I particularly like this line:
Chemotherapy is as brutal as the cancers it doesn't cure.
Fuck you, clown normally ageing prostate.
I thought we didn't have to pretend to like Seidel anymore because he said or wrote something arguably sexist in that NYT Magazine profile a couple of years ago.
Damn it. I still haven't caught up with the Times' latest "We saw this on Twitter! We're not old! We'll never die!" recommendations.
Does is poem remind anyone else of
"Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker"?
8 is really not playing fair. Merrill's pure virtuosity, light years from anything I would write or feel, is always a marvel. (But it's also sentimental for me because I had an old email pen pal who sent me his poems, inappropriate, unsolicited, at rough times in a rough year, and learning to appreciate them was part of that year's rapid-fire maturation process.)
I never quite learned to love Strand but am grateful that I made it to a workshop with him & Patrizia Cavalli at Chicago-- although I have to remind myself once a year or so that it really did happen and wasn't something I dreamed, since my memory of that year is of an undifferentiated black pit. (Different year!)