.

went to Barnes & Noble yestreen. they got the thing right, pretty much. you step in and smell Starbucks coffee: good start. I do not actually look at many books. I just don't have the time or focus to read all the history I want to, or the science books, or fiction. I hate to admit that, but that's where I am. I almost got a book by James Hillman, who is a Jungian therapist (albeit one quite willing to criticise Jung), but the book was made of crappy paper with a crappy binding: what's the point. especially as Hillman is someone I'd underline a lot. I saw Kenneth Koch's collected and was this close to getting it. it just didn't excite me in the way Berrigan's did, however. I was bemoaning (you should have seen me bemoan!) the lack of a collected Berrigan years ago. it's not that I don't like Koch, it's just that he's on a different level of need for me. the Koch doesn't identify the editor or anyone involved, which removes a personal aspect from gthe project (it shouldn't but it does), whereas Berrigan's is a family affair and it shows. plus Notley's introduction has some useful comments to make. I was surprised to find a selection (or was it a complete) of Djuna Barnes. fault to me, I've never read her. sprinkled thru the book are photos of her, making the book seem like a biography. Laura Riding is of interest, but right now I'm suire I can't read her. what I've read of her is tortuous, tortured senteces, fascinating but such as my attention span can't render properly. see, I wasn't desperate to get anything. Sylvia Plath's journal looked interesting, as did a book by Kenny Goldsmith in which he gathers daily weather reports together. his projects are fascinating altho I wonder if we have to trust their actuality. keeping the scope up the way he does would seem to take mucho time. his book in which he gathers all the words he hears for a week: how the fuck could he do that? granted computer and granted some people have mighty fine engines, but still. I got none of those books. nor Mary Oliver's plethora. what's her hold on the po book public? the end display didn't seem to get marketing's full attention. MO was there, a selected and a collected Dickinson, Bloom's ridiculous Best Poems ever. the double dip of Dickinson is a waste of space. I'd do Plath and/or Ginberg there, and not MO, who seems low octane however well regarded she might be. trying to move some units, folks. I'd put Koch there, because it's a giftie sort of event. I suppose Bloom belongs there, in lieu of a more exciting anthology. nothing edgy about ranking on Bloom, but let me do so anyway. yes, "Song of Myself" makes an appearance, but no, not the whole thing: there are other warhorses to appease. long ago, on Jerry Garcia's birthday (and mine), the radio station that laughably still calls itself the Rock of Boston, decided to play "Dark Star" in tribute. oh, about 12 minutes in, the announcer jumps in and says, well enough of that. this station was the edge, of sorts, back in the day, but now it's all perfunctory. economic forces dictate, and that's what it feels like to put only part of Whitman's poem in. cripes, it's one of the poems Clinton uses to get chicks, so it has historical value. I'd like to go thru the whole anthology and determine which choices Bloom was guilted into and which set his dinghy rocking. altho frankly, does anyone think he even looked at the galleys? like any CEO, surely he trusts his grad student minions to get the job done. so what book did I finally get? Area of My Expertise by John Hogdman. I saw him on the Daily Shiow, where he was extremely funny. his book is an almanac of facts, such as: a list of all 51 state flowers, and one of all the presidents who had hooks for hands. we ate dinner at an Indian restaurant. on our way out, a manga display pulled Erin and the rest of us into a little bookstore. Lexie found 3 books by Dave Pelzer, who chronicles his life dealing with abuse. Beth got a couple Terry Patchett books to give as gifts. the cashier said, these are wonderful, referring to the Pratchett books. Lexie thought she meant the Pelzer books. she says it's a fascinating series. the cashier says, they're so hilarious, and Lexie fogs over, err... umm...until I explain.

friday night we fetched Beth's niece from the airport. she's spending Christmas with us. her family stopped doing Christmas because the tensions of the season came to dominate too much. it was her idea to quit it, as a young girl. but she's excited to come back to it. our tree's been up a while. the youngest daughter of Israeli friends helped us trim it. the family's been in the US for 5 years, and before that Singapore. I don't know if the girl, 9 years old, was even born in Israel. Christmas is a fascination for her, unsurprisingly. obviously the matter of Christmas is a tough one to negotiate but honest, we're not inculcating. Dana was bubbly excited when she came over to trim the tree. she said unwrapping the ornaments was like opening birthday presents. so the house is in festive mode. Beth's niece was due at midnight, requiring a visit to Logan in its rare comparative quietness. while we waited, an alarm sounded and the escalator from where we expected Lexie to appear stopped. then an airport worker pulled the security fence closed. Beth goes to the worker and asks, where's my niece? and Lexie comes along from another way. so there, just as magical as that. and not enough sleep. and then our Christmas party. a feature of which was drumming. my drums were not on display but a request came from the younger children. so I hauled out my congos, bongos, domubek and other hand drums. now, all the boys are in Erin's room playing Magic cards and vid games but just about everyone else ends up drumming. I mean, go figure. and it went on, gosh 45 minutes or more. even with some rave-like dancing and ululations. it's so weirdly unselfconscious. cripes are we boho or what? I've always observed that drums are tempting: when people see them, they want to make a little noise. and not enough sleep, once again. this is my poetic milieu. it works for me

the collected of Berrigan and Koch appear simultaneously and, having to prioritize, I chose Berrigan. not to implement a dualism, that's Ron Silliman's job, but Berrigan's more 'important' to me. and part of that is merely that Koch has been more available to me than Berrigan, easier to find his books. both books are unquestionably events. as opposed to the yearly Best American Poetry, which srikes me as a grim escapade for those profs too lazy to implement their own reading list. also, the anthology for those needing cv material. lark on. I will get Koch's book as soon as I can. I like in both him and Berrigan how their work is centred on adventure. I aint even seen Koch's visual work to speak of, that's a further element of adventure. I got Koch's New Addresses from the library the other day. I'm geting kinda leery of thin hardcover poetry books from major publishers, there's such an air of dry formality to the packages. it's grim to look at the credits for Koch's book and see APR, Poetry, The New Yorker. good for him, I guess, because he got paid, but to think an inarguably great writer (our greatest? what a dopey thing to say) is stuck in the evident morasses of those rags (no, The New Yorker aint a rag, but its column filler stance toward poetry is bogus) is just a little depressing. I liked Koch's addresses altho reading thru the book, I got a feeling more of exercise. a trifle prefunctory. but I was glad the book was thematic, and not just recent scrapings. which goes back to the nature of those big pub po books. everything looks so damn formal.