Grumman taxonomy update

My previous note referencing June 2 was wrong -- it should be June 1. Here's the exact link.

Yahoo spyware

If, like me, you made the mistake of installing Yahoo Messenger version 7.5, and suddenly discovered that it made Yahoo your default search engine, there's a way of fixing it, but it's not easy. You can find the solution at the Simple Thoughts blog, but their solution didn't do the whole job for me. Nick Jones figured out the rest of it, and I added his solution to the "comments" section, so read all the way down.

Carved Sculpture

It was brought to my attention recently that I don't have any examples of Harvey's carved work, either here or on the website. So here are a couple, and I'll be adding them to the website too. These are both stone -- I'll be posting some of the work in wood as well.

Gluttony, 12"x9"x9", travertine. We're not sure of the dates of any of these. A guess on this would be late 40s-early 50s.

Megalomania, 30.5"x7"x4", marble. I'd place this one in the early 50s, possibly carved in 1950 when Harvey and Barbara spent a year in Rome.

Both of these are in my collection, in the house at Opus 40.

Thanks to Cindy Bell for cataloging all the carved pieces we have records of.

Opus 40 in the News

More press coverage of Opus 40. Boston.com, which incorporates the Boston Globe and other media, has picked up the New York Times story. And in this week's Woodstock and Saugerties Times, a very nice article by Paul Smart, about the tribute to Harvey Fite which was held here last week, organized by Lyn Thoman.

Richards Pushes Grumman's Taxonomy to the Breaking Point

Bob Grumman makes his long-awaited exigesis of my hay(na)ku today (well, that link will work if you read it today; otherwise go to his archives and check for June 2), after first wondering

why I don't just junk my taxonomy on the grounds that it must be worthless if it has any problem with an obvious poem like Richards's piece.

But he stays with it, and Grumman as theorist is always weird and interesting. So I recommend it. I think.

A Patrician Baritone

We're in the New York Times today. A very good article, with the odd sidelight that I am described as someone

who speaks in a patrician baritone and resembles a stockier, long-haired George Plimpton.

Happy Birthday Walt Whitman (etc.)

Happy birthday to:

1819 Walt Whitman, West Hills NY, poet (Leaves of Grass)

1821 Elizabeth Blackwell, Hastings, 1st woman doctor of medicine

1861 Emily Perkins Bissell, welfare worker (1st christmas seal drive, 1907)

1894 Fred Allen, Cambridge MA, comedian (Fred Allen Radio Show)

1898 Norman Vincent Peale Ohio, clergyman (Power of Positive Thinking)

1930 Clint Eastwood, San Fransisco CA, actor (Dirty Harry)/mayor (Carmel CA)

I know what you're thinking. "Did six lilacs last in the dooryard bloom, or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, with all these house calls to make and all these Christmas seals to sell up and down Allen's Alley, I kind of lost track myself. But being as I'm large and contain multitudes, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I think positively? Well, do ya, punk?

Time and Tide Wait for No Man, But We Wait for The Times

The article was postponed a week. It'll be this Friday's Escapes.

Hay(na)ku, hay(na)ku, It's Finger Poppin' Time

The hay(na)ku, according to a recent post on the New-Po list, "is a tercet where the first line consists of one word, the second line of two words, and the third line of three words." An unpromising form, says I, who thinks that a haiku is already too short for my Western mind, but I tried one anyway, and lo and behold it turns up on Bob Grumman's blog, along with a promise to analyze it in the future. If this happens, I will link to it once again.

Opus 40 in the NY Times

A photographer from the NY Times was here today, taking pix for a story that should run this Friday. It's a story that a Times reporter came up here to do last fall, but then it never ran. He told us that they were planning to put it off till this spring, and apparently that was the case. According to the photog, this is going to be a big story, on the front page of their Weekend Getaway section. So let's hope. Look for it.

Poets' Corner

A recently discovered -- by me -- treasury of public domain poems, pictures and bios of poets, at a site called Poets' Corner, put together over the past ten years by four gentlemen, Bob Blair in Texas, Jon Lachelt< in Colorado, Nelson Miller in Georgia, and Steve Spanoudis in Florida. Offering particular pleasure -- the "Faces of the Poets," but all of it worth a look.

Net Neutrality

This is a post that every blogger, no matter how small his readership, needs to make. Because today you can find my blog with no trouble. You can find poetry blogs by experimentalists like Ron Silliman and formalists like Mike Snider, or international poetry blogs like Anny Ballardini's, from Italy (and look for my page on Anny's Fieralingue anthology of contemporary poets). You can find the Academy of American Poets or Poetry Daily, which features a new contemporary poet every day--today's is Victoria Chang, with a poem originally published in Ploughshares. Here's a taste:

Proof

They say my great-uncle read foreign books
in a mud house in Nanking,

plowed his twenty acres, listened to
rare birds, disobeyed

the tides' yes and no. One day he knelt in the street,
sign around his neck

that said: Traitor. Little Red Book spread like wax
over him, even

beech trees turned.

You can find tiny online poetry magazines like Snakeskin from England (look for me in Issue 118), or larger ones like Jacket from Australia (here's my review of Calendars, by Annie Finch), or Cortland Review (look for me here and here). You can buy books directly from small presses like Ye Olde Font Shoppe, which has published my books, along with those of Dennis Doherty and, most recently, an anthology of poems from Erie, PA; or from McPherson and Co., or the University of Georgia press (publisher of Rachel Loden's Hotel Imperium. Or you can find Powell's Books or the Gotham Book Mart or the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, if you prefer an alternative to Amazon.

You can find the Woodstock Artists Association or the Town of Saugerties, or the Saugerties Artists Studio Tour or the Saugerties Lighthouse, or, of course, Opus 40. You can link to blogs by Nick Jones or Jerilyn Dufresne.

And you can do all this as easily as you can access IBM or Amazon or anything published by Rupert Murdoch. But this could change, if Congress goes through with its plan to create a two-tiered internet, one (fast) for the haves, the other (slow or nonexistent) for the havenots. Here's what MoveOn.org has to say about it.

Congress is now pushing a law that would end the free and open Internet as we know it. Internet providers like AT&T and Verizon are lobbying Congress hard to gut Network Neutrality, the Internet's First Amendment and the key to Internet freedom. Net Neutrality prevents AT&T from choosing which websites open most easily for you based on which site pays AT&T more. So Amazon doesn't have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to work more properly on your computer.

The above link will take you t0 MoveOn's petition. It should be signed and sent in.

Richards and Grumman - a standoff

Poet Bob Grumman, who is more than a little strange but whose essay on Mnmlst Poetry (which does not include "f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb") is one of the most fascinating reads on the Internet, recently informed the NewPo list of a site called Googlefight , where you can pit two names or words or phrases against each other to see who gets the most Google hits. He had tried himself against Master Poetry Blogger Ron Silliman , and found to his surprise that after being thoroughly trounced by Silliman, he had come back and beaten him a few days later.

Bob's theory:

Chris Lott said something good about me, which in less than a day multiplied my Internet popularity by 9! I just went up against William Shakespeare. I forget what he scored, but the graph comparing his total to mine was so large, to get the proportions right in the small space allotted, mine was barely visible--but it represented the same 548,000 I got against Silliman. Now if the Mole says something good about me, I may catch up with the Bard!

Well, I didn't want to say anything too good about Bob, because I lost to him 548,000 to 484,000, and while this may not put him ahead of the Bard, it'll probably soar him way, way past me.

Here are a few others I tried:

T. S. Eliot -- 38 million Tad Richards 484,000
Marvin Bell -- 6 million Tad Richards 484,000 (of course, this may include Marvin Bell the standup comic, but then again it may also include Tad Richards the champion bass fisherman, although I think he may be in semi-retirement, since you don't see too many hits on him any more.

But here's one I liked

Tad Richards -- 484,000 Jorie Graham -- 200,000

In Perhaps the Oxymoron of All Time...

Happy Samuel Beckett's 100th birthday.

And in tribute, this section from Situations:

A country road. A tree. It’s evening. Bob
Sits on a hillside, taking off his shoes,
Trying to tell himself he’s done his job,
Fulfilled his destiny, and paid his dues,

But nothing satisfies. Only the imprint
Of Carlene’s lips. Only her eyes that glowed
Beyond desire, pure as an infant,
Sans peur et sans reproche, her heart bestowed

For just an instant on him, and her grace.
What has he done? How long has he been walking?
Did they beat him again? What is this place?
Someone is drawing near; it’s Stephen Hawking.

“Since sudden fame has come to Mary Jo,”
Hawking says, “mine is the fate of chicks.
I wait at home, while she’s the new Perot
Generalissima, Grand Inquisitrix.”

“She’s the Inquisitrix?” says Bob. “I must
Plead with her for my darling’s life, or sorrow
Will dog my footsteps. Will she come here?” “Just
Wait,” says Hawking. “Soon.Or else tomorrow.”

“My misdeeds,” Bob says, “have too long a shelf
Life upon my conscience. On reflection,
I think my best course is to hang myself.”
Says Hawking, “It might give you an erection.”

“Don’t let’s do anything,” says Bob. “It’s safer.”
“Let’s wait and sey what she says.” “Even so,
There must be something we came all this way for.
What do we do?” “We wait for Mary Jo.”

The Page

This is as good a site as I've seen for a roundup of poetry on the net. It's called The Page, and you can find it at http://thepage.name/

Down the center, it has links to recent articles about poetry, with one-sentence quotes from the article, sort of like Arts and Letters Daily but focused on poetry. Here are the ones at the top today:

"There was Creeley the bohemian and the dyed-in-the-wool Yankee, the approachable and the avant-garde, the laconic writer and the blue-streak talker, the gentle pigeon-raiser and the high-strung Young Turk." D. H. Tracy • The New York Times

---

"Why has our age become so enamored of a poet who almost to the end of her life required a special taste?" William Logan on Elizabeth Bishop • The New Criterion

---

"I thought it was okay for poems in some crucial way to be part of the world of everyday entertainment, and that it would do the academy no great harm to acknowledge this." Bill Manhire talks to Nick Twemlow • Poets And Writers

---

"In the beginning you write for the high of finishing it, of getting through. Now the reward is feeling that you're on the right track and can work at it." Seamus Heaney talks to Sam Leith • The Daily Telegraph

---

"Down with the poetry cheerleaders, I say! Readers don’t need to be talked down to." Michael Schmidt • The StAnza lecture 2006

I referenced the Michael Schmidt piece yesterday, in the process getting the name of the festival wrong -- it's not St. Anza, it's StAnza, with a capital "A" in the middle.

Over on the left, also like A&L Daily but po-specific, a list of links to poetry-relevant sites. An excellent list.

And on the right -- and this is a little different -- Links to "New Poems" that can be found on the web, referenced by author and publication.

John Ashbery The Paris Review

Gregory O'Brien Best New Zealand Poems

Robert Hass American Poetry Review

Sarah Rosenthal Boston Review

Eavan Boland The New Republic

This is a good one to have on your favorites list -- you could do worse than having it as your home page.

Is She Really This Small?

From Michael Schmidt, author of one of my favorite books, Lives of the Poets, in a lecture at St. Anza, Scotland's Poetry Festival:

The other anecdote puts Picasso in the frame with an American GI at the end of the Second World War. The soldier says he dislikes Picasso’s kind of art with its distortions and stylisations and dislocations. ‘What sort of art do you like?’ asked Picasso. The GI pulled out a photograph of his girlfriend and presented it to the artist, who gazed at it and asked, ‘Is she really this small?’ It is about the conventions we are prepared to accept, about conventions so ingrained that we do not recognise them as such; it is about becoming conscious of them, of what is conventional, and understanding why, and what that convention includes and excludes.

A few new things

Posted on the art page of my website.

Here are a couple:

The Tragic Polka

THE TRAGIC POLKA

First you kill your father, then you off the king
Doing the tragic polka
Then your mistress checks out while she’s wearing your ring
Doing the tragic polka
Watch your lover sinking in a bottomless descent
He’s robbed and cheated for you but the money’s all been spent
He’s sacrificed his honor and disgraced his regiment
Doing the tragic polka

Step it when you find out that you’re married to your mother
Doing the tragic polka
Twirl it while they tell you that you can’t inter your brother
Doing the tragic polka
Your son has snatched your wife away and laid her in the shade
You could have won the duel except for poison on the blade
Your husband is a loser but attention must be paid
Doing the tragic polka

I'M WITH YOU ON THE LAST TRAIN TO ROCKLAND

I'm not exactly sure what inspired this, and maybe it's best that I don't plumb it too much. But it may have somehow started with the fact that Pat and I went on a cruise for spring break -- our first vacation in forever -- and, well, you'll do things on a cruise that you wouldn't do in real life. For example...I went to a Mickey Dolenz concert. And that may have done terrible things to my psyche.

Then, looking to find the second half of "Howl" online, I Googled "I'm with you in Rockland." And you know how when you type in a few letters in a google search, Google will guess what you're trying to find? Well, I typed in "I'm with you in," and let Google guess the rest. And it did, in fact, guess "Rockland." But here's the weird part. A search for "I'm with you in Rockland" produced all sorts of hits, none of them related to Allen Ginsberg or Howl. Go figure. But as a strange, horrible result of all this, Ginsberg and the Monkees began to inextricably entwine in my mind.


Anyway, here it is:

I’M WITH YOU ON THE LAST TRAIN TO ROCKLAND

Take the last train to Rockland,
And I’ll meet you in the lobby.
You’ll be in the soup of time
so don’t forget to bring kohlrabi,
oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!

’cause the angelheaded hipsters
left for balls and endless cock
We’ll overturn one pingpong table
’til the morning brings us shock
And I must glow, oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!
And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.

Take the last train to Rockland,
And I’ll see you in a bit.
We’ll have dreams and adorations
And that sensitive bullshit
I wanna blow. oh, no, no, no!
Oh, no, no, no!
And I don’t know if I’m ever coming home.

52nd Street

Here’s a thought. Why not use a blog that no one reads to discuss a book that no one will have read, and damn few will be interested in reading?

The book is Fifty-Second Street: Street of Jazz, by Arnold Shaw. I’ve been a fan of Shaw’s for years, ever since I read Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues, his great history of the R&B of the 40s and 50s, my favorite music.

Shaw was a music business industry professional -- song plugger, pubishing company executive, a little bit of everything, and ultimately the founder and first director of the Popular Music Research Center at University of Nevada-Las Vegas, later named the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center in his honor. So he has an insider's knowledge of the business, and Honkers and Shouters is not just about the performers, but the behind the scenes people too—the guys like Art Rupe of Specialty and Lew Chudd of Imperial and Herman Lubinsky of Savoy, and producers and arrangers and songwriters and the whole panoply of people in the music business.

I knew Shaw had written a bunch of other music books, and I’m finally getting around to them. I ordered Fifty-Second Street: Street of Jazz, and The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s, and I've started on the former.

All I knew about 52nd Street was that bebop started there – in the 52nd Street clubs and the after-hours sessions at Minton’s in Harlem, So I had innocently expected to read about the 40s, and the beboppers but this being Shaw, I'm getting so much more. It's a history of The Street from the speakeasy days, and it covers not just the jazz musicians, but the club owners, and the cabaret singers, and the strippers, and the insult comics, and the clientele. I hadn't know anything about that early history of The Street--the Dixieland players, and the swing guys -- people like Louis Prima, and Art Tatum, and the early guys who integrated jazz even before Benny Goodman -- Joe Marsala, a white player from New Orleans, needs a hot trumpet player, so he goes out and hires Henry "Red" Allen, and no one thinks twice about it, even though it's never been done before. And songs that got their start on The Street, and became huge hits -- like "The Music Goes Round and Round," which was first performed by these guys -- I can't think of their names now -- who played at one of the clubs, and people came flocking to that club to hear them. Great stuff. I'm more than halfway through the book now, and just starting to get to Dizzy Gillespie arriving on The Street.