More books and writers to recommed: Catherine Wagner. Miss America and Macular Hole. Catherine Daly and Catherine Wagner both display the same nervous intelligence, flashes of wit, allusions to pop culture, etc. Both write self-aware, self-conscious, self-referencing, self-self-self work, and yet we’re strolling into dangerous territory here because we know that I=Another. We’re doing doubles here today: Cid Corman and David Jaffin, and now Catherine Daly and Catherine Wagner! All of these doubles, are of course, brilliant and worthy of more words than I have time for at the moment, as I have to rush out and earn my daily (or should I say Daly) bread. Here’s a poem by Catherine Wagner from Macular Hole:

My greed was outrageous
power-outageous

I felt all better & feverish
my braincase was
hypertranslucent
& exercised with rumpling
tumbling skin
which I held gently
over my brain
like a blanket
or a weird threat
of cutting it off
from the world.
Oh my god. My
chest got cut off in
the mine.
I was mine & I was going
to dig myself a jewel.
I dug a little bone in me
I dug a little boneshaped
hole in me, I loved it
Hello you fuckers!
Dug around in there making
my emergencies go off
I thought they were lovebells
or runaway truck ramps

I’m hungry.

I think what I like most about Catherine and Catherine is that they are introducing myth back into post-post-modern poetry. That’s really great, considering that the L=A=N=G folks appear to have made myth uncool. And pardon me if I still say the names Yeats and Blake and David Jones and those other workers of and creators of myth with a smile and a steady look in my eyes.

Baudelaire and Poe, Poe and James Clarence Mangan, Cid and Dave, and Catherine and Catherine!