Bang’s is the kind of poem where if you took one card out, the whole house would fall.

So you always go into workshop with your head bowed. As a professor said to me this week, young poets who don’t affect self-doubt can feel false. “Benjamin etceteras” “a cult of ghost-lovers” “reaching up to pull down”– would these apparent one-offs get culled in a poetry workshop? Maybe… but it’s impossible to have this poem’s brand of authority and conviction on the page in workshop, I’ve found. The “douches with bulbs, douches with bags” image stayed in my head all week. This poem is the first in the book, theoretically because Mary Jo Bang’s social security number is first (?), but actually because there is nowhere else to put it. I may post more this anthology is pretty good. Here’s the second poem I chose from Privacy Policy. I imagine my face splashed across the landlord’s computer screen. Unbolt the calm and what spills out is emergency, veiled by tumbling fabrics and white smoke. He hosts the show I put on when I drive, drifting from my home life, work life, sex life, and what else? The fused horizon between an unpaved parking lot and night.Ī blue and red light on a pole mimics an approaching police car.Ī man whose living is talking waits to hear if he has cancer of the mouth. Velázquez obeyed but left the orb transparent. Pacheco’s iconography for the Immaculate Conception dictates that Mary should be standing on the moon. When I looked away, I was instantly transmuted. Love you Stav~~~ My Face in a Surveillance Camera This one with him in it couldn’t have been done that way. He is totally right many poems would better and more accessible if they were a song or a story, but some can’t be transformed that way. “Make it a song or make it longer and make it a story,” said Stavros. I’m posting a poem I wrote because on this week’s Cumtown the boys talked some shit on poetry.

I think the poem appears on page 18 of Space (Harper and Row, 1970). I couldn’t get the formatting to appear and the spacing of the couplet is really important.

The final couplet here is extreme, enacting couplethood (pairdom?) on the level of words, syllables, and letters. One of the papers I most enjoyed writing in undergrad was about Clark Coolidge’s sonnets, which this poem is one of. I might have been a better student… but being a better student isn’t everything. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had encountered Ashbery, Berryman, Lowell, or Bishop instead. I wanted sense and I wanted what’s beyond sense. I could tell that I had grown out of Anne Sexton and Mark Danielewski but I didn’t know what came next.

Of all living poets (and maybe all poets ever), I am most indebted to Coolidge. I was an English major and I was bored out of my mind. Clark Coolidge’s poetry was a bright spot for me in a time of immense sameness.

The long dark emergency stim