“If the Psalms Aren’t Poetry, They’re Useless”
Peter O'Leary and Alicia Ostriker discuss Robert Alter's translation of the Psalms on the Poetry Foundation site

Bibliomancy (poem)

    I ching,
    I change,
    The book of loose changes,
    Chapters of fortune:
    I, cope of good hope,
    Lose my thought in the action
    Of a rook on a post—omen
    Of the great amen makes
    Plain the hap and stance
    Of pacts made at midnight masses.
    In croons of crow I read
    My fate: to deftly send the moon
    To the corner pocket, Scratch
    And shuffle out
    Through the pages (I ching,
    I changes) of an old sage,
    Toking on a bitter root, takes
    One look at me, lets sail
    A smile of June and damages,
    Teeth like lost cargo
    A wash awash on the beaches.
    Deathly scent of a bloom, the bird
    Of the floored tanks free
    To sod, dive-bombs like a dove
    On the ought and is—I cling
    To my stage business.

best of the gourd 2008! / year in review

1. You can now purchase my new chapbook, Say To These Bones, Live! online--just click 'add to cart' on the Ice Box Press web site. I have already had two great readings and another one coming up this Friday at Quimby's. Support, support!

2. The Anxiety of Imitation from March

Part One: I Am Everything I've Seen (And Not Much Else)
The Masters of Culture are the Greatest Imitators... Art Is Self-Expression, The Self Is Imitation

Part Two: Now Let Us Praise Different Men
Similarities Excite Difference...The masters of culture have escaped from sameness, everyone imitates them rather than they imitating everybody.

3. The New Victorians

4. Poetry Criticism

The childhood poet and the 20-year-old poet - The Primal Poetry Experience
Bukowski and Zen - "Don't Try"
Bukowski the Loser
poetry and prose
this animal poetry

5. Top Books I've Read This Year

The Way of Zen - Alan Watts
Run With the Hunted - Charles Bukowski
The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel - Don Marquis
Animals In Translation - Temple Grandin
The Pleasures of the Damned - Charles Bukowski
Born On A Blue Day - Daniel Tammet
I Was Vermeer - Frank Wynne
Evolution and Conversion - Rene Girard
Introduction to Christianity - Pope Benedict XVI

(I've also been reading a lot of John Ashbery and John Milton all this year, though not in ways that complete books.)

6. Selected Poems

It Becomes So Hard To Judge These Distances
"Out of an ancient tree" (sonnet)
"My generation was born" after the campus shooting in DeKalb
Detective Story (prose poem)
These Have Been Hidden
My Figure, My Founder
eAster* egO (visual poem for Easter)
in t(wo mb)t (visual poem for Easter)
Song for the City
"Yet for all I've done I've never been able to escape"
too early for work (haiku)
eating lunches by (haiku)

7. Frost Cento - still working on it! Should be done in the Spring!

it knows no other art

"In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were many times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly."

- Matsuo Basho, The Records of a Travel-worn Satchel, Tr. Nobuyuki Yuasa

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