Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Trick

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.

6 comments:

A. D. said...

i with you on your paul-ralph observation.

happy halloween.

cK said...

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

Anonymous said...

happy halloween!

i liked your bad mood poem; despite the gen. badness of all things, you sound pretty good ;)

rad

Anonymous said...

happy halloween, pg!

M. Shahin said...

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.

The Sublibrarian said...

And a Happy Samhain to you, Paul.