Being one stanza from Louis Cabri’s “Salon, salon.” What if the reader isn’t immediately transformed into rhythm of the chorus of David Bowie’s song? Since so much of my own poetry carries on precisely this kind of dialog with pop culture, I worry about this more than a little.

 

Are Abigail Child’s poems, which here as elsewhere follow a prosody that can be traced historically back to Stein, inherently more optimistic than her films? Does she use different media for different moods? [At the Drawing Center on Tuesday I asked her & she replied that it had obviously been a long time since I’d seen one of her films. ]

 

Why do the works from K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Dead Nation have nine elements of punctuation in front of every line? In “false / Vodoun Democracy,” it’s nine consecutive colons (:::::::::), while in “Mars Needs Terrorists” – a title that Spicer would have envied – each line has a block that includes five colons alternating with 4 periods (:.:.:.:.:). I’m working hard here to avoid all kinds of colonitis puns.

 

Is Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Draft 56: Bildungsgedicht with Apple the shortest section of Drafts to date, or is than an optical allusion created by the “landscape” orientation of Kiosk’s page? Also, how is it that DuPlessis is managing to get more productive every year? It’s the literary equivalent of watching the careers of Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire – they already had established themselves as baseball superstars when each suddenly just blossomed into power hitters on some transcendental level.