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As I believe I indicated, I have submitted the anthology proposal to a publisher and am waiting... Given the work I put in, I might shop it around if they decide to pass, though anthologies are a pretty hard sell, given the difficulty with clearing the rights. Never one to leave well enough alone (kind of a commonality around here), I have been uncovering a few more poems that might fit, including one that someone recommended to me (you didn't include Larkin's Whitsun Weddings ). Here is a poem I just came across that I think is actually fairly interesting, but would not include it because it would be such a drag having to justify why I am including a poem by an admitted adulteress who seems to feel no shame. Perhaps in the 1980s and even early 90s this wouldn't even have raised any flags, but times are different now. Also I don't think it is such an amazing poem (relative to all the other ones) that I would want to really fight for it. If I thought it had a really unique perspective (above and beyond the illicitness of the journey), I might take the risk... Asking for Directions by Linda Gregg We could have been mistaken for a married couple riding on the train from Manhattan to Chicago that last time we were together. I remember looking out the window and praising the beauty of the ordinary: the in-between places, the world with its back turned to us, the small neglected stations of our history. I slept across your chest and stomach without asking permission because they were the last hours. There was a smell to the sheepskin lining of your new Chinese vest that I didn't recognize. I felt it deliberately. I woke early and asked you to come with me for coffee. You said, sleep more, and I said we only had one hour and you came. We didn't say much after that. In the station, you took your things and handed me the vest, then left as we had planned. So you would have ten minutes to meet your family and leave. I stood by the seat dazed by exhaustion and the absoluteness of the end, so still I was aware of myself breathing. I put on the vest and my coat, got my bag and, turning, saw you through the dirty window standing outside looking up at me. We looked at each other without any expression at all. Invisible, unnoticed, still. That moment is what I will tell of as proof that you loved me permanently. After that I was a woman alone carrying her bag, asking a worker which direction to walk to find a taxi. From All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems by Linda Gregg. On-line source

Are you planning on reading the trilogy in one go? I haven't tackled this, and indeed, currently it is packed up (only a small portion of Waugh is on the shelves at present). I guess I am afraid of a let-down. Several people/reviewers told me that Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End was his finest achievement, far outshining The Good Soldier, but I found it turgid and flat and barely made it through. There could be many reasons for my reaction, though in general I don't like reading war stories, or at least traditional ones. I was moved by Nemirovsky's Suite Francais.

I am curious if you were there or just read Reich. I have a number of issues with your post but do not have time. No, just passing on Reich's observations. Almost no one seemed to have anything to say about the Chicago Jazz Fest this year, which seems ominous in and of itself. After my move out of Chicago, it is pretty unlikely I will ever make it to the Chicago Jazz Fest again. It certainly has declined from previous years, in my estimation. (I guess I've been there most years since 1998.) If I was going to travel on Labor Day weekend (which I don't like to do), I would start going to Detroit's.

On the whole it does look pretty underwhelming (esp. if you are not totally sold on Vandermark) and Detroit was clearly the place to be. Reich really liked Allen Toussaint: http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-ent-0904-jazz-finale-20120904,0,2669706.column I saw Toussaint at Chicago Symphony Hall a few years back and he was quite good, so I'm glad he is touring more regularly and is still sounding great. I'm wondering if the city should just give up on Petrillo and move all the headliners to Millennium Park. No question the sound would be much, much better (and the attendance is down so much that they would probably all fit on the lawn). I'm guessing they won't because the only way they recover any money at all is the food concessions and those can't be relocated closer. But it is starting to look like a long, slow decline in the quality of Chicago Jazz Fest because of the city's head-in-the-sand attitude.

Just a congrats to you guys who are keeping on giving it up! I never started (cigarettes or alcohol), mostly because addiction clearly runs in our family, esp. on my mother's side, and I knew I'd have trouble if I started. My addictions (basically sugar and collecting books/CDs) are marginally less dangerous to my health and wallet...

Yes, that makes sense. Perhaps I should rephrase it to ask whether he is still in the UK canon. I'm not really sure why the name would have been somewhat familiar to me, but perhaps he was in an older poetry anthology I read. What was particularly interesting to me is that he continued writing poems until 2000, though he eventually moved away from rhymes to blank verse. He also wrote some children's stories and poems. Of course, canons are funny things. I have run across two poets who are supposedly in the Canadian poetic canon - Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster. They've both wrote a huge amount of poetry, but I have never come across them before and I do read pretty widely. I like some of Souster's earlier poems, but find his work of later decades pretty forgettable. On the whole, Dudek strikes me as the better and more interesting poet over his whole career. Still canons are funny things. Apparently in the U.S., Karl Shapiro is still (barely) in, but Harvey Shapiro is out. I think both are good, but Harvey Shapiro speaks to post-war times much better, along with Alan Dugan, who is just clinging onto his place in the canon.

Still enjoying this, but it is so long, and I seem to have so little time to read (mostly just the bus two or three days a week -- other days I bike to work, which is great exercise but not so good for reading). I have been reading or perhaps more accurately skimming a great deal of poetry, trying to uncover interesting transportation-related poetry. I've just submitted the project to a publisher but figure I can still tweak the table of contents a bit if they decide they are interested in proceeding. As a bit of a lark, I also picked up Pitouie by Derek Winkler, which is about an island in the middle of the Pacific that is being pitched as the perfect garbage disposal site by its corporate owners. It looks like a fun, fairly quick read.

I'm trying to get a handle on whether Charles Causley was ever in the UK poetic canon or not. He hasn't made the cut in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, probably because he was writing ballad-inspired poetry well past the point it was fashionable. I have a sense he may have been more widely read in the 1950s and 60s. The name sounded vaguely familiar to me while I was browsing the library shelves and I ended up borrowing Union Street. I thought some of the poems were fairly interesting, particularly the earlier ones which draw on his experiences in the Royal Navy during WWII (a lot of lost sailors in these poems, which definitely ties in with the ballad form). One of the poems singled out in the introduction is "Ou Phrontis" where the refrain of every stanza is "I don't care!": "But the bridegroom is occupied elsewhere, / I don't care!" "Another the bridal bed will share. / I don't care!" etc. To be honest, I don't really care for the poem, but I have to think that Maurice Sendak came across it at one point, since it seems like Pierre is just an extended riff on "Ou Phrontis." Of the poems I did like, two really stand out (to me): "Conversation in Gibraltar" (which I hope to have included in the transportation anthology) and "Convoy." For now, I'll just report on "Convoy" Convoy Charles Causley Draw the blanket of ocean Over the frozen face. He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish, Staring through the green freezing sea-glass At the Northern Lights. He is now a child in the land of Christmas: Watching, amazed, the white tumbling bears And the diving seal. The iron wind clangs round the icecaps, The five-pointed dogstar Burns over the silent sea, And the three ships Come sailing in. (From Union Street, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957) What I think Causley is getting at here is contrasting the drowned sailor, lost in the North Sea perhaps, with the three ships that make it safely into port (as part of a convoy). I find the poem really open-ended, since it isn't clear whether Causley is somehow making a (false) equivalence between these two things, like the safe passage of the three ships doesn't outweigh the loss of one sailor. But he probably isn't saying that precisely. It would make the poem clearer if the reader knew whether the sailor was on a ship that sank (though presumably Causley would say something about his mates) or was on one of the saved ships but was swept overboard or died in some other manner. It is probably the fairly radical open-endedness that makes it interesting to me (certainly more than the semi-traditional ballads he also writes).

We'll see! Now this is good stuff, but really the real truth -- sugar causes all cancers! (Lance should have avoided all breakfast cereals growing up -- then we wouldn't even be having this conversation...)

Finished reading Five Seasons by A. B. Yehoshua. Really hard to understand how this made the Man Booker list (maybe just the longlist though). I found it a total damp squib of a book. The main character has been taking care of his wife when she finally dies of complications from breast cancer. It then traces his misadventures over the next five seasons as he sort of comes back into the realm of dating and considering remarriage. I found the character to be fairly unlikeable, obsessed with money and to a slightly lesser degree status. To some extent, his profession (accounts auditor) does reinforce these tendencies. But beyond this, almost everyone in the book has a very mercenary approach to relationships (ranging from a professional matchmaker who contacts him too early to his old camp counselor, who has an unusual proposition for him). Frankly, I would consider it on the anti-Semitic side if it hadn't been written by an Israeli. Certainly not my thing. On the positive side, I have finally cracked Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls and am enjoying it tremendously. What a relief after a summer of largely disappointing novels (though the poetry has generally been fun to read). This is a fairly epic novel, and is probably best considered Skvorecky's fictional autobiography. The main character (Danny) is an unambitious professor of literature in suburban Toronto with a troubled past (he had been forced to work for the Nazi war efforts in occupied Czechoslovakia). The action shifts back and forth between his memories of these times (including a hair-brained scheme to damage some German war planes) and his interactions with his students as well as the exiled Czech community in Toronto. I didn't realize until recently that this novel was written in 1977, so long, long before the Velvet Revolution (and indeed not all that long after the war). I haven't reached the section where Danny escapes and his other friends don't make it out (including a figure who is clearly supposed to stand in for Vaclav Havel). Definitely a good read so far.

Second tier is not a bad place to be. Personally, I'd probably also put Philip Jose Farmer there (above Harrison), though he is probably considered a bit more influential. It's interesting that a number of writers who would have been considered fairly important back in the day have faded so much (John Brunner, Samuel Delaney, Harlan Ellison -- has he published much at all lately??). Of course, I don't really keep up with the field any more.

Really? I have seen this: Collectables - Bal Masque

That is so great to get your stuff out there. I'll definitely try to check it out. That's so funny. The books look quite a bit like the books we put together in grade school, where we wrapped chapbooks (not that we called them that) in cloth and ironed them. It might help sales (in general) if a poem or two were up on the LRL website so people had some sense of the contents.

I've always thought this was a powerful poem, but today it really hit me. Guess I've been thinking about my mother lately (she's been gone nearly 16 years ) The Race by Sharon Olds When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was cancelled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you'll see a yellow bus, get off at the second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then run. I lumbered up the moving stairs, at the top I saw the corridor, and then I took a deep breath, I said goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort, I used my legs and heart as if I would gladly use them up for this, to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of women running, their belongings tied in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my long legs he gave me, my strong heart I abandoned to its own purpose, I ran to Gate 17 and they were just lifting the thick white lozenge of the door to fit it into the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not too rich, I turned sideways and slipped through the needle's eye, and then I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet was full, and people's hair was shining, they were smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a mist of gold endorphin light, I wept as people weep when they enter heaven, in massive relief. We lifted up gently from one tip of the continent and did not stop until we set down lightly on the other edge, I walked into his room and watched his chest rise slowly and sink again, all night I watched him breathe. Sharon Olds from The Father (Knopf, 1992) On-line source

Story here RIP. I admit that I haven't read his work in quite some time, but I enjoyed it a lot in my late teens and early 20s. I wonder if he ever stopped pushing Esperanto. At least a couple of his books had instructions in the introductions on how to contact some group to get your free Esperanto dictionary. Well, at least that's how I remember it...

Yes, the listed price will include VAT. Nearly all the time if you buy direct from Amazon.co.uk, VAT is removed at the checkout stage, so you can always cancel the transaction if something seems off. (There are some items this isn't adjusted but fairly rare.) As mentioned elsewhere, if you have to order from Marketplace seller, they will not remove VAT.

You only get the combined shipping if you order directly from Amazon.co.uk, not the marketplace sellers.

I probably am missing some of your points. Basically if you are not in the UK or Europe, there is no point trying to get to the magic number (about 25 GBP). However, Amazon.co.uk does combine shipping costs, so unless the Marketplace seller's price is well below the Amazon.co.uk price, you are much better off going with Amazon. Also, I've noticed that it is somewhat rare for the Marketplace sellers to even offer to ship outside of Europe. Finally, if your mailing address is US or Canada, Amazon.co.uk will knock off the VAT, so the the total is a bit lower. So I almost always buy direct from Amazon.co.uk (assuming it can't be found at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca).

RIP. I had really wanted to get to see him at the Green Mill this past Dec/Jan. but in the end didn't go (for some lame reason I can no longer remember). Well, I did manage to see him on a few occasions (as well as Fred Anderson). Thanks for the music...

So I have been going through some other poets' work. I had high hopes for Alice Notley, but virtually all of the poems that she chose for her New and Selected Poems are truly epic length. While I can sort of see the ideological appeal of staking a claim that near book-length poetry is just as important as novel writing (following in the footsteps of H.D. I guess), I just think it is close to career suicide to do it. You can't get your poems in magazines or anthologies, and you need to carve out excerpts anyway if you go out and give readings. I think the only one whole really gets away with it anymore is John Ashberry. Anyway, I found one of the office poems by Alan Dugan. I guess the other one I found amusing is in his newest collection, so I'll post that later when the book turns up here. ON TRADING TIME FOR LIFE BY WORK The recepionist has shiny fingernails since she has buffed them up for hours, not for profit but for art, while they, the partners, have been arguing themselves the further into ruthless paranoia, the accountant said. The sales representatives came out against the mustard yellow: “It looks like baby-shit,” and won, as ever. In the studio, the artist, art director, and the copy chief were wondering out loud: Whether a “Peace On Earth” or a “Love And Peace On Earth” should go around the trumpeting angel on the Christmas card. In this way the greeting card company worked back and forth across a first spring afternoon like a ferryboat on the river: time was passing, it itself was staying the same, and workers rode it on the running depths while going nowhere back and forth across the surface of the river. Profits flow away in this game, and thank god there is none of the transcendence printed on the product. From Poems 2 (1963)

Reznikoff is quite high on my list of pithy urban poets. It looks like the current collected poems has maybe a handful of additional poems not included in my earlier edition from Black Sparrow, but I couldn't justify ordering it for that. I'll just borrow from the library. Here's a subway poem from Reznikoff: In steel clouds to the sound of thunder like the ancient gods: our sky, cement; the earth, cement; our trees, steel; instead of sunshine, a light that has no twilight, neither morning nor evening, only noon. Coming up the subway stairs, I thought the moon only another street-light — a little crooked. From Jerusalem the Golden (1934)

Winding up the anthology. Still a bit short on driving poems. In part this is because many of the best were already included in Drive, They Said (which not coincidentally was put out by the same publishing company I am talking with). Anyway, it has been an interesting process, diving back in and rereading a lot of poetry. Most of my old favorite poets still hold my interest, though I wasn't as grabbed by L.E. Sissman as I used to be. In general I found that I was not very interested in long poems or poetry series. Certainly in part this is because they cannot be anthologized (or anthologized easily) but just in general I don't have the attention span to read a really long poem -- and at root I think that poetry should be shorter and to the point. Thus, I found I was not nearly as interested in Adrienne Rich's later work. I struggled a bit with Basil Bunting's Briggflats, though I liked his Odes a fair bit. He was a bit of a new discovery for me (I think he is mentioned way upthread). Two pleasant discoveries were that Alan Dugan and Harvey Shapiro had continued to write (past the books I knew them by) and indeed had quite recent collected volumes out (Poems Seven and The Sights Along the Harbor respectively). Even better, I found used copies of these books super cheap (even with shipping to Canada), so I ordered them. Both of them have a bit of wry perspective on urban life. Dugan in particular seems to have written quite a bit about mid-1950s/1960s business life. If I were his publisher, I would definitely try to get some kind of Mad Men tie-in. I'll add a Dugan poem later on. Right now I'll just attach a short poem from A Day's Portion (Harvey Shapiro). This poem doesn't have quite the gravitas to go into the anthology, but it is still fun: Harvey Shapiro New York Note Caught on a side street in heavy traffic, I said to the cabbie, I should have walked. He replied, I should have been a doctor.

I find that Garcia-Marquez screams that with every literary breath he takes. It's an attitude that turns me off to a number of very different authors, but who have this flaw in common: Thomas Mann, Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow (maybe the most overrated American novelist?), Milan Kundera, and others. Nabokov has enough humor and verbal brilliance to counteract this tendency. I'm with you on most of those authors, but personally, I think Bellow had some verbal brilliance at times (at other times he could be a bit annoying and pretentious.) I think Augie March is quite good, and I also enjoyed The Dean's December. My problem with Bellow is that he truly seemed to be writing the same story over and over (conniving family members, particularly the uncles), the narrator is almost always a not-very-settled family man with a roving eye or a man in the midst/recovering from a painful divorce. Women always seem to be the root of the problem in a Bellow novel. I don't always care for where Philip Roth goes in his writing, but I think he ended up expanding well beyond his original template or imaginative world.

Not even Quilty? I'm stuck halfway through Lolita. I don't think I've made it to the introduction of Quilty, unless he started off as a very minor, incidental character. I actually wished I enjoyed these books more, since I know Nabokov is an important writer, but I don't connect with them.

I find that Garcia-Marquez screams that with every literary breath he takes. It's an attitude that turns me off to a number of very different authors, but who have this flaw in common: Thomas Mann, Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow (maybe the most overrated American novelist?), Milan Kundera, and others. Nabokov has enough humor and verbal brilliance to counteract this tendency. So I like a few of the authors on your list but can't bear Nabokov. I cannot find a way to take any interest in anything any of his characters get up to. I didn't realize this before I actually got into his earlier works --- and I ordered the Library of America set of his novels written in English. I'm still trying to make my way through a few more of his later novels, but can tell that before too much longer, I'll give up and donate the set to the library.