Strand and Millar in the fall journals

My copies of the fall issues of Virginia Quarterly Review and Willow Springs are here now and I've actually had the time to browse both of them today.

VQR is always worthwhile and this issue has a play by Tony Kushner, Art Spiegelman comments on MAUS, an unpublished Robert Frost poem called "War Thoughts at Home," an essay by Rick Barot on Rilke, an essay by Dave Lucas on Mark Strand, and some good poems by Debra Nystrom, Campbell McGrath, and Bruce Bond among others.

Besides being an insightful renewal of the "evacuation of the self" approach to Strand's work, the Lucas essay on Strand is laugh-out-loud funny. Here's an exerpt:

Stop me if you've heard this. A beautiful blonde steps into an elevator with George Clooney. Once the doors close she sidles up to him and, in a sultry whisper, offers him "the best blow job you've ever had." And Clooney says, "What's in it for me?"

The joke works in the same way a good poem should work: it manifests in language what's already vaguely understood. Elaboration is of no avail; the good joke is in the most essential reduction. There are countless variations of this one--celebrities and athletes are frequent subjects; I specifically recall a version I heard at a writer's conference a few summers ago, related with the supspicious earnestness of an anecdote. Its subject was Mark Strand.

But here's a different joke. Marvin Bell and Mark Strand walk into a bookstore in Iowa City. Neither of them sees any of his books on the shelf. Dejected, Bell says, "They must not stock any of my books." Strand replies, "They must be sold out of mine."

One of the great things about Strand's work is how he doesn't take himself so seriously, and how he parodies himself. Makes me think he'd really even appreciate this posting at Poetry Snark.

I was also very happy to find poems by Joe Millar in the fall issue of Willow Springs. I've previously posted on Joe here and here.

From what I've found online, it appears Joe's new book will be called Fortune and is forthcoming soon from EWU Press. I'll certainly let you know when it lays down for sale. Here are two of Joe's latest from Willow Springs.


Fall Night

Alone with Rilke’s ghost in my taxi
parked somewhere near the Avenues,

summer over, radio silent
waiting for the bars to close

reading the one about autumn:
that he who’s alone now will stay alone

write long letters and walk in the streets,
gray vagrant streets, ashen with moonlight

not knowing, not telling, no buses, no cars.
Like dry leaves in the wind, Rilke

whispers to me under the dome light
that nothing I’ve seen will be forgotten:

not the marriages fallen apart or the son
grown to manhood without me,

not the money lost or the hours spent
wandering the amnesiac sand,

not the fire on the beach near the limestone flats
we never came back to, burned down to embers,

or the twilight spreading its silent blue dust
over thirty bald eagles perched in the trees

gorging on thousands of infected carp
glittering in the shadows.


Caroling

We clutched the worn, purple mimeos
of Joy to the World and God Rest Ye Merry
awkwardly as we sang a cappella,
a bit out of time, clustered
next to the fly-speckled angel
in the La Honda Home for the Aged.

The patients sat up straight in their pjs
under the fragrant pine boughs,
wheezed, giggled, clapped and waved.
And my brother walked out among them
bending down in his white shirt
to listen, nodding, giving away
the tissue-wrapped navel oranges.
Later he’d lead me to two old men
lying in neighboring beds, rough
faces angular, deepened by weather,
big-knuckled hands fleshy and scarred.
Clarence and Dale from North Dakota,
brothers who’d followed the wheat harvest,
picked apples together in Washington state.
Sometimes they need extra oxygen
and both of them suffer bad knees and feet.
neither has many teeth, smiling broadly
after ninety Christmases.

Don’t ask my why I’ve waited here
locked up inside the hours and years
or why I keep turning away from the one
who holds out his hand in the night.
Don’t ask me why I wake up so early
and stand on the bridge before work
watching the red leaves drift into the river
and thinking nothing will last.