“Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo”

For this inaugural monthly Animal Poem post, a look at “Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo” by William Matthews.

It’s a gorgeous poem from his 1973 Rising and Falling collection, which is one of my “desert island” books. The immediate beauty is of course in the largest metaphor — the snow leopards “jump / down and jump up, water being / poured,” a visual image of their physicality that is reinforced, with a heavy emphasis on the endangered aspect of the snow leopard, in the last three lines of the poem (the “them” refers to his children): “I save them whatever I can keep / and I pour it from hand to hand.” But in between that introductory image and the end, man what a lot happens in this 18-line poem.Continue reading ““Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo””

Beasley / Biespiel / Jensen / Friebert

A short look at: Bruce Beasley’s Theophobia  (2012), David Biespiel’s Wild Civility (2003), Laura Jensen’s Memory (1982) and Stuart Friebert’s Funeral Pie (1996).

One of the (oh so many) things that drives me nuts about statements like, “I don’t like poetry” or “I could just never get into poetry” is the underlying idea there that poetry is a single thing. It’s like saying, “I don’t like movies” or “I don’t like food.” Just because I can’t stand beets (I really can’t stand beets) doesn’t mean I’m going to write off all red foods, or all food. You could say a strawberry and a beet look sorta the same, couldn’t you? But the taste?

One of the things that struck me reading these four collections (all of which I like) is how vastly different their use of language is, what a nice spectrum of diction they represent. Friebert and Jensen all use very everyday vocabulary. In “Pocket Gopher,” Stuart Friebert writes, Continue reading “Beasley / Biespiel / Jensen / Friebert”

2012: A Short Look Back at What I Watched

I’m such a huge fan of movies, and taking a look now, boy did I see a lot of ’em this year! Here’s a sampling of the best and worst I watched this year:

Best 2012 Movie: (bearing in mind that I haven’t seen Lincoln or Beasts of the Southern Wild yet) A neck-and-neck tie between Moonrise Kingdom and Silver Linings Playbook. Moonrise Kingdom is such an immersive, total world, a world you want to live in, with all its quirky quixotic romantic characters, and its nostalgic colors and its delicious soundtrack. But Silver Linings Playbook, which I just saw today, is such an alive movie, and it moves you from laughing hard to nearly crying without jerking you around, or feeling contrived or unrealistic. So the tieContinue reading “2012: A Short Look Back at What I Watched”

2012: A Short Look Back At What I Read

Before the look back, a quick look forward. Coming soon (or eventually) in 2013:

  • Reviews of collections by James Arthur, Bruce Beasley, David Biespiel, Stuart Friebert, Laura Jensen, A. E. Stallings, and Wendy Willis
  • Posts about William Matthews’ and Christian Wiman’s poetry
  • The afore-mentioned monthly look at an animal poem (replacing 2012’s Months posts)
  • Some more extensive film reviews on occasion, in addition to the short ones you can always find, frequently updated, on the Film page

Now for the requisite (and for all it’s cliché to do so, enjoyable) quick look back at the reading I did this year. (I stuck the Worst in the middle, because I didn’t want to end on a low note).Continue reading “2012: A Short Look Back At What I Read”

December

For this last “Months” post of the year — and please don’t take this as a knock against December poems (I thought about mentioning W. S. Di Piero’s “Chicago and December,” or Linda Bierds’ “The Neon Artist in December,” or Kenn Nesbitt’s kids’ poem “December 26.” or any number of excellent poems about snow) — I just must revel for a moment longer in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales (because the rule is you have until New Year’s Day to finish up the Christmas books). I love it for all its wonder and humor and nostalgia, but even more so for the language, which alternates between lush, luxuriously alliterative figurative passages like,

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

(such a joy to say aloud), and the simpler telling of what happened,Continue reading “December”

Beatdom arrives in the mail

Just a note that the latest issue of Beatdom, in which you can find one of my poems, “Rambo’s Bohemia,” (along with a Patti Smith interview, essays, other poetry and more)  is now out. Got it in the mail today. (If “publishing a volume of poetry is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for an echo” (Don Marquis) then a single poem in a literary magazine would be, well, quieter, but I am of course happy to point out that it’s dropped nonetheless!) You can either download to Kindle or order the old-fashioned paper version.

Beatcover12

Most Vivid Reads #5

This is the final installment of my “Most Vivid Reads” series. (See below for the full list of books).

The Book of Nightmares — Galway Kinnell

I loved this poetry collection when I read it in college, and I still do. It’s melodramatic, its images are overwrought and its underlying emotion is morbid. It talks madness, birth and death, and how mortality underlies everything, speaking alternately straight up and with a bemused chaser, and that’s exactly why I love it. It hits that youthful ‘but life leads to death, death, death’ phase we all go through (especially (?) us artsy types), but it’s such well-written morbid angst. It’s like the best part of revisiting your youthful darkness-obsessed phase, because Kinnell has such a great control of language. I don’t find it amazingly profound or deeply moving in its mysticism, which is what some claim about The Book of Nightmares. But I do love it.Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #5”

Most Vivid Reads #4

Entry #4 in my “Most Vivid Reads” list (“most vivid” being a very similar but slightly different list than just a straight “My Favorites” — the books highlighted here are the ones that have been the most memorable reading experiences, the most vividly injected into my brain (and therefore life), whether or not I re-read them to death). Previous posts in this series can be found here.

The Road — Cormac McCarthy

If you’ve read it, you knew it was coming on this list. The Road is not just engrossing, it’s enveloping. It’s spare writing (I swear 90% of the book is white-space) but each sentence paints such a vivid picture in your head you’ll feel you watched it on screen (they did make a movie of it, but it feels like there’s really no need to see it (I didn’t, even though it starred Viggo Mortensen!) because the novel is so visual, so vivid). Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #4”

Warhorses and The Porcine Canticles, Briefly Reviewed

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa and The Porcine Canticles by David Lee

Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa (2008)

Yusef Komunyakaa is, as previously mentioned, one of my all-time favorite poets. He’s a very deft writer, who can amaze, and blaze images and words into your head. Or sometimes he can be just deft. This isn’t my favorite of Komunyakaa’s work, but it’s not like he’s become a terrible writer here. It is and isn’t a criticism of Warhorses to say that it’s a collection that does something together (it’s a lyric meditation on war (so of course love too), touching on conflicts historic through present-day (it was published in 2008)), but it’s not a collection of individually great poems. (The third section is the exception — “Autobiography of my Alter Ego,” Continue reading “Warhorses and The Porcine Canticles, Briefly Reviewed”

Most Vivid Reads #3

The first two posts in this series can be found here  and here.

Gilead — Marilynne Robinson

Gilead is a luscious read, a quiet, powerful, resonating read, the epitome of the sort of book you might find yourself refusing to read the last page of because it will be awful to have it be over. The narrator is an old man, a minister, nearing his own death and writing a letter (the book is the letter) to his young son. “My custom has always been to ponder grief,” he says partway through,

That is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. That old weight in the chest, telling me there is something I must dwell on, because I know more than I know and must learn it from myself—that same good weight worries me these days.

And you will remember, and slow down to think about, his voice, I daresay, off and on for all of your days.Continue reading “Most Vivid Reads #3”