My poem “Gratitude,” which originally appeared in the Georgetown Review, is posted on the Best American Poetry website today. Click on the cover below to visit the site and read the poem.
5. We think this counts, even though there are no words, Disney’s Fantasia, the Dance of the Hours, featuring three Three Hippopotami in Tutus
4. “My Humps”: Black Eyed Peas
Also consult the Alanis Morissette parody:
3. “Baby Got Back”: Sir Mixalot
2. “Tits and Ass”: A Chorus Line (extra: dubbed into Italian, I think. Trust me, it’s better that way)
1. “Big Bottom”: Spinal Tap
In addition to all of the usual magazines and newspapers, of course, I managed to fit these in:
1. Tom Wolfe, I am Charlotte Simmons
2. Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word
3. George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier
4. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch
5. Ben Katchor, Beauty Supply District
6. Charles Burns, Big Baby
7. George Orwell, Why I Write
8. Tom Wolfe, In Our Time
9. Tom Wolfe, Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine
10. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
11. Kimball and Kramer (eds.), Lengthened Shadows
12. Amy Clampitt, Westward
13. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
14. Robert Crumb, R. Crumb’s America
15. Gay Talese, The Gay Talese Reader
16. W.H. Auden, Academic Graffiti
17. Gabrielle Bell, When I am Old
18. Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories
19. Cusquena Paintings in the Churches of Cusco [no author]
20. Mario Vargas Llosa, Feast of the Goat
21. Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes
22. Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries
23. Sarah Hannah, Inflorescence
24. T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and The Waste Land, annotated by Valden James Madson
25. Adam Kirsch, Invasions
26. Adam Kirsch, The Modern Element
27. Hal Sirozitz, Before, During, and After
28. E.A. Robinson, Selected Poems
29. Dana Goodyear, Honey and Junk
30. Davis McCombs, Dismal Rock
31. Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House
32. David Mason, Ludlow
33. Lynn Levin, Imaginarium
34. George Plimpton, The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair
35. Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up
36. Tom Wolfe, The Pumphouse Gang
37. Jenny Holzer, The Venice Installation
38. Philip Roth, Everyman
39. Simon Armitage (translator), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
40. Robert Lowell, Life Studies
41. Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead
42. Erica Dawson, Big-Eyed Afraid
43. Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees
44. Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Volume One
45. Drawn and Quarterly Showcase Volume Two
46. Harvey Pekar, Another Day
47. Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
48. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny
49. Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men
50. John Ashbery, A Worldly Country
51. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
52. Nathanael West, Day of the Locust
53. Sophie Hannah, Pessimism for Beginners
54. P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves
55. J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
56. Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets
57. W.H. Auden, As I Walked out One Evening
58. Mary Jo Bang, Elegy
59. Henry Taylor, Brief Candles
60. Arthur Nersesian, The Fuck-Up
61. Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt
62. J. Allyn Rosser, Foiled Again
63. David Leaf (ed.), KISS, Behind the Mask
64. P.G. Wodehouse, Luck of the Woosters
65. George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
66. Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy
67. Johannes Steinhoff, Final Hours
68. Tom Disch, About the Size of It
69. T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
70. Charles Simic, A Wedding in Hell
71. Charles Bukowski, The Flash of Lightning Behind the Mountain
72. Jay McInerny, Model Behavior
73. W.S. Di Pierro, Brother Fire
74. Chuck Palahniuk, Snuff
75. Simon Armitage, Selected Poems
76. David Davies, Nelson’s Navy
77. Kevin Huizenga, Curses
78. Eavan Boland, Outside History
79. Joshua Ferris, And then We Came to the End
80. Jeanette Winterson, Boating for Beginners
81. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
82. Sarah Vowell, Party Cloudy Patriot
83. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
84. Michael Quadland, That Was Then
85. Tom Disch, Castle of Indolence
86. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
87. Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation
88. Tom Disch, Castle of Perseverance
89. Tom Disch, Camp Concentration
90. Greg Sanders, Motel Girl
91. D.H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers
92. Howard Griffin, Conversations with Auden
93. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
94. The Upanishads
95. Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
96. Ben Katchor, Julius Kniple, Real Estate Photographer
97. Jonathan Ames, The Alcoholic
98. Henry James, The Ambassadors
99. Paul Fussell, Class
100. Christian Landor, Stuff White People Like
101. Drawn and Quarterly Showcase, Volume Four
102. Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle
103. Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Stones, Part One
104. Gahan Wilson, Monster Collection
105. Charles Addams, Half-Baked Cookbook
106. Robert Frost, Versed in Country Things
107. Stewart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster
108. Wendell Stacy Johnson, W.H. Auden
109. Frederick Seidel, Cosmos Trilogy
110. Adam Fieled, Opera Bufa [sic]
111. Philip Larkin, Jill
112. Joseph Epstein, Narcissus Leaves the Pool
113. S. Eddy Bell, Lulu and Mitzy, Best Laid Plans
114. David Yezzi, Azores
Here is the 2007 list
There must be many other such derelicts—
orphaned, abandoned, adrift for whatever reason—
but few have kept flying before the winds
of cyberspace so briskly as Drunk Driver
(the name of the site). Anonymous (the author)
signed his last entry years ago, and more years passed
before the Comments began to accrete
like barnacles on the hull of a ship
and then in ever-bifurcating chains
on each other. The old hulk became
the refuge of a certain shy sort
of visitor, like those trucks along the waterfront
haunted by lonely souls who could not bear
eyewitness encounters. They could leave
their missives in the crevices of this latter-day
Wailing Wall, returning at intervals
to see if someone had replied, clicking
their way down from the original message
April 18. Another gray day. Can’t find the energy
to get the laundry down to the laundry room.
The sciatica just won’t go away.
through the meanders and branchings
of the encrusted messages, the tenders
of love for a beloved who would never know herself
to have been desired, the cries of despair,
the silly whimsies and failed jokes, to where
the thread had last been snapped,
only to discover that no, no one had answered
the question posed. Because,
no doubt, there was no answer.
Is there an “answer” to the war
wherever the latest war is going on?
If one could get under the ship
and see all those barnacles clinging
to the keel, what a sight it would be.
Talk about biodiversity! But on deck,
so sad, always the same three skeletons,
the playing card nailed to the mast,
frayed and fluttering weakly, like some huge insect
the gods will not allow to die.
