Poems Up

I have some "translations" of Apollinaire up at Notnostrums with these folks:



--there for the picking, if you want or haven't and want.

Essay

by Bernadette Mayer

I guess it’s too late to live on the farm
I guess it’s too late to move to a farm
I guess it’s too late to start farming
I guess it’s too late to begin farming
I guess we’ll never have a farm
I guess we’re too old to do farming
I guess we couldn’t afford to buy a farm anyway
I guess we’re not suited to being farmers
I guess we’ll never have a farm now
I guess farming is not in the cards now
I guess Lewis wouldn’t make a good farmer
I guess I can’t expect we’ll ever have a farm now
I guess I’ll have to give up all my dreams of being a farmer
I guess I’ll never be a farmer now
We couldn’t get a farm anyway though Allen Ginsberg got one late in life
Maybe someday I’ll have a big garden
I guess farming is really out
Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops
I guess farming is just too difficult
We’ll never have a farm
Too much work and still to be poets
Who are the farmer poets
Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient farm
Flannery O’Connor raised peacocks
And Wendell Berry has a farm
Faulkner may have farmed a little
And Robert Frost had farmland
And someone told me Samuel Beckett farmed
Very few poets are real farmers
If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too,
Why not a poet who was also a farmer
Of course there was Brook Farm
And Virgil raised bees
Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of farmers
I guess poets tend to live more momentarily
Than life on a farm would allow
You could never leave the farm to give a reading
Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord
I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right
I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat
Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve
That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes
Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing
Or on as little as one needs to survive
Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars
Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

Web-Palaces

Has it been long enough to claim antiquity from the nineties? Of course. It's been long enough to claim that from yesterday's status updates--context often evaporates faster than you can respond. But here I want to look into one specific relic, namely:

The above image is the logo for "Erin Marie's Poetry Palace!": http://www.cswnet.com/~erin/, a website dedicated to housing a collection of poems, jokes, and Fun Javascripts, like this Tic Tac Toe "app":I played it on 'Hard,' despite the warning. And, predictably, there was no winner.

One page collects a selection of "Young American Poets and Their Poetry," including Gerald Costanzo, Gibbons Ruark, and W. S. Di Piero. A young Daniel Mark Epstein begins one of the poems presented there, "At the Millinery Shop":

She wants what no clerk in the city can bring her,
a hat that will make up her mind.

I wish I had one of those. Because then I might be able to decide whether I should try to describe the uncanny nature of the text-box on Erin's home page that fills as you scroll over a new link. After the field is populated, you can use your cursor to adjust the text. But it changes as soon as the mouse moves to something else. The interaction is more ephemeral than a google search, and yet it is still an interaction--with Erin.



This has, perhaps, a purer beauty. While the poet fades, his or her work scatters, multiplies, lives on, emits nothing, prophesies.

This site is, by necessity, out-of-date. And that is where its blessedness roots--in this little palace, where time shifts visibly. Ye Olde Poesie is often blessed in the same way. Look at it >

Sea Ranch Popsickle Island

In case you're wondering what the words in this subject line mean, let me tell you:

FRIDAY

1. Sea Ranch, issue 3 (a biannual journal (featuring a bipolar collection (of two poets (Chris Martin & me)))) is out and coming out tomorrow @ Friday @ 7:00 p.m. @ Unnameable Books, thanks to the duo (Alan Felsenthal & Ben Estes) over at The Song Cave.







SATURDAY


2. Popsickle 2011, Brooklyn's 2nd annual summer literary festival, is going (though it deserves a more active verb and preposition) down on Saturday from 1-8pm @ the Gowanus Ballroom with too many good ones to name (like Lonely Christopher, Dottie Lasky, Paul Foster Johnson—to name a few.
   
   A will happen immediately following the 7:45pm reading finale slot with Ariana Reines, Jason Daniel Schwartz & me. What else would you want*?



NEXT SATURDAY


July 30 New York Poetry Festival on Governor's Island. Enough said/TMI.

*A bookfair? Well, there will be one of those there too.