Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Like its actors, "Ma vie avec James Dean" (2017), written and directed by Dominique Choisy, is extremely likeable. Johnny Rasse plays the young director Géraud Champreux, who goes to Normandy to present his first feature film "My Life with James Dean." He meets a bunch of oddballs, including Balthazar, played with lovelorn candor by Mickaël Pelissier. Françoise Lebru, who plays Champreux's mom, steals the few short scenes she appears in.   

A Christmas column for Singapore Unbound's e-newsletter. Sign up here . Sunday morning, I found myself in Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. Having left the Christian religion twenty years ago and not having found my way back to it yet, I was attending church at the invitation of friends, a lesbian couple who love Guy and me, and whom we love. Mount Auburn is a special congregation. In defiance of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Mount Auburn has not only championed the cause of ordination rights for GLBT persons but has also performed same-sex covenant unions since 1994. After the confession, the readings, and the beautiful singing of the chancel choir, the pastor Rev. Stacey Midge applied the Bechdel test to the Bible. Named after the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the test measures the representation of women in fiction. It asks three questions of a work: (1) Does it name more than one woman character? (2) Does it have a woman talking to another w...

Watched "Love after Love" (2017) yesterday and loved it. Directed by Russell Harbaugh, it starred a terrific ensemble cast of Andie MacDowell as mother, and Chris O'Dowd and James Adomian as her two sons, all trying to come to terms with their husband/father's death. Nov 25 - had breakfast with PYR and first interview. She's a great storyteller. I've written 6 of the poems for A History of Singaporeans in America. Got the idea to name the poems a la Chaucer. The Host. The Ceramicist. The Prodigal. The Regular. The Lawyer. The Whore. PYR is The Lady. The book's epigraph is from Henry James: “‘Ah then she’s not French,’ Isabel murmured; and as the opposite supposition had made her romantic it might have seemed that this revelation would have marked a drop. But such was not the fact; rarer even than to be French seemed it to be American on such interesting terms.” — Portrait of a Lady 

GH and I spent Thanksgiving with our friends living just outside of Kingston. The visit was a food and movie marathon. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, Chikamatsu Monogatari , or A Story from Chikamatsu (1954), unfolded at just the right leisurely pace for all the parts of the tragic love story to be perfectly comprehensible. It reminded me of what Erich Auerbach wrote about Odysseus's scar, how everything in Homer, unlike the Hebrew scriptures, is simple, stark, and obvious. Then we watched Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), which was charming in its own way, but paled in comparison to the Japanese classic. Then we watched the Coen brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). I liked their twisted takes on the conventions on the Western genre in this anthology of stories. There is grotesquerie, of course, but also, surprisingly, tenderness and pathos.

Went to the Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK (RAPAPUK) Conference in Cambridge, UK (Friday and Saturday, Oct 26 and 27). Initiated and co-organized by Dorothy Wang. The theme of the conference was, aptly, "Legacies of Colonialism." Priyamvada Gopal was most incisive and insightful about the possibility and meaning of "decolonizing Cambridge." I also learned from Walt Hunter's paper ‘Riot of Sound: Claudia Jones’s Carceral Poetics’ and Chinelo Ezenwa's paper ‘Stifling Indigenous Agency through Translation: the Igbo Psalms and a Poetics of Decolonization’. Dorothy was at her polemic best in her presentation 'Whither Poetry Studies?' There were poetry readings during both evenings of the conference. The first night showcased four experimental and performance poets. The second night, which I liked better, showcased three page poets, among whom Will Harris and Mary Jean Chan stood out, for me.

Quash the Conviction and Sentence of Artist-activist Seelan Palay, October 9, 2018 Call on Singaporean Writers to Condemn Seelan Palay’s Wrongful Imprisonment, October 22, 2018

I've a new poem, "Counting Song," in the anthology of new Singaporean writings in CHA . After four days of events, the 3rd Singapore Lit Fest in NYC ended on Saturday. I think I am most proud of having given a platform to a diversity of voices while keeping the quality of writing and performance high. The most important step forward is to democratize the curatorial process. Having been the sole curator for the last two festivals, I'd like to have two other people join me on the selection committee. I have someone from the USA. I need someone from Singapore.

So pleased that my new book of poems CONNOR AND SEAL will be published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Thank you, Bryan Borland and Seth Pennington, for believing in the work. My publishing journey has been one of twists and turns. My very first book PAYDAY LOANS was published by Roxanne Hoffman's Poets Wear Prada, a small press based in New Jersey. Encouraged by the late John Stahle, my second book EQUAL TO THE EARTH and third book SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT were self-published in New York under the imprint of Bench Press. My fourth book THE PILLOW BOOK was picked up by Singaporean indie publisher Kenny Leck and his Math Paper Press. STEEP TEA, my fifth book, was released by Michael Schmidt's Carcanet Press in the UK. I'm glad that my new book has found a home in the USA. It's the most American and queerest of my books. It owes its inspiration to Rita Dove's THOMAS AND BEULAH and its life to my life with Guy Humphrey in Harlem. Based in Little Rock, Ar...

By closely examining five well-chosen case studies—the 1966 Vandalism Act, the 1974 Press Act, the 1986 Legal Profession (Amendment) Act, the 1991 Religious Harmony Act, and the 2009 Public Order Act—through the lens of critical discourse analysis, Jothie Rajah's Authoritarian Rule of Law: Legislation, Discourse and Legitimacy in Singapore shows how the Singapore state governs through the illiberal "rule by law" while claiming to do so through the liberal "rule of law." By legislating illiberal laws and dominating public discourse, the state has successfully silenced or co-opted, in turn, its early electoral opponents, the local press, the legal profession, the Catholic Church and other religious organizations, and local civil society--the major sources of non-state authority and mobilization. How then, Rajah asks, does the Singapore state construct and maintain its legitimacy despite such illiberal moves? The answer, implicit throughout the book, is articul...

This collection of closely-linked essays by sociologist Teo You Yen challenges the reader to look closely at the portrait of poverty and inequality in Singapore. It is not a pretty sight, the precarious existence of many Singaporeans living in the richest country in Asia. How did we get here? The book has many answers, big and small, the most important of which is that poverty is not an exception to the much-touted system, but is, rather, the result of the structures, policies, and procedures pursued by government and people to increase wealth. Poverty is the result of inequality. Teo describes with sympathetic insight and keen detail the lives of Singaporeans living in poverty. She is an excellent writer whose expositions are lucid and descriptions vivid. Significantly, she locates herself in her study, as a means of contrasting her better position (university professor, married with children) with that of the disadvantaged. What would hammer home her argument is a companion volume de...

On behalf of my dad, mom, and sister, I want to thank you for coming out tonight. And thank you for sharing your memories of my dad. They help to give a fuller picture of the man. I will always remember my father as a man of great patience. When I was in Radin Mas Primary School, he waited for me outside the school gates for my pianica class to finish, so he could bring me home on his bicycle. He taught me how to swim in the Bukit Merah public swimming pool. He would patiently demonstrate the strokes to show me how to do it. Whatever patience I possess as a teacher now, I learned it from him. When I went overseas for my studies, he waited for me to come home. When I decided one year not to come home in order to travel around in Europe, he waited for me still. His patience was the kind that gave his children the freedom to pursue their own lives. After I moved to New York, I would come home every summer and find him waiting for me. I don't mean to suggest that he was not doing a...

At this year's Singapore Theatre Festival, organized by W!ld Rice, besides "Press Gang," I also watched "Supervision" written by Thomas Ng and directed by Glen Goei, a full-dress rehearsal of "An Actress Prepares" written by Alfian Sa'at, directed by Aidli 'Alin" Mosbit, and starring Siti Khalijah, and "One Metre Square: Voices from Sungei Road" co-created by San Mu and Zelda Tatiana Ng, and directed by Zelda Tatiana Ng.

Why do establishment defenders rush to claim that a satirical work is "heavy-handed" when it finds its mark? Akshita Nanda, the arts correspondent of The Straits Times , dismisses the new play by Tan Tarn How, "Press Gang," in just such a manner but she does not really address the accuracy of its depiction of the self-censorship rife in the newsroom of the fictitious Singapore Times or of the different personalities satirized in the play. How could she, after all? The people skewered are her colleagues and bosses. And, even more dangerously, her bosses' bosses, the current PAP government that has shown itself to be no friend to the press. It is not without reason that Singapore ranks 151st in the 2018 World Press Freedom Index, three places below Russia. But you will not find a hint of such a dire situation in Nanda's review. Instead, she insinuates that the play is wrong. "Accuracy is not the point of the text," she pontificates, "as thea...

Last night, at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park, watched with GH the Classical Theatre of Harlem's production of Antigone , inspired by Paul Roche’s adaptation from the classic Greek tragedy by Sophocles, and directed by Carl Cofield. The set was tremendously impressive with a two-level ramp on the right, topped by columns, on both of which, ramp and columns, were projected images, colors, and protest graffiti. On the left was a grand flight of stairs going up to forbidding-looking glass doors. The actors were fine, but the best of them all was the man who played the comic Messenger.   Alexandria King and Ty Jones as Antigone and King Creon, Photo: Richard Termine

Stephen (also Stephanie) Burt has made girlhood her territory, not looked back upon in nostalgia or regret, but as it is happening . Attacking it with memories, real and imagined, and with poems written after Callimachus and Baudelaire, she treats it appropriately with seriousness and artistry. Advice from the Lights is a fantastic feat of recall and imagination, rendered in language alive to its own possibilities.

Hari Kunzru's White Tears is utter compelling. I've not read a novel as good as this one for a while. Gripping plot, complex characters, and beautiful writing combine with memorable set pieces to twist (or is it untwist) a yarn that is dyed in the history of blues in the USA. A novel that forces one to reconsider the deadly implications of cultural appropriation. HA's recommended that I read the title story, so I bought the collection Nathan Englander's What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank to do so. The title story is as good as HA's warm recommendation. My sympathies kept shifting from one person to another as two couples drink, smoke weed, and play a parlor game that turns out to be devastating. The other stories in the collection never come close to the complexity and power of the first story, although "Peep Show" is an intriguing surrealistic turn and "The Reader" is an affecting tale, mostly because as a poet I sympathize de...

At MoMA today, the revelation was Bodys Isek Kingelez's sculptural models of buildings and cities. Fanciful, colorful, utopian. "Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can't make models is a nation that doesn't understand things, a nation that doesn't live": Kingelez (1948-2015), based in then-Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also saw the retrospective of Adrian Piper but was not as taken with it. The exception was a triptych of Madonnas and children, white in the central and biggest panel, flanked by black and Asian. The misery in the side panels comments ironically on the happiness in the center. Among the many gifts of patron Agnes Gund to the museum was a startling beautiful "Soundsuit" by Nick Cave. Perched on a mannequin was an elaborate construction of metal, beads, and ceramic birds and flowers of the kind commonly founded in antique or secondhand stores. * Two Singaporean debut novels. Enjoyed Rachel Heng...

My first Aeneid , and it was a very engaging introduction. The translation read very well and I followed Virgil's storytelling eagerly, skipping over only the list of combatants and their family origins. The sack of Troy was utterly gripping. The tragedy of Dido, in this translation, was less affecting than I expected. Aeneas' reaction in the episode was remarkably muted. The Furies were terrifying; the whole descent to Hell was excellent. In the war between the Trojans and the Latins, Aeneas, destined by the Fates to win, was less interesting than the tragic figure of Turnus, war leader of the Latins. I was struck by how closely Virgil imitated Homer in terms of incidents and also tried to go one up. So the epic did not end with the siege of the Trojan's camp, as in The Iliad but went further in having the Trojans lay siege themselves to Latium, the success of which forced finally Turnus to fight Aeneas one to one. Ferry's iambic pentameter is very flexible and capabl...

Just read my first Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find . I remember reading the title story somewhere else and it was just as good the second time. She is terrific at conjuring up a sense of mounting dread. Her characters feel real mostly because they act out of motives that are obscure even to themselves. That sense of mystery gestures to the beyond, the religious, the damned and the salvific. There is a dogged persistence to her most memorable characters, like Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson in the otherwise slight story "The Artificial Nigger." The religious symbolism is laid on a bit too thickly for my taste, but hey, I'm not of the South. The masterpieces are here: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "Good Country People," and "The Displaced Person." The slighter ones too: "A Stroke of Good Fortune," "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," "A Circle in the Fire," "A Late Encounter with the Enemy....

United States Virgin Islands Let’s find an instrument close at hand— an old sardine can, white pine wood, a useless sack for twine— and join a scratch band that welcomes us. United States, we sing of thee, with our squash, our cane flute, ukelele, and ass pipe made from the exhaust tube of a car, we sing, make thyself worthy of us and make us worthy of thee, we sing all together from Twin City, Rock City, Love City, from all over, islands old as the volcano but forever virginal.

Puerto Rico To see the bioluminescence, light without fire, sit tight in your canoe and stir the dark water. A tiny meteor will appear in the atmosphere of the bay. Stir again, this time not with your paddle but with your hand, and direct the sentence of the second meteor. You are then angel and patient.

Northern Mariana Islands These islands have names-- not Asuncion, Saipan, Tinian, Pagan, but older ones-- Launch Pad, Mission Field, Way Station, The Secret of My Heart's Desire, and one that is possibly mistranslated as Dandelions Growing Out of a Boot.

Guam Ferried over by a military transport, the brown tree snake has nearly killed off the ko'ko' bird, now only bred in captivity. Forests, where the secretive rail once ran, its elongated body slipping through the receptive herbage, are empty of bird whistle but full of spiders and swathed like a bride in spider webs.

American Samoa He charged at the ball and at the quarterback. He sacked all our defenses. He made America sit up and look for their maps. “I have a fear of being average,” said the tight end. He shot himself dead in the chest, the warrior, said good-bye with the lyrics of “Who I Ain’t.” Born in Oceanside, California, but he came from the territory with one zip code. in memory of Junior Seau (1969 – 2012)

District of Columbia Not real, marmoreal city, mammary gland, memory land, march of the living and the dead, the murmur in the corridor that changes everything. The reflecting pool, humming tunelessly, steals your face. * Lady Bird (2017), written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a good movie, but not a great one. Why the fuss over it? Saoirse Ronan, as the Sacramento high school senior stumbling through her first romance, family entanglements, and college application, makes it very watchable. Laurie Metcalf is wonderful as Mom. Lucas Hedges, Lady Bird's first boyfriend who turns out to be gay, is a natural actor. He also appears as the nephew in Manchester by the Sea . In Valentina's Wedding (La Boda de Valentina, 2018), a silly but enjoyable romp, an all grown-up Ryan Carnes as Valentina's gringo fiance. Still has the body he showed off in Eating Out .

Wyoming Here you can stand over the Continental Divide, rivers to the left, rivers to the right, and feel the irreconcilable differences. Rain stands here too, in this great Basin, not running to any ocean, true, but moving, nevertheless. The rain sinks here into the parched ground, or else evaporates into the air.

Wisconsin This is the house that Wright built and rebuilt and rebuilt after each ravagement, the limestone from a local quarry, the plaster mixed with sienna to resemble the sandy banks of the river, the shingles weathered to the color of silver-grey trees, the windows placed to let the sun in at every hour of the day. This is the house that houses Japanese prints and Ming vases, a council circle re-de-signed by an immigrant Dane, and bears the name of a Welsh bard, which means Shining Brow. This is the house that built other houses and the centrifugal house for Non-Objective art, later named after its founding Jew. This is the house that students come to every summer to study how to build a house.

West Virginia A snippet of video cut from a cut and recombined with the clip is called West Virginia. A pod of dolphins leaving a super-pod to join a herd is called West Virginia. Welcome to the secession from the secession, which is not the same as unity, or Not Having Left. Welcome to the past, the present, and the future. The deutero-stomes, whose first hole formed the anus of the organism, split from the proto-stomes, whose first hole formed the mouth, 590 million years ago. We look forward to their rejoining and our recording of the convention of the blastopore.

Washington “I don’t belong to any of you,  not to the Army Corps of Engineers, not to the anthropologists, not even to the Confederated Tribes of the Coville Reservation, to whom I most closely resemble in my genetic material. I am not native. I am not foreign. I am the Kennewick Man, named so because I was completely found in Kennewick, which means a grassy place, as in the grass is always greener on the other side, also, winter paradise, for winters there are mild, or, in another name, Tehe, the laughter of a girl when asked the name of where she lived.”

Virginia Do you want the name of your state on a landmark case against loving? “Mr. Cohen, tell the Court I love my wife and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.” Mr. Cohen, tell the court of public opinion I love all my boys, the statistician, the father, the masochist, the Starbucks manager, the above-average architect, the ex-lawyer, and the lovers still in their diapers, and it is so unfair that I can’t live with all of them at once, at their peak, o, blue ridge mountain, by the Potomac with its two sources.

Vermont sugar maple rock maple hydraulic lift phloem tap bowling pins guitar neck pure stand shade tolerant pool cues sad sap real estate civil union fall colors secret history climate change commemorative coin winged seed winged seed

Utah In the painting of the Promontory Summit by Thomas Hill, in the ceremony of the golden spike, which would join not just two rails, not just two halves of a country, but two world-faring oceans, you can see the Big Four, the railway officials, the railroad workers, women, even an Indian, but not a Chinese stone blaster stone carter, bridge builder, cook, who survived the panning years over the Sierra Nevada.

Texas They raise them now, the broncos, for bucking, running wild on the open range, but gentled for worming, for loading in trailers and in the bucking chute. The beasts are scored too, for rocking hard and not in a straight line, for bucking unpredictably. On the first jump out of the chute, the cowboy has to mark  the horse out—his heels have to tap the shoulders of the athletic gelding for the ride to count. Make it count.

Tennessee Heartbreak. Jailhouse. You’ve got to love the words as much as the music. You’ve got to shoot not just from the pelvis but break out the pulse.

I've just discovered Freddie Mercury. https://youtu.be/oozJH6jSr2U

South Dakota You could flash a route, but the pure ascend the rock on-sight, without fore- knowledge, every handhold a self discovery. You could dance with the crowd on the head of a pin, but the tenacious  angel, who knows when to smear and when to campus, always mindful of the risk of a zipper, climbs the Needles.

South Carolina There’s no sensation like syncopation. I’d rather Charleston in Charleston. There’s more to destroy than the towers of Troy. I’d rather Soloi in Soloi. Give up the dry eye to the blue sea and the blue sky. I’d rather Shanghai in Shanghai. For the scoop and the dope, for the good trope, Grant in Grant and Hope in Hope. I may never Barbados in Barbados, or Buncombe in Buncombe, but let me be banged up by a gang of 251 men or more. I’d rather Singapore in Singapore.

Rhode Island On a sailboat or in a synagogue, the end will come. Watching the green light or lighting the gas light, the end will come. Working on a farm or in a pharmacy, the end will come. Reciting a letter or rescinding a check, the end will come. Out of the sky or into the skin, the end will come. Come, the end, for, after a lifetime of waiting, we are well provided for.

Pennsylvania Fourscore and seven years ago, Charlie Chaplin released City Lights , the Scottsboro Boys were convicted of rape, Nevada legalized gambling, Harold Urey discovered deuterium, the Empire State Building was completed, John Haven Emerson perfected his iron lung, a gallon of gas cost 10 cents, Dick Tracy began his career in the Detroit Mirror , Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion, the Bible Student Movement took the name of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Alvin Ailey was born—so I date this poem and this poem dates me.

Oregon Under it all swims the fungus, the weight of 200 whales spread thin over 2000 acres, surfacing like splashes of latex in most places, breathing through the gills of honey mushrooms every fall. It kills trees, yes, creeping after the network of roots and tying its shoestrings around and about their feet, but the slow decay, the inevitable drop, makes temporary homes of trees for what we hear as birds.

Oklahoma Sooner rather than later, all 25 native languages spoken here will disappear, unless the school in Tahlequah succeeds in teaching its children to cherish their Cherokee, the language 75% of which consists of verbs, some verbs denoting the quality of their direct objects, so you can say in one word hand me something flexible, like a rope, hand me something long, like a broom or a pencil, hand me something liquid, or a container for liquid, like a cup of joe, hand me something living.

Ohio The blushes along even the baseball bat make you think of passion but it was a celebrity wedding, this Andy Warhol print of Pete Rose, this picture bride, this baseball card, made in the exciting year chasing the world record of hits, and breaking it the day after the work was unveiled. Two years later, Rose was banned for betting on his Reds and Andy, who did not know a thing about baseball, was dead.

North Dakota You know Fargo, now get to Minot, where every September Vikings take up swords to fight the Trolls at the Norsk Høstfest, and the solemnest business, to induct into the Hall of Fame chefs, oil drillers, actors, the dishy Josh Duhamel, musicians, coaches, the secret agent who saved Mrs. Kennedy, the school counselor who spent all his free time building a Viking ship from scratch, through his leukemia, which sailed, after his death, through the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, down the Hudson, into the storm of the Atlantic, the ship Hjemkomst, all the way to Norway,  ending in champagne with the pale King.

North Carolina Wilmington—where the term “race riot” was invented to dress up the killing of blacks. At the age of 32, Alexander Manly  dared to write in 1898, “Every Negro lynched is called ‘a big burly, black brute,’ when in fact many…were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them as is very well known to all,” and had his words twisted in the white papers and afterwards his Daily Record burned and gutted, and his people, women also, gunned down by the Red Shirts.

New Jersey Put out the light, Edison, return to your river, to your fishing with a bamboo rod. Forget your rod and let the fish still swim in their ignorance. The schoolchild working late into the night on advanced trigonometry will thank you. The factory worker descending into the chemical tank will thank you. The first-time lover too, fumbling with the buckle of the boy on top of him, borrowing an excuse from the moonless night for his inexperience. That lover, he will remember the sweet terror afterwards, as will the savage, cowering in the fundamental shadow of the eclipse of the sun. New Mexico No, it doesn’t go beep-beep. The roadrunner has a slow and descending dove-like coo. With its red and blue mascara, it’s a drag queen who has just undressed after the show, and from the print of its zygodactyl feet, digits 2 and 3 facing forward, 1 and 4 facing back, nobody knows, not even him, where he goes off-stage into the night of...

Last night, went with GH to the National Black Theater to watch Sancho , written and performed by Paterson Joseph. Brought from the Caribbean to London by his master, Ignatius Sancho rose from servitude through education and patronage to become an author, composer, and letter writer in the eighteenth century. He was even painted by Thomas Gainsborough as an English gentleman. No Moorish prince or spear-shaking warrior for him. The talented Joseph, whose parents also came to London from the Caribbean, from St. Lucia, showed a vital connection to one whom he considered legitimately an ancestor. The first half of the play was well conceived and written, dramatizing his birth on a slave ship, the theatricals at his mistresses' London house, his education by the powerful Montagu family. The courtship portion fell a little flat and the opening of a grocery shop at Westminster felt anticlimactic. But the writing brought the one-man play to a suitably triumphant end, which I won't give...

Nebraska Banged-up Chevy jitters past Wenzl Hardware (closed), Pioneer Theater, (shuttered), Western Outpost (cowboy boots for sale) to Long Home Coffee Company. Inside, three men rhyming with Cezanne mutters about Walmart. A schoolgirl is excited on her phone about a college on the coast. The tablemat plugs a play (New!) about two ladies who lock themselves in a closet and pray when America elects a Democrat. Over the brown sink of the Missouri swoop tiny white-bellied insect-eaters in lasso loops.

Montana Little was lynched here for organizing the miners and lumberjacks and speaking against the war. German was forbidden for a time. Further back, a general asked for the bison to be slaughtered to starve the Indians. In these rich valleys between sky-topping mountains, a river runs through the last best place, and by the river roamed families of triceratops, plucking at the palms with their beaks.

Missouri He came into the world with Halley’s Comet and went out with it, as he fore-said. He trained as a steamship pilot and studied the river’s every swirl and snag. He nicked his penname from an old sailor, an old river cry, meaning, mark the two fathoms that give safe passage. He changed his mind. He decried the domination of the Philippines and praised the Chinese Boxers. He was against slavery but made his masterpiece, Huck, struggle with the common prejudice, terrified he was going to hell for freeing Jim. Have I read it? No… I’d rather float with this boat downriver and think of his dark last years when his daughter Suzy died, and then his wife Olivia died, and then another daughter, the youngest, Jean.

Mississippi Good levees, once built by slaves, then poor Irish, taken over by the state, funded by the Fed, make good fortunes until they don’t. (The wetlands, endemic sponge, are vanishing.) The river sleeps while it runs the manmade course and once in a while wakes up, like an epidemic or a riot, into flood.

Minnesota Get on the green bus. It stopped when the plane on the way to the funeral of steelworker Martin Rukavina crashed into dense forest, but the bus has started up again. Ignore the jeers that you’re hopping on the bandwagon, some wagons just have the better music, Bob Dylan i s playing, and anyway the bus is passing some nice bits of water— Minneapolis, city of water, Minnetonka, big water, Minneota, much water, Minneiska, white water, and, Dakota for waterfall, or curling water, Minnehaha. In memory of Paul Wellstone, United States Senator from 1991 to 2002.

Maine If the Old Sow, sucking whirlpool, with treacherous troughs, standing walls of water, boils and spouts, and that natural impossibility, the reverse waterfall, is the American Charybdis, Scylla is the exposed trail of hikers making their endless way through Acadia, up the mountain, with their packs and in their good- grip shoes, to the glacial erratic called Bubble Rock, which they threaten, in so much photo evidence, to push off and crush who- ever is below, smiling for the record and showing all their teeth. Massachusetts There is a Quality, so familiar, to dismay in social media. The table is set for us to be quotable, be thunderous. Time to slip away from our chair and parley— with the Air. Michigan Five died building Mackinac Bridge— one fell into a caisson, one of a heart attack, two when the catwalk collapsed their first day on the job, and one ascended  too quickly from the straits and died fr...

Louisiana The state produces the most number of vampires. Imprisoned by their immortality, disdainful of science— how can it stand up to sorcery— perversely proud of their hue and cry, the music of hurricanes, the undead are figures of corruption. Don’t go near them or you will catch their fang and feel their half- throttled angst and turn in a funk into one of them.

Kansas The ghost, cowboy hat, curtain moustache, sidles up and chuckles appreciatively, howdy, boys, welcome to Kansas, and slips into the bar. The street is deserted, except for the pale sheriff with a five-point badge, walking a skeleton horse, who glares at us, spits near our feet and croaks, liberal elite. When we turn the corner, a tall woman, hooked to translucent wings, is giving out flyers that say in red, What Would Jesus Do? and show a pair of rainbowed hands letting fall a bloody fetus. There isn’t much else to see. For more than unfunny cartoons, we will have to follow the flight to the cities. What’s this? A terrier, hair gone white, sniffs our penny loafers, crawls away, muttering, Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Kentucky Not our place, not anyone’s, although we name the caves Rotunda, Grand Avenue, joke about Fat Man’s Misery, even mythologize the stream, calling it obviously the Styx. Bats, with their livid cr...

A break in the alphabetical order to take in the news of the day: Maryland O say can you see by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming, whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof in the night that our flag was still there; o say does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the faith and the home of the Ba’ath.

Friday night, watched "God's Own Country" (2017), about a young Yorkshire farmer (a very credible Josh O'Connor) who numbs his frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex until a Romanian migrant worker (Alec Secareanu), joining his family farm for the lambing season, shows him how to be himself, a gay man capable of love and connection. The film brings to mind "Brokeback Mountain" except that "God's Own Country," directed by Francis Lee, is much better. It actually shows the blood and death of newborn lambs. Some survive, some don't, a visual comment on the dangers and pitfalls of coming out in this day and age still. Not in love with the title, though.

Iowa What’s the line around the barn, a viewing line for some dear leader? Oh, it’s the line to see the butter cow, 600 pounds of U.S. Grade AA salted butter, or else it’s to see the butter Elvis, or the butter Obama, or Grant Wood’s bony couple in butter. Barbara Ehrenreich writes, “I’m not going out of this life without butter on my bread. I’ve had so much grief from people about butter. I like a glass of wine, or a bloody mary, too.”  Oh, look, this year, Norma “Duffy” Lyon tops herself. She has sculpted with 2000 pounds of butter a life-sized The Last Supper.

Indiana Open cockpit, open wheels, writing an O 200 times in dust and smoke, on the oval track, plotting ahead, jostling for position with other high- strung vowels, every zero, slightly different, always imperfect, if it is not erased in flames, every event a non-event, going nowhere fast, despite the hundreds of thousands of diehard fans randy for memorabilia, just for one, just one, to lift at finish a bottle of milk.

Illinois It is called Little Egypt because of its rivers and the fertile land. Because of starvation’s trek for a handful of meal. Because of slavery and its deliverance in uncivil war. Little Egypt is not in the south of the state, it’s everywhere, its boundaries the boundaries of the promised land, its capital the capital creamed off of labor. It’s make hay while the sun shines, it’s the massacre—mass acre— at Haymarket.

Idaho You have come to the heart, division and double, of the matter, the deepest canyon, a fall higher than Niagara, but more secret. The sun comes down on potatoes and semi- conductors. The river is called Salmon, or No Return. Neither in Mountain Time or in Pacific Time, O my governor, O my private, is there a highway between Boise and Coeur d’Alene.

Hawaii My myth too—home, the underworld, an ancestor who returns as a sea turtle when he is not the naval officer who died at Pearl Harbor. From the school, which trained the black president, my aumakua took the name of Steve McGarrett. Hawaii Five-O  was sometimes shot in Singapore, do you know? How do you know a man would die for you if you don’t sleep with him first? Under another trademark, he took up with me in New York where we were happy-unhappy for two years until he was recalled to the spirit world, reappearing under the world-class surf a shark.

Florida This evening walk around Lettuce Lake begins on the planks of good intentions. Palm fronds droop, like fingers over railing, over land sliding below wetland, and weeds yielding along an indeterminable wave to duckweed, a false green carpet to the door of the lake. Bald cypresses, wearing beards of moss, sit surprised in water, their grayish knees breathing above the rootless bladderworts. Here, the wading bird is king, the Great Egret picking its way between land and lake, spearing the temporary frog to an unexpected hump of ground. Here, the roseate spoonbill swirls the mud. Even the osprey, which nests in feather- tips of trees, must bury itself in the lake, wings held up like an archaic angel landing on a gravestone, before rising with silver in its beak. And here, reads the sign in stainless steel raised by park authorities, is Alzheimer’s Walk that travels two feet above the bog, two feet from the leafy stink, but does not ...

Connecticut Wrong, the idea was found in the boats of the Punic Wars,  the idea of inter- changeable parts for building American muskets, delivered only after the death of the contractor by his family left behind. American words were standardized earlier by the great Webster, who taught generations of American children, including the kiddos from Sandy Hook, to spell center for centre, program for programme, and armory for armoury. Delaware Where are the catapults firing pumpkins into the sky? Where are the slingshots flinging the hardiest squashes—the Caspers, the Luminas, La Estrellas— for the longest way without getting pie? Where are the complicated air cannons with the names Big Ten Inch, 2nd Amendment, Old Glory, De Terminator pumping their fists in victory and vengeance? All gone. The World Championship Punkin Chunkin has been canceled. A machine exploded two years ago and hit a female TV crew. We don’t wish for anyone, ...

Colorado After the gold, the silver, it was the turn of the carnations, the precious metals of a rush of colors, the historic medals coaxed from the ground, won and worn on the lapel by queers and presidents— first to grant women’s suffrage by popular vote, first to repeal Prohibition, first to legalize the recreational use of cannabis— you can get high and green just thinking about it.

California Arnie has no more devoted follower than Olympus Chan from Guangzhou. For at least a year, between fifteen and sixteen, he went so far as to put on the Austrian accent. Trained and won Mr. Universe at age 20, same age as Arnie. Moved to Hollywood to be in the movies. Had his big break not as Conan, but Young Confucius, breaking his opponents’ jaws when they did not heed what he said. Grew rich selling herbal supplements, grew famous too. Then the ultimate test, the gubernatorial contest, he loved saying “gubernatorial” with a Cantonese twang, which he won handily against the El Salvadoran, on the back of a huge Asian turnout, and not a few El Salvadorans, at last striking gold as Asian American and universal.

Arkansas for the Little Rock Nine   It’s KAN-sas but it’s AR-kan-SAs, the final “s” is silent. Here you can dig for diamonds—prospect, it’s called— and name them Hallelujah, Amarillo Starlight, Okie Dokie, Superman’s, Bleeding Heart, Uncle Sam, Brown Rice, Limitless, and Sweet Caroline. Little rocks, the markers of the change from delta plain to the Ouachita foothills. Little rocks, the final “s” is not silent.

Arizona Remember “Raising Arizona”? Infertile couple, a convenience store robber and a cop, kidnap one of the “Arizona Quints” and raise the baby in their desert trailer. Daddy’s bounty hunter finds them, and they blow him up. You want to know my interpretation of the Coen Brothers movie? The couple, Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter, are European colonialists, white trash, Papa Arizona is the Injuns, and Junior is the land. The kidnap is all very fine. When Cage & Hunter return the kid in the end, it makes no sense. Remember the reviews? Technically brilliant. Incoherent story.

Alaska You like the sea? You’ll like Alaska, 34,000 miles of tidal shoreline. Not for nothing is it the object to which the sea is directed. It is something of a marvel, a marriage of extremes, the sea locked solid in an iceberg, the outcrops of rock melting and running over all forms of life, even the hardy shield ferns that cling to these unpromising islands. You like volcanoes?

It's National Poetry Writing Month again, and I've started a project tentatively titled "50 States in 50 Days," as a way of getting to know this country better. Suggestions welcomed. Here's Day One: Alabama Why would you want to see a natural disaster, even if it’s the greatest? Visit the Vulcan instead, cast-iron god holding up his new spearhead to the sun. You can’t see the impact crater, even though the impact rim is intact. You can only walk in the maze of rings of fractured rock, more than 3 miles across, hope to find in the ground a splinter of shocked quartz, which proved this is indeed a star-wound. * PB invited GH and me to a sake tasting last night. Terada Honke has brewed sake for more than 340 years in Kozaki, in Chiba Prefecture, 87.5 km to the northeast of Tokyo. The lecture was by the 24th Head, Masaru Terada, who married into the family, like the two generations before him. The brewing house specializes in so-call...

PB invited me to join him last Sunday to watch documentary on the US incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Part of the 11th Annual Peace Film Festival, organized by Yumi Tanaka and a band of volunteers, Resistance at Tule Lake (2017) by Konrad Aderer was less about the resistance than about the remembrance of this infamous episode of American history. Tule Lake camp was where those who refused to answer, or answered no-no to, the government's loyalty questionnaire were sent. There was a special segregation center inside the camp for those judged especially resistant or disloyal. The government also mounted a campaign to persuade the prisoners of all ten concentration camps to give up their US citizenship and be deported to Japan, even though most of them had never seen that country. Fearful and angry, many Tule Lake camp inmates joined the pro-Japan faction called the Hoshi-dan. The film showed them running in squads and doing other physical exercises to train t...

Turning 48, or Post Your Birthday Wish, If You Wish, Below this Post  I’ll write one true thing a day in the week running up to my birthday. John Ashbery is boring and I’d rather eat cardboard than read his poetry. I’m a poor judge of character, which is my saving grace in making friends. Angrier. Sadder. Heavier. I look at the young and am disconsolate. There are no moral phenomena, but I have to act as if good and evil exist. Last week I wrote a respectable poem about sex with a party of cyborgs.  John Ashbery is boring but “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is brilliant. Love, I have been under increasing pressure to make a false allegation.  Photo by Guy E. Humphrey. I name it "Wallflowers."

We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge. The premise is intriguing: a black Bostonian family, the symbolically named Freemans, join a research institute to teach sign language to a chimp called Charlie. The situation is set up for a scathing social critique of racism, some of which Greenidge delivers. The most effective, because the most moving, involves the allure of white trickery to a stern but lonely black schoolmistress. Nymphadora is the most searing portrait of the novel, and she burns the other characters out of the stretched canvas. Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole. Published by Two Lines Press, which I discovered at AWP, after Tim Tompkins suggested looking for its editor, and his good friend, Olivia Sears, this German novel is dense with the poetry of a wasted landscape. It is haunting, a nightmarish reckoning with history and holocaust. After reading it, I was filled with the excitement of imitating it, but found I could n...

I have three poems in Birmingham Poetry Review (Spring 2018 number 45), a publication of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The issue features the great poet Gerald Stern with new poems written in his 90s, and a perspicacious essay by Lucy Biederman on him titled ""And I Go On and On": Gerald Stern's Poetics of Protest." It's bracing to read about how Stern has integrated his politics into his poetics from the start. Some terrific poems in the issue. I particularly enjoyed Saara Myrene Raappana's "Heroic Origins" (it's about bees), Chelsea Rathburn's "The Corinthian Women" (who stood aside while Medea murdered her children), and Gary Soto's two Untitled poems based on Henry V 4.1.98-99 and the bard's Sonnet 150.9. Thanks, Adam Vines and Gregory Fraser, for accepting my poems. Annual subscription is only $10.

THL and JEHL: If the city could answer your questions, what would you ask it? Why are these important issues to you? JLK: Will you ever change your survival and authoritarian mentality, which prioritizes economic development and political control above all else? How can you be changed? Will you remember me? And how will you remember me? THL and JEHL: Also let’s consider the reverse. What would your city ask you? Why? JLK: Who are you? Thanks, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Jason Eng Hun Lee, for the interview .

Last Tuesday, went to the Morgan Library to see the show of Peter Hujar's photographs: "Speed of Life." The creator of the iconic image of the Gay Liberation Front, showing 2 lines of young people walking down the street, arms linked, fists punching the air, Hujar was really a portraitist. The most compelling photos are headshots, followed by those of the body in half-recline. Since I was there, I also looked into the Tennessee Williams show, "No Refuge but in Writing." The final plays are really the results of lots of earlier stories, aborted versions, and messy revisions, suggested by Eliza Kazan and others, as much as by Williams's own muse. He exploited his life for his materials, as all writers do, and his life included other people's lives. * Wrote "Returning from the Women's March in DC" on Friday, tinkled with "Judy" on Saturday, and "Cyborg Vs The Grim Reaper" this morning. Cyborg sex: the wave of the futu...

Wrote "The Morning After Trump's Election (Watusi)" from Connor's perspective yesterday. Today added a small section to "Handheld Devices" and refitted the sequence to reflect the aging of both men. Watched The Square (2017) with MH yesterday, after lunch with LF and JT. Written and directed by Ruben Östlund, it stars Claes Bang as the chief curator of a prestigious Stockholm museum who is trying to promote a controversial new exhibit. As MH confirmed, the film is spot-on in its satire of art institutions and their patrons. What was less expected was how moving it was in illuminating the seemingly obvious, but infinitely complex business of creating a public square of mutual trust and equal rights.

Another retro-fit today, with some small revisions to fit it into the overarching narrative. Connor: Later, at the Same Dance Party Finally he withdraws his sweet body from the kiss, and the veil descends. I’m completely involved with someone,  he says, he’s coming back tomorrow.  Thrust together by his words, we taste each other’s mouth through the silk. Then all the names of the world— body, kiss, tomorrow, his name Seal— swaddle in a wet underwear the things they designate. When he backs off again, a cry I cannot recognize passes my lips, T ake me home with you.  It does not pass the cloth of gold. He presses through the crushed bodies,  pulling his tee-shirt down as he goes.

Today's offering retrofits an old poem (from "The Book of the Body" sequence") with a new title. Meeting Seal at an 80’s Dance Party on Throwback Thursday It is time to bring your face into focus before this lens moves below the chin to other features harder to identify as yours. The best image is that of the cheeks. The right cheek and the left cheek do not meet. Like the back of the hand and the palm, like the head of a silver coin and its tail, the cheeks do not see each other except in a mirror or a photograph. This is true of my cheeks until my right brushes your left when we dance and, in that flash of flesh, the coin turns up both head and tail, the back of the hand shakes hands with the palm.

Connor: Identity House (New York) Shirtless bartenders popping the cork. Drag queens hosting What-the-Fuck. Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee, can such places be? Flirtations flit. Beauty meets. Grown men deep kissing on the streets. Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee, can such places be? Talk we must about coming out in the calmness of Identity House. Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee, can such places be? No more need for metaphors unless we are figures of speech, yes, us, Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee. Can such places be?

Connor: A Tale of Two Cities, Three Maybe She’s a baby from Vietnam, from Saigon, if the truth be told. She’s a girl from Nebraska City and she’s sixteen years old.  She’s unusual, that’s for sure. She asks him out for ice cream at Nancy’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor by Dick’s Movie Palace of Dreams. She’s in love with the boy She’s in love with the boy but after a whole year of eating pussy he knows he’s not in love with Katie. First, an ice cream, and then, a movie. One thing leads to another. She’s smart, a looker, but he has eyes only for her quarterback brother. In the lab, she makes up excuses to peek at his dissection. He sneaks his looks in the locker room at Tommy’s pink ass and Joe’s erection. She’s in love with the boy She’s in love with the boy but after a whole year of eating pussy he knows he’s not in love with Katie. He tells her at the Farm Aid show he’s applyin’ to New York University. This town’s too small for big dreams, he e...

Connor: Art Show at the Center On a black dummy, a shawl—not cashmere, cigarette butts. Apple seeds arranged like tea cozies around the roots of trees next door. So this is what art is! You are one thing and you are used for another. Slightly built, curly haired, the Artist-in-Residence smiles from New Jersey.  Close enough to New York, if you ask me. The star of the show: 3 blocks of yellow soap, the height of my chest, carved voluptuously to look like—urinals. Oh, the urge to use them! To spray them and be clean.

Connor: Nebraska From the bluff we turned our backs on the river and opened a trail, as Lewis and Clark. We spotted the grizzly, Tom did, glummer than Meriwether, and gave him wide berth slowly on our stomachs. When I hit some raccoon shit, Tom changed my name to Pvt. John Collins and tied my paws to a tree and whipped me with the whip of a branch, rubbing himself until he let go gum from the orange. We hurried home, it was getting dark, and watched dad slam the boot on boxes of his stuff and drive off. I was the one to break the silence, kept during the whipping— Tom, let’s go back and tie me up.

Given to me by Elda Rotor in a bag full of literary goodies, The Book of Emma Reyes is a revelation. Godmother to Latin American writers and artists in Paris, Emma Reyes was illiterate until her late teens, escaped from grinding poverty and the convent in Columbia, to Buenos Aires and then Paris, to re-invent herself as painter. The memoir, written as a series of letters to Colombian historian and critic Germán Arciniegas, won praise from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As translated by Daniel Alarcón, the style is artfully simple and wholly faithful to the world. No literary flourishes, no imaginative metaphors. Just a sustaining belief that the material itself holds its own interest.