I’m pleased that a strange old sonnet of mine has found a home in the newest issue of the excellent Wine Cellar Press.

And be sure to click over to the second page, to read another poem, A Found Fragment in your Firetorn Books, which was written following the prosody of Old English alliterative poetry.

Last, next.

80: Trailhead (PCT)
81: Autumn Trilogy (Maple)

Seventy-seven years ago today, one of the two men I was named after was murdered by the Nazis, his body left in the street with a sign reading TERRORIST pinned to his chest.

• Maria Dahvana Headley (trns), Beowulf (MCDxFSG 2020)
• Thoreau, Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds (Island Press 1993)
• Dana Levin, Wedding Day (Copper Canyon 2005)
• Steve Martin, Born Standing Up (Scribner 2007) (reread)
• Goethe (Salm, trns), Faust (Bantam 1962, 1985)

I found this in a book I just pulled off the shelf. The website is still live, mostly, but it doesn’t seem to be a brick & mortar shop anymore.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

Last, next.

79: 50 (Grass Stain)
80: Trailhead (PCT)

• Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways (Penguin 2013)
• David Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language (Princeton 2007)
• Robyn Hitchcock, Somewhere Apart: Selected Lyrics 1977–1997 (Tiny Ghost Press 2021)
• Dorianne Laux & Kim Addonizio, A Poet’s Companion (Norton 1997)

I’ve just finished writing two books. They’re very weird, and probably gibberish, but I suspect there’s perhaps — at most — fifteen people who might, briefly, find them curious or even somewhat bemusing. In other words: typical poetry manuscripts. Let’s see what happens next.

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space:

If we were to give the imagination its due in the philosophical systems of the universe, we should find, at their very source, an adjective. Indeed, to those who want to find the essence of a world philosophy, one could give the following advice — look for its adjective.

(see also)

I found this yesterday in, I’m guessing, the book that I bought there in the spring of 2001.

A little research shows it closed some time after it moved from Montague St in Brooklyn Heights to Smith St in Brooklyn.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

Last, next.

78: Nat’l Parks (Great Smoky Mtns)
79: 50 (Grass Stain)

• Danielle Pafunda, The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books 2017)
• HD, Trilogy (New Directions 1998)
• Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End (Harvest 1989)
• Ada Limón, The Carrying (Milkweed 2018)
• Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods, Survival of the Friendliest (Random House 2020)

“The Light’s Agitation,” a poem sequence I wrote in the late ’90s has just appeared in the newest Otoliths.

Thanks as always to the irreplaceable Mark Young for giving it a home.

This morning, I went inside a bookstore for the first time since January 2020. I picked up part of an online order, I browsed, and I bought a few more books. It was almost normal.

And, of course, I grabbed a pinch of bookmarks.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

A very old poem of mine, called Elegy, was published today in the “inaugural expo” of Cool Rock Repository.

It’s so odd to think that this poem is finally seeing the light of day after living in my files for nearly thirty years.

• Ursula Andjær Olsen (trns, Katrine Øgaard Jensen), Outgoing Vessel (Action Books 2021)
• JM Tyree, The Counterforce: Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (Fiction Advocate 2021)
• Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (Norton 2021)
• Marcus Aurelius (trns, Gregory Hays), Meditations (Random House 2003)
• Jean Daive (trns, Rosmarie Waldrop) Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan (City Lights 2020)
• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Penguin 2015)

Last, next.

77: United States of Letterpress (Erin Beckloff)
78: Nat’l Parks (Great Smoky Mtns)

🔗 Building Ages in NL “A Dutch data engineer wanted to find out the age of the building his son lives in and ended up creating a map, visualising the age of all of the Netherlands’ 10 million or so buildings.” (via)

I was able to determine that my father was born in a house built in 1905.

1977:

2018:

Laurie Anderson, Spending the War Without You:

I have to tell you: in theses lectures, I’m not going to be explaining my work or describing who I am as an artist. In fact, I don’t care if you know who I am.

I’ve never really tried to express myself through my work. It’s more about curiosity, about how things are, what they are.

Plus, I’ve really made an effort for most of my life to just get rid of the idea of being anyone at all.

(From Pt 1: The River @ ±7m 30–50s)

• CG Jung, Synchronicity (Princeton 1973, 2010)
• Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon 2021)
• Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English (Random House 2019)

Last, next.

76: Kraft (graph)
77: United States of Letterpress (Erin Beckloff)

• Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones (Shambhala 1986, 2016) (My first reread in maybe 33 years)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (Pike trns), The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Dalkey Archive 2008)
• Claudia Serea, Nothing Important Happened Today (Broadstone 2016)
• Craig Koslovsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge 2011)
• Rainer Maria Rilke (M.D. Herder Norton trns), Letters to a Young Poet (Norton 1954)
• Don Paterson, Orpheus: A Version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus (Faber & Faber 2006)
• Aase Berg (Göransson trns), Remainland: Selected Poems (Action Books 2005)

1. Evening’s Empire was a long time coming. I checked it out of the library in the spring of 2013, and read maybe the first quarter. I bought a copy a year later, starting over from the beginning. I set it down repeatedly over the next six years, and finally finished the last three chapters in a big push over several days. An absolutely excellent book.
2. All this Rilke over the last month or so is because of a correspondence course called Rilke by Mail offered by the poet Mark Wunderlich. Rilke was an early and, I see now, extremely strong influence on me when I was a young poet starting out in college.

In the months since writing my response to this interview question, I’ve seen several references to extremely similar writing prompts – a typically synchronistic example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

In the Kenyon Review (from 3/2021), Michael Montlack speaks of Dorianne Laux & Joe Millar’s method of “making a list of words, throwing in a quote or fact or phrase, and taking an hour to write a draft.”

And in the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter (from 10/2020), Valerie Coulton describes Edward Smallfield’s process that “consists of a personalized postcard with four words and a quote. He used to pass these out in workshops, and then everyone would write for 15 minutes.”

I’m not surprised to see randomness and chance being integrated into writing prompts, but now I’m curious to find out what the provenance is for Rita Dove’s exercise, which I’ve been using on and off for about twenty years.

Here is the last part of my poetry mini interview.

It’s the shocking season finale! To save our gang’s favorite hang-out from foreclosure, I must perform a thrilling leap on water skis over a shark tank. And in the audio commentary, I talk about what I’m currently working on.

The fourth part in my poetry mini interview is up.

In this week’s musical episode, Hal Holbrook — fresh off his Tony award-winning run as the Mysterious Stranger — joins the cast to sing about adjectives. Performed and broadcast live before a studio audience!