I blockquoted these for you

Here is a new MC feature called Letting Things Speak for Themselves (it is the blogging equivalent of pointing at something, or photography, or blogging). This one, a poem from the latest New Yorker, was inspired by National Poetry Month, and by this funny post on Videogum, and by Nick’s very own poetry submission to the New Yorker.

Here Name Your
by Dora Malech

My friend spends all summer
mending fence for the elk to blunder

back down and the cows to drag
the wires and the snow to sit and sag

on, so all the twist and hammer and tauten
and prop amounts at last to nought, knot, tangle.

The next year he picks
up his pliers and fixes

the odds all over again. There are no
grownups, and I think that all of us children know

and play some variation on this theme, the game of all join
hands so that someone can run them open.

Then war whoops, shrieks, and laughter
and regather together

as if any arms might ever really hold.
I’m trying to finger the source—pleasure of or need

for—these enactments of resistance, if Resistance
is indeed their name. I’m trying to walk the parallels to terminus—

call them lickety-split over rickety bridge,
tightrope, railroad tie, or plank as you see fit—

trying to admit to seeing double,
innumerable,

to finding myself beset by myself
on all sides, my heart forced by itself,

for itself, to learn not only mine
but all the lines—

crow’s flight, crow’s-feet, enemy, party, picket,
throwaway, high tide, and horizon—to wait

in the shadows of scrim each night
and whisper the scene. Always, some part

of the heart must root for the pliers, some
part for the snow’s steep slope.

LOVE. IT. I’m so glad that took up space in a magazine that I pay money to receive. My favorite part was either the enjambment in the fourth stanza or the part about fingering.

Anyway, two cheers for contemporary poetry. And two cheers for blogging!

That brings me to a debate Nick and I have had many times: Which number is the funniest?

a) 2
b) -1
c) 5 or so
d) 100
e) millions

My Hypertext Journey into the Ninth Circle of Hell

I just got an email advertising a screening of a film called "Polis is This," so I decided to look it up. It turns out it is about the poet Charles Olson. One of the blurbs in the ad, from the Boston Phoenix, called it "The best film on an American poet ever." Another blurb, from somebody named Iain Sinclair, called it this:

"Coherent, topographically astute, witnessed."

After reading that sentence, I wikipedia'd "Iain Sinclair," and learned that he is a British writer and filmmaker whose work is rooted "within the influences of psychogeography."

Interesting!!

So I clicked on "psychogeography," and as you might imagine, I learned a bunch of meaningful facts.

Then I went back to the Iain Sinclair page and clicked on a link to an article about him in the London Times. Here's how the article began:

IT IS A CITY THAT forgets. It is a city of the forgotten. You can still disappear without trace in London. It calls to those whose one desire is to vanish. Here you can, in the old phrase, “go under”. Here you can “break”. The city is built upon lost things.

Unfortunately, my hypertext journey was forced to end there, because it turned out I had barfed all over myself and was drowning in my own barf.