Tonight, I sipped goat milk kefir, thought about modern womanhood and Dorothy Parker’s witticisms, and wrote this poem (as usual, still a draft):

Vim & Vigor

She shuffles the dating matrix,
dealing deftly for Friday night;
the Cowboy deserves Saturday;
the new guy just took a late flight.

I watch her play with those quick hands,
quite bored, she looks up, mock despair;
just then, then phone buzzes, asking–
she tilts her head; no, not a pair.

Unlucky nights, there is crying,
facedown are old pictures of Him;
business cards pile up, discarded;
a door slams: caprice, whimsy, whim.

She turns up the King of Diamonds,
draws him to her suite though she vowed
not to choose unavailable;
she’ll say, “I hope we weren’t too loud.”

A new poem I wrote on this morning’s flight from Miami; still a draft–

I want him to trace the path
connect freckles on my back
create constellations, ask
why this one and when was that

I want him to hear the tales
see the shapes behind the dots
lift oral tradition veils:
who came before, what they wrought

I want him to touch each point
pierce the mute skin of the sky
fingers spanning story joints
he braces me, we sigh—

The poetry world is rather upset this week about the “pirated poetry anthology” Issue 1, published as a .pdf (3,785 pages) by Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter.

A Kristen Taylor is included, and her poem on page 104 is titled “Coats made without courage”.

I find the project amusing and imagine the editors rounded out the collection by scraping the interwebs for those of us who occasionally put up poems or are linked to poets with an online presence.

As for consuming this voluminous mass of words, editor Stephen McLaughlin recommends; “If you’re up to it, I’d suggest gulping the magazine whole, for 83 straight hours of transcendent poetic revelry reflecting the whole panoply of human achievement, emotion, wistfulness, and athletic achievement.”

If you’d like to read poems I have written, I post them here (scroll down).

For example, I did attempt a triolet (ABaAabAB) a few years back:

a pretty hewn town

and someone laughed, and someone paid
and some one cleaned the mess we made
we knew the chef and so we stayed
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and someone struck, and someone played
and someone slept and someone strayed
and someone laughed, and someone paid
and some one cleaned the mess we made

And, anyway, a poem I wrote about coats would do more to allude to Yeats’s “A Coat”–I am happy for the editors to have caught my name, but as for the poem, they wrought it. And let them take it, for there’s more enterprise in browsing the real work of the included poets.

If I were you, I’d start with one of my favorite poets, Alan Michael Parker and his “Love Song with Motor Vehicles” (this is the title piece of a wonderful collection)…

p.s. His purported poem is on page 2635 of the anthology.

…so runs the middle line of a marvelous Merwin poem published in March in the New Yorker.

And so water splashed down the middle of my day, cleansing, replacing.

I opened the door to watch colors washing, the drops marring the stillness of the pool a few steps from my door;

but then, flashes of red circling underneath and I knew I would be all right:

Wishing you moments of rain, of light, and of knowing from the magic cottage–

It feels good to get lost in your spam folder every once in a while. Lately, my folder has been full of silly spambot memes, and I took today’s batch to make a poem called steganography.

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