Readable Poetry! Praise for Matthew Dickman and Devin Johnston

All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman (2008 - The American Poetry Review, 83 pp)
Traveler by Devin Johnston (2011 - Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 65 pp)

Readable poetry - it sounds like linguist Noam Chomsky's famous nonsense sentence, "green colorless ideas sleep furiously".  Yet these two volumes actually contain poems an ordinary, MFA-less human being not only can read but would derive pleasure from reading.  Strange but true.

Let's start with Mr. Dickman, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize.  (Do we have to disclose the fact that he signed this volume for us at a reading?  This Very Important Blog must adhere to the highest literary ethical standards.)   We enjoyed the live out loud exuberance of these poems.  One sees it right away in the first poem, The Mysterious Human Heart where he declares "...facing the street where my heart is president / of the Association for Random Desire".  The reader is right there with him on that street, willing to be led wherever he wants to take us.

It isn't all just wit and wordplay.  There's love and longing and grief in these pages.  Solace, too; in Byron Loves Me are the lines "You could have been in that car.  You could have / been like her / but you sat on the floor and pulled Lucille Clifton / off the shelf instead." 

Devin Johnston's poems in Traveler are not as immediately accessible as those in All-American Poem, and we're ashamed to admit how many times we wished to be reading it on a Kindle with it's built-in dictionary.  (Even though it probably doesn't have any listings for nacred, rhinarium, or pleroma.)  One hates to describe them as being "exquisitely wrought"--it might make them sound precious.  It's just that the skill in "poem-smithing" is so obvious one is willing to give the poems the second (or third) reading they deserve. 

I concentrated on Iona, which starts "Arriving damp with sea spray, fingers cold / I disembark a day already old..."   The reader gets to spend time with this traveler, watching with him as whiskey is made ("the kernels dried in ovens, milled to grist / oared to mash, the wort drawn off and mixed / with yeast in wooden washbacks").  We benefit from Johnston's keen eye, and we delight in his ability to tell us what his "Traveler" has seen. 

Readable Poetry - an idea whose time as come.

Coastal California - A Great Guidebook

Coastal California - Fodor's Compass American Guides
Written by John Doerper
Photographs by Catherine Karnow and Galen Rowell


No, it doesn't tell you the latest restaurants or the newest boutique hotels.  It doesn't tell you what the cool shops are.  The star of the book is coast itself; we are merely the supporting characters.  Which is how it should be. 

What this book does offer is page after page of  mouthwateringly gorgeous photographs, suberb histories, and excellent descriptions of the wonders of the state.  Trust me, You will be checking the car's tire pressure and throwing some clothes in a backpack within minutes of thumbing through this book. 

Have you ever been up PCH (Pacific Coast Highway)?  We were on part of it recently coming back from Ojai.  We stopped just at the border between Ventura and Malibu and walked along the near-empty beach twenty minutes before sunset.  I've been on four continents but, simple as it was, watching the huge orange sun drop down into the sea was one of the best travel moments in my life.

Pay attention to the guide's comments about California State Parks, too.  El Capitan--a bit north of Santa Barbara--is well great.  While it can get a big crowded in the summer, it's worth it to be able to wake up, take your fixin's down to the bluffs, park on a picnic table, and have your breakfast overlooking the grey, white-capped Pacific.

Oh, yes--the maps are good, too.  Not as precise as what your smartphone can conjure up but going "low tech" fits the mood of a good coastal tour better anyway.

Heavy, Season 1 - The People We Carry

Have just viewed the first season of Heavy, a semi-dignified reality show that aired on A&E.  The male clients weigh in at 5- or 600 pounds, the women at 3- or 400, and the show follows them as they began a program of physical exercise, diet re-education, and therapy. 

What's contained in those centuries of pounds?  Deceased mothers.  Living, negative mothers (one said of her aspiring singer daughter, People want to see Madonna; they don't want to see her.")  Family members members who interfered with young girls.  Fathers felled by suicide.  Sons lost to untreated mental illness or drugs.  A range of situations and events over which the clients can't let go.

Weight Watchers, for example, asks, What are you eating?

Mariane Williamson's A Course in Weight Loss asks, What's eating you?  Or more pointedly, What's going on with you that you aren't treating yourself well?

The clients seem high strung and overly emotional.  One isn't sure if it's just due to the presence of the cameras or if they're so used to eating through every emotion that, without continual food intake, they're a  bit raw and naked.

The toughest job the trainers, coaches and therapists seem to have is explaining to the clients that greasy, sugary, overly processed junk really isn't a good thing, that consuming masses of such food is really an act of self-violence, self-abuse--a one-person Fight Club.

God bless Alice Waters and God bless the First Lady for encouraging us to take good care of ourselves by way of our food choices.  And shame on those who attack them as being "elitist".

John Keats - Ironman (Who Knew?!)

Have just finished "Walking North with Keats" (Yale University Press, 1992) by the aptly named Carol Kyros Walker.  The poet had taken the walk in 1818 with his good friend Charles Armitage Brown through England, Ireland and Scotland.  Ms. Walker retraced that walk and documented it with understated lovely photographs as well as commentary on the letters and poems Keats wrote to his ailing brother Tom and semi-cloistered sister.

One thinks of Keats as being this delicate, fragile hummingbird given that he died at age 25, but there he was on this trip hiking 5, 10, 20 miles a day!  And mind you, this is before Gore-Tex and Timberlands and toasty fleecy pullovers; when one got wet one stayed wet.  Which, of course, is what happened--Keats took a nasty chill on Mull and really never completely recovered from it, dying 3 years later.

What stayed with this reader, though, was the purpose of the trip.  Keats had trained to be a physician (apparently in those days it was just an apprenticeship), but, as we know, wanted to be a poet.  Walker says Keats saw the journey as a sort of Poet's Apprenticeship--a way to shake off the his previous life and to enter fully into his new profession.

Alors, moi aussi.  Welcome to the first post on Anyone's Cockatoo.