Strange that such vicious pulp poetry, the product of sweaty male
projection, should win someone the bays...
Your question, David, ("And what do the gentlemen do?")evokes the anecdote
of John Berryman, I think it was with his AA group, at a performance of the
musical _Camelot_ when it got to the question "And what do the common
folks do" roaring out in perfect time & tune "They screw, they screw!"
To return to the identity & mysticism theme (as adumbrated in my mail of
7.June, for example) via the recent identity crisis that shook, rattled &
rolled this list & was so pertinently dubbed "hall of mirrors" by Kent
Johnson quoting somebody (?) called Roger Day, I should like to pick up that
mirror topos and ask about people's favourite mirror poems, Lacanian or
otherwise; one thinks of "The mirror cracked from side to side" or Robert
Duncan's late Baudelairean masterpiece _The Face_, and I'd like to award the
prize for best funny impromptu mirror poem to Dylan Thomas, who according to
e.e. cummings according to Harold Norse kept staring at himself in a baroque
mirror in cummings's home then said "Who is that distinguished Lesbian
writer?"
Martin
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