AND THEN THERE WAS 10


An update on the dwindling shelves of poetry in the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Chico, CA.

When last reported on in February, I had noted that there was a drop-off from 22 shelves of poetry in 2005 to just 15 in early 2009.

I was in the store today to find that they had disappeared the entire POETRY section completely. I asked a roving employee where it had gone, and he walked me over to the reverse side of the children's playworld, with cardboard castles and all of that kind of nonsense. I then noticed that it was not even 15 shelves anymore, but 10.

10 shelves of poetry.

And of these 10, 2 and a 1/2 were devoted to anthologies and the Best of series. Another entire half of one shelf was given over to Dante's Divine Comedy. The combination of Homer and Charles Bukowski's books would fill out the other half of a shelf. One more shelf could be occupied by simply filling it with Baudelaire, Whitman, Frost, Neruda, and Blake.

Anyone not involved in the world of poetry would be safe to assume that only dead people wrote poetry.

REDUCED TO CONDENSITY 4



The erotic world must be explored in some way, in some form, for the work to have any longterm interest.

Just as--or not just as--a house of any worth must consider Lighting before anything else.

This is not prurience.

Before cabinetry, before tiles, before windows.

Laura Sims' Stranger--a work of mysterious, emotional, fragmentary arrangements.

Choss is not exactly scree.

As well as a sliver of death in the mix but no nostalgia of/for victims.

We passed the official sign for NY, NY in 3 a.m darkness and saw an SUV, 100 feet or more from the road, completely engulfed in flames.

Laura Sims' Stranger--the sense of denseness in flight.

Two movies are titled Crash, but Cronenberg's is the only one worth watching.

Because windows are for forgetting.

I have been occupied with various things over the last few weeks but thought I would explain that I did reach the summit of Mt. Shasta (14,162 ft) on June 28 at 9:30 a.m. That Sunday morning involved no sleep, getting ready, and leaving camp at 3:30 a.m. Six hours later we were on the top. We didn't get back down to our cars until 3 p.m. Then, I had a 2.5 hour drive back home. Where it was 109F. An incredible climb. Mt. Rainier looms.