Let our tears be turned into laughter

Hm. Dancing in the streets of Baghdad.

Last thing before sleep. Here is a poem by Frederick Turner on the—“fall?” “rise?” let’s be optimistic—liberation of Baghdad.

Frederick Turner is one of the few poets I know of to attempt the epic form and science fiction tropes at the same time. New World, with its Gerard Manley Hopkins-inspired five-beat line (not entirely successful, imho) detailing the sojourns of a man on earth after the anti-bourgeois wars have left farmsteaders and prole cities on earth, and the Genesis poem, in iambic pentameter, about the colonization of Mars, attempted, if I recall correctly, in a "fractal" organic form. Rachel corrected me gently when I confused him with Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the frontier, but I remember her corrections to this day. Who else has attempted the sci-fi epic? Besides James Merrill and his radioactive bats? [grace to Disch, though I’m not too familiar with his work]

Here is Frederick Turner’s response to the Hamill-led idiocy, touching on points that Dana Gioia recently called “corrected” or otherwise ameliorated in his update of his Matter book.

Five thousand poets against the war? Who ever heard of five thousand poets agreeing on anything? But then I guess any old poem qualifies you, even that excrescence jotted on a napkin in a cafe that you ducked into after the protest. Happy the poet who has written one poem, wrote poet Robert Francis in one of his Satirical Rogue books; one can bring it up in conversation, saying, that reminds me of a poem I wrote once, or defend it saying, but what can one expect of a first poem?

What can one expect, indeed?

By the way, I’m posting this with the Omniweb 4.5 sneakypeek 2 (v442), which apparently uses the Safari WebCore rather than the decade-old SGML framework it was using since it was a NeXT product. Scratch that; it just ate this post, and put up a crash report e-mail. Here I am retyping this crap again. Sigh. I wonder if they will maintain the SGML framework to render the rising XML technologies, such as MathML, OPML, GeoML?
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