the vacation at its end, i relax

here are the books i bought while in NH:

Zukofsky's A (been thinking about buying it for a long time then came across it...)

Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (to replace the copy stolen by my mother, hardback & still brilliant)

Steinbeck's Travels with Charley

& a little chapbook, seemingly self-published by Alex Crangle entitled Emotion is a Robotic Piano Playing the Twelve Tones of You. i found this little book at the Plymouth book exchange in a small college town for three dollars. i assume alex crangle is a student there. i like it alright. he, after all, writes such poems as: "An Epic Space Poem: Part 1 or; From Your Seat in the Dirigible, A Million Miles Up" and "Long Legged Anthropods Probably Crawl On Me In My Sleep" and "The Centipedes Are Getting Downright Arrogant". Here is an example of Crangle's skillz:

The Guardsman 40,000 Is

The Guardsman 40,000 is now
a bald tire in the dirt surrounded
by last year's brown leaves and the cracked
vacuum chambers of old street lights
now fallen, their filaments hanging out like
thin mercury tongues in a broken bed of glass
and dust. I have to be careful, my shoes
are somehwere in Vermont and the twine keeping
the paperback books on my feet is unwinding
quietly, cut by rocks and giant emerging pythons
of deep, established roots. The black-
market book merchant sells Thomas Mann and Jean
Genet from suspended trenchcoat wings, promoting
the modern thought I use to wander this new rhodo-
dendron forest. But I fear
these fraying thoughts
will only hold for so
long. I'll never

see the rubber
walls of this
prison.


anyways, in some of the poems there is a randomness that entrances me, tho also, sadly, at least for me, an admiration for bukowski...

just getting into Matt Hart's Who's Who Vivid & enjoying it. it is fun, easy going stuff, & heartfelt. i particularly like the first poem, the poem that appears in alice blue 1. a lot of it relies on the juxtaposition of images, as though the connecting lines have been cut free, & perhaps a little surrealism, but tamed.

still thinking about Jim Goar's Whole Milk, from Effing Press. I like it more & more.