Enjoying the delights of Hat 6. I should read more poetry.
Like Kim Lyons' poems especially.

More evidence that the younger generation is just plain smarter than we are. (smart, ie. intelligent & stylish). Though occasionally the multiple layers of self-parody & self-consciousness are... a bit jejune (to this stuffy 52-yr-old senior citizen).

Happy to appear alphabetically between Nada Gordon & Mark Halliday. (Both of whose poems seem, in places anyway, to be riffing in jokey ways on mine. Widderruf. But I'm just being self-conscious.)

Mark Halliday was at Brown, in the grad program I think, a couple of years ahead of me. He published my first poems outside of high school, in a little spiral-bound anthology of "new poetry". I wonder what ever happened to that. Mark & David Cashman were publishing The Providence Review then (with the epigraph from the Bonanza Bus driver on the frontispiece - "This is Providence. Everyone changes here.") David is still writing poetry - had a book published recently (This Much : selected poems, 1970-2000. Catskill Press, 2003).

Read yesterday & today, new book:

This Much : selected poems 1970-2000, by David Cashman. Catskill Press, 2003. David used to edit The Providence Review with Mark Halliday. I met him back in the 70s and then didn't see him for 30 years, until I started going to church across the street from my house & found him there. He's an excellent poet, & I admire & envy this book. Makes our blogger's games look like so much trivial pursuit.

(Poetry happens, sometimes, on a different level, unbeknownst, anonymous almost, closer to ordinary non-literary life, without losing any of its authority, integrity, freedom, "literariness".) (I'm being somewhat more inarticulate than usual this morning.) (The ambitious & the professional can lose touch with it. I am speaking for myself here, others may identify. This may be some kind of natural or moral cycle, leading perhaps to re-discovery.)