Buenos Dia de los Muertos!

Last year I had a great time at the Day of the Dead celebration in Tucson but missed out on a trip there for work this fall. C'est la guerre.

The Frida picture is from a slide show at The New Yorker. There is an article about the exhibit at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in this week's issue. I am hoping to experience this firsthand in a couple weeks on the way back from a trip to Madison. (Granted this will be the long way back but I also hope to see some old friends from my salad days in the Army who live near St. Paul.)

Recently I have been listening to and enjoying the latest albums from Rilo Kiley, Bruce Springsteen, Dwight Yoakam (all Buck Owens covers), and The New Pornographers. Speaking of Neko Case, the November issue of Poetry has a brief essay by her about poetry entitled, "My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic About Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum". You can read it here. Here is another poem from The Poetry Anthology. I like this one as I think we have all been at poetry reading that has exceeded our allotted span of attention and the mind starts to wander. Have a good weekend. (I was just informed that Wilco will be on PBS' Austin City Limits this week. Check your local listings. And now the poem....

At the Poetry Reading


I can't keep my eyes off the poet's
wife's legs—they're so much more
beautiful than anything he might
be saying, though I'm no longer
in a position really to judge,
having stopped listening some time ago.
He's from the Iowa Writers Workshop
and can therefore get along fine
without my attention. He started in
reading poems about his childhood—
barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,
that sort of stuff—the loss of
innocence he keeps talking about
between poems, which I can relate to,
especially under these circumstances.
Now he's on to science, a poem
about hydrogen, I think, he's trying
to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.
Maybe he'll succeed. I'm imagining
myself sliding up his wife's fluid,
rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-
stockinged legs, imagining them arched
around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.
My God, why doesn't he write poems about her!
He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,
leaves him for another poet, perhaps,
the observant, uninnocent one, who knows
a poem when it sits down in a room with him.

by John Brehm
Source: Poetry (June 1998).