I mean to get to listening to all this John Newlove recording from 1968.
*
Watching 2009’s Hamlet. It makes so much more sense to have a man stagger and cower than a page’s exclamation mark.
MacBeth is listed at Cineplex but with no showtimes even though worldwide release was Feb 5 and it’s showing in NYC this week.
*
ICYMI, a post about Lana’s Pinhole launch may have got lost in teh shuffle.
*
Also, Aha, Poetry is disintegrating so I salvaged Jane Reichhold’s kasen renga formats and put them under templates.
*
In files I found I epigraphed a poem ““seeing the mourner’s white dress/I become comfortless” (The Mourner, Songs collected in Gui) but from which book? Some Tang collected but which?
*
Already I have fallen off my record keeping of which poems I sent out this year.
*
I wrote a poem. I wrote 16 in the day, but 2 I think have legs. So long as I don’t look at them too long and hard. Here’s one,
Pedant upon not finding
the Philip Larkin book
I had a decade ago—
thinned out, lent or misfiled—I’m mollified by a third Stanley
Kunitz I forgot I got and its
red tab flagging it “to read”.a mellower more delicate
rinse after bellicose, crass
Irving Layton that reminds meunflatteringly of Uncle who
took puffs from cigar as he sat
in a golf cart with oxygen tankyet kindly didn’t blow us to Kingdom Come.
once he told me, matter-of-factly:
to be feminist was to be a lesbianmarriage wrecker, and further,
“histrionic” had the same
greek root as “hysterectomy”his proof: women are drama queens.
the first I discarded as implausible,
the rest I didn’t fact-check. to emoteis not uterine. the fish that slips.
off the line. “this prize belongs
to no one”* so I note, and let us all go.*Stanley Kunitz, “The Catch”
I’ll let it sit and bother me that all the people cited are dead white men.
*
Today’s reads from:
Nothing Without Us Too, ed. by Cait Gordon ad Talia C. Johnson (Renaissance Press, 2022) [fabulous! I’m consuming it entirely too fast], Jessica Corra “this was a benign reminder”
I Am So Calm by Alice Burdick (above/ground, 2025),
“Pleasure is a thing that doesn’t rely
on passive joy. Active surprise
a way to the whole mind.”
Elegy for Opportunity by Natalie Lim (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) “maybe the apology is closet than you think”, and
Touch the Donkey #44 with Jennifer Firestorm “my limits immitate my worst habits”.
It is pleasure, not penance to read women too.
*
So you can’t take a deep breath. Can you visualize yourself in a safe place? Inside an embrace? Face buried in a shoulder, ears cupped away from noise? No where else you have to be.
*
Remember to water, feed, listen to, and walk your body. You’re not just mind.