Had a fun poetry group tonight, which included a baby shower for Jared (he and his wife Julie are due any week now) with cake and presents and general silliness and frivolity. I gave the baby a cute little red and white striped shirt made in Italy. And I gave the dad a tee-shirt and six-pack of beer. Our own RL had actually knitted things for the baby, all lovely and soft and beautiful.
The poems tonight were a trip: including one about a broken heart and hard candy, one arising from the Hanford civilian radiation exposure depostitions, and one made from the Flight 93 transcripts that really gave me the chills.
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From a Joshua Clover essay in Fence. Thanks to Joshua Corey for the link:
A Tale of Two Steins
"Chickamauga is where I'm from and Canada's where I'm bound" doesn't strike me as poetry. On the other hand, "Chickamauga is where I'm from and solitude's where I'm bound" does. Not a poem, not especially good poetry, but poetry. It's in the equivalence (the machine of metaphor in the skin of grammar) drawn between "Chickamauga" and "solitude," which in common speech are not exchangeable terms: one's a place, one's an emotional circumstance. This error - the confusion of kind - sets poetry apart from common speech. That, and line breaks.
. . . read more here.
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