back when I first started seriously doing the poetry/open mic thing, a woman named Lisa Hemminger told me that we poets need to journal our influences, to keep track of who we were reading while we were writing what, to catalogue where poems came from. Lisa was (maybe still is?) purposely the star of her own movie, a runaway hit in her own mind.

so this is my twist on the blog livejournal madness. here I will not talk about what I had for lunch or who annoyed me on the subway or what have you. I will post random information about what I'm reading/hearing and what I think of it. maybe some writing exercises I'm working with. that's my story, now it's over.

to start off: the poet I'm currently adoring is Stephen Dunn. "Between Angels" and "Different Hours" contain some of the most precisely beautiful language I've encountered in a long while. there's a grace to it, an effortlessness that belies the craft -- the words seem to lift off the page like feathers, but feathers placed in such a way that whole birds appear if you care to look.

who knew? figured him for stodgy, but I was wrong (it's happened before, once or twice). at the risk of probably breaking major copyright rules, check this out:

SWEETNESS

by Stephen Dunn

Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet...

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care

where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

(from "Between Angels")