Best of 2011

• Best novel: The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill. (Actually published in 2001, I believe, but what a wonderful story. The minotaur of Greek mythology is alive and lonely in the American South, living in a small trailer park (where he likes to work on cars in his spare time) and working at a restaurant (where the manager has the brilliant idea of taking M.—as everyone calls him—out of the kitchen to carve prime rib for customers in the dining area). There is plenty here to make a grotesque southern gothic novel—a half man half bull protagonist; a hirsute woman; a gay civil war re-enactor; a jealous weightlifting husband of an underdressed, attractive, and flirtatious neighbor; a dead dog; aimless young men looking for a fight—but what’s amazing about this book is its tone and tempo: a calm and somewhat bemused loneliness even as various threats loom ahead.)

• Biggest book read: A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles (968 pages).

• Best book of poetry: At Lake Scugog by Troy Jollimore. (How did this book not get more attention? I just assumed it would be up for the National Book Award and a Pulitzer and so on. This guy has as big a brain as anyone else writing poetry today. A professor of philosophy, he writes formal, funny, musical poems that engage rather than intimidate the reader.)

• Favorite new cookbook: Trout Caviar: Recipes From a Northern Forager by Brett Laidlaw. (Laidlaw wrote a couple of interesting novels back in the 80s and 90s. Though they were realistic stories set in the Midwest, their Berrymanesque circumlocutions flew in the face of the plain-spoken minimalism that was au courant at the time. When I met him and mentioned the novels, he seemed genuinely surprised that anyone read and remembered them. Now, without warning, and nearly 20 years after his last book of fiction, a cookbook full of hearty recipes and good, clear writing.)

• Best New Yorker Article: “Dr. Don” by Peter Hessler in the September 26 issue. This profile of a small-town pharmacist in Western Colorado is like McPhee at his best.

• Favorite new band: Avett Brothers.

• Favorite new solo artist: Sharon Van Etten.

• Single of the year: “Miss K” by Dear Tick.

• Best movie: Bill Cunningham NYC.

• Best television series on DVD: Slings & Arrows. (Three seasons of a Canadian series about the goings-on behind the scenes at a Stratford-on-Avon type theater. Wonderfully combines Shakespeare, humor, and poignant drama. I actually watched these at the end of 2010, but certainly haven’t seen anything better since then.)

• Best online video: Ultimate Dog Tease.

• Favorite new restaurant: Cajun Potluck in Shoreview, MN.

• Favorite spice: prosciutto.

• Favorite new breakfast food: smoothies.

• Most awesome national landmark visited this year: Crater Lake in Oregon.

• Biggest fish caught: A twelve-inch brown trout in Hay Creek.

• Prettiest fish caught: A couple small brookies in the Poplar River.

• States I attempted to catch trout in this summer: Minnesota, Iowa, Oregon, and California.

• States I was skunked in: 0.

Please note: "New" means new to me; "best" means favorite; "favorite" is self-explanatory.

Video Clip of the Day (Even if it is a year old)

A three-year-old boy reciting "Litany" by Billy Collins.

Poetry Has Its Day in Court

Poetry is news that stays news and people die for lack of it every day and so on, but sometimes in its small way poetry makes news. That’s the case with a book of poems I reviewed a few years ago, 67 Mixed Messages by Ed Allen, a series of infatuated sonnets about a student named Suzi Grace. Turns out the subject of the poems is a real person, and she didn’t appreciate being the subject. On the other hand, it doesn’t sound like she has much of a case. There’s a long history of poets writing about unrequited love (Dante had Beatrice, Yeats had Maud Gonne, and the mid-century confessional poets made de facto fair use of various people in their lives), and it’s hard to imagine a world in which the poet has to fulfill some Antioch-style contract with his or her muse (Honey, is at all right if I say your eyes are nothing like the sun?). On the third hand, methinks the poet doth protest too much when he claims that making the speaker of the poems bisexual lessens his creepiness.

This Thing of Darkness

Old virus ain’t quite done with Mr. Daddy yet. Still got a thing or two to teach him. Gonna pick him out of his bed and toss him on the bathroom floor where he’ll heave and wretch, his knotted guts exploding out of him. He’ll shake and shiver under five blankets and all his winter clothes. He’s known some pain in his time—Vietnam, working in the fields, his daddy’s belt—but nothing like this. This fever has Mr. Daddy like the whale had Jonah, and it’s going to take him deeper than he’s ever been, so deep he thinks he’s not coming back. He has fever dreams and waking visions, unable to distinguish which is which: he sees himself dying here alone, unmourned by wife or children. He swears to God: no more drinking, no more carrying on. But when the fever spits him back out, Mr. Daddy picks himself up off the floor, checks himself over—no breaks, no lasting injuries—cackles: If I can handle that, I can handle anything.

—Dallas Crow

"This Thing of Darkness" originally appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of Red Rock Review.

Line of the Week (Or Month) (Or Season) (Or Whatever)

"It is an honor / to learn to replace one hope with another."

—Denis Johnson

Why I Am Not Frank O'Hara

Today I'm feeling very Frank O'Hara in my new chartreuse shirt.

Of course, I lack his rakish widow's peak and almost Roman profile.

I lack his Manhattan address and his avant-garde coterie.

I will never pose for Larry Rivers or Alice Neel, never

(much as I'd like to) own a Fairfield Porter or Jane Freilicher.

I will never saunter into a typewriter shop on my lunch break

and tap out a new poem to accompany that evening's cocktails.

I lack a certain savoir-faire, a certain je ne sais quoi.

I'm a straight Midwesterner, a secondary school teacher

with two sons in tow, but my step is jaunty nonetheless.

I've got the summer off, and today we're going on vacation!

I've packed my fly rod and my Du Fu. Nothing

can bring me down, not even standing in shuffling

line after shuffling line for ticketing, baggage check-in,

and security. Don't they get tired? They look tired.

For nearly eight years they've been on orange alert!

In front of these uniformed strangers I take off my belt

and shoes, offer up my cellphone, my house and car keys,

then slip through their metal detectors undetected.

My only identifying traits: a jaunty step and a chartreuse shirt.

—Dallas Crow

"Why I Am Not Frank O'Hara" originally appeared in the 2010 issue of Off Channel.

Frank O'Hara in Iowa, 1980

In their bedrooms teen boys prance

a la Freddie Mercury, fancying

themselves in tights and ballet slippers—

so tres charmant, my dear—but

to avoid post-school pummelings

their apparel proclaims allegiance

to Aerosmith, Zep, the home team.

Kids who have never heard of James Dean,

the adults' autumnal rectitude:

I've never been so happy to be dead!

Mothers, you only see some of what you see.

Amid the corn and soybeans and tv glow,

we are approaching the pole of inaccessibility,

where summer brings with it a kind of despair,

as do winter, spring, and fall.

Future farmwives of America, prepare

yourselves: you only see some of what you see.

—Dallas Crow

"Frank O'Hara in Iowa, 1980" originally appeared in issue #42 of Cairn.

Hiatus

The unofficial hiatus is now official. I haven't written anything of substance for this blog in a long time, and subsequently—and quite reasonably—readership has dropped. And I'm not feeling much that seems blog-worthy these days, and when I do, I don't have time to write it. So . . . it's time to give this thing a break. How long? Who knows? It's been fun, but it's time to take it off my list of things to think about for a while. If you want some good blog reading, this is the one that I've been enjoying lately. This one, too.

Dept. of Shameless Self Promotion

Sometimes a guy's gotta do what a guy's gotta do: toot his own horn. I have a short article on teaching a poem by Campbell McGrath in the new issue of Minnesota English Journal.

The Complete List of Subjects Treated in the "Partial List of Subjects Treated" in Garry Wills' Translation of Martial's Epigrams

Adult Homosexuality

Artifacts

Baldness

Banqueting

Body Odor

Cunnilingus

Debt Delinquency

Fellatio

Legacy Hunting

Marital Fidelity

Marital Infidelity

Misogyny

Pederasty

The Simple Life

Tributes to Emperors

Tributes to Friends

Tributes to the Dead

Wine

The Writing Profession

Saint Paul, Sidewalks, Poetry

Need I say more? Well, here's a link to a public tv episode that aired last week that does say a little bit more. Note the very green trees in it, a welcome reminder of other seasons on this gray and icy morning with no one out and about. It's eerily quiet. No traffic. No pedestrians. No dogs.

Faulkner

Pyromaniacs,

fecund summers,

sentences longer than trains.

—Found poem taken verbatim from a conversation with C. Oliver, 11/9/10

Prose Poet David Shumate on Writing Poetry

Poetry is a strange endeavor. You go snooping about. Sticking your nose into other people's business. Turning your soul inside out. Then you huddle over a paper for hours to give voice to what you have learned, and in the words of the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, ". . . try to find words that are better than silence."

# # #

I seek words and images that possess the honesty of stones. Of water.

I want the poem to glow in the dark.

# # #

Sometimes, as the pieces of a poem are taking shape, I feel momentarily whole. As if the senses, the mind, the intellect, the ego, and some spiritual core have fallen into synchrony.

This is a seductive feeling. I return the next morning hoping a poem will lead me there again.

I hope the poem conducts the reader on a similar journey.

— from Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets, edited by Todd Davis & Erin Murphy

For a Good Time, Call . . .

Sandra Beasley!

Now that poem is alive!

Tadpoles!

Thanks to the Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk project in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Best of the Backlist

The other day I was telling my friend, Jomama, who is a sales rep for a book publishing company, how much I thought of Dave Eggers' post-Katrina book Zeitoun. Ms. Mama had just been down in New Orleans on business, and she commented that many of the bookstores down there were still displaying the book prominently even though it was no longer a frontlist title. Since then I've been re-reading Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, a book that I have loved since it was first published back in 1998, though I hadn't sat down to re-read it until now. Well, it stands up. It's an almost unbelievable story in many ways, and Orlean does a masterful job of telling it. Just because it's not brand new doesn't mean it's not worth reading.

I have also recently noticed that the window for comments on Facebook has shrunk to just a few hours. If people don't comment on a status update or a new photo in the first couple hours, they probably aren't going to. And that's too bad in a way. The update (if it isn't tied to the moment—and most aren't) doesn't really lose humor, poignancy, or validity half a day later. A year or two ago, such comments might have trickled in over the course of a few days, but now the conversation is over much more quickly. It seems to me even more of a loss when people post family or vacation photos. These things seem even less ephemeral, and yet the active comment window remains equally small.

All of which puts me in mind of something Quentin Tarentino said about his video store days. Customers would come in looking for recommendations, and film geek Tarentino would press whatever odd, obscure, great, foreign, or forgotten movie on them only to have them ask if it was new. His response: If you haven't seen it before, it's new to you.

In the spirit of Mr. Tarentino, I bring you the best of the Corvus backlist. The most recent of these is over half a year old, and the others were posted before 2010. They are the ones that have received the most visitors, but which many of you—if you are new to Corvus—may never have seen.

• The poetry of divorce

• The poetry of rocks

• Basketball and marinade

• Reviewing a review

Enjoy!

The Holy Order of Fish Handlers

There are those who claim

they can catch the sleek

trout in their bare hands.

My first response to this

was disbelief, but when

I try to imagine it—

I who can barely catch

that lovely and elusive

fish with hook and line

and who have seen them

flash upstream when I

merely scratched an itch—

I imagine something

like a sacred meditation,

a dance of stillness

demanding the non-

attachment of a monk.

To teach oneself to

stand in a cold river

without disrupting it,

to cast no shadow:

is it any different from

learning to levitate, or

mastering that bullfrog-

like chanting that resounds

even underneath the temple?

They talk of calming the fish

by gently stroking

its belly, and I admit,

like a hungry trout

gulled by glint and feather,

I may have been seduced

by a beautiful idea,

but I want to believe

in this, the holy order

of fish handlers, who, to

briefly catch their prey, must

first forget themselves.

—Dallas Crow

"The Holy Order of Fish Handlers" originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008 (Vol. 103, #3/4) issue of Poet Lore.

The Aesthetics of Gravity

Think of the pleasure boys take in falling,

the hours they devote to it: ko'd, shot

in the back, machine-gunned in the

gut; tackled, clotheslined, checked,

body-blocked, tripped; in slow motion

whenever possible; preferably

for an audience of friends or family;

dramatically, comically; into

pillows, hay, leaves, mud, snow—

any pile promising padding or a mess;

water, too: flips, splits, bellyflops,

can openers and cannonballs.

Some may argue that phylogeny

recapitulates ontogeny, that

they are reliving that initial fall

from grace themselves; others may

insist they somehow sense their

own mortality, and are preparing for

their future decline; but I am convinced—

watching my sons catapult and pirouette

through the invisible air, then replay

those all too brief moments of flight

again and again for friends—they are

enchanted by the aesthetics of gravity.

Icarus is their hero, not for his

Pyrrhic success or greedy heedlessness,

but for his most delightful failure.

—Dallas Crow

"The Aesthetics of Gravity" originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008 (Vol. 103, #3/4) issue of Poet Lore.

The Fool's Wife

The king's a fool. He's a fool's fool.

It's unnatural. What servant has

a servant? What wife a wife?

I'm the fool's fool once removed.

And when the king, that fink,

is in a funk and sends his fool away,

he drowns himself in sack,

then sacks out in the hay.

—Dallas Crow

"The Fool's Wife" originally appeared in Dunes Review (Summer 2008).

Line of the Week

"What falls away is always. And is near."

—Theodore Roethke