Poetry News

I'm just now catching up on poetry news – 

congratulations to Mr. Merwin.

Whitman quotes Merwin in 

The Wild Kingdom

:

The line is taken from:

For a Coming Extinction

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you

Tell him that we were made

On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

Unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your work to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

Party-UPDATED

PLEASE NOTE NEW DATE




I will be at Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn, NY on SATURDAY, NOV. 13, signing books and "in conversation" with the Internet's Tucker Stone. It will be like Jim Fowler on Johnny Carson mixed with Pekar on Letterman. I should also have some new zines finished by then, I hope? Please stop by and say hello. Present your business card.

The Wild Kingdom Cover


Please note, this is the actual cover of my new book:


Not this, which several websites have reported:


I know, they're pretty similar, but if you look closely, you can tell that the first version is more pleasant and more scientifically accurate. Also the first one is what the book looks like.  The second version is incorrect and should be discarded. What must have happened is, because one file was created as a .gif and the other a .jpg., the different algorithms must have introduced statistical errors into the data. It's an easy mistake to make. If you're using Netscape on your T-Mobile everything should appear correctly.

Turtle

Today on the way home from breakfast I found a turtle in the road. To save him from being run over, I put him in my kitchen for a while. I woke Katie up to look at it. At first she thought it had got into the house on its own somehow. Then it crawled into the cat's food dish and sat there. We put it into a box and brought it to the park.