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Media and other stuff Sherman is currently enjoying

I fondly remember the early days of my career, when I was snail-mailed poetry submissions to magazines, and eagerly checked my mailbox for the telltale self-addressed stamped envelope that would bring me the good news of acceptance or the tragedy of rejection. However, as I've been preparing my new poetry manuscript for publication, and sending poems out to magazines in the old-fashioned way, I've also found tons of great online literary magazines. Here are a few online poems that I've read recently and enjoyed:

http://www.boxcarpoetry.com -I can't believe this guy had the balls to rhyme "skin" with "Eden."

http://www.shampoopoetry.com -Nepotism alert: Mark is one of my poetry editors at Hanging Loose Press. I love this long sequences that he's been doing. They feel quietly epic.

http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/flashes/duhamel.html -I've always loved Duhamel's poetry. She's experimental but never obscure, and always very tender and funny.

http://42opus.com/authors/emilykendalfrey -I'd never heard of Frey before I went on my Internet poetry quest. Her poems are all over the place. I like her stuff quite a bit. Playful, mysterious, eccentric.

http://failbetter.com -This poem is sad and witty. I hadn't heard of Starkey either. And I found a bunch of poems online, loved them, and have ordered his book, Ways of Being Dead. Yes, I'm one of those poets--you know, the ones who actually buy books of other people's poetry.

- all the above posted 8/12/08

As Obama continues to toss aside "offensive" and "inappropriate" black artists like Bernie Mac and Ludacris, in order to appease the wussy, mushy middle, let me celebrate these gloriously offensive and poetically inappropriate artists:

Richard Pryor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txp8B4ek_kk

Moms Mabley:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQHYzJr0_tc

Redd Foxx:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H94jAkaTqQ

Chris Rock:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Wy_xRHJd4

Nikki Giovanni:
http://nikki-giovanni.com/egotrippingqt.shtml

Lucille Clifton:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15599

Gwendolyn Brooks:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=843

Ohio Players:
http://www.last.fm/music/Ohio+Players/_/Sweet+Sticky+Thing

- all the above posted 8/5/08

First of all, I'll list some favorite Web sites:

The Five Stages of Hall & Oates Grief - I love this one!

garfieldminusgarfield.net. Yes, it's about that famous comic cat, but it's also not about that famous comic cat. You must visit this site. I am obsessed with it. A few friends visited it and were baffled by my interest. Other friends spent a lot of time trolling the site and sent me their favorites.

rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com. Monday through Friday, I do the NY Times Crossword Puzzle online, but I have the paper delivered on weekends because I want the puzzle in my hands. I'm a decent puzzler. On my own, without Google searches, I finish the tough Sunday puzzle around 90% of the time and the far more difficult Saturday puzzle maybe 60% of the time, and with a little bit of Google help with one or two clues, I almost always finish. Among the many blogging puzzle solvers on the Web, Parker is the most hilarious and aggrieved. He's also politely responded to a few of my queries. I love how he links to youtube and other sites to give visual aid and enhancement for the puzzles. I'm on this site at the end of every day.

poetrydaily.org. It's sort of the CNN Headline News of the poetry world.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/simmons/index. This is Bill Simmon's world. He's a good writer, but more important, he is an unabashed and unashamed sports and pop culture fan. His work is really a continuing autobiography rather than typical sports coverage. Search his archives for his various takes on The Karate Kid trilogy of flicks.

For professional basketball news, I always go first to Henry Abbott at http://myespn.go.com/nba/truehoop. This is the site for serious NBA hoops fans. There are other funnier and crazier sites, but Henry covers and links to all of them, plus he provides amazing game coverage, as well as astute political, cultural, and economic comment. I love to talk hoops with this guy. Above all else, his gmail avatar is a photo of former Trail Blazers great, Buck Williams. How could one not love a guy who loves Buck Williams that much? It's all about engine, bro.

Also, you must check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpXVwNVyGSQ. I didn't endorse the making of this particular short film, but ever since I saw a bootleg copy of Todd Hayne's short film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which used Barbie dolls to tell the tragic tale of the anorexic pop star, I have been dreaming about making a film of one of my stories using action figures. For many years, I've publicly expressed my love of the idea, so perhaps this filmmaker heard me, liked the idea, and went for it. The guy used every word of my story in the film. And I love it. I've tried to contact the filmmaker, and have emailed a few of the addresses that I found for him, but he's never responded. Maybe he's afraid of getting sued. But much in the same way that Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield, has expressed approval of the highly non-official garfieldminusgarfield.net, I also express approval. This is also inspiring because it proves you can make a great film using minimal resources. So if the filmmaker reads this, contact me through the website, and let's talk. I'm not going to sue you. I want to find out who you are!

Here are a few books I've read recently and liked:

Murray Silverstein's Any Old Wolf. A book of poems by a good friend's father. When she told me she was giving me her father's book of poems, I have to be honest and admit that I thought I'd be reading Jimmy Stewart shit. But Silverstein is a powerful poet. Great and disturbing stuff. I know his kids, so to read poems about them felt so intimate and disturbing. Really makes me wonder what my kids are going to think about my poems about them.

Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables continues to be a desktop book for me. I always keep five to ten books near my computer and when feeling stuck or uninspired, I will grab one of those books, read a few pages, and return to my own work. I've written five poems in the last few months directly influenced by Beth's book. Go to this review on pastemagazine.com and you'll find much more coherent praise than I am able to give here.

By the way, Paste is a great magazine. Subscribe, subscribe.

And I've also really been into Elizabeth Hadaway's Fire Baton. I feel a strong kinship with her formal poems about poverty. I guess her newest work is really different though---more overtly classical and spiritual---so I'm looking forward to that radical change. This is a woman who changed her legal name---and makes a point of publicly noting the change and her previous name---so we're talking about a person who is not afraid of making an eccentric statement. Good for her; good for us.

And, oh, one more - last night, my sons and I play a lot of Heroscape, a Dungeons & Dragons type board game, and we've got the new set of heroes:  Aquilla's Alliance.
Check out that killer giant fly with the scorpion stinger. My wife cannot even look at it without shivering.

- all the above posted 7/30/08

Big-Eyed Afraid, poems by Erica Dawson. These are formal poems, but they have such unusual and powerful rhymes and percussive meters. Various phrases repeat from poem to poem ("I was born..."), making this book a sort of ceremony. I loved it.

Dictation, stories by Cynthia Ozick. The title story is about the friendship and romance between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of their fame. It contains a bit of mystery, too, that will leave you wondering what secret puzzles and inside jokes might be hidden in the works of all of our great writers.

Mad Men, the TV series on AMC. I watched the entire first season in one marathon session and was left gasping for air. Set in 1960, this tells the story of Don Draper, an advertising executive, who is hiding wartime secrets. It is crazy good and disturbing, especially since this series is set in a time when men (white men!) had all the power. But the women's stories here are not forgotten, and their struggles are poetic and painful. I recall one episode where a new secretary was puzzled by seeing another secretary weeping in the bathroom, only to find herself weeping in that same bathroom by the end of the same episode.

The Dark Knight and Iron Man are the two best mainstream movies of the year. Yes, they're about superheroes, about comic book characters, but they both deal so powerfully and shocking with the notions of justice and injustice. There's a scene (one of many such scenes, actually) where Batman, in the pursuit of knowledge, commits a brutal act of violence, of torture. The audience fucking gasped and recoiled. The major difference between the two films is the endings. At the end of Iron Man, the last line of dialog shoots you out of the theatre laughing and dancing. The end of The Dark Knight left the theatre utterly silent. Just great, great, great flicks.

My sons and I are currently obsessed with a board game called "Last Night on Earth," about a zombie attack on a little town. It's made by a local Seattle game company and I think they've got a hit on their hands. It's fun, fast-paced, and, best of all, it's difficult for the humans to defeat the zombies. My sons spend the day quizzing me on better ways to play the humans and defeat me, the zombie master. And speaking of zombies, you must read the comic book, The Walking Dead. It's the best zombie literature out there right now.

And, oh, to quote Hopkins, "glory be to God for dappled things," because "Project Runway" has just started a new season on Bravo. I can't even begin to tell who is the favorite yet, but as my wife and I watched the first episode, we both noticed that nearly every contestant, male and female, is seriously attractive. Even the weird-looking folks are weirdly hot. And that leads me to a guilty pleasure: New York Magazine's "Look Book," a weekly photo feature that focuses on the street fashions of everyday folks in Manhattan. I keep the "Look Book" coffee table book on my, well, coffee table and page through it most every day. My favorites are Kareem Dimitrious Colllie and Donald "Ray" Franklin II (on page 130-131). They both look so incredible. I mean, I'm never going to wear a hat and a scarf knotted smartly around my neck like Mr. Franklin, but if I did, I would wear it like him. I do have a pair of trousers that are similar to Mr. Collie's, but I've only worn them once because they seem to be too stylish for me. I just don't have the confidence for them. Yes, I feel defeated and shamed by my own pair of pants.

- all the above posted 7/18/08

Some favorite websites:

Considering all the ridiculous protests of the Obamaniacs about the recent satirical cover of The New Yorker, I suggest folks check out the cartoonbank.com. Type "Native American" into the search engine and you'll find some great stuff. - posted 7/18/08

Check out uncrate.com for strangely compelling, often ridiculous, and sometimes gorgeous celebrations of masculine consumerism. - posted 7/18/08

This is an online literary magazine I've been enjoying: blackbird.vcu.edu - posted 7/18/08

Oh, I almost forget. You must get Jacob Golden's "Revenge Songs," which is a great CD. My favorite song is "Pretend." I'll listen to that one twenty-five times in a row. - posted 7/18/08

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