Has it really been a month since my last post? Blame the holidays (and the fact that I know nobody is actually reading this blog—kind of reduces the urgency).

But I’ve got a stack of lit mags that I’ve been wending my way through. As always, a mixed bag.

Cimarron Review, fall 2011, is visually beautiful and refined, from the cover photo and coverstock to the typography and layout. It has a wonderful piece by Elton Glaser, “Down on the Farm.” What I love is not the pathos—I know nothing about the vicissitudes of growing up on a farm in the middle of nowhere, and couldn’t truly relate on that level—but simply the language, the apt metaphor and simile that seems to spring from the particular sensibility of the southern drawl: “you unruly as a mule with a bur in its bowels,” Glaser writes, and “you’ve got more grit than a rooster’s gizzard,” “night crawlers / like convicts at a prison break, betrayed by the moon.” I appreciate metaphors that arise naturally from the environment. I also love the description of catalog items as “those slimsy innuendos of a riper life.” Slimsy? Fabulous! (I assume that wasn’t just a typo—if so, keep it!). I also love the lush, extended metaphor that beings Naveed Alam’s “Citizen of Inconclusive Republics,” which notes, “One must / dry sadness on the balcony till it stiffens, dust off // the sand, take it down the corridors…” On the other hand, this poem begins to ramble and wanders too far from where it began. Also, I’m not real keen on Mary Jo Bang’s attempts to update “The Inferno”: “Inside that cavernous hole / that I was staring at like Cortez at the Pacific…” Cortez? What’s a conquistador got to do with Dante? And is Bang purposely perpetuating Keats’ inaccurate depiction of Cortez as the first European to view the Pacific? I was similarly confused by Doren Watson’s “The Dogs in Shakespeare’s Dog Sonnet,” which suggest the “bark” in “It is the star to every wandering bark” is not a boat but a dog’s yelp. I can’t quite figure out if Watson is being cheeky or not—surely the editors would know better, but then again, who can say?

River Styx, #86, is far less visually appealing, but it is always worth a read. The highlight for me in this issue is Joan Murray’s “Groundhog and Crow.” Told from the perspective of a dead groundhog—now there’s a mindset you don’t enter every day—it describes and fully conveys her ecstasy, her rapture, at the coming of a crow, which can only be the longed-for god:

I love the urgency of the language—two stanzas, the first comprising two sentences, the second, just one, chopped up by commas in increasingly small and compelling pieces (I also have a soft spot in my heart for poems about dead and dying animals). You can’t stop reading until the end, which leaves the reader with perhaps the same “breath-knocking thud” that signaled the animal’s demise. Interestingly, this poem is followed by another by Elton Glaser (would that I were so prolific!), this one recounting the overall scene of desolation that was brought to New Orleans by the great hurricane. Moreso than the “Down on the Farm,” though, this piece seems to require a connection to the place—and though I’ve been to New Orleans a few times (mardi gras!), I guess I just don’t share that intimacy. Also noteworthy is George Bilgere’s “Eighty Yards,” which starts with a literally pedestrian scene—”a couple of black kids / are ambling down Lee Road”—that launches into a whirlwind of spectacle as one of the kids, a track star, begins racing down the street, “a pulse of pure velocity,” before settling down again, a brief meteor that takes us outside ourselves and our suddenly sad limitations for just a moment. The whole poem is a single sentence, which dutifully conveys the awe and wonder of being visited by a god, “wing-footed Hermes,” in the least likely place. I love that the poem is essentially pictorial, narrative—the poet lets the scene speak for itself and resists any attempt to editorialize. Also notable is Robert Levy’s “Delivery.” Levy diplays a deft handling of rhyme in these six six-lined stanzas rhymed abcabc. The scene, too, is wistfully portrayed, and the poem ends with a balled up wad of emotions—inadequacy, regret, shame, desire–that is objectively mirrored in the balled up wad of dollar bills that fill the speaker’s hand.

Well, that’s two. Plenty more lit mags are piling up on my desk.