Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - "Babel"

As a poet I really like all the language craziness when the crew gets aphasia but the episode's a little boring since we figure they won't kill the whole crew in the fourth episode of a brand new tv show.

RATING: 53%

NYC Ghosts & Flowers by Sonic Youth

Well, this album sucks, but the question is does it suck as much as Pitchfork famously claimed? I guess it'd be hard to, but I doubt even Pitchfork really believed the album was a 0.0. It's got some good moments musically speaking, but those are frequently ruined by bad impersonations of high school students imitating Jim Morrison imitating the beat poets. Well, there was nowhere to go but up after this I guess, but it's easily the worst thing Sonic Youth has ever been associated with.

RATING: 19%

Literary Journals

You got your poem about blue jays published in the Iowa Review? You're famous! Congratulations, John Keats!

RATING: 0%

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Metered Verse

About 150,000 years ago, some apes figured out that if they used a stick to beat on another stick while they talked, they could get other apes to pay attention and maybe even have sex with them, and metered verse was born. While the technique has long been abandoned by serious contemporary American poets, as well as other champions of liberty like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, a few foreign poets such as Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare have had modest success with it. In conclusion, it’s difficult to write in meter during a 90-second commercial break, especially if one is using both hands to cram Chick-fil-A into one’s slavering maw.

RATING: Ronald Reagan%

(Image from www.apolloscabinet.com.)

Free Verse

What, you want me to use iambs and rhymes and shit? This is poetry, man, it's not supposed to be work. Here's a description of a bird I once saw getting eaten by a smaller bird instead. Also, I don't even like using line breaks so now it's a prose poem.

RATING: Whatever-I-Feel-Like-All-The-Time%

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army

A fine homage to Tolkien and Rowling, but not without its problems. Bad dialogue and bad acting, but great action scenes, great sets, great costumes, great effects, great monsters, a gynormous (heh heh) Venus of Willendorf, and poetry by Tennyson (don't worry, Glenn, he's dead). It's also nice to see Ron "Hatchet Face" Perlman getting steady work. Overall, it's no Pan's Labyrinth, but I'll probably still watch it like 10 more times. Alternate ending here.

RATING: 80%

(Image from moviesblog.mtv.com. I do love me some Mignola.)

Denise Duhamel

It feels like a bit of a platitude to insist that Denise Duhamel is the colorectal cancer of English language poetry, so instead of reviewing her I thought we could do a Denise Duhamel Madlib. Hopefully, you will find this exercise instructional.

***

Wacky Noun
Fav. Barbie Type (ie Malibu, Politician, etc. visit the Mattel webpage for more suggestions or be creative.)
Place
Muscle Car
Phallic Object
Traditionally Male Organization (Army, the Skulls, etc.)
Adjective
Wacky Adjective
Traditionally Male Verb (Jerk-off, Fight, etc.)



Once upon a (Wacky Noun), (Fav. Barbie Type) Barbie went to (Place). Ken was there, waiting by his (Muscle Car) fiddling with his (Phallic Object). Ken was a devoted member (heh) of the (Traditionally Male Organization) and Barbie was (Adjective) because she thought she was just as (Adjective) as Ken. It was a (Wacky Adjective) day in Barbieland, so Barbie decided to (Traditionally Male Verb). She was out to prove she could do things as well as any man and no one could tell her she couldn't.

***

I think I need to help myself to a Tums cocktail. Insert your own line breaks (more-or-less arbitrarily) and add a racy title and you'll have a poem better than any Denise Duhamel poem I have ever seen. Or just write your own damn poem, see what I care.

Rating: Your poem: 5%
Denise Duhamel's: <1%

$30

$30 is a good amount of $. You can buy like three movie tickets at the new movie theater with it, or maybe like ten movie tickets at the dollar theater (how does that work, anyway?). If you have $30 in a town like Houston that basically means you can eat for a week, or maybe have one really nice meal with drinks. $30 is a good amount to be paid for a poem I guess, but it's nothing like the time I got paid $100, which in retrospect is probably where I peaked oh well.

RATING: 94%

Introductions, &c.

Hello everyone. My name is Professor Theodor X. La Merciere and I will be the new poetry reviewer on your little website. Please do not misconstrue the heretofore light tone of this post as an invitation for undue familiarity. I expect to be addressed as Professor Theodor X. La Merciere, Professor La Merciere, or Professor. I have taught adjunct at some of the finest community colleges in the state of Alabama and you will treat me with the respect due a man in my position. I hope this introduction has been sufficient.

The first poem I will be reviewing (chosen at random) was the featured poem on Poetry Daily on Mar. 16, 2009: Deborah Warren's "Dream with Flowers and Bowl of Fruit." (Hmmm, I am bored with this poem already and all I have done so far is type its name.)

The poem begins with what I read as a self-referential allusion to the boredom I am about to experience while reading it: "Too many of my dreams [read: poems] these days are boring." While I appreciate Ms. Warren's tactic of forecasting my distaste, she does nothing to alleviate it. Instead, Ms. Warren uses the next two stanzas to talk about how deficiencies in her character make it so that she is unable to scare up a dream that is any more exciting than the flowers, &c. referenced in the title. (Her mental poverty, I gather, is the lingering message of the poem...)

The loose iambic meter is, perhaps appropriately, plodding and the rhymes could not be any more nauseatingly cutesy, art imitating life in both cases. (Ms. Warren even rhymes "drama, and I miss" to "trauma--and I miss." You must see it to believe it.) Though perhaps the fact that she is a formal poet is punishment enough for the crime of writing this steaming pile.

Rating: Oh, let's say 15% (for her honesty)

AWP Conference

AWP is a yearly conference in which a lot of writers, mainly poets, get together and pretend that if they make it as a poet they will be "famous." They all walk around acting like top shit kissing everybody's ass even though if they were the most famous living poet in America nobody would care outside of the ten thousand people gathered at that one conference. The most ridiculous phrase I've ever heard in my life is "rock star poet" used to describe some young poet who had two moderately successful books. But the thing is that a lot of these poets branded with that asinine label will act accordingly - doing drugs, sleeping with poet groupies (the lowest of all groupies), and showing up an hour late for poetry readings. The demise of poetry in America can only be blamed on poets. AWP is the most wretched display of delusions and sycophancy outside of a graduate workshop but I'm still sorry I couldn't make it this year.

RATING: 24%

Being forced to listen to poetry on interminably long elevator rides

A great way to make people detest poetry.



RATING: 3%

The Creative Class

I can't decide what I love best about Writers and Artists--their maturity, their Herculean attention spans, or their robust psychological health. Maybe it's their insatiable appetite for intellectual conversation, their reverence for the classic works of Western civilization, their hard-nosed political and economic sensibilities, or their uncompromising work ethic. What ever it is, I think they render self-evident the argument for beating your kids more.

RATING: Snowflake%

(Image from redwing.hutman.net.)

Art

Art is totally lame and/or for gaywads. If I had $8,500, I wouldn't give one cent to art it sucks so bad. People are always writing poems that don't rhyme, or painting some dumb picture that looks like it was done by an epileptic three year old, and I'm supposed to hock over my hard earned dough? Hell no this is America. The only things I hock over my money for kill people or blow things up.

RATING: <.000001%, or not-even-$1 million-out-of-almost-$1 trillion

Smash by The Offspring

This was one of the first CDs I ever owned, but then I inexplicably sold it. Maybe it was because it was so damned popular, and I was under the impression at the time that if something is popular that means it is bad, which is totally not true (all the time). Well, I got it on Amazon the other day for like ninety cents, and it's a pretty good album as I'm sure you all remember. The lyrical content is laughable, but Jesus, what do you want, Leonard Cohen? Listening to this album after more than ten years makes me realize how much of my own shitty high school poetry/songwriting was inspired by lines like

"Superpowers flex their wings
hold the world on puppet strings
egos will feed
while citizens bleed"

Gross!

RATING: 68%

All Over Coffee by Paul Madonna

All Over Coffee is a comic strip published in the San Francisco Chronicle. It consists of short, poem like text often dealing with people and their difficulties interacting with others juxtaposed with barren images of a cityscape in which all the people and vehicles have been removed. There is one hardcover collection that is moving, beautiful, and often funny, but you can also check out the weekly strip by following this link. I can't believe somebody put together comics and poetry so successfully. It's almost like it was custom made for me. Now if only Paul Madonna could find some way to write in Captain Kirk and Darkhawk, I'd be set.

RATING: 91%

Earth

Earth is a place you might know by looking around right now. It is the only planet in the solar system to have produced three Knight Rider television series, sentient life, and pornography. If you want to go to CiCi's Pizza and eat all the pizza you can until you puke for $4.99, then Earth is the planet for you. If you want to immediately die of asphyxiation and extreme atmospheric conditions, then try any one of the other seven planets why don't you. Other things Earth has produced that no other planet we know of can get credit for: poetry, love, the Chick-Fil-A advertising campaign "Eat Mor Chikin," hate, witty bumper stickers, jock straps, and Darkhawk.

RATING: 100%

Mercury

Some bloggers think Mercury is the worst planet, but he's definitely one of the coolest gods. He's the god of communication, but also of exchange and profit--two jobs that might look unrelated until you consider that a free market is basically a big price computer, and that the "invisible hand" of the market described by Adam Smith is actually an invisible brain (I guess this isn't so counterintuitive in the age of the Internet). English words like market, merchant, commerce (and thus the m in "dot com"), mercenary and mercy are all cognate with Mercury.

In Greek mythology, Hermes (Mercury's Greek incarnation) stole Apollo's cattle, and only agreed to give them back on the condition that Apollo would exchange his caduceus (the winged staff entwined with snakes that you see on hospitals, ambulances, etc.) for Hermes' lyre (the symbol of poetry). So even though Apollo is the god of poetry and poets (*ahem*), he actually has Hermes/Mercury to thank for it.

It's human nature to hate our creditors.

RATING: 100%

(Image from www.antinopolis.org. Read Frederick Turner's book Shakespeare's 21st Century Economics for a deeper discussion of markets, myth, meaning and morality.)

The Silence Of The Lambs

Hey, you guys know what a great movie is? This one, that's what. As you all probably know, this is a fantastic and suspenseful movie that deals with complex issues of gender construction in our society and the emotional impact of trying to challenge that, oh and also some murders etc. It is based on the not so great book by Thomas Harris, although that book is not as abysmal as its sequel, Hannibal. The direction is amazingly tight, and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins burn up the screen when either of them is on camera. You know, this was on my top 100, but then I made some inexplicable changes and now Elephant is on my top 100. Maybe I would change it if I hadn't already reviewed that one.

PS - I really like Poetry Magazine's cameo in the movie, and also the film's climax is set to Hip Priest by The Fall. Extra points.

RATING: 86%

Reviewing Books Of Poetry

I like to read poetry, as many of you know, and I also like to write reviews of lots of things, as you can probably tell by the 300+ reviews I've done for this blog, but reviewing poetry books is kind of a mixed bag for me. One problem is that everybody expects when a poet reviews a book of poetry that they try to make their review sound poetic, but fuck all that noise, and also I don't like sounding academic which everybody also wants you to do, to which I say balls poopy vaghole. The biggest problem though is that in this world of google alerts, I always worry that if I write a bad review of somebody's book their feelings will get hurt. When I half-jokingly reviewed Fence Magazine a while back, somebody obviously got angry and started crying or something, and I felt a little regretful because I don't want to make anybody feel bad with this blog, but rather I want them to laugh or some other such joyous act. However, I believe there is a serious lack of poetry police out there, though, and that a lot of journals don't want to publish negative reviews because it "hurts poetry" or maybe for the same sappy reasons I am reluctant to do it. But without poetry police actually leveling legitimate criticism, who's going to call out bad books and bad poetic directions? I don't think I'm alone in saying the majority of American poetry being published in major literary journals is bland and highly predictable. Hey, maybe cantankerous old Yvor Winters had the right idea. In conclusion I would like to say poopy again, and also you probably shouldn't come to this blog for legitimate academic criticism, and if I hurt your feelings somehow I am sorry in advance.

RATING: 27%

One Big Self by C.D. Wright

If I'm not mistaken, this book was originally released as the text to a big photography book in which Wright wrote the accompanying text to photographs Deborah Luster took of Louisiana state prison inmates, but then Wright decided to publish just the text so that poor poetry aficionados like myself could afford it. Anyway, it's gripping, and Wright does a fantastic job of weaving all of these voices together (a large part of it is created from actual words of the prisoners, so the voices float and repeat like a ghostly chorus throughout the book), and by the end I was feeling pretty terrified and philosophical about life and/or society. Look, justice is broken, but what does this book say about it? I guess it isn't poetry's place to judge, anyway, or take sides. One problem I do have with this book, though, is that Wright often seems to embody these prisoners, and writes in poor or abbreviated vernacular, and uses their "words" to manipulate the emotional being of the reader, but where does this white broad from high society get the right to come on down to the lowest class of citizens, those stripped of rights, and embody their voices like this? It's just that she is no folklorist, so the times when she writes in colloquialisms seems disingenuine and somewhat racist, but whatever she's C.D. Wright and I'm just some guy who watched four Batman movies in 24 hours this weekend.

RATING: 72%