"The Relevance Was Alaska's"

The Relevance of Africa
Sarah Palin

And the relevance to me
With that issue,
As we spoke
About Africa and some
Of the countries
There that were
Kind of the people succumbing
To the dictators
And the corruption
Of some collapsed governments
On the
Continent,
The relevance
Was Alaska’s.


"Not since Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass has there been such an electrifying debut. And she is yet to publish a collection. This is an astonishing poetic insurgency. The building momentum will soon be unstoppable."

LINK:
Sarah Palin for Poet Laureate

"Our Heads Full of Language Like Buckets of Minnows Standing in the Moonlight on a Dock."

What the Doctor Said
Raymond Carver

He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong



Ray
Hayden Carruth

How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables
right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same
time, eating a piece of pie? - that's what I
wondered. A big piece of pie, because I'd just
finished reading Ray's last book. Not good pie,
not like my mother or my wife could've
made, but an ordinary pie I'd just bought, being
alone, at the Tops Market two hours ago. And how
many had water in their eyes? Because of Ray's
book and especially those last poems written
after he knew: the one about the doctor telling
him, the one where he and Tess go down to
Reno to get married before it happens and shoot
some craps on the dark baize tables, the one
called "After-Glow" about the little light in the
sky after the sun sets. I can just hear him,
if he were still here and this were somebody
else's book, saying, "Jesus," saying, "This
is the saddest son of a bitch of a book I've
read in a long time," saying, "A real long time."
And the thing is, he knew we'd be saying this
about his book, he could just hear us saying it,
and in some part of him he was glad! He
really was. What crazies we writers are
our heads full of language like buckets of minnows
standing in the moonlight on a dock. Ray
was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his
poems are good, most of them and they made me
cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,
me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool
because all old men are fools, they have to be,
shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie
into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes
onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles
shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I
ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.

LINKS:
Parting Words: Remembering Hayden Carruth (NPR)
Hayden Carruth's Obituary (The Guardian)
All of Us: Collected Poems by Raymond Carver
Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey by Hayden Carruth

"No Death For You."

The Smiles of the Bathers
Weldon Kees

The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love.
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow and old:
The pilot's relief on landing is no release.
These perfect and private things, walling us in, have imperfect and public endings--
Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you.
You are involved.



LINKS:
Weldon Kees' Poems on PoemHunter.com (.pdf file)
The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees
"The Disappearing Poet" (New Yorker article)
"The Cult of Weldon Kees" (article)

"I Am the Least Difficult of Men. All I Want is Boundless Love."

Meditations in an Emergency
Frank O'Hara

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious
as if I were French?

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous
(and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable
list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with
which to venture forth.

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else
for a change?

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too,
don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of
pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of
perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the
confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes -- I can't
even enjoy a blade of grass unless i know there's a subway
handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not
totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the
least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and
even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing?
Uh huh.

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time;
they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and
disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away.
Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me
restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them
still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I
would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm
curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be
attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the
earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can
spare myself little sleep.

Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven.
Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best
discourage her?)

St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness
which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a
legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that holds you in the
bosom of another and I'm always springing forth from it like
the lotus -- the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must
not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the
filth of life away," yes, even in the heart, where the filth is
pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my
will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in
that department, that greenhouse.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I
admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a
final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

"Fanny Brown is run away -- scampered off with a Cornet of Horse;
I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She
has vexed me by this exploit a little too. --Poor silly
Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. --I wish She had a
good Whipping and 10,000 pounds." --Mrs. Thrale

I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my
dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from
the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where
you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot
ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in
the lock and the knob turns.

LINKS:
New York Times Freakonomics blog on Mad Men's use of Frank O'Hara
The Mad Men scene in question
Meditations in an Emergency at Amazon.com, still on back-order

"Such Pictures You Shall Weave! Such Tapestries!"

Hades Welcomes His Bride
A.E. Stallings

Come now, child, adjust your eyes, for sight
Is here a lesser sense. Here you must learn
Directions through your fingertips and feet
And map them in your mind. I think some shapes
Will gradually appear. The pale things twisting
Overhead are mostly roots, although some worms
Arrive here clinging to their dead. Turn here.
Ah. And in this hall will sit our thrones,
And here you shall be queen, my dear, the queen
Of all men ever to be born. No smile?
Well, some solemnity befits a queen.
These thrones I have commissioned to be made
Are unlike any you imagined; they glow
Of deep-black diamonds and lead, subtler
And in better taste than gold, as will suit
Your timid beauty and pale throat. Come now,
Down these winding stairs, the air more still
And dry and easier to breathe. Here is a room
For your diversions. Here I've set a loom
And silk unraveled from the finest shrouds
And dyed the richest, rarest shades of black.
Such pictures you shall weave! Such tapestries!
For you I chose those three thin shadows there,
And they shall be your friends and loyal maids,
And do not fear from them such gossiping
As servants usually are wont. They have
Not mouth nor eyes and cannot thus speak ill
Of you. Come, come. This is the greatest room;
I had it specially made after great thought
So you would feel at home. I had the ceiling
Painted to recall some evening sky--
But without the garish stars and lurid moon.
What? That stark shape crouching in the corner?
Sweet, that is to be our bed. Our bed.
Ah! Your hand is trembling! I fear
There is, as yet, too much pulse in it.

LINKS:
Alicia Stallings' website
"Recitations" by A.E. Stallings, illustrated by R. Kikuo Johnson (via Boing Boing)

Tao Lin Offers a Cure to Existential Despair Through Strategic Investment Opportunities

Poet/author/blogger/etc. Tao Lin is selling ten "shares" of his new novel, totaling 60% of the U.S. Royalties, on his website. Beyond the simple support-your-local-artist philanthropic benefits that buying into the book might bring you, he also suggests that you may get some long-needed existential relief out of it as well:

People who buy shares will also have more meaning in life if they already like and promote my writing, because they can promote my writing and also be making money for themselves, which can be exchanged for "goods" in concrete reality; therefore existential despair due to "having to do what you normally wouldn't be doing if you had a lot of money" can be relieved to some extent... If you don't know what to do with your life, or even if you just want to relieve boredom for the 10-15 minutes it will take to send me a check or paypal me, or email me, I recommend that you buy shares of the royalties of my second novel. I recommend this because you will then know what to do for a while, and if you ever feel bored in the future, and own shares of my second novel, you know you can always promote me in order to make more money for yourself. You will never not know what to do with your life again if you own shares in my second novel, sort of.

I haven't yet read "Eeee Eee Eee", Lin's first novel, but "You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am" is one of my favorite books of poetry released in the past few years.

At $1,250 per share, investing in Tao Lin's artistic future is a little out of my price range at the moment, but those of you with recently-matured trustfunds or an excess of pocket change may want to take a moment to consider the possibilities.

LINK: Reader of Depressing Books.

"We Are Not Pleased the Way We Thought We Would Be Pleased."

Outsider Art
Kay Ryan

Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said--
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people.
Their purpose wraps
around the backs of things
and under arms;
they gouge and hatch
and glue on charms
till likable materials--
apple crates and canning funnels--
lose their rural ease. We are not
pleased the way we thought
we would be pleased.

Read Meghan O'Rourke's piece on America's new poet laureate at Slate.com.