Things appear shiny to me when the NYT's Sunday Book Review features reviews on books dealing with two poets, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, nevermind the fact that quite a bit of their fame rests on their being cultural rockstars vs. language shapeshifters. Of these two Beat leading men, I prefer the darker and seedier Bukowski[1], mainly for reasons of personal identification. Why? Because in an Rolling Stone interview, Bukowski had these words of insight for those losers with ugly mugs[2] and poetic aspirations:

"Ah, well, I shouldn't complain. That makes three different ladies in the last 36 hours. Man, I'll tell ya, women would rather screw poets than just about anything, even German shepherds. If I had only known about all this earlier, I wouldn't have waited till I was 35 to start writing poetry."

And when you think the NYT folks couldn't suprise you anymore on a Sunday morning, they go ahead and review an epistolary book by that desert madman and misygonist, Edward Abbey[3]. You can't help but like a man who wrote in a letter to a fellow writer:

"Reality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody’s typewriter, even Tolstoy’s, even yours, even mine"

Meanwhile what the fuck is wrong with the Iranian mullahs? Banning books and murdering writers is the most sure way to speed up the demise of a fruitcake empire - looke what happened to the Glorious Soviet Fatherland when they tried this? Also memo to Du(m)bya: when you finish reading your Camus's "The Stranger", get a B-52 bomber to drop it, and many others like it, over Tehran.

Finally, while I prefer the poetry of Adrienne Rich ("I came to explore the wreck./ The words are purposes./ The words are maps. /I came to see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail."), and find much of her critical prose feminist theory heavy, she can make me thinkful:

"Poetry has been written-off on other counts: it's not a mass-market "product", it doesn't get sold on airport newsstands or in supermarket aisles; it's too "difficult" for the average mind; it's too elite, but the wealthy don't bid for it at Sotheby's; it is, in short, redundant. This might be called the free-market critique of poetry. There's actually an odd correlation between these ideas: poetry is either inadequate, even immoral, in the face of human suffering, or it's unprofitable, hence useless. Either way, poets are advised to hang our heads or fold our tents. Yet in fact, throughout the world, transfusions of poetic language can and do quite literally keep bodies and souls together - and more.

Critical discourse about poetry has said little about the daily conditions of our material existence, past and present: how they imprint the life of the feelings, of involuntary human responses - how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, or a group of men on a street-corner, how we hear rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbour or a stranger. That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognise it or not. A great many well-wrought, banal poems, like a great many essays on poetry and poetics, are written as if such pressures didn't exist. But this only reveals their existence. But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination's roads open before us, giving the lie to that brute dictum, "There is no alternative"."

[1] One of the more effective and poignant moments in that much liked movie "Sideways" is the scene in which its anti-hero Miles bemoans the final rejection of his novel by quoting a Bukowski-ism; the dialogue goes: "I’m not a writer; I’m a middle school English teacher. I’m so insignificant I can’t even kill myself.... Half my life is over and I have nothing to show for it...‘a smug piece of excrement floating out to sea.’"