The current Ringing of the Bards is now live at Ansari’s. I’ll call out shakir hasnain‘s in particular because I can’t leave a comment there at his interesting koanic sort of piece.

How it works: The composite poem for the poetry carnival there will link you to the full poem submitted for each the participating poets this round. Take a trip around! High participation this time. Remember next time, it’ll be fab Wm‘s turn to host.

I finally got down to a long sit with Days into Flatspin which is the title of that first attracted me when Marcus read a piece from it at Poetic Desserts how long ago?

It has a different tone than the work I read a month ago. Much denser, in a good way. More reporting less moralist.

His take on personification of the 7-11 changing commerce over decades has judgement in it, but crotchetyness and humor. He plays a lot with personification, of turtles and mother nature herself. It is more towards a sort of refinement for entertainment in places but within poem and from poem to poem the tone (from serious to intense to calm and to comic), pace, distance from reader and subject as well as style of linearness: asides and enjambments keeps shifting so it never becomes predictable.

What repeats is a pivot of hinge from idea to idea turning. The word hinge itself repeats 5 times as a favorite concept running as a thread through the pieces. But the balance between expected and not is what rings. Pairing of comparisons are as usual as minnows as sperm but the ovum a floating bread crust tweaks things bright. It’s a continual sort of ping of ideas.

Even a verb choice makes a sharpness that isn’t expected and acts as a clapper to switch alert. In The Off Chance “We’ve watched/ you captain the tail//of a housecat, saying the compulsion to move/to displace even a fraction/ of the sea of what it is” he gets to the end of the unity underlying and tying all things through an unusual route that isn’t solely a list but the soundscape that resonates with the meaning.

Right from the book’s beginning and the hull of her ribs, anvil head (of cow and her comical and accurately described badly tuned tuba) and ants worried to the punky/ tops of knotted fence posts, there’s an intensity of sensory attention to detail and a freshness that fits the newborn carried through the pasture “a drooling lump/of living in the verdant riddle” .I love the pov of him feeling outside the moment yet he’s the only one who will retain it with cow and infant not being able to remember ever having met or been surprised by each other or observing each other. There’s an accuracy of capture there. As there is in a different way in Morning with the sentiment “If anything like mercy had the controls/the sun would switch off. Shakes/ in the marrow in the bodhran heart. I’m//done.”

“I don’t know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That’s where the mind moves, that’s what’s new.” Anne Carson talks to Emma Brockes atThe Guardian [via http://www.thepage.name/]

[T]his is a woman who will happily devote 50 pages to discussing 14th-century French mysticism and round it off with a joke about Kant – her publisher, Knopf, leaves her pretty much alone. “Lucky,” she says, and giggles.

Much of the rest is similarly quirky. Sounds like someone I have to find a book by. She’s Canadian so naturally I would hear about her thru a British newspaper.

And voila, easily enough done. I’m #2 in the library queue for The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. (I love the internet.)

Event Link: Poets can be heard online or off the air today. Probably every day but in this case it will be Max Middle, Sandra Ridley and Hugh Thomas who will be interviewed this evening on the radio in advance of them doing their reading this Saturday. [Max is the one pictured on the left from an August event.]

Now this is cool. A solution to two problems at once.
a) How to format online text with spaces in poetry without a huge amount of characters, and
b) to do erasure poetry without an image that would be slow to load.
Mairead Byrne takes a news story and just changes the text color to white except what remains for the poem. Elegant, simple solution.
The blog generally has interesting things to say, and is a link or two away from e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s of interviews of poets about poetics by Tom Beckett. Like Jordan Stempleman saying,

I’d look down upon the parents for not reading poetry to their kids when they were very young while they were on the toilet. It’s the best place, you got ‘em, and they have this wonderful look of concentration on their face. […]
My daughter, now three and a half, each time she sits down for an extended stay on the toilet will call me in from the other room and ask me to read her poetry. Now granted, she usually stops me at every fourth or fifth word to ask me what it means or to laugh and repeat it because sonically it just sounds wild, but that’s great stuff, no? Adults are way too freaked out to do those kinds of things. Workshop students better find the paradigmatic happenings in the poem or it’s strike three! My readers tend to be those who don’t worry so much about cracking anything. They connotatively feel the language and respond. At least that’s what the one reader I know I have does.

One last thing, Paul Hostovsky’s poems in Umbrella — love their whimsy. They’ve got a Tom Wayman-likeness to their narratives. But of a whole other character and not to be missed is Christina Pocosz, an excerpt,

Remember the iridescent
plumage of the hummingbird
is black
without the light.
Black like a branch
bereft of the life of the living
leaves, charcoal waiting
for the flame.

The cadence word and image reach me in concert, a knot of carollers when I least expect it on a snowy afternoon.