What About Food?

I've always been a bit mystified by how economists measure "the economy." Rates of joblessness: these make sense, as do the other categories, such as GDP, "housing-starts," the Dow Jones (which I think of as the Tao Jones because it's essentially mystical), "consumer-spending," etc. What's left out, though?
Why don't we hear regularly (daily) about the following: is everyone getting enough food? Is everyone able to get medicine? Does everybody have access to a good school? I guess what I'm asking is: Who decides what the measurement-categories are, who appointed these people, and why doesn't measuring "the economy" involve really basic things? If the stock market goes up and a bunch of people still aren't eating, in what sense is the economy okay? I'm just going hard-headedly practical hear, nothing Marxist about it. If a disinterested observer arrived from outer space, and we told the entity that the economy was okay except for the the 3 trillion dollar deficit, poverty, famine, and a sooty atmosphere that's cooking where we live, the entity would say, "Who in the hell is in charge of measuring things down here? Fire that person."

Poets, rightly, have a reputation for having their heads in the clouds, but I think because we often think about common objects quite concretely, we occasionally can display useful "bullshit detectors"--I think Hemingway (not a poet) may have invented this term. I mean, I see Wall Street guys (never women) , wearing those goofy pin-striped suits from Guys and Dolls, yammering on MSNBC about whether "the market has found its bottom," and I want to allude to a phrase from my father's generation: "You couldn't find your ass [or the market's bottom] with both hands and a flashlight." If a nation's "economy" isn't working for huge segments of the population with regard to basic needs, then it's either not working, or it's not an economy in any practical way. Same for the global economy. I hate to use the household analogy again, but I will: What if person came home and said to his or her significant other, "You know, our household economy is in great shape, except there's nothing to eat, we can't afford to get sick, and our kid's school sucks. But our mutual funds look good."

Economists, add to categories, get more basic, become more practical, and pull your heads out of your NASDAQ.

I think this may have been a rant.

Property and Stuff

So: we were going to "go condo," but we decided not to. The building was distinctive if not unique, but the price almost left the earth's atmosphere, and owning a building (but not really) with nearly 30 other people as well as having a pseudo-landlord proved too complicated for us. So we bought a house, a real solid beast that's close to where I work and energy-efficient. We're trying to reduce our carbon-footprint, as if I knew what that meant.

Owning a home is such an American ideal--for working- as well as middle-class folk. My father--a hard-rock, underground gold-miner turned carpenter and stone-mason--got his houses the old-fashioned way. He bought land with cash and built a house himself. --Sold it when I was six, bought other land further out in the sticks and built another house himself. He thereby cut out the realty middle-person and never had a mortgage. He "designed" the homes himself. Oh, my goodness. "Eccentric" and "idiosyncratic" don't quite cover it. In what he called "the rumpus room," there was a piece of exposed steel and vaguely rusted I-beam running down the middle of the ceiling. It was holding up the second floor, but it could have held up Trump towers. Why he made this architectural choice remains anybody's guess. He used to make his sons do "pull-ups" on the thing, and until I was about 10, I thought all families did this sort of thing.

No doubt my inclination to own a home was influenced by my father's attitudes as well as the over-arching, steel I-beam American ideal. I suspect I like to own a house (or own a mortgage) for three main reasons: I don't like landlords. I like peace and quiet (harder to find in a rented place, usually). And I've almost always grown a garden. I probably won't get into gardening again much, but even growing some herbs and the odd vegetable is satisfying. (And the produce I produce is indeed often odd. I grew a red potato once that was almost as big as a football. I wanted to bronze it.) Maybe an apple-tree, too. If I could get these three things (no landlord, quiet, garden) by renting, I might have never bought a house. Who knows? Also, American apartment-buildings tend to be badly constructed, whereas ones in Germany and Sweden (two countries in which I've lived) are built to last, so one is more likely to find a rented "apartmental" place there that doesn't surround you with noise and cracked walls and a kind of stucco-hell.

Having found the house, we're on the lookout for "stuff," of course. For example, we want to modify the kitchen slightly, so we went in search of granite today. We ended up at a place called "Warehouse Liquidators." When I saw the sign, I was immediately suspicious because I wondered how they managed to turn wood and metal warehouses into liquid, and I wondered why we would be interested in buying such liquid. I was going to raise my concerns to the other person in the car, but I knew she would develop a powerful counter-argument, such as "Shut up."

Once inside, I discovered the kind of "market-place" I love: no frills, no "salesmanship." They just leased a big old place, got some stuff cheap, threw it on the floor, plugged in a cash-register, and called it good. The staff there was exuberant and irreverent, and there was even a store-cat, who was probably thinking, "I have no possessions, and I have a great life; what's up with humans?"

We didn't get much "stuff" there, but the adventure was great--exploring the raggedy edge between wholesale and retail, looking at "stuff," most of it made, I suspect, by grossly underpaid workers half a globe away. I've seen a lot of bookstore-cats, but that was the first Warehouse Liquidator cat I've ever seen, so I may have to write a poem about her. We were looking at some tile, and she came over and sat on the box, as if to say, "Let me know if I can help you with your color-selection." Knowing cats, I imagine she's both on salary and commission and probably owns a piece of the operation, too.

Ultimate Frisbee

Recently I seem to have quite a few students in my classes who play Ultimate Frisbee. I've seen frisbee-golf played on the campus for years, and I'd heard the term, "Ultimate Frisbee," but I didn't know the extent to which it's a widely played organized sport until I asked a student last semester. He happens to be a good poet, fiction-writer, and blogger, as well. He's so active and accomplished at the sport of UF that he even traveled to Brazil recently to compete. I confess I don't know what the rules are, and I've yet so see the sport played--although I have seen photos of people in the midst of U.F. I think there are some rough parallels to football, soccer, and rugby. I should probably just look up the rules on the web, but so far I've been too lazy to do so, or perhaps I just like thinking about the sport from a distance that exoticizes it. As far as I know, all that members of my generation did with a frisbee was toss it back and forth or have dogs go after it. I remember getting bored with the tossing pretty quickly, much faster than I did with "playing catch" with a baseball, for some reason.

I wonder what Penultimate Frisbee would look like. Maybe it's the equivalent of AAA baseball, or maybe its rules are different, making for a slightly less interesting or competitive game. Another possibility: the rules of PF are the same as those of UF, but the frisbees that are used have manufacturers' flaws, so they wobble, careen, and crash, and the PF players simply have to bear that burden. I suppose people would be reluctant to admit they played Penultimate Frisbee.

Clearly, from my point of view, at least, Ultimate Frisbee is better for civilization in the long run than Ultimate Fighting, which I gather is quite popular. Surfing through the channels, I can't bear to watch more than about 5 seconds of ultimate fighting, partly because I suspect all the participants will suffer head-trauma and brain damage. It's just a matter of evolution; the head wasn't "designed" to get beaten on. It was "designed" to hold our organic version of the hard drive; it's a casing, among other things.

I think Penultimate Fighting would be more entertaining than Ultimate Fighting, certainly less degrading (to contestants and audience alike) and injurious. Contestants would move out into the ring or cage and demonstrate clearly that they were in a bad mood--miffed. They'd shove each other and trade insults, perhaps denigrate one another's fashion-choices or coiffures. If either tried to land a serious blow, he or she would be disqualified. After each round, the "corner men" would suggest additional insults or encourage their charge to go out and try to tie the other contestant's shoe-laces together. The crowd, reading paperback novels, would look up occasionally and cheer if one contestant made the "rabbit-ears" sign behind the other person's head. The "loser" would be the first one to get fed up and say, "I have better things to do than to tussle with you, you insufferable fool!" Penultimate Fighting: I think there are some real possibilities here.

Giving an Author Multiple Tries

Over the years, I've tried to read and like the mystery novels of Michael Innes, but I could never get past a chapter or so in any of them. The other day someone on LibraryThing recommended two books by him, Lament for a Maker and From London Far. I read the former and liked it all right, even though I tend to dislike mystery novels with multiple narrators. It's an extremely intricate and whimsical book, set in Scotland. Now I'm reading From London Far, and I love it. A scholar of 18th century British poetry gets pulled accidentally into intrigue. The book reminds me a bit of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, but it's not quite as manic and idiosyncratic. There's a bit of Edmund Crispin in Innes's books, too, but Innes exhibits more gravitas; the book lies more toward Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear on the spectrum.

Anyway, I am most pleased that--what? my fourth or fifth attempt to read Innes--resulted in a successful meeting of author's books and reader's mind. I had to be willing not to write off (or is it read off?) Innes forever. It was a matter of patience more than persistence, of flexibility more than patience, and probably of serendipity more than flexibility, for I probably wouldn't have tried again if it weren't for the recommendation on LT, where bibliophiles party down with their bad selves.

Generosity

I don't think "an economy of false scarcity" and "a zero-sum game" are the same concepts, but they seem to overlap. The former, I gather, is both an economic and an anthropological concept. The latter is a game-theory concept. As you've already gathered or know, the former means there's enough or more than enough but someone has a stake in pretending there's not--and in enforcing circumstances that make for scarcity. The latter means that in "the game," there must be a total winner and a total loser; a win/win situation isn't possible, nor is it possible for one of the "players" to become a spectator and enjoy the achievement of the other player.

I was thinking about this topic both in terms of academics and the world of poetry today, as well as life in general.

As you might imagine (if you're not an academic), academics can be at least as insecure as the next person. So sometimes if a fellow academic has some success, that's seen as taking something away from another academic; there's only so much success to go around (the insecure person fears). I think it's more than mere envy or insecurity. I think maybe they the person believes there's only so much to go around, when in fact there's so much work to do in academia, so many possibilities, that abundance reigns. After all, new literature gets published and republished every day, so in the field of English, there's no end of work to do in terms of interpretation, editing, theorizing, thinking about teaching X or Y, and so on. The reservoir is always full.

Generosity is rather toward the other end of a spectrum from zero-sum thinking, insecure thinking, time-wasting, fake-competition thinking. Sometimes generosity's driven by less than noble intentions, of course; it is faux generosity. It gives to get. But real generosity fuels itself. Since I'm older, I now, by definition, have younger colleagues. It's not so much that I get great satisfaction from providing some assistance or advice, or an avenue for publication, or whatever; it's that the generosity seems like part of a process that's working well. I feel as if I'm part of the rhythm of how things should work, partly because it's so simple to be of basic help. It takes a while to get to the point of expecting nothing in return--literally not even a "thank you." You just just sort of throw your wee grain of generosity into the mix of things and know it will at least do no harm and probably do some good. If nothing comes of it, what have you lost? If the person is "ungrateful," so what? Maybe they fear they're in a game in which they owe you something, and they don't like that game, so maybe their response is understandable.

In the world of poetry and art in general, whole systems are built upon an economy of false scarcity. There are just a few elite publishers of poetry, for example (Knopf being the prime example), a few elite writers' conferences (Bread Loaf, for example, and even at Bread Loaf, there's this hideous pecking-order, I've heard), a few big awards, an Academy of American Poets with a static number of slots, and so on. At the same time, there's always been a sense in which there are too many poets, too much poetry being produced. The systems that can admit only so many poets and poetry depend upon scarcity.

Unless you're compulsive and believe you have to read all the poetry, how can this scarcity really be so? What if everyone in the U.S. (for example) wrote a poem tomorrow? What would be the harm? There's a good chance some good might come of it and an excellent chance almost everything else the people would do would be more harmful. But if, somehow, a person gets invested in faux scarcity or zero-sum thinking, then productivity, abundance, generosity, exuberance, and diversity all become threats. Someone has to lose! The basic fear (besides thinking that someone else is going to take all the peanuts), I think, is of a loss of control.

Of course, like everyone else, I have my regrets about giving X to Y in life and remember that Y probably took advantage of me. But I have almost no regrets about being generous--providing assistance or advice if asked, providing a bit of an opportunity, an opening, an avenue. Answering a question; giving a tip; saving somebody from some unnecessary grief I had to go through when I was in the same spot. As I mentioned, it usually feels as if it's the way things should work. It feels deeply practical; forget altruism. Yes, it's a tough, competitive world out there, and no amount of generosity will likely change that soon, but by the same token, there's nothing really preventing a person from being generous within that person's powers (however meager they may be), genuine personal limits, and sphere. That is, there's only so much I can do, but at least I can do that, and withholding it doesn't mean I'll "have more" (as the zero-sum logic would dictate).

--Which is one of the reasons I enjoy teaching poetry-writing. The more poets, the better, as far as I'm concerned. The more readers of poetry, the better. No need to create false scarcity; it's not a zero-sum game. If some writer who took a class from me publishes a book (let's say), that simply does not take anything away from me or anyone else. I've neither won nor lost. I just get to be a spectator and enjoy the person's achievement. I "win" (falsely) only if I indulge myself by taking some credit for the publication. ("You know, that person took a class from me once.") I lose only if I imagine that the person's achievement somehow limits me, but it doesn't limit me, so there's no reason to "go there."

Marcus Aurelius: 7:73: "When you have done a good act and another has fared well by it, why seek a third reward besides these, as fools do, be it the reputation for having done a good act or getting something in return?" Translated by Jacob Needleman and John P. Piazza. Tarcher Cornerstone Editions/Penguin, 2008, p. 59.

I suspect generosity is a renewable source of energy.

Iron and Irony

Apparently the etymology of "iron" goes back through the Celtic language to an early time in what we now call England or Britain and is linked to the word iren, with an accent on the e. Irony, on the other hand, is of Greek origin: ‘.

On the surface, however, it does look as if iron is embedded in irony. Extrapolated from this etymologically ironic situation, one could, I suppose, manufacture other outcomes from other metals. That is, one kind of irony comes in the form of unintended consequences--a twist of fate.

A goldy, therefore, might be a surprisingly wonderful outcome, an unknotting of fate. A leady would be a disappointment--heavy, sure, but nothing like irony.

A silvery would be less then wonderful but still satisfactory. "You know, I have to say that the end result was at least silveric if not entirely goldic."

What would a steely be, as a noun? Would it be an extremely strong version of an irony? I think so. "Oh, how steelic that was," we'd say, "almost too ironic to bear."

A tinny would be a cheapened outcome or situation, I assume--as a sequel in Hollywood is almost always a cheapening of the original. "I found Big Explosion II to be a tinnic version of the original. Big Explosion I was explosive and big in such an original way."

A coppery, as a noun, would be a softening of a situation, an easing of tensions. "The diplomatic talks were regarded as copperic by all parties involved."

We run into some syllabic complexity with an aluminumy, which would be a lightening of a situation, perhaps almost a giddiness. "He won the lottery--how aluminic!" If the giddiness occurred in a play, it would be dramatic aluminy, which I don't think Aristotle covered in the Poetics, ironically enough.

Is Our President a War-Criminal? Sullivan Thinks So

Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan now seems to think that the President of the United States is a war-criminal:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/03/the-war-crimina.html

Colleen McElroy

Thanks to a colleague of mine who invited her, poet Colleen McElroy read at my campus on Friday. What a wonderful 50 minutes. She's not just a fine poet but a real pro at reading, providing just enough background to each poem and, in cases where none is needed, none. She has a fabulous sense of humor and a warm sense of self-irony. She also loves movies from the 1940s, so I felt immediately that she and I shared at least one wave-length.

Chiefly she read poems from her new book, Sleeping with the Moon, published by the University of Illinois in 2007.

In addition to being a poet and having been a professor, she is also a trained linguist and a professional collector of stories and folklore--worldwide, from Madagascar to Tibet to Cuba. She reminded us that, sadly, languages are becoming extinct worldwide as quickly as species of animals and plants.

In addition to the systematic reading she has done as a professor, linguist, collector, and editor, McElroy clearly does the kind of indiscriminate, voracious, and impulsive reading that many poets do. There's a certain kind of poet who finds almost anything and anyone interesting and therefore almost any kind of reading interesting. Part of the impulse springs, I think, from finding even commonplace utterances or texts full of possibilities, and another part springs, perhaps, from a stubborn refusal to let go of that readiness one has in childhood to find the world fascinating. It's not so much that one remains childish or naive; in fact, McElroy is, I assure you, quite the opposite of that. She has lived and learned. It's really more of a tenaciousness, a refusal to agree to be bored by what other people find boring or to agree to ignore what other people ignore. In some ways, poets like McElroy use reading to forage, scavenge, rummage, and detect.

Not surprisingly, then, when a student asked for advice for young writers, McElroy's first word was "Read." But she didn't follow that up with "read poetry" or "read the classics." She said something like "read anything and everything, and read all the time [when you're not writing]." She also advised keeping a journal at the ready, and she advised a colleague of mine to keep a journal in almost every part of the house--what a great idea. A kitchen journal, a bedroom journal, a living-room journal, etc.

McElroy writes and reads poetry with great care; the poems are filled with precise, evocative imagery, and there is an easy but by no means careless voice in them all.

A poetry reading on a Friday afternoon: what a fine way to end a work-week.

Two, Four, Six, Eight . . .

Vaguely, I remember our high-school's cheerleaders leading a cheer that began as follows:

Two, four, six, eight.
Who do we appreciate?

Somehow, it made sense back then, partly, I suspect, because I was on the football field (or the sidelines thereof) or the basketball court (or the bench next to it), and I regarded all cheers as background noise, which makes "sense" because it just has to be noise.

Now, of course, I realize that the first line has nothing to do with the second line, that we're dealing with some inexpensive word-play, and that, because I'm an accursed lifelong student of English, I think the second line should be "Whom do we appreciate?" Accursed is just the term for this condition. Those former cheerleaders probably have their feet up and are appreciating a glass of wine, watching a movie, and not thinking or blogging about subjective v. objective forms of a word.

Nor can I remember whom, exactly, our cheerleaders did appreciate, although I certainly still appreciate the energy they threw into their organized optimism. (When I was a sophomore, I ended up one night, after an athletic contest, in a car full of senior [wow!] cheerleaders--a Ford Mustang, no less--and the young women had a bottle of blackberry wine with them. I appreciate my dim memories of that evening as well.)

In any event, I thought of the cheer when I thought of Adelaide Crapsey [no jokes, please] (1878-1914), inventor of America's very rough counterpart to the haiku, the cinquain, which is a five-line poem in which line one has two syllables, line two has four, line three has six, line four has eight, and line five has two. So the form is both incremental and circular, in my assessment. Subsequently, those attempting, unwisely (in my opinion), to improve upon Ms. Crapsey's invented form, have tried to dictate not just syllables but parts of speech, so that a noun should go here and a verb there, or whatever. Nonsense. The simple elegance of 2-4-6-8-2 endures.

My cinquain this evening concerns cities, which depend for their existence upon convincing large numbers of people that they should live in cities. If people who live in cities (large or small) woke up one day and truly realized that they live in a crowded, dirty, noisy, over-priced place, and if they decided t do something about it, they'd leave, go to the dwindling countryside, and--start another city. Oh, well.

I do find it amusing when people positively swoon at the mention of this or that city--NYC, London, Paris, Rio, L.A. An individual's sense of identity and importance gets entangled with the mythologizing of urbanity, of the central market-place, of the alleged hub of civilization. (If we ponder that metaphor just a bit, we might speculate that the more interesting part of the wheel--the outside, where the rubber meets the road--is analogous to villages and small towns, far from the hub.)

I am as guilty as the next person, whoever he or she is, of a robotic acceptance of the notion that city = good. I've convinced myself I'm fond of San Francisco and Stockholm, for example. I also find it amusing when one city's residents pretend to be better than another city's residents. Seattle v. Tacoma. S.F. v. Oakland. Philly v. Pittsburgh. Rome v. Naples. Whatever! It's all just streets and sidewalks, sewers and towers, cars and dog shit, "bistros" and homeless shelters, retail and wholesale, smog and bad water. The bigger the city, the smaller the living-space for twice (at minimum) the rent/lease/mortgage. ("But the restaurants! The nightlife! The museums!" Uh-huh.)

Cinquain: Urbanity

City
will always tell
you that it’s grand, sophis-
ticated, as you stand over
sewers.

Two, four, six, eight. Whom do we appreciate? Adelaide Crapsey.

In Praise of Agatha and LT

In addition to reading some poetry while we were at the (Washington) coast, I read an Agatha Christie novel, There Is a Tide, more recently known as Taken at the Flood. It's taken (so to speak) me decades to warm up to her books, and I still don't like them all, but I'm now very fond of the Poirot books. The Clocks is my favorite. There Is a Tide is a terrific Poirot book, too--and it's also a very good novel of manners--the crime and detection aside.

It includes some extremely astute observations about post-WW II England, its economy, the status and self-doubt of men who did not go to war (some farmers were exempt, for instance), and the views of women who did serve (as nurses, for example), who had "seen the world," and who returned with ambitions to be more than housewives and to live somewhere besides a cozy village. In the book, there's also a sense in which England no longer knows who or what it is when it isn't fighting the Germans anymore.

Christie's novels tend to develop a bit slowly during the first 30-40 pages, but one's patience is usually rewarded because her plotting is superb, deceptively tight, and she works well with an ensemble cast. There Is a Tide turns out to be a gem, and the bonus is that I secured an older, very pulpy paperback with a lurid cover--my favorite. Hats off to Agatha and Hercules.

As if reading Agatha Christie novels weren't sufficiently nerdy, I now rush to heap praise on LibraryThing, a site on which one catalogues all one's books, "tags" them, ranks them, reviews them, and on which one may join groups based on authors, genres, topics, periods and eras of literature, and so on. It's just too much fun. One may instantly generate "author clouds"--the more books you have by an author, the large the font is for that author's name in the cloud. One may also generate a photo-collage of one's authors. I was explaining all this to some people at a restaurant, for some inexplicable reason, their eyes got glassy. ("Check, please!") Gee, I wonder why.

There's a group on LT called The Black Orchid: A Nero Wolfe Group, dedicated (obviously) to Rex Stout's famous detective, and the conversational threads on there are hilarious--for their minutiae, their passion for Wolfe and Archie, their discussions of food, orchids, and NYC, and all manner of things, with wildly circuitous detours. I also started several groups--one called Working Class, one called The Harlem Renaissance, and one called Karl Shapiro and Company--all about mid-20th century poetry. --Also one on Robinson Jeffers and one on Langston Hughes. The latter two have yet to "take off," as it were.

It's astonishing (perhaps it shouldn't be) how much bibliophiles from every culture on the planet have in common. There are versions of LT in numerous nations and languages, but they are also linked to the main (U.S.) LT site, so I can (for example) get to the Swedish site via a group called (with typical Swedish obviousness) Swedish Thing. The conversational threads on that group-site are few, measured, deliberate, serious--and of few words, whereas Americans and Brits do tend to go on a bit (like some bloggers).

It's too bad (or maybe not) that bibliophiles don't have more political clout. --Which makes me think of one of my very favorite droll bumper-stickers: I PLAY THE BAGPIPES, AND I VOTE. Bag-pipe players and bibliophiles--political forces with which to be reckoned. Something arcane this way comes. Mere eccentricity is loosed upon the world, the ink-dimmed tide is loosed, and what rough first edition, its hour come round at last, falls off the shelf in Toledo to be read?

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Today is an anniversary of the Traingle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy in general and, more particularly, a tragedy in the history of labor and of women's labor. Another blogger alerted her readers to the annivrsary, and she included a fine poem she wrote that evokes the infamous fire. Here's the link to poet Karen J. Weyant's site:



http://thescrapperpoet.blogspot.com/

I think you'll really enjoy the poem.

More Poet's Political Questions

Some more political questions from a poet's point of view:

1. Because reporters don't seem to ask good questions anymore, why don't they ask candidates who their favorite poets are? Sure, it's irrelevant to the election, but so are most of the other questions. I figure Obama would answer straight-up. I think there's a 35% chance he'd say Langston Hughes, chiefyy for the sense of humor, not necessarily for the ethnicity. I figure the Clintons (plural) would stall, consult their team, do some polling, and then (if it were today) name a poet from Pennsylvania. I figure John McCain would get angry and hell at the reporter, "What kind of question is that?! Shut up!"

2. Why doesn't Ralph Nader run for mayor of a city first? Why does he always have to start at the top? How about mayor of Toledo? What if we made Ralph activist-poet-laureate?

3. Will the Dems manage to lose what most political scientists view as the easiest election to win in decades? Or should I ask, How will the Dems lose . . . .?

4. If "gay marriage" is, as some allege, a "threat" to heterosexual marriages [I still don't get how it could be a threat, and I'm still in search of one good example of such a threat], does it then follow, logically, that gay divorce would be a threat to traditional divorce and therefore an aid to traditional marriage, meaning we should make gay marriage legal so that gay divorce would be legal?

5. In the 2004 election, the GOPers allegedly used ballot initiatives on gay marriage to get out (so to speak) the vote on their behalf, in Ohio, for example. What ballot initiatives are they planning this Fall?

6. Instead of sending all taxpayers (in certain brackets) a $600 refund, why doesn't the government "bundle" that money and give it to the people who can't make their house payments?

7. What is one success Bush has had? I thought about this question hard, and I came up with the following: he has given a lot of money for AIDS relief in Africa (even though he insists on so-called abstinence programs). That's a good thing. I'm even willing to take the Iraq war off the table and say that people can agree to disagree about that. But leaving that off the table, what remains? Economy = bad. Environment = bad. Eroded civil liberties = bad (in my opinion). Foreign policy [even excepting Iraq] = bad. Support for veterans = bad. Energy = bad. Response to disasters [Katrina] = bad. Speeches = bad. Appointments = bad (strictly from a competence-angle). Polar bears = bad. Immigration = no policy one way or the other; a zero. Closing gap between rich and poor = bad. But I suppose some people want that gap to widen--I mean, seriously, from some kind of effed up philosophical point of view.

8. Would anyone be in favor of electing Obama, Clinton, and McCain and giving them each roughly 16 months in office? I guess we'd simply draw straws to see who started first. Or we could give each one 8 months and then hold a referendum to see if we wanted that person to continue. Why wait four years to see how bad things can get? Society moves at a much faster pace than it did in, say, 1808, so should we speed up the presidential cycle?

9. Did you get the sense, as I did when I watched Obama giving his speech on race, that he was thinking, "I can't believe I have to explain such simple things to [white] people"? I thought it was a great speech, but I did sense an understandable weariness on his part. A kind of "I thought we covered this already in high school history" feeling.

10. Is Obama essentially doing to the Clintons what Bill Clinton did to Bush I and Bob Dole? Hoisted on his [Bill's] own . . . ?

11. Who would be in favor of a heavy tax on presidential campaigns? Not on the people who give money, mind you, but on the candidates' campaign-machines. I'd put the money directly into Medicare, Social Security, and/or homeless programs. That way, society would benefit from each campaign, no matter what. And we'd take the money from them right away, before they spent it on attack-ads or whatever. Right off the top.

12. Does Congress matter anymore? Is it even logistically possible for any Congress to say No to any president at this point? Are we pretty much working with elected dictators at this point?

Ashbery, Dunn, and Kunitz

At the beach on the Washington coast, I read three books of poetry by three venerable poets: Where Shall I Wander [no question mark] by John Ashbery; The Insistence of Beauty, by Stephen Dunn; and a later Selected Poems (circa 1995) by Stanley Kunitz.

Although Ashbery is of the New York School and bears some relation to L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E* poets, he's pretty much a school unto himself, drawing on a vast range of diction, creating expressionistic collages of language, infusing his poems with allusions and droll linguistic wit, and almost never, it seems, being interested in straightforward rhetoric, accessible narrative, or otherwise conventionally representational poetry. I've always found his poems to be amusing and extremely clever, but I don't like them as much as many of my cohorts do. I tire of them quickly, and I do get the sense that sometimes he's just effing around--that one could take out a couple lines and replace them with other lines, give the poem to someone, and not have that person catch the switch. (I can't imagine doing that [and getting away with it] to poems by Housman, Hopkins, Dickinson, or Auden, for instance, but I think it would work with some of Ashbery's poems.) As linguistically rich and surprising as his poems are, there is nonetheless something insular or insulated about the work. I start to yearn for poetry that's more sanguine, robust, and grounded, less academic, upper-middle-class, and enervated. Ennui abounds. A lot of his poems sound like J. Alfred Prufrock on roids or Franz Kafka on laughing gas. But Ashbery's an extremely famous, celebrated poet, so I think I'm in the minority in my view; also, Ashbery's ear for all the odd phrases we're flooded with each day is extraordinary; out of nowhere will come a line like, "Attention shoppers."

Dunn's poetry is quite clear and grounded, and his voice is interesting. This particular book is a bit too insular for me--not in the way Ashbery's is, however. The book seems centered on Dunn's own immediate experience, including such things as romantic break-ups. I found myself wanting a broader range of experience represented, and sometimes things got predictable. In a poem apparently about a new lover, he speaks of the woman's former lover and brings in the old reference to three people (figuratively) being in the bed. That idea seems worn out. "Grudges" is an intriguing, well crafted villanelle, modified, about 9/11. It doesn't quite capture the global nature of the mess we're in, however. For me, it personalized 9/11 a bit too much--shrank the event. There's more than a grudge involved when planes get flown into towers and the U.S. invades a country for trumped up reasons--at a cost of a trillion dollars. Like Ashbery, however, Dunn is a venerable, much celebrated poet--of the plainer style.

I read Kunitz's book third and was glad to do so, for I felt as if earth, sky, water, air, fish, ordinary folk, fire, wood, recognizable landscapes, and less preciously rendered experiences were suddenly let back into the room. Things had gotten a bit stuffy with Ashbery and Dunn. As much as I enjoyed Ashbery's rare, relentless cleverness and Dunn's spare, self-grounded work, I was really hungry and thirsty for the kind of poetry Kunitz writes, so the order of the reading worked out beautifully.

Anyway, props to these three veterans of American poetry. Solid books, established reputations.