{"id":113179344,"date":"2023-04-07T12:30:06","date_gmt":"2023-04-07T12:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=113179344"},"modified":"2023-04-07T12:30:06","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T12:30:06","slug":"friday-links-poetry-and-basketball-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lazyandentitled.org\/?p=113179344","title":{"rendered":"Friday Links: Poetry and Basketball Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

“My heart turns numerous, \/ butter at a certain temperature \/ and my porch gets bigger \/ when afternoons laze away there.” – Christopher DeWeese, “Tax Holiday”<\/h2>

Who knew it? A trip to my in-laws\u2019 house involved spending more time eating fried fish than tending to my Substack. Y\u2019all up for some poetry talk and then NBA highlights? It\u2019s National Poetry Month! NBA season\u2019s almost over! I assume at least some of you listen to The Line Break<\/a>!<\/p>

What I\u2019ve Been Reading This Week<\/strong><\/p>

For National Poetry Month, I\u2019m doing a 30-for-30 reading challenge. One book of poems per day until I can\u2019t. So far it\u2019s been fun! I\u2019ll write more about it Wednesday, but it\u2019s been really positive so far. Gets me reading even more, and has been an excuse to revisit some old favorites. I\u2019m trying to loosely theme my readings, and this first week was all poets who bring a kind of unsettling element to their work. <\/p>

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One sentence on each book: The Next Monsters<\/em> by Julie Doxsee wonderfully blurs the line between poetry and flash fiction, with really surprising turns (here\u2019s a Line Break where I read one of the poems<\/a>). Undersleep<\/em> by Julie Doxsee has poems that run on to the next page even if you feel like they should be over, almost creating the effect of tossing and turning in your sleep. entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate <\/em>by Johannes G\u00f6ransson is a delightful plunge into gross-out surrealism while also being so ostentatious you\u2019re not actually grossed out? I saw him read right around the time this was coming out and he described it as \u201csomething JonBen\u00e9t Ramsey would be in,\u201d which I still think is a hilarious way to frame a book. Fjords vol. I<\/em> and vol. II <\/em>by Zachary Schomburg are wonderful surrealist prose poems with images and characters that build on each other, and both books are indexed, which is a fun way to explore a collection (here\u2019s a Line Break where I read one of the poems<\/a>). The Black Forest <\/em>by Christopher DeWeese surprised me the most, a book I read when it came out and thought was fine but absolutely blew me away on this re-read. <\/p>

Poetry: good. Reading challenges: good. More thoughts soon!<\/p>

LINKS!<\/strong><\/p>

Every year, certain players emerge as Dudes I Think Are Fun. The latter end of the Obama administration had me obsessed with Boris Diaw and Patty Mills. I still get sentimental about the Steve Smith\/Mookie Blaylock Hawks backcourt. The rules for this are:<\/p>

  1. Try not to be too obvious, i.e., Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant and LeBron and Giannis are almost always fun<\/em>, but they already get all the attention. <\/p><\/li>

  2. No Bulls. Otherwise this list would be all Bulls. Maybe DeMar DeRozan five times, who knows. Even in the depths of Bulls misery, I can always find five Bulls I think are fun. Gotta look beyond the home team.<\/p><\/li><\/ol>

    In that interest, a highlight starting 5 of Dudes I Thought Were Fun this year. <\/p>

    • C – Domantas Sabonis: <\/strong>LIGHT THE MOTHERFUCKING BEAM! I almost put this 31-minute De\u2019Aaron Fox\/Sabonis highlight video<\/a> on here, but come on. The season\u2019s still going. We can all watch that 31-minute video and weep nostalgically like five years from now. In the meantime, BIG MAN PASSING!<\/p>