What He Ought to Know
Ed Foster
Marsh Hawk Press 2006

New year's first book, a day early. Ed Foster's poetry has new contacts, more lookin' at boys, more dedications, more dears (Dear A., Dear Levantine, Dear Wunderbar, David, dear), more ohs (Oh, Ted; Oh, Gene; Oh, David), more propositioning. These conversion narratives are not postmodern but they are embedded in watched over, opened intonations -- "Marilyn erred (said David)"; " language you remember, / Henry said, quoting Auden." Intimacy to a degree, rapacious, bookish, still a contrary stoicism reveals dark emblazonments of self-doubt in titles like "Our Dossier of Loss" and "The Pointless Life We Lead." In the poem titled "Ekhardt's Ice" Foster pinpoints another pervasive element, an ogler's detachment, "Like Ekhardt," but Foster seems ready to let this go. Here the narrator cites Spicer's "Ahhhh" and "the boy" who yells "Fisssh"; then the narrator thinks "spring seems just / another determined thing." Why resort to Spicer or "the boy" for permission to shout and then reflect like this, so pared back, detached? The finest poems are rowdier, calling Buddhist piety to task, sizing up bliss as "nothing new," giving form to "swell, tight bright anger in my bed." While Foster also cites Death in Venice, Melville, and even W. V. Quine, it's more engaging when he shuts down his lover at 3 a.m., notes the next day the waiter needs a shave, lingers waiting for French teens who don't return. Sometimes Foster refuses to slice the veils -- "The athlete, too young by western standards for what he'd want" -- what wanting jock is too young? western standards? Still, the manhunt is a persistent measure composing the narrator as Everyman in pursuit of his younger self, the voyeur-participant: "Styles change...There was / a time women might look svelte...No more…Boys occupy my stage...The metric lives on pleasure / for the eye." The eye, the boys, mere metonyms (for Foster), poetry fills the stage. (It can live no other way.) The most evasive of these "new and selected poems" come from Mahrem (2002) again from Marsh Hawk Press. Not all of that collection is included here. I miss the predatory overture of "Men Who Threaten Men" or the directness of "Love": "Take your prick in hand / and move it slowly. / Take his and / bring it to your mouth." Yet a selected poems is by definition a winnowing. For now, I'll settle for the treasure in reach, the unstable ambiguity of "Litany," for example, in which Foster unfastens a compressed, cross-generational auto-inventory of the once-family man, now afloat: "His orchids are inherited disease; / their purifying roots are white -- / he loves the petals / as the boy imagines skies / beneath his father's silk." These poems are poised as a cirrus sky, knottings of cadenced desire, unruly, "painted blue for love."

Early MLA returns. Also, just scroll down for several more.

His kiss looks disgusting. Antennae.

My predictions for 2006.

Bohemians blaze into flickering babble.

Babble, the national flower of somewhere.

Ever notice? But don't worry, only a few quiet come to maintain watch over how and then even they set off suspecting the unimpossible though in deployable scopes.

Pan from sky to pool-and-vetiver cliffside. Wet doublets are half empty. A canoeist roundtable sups, having partially re-escarped.

2006 has a too-everyday touch, divided loyalties and substance abandonment, but this can be upped.

Let's get back to bohemia, yes? and don't call that rustic mytho hole in the Newtons tele-tragic just because our scarves are more vintage. My bohemians are these pastry munchkins in fury chopping the air.

Guru, you're so unnecessary!

Ok, I forgot the trend-driven eco slant. Habermas. Benjamin. Sam Yosemite.

I'll leave these to whitecollar welders of many incredibly narrow stripes. Why, I remember, once, being really angry at the way my kilt and tartan were portrayed as intersecting and square. But I'm still a clan stripper/investor. It's locally pure!

And I prefer Hermes triangles through which the narcissus paling pass, my boheme, having to duck inside the Scylla of aphorism as usual. Then a crossroads and the come-about. (No pointers on how street cops operate in classy zip codes. No Charybdis of rapid discovery, either.) My bohemia is folded in by only the messed with, while attending geniuses commune to allay Bush's rush to complex ignorance. Nothing unjustified won't happen.

Bohemian.

You can't be superior to anyone you erase, stupid. Don't like me, now that's better, like lifting a big symbol of prosperity off your chest. It feels.

I'm not part of it, not you so I shouldn't say more, according to your latest poetics (an intellectual ruins).

Aw, come on, try an exercise in subject-mood agreement.

The ache of summer is palpable, and night is falling as snorts of derision dampen my naïve representation of democracy.

What we notice in your badmouth are this and that intense selfinterest and decay.

(You're post-avant when you take cues from décor trends, surely.)

Then William said to his dark lady, oh, I'll steal this because we can substitute words here and there. We'll call it modern English.

By way of a PS on bohemians, Schuyler (ravaged of course) was more of one than Ginsberg, unravaged. And Brainard (ravaged then unravaged and then ravaged) was a big boho. Auden? Think so.

Jim Brodey was narrowly boho. Less narrowly, Harry Matthews is.

What is the enduring appeal of John Godfrey if not mammalian swagger of the boho? Candidates for living women bohemians: In addition to Mayer and Notley, Kyger, B. L. Hawkins. Not C. D. Wright. Lisa Jarnot. I'm taking Anne Boyer's word she's bohemian, herself. Jimmy Behrle thinks he could be but he's not a woman. I swear Alli Warren is a hobo. Stephanie Young may be, ok, is; Cedar Sigo, sure, still he's no woman, either. Arguably, Jeni Olin. Lee Ann Brown maybe, maybe it's personal style? But then the person and the person's style are huge parts of bohemia. Juliana Spahr. Eileen Myles. Magdalena Zurawski.

I'm leaving many, many out. And I'm leaving out content, which has to be almost always drop-down-and-give-me-twenty cool. Sometimes it's easier to draw lines. Kent Johnson is not a bohemian. Why not Michael Gottlieb? Ted Greenwald and Rene Ricard are oddly bohemian, almost in the same way as Jeni Olin (they can't help it).

We get the point. "Life chips" fall all over poetics in Brooklyn and San Francisco.

Fate, linkage to gravity, the ballgown. Three items that are definitely me.

Well put, Nick.

Jack Kimball, in his inimitable witty and charming way, has responded to this post on his blog by awarding himself the honorary title of bohemian and stands ready to award it to other professionals of his acquaintance. This is fine, and I applaud the gesture. But the bohemianism I was picturing includes the description offered so tellingly by Alice Notley: "if you're a poet and aren't somewhat ravaged" then "there's probably something wrong with your poetry.' Doubtlessly every poet Jack is thinking of feels ravaged. But I don't think Alice is writing only about how poets feel. In the age of Bush and 9-11 every responsive, sensitive person deserves the right to feel ravaged. Very likely, the poets Alice is describing are or were much more desperate life-wise, at all moments, than the people Jack is thinking about. Now, of course, we'll get into it about the word "desperate." When I say desperate, I mean those artists who have put virtually all of their life chips into their creative work life to the point of anguished and unending economic risk.

I can proceed with specific suggestions. And I'll ignore economics if I may.

Putting life chips into creative work. It's an extraordinary formulation that can be fulfilled innumerable ways, I would argue. The clearer examples of poets are dead. Spicer. But not Duncan? Wieners. Kerouac. But not Burroughs? Yes, Burroughs. O'Hara. Berrigan. Weiner. Ceravolo. But not Whalen?? Whalen. Helen Adam? But not Bishop? Was Robert Lowell a bohemian? Creeley. Of the living, surely Notley, surely Mayer. Ashbery is my bohemian. With respect to Notley's criterion, ravage, that is a sign of particular bohemian behavior, but not an exclusive or necessary sign. Age brings on ravage, for example, but does not inevitably render one boho. Elmslie, counterexample, is a bohemian without ravage.

Bohemianism is a state of mind directly connected to life practice. This I grant you, Nick, because I believe this is where we agree. I suggest that there are degrees of success in the bohemian life, some failing it completely, nonetheless quintessentially part of it. Others striving but attaining it narrowly or not at all.

Tom Raworth's Xmas.

I feel better now that I've checked in with Nick Piombino analyzing bohemia, even as he claims his separation from it.

Unlike Nick, I have no cri de l'exile, no memory of giving that life, that way of ignoring the insignificant, up. I consider myself boho for perpetuity. Like me, bohemians I admire, it seems, fall into primary and secondary categories of professionalism. Speaking of the secondary, like Nick, for instance, I'm trained as a psychologist, couldn't you tell? Unlike Nick, I've been more on the teaching and language end of the psyche scale. (But I'm ready to counsel you the second you ask, flirt.)

I know bohemians I admire are professionals. This is tautology. I know these whack-jobs by their primary works, their accomplishments, and through these I type them. Poet and essayist Nick ironically, I think, feels he's no longer bohemian (maybe because he's a therapist??). But look at him -- something he can't do! -- his approach is still that of a new fellow in town, hunting language, eager for more input, welcoming the more recent arrival! He's unguarded in the face of poets, young bohos, especially. You can't get closer to the essence of bohemia than that.

I started to define bohemianism as ignoring the insignificant. That can be a 'problematic' for poets-as-pure-artists ('pure,' that is). Earning a living in teaching, communications, sales, counseling can be seen as fairly insignificant, but the entirety of the boho life can handle this. It's secondary. We can even handle bouts of "lack of light and sun and air," to quote Nick. Bohemianism craves discontent, stifling blankness, nothing in the way of bombast through speech or silence. We give it up.

Now let's see... the cloner faked his results?

Selected from terminate and stay resident:

treaty bourbon boiling
rough-hewn loutish base
used gruel elves
the undulate dose

From Ms. Dickinson via finish your phrase:

one fainting robin

I've been thinking how victimization
fouls up the law:
insofar as our ignoring it
makes fortunes.

Because its buildings were sold for luxury condominiums, the Vatican in Rome will close at the end of the year. Read more.

Better than marriage, it was an atmosphere-filled parallax.

Ours was a taxonomic relationship.

Read this somewhere. Art from Iowa ships in 24 hours.

O shit. Olivia Sachs Fish has been surpassed. All of us think of Nada.

For Jeremy Prynne

Pacify mudsuckers' attachment in for muted mar
counter-piper or rainbow pike gone to drainage,
sturgeon some, give, bowfin platter; tied up ling
to kin a seahorse desiring paddlefish. Even bull-
head bestow mullet chubs and skate to even rope
flatline sea apple frogspawn, slide under mirage
fore clam planning our sailfin corkwings to meters
in trout, glowing eels. Enough out of a clown barb
to grasp another, nearly cold dump for a dab
angle leopard bass, everywhere cory cats, brill
at rising smelt. Dace, non-goby rout there, sole or
by a maternal tub gurnard, glinted shads so tope,
bluefin and shrimps forever we say, pinching red
reticulated sharks and rays. Nostalgia for tetras
assess parallel perch, gars, butterfly blacks. Blenny
chatter damp marlin, forcep fish outsourcing toy-
active golly, pollock, hot cod, all snappers diluted
and fuming over a dartfish: easy to swordfish over
a crab, allis and twaite, red pickerel, herring,
cup coral and sun carp for lamprey and weevers.

Out of a large stack of discardable freebies, I just yanked -- oh, what a mess -- the most recent issue of Dubuque Review, and I have to believe, I'm compelled to admit, that under the editorial stewardship of Jeb Dull The Review (as Jeb's friends call it) has evolved over the last few issues into the most energetic, the most first-rate magazine in North America in two or three decades, even if previously under Jeb's estranged wife, Susan Coxcombe Dull, it had been associated with the Labrador Ice Movement of Extremely Quiet Vers. Jeb (and by the way, isn't it time we had a full collected or at least a hefty selected of this mostly fine mid-career postman and poet?) has pulled out all the stops (what does that mean actually?), pairing famous and not-famous side by side! What a go-for-broke strategy!

Beside loving to read pieces from old friends, Peter Everwine's "Lullabuy" -- a hugely clever title I might add -- Robert Bly's "A Nun Whispers," Elizabeth Macclin's "Fog You," Richard Kostelanetz's "Exclamationmarkierung: The Haiku" -- I came across a startling poem from a young woman Bill Corbett had been telling me about, Olivia Sachs Fish. Fish's poem is titled "Us" and this piece is so self-contained I just have to type it out in entirety. So I will. Here it is. Below. It's called "Us." By Olivia Sachs Fish.

On a long reel from the sideboard
I woke how unclean windows weaving
A thousand downs the middle, was it
To echo you as you moved we poked

If there were thought and wish,
Hunger and recall, will,
We might have impatience
Memory, intention, down-filled

Blown through "I knew" -- that
Phosphorous arranging 'nother "I know"
And the ruled thread wrapped what
We met I lost through ashen facades

-- Clam words alone longing --
Gosh, filled without overfill
Longing sated, making them
And us not just one

At the top as though a lost fountain
Just enough syrup
That meant spirit, desire, appetite
Pool or garden carpets of spite.

I can think of only four or five poems written by women in the last half-century that gesture with a perplexed, hysterical dexterity comparable to that of Fish's, the tortured, distaff syntax conveying dementias in meanings and miming athleticism with prepositions like a true coded necklace of antinarrative mastery. Note the second stanza; in recent years, even earlier, I can't remember a more unlimited bellowing of eidetic, observed verbal purpose, unless it's Amy Lowell, Loy, Moore, Clampitt, Waldman or, perhaps, Ammons; nothing as self-blasting as these end-rhyming / off-rhymed re-figured hand-shadows, wish / impatience and will / filled that "echo" others throughout, e.g., longing / one / fountain / them. My take is this. I reckon the near miss of rhyme is more than intentional, it's art etched with threats of closure. Note also precise and daring amplitudes in degrees and types of textual rendition, lush craft telegraphed up to the surface in the first stanza. Count these words -- first and second lines, precisely six items! Seven in the third and eight(!) in the fourth! Observe, too, how useful it is to have fricatives honk inside iterative environments of the first four stanzas, and how these little s's and f-words are pulverized by labials, except -- and it's always these exceptions that belie the enormous debt all avants pay to design! -- the last stanza, the one containing the one and the only one line-ending lexical item that refuses to rhyme even halfway, "syrup"! Even when Kit Merwin, my old roommate from Fulsom Community, is translating from Incan tabulature, he wouldn't realize this kind of tour de semantic substitution more effeminately or more emphatically than Fish.

One aspect I basically admire the most in any number of opposite-sex ways is how optimistic Fish makes me when I read a poem like "Us." I'm liberated by how facilely and womanly Fish lets constraints constrain. I myself would begin the penultimate line without the word "That," because that would make that dynamism between "syrup" and "meant" more meaningful. Yet, what really matters here and to Fish, apparently, is that she doesn't give a fig (what does that expression denote?) when dynamism is concerned, if it is, particularly, maybe, when the poem is coming to a conclusion, it seems. It's as though syrup is generally sticking to her words, slowing everything down or just a bit, saving her best to last. That metaphor -- and you won't find me talking too much about metaphor because they're so easy -- carpets of spite. Whew! Just like a mad poet or constrained woman. I don't know what she is saying and I don't want to know. That's how dangerous this poem makes the reading of it feel. You want to complain about constraints? Go Fish!

New title -- "Make a Killing as a Poet: Average $250/hour and spend time on what you love." Fiction.

Modesty is unimpressive. Isn't that the point?

Impossible to decide. Should I submit to Here Comes Everybody or send in my reservation for ______?

End of the year goodies! Fantastic to see Publishers Weekly taking on Linh Dinh, Drew Gardner and Shanna Compton as well as David Larsen, whose write-up is reprinted, below. If you're already a subscriber to PW, you can read the reviews online (scroll down for Dinh, Gardner, Compton and Larsen). Otherwise, subscribe free for a month. Linketh here and followeth directions.

You use 25 barrels of fish a year. Omigod, you poor little fish. Dead, dead, dead, you're talking to Ed the fish, here. One evening on t.v. in the gym, a dying fish articulated his version of romance. Ed described himself as a fish-in-training. He crept past the recreation center's swimming pool. Open a fish, open a mind. By the middle of the night the fish realized federal aid was not imminent. Ordinary fish. Son of a fish. Officials had had enough of the fish. (It might've been better being one big fish instead of one of a lot of little ones.) Next day Ed took a job in the cafeteria. Growing up fish evolve. It's a measure of the increasing clout of fish that the soundtrack strikes you like a fin.

Let fish cool before kissing.

Discover why fish have made Puntacana Resort their home.

Ten unique destinations sharing an ideal spanning five decades, elegance without pretense, embracing and enhancing fish.

A chance to remember for a moment a fish held with the lamp switched off.

Do you fish? Do you use your dick the way it is supposed to be used?

A little.

I love to fish.

Life is death if you don't have a little fish now and then.

Like the exotic-looking new fish that showed up at class one day, Ed is a bit of a dichotomy wrapped in newspaper.

The fish was dressed in black. He thought it was legal, he wrote, on a fish.

From Publishers Weekly:

The Thorn
David Larsen. Faux (SPD, dist.), $15 paper (88p) ISBN 0-9765211-0-5

Larsen is one the two most important practitioners of an emerging form that might be called the "graphic poem" -- basically, verse comics. (The other is Gary Sullivan, also published by poet Jack Kimball's Faux Press in Boston.) Larsen's graphic piece "Bucket [sic] of Blood" (www.temple.edu/chain/larsen.pdf) and other works have already brought him a blogospheric following; this much-awaited debut, however, showcases Larsen's conventional verse, which is unique and accomplished in and of itself. The Wordsworth poem from which the book takes its title describes its thorn as "a mass of knotted joints,/ A wretched thing forlorn," and the same is true, explicitly and knowingly, of the speaker of this collection. What Larsen (who often signs work LRSN) is after is nothing less than an anatomy of the abject, one that drinks deep of English poetry's traditions of pathos and history-surveying. Abjection, here, is a close cousin to violence, and both are directly linked to emotional cowardice -- often in others. In a cumulative manner impossible to quote, the speaker doggedly tracks that cowardice at various levels of representation and relationship: from what roommates say to what Osama bin Laden does, from the words of "The Diviner Satih" to all of Phoenix. It's an obsessive, superintelligent, highly promising work, and an often beautiful one. (Dec.)

Great for LRSN! Grab your copy here.

Local poetry-real-estate news: Our friends from the Demolicious series report they've been ushered out of their second Central Square venue in three months. We thought the series was secure in respectable, new haunts, the Enormous Room. Michael Basinki gave a terrific performance for the first and now the last Enormous read. And tout le monde poetique was looking forward to Caroline Bergvall this Sunday. Now canceled. Seems as if local barkeeps require big crowds of drinkers to pay the Sunday rent and overhead. So new plans for this Sunday. Demolicious moves to John and Andrew's much swankier real estate, their home near Central Square...an open reading and party. If you need time and directions, e me.