can she bake a cherry pie

*
I can't imagine the frustration the critics of Billy Collins must feel—

especially the avant-hick ones—

how, armed with their grad degrees in poetics, in post-posty theory,

they can prove, semiotically, scientifically prove,

how inadequate the verse of Collins is—

and yet, despite their poeticspeak (Orwellian emphasis),

his books continue to be bought and read and enjoyed

by tens of thousands (surely hundreds of thousands by now) of poetry readers:

Count me among them.

*

Avant-hicks: I used to call them avanthacks, hacks, but hicks is I think more appropriate for these impoverished pockets so cut off from the rest of the world, and yet so convinced that their sect is righteous: how saved and holy they are in their isolation, incestuous, bristling, mad.



///

iowa writers workshop turns 75 years old

*
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june11/iowawriters_04-07.html

*

Good for them!

Congrats.

Of course, when I applied to go there as a student to get my MFA,

they rejected me.

And Warren Wilson also rejected me, when I asked if I could study with them—

Vermont College accepted me (they had lower standards, obviously, if they took
worst-cases like me)

and I got my MFA degree from Vermont.

I wasn't good enough for Iowa or Warren Wilson,

which is another illustration (if more were needed) of their outstanding quality.

///

protest (and if you have to do that crap-out, why not googoogajoob)

*
Recently I received a solicitation to submit something to this:

"[A]n anthology titled A Long and Winding Road which will contain around 200 writers of all genres and world cultures, all born 1940 through 1960. The intent is to provide glimpses into what makes the generation unique, what influenced and shaped, what perspectives emerged and evolved."

. . .

Twenty years of writers, and none of them, the poets prosewriters playwrights, essayists et al,

not one of them wrote a phrase which could be appropriate for the title of this book?

It has to have that clicheish tagalongline, that inane refrain from a pop song?

Why?

I protest.

If the editor were taking for his title a phrase from Sharon Olds or David Mamet or Carol Ann Duffy or Robert Hass, to name just a few of the important writers from this generation,

if the editor were using a quote from any significant "world culture" author born 1940-1960,

I would be willing to submit something for his consideration.

After all, I don't get solicitations for anthologies every day.

In fact, I never get asked to be in any anthologies—

if you're ever in Groliers in Cambridge, Mass, or at Open Books in Seattle, or in a big library, look at their walls of contemporary USA poetry anthologies, all so unalike in their demarcations,

yet all so similar in that none of them include my verse.

—The only exception being the two edited by Billy Collins!

(Collins transcends the in-house standards of PoBiz, which most other anthologists are required to obey: he can include a pariah in his anthol and not suffer reprisals, whereas the other compilers fearful for their careers must exclude blacklisted writers like me or face negative consequences in their professional currency.)

*
But I digress.

///

pobizarre

*
Here's another bizarre entry in the absurd column of pobiz—

http://www.poltroonpress.com/submissions.html

—
if you linked to that page, you'd see this:

Poltroon Press Projects 2011

Thank you for your interest in Poltroon Press. We are not currently reading any unsolicited manuscripts. We have unpublished material by the authors dear to us that we would like to publish and hope to get around to in the near future. We would welcome poetry manuscripts from Rae Armantrout, Tinker Greene, Bill Knott, Joanne Kyger, or Steven Lavoie, but if that's not you, please do not send us your manuscript.

***

Surely, if you're a publisher of poetry, you have to have some standards, some esthetic principles?—

You can't promiscuously publish anybody and everybody, this kind of verse and that kind of verse, all schools without discrimination,

not without compromising whatever artistic values you're trying to maintain and manifest in your choice of projects,

not if you're serious.

*
I am not thrilled at my appearance on that list of poets whom Poltroon would "welcome poetry manuscripts from,"

since I feel no affinity with the other poets mentioned. What I've seen of their work I dislike—

I find it depressing that Poltroon Press (or anyone else) would associate me with them,

as if my verse were compatible, as if I were one of that avantcrowd,

all of whom, I assume, bear the Silliman-Approved stamp.

And I would guess they (those other poets) are as insulted to see my name alongside theirs as I am to read mine there.

///

free at last

*
wouldn't ya know it, my nemesises at PoChiMag posted a note about my vanity volumes on their "Harriet" website,

and naturally they neglected to mention even in passing that all my books can be downloaded

FREE—

they "forgot" to note the most important aspect of my self-publishing activities,

which is the fact that I GIVE MY FUCKING BOOKS AWAY FREE!!!

But of course they don't want anybody to know that, do they,

they and every other online poetry website do not want their readers to know that

I GIVE MY BOOKS AWAY FREE—

*
As usual Poetry Magazine continues its vendetta against me,

continues to insult and denigrate me as they have done throughout my career—

I wouldn't expect anything else from them.

///

edwin muir

*
Edwin Muir's Collected Poems was published in 1965 (Oxford U. Press)—

with a preface by T. S. Eliot, which ends by noting

"that great, that terrifying poem of the 'atomic age'—The Horses."

That 'atomic age' seems quaint, but the Times Book Review this past Sunday quotes a new book claiming that even a limited nuclear war in the mideast would cause the famine death of hundreds of millions of people around the globe. I wonder if Colonel Ghaddafi is reading Muir this morning.

Midway in the book (p. 142) is this sonnet:

THE RIDER VICTORY

The rider Victory reins his horse
Midway across the empty bridge
As if head-tall he had met a wall.
Yet there was nothing there at all,
No bodiless barrier, ghostly ridge
To check the charger in his course
So suddenly, you'd think he'd fall.

Suspended, horse and rider stare
Leaping on air and legendary.
In front the waiting kingdom lies,
The bridge and all the roads are free;
But halted in implacable air
Rider and horse with stony eyes
Uprear their motionless statuary.

//

alessandrelli

*
these poems seem interesting to me:

http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue14/alessandrelli.htm

...

though I have questions:

are they a sequence? or separate poems?

and why are the poems so disparate in form?

since the tone, the voice is the same throughout (consistent) why the warping shapes?

maybe the poet is struggling against his consistency—

i.e. his content.

//