happy vappu

...sososososo. life's been busy. good busy, for the most part. i've been fairly productive... other projects are taking off!

in the po-biz, emily has just posted an update about the summer issue of warbler. she has an awesome line-up so far, including poets emily kendal frey, maya pindyck, derek pollard, stephanie king strickland, and... well, me. plus an interview with my brightest diamond, whose track "golden star" is always included in my warm-up when i take my ipod on the trail. incidentally. they remind me somewhat of goldfrapp crossed with portishead. as for the poetry so far, holy hell. i'm excited about that.

...it's come to my attention that at some point, both juliet cook and daniela olszewska will have chaps in the scantily clad series. this is also pretty exciting-- i wouldn't say that the ladies are underrepresented (that word feels too political... there seems to be a case of ladies just not submitting as much, if the recent pleas by certain editors are anything to go by... on the other hand, emily at warbler was just asking for more men to submit, and i was afraid that we wouldn't have enough quality submissions from men at the very beginning, etc.), but these are two ladies who write colorful, never-a-dull-moment poetry, and i can't wait to see their collections. daniela is currently featured at no tell motel, and her first day was brilliant.

...scantily-speaking, i have now had a chance to read the collections by brian henry, steven schroeder and tony trigilio. my highly personal, esoteric, amateurish thoughts following someone else's video of turku's vappu, 2007. a short video featuring my favorite part of the day: all those freaking adorable white caps.



a.) hit and run by brian henry: description that comes to mind: poet writing about prairie life and poetry. but there isn't enough of either theme, or one particular style of writing, to let me know that henry was doing-it-on-purpose. here, the poems i liked, i really liked, and the poems i didn't, i really didn't. of the ones i didn't like, the poems seemed to either take themselves too seriously or not seriously enough, and i was left feeling kinda unsettled about the tone of the whole collection because of this lack of distinction. of the ones i found reading again and again, a couple were the rapidly-blinking list/wordplay/automatic variety that i can usually give or take, but i found henry's choice of words musical and hypnotic. see "quotation mules", "hit and run", "neither remote nor intimate" for examples. the other two poems i really liked where "dusty or not, this girdle" and "one tough customer"... otc is an especially decent poem.

b.) 90 percent of everything by steven d schroeder: right off, this collection seems longer, page-wise, and a lot of the poems have already been published in fairly proper journals and magazines. i'm not especially familiar with schroeder's poetry, so i really have no idea what to expect going into the collection. on the surface, the poems here are straightforward verse, with smattering of list-poems thrown in for good measure, and one good chunk of prose. at this point in my reading-collections-for-pleasure-career, when i see lists and prose along with verse packed into a chapbook, i feel overwhelmed, and maybe a little wary. i am all for poets experimenting, and manipulating the form in order to enhance their sentiment and choice of words, but more often than not, when a poet jumps around like this in the span of 23 pages, it ends up feeling like a.) a workshop manual or b.) the poet isn't comfortable. in 90 percent, i took it as a little of both. as for point a.)- meh. as for point b.)- well, this sort of spilled over into the sentiment and word choice, or vice-versa. schroeder basically explodes (implodes?) all over the page with a thousand little in-your-face factoids and statements. his poems feel scientific, almost, and very deliberate, but almost like he's writing from inside a pending ulcer in the pit of his stomach. i think this style will rub a lot of readers the right way, but i came away from the collection feeling like i still have no idea about schroeder's poetry-- there did not seem to be a lot of schroeder in schroeder's poetry, but there was a ton of twitchy, insomniatic (?) intelligence. my favorite poems here were in fact the lists ("easy homunuculus assembly" and "fifteen ways to finish fish" especially) and then a spooky poem called "we never did anything"-- this one seemed to be the only point where schroeder slowed down and got reflective... all in all, a dense, strongly worded collection.

c.) make a joke and i will sigh and you will laugh and i will cry by tony trigilio: obviously, i am a sucker for such a title. in contrast to what comes before it in the series, this collection seems to be all about tony trigilio. it opens with gentle self-deprecation and pretty much holds the tone for the next fifteen pages. you learn about where he lives, how he lives, who he lives near, what he sees-- what you don't learn, explicitly, is what he thinks about all that-- he reserves judgment. the words that come to my mind: urban, mundane, aging. the presentation of it is very neat and cinematic, and you come away feeling like you've just met a fully developed character from a different generation (in my case). personally, i find this character charming, whether it really is tt, or not.