Chad Parmenter
Carol Novack--{possibly Australian}
Mike Dockins
Sharon Dolin
Nicky Beers
Ben Lerner (two poems?--has *that* _ever_ happened before?)
Natasha Sajé
Galway Kinnell
Kazim Ali
Julie Carr
Matthea Harvey
Brian Turner
Geoffrey Brock
Adrienne Miller (TWO POEMS?)
Louis Bourgeois
Jeannette Allée
Danielle Pafunda (in case you're keeping track, that's 3 BAPs for this former Lehman assistant. I love you and like your poems DF, but that's 3--as many as Bollingen winner Frank Bidart)
Peter Pereira
Sabrina Orah Mark
Here's Dockins':
Dead Critics Society
Zooks! What have I done with my anthologies? I'll need a
year of sleep after writing my millionth review (with aplomb).
XX bottles of moonshine litter my bedside table like arsenic.
Why no lilting iambics in contemporary poetry? Only dead,
vermin-ridden prose riddled with autobiographical treacle.
Under my bed, the skeleton of Browning. I use his broken-off
tibias as walking sticks. For hundreds of scenic miles I drag
sensitivity, & marvel. Content must be pounded into a rich
risotto of form—evident rhyme scheme & equal stanzas. I
quote Keats: "Gasp! I'm dying!" Were he as prosperous as J.
P. Morgan, he may not have suffered so. These days, a black-
out of good taste, a dimming of metrical etiquette, a dismal
nerve of postmodern surrealism, whatever that means. I'm
mad! I raise one of Browning's femurs in revolt! I've a notion,
ladies & gentlemen, that our language has crumbled into
kindling—a few tiny sparks, maybe, but no thick log to keep
joy in prosody truly alive. Meantime, I'm just about up to "Q"
in my encyclopedia of literature: Quixote, etc., but still I gather
hives hunting hopelessly for my beloved poetry anthologies.
God knows Browning would have understood—what a saint.
Five finger bones claw the floor under my bed, searching. You
entertain such a relic, you pay the price—each knuckle a shiv
digging for inspiration in the floorboards, scraping shallow
crosses into my skin as I slumber. I should lock him in a box!
But then nothing would remind me of my own bones—O my
awaiting death—the only theme suitable for a poetry buzz.
3 comments:
According to the Beloit Poetry Journal website, four additional folks in BAP07 are Nicky Beer, Galway Kinnell, Natasha Sajé, and Ben Lerner (2 poems).
I didn't realize Lehman had so many personal assistants.
Actually Lerner's very talented.
Don't know anything about the others, though, besides Kinnell.
Ooh -- was that the Jane?
Moving on.
I keep staring at the list of names, thinking you've arranged them in some secret abecedarian order, Jimmy.
Zooks indeed. Looks like the poem is a double abecedarian, Z-A down the left side, and then Z-A back up the right side. May have been difficult to write? But I've heard there are five such poems in MD's debut collection. Kudos to MD then.
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