Marking · time · in · multiples · of · eight

If you want a giant nosegay of opinions about the current state of poetry reviewing,  one such bouquet is up--in pieces, at least--in the first issue of MAYDAY. (Disclaimer: I am one of the contributors.) As usual, in reading the other responses to the prompt--many from people who are NAMES (at least to me)--I am abashed and admiring at once. I believe now that my worst problem is not--as I once feared--a lack of intellectual rigor but a mail suit of archness that seems to grow right out of my skin. It's like I've just noticed I have scales and can you get dermabrasion for that and all? It's as if I can only be serious, and I am dead serious almost always, with my eyebrows raised. ("Serious" doesn't mean "humorless." Really! Look at that giddy souffle with a pellet of lead for a heart!)

I used to worry a lot about being all style and no substance. My thinking on that's changed a bit--style is substance or can be if you're of a certain cast of mind (I am). But if style and rhetoric are, on some level the same thing, your style had damn well better be deft enough and strong enough to merit the identity. And suddenly, suddenly, I am feeling as clumsy and weak and, well, belated as a baby dinosaur. Will there be better lexicons when we grow up?

What course of treatment do they recommend for an allergy to sincerity? Or maybe it's not so much sincerity as sentiment that gives me the hives. It hurts, almost, to give an opinion unqualified by some some attestation as to the partial, subjective and highly idiosyncratic nature of opinion itself. But, of course, I have this baffling gravity about my own opinions, even when I tell you (and I will!) for god's sake, don't take this stuff seriously! I want you to value what I say and, at the same time, to see the idiocy inherent in that judgment. It isn't just, it just is.

That old ankylosaurus always was kind of a loner anyway...
But ankylosaurus, know'st ye not that thou and I am one?

When you fall asleep at noon and the silk monkey and Snufkin and the hobgoblin and his panther come to you in your dream, all you want is to rush to J. in Prague with a dish full of plums and tell her about it.

I like this Mark Wallace poem. I think it has inspired me to a collaborative experiment with you, gentle reader. Let's make something beautiful together. Write me with a question or a conundrum and I will write you an answer. Factitious and fictional inquiries encouraged. Because, ducklings, because why? Because:

THIS 
IS 
AS 
SIMPLE 
AS 
IT 
SEEMS 
BUT 
NOT 
AS 
IT 
GETS