Tory Dent's book is lost somewhere in the morass of the apartment, so instead I turn briefly to one of the louderARTS project's poets of the month: A.R. Ammons. I started reading Ammons' book "Glare" a year or so ago, but left it at Roger's house where it got absorbed into THAT morass and only recently resurfaced. "Glare" is a book-length poem that mingles abstraction with what hints at a long narrative line... it's been a long time, and I need to start back at the beginning again.

But in quickly choosing a partner Poet of the Month for Marilyn Nelson, he sprang to mind. In addition to the fact that his work is a fascinating mix of styles and lingual textures, I have a soft spot for someone who didn't get noticed at all until 38, and wasn't critically acclaimed until a decade later -- and still ended up publishing more than 30 books of poetry.

Check this out:

City Limits
by A.R. Ammons

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

***

That is ONE SENTENCE! One sentence, gorgeously spiralling in and out of itself, turning and twisting and never feeling strained. The sense of being lifted out of oneself, of being transported for a moment to a fundamentally new place, is what I believe distinguishes poetry from all other forms of writing. It is what I find lacking in so much of what I hear on microphones around the city -- that dedication to getting it SO RIGHT that the world tunnels to just - that - poem. So all noise, breath, light disappears for the moment of the poem. In short, to explain the world in such a way that only a poem will do.

so GinnaKarla and I have started actual capital-W work on our second books. I'm not sure how I feel about this first one anymore, but I feel that I can't even see it at this point, so who's to say. In any case, it's time to start work on another one, and so we have. Both of ours, interestingly enough, will deal with family in some way -- hers, relating to secrets and superstition and mine starting with suburbs and shadows, moving into some full-on psychic break madness, and then resolving (hopefully) with a long long poem. We'll see how that goes. Right now I'm flip-flopping between the first two sections -- the one dealing with the protaganist as child and her family goings-on, and the second one where moves back to her childhood home and loses it (it being her mind, apparently.) Short attention span theater, I suppose.

I'm still reading Tory Dent -- trying to get through the long last series "HIV, Mon Amour" in spurts on the train. more later...

so Louise Gluck is the new poet laureate. let me take a moment out of my lunch to say that she is an excellent writer. As a matter of fact, I gave a copy of Meadowlands (her fifth book, I believe) to Sabrina for her birthday just this past Sunday, believing that her ability to intertwine the strange and surprising image with highly grounded, everyday language would complement Sabrina's lyrical/narrative bent.

that said, ADRIENNE RICH SHOULD BE THE POET LAUREATE OF THESE UNITED STATES. and I know it's not going to happen -- the highly political Jewish lesbian, poet laureate of a country that thinks that calling deep-fried potatoes "freedom fries" is an act of patriotism? not likely. But the woman has every kind of qualification you could imagine -- except safe politics. I mean, check it out:

Poetry

A Change of World (Yale UP, 1951)

The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (Harper, 1955)

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962 (Harper, 1963; rev. ed., Norton, 1967)

Necessities of Life (Norton, 1966)

Leaflets: Poems, 1965-1968 (Norton, 1969)

The Will to Change: Poems, 1968-1970 (Norton, 1971)

Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972 (Norton, 1973)

Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (Norton, 1974)

Twenty-One Love Poems (Effie's Press, 1977)

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (Norton, 1978)

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 19 78- 1981 (Norton, 1981)

Sources (Heyeck Press, 1983)

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950- 1984 (Norton, 1984)

Your Native Land, Your Life (Norton, 1986)

Time's Power: Poems, 1985-1988 (Norton, 1988)

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991 (Norton, 1991)

Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970 (Norton, 1993)

Dark Fields of the Republic, 1991-1995 (Norton, 1995)


Prose

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Norton, 1976, rev. ed., 1986)

On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966- 1978 (Norton, 1979)

Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1986 (Norton, 1986)

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Norton, 1993)

PLUS a new book of essays and a new book of poems ("FOX") since that list was put together.

*sigh*

in other news, I'm reading Marilyn Nelson's selected poems ("Fields of Praise") and Tory Dent's "HIV, Mon Amour" simultaneously, going back to what I used to do in grad school: read books with vastly differing styles in hopes of some organic fusion in my own work. more on that later.