Looking at today's featured poems at both daily sites, Paul Muldoon over at Poetry Daily and Ralph Angel at Verse Daily, leads me to say: Muldoon just doesn't do it for me. All the endless play and cleverness in the end just seems kind of coy to me and I sort of admire what he pulls off but I've never felt bruised or caught or seduced or fed by any of it. Sorry, man, it's important for us Pauls to stick together, I know, but just can't quite go there. Whereas I do like Angel's work: his first book was one of the very first books I bought after a reading. And he gave a pretty great reading here this past spring. I admired the hell out of how he took charge of the crowd: he stood there for thirty seconds or more, completely silent, thinking whatever he was thinking. It was completely audacious, playful in a showy way I loved and likely couldn't pull off, not radiating the same cool.
***
Happy Halloween, y'all.
About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
6 comments:
i with you on your paul-ralph observation.
happy halloween.
Hey, maybe you need to set up a bracket system. A March Madness, you see, for poets.
I've been saying for some time (about 10 seconds) that the humanities need something like a rotisserie venting system. I leave it in your capable blog, pG.
In a continuing narrative form, it just might be as entertaining as Modern Drunkard's battle of famous drinkers. Faulkner and Churchill were really quite formidable.
-cK
happy halloween!
i liked your bad mood poem; despite the gen. badness of all things, you sound pretty good ;)
rad
happy halloween, pg!
I agree with you on Muldoon. I got a collection of 30 years of his poetry and I only liked 5 of the poems out of the entire collection. There is not one poem out of the 5 though that really stands out and affects me profoundly. I like them but they are not spectacular.
And a Happy Samhain to you, Paul.
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