In any event, this suicide arose after poor Crane was beaten just after attempting to proposition several officers. An even more bizarre element concerns his fiancee, Peggy Baird, who had just experienced a freak accident involving an exploding cigarette lighter. With his fiancee bandaged and sedated aboard the cruise ship. it was small wonder that the sexually confused Crane plied himself up with liquor and made bold barebacking suggestions to the ship’s crew.

Crane’s death, as strange as it is, tends to greatly overshadow his ambitions, which can be best enjoyed with his epic poem, The Bridge, which kicked things off with the following stanza (from the opening section “To Brooklyn Bridge”):

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

It’s probably worth mentioning that Crane had befriended the poet Samuel Greenberg in 1913. Greenberg died even younger than Crane did in 1917 — merely twenty-four, impoverished, overworked, contending with the premature deaths of his parents. Upon receiving a package of Greenberg’s manuscripts, Crane remarked that Greenberg was “a Rimbaud in embryo,” finding his poems “fugitive and incomplete.” But the interesting question of whether Crane saw Greenberg as a model for poetic martyrdom remains mostly a mystery. Certainly, Crane was content to call The Waste Land both great and “so damned dead.”

But we can proud report that Jasper Johns, who was greatly inspired by Crane for a great number of his works, is not yet dead. (Hi, Jasper! Keep painting that canvas!) It is also quite possible to celebrate Crane without being compelled to mimic his exuberant demise. It’s always a good day for poetry. Just be sure that your loved one doesn’t screw around with a lighter on the fritz.

Stay writing, don’t die too early, and keep in touch!

Who is the Correspondent Talking With? Mark Doty

What’s Going On? So here’s the deal. Mr. Doty here has arranged a considerable amount of poetry together. But have you ever stopped to consider just how it was put together. Furthermore, there is a good deal of talk here about Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and the degree to which poets should revere Mr. Whitman. Mr. Doty was a good sport during this interview, and we hope to revisit his work at some less rushed point in the future.

National Book Awards Podcast #4: Mark Doty (Download MP3)

If someone published an article containing false information about me, I would want it removed from the Web; it is no different for you to claim I wrote a certain poem when I did not. It is my basic right to protect my name and reputation, and I find it really tasteless that some people would laugh this off as some kind of avant-garde experiment.

It is worth observing that Danny Pitt Stoller’s name has been frequently used as a mark. Despite being married, Mr. Stoller has slept with a mere 2.2 people in the past eleven years, and hopes that he will yield 2.2 children in the next eleven years. He once ran for treasurer, losing to Esmerelda Muttmuffins by a 72-28 margin. Ms. Muttmuffins still holds the coveted position. There was a six month period in 1997 in which Mr. Stoller’s telephone bills were about $300 monthly, the result of too many 1-900 telephone calls. Mr. Stoller is a legally ordained minister and has officiated over many weddings. That woman who married a dolphin some years ago? It was Mr. Stoller who presided over the ceremony. Mr. Stoller has written 210 letters to the editor, but none of them have been published in Newsday. He wears pink socks in his bedroom, but never in public. He genuinely believes that Michael Bay is one of the most important film directors of our time, and has watched every episode of The Beverly Hillbillies twice.

And, yes, Mr. Stoller is dour and humorless. (Well, not quite dour and humorless. Contact with him in 2010 has revealed a sense of humor and elicited a slight modification to this entry.)

Holdout absent letters, turn redux
Wait and drink Lethe’s mug will wear a tux
Lobes probe further heights
Emolument
But at unknown escarpment

• Is there any purpose in listening to someone outside my socioeconomic strata?
• Is there any purpose in venturing outside Manhattan? After all, New York is the center of the universe.
• Is there any purpose in sampling different food when I am comfortable with the bland meals I eat at home?
• Is there any purpose in trying out another sexual position besides missionary?

(In case it wasn’t clear, the answer to all these questions is a resounding YES!)

(via Bookninja)

And here’s a report of the evening from Richard Grayson. As Mr. Grayson notes, someone did indeed leave in a huff midway through the reading. Many thanks to Levi Asher for inviting me.

(Mad props to Caryn)

Nevertheless, I will have more details soon, but it goes down this Thursday. At 8:00 PM. Somewhere. More specifics to come.

ALSO FROM TAYLOR MALI: “What Teachers Make” and “Like You Know.” Here’s the guy’s website. He also has podcasts.

Let me count the ways in which this sentence is stupid. For one thing, why the fuck should “The Waste Land” be “accessible?” It’s not as if Eliot’s masterpiece is a building that needs a fucking handicapped ramp. It’s an epic poem that requires you to take the damn thing apart and find out why it hits you in the gut. “After the torchlit red on sweaty faces?” Come on. It’s pretty fucking clear we’re not reading a Carl Hiassen thriller. It’s pretty fucking clear that we’re not talking about some bullshit dichotomy (Complex style! Simplistic themes! You see! No gray areas! Here’s a helpful bulleted list for you to bring to your book club after you bifurcate the fresh fruit!).

Single-minded hedgehog? Try looking at yourself in the mirror, Michiko.

“The Waste Land” is a poem that requires you to read other poems, that requires you to understand why so many other writers feel compelled to reference it. And poetry itself is a form that requires rereading and note taking and many other things that an active reader engages in (SURE AS FUCKING NOT MICHIKO, who has earned the Pulitzer Prize for the flaccid, worthless and, above, all abso-fucking-lutely bitter “reviews” she regularly files for that bulimic broadsheet).

Second, is Michiko such a reclusive and illiterate dunderhead that her review here is a matter of telling us what the fuck Craig Raine (who Michiko helpfully reminds us is “a poet himself”) is telling us? Are there absolutely no fucking brain cells she can access within her head? Nothing in all her years of reading that she can ruminate upon to give us some concept of what SHE MIGHT FUCKING THINK of T.S. Eliot? Can she not even offer one fucking sentence limning (to momentarily use that dreaded book review verb) Eliot’s prosody? Or is she hopelessly locked in this self-imposed literary menopause and just too damn absinthian to feel anything anymore?

If this is the case (and I suspect it is), then what we have here is a critic who approximates the living embodiment of Cliff’s Notes: dictatorial, synthesizing a process that has never been about a verbal heartbeat, and emitting generalizations in a way that discourages the next generation from literature. Because in this review, it’s not about the poetry, dammit. It’s about Eliot’s “buttoned-up banker’s mien.” It’s about personality. It’s about what Eliot had for breakfast or who he fucked or whether he ate a tuna fish sandwich before penning a canto. But it sure as fuck isn’t about “torchlit red on sweaty faces.” Because Michiko has no desire to sweat. She has no desire to feel. She has no desire to see what’s so fantastic about these five words. She has no desire to throw herself into anything approximating emotion. For Michiko, it’s all about how she can tear someone who’s struggled for years to produce something beautiful a new one in a matter of 1,000 words.

I’m sorry, but I’ve had enough. Why does the New York Fucking Times, the alleged vanguard newspaper that has the temerity to declare itself the cultural fucking gatekeeper, employ so many fucking people who could not give two solid shits about fiction? Who feel the need to stifle this fantastic art form with idiotic banter? Who feel the need to constantly shit upon it without expressing a glimmer of literary interest? And who treat the people who read these reviews like dark and dusty troglodytes who hole up under bridges with books rather than active thinkers who are part of our population?

This leaves us with Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee reading their autobiography and Jimmy Carter, who actually has written some poetry, although his nomination is for Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, about as “poetic” in nature as Franken’s schtick.

Granted, the Grammies, like most awards ceremonies, are pretty pointless. And there’s no reason to expect them to honor the rich and eclectic millieu of audio books. But if the category in question “includes Poetry, Audio Books & Storytelling,” why doesn’t a single nomination feature poetry? If the celebrities are getting greater recognition, why not create a new category dedicated exclusively to literature?

Well, we can’t have that. Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, and Donald Hall aren’t nearly as sexy as Blige strutting her stuff. Gonna breakthrough? Not on your life.

Pick 3 stories from Google News. Using only words that occur in the first few paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each, no more than 60 characters per line. The 3-word title should use a word from each story. Be sure to include links to your 3 stories after the poem.

Okay, I’m game.

Prohibiting Crocodile Sex

Freshening up, young man snacking on a crocodile penis, protracted
Spiders and locusts, belching
Bite on his ear

Influence the first brasserie, artery-clogging
Unanimously approved the ban
An additional 12 months because it may take more time

Any sex between is a felony
Consensual? The first time with two, prosecuted under the law
Preferential treatment? Indicted

Sources:

Guardian: Where to next after a light snack of crocodile penis?
USA Today: New York becomes first city to ban trans fats.
Boston Herald: Correction officers indicted on charges they had sex with inmates.

Gipper skipper
You’ve never been a big tipper
But Adolf’s hair
And yours compare
I type this
After a night of drinks

There are even Canadian sonnets!

While I’ve had my quibbles with Mr. Orr in the past, Mr. Asher challenged me to limn just what it was about Orr that made him “very good.” It’s a fair enough question, seeing as how Asher has called Orr “hopelessly square.”

First off, if the NYTBR‘s purpose is to profile smart and well-informed reviews that straddle the fence somewhere between layperson and elitist New York Review of Books subscriber, then any decent poetry critic must divagate within this territory. And I feel that Orr has done this quite well, daring to challenge icons, introducing poetry to a readership without making it dull, and shifting the focus away from a poet’s public perception to the words that the poet has written with a deft and playful touch. Take, for example, this recent review of an Elizabeth Bishop collection. It introduces Bishop to the uninformed and subtly guides the reader into contact with her poetry instead of Bishop’s reputation, establishing and comparing such qualifiers as “difficulty” and “subtlety,” and using these terms to segue into the text of “Vague Poem.” He playfully suggests that more people know the lyrics to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” than Bishop’s poetry, which suggests someone attuned to pop culture (certainly a lot more than a closet fetishist like Leon Wieseltier or Dave Itzkoff, who has only recently discovered that chicks write speculative fiction too).

Then there is this review from November 2004, which challenges the qualifiers behind The Best American Poetry series, clearly outlining the history of these compilations, while suggesting that the bar may be set too low and imputing that “poetry isn’t really an open system; it’s a combination of odd institutions, personal networks, hoary traditions, talent and blind luck” to the NYTBR‘s democratic reading base.

Hopelessly square? Even Mr. Asher had to applaud Mr. Orr when he took Jorie Graham to task. What we have is a poetry critic with a mischevious streak that is far from Pat Boone. I’m under no obligation to acknowledge the positive, but Orr’s poetic review of Billy Collins’ The Trouble with Poetry was one of the few interesting reviews under Sammy Boy’s tenure. One does not expect such exuberance from a lawyer, much less from a publication whose editor cannot appreciate a brownie or an intelligent woman. But, alas, there it is.

I have no idea what’s made Orr’s work sparse in the NYTBR these days. Perhaps it’s Sammy T’s tone-deaf editorialship. But Orr was a welcome presence within a hopelessly corrupt publication. And I contend that if there was one thing Sammy Baby did do right, it was hiring David Orr.

Crystal droplets collide beneath interminable recesses
Ruby flowing ‘gainst untouched crack vials
Amphetamine fury dappling touching his hard physique
Fortified by the Almighty Dollar, corrupt Christian sentiments
The narcotic sting of empathy abandoned
His soul left in a shoebox, his heart sutured sewn sayonara

Bleeding after thirty he an’t be trusted
Encapsulated Capulet, entranced traitor
Sense of the commons, house whored away by ambition
He weeps, reaching for a sole bottle of Walker
Enmeshed engorged obliterated mirrored by the declivity
Corroding his bedside manner

He hopes his character will migrate to a milk carton
Lost in a cubicle farm, loved solely by cardboard
Cunctating coasting before the fllint struck forty

Then She entered. He didn’t ask for a save
Her etioliated skin sucked moonlight like second hand smoke
He asked her questions long short tricky
But her ghostly lips stayed crisp sounding invitations
Beckoning him to a graveyard of lust pulses
The Juliet abandoned held his dainty hand

[NOTE: Thankfully, at this point, it appears that I abandoned the poem, perhaps because of the ridiculous deus ex machina at the end.]