Saturday, July 21, 2007

Been to Oregon Lately?

I have five poems up at Oregon Literary Review.
They are all from What's Written on the Body. It's an interesting selection of poems, and I didn't know they would be appearing at OLR, so it was a pleasant surprise to see them there today. It looks like a lovely journal, all on-line content, including artwork, interviews, essays and reviews. Check it out, if you are so inclined.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hey man -- provocation that stays, as usual. i find your work compelling, a cut well above (were it deeper photographs would suffice -- no: my own viscera; but by "above" i mean your blade reaches the mind rather than the brain, it affords the strange yet straightforward glimpse from the wings of our ancestors, from angels, instead of of the displaced awe of a casual tv watcher st{r}uck on watching surgery for real in between football and the sopranos) almost all medical writing, the best of which i've read has to be Frank Huyler's The Blood of Strangers. your poems reach a a pointed lyricism near his writing in that book -- the only worthwhile constructive criticism that occurs to me: when you stray from more strict observation/showing/relating (as i think any writer must do to refrain from being a robot, as any writer must do to be a writer and not another apostle explaining something the reader was not there to witness [lovely how the latin root of "martyr" translates best as "to witness"]) away from building/following your narrative/line/flow/point (or to be more accurate, what appears to be that, at least, at the moment of straying) it sometimes seems you are intruding. the sort of intrusion that either seems staged, but more often seems genuinely unwelcome, like the intrusive thoughts of a trauma "victim" during some important task which render the activity meaningless or worse cause the cessation of the activity, even to the point of forgetting it, to dissociation: when this happens, all the previous momentum of the poem, in fact its entire content, disappears from the mind.
i'll look at the poems more and try to point out a specific example of what i describe.

keep on breathing -- wayne