I am a bit torn between taking the time to write down my thoughts properly, which will probably require a few posts, and just dashing off some thoughts that are top of mind. I may split the difference: writing just a few things now and then setting up some posts where I track transportation and "vacation" poems. I think the likelihood of me ever finishing the first project, let alone the second is so slim, but I guess it's worth having a few goals along the way. (I was really in deep despair just the other day over the state of the world, and I decided I really ought to move some of these projects forward as there is so little else to motivate me when I cannot be consoled with all the usual blather about "how it gets better," when quite frankly the world is getting worse and at a pace no one is ready for...)
Anyway, I have been reading Michael Longley (incidentally I started about two weeks before his recent passing), and this led to John Burnside and even Frank Ormsby's Goat's Milk. I was surprised to find that I not only had read Longley's Collected Poems over 10 years ago (probably right after I hit Vancouver) but had made a list of my favorite poems from that volume! I certainly didn't remember that, which just goes to show that I really have to write down more of my thoughts before they escape. In general, I am not a huge fan of Longley's (both because he stuck with rhymed poetry long after it was out of fashion and he is mostly a rural poet*). Burnside is very much a religious poet (and in a way that irks me far more than it does with Mary Oliver, for example). That said, he had a few transportation related poems that were pretty interesting. So far I am finding Goat's Milk** the most to my taste of the bunch.
I will likely go ahead and set up pages where I just start dumping these titles but generally not cross-linking to the actual poems, so I don't forget any others (after I had gone to the trouble of finding them in the first place). I do recall that Frederick Seidel has quite a few poems about riding motorcycles of all things. And John Balaban has a number of poems on being in Vietnam (though generally as a soldier, so the theme would have to be stretched to the breaking point and beyond to just include people in foreign places, even if at work on in a war, to accommodate those poems). But his bicycling poem would fit, though it is only one poem out of a sequence. And there was a poem from a collection I checked out recently from Robarts, which I believe was just called "Train," which I liked a lot. I hopefully can track this down right away, but this is why I need a better system obviously. So anyway, this is just off the top of my head of recent discoveries, and I will go find the original lists from where I have saved them to generate the full lists.
Transportation poems:
Eileen Myles "PV" from Maxfield Parrish - subway
(She actually has quite a few about bicycling, and I am hoping to find one that is short enough and not completely profane, but that seems unlikely.)
Jack Gilbert "Suddenly Adult" from The Dance Most of All - train
John Burnside "III: Pilgrimage" from "Roads" in The Asylum Dance - bus
(I generally don't like excerpting poems or even one poem from a series, and there may be better examples, but this has several gripping lines.)
The Poet on Vacation:
Jack Gilbert "Worth" from The Dance Most of All
Anyway, several years back I was on a Ralph Gustafson kick. I eventually picked up all three volumes of his Collected Poems, but I had to order them as Vols. 1 & 2 and Vols. 1 & 3! I finally parted with one copy of Vol. 1. I'm still burned up that the signed copy of Configurations at Midnight was lost in the mail, and I still hope that some day it will make its way to its destination or be returned to the store. I do have one signed copy of a selected poems, and from time to time I consider buying another. It turns out there is a bookstore near Casa Loma that has quite a few. I think I'll wait until spring, and then head over and see what they have in stock.
And with that, I think I need to wrap this up and get back to just reading poetry in order to return these books on time.
* Though for some reason he writes quite extensively on Greek mythology, particularly reworking scenes from The Iliad and The Odyssey.
** Milk keeps cropping up in unlikely places. There is a new lit. magazine starting up in Toronto called Milk Bag. I decided to submit something, even though it is pretty clear I am not the target audience, and indeed they didn't take my submission. Then I checked out Black Milk by Tory Dent; my quick perusal of this volume suggests an affinity with Christopher Smart. "Black Milk" is also a poem in Almadhoun's Adrenalin (though this may be challenging to actually borrow...). And Charles Simic has an early collection titled Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk.
