Wednesday, April 15, 2009

the cruelest month review series #7


blog crush lists seem to become passe. they were the rage a few years ago but perhaps that was because blogging was brand new and we were all getting used to not just becoming poet-bloggers but most critically readers of blogs. still, if one were to wonder what my crush list is then all you need to do is look at my links to the right. these are not all the blogs that i read regularly, but these are the blogs that i hit up for new work several times a day.

with that in mind, my review tonight is not a critical examination of blogging but a look at one of my most favorite poet-bloggers, w.b. keckler's joe brainard's pyjamas. keckler is a most prolific poet and blogger with updates almost hourly. but rather than despair on not being able to keep up with his writing i do plunge into his work with utter glee. keckler is hilarious and cutting too. once, in a post, while he was at work the poet posted a line that literally had me fall to the floor and holding my stomach from laughing so hard. instead of hunting around for that post i'll just summarize it. it went something like, 'returning to my desk i could smell something like burnt popcorn. i shouted to the office, what smells like cum'? oh man, i don't do it a good service but it is that sort of humor and boldness that i admire in keckler as a poet-blogger.

even still, keckler publishes entire chapbooks worth of poems. take a look at his recent sappho online series. even more, the dude loves pop culture and art. and he's got good taste. it would seem that the hombre spends most of his time online prowling for more, and more and more.

and why not. in my eyes this is a poet who knows the deep meaning of the phrase carpefuckingdiem. again, this is not a critical examination of keckler as a poet and blogger but just a few notes on why he's one of my favorite poets and bloggers writing today. check it.

2 Comments:

At 4:11 PM, Blogger William Keckler said...

What kind words from a good friend!

I had no idea.

Thank You, Richard!

You were one of the first bloggers with whom I connected, and your blog has ever been a paragon of human decency as well as readworthy writing.

Did I sound Dickensian just now? I was going for "Dickensian."

So many blogs (and my own included!) are often filled with negativity or atrabilious bitchiness (pleonastic? excrementing the lily there?) or "sloughs of despond." I do fall into those sloughs, and I'm mad later when I see how they infect my blog.

"Count Blogula" I call myself during those funks!

He's not always a nice guy.

I rarely Google myself and I'm ashamed to say I'm in an "online less" phase, or I would have thanked you sooner!...not to belie anything you wrote here....just bad timing after your eulogy, I guess lol! My "hourly" reputation is no more.

I'm reading more paper again lately.

I wish I could say it was all deep but I'd be lying horribly.

But the weather has changed too, you know?

So I'm out and about with the other heliolaters.

While I haven't had any haunting of my house in many months (nary a flutter) you first appeared as a commenter I think when I was weirded out by it, to say something comforting, which I greatly appreciated.

(No, I'm not putting quarters in the milk machine for more "milk of human kindness" but just saying thanks dude lol!)

I had this weird experience today, though that was purely human haunting.

I was visiting my Mom, and I was in her backyard admiring this grove of bamboo that began when I planted just two stalks about eight or nine years ago.

And other neighbors had followed suit and they had an even larger grove...theirs was huge. You could shoot Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in theirs.

And it's 85 degrees here in PA, total July weather, thanks to global warming or just longitudinal weather shifts...it's like this every year oddly now...and I'm standing in this place of my childhood and seeing all these children ghosts, including my own..and this recurrent nightmare I've been having for years (truly horrible) was sort of flickering against the bone in my brain and I actually began walking backwards to get away from the idea of this...body...and I nearly jumped out of my skin when I felt the body touching me with its hands and then realized I had backed up into this red maple tree's branches hanging low to the ground.

But I couldn't have gone colder if I had been in a Henry James corkscrew ghost story.

And I thought...what the fuck just happened?

All the real haunting occurs in childhood.

Half buried memories and the place where we realize how fucked up the world is and don't have good barriers yet and internalize too fucking much. Children are visceral bumper cars.

Even approaching that ground of childhood is dangerous, I realized today.

I should have kept out of the backyards.

This is probably the longest comment you will get in a long time.

I believe this is what is referred to as "bad form."

Emily Post didn't tell us what she thought of comment box etiquette, but I think we both know I am wrong.

And this is unseemly.

So I shall avaunt and quit your site.

Trelity is my word verification.

And a fine fellow Trelity was, when I knew him in our schoolboy days!

But thanks again!

As the cover of Amy Sedaris's awesome hospitality reads: I LIKE YOU.

 
At 4:11 PM, Blogger William Keckler said...

hospitality book!

 

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