The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
The Cartoon & Poem Supplement
"Can you believe it’s fiscal quarter three already?"
OK I’m running late with it and the poems kinda slap so this one’s free again. As always – subscribe to get every Supplement, or just to support me.
Poems:
“From ‘Sometimes Tropic of New Orleans’” by Rickey Laurentiis: Major. Laurentiis is working much harder and trying much stranger things than most poets that make the magazine, which means far more is at risk. Thus, although this is imperfect – the parentheticals don’t do much for me, and the ending peters out, though this is seemingly an excerpt so that’s to be expected – I give this as much credit as anything this year, because its twisting logic and ode/etude combo excite me; each juxtaposition has the spark of discovery (“stinging knowledge”), not just clever thesaurus use. Laurentiis is established (she won the Cave Canem prize a decade ago and her new book literally just got longlisted for the NBA) but if you’re under forty and not tenured you count as up-and-coming for the purposes of this particular magazine. Thus the humility to write a poem about not-knowing, forgetting, especially forgetting Dickinson who isn’t exactly Milton, is notable; turning that not-knowing into self-image (“something like what I hope / I really am. Or seem. Or mean”) is a surprisingly potent vision of gender euphoria, tucked into the pocket like a sixteenth note. Is poetry madness, a way of touching the invisible by reading against our maps and views? Laurentiis is slippery; read close and you might slip into something less comfortable.
“I speak with gravity.” by Jane Hirshfield: Hirshfield, who has less to prove and acts accordingly, has landed on one of the funniest titles I can recall; she pays it off well, if perhaps in more somber fashion than I was expecting. What does Hirshfield want to talk about with gravity? Silence, stasis, the now. Gravity is between two words, as if in a scrolling dictionary; it is between two states, before and after. That a tree doesn’t “grieve” this state as we do is not the most interesting conclusion. (What is language for if not arbitrarily mapping our inner lives onto the lives of trees? Why did we give that overwrought Richard Powers book a Pulitzer Prize, if it is not so?) And I wonder if a constant, unheard note could truly be called “musical”. Does “grav” express existence, or is that just a regular expression?
Cartoons:
Here's where to find the cartoons, with credits, in order.
Cover: Really nice stuff from regular suspect Nelson. Those hands – the visible lightness of their touch! And some very fun pigeons with different personalities.
Pg. 11: Drop the full length Grey Lady diss track!! enough teases!
Pg. 13 [Sketchpad]: The funniest thing about this is that there are no songs from Taylor’s last FIVE albums… and there are two songs from reputation.1 Somehow this comic is both Swiftie-fan propaganda and incredibly rude to Taylor Swift.
Pg. 25: Gives decent (pre-post-woke) Dilbert. Unfortunately for both of us, I think that shit is funny. Best of the Week.
Pg. 31: I enjoy a really stupid puzzler. “Oh, it’s an eye chart!” is pretty much all, but the quarter-second delay still hits.
Pg. 32: I’m retiring MPJ2. From now on I’m doing Let’s Remember Some Pets. Let’s Remember Some Pets: Hemingway’s six-toed cat colony.
Pg. 35: This is pretty good, but it is also basically Joss Whedon Presents: The Bible. “Wait, what the smite just happened?”
Pg. 36: Page 31 is the “Monday” puzzler, this is the “Tuesday” puzzler.
Pg. 39: The danger of really going for “crater-pocked moon” is that you’ll tip over into “giant pepperoni pizza”.
Pg. 43: The Strength of Weak Guys.
Pg. 46: Made me think about whether “learning” how to relax is or is not therapyspeak. Strikes me as existing at the exact border of regular phrases.
Pg. 51: It is sort of sad to see Roberts still imagining a health-nut mom as looking like a seventies hippie. Victoria… they are, unfortunately, millennials.
Pg. 52: This is really just an “If a Dog Wore Pants” drawing (If a Hermit Crab Used a Locker Room…) and it lacks the vague existential horror that would really give it punch, but I’m still amused.
Pg. 59: This is what a coffee made with that barista oat milk tastes like to me. I would rather just have black drip than the choice between a bad stomachache and soap suds texture. With that said, for three dollars I would buy any stupid little canned drink I see one time, including but not limited to this.
Pg. 60: OBJECTIVE STATEMENT: Whales mostly eat krill, not fish. SUBJECTIVE STATEMENT: Krill and fish cannot be friends.
55 Years Ago Today
please do not engrave any brief phrases i like
on your assassination bullet casings
One of which is both a non-single and one of the worst songs on what used to be easily her worst album. ↩
Once more for the road: MPJ stands for Mid Pets Joke, and also… so many other things. ↩