Crg Hill's poetry scorecard

Reading 2008

I'm a lister, or at least I've been a lister since I started teaching in 1990. Daily or weekly lists help me prioritize.

I've kept another kind of list since 1992, a record of the books I've read (inspired by the list I kept the year after I barely graduated from high school in 1975). Below are the books I read in 2008 (some for at least a second time as I get ready to teach them in my YA Lit class; others I've read before and read again--and may read yet again, a gain, A GAIN, at least for me--because I guess I'm a re-reader as well as a lister). Hope some of the titles are legible (my handwriting is becoming less and less so).

What I especially love, find fortuitous, is the bulge in the list (36 books) since I assumed the responsibility of my new teaching/research position in August/September at Washington State University. I have never read so much, so deeply, as I did in the last four months.

Under our care willingly to know. This objective was alien, cloth habits seeming to glow, making a sound they cloaked. Felt virtuous, like a volunteer, a culture. He imagined startling his certainty under his arm, down and down to bring up in the bowels the evolution of flatness and depth.

Nico V. on Seattle's The Stranger Poetry Chain:

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2008/12/26/seattle_poetry_chain_5_nico_v

Stimulating to this day, their crucifixes stood consistent in his desert. A wind shook their burlap habits. They were barely able to stand. The mission is analogous to the top of the harsh whitewashed thing-in-itself. In the glazed clay ground, idealism remains. When they heard the shout, reality was sitting on the planks, dulled by dust and sweat. Passing thought, blazed trees, the freedom of drift through the point at which we always believed. The old one blustered about the demons of meditation, his own shameful mist.

Love Pome

thembraced

Any Cell-phone Haiku?

The latest issue of The New Yorker (Dec. 22 & 29) has an article by Dana Goodyear about the cellphone novel craze in Japan. I'm wondering are there other genres of cellphone lit? Haiku? Vizpo? The constraints on typography on the cellphone are ripe for new works.

Brief Poem About a Brief Poem

The bird was unknown
but poorly described by the new.
The large-billed songster,
the present cheerful strain,
the specimen I kept in the treetops
engaged in catching insects.

Shades of Dialogue

Misread Headline:

Pope Accused of Stroking Homophobia in Speech

BYSTANDER: An Irreality by mIEKAL aND

A 'pataphysical post-apocalytpic novella in 3 movements

· Paperback: 130 pages
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 1-934289-63-9

http://www.blazevox.org/bk-ma.htm

What would happen if words, disguised as characters Balboa Pettibone 
and She-singer, could hallucinate and time travel? mIEKAL aND, one of 
our most intrepid verbal explorers, takes us into the world of genre 
fiction and sets it spinning into an “irreality” as iridescent as myth 
clothed in neon language.   The sideways feints and flourishes of 
aND's words lead us through a minefield of future decay, artfully 
finding glimmers of beauty and eros even in the most blasted lang-
scapes and bone-scrapes. In a world where “a blackened sky corrupt[s] 
the horizon,” “snakes of anger” war with “snakes of confusion,” and 
“there are no curtains between darkness and its opposite,” the beauty 
of the words themselves offer joy in apocalyptic circumstance. And 
courtly love wins the day.

Maria Damon

There is a secret travelogue through the irreal estate of the 20th 
century, a picaresque that passes down the arcades of the Invisible 
Cities, across the plains of Flatland, through the Gardens of Priapus 
to the foothills of Mount Analogue. Between the lines of Bystander: An 
Irreality, mIEKAL aND has thoughtfully printed you a map for the next 
leg of the journey. Pack your sieve and your bicycle; it's a long trip.

Darren Wershler

_Bystander: An irreality_ is indeed an irreality or sobreality so vivd 
it brings senses to a full function and merges the one into the 
implications of the text. What I experiencet wasnt prose or poetry in 
its common definition. Its written just and laconic. Exactly the 
amount and texture of information needed to hook the right senses and 
teleport one inside. Psy-fi and a metaphor for the webbed chronology 
of thought and remembered events, reconstructed map of communication. 
After digestion i found a brain map that emerged, map of how thoughts 
are layed and georgraphical x-ray of how they settle and drift with/ 
within time.   The process of reading or rather drinking pleasantly 
hurts the neurons, like adrenaline that spreads from the head to 
appendages. I want to repeat the journey on my own after watching 
Balboa....

Alexandra Zavylova