A long-time E-Verse reader sends in top five movies/TV shows in which single men have comically had children foisted upon them, forcing them to grow up and take on adult responsibilities. Why is this a subject of such enduring fascination?
5. Father Goose: Grizzled, alcoholic recluse Cary Grant lives alone on a Pacific Island during World War II, until he is invaded by Leslie Caron and a gaggle of young girls, all evacuated from their nearby diplomatic girls’ school after the Japanese invasion.

4. What a Girl Wants: Straitlaced, aristocratic, British Colin Firth finds a free spirited young American teenage girl on his doorstep—the alleged result of one of his one-night stands. OK, so he wasn’t so much forced to grow up as to loosen up.
3. The Game Plan: Pro-football player Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson finds a precocious young girl on his doorstep—again, the alleged result of one of his one-night stands.

2. Big Daddy: Immature bachelor Adam Sandler finds a precocious young boy on his doorstep—the alleged result of a one-night stand of Jon Stewart’s with a Hooters waitress.
1. (Three Men and a Cradle, remade as Three Men and a Baby in the U.S.): Three wild French bachelors find a baby girl on their doorstep—the alleged result of one of their one-night stands. They spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out how to take care of her and also figure out who the mother is. Remade in the U.S. as Three Men and a Baby, seemingly with the same plot. But actually, there are several crucial differences. One, in rewriting it they felt they had to come up with a reasonable explanation why three straight men would live together, so they created for them a dream house, plus made them womanizers. Two, they wanted to make them more manly, so they added in a part where the three men are involved in a drug bust, to which they bring the baby for some reason (in the French version, drugs were part of the plot, but involved the heroes trying to successfully give a drug dealer some heroin without them getting busted. Oh, and the American one had to have a car chase.

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In this month’s issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, Andrew Goodspeed writes about the Kevin Ducey’s book Rhinoceros: “Kevin Ducey’s great strength is his daring. He frequently appears silly, he risks silliness in his work, and this silliness sometimes succeeds admirably. Few modern poets have that sense of daring, and it is a point to Ducey’s credit that he has attained this in his first collection. At his best he is genuinely amusing, and he writes serious poetry with an eye for the offbeat, the unexpected, and the peculiar. Yet he also possesses a fine lyric ability, one that appears suddenly, unexpectedly, and arrestingly. Amidst the hurly-burley of Rhinoceros, one occasionally glimpses lines of such unforced beauty that the general welter of cultural reference suddenly grows still, and one senses that one is reading poetry of substantial accomplishment.”

To read the rest of the review for free, visit the Contemporary Poetry Review.

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Tupelo Press announces a Sarah Hannah Memorial and Reading. “Please join us October 25th from 7-9PM for a memorial for Sarah Hannah (1966-2007) including readings from the new book Inflorescence by poets and friends at Poet’s House, 72 Spring Street, second floor, New York, NY 10012.All are welcome and encouraged to attend. For information about participating in the reading, please email: publisher@tupelopress.org.”

Eva Salzman, a London-based critic, is preparing article on Sarah Hannah’s two books, Longing Distance and (just out) Inflorescence, for the Contemporary Poetry Review. Ms. Salzman has written: “We’re profoundly saddened to report that one of our own, the poet Sarah Hannah, has died tragically, and tragically young. She grew up in Waban, Massachusetts, the daughter of two painters, Renee Rothbein and Nathan Goldstein. Having received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D from Columbia University, she latterly taught at Emerson College in Boston. Her first book Longing Distance (Tupleo) received widespread acclaim from leading poets such as A.E. Stallings, Linda Gregerson, and many others. The cover of her second—and last—book, Inflorescence, which is due out fall 2007, features a painting by her mother. A talented writer, she was the kind of person who called it as she saw it, often in ways not everyone wanted to hear, which is often the way of extraordinary people. Funny, warm, cynical and lyrical, she was both fragile and powerful, a combination of such extremes in equal measure. The loss to the literary world is great. The personal loss to family, friends and her devoted students is unspeakable. When not engaged in highbrow literature, Sarah Hannah played guitar in a heavy metal band, and was proud to have been once kissed by three out of the four Monkees. Ah well, nobody’s perfect. Nobody could have been loved or valued more. She should have been read more when alive.”

The Garden As She Left It
Sarah Hannah

Locked, strung
With pollens, stirred by bees.
The cicadas burn

Their fine blue current.
At the center, two paths cross:
A ring of impatiens.

Their white petals lift to the air.
Are they waiting for the next departure—

Scrub jay, sulfur moth, the summer?

The paths lead outward
To a brick border,
A perfect circle squared.

On the gray wall of the house
A thin broom slants,
The air around it furious.

The dim figure of the woman,
The recent flutter of hands.

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In the current issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review, the infamous critic James Rother continues his series on the Prose of Poetry: “Where poetry can but clutch and cling, prose is free to root about, its snout on the alert always for any scent of a truffle. Poetry might put down roots where only rhizomes flourish, but the only bark of the Tree of Life poets ever get to scratch-and-sniff derives from simulacra of the rumors of Yggdrasil that they themselves have planted. At the risk of prematurely trespassing on the concerns of the next segment (’The Poetry of Prose’) of the triptych whose first panel is the present essay, we might call as a witness Henry James, a writer who, so far as anyone knows, never authored a line of verse, to testify, not for the prosecution, or even for that matter the defense, but as an amicus curiae, able to throw light on a debate now of long-standing as to just where the ineffable becomes vulnerable to the ministrations of language most—to invoke one of James’s favorite adverbials—tellingly. To that purpose quotations from appropriate lessons of the master might best be restricted to non-fictional works—or those of merely marginal fictionality—such as A Small Boy and Others and The American Scene, in which elements of fabrication meld imperceptibly with those of stock-taking facticity, and where glitches in successfully moving the actual along appear to have been fixed quite artfully ‘in the mix’ of a reality scrupulously synthesized out of brother William’s brute facts and his own ‘fully blown flower of high fancy.’”

You can read the whole article for free over at the Contemporary Poetry Review.

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Top 100 Cool Novels, #92: GUT Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson (1997). This book really stands in for Winterson’s entire oeuvre, which must be read in toto to be fully appreciated. Her record is substantial, including the legendary Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), The Passion (1987), Sexing the Cherry (1989), Written on the Body (1992), and Lighthousekeeping (2004). Her faith in poetic fluidity, multiple perspectives, and a variety of modernist techniques allows her to stand out among her contemporaries, who remain overwhelmingly devoted to either historical novels, social realism, or magical realism. Her books are dark, difficult, and unmoored from reality as we generally know it. They probe the emotional depths of characters that exist almost as ghosts or as their own journal entries. GUT Symmetries makes use of a large historical and scientific canvas to convey intense, intimate events (GUT refers to both the elusive “grand unified theory” that would combine the expansive theories of relativity with the erratic subatomic theories of particle physics as well as the “gut” of mind and body; she makes further use of the medieval belief that the cosmos is mirrored in the human body, just as the sweeping moments of history gather up the smallest emotional activities of her characters).Jeanette Winterson attended St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. When her first attempt to attend the college ended in rejection, the working-class Winterson drove like a demon through the night down to Oxford to confront the St. Catz (as it’s known by members) dons and convince them of her worthiness. Convince them she did. Given that the college’s guiding saint is St. Catherine of Alexandria (not St. Catherine of Sienna, the erotic saint of the lilies), this impressed the dark-robed host as appropriate. They invited her to pack her bags and turn up that Michaelmas with some cotton underwear (as T.S. Eliot once recommended to an anxious American preparing to study at Oxford). St. Catherine of Alexandria, for those unfamiliar, was known for her persuasive rhetorical gifts. According to the various legends from which her biography has been cobbled, she converted a great number of “pagan” philosophers (they were likely Neo-Platonists). Due to her talkative nature and tendency to convert the locals, concerned citizens arranged to have her tongue cut out. Additionally, she was tortured on a “breaking wheel” which itself broke when she touched it. They wound up just cutting her whole head off. Needless to say, Winterson fit right in at Catz, a college with a reputation for encouraging a lively social life (both wild debauchery and daunting scholarly debate) at a university likewise noted for its tolerance of eccentricity and extreme crankiness.

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