Have you read this yet?

James Jesus Angleton, head of the C.I.A.'s counter-intelligence division during the Cold War, and founding editor of long-out-of-print Yale-based literary journal Furioso:

What he brought to spycraft was the intellectual model of the New Criticism, which, as one contributor to Furioso put it, was propelled by “the discovery that it is possible and proper for a poet to mean two differing or even opposing things at the same time."

( Gladwell, The New Yorker)

Seth Landman's (Blurry) Whale

Sometimes a book is only truly read when it's read twice, or more than twice, because reading it just once is just not enough, is only half-reading it, as if the definition of the number one, in this special case, is half-of-one. I'm not talking about the Da Vinci Code. With the Da Vinci Code, reading it once is one-half too many. You only need to read half of the Da Vinci Code (the second half) to have fully read it. In this case the definition of the number one is actually two, so that to equal one, you only need half-of-one.

Scratch that. Don't read the Da Vinci Code at all.

I'm surprised by myself. I meant to write about Seth Landman's The Wild Hawk the Sea when I set down to write. I am still going to write about The Wild Hawk the Sea, which is out from Minutes Books, and which I just finished reading a second time, now having completely read it.

With fifteen poems, none exceeding a page in length (I don't know why that's relevant), The Wild Hawk the Sea is impossible to summarize. Sure, there's a ruminating "I" running through it, dislocation, derangements of various ilk, surprising or mysterious juxtaposition, but those are words that fall away.

Let your uncertainty sniff out the truth. Steer yourself in tricky ways. Tricky steering is not only necessary, but it also looks good from above. If the Spanish Inquisition got its hands on this book, they would take up other lines of work. Or, with tenuous conviction, they'd give Landman a few half-hearted thwacks, while in their skulls much more resonating thwacking would be occurring. What I'm saying is inside my skull there is thwacking. What I'm not saying is I am the Spanish Inquisition. The Wild Hawk the Sea has a whale on the cover, at least on my copy. And I won't even mention how many Wakefields there are inside. Also inside is this great poem:

Portable Flowers

Portable flowers came to my mind,

and I thought, as in all other things,

do I need to say my? Music alone

had helped me up until this moment,

and now these flowers, little performers

in the vase of my massive, golden brain

creep in and open a curtain I knew

not existed. And here on earth, a melody

doesn't end; I'm squatting on a mountaintop

now; now bawling at something vast in a

wildflower; I'm wholesome on horseback,

late sunset, hawks carving up the clouds.

Oh, this is the warmest afternoon, and

it drives away the chill in my heart,

though perhaps in feeling more myself,

for the first time in so long, I'm really on

a great bluff, cultivating a gloom more my own.

Also, following all that up with the business side of sides, Landman's poem "The Coast," which is in The Wild Hawk the Sea, first appeared in the pages of notnostrums. His life is here and here and here. Not here.