Reading Gerritt Lansing's A February Sheaf, a second or third attempt at Lansing's selected poems. I've heard a lot of grousing about previous editions -- I will not add to the store of heartache except to say why put the uncollected (and very literary) poems at the front? and not at the back, after the far superior essays? The selected poems, the greatest hits, I want those first. I want to know what about this guy everybody loves so much. After some mild anxiety at Lansing's genial queer otherness, I got into the Sheaf; another demonstration that some of this work we all live for (e.g. Kevin Davies') comes to us through Projectivist/Black Mountainish sources, such as Lansing, George Stanley, John Wieners... Not that Lansing isn't terrific without serving as part of the great chain of being -- he's lively, curmudgeonly, and... agh, back to class.

UPDATE: Feeling anxiety about talking about anxiety -- what, claiming another white male hetero privilege are we? But surely a heap of the pleasure of poetry is that different people are making it, are saying whatever needs to be said, and not whatever. Although that was the word in "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that got me, whatever. "It's like Kurt Cobain was here," someone (Jim Jones?) says on the Cam'ron album.

Options and direct participation programs have scrambled my brain.