the myth of heaven indicates peace and night

i hate walt whitman right now. am i allowed to say that? i just want to punch him in the face with all his cataloguing and optimism and exaggerations. i'm in the middle of a big walt project, so this is rather unfortunate.

w.s merwin had the right idea about whitman: 

"It's not a poetry that develops in a musical or intellectual sense. It doesn't move on and take a growing form- it repeats and finds more detail. That bothers me, but in particular it's his rhetorical insistence on an optimistic stance, which can be quite wonderful as a statement of momentary emotion; but as a world view and as a program for confronting existence, it bothered me when I was 18 and it bothers me now."

i don't have time for this.

in a field, i am the absence of field

my friend becca recently made a list of songs that she could remember hearing for the first time. there aren't many songs that i can remember exactly when or where i first heard them. actually there are only two that come to mind: "you're so vain" by carly simon and "mahgeeta" by my morning jacket. 

poems on the other hand... there are tons. i guess that's because you have to actually sit down and participate, unlike a song that can creep its way into your awareness. i like poetry, and reading in general, really, because you have to be so present. and at the end, you look at this thing that you were so absorbed in and it's just ink on a page, not like a movie or a play or something else that pulls you in through an (awesome, but) much more elaborate structure.

here's some of the poems that i remember my first encounter with...

- the nails by w.s. merwin -- once at a reading someone requested that merwin read this poem, and he refused, saying that it was too painful to read aloud. don't read this poem if you're going through a break up. i'm jus' sayin'.

- keeping things whole by mark strand -- a teacher showed me this poem when i was taking a poetry class one summer in high school. it changed my idea of what a poem was. 

- directions to the brothel (click around, you'll find it... someone made a video that scared me when i watched it with the lights off.) by michael dumanis -- michael is the teacher who showed me keeping things whole. 

- 13th dream song by john berryman -- i can't believe i haven't done a berryman post on this blog yet. just wait. it's coming. 

- author's prayer by ilya kaminsky -- this link is sweet because you can hear him reading it. ilya is deaf and has a russian accent. he can be sort of hard to understand, so when he read at sarah lawrence he passed out copies of his book so that people could follow along with him. he reads like a rabbi and when everyone follows along it felt like a religious experience. 

uhhh i guess that's enough for now. you guys should read those poems. 

oh, also, i'm reading here (school) today (tuesday) at 8 pm, in slonim house. it's a 6x6 featuring 6 slc students and 6 students from columbia university, all reading for 6 minutes each. cute, right?