I Peeked Into Jean Valentine's Stable and Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon came rushing out at me (sigh)

In a hospital examination room I took out the New Yorker and read the two poems in it. One called, I think, "Meditation," which was about a squirrel, human consciousness, living in the moment, etc, etc.... The other was a Jean Valentine poem I tore out and took with me because the Dr. (who would make me cough and who spoke about rich fatty salmon and cold mountain water-- the mixed benefits of the last frontier) walked in.

Here's the Valentine Poem:

---------------------------------

Hawkins Stable

It was years before you could climb

back up over the fallen stalls, and knock at

the Hawkinses’ old door



—they were gone,

you could just look in from the road.

Field after field.

Your eyes looked two ways at once.



Under the fields,

the dense tongue of the cow—

and the horses’ eyes—

and the water from the hand pump in the sink,

racing as horses race.

---------------------------------

A strong, interesting piece I've read and enjoyed several times. But this is a poem (or something very like it) that Seamus Heaney might have written 40 years or, even more so, Paul Muldoon a decade or so later.


"Your eyes looked two ways at once" is a particularly Muldoon-ish line. Interesting and provocative. But (for me) also cryptic in a somewhat unattractive way.

I enjoyed this poem. More so perhaps for how it brought me back to work I read over 20 years ago. Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist" and Muldoon's elegant and often zany Quoof." (Two books that were very important to me.)

On a related note: in the airline magazine I saw an ad for an Italian painter making his final appearance in the U.S. They labeled him the Van Gogh of Our Times. Sigh.

AWP: Things I was Tempted to Do

1) Execute a rat.

2) Rub Goransson's head till theory, like sable-colored bees, came pouring forth.

3) Throttle that strange Omnidawn guy. Yeah that strange guy with the strange face trying to entrance and entrap you with his eyes and strange offers of "Gourmet Chocolate." Creepy.

4) Buy a bunch of Shane Jones' Light Boxes, take all the pages out, carefully, and then stitch them into a giant balloon and float away.

5) Say "are you going to buy it or what?" to that lost, sensitive soul who stood reading "The Man Suit" at the B.O. booth for 20 minutes. In fact, I said nothing. In fact (2), he bought it. In fact (3), it was probably only a minute or two (that was one of the many times I was tripping on my own juice).

6) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

7) Lock myself in my hotel room and watch Poem Videos all day long. Especially CD Wright's profound little piece about the bottle of green liquid and Paul Muldoon's wise Hedgehog. Yawn.

I did actually enjoy some of these.

But I think I enjoyed the fluttering little bird in the "O" most.

8) Use the word "prick" more often.
O, hell, I probably said it 50 times.

9) Start a book contest where the finalists have to fight to the death in a Coliseum filled with drunk bloodthirsty writers and me, of course, with my thumb ready.

10) Browse the bookfair's tables for poems to submit to the various categories of SPD's bad poem contest. I'm convinced that all the real winners of this contest have already been published. That no one could deliberately come up with shit as bad/good.

11) Go up to my room and watch porn.

"Fuck Off," etc: 12 Quotes from AWP

1)A nice and crazy woman bought a copy of my book.
Told Geoff Bouvier he was brilliant.
Told me to "fuck off."
Said she was "tired of sucking Paul Muldoon's dick."

(not sure in which order these 4 things happened.)

2) "No one's doing what I'm doing. I'm the most passionate writer here."

3) "If you buy a copy of it I'll draw you a boat."

4) "We're headquartered in Boston. Have offices in Chicago and New York. But we kick ass everywhere."

5) "Reading Holy Land's like getting punched. Reading With Deer's like getting knifed and then pissed on."

6) "She wrote it during an 8-week Ecstasy binge."

7) Reb Livingston (one of the most quotable people I've met):

"I need to coat my throat."

8) "I just wanted to say hello and tell you thanks for doing such a great job with my poems."

9) "Finger or thumb?" (kind of like "Tea or Coffee?")

10) "I'm way too important to talk to you. O, did I say that out loud (followed by a loud burst of fitful cackling laughter)."

11) "He wasn't as much of a prick as I thought he'd be." (Samson Starkweather regarding a well known--a very well known--poet)