I like Gary Sullivan's idea of a blog devoted solely to poetry book reviews. Started me starting to start to think about what general principles might inform it. Seems like such would be useful, in this our modern whirl of lingos & community codes.

I might start with the Chicago Critics for some guidance. But their writings seem today like elaborate structures from the distant past, full of incomprehensible symbols : a top-heavy elephant, ponderous with erudition.

Or maybe it's just me. In fact it is just me.

The idea of going back to Aristotle & Coleridge et al. for basic principles. Is it even possible? I like the idea. Start with first principles because the first principle of poetry is its strangeness : we don't know what it is.

I'm just babbling this morning before getting down to work.

Emerged from my musty cave last night to attend reading downtown (at new spare restaurant-bar, Tazza) by visiting Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan. Funny, exuberant, bawdy, silly. Politics, art, sex, religion - all the serious stuff - are fodder for satire. Enjoy life, be free. Great singing (a complex aria set to some industrial engineering magazine?) by the startlingly pale Nada. Poe would have approved. High points for me were their version of the Book of Revelation (set to an antique novelty-items catalog), Gordon's take-off on Whitman (Song of My OwnSelf), Sullivan's long Kerouacky epistolary piece. Their performance style reminded me, oddly, of the atmosphere at the coffeehouse sketched in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.

The evening was hosted by two Mikes w/microphone (Gizzi & Magee). Mairead Byrne was there too. This is Providence, reporting.

Responding to JK (of today, 8/7) :

it seems like there is a basic difference between:
1) this text means [. . .] to me
and
2) in this text, the author is communicating [. . .].

A text will trigger all kinds of thoughts & insights in a reader; but this is a little different activity from that of trying to "hear" exactly what the author is communicating.

It's possible that Gary's "mis"-translation is actually an effort to convey more exactly what the poet is saying in the original. I suppose there are as many ways to do this as there are languages (or more).

Gary Sullivan's (Elsewhere) musical explorations. I feel like I'm back in the time of the Crusades, but there are peripatetic monks passing ms. around in Toledo or Edessa. The snob & the obsessive are not far apart ("crank" is the wrong word here). I like African electric guitar too. Out of the thumb piano tradition. There was a jazz underground in Mpls late 60s - Jeff Greenspoon & friends. Jeff gave me guitar & thumb piano lessons. I learned harmonica from a goofball named Eugene.

In SF at the Fillmore I was knocked to the ground by a huge fat Hell's Angel from NYC outside a Dead concert (circa 1974). One straight arm ringed with metal to the back of the head. They were having their national convention & had just stolen my $50. guitar for the offer to get me into the concert (I had no money). I was trying to give them a hard time. They did get me into the concert. I danced onstage (my high school friends Al Franken & Tom Davis - later comedians on SNL - had tickets). Asked Jerry Garcia during break if he could help me get the guitar back - he said "sorry, there's nothing I can do". He was covered with sweat but very gentlemanly about it.

O how boring, America! This is the journalism. How about Angel, the Puerto Rican orphan I met on the street, who could hardly speak english? Our hungry hitchhike from SF to Denver (almost killed by car thieves who picked us up in the mountains - our discussion about Jesus that got us off the hook?) The campfire in the cold in the desert outside Reno - "Henry, you are good, I hope you never turn bad." My flight from Denver - Angel's crusade TO FIND SASQUATCH???

Oh, music. . .