There's this new poet I discovered in the bookstore the other day who was so good I actually brought his book on the spot which is something, with money tight the way it is lately, that I just don't do at all. Apparently he's been around for quite some time, James Tate, and he won a few prestigious awards lately, Pulitzer Prizes and whatnot; here's someone who I found that actually has stuff I like, which those two things, Pulitzer Prize winners and people I can actually read, don't make combinations I enjoy too often.

I'll just transcribe one of his piece real quick so you can see the different, very quirky way of writing that makes me like him. Oh, he's a poet too, if I haven't revealed that already.

The Camel
James Tate

I received the strangest thing in the mail
today. It's a photograph of me riding a camel
in the desert. And yet I have never ridden a
camel, or even been in a desert. I am wearing
a jellaba and a keffiyeh and I'm waving a rifle.
I have examined the photo with a magnifying
glass and it is definitely me. I can't stop
looking at the photo. I have never even dreamed
of riding a camel in the desert. The ferocity
in my eyes suggest I am fighting some kind of
holy war, that I have no fear of death. I must
hide this photo from my wife and children. They
must not know who I really am. I must not know.

----

Wow. I love it. There's lot's of random pieces like that throughout the book. Never have a read a poetry book where each new poem is a complete and random surprise. I don't feel like I'm being preached to, or that the idea is so obscure that my limited intellect is being challenged to the full. This is great.

I brought a poetry book maybe... two to four months ago by a certain Campbell McGrath. It was delightful at first... but continuing to read it makes my head hurt. Very badly. I'm not sure, on further reading, why I thought this collection of poetry was for me at ALL. I'm of the love of Bukowski, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. Simple and straightforward works. Maybe it's my limited vocabulary that's dominating my dislike and disdain for this particular poet, but it's a book I still have yet to finish. A little over 200 some pages, entitled Seven Notebooks, I think I have only reached the fourth one, and I dare not think about what hurdles the other three will be. Here's an excerpt, one of the pieces from his book.

April 20
Campbell McGrath

Talking in class about rhetorical posture.
The students, several of whom are extravagantly
gifted, have been so deeply indoctrinated
with the depersonalizing jargon of critical theory
that they can barely accommodate the notion
of authorial agency, let alone the concept of a speaker.
Where is the speaker situated in this poem?
Not the speaker but the voice. Not the voice
but the self. Not the self but the locus of issuance.
How can I convince them that poems if texts
are human texts, that texts if artifacts
are artifacts forged in the furnace
of the heart, the soul, the psyche, however
you imagine or care to name that machine
we hear idling in the engine room at night.
Springlike today, near seventy, sunny and blue.
Budding trees no longer skeletal as logic.
The particular hickory or maple in the alley
whose sheaves of hairline branches engraved
discrete linear designs upon the iridescent sky
has swollen into generality, a fuzzy abstraction.
Another week should see the bloom-out
of purest, whisper-green shoots, darkening
all summer to fall.

----

The two instances of pieces, actually random ones I picked out (that weren't too long, bless my fingers, it's late) are really fine examples of the whole of their works. One is very random, but still has a very sure, otherworldly point, and the other is random, just random! Maybe I'm revealing the truth in why I would never "make it" in the poetry world, although Tate has won very important awards, much more than the other guy, it took years for him to get there (starting his writing back in the 60's) and his particular style of writing was confusing for many at first, he still made it. So maybe, he can be my hero.