Some of Daniil Kharms' pieces, translated by Matvei Yankelevich, are in the fiction section (?) of the New Yorker. It's like stubbing your toe on buried treasure.

Your summer is still salvageable: Octopus #9.

Prose on Poetry.

You're welcome.

I'm teaching a 3-week summer class starting Monday. Literature. Sula. Best American Non-Required. Ghost World. Walking the Black Cat. A handout of poems.

Monday night, I went to see Mathias sing for Man's Last Great Invention vs The Predator at the newly renovated State Theater downtown. They created an improvised score for the film. Their performance gave me an entirely new appreciation for The Predator. MLGI was able to amplify the emotions that were hiding just under the surface (and the homo-eroticism that was not). The climax of the film, where Arnold's character and the Predator engaged in a long one on one strategic fight scene became more of a love scene, one full of mutual respect and foreplay, behind the violin and sparse guitar. I almost cried. But I didn't.

I'm reading what was caught in yesterday's postal net:



This is the first DQ in existence with my poems in it, which excites me. The Foust and Bradshaw are pretty killer. But I was most interested in Norma Cole's "Why I am Not a Translator" and the interview with Clayton Eshleman and Ethriam Cash Brammer: "Going to the Moon with Some Wonderful Ghosts: Literary Translation and a Poet's Formation." They make a great warm-up for this fall semester's Translation Theory independent study I'm taking with S. Gonna translate some Russian poems and think twice about it.




Dorothea Lasky's debut book of poems, AWE. Dorothea is pretty new to me. I've read about half of AWE so far. I can safely say this may be the best collection of poems I've read this year. I am very certain it will be in my top 3 when the year ends. These are the poems I'm trying to write right now, pretty much. Dark and perfectly odd. Quirky, but don't you dare laugh at them--you'll be sorry when the next poem comes around.




Wenderoth's fourth. At an early glance, it looks like quite a departure.

"...the notion of setting up a narrative prose poem one way, then turning another way and maybe another before all is viciously surreal and the poem turns on its head (or elbow or cashew) is something that Tate has completely mastered. At times Schomburg’s poems take refuge here; on other occasions, he shows he’s capable of much more...I should mention The Man Suit is the best first book I’ve read this year."

I'm not the one who said it. John Deming did. He says more accurate things about the Suit in Coldfront.

Watched the Cubs embarrass the Giants. Bought some rosebushes. Will soon plant the rosebushes. Eating hot dogs, corn on the cob, cucumber salad, and apple angel food cake. Might later watch the video (DVD) version of Dark Brandon which was sent to me, thoughtfully, by Brandon Downing though I admit, I'm a little scared of it. Could be a lot to handle. I will definitely give you a run down later. Got Julie Doxsee's Fog Quartets and Justin Marks' [Summer_insular] from Horse Less Press in the mail today. Those'll get squeezed in some time tomorrow. Almost ready to pick some finalists for the Octopus manuscripts, so that's cool.

Mathias, deservedly, scored big po-points by winning the Diagram chapbook contest (New Michigan Press) for his manny, Creation Myths. You're going to want to invest in this on the ground floor. If you put away a nickle every day from now until it comes out, you should be ready for purchase. I'm told I might have a free copy coming my way (from M) because I'm in his fav 5. That's what he tells me anyway. Congrats to him.

I disagree with people when they say Truth can be stranger than Fiction. In my estimation, Truth can only be as strange as Fiction.

If you haven't checked Press Press Press for a while, maybe you should. It's heating up. It's July over at Press Press Press.

M and I know now what Octopus #9 is going to look like. You will too in two shakes.

I had a few goodies waiting for me upon my return.
Ange Mlinko's The Children's Museum (Prefontaine Press). This is another of Ryan Murphy's stunning One-Offs. This guy can not miss. C.S. Carrier's Lyric (Horse Less Press). And two of the most intriguing and well-conceived print journals around: Soft Targets and Practice.

And I found these two reviews of The Suit, if you're interested. Open Letters. Jacket.

Night #27: Council Bluffs, IA. 9100 miles. End of trip. A 15 hour drive through the rest of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, ND, SD, and IA. Not much landscape variation, but got to experience the fade out of the hard vowel sounds via gas station cashier. Got in around 10:30. Stayed with my family. Ate BLT sandwiches. Slept in a bed.

Night #26: Regina, Saskatchewan. 8150 miles. We hiked south of Lake Louise in Banff before starting home. It was a very popular trail, paved even, to this waterfall, then we took it beyond that for a ways to find some ink pots. We started really early (in order to make it out of Banff for a long drive across Canada's heartland), so the trail was empty when we started, but when we came back, we entered some sort of strange Disneyland universe. There was even a sno-cone booth set up at beginning of the trail that I swear was not there when we started. Hmm. Then we drove through Saskatchewan. It is flat. Flatter than Nebraska. But we were still far enough north that the sun set for an entire hour and a half. That's a good combination. If I were to fall in love and marry a horizon, it may be Saskatchewan's.

Night #25. Banff National Park. 7600 miles. Saw some pretty rad waterfalls and the Athabasca glacier and learned all about glaciology in the science center across from it. We were perhaps a tad disturbed that tourists had so much access to the glaciers. The things are so massive (despite the fact they're just fractions of what they used to be) and beautiful and precious and natural, and the park allows tourists to walk all over them. There were lots of people on the Athabasca (despite the many posted warnings of hidden crevasses). And they took big old special tour buses up the glacier. It was all kinda sad to me. Regardless, we took one of our best hikes near there. We could see everything from where we were. I could even see your house.

Night #24. Jasper National Park. 7500 miles. Back into the mountains. Grabbed a campsite on a glacial river (that green one) where the mosquitoes were like a fog. It made us want to cry. When we got out of our tent in the morning, there were all over us. I can't describe to you how miserable this is. Can you see them there on the tent? I swear one bit me on the heart. Took a hike north of Jasper (the town in the park) and encountered a grizzly bear. No joke. It was the one time we weren't wearing our bear bells. It was a fairly popular trail, though that day we were the only ones on it, it seemed. The bear was about 40 feet ahead of us on the trail and didn't know we were there. A took a picture of it (can you make it out there in the trees?). It must have heard the snap of the camera and it stood up on its hind legs for a second to check us out then ran the other way. It can run fast. I reminded A not to run when the thing stood up, but it is pretty easy to forget all that. I made crap in my pants.

Night #23: East of Grand Prairie, Alberta. 7200 miles. Another long and beautiful drive. We crushed another murder mystery on cd. I think I got the formula down. The murderer is usually the little kid. Saw some ram/sheep on the road. A was excited to visit Dawson Creek and get her picture taken by the sign because she was once addicted to the WB teen drama of a similar name. Turns out, the place is kind of a dump. There are buildings, but everybody is this kind of grey color. I think I saw a meth deal go down. Found a campground this time. Kinda dumpy. Did some meth.

Night #22: South of Liard River, BC. 6500 miles. The long winding drive from our spot on Kluane Lake to Liard River was one of the most beautiful drives ever. It is one of the few I wish were much longer. Yukon and Northern BC are so remote, the occasional RV shared the road with us. We seemed to see more wildlife than cars. A little red fox (we watched it hunt and eat some sort of rodent). Buffalo herds. Black bear. Brown bear. Moose. All ON the road. We also saw a double rainbow in the early evening, the entire arc visible on both. These are things I've never quite understood (for the same reason I still can't understand why glaciers can be blue--I mean I understand it, you know--I mean I could it explain it to you, but I don't really understand it. And if you try to explain it to me, rainbows I mean, it'll make me dizzy). Also, is it ok to think rainbows are cool? I suppose not in a Lisa Franks and Unicorn sort of way. Also, we came across the sign post forest and walked around in it a bit. Jealous? We found another good tent site off the road a ways (our 12th now, I believe, outside a campground--more money saved for the steep Canadian postcard postage.

We're home and I have a lot to tell you about the last week of driving. But give me a moment to catch my breath.

http://www.youtube.com/v/MJJIpBXaUQs"> http://www.youtube.com/v/MJJIpBXaUQs" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="190" height="140">


Night #21: Kluane Lake just outside Kluane National Park. Yukon. 5900 miles. We started our trek back eastward in the morning, stopped in Anchorage to load up on groceries before the Canadian Price Crunch. It was a beautiful drive despite the rain and clouds. A black bear crossed the shotty road in front of us. I read some killer manuscripts for Octopus while we listened to some murder mystery novel. I think the little girl did it. We ended up finding a perfect spot to set up tent on Kluane Lake, but had to do some inadvisable offroading to get there. Something only an ATV should be doing. There were fears of high-centering the Corolla. It's a rental.

Night #21: Kluane Lake just outside Kluane National Park. Yukon. 5900 miles. We started our trek back eastward in the morning, stopped in Anchorage to load up on groceries before the Canadian Price Crunch. It was a beautiful drive despite the rain and clouds. A black bear crossed the shotty road in front of us. I read some killer manuscripts for Octopus while we listened to some murder mystery novel. I think the little girl did it. We ended up finding a perfect spot to set up tent on Kluane Lake, but had to do some inadvisable offroading to get there. Something only an ATV should be doing. There were fears of high-centering the Corolla. It's a rental.

Night #21: Exit Glacier. Kenai Fjords National Park. 5250 miles. After a hot shower, a breakfast burrito, and a Bonine tablet in Seward, we took a boat trip around the Kenai Peninsula. We got a reserved seat next to a couple from Florida who complained about the seating arrangements (both A and the lady wanted to sit forward to avoid sea sickness). They spoke to us in English and then to each other in Spanish about us. I could barely make out the words "handsome" and "intelligent." Anyhoo, we saw a family of Humpbacks (probably my favorite animal of all time) and a sleeping Humpback, a very rare sight. Killer whales, sea lions, puffins, porpoises, bald eagles, and enormous blue-glowing glaciers. Our fav was the Aialik Glacier. There were thousands of floating icebergs at its feet, some with sea lions on them, and we heard the constant sound of distant thunder, the glacier calving. On the entire trip, our perspectives were thrown off. As soon as it seemed like we were within touching distance of an iceberg, we were told it was miles away. And it was all very quiet, and serene, except for when the deckhands would get on the horn and say "Prime Rib is ready" and everybody would rush down to load up. Also, we found a great little place near where we were tenting that sold salmon that was caught that day. It was like taking a bite just pulled from the waters. We ate all of what we had before bed.