Annoyed with both Jim Harrison & William Logan pieces in NYTBR last weekend. Logan tries to knock Crane off his always-shaky pedestal. Harrison the successful bon-vivant novelist makes fun of academic poets. They are fair game (I've done it myself occasionally), but when he writes "Vallejo... a grander poet than any now living on this bruised earth"... fooey. Excuse me, Jim, but how would you know?? Stick with hunting quail, buddy. Poetry's out of your league.
Reading H.L. Humes, The Underground City. He's better than Pynchon, John (speaking as one who hasn't read Pynchon).
Here's a new chapter from untitled fresco-in-progress.
1
Like the famous rose out of the dried-up swimming pool
the thought of you comes to me with the approach
of your birthday. The planet spins just out of reach
of the sun (path of a dizzy potter's wheel)
still warming with evening light the flaking fresco
(framed by gilded oak) in the old Town Hall
where the phantom image of a pax municipal
is captured in a ring of dancing girls... come & go,
come & go with me they sing, in their clear soprano
silence of pastel. And so I would indeed...
out of my fated rounds (Providence, decreed
in faded characters - Dante Street, Hope, Gano...)
and across the squared improbable city
harbored in every heart - toward you
(my dancing absence, skipping beat, blue
J). From shallow deeps and minor bays to blazing C.
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