My Cats are My Alters

anyway, so it should come as no surprise that one of my Instagram accounts is me "as" my cat, Bianca Leeroy.

I have tried to stay true to my cat's vision and see things in a feline light.

If you want to check in, we are @biancaleeroy.

Thanks for visiting.

The IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award 2018

On rare occasions, I submit things to contests and then forget to follow up on them.

So I just accidentally learned (while trying to find something I once posted somewhere) that I was a runner-up in this international haiku contest.

I really like the selections the judge made. Some other haikuists I admire quite a bit were runners-up and commended.

Thank you, Dr Drago Štambuk.

Here are some really great haiku collections and anthologies I have been reading over and over (because the poems change constantly).

Feathers from the Hill, W.S. Merwin (1978)

The Haiku Anthology, Cor van den Heuvel (1999)

Zen Poetry: Let the Spring Breeze Enter, Lucien Stryk, Takashi Ikemoto (1995)

Nick Virgilio: A Life in Haiku, Raffael da Gruttola (2012)

Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, Kacian, Rowland, Burns (2013)

Haiku Moment: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Haiku, Bruce Ross (1993)

breakthmarks, Gary Hotham (1999)

Haiku 21: Contemporary English Language Haiku,  Lee Gurga & Scott Metz (2011)

Book of Haikus, Jack Kerouac (ed. Regina Weinreich) (2003).

And anything I can find by Chris Gordon.

There are others too, but these were the first books at hand. I would heartily recommend all of those titles and associated authors.

I should add that the Haiku Foundation has made available an overwhelming number of haiku collections (going back decades) on their fine website. I often stop in there too.

These prisms never get old for me.

The End of Cancer?

Immunotherapy is a sea change in medicine and the results we are seeing already are staggering.

Could we be seeing a real cure for cancer and an end to much more debilitating and uncertain treatments?

Look at what's happening at Stanford.

I'm not oblivious to the fact that this potential cure which could end so much suffering is based upon the suffering of test animals in labs. I really hope to see the end of animal testing in my lifetime and now this is a realistic goal with the advances which have been made in stem cell research and cloning. The test "subject" will no longer need to be a sentient being. The test subject can be cells alone. This can't happen soon enough.

Platonic Fridge

You get so wise

talking to the plant

about the grilled cheese sandwich

you are making

in the middle of the night

all about guilt.

Cheese.

You think your thoughts

are mostly stolen

animal products too.

The moon in the window

is also a thief.

All light feels stolen,

if light is property

which seems a sacred idea

about shoplifting

the divine.

The moon in the night

like a yearbook in your mind

quietly assaults you.

You turn the sandwich

as a lover turns

a lover in a drawing

you can’t stop tasting

before you actually taste

yourself forbidding yourself.

Before you are the moon,

its shoddy accounting

and what it did with light

for billions of years

that it can’t explain

or won’t in this court

because it doesn’t even understand

it is a dark body

with accountability

to other darkness.

Speak for Those Who Have No Voice

Hey, please help this house resolution become a bill and then the law of the land.

Animal abusers and murderers often get off scot-free.

And these same people are very likely to turn their hands on humans later.

I already called my senators and representative.

It will only take five minutes of your time.



Help pass a national animal cruelty law.

The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act will make it a federal crime to commit malicious cruelty to an animal on federal property or otherwise in interstate commerce.

Federal law already prohibits animal fighting, as well as the trade in obscene video depictions of animals being crushed, burned, drowned, suffocated, impaled or subjected to other forms of heinous cruelty. But while the trade in video depictions of cruelty is banned, the underlying cruelty itself is not. The PACT Act will create a federal anti-cruelty statute that complements the cruelty laws in the 50 states.

TAKE ACTION
Please make a brief, polite phone call now to your U.S. Representative and your two U.S. Senators. Look up your federal lawmakers' phone numbers. You can say, "As a constituent who cares about animals, I urge you to co-sponsor H.R. 1494/S. 654, the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act. If you're already co-sponsoring the bill, thank you and please do all that you can to get it enacted quickly."

--source: The Human Society of the United States

In the Mail Today

In my mail today: the last two Burning Deck titles: Elke Erb's The Up and Down of Feet  and Paol Keineg's Triste Tristan, and a letter hand-signed by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop explaining that even the nonpareil thing must come to an end.

"Begun in 1961, Burning Deck has had a long and, at least to us, interesting life. Now after 56 years, our own  high-end birthdays and illnesses make us end the press."

I think one could easily make a strong argument that Burning Deck was the most important American publisher of avant-garde poetry in the half century it operated, and it certainly built strong bridges between the European (particularly, the French and German) and American vanguards. 

Here's a by-no-means-comprehensive list of notable titles the press published (from Burning Deck's Wiki article):

99: The New Meaning, by Walter Abish

A Geometry by Anne-Marie Albiach

Why Write? by Paul Auster

The Heat Bird, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Utterances, by William Bronk

The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), by Robert Coover

Striking Resemblance by Tina Darragh

Species of Intoxication: Extracts from the Leaves of the Doctor Ordinaire by Michael Gizzi

Artificial Heart, by Peter Gizzi

The Countess from Minneapolis, by Barbara Guest

Innocence in extremis by John Hawkes

My Life, by Lyn Hejinian

A Test of Solitude by Emmanuel Hocquard

Some Other Kind of Mission by Lisa Jarnot

Trial Impressions by Harry Mathews

i.e. by Claude Royet-Journoud

Numen, by Cole Swensen

The Windows Flew Open, by Marjorie Welish

Turneresque, by Elizabeth Willis

The Heat Bird is just a fantastic book. It's impossible not to see how that book influenced Rosmarie Waldrop's own evolution as a poet. I would recommend readers enjoy the Berssenbrugge title alongside Rosmarie's equally stellar The Reproduction of Profiles (New Directions). Both of these books hold up wonderfully.

There are so many more titles worth recommending in their back catalog. For example, the authors of the two final books published by the press have both been published by Burning Deck before, and I would recommend both of those earlier books. (I reviewed Keineg's earlier title for the American Book Review, back in the old papery, pre-internet days.)

I hope this means Keith and Rosmarie will be able to concentrate on their own poetry without distraction now. They've more than earned that. And I also have this (perhaps quixotic?) hope and wish that the powers-that-be might grant either deserving poet a MacArthur so we can set a new record, age-wise. I have no doubt the funds would not go to waste. And both poets are "fully empowered" now, to speak in the Nerudesque idiom. Age be damned.

Library Amnesty Day

One rainy spring afternoon in Baltimore, a young man walked into one of the city’s smaller libraries. He drew a little attention to himself since he was wearing a burnouse. It was Library Amnesty Day, which meant that patrons could return overdue library books and have the fines for those books waived. He explained that he wanted to take advantage of this amnesty. “This book is wonderful and everything in it is true. I am living proof of that,” he half whispered and smiled. “But I think I have been wrong to keep the book so very long.” The librarian asked him for his library card . He replied, “I have none.” She tried to get more information but he fled. He was in and out of the library in under three minutes. The librarian tried to place his accent but she couldn’t. At first, she thought it must be a prank since he left no book. He did leave a plastic tube on the counter of the librarian’s station. This tube was discovered to contain an ancient papyrus. Obviously, this had not been borrowed from the small library in Baltimore. It was forwarded to one local university and thence onward to several others. Eventually, it was determined that the origin of the papyrus scroll was the Library at Alexandria, burned when Caesar himself strategically set fire to his own ships during the siege of that city. The fire spread from the ships to the docks and then reached the vaunted library and consumed much of it, Plutarch informs us. Other historians insist the fire (or multiple fires) happened earlier or later. But all agree that the library and its precious volumes perished by fire. Had the Library at Alexandria ever collected such penalties, the overdue fee the mystery man was seeking to have discharged would have been astronomical. Even a modern robber baron would have difficulty paying such a fine. The scroll the mysterious man dropped off contained text in ancient Greek and hieroglyphics. The title of the work, when translated, was revealed to be How to Live Forever.