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  • The Pleasantry Supreme

    Not just thank you very much.
    But thank you very very
    very very
    much.

  • Cat Fish

    Boy am I glad that
    trout don’t eat cats.
    Because if they did
    we’d have to use kittens for bait.
    And, well,
    yuck.

  • Ferry ride

    This brain don’t tire
    of shore
    shrinking to speck
    as boat pulls away
    as every day
    I immigrate.

  • Monkey Friend

    And the monkey breath!
    You gotta pack that up, my friend
    all smelling of termites and sticks
    and other monkeys.
    No one asked you to smell that way.
    In fact, the assignation specifically connoted
    replicating a contrary stench, to whit:
    the non-monkey stench.
    So why carmelize your ack ack ack ack ack, my friend, my friend?
    Instead, hey —
    flatten out your wallet.
    Hey narrow your eye-wear.
    Hey surge-protect
    your estuary
    knowledge core.

  • Graffiti Glass Breath

    Gathering glass breath
    into slushed dixie cups
    chimney’d through milk wood
    through worm weed
    in whispers.
    Marked pies with iron-crossed crust.
    Heartfelt. Growing.
    Red whispers.
    Sliding up against
    red-veined wood fences.
    Slipping into character such that
    white curves
    twist toward
    fading blue words.
    Graffiti glass breath, my sweetie.
    Popular chain-gang motif.

  • My unkind moment

    He looked like he was drawn
not with a pen or a paintbrush
but with the dull wet end of a used toothpick.
    A dent. An imprint.
A soft image.
    Leaving behind
a flaw designed primarily
to gather dust.

  • Russia Me Lap Am On (for Kenneth Koch)

    Artichokes with dark splotches, dry stems,
    peeling soft near avocado papa-san.
    Pump cheese? Please — pump chew. Pump chew, you bastard!
    Pump cheddar!
    Fact: Belgium bats its Belgian eyes.
    Hungary honey-shaded my heart.
    Luxemburg — well, you know how I feel about you, Luxemburg.
    And Russia
    me lap
    am on.

  • The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 6.5

    Pale Fire Peoples!
    As suggested last week, here’s a bonus round for folks interested in re-reading the first section, talking about the Richard Rorty introduction to the Everyman’s Library, and/or bringing other external sources to the party.
    My 2 cents: I was a bit disappointed with the Rorty intro. Seemed to me he was commiting a Kinbote of sorts — putting himself too much in the center of things. I kept waiting for him to say “When we first encounter so-called ‘Gradus,’ we are wearing those pants we thought we’d given away, but then it turned out they were just buried under some other clothes on our rocking chair in the back room.”
    Some of what he described as what the reader would go through rang true for me — in particular the section on page x where he talks about the experience of reading the intro and the poem. But after that, I started writing “no” in the margin of my copy every paragraph or two. “The awed sense that royalty has condescended to treat us as a confidant”? no. “the revelation of some new and surprising fact about our remarkable host and commentator”? no again. I just didn’t have that experience — at the start, for me at least, Kinbote was a clown. It was only toward the very end that I was surprised to find myself getting a wee bit of sympathy for the narrator.
    Those are quibbles, I suppose. My biggest beef is that so much of Rorty’s essay hinges on the idea that Nabokov wanted us to forget about Hazel and then only come back to her in the end. (1) did we really forget about her? didn’t seem that way to me. (2) I don’t recall N. swinging her story back into view in the last few pages.
    Still, it made for an interesting reading. Your thoughts?
    Next up: starting on August 16th, Deathmarch 3: At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flan O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan), which, according to James Joyce, is “A really funny book.” (I’m not making that up.)

  • Poem

    Soon will come a time
    when we’ll move out to that house
    by the brook.
    And the weather will be fine.
    And the broadband.

  • The Pale Fire Deathmarch, Week 6

    Pale Fire Peoples!
    Just finished PF this very morning. Enjoyed the close very much — it felt like a soft and very satisfying landing. Looks like many of the folks (at least the commenting folks) on the ‘march appear to be in the “he’s a nut” camp. But me, I didn’t feel like VN was committing 100% either way. It felt to me like at least three stories kept in focus at the same time — the story within the poem, the story of Charles the eccentric ex-King, and the inferred story of Charles the looped stalker. I’d been braced for some sort of neat “it was all a dream” ending and this more open-ended close was a bit of a relief. Or mebbe that’s my delusion 🙂
    Either way, I’m glad I read this one. As with GR, it just felt good on the brain to be reading this ecstatic (to swipe Updike’s word from the back cover) prose in small, savoured doses.
    Next week: This is the thread for closing thoughts on the book itself. Next week, by popular demand, we’ll add a thread for folks what want to re-read the poem, intro, and foreword, and throw any other external sources into the stew.
    Thanks all,
    -CV