David Ulin, Suzanne Lummis, WIDE AWAKE and me.

Reposting this from Facebook, where, but for a handful of exceptions, it was not commented on:

Read David Ulin's remarks about WIDE AWAKE in his 10-Best [books] article in LA TIMES. Became enormously depressed, but nothing I can do about Ulin reducing the collective value of a large (and quite diverse at times) group of poets to one person's choices. And this isn't intended as a slight towards Suzanne and the work she did compiling it (I [bought] a copy)--just Ulin's insistence that the only poets worth remembering in perpetuity are the ones intersecting with [Suzanne] to varying degrees.

New poem: POEM INSPIRED BY AMBER TAMBLYN'S QUENTIN DEAN.

[Poem inspired by an Amber Tamblyn poem I liked in the anthology WIDE AWAKE.]

I remember Quentin Dean

from IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

where she placed herself

in a front window

of a small-town house

in hopes that someone 

happening to pass by

could stop the car

and come inside

for mutual breaking 

of nightly monotony

in stifling-in-many-ways

Southern United States

>

from her brief biography

on the Internet Movie Database,

Quentin Dean wanted more from life

than to be a mere object of desire

in Hollywood studio films and TV

in the days before

the counterculture briefly made

old-fashioned gloss

(that even permeated movies

with a Social Conscience)

almost obsolete

>

so she left Show Business

and lived until 2003

and likely didn't give a damn

about people who went on the Internet

to find out Where Is She Now?

>

Quentin Dean knew

who she was,

where she was

and, I'm guessing, was happy

to not have to care anymore

about all that nonsense

regarding photo shoots, publicity

and the Male Gaze

that can be a curse

more often than not