sumpin fun.

The Night Wile E. Coyote Met Road Runner at a Party

It was at the ACME party, not the place I’d ever expected to find a bird.
Still, there he was, taunting this predator with all his feathery blueness,
honking as an intimation of speed, of 90 mile-per-hour hot rubber,
so fast he seemed not to move at all, standing in front of the refrigerator,
his profile turning to face me before he raced off somewhere down the hall,
through the smoke, clear to the end of the road paved to nowhere.
I followed his motion marks that fell to the floor like yarn unraveled.
He was gone, leaving the refrigerator white and cold.

I bought all the bait I could find, all the poison. I faced the road like an arrow
lying in a bow, arcing it back tight, ready to fly toward his flash.
I hoisted pianos and safes, chipped ledges to their last finger hold, prepared
for a kind of war complete with missiles and heavy cannons, anything
to slow him down, make the minute before his disappearing last, if even
another minute. Then I painted signs, pitiful red signs to explain to everyone
my inevitable doom.

a letter from sharon olds to the first lady

The Nation has reprinted the letter from Sharon Olds' declining her invite to the National Book Festival from Laura Bush. The link to the letter is this: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/olds

just a thought, but the same damn thought over and over

This is what I just sent to Poetry Magazine.

Dear Editor,

Yesterday I went to Barnes & Noble and picked up the new Kenyon
Review (a new Bob Hicok poem in it) and yours too. As I was looking
through Poetry, I saw the ad for the
2005 Best American Poetry, which said it was "Available in paperback
and hardcover editions wherever books are sold." I was wherever
books are sold, so I got up and headed
over to the poetry section.

As I looked through the contents of Best American, I realized I was
looking at a contemporary anthology, not necessarily a 2005
anthology, almost any anthology printed in the
last 20 years. Sure there is a modicum, a sprinkling of the
late-breaking, but these names: Ammons, Ashbery, Bukowski, Dunn,
Field, Hacker, Hecht, Hejinian, Hirschfield,
Justice...and I'm not halfway through the alphabet. This list also
doesn't include expected but more recently published names: Karr,
Hoagland, Ruefle, Greenberg, to name a
spattering. Mostly though, these names have been around for a long,
long while.

For those who might intend to buy it, what I'm intending to say is
that this book appears to be a dated textbook of the downward slope
of writers. I know I'm young, and that
writing is about knowing your parents in the field as much as you
know your grandparents, but dare the editors show me my siblings? Do
they not want to show me the most
current names? I'm thinking names like Tony Tost, Jake Adam York,
Eduardo Corral, Rebecca Loudan, Joshua Corey, lots of others. If
this is a yearly state of the state of
poetry, why am I seeing so much of what has been seen for 20 years?

I opted for the Poetry and left.

Corey Green
Atlanta, GA

viola, i've found it.

i just found this poem that i'd been trying to find for a while. i suppose if my effort were more concerted, i'd have found it earlier. it wasn't trying to hide from me.

"The Artist"

Mr T.
bareheaded
in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
on all sides
stood on his toes
heels together
arms gracefully
for the moment

curled above his head.
Then he whirled about
bounded
into the air
and with an entrechat
perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
My mother
taken by surprise
where she sat
in her invalid's chair
was left speechless.
Bravo! she cried at last
and clapped her hands.
The man's wife
came from the kitchen:
What goes on here? she said.
But the show was over.

-- William Carlos Williams.

just look

This may be the most peculiar thing I've seen in a while. Odd-striking. More odd-striking than if a mascot followed me around or if I heard everyone chanting "Corey" like they do in that commercial (cept his name is "Hank"). Little letters with gloved hands and with feet that somehow communicate--sign language?--and decided to line up to spell my name? Odd. Very Odd.

finally, i wrote

here's something--at least it's something.

"The magnolia"

behind his grandfather’s house
always struck him, at 25 feet,
as an enchanted shrub,

the gargantuan blooms. He tried
to climb it like a praying
mantis, as though climbing

through a green meditation,
climbing through the limb-ness of all
limbs into air.

Higher than the old gray shingles
of his grandfather’s roof,
He could see across the pastures

to the hills where he imagined
the transplanted Tibetans
practiced their own calm levitations.

He resented his grandfather after
he cut down
the magnolia, not letting its limbs

drag the ground, heavy,
not letting it snap
like a giant’s back.

lots to do

i've been bogged down lately by one question: what am i doing? it does seem, though not all the time, that i can get by without writing, and those times that i feel i should write seem pacified with consumption of other writing.

and when someone else brings up the question in class, our professor says she usually asks of her poems, So What?, as if that has an answer.

i'm sure some people have been able to answer it sufficiently--plath, baraka, sexton, berryman, dove, brooks, ginsberg...

do i pretend (portend?) to be those people? i'll be more than lucky if i can wade my way through the millions of respectable contemporary poets. maybe that's the answer--the question has to be answered, and either i answer it or the million others do. that seems really cheesy, but maybe that's it.

taking my convolescence seriously

in the short time between summer term and fall semester, i'm reading the collected poems of richard howard, with a side of the collected poems of ashbery. howard's a little dry compared to ashbery--it's a little like comparing ellen degeneres with mario cantone. it's easier for me to like mario. the humor is in front of you almost like a little TV dinner. ellen, however, (though not as funny as she used to be) is an acquired taste.

i'm not even sure if the metaphor works, cause i'm not sure ellen's at the top of her game like she used to be. regardless, my favoritest undergraduate professor, dr. johnny wink, once said that poet's come to you when you're ready for them. (he of course was quoting one of his professors.) he also said that you should really learn to appreciate the greats. well, i recognize something in howard, but i don't know what it is. maybe i'll figure it out.

it was the same way with wallace stevens for me. he'll never be my favorite, but he's wallace stevens. to understand poetry, one should understand what was great about great poets, and stevens is easily in that category. i've figured out a lot about stevens (no, not all), and have grown to appreciate him a lot, but he'll never be my favorite. we'll see how howard pans out, though.