Galatea Resurrects #13 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 13 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2009-12-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

Dec. 22, 2009

[N.B. You can scroll down for all articles or click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article. Since this is a large issue, if it takes too long to upload the entire issue, you can click on the individual links below to more quickly get to a review that interests you.]

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
By Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Crg Hill reviews DICK OF THE DEAD by Rachel Loden

Patrick James Dunagan reviews YOUR WILDERNESS & MINE by David Highsmith

Troy Jollimore reviews OHIO VIOLENCE by Alison Stine

Crg Hill reviews LANDSCAPES OF DISSENT: GUERRILLA POETRY & PUBLIC SPACE by Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand

Thomas Fink reviews HOUSECAT KUNG FU: STRANGE POEMS FOR WILD CHILDREN by Geoffrey Gatza

Patrick Rosal reviews THE LONG LOST STARTLE by Joel Toledo

Emong de Borja reviews YOU ARE HERE by Mabi David

Denise Dooley reviews ELDERS SERIES #3 by Chris Kraus and Tisa Bryant

Jade Hudson reviews COLLAPSIBLE POETICS THEATER by Rodrigo Toscano

Eileen Tabios engages ANALFABETO / AN ALPHABET by Ellen Baxt

Denise Dooley reviews CLASSIFICATION OF A SPIT STAIN by Ellie Ga

Rebecca Loudon reviews WITH DEER by Aase Berg, Translated by Johannes Göransson

Gabriel Lovatt reviews WITH DEER by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson

Tom Hibbard reviews CHOOSE, SELECTED POEMS by Michael Rothenberg

Amanda Reynolds reviews THE LOST COUNTRY OF SIGHT by Neil Aitken

Virginia Konchan reviews IDENTITY THEFT by Catherine Daly

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews TORCHED VERSE ENDS by Steven D. Schroeder

Eileen Tabios engages WATER THE MOON by Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Virginia Konchan reviews ZERO READERSHIP, AN EPIC by Filip Marinovich

Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews MANHATTAN MAN AND OTHER POEMS by Jack Lynch

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews NAVIGATE, AMELIA EARHARTS’ LETTERS TO HOME and CADAVER DOGS, both by Rebecca Loudon

Eileen Tabios engages HI HIGHER HYPERBOLE by Nicholas Manning

Amanda Reynolds reviews TO THE BONE by Sebastian Agudelo

Virginia Konchan reviews THE BOATLOADS by Dan Albergotti

Crg Hill reviews CARAMBOLES by Alexander Dickow

Jim McCrary engages A MAN ABOUT TOWN by Robert J. Baumann

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews LETTERS TO POETS: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT POETICS, POLITICS, AND COMMUNITY, Eds. Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax

James Sanders reviews PLAYING WITH WORDS: THE SPOKEN WORD IN ARTISTIC PRACTICE, Ed. Cathy Lane

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews SUPER 8 and HALLUCINATING CALIFORNIA by Richard Lopez and Jonathan Hayes

John Herbert Cunningham reviews THE PROSODY HANDBOOK: A GUIDE TO POETIC FORM by Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro

Jeroen Nieuwland reviews POETRY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: A READER, Eds. Maria Damon and Ira Livingston

Jon Curley reviews TERRA LUCIDA by Joseph Donahue

Dana Ward reviews WOW WOW WOW WOW by Kevin Killian

Fiona Sze-Lorrain reviews ONE AND TWENTY by Paavo Haavikko, Trans. By Anselm Hollo

Virginia Konchan reviews TUNED DROVES by Eric Baus

Jeff Harrison reviews GHOST DANCE IN 33 MOVEMENTS by Anny Ballardini

Eileen Tabios engages TRUST by Liz Waldner

Lisa Mahle-Grisez reviews EROS & (FILL IN THE BLANK) by Charles Freeland

Jon Curley reviews TRUE CRIME by Donna de la Perriére

Virginia Konchan reviews INTERVENING ABSENCE by Carrie Olivia Adams

James Stotts reviews THE BRITTLE AGE AND RETURNING UPLAND by René Char, translated by Gustaf Sobin

Virginia Konchan reviews CLOSE CALLS WITH NONSENSE by Stephen Burt

Jim McCrary reviews HOUSE ORGAN SUMMER 2009 edited by Kenneth Warren; RUGH STUFFby Steve Tills; HYPERGLOSSIA by Stacy Szymaszek; SOME SPECULATIONS AROUND GEORGE OPPEN’S PAROUSIA by Rob Halpern; WELL MEANING WHITE GIRL by Alli Warren; SPRUNG FORMAL LITERARY MAGAZINE; GET THE FUCK BACK INTO THAT BURNING PLANE by Lawrence Giffin; and MY DAY WALKING FROM MT. TABOR TO THE ZOO and MY DAY by James Yeary and illustrated by Nate Orton

Virginia Konchan reviews HAVE A GOOD ONE Anselm Berrigan

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews THE METHOD by Sasha Steensen

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Virginia Konchan

FEATURED POET
Tom Beckett interviews Rebecca Loudon

FEATURE ARTICLE
"’That all of us may write better’: Gatekeeping, the Literary Establishment, and Marianne Moore as Editor of The Dial” by Kristina Marie Darling

FEATURE ARTICLE
On the Philippines' 2009 National Artist Awards

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEW
Martin Edmonds reviews PELICAN DREAMING: POEMS 1959-2008 by Mark Young

ADVERTISEMENT
Tiny Poetry Books Feeding the World...Literally!

BACK COVER
Yeah, yeah, Happy Holidays…am exhausted!

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2009-12-22T08:27:00.000-08:00

Right. Being editor means I can post a photo of moi boy and moi dog. Have you heard he's a soccer champ (under-14 2009 Napa Cup thank you very much) and is on the Honor Roll? The boy, that is. The dog, though, is a champion frisbee chewer and stuffed animal destroyer! Right.

So, to official bidness: Thanks as ever to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. We have 55 NEW REVIEWS this issue! I like to track GR's progress, so here are some poetry-lovin' stats!

Issue 1: 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)
Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)
Issue 7: 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 9: 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)
Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)

Of reviewed publications, the following were generated from review copies sent to GR:

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews
Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews
Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews
Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies HERE.

As of Issue No. 13, GR has provided 712 new reviews (covering 326 publishers in 16 countries) and 62 reprinted reviews (to bring online reviews previously available only viz print).

*****

As I've said before, your Editor is blind, so if there are typos/errors in the issue, just email Moi or put in the comments sections and I will swiftly correct said mistakes (since such is allowed by Blogger).

*****

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

With much love, poetry and fur,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
Dec. 22, 2009

DICK OF THE DEAD by RACHEL LODEN

2009-12-21T23:55:00.000-08:00

CRG HILL Reviews

Dick of the Dead by Rachel Loden
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2009)

Seriously Laughing, Laughing Seriously

There’s been perpetual debate about the affiliation of poetry and politics. Some commentators argue that poetry must be apolitical or compromise its universality, others that poetry is innately political, a language act in defiance of speech and other quotidian acts of language. There’s also much debate about the role of humor in poetry, many contending that there is only room in poetry for irony. To laugh at or with a poem drops the literary value of that poem. In the face of these debates a poetry emerges every now and then that is uncompromisingly political and unabashedly funny, often at the same time. Rachel Loden’s Dick of the Dead is just such a poetry, a collection that massages the brain and tickles the funny bone. This book is immensely pleasurable yet it is also seriously serious. Dick of the Dead, as the last line puts it, “makes me furiously glad and fills me up with serious pleasure” (83).

Stylistically varied, Dick of the Dead through verse and prose pokes us with the inexplicable exploits of Richard Nixon and his cronies, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and other annoying political and historical figures. This is an acutely social poetry, Loden prodding the many light beams and dark shadows of our history–politics, major and minor events apocryphal and documented, film, other poems, folktales—into gray shapes we must confront before we can move beyond them.

These are abundantly constructed poems and seamlessly so. They are not organic, self-exploratory lyrics, but vehicles built of multiple, often unexpected, components. For example, the poem which features Cheney as the speaker, “Cheney Agonistes” is assembled out of nine different sources from Peter Pan ((“But now if I’d been Blackbeard’s boatswain//(as I should have been) Pan and the lost boys/would have long since walked the plank.”)) to a report in the Independent, a UK newspaper, that Cheney has a man-sized safe to keep his papers out of public scrutiny (“…I do my work. I am the man/inside my man-sized safe…”) to Senator Lindsey Graham predicting victory in Iraq at the 2008 Republican Convention. One source, Bush’s near-strangulation encounter with a pretzel, is the springboard from which Cheney spews his disgust for the president (“I have to work for everything I get—not like/that Kennebunkport parrot, whose tray of pretzels//sates his meager appetite…”).

Decidedly unself-referential, many of the poems are rewritings of other poems or carry strong allusions to others. Pound’s “In A Station of the Metro” is recast into “The USNS Comfort Sails to the Gulf”:

Huge red crosses on the whitewashed hull:
http://www.comfort.navy.mil/welcome.html

Many of the poems are created out of quite unlikely materials. For example, “Affidavit” is a poem based on a macabre crime in which the husband beheaded his wife as reported by one of the investigating officers, Palo Alto police detective Mike Denson. For Loden, then, a poem can start anywhere, with any thing.

Serious poetry is often derided by its detractors as being humorless. This indeed is a book of serious poetry—some of our history is a rank albatross hung about our necks, but it has many, many instances of comic relief, of irrepressible humor, to clear the air with laughter. The first poem, “Miss October,” in the guise of a would-be Playboy model, includes these lines about Hugh Hefner inevitable demise, his

Last vial of Viagra
Safely under glass

At the Smithsonian.

Or maybe that is too close to the possible truth to be funny.

You have to wonder also about the playfulness of the title—Dick of the Dead—and its humorous connotations. Is it a play on the fact that when males die, they have erections, i.e. Dick Nixon engorged past, present, future (will he ever go away?)? That perverse thought is perhaps echoed in the poem “A Quaker Meeting in Yorba Linda” when Mrs. Nixon is quoted as saying to Tricia and Julie: “Girls your father is sprouting from the grave.”

The humor comes through in many of the poem’s titles: “My Angels, Their Pink Wings,” “I Was a Communist for the FBI,” “Fury’s Ukulele,” and perhaps the most preposterous and pompous (a title that might even make Billy Collins blush),“A Redressed Poet That Seems Living, How to Make Him Sing.”

The book has even got me to laugh at one of the lingering embarrassments of my young adulthood, an event that permanently soured me on the integrity of our country’s leaders: Watergate. I’ve laughed, too, at Richard Nixon, but this laughter has been more complex, not simply in derision, now streaked with pity, finally recognizing and accepting his utter humanity, gloriously flawed. Or I’m just tired of laughing at him

These aren’t punchline poems, however; many have a humor with a bite, a wryness with a sharp edge. In the first poem Nixon appears in, “In the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments,” he is a ghost with a simmering grudge. Envious that Leonid Breshnev has a statue, even if it is legless in a graveyard of statues, he rues the fact that there is no statue of him “astride an American city,” though they both held the “world on a razor/of our mutually assured destruction, and yet--//comrade! you remember—we felt strangely free.” The last line of the poem perhaps suggests a legacy the Nixon ghost is not quite conscious of as he observes Elks conventioneers visiting his library in Yorba Linda: “a queer uneasiness they cannot place,” a gut-sense that even three decades after his fall, even for his supporters all is not as it seems.

“Sympathy for the Empire” conflates Teddy Roosevelt, John Wayne, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a poem that rouses a cold snigger, dripping with bitterness. In the end, one has to ask who is this man (Rumsfeld) who thinks he knows what is right for all of us, his desk adorned with a quote from Teddy Roosevelt, “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords”?

Loaded with political references from the last century, with a perhaps more than we would ever want from the ignominious Nixon and Bush administrations, sprinkled with pop culture allusions, reanimating other poems, this is a collection that by engaging us with the social world around us, funny, sad, irritating, painful, we cannot help but look at the world in the same way again. Along with Kevin Davies' book The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Dick of the Dead has to be one of the best books published in the last couple years.

*****

Crg Hill until recently edited SCORE, one of only two journals dedicated exclusively to concrete/visual poetry. In the last three decades his work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including several available on-line. His creative and critical works in progress can be found at http://scorecard.typepad.com. // During the anemic Carter administration, Crag Hill kicked the "i" out of his first name. Continuing to be underwhelmed by his elected leaders, he threatens to kick out the last vowel, too soft, too soft, he says. Something in the Scotch-Irish in him thinks he'll be well-represented by the guttural "Crg."

YOUR WILDERNESS & MINE by DAVID HIGHSMITH

2009-12-21T23:50:00.000-08:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

your wilderness & mine by David Highsmith
(Blazevox, Buffalo, New York, 2009)

Turn me loose set me free
somewhere in the middle of Montana
give me all I’ve got coming to me

- Merle Haggard
“Big City”

(evolution
she spat)

- “aberration”

Everybody needs the company of others. Poets, often despite themselves, are social beasts; even in hate seeking the consistent comfort of care. We need each other to behave according to expectations imposed by rules of our common ends, yet what’s in common often does not extend past the bare minimum of social surfaces. Bound by our mutual desire to be accepted by the group we attempt to enwrap others within restrictions we pile upon ourselves. When the poem doesn’t achieve its own standard, developing its own environment beyond such arbitrary, irresolute restrictions it is of little use aside from continuing the constant prattle of regularity one finds round any office water cooler or hollered about down at the local schoolyard.

What is wanted is work that disappears into itself, resistant to becoming tangled in fear of being misunderstood; denied; withheld. Such stuff struts without acknowledging self-awareness, there is no singular individual will clearly at work behind its moves. The reader is challenged against her expectations by poetry of this order. “No ego pumping here” reads the posting. Those looking for group identity in poetry by which to propel a comfort and acceptance of and for themselves often fail recognize poetry of such order.

David Highsmith writes poems from out the natural circumstances of which they arise, not worrying whether to follow any ‘correct’ set of rules to match expectations of some supposed audience. There’s generous looseness in the breadth offered up in this latest collection. Opening with the 75 haiku-like sections of the sequential long poem “October Fires” where each numbered verse stands equally well alone as together, meditative and crisply honed:

67)
go shopping, body, teach us
in our very legs
your innocent character

and closing with the probing rhythmic prose of “Something You Believe In”:

Poetry, too, says something you believe in. It says your taste is true, that truth is either a private or a public matter, that matter is either incandescent or somewhat murky, that mute rage is both idle and reputable. The poet knows that rain is falling, and demonstrates the skill to navigate within a storm, between the worlds of sleep and those of copper wire. What wonders is both wonderful and offensive. The poem advances its formation, its armor, and its weaponry. The poem voices the sound of rubber chicken, of novelty lost. Its sound is a deep hacking cough from within a tomb. Within a tomb, a mummy wonders about snipers, sit-ups, and clean sheets. These are the concerns of poetry, its linen wrapping. Poetry homogenizes and elucidates our bother, our dull routine, noxious and dead to honor. It wonders at parts of speech, sourdough, hearts, shellac, tremors, rumbles, stingrays, the possibility of love and the impossibility of satisfaction. It is asphalt and cold to touch. It is the surface upon which we hope to move. It dreams what you dream, that a verbal city is loot for the taking. Whatever knows you in a poem knows you better than you know yourself, it knows that the whole is true, that time is the intangible squeeze, Beatrice on the Brooklyn bridge.

Highsmith centers the moment of writing exact in extraction of its sources. This is no small theatre of spectacle. Beatrice takes Dante off of Virgil’s crude, beautiful hands (he is, after all, “pagan”) and ushers him into the daunting vision of the uppermost glory of the unfolding rose of light. What may not be witnessed in this life, Dante records in as inhuman ability as allowed. The image her appearance makes here is not mistaken. She stands forth on Hart Crane’s symbolic harp, above Whitman’s waters beacon to the desire that the words of the poem have not missed the mark.

Throughout the collection, Highsmith advantageously scatters a variety of approaches to the poem. There is a sustained exploration of couplets, from the zany comic adventure of “xanadu”:

We know no grief or pain, it’s another day
In Xanadu & Scooby Doo, I think of you

and the Dadaist leaning Americana of “blue ridge shuffle” with its finalizing “as if a cat had anything to do with it” humors, to the lengthy “inbound volume” with its questionings made to a possible addressee:

won’t you be my chocolate bunny, won’t you be my
national park, bleak reprieve leads into March

Highsmith aptly demonstrates comfort moving from such fringey, stylistically jumpy linguistic play within the line to a more accepted “workshop” standard conception of the short lyric.

film noir

phenomena
gathered at her bedside
would not leave him alone

what left him alone
made for restless nights
an accessory’s babble of love

she recalled the thrill of being held
b.c.u. in a window beyond
what he called body

he was her life, a silhouette
through venetian blinds, anatomy study
to slacken the impertinent

she was his sad simplification
his hard edge, what bothered her
would not leave them alone

The visual conception fairly easily ties together the title with the content of the poem. Varying points of explication are readily available. Such work pleases the conservative reader. Yet even poems such as this share in the irreverence dealt by their more cagey counterparts while not being adverse to showing off a bit of clear, controlled awareness of “craft.” Highsmith has too much imp in him.

french class

another night of night school
et les jeux sont fait

we “lick the windows”
of a textbook magazin

regard un morceau de pain,
un peau de lapin

practice despair
to interrupt the timorous traffic

embrace le clameur de la rue
as we strive

to suffer desire, to imagine a sound
sensed above the rattle of Peugeots

The result is a collection that’s fun and surprising to flip about through reading at random and even while on the go, as well as, alternately, for extended lengths of time, dwelling on the more ambient moods and turns of phrase, following out the trickling lead given by this or that bit which strikes the fancy. It’s much more than that “there’s something in here for everybody” feeling, you aren’t left to take or leave a poem because it just doesn’t “work” for you. Every poem here “works.”

Highsmith hits strides in the longer poems where the riffs strike up melody and there’s an ever present scat-like occurrence where sought after meaning holds no ground as granted sound steps to, pounding along with rhythm of a panther stalking prey.

sustained with basin, another sunken treasure
achromatophilia beneath straw, cautiously
thrown, savanna to no object, unleashed

& coils into snakeroot, a notion of risk kindles
a carpet of grass, shale pit, layered inference
to sidestep eons, flight preceding echolocation

snapdragon to clam, bivalve, a fissure to stump
this sterile banter, hind limbs on which an
animal stalks, our history, the corollary static

to codify events, a thin rail west, a river’s route
slim spur of columbine, a beauty yet to come
wide continent resplendent beneath assertion

(“haystack draw”)

At these points the poem is nothing but pure linguistic animal, devouring and regurgitating language propelling itself ever further on vocabularies stretching to iridescent heights of sonic bliss. All with a gleam to the eye and a smile hinted at back of the lips. Poetry is a pleasure worth being around for and happily Highsmith isn’t averse to acknowledging it.

One wonders why more poets aren’t accepting of this instead of the usual picture: stilted selves so often seeming, awkward to the eye and heavy sitting on the page. The poem is the only true fact the poet leaves behind and facts, damn it, matter. It’s worth being reminded of how absolutely open the lands are that await a dizzying soul to step forth and do some exploring. Life is pure adventure when you’re welcoming of it, more attention needs be paid to allowing for the poem to take like part in such crucial and necessary excursion.

for Rachael Rakes
Brooklyn – San Francisco, Oct. 25-30 2009

~ ~

endnote:

David Highsmith lives in San Francisco. His involvement within the poetryworld of that city began in the 1970s. He is the proprietor of Books & Bookshelves which stocks quality wood furniture at acceptable rates along with holding one of the premiere inventories of small press poetry books while also serving as a delightful venue for an ongoing reading series hosting local and out-of-town poets of little to broad renown. He is a generous bookman. Be generous back and may poetryworld continue to spin round. Ask him about his other recent publications, the serially structured CONGREGATIONS (Plan B press) and PETROGLYPH (Painted Bison Press) each is worth notice.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives and works in San Francisco. Recent publications include: From Chansonniers (Blue Press, 2008) and Easy Eden w/ Micah Ballard (PUSH, 2009). Things are looked to be forthcoming in Forklift, Pax Americana, and ON.

OHIO VIOLENCE by ALISON STINE

2009-12-21T23:42:00.000-08:00

TROY JOLLIMORE Reviews

OHIO VIOLENCE by Alison Stine
(University of North Texas Press, 2009)

The poems in Alison Stine’s first book are eerie, creepy, ominous: they have the feel of those quiet moments in horror movies when, though nothing has quite happened yet, you just know that something absolutely awful is about to. The wind blows, birds cry, clothes flap on the line, and the tension rises to an unbearable level—as often as not to be relieved (if ‘relieved’ is the right word) by the discovery that, to borrow Heidegger’s words, ‘the dreadful has already happened’:

. . . They have found
her bones in the park, scattered circuitous
by animals amid the fretted leaves, the forest
giving up its secret in layers of stench:
the heavy sweet, the vinegar. Now a slender
leg. Now a finger, a skull smashed like a star
on the spot that was once soft, that someone once,
years ago, took great care to guard. . .

(“After the Body”)

‘The Dreadful Has Already Happened’ is also, of course, the title of a poem by Mark Strand, and Stine’s poems share some of the weirdness that animated Strand’s early work, though the setting, as suggested by the book’s title, is interestingly her own: a Middle America whose gestures at heartland wholesomeness are entirely incapable of concealing the grim reality lying beneath. (Perhaps the true presiding spirit of Ohio Violence is the David Lynch of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, those squeaky-clean all-American towns in which the possibility of grisly death ever lurks in the woods and fields that lie just beyond the parking lot.)

“This is football country,” declares the opening poem, “Fields Beyond Fields”; later, Dale Earnhardt makes an appearance, as does Elvis. But it is not the lives but rather the deaths of these figures that fascinates this poet:

. . . I heard when Lisa Marie
                  at nine found him dead or dying, marble skin

                                    in the bathroom, blood leadening, forehead

taking on the tub mantle, she got in her
                  golf cart and circled Graceland again

                                    and again until the cops came. It was early

morning. It is only a story, but I think it is
                  true. . . .

                   (“In Graceland”)

This concern with truth and fiction—the question of whether a story is true, and of what it means if it isn’t—pops up frequently. “We lay in the fields, and I // swear to you, nothing happened,” Stine writes in “Fields Beyond Fields.” As if worried that the reader might such denials too comforting, she later confronts us with the question: “Does it matter if it didn’t happen?” (“When the Hand is a Knife.”) Well, one might say, it matters to us—particularly when the ‘it’ stands, as it so often seems to here, for our lives, our very existences:

From brain to body blooming,

                                    it is all about chemicals; it is always

                  about them, too much or too few
inhibited, the nerves frayed,
                                    the blood lines blocked. At birth,

the chord can twist the neck; it can
                  choke . . .

                   (“Elegy for the Interrupted”)

It is not clear exactly who “the interrupted” are. They might be just about anyone; indeed, they might have been us. One comes away from Ohio Violence newly impressed with the contingency and instability of the hazardous universe that is our home; and impressed, as well, with the ability of these stark, memorable poems to distill that universe into language and to make of it a sad and haunting song.

*****

Troy Jollimore’s first book of poems, Tom Thomson in Purgatory (MARGIE / Intuit House) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2006.

LANDSCAPES OF DISSENT: GUERILLA POETRY & PUBLIC SPACE by JULES BOYKOFF and KAIA SAND

2009-12-21T22:25:00.000-08:00

CRG HILL Reviews

LANDSCAPES OF DISSENT: GUERRILLA POETRY & PUBLIC SPACE by Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand
(Palm Press, Long Beach, CA, 2008)

Landscapes of Dissent: Taking Poetry to the People

Though passionate, well-written, I wonder whether Landscapes of Dissent has earned its space. Is its appearance premature? Is it documentation of a vital political/poetic avenue or is it a call to similar action? As documentation, it scratches the surface, touching briefly upon the work of but four guerilla poetry groups and a smattering of others. As a call for action, it falls short—a small press book (oh the irony), a microscopic audience at best (then again, it is in the small press community one is likely to recruit guerilla poets). Its call might be louder if it mapped out a wide campaign, if the book suggested coordinated local actions accumulating in a wide-spread wave of public poetic interventions, a guerilla poetry tsunami rushing the beaches of Culture.

The book is clear about its parameters, considering work outside the traditional venues of art galleries and books*. Focusing on places/spaces in which poems usually do not appear, Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand are more interested “in how poem’s form and content are not the only sites of political possibility. A poem’s physical location also matters… What if, rather than in a book, a poem were lodged in public space?” (8-9). Where and how the poem appears or is performed is the armature of the form and content.

In tune with the Situationists, the authors argue that “psycho-geography” (10-11), the study of geography, of place, as it shapes our psychic space, subverts the barriers between art and everyday life. Boykoff and Sand quote Henri Lefebvre who posits that “Space is a social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with function and structure” (17).We are what surrounds us, what rounds us. But this is a two-way street: what rounds us we can use to surround us on our own terms. Guerilla poetry heightens that reciprocity, pushing our shared spaces into action.

For the guerilla poet public spaces are an infinity of potent pages, whereas the book is bound, a moribund commercial entity. These spaces outside books and galleries and museums embody texts to be interacted with, to be nudged and jolted. As illustration, Boykoff and Sand cover the work of four dissident groups, poets who resist the power of public policy, who engage in oppositional strategies, and who themselves have views not heard in the dominant political discourse. These groups utilize public spaces in unconventional ways to present their poems: “These are guerilla acts: the poets did not receive outside funds or permission. They stake claim on the space” (28). Unconventional venues necessitate unconventional audiences. Boykoff and Sand apply the term guerilla poetry “to poetry in public space to see what happens when poetry reaches an audience that will be less predictable in its response. This audience has not intentionally sought to experience poetry” (30). The audience becomes inadvertent.

The four spotlighted groups are PIPA (Poetry is Public Art), PACE (Poet Activist Community Extension), The Agit-Truth Collective, and Sidewalk Blogger, all poets active in the traditional venues of poetry, magazines and poetry readings, but who choose to bypass these venues. The swift undercurrent of this book is its insistent call to resist “legitimacy, legality, and legibility” (29), to undercut commercialism wherever possible. These four groups selflessly spend their energy finding new ways to cast consumption back on itself

PIPA is a loose-organization of poets who “intentionally or non-intentionally, choose to break poetry out of the frame of the page and test its assimilation and/or intrusion into public spaces” (31). Though PIPA has no centralizing principle, Kristin Prevallet asserted in an interview that public art “is a way of thinking about poetry as a conceptual project as opposed to a poetry project whose end result would be a book or a small press literary magazine” (31). In one PIPA project participants picketed the 2004 Republican National Convention and anti-Iraq-war demonstrations with slogans such as “Permanent Cultural Vibration,” “Lose the Illusion of Your Exemption,” “Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what Bush is doing to your country.” The slogan project “allowed poets to consciously contribute to an extant form where citizens use poetic resources without deeming what they make ‘poetry,’ updating, in a sense, the Situationist project of generating slogans for the May 1968 uprisings” (34). In another PIPA project, “Debunker Mentality,” a coterie of New York-based poets mobilized to articulate the space/s mainstream media had avoided following September 11, 2001. When and where the media was incoherent or worse, mute, these poets blanketed the city with posters with poems framed by critical questions such as “Why is it unpatriotic to dissent?” which they spread around the city. One participant, Nathaniel Siegel, expressed the raison d’etre for such actions, insisting his duty as a poet is “‘to not simply reflect the time I am living in: my job is to live and to live through my interactions with others’” (47). This is poetry of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Based in Philadelphia, PACE participants (CA Conrad, Linh Dinh, Mytili Jagannathan, and Frank Sherlock) hit the streets with their poems. Performing their poems against the backdrop of commercial spaces such as street malls, their inaugural event taking place on Christmas eve, PACE poets experience their affects on their audience first-hand, poet, poem, and inadvertent audience in direct contact, unlike many of the other actions described in this book. The poem is the vehicle to make this interpersonal connection, challenging both the poet and the passerby to cross the distances between them, to wedge narrow personal spaces with broadening public spaces.

Boykoff and Sand themselves have been involved with the third group, the Agit-Truth Collective. In their first project they added hand-made signs to highway markers, urging “Where is the dead/end of our imperialist fiasco.” These signs disrupt the site and the sight of unsuspecting viewers, forcing the reader to interrogate the question and the context within which it is asked. All the signs are overtly political, jamming political discussion into the streets, so-called neutral spaces we passively travel through to the places we live and work. Walking to the store is not a mundane, apolitical venture when you are confronted with signs emblazoned with images from Abu Ghraib declaring “You have the right to remain liberated.” Active in Portland, Oregon, the collective engages in interventions that Hakim Bey argues creates temporaryautonomouszones, or TAZ, “an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it” (73-74). Agit-Truth Collective carried out one such action in three stages on a Portland bridge. In the first stage passing cars were met by a dancing George Bush shaking a sign reading “Honk if you ♥ totalitarianism.” Next, a participant wearing earphones held up a sign ordering, “If you don’t honk we are writing down your license plate number.” In the final stage, two Agit-Truthers with clip boards pretended to take down license plate numbers.

Sidewalk Blogger is the fourth guerilla poetry group discussed. Inspired by the “Freeway Blogger,” Susan Schultz deploys the placement without permission of highly charged political statements in spaces. Inserted on fences and often among commercial signs, Sidewalk Blogger implores the audience to “Keep out of Iraq” and to “Im/pe/ach.” Sidewalk Blogger also strategically chooses where to place these signs. For instance, near the exit to a Marine Corps Air Station, she placed a sign which read “Out of Iraq.” Again and again, place is part of the poem, part of the grammar, of the expression. Place/meant.

Many readers may argue that the work documented is not poetry. Boykoff and Sand anticipated this question and marshaled Philip Metres’ concept of “lang/scape” as part of their answer: “To call such language acts poems,” he writes about the kinds of interventions described in this book, “is to interrogate not only page-based definitions of poetry, but also definitions of poetry that privilege difficulty, complexity, and ambiguity above all else.” The difference between graffiti–propaganda–and the works such as the Sidewalk Blogger is that graffiti closes down the interpretive field while guerilla poetry strives to open it up wide.

I wish the final section, “Your Turn,” had more development. By no means am I calling for prescriptions here–true guerilla poets are local, autonomous, and unconventional, yet as a call to action the section could outline a range of activities and perhaps suggest a time span within which these activities are accomplished. Then these actions would not seem sporadic, effective but ephemeral, their deconstructive/constructive forces dissipating, drops in a cavernous bucket rather than a rolling wave. One of the book’s final arguments: “Contrary to this techno-centered vantage [Critical Art Ensemble], we believe keyboard activism will never supplant boots-to-the-pavement dissent” (114). A bold statement but that may or may not hold up. In the meantime, as I ponder who to pass this book on to–it has no business languishing on my bookshelves–get out of your studio, your comfort zone. Find some way to take your poetry directly to the public.

* I recommend finding a copy of another, older book that also chronicles boundary-breaking appearances of poetry in public spaces, The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance, edited by Stephen Vincent & Ellen Zweig, Momo’s Press, 1981.

*****

Crag Hill until recently edited SCORE, one of only two journals dedicated exclusively to concrete/visual poetry. In the last three decades his work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including several available on-line. His creative and critical works in progress can be found at http://scorecard.typepad.com. // During the anemic Carter administration, Crag Hill kicked the "i" out of his first name. Continuing to be underwhelmed by his elected leaders, he threatens to kick out the last vowel, too soft, too soft, he says. Something in the Scotch-Irish in him thinks he'll be well-represented by the guttural "Crg."

HOUSECAT KUNG FU by GEOFFREY GATZA

2009-12-21T22:22:00.000-08:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Housecat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children by Geoffrey Gatza
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2009)

In his previous work, Geoffrey Gatza has written innovative poetry with a wide range of reference and stylistic approaches. He is also the editor of the journal BlazeVox and directs its press. Though Housecat Kung Fu is subtitled Strange Poems for Wild Children, this book of children’s poetry is not confined to pre-teens. Borrowing from Barnum and Bailey Circus, the back cover bio trumpets: “children (of all ages).”

Like much children’s poetry, Gatza’s book features animal imagery (often put to allegorical use) in 27 of the 32 poems, comical wordplay, goofy surrealist imagery and narrative effects, and bits of moral edification. The illustrations are also amusing and well done, but rhyming poems like “Lorikeet Landing” are the exception.

Readers of various generations attuned to the “strangeness” of innovative adult poetry will have much to enjoy here—for example, the title-poem, which opens the volume:

The smell of buttered toast overwhelms this poem.

How do you explain your moment of wild abandon
to anyone other than those who were there to feel

the momentous weakness of time’s grasp on change;
on growing up. It’s a poor heart that never rejoices (9)

The title is but a decoy for a very brief philosophical poem. The opening line’s first five words beckon us to recall a marvelous experience, but the rest of the line cancels the invitation with an absurdity. Perhaps “overwhelmed” by a smell, the writer nevertheless chooses words for a poem, and a reader/listener must be able and willing to reactivate a past olfactory experience to share this feeling.

In the question without a question-mark that occupies the two couplets, the poet may be suggesting a communication barrier between adults and children, as though opening a book of children’s poetry by calling that very enterprise futile. If not, he may be posing a challenge, not an impossibility. The lengthy object of the infinitive “to feel” complicates the sentence further: “time” as the immaterial medium of “change” is neither “weak” nor “strong”; it “flows” while “containing” continuity and change and does not “grasp.” However, we can read “time” as human beings’ imperfect conception of duration and flux, a paradigm disrupted by “change.”

Disrupting any expectation of further difficulty, Gatza concludes with a clear statement of moral/psychological instruction typical of children’s poetry. The impulse to “rejoice” is one common denominator of the generations and can help readers overcome the conceptual difficulties involving time and change.

Two other poems, “The Inner Peace of Animals” and “Fredric Squirrel,” include a sizeable dose of didacticism, but Gatza makes us question whether he is mainly trying, while entertaining his audience(s), to teach the lesson literally articulated or whether he is parodying his sub-genre’s convention. In “The Inner Peace of Animals,” “a very old lion” is visiting “an old leopard/ who lived in a bird’s nest” to inquire about “the most important lesson of living.” The leopard provides a rather general answer:

Do no evil, do only good.
Purify your heart. Fulfill the talents of your soul!

The lion had expected to hear a very long explanation.
He protested, “But even a cub can understand that!”

Yes, replied the wise sage, but even an old lion cannot do it. (33)

Does Gatza agree that wisdom is simple but hard to put into practice, or is the “old leopard”—using the listener and not himself as a negative example—indulging in brinksmanship to plump up his ego? In the work of an Ezra Pound-influenced poet who strives to make every word count, the repetitive “wise sage” must signify an undercutting of the leopard’s authority, perhaps even implying pseudo-wise pseudo-sage. Though the lion wrongly focuses on the explanation’s length rather than its content, the “teacher’s” advice is easy to dispense; it would be far more challenging to present a means to accomplish these goals. And do we trust a platitudinous “leopard” who has colonized the home of a much smaller, less powerful creature? Is such an action an example of doing “good” through empathy with an “other” and fulfilling one’s own spiritual talents or is it a politically suspect appropriation and an evasion of one’s natural modes of fulfillment?

“Bergamot Bunny” is more obviously a parody of somewhat purple, didactic, abstract verse, especially when one considers the puncturing of the bunny’s musing in the penultimate strophe with a narrative of disaster in the last one:

During this time of transition, I wish
to do what is not expected, to be here
but also with you, there, under wild
Perspectives of the soul, adrift, riding under
unruly waves, every moment reminding
of our immediately slight insignificance . . .

That is until last year when most of his machinery,
and ship, tragically, was destroyed by a tidal wave.
After that he vowed to voyage only in warm dreams. (47)

Following two tercets that could reflect the hand of a cannier kids’ poet, this passage involves the grownup parody of sophisticated awkwardness. Like John Ashbery in Three Poems and later seventies work, Gatza sports a clunky idealizing rhetoric hovering near cliché yet happily marred at various turns. For example, the preposition “under” attached to the object “Perspectives” “is not expected”; it feels “wilder” than the expected “within” or “from,” because the vantage point somehow subjugates (not intersects with) the perceiver, as do the waves under (not on) which he is “riding.” Further, the adverb/ adjective/noun combination preceding the dreamy ellipses has a jarring effect: is the slightness understandable at once, or is it simply compelling, and is the last word redundant of its predecessor, or does the adjective undo the noun’s impact, suggesting greater significance? Even before the “tidal wave” destroys the bunny’s “machinery,” something has jammed its verbal machinery.

Manifesting an elegant compression in direct contrast to “Bergamot Bunny’s” expansionist tendencies, “The Raccoons of Chinatown” joins allusions to Chairman Mao and (American urban) Chinatown restaurants with surprising wordplay:

The raccoons of Chinatown

                  fear not the long march

The raccoons of Chinatown

                  Do fear the great wok,
                  chili garlic sauce and the
                  cleavers of Chinatown chefs (43)

The lightning pun of “march/wok/walk,” to cite Gatza in “Lorikeet Landing,” produces “the honey of a wild spelling bee” (11). Also, note the complexity of troping in the middle of an otherwise reasonably transparent narrative, “One Heck of a Tree”: “little green men wear crayon sin caps” (12). “Rayon” is a logical material, but the addition of the letter “c” at the beginning turns these diminutive grownups into kids. And the odd idea of headwear producing a negative moral state is complicated by the fact that a “sincap” is a squirrel, and a “syncope” is a loss of consciousness or a rhetorical use of deletion.

Children’s poems often make liberal use of surrealism to explore affective states, and Gatza’s “Elephant” does so with poignancy that can move readers “(of all ages).” Seeking emotional sustenance through memory, the elephant at first “reminisced on nothing wafers” (16) and could not satisfy its hunger. To further its quest, the speaker strove to transcend carnal presence, mere appearance, in order to recognize and assert the “inner self”: “so I took off my nose and unzipped/ my skin and folded it neatly by the reflecting/ pond. . . .” This is preparation for the spiritual act of “deep prayer/ to the memory machine,” but the elephant’s psychospiritual opportunity turns out to be mediated by consumer capitalism: the machine “cost 50 cents/ more than I had/ in my ear” (17). Forced to choose between quantity and quality of memory, the speaker elected for “three dollars of leaded/ memory” over “a half pump/ of super premium”; this pragmatic decision is interrupted by a disorienting shift in surreal impact: “green smoke// chugged a printout face from/ its furry eye and responded// ‘When Elephants fly.” Yes, this is a deux ex machine, but we can delight in how commerce gives way to the potential for “flight,” a trope for liberation, especially for an animal so influenced by gravity.

I wish that Housecat Kung Fu had been around between 1993 and 1996, when there seemed to be a dearth of “wild,” “strange” enough children’s poetry in my local library for my two daughters to absorb. Though I remember giving them premature smatterings of Mallarme, Dickinson, and Yeats, Gatza’s admirable crossover poetry would have launched their poetic education splendidly.

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Clarity and Other Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2008) and two books of criticism. He is also co-editor of a 2007 collection of essays on David Shapiro. Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs published his chapbook, Generic Whistle-Stop, in 2009. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). Fink’s paintings hang in various collections.

THE LONG LOST STARTLE by JOEL TOLEDO

2009-12-21T22:21:00.000-08:00

PATRICK ROSAL Reviews

The Long Lost Startle by Joel Toledo
(University of the Philippines Press, Dilliman, Quezon City, Philippines, 2009)

Days after Ondoy, the first typhoon of several that devastated the Philippines in October, I got my first experience of brownouts in the middle of a metropolis of 11 million people, when a fire blew out a transformer in Quezon City. I sat in the dark with no fan or air conditioning, eating by candlelight, thinking of my loved ones both in the Philippines and back in the States, wishing them safe, recalling their voices and faces. It may have been the slowest, quietest night of my peripatetic, four-month stay.

As if to pick a scuffle with Grandpa Whitman himself, Joel Toledo asserts, in his sophomore poetry collection, The Long Lost Startle, “I can do with less electricity.” Hailing from a country where sources of power (both literal and figurative) are not dependable, Toledo has written a collection of poems that taps other kinds of energy—mostly meditative and mostly acquired through the poet’s powers of observation and reflection.

The night I sat in the dark in Quezon City taught me, I think, we all can do with less electricity, for the dark, if we’re patient enough to know it, can become a kind of solace, and certain things reveal themselves only in particular versions of quiet. Toledo’s book is, among other things, a reminder of this.

The Long Lost Startle, which follows his 2008 debut, Chiaroscuro (Unversity of Santo Tomás Press), doesn’t propose a radical return to nature, but the poems do have a strong connection to the natural world—its petty cruelties and sublime revelations, its noises, both grievous and sonorous, as one might “climb trees, collecting the carcasses of cicadas.” (I’ll return to a parallel image at length.) This is a voice that knows the sensations of the earth, its whims, its weathers, and its seasonal yields of agony, mercy, discovery, and joy.

In a poem, delightfully titled “Tree Five-Seven-Five” (I love the absurdity of a tree named with a number), Toledo composes a Roethke-like conversation with a garden critter.

Caterpillar hi,
could you please not forget your
left-behind cocoon

This poem is one of several visitations about time passing. The poem ends:

Climb aboard and see

how I lean over,
how I age in this weather.
I need company.

Rhyme (of both the end and internal variety) is virtually non-existent in the collection, and consonance and alliteration make rare appearances, so when such devices do appear, they must be well-timed, which they are. Such subdued sonic effects, too, lend themselves to a kind of unplugged aesthetic. The silence of the poems clears out space for the struggle to recover “the long lost startle” of the title.

The speaker of these poems is poised between the twin stillnesses of birth and death, gazing at them simultaneously as often as the poet can stand it. The commotion between those two extremes baffles the serenity of one and the terror of the other. And so the speaker of Toledo’s poems is keenly aware of his own aging. He has a remarkable empathy—an adult’s empathy—for the sadness of children: “Nothing we do/can console them…Meanwhile,/we do what we can.” In another poem, the speaker recalls the death of his grandmother and admits, “I am wild with fear. I am inconsolable.”

So where is the relief? In “The Same Old Figurative”, the poem insinuates the imagery of baptism, though the speaker is less interested in water as a means of salvation and more interested in the rains as an opportunity for immersion, study and attention, an opportunity, in fact, for work:

It is only in its breaking

that the rain gives itself away. So come now and assemble
with the weather, notice the water gathering on your cupped

and extended hands—familiar and wet and meaningless.
You are merely being cleansed. Bare instead

the scarred heart; notice how its wild, human music
makes so much sense. Come, the divining

can wait.
Let us examine the wreckage.

For Toledo, everything in the material (and perhaps psychic) world seems to move through ruin (a word which reappears throughout the collection). In the poem titled “Ruin”, Toledo writes: “And before the end comes, the complete/corrosion of all things beautiful.” Even the seeming permanence of the celestial is subject to extinction: “the stars and their kind shapes,/now gradually put out,/seemingly more distant, also perishable.”

In the face of such inevitability, how do we hold it all together? “We endure them despite their expected/tragedies.” The book is full of burdens and, still, it is a record of a figure who tries to stay steady in the middle of it all, annoyed—and even disconsolate at times—about what one person, as prone as he is to his own loss and affections, suffers, and amid such suffering, he persists, loves. Above all, the speaker refuses to be deprived of wonder. “And I am held//in awe of the things that move in the world,/or are moved,” declares Toledo in a tender tribute to his wife in a characteristic style of speech that resonates with its private ebullience.

As solitary as the voice seems (rarely does the speaker act or interact with others or his environment; instead, he is a rapt watcher, as if the observation, meditation is the work and the poem is work’s artifact), we can’t ignore the fact that the poems are expressly made in the context of human relationships. There are a good number of pieces in the collection dedicated to his children and to friends. So, it’s hard to fully disembody the voice of these poems.. That is, this is a book that footnotes a world of simultaneous solitude and companionship.

Although these are not elegiac poems, they’re not without darkness, duende, and small bursts, throughout the collection, of astonishment, a boldness of vision: “I notice, looking closer, the magnitude of noise ants make.” And with such attentiveness, the collection progresses toward praise. In the penultimate poem, Toledo writes:

…Yet these things
do not matter as much

as that rising sense of displacement, as if
where you are is not enough, as if there
in the very center of a split rock, you will find
a gentler heart, an almost throbbing heart,
the sun hitting it just right and you are
most welcome to listen.

The “as if” feels less like doubt and more like an intelligent questioning, a rational (and temporary) check to the realization that there could be something impossible and throbbing at the center of something hard and ancient. The collection has many beautiful and strange images, though the images, as the one above, often serve as doors that open into broader ponderings and abstractions.

Interestingly, these are poems that have the hardness of formal distance. Toledo inclines toward regular stanzaic form, a sense of order. There’s wonderful formal tension here, though. The long running syntax, punctuated by short stabs, livens the vertical pace of the poems. The line and stanza breaks help control—well—the voltage of such syntax. There’s an abundance of complex sentence structures, making use of appositives, adverbial and adjectival clauses, catalogs—as ways to sustain the energy of the poem across the breaks, across the enforced silences. Perhaps one of Toledo’s flaws is the uniformity of his diction from poem to poem—which is mostly arched—but which works beautifully when timed with the movement between meditation and exuberance.

You have to admire a poet who is interested in something akin to myth-making. The construction of images, constellations of language, that intimate both the material world and the absolutely confounding (and sometimes cruel) spiritual design that propels it. Toledo points us to “[t]hat keening sound beyond—/past the new wrecks of our bodies, down where the crickets/mutter their terrors.” I get the sense that he believes, if you observe the world long enough and with great care, if you can be still, then common beasts, works of art, memory, your very flesh and blood, can transport you to a metaphysical experience of the physical universe, an extraordinary vision of the shared, ordinary world: “And if I startle you, it is because I am speaking in the plural…”

I would like to point out, there are some poems in the collection that seem to take on not just the life of writing, but the culture of it. In “Craft”, you can imagine the litany of workshop critiques: “So they talk about detachment over and over,/like the idea is singular and repetitive and true,/as the higher voices that demand no less/than stillness and explains how/tiny movements are unnecessary and invasive, that all mistakes are acts of war.” And in “Clichés”, Toledo recalls, “We were taught/to mean, not be,” prodding the old MacLeish maxim.

Toledo considers the traditions that haunt him and his contemporaries in “Drunk Leaning Into a Poem”. He warns us, “The dead rise up and reclaim/their spaces in the tradition.” He continues with a more dire caveat: “The critics lurk ‘round the bend,/toasting the departure(d).”

The most provocative, personal, and artful commentary in the book about the current state of poetry is “The Irrelevance of Meter”. It is written in six fat sextets and ending in a one-line stanza, each line lengthening as the poem develops, as if the poem can’t be constrained by any regular metrical quantity. What the lines contain is evidence of a longing, a political and poetic one. There are:

crows that circled the coconut trees, cawing their cadence
of This will do, this will do, though by now you are conscious
that you have not been climbing trees for so long. What’s the use

anyway; you are cutting up your sentences and it is dark outside,
like the black rivulets of a raven’s feathers growing blacker, blacker
as you pushed its dead body closer to your face. Or during hide
and seek, moonlit nights when you were caught by your father
reading his magazines in the field, on the tree, yanking the branches.

I suspect Toledo, here, in referring to the archetypal provincial pastime of climbing trees, is critiquing the predominant ethos in contemporary Philippine poetry to expunge “local color” and references to Philippine life, particularly provincial living (as much of the country’s poetic production and criticism comes from the urban center of Metro Manila). The poet feels foreign to his very experience, which is homegrown, provincial, constantly recalled, even amid the urban chaos, in the body. Another poetry is demanded of him (one that puts distance between the poetry he produces and the poetry residing in his marrow and gut); “you have not been climbing trees for so long” because the critical gods have admonished him against acts of nostalgia, have warned against the pitfalls of mining the past. This poet, however, takes a step toward arguing against those gods: What’s the use, then, of “cutting up your sentences?”

There’s been an appropriate reaction against the trafficking of caricatures and shallow portrayals of Filipino life, but it seems our poets have inherited a rampant and incongruous fear of exoticizing oneself in a poem, a fear instilled by critics and the culture of writing workshops. Rather than challenging poets to re-see or see more deeply into these references, critics and workshops have asked poets to excise such images or avoid them all together. Succumbing to such fear, as a result, has led to a widespread silencing and erasure of the sensual experiences specific to our homeland. Out of fear of self-exoticization, whole lexicons, common and proper nouns, landscapes, backroads, and trysts go unrecorded. They vanish. And let’s face it, our literature is complicit. I suspect Toledo has had enough of such erasure (as have I).

(Notice, at the end of that last passage, Toledo gets an extra clever barb in, the image of the boy “yanking the branches”, implying there may be a little jerking off going on—and not just in the trees, not just in the provinces.)

The poem ends, if not with urgency, then with a welcome confidence and seriousness:

…surely the sounds are coming back, surely
you remember that cursed uncle, his unlamented passing,
dark stain of bird bodies impeding the sunlight, and how memory
makes no sound, gathers nothing in its alleys but moss and moving
figures, voiceless brilliances and darkness. You struggle to hear it,
the sadness, but it is the flicker of Christmas lights and you must see it

for it is beautiful and it illuminates and it leads to other dazzling ruins.

For our sake, and for the sake of Philippine poetry, I do hope “the sounds are coming back,” that the strange and familiar racket of our stories is, surely, irrepressible. For the sake of Philippine poetry, Joel Toledo may be one of the poets to bear that din. In that regard, The Long Lost Startle is an excellent foray, poses excellent questions, an excellent augur—startle, found.

*****

Patrick Rosal is the author of My American Kundiman, winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, winner of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies including Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Language for a New Century. In 2009, he was awarded a Fulbright grant as a Senior Research Scholar to the Philippines.

YOU ARE HERE by MABI DAVID

2009-12-21T22:20:00.000-08:00

EMONG DEBORJA Reviews

You are Here by Mabi David
(High Chair, Quezon City, 2009)

Inside, Outside, and Here: Reading Mabi David’s You are Here

Lyric poets who incorporate historical material in their work contend with a number of pressures. First, there is the dominant mode of the lyric poem -- a mode that employs, in relation to history and the historical material, several readily discernible strategies. In this mode, history is a trove of narratives -- we get an anecdotal poem that starts with encounter, ends with insight, and at various stops expresses wonder. Variants of this mode include the persona speaking as a historical figure, the politically engaged persona with an engaging real life, and the persona describing atrocity, then delivering shock value. Another set of pressures, and this time specific to the Philippine poetry scene, comes from the old yet persistent debate on art for art’s sake and art for the masses. The challenge for the poet, of course, is to rethink these pressures, through poems and a poetics that reassess the potency of the dominant lyric mode, and go beyond a simplistic view of the political as extricable from art, or art as totally subsumed by politics.

An historical material is a privileged object because it continues to be transmitted through time. Its transmission is subject not only to chance operations, but also to a system of power, an archive. In the Foucauldian sense of the term, an archive is not merely a repository (of the state, or of a culture), but is the “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”

As it was is as it should be, so that historical preservation
in that city means mutability, the untempered erosion of its ruins,

the bombed-out church refused repairs since the war
as constant reminder of the horror, its half-steeple in steady

decline, a mouth to the elements crying its aged warning, dribbling
granular and gray on the shoulders of the frightened faithful.

(from “Itinerary, Day Seven (Sens de la visite)”)

Certain historical materials result from a tension between erasure and recording. Their once being-at-the-verge-of-erasure is a necessary condition for their recording (or acquisition) and their consequent transmission (or exhibition). The evidence of this erasure has value, if not for memory, then at least for the spectacle of the memorial. Institutions that mediate the transmission of the historical material (distorted by the institutions lenses) require it as it was for it to have value, as spectacle, in this storied age.

If as it was is as it should be,

what ashy leftover to leave as immutable script on this storied age,
by what eternizing rubble do we make handy our brief holiday tale

(from “Itinerary, Day Seven (Sens de la visite)”)

But how can a person respond in this storied age without resorting to the spectacle of the memorial? What forms of response (or resistance) are available to the everyday as it faces the enormity of history? Let’s return to the fact of dominant lyric mode -- the anecdotal, epiphanic lyric.

The impulse to write a poem that treats history as a trove of narratives may in part be engendered by the very size of history. A spatial imagining of history overwhelms our human capacity -- names, places, dates, stories, simultaneities, causalities, events…. an angel of history, even, who Walter Benjamin describes would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed but has his wings caught with such violence he can no longer close them. Inherent to this style of poetry, is a notion of form as separable from content, and the notion of a stable persona (at least socially, if not emotionally) vis a vis the poet’s “voice.” The historical material remains as subject matter -- apart from, yet seemingly affecting the persona through the persona’s deployment of time-tested ruses. The problem with this thought of form apart from content and the singular consistent voice is comparable to an act of detachment, however intimate this “voice” may sound. In this mode of utterance, the historical material is an object of contemplation, external to the persona.

In David, however, what we find is the complexity of a person -- one for whom boundaries between inside (conventional subjective space) and outside (conventional objective space) blur, where history and the historical material permeate the person, and hence constructs her; a person constructing and at the same time constructed as it moves within the forces of a historical field.

Look at you, listening. Listen to yourself as you listen to your
self speaking out of an actor’s mouth, feeling more spoken of, also

at, the unique experience that brings you here becoming an alienation.
Being narrated, the narrator is wrenched from his story. A third

body, nailed to that chair in that discriminate, you are in
the audience but not of it, differentiated by their taste for your tragic

distinction. It looks back at you, looking at it. This strange sensation
History has a cruel prepositional gaze: it fixes you. It mounts you,

its students come for you, your transparency a visible thing to look at,
over, then through, to not forget what must not to be forgotten, that grief

a tunneling predicate fixing everyone in their place in that auditorium.
Look at you looking back. Heroic composure. What elegance. You can

leave now, disappear from view, become unnarrated Narrator, Or
you can stay. This event is endurable. Either way, first person, singular.

(from “Itinerary, Day Five (Tribute to the Survivors of the Battle for Manila, Fort Santiago)”)

A certain displacement is at work here for the you. The you listening to himself speak, looking at himself, himself a part of the audience, but by virtue of his experience apart and distinct from it, a self objectified and hence transparent as a subject from the students’ and audience’s point of view. Displaced, yet still in a position, Either way, first person, singular.

The question “where are you?” or perhaps more accurately “where is the you” is an important question/poetic in David’s poems. Not merely in the literal sense of displacement that persons (people in foreign land or in historic events) experience, but a displacement that subjects one to an experience of being in complex subject positions -- narrator and viewer, at home and alienated, subject and object, where the public realms of history, place and work permeate the private sphere:

                  you are touched

by their pathos, here where you stand,
                  a mere 50 years, one century
                                    later, with your research – are you

enjoying the view -- in the same sweltering march
                  culled from note cards and catalog, are you
                                    finally in their shoes,

finally as if
                  you were there, is it miserable enough
                                    or real enough or are the facts

representative enough, is it like
                  you were there -- is it finally your
                                    history -- “You cannot go in

(from “Repository (Lamplight on, cone of curiosity)”)

In “Repository (Lamplight on, cone of curiosity),” where a forward momentum is sustained though the poem’s long sentences, enjambed through indented tercets (a formal means of deploying a force of displacement), we encounter a researcher, trained to objectively respond to and analyze historical materials (the sphere of work), experiencing these historical/work materials penetrating her person-al realm. The poem begins, through an epigraph, with a famous line from Hamlet, “Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.” But how might we speak to it, what language can possibly be used when the personal introduces difficulties while objective means do not suffice?

                  We’re any of your relatives and/or friends
killed during the battle for the liberation?
                  If so, please

name your victim, your relation to your victim,
                  the approximate location of your victim’s death,
                                    your victim’s manner of death

[please check]: by
                  crossfire or
                                    shelling or

bayoneting or
                  burning or
                  torture or “others,”

(from “Repository (Lamplight on, cone of curiosity))

How speak to it? We are faced here with the limits of speech, as response, and also as a way to comprehend, to make it comprehensible, at a limit of speech as a possibility for locating the person. If we rely on the “voice” as the means for the lyric, then this limit is insurmountable. Yet there is, in historical as well as geographic displacement, a reminder of the artificiality of speech. In the poems titled “Soliloquy,” we find characters in travel encountering this artificiality/materiality (in the first poem quoted below, the character with a foreign companion, while in the second poem quoted below, in a cocktail in a foreign land).

gone, getting it
                  “right” and getting him,
getting him to get you,
                  wandering into

where words, i.e., to hold
                  a thing in your freezing
hands, is not the currency,
                  but that someone holds

you, you are held in place,

(from “Soliloquy (When my friend)”)

                  What I can swallow
                  is the delicious bubble

such settings serve as shape to
                  speech, liquid
refractions
                  in the atmosphere, precious
unlikelies one can can string, be
                  brimful of.

(from “Soliloquy (My friend, who frequently)”)

Relying on speech for locating, we encounter other means for understanding location. How speak of it? Perhaps a response should be made, not through speech, but through writing that creates spaces -- the space of here. Surrounded with forces of displacement, where are you? You are here. The ambiguity of here is important. What the person needs, to be able respond to these forces, is not a certainty of location, not a certainty that builds clear boundaries between inside and outside, but one where these boundaries are blurred, under erasure, in the Derridean sense of the sous rature, enabling us to tackle the it without resorting to dualities. You are here, a mutable, emerging here with its ever-changing referents, a here where inside and outside are in complex interaction constituting and also constituted by among other things, the person. Perhaps in here the indistinguishable despite its ominous tone of erasure, offers salvation. The person prays/sings/writes/travels from mantle to sacramental to multiple to indistinguishable:

Sweep of fronds on the streets, let us
make of the path a green mantle

Though there are no words for what
we enter, let entering be sacramental

If there be nothing on the tables
then let it spread, let it be multiple

Let us with strangeness and hunger
beside them be indistinguishable.

(“Prayer For Palm Sunday”)

*****

Emong de Borja is from Pateros, Metro Manila, Philippines. His ongoing writing projects include a chapbook of poems, a series of reviews on locally published poetry books, and an essay on a possible poetics of sincerity. He works as an IT consultant in the areas of information security and service management.

ELDERS SERIES #3 by CHRIS KRAUS and TISA BRYANT

2009-12-21T22:15:00.000-08:00

DENISE DOOLEY Reviews

Elders Series #3 by Chris Kraus and Tisa Bryant
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2009)

Belladonna* has long hosted a lush, challenging conversation at the limn of the new avant garde. The Elders Series is structured for teetering push and force – a writer chooses an admired writer, and excerpts of their work are printed alongside their mutual interview/conversation; it is a hell of list (http://Belladonnaseries.org/eldersseries.html).

The Elders Series # 3 features Tisa Bryant hosting Chris Kraus. Both write fiction, both identify as autodidacts and work from a rich grounding in theoretical and experimental work (Kraus edits the Semiotext(e) series, Bryant ascribes much of her education to the Dark Room Collective), both pull from noir with the urgency and eerie sense surrounding their narratives.

Tisa Bryant's XXX plots a series of encounters in the city space of a brain town. Going into Boston to a film, the narrator navigates buildings, memories, the habits of girl watchers, the talking head audience of a Q and A, strangers on the street. These are adversaries of Looking and Judgement. “The crowd beckons and invites and terrifies; she allows for every possibility, walks aimlessly towards something she didn't know she'd find, but yet expected.”

Retaining an openness to encounter is the narrators' main battle, and stays open by sustaining an energetic language of response. She is taking everything in – (she is named Iris, and she is indeed all I's and Eyes) – and what the story gives us is the joyous perpetual churning of how she processes it.

So how'd you know about my birthday, sweetness?”
... I must bash. I am a basher. Gutterance and quell. Quarry.
“How did i know? Let's just say, I saw you coming. Now could I please just see you go?” Everything. About. Me. Hardening.... This repartee is the best of public art.

Bryant's chrome descriptions let setting as character give voice to the questions -- who is shown and who is acting? who gets to build the connective tissue? at what point is intellectual sparring play, and at what point is it defense?

Chris Kraus's story "Catt: Her Killer" is austere and gorgeous in its conventions:

"Since meeting her killer, she spent several weeks in this delirium. And when she woke up she fled."

Kraus is a good foil to Bryant here because you can both feel where they share concerns and witness a totally different approach. Through noir stylings and a sifting expository time frame, her stylized investigations sneak through the lines with a major technical grace. The story has to do with shifting real estate and shifting power, and with the buying and selling of artists, and with fish farmed on cheap soil. No character is more interesting than the narrator, and this might well be the very reason the narrator pays them so little attention. Kraus's interests are slippery. The story overall is so airy and well executed that it mostly hits home as sense memory, after it is finished.

Belladonna* has caught flack for the elders series (see Kate Eichhorn at http://Belladonnaseries.org/eldersseries.html). But I think it provides an interesting answer to some of the most aggravating conventions walling off Contemporary Fiction – those arising from a shift in book review journalism towards biographic investigation. (witness this disaster.... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/6256085/Lorrie-Moore-interview.html)

If reviews are now celebrity profiles, the record skips again and again on the chinked groove of biography and rarely reaches as far as experimentation or authorial intent. But these investigative pairings might offer a solution. Bryant and Kraus makes for an exciting duo, especially in the glow of their conversation, because they are trying for things in such different ways and able to grill one another. Their stories grill each other, too, through their proximity, and the scrutiny bisecting the little white book is all kinds of refreshing.

*****

Denise Dooley lives in Rogers Park, Chicago. She writes poetry and fiction; recent work can be found at http://www.shampoopoetry.com/, http://www.sundress.net/wickedalice/, and http://www.tacks.freehostia.com

COLLAPSIBLE POETICS THEATER by RODRIGO TOSCANO

2009-12-21T22:00:00.000-08:00

JADE HUDSON Reviews

Collapsible Poetics Theater by Rodrigo Toscano
(Fence Books, Albany, N.Y., 2008)

To say that Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT) is a mere reflection on what has become an all-consuming Globalism (in poetry, art, industry, and the society mirrored by the interconnectivity of these arenas) would be a vast understating of what appears to be the project’s objective. Instead of modest polarization into rejection of what is (for an acceptance of what can be) or an acceptance of what is and a satire of where we seek to change, Toscano’s work is an attempt to define the inner relationship driving our decision either way. While there is a concentrated call to institute modern/revolutionary art, which results from the tiring constraints of the previous craft, Toscano means to designate a more inclusive counter-ground: a theater where movements/words of "players" can be seen as driven by the strings of a revealed (fatigued yet still driven) Capitalist culturalist, hand -- which guides our conceptions and represses our identities. CPT is a new vantage point, through which we can see what has become our mechanized adoption of corrupt values or our mechanized rebellion. It symbolizes more than a reaction. It formulates a realization. CPT is a theater/poetry anti-school-conversation, a view of the school, the delusive force-feeding of popular culture, from an outside (a newly constructed space where we can see all socially-argumentative sides tugging and how we have been tugged).

Toscano opens his book with a statement of urgency: “Alienable Dividuals. Entities. Seek a freedom in, not from.” As is suggested by the concept of anti-individualism (“Alienable Dividuals”), Toscano is toying with the idea that we are currently, blindly, acting as portions of a whole -- in an almost geometrical relationship with one another (a notion he develops through four equally participating voices [amid cuboid quatrains]):

(1) How’s it that we’re four distinct entities here?
(4) How’s it that we’re singular and one-at-a-time ?
(2) How’s it that we’re each one quarter of a whole?
(3) How’s it that we’re each four times more than the other?

For an explanation as to why we are in social-political Geometry with one another, according to Toscano, one need only look as far as our unconscious, daily activity. As Toscano opens “TRUAX INIMICAL,” there is a distinct (social-psychic) mechanization in what seems to be our computer usage:

(1) Scrolling
(4) Pointing
(2) Clicking
(3) Selecting

The poetic sequence (which in performance lasts around 16 minutes) goes on to build on this concept (Toscano often calls these para-thematic repetitive refrains, “clocks”). These options/anti-options become more overwhelmingly inclusive of interactive "entities" (fractalizations of “people”). Until, through recognition of the patterns of relation, and through a panning out (an intervention into spectatorship), we understand this mechanical structure to represent ourselves and what we expect out of art. It seems one of Toscano's overriding objectives is to display an unrealized, global, participation in not only the way we answer artistic questions, but additionally in the methodology by which we (ourselves) question. His design is to help us shift outside of these patterns; that we might, through a new consciousness, recognize our roles within them.

The ways in which Toscano means to reveal the mechanical mold of the contemporary artist are perhaps even more clear in (within the context of “Eco-Strato-Static”) the suggested need to read “Group B” and “Dance” “In the approximate rhythm of their twinkling” or by drawing out a “spokesperson” (accomplished through dangling “…a giant mic from a giant crane” [as though fishing out the means to stardom by hooking others on the self]). Indeed, what is displayed by the externalization from this symbolic or perhaps actual reality is reflective of the poet's/artist's plight, that he/she must sell himself/herself (at times, regardless of worth).

In general, value or the attaining of this value is something pivotal in Collapsible Poetics Theater. The nameless figures struggle to be complete, free from their congruence with one another, but only manage to contribute toward the function of a whole. While they are referred to in the introductory piece as numbers (which almost makes them seem like mechanical components), they are later referred to as equally ambiguous “players” (as though they are simple components of a mathematical calculation). Additionally, different characters are indicated by left alignment or right alignment (which in the case of “Eco-Strato-Static” may signify a mirroring artistic leniency) and Bold, Italic, or normal text (which might again be a signal to archetype). The relationship between voices and their ambiguity (as demonstrated through the externalizing of the reader) becomes a yearning for identity that often reinforces the productive necessity of their ambiguity (as opposed to the desired "characters" in more traditional plot-character matrix structure).

While this "value" or lack thereof is something that Toscano directly grapples with, he is also content in slyly pointing out the function of reactionary art. In “BALM TO BILK,” voice 1 counters voice 2 “you can’t… ‘blick’ that.” Mainly, this is because "art without purpose is purposeless:"

“…any formula
based purely on affect
outside the realm of
objects, object’s origins, relations
logic, counter-logics
nth degree determinations of—”

Voice one additionally asks “where are the imbedded social demands in this stuff?" Yet, down the page, voice 1 begins to speak with the terms of voice 2 (as voice 2 speaks to the logical yearnings of voice 1). What results is a counter artistic ground where one can see both functional sides of what (in actuality) is activating the construction of the artistic "self." The reader is led to think about herself as one voice or the other and (upon re-examination [external viewing of the artifact, in which both these views are contained]) to think about herself completely differently (or more inclusively).

There are more overt ways that Toscano seeks to create an inter-reflexive relationship through alternate perceptional ground. CPT’s aesthetic-political outlays are consistent with Walter Benjamin's theories on what art has become through film: a form removed from what was once a creative distance (between art-viewer and art) or room for personal interpretation (for the sake of willingly adopting imposed viewpoints and interpretations). Likewise, our cries for individuality are no more than systematic assimilations into a corporate whole. There are no individual poems, no individual artists. Now, differing voices are not different; they unintentionally, syntactically, construct global meaning (they are unaware slaves):

(1-2) I
(3-4) Fly
(1-2) In
(3-4) The
(1-2) Deep
(3-4) Of
(1-2) The
(3-4) Night

In intention, the separate constructors are meant to be seen as vital, but useless through their adoption of roles. Only through the window of the page, where this relationship can be externally objectified, can the interconnectivity of these different voices be understood. What is argued, through coherence to a global idea, is not only the importance of "a global idea," but also the utilization (as suggested syntactically) of the individual (perhaps the utilization of the individual for the global idea).

In other cases, the voices interact with other voices' perceptions. “Eco-Strato-Static” is a poem where a voice mentally drives the actions of a different voice, as though one voice is the process of thought and the other the externalization of that thought. This internal relationship gets cloudy, as at one point there is a complete disconnection:

Start acting like you have an innovative product.
Okay.
What’s happening?
I’m acting like I have an innovative product.

It seems that even the disconnection of one aspect of a person to another creates a complete counter-conversation. After losing track of the mental portion, the previously quoted poem regains its bearings and argues with itself. Therefore, the externalization from even the relationship between the artist's mind and the artist's action reveals multiple independent aspects of the individual (a common necessity as a machine, but desiring, individual, components).

In a sense, Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater contains counter-ground for itself. It continually pushes itself, on the page, past what can be conceivably accomplished in performance. The poetic activities piece “Clock, Deck, and Movement” becomes a purposely over-complicated construct of direction. Where directions might previously be conceptualized as simple inclinations, exhibited in performance, it seems Toscano means for the performance to exhibit the implications of "the cues themselves." Perhaps how controlling they are of the piece one begins looking for in the physical embodiment of the work.

The movements of bodies is also crucial to the idea of function. Kit Robinson, after seeing the performance of "Clock, Deck, and Movement," stated, "The movements involve articulations of separate body parts and investigations into the relationships between parts of the body. For example, thrusting the rib cage forward while bending the knees with one leg forward, or twisting the torso while extending one arm upward and outward with three fingers pointing outward." It seems that Toscano means for the positions of bodies to suggest the limitation of bodies. Perhaps this is yet another way he intends to demonstrate our adherence to global movement. We mean to be moved in one way, but through the way we are resisted by "the current configuration," we do nothing but contort ourselves. Only when we are able to see a body alternate to the one we inhabit can we see what is the futility of resisting the limitations of the body.

Eventually, what often results in the Collapsible Poetics Theater is a collapse of the known world into itself (much like a curtain, surrounding us at all times, bunching up as it streams to the floor). A vision is made available through newly gained perceptional grounding. We realize, more clearly, political, economic, cultural, and personal relationships not yet manifest (or denied, in hopes of retaining comfortable, un-collapsible, reality).

*****

Jade Hudson was raised on a wheat farm in central Kansas. He received his B.A. in Creative Writing English from Wichita State University, where he founded and oversaw an undergraduate Creative Writing organization, tutored the handicapped, studied under the widely renown Albert Goldbarth, and graduated a McNair Scholar with honors. Jade is a current poetry master's student at the prestigious Miami University of Ohio. More recently, Jade won runner up and honorable mention in the 2009 Academy of American Poets graduate competition, judged by Thalia Field. He hopes to eventually earn a PhD in Creative Writing and work as a tenured professor of Poetry.

ANALFABETO / AN ALPHABET by ELLEN BAXT

2009-12-21T21:55:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Analfabeto / An Alphabet by Ellen Baxt
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2007)

I first read Analfabeto / An Alphabet shortly after it was released in 2007 and was appreciative then for its lush language. But when I read it again recently, I was struck by how much more the second experience resonates, and I know why: for the past few months I have been looking through the eyes of my newly-adopted teen son. So when I read a line like

Pressure of proximity
(13)

I feel recognition. It's like how, three months into his new English-speaking country, my Colombian son is feeling pressured to speak (more) English. I know he understands some of the English he hears, but that's a different engagement than speaking it. Pressure of proximity--it's a source of stress, a struggle.

It's this transition phase between two worlds, two cultures, two languages that is (partly) addressed by Analfabeto. It's during such a transition that a concept like "affection or / disease" (12) makes sense though they are not literal opposites. During this transition, one is "illiterate" of not just language but of the new life into which one inevitably will be enfolded.

However, what is gorgeous--what makes Analfabeto's experience transportative and then transformative--is how this neither here-neither there phase blossoms into the mysteries and uncertainties from which poetry can emerge. For instance

Let me land in the open air. A swallow, an Easter lily.
They corked his Everything's fine. The guards aimed with firearms.
(53)

When I write I think I've made a noise. Looking up, the quiet is startling.
(19)

Gorgeous. But scaffolding these fragments is not just the beauty of the language but the intermingled prose that journalizes travels between the U.S. and Brazil. These vignettes are also evocative, even as their specific circumstances reveal the roots of fragmentation elsewhere in the book:

It is embarrassing to smell bad so there are three four five showers a day. It is not embarrassing to be a little chubby. It is embarrassing to miss dance class because I am afraid of the dark in the blackout when a lady is screaming in high heels running. Near Parque Treze de Maio and all the parks and bus stops and tailors and bakeries and newstands there is a blackout. The lights brown, hum, then apago! a woman is screaming. In the dark, the ball of her epiglottis trembles. Her scream comes closer, then backs away. It has a trill, like a flute. I stand too close to a man and his girlfriend who look up and ask what I want. I stand next to twin police officers because they have guns. Today I don't get mugged and I am not threatened with a gun. I also don't dance ciranda in the room with the wide wood planks and a mural of the poet Manuel Bandeira or flirt with the dark Italian. Skirt billow.
(25)

Many parts of the book come off as a pelicula in slow motion:

A hilltop room, Our Lady of Conceicao/Oxum. I back away from a pair of transvestites like bears, slowly and without turning around. An old woman faints -- the weight of the hoop skirt or, the spirit mounted her. A watermelon was smashed open. Afterwards, all the people had one hand full of popcorn.
(34)

Combining with the text are generous blank spaces on pages which enhance a dream-like quality to the reading experience. For instance, the above excerpt is printed as a paragraph on top of a page. The page faces another page that is mostly blank except for three lines at the bottom:

Stay, you must stay the night. The bus doesn't pass. Goes only to Port of Hens, not the city. Do not worry. Tomorrow will return you. Tomorrow.
(35)

What results is an effect that transcends the impetus of this project: the specifics of history, globalization if you will. It's how a Brazilian teenager comes to observe, "Our language is polluted with English."

Yes, there is "pollution" throughout Analfabeto. But in meditatiting over the book's themes, only some of which I address and which is summarized on the book cover as

"shifts in identity -- cultural, gendered and sexual. It addresses the complications of translation, not only linguistic translation, but also the multiple ways we translate ourselves when we are away from whatever we might call 'home'."

Analfabeto never loses its sense of wonder. And it is this determined purity that lingers in the reader's (this reader's) mind. There is suffering; but one keeps looking forward for there also is persistent beauty:

Long means far. Near means pertinent.

Excuse me, may I use your fire? There is much wind.

You are very beautiful. With burning I will stay with you.
(59)

Analfabeto's alphabet -- nay, alphabets -- remain in memory as quite lovely flames.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: two reviews of her first 2009 book NOTA BENE EISWEIN -- one by Grace C. Ocasio at at Jacket 37 and the other by Joey Madia at New Mystics (July 2009). Her second 2009 book FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA was also reviewed recently by Jesse Glass at Ahadada. You also might check out Jean Vengua's engagement of one of her poems from THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS over at YouTUBE! Last but not least, she just -- just! -- released a chapbook in time for holiday gift-giving: ROMAN HOLIDAY.

CLASSIFICATION OF A SPIT STAIN by ELLIE GA

2009-12-21T21:45:00.000-08:00

DENISE DOOLEY Reviews

Classification of a Spit Stain by Ellie Ga
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2009)

Scientific presentations of data have become rote tactics in visual and intermedia arts. I'm thinking lots of things encourage this impulse at this moment: an organizing response to disordered “surplus information,” the library science boom, a generation of artists especially adept at meeting artworld/non-profit documentation demands, a belief that the ordering of information can flatten hierarchies palo alto style. I'd add to this the expanding definition of intermedia work toward including sense-making and transcription, and the increasing number of artists finding support through residency programs at scientific associations and research centers.

In Classification of a Spit Stain, the marks, stains and textural details of urban sidewalks are meticulously documented and photographed to surprising effect by Ellie Ga. Ga acts as a scientist/anthropologist/garbologist addressing human relics left on sidewalks.

The mundane subject matter is made beautiful via magnification and reverent art book context; some photos stand as abstract expressionist paintings, dark suns and Rorscharch spots, others a classification she lists as “kandinsky/calder”. "Monster" stains do look like monsters. A discarded banana peel on a dirty sidewalk is so abstracted in its grainy xeroxed photo it might be an ink blot or bad screenprint jokingly titled “banana peel.”

But with Spit Stain, the book's real pleasure is the transparency of its scientific pretense. Ga tracks the stain "types" with loyalty to the tropes of scientific method, down to the office-supplies of the laboratory (the gridlines of the lab notebook are reproduced with total clarity, even as the typewritten words smear and photos blur). But the application is lax. Aesthetically subjective stain types (spit, piss, round/raised, freeform, etc) are recorded with a legend for type, mo/yr, and hash marks tracking frequency.

The “spit stains” are presented without too much commentary so that the marvel of collecting becomes the only end, and scope is limited and precious. While photo-as-evidence is old as cameras, classification as technique also has more recent references with respect to human impact. Consider Sarah Sze's 1996 Soho piece, http://www.summervillain.com/blurgh/content/2006/03/sarah-sze-talk-at-harvard/ or Public Phenomena by Chicago's Temporary Services, ( http://www.temporaryservices.org/public_phenomena.pdf )

Ga is a founding member of Ugly Duckling Press, and as an object Spit Stain is straight book-arts beautiful. It's useful as a map, as a laff, or as a jumping off point for data techniques: teaching us to lay down a new grid of observational criteria, and to try to see beyond the distracting prettiness of the grid itself.

*****

Denise Dooley lives in Rogers Park, Chicago. She writes poetry and fiction; recent work can be found at http://www.shampoopoetry.com/, http://www.sundress.net/wickedalice/, and http://www.tacks.freehostia.com

WITH DEER by AASE BERG, Trans. by JOHANNES GORANSSON (1)

2009-12-21T21:40:00.000-08:00

REBECCA LOUDON Reviews

With Deer by Aase Berg, Translated by Johannes Göransson
(Black Ocean, 2009)

With Deer begins with the statement:

FOR WE ALL STAND AT THE EDGE OF THE GROANING CHASM OF VALPURGIS.

I looked into Valpurgis. I read articles that described it as a celebration that Swedes participate in on April 30th, Valpurgis Night. There is a bonfire. There is wild animal dancing and pagan feasts and festivities that tie into pre-Christian spring fertility rites. Swedes come out in droves to celebrate spring, to say goodbye to the cold winter and welcome the return of the sun and with that hope. What I found in Göransson’s luminous translation of With Deer is a much deeper sense of endings and beginning. These poems feel like an entire burgeoning, surrealistic, post-apocalyptic creation of a planet and that planet’s inhabitants, that starts at the bottom of a tarn or tjärnes, a small lake thick with vegetation. The first section of With Deer is titled IN THE GUINEA PIG CAVE.

STILL

His fingers search the bottom of the tarn for the water lily’s black vein. Still the love beast breathes. Still he suckles the fox sore on my weak wrist. In the distance the wind is slowly dying; the night of nights is coming. But still the fetus lily rests untouched. And still his fingers search the bottom of the tarn for the water lily’s black vein.

Who is he?

It is glowing green here – the light, drops, flutters, reflections, slits of light and lightness in the trembling foliage.

It seems he is living in the water. Water is the beginning of everything and the beginning of this place of carnage and weird growth. There is glowing, there are snakes. It’s dangerous, but full of light, light as seen from under water. Berg’s language is gentle and cruel. She doesn’t pull her punches. The snake has human eyes, ah, are we in a kind of Eden then? He follows the deer’s movement with a calm gaze. There is no earthly form here, but there is a kind of cannibalism, the love beast suckles the fox sore.

WATER BOTTOMS

Soon the ray will burst out of the branch. Soon the membrane the poison will erupt. Soon the eye juices will run across the wooden face, while the grass is ground into seed flour in the deer jaws. The sweet stalk will bend backwards toward the pain. And here a feather moves toward the river surface, as she who loves water sinks back through the bottoms of light.

The next poem, IN THE GUINEA PIG CAVE, is a painting, a grotesquery, an assemblage of meat and viscous fluids. These are the ingredients of a primordial soup. There is a pregnant sister and there are guinea pigs and they waited with blood around their mouths like my sister. The guinea pigs wait with her, are perhaps bizarre midwives. The last three lines of this poem could be describing gestation, the body growing, though with what monstrous child?

That is where the guinea pigs lay and waited with blood around their mouths and contorted bodies. They waited. And I was tired in my whole stomach from meat dough and guinea pig loaf and I knew that they would take revenge on me.

In the poem, IN THE HORRIFYING LAND OF CLAY, humanity seems to make its first obvious appearance with the muscles of my taut inner thighs, and, the flaccid landscape. Later in the poem, a dark horse makes an appearance, as well as manhood and musculature, and I was thrilled to have him as my enemy. I have no doubt that Berg has a terrific sense of humor and pulls our collective leg in this book as well as pulling it completely off and gnawing on it for breakfast. The language of the poem changes here, becomes almost that of a good old fashioned bodice ripper what with the multiple mention of muscles and the horse (however evil) galloping and dynamic and furrows of plowed soil (yikes) and barren plots (double-yikes), and yet the sister swells in spite of the barren plots. Hmm. The poem ends with I was thrilled to have him as my enemy. It’s hard not to read this thrill as sexual. It seems out of place right after the weirdness of The Guinea Pig Cave, but then again, I read this entire book as a genesis, and the title of this poem lends depth to the bits of purple prose. Horrifying being the key word. Almost a polite way to describe a violent sexual act.

The second section of With Deer is titled FLESH-SHEDDING TIME. Wow! No beating around the bush there. We are going in and we’re going in alone and we’re going in naked and more than a bit afraid and without a flashlight. There is a woman-beast in the first poem of this section, FOX, that made me want to stay up after I’d read it and watch a light hearted romantic comedy like Sleepless in Seattle or Videodrome, so I could sleep.

FOX

We sat at opposite ends of the table. Riffraff was all around us. The whites of his eyes glittered. A sexwoman caught, with a desperate hunger, his surgeon’s gaze. That night he would tear his hands through her fleshy matter, her teats and sloppy skinfolds.

This reads like a pre-formed sexwoman to me. The flesh is there, the blueprint is there, the tools to bind and bend and accelerate human growth are there, but we are still in the mess of creation. The sexwoman is coming to terms with an actual body.

I had an ache in my vulva. The monstrosity wound itself around the intestines, gnawed lightly on the frail surface of the belly bladder with its small nip-teeth, and wanted out.

These sound like parts waiting or wanting to be whole. The thought of whole is there but it has yet to reveal itself in completion.

I downed another glass – there lay the monstrosity finally anesthetized on the bottom of the creek. Then we waited for weeks that never came, while the ages rolled their cogwheels over our heads.

I could feel my brain scream out for mental activity, but the intestines were up to my throat and it was impossible to concentrate in the heat.

He smelled of snail acid, the white of his eyes glittered. He took out the nice, long staff; the nice, long staff of glass. It had a little prong at the tip, a little fiber beak. Then I relaxed. The booze abated; the monstrosity grew still. I smiled into the pillow, and maybe waited for the final drubbing.

It’s interesting to me how, in the last part of this poem, Berg’s language becomes almost contemporary. A door opens, so there is home, a house. There is sky and a doll and nose bleeds and booze and relaxing. But not too much relaxing. We’re not all the way human. Not yet.

In the poem THE GRISTLE DAY, there is a lot of blood. Thick blood. Berg writes, We are born out of sewers, out of horrifying dough beyond good and evil. There’s that Eden again. Lots of blood in this poem. Placenta, holes, screaming, embryo and eggshell. Your basic birthing. If you are birthing a planet or a new kind of human. The placenta shows up in the next poem, FOX HEART, and this poem brings even more of the earth-heave.

The belly bottom beats offended; the coral bulges. Slowly puked-up, the sludge of the afterbirth waits; I have to tear this sinewy sinew from its hold. Now the mouth once again seeks your blue and bitter mouth. The last fox is corroded to foam and rot.

I love foam and rot and was thrilled to read them. I love Berg’s insistence on pushing us further and further into her imagined and wild and deadly new world. The next poem, THE RED KISS, brings us back to the primordial soup of the tjärnes with Corals hide fat and skin. Her lips seek the surface to be saved by oxygen. We are saved. The idea of a new planet is reinforced with the poem, MASTIFF, in which we walk blinded toward the still-smoking planet that lies torn and crushed near the ruined wall on the outskirts of the city. In death there is birth, the cycles, but unpredictable here and terrifying and wobbly.

After this, the poems take on a more human, but still extraordinary feel. There is a push toward human, toward kisses and moans and brown skies. Perverse nature continues to take place. There is new life and the industrial era is ushered in with diesel fumes. People and animals morph to create new species as the old withers and sinks.

The last section of the book is titled, ORGAN. The tjärnes becomes, finally, a sea with strong black waves.

CROWD

The chafe sorrow carves; hard black waves are heard. The people erect the heavy wall out of broken hungerstones. That is how the hoard builds a wall against the approaching darkness while the wait rolls its mills against the wall. Angrily the wait scrapes against the wall: strong black waves are coming and breaking.

After CROWD, the poems take on a more pedestrian tone. The form changes from all prose poems to some poems with stanzas. This change feels a bit awkward so far into the book. There are horses, and licking and stones and lungs. There are some exquisite passages indeed, Out there in the heart of darkness genes are bursting, and, Harpy in the mouth of wood screams hard against the bulging veins, but traveling to the end of this lush and extraordinary tale brings less than I had hoped for.

The last section, INSIDE THE DEER, begins with a haiku, SHARD, which feels like it was written for a different book, then Berg includes a poem about doll parts as body parts, puppy snow, sly girl arms. Maybe it’s because doll poems are so pervasive with 30 and under artists trying to make shocking statements. Perhaps when Berg originally wrote the poem, this symbol was not as ubiquitous as it is now. The poem DOLL DOLL ends with the line, And I stand with my clotted heart and suck on the pearl necklace, almost a disappointment when compared to a line from an earlier poem, We are born out of sewers, out of horrifying dough. Berg redeems herself with a return to the original mystifying and terrifying language of the largest sections of the book with the end poem LOGGING TIME.

One can hear whimpers and hunting games in the hunger moss. The wax girl rubs her sensor prong against the tight skin of the large scar. Moles loosen, the fox tree glows red. Now it is time for the cutting to slowly start to heal.

With Deer is a ride through a rare forest, indeed, and Göransson’s sensitive and thoughtful translation is a delight. Would I buy this book for a friend? Oh yes, absolutely, and I will, and for my enemies as well.

(Note: The italicized statements above are all drawn from With Deer.)

*****

Rebecca Loudon is the author of Tarantella and Radish King (from Ravenna Press), and Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home and Cadaver Dogs, both from No Tell Books.

WITH DEER by AASE BERG, Trans. by JOHANNES GORANSSON (2)

2009-12-21T21:35:00.000-08:00

GABRIEL LOVATT Reviews

With Deer by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson
(Black Ocean Press, Boston, New York, Chicago, 2008)

OUT THERE IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS GENES ARE BURSTING: AASE BERG’S WITH DEER

For those familiar with Aase Berg's work, the fact that the cover of the English translation of her first book, With Deer (Hos rådjur, published in Sweden in 1996), centers the title and a pair of black antlers against a saturated hunter orange should resonate as an apt emblem of the zone through which Berg's poetry proliferates. Here is a warning from the very outset: Berg’s territory is a dangerous one, a morphologically unsound terrain in which roles and actions contradict, conflate, gestate, and transform. Wear a safety jacket.

Divided into six sections, the book begins with the descent of “In The Guinea Pig Cave,” and continues to move through a series of confrontations—ontological, biological, temporal—in “Flesh-Shedding Time,” “Seal-Bound,” “Organ,” “Inside the Deer” and “September Glass.” As translated by Johannes Göransson, the language spreads like an unquantifiable contagion, continually readapting to defy the hostile environs of a literal mind that would demand word and image work to merely work towards clarification and reification. “The perverse nature continued to take place,” begins “The Snail Ancestry.” There is a merciless conditional logic ruling With Deer: inclusion means submission to violent transformations. The processes that effect those changes include everything from mastication to putrefaction and it seems as if one of the governing precepts of With Deer is the constant reversion of the substantial and solid to the spectral and liquid.

To quote out of context of the whole seems a sort dismemberment of the entire bodies of the poems. Many of these pieces are prose poems, a formal choice that contributes to an overriding sense of claustrophobia and circular inevitability. Visually this is communicated by labyrinthine lines without breaks, as well as the interdependent logic of a prosaic sentence which, in Berg and Göransson’s hands, accretes into a litany of body parts and burned out habitats. What I am interested in here, however, is the way in which her Berg’s poems steadily trade the body as a whole for the body in pieces and back again. This segmentation emerges through the recurrent violence engaged by both syntax and subject. Berg consistently employs prepositions, pronouns, transitive verbs and stock characters to create lyrical or conceptual liaisons between lines that resolve themselves through the logic of grammar and the ideas each part signifies. Despite the gorgeously sustained devastation, With Deer still retains shadows of structural tissue that points to some sort of retention of humanity, if only the ability articulate that devastation, a linguistic heap containing

“contorted bodies” “sludge of afterbirth” “fermented thigh”
“fishes floated up” “harrowed leather body” “slop flesh”

To survey the processes through which this happens is to be caught in a swirl of

“rotting acids”             “tar”             “marsh gas and diarrheas”
“soul fluid”             “magma”             “hideous lymph”
“corpse juices”             “oil”             “syphilis plasma”

For Berg, change is often catalogued as the liquefaction of the rigid architecture of skeletal structures. The relative dissolution of the concrete and easily apprehended is a part of the brutality in Berg’s work, a particularly physicalized trauma that finds its poetic representatives in bodies dismembered, bodies disfigured, bodies consumed, bodies disintegrating, and bodies that have entirely disappeared. The poetry is less about the unadulterated image of what has been lost―memory is not reverie here―than about the interminable pain that attends rot and renewal. This is poetry comprised of gangrenous and phantom limbs, containing the sense that all growth involves contamination or that there was something attached once, below the site of amputation.

Berg’s precise use of poetic tropes—similes, metaphors, metonymy—does not indicate comparative relationships as much as they function as junctions that merge remarkably disjunctive images, establishing interconnections that abolish the comparative and figurative and replace it with a membranous net:

from “In The Guinea Pig Cave”
There lay the guinea pigs and they waited with blood around their mouths like my sister. There lay the guinea pigs and they smelled bad in the cave. There lay my sister and she swelled and ached and throbbed.

from “Deer Fabric”
The deer fabric is thin. I carry it cautiously as if it were a cloud in my hands. But the heart moans from inside, so loudly, and my lungs squeak.

In Berg’s poetry, there are no fixed images or agents to calm the tumult. The figurative does not work to establish an easily discernible system of aesthetic correlations, but, instead, functions as a machine of mutation, almost always indicating a radical shift in the entire reality of the poem. It is an extraordinarily subtle way of unsettling and effacing the concept of subjectivity by vacillating between a. /the formal categories of the figurative and literal and b. / the ideological concepts of subject and object.

The formal challenge of subject and object are less dialectically opposed than they are ambiguous and continually changing points on a continuum. Along those lines, Berg dissolves the lines that delineate human from animal, victim from perpetrator, and the concrete from the imaginary in an atmosphere of unremitting violence.

from “Song Lake”
She lies with her legs bent across the rock at an awkward angle, and something moves, pokes out of her half-opened mouth like a stump of fat, or a tongue or an intestine. It grows longer and slimier and thick as a sturgeon - it is the venomous moray that is pressing out; the venomous moray with its sharp, horrible eyes. It has made a nest in there behind the crown of teeth on the bottom of the skull in the white cave of the cranium.

Berg's work serves as a reminder that all mutations are not the same, that each change demands a corresponding force that often turns the body, mind, or landscape into site of pain or atrocity: “in itches, in nightmares, in agony, in constant aches, in flesh that rubbed against flesh and rotted.” The effect is the creation of an entire network of vital linkages just recognizable enough to evoke panic at the inability to exactly discern the every urgent signal. I have the sense of these being warning signs from the real world—the one that lies beneath the husks of order and efficiency in the workaday world—fecund and writhing.

*****

Gabriel Lovatt writes, researches, and teaches at the University of Georgia, where she is working on her Ph.D.

CHOOSE, SELECTED POEMS by MICHAEL ROTHENBERG

2009-12-21T21:30:00.000-08:00

TOM HIBBARD Reviews

Choose, Selected Poems by Michael Rothenberg
(Big Bridge Press, Guerneville, CA, 2009)

GHOSTS OF THE JOURNEY:
CHOOSE, AN IMPROMPTU SELECTION OF THE POETRY
OF MICHAEL ROTHENBERG
"With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization
that constitutes the relation to the earth...."
-Deleuze & Guattari

According to Freud, people live in repressed worlds, the visual aspects of which are a skeletal, twisted translation of imagery that rests forgotten in the mind's inaccessible compartments. Probably Freud would agree with Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh in their poetry collection, 237 More Reasons To Have Sex, Reason Number 123: "Then you said, 'Everything is about sex, except sex which is actually about power and money'." A popular saying is, "Where you go; that's where you are." But Freud might interject: "Where you go; that's where you aren't." It's common to visit where you are comfortable, rather than where anxiety tears you to naked pieces.

In society, repression is exclusion. An example might be racial prejudice and antagonism, but, in my view, a much more general and insightful way to look at exclusion is as a problem of self-fulfillment. Individuals and individuality are excluded. Ideas are excluded. It seems to me that the obstacles that the ecological movement faces are brought about less by materialism than by what materialism implies: fear of failure, 21st Century-style. The origins of greed and wastefulness might be in apprehension, because our clearest and most sincere aspirations are generally locked in the fortress of polluted pessimism and a situational realism that is acknowledged by the world.

So what, you say? So this. If that same self-aggrandizing, fiercely monitored realism makes out that civilization in 2009 has reached no landmark or shows no signs of resolving itself into any strand or along any path, is just a random hunt for survival, then a possible retort is that no landmark or strand should be expected to appear. These will be excluded, suppressed. They would be--and are--unacknowledged and obfuscated.

Even so, rather than saying what that strand or landmark might be, what I want to point out is that Michael Rothenberg's slight, buoyant, believing, hurried, likeable recent selected poems, Choose, published by his own Big Bridge Press, seems to me fruitfully viewed as a revealing Freudian dream or series of dreams about civilization. In saying this, I am praising its craftsmanship, the way its one-page poems sum up millennia, the way childlike juxtapositions reveal subliminal themes, the way temporal detail traces out a momentous and discernible landscape.

Rothenberg's poems have the quickness and clarity of a dream. Yet, like a dream, they are in no way mundane. They seem to ride a rippling current toward some exciting mythic destination. They are like gazing at the ocean and seeing an absence, a journey. They are like seeing, as Rothenberg writes in the poem "Elegy For The Dusky Seaside Sparrow," "the demise of the river,/ the fanged beast at the door of the sea." Or they are like seeing, as in the poem “Polarizations,” that we are “walking/ between abstraction and magic.” Like seeing

A skittish ghost-herd
On Champs d’Elysees
Now under deconstruction
And supervised
By The New Pound Projective
Semioticians
And the Magicians of Jazz Street

The epigraph for “Polarizations” from Mohammed Mrabet is, “A madman doesn’t need success. All he needs is a good hospital.” To be motivated only by the censored values that result from a bad dream, to worship only the acceptable visible icons of our repressed much vaster libidinous inner workings is, as Freud tells us, madness. Thus, in another way, the madman does need success. Indeed, success is his madness. It is the insane asylum in which he lives. And this journey of absence, too, is an asylum, a prison. For

This day belongs to panic
Jets & 7,000 reruns of suicide
Anthrax in Florida
India hijack hoax
Russian plane downed
320 million dollars of U.S. aid
goes to Afghanis
Ten killed in Palestinian-Israel clash
A bus driver’s throat is slashed
(From “Apocalyptic Yearnings”)

We must "get away." We must have more than what is approved. Rather than self-justification (“success”), this journey of absence, this journey on which we are forced to embark is the “Manifest Destiny” of “Infinite Justice.” Rather than “platitudes” about murderous destruction (Hurricane Katrina), we must travel to a diffuse though still truly felt tangibility that battles “separation and exile.” Rather than “movie stars,” we must encounter Economists, poets, L. Gustave Moreau, Dizzy Gillespie, “mineral springs,” Redwoods, “a boy/ Who peers between shadows,” “people ‘actively dying’.” As Michel Foucault says in Madness and Civilization:

Water and navigation certainly play this role. Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is…the prisoner of the passage.

Sanity is our destination. As long as “home” is a symbol of repression, as long as the ocean on which we gaze is an absence that we wantonly refuse to recognize, there is imprisonment and exile. As long as our allegiance is to distortion, the journey and the “infinite crossroads” remains. As long as no one is interested in the strand, then "the land he [the madman, the "Simpleton," writes Foucault] will come to is unknown--as is…the land from which he comes.”

I can't say what I've seen exactly
Patterns as if stenciled, traced
upon wild fields of abstract, spectral motion
Color in celebration of chaos, pure blues
Simpler than apple hues and flesh
White flowers, wings. The Apparition
Man and woman. "The Chimerae"
Suggestions torn by invisible hand
reaching through awe-open mouth, a breathless
naked, deathless magic of creative will
(From "L. Gustave Moreau")

The title of Rothenberg's collection, Choose, is closely derived from current political debates. The idea of being “Pro-Choice,” its expanded implications in terms of Democracy and allowing people to decide about their own lives. But once through the text, the reader begins to associate “Choose” with a much wider and perhaps less politicized set of ideas. Choice becomes responsibility. It becomes a courageous willingness to accept the vegetable planet as it is. It becomes an admission that

I used to be someone else
Out for a cigarette
Bourbon & weed

It becomes an understanding of “broken vows,” of poor responses to natural disasters and local energy problems, of trustworthy and untrustworthy politicians, of an obligation to "be there" for the sick and elderly. Rothenberg gives a succinct list in “Core Sample 1,”

Lice, fire, flood, and disease
A candy shop of holocausts
Bubble gum pops on the face of a deity
Toying with the physics of tension
Birth and assassinations
A dish mop, filter, sponge
Window frame hung on a wall

What then is the remedy? Like postmodernism, which for me is poets such as Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Jarrell, Sexton, Bishop and a host of others; and like Beat writing also, Rothenberg grapples with this deceptive aura of order with various sorts of efforts to be inclusive. So that "choice" stands for the modern way of thinking, even extending to the inability to choose. Choice represents quantum “difference,” duality, the peaceful assurance that acceptance wins for sanctity of all life. It represents a course that has no clearly prescribed frame of reference or standards of actions. In books like Berryman's Love and Fame or Lowell's Life Studies, like the Beats' moral border-crossings that beatify junkies into saints, the notion of what is sacred becomes secularized and "prosified" to make everything clean, included and meaningful. To me, the title Choose suggests an evolved lineage; it suggests "Chosen."

CHOOSE

I have a clue
Monkeys like to be left alone

They don't smoke cigars or play poker
Prefer not to dress up like The Three Bears
But a man's got to do what a man's got to do

Sunflower seeds, bananas, peanuts
Making industry out of ecology
10,000 years of giving up
Now we're supposed to compromise

So we take what's left and split it
Take what's left and split
Until everything is in ownership

And no one can live
Because there are too many fences
Up to the moon and across the cosmos

And, from "Day Trip,":

Never turn your back on the sea.

In this way Rothenberg moves from the outward. the iconic, the visual, the monolingual to filling the molds, the rejected forms, the questionable objects with an unexaggerated, denotative profusion taken carelessly from the daily.

In the poem “7 Days in Darien,” (referencing the film “Seven Days in May”?) Rothenberg writes:

Spanish moss. Live oaks, resurrection ferns
Fort King George Motel
Reading Bhaghavad Gita
Todd reads the turtle news
“Leatherneck Nesting on Sapelo Island”
Apple passion fruit juice, peanut butter cookies
Shower, shave, and go to sleep

In a poem with the gratuitous but still appropriate title “Rosemary Clooney Died Today,” the cream filling is provided in casual lines such as these describing Rothenberg’s friendship with the poet Philip Whalen:

Agates, buddhas, books and very little else
over 78 years, but tons of friends
Who admired him, never knew
how to talk to him, or ways to take care of him
Protect him in his grand vulnerability
He was after all a cranky guy but so what
if that was his worst aspect
then give me more Philips

Instead of the brickwork of an illusory--selfish, hysterical--cogency the reader is presented with the paradoxical, autonomous limitlessness of the universe at hand. Instead of quatrains for "what war?/which war?" there is "more fun" and "NOW" at "the Cosmic Hotel."

Choose contains thirty-two poems selected from 1992 to 2008. Like Beat writing in general, many of the poems appear deceptively ordinary. However, there are several that especially stand out: "Persistence Of Ectoplasm," "Apocalyptic Yearnings," "Katrina," "XLVII. The Eiffel Tower,""Redwood Floodwatch," "Phantom, Come Hither."

"XLVII. The Eiffel Tower," Rothenberg's poem about a rainy night that he spent in Paris taking a metro to the Eiffel Tower and back to the apartment where he was staying is particularly a high point. In repeating the phrase "I never want to forget..." throughout his recounting the experience, Rothenberg convinces the reader of more than merely his excitement upon seeing the fin-de-siecle landmark in the city that has meant and means so much to Western culture. He convinces the reader of his sincerity as a human being, of a certain willingness to sacrifice for others and a missionary eagerness to share life's wonder.

I never want to forget how far down it was or how
Big the tower became once I came closer to the earth again
How beautiful and unreal, big and bright and impossible, the tower!
I walked down and down then on the ground
Looked back up at the skeleton of infinite illuminated erection
Caught a glimpse of myself watching the glowing
Skeleton reaching, filling
Gray-green cloudy night sky, watching
I never want to forget the thrill
Of watching The Eiffel Tower
Phosphorescent organism in the sky
Above branches of low trees
As I looked back toward where I'd been
Rain falling in my face
As I turned back walking to the metro

Yet, at the same time, in this complex psychic tapestry of absences and elsewheres, of towers, erections and icons, of millennia and grungy, random lost weekends, it seems that there is also a certain uneasiness and reticence. Rothenberg's intense emotion, like a recurring Freudian dream, could be construed as speaking of places that are notable for their being unmentioned, either in the poem or the collection, places such as Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel. Would he be as effuse in writing about his native Florida or his more recent residence in California? Would controversies about the Eiffel Tower, were they to arise, menace him as intensely?

Rothenberg's poem about the Eiffel Tower is like Edwin Rolfe's poems about Spain during the Spanish Civil War: Rolfe uses the same phrase, "I never want to forget..." yet the reader notices that the poems are written as a foreigner and soldier. In his poem, Rothenberg admits that there is much he's already forgotten about the Eiffel Tower. I think that what Rothenberg's epiphany expresses is a concern more about humanity itself, the journey to and the exile from peace and fulfillment (the journey we have been talking about; the journey to overcome madness and servility) than any geographical place. It's Rothenberg that "wonders where God is" because he can't shake the idea that "You love everyone but can't live with yourself" and because the absence that he sees, the silence that he hears is still haunted by the troubling "Expatriate utterances of stolen voices."

*****

Tom Hibbard has had many poems, translations, reviews and essays published on and off line in places such as Word/For Word, Big Bridge, Fishdrum, Jacket, Otoliths, Milk, Cricket, Moria. A poetry collection, Place of Uncertainty, is available online at Otoliths Storefront. Bronze Skull published a chapbook of Hibbard's poetry in 2008 titled Critique of North American Space. A long piece on "Linear/Nonlinear" appears at the Big Bridge archive. Upcoming publications are a review of a Jacques Derrida tract in the spring issue of Jacket (reprinted from Word/For Word) and two poems in the online "Green" issue of Jack.

THE LOST COUNTRY OF SIGHT by NEIL AITKEN

2009-12-21T21:25:00.000-08:00

AMANDA REYNOLDS Reviews

The Lost Country of Sight by Neil Aitken
(Anhinga Press, Tallahassee, FL., 2009)

Neil Aitken, founding editor of The Boxcar Poetry Review, loses it all in his poetry collection, The Lost Country of Sight. Countries, a father, language, and the narrator himself all recede into a liminal grey space. Aitken’s narrator declares himself “a ghost among the living,” and throughout the four sections of the book, there is nothing much for a reader to grasp at but ghosts, air, and ashes upon the shore. The poems are in fact defined not by the customary search for home or the characterization of that site but by the very absence of home as a concrete location. Aitken writes, “In me, there are as many countries as names.”

The poems in The Lost Country of Sight whisk a reader from airport to seashore and from Taiwan to Vancouver, British Columbia. Yet, everywhere he takes us, Aitken shows us much the same sights. The characters that we encounter are all “sleeping women,” “ghosts,” and those figures like the man who is described as a “castoff map.” Nevertheless, there is some method to the madness. In the first section, Aitken floats us over Hong Kong and Taiwan. Then, in the second section, we land long enough to experience the death of a father. From there, it’s off to Los Angeles and Vancouver in section three, and finally, in section four we’re back to the current and floating toward no particular destination other than our own inward reflection along with the poet himself. Here we are left with “grey upon grey,/ smog upon cloud, no memory of stars” as the narrator finally reaches the shore, his father’s ashes in hand. What is beyond is left to the imagination.

The best poems can be found in section two of the collection. Here, the reader begins to learn what is at stake for the writer and perhaps to discern some intention for the grey upon grey of the text. The influence of Asian poets is evinced in the subject matter but also in the poet’s presentation of nature and image. There is gentleness in manner not unlike the haikus of Bashō in lines such as “Even the bamboo has forgotten the napalm at last,” which is found in the poem entitled “All the Names of Children and Homes We May Never Know.”

Other critics have also noted that Aitken’s father poems are reminiscent of Li-Young Lee’s careful and beautiful lines. In fact, Aitken himself writes on his blog: “Many of my favorite poems revolve around the father. The father as foil. As counterpart. As template. As warning. As authority. As loss. Fathers are often fixed points, what we measure ourselves against, the poles to which we find ourselves tethered to and which we strain to break free. Sometimes the father is an anchor. Sometimes the father is a mirage. A ghost. A myth we tell ourselves. The father is many things at once. For me, often my father was home.” If Aitken’s father was home much as Lee’s often seems to be, then it is a much different version of that place as shown in the poem “Burials”:

Pulling through Montana in the snow
we cling to the tail lights of the last car
blurring back into the darkness.

"Like the inside of a coffin," my father says,
as if knowing the exact shade the dead see,
lying stiff, frozen eyes peering up through closed lids—

he shifts in his seat, watches the road disappear,
thinks again of dying and the burials we've seen,
his father's simple reduction to ashes.

How small the urn, how light, for a man
that stood 6'3", carried a boy on his shoulders,
lived on trains as a youth, picked apples as a man.

This past summer, watching him thin
to disappearing, blurring out lines between lives,
my father trying to return pieces, fragments, time,

the body burning, the dark smells of crematoriums,
funeral homes, and pale faced lawyers.
Something merges, ends, and begins.

My father placing the ashes back into the air,
offerings to the skies, to the seas,
unaware how Buddhist he is at this moment,

how the faint sound of bagpipes echoes,
how the ashes fall catching light,
reflecting something back into the silence,

the dark birth of the sun coming into view.

Where Li-Young Lee sees the beauty of the “Chinese apple” in “Persimmons,” Aitken finds only these “dark smells,” “funeral homes,” “and pale faced lawyers.” In this section there is no real rebirth as might be expected, but there is a reveling in a dreamlike state. There is even a poem entitled “Elegy for Grey,” which seems to acknowledge the poet’s awareness of each section’s insistence and reiteration of a colorless world. It’s surreal, and perhaps that’s the poet’s purpose, to rarely see the father in life in this section. He is depicted in dreams and bit by bit. He is visions and memories, but nothing to be sure of.

Upon finishing The Lost Country of Sight, one might wonder something relatively simple: what’s all the sadness for? Sure, there’s a loss of place and the loss of the father, but is there really nothing solid of life to grasp? Nature? Memory? Beauty? Language? But the poet is resolute. In this world, there is only grey. In some ways, it feels like each section of the collection should be its own book. Hobbled together, the sections move us along with the tide, but they never let us come up for air.

What a reader is ultimately left with is the efficacy of the lie. The poems are all about being ghostlike, and yet the narrator is quite concretely, everywhere. Aitken says that “forgetting is in the blood,” but truthfully, the existence of the poems proves he can’t forget. And how can we believe that he has found “a certain place,/ a place outside of language,” when he is after all, a poet?

*****

Amanda Reynolds received an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. She currently lives in and writes poetry about Pittsburgh, PA and teaches at Slippery Rock University. She has recently published work in journals such as Gargoyle, Mississippi Crow, and Gander Mountain Review.

IDENTITY THEFT by CATHERINE DALY

2009-12-21T21:19:00.000-08:00

VIRGINIA KONCHAN Reviews

Identity Theft by Catherine Daly
(Dusie Press, Switzerland, 2007, 2008)

Defying the Commercialization of the Self

Identity Theft engages with the rhetoric of fashion (specifically haute couture), to create a poetic that is polemical in its urgency and explicitly French in its means. A hybrid text, fashion illustrations and graphics accompany the chapbook’s 13 poems, varying from a hand dripping with diamonds to a cluster of slingback heels. Daly, the author of two previous full-length collections (Locket and DaDaDa) here uses these charged cultural signifiers to engage with the politics of identity formation, usurpation, and reclamation.

Daly is not alone in using the rhetoric of consumer branding to question of how a female identity is shaped (or deformed) by the machinations of fashion advertising, but she is one of the few poets who manages to make actual poetry out of this rhetoric. The speaker of Identity Theft persistently addresses a “you” (in enlarged and bold-face type), a female whose personhood and rights are under siege. One of the collection’s tautest poems, “short list” rejects the common lure of allowing acquired goods to substitute for identity (the poem in its entirety): “crave + covet + collect/ THE jacket/ THE dress/ THE purse/ THE skirt/ THE shoe/ to what end, spree/ what commodity/ the one/ commodious”

The speaker in these interconnected poems equates the nude body of the clothed woman with the unveiled text (from the poem “underneath”: “a body intimates its nakedness/ text . . . what thing/ person/ could prove/ separate self self me”), and Daly’s poem “jouissance” recalls to American readers a French concept not directly translatable into the English (the closest translation being bliss). Lacan introduced the term jouissance as a foundation of the pleasure principle, which, at its furthest extreme in the pleasure/pain dialectic, becomes suffering. (Jouissance is also inherent to hermeneutic discourse; in The Pleasure of the Text Barthes cites it as one of two textual effects, alongside pleasure). From Daly’s “jouissance”: “Your words proclaim dread of mine,/ transmission/ consumption/ coaxial = send impulse . . . desertification of her clothes/ the flag.”

Daly’s efforts to preserve this figure and clothe it in politicized language, is heroic: “My abandon, my glory/ clothed in terrifying radiance . . . apocrypha, apocalypse/ unclear etymology/ before Inanna, Hannah, Anne,/ grace.” The speaker, at the close of this poem, fuses the erotic, spiritual and political into one: “I am my voice; my voice, cloth,/ fine-eyed mesh, net . . . voice shatters foreign lands, how? You are rebel lands/ old topoi,/ estate holdings . . . sty/ complied, compliant/ made green and felicitous.”

Identity Theft’s closing lines would be read, ideally, to or by Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve: “Identity is not a gift economy/ identity is a standard/ gold.”

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The New Republic, Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing reviewer for The Rumpus and ForeWord Magazine.

TORCHED VERSE ENDS by STEVEN D. SCHROEDER

2009-12-21T21:15:00.000-08:00

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

Torched Verse Ends by Steven D. Schroeder
(BlazeVOX [books], Buffalo, N.Y., 2009)

A class of readers exists who hates anything modern in poetry. They believe that poetry should be about the classic and the beautiful. They like rhyme and meter and orderly poems. Those readers will not like Steven D. Schroeder’s Torched Verse Ends. But many of the rest of us will fall in love with this book.

With the epigraphs for each section of this book, Schroeder lets the reader know what to expect. He quotes Charlie Brown, Homer Simpson, and Douglas Adams. Many of his poems similarly make use of elements from modern life: the personality/psychology tests that so many of us must endure on the job these days (“Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 3”), statistics that batter us (“Sturgeon’s Law”) and our various night selves that leave us sick and/or starving (“Nightlight as Nightlife”).

Yet none of these poems is universally grim. Many are delightfully funny, in fact. I love the poem, “So You Want a Worker,” which shows the dehumanizing potential of the workplace with lines like “Do not bite your worker back” and “No, you may not buy another worker—you don’t pay the one you have,” and ends with the line “Do not flush your worker.” By using humor, Schroeder keeps us from sinking into profound despair while still forcing us to face the modern workplace.

Some poems help us look at the world through non-human eyes. “Robot Rhetoric” imagines the world as a robot would see it, and makes reference to various pop culture icons of robot mythology, such as this line: “We dream not of electric sheep or boogaloo, nor of soft tissue on titanium like crybaby cyborgs.” This poem resembles computer code (at least, the computer code that I wrote decades ago as I played with BASIC), an interesting experiment with form, albeit not traditional form. And like all good poems, this one gives us plenty to ponder, like this line that considers the takeover of the world by robots: “You shall become a vacuum cleaner.”

Schroeder also makes allusions to a variety of more traditional types of literature. “Fifteen Ways to Finish Fish” reminded me of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” “All the Better to Eat You With, My Dear” references fairy tales and their dark underside. In “Wear Your Hipwaders,” the Devil makes an appearance before mere mortals, but Schroeder has fun playing with this ancient plot device: “Last week, I caught the Devil fishing, by which I don’t mean I hooked and landed him on a nymph, but that he was practicing his ticktock cast into a hole on the Fryingpan River, and since it’s Lucifer himself, you have an into the fire joke.”

“Wear Your Hipwaders” is a prose poem, as are several of the poems in this book. But Schroeder’s poems do not conform to one particular form. Some poems have a strict stanza structure, with each stanza having the same amount of lines. Schroeder includes several list poems, but each one takes a different form. Even his index of selected subject matter seems like a cryptic poem (I’m assuming that it’s not a poem, since it isn’t included in the Table of Contents and it does seem to work as a true index).

I like the sense of play, both with linguistics and ideas, in these poems, and the fact that the playfulness supports the seriousness of the ideas, instead of undercutting them. I like that these poems tackle serious issues without succumbing to hopelessness. I like that they give my brain much to ponder. After reading these poems, I found myself mentally coming back to them again and again, as I made my way through my working day. But most of all, I like the way these poems inspire. I found these poems expanding the way I approach my own writing as a poet: their experimental, yet accessible, nature made me want to stretch out of my own comfort zones and play with words again, the way I did years ago when I was first starting to write poetry.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals and Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. In 2009, she was invited to read as part of the noon reading series at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale and serves as Assistant Chair of the General Education department. Her website, which has connections to the blogs that she keeps, is www.kristinberkey-abbott.com.

WATER THE MOON by FIONA SZE-LORRAIN

2009-12-21T21:05:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Water the Moon by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
(Marick, Michigan, 2009-2010)

A Marvelously “Decanted Existence”

As a once active anthology editor and former editor of something called The Asian Pacific American Journal, I’ve read quite a few poems touching on the Asian diasporic experience. And so I came to reading Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s Water the Moon with both anticipation and dread. Anticipation because I’ve enjoyed the writings I’ve previously seen from her, and dread because, to be blunt, I’ve found many poems in this category tend to repeat each other. Well, the book swiftly brushed away my concerns—from almost its first page it became quite welcomed and welcoming. Indeed, with its first epigraph for the book and epigraph for its first section, respectively

Chuang-tzu dreams he’s a butterfly,
and a butterfly became Chuang-tzu.
(--Li Po, Ancient Song)

and

At the tip of every tongue,
the wind, a chasm—
desire enters the forest.
(--no attribution, which implies Sze-Lorrain might have written this herself)

I immediately wanted more and, while in its early pages, already wished that the book would not end as I swiftly began relishing its experience. In the pages of Water the Moon, I would come to discover (with much relief) the freshness that enervates even the most explored theme.

The collection’s three sections outline a familiar path in diaspora: the young immigrant’s meditations over a birthland (in this case, China), life in new place (in this case, Paris), and the epiphany or various epiphanies from such a history. As a whole, the poems in Water the Moon chart desire’s autobiography in as fully fleshed-out a manner as the most satisfying, robust, long novel. The opening epigraphs attract the reader immediately while also serving their epigraphical purpose. Thus, will one encounter poems about loss but where, like in “Tibet”, desire is a strong presence:

Those who perished
before arriving
built their tombs
in those who escaped

Or this from “A Talk with Mao Tse-Tung”:

Your wife said she was your dog,
whoever you asked her to bite, she bit hard.
Fevered and barking, she devoured hands
and knees. Brought to trial, what
did she bite except her own tongue?

At the same time, many poems reveal how pain affects meaning; in “Par avion,” memory fails and lapses to metaphor from the frustrating attempt to understand:

The real message was drowned
on the way, washed by tears
from the sky that blurred
address and date.

Water the Moon often offers language that is gorgeous, resonant—in a poem like “Fragile,” for instance, the words speak to fragility but, in their clarity, is powerful rather than fragile. Here is a movingly lucid poem:

Fragile

The sea under our bed
holds immensity for sleepless
hours that belong to last night.
I am moon-fishing while
waiting for you to open
your eyes and cry for light.
Crawling in the sheets, I fear
burying you in my dreams where
your tears drop as water
trickling from the sky, and I am
an instant of devastating white.

The language needs to be compelling not just because it should be in poetry—it seems storytelling, here, relates more to this excerpt in “L’Assiette des Trois Amis”:

…the symbolist poet who defined seeing
as renaming or forgetting the thing one sees?

Sze-Lorrain has achieved something fresh and wondrous with this collection. Each poem tells a story by not relying on story. Through meditation, each poems becomes a story distilled into a larger and yet more intimate significance or, as she puts it in “Mysticism For a False Beginner, “ a “decanted existence.” To decant a wine is to pour from bottle to decanter in such a way as to eliminate the muddying debris from years of storage and/or to awaken the liquid after story to more clearly show its character (flavor, fragrance, etc). “Decanted existence” is one of the effective descriptions I’ve read in poems.

But the marvel of Sze-Lorrain’s achievement is how the clarity from decanting doesn’t result in communicative stability. Her poems simply dispel mist from meditation, bolstering lucidity in one’s necessarily ongoing engagement with the past ever-present in the future:

What isn’t relative? insists Einstein

The answer is like a door.
When you open it, the rain has stopped.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: two reviews of her first 2009 book NOTA BENE EISWEIN -- one by Grace C. Ocasio at at Jacket 37 and the other by Joey Madia at New Mystics (July 2009). Her second 2009 book FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA was also reviewed recently by Jesse Glass at Ahadada. You also might check out Jean Vengua's engagement of one of her poems from THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS over at YouTUBE! Last but not least, she just -- just! -- released a chapbook in time for holiday gift-giving: ROMAN HOLIDAY.

ZERO READERSHIP, AN EPIC by FILIP MARINOVICH

2009-12-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

VIRGINIA KONCHAN Reviews

Zero Readership, an Epic by Filip Marinovich
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY, 2008)

A book-length poem in two parts which visits and revisits Belgrade in the decade following the political conflicts encountered by the former Yugoslav states throughout the 1990’s, Zero Readership presents an unsentimental journey through the trials of the Yugoslavian people throughout the 20th century’s bloody final chapter, a journey made all the more compelling when told through the perspective of the speaker’s own family.

Among the book’s haunting figures is “Gramma Nada,” introduced to the reader early on with the stark description: “four black suitcases against the china cupboard/ ORIGIN in white lettering down their sides.” “Ancestor ancestor,” asks the speaker, “What is an ancestor?” This poem, entitled “Extended Family Voices,” also houses the elliptical couplet “elephant/welcome,” embracing the time-honored symbol for ancestral memory—and the importance to species survival thereof.

As if a global abduction has occurred, the need to know where we are going, individually and collectively, permeates, as does a world-weary, often childlike tone: “I use these crayons without naming the colors they give./ What crayons? If I’d named them I would now remember where I placed them/ for safekeeping. Crayon safety is important in this cave.” “Grampa Mercy” as well as Gramma Nada give birth to contradiction—lines such as “Mercy will kill me” arrive unexpectedly, as do meditations on infinite space: “ . . . rhythm is a distant planet beyond Jupiter it sometimes flickers/ in my science fair telescope. I will orbit it only if I can/ whirl my way off this balcony and find water in space to baptize/ myself Zero Gravity Trombone . . .” The speaker sometimes adopts Nada’s voice, to return the narrative closer to the actual scene of Eastern Europe: “You are not my husband Mercy you are my father Joy and I am your daughter/ Nada Seadweller. We escaped civil war by dumb luck, a fluke when Freedom/ could have ordered his men to shoot. Our people were ready in the national/ bank with Kalashnikovs loaded . . . Let’s pack and reminisce how/ my brother Dear Owleye worked Alexanderplatz blackmarket after the war.”

The devastation of Belgrade is the book’s thematic center, yet historical references are traced back further, to the “liberation” of Belgrade in 1944. Alongside decades of flying artillery shells and a profound trauma and literal dislocation beyond what most American-born citizens (and poets) could ever imagine, the simplicity of the speaker’s invocations remain adamantine: “I wish to praise her. She’s sick and I’m using her for my muse./ Is this sick of me? True Muse, please DO sing in me/ that I may stop using other people for their language/ their strange Belgrade speech.” Stanzas of truly startling beauty arise from the ashes of decimation: “I am thy father’s lyric/ doomed for a certain time to feed you lines/ when you dry and corpse and fly on wires/ above my white prompter robe.”

Zero Readership does not avoid the horrific subject of radioactive warfare, particularly the depleted uranium bombing by NATO in ‘99—a “fatal souvenir/ you may find blooming in you/ tomorrow or in 2 or 20 years,” in a “once/ ecological paradise” turned “birthing place[s] for/ two-headed children.” Here, the speaker abandons verse altogether, not an issue for readers who appreciate splices of documentary poetics in collections otherwise lyrical in conception: “The Serbs made tanks out of wood and the Americans/ bombed the hell out of the wooden tanks but the uranium went/ into the ground it will leave in 7,000 years don’t worry/ nobody reports about that but history and statistics will show/ what happened. The planes bombed funerals in progress,/ hospitals full of civillains, cornfields in Vojvodina/ where farmers had to go in groups to pick the harvest/ or starve.”

Readers whose defense mechanisms against criticism of American culture or public policy are reflexive should skip whole sections of Zero Readership, such as the excerpt “Student Interlude 2” from “Extended Family Voices 2” (an excerpt): “Despite the uranium/ in our food and water/ we are happier here/ in Belgrade/ than all of you in America/ dying a death by surplus—/ A HEAP OF/ SURPLUS GOODS/ BURYING YOU/ and your senses—” Painful indeed, to contrast the relative ease of a privileged American upbringing with that of Zorana, who “stayed up doing her math homework . . . by tomahawk green light/ flashes/ in her window and learned algebra in dust swinging up from Belgrade concrete . . a curious mixture of blood, bombs,/ and human feet.”

Regardless of this book’s readership (zero, or the world), it’s difficult not to stand in awe of a poet who marries a line such as “corpses/ killed for nafta, black market oil diluted brown in soda liter bottles,/ filling our cars/ lined up for/ for miles in May fuel shortage blaze,” with this one: “I am the poem doctor when I tap your poem’s knee with my rubber hammer/ you scream/ and jerk it till we’re ready for ecstasy.”

Zero Readership relates the unification of language to the cessation of war, and the glossolaliac contortions of language to hope, by suggesting that cannibalistic and eucharistic ceremonies are non-oppositional sides of the same desire for consummation:

“find me
and where you can dine on my body
the blood speaks complete sentences in my ears.
here blood speaks complete sentences in my ears.”

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry and critical writings have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as The New Republic, The Believer, Notre Dame Review, Rain Taxi, and American Poetry Journal. She is also a contributing reviewer for ForeWord Magazine.

MANHATTAN MAN AND OTHER POEMS by JACK LYNCH

2009-12-21T20:55:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS T. SPATAFORA Reviews

Manhattan Man and other Poems by Jack Lynch
(Reed and Quill Press, Inc., New York, 2008)

I recently happened upon Dr. John Lynch’s Manhattan Man and other Poems and discovered a treasure chest of sensitive, profound, yet reader-friendly gems. There is wisdom and delight in a variety of poetic forms, including works of prose poetry. Dr. Thomas Fink’s introduction to the book aptly tells us that “Jack Lynch has been receptive to various poetic modes without choosing to inhabit any fashion exclusively.”

Laments distinctively express the speaker’s emotionally devastated state and desperate wish for its oblivion, as in “Good Friday,” metaphorically depictive of the agony and ecstasy of the Christ. The book’s seed piece, “Janeen” and “Mother to Son” address loss and abandonment, the last bedazzling the reader with a clever and deceptively ironic variation between stanzas. “Manhattan Man” eulogizes the departed soul of the neighborhood vagrant. Indeed, “Janeen” is thematically comparable to my lyrical favorite, “My Blue Heaven,” where the narrator expresses his profound love for his emotionally disparate and troubled lover. “Evening” metaphorically discloses the lyricist’s paradoxical comprehension of liberty as a life devoid of projections and expectations, whereas an entrance gate in the allegory so-called simply and succinctly represents the eradication of interpersonal barriers.

Can modern poetry express spiritual themes and still be modern? In Lynch’s case, craft and content merge to answer positively. Reminiscent of David’s Psalm 102 in the Old Testament, “Good Friday” clearly symbolizes the emotional and physical anguish which Christ was compelled to endure prior to his resurrection. Experiencing a bleak moment, the speaker is longing for Easter Sunday to finally arrive and liberate him from misery. The speaker, like Christ, is crowned with “thorns of lassitude.” “I don’t want to eat wheat…” echoes Psalm 102:4 (“I forget to eat my bread.”).

“Some call you crazy;…//you’re not here anymore/but your music is/every night.” A man with “long hair and beard,” wearing a “primitive cloak,” orating sermons to the crowd and preaching about “ghosts” and “purgatory”—the figure is yet another representation of Christ, scorned and persecuted in life, now praised in death. “Manhattan Man” depicts a tragic Christ-like figure still mourned by his disciples in the streets. The
Manhattan Man is “everywhere” after his death yet living “with us always.”

The sorrowful “Janeen,” analogous to “My Blue Heaven,” depicts a man’s abject mourning over the loss of a loved one—“You were lost to us!” Written in open form, this lament addresses loss, or perhaps abandonment, but not to death and certainly not by a lover, as suggested by the use of “us” (line 25). The poet’s description of the subject’s rapidly altering physical appearance—“And the rich, strong color in your face faded”—suggests the likelihood of a tragic loss of identity or sanity that might befall the victim of a severe depression. The poet mines the emotional richness of his subject, leaving us with an indescribable sense of pain and sympathy for the young woman.

Abandonment is addressed in the free-verse, deceptively subtle ironic lament “Mother to Son,” wherein the poet cleverly employs a subtle, dual point of view between the first and second pair of quatrains, the speaker in the first two stanzas paradoxically portraying the son who was the recipient of the mother leaving home: “Forgive [your mother] for leaving you one night when she found love.” This is depictive of the indescribable suffering that a boy endures, losing his mother to a stranger of the night.

One of the many love poems personifies a blue-blooded crab that metaphorically changes her personality by moving sideways and changing direction “without notice.” Indeed, the speaker’s unconditional love for this “crab” is stupendously touching. Lines such as “it is more than worth the patience…” concluding this exquisitely written lyric suggest an incomprehensible love, adoration and unequivocal acceptance reminiscent of the New Testament (1 Corinthians).

I was particularly taken by the vivid imagery in the allegorical “Evening,” metaphorical of the predictable and ultimate end of one’s plans, hopes and yearnings, which enigmatically signifies the conclusion of freedom and the threshold of predictability, certainty and bondage. Two roadside travelers ultimately discover that life’s freedom ironically lies in the unknown rather than in the projected and certain.

The shorter poems are smart, witty, accessible and intelligent. “Gates,/no more/just you and me/opening and closing…” The repetition of “no more” is employed in “An Entrance Gate” seemingly to emphasize the transcendence of physical and emotional interpersonal hindrances that make opaque our transparency toward one another and inhibit our freedom of expression. The gate is, antithetically, in fact, a figurative interpersonal barricade brilliantly employed in this abbreviated, allegorical composition.

Mourning for the departed Christ figure in “Manhattan Man,” the emotional devastation of “Good Friday,” love for the sorrowful in “Janeen” and “My Blue Heaven,” pain for the abandoned in “Mother to Son,” the bliss of the beginning of true freedom in “Evening” and the wonderful end of superficiality in “An Entrance Gate”—these mature, varied poetic expressions offer sensitivity, anguish, humor and mystical qualities of this book.

Jack Lynch’s Manhattan Man and other Poems is evidence that the Whitmans, Dickinsons and Frosts are not lost with the times. There is form as well as a joyful celebration of language and sound.

*****

Nicholas Todd Spatafora is an educator at Joseph Pulitzer Intermediate School in Jackson Heights, Queens and an English Professor at the City University of New York. He holds two graduate degrees from Hunter College in New York City and has enjoyed a successful career in education spanning twenty three years. Contemplating a life in Catholic ministry, he attended Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in New York. The author is a member of the Tao Society in Tai Pei, and prior affiliations include the Religious Society of Friends and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. He and his wife Hsiaochen (Judy) reside in Flushing, New York.

2 BOOKS by REBECCA LOUDON

2009-12-21T20:54:00.000-08:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home by Rebecca Loudon
(No Tell Books, 2006)

and

Cadaver Dogs by Rebecca Loudon
(No Tell Books, 2008)

A few of the traces of Amelia Earhart’s post-historical life surface between the pages of this book. Tho the only way we know what’s between the pages (indelible invisible ink) is by what’s on them. And what’s on them, it’s as if fever had written/is writing: traces lead to traces … Now I’m too something. Now you’re too something. Now I’m a Kiki Smith woman carrying a wolf across my back. My house has birds flying in it, my house is an island … the wolf is not the kind that sits safely in the lap.

Dear Ones--
Dear Ones--
Dear Ones--

Now I’m too small even for a girl. Now I’m too big.

Letters are addressed to her family: father, mother, sister Muriel/Pidge; Frank Hawks, who gave AE her first airplane ride; pioneer aviator Anita Snook, who taught E to fly; her navigator Fred Noonan; and her husband/partner George P Putnam. Lost journal entries are addressed to … the Erinyes? … the future? … I assume all letters and journal entries are written after AE falls out of history and into her fate.

The book tracks an arc of sorts. Which begins with “O jubilate” … and ends with I was a seed pod tumbling and an admission:

… what a bad idea it was
to have decided against the parachutes …

and passes thru love regret and a million other states between. Sometimes she lives, sometimes she dies. Loudon’s AE covers the ground the way a shadow does, a shadow cast by an old ghost plane.

A(nother?) Kiki Smith wolfwoman is the tutelary deity of Cadaver Dogs, tho dogs are not wolves, wolves are not dogs, but who feels it knows it, and …

These poems are intense. It doesn’t matter the subject, or the manner of construction. Take, f’rinstance, something neutral, like this found poem, “Sock Monkey Directions”:

Draw a line for your monkey’s tail
Sew your monkey’s arms
Sew your monkey’s tail
Turn legs inside out

Cut your monkey’s arms
Cut your monkey’s tail

Secure your monkey’s crotch
Stuff your monkey’s crotch
Sew up your monkey’s crotch
Trim your monkey’s crotch

Attach your monkey’s arms
Backstitch your monkey’s mouth
Secure the ears with invisible stitching

Sure, of course, monkey is a loaded word. But why does this hurt so much? “Backstitch your monkey’s mouth / Secure the ears with invisible stitching” … I can’t read this without flinching …

The title poem is serial; at least it comes in eleven sections. It begins

the electricity meter spins and spins
you yell what makes it spin like that
what source of power are you abusing

and ends

… her desperate hands
wiping and wiping the sterile
skin sluicing blood
from a puncture until it runs pink
lips puckered whispering
wound wound wound

I read it as a love poem. I think the whole book’s autobiographical. I don’t think this is fiction. That doesn’t mean all this happened. Just. Like. That. But that’s exactly how it happened, and keeps happening. Do I sound confused? I’m not, but don’t ask me to describe what I just read. I mean. After all. What is description? You hadda be there. Be there.

Be there. Where the humanimal lives …

And the bees, the bees: the bees make honey in the lion’s head. Loudon is one who is one. I for one won’t miss a word, from now until the end.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is the author of a number of chapbooks, most recently World Zero and A Spectrum of Other Instances. He is also the author of the full-length No Sounds of My Own Making, and the editor of 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’. His work has appeared in numerous journals and in several anthologies. His current project is Flux, Clot & Froth, which will probably top out at 700+ pages, and for which he hopes to find one reader, please. He is part of the team (title: editor or something) at Leafe Press. His ongoing efforts can be seen at Zeitgeist Spam.

HI HIGHER HYPERBOLE by NICHOLAS MANNING

2009-12-21T20:45:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Hi Higher Hyperbole by Nicholas Manning
(ypolita press, 2009)

We can talk about the witty sounderisms -- e.g.

here *
at your hairs' (hot) roots is water-
melon: mou in an ivory hue

-- that tear down the (faux) binary between sound and meaning. But this is 2009 and that's old news, yah? So I want to discuss instead why Hi Higher Hyperbole contains a photograph of the author with scissors stabbed through his heart, bloodying his white shirt, and yet the expression on Nicholas Manning's face might be summed up as ... utter indifference. (If author-photos were an Oscar category, that gilded statue would be on its way...)

The raison d'etre for the author photo is the same reason why this chap contains pink pages and is covered by a red cardboard stock embossed with a felt-ish doily cut-out in the shape of a heart; what could be presented here is the cheesy covering to factory-made chocolates rather than poems. Not to say this is not a brilliant design decision -- kudos, indeed, to ypolita's designer for the presentation of these poems, as a romantic satire of satire is certainly part of this project.

And said raison d'etre can be explained as well by another visual component: how the line breaks conspire to have the placement of end-words create the following pattern to the verses:

Some poems from the chap are also available in Galatea Resurrects #10. If you lined up all of the poem-profiles horizontally, you'd get this metaphor for the poems' sensibility:

In other words, there would seem to be no radical peaks soaring off the page or crashing depths that might even puncture the base line. It's all just a consistent linear portrait of a life lived with emotion but not necessarily with passion.

And this raison d'etre to which I've been referring? Well, it can be gleaned in the fact that, as noted in the chap, "Hi Higher Hyperbole is extracted from the manuscript HOMO SENTIMENTALIS: A Guide in Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy." In other words, nota bene that subtitle.

So, is that the romantic zeitgeist as defined by Manning? Well, let's take a look at the content in the poems, shall we! Here goes with, say, number X":

blush *
in the too plush burgundy
of my devotion * nook
where even
the velvet has desires * (malsains)
and nothing is denied * nothing
and nobody * nobody * know
it will not do you any good
to hide the myrrh * or
to call the eunuchs
all sent away * my darling
to roam the desert
on a sham quest * of my instigation...
cunning * my love is
and ruthless and
about as sure
as the ashen soils * are unforgiving
and your eyes of * a blueness
the darkness would be proud of

Can one say for sure that these words, by being over-the-top (hyperbolic) -- "blush / in the too plush burgundy /of my devotion" -- are not sincere? One can certainly interpret it that way: "my darling / to roam the desert / on a sham quest* of my instigation."

But the effectiveness of Manning's project here is that the reader (this reader anyway) doesn't totally believe in the poetic persona's complete jadedness. Too many of the lines are simply ... so beautiful. So beautiful they effectively seduce -- like, the persona is joking around but the persona is also too wise to shut the door totally on Love walking through the door (oh hey yeah this is also a novel, like mebbe poet-turned-novelist Marisa de los Santos' novel synchronistically entitled LOVE WALKED IN). Beautiful lines like (and let the chap fall on desk to open randomly to):

the heart of a chestnut
dropped and warm * an ember
in such snow
as burning down a puncture
to a gulf
of cobalt swum * with silhouettes
such as we caught those winters way back

If one might revert to one of Modern Love's cliches: these poems not only succeed in attracting boys and girls to the poetic persona, but many of those attracted might even harbor the sincere if clichetic desire to reform this "bad boy" with "true love." Too many of the lines are simply too lovely to dismiss -- a reader commits despite the inherent irony that occasionally surfaces. The chap packaging may be dime store, but the bon mots inside are nothing less than truffle bon bons, if a reader is willing to, ahem, commit. Here are some lines that I can envision someone reading out loud and snickering along with a snickering crowd:

your image
is as a white blinding * rose :
pose * upon the glittering
water (-lily)
which fills my mind * yet secretly sabotages
my every desire ... for you flee (for)
the slightest sound: adoring
rustle! too ardent
words...until all is lost : of a sudden
so * when still I may have held you
and but my eager elan
ignore ... lost ...
the broken *
flower

But amid such a snickering crowd, I suspect there'd be at least one or two who'd be sort of intrigued, and willing to explore further to see if what's behind the pose negates hyperbole.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: two reviews of her first 2009 book NOTA BENE EISWEIN -- one by Grace C. Ocasio at at Jacket 37 and the other by Joey Madia at New Mystics (July 2009). Her second 2009 book FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA was also reviewed recently by Jesse Glass at Ahadada. You also might check out Jean Vengua's engagement of one of her poems from THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS over at YouTUBE! Last but not least, she just -- just! -- released a chapbook in time for holiday gift-giving: ROMAN HOLIDAY.

TO THE BONE by SEBASTIAN AGUDELO

2009-12-21T20:40:00.000-08:00

AMANDA REYNOLDS Reviews

To the Bone by Sebastian Agudelo
(Saturnalia Books, Philadelphia, 2009)

Teacher and word gourmet, Sebastian Agudelo, has a lot to instruct and tempt us with in his poetry collection, To the Bone. He offers us poems that tease the palate, taunt the taste buds, and yet make our own wants and hungers disgusting to us at the same time. This book of poems is broken into three sections in which food is love and hate, war and peace, and breathtaking and horrific at the same time. In section one, the reader is thrown into the back kitchens and alleys of swanky restaurants that serve “adobo-crusted tuna” or “lamb in grape leaves” from the palms of a demanding “Chef” and “barbarian” dishwasher. At one turn we see solemnity and prayer before the meal, and at another bend we are faced with “the chemical stench of fires.” A shorter section two gets nearer to the bottom of the bowl. Here we don’t forget food, but now we are also faced with aging, sadness in daily work, and a poignant humor that the author seems to find in life. Finally, in section three, Wallace Stevens and Vallejo among others appear, along with perhaps the most interesting poem, “Sustenance,” in which the speaker’s wife attends a Lamaze class where the women wonder about, of all things, what should happen to their afterbirths. Agudelo leaves a reader feeling wonder, lust, disgust, and even shame.

In the end, there are some images that I wish I hadn’t read in To the Bone. The dying pigeon in the back alley dumpster that found its way into discarded kitchen oil will probably haunt me for quite a while. But there are also long well-crafted sentences that make a writer marvel in the sheer luxuriance of it all. In “The Smell of Cooking,” Agudelo writes:

Then like some riddle moving through clues,
the cooks worked down to fowl, goose,

duck, squab, all plucked and de-boned
and seasoned also, all waiting for

the smaller animal inside, till all there was
was tern or sparrow, something small enough

to cradle a white truffle and the cooks
proceeded to truss each cavity and roast

the whole concoction days on end.

And there are beautiful (yet sinister) character sketches of men like the dishwasher who becomes an ancient Roman or Greek barbarian in one poem. For that matter, to appreciate food, perhaps one must be global and historically minded in his or her experience as Agudelo’s poems certainly are. There is the gross appetite of America bumping up against “the temple kingdoms of medieval India” and “tandooris down on Chestnut.” Even where there is no luxury in the travel, the language still remains lush. When looking at 17th century art, Agudelo sees,

no scarlet drapes to backdrop leisure,
no maps to hem the territory which
parceled and torn bought the cloth

for the drapes, gold for the filigree
and time to flirt and serenade.

The same meticulous craftsmanship found here is shown in the many lists that make up the book’s poems. In “Surveillance,” you can’t stop reading down the page when you find couplets like,

                  It can’t be that bad, to Amaru and Henry
his underlings, he’s left the counters, sideboards,

                  the casework in the cigar bar. No pulidora
for that, just rag and chemicals, just fingering

                  each fluted keystone, each domed shell,
brassoing the pulls, the hinges, the latch,

                  polishing the marble tops, till morning
when the place will gleam enough,

                  Martha will joy stick her cameras trying
to angle out the reflections that saunter

                  like inverted wet ghosts on her screens.

And on the subject of form, this book serves up quite the banquet. Rarely do we find two poems that look similar. On one page there are these jagged couplets and on another very clean quatrains. In a way, it’s like reading a poetry primer. Each page offers us a new lesson in line breaks, alliteration, stanzas, or similes and metaphors. A reader has no choice but to slow down and savor lines like:

Theoretical and practical, he’d call the furrow
and plant the beaten peasants there to turn over
stony substratum for surface clod, add morning
fog rising and tugging them through the acreage

a whole valley, till dusk, when the sacerdotal order
of the bottle doffed its investitures and let the secret
scripture of the waning moon, the public river
roll of their tongue.

Then, just when you think you get a break from the hard work of untangling a verse, Agudelo hits you with an Italian sonnet variation as in “Expulsion.”

If the punishment was to make ends meet
then they have the whole classified page,
can circle management, service, the stage,
and suck the free-market of its sweets.
If sweating’s what it was really about,
the range spewing hundred eighty thousand
BTU’s combined should be plenty to amend
and still the cook shows up, clocks in and out.
If when the fruit gave in, knowledge leached
like gossip from overripe neighbors on stoops,
why didn’t the dark or dirty secrets teach
a master plan, the news of how to reach
success, identify the breaks and loop-
holes, tell why the wayward don’t get rich?

Here is a restaurant you must return to. It’s so good that you don’t care if the cook is spitting in your soup or thousands of dollars of caviar is rotting in the fridge. These are poems that are just dark and twisty enough to make us hold on tight. We lurk alongside a brilliant narrator who watches from the wings. A narrator who waits and scrutinizes the world and the characters in it and who is not afraid to judge.

One idea I did expect to see return was a statement found in the very first poem. Agudelo writes about the state of poetry,

Poets of the 1890’s got high on opium
drunk on absinthe, just to read the shimmer
spume, and fluorescence of a worn-out world.
Poets now will diet on bizarre produce.

Is this a lament? Or is it an acceptance of fact? Which type of poet does Agudelo want to be? I’m left wondering if this book is an attempt to bring back the beauty or wallow in the den. In any case, To the Bone is worth reading if for nothing more than the bizarre question found in the poem “Sustenance”: “what happens to all that?”

*****

Amanda Reynolds received an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. She currently lives in and writes poetry about Pittsburgh, PA and teaches at Slippery Rock University. She has recently published work in journals such as Gargoyle, Mississippi Crow, and Gander Mountain Review.

THE BOATLOADS by DAN ALBERGOTTI

2009-12-21T20:35:00.000-08:00

VIRGINIA KONCHAN Reviews

The Boatloads by Dan Albergotti
(BOA Editions, 2008)

Primal Fucking and Deathbed Prayers: a Poet for the New Millennium

“What I know is what is sacred,” the speaker of “Vestibule” declares. This opening poem equips the reader for the impassioned world of The Boatloads, which contains some of the most twisted homages seen in some time. Textual revisioning is Dan Albergotti’s forte; his poetic license, while contemporizing the legacies of Abraham, Keats and the good Lord himself, is audacious. His poem “Book of the Father” drips with scorn: “ Yeah primal fucking. . . Yeah Abraham . . . Yeah paranoid/ schizophrenia . . . Yeah convenant and submission . . . In the tank with Ariel Sharon, in the studio with Jerry Faldwell, in the cockpit with Mohammed Atta . . . Yeah Sodom. Yeah Babel . . . Yeah Abraham and your literal origins. The father is high. Yeah the father is high. Yeah Abraham, just like a father, just like a father with a knife . . . ”

His two poems that reference Keats (“Revision” and “The Eve of Ever After”) anchor the collection; both reimagine ends to Keats’ actual death, alone, in Italy—in “Revision” he and Fanny retire to a Greek island to “perfect the art of the human body”; in the “The Eve of Ever After,” Fanny and Keats bear the slings and arrows of aging, bearing children, and losing libido (a distinctly unromantic end). “Those were the good times. Before a pale blue sigh/ replaced the purple riot in his heart. Before she/ lost her figure giving birth to little poets.”

With an irreverence bordering on blasphemy (“We want to find a higher intent/ a god to damn”), and a connectedness to the natural world rivaling none, Albergotti’s debut is a charged pastiche of imaginative genius, fiercely broken chips of song, and a strange peacefulness borne of surviving a treacherous journey only to find oneself washed up on foreign, or, with any luck, domestic shores.

His poem that speaks most directly to the problem of faith (few have it, and even fewer believe in the need for it), is “Affirmation of Faith,” a poem which, like his two elegiac poems “Notes for a Poem in which God does not Appear” and “Poem in which God does not appear” tackles the oblivion of faithlessness (and of death) from a radical perspective: empathy. “I believe there is nothing to be done/ for the squirrel that’s been dying/ all morning on my gravel driveway,” the poem begins. When this animal death intersects with the death of a sparrow that hits the glass-paneled window of the living room: “I believe I stood and walked to the window/ and watched the sparrow close her eyes/ evenly over four minutes while her small head/ became more and more perfectly framed/ by an expanding halo of clear fluid.” When the speaker’s father dismisses the speaker’s vigil over these twin deaths from the animal kingdom as inconsequential, the speaker simply states: “I do not believe my father can feel the movement.”

These two poems, among others, testify to the severance between modern man and his dying gods, and introduce a profoundly disquieting thought: our participation in the divine may at times be an act of interference in the inevitability of death.

Here, the problem of language (formulated by E.M. Forrester as “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”) is inextricable from the problem of how, and in what, to believe. “We say Ilium and auto-da-fé,/ napalm and Nagasaki. Our words are like tongues/ of flame atop toy soldiers, consuming us as soon/ as we utter them,” says the speaker of “Lesson of the Elements: Fire.” Echoing Rilke, who equated beauty with terror, The Boatloads equates terror with the imagined indifference of god and the natural world—and the implications thereof, of being forgotten. Yet this most intimate of intimate relationships—that of a projected godhead and the soul—is one with which Albergotti refuses to exchange for a variety of temporal banalities, despite the fact that the god mourned for in The Boatloads is conspicuously absent.

In The Boatloads, the reader confronts the notion that the book of life is generated by an absent god wresting forth beautiful songs from his pining creation—as if god, tired of wooing the soul, has decided to let creation woo god—however heartbreaking, this idea of a lyrical sacrifice demanded by god surfaces, with force. “There is no answer./ There is/ no other song. The only song/ is this song./ Our lords make us sing it./ And then they write it down./ See how the lords are writing us. / They are wise and mad.”

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry and critical writings have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as The New Republic, The Believer, Notre Dame Review, Rain Taxi, and American Poetry Journal. She is also a contributing reviewer for ForeWord Magazine.

CARAMBOLES by ALEXANDER DICKOW

2009-12-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

CRG HILL Reviews

Caramboles by Alexander Dickow
(Argol editions, Paris, 2008)

Laughter Toads: Alexander Dickow’s Caramboles

Alexander Dickow’s first book, Caramboles, promises, delivers, and promises that much more compelling poetry will come from this poet. Reveling in “error,” irascible, irreverent, the poems’ jumbled syntax jerks down the page, across the book, a fractured fairy tale, the last dance of a wedding, bride and groom stumbling to their own premature nostalgic beat. Or Charlie Chaplin wobbling out of the stranglehold of our stringent cultural expectations.

Fluent in French and English, Dickow writes original poetry in both, or so it may appear on the surface. Through the multitude of “mistakes” in these poems, Dickow may actually be positing that he cannot be–that no one can be–fluent in any language. Any language has its limitations, its presumptions. Starting with the title, few things can be taken for granted in this book. There are two possible reads, the first not an accurate translation yet perhaps more indicative of the poetry. The verb caramboler means to strike, to bump into, evoking the colliding syntax (not a poem in English without a dent; I cannot say if the same errors occur in the French). More literally, a carambole is a somewhat acidic fruit characterized by its star shape. I cannot fathom how that fact acts on the poems, so I will dance with my first read, even if I step on someone’s toes.

I hypothesize that Dickow wrote the poems in French first, then made a loose translation in English, producing the syntactical quirks that abound in clumsy student translations. Surely he could not have created the contorted syntax in his native language.(Who the hell was his English teacher?) But then again he may be implicitly arguing that fluency is an illusion at worst, elusive at best. Many of the poems hinge–or unhinge–on this flawed grammar, the enjambment demanding the reader’s attention, dizzy on the precipice of meaning. These fender-benders of nouns and verbs are also at the root of an abundant humor, a contagious playfulness, throughout the book.

Caramboles is a political book insofar as Charles Bernstein’s argues in “Sign Under Test” (Girly Man, The University of Chicago Press): “The politics in a poem has to do with how it enters the world, how it makes its meaning, how its forms work in social contexts. The politics in a poem is specific to poetry not politics [my emphasis].” This series of poems pokes at the poetry world, the teetering syntactical structures jabbing at poetry’s conventions. The book perhaps takes a stab, too, at the larger world, at American provincialism. An American studying abroad in France, Dickow thumbs his nose at those in the United States who not only do not know another language, but who also garble what little information they gather about another culture (remember “freedom fries”?). The former political stance, positioning against the norms of poetic form, however, dominates the latter, the social/cultural.

The reader is given no time to settle into a passive reading. The first rupture in syntax occurs at the end of the fifth line and/or the beginning of the six line of the opening poem:

Clumps of smarmy grackles
splutter quoting Trakl’s
Whispered into After-
noon. Melodic like a
nervous flock of laughter
toads, they clash and strike a
different chords together,
birds of neither feather.

Is it “laughter/toads,” a curious image, or is it “laughter[missing/implied/invisible word/s]/toads. Is it then the toads who “clash and strike a/different chords together”? The grammar “mistake”–“a/different chords,” plural noun when the article calls for a singular noun–produces a kind of nervous laughter, a flock of stumbling “birds of neither feather” unable to fly but flying nonetheless. In this poem and others, form is the armature of content. The muffed syntax draws attention to itself, the poem driven less by what the poet is saying than how he is saying it, the effect coming from the syntactic mish-mash rather than semantic content.

Another example shows how the garbled grammar creates ambiguity. One poem (all the poems are untitled) begins plainly enough (though it is not clear by the end of the poem what the object “it” is): “I have glimpses everywhere for it.” But then the next two lines veer from expected order:

I will scouring any single one
by one of that belongings from me

The “will” can work as an auxiliary verb as in “I will scour,” yet it can also function as a noun, the will, the poem’s will, behind the scouring. In the next line, “belongings” can act as a noun, as in property, or can be a bungled verb, “belongs.” One of many first person poems, the syntax unfolds a perplexed autobiography:

I will be break all of rules
to be finding it back.
Besides myself to worry,
because if I would lost it,
I have none of moreover.

The speaker works hard to make sense, to recover his rightful path, but it, whatever it is, is out of reach far into the future. The speaker, however, retains a smidgeon of hope:

Following for clues, is notice
some kind of resemblance…
Had you to seen it anywhere,
you are telling me? Once
day I would maybe to wake
thoroughly up myself,
I’ll found it here was whole
the time, right affront of me.

Abruptly the poem closes with a call for help, a plea to the reader to discover coherence in the confusion of the world:

Help me to seek for I lost it there.

Caramboles has four sections. In the first, the English is right justified on the left hand side of the book, the French left justified on the facing page, the two languages meeting squarely in the margins. In the second part, “un conte–a tale,” the English becomes left justified on the left hand side and the French right justified on the right hand side, the binding opened up with ragged spaces. In the third part, “a tale–un conte,” the French has shifted to the left hand side, right justified, and the English is on the facing page, left justified, French and English meeting in the middle (creating an arrow shaped poem on pages 70-71). In the fourth section, the French is again on the left side, now left justified, and the English on the right hand side, right justified, replicating the staggered spacing of the second section. What is with all this jockeying of margins? In total effect, the book swings across pages, across time and space. That iconic wedding again? Or naively swaggering Charlie Chaplin? More likely, Dickow eschews the rule-abiding poetry too often presented in contemporary literary journals.

Would I know anymore if I could read as fluently in French as I think I can in English? Or is this book an argument against fluency, subverting the transparency of most poetic language? On the back cover (translated from the French on goodreads.com), Dickow writes, “I merrily reduce the English language to a frenzied shuffle. Or else I unhinge language, dislocate it, as though I were a gnome in a museum tilting picture-frames for a good laugh, just enough to discompose the patrons. Aficionados object; campaigns are launched against the crooked: the virtuous demand redress.”

Whether you are a stodgy aficionado or a mischievous gnome, you have got to chuckle reading this book, the cracked picture frames of the poems deflecting just enough light to tickle your eye.

*****

Crag Hill until recently edited SCORE, one of only two journals dedicated exclusively to concrete/visual poetry. In the last three decades his work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including several available on-line. His creative and critical works in progress can be found at http://scorecard.typepad.com. AND: During the anemic Carter administration, Crag Hill kicked the "i" out of his first name. Continuing to be underwhelmed by his elected leaders, he threatens to kick out the last vowel, too soft, too soft, he says. Something in the Scotch-Irish in him thinks he'll be well-represented by the guttural "Crg."

A MAN ABOUT TOWN by ROBERT J. BAUMANN

2009-12-21T20:25:00.000-08:00

JIM MCCRARY Engages

A Man About Town by Robert J. Baumann
(Hey Tiger, a division of Mitzvah Chaps, Lawrence, Ks., 2009)

Baumann has done it again and again. Published another chapbook from his local press, Mitzvah Chaps, here in Kansas. This time he breaks ground by printing more blurbal text on back cover than poetic text within. Huzza's and what else there is to RB!! Breaking the publishing rules is as easy for RB as breaking wind in bed. Trust me.

Of course the blurbs are fake and egoistic and not nearly as dirty or funny as the poems..uh...lettres inside. This time the trick is him, RB, writing to various persons some famous, some local, some not real, some culled from TMZ.com and in his dreams for most part. That is his talent...not all of it...but a lot of it and here it is evident.

The letter....ah the letters....that we could all write such. Here, for example, one such to Ms. Jennifer L. Knox, well known poeta and bon vivant (?)

"Dear Jennifer L. Knox,

When I asked you to have sex with me in the
liquor store I meant steal that sign at the
register that says PENS which you did so I got
off. Was it good for you?"

Or a letter to Milwaukee:

"Dear Milwaukee,

Here's another something for you to wrap in
baconl. It's my love life? It's my comb-over?
It's my Member"s Only man bag full of crevice
oils? Ben Gay and lamb fat are pretty much
my mantra now that I'm bald."

And believe me, the responses from the above our others are in no way, well maybe...forget that.

Baumann is one of the things that makes being an old, geezer poet an okay thing. To know that coming up are younger, brighter, nastyer, drunker persons who will bury your poetic ass and a lot of your peers along with you. And that is pretty much what it is all about, no? Come on RB!

You need, and I am not trying to be all uppity about it...I mean you need to find this book (hint: google Baumann and find Mitzvah Chaps) and read his letters. They are new, fresh, not from a schoolbut they are full of potty mouth and hipster twang...what used to be street wise and is now, oh I dont know, some sort of postconceptpopo or something. Robert Baumann is real. This is the proof. Praise him. Good on him. Pee on him. Poo on him. Come on (to) him too. You do that now. All of you. You do that now.

*****

Jim McCrary blogs at http://wwwresistingpoetry.blogspot.com/.

LETTERS TO POETS: CONVERSATIONS ABOUT POETICS, POLITICS AND COMMUNITY, Eds. JENNIFER FIRESTONE & DANA TEEN LOMAX

2009-12-21T20:15:00.000-08:00

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community edited by Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax
(Saturnalia Books, 2008)

When I first heard about Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Part of me wondered if there could possibly be anything new to say about poetics and politics, in this day of blogs and tweets and multiplying media outlets. But in this book, the process is just as intriguing as the end product, and it leads to some interesting outcomes.

Editors Jennifer Firestone and Dana Teen Lomax asked pairs of poets to write letters to each other over the space of a year. Letter writing could be done by e-mail, but each letter had to be at 2-4 pages long. Instead of forcing less-established writers to be the supplicant approaching the more famous poets, the editors chose the established poets and let them be the ones to choose the emerging poets or the established poet could choose to let the editors pair them with a poet. The goal was for each poet to write at least three letters.

In the introduction, the editors say “ . . . we hoped to develop a project that wasn’t altogether familiar to readers, that wasn’t another anthology of poetry or poetics” (ii). In this, they have been successful. I haven’t seen another book quite like this one.

My favorite format for discussion of poetics has been the interview. But in the interview, we often don’t learn much about the interviewer. With this book of letter exchanges, we find out much about both poets. Some themes emerge as we read: poets are concerned about making a living, about race and gender, about the relationship of poets to the academy, and of course, about how to create the best poems.

As letter after letter addresses these concerns, I found myself feeling better about my own anxieties. If even the most established poets wrestle with these issues, then I find it a comfort. Even poetry fame doesn’t solve these thorny issues.

I also find some good advice tucked into these letters. Eileen Myles advises Jennifer Firestone to give less to her students; she says, “It’s hard for young teachers to do this, but especially for young female teachers” (105). I remember when I first started teaching, I spent almost an hour grading each paper. Students spent as much time reading those comments as they do reading the comments that I produce much more quickly now. I’ve come to realize that I’m not really the important part of the process; the writing of the paper is what’s important, less so the comments on it.

Jill Magi writes to Cecilia Vicuna, “Life speaks in us, the Upanishads say. To ‘recognize’ that language, the way it sepaks in you, to discover where it is in you, is what matters, to find the source of delight that opens all doors: being in poetry” (171). The book brims over with this kind of advice and inspiration.

It’s wonderful to hear that the human condition affects us all; no one escapes entirely. Claire Braz-Valentine writes, “The truth is that we all are uncomfortable in our own body, our own life. We want so terribly to get it right. We look to others and think, if only I could have done it that way, looked that way, written that way. We are a constant whip on our own back. We never let go. We need to breathe, relax into that person we were born into, be her. Let her think, create, love, and rest” (306). She writes that she’s getting closer to being the person she always wanted to be. What a hopeful message.

We even get the occasional poem. I found Karen Weiser’s project that involved John Audubon’s life fascinating, and I was happy that she included a poem with haunting lines like “O, to be a strippling world / with a certain thrown-her-glove-in sense of possibility” and “On the Mississippi Audubon killed the birds then drew them.” But don’t buy this book if you’re hungry for poems. The poets spend far more time discussing approaches to writing and revising poems than including those poems in their letters to each other.

Many people are out there, talking about their writing processes and their political views and their personal issues, in endless blog posts and tweets. But a series of letters provides a depth and an intimacy that most writers rarely achieve on their own. What a gift to have the art of letter writing preserved into our current century. I’m still fond of the letters of John Keats, but they don’t have the kind of immediacy and relevance to my present life I find in the letters in Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals and Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. In 2009, she was invited to read as part of the noon reading series at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale and serves as Assistant Chair of the General Education department. Her website, which has connections to the blogs that she keeps, is www.kristinberkey-abbott.com.

PLAYING WITH WORDS: THE SPOKEN WORD IN ARTIST PRACTICE, Ed. CATHY LANE

2009-12-21T20:10:00.000-08:00

JAMES SANDERS Reviews

Playing with words: The spoken word in artistic practice, Ed. Cathy Lane
(CRISAP, London, 2008)

The blurb on the back cover of the book advertises it as “an anthology of works from over forty leading contemporary sound artists and composers who use words, particularly spoken words, as their material and inspiration.” Sounds good. But what’s actually in the book is even better.

Playing with words is less “an anthology of works” in the traditional sense and more a curated space, where each contributor has been given room to display her practice. Some contributors are represented by sound poems and scores, but presentations also consist of interviews, essays, memoirs, documentaries, and manifestos. For example, there is an essay by Clive Graham about the history of sound poetry through the lens of his presenting a show devoted to sound poetry on British radio; next to that is a manifesto on sound by Jaap Blonk; that piece is in the neighborhood of an interview with Trevor Wishart about his uses of computer technology to organize compositions based on vocal characteristics such as pitch or accent; and that is near David Toop’s reminiscences about collaborations with Bob Cobbing. The book’s heterogeneity feels fresh to those used to the structure of typical literary anthologies because it emphasizes that what is on display is an activity, not a product, and not one type of activity but a wide array of approaches to language and sound. Even among those who contributed artistic pieces there is a variety, ranging from Sten Hanson’s “Rann Sten,” a sound poem transcript complete with context and explanation, to Iris Garrelfs’ tantalizingly inscrutable “A composer’s idiosyncratic method for bringing about structural associations and developing contextual collages,” which consists of an abstract photograph with a short text beneath it, presented on a single page. Garrelfs’ piece could be a conceptual score, a illustrated manifesto, or something else, but it revels in its nebulosity.

While the book purports to exhibit artists who “use words,” this parameter is thankfully interpreted loosely. In actuality, the book focuses on those practicing at the intersection of language and sound. Many of the artists are concerned with the non-lexical elements of language, their relationships, and the aesthetic, social and political aspects of these relationships. In fact, what writers should appreciate about this book are the many strategies for composition-- that is, the organization of language-- that don’t utilize words or similar literary or even linguistic strategies. Writers by and large are part of a tradition in which semantic aspects of language get foregrounded (by readers and then by themselves). Music composers by contrast come out of a tradition focusing on the relationships between sounds; they approach language on a musical level* indifferent to concerns of (or problems with) sign/signifier relationships, akin to the way in which B.F. Skinner approached language as a part of human behavior, jettisoning traditional linguistic categories in favor of his behaviorist ones. Ms. Lane’s collection of composers, musicians, and performance artists serves to remind writers that they are part of a wider artistic practice of “language organizing” and that they should not be constrained by traditional methods of composition.

There are only two drawbacks to this book. First, the book only includes 40 contributors: an anthology with this rich a set of ideas at its core begs for a wider sampling. That’s not to say I have a quarrel with the sample being more of a cross-section than a “survey of the greats”. The fact that prominent artists like Joan La Barbara, David Toop, Trevor Wishart, Jaap Blonk, Laurie Anderson and Sten Hanson appear alongside student work accentuates the democracy of both language and sound (or at least their capacity for democracy). To spin the drawback more positively, the book is a good start and hopefully the beginning of a more ambitious project. The other drawback is that there’s no accompanying CD/Web page with examples of the sound works described/scored in the book. Several of the artists do include a Web site with some samples as part of biographical details**, but readers would have benefited from a more systematic integration of sound samples with the related texts. Ultimately, these drawbacks are minor and are a common side effect of success: any book that has the reader asking for more at the end must have done something right.

+++++++++++++++++
*Not, for example, when they write librettos or song lyrics.

**I’ve reproduced some of the links below:

Tomomi Adachi’s site: www.adachitomomi.com
Brown Sierra’s site: www.brownsierra.org.uk
Viv Corringham’s site: http://hometown.aol.co.uk/vivdc/
Iris Garrelfs’ site: www.irisgarrelfs.com
Clive Graham’s Resonance FM—Sound Poets Exposed playlist: http://www.stalk.net/paradigm/playlists.html
Dirk Huelstrunk’s site: www.soundslikepoetry.de
Joan La Barbara’s site: www.joanlabarbara.com
Leigh Landy’s site: www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/~llandy
Language Removal Services’ site: www.languageremoval.com
Joerg Piringer’s site: www.joerg.piringer.net
David Toop’s site: www.davidtoop.com
Michael Vincent’s site: www.michaelvincent.ca
Julien Weaver’s site: www.hypio.io
Trevor Wishart’s site: www.trevorwishart.co.uk
John Wynne’s site: www.sensitivebrigade.com
Pamela Z’s site: www.pamelaz.com

*****

James Sanders is the most mycophobic member of the Atlanta Poets Group. The group publishes the sound poetry magazine aslongasittakes and the paper-based spaltung. James' book Goodbye Public and Private is out from BlazeVox.

TWO COLLABORATIONS by RICHARD LOPEZ & JONATHAN HAYES

2009-12-21T20:05:00.000-08:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Super 8 by Richard Lopez and Jonathan Hayes
(Superblast!, 2006)

and

Hallucinating California by Richard Lopez and Jonathan Hayes
(Windowpane Press, 2008)

I remember, je me souviens, it must have been 8th grade, James Jump passing around a grainy b/w photobooth shot of an unidentified female friend, pants down, showing off her newly fringed pubes. The shot was so out of focus. Or something. Maybe I was out of focus. There was mystery there, or something, and I couldn’t see it.

I remember, je me souviens, about 5 years later, a guy named Nelson inviting us over to watch a grainy hardcore short, the whir of the projector … and me thinking afterwards, as my girlfriend and I were fucking, whether he and his were, too, … it wasn’t exactly an erotic thought, it wasn’t exactly not one …

Which brings me, by a commodius vicus of poetry thru a recirculation of memory, to Richard Lopez’s Super 8, the memory/invention of a history? an eBay purchase? the phenomenology of the gaze? The uncanny identification associated with Lacan’s imaginary? hell, let’s just say Super 8’s a collection of poems relating one way or another to experiencing some movies formerly referred to as porn.

Even where the poems appear purely descriptive, e.g.,

foreground
a tube of Vaseline

2 men rut it out
desiring

weighted by the
splay of light
printed

the tattooed forearms

(“grainy”)

they’re not, since some degree of interpretation/fantasy is implicit in the very act of describing: “desiring”, “weighted” … Lopez knows this.

Sometimes the identification is “complete”. Take “babybaby’s quarry ride”:

baby yr lips to my lips she sd
ride my motorcycle in the empty quarry
and then was gone

she kissed my hair my eyes
touched skin with skin
kiss me she asked and she did

No way to tell whether this actually happened, so to speak. I think that’s one of the points of focusing on the involved observer: how easy it is to morph from involvement to identification. I can’t help but thinking of Lacan’s mirror stage here … the mirror … the screen …

But. Or in any case. Compassion. Compassion for one’s self vis-à-vis one’s desire, compassion for that desire/those desires, compassion for others’ and theirs, compassion … It’s most explicit, perhaps in the last words of the last poem, “bettie page’s klaw”, which invokes among other things La Bettie’s famous knowing gaze:

… we are all full of shit

go on so
hold tightly our body we can never own

Hallucinating California is a collection of urban vignettes by two psychodelibilly flaneurs Wharf-Ratting around the 415 and the 916. I’m not sure whether it’s a twofer (Hayes/San Francisco; Lopez/Sacramento) or whether the poems are collaborations. I’m guessing the former but either way … one could argue that on the one hand nothing earthshaking happens in these poems, while on the other each represents what philosophers call an Event; and after an Event, well, nothing’s as it was, is it? These are quiet poems, yet …

good afternoon

he placed a deaf card
on the tacqueria table
it said, “will you buy me? any price accepted”

as he retrieved his cards from the other tables
and made his way back to me
i lifted a plastic basket that held tortilla chips
and offered them to him

he opened his mouth wide
and pointed that he had no teeth

According to Badiou’s schema in Being & Event, subjectivation only occurs via fidelity to an Event. In this case, the toothlessness suggests there’s no easy way out of this encounter, and that “any price” isn’t really “any” price; fidelity means reaching into one’s pocket and exchanging money for the card, real money, money that one may not have … and can’t, because how much would be enough, really, to make a difference?

That’s from the 415. Here’s one from the 916:

sun burnt like a blowtorch

greenish blue streets can’t drive w/o
the a/co on
in july hot summer
tho if one asks no it never gets
hotter than the surface of the sun
check that shit
i’m here to say otherwise
the sacrament can’t do no sacrifice
it ain’t blazing
i’ve seen street bums broiling
in their clothes
deep in shade
and the sky stretched out
tanning hides
freeways opened like veins
people burst spontaneously in flame

"Yes they do.” “Don’t they, though.” So do poets. This is what happens or can happen when your eyes and heartmind are open, when you take a Lew Welch-like poet-walk down the street.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is the author of a number of chapbooks, most recently World Zero and A Spectrum of Other Instances. He is also the author of the full-length No Sounds of My Own Making, and the editor of 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’. His work has appeared in numerous journals and in several anthologies. His current project is Flux, Clot & Froth, which will probably top out at 700+ pages, and for which he hopes to find one reader, please. He is part of the team (title: editor or something) at Leafe Press. His ongoing efforts can be seen at Zeitgeist Spam.

THE PROSODY HANDBOOK: A GUIDE TO POETIC FORM by ROBERT BEUM & KARL SHAPIRO

2009-12-21T20:00:00.000-08:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

The Prosody Handbook: A Guide to Poetic Form by Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro
(Dover Publications, Mineola, N.Y, 2006)

In 1965, Harper-Collins published what became one of the standards in the field of metrics -- A Prosody Handbook. Robert Beum (Shapiro having passed away in May 2000) has now resurrected this classic, revised it somewhat, and had it released by Dover as The Prosody Handbook.

In his foreword, Beum states the premise of the book “No one who comes to prize it needs to be consciously aware that the verse form is terza rima or that the third foot in the second line is a trochee. Yet the principle holds: metrics influences meaning, interpretation dare not ignore versification.”(x) Even while the book has moved pretentiously from the general to the specific elevating itself from ‘one of’ to ‘the only’ book on metrics, that premise still holds. The opening chapter reiterates and builds on this premise, poetry being defined, on p. 1, as “an art of SOUNDS moving in TIME” or “a situation in which sounds are uttered and perceived consecutively.” This concept is further elaborated on the next page in a manner important not just for metricists but for free versers as well: “A poet’s intention is to shape a prosodic form that is perfectly suited to the point he wants to make -- to the particular quality of human experience he deals with -- in this particular poem.” Whether you are John Milton or Ron Silliman, sound and sense combine to make meaning.

The next chapter begins the discussion of verse, poetry being divided into “metered poetry (verse) and free verse.”(7) Verse, when expressed by itself, is given a rigorous definition: a “metered language; that is, language in which some quality of the syllables, such as stress or quantity, is either strictly or at least relatively regularized.”(6) Consideration of free verse will be left behind for a considerable time -- although it will not entirely be forgotten.

A number of the ensuing chapters fall naturally into units best considered together. Chapters four through six are like that. They build a bottom up approach to poetics and the consideration of words. Chapter four considers an area seemingly forgotten by more recent books, that of the syllable. Considering the syllable from four facets -- Color, Stress, Quantity and Pitch, there is much that the poet will find profitable to explore and adapt to their own poetic outpouring. The syllable is then collected into the foot. Here is where the authors begin their exploration of metrics proper and its corresponding concept of scansion. In responding to the self-imposed question “Is the correct scansion important?”, the authors have this to say, at p. 29: “The answer to it, we feel, is much more often a yes than a no. Once a poet decides to write in a meter, he obliges himself to stay within it, allowing of course for wide variations at particular points -- a traditional liberty of English verse. The poet is more or less bound to stay within a pattern once he adopts it, for a quite simple reason: he has established a pattern, and this means among other things that he has established an expectation in the reader or listener.” The chapter then proceeds to consider the four most common metrical patterns: in relative order of importance, the iambic, the anapest, the trochee and the dactyl. As the authors say, at p. 32: “The very nature of our language, and not simply the caprice of poets, has given these four feet their dominance, and given the iambic foot dominance among them. It is, in fact...all but impossible to use any other combinations of stress and nonstress, except as variations.” Consideration of the most common of those variations, the spondaic (two stressed) and the pyrrhic (two unstressed), which are often found together forming what some have called the ionic foot, completes the chapter walking us into consideration of the line. All concepts are introduced and developed through use of excellent examples from poetic history.

The triad seems to be the holy grail of this work. The next three chapters -- ‘Accentual and Syllabic Verse’, ‘Meter and Rhythm’ and ‘The Uses of Meter’ -- can again be grouped productively as a unit. In the first of these, the authors display their chauvinism by crediting Robert Bridges with the return to syllabic verse which they credit him as “pioneering...in his old age, he did not master the form until his last poem”(55) in 1929, Even when they finally do get around to mentioning Marianne Moore, it is after mentioning Dylan Thomas. If they had done their homework, they would have discovered that there was syllabic verse in Moore’s first book, published in 1921. This is a weak point throughout the book. Fortunately, it doesn’t detract too much given the wealth of merit included -- such as their statement regarding meter and rhythm:

Meter in itself -- although not in its functions -- is a relatively simple matter that we can usually describe with great objectivity. Rhythm is always complex and is often difficult to describe. Meter is a matter of mechanics, rhythm is almost always unanalyzably organic. There are, at least in English, relative few possible meters, whereas every new combination of words really brings about a new rhythm.(60)

Or this statement found in ‘The Uses of Meter’ under the heading ‘The Expression of Feeling’:

Meter is paradoxical. It tends to modify emotion at the same time as it seems to express it. Meter seems appropriate to emotional and imaginative expression not only because it suggests and stimulates feeling, but also because it makes the language in which it appears unlike the language (and experiences) of everyday. Meter introduces a note of the consciously planned, the symmetrical and artful, and thus makes our experience of reading verse an experience greatly different from our direct involvement in ordinary discourse and from our participation in an actual emotional situation. In other words, meter can be a means of obtaining what is often called ‘aesthetic distance’ or ‘psychic distance’.(69)

In the latter chapter, they prescribe several uses of meter, most of which are as well and as poetically described as for emotional modification. Unfortunately, they exhibit poetic chauvinism in denying free verse the same abilities. One can only assume they haven’t read much free verse.

The next trilogy takes us through ‘Tempo’ and ‘Rhyme’ to ‘The Uses of Rhyme’. ‘Tempo’ collects a number of comments spread throughout the earlier discussions into a readily accessible catalogue of devices on how to speed up or slow down a line. The first thing ‘Rhyme’ does is define itself: “when we speak of rhyme, we usually have in mind only two types of agreement: different initial sounds and identical following sounds,...or polysyllables which correspond at every point except one...”(86) This definition is somewhat broadened on the next page: “It is convenient to distinguish four types: (1) full rhyme (or simply rhyme), (2) slant rhyme (sometimes called half rhyme or off rhyme), (3) alliteration, and (4) assonance.” All this comes with a caveat: “when we speak of rhyme as agreement or partial agreement in sound, we imply that this agreement is being used as a conscious device, that it is intended to be conspicuous.” Note that the axiomatic extension of this is that sometimes these ‘effects’ creep unconsciously into our writing -- something of which we must be very conscious. ‘The Uses of Rhyme’ sets out, guess what, the uses of rhyme. An interesting one is that rhyme may afford the aesthetic distance necessary to write about difficult emotional subjects.

We now enter into the final trilogy -- ‘The Stanza’, ‘Stanza Forms’ and ‘The Sonnet’. The authors very effectively introduce the concept of a stanza by comparing it to the paragraph:

A stanza is the verse equivalent of a paragraph. Like each paragraph in a story or essay, a stanza advances the composition; again like the paragraph, an individual stanza may represent a complete change in tone and idea or only a very slight one.(107)

Well chosen examples then elucidate this statement demonstrating how the stanza either carries forward or completely radicalizes the idea. This sets the stage for a listing of stanzaic forms moving from the couplet, through the tercet to finally arriving at the ode and unusual forms such as the sequidilla and the haiku, etc. Although by the time of publication the ghazal and the pantoum had already been used and would become much more so in later years particularly as a result of the influence of Ashbery regarding the latter, there is no mention of these forms. The sonnet, the only one-stanza form to have attracted a name, is well explored even in the concision of six pages.

Leaving behind the triumvirate, we enter into the duple meter of blank and, then, free verse. The section on common metrical variation in blank verse is well worth reading. That setting out the limitations of free verse is as well. The free verse poet should pay particular attention to the first two of these: “(1) Without the guideline of meter, one is sometimes unable to tell exactly how a certain word or syllable is to be stressed...(2) Free verse lacks the melodic and mnemonic qualities of rhymed verse. It is such a spare medium that it must compensate by showing extreme deftness of rhythm, or vivid imagery, or expression that is in some other way especially engaging.”(151)

The final duple arrangement is ‘Classical Prosody’ and ‘Prosody and Period’ -- the latter worth the price of admission by itself. However, an added bonus is that, even while dismissing Classical, or quantitative, prosody “English verse is so powerfully accentual and our ears are so habituated to its accents that quantitative prosody seems quite foreign to us.”(156), they are able to support its study:

There are, however, a number of sound reasons why an English speaking poet should study classical prosody and try his hand at imitations: by substituting his native stress principles for the quantitative principle he may find one or more of the classical forms congenial; and he may be led to pay more attention to the lengths of his syllables, to tempo, and indeed to acoustic qualities in general.(156-7)

These are all valuable reasons to explore and experiment using not just classical prosody but even, if a free verser, the stanzaic forms set out earlier. The one reason which is not mentioned and is probably the most important of all to a free verser is that exploring these prosodic forms teaches discipline.

The final chapter, ‘Scansions and Comments’, discusses what today is a lost art -- scansion. Merely because we poets today have for the most part abandoned the time-honoured poetic forms in favour of free verse does not mean that we should not have to worry about scanning our poems. Scanning assists us in the development of rhythm which, as the authors pointed out earlier, is an essential aspect of free verse in order to distinguish that verse. There is another art employed here that is on its way to being lost -- close reading- particularly as employed by the New Critics. We are taken on a tour of plosives and sibilants and the sounds of poetry and how these sounds make the poem come alive. This combined with discussions of the techniques already discussed throughout the text as they are applied to some excellent examples of excellent verse makes this chapter a gem. It is unfortunate that the authors use the term ‘scansion’ in place of close reading as it may tend to confuse the novice.

Should the reader be under the impression that all good things must end, particularly when the last chapter has been discussed, they would, in this instance, be incorrect. For perhaps the best feature of this excellent book is the Glossary which is all encompassing. This book belongs on every poet’s bookshelf.

*****

John Herbert Cunningham is the host of Speaking of Poets – a half-hour radio show on Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, reviews and interviews. He publishes regularly in half a dozen literary magazines in Canada and the same number in the U.S. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with the free jazz group ECMW – Experimental Creative Music Workshop. He is currently studying the alto sax, the Chinese flute and the darbouka.

POETRY AND CULTURAL STUDIES: A READER, Eds. MARIA DAMON & IRA LIVINGSTON

2009-12-21T19:55:00.000-08:00

JEROEN NIEUWLAND Reviews

Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader, Eds. Maria Damon and Ira Livingston
(University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, 2009)

‘I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos,’ sighs Stuart Hall, cited in Michael Bérubé’s recent essay ‘What’s the Matter With Cultural Studies’ (online, with a still open comment section, at The Chronicle Review). In his essay Bérubé voices disappointment about Cultural Studies not living up to the promise many felt it harbored with its nascence in the later 1960s. He argues – with fervor and disappointment – that it has brought about very little change in American higher education and, again referring to Hall, claims that it has suffered from a tendency to too many monocausal analyses, attractive and problematic for the same reason that they simplify the more complex reality of the way the world works (for example, explaining away complex political /cultural phenomena as results of neoliberalism). Another problem Bérubé mentions is that for lack of a clear methodology Cultural Studies has often devolved into the entirely different ‘study of pop culture’, or a generic ‘cultural criticism’. What remains unclear is how Cultural Studies might indeed be more consistent and effective in complicating accounts of neoliberalism and hegemonical structures.

Poetry and Cultural Studies is a new reader edited by Maria Damon and Ira Livingston, and holds up quite well when considered against the criticisms that Bérubé levels at the field as a whole. And although it has its weak points, this book delivers what it sets out to do and is a handsome, and very useable contribution to, and intermingling of both literary theory and Cultural Studies. The book does not suffer from monocausal analysis – it collects essays, both chronologically and thematically, about a wide range of specific areas. Even the criticism that Cultural Studies has no method is partially circumvented by the fact that all essays share the connection of poetry and Cultural Studies.

There are some minor quibbles to be made regarding the editing of the texts, but on the whole this book has been well put together. The sections are thematically organized and at the same time provide both a sense of historical overview. They are: Precursors, Ethnography, Mass Culture/Cultural Politics, National (De)formation, Subject (De)formations, Reinventing Tradition, and a (short) index. Damon/Livingston perhaps sound a bit overly modest when they write that ‘each reader will likely be struck by glaring omissions from his or her own canon of poetics as cultural critique’ (italics added), but of course it is indeed unavoidable that some readers will find 'classic’ texts from their different disciplines missing.

Yet many classic texts from the beginning of social studies are included. Some examples of modern classic texts that you will find in this reader are – Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘What is a Minor Literature’, W. DuBois’, ‘Of the Sorrow Songs’, and Henry Gates’ ‘The Signifying Monkey’, as well as essays by scholar/poets such as Rachel BlauDuPlessis (about the construction of ‘modern male whiteness’), and Barrett Watten (Gertrude Stein, Fordism, and the historically embedded constructivist moments of radical poetics). At the same time, there is a wide geographical focus, with texts about poetry from India, China, to France. Although what remains unclear is the criteria by which these texts were chosen, why some countries are included and others not. Finally, you will find texts about popular or marginalized art; for example, the engaging read by Robin Kelley about ‘Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los Angeles’.

A minor comment about the first section is that it seems slightly odd, maybe anachronistic or revisionist to call the varying texts grouped therein, ‘Precursors’. Should Deleuze/Guattari’s ‘What is a Minor Literature’, published in 1975 really be considered a precursor, or rather an oblique influence? Also, the inclusion of Wordsworth’s 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ seems a bit out of place here, even as a ‘sort of self-consciously definitional boundary of literary poetry’ (15). It precedes even the earliest other text by more than a hundred years, and just comes across as somewhat anachronistic. This is mainly personal preference, but one might imagine that instead of including such an old text it would have worked well to tilt the focus somewhat more toward the contemporary, and recognize some of the names of the moment that will probably prove to be of lasting interest, including for example an essay by Alain Badiou, or essays about Flarf or Conceptual writing.

One last point to mention is that the essays have been redacted. This is a shame and really makes the difference between a reader for students and a collection for scholarly reference. This was also the intention, but as even the editors acknowledge the essays are often ‘substantially (and sometimes ruthlessly) condensed’ and ‘smaller omissions and related editing have been done silently’(16). Some pages are scattered with many ellipses, which is annoying with reading; furthermore, the reader does not always know when and why redactions have been made. Sometimes it just stings to see nuance and style being traded in for concision – like with Walter Benjamin’s beautiful essay about Baudelaire.

* * *

When stepping back briefly to think how this volume fits into the larger discipline of Cultural Studies, one realizes that the combination of poetry with Cultural Studies is more complicated than one might realize at first glance. Since, as the editors point out, Cultural Studies was of course conceived of precisely as a protest against the prioritization of high (literary) art forms such as poetry. The New Criticism of the 50s/60s – with its emphasis on the quality and integrity of a poem – did little to further the cause of poetry for Cultural Studies. But at the same time poetry was on the one hand also playing an increasingly important role in the 60s/70s counterculture, while on the other hand being discovered by mass culture (Slams, open poetry readings), as well as capitalism as a useful tool for commodification (the poetry of billboards and commercial slogans). For some time now, Damon/Livingston assert, a Cultural Studies perspective of poetry has been possible. So POETRY, although printed boldly and in capital letters on the attractive cover in fact of course refers to Poetries. ‘We must multiply poetic subjects and objects’ (Guy Debord, motto of the Introduction).

This volume seeks to participate in, more than merely describe the history of Cultural Studies and certainly accomplishes both – although in the introduction the emphasis is really more on the historical. There is an overview in the introduction of how the gap between the poetic and the ordinary everyday has been theorized, followed by a brief example of how South Asian British band Cornershop’s song ‘Brimful of Asha’ triggers multiple cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary readings, but at the same time defies being ensnared in an exclusively Cultural Studies framework. These are also ‘questions opened by the song…as if the rhythm asked our bodies… We live our answers; we keep the question open however we can, or move toward various closures, in the way our brains and bodies are wired and rewired to themselves and others.’

This is a laudable analysis in that it leaves space for a reception of the song that is not solely theorized but also experienced more directly or intuitively. It is an attitude that gives the book a balanced combination of theoretical framing, as well as a flavor of following intuitive connections. For example, on the one hand modern classic texts of the field are included, while at the same time Maria Damon’s own contribution is her personal account of the poems of three young women students at a General Equivalency Diploma course. When Damon started Graduate school she had taken the poems with her for sentimental reasons, never expecting to write about them. In other words, she allows a kind of poetry that would normally not be of interest for scholarly anaylsis, to change the very vectors of her academic writing. And conversely, she places the poems and the social context in which they were written in new light by taking them seriously as objects of analysis.

This question concerning the role and function of scholarly analysis is further explored in a contribution by Charles Bernstein. He deploys his ever unfailing critical wit in both criticizing academic thinking, while at the same time upending the academic format within which he is working. ‘A critic lovely as a poem’ reads the essay’s motto by Dorothy Parker. This line by Parker is fitting because as a critic Bernstein argues for and also uses ‘poetic’ language – readings and writings of openness, movement, affect, enactment. And he inveighs against academic didacticism, elitism, normative preconceived notions of poetry, ‘closed’ top-down poetic analysis, a predetermined literary Canon. The content of Bernstein’s argument is supported by the essay’s form and language. In other words, while retaining the basic format of a scholarly paper he does not argue against academicism in a purely academic fashion. For example, instead of a conventional structure this piece includes a poem, many shorter, aphoristic parts that challenge and stimulate the reader to react, with language scattered with puns.

Bernstein’s humor is not facetious because the humor itself posits an argument, or rather enacts an argument. It is humor that illustrates the potential force of recognizing the humor, jouissance, that is already present in language anyway. Bernstein argues that while recognizing the importance of scholarship, there is no need to do so with a glum face. ‘While I respect the authority of scholarship, I reject the authoritativeness of any prescribed set of books, methods, experts, standards.’ (362)

To slightly resituate Bernstein’s argument – and considering that one of the aims of Cultural Studies is to criticize and democratize institutions – the publication of this book would have been a good opportunity to extend politics of the book/poetry into the presentation of the book itself, for example by making it available online via Open Access (a development that has rapidly been gaining currency with philosophy publishers such as re.press and Open Humanities Press). Although, it should be mentioned that the hard copy of the book certainly looks very handsome, including the visual, anthropomorphic poem ‘Be Poem/Poem Being’, by David Baptiste-Chirot.

Part of Bernstein’s argument is that it makes no sense to just point out a difference if what one says does not also make a difference. The title of his essay – ‘a blow is like an instrument’ – is a good example of his style and content – it is wonderous and intriguing and invites the reader’s active participation from the beginning. Halfway through it becomes apparent that these are the words of a jazz musician, comparing the blowing of a wind instrument to the playing of another instrument. A blow is like an instrument in that it is an unmediated force of its own, in the same sense that Bernstein’s writing and the criticism that he advocates is like a blow of force, or a particular kind of affective wind that blows through the text (as opposed to a purely logical argument that forcibly keeps a text pinned upright).

I open the door and it shuts after me. That is, the more I venture out into the open, the more I find it is behind me and I am moving not toward some uninhabited space but deeper into a maelstrom of criss-crossing inscriptions. The open is a vanishing point – the closer I get to it, the greater the distance from which it beckons. And I begin the journey again. (372)

This book, Poetry and Cultural Studies, is a great place – predominantly for students – to venture out on such adventurous beginnings again and again, and to return to after having explored other texts in other places. Incidentally, a podcast of the book’s launch party in September – with readings by Bernstein, Pierre Joris, and Tracie Morris – can be found at the PENN Sound website.

****

Jeroen Nieuwland has published reviews in Jacket, ibid, and India Nu. His poems have appeared in Spirits, RealPoetik, and Bordercrossing Berlin. He maintains a web log at transversalinflections.wordpress.com

TERRA LUCIDA by JOSEPH DONAHUE

2009-12-21T19:50:00.000-08:00

JON CURLEY Reviews

Terra Lucida by Joseph Donahue
(Talisman House, 2009)

Joseph Donahue’s Terra Lucida is a braided, poetic breviary of a book, an awe-inspiring volume of three sections which arrange its various explorations into the physical and spiritual world as achieved catechism and cataclysm. Words haunt and redeem, regulating a portal of consciousness where through one is at witness to the articulation, disintegration, and reinvention of autobiographical, biblical, mythical contours of shimmering, often terrifying, ontological inquiry. Donahue’s scope is vast, documenting the myriad strands of thought which ignite and disperse their vaporous contents with a fugue’s keening and joy’s unhesitant breath. Hope expectant and murdered, tracing an arc of recovery and loss which is memory’s jurisdiction but also the world at large, is the heritage and projection of poems which, independently or en masse, seek fidelity of vision in a world where apocalypse and creation are simultaneous, synonymous.

It is an imposing, rightfully cumbersome assemblage of poems, an archive of textures in which words grope for “possibilizing” (my woeful neologism) language into being signification of event and prognostication, a marriage of dualities and dilemmas for which tension is a symptom of a relentless reckoning of the illuminated terrains on which the poet sets foot. George Herbert, William Blake, William James, Jacques Derrida, and Nathaniel Tarn (for whom a poem is dedicated) come to mind as fellow questing spirits but Donahue seems to evoke no forebears or align himself with any movement, muse, or creed in his efforts to align language with the infinitude of its sources in culture, history, religion, and myth. His vision is spectrally multiple, casting in and out the structures of thought and meaning which attend to the building of worlds and words.

The lines of these striking poems move antiphonally, weaving the commodious arcs of deliberation for which Donahue strives to understand the world. Materiality of text and flesh, physicality and illuminated, spiritual presence are constant concerns. Notice how he is able to merge the codex of corpus and nature into a seamless entity of mutual self-making:

My life is a letter in a word rising
on the unrolling white of the sky.

But here is the greater
miracle: that these flashes

are legible, as vines are,
as the winding sunlit leaves

where I read the sweetness
of the fruit that will be.

The lushness here is dependent on the gesture of thought evoked, not any kind of meandering, prolix congestion of words and lines. He is an economical conservationist of meaning and proliferating contexts, not content to spill words in hoping they will sop up some filaments of revelation. ‘Revelatory,’ in the case of Donahue’s poetry, would not judiciously describe the end-point of any of these poems’ investigations with the visible, invisible, self-invented, or hoped for; rather, it is a term that can satisfactorily encompass the reader’s sense of the sheer scope of his investigations. Terra Lucida is antithetical, often self-cancelling, in locating as a crucial universal trope the gestating, transformative, and transcendental beside and against the dying, static, and dissolving. Regardless, the categorical imperative of these poems, even those which visit the extreme calamities of experience and vision, always settle bird-like on the bright possibility of hope:

The thought of
a hoped for end

of hope, a presence
yet to be present,

& a thought
of shape

persisting like
the hope before

any thought of hope.

*****

Jon Curley teaches literature in Newark, New Jersey. His first book of poems, New Shadows, was just published by Dos Madres Press.

WOW WOW WOW WOW by KEVIN KILLIAN

2009-12-21T19:45:00.000-08:00

DANA WARD Reviews

Wow Wow Wow Wow by Kevin Killian
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2008)

I'd like to start this review with something of a detour. Remember back in the day, before we were blessed with dazzling on-line audio archives like PennSound? It was a pretty tough trick, impossible in fact at least for me, to ever get to hear what these poets I so adored sounded like. Sure there were some recordings of the Modernists around—Eliot, Pound (how much did that freak me out on first hearing it?!?!) & Williams, & Rhino had kept Beat voices circulating on CD. But as far as I could tell that was it. Well, in 1996, Exact Change issued their first (& only I believe) yearbook which included a CD of readings. Looking at it now, whoa, what a lineup of poets! Seminal hardly accounts for the epic importance of the poems we get to hear performed. & to think that for many (like me) this may have been the first time hearing any of these voices. Among the inexhaustible treasures on this disc (now neatly archived at PennSound) is a recording, from 1982, of Ted Berrigan reading "Red Shift", one of his later masterpieces. This performance, with its devastating calibrations & novel insistences, gets under the skin like no other. After a reading or at a party try this game--repeat a few lines of the poem aloud & I bet you'll find that more than a few of your cohort can pick up where you left off, such is the penetrating magic of his reading. If you, like me, hold this recording dear, perhaps it's obtained a special place in your imagination as a referent for one kind of emotional affectivity that poetry can achieve. I'd like to use this forum to propose that it has a compliment of sorts in a performance by Kevin Killian. The reading Killian gives of his poem "Is it All Over My Face?", from the launch reading for EOAGH's "Queering Language" issue (that issue itself a new & classic resource) is one for the ages, & while it uses a somewhat different set of tools to achieve its effects, it is in every way as memorable & moving as Berrigan's evergreen. Charming too, as Killian stops here & there, just as one's heart is starting to break, to fill us in on details that illuminate the poem in intimate ways. So it's a very generous reading, & in places very funny. But finally, by the time we've reached the spot where Kevin's voice drops to a whisper, & he hits the word 'cat', as if it yielded to us some bathetic power we've only heretofore barely felt, we know that we've entered a world of rare emotion & art where a plain, open kind of grief remains wedded to indelible mystery. So, as we turn in this little cul-de-sac I hope one of your next stops after my review will be a trip here—
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Queering-Language.html for a listen to this reading, & the many other wonderful things gathered on that page.

So, to begin again with the matter at hand, Killian's chapbook Wow Wow Wow Wow. Last year, after most of us had been waiting for what seemed like forever, ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni finally brought out Action Kylie, Kevin's collection of poems attending his muse/familiar Kylie Minogue. That book is a sun bringing with it the pixilated daylight of pop & the twilights of memory & death & lost love. I've been thinking of Wow Wow Wow Wow as a celestial body moving through the gravity field of Action Kylie, as indispensable as our very own moon. It's a short book, 18 pages long, & begins with a quick, chilly burst. "Giving You Up", the first poem, details a mysterious self-circumcision, the resultant blood becoming 'magic graffiti' on the clinical hospital walls. The next poem, "Tightrope", keeps us in suspense, as it opens 'high up on the passage between the vowels, a rope that crawled like/a snake from one edge of the page to the other", & I take it that here we're in the zone of composition itself, navigating the precarious cathexis of contemporary writing. One of the interesting features of Kevin's poetry involving Kylie Minogue is one never quite knows when or where she might show up. This becomes suspenseful in an elemental fashion for it always seems that around this or that corner she may be lurking to open some horizon of meaning we wouldn't have seen without her. That's the case with 'Tightrope', which, after a brief detour to Alice Notley's Parisian apartment ("In France in that little room, the red, white, and blue/intertwined in ribbons") we follow the phantasmal presence of a Kylie b-side on an errand to Duane Reade where the patrons "shriek in excited whispers" upon finding that spirit amongst them. Now, let's pause for a moment to marvel at what I've just recounted to you as if it were a matter of course in one's reading. Think for a moment of whatever work you've been reading, the poems you've loved of late. Have any contained such a wealth of improbable turns, collapses & excitements? Well, maybe some, but none with the particular tones & combinations found here. That's the thing about this little book, it's incredibly exciting, lit up by turns with the freezing & burning we associate perhaps with Renaissance poetry, frost & unbearable heat in duet. Dana, calm down, you might say. Well, I say in response that one of the great gifts of Kevin's writing is that it enables us to risk the folly of our own enthusiasms, & to move from that first station of excitement, mild shame, to someplace where that state is commingled with a complicated, necessary ecstasy.

"Cherry, can you see me?" so begins "Cherry Bomb/Heath Ledger", a work devoted to memorializing the fallen actor's dual nature, the Dionysian implications of that first name Heath—"the boy of the moors, all mad fire", & the Apollonian Ledger—"that is one/motherfucking MBA sort of book" as Kevin has it. The poem also opens a window on the great debates played out among Kylie fans over the merits of her tune (another B-Side) called Cherry Bomb. It's a poem of divisions, of unreconciled drives, & the mesmerizing alchemy expressed when such dyads so vividly inhabit one body—

"You made me feel like I didn't need to go to work.

You had the hands of a clown grown calm.

Feed me up sight with your cherry bomb"

Let's pause for a moment to enjoy the beautiful roundness & buoyancy of these lines like a cluster of helium balloons with their strings anchored down by a big raft of pillows. The poem ends with a tender scene of particular resonance here—an image of Heath with Dannii Minogue "hugging that Australian boy with Down’s syndrome at some charity event, hearts all over them." Then, on our way out, we get one last look into the charm box of his name, one last play with that handful of letters, but it's so shivery & good I'm not going to tell it here.

As such I should probably ask you...how do you feel about spoilers? Me personally I'm a glutton for them. But I won't presume here to know how you feel. For discretion's sake let me proceed with a short catalog of some the books other pleasures. So, what else is here? Well, there's a couple of miniature narratives, one where a young person gazes out on a city of promise, & another that deals with the physical allure of books, their relation to erotic seductions. There's an essay concerning a Kylie video, a few carefully appropriated film dialogues, & the hair-raising lyric "Genital Emotion" which indexes moments of having "behaved disgracefully", & addresses us to 'the most embarrassing thing that could/happen, outside of death". I should say too that the sequencing is exquisite here, & works to create an atmosphere of dreamy obsession & peril countervailed by both elegy & ingenious play with the material of language. Yet, as with much of the poetry I love there's something else extant, a 'something else' that continually resists my attempts to apprehend & express it. It manifests itself in a convergence of knowledge, design & receptivity to transmission (of the Spicerian sort) in Kevin's writing. I always feel that to express it I would need first a kind of magic epistemology, the kind that would dissolve before I tried to apply it. A last question, related to the living unknown I've just described—what is the feeling I had so much reading these poems, this feeling they are bonded together by some particular theme or thread I never did quite suss out. Is it the dialectic between a collection of b-sides from Kylie, & this book of Kevin's, released in the wake of his 'full length LP'(Action Kylie), & the notion that, for the true fan, there is no such thing as a secondary text, only constellations of related intensity marked by the performer, or the poet's intentions? Killian's writing has for years performed the necessary task of giving a musical & narrative body to (among other things) the wondrous collapse of high & low, major & minor. Think of his Amazon reviews for a moment (Hooke Press published some in a chapbook edition, & all of them can be accessed here—www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A30TK6U7DNS82
R/ref=cm_rss_rev_feedpdplink. BTW it's like the Met--you can't see it all in one day.) There, he's leveled the omniscient voice that's all too often native to reviewers, contriving instead a voice that's in and amid his objects of attention, with them, through their trajectories & potentials, their frailties. What seems at first blush like an act of common courtesy is instead gently, but explicitly, political. & alluring. & funny. & all the things we like.

In closing I'll admit something true, & probably obvious. I write this as a fan. I take pride in my fandom, as it is finally only a contemporary expression of devotional love that's been part of the human scene forever. It's grounded in what I take to be the inarguably extraordinary character of Kevin's writing. If I have betrayed some illusory trust of presumed objectivity, I will have done so only in service to another kind of accuracy, & to the real work of advocating for art I can't imagine living without. To lay your hands on a copy of Kevin's book, write to the heroic curators & editors of the Belladonna Series Rachel Levitsky & Erica Kaufman. You can find all the necessary info over at www.belladonnaseries.org.

*****

Dana Ward is the author of Goodnight Voice (House Press) the Drought (Open 24hrs), & Roseland (Editions Louis Wain). A collaborative book with the artist Paul Coors entitled I Want This Forever will be published in early Winter. Recent work is out or forthcoming in Mrs. Maybe, Try!, Shampoo, BoogCity, & various other lovely spots. He lives in Cincinnati, edits Cy Press, & works as an advocate for adult literacy at the Over-The-Rhine Learning Center.

ONE AND TWENTY by PAAVO HAAVIKKO

2009-12-21T19:40:00.001-08:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

One and Twenty by Paavo Haavikko, Trans. By Anselm Hollo
(Aspasia Books, Ontario, 2007)

One and Twenty: Within and Beyond the Epic

The Finnish poet, writer, playwright and publisher, Paavo Haavikko (b. 1931)’s One and Twenty (1974) is a véritable chef-d’oeuvre. Rendered faithfully into the English language by Anselm Hollo, this collection of 35 epic cantos recount an odyssey in quest of the Sampo, travelling from Byzantium (Cantos 2-11) to Africa (Cantos 12-18) and Moscow as well as the Russian Continent (Cantos 19-31), before finally depicting a dramatic heroic-tragic homecoming (Cantos 32-35). Although the symbolic value and the metaphoric presence of the Sampo — what/who is him/her/it? — weighs in heavily in terms of shaping a reader’s narrative understanding, this epic poetry’s strong oral appeal, or the eclectic fusion of ethnographic and Finnish folk cultural elements gives the work an overall abstract expressionist flavor, rather than an aesthetics of concrete realism.

Here begins the masculine voice that embarks upon One and Twenty:

                  Twenty-one and a sail, days and nights.
                                    Nights, they sleep. Days they row, days and days up the Nevá
they row, stop at night, pull the vessel with ten pairs of oars
                  across the bare water,
from the Nevá to the Roiling Waves, from the Roiling Waves
                  up to Novgorod, from Novgorod to the headwaters,
                                    and from there across the isthmus,
over round logs, running the last log up to the prow, they pull,
they row, they descend, they pull, they sail toward Pohja,
                  the Southland.
(Canto 1, p. 1)

Already, as seen from this start, the gulf between history and myth appears within sight. Sensuous rhythms and rich assonances of diction governs this voice whose role resembles that of a Greek choir, as it speaks of the odyssey, evoking moral lessons while keeping action in constant flux and suspense. To admit, this voice possesses might. The fact that action never stops in this epic account may risk crowding out music and language for the poetry. Haavikko, seemingly aware of such a danger, continues however, as if challenging himself, with increasing intensity and energies to propel forward the imaginative traits of the narration by ironising the fate of Sampo with various moral measures. Take a look at these different instances, in which an affirmative moral voice recurs side-by-side “images and metaphors relating to darkness, blindness, gold, and the ability to see” (p. xv), or implicit literary forces that uphold the Finnish ideology of national reawakening — a motivation that is prevalent in Finnish literature from the post-war years:

Man, mind and sword, we are on our way ! To the Southland’s feast
                  with drinks fit for gods, food for fluttonous sinners.
only weaklings need invitations, good men don’t need them —
(Canto 1, p. 2)

Victory is not won by weapons, it has to be bought from the best offer.
                  Every officer has his batman,
                                    more faithful than a shadow.
Every five men share a servant, always,
                                 because war is eternal, as is Byzantium.
(Canto 9, p. 26)

No one among us has ever traveled that way, that way
                  goes a tale that knows sheltered harbors,
The way we know the stars in the sky but not
                  what lies between them.

The world is shaped like a large coin, only bigger,
                  moldy silver, green copper, gold.
It bears the Emperor’s image, he looks human,
(Canto 11, p. 36)

In this vein, Canto 26 stands out as the most telling instructive canto, bare of any narrative association, but a plain speaking voice. On one hand, it responds to the precedent canto that ends with the declarative line, “Speak your piece.” On the other hand, it serves as a turning point and diversion for the Russian expedition. More difficulties imbue as the explorers attempt to reverse their fate, even if against the wills of gods. Authoritative, this canto either strikes fear or restores confidence. Is it optimistic? Or is it foretelling an omen? Again, the unknown of what lies ahead once on the road heightens itself:

When you don’t need to hope, you don’t need to be afraid,
                                                      to be afraid, to hate.
When you don’t need to be afraid, you don’t need to hate
                                                      or to hope.
When you don’t need to hate, you don’t need to be afraid
                                                      or to hope.
When you don’t need to hope, you don’t need to hope,
                                                      or to hope.

And so it goes. Before the judgment hour, that is — “but that is why this world is poor, the sea mighty/ because the Sampo fell into the sea.” (Canto 35, p. 100)

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of a collection of poetry, Water the Moon (2009/10). She is one of the editors at Cerise Press and lives in France. (www.fionasze.com)

TUNED DROVES by ERIC BAUS

2009-12-21T19:40:00.000-08:00

VIRGINIA KONCHAN Reviews

Tuned Droves by Eric Baus
(Octopus Books, Portland, OR and Brooklyn, N.Y., 2008)

Being able to attenuate the ear from behind a variously constructed partition is key, for the speaker and reader of Tuned Droves; in the first section the reader is told the tell-tale signs of a “perfect listener.” From “The Wires Led to a Hive”: “Think of something quieter. Child-flower, bed-flower, the long pause/ her name created./ If a singer neglects her title long enough to lose her tone, the first of/ many eyes emerge./ This is the sign of a perfect listener.”

In Baus’ world, not only speech, but being, is created by projection. Thus, there is a danger implicit in quietude, yet the world the speaker inhabits is one in which silence, as in a game of hide-and-seek, is often necessary. Certain passages in this collection halve sonically, such as the last word “stream” in an untitled prose poem from the section “I Know the Letters This Way,” easily misread, during the first reading, as “scream”: “Do you want to hear my second sound is her shortest sound . . . A tone beside another. They think they have seen my name before. It was here. It was here. We heard it. It was here before they started swimming. Look. We have similar streams.”

The fragility of wire communication and the ecosystem, in which whole universes can shift with the alteration of one word or species, is the weighty axis upon which this tensile collection of verse rests. Directives are given readily: “Do not call out the conductor’s name. Do not repeat the perfect page . . . Be still. Do not discuss the continuous corner.” Cosmic definitions are also proffered with mathematical precision, such as “the core of any sonar is silence,” or, from “The Formation of Flowers”: When a phonograph and a projector converge, they conceive two distinct components: echoes and antennae.” The speaker’s authority comes to a hilt when he coins the most revolutionary vehicle since the Model T-Ford: a “non-lethal ambulance.” “The mandatory distance from the non-lethal ambulance is one hundred solid digits. Keep that in mind. The minimum time for hive transfers is half of half of that.”

Characters are alluded to in the most generic of terms: a man and a woman. The woman is also referred to as “Miss” or “Miss Toy” and the [a] man, as a “king without subjects.” The fringe benefits of naming are delimitation, yet, as there is also violence in this art of naming, Baus again advises caution: “When I write her name is a secret name, the wax removed lets some-/thing tumble over me from the air.”

Entire sections of the book have a subaqueous feel, as if written in utero; communication thereby is reduced from song to speech to gesture, then further reduced to whatever form of dissolution comes after that: “How do I know there is going to be an accident. I can no longer speak with my hands.”

A world in which the bee and the tortoise “survive as obstacles to grammar and song” is a fraught world, wherein the chief peril is not to mankind, nor really even to nature, but to the text, where ambushes by vultures and wolves menace the dark undergrowth surrounding the oft-referenced “perfect page.” Receptive listening becomes, in this context, not an idle pastime, but an imperative. In Baus’ work, the objective of the speaker is not what, but rather who, to listen for. From the penultimate poem “They Showed a Film of Walking to Water”:

“She was folding her arms to make a mirage, touching the snow in a/ sentence. She knows I know I will disappear tonight, a time-lapsed/ splash in my place./ Inside any good song is a small piece of snow is the one I am listening/ for.”

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The New Republic, Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing reviewer for The Rumpus and ForeWord Magazine.

GHOST DANCE IN 33 MOVEMENTS by ANNY BALLARDINI

2009-12-21T19:35:00.000-08:00

JEFF HARRISON Reviews

Ghost Dance in 33 Movements by Anny Ballardini
(Otoliths, 2008)

Ghost Dance in 33 Movements is a collection of thirty-three poems written from viewings of films archived on the UbuWeb site. Here is the last stanza of the poem "Nam June Paik":

Paik's soundless stillness is stoic even brilliant rhetoric from regret
to a callback of neglect lack of glee tight in its lack of weight
white etched in black stuck in eternal glitch caught
in the net a tent clinging in vortical twirls
blinding glitter blurring lines
a nit without whirr in
nature a twig
in ether a
white
static
wing

This lyrical commentary becomes more lyric than commentary as it progresses, yet certain of the recurring sounds refer also to the commentary. Commentary and lyric are sometimes juxtaposed in these poems, as are prose and lines, quotation and creation. There is a varied use of line (content as well as form), often occurring within the same poem. This is the first stanza of "Robert Rauschenberg":

screening the times
blurring boundaries
through
assemblage, conceptualism, printmaking, fabric collages, sculptures, destructive reductions,
giants
humanitarians
artistic message
massaging masses
Joseph Albers' student at Black Mountain College

After this stanza (the fourth line is "Assemblage... destructive reductions," - in case the blog format breaks it) is a quotation from Tate Modern, followed by the monostich "history shaping itself organically", then a lengthy quotation from Leo Steinberg, and then this stanza (what I read as one stanza; there is a new page after "...personal information".):

Rauschenberg anticipated and set up our mental attitude
towards the internet
the era of information
his works of art the layering of personal information
an action painting through gathering and depicting
his (as
our) personal ways of carving through the ether
from Lévy's enthusiastic approach
to a future of which we are less sure
"as usual" would say Michel Eyquem de Montaigne,
i.e.: "Que sais-je?"

And more follows! One of my favorite poems in this collection is "Jorge Luis Borges", which can be read online: http://www.poetserv.org/SRR32/ballardini.html

Here are five lines from the poem "Yoko Ono":

a fly of the 200 flies
on Virginia Lust's naked body
wanted the space effect
(see galactic moons craters hills
wild enchanted forest conundrums)

Ghost Dance in 33 Movements merits a lengthy written study, preferably one that would mirror its poetry and quotation. At the close of the poem "Isidore Isou", Anny Ballardini quotes Jack Kimball (in an interview with Tom Beckett) saying pleasure "is what makes the work poetry." This book provides the pleasure of poetry, and the pleasure of scholarship.

*****

Jeff Harrison reviewed books for the past five issues of Galatea Resurrects. He has publications from Writers Forum, MAG Press, Persistencia Press, and Furniture Press. He has two e-books at xPress(ed), and one at Blazevox. His poetry has appeared in The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II (Meritage Press), An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), Otoliths, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Xerography, Moria, NOON: journal of the short poem, Dusie, MiPOesias, EXPLORINGfictions, and elsewhere. Some of his poems can be read here and here. You are welcome to visit Antic View.

TRUST by LIZ WALDNER

2009-12-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

TRUST by Liz Waldner
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland, OH, 2009)

Reading through Liz Waldner's TRUST, I came to feel that this book is the first in a very long while reading contemporary poetry collections that I have a sense of each poem being an individual poem, rather than part of a series developed by its author. (Factually, many of the other poetry books I have read may not have been written serially but for whatever reason, TRUST is the only one in some time where my response included this thought that each each poem was written singularly.) If my sense is accurate in terms of how Waldner created these works, it's nonetheless apt that, per its title, trust is the collection's theme. The poems all deal with this notion on one level or another.

What's enjoyable, though, is how various poems address trust in unexpected ways, e.g.:

This skull I hold
Grew full in love
(from "Passing")

But because, to me, the book did not seem to have been created serially, I found myself paying attention to the blurbs, curious as to how the blurbers might come up (if they do) with a concept to apply to the collection. Blurbs were provided by Kazim Ali, Sarah Gridley and Mary Biddinger. The first two praised Waldner's craftsmanship and luminosity -- traits I also gleaned and appreciated from my reading. But these are traits not specific to particular themes.

And I also observed what Gridley calls "weird" in many of Waldner's poems; "weird", however, may be just another way of describing the pleasingly-unexpected twists in diction. But such weirdness is also what elevates many of the poems beyond their clearly musical root, in the way that an older Jose Garcia Villa once said (or words to this effect), "I used to think poems should sing. Now I believe they should think."

Not that a binary needs exist in what poems should do/be, as may be implied by Villa's statement. But while the music is not just obvious but heightened in many of the poems, one also ends up focusing on what the poems are saying because the thoughts were presented in attention-grabbing ways:

Posole soaks in a bowl and makes little kissing noises
(from "Necessity With Respect to Yes")

An extra-long leaf of grass
pretended to metronome.
I wasn't fooled; I am learning to dance.
(from "Annunciation")

I also think many of the poems insist on the reader not just emotionally (as in lapsing to the engendered resonance) but also intellectually responding; I think this results partly due to how the poems don't abstract themselves from the figurative world -- as in, with deft humor from "Point, Counterpoint":

...you sob,
"I wanted to pick up light."
But you are myopic
and wanted to blow your nose.

More importantly, the poems overtly link "world" with the poems' "I". That is, Walden's words may reconfigure reality but they don't cause us to forget the realness of the references:

The world fits me.
For my right ear is a notch,
a duplicated valley's V ascending askew,
earth opening like Venus' shell
bearing the bluegray of sea.
(from "Forked Song")

To create light (if only in that reading space between reader and poem) from specific objects is one of the strengths of these poems. "Forked Song" shows how Waldner achieves this through the insistent specificity of the "I":

Shadows rise and fall down with a swing, with a rock
like the sea's that roars on the palms of my hands
when I cup the world to my ears.
I wear the far field like a watch as I swallow
wheel after wheel of orange.
I am the one who is here.

And it is the unapologetic "I" here that is significant. For, surely, a world cannot be acknowledged (even if it exists) without an "I"...? (This reminds me of how the phrase "I love you" depends not just on "you" which more commonly, in my observation, is how the phrase is interpreted, but also on the "I"). Here is the title poem in full:

Trust

If I would be walking down the road
you told me to imagine and I would and find
a diner kind of teacup sitting on its saucer
in the middle then I would feel so good
in my life that is just like mine
I would walk right up and look into my face
eclipsing the sky in the tea in the cup
and say, "Thank you, I have enjoyed
imagining all this."

Yet it is Waldner's impressive achievement that none of the poems read as being imagined--and, thus, is the theme "Trust" fully developed in this collection. In these poems, the reader becomes "I" (or "you") when that word is written. The light shines forth, too, from the reader's eyes as the reader believes in the poems sufficiently to inhabit them.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere: two reviews of her first 2009 book NOTA BENE EISWEIN -- one by Grace C. Ocasio at at Jacket 37 and the other by Joey Madia at New Mystics (July 2009). Her second 2009 book FOOTNOTES TO ALGEBRA was also reviewed recently by Jesse Glass at Ahadada. You also might check out Jean Vengua's engagement of one of her poems from THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS over at YouTUBE! Last but not least, she just -- just! -- released a chapbook in time for holiday gift-giving: ROMAN HOLIDAY.

EROS & (FILL IN THE BLANK) by CHARLES FREELAND

2009-12-21T19:25:00.000-08:00

LISA MAHLE-GRISEZ Reviews

Eros & (Fill in the Blank) by Charles Freeland
(BlazeVOX [books], Buffalo, N.Y., 2010)

Charles Freeland’s Eros & (Fill in the Blank) will surprise you. Rich with quotidian bits of life like shoes and small failures, it still finds space for the all-consuming—those notions like lust and madness and disappointment lurking at the margins of daily existence.

The range of Freeland’s prose poem is not what’s surprising, though, given his previous full-length collections and chaps (Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro (Otoliths, 2009), Eulalie and Squid (Chippens Press, 2009), and Furiant, Not Polka (Moira, 2008). The most obvious surprise here is the form Eros takes: a 121-page entity that begs for attention simply by the fact of its being. And the reader must contend with this form, if only to acknowledge the astonishing feat Freeland has pulled off. If every prose poem is its own genre, as Peter Johnson has remarked, then Eros stakes out a massive corner of genre all for itself.

Some might find a solid, gray column of words running for 121 pages to be disorienting. Where to stop and take a breath? Where to put it down and then resume reading? But readers need not worry because they can enter Freeland’s world anywhere. He somehow avoids the expected lurches and stops and starts endemic in such a large piece and allows us to enter Eros just as easily on page one as on page seventy-six, like dipping into a pool or moving among rooms in a great house.

But the most captivating part of Eros has little to do with its shape and everything to do with Freeland’s precise language play—an allusion to Boccaccio or Dairy Queen, an explication of disappointment, for instance:

What if the earthquakes are only half the story? And that crippling jealousy, say, another one-eighth? You wish to go into the world to find it. But you haven’t the strength. Because what if what you find doesn’t correspond to what it was you were looking for? Doesn’t seem like anything you’d want to call your own? We are expecting some sort of pay off whether we want to admit this or not. And whatever disappointment exists one or two paces ahead is not, we say, designed for us. Set out and arranged ahead of time by uncannily steady hands. But accidental. The kind of thing that makes for pleasant reading on a Sunday morning. When the fish are wide awake in their containers. And you experience that odd unpleasant sensation that there was something you were supposed to do. (21-22)

Here and throughout, as it explores the registers of recognition and dissociation, alienation and longing, Eros effortlessly moves between interior and exterior, moves as familiar—and as uncanny—as catching an unexpected glimpse of your outline in a mirror from across the room. Some snatches are magnetic, so much so that you linger on the lines, wondering how those words have escaped being placed together before:

Because the shape and nature of our own failures rarely seem redeemable in the mirror. They hang on us like a painter’s smock. And the oak in the table, the skin on the hand of the nun, tell us that we are only just beginning to realize the extent of our misery, our degradation, when the doorbell rings and the mind drifts in fresh directions. This is why, come morning, we feel as if the world is all emeralds and mahogany. (57)

The seeming inevitability of Freeland’s language enhances, rather than undermines, its ability to disrupt accustomed patterns of knowing. Still, Eros reflects a constant tension between the desire for engagement–with the world, the Other, the reader–and a failure to connect. Eros’s Other (fill in the blank) remains no one and anyone; it is an ever-present absence, a blank filled with thought and self, perhaps forever empty.

As always, Freeland is at his best when flirting with despair, with regretted deeds and more regrettable avoidances. In Eros, the past increases in enormity with each second and the future never fulfills its promise. The past is a Gila monster, a rocking chair, the wind; and the present, a slick otter. “The cartoon villains brushed in pastel and stinking of olives. But you’ll never make them as ugly as a man’s face when he looks in the mirror after committing no sin whatsoever. After living the type of life that avoids blemish so thoroughly, even the film critics are amazed.” (77)

Readers can locate the fraud in themselves here, too. Eros makes patent the most false part of us—the part that resists the commonplace because of its very nature and fears the dangers inherent in the exceptional—the part to which we routinely succumb. “Maybe we are running from one place to another because we are bored and frightened and we’ve come to believe that only meaningless activity, so long as it is activity—a movement, an endless twitching of the limbs—will set us to rights again. Our deepest insecurities, though, are nothing compared to our most cherished illusions.”(78-29)Both, Eros suggests, are more real to us than either self or Other, and reveal a kind of blind enchantment with our own imagined misery.

Freeland’s speculations and supposings about why and how we choose to pick one metaphorical scab over another lead readers to understand that their experience is only separated by small degrees from those “allotted to someone else.”(67) And these scabs are, after all, what fill in the blank.

*****

Lisa Mahle-Grisez teaches composition at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, OH and considers herself a lucky reader of all kinds of prose and poetry.

TRUE CRIME by DONNA DE LA PERRIERE

2009-12-21T19:20:00.000-08:00

JON CURLEY Reviews

True Crime by Donna de la Perriére
(Talisman House, 2009)

Any prescient poet or criminal forensics investigator knows that the physical body under examination needs a careful assessment of its condition, contours, and some definitive declaration of its mode of dispatch, if said body is no longer breathing, no longer with us.

Donna de la Perriére’s True Crime works, poetically and forensically, in a realm of counter-intuition, seeing bodies as silhouettes and shadows, amassing portents and reiterating tragedies of degradation, misunderstanding, and, gruesomely, as etchings of violence and sinister, unknowable motives. The body is a continual site of contemplation of this disturbing, enriching volume and consciousness, forever probing and attempting to define the scene of the crime or the scene at the time, sits like a raven or revenant upon it.

The volume opens with “The Great and Secret Show” which manifests the body as an atrocity exhibition. Here, the poetry of witness, the emblematic practice of historical recuperation, becomes clinical, a dry, dissecting reminder of how the body can be perceived as a merely reified object:

a ceiling fan cools the room
the body’s eyes are flat and milkshot
head propped on a wooden block
all afternoon they watch it, just here, just like this
waiting in the body’s secret as if were a shadow

What follows are poems which connect the archival with present tense, murdered relatives and passages where “you” forces the reader to deliberate the zig-zag labyrinth of menacing scenarios one can construe as “true” because the reality constructed is so rigorously conceived. Communities of dreaded circumstance, particularly engulfed in murder and trauma (whether true or invented, certainly criminal) and rooted in de la Perriére’s Southern background are configured with scalpel-sharp historical illustrations. The desultory nature of crime and its reception is recorded in chilling absence of pathos or prolonged deliberation of the reason for acts of savagery. In “Gospel,” the narrator documents the murder of a relative and the summation delivered is powerful in its cold, clear-eyed, non-therapeutic description:

Everyone in my family is dead.
Sometimes I think our lives have amounted to one
long lesson in crisis behavior.
Everyone lost everything.
It was exactly that simple.

The lack of apparent emotional register paradoxically suffuses the reader with an abiding alarm and pity, two fundamental possessions for which this kind of poetry becomes moving. In fact, possession and dispossession of bodies, emotionally or historically, a recurrent, mobilizing a resonant cross-hatching of presence and absence which encourages meditation on transience and transfer-- how we think about bodies and think through them, how their vitality and obsolescence is not just physiological truth but an ethically-loaded criterion of how our humanity is limited and extended by the attitudes we generate about life, mortality, true justice, and true crime.

The second section of the volume, “Return to the Scene,” employs legal terms as titles and fixes attention on both crime-based anecdotes and dizzying, occasionally hilarious studies of subjectivity. The entire poem “Prima Facie” runs accordingly:

I am bored. I am dying. I am having my period. I am so sick of this shit.
Imagine these understood in their literal extreme.

What we call “heritage.” I know a lot of people who. But no one knows
except him. I am no one knows. Interesting, our forms of self definition.

In True Crime, mysteries accrue as crimes abound. Recognition of self becomes, not fact, but a process. de la Perriére suggests that true crime exists without restraint, prevails as social evil and a woeful occasion for civic amnesia. She also seems to urge that it is a true crime not to document unseemly events but, perhaps more importantly, not to focus in on how we construct our senses of self and sensibility. This volume impressively conducts a forensics of ethics in poetic form and is a glistening debut.

*****

Jon Curley teaches literature in Newark, New Jersey. His first book of poems, New Shadows, was just published by Dos Madres Press.

INTERVENING ABSENCE by CARRIE OLIVIA ADAMS

2009-12-21T19:15:00.000-08:00

VIRGINIA KONCHAN Reviews

Intervening Absence by Carrie Olivia Adams
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2009)

The Ghostly Presence of Absence

Carrie Olivia Adams’ debut collection, Intervening Absence, engages with the forces that establish—and destroy—the structures of our lives. Architectural structures are literal and metaphorical in Adams’ work (as representations of the self): Martin Heidegger also explored the poetic significance of dwelling places—and the implications of their dissolution—throughout his oeuvre. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger recalls the Old English and High German word for building, buan (“to dwell”), arguing that the role of the poet is to build a habitation for thought, in which the poet and his or her readers may dwell. The metaphor of a bridge figures in Heidegger’s thought as a connective structure between divine and human realms; in Adams’ work, bridges figure as conduits whose destruction bodes disaster.

From one of the two title poems “Intervening Absence”: “Water/ knows its way in/ through the cracks/ Floods have reached the bridge/ Now the bridge bridges nothing.” The bridge reappears in the collection’s final poem, “A History of Drowning,” as well, this time not as a monolith flanked by twin negations, but as a place of temporary refuge: “This is before you have forgotten which way is east. So, this is after you stopped on a bridge/ by a statue to admire her hands . . . If you keep walking you will find the ocean/ or a single wave/ or the cusp of a shell./ There is a room in the attic with jointed anatomic models and dressmaker torsos./ You & the parcels may stay there.”

The other guiding trope of this collection is the voyeurism inherent to beholding/being beheld. Also from “A History of Drowning”: “You had been watching your neighbors./ At first, they thought it was a coincidence/ that you were by the window every time they looked out./ But once they knew you were watching, it then seemed normal to them.” The power of the viewer, in Adams’ filmic modality, grounds Intervening Absence as a poetic of discomfiting slippages and sudden foreclosures. This mounting drama is enacted with impressive restraint: “Music/ indistinguishable from the sound/ of breakage. Perhaps it would be/ if you were listening—/ Instead, you want to watch me. Some days./ I want you to./ Watch me.”

Completed acts (of an arc of thought or full gesture), are so repeatedly interrupted in Intervening Absence as to take the place of communication. The speaker emphasizes the infinite suspension of the present moment, caught “mid-prayer,” in her poem “Vermilion” (or, alternately, from “Pockets”): “The shutter caught/ mid stutter.”

At her best when linking the crises of contemporary thought to linguistic interrogations (also from “Vermilion”: “I hated the potential of the instant./ What becomes of intention?” or, in the imperative form, “Extract and yet signify,/ become”), Adams continually surprises—and delights—her reader by perceptual shifts which thwart expectation: “The commonplace might be miraculous/ and never enough.”

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The New Republic, Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing reviewer for The Rumpus and ForeWord Magazine.

THE BRITTLE AGE AND RETURNING UPLAND by RENE CHAR

2009-12-21T19:05:00.000-08:00

JAMES STOTTS Reviews

The Brittle Age and Returning Upland by René Char, translated by Gustaf Sobin
(Counterpath Press, Denver, 2009)

Because there is a strange point at which translation itself becomes a mode of elegy (and that point is a poet’s death), it makes sense to consider Gustaf Sobin’s posthumous double-book of translations from the French of the also-late poet René Char as a special, hyper-realized form of elegy. When Char died in 1988, we didn’t immediately know exactly how—but that wasn’t so concerning; he was, after all, 81 years of age. It might be redundant, and yet appropriate, just to always call the cause of death, with a shrug, ‘heart failure.’ It seems to me that that suffices. Gustaf Sobin’s heart failed in 2005. And now, four years later, comes this slender book of Sobin’s poems and aphorisms facing their French ghosts on every page, reminding us so conspicuously of Benjamin’s mystic formulation of the text and its afterlife, the ghost manifest in the wisps and trails of various translations and perjuries and dedications and anamneses through time.

When the poet becomes the metaphor, and the body becomes language, how do we approach him and it? Mary Ann Caws, who also translated René Char and moved her family to Vaucluse to be near him, spoke of the effect of his death on her work, during a lecture she delivered in a small classroom at Boston University in 2008. She had felt, afterwards, that no longer having the poet to consult, she was confined to definite interpretations; the authority of living inspiration left her when the poet’s body was laid to rest. Her translations could no longer be collaborative, but were perforce mnemonic. And in her brief introduction to this volume she remembers in quick succession her time with Char, and with Sobin. But time in the past tense is concentrated into a single dimension, with the book being the means of reconstituting its movement.

Char was obsessed with escaping death through aphorism, the logic of poetics. This is like the man who thinks he can confess his way into heaven, except the poet is like the confessor saddled/endowed with irony, ‘un saveur perfide’:

Death’s great ally, where its midges are best concealed, is memory.

He had, up to the last, a genius for escaping; but he escaped, suffering.

The poetry itself creates tension in this charged relationship. There is so much irony and affection in lines like these, from ‘Red Hunger,’ a poem from Returning Upland—

You were so lovely no one even noticed your death.
Later, it was night; you set out alongside me.

—that it almost makes you cry, and reveals a reciprocal tenderness and propheticism from Sobin. The book is beautiful, essential.

*****

J.H. Stotts is a writer and photographer living in Boston and starting a family. His essays, poems, and translations have been published in Circumference, Hanging Loose, The Atlantic, and numerous e-zines. He's exhibited his photography and paintings in Boston, Russia, and Mexico. What he can't publish elsewhere he posts on his blog, The Fugue Aesthetics of J.H. Stotts. He finished an 'inauspicious' shotgun anthology of Russian poetry, from Fet to Esenin to Ryzhii, in formal and experimental translations and is currently at work on a selected poems of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, to come out in '09 from Whale and Star Press.

CLOSE CALLS WITH NONSENSE by STEPHEN BURT

2009-12-21T19:00:00.000-08:00

VIRGINIA KONCHAN Reviews

Close Calls with Nonsense by Stephen Burt
(Graywolf Press, 2009)

Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with Nonsense is a collection of thirty essays by Burt on contemporary poetry, including a fine introductory essay and ending with his much-discussed essay, “The Elliptical Poets,” first published in Poetry Review in 1998, and reprinted in American Letters & Commentary the following year, as well the aphoristic essay “Without Evidence,” which contains numerous, and often amusing gems, such as “Cats are lyric animals: we can never know for sure whether they need us. (Dogs, by contrast, thrive on pursuits and instructions . . . they are animals suited to narrative.)”

Burt is quite forthright about his selections and his approach to the gestalt of criticism in the preface: “I have tried to show why I like what I like, and why I like some poets and poems more than others.” A critic’s job, Burt says, is to say “what interests us, what seems trustworthy, inventive, memorable, new; to say, when appropriate, why a work fails; to show how we read, what we choose to reread, and why.” Whether one agrees with Burt’s opinions or not, this is a refreshingly sober approach to the discipline of criticism. Burt’s nuanced unpacking of texts is extraordinary, and, while meta-analytical, the work retains its integrity under his scrutiny. Some might argue with his omissions or dismissals in Close Calls, but a posturing of objectivity when many critics, including Burt, have very strong opinions (“observational bias” in social science parlance) can be even more corrosive than any rhetorical posture or setting forth of likes and dislikes.

The inseparability of subjectivity and aesthetic judgment (an ever-finer distinction), is elucidated in Burt’s reading of William Carlos Williams’ poem “To a Poor Old Woman: “They [the plums] taste good to her/ They taste good/ to her. They taste/ good to her.” As an example of how Burt’s attention to lineation (a poem’s spine) abets appreciation: “They taste good to her (you might not like them); they taste good (not merely adequate); she tastes them, taking them into her body rather than merely contemplating them.”

Randall Jarrell’s remark that poetry doesn’t need to be defended, it needs to be read, jump-starts Burt’s introductory essay Close Calls with Nonsense: How to Read and Perhaps Enjoy, Very New Poetry; likewise, if the average reader really believed cash to be analogous to poetry, as Wallace Stevens did (“Poetry is a kind of money”), the quandary of contemporary poetry’s steadily declining readership would be solved.

Burt’s selections are largely of Anglo, Irish and American poets: this book would best be read in conjunction with the anthology New European Poets, which gives space to the exciting contemporary poetry being written today in Eastern as well as Western Europe.

Giving equal space to those poets whose work is deconstructive and those whose work is more elegiac or neo-baroque, Ashbery figures here as the bridge over troubled waters. The introduction to Burt’s essay on Ashbery shows Ashbery to successfully evade any tag of gigantism foisted on him: “The great inventor of a style fluid enough to reflect our uncertain times, a helpless symbol of those times, an incomprehensible hoax, a clear-as-glass poet of loneliness and dejection, the greatest living surrealist, the last Romantic . . . readers and reviews have bestowed on John Ashbery all these labels. Meanwhile Ashbery has gone on writing his poems.”

Among the more revelatory essays (many of which began as reviews) is his essay on C.D. Wright’s collaborations with photographer Deborah Luster. All three of Wright’s book-length poems (Just Whistle: A Valentine; Deepstep Coming Shining; One Big Self) grew out of her work with Luster; this essay—“Lightsource, Aperture, Face: C.D. Wright and Photography” is as richly informative as it is humanitarian, particularly the excerpt on the collaboration of One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. “ . . . for Wright, as for Luster, the photograph need not discipline, nor need it serve bourgeois privilege. In these photographs, prisoners can imagine what it would be like to control their own bodies, to choose what face they show the world.” This haunting essay ends with a reference to Wright’s most recent collection Rising Falling Hovering and her focus on the power of the face: “The literal darkness through which the immigrants must move . . . stand for the ways in which U.S. citizens find it almost impossible to “see,” to acknowledge them, as fully human persons.”

Burt investigates the grammatical subject with just as much probity as he does the poem “itself”—and when gender politics underscores the work of a particular poet in this book, Burt’s analysis is formidable. From Burt’s reading of British poet Denise Riley’s poem “Lyric”: “This ‘it’ behaves like an ‘I,’ that is, it both seeks and escapes definition; Riley’s opening metaphors consider it both as a driven machine (like a motorboat) and as a natural creature who sings like a bird (like Keats’ nightingale). And yet not “I” but “my burden” becomes the “subject” of Riley’s sentence: “lyric” projects a speaker (or a “subject”) able to have (and “hold”) experiences without being able to substantiate (or “hold”) any firm beliefs about what or who does the experiencing.”

Quoting generously from the poet’s actual work, Burt is quick to point out when space (or his preferences on how a poet navigates subject matter) impedes further exposition: “I have also skimped on [Liz] Waldner’s large-scale imitation of source texts—of nineteenth-century botanists, of seventeenth-century essayists, of Greek geometers. I have skimped in describing Waldner’s commitment to theology as a subject, preferring her Christian symbols and allusions when they are vehicles rather than tenors.”

“It’s difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there,” said William Carlos Williams. If held to be true, this is a social, rather than academic, problem; all intelligent attempts at ameliorating this problem should properly be seen as grist for the mill. “Few kinds of writing seem so dated, so clearly wrong, as old book reviews,” Burt says in his introduction; hindsight is, after all, 20-20 (if that), but poets as well as the “average reader,” led more by instinct than erudition, eventually work in concert to decide what will be remembered by posterity.

This book is worth reading for a few singular essays alone: his essays on D.A. Powell, Paul Muldoon (early and late) and A.R. Ammons, among others, are genuine articles of critical scholarship, as exacting as they are passionate. In these essays, among others, Burt’s powers of criticism—the art of, ideally, shedding light on a subject—are bar none.

Close Calls with Nonsense should incite, rather than close down, discussions on the subject (and readership) of contemporary poetry today. Critical texts on contemporary poetry are far too rare, and the heated response to anthological attempts to create an assemblage of voices (however exclusivist), such as American Hybrid, prove only that contemporary poetry needs more, not fewer, texts such as these, without the reactionary fear that critical texts on poetry or contemporary anthologies of poetry are the final word.

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry and critical writings have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as The New Republic, The Believer, Notre Dame Review, Rain Taxi, and American Poetry Journal. She is also a contributing reviewer for ForeWord Magazine.

PUBLICATIONS WRITTEN OR EDITED by KENNETH WARREN, STEVE TILLS, STACY SZYMASZEK, ROB HALPERN, ALLI WARREN, LAWRENCE GRIFFIN & JAMES YEARY

2009-12-21T18:50:00.000-08:00

JIM MCCRARY Presents Mini-Reviews of

House Organ Summer 2009 –Number 67 edited by Kenneth Warren

Rugh Stuff by Steve Tills

Hyperglossia by Stacy Szymaszek

Some Speculations Around George Oppen’s Parousia by Rob Halpern

Well Meaning White Girl by Alli Warren

Sprung Formal Literary Magazine

Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane by Lawrence Giffin

My day walking from Mt. Tabor to the zoo and My day by James Yeary and illustrated by Nate Orton

House Organ Summer 2009 –Number 67. Edited by Kenneth Warren
(SP, 1250 Belle Ave, Lakewood, OH 44107, 2009)

Number 67! Congrats to Warren for reaching that number of issues. What could be simpler than HO. The new issue is 6 sheets of 8x11 white copy paper folded vertically and stapled which makes for 24 pages of poetry and essays which is usually what the issue contains. Put in USPS mail box with a stamp. That the beauty of it for me. Oh wait, the writing too. This time (as always) something to turn ones mind a bit…to see in print after a very long time two of the first poets I encountered in the mimeo mag world of mid 1960’s. Richard Grossinger who published a mag called IO among other writings from somewhere up in northeast woods. Always on edge of what made that time interesting in the conscious expanisism of poetics in print…and here in this House Organ…a title for the times 2013: Raising the Earth to the next Vibration (after 2012, Richard?). And further down the contributors list is Sotere Torregian…one of the great known/unknown poets of my life span first noticed by me, I think, in maybe a D. A. Levy mag or not, in mid 60’s too. Well good to see them along with Stephen Ellis, Clayton Eshlieman, Harrison Fisher, BrianRichards, Peter Lamborn Wilson, A D Winans and Dale Smith. A grouping of contemporary writers that would not come up many places. The essays by Grossinger and Smith (writing about Walter Benjamin are deeply intellectual and provoking. The poems/texts of the other contributors resonate as with few collections around today. Send Warren money.

Rugh Stuff by Steve Tills
(theenk Books, Canandaiga, NY, 2003-2009)

79 pages and for a golfer like Tills can that be just so. Well, if you wonder and you should and I did throughout this book that the puns and meanings are flying all over the course and in and out of a lot of so called ‘traps’ manmade or not. It is the unspoken rule of poetics, golf, roommates, drinking buddies, and whatever else makes up the heartless brotherhood formed by fellows who go on with this notion of textual nonsense. And then to put down the golf club and knock about on a keyboard for what comes as in:

“Look Pards! There’s more to the cup/than a half mast coiled/So Master This!/ ya cheatin bastard: 16 irons in the Erie Canal/and your Bag-old caddy/on a course of his own.”

Tills is one of the funniest poets alive today….and there are a lot of funny poets around….that is a good thing. To write the perfect mix of golf, poetry, textual swing and not once give up and walk away is a great accomplishment.

Hyperglossia by Stacy Szymaszek
(Litmus Press, POB 25526, Brooklyn, NY 11202)

I listened one nite in a basement art gallery in downtown Lawrence, Kansas, to Ms. Szymaszek read for some time. It was a great pleasure to my mind. But it wasn’t until a few weeks later that I held this book in hand and was able to see the words spoken earlier. So I was able to read and see the page before me and before I read any of the back cover blurbs. I simply read this book from front to back. There I said it. The next day I read the back cover and had no idea what some few of the words meant but that is something that doesn’t matter just now at all. No offense for sure. Here is what I found in on the pages of this book(whose title I still have not puzzled out)…ten thousand words(?) that took me up and flung me against my own brain and as I slide down the inside of my skull it was Stacy who caught me in her henna hands. She is a beautiful person, you can tell from the words and she is gonna, as the girls along the bank of the Nile (in the BC) used to say KICK SOME POETIC ASS!!! Why the Nile and why before Christ….oh just because.

Some Speculations Around George Oppen’s Parousia by Rob Halpern

This is a 4x11 inch broadside on card stock. Has an image of two spikes. Printed in gold on grey. Beautiful. I don’t even know where I got it. Maybe when I was in Seattle or Portland. There is no print info, who did it or where or why. It is worth repeating. Here is the poem:

…the casual horror of the iron
(By which he must have meant being
Penetrated bysome impenetrable thing
I mean fucked & nailed to wood a beam
Still singing of sky or stone or glass
Anything to name so that by naming
Make that thing appear to overcome
Its own idea or the labor that made it
Look unimaginable a glean so hardened
By time a speech so impure so perfectly
Coinciding with the nail my thing avoids

----yr emptiness impossible to bear.

Well Meaning White Girl by Alli Warren
(Mitzvah Chaps, 706 Illinois St, Lawrence, Ks 66044)

(Here publisher Robert Baumann, designer Anne Boyer and writer Alli Warren come together in one of the most thoughtful chapbooks seen in quite a while. The poet supplies a collection which deserves wide reading and at the same time provides text which creates multiple responses….all positive and pleasurable. This quote from early on does provide detail:

“The squad and I ski and swan
Thus a prayer is a sentence
And individuals are predicated
By the eyes and face
By our being holding them
By which I mean I met
Convulsions both moving & impressive…”

To Ms. Warren….thank you and all best for the future you create or desire.

Sprung Formal Literary Magazine
(Kansas City Art Institute, 4415 Warwick Boulevard, KC, MO 64111)

Yes and yes to both journal and institute. There are such things and places here. And one of the perks , besides getting Sammy the Pope Brownback as our next Gov of Kansas, is getting lit mags like Sprung Formal in the mail. This publication must be one of the, if not the best lit journal coming out of any ‘institute’ In these here United States…especially, now without question, these HERE Jesus states aligned geographically with Missouri. Okay, enough of that. Great magazine, even better graphics, even better writing. Oh there are a few ringers who some how got through including Mike Hauser (who I believe attending the Milwaukee County Arts in Restraint Program) and Nada Gordon (who I believe works for the Elsewhere Institute of Visual Arts, Brooklyn) but hey…so what they are both funny, brilliant, good looking and well dressed contemporary poets and deserve any print they can find. I gotta say that there are a lot of contributors to this journal and they are all good writers/vispoets/graphicpoets or whatnot. I wish I could single some out for that ‘special recognition’ we all crave…but that would be unfair to the rest. Maybe you can find some of this mag online at www.kcai.edu. Maybe not. They are a school. They probably can’t afford too much of a fancy online issue. Order by pay pal.

Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane by Lawrence Giffin
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 232 Third St, Brooklyn, NY 11215)

“There is nothing to do/For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it.” This quote appears in front of Griffin’s long title poem. It could be a quote from , oh, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs, Joe Conrad or Ed Dorn, or Shannon Compton, or John Ashbery (no, really? It is? I don’t believe it.) The author, Griffin made this shit up and I don’t have time to google Ashbery to see if he is bullshitting me. Does it matter. Fuck no. This is a cheap, 10 dollar chapbook come out of Brooklyn. It’s a long poem by some guy I never heard of. And, you know, it is a good poem. Can I say that without getting bashed? Well long poems are not so common around here and having one handed to you is a treat. This is. Griffin seems to consider a greater culture from which his text comes and that is welcome. Oh it has left margins and quotes and punctuation and names and hidden signals to young people and could probably be re-mixed and become really important…but why bother. I read it through and say now that it is worth finding. And what is more important for me, him, the publisher, all of us is that I will now seek out more from Lawrence Griffin. Hopefully it does exist.

My day walking from Mt. Tabor to the zoo and My day by James Yeary and illustrated by Nate Orton
(both from abandoned bike press in Portland, Or.)

(No more info on chapbooks, look online). Call what these guys that put up in print what they did…day book, journal, notes, scraps, drawings, thoughts, quotes, rants or simply fiction (maybe some of it?). It matters because they took the time to collect these couple of days and make them available to the rest of us. Maybe if more so called poets did some of this it would matter, I don’t know, maybe. Orton’s drawings are priceless, could be on the wall of the fucking Sistine chapel or a dumpster or a mad classroom chalkboard. That good and nail what the street is. Yeary does more than just ‘put it up’. “Trying to decide if a corner’s important…” is a single line and somewhat typical of both chapbook contents. You could do worse to write that line. It carries a lot. These two should do more, maybe they do. Who knows? We’ll see.

*****

One can find Jim McCrary occasionally at wwwresistingpoetry.blogspot.com

HAVE A GOOD ONE by ANSELM BERRIGAN

2009-12-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

VIRGINIA KONCHAN Reviews

Have a Good One by Anselm Berrigan
(Cy Press, 2008. Available directly from publisher)

Anselm Berrigan’s voice continues be one of the most refreshing in contemporary American poetry, for its singular welding of candor, political awareness, and humor that attempts, with a very high rate of success, to co-opt the commercial and political jargon of our times to return it to higher purposes (which here include but are not limited to free speech, dead-on paeans to and condemnations of contemporary life, and love).

Berrigan’s fifth chapbook (his fourth full-length collection Free Cell was published in September by City Lights, and pairs the work of Have a Good One with a second experimental suite, “To Hell with Sleep,” as connected by the central poem “Let Us Sample Protection Together”) is interspersed throughout by the oft-repeated refrain of “Have a Good One,” a catch-all phrase issued by shopkeeps and drinking buddies across the world. “Have a Good One,” in this context, accrues connotations that are slightly sinister, in a book rife with political disillusionment and the dialectic of resistance and surrender to forces that are not always as benign as they seem. Social and philosophic discourse amount to a danse macabre: “My mission tonight is/ to/ not get so drunk I can’t/ properly/ emcee. It’s surprisingly easy/ because I’m thinking about experience.”

The speaker’s unwillingness to play for an enemy team that represents such feel good principals as mutually assured destruction form the thematic standoff of Have a Good One, and the language Berrigan uses to address classical problems is wildly fun: (“the just purely/ not believable/ destruction of Troy”), (“Remember lava flowing/ freely all around us/ stains with warmth?/ I’ve had a great life./ But I ain’t going/ out like that.”).

The problem of free will, here, “is not that it does or does not/ exist, but that it’s pointless,” and the question of culpability, in Have a Good One, is complicated by complicity: “I let people let me/ hurt their feelings” and confusion over who armed who with what weapon abounds: “We’re still here/ and I’m handing you this gun/ you’re already holding.” Inordinately sensitive to the “consequences of refusal,” ecstasy here rides the coattails of resistance (or vice versa), and capitulation and loss of possibility form other odd bedfellows: “resolve is useful while/ surrendering potential.”

Several poem-stanzas in this collection stand alone as individual units of deep pathos (“So what/ that you’re/ independent./ Everyone here/ is independent./ That’s why we/ can be nukers. Call me down/ but don’t play/ it like you’re/ so free/ it doesn’t matter/ how thoroughly/ you’ve humiliated me”) and verse is here proven the ally of colloquial necessity: “Off the record/ he’s a piece of shit./ Time management/ I don’t buy./ Just tell me/ what’s happened./ Whatever it’s/ going to be/ is what/ I need/ to know.”

Have a Good One ends with an assertion of what the speaker can claim, despite the world’s opacity, to know (“What I know is/ the birds sing back”), and his answer to the Y/N question posed by the questioner of our inmost selves (with subjectivity figuring as the ultimate capital that a consumerist society threatens to destroy): “Let me/ swim in/ the grease/ I love . . . Have a Good One . . . Yes”

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The New Republic, Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing reviewer for The Rumpus and ForeWord Magazine.

THE METHOD by SASHA STEENSEN

2009-12-21T18:25:00.000-08:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

The Method by Sasha Steensen
(Fence Books, 2008)

According to the cover of the book, “The Method is a manuscript of theorems and proofs written and diagrammed by the mathematician Archimedes in Syracuse around 250 bc. The Method is a book of poems by Sasha Steensen. The former is a text that has survived, at least in parts, through a series of processes that includes palimpsesting, thievery, obscurantism, acquisition, and conservation. The latter text takes the former and its history, which has been invisible, overwritten, and requisitioned for use value, as a jumping-off place for …”

just what, exactly?

In these poems, The Method (whose?) is The Archimedes Palimpsest, physical object, text, human … Frankenstein’s monster … a foetus …

pastpresentfuture …

*

For me, “The Future of an Illusion” is the central poem of this book. Maybe because, among other things, it begins “Perhaps I could use my own words just this once, and make Method mouth what I desire.” It does and doesn’t happen, to speak, instead of to be spoken … what speaks her? What speaks when The Method speaks?

*

This isn’t a trick.

*

My brain breaks and puts me in mind of Jack Spicer, and his relationship, say, to Garcia Lorca, or Billy the Kid. Or, say, the relationship of the unconscious to the contents of a dream …

The unconscious, we recall, is structured like a language …

Like whose? The Martians?

All I know is that when, later in the poem I’ve quoted above, Steensen writes, “Everyone insists that I will write about pregnancy, but I won’t”, my brain breaks again and I think: this book, these poems, are something like dream work. I mean, one of the first pages reads:

She dug the box
out of the closet.
She stuffed the baby’s clothes
with rags
until a body
like a scarecrow’s
filled the clothes.
She placed the body
in the bed
beside her.

But who knows who speaks through any of our poems?

*

Some of the poems are retellings of the history of the Palimpsest, e.g., “Tischendorf Takes a Leaf”, and perhaps “The Nightly Visitant” (a security guard with a flashlight?). But only more or less. In the first The Method speaks, in the second someone takes The Method’s teddy bear. As Steensen notes in “The Stranger at the Gates”,

I told you
I’d tell your story
if you’d just let me tell it.

…

I resent you
whom I serve.
I said I would say
what you want
but say it my way.
I am a television.

Wait. A television doesn’t say what it wants. Wait. Which brings me back to a line a few lines earlier:

I hate a metaphor.

I believe her. Metaphors seem pulled from her like … well … three lines after this one I read:

I heard her heartbeat fifteen times
before she was born.

*

I don’t know why I seem to keep coming back to some kind of no not equation between The Method and the foetus but uh some kind of similarity between them …

*

In spite of all the temptations (and I think Steensen offers those temptations knowingly, only to frustrate them), I think I’ll stop trying to “figure it all out”. Perhaps this is a palimpsest no current technologies available to me can untangle. I don’t think I can perform an archaeology, in the sense of assigning each poem, or part of poem, its coordinates and levels. There are religious concerns, and historical concerns, and autobiographical concerns, and theoretical concerns, ecological concerns, tho I’m not sure concerns is the word … it’s funny, because this isn’t an impossible book …

I mean, …

I mean, poem by poem, I get it …

*

and … and … again, well, tho this is a book concerning pretty much everything, I come back to the question, what is speaking here?

Poetry. That without which people die daily. As they say. In a way it’s true. The evidence is on every page. I only wish I could articulate it. But since Steensen has, or, better, since that which speaks thru her has, I don’t have to. What kind of review is this? It’s one that’s tangled in the palimpsest. It’s one that simply says, there’s only one thing for it. Though it’s not The Method speaking here

here’s a hint from a poem near the end of the book, called “Palestine”:

It’s hard to hate a people,
Method chants,

Saba, Savva,
old man,
fiih,

when you’ve read
their poetry.

To quote: “Give [yourself] over to the downdraft. … proceed as a companion …” … to paraphrase and dance with it.

and then what

happens
is precious
and strange and

you’re
in it,
…

If
you want
to know what

it
feels like

… Blink
Blink Blink and

you
are structured
like

muttering
what strange
99 most beautiful

names
lack of
lack leaving a

trace
= to
1063 poppy seeds.

[they fill up a universe]

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is the author of a number of chapbooks, most recently World Zero and A Spectrum of Other Instances. He is also the author of the full-length No Sounds of My Own Making, and the editor of 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’. His work has appeared in numerous journals and in several anthologies. His current project is Flux, Clot & Froth, which will probably top out at 700+ pages, and for which he hopes to find one reader, please. He is part of the team (title: editor or something) at Leafe Press. His ongoing efforts can be seen at Zeitgeist Spam.

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS

2009-12-20T21:30:00.000-08:00

By Virginia Konchan

Virginia's poems are from a manuscript-in-progress entitled The Falcon and the Nightingale are One:

Lady of the Flowers

You resurrect the dream of sleep, the dream of deep,
abiding regard based on mutual compatibility.
You write cribbed notes in lowercase. Your life
is a study in unwarranted familiarity.

You wish to return to stream-of-consciousness
relations without the eventual bankruptcy
of the surrealist project. Intestines are connected
to other intestines, and the head to the body:

to believe this is to defy Plato. You do it anyway.
You maintain interior convictions in the face
of overwhelming evidence to the contrary:
enter exhibits A, B and Z. This is the essence

of faith, as well as the symptomatology of schizophrenia.
A body without organs is not a body. A mind without
orientation is time. Willing to die for a cause: that’s
noble, but only if you die. If you live, you will suffer,

or, in certain circles, evolve. Genet wrote a text in prison
about the lunatic Parisian fringe: Our Lady of the Flowers.
Someone loved Divine’s pilgrim soul; someone else
wanted him dead. Lady Luck, ayez pitié de nous.

+++++

Rosary for the Dead

No, I do not think anything I say will bring you back faster.
No, I do not expect the poem to serve me. No, the sun
is no prettier going down than it is coming up. I want
the dead to leave me alone. Tell our ancestors to stop
speaking to me from within those crinkled oil-stained
portraits in the hall. Yes, you were my first love, but
what are you good for? I take the laundry off the line
myself: canning season has come and gone. Once,
among the arbors, I thought I heard you say, like a tin
drum in my ear, that way. You deceived me. The dead
have always deceived me. You were my brother with
the Easter colored hair! How sadly our story ended:
you begging listen. Luke, for the last time: why
do you ask for what you are unable to receive?

+++++

Of Thee I Sing

Take your musicality. I knew nothing of your musicality.
Take your mutilation, which came before your mutilation
of yourself. You were dragged to the underworld, Dantean,

Miltonesque, to remember who I really was—brutish,
degenerate. How you did not flinch. How you were,
in all your ways, from waking to sleeping, like a man.

Trapeze artist, Crazy Jane: did you even exist outside
of my metaphoric definition of you? A separate identity—
treason. I called you killer. If you lay down with Father,

I did not want to know. How your body was found face
down in the snow, or in the lake, face up, glowering,
a wasted corpse. White Goddess. Queen Bee.

You were born to serve, to die a sparrow’s death.
Take your place, mother, in the martyr’s order
of things. Do not ask me to remember your name.

+++++

Day at the Zoo

What is that
thing over there
without guile.

+++++

Slalom

This is the chariot of the will.
Your dogs do not thirst.
They want for nothing.

The snow is iron, confiscated and refigured.
You, master, drive through it, impervious.
Your dogs cease even to see abstractions.

Your dogs are never restless,
having become a part of you,
now, like an underwater serpent

with thousands of legs.
No one applauds anymore,
they simply move aside.

This is the chariot of your will,
transfixed dance to end all dancing.
And mother, morose, on the sidelines:

This is my son?
This is my son?

+++++

Amen, Rinse, Repeat

No more sudden blights.
The Almanac’s reading
true. The weatherman,

unemployable, quavered
in his seat. I’m trying
to find the right word,

he said. To explain how
it feels. To catch fish without
moving. The falcon stalked

past the falconer, honorific
talons retracted. The broker
stared at the voided stock,

numeric code unwound. This is
Mother Nature, said the farmer,
in whom I’m more than pleased.

+++++

Slow Song

Those who say the Lord only wept twice
clearly did not know the Lord: he cried
every goddamn day. Mornings, picking
his heart up off the floor and pasting it back

on his body, cheerful again, a dutiful son.
The children were cruel, dumping sand
on his head. Part of him—chipped bone
splinter—understood, but mostly

he did not understand. He learned to fear
eye contact at an early age, after seeing
one eye after another flee from his
like crows from a strong wind.

Is the Lord an amorous Lord? Watch him
exchange idiocies with a scented girl, then
sway, ill-at-ease. The Lord is inscrutable, like a
laminated map of Egypt, or a hologram of disease.

+++++

On Dissonance

1.
Jabés, on the sea: “If the sea had no ears to hear the sea,
it would be a gray sea of death. It would be a mined sea
whose explosions would threaten the world in its elephant memory.”

2.
Historian Édouard Ganche: “Chopin’s skin was very white, his cheeks
sunken. Even his ears showed a form particular to consumptives.” Teacher
Józef Elsner: “I was reluctant to constrain Chopin with narrow, academic
rules, so as to allow the young artist to mature according to his nature.”

3.
George Sand’s nickname for Chopin, while alive: Beloved Little Corpse.

4.
1831: Chopin learns, while traveling, that the November Uprising
against Russia had been crushed, and pours blasphemies into a journal
that he kept secret to the end of his life. Biographer: “These torrential
outcries found musical expression in Revolutionary Étude in C Minor.”

5.
Like Kafka, Chopin proposed marriage, but never wed. Maria Wodziński,
dismissed from his life with quiet ceremony: after placing her collected
letters in an envelope, he wrote across the seal My Sorrow.

6.
1849: Chopin’s Paris funeral, delayed for weeks. Mozart’s Requiem,
the score he desired to accompany the service, required female
singers, then banned from The Church of the Madeleine.
Compromise between Church and death-wish: the female
singers could sing, but from behind a velvet curtain.

7.
Major Innovations: sonata, nocturne, waltz, prelude.
Invention: ballade. Poet, be seated at the piano.
Strike the black, otherworldly chord.

+++++

My American Dream

The rose was kind of beautiful, nonetheless,
in the garden, beside the plaster saint,
in the moment when matter was at last
revealed. No romance, warned the man.

Later, and if so only maybe, and if then, not here,
but there. The sympathy card arrived on schedule;
ditto for anniversary, get well soon, and congratulations
for this that and the other thing. The fear of becoming

redundancy’s slave is implicit. My birthday falls
on the second of May. Was it ever beautiful?
The white Thunderbird convertible in the driveway,
wind in my mane, heart in mouth, harm, no harm,

done with hard wind, hardly won war, oh, beauty.
Oh Mother, first death. Then a little rattle.
Then a quick fumble. Romance, said the man.
Then some fussing behind his back. The body.

A name. This car is not a lemon. This car
is green. This car sees me: I see this car.
Quiet carnality, I love this gift of lid, no lid,
idle genius, singing beyond the idea of sea.

*****

Virginia Konchan's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Believer, The New Republic, Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a contributing reviewer for The Rumpus and ForeWord Magazine.