When I was a kid, my brother and I played innumerable rounds of Horse. Or Pig. Or even Superman which was a reversal of Horse and meant that a missed shot gave a letter to your opponent instead.

My brother Joe was a better shot than I was. Two years older, faster, stronger, better in every way. So we started employing trick shots instead of straight up shooting for the basket. No, now you had to spin around fifteen times or ricochet the ball off the planter or perform the layup with a blindfold on. These shots were less about skill and more about luck and abiding by the rules of the shot. And since anything can become easier with practice, we had to mix it up a lot, discarding old tricks that were no longer baffling our opponent, keeping them off-balance and always in danger of falling splat on the pavement.

Poetry is like that. Master a trick shot, even if it’s the only one you can do, and keep dazzling your opponent with it. More importantly, if they can’t make the shot, they get tagged with an H, even if the reason the shot involved bouncing the ball off her own head was just one person’s way of keeping the game interesting, of preventing the Joes of the world from simply trouncing the Julies.

(Crossposted with WEE.)

“Critics being critics – there has been, is, and will be attempts to impose rules on free verse that (in theory) assist in making judgments about them.”–gabriel

Most other art forms get a daily dose of public opinion to keep them honest. A snob might bemoan some purer form falling by the wayside, and I might even be that snob on occasion. The rules that critics have applied to free verse are better seen as genres–it’s easier to compare a mystery to another mystery than to a cookbook–and while I don’t particularly want to read horror, we wouldn’t even know that there is a market for it if it we refused to publish it in the first place. Why is poetry different? We can point and laugh at the Dan Browns of the world, safe in knowing we can’t even be compared. We have no expectations of poetry being popular, so we can feel validated by the lack of popularity and our own misunderstood genius.

“Oh, we got both kinds. We got Country and Western.”–Blues Brothers

There are huge chunks of the population that don’t want Country or Western, but poetry critics don’t seem to want them to have the choice. Yes, it’s a chicken and egg question: Is the market for poetry so small that we have to limit publication, or is the market so small because we already have?

I can’t answer that question. Come on, you knew I couldn’t. Don’t look at me that way. But I think the internet, the world of blogs, online publications, and similar outlets can find out. Right now, we’re still operating under the principle that there isn’t enough space for all of it, Country, Western, Swing, Hip-Hop, Rock. We have to squash one genre to allow our chosen one room to grow. But there is a near-infinite number of pixels available and we’ve got more elbow room than sense.

(Crossposted with WEE.)

If you’re a fan of fantasy fiction (say that three times fast), you should check out Scoplaw’s blog for some good discussion of some must-reads.

One book I recommended is Marie Jakober’s The Black Chalice. I had a tough time with the book in the beginning, but I was glad that I persevered. You can read my review here, where I gave it four out of five stars.

I like to do mental “if you liked this, you’d love this” lists, but Jakober’s book is harder than normal to fit. If you like Kate Elliott’s setting, you might like Jakober? If you like medieval mysteries, you might like Jakober? Aw hell, I don’t know. Just try it. It’s a one-off, so you won’t be out too much time.

Okay, things are getting desperate.

I considered making it myself, though I don’t think any store within 50 miles would supply mascarpone. “Hey, duddint Jeff Gordon drive onea those? Nyuk nyuk.”

For a mere fifty dollars I can have one delivered from New York City. (All together now: New York City?!)

Even burnt popcorn, food of the gods, didn’t help. I’m going into a decline.

Which reminds me of a poem, a poem with a pun!

The whole poem isn’t worth posting. It is, in fact, sucktastic. But the pun was a good ‘un.

excerpt from Babel

I still thumb the leaves
with some odd hope I’ll decipher
what he wrote. Or someday Catullus
will come cackling through my brain
reminding me how to decline age.

Maybe the next time I’ll offer 10 dollars to the person who can write a poem around that pun.

Which reminds me. Have you written your julain today?

Today I heard the world’s stupidest comment. It wasn’t “George W. Bush has your best interests at heart” or “This might sting a little.”

No, it was “Give me an amicable divorce and we might get remarried someday.”

No, Steve didn’t say it and I’m not posting this from prison.

I just got a call from the world’s smallest telemarketer.

And I bought from her! Four boxes of Girl Scout cookies! Samoas and Trefoils!

They always say that once you buy from a telemarketer, your name gets out. Then everyone knows you for the sucker you are.

Telemarketer Olivia knows this and will use it to her advantage. “Buy six boxes next year, Aunt Julie, or I’ll give your name to the Brownies!”

Which means that I’m bored and need someone new to stare at.

*crickets*

Yeah, I never seem to get any volunteers for that one.

I got Steve baseball tickets for our anniversary. Opening weekend at the Jake, where we will probably freeze our byootocks to the seats. April in Cleveland. There are fools, damned fools, and Indians fans. Guess which of the categories we belong to.

(I usually say I’m a Cleveland fan when people ask me my team. My thoughts on the name “Indians” are incoherent and ill-formed. Essentially, I agree with whoever spoke last.

This is unlike me. Usually I get an opinion and stick with it, never letting inconvenient things like facts get in my way.)

April means spring, which means baseball, planting tomatoes, and having to mow. Two out of three ain’t bad.

My thoughts only turn that way because the thermometer read 52 at one point today. It made me want to pick out seedlings.

Bears have the right idea.

I just remembered that April also means the drive-in opens and I turn 35. I’m aging awfully gracefully for such a surly punk. Rarr.

From a bug, for example, on the door of a car.

My husband has a ’73 Mustang in need of a paint job. It used to be gold. Strike that, it used to be the color of a bug. We didn’t know it used to be the color of a bug until the bug showed us.

If only it were a Volkswagen, the symbolism would be perfect. Wait. That’s a beetle. Nevermind.

Drive Thru

I’ve seen too many insects die that way
with whirring wings that weren’t quick enough
to shear the wind. I’ve seen lean swallows stray
into my path, ride turbulence too rough
for my smooth mammal body to withstand.
But some slow few lie crumpled on the tar
like feathered caps. I’ve seen the furry bands
that stripe a raccoon’s tail hang from a car,
an inadvertent trophy for their aim.
But still I drive. The horrors of the cross
between man-made and nature are the same
if I should see or not. So I’ll engross
myself in speed when bright mosquito blood,
if theirs it is, lies specking on the hood.

I’m frozen and I don’t like it one little bit.

Every year I ask for heated socks. I never get them. Dammit, if wearers of hip-waders can have heated socks, so can I!

I’ve been cold since 1999. It’s like my internal thermostat woke up one day and decided that mammalian was overrated and wouldn’t I rather be a lizard sunning on a big rock somewhere?

After six years, I think I can tell said thermostat, with some authority, hell no.