My buddy W.E. Butts employs the lens of the present to makes demands on the past in his book Sunday Evening at the Stardust Cafe (1st World Publishing 2006).  These soulful remembrances fixate not only on the irredeemable properties of memory, but what is meant when a person or thing is paid mind to, retrieved, and how the makeshift, the stopgap and the oft-sifted can not only help us take measure of our losses, and reshape them, but intercede or help put us at ease.  A gifted poet, Butts has consistently mapped out the failures and fortunes of small town existence with the spine and the enterprise of someone set on some grail or a good cup of coffee.      


2006 found Mark Levine cropping up in The Wild (University of California Press 2006), with more poems of a circuit-like intricacy and an almost enforced lyricism.  Though these latest tend to strain towards the idyllic, his goggles once-again are trained on the out of kilter (here, the bucolic attests to the affliction it smacks of) and less-often logged, where the "I" is not so much belittled by Nature as sounded off of it, stilled. 

 

 

While they can't hear you scream in space, they might be able to hear you create.  At least in the case of Bill Knott, that is.  His new blog (http://billknott.typepad.com) is a habitually reloading box set, not only cataloguing and seeing to his whole blessed output, but fortifying and power-boosting these historic works with bonus tracks (up-to-the-minute outtakes, the talked-up, and  translations--his and others’), b-sides (the unpublished, the just-birthed, and the knocked-off), the bits (assorted tirades, routines, and tell-alls), and the (anti)-blurb (contesting and coming to terms with everything pobiz).  There couldn't be a better-timed capsule out there--subversive and barbed, it sticks like an asterisk in the throat of the establishment.  Yes, the outcast will be awarded the last word.    

 

 

 

Mark DeCarteret’s work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press) and Thus Spake the Corpse:  An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press).  A new chapbook (If This Is the) New World is forthcoming from March Street Press this year.