GALATEA RESURRECTS, #3 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 3

August 24, 2006

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

CONTENTS:

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
From Eileen Tabios


NEW REVIEWS
David Goldstein reviews SYMBIOSIS by Barbara Guest and Laurie Reid

Brandon Downing reviews CAN ARBOREAL KNOTWORK HELP BLACKBURN OUT OF FREGE'S ABYSS? by Boyd Spahr

Crag Hill reviews EYE AGAINST EYE by Forrest Gander

Abigail Licad reviews HERE, BULLET by Brian Turner

David Baptiste-Chirot reviews LYRIC POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ by Kent Johnson

Anna Eyre reviews CORNSTARCH FIGURINE by Elizabeth Treadwell

Eileen Tabios reviews INSECT COUNTRY (A) by Sawako Nakayasu

Allen Bramhall reviews BOXD TRANSISTOR by Jon Leon

Allen Bramhall reviews NOT EVEN DOGS by Ernesto Priego

Craig Perez reviews PACIFIC POSTMODERN by Rob Wilson

Mary Jo Malo reviews SING ME ONE SONG OF EVOLUTION by Vernon Frazer

Phil Primeau reviews PIECES OF THE SKY by Greg Fuchs

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews EROSION'S PULL by Maureen Owen

J. Csida reviews EROSION'S PULL by Maureen Owen

Andrew McCarron reviews WHERE X MARKS THE SPOT by Bill Zavatsky

Eileen Tabios reviews SLIP by Chris Stackhouse

Ivy Alvarez reviews chaps: LEARNING THE LANGUAGE by Kate Greenstreet; GROUNDED by George Held; AMERICAN MASTER by Raymond L. Bianchi; SCENES FROM THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT by Micah Ballard; 9th & OCEAN by Kevin Opsteda; and LAST WE SPOKE by Sunnlyn Thibodeaux

Susana Gardner reviews 20/20 YIELDING by Sunnlyn Thibodeaux

Allen Bramhall reviews OPENING AND CLOSING NUMBERS by Anny Ballardini

Carlos Hiraldo reviews WATERMARK by Jacquelyn Pope

Janet Hamill reviews FEMME DU MONDE by Patricia Spears Jones

Ernesto Priego reviews THE ACHING VICINITIES by Jean Vengua

Allen Bramhall reviews FILM POEMS by Mark Lamoreaux

Ann E. Michaels reviews TEN DEGREES ABOVE ZERO by Elizabeth Raby and MORNING ON CANAL STREET by Paul Martin

Craig Perez reviews UNRAVELLING WORDS & THE WEAVING OF WATER by Cecilia Vicuna, Trans. by Eliot Winberger and Suzanne Jill Levine

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright reviews ING GRISH by John Yau and Thomas Nozkowski

Eileen Tabios reviews IN THE WEAVER’S VALLEY by William Allegrezza

Melissa Weinstein reviews AFTER THE SINEWS by Patrick Dunagan

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews THE POET SLAVE OF CUBA (A BIOGRAPHY OF JUAN FRANCISCO MANZANO) by Margarita Engle

Julie R. Enszer reviews THE COUNTESS OF FLATBROKE by Mary Meriam

Jon Leon reviews chaps: GUITAR SMASH by Brian Howe; LYRIC POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ by Kent Johnson; and THRENODY by Tom Clark

Julie R. Enszer reviews BEGGARS AT THE WALL by Rochelle Ratner

Cynthia Arrieu-King reviews SECRET ASIAN MAN by Nick Carbo

Thomas Fink reviews I LOVE ARTISTS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Reme Grefalda reviews PUTI/WHITE by Patria Rivera

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews RUMMY PARK by Rebecca Lu Kiernan

Allen Bramhall reviews A NATURAL HISTORY OF SUCHNESS by Stephen Ellis

Laurel Johnson reviews OFFICIAL VERSIONS by Mark Pawlak

William Allegrezza reviews KLANG by Andrew Lundwall

Laura Stamps reviews ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME by Lyn Lifshin

Corinne Robins reviews A PANIC THAT CAN STILL COME UPON ME by Peter Gizzi


FEATURED POET:
Eileen Tabios presents David Baptiste-Chirot


FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS:
Sandy McIntosh offers a memoir with reviews of LIVING IS WHAT I WANTED by David Ignatow as well as SELECTED SHORTER POEMS and THE TABLETS, both by Armand Schwerner

Mark Lamoreaux reviews STEAM by Sandra Simonds

Allen Gaborro reviews NOLI ME TANGERE by Jose Rizal

Timothy Yu reviews ANTHROPY by Ray Hsu

Dana Teen Lomax reviews A READING SPICER AND 18 SONNET by Beverly Dahlen

Steve Potter reviews OXBOW KAZOO by John Olson

Allen Gaborro reviews the 8TH WONDER poetry performance troupe


FEATURE ARTICLE:
Sandy McIntosh "reviews" OTIOSE WARTS by Argol Karvarkian


BACK COVER:
An example of the Underlying Sensibility to Galatea Resurrects

posted by EILEEN @ 11:55 PM 1 comments

FROM THE EDITOR

ENGAGING CONVERSATIONS

A reviewer had to bail at the last minute on sending over a couple of reviews. Why? Because, he said, in looking over the review copies I'd sent him, he ended up questioning much of his assumptions about poetry, and had to deal with such first. I'll belabor the obvious: such a result is as significant as writing a review -- I was happy to hear how reading poems so affected him. Poetry should (if it must do anything) affect...

Looking over this issue's Table of Contents makes me wanna croon some statistics atcha! This is the third issue of Galatea Resurrects and here are numbers (on top of other features and e-reprints):

Issue 1: new reviews of 27 publications & other poetry projects

Issue 2: new reviews of 38 publications & other poetry projects (one of which was reviewed twice by different reviewers)

Issue 3: new reviews of 48 publications & other poetry projects (of which two are reviewed more than once by different reviewers)

As someone who had launched this project with prayers to get a minimum of five reviews an issue, I'm amazed. But, of course, pleased. Thanks to ye volunteer-writers for spreading the word about the Word to the world.

The deadline for sending reviews for the fourth issue will be November 5, 2006. Review information, including available review copies, are here. Note that the list of available review copies can change daily, depending on what the mail brings.

Here are more stats: Of new reviews, this number of reviewed publications were derived from review copies sent to Galatea Resurrects:

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviewees
Issue 2: 25 out of 38 new reviewees
Issue 3: 27 out of 48 new reviewees

Obviously, people are checking Galatea Resurrects' review copy list. Authors and publishers should note those stats. And in response to some expressed concerns out there that review copies just arrive here to form unread stacks, please note that every review copy you send will be read by me (not to say it will be reviewed by me, but your lovely poetry publication won't just arrive at Galatea's mountain to be eaten by its little insect critters as it lies ignored in some corner).

I am pleased to present multiple (re)views of the same project--as is the case, this issue, for two publications--if that project affects more than one writer who feels compelled to write about it. Note that most of the books reviewed are chosen by the reviewers themselves--not proscribed by me.

A housekeeping detail: this being a blog, posts can be edited for errors so please feel free to let me know. Feel free to use the Comments sections to add ordering or other relevant information, too. This being a one-person operation, I might get sketchy on some details.

Another housekeeping detail -- I would have thought this point obvious but based on something that occurred behind-the-scenes regarding one of the reviews in Issue 2 (and perhaps as something that may be relevant for this and future issues, too), I hereby note: ALL OPINIONS EXPRESSED HEREIN ARE THEIR AUTHOR'S, NOT NECESSARILY THE EDITOR'S. I may agree or disagree with various assessments but please don't assume that my publishing of a review means I agree with the opinions therein. This project, after all, ain't just about my opinions -- I just want to do my bit in encouraging engagements with poetry, such as through this forum.

(Hmmm. That second "housekeeping detail" (I am a lousy housekeeper and so it's fitting Moi digresses) reminds me of a criticism lobbed at this project when Issue 1 came out -- that I, as editor, apparently don't have some editorial standard because I don't seem to discriminate among poetic styles. (Style? Yawn...) Anyway, ye critic, ye presume too much. Maybe I don't want to keep preaching to the converted...so that, maybe, I find it advantageous to present a forum where, say, the reader of Brian Turner might discover the poems of, say, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge AND vice versa. Consider the implications of that possibility, why dontcha? Anyway, end of boring digression. Moving on...)

Last but not least, this issue was put together during the Dog Days of Summer here in St. Helena. Yes, that is a gratuitous note to post this photo of my babies: Achilles (left) and Gabriela (right):



With much love, fur and poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
August 24, 2006

posted by EILEEN @ 11:52 PM 1 comments

CAN ARBOREAL KNOTWORK HELP BLACKBURN OUT OF FREGE'S ABYSS? by BOYD SPAHR

BRANDON DOWNING Reviews

CAN ARBOREAL KNOTWORK HELP BLACKBURN OUT OF FREGE'S ABYSS? by Boyd Spahr
(Dusi/e chap, 2006; Available gratis at http://dusie.org/)

Prose Poetry is suffering a bit these days. Is it the perceived ease of its composition? The formal latitude that it allows its practitioners is notoriously intoxicating. And not merely by its spacial availabilities, or the multitude of ways that incongruent participles and fragmentary structures can be stitched together into that almost preverbal construct--the prose block--to create "new" meanings, "transgressive" narrative structures, or "post gender" arcs of telling...

And I too, am one of them. I was seduced by prose poems, back in the day. It hurts so bad to say it. But writing prose poetry set off all these thunderstorms of insight. I could collapse narrative space! I could wreak havoc as dialogue and idea and process and story structure all fought it out on the same flat, muddy field. No more grammatical heirarchy! It pissed of my MFA workshop teachers alot, and made the pantoumists fume.

But it really just seems too easy sometimes, this prose poetry, doesn't it? These shifts of tone, the start-stop rhythm of sight and summary, the harrowing-ness of it all. Prose poetry often suffers because it is perceived as 'undeserved'. Many poets I know don't like reading it, either. It can be a physically constricting form: the smoothing-over qualities that prose forms produce don't always sit well with us. We want our full-stops and deep breaths to be earned, to be intrinsically within the lines, and not dictated to us by those fools from the University of Chicago.

Sometimes, flipping through the journals--and their frequently copious helpings of 'paragraphic' work--I get a sick and smarmy thought running through me. That most, if not all, the prose poetry that I read is not written, but generated. That an engine exists, downloadable perhaps, that can take a few pertinent details--dramatic weather, inner turmoil, shock dialogue, some operatic ellipses--and, with a smear of personality, any personality, can spit out 60 lines in the manner of William S. Burroughs' "The Western Lands", fragmentary, radical, full of mock gravity, and eerily punctuated.

Well, I'm late to the party obviously, because the form is changing. Prose forms, and I was kidding when I slammed them a minute ago, remain ripe for foraging, pillaging, and all spectra of experimentation. New book artists are ripping apart old standards of printing, presentation, and assumption; traditional letter-systems lie lifelessly along the map of a new, graphic poetics. And even 'traditional' prose poetry has been the beneficiary of some recent experimental examples, which, for my taste, are almost more remarkable when they fail (if only because the template for a 'successful' prose poetry remains so easily within the grasp).

One of these strong failures that has recently come to my attention is the (pseudonymous) Boyd Spahr's recent Dusie chapbook, CAN ARBOREAL KNOTWORK HELP BLACKBURN OUT OF FREGE'S ABYSS? Don't even ask me about that title, by the way–but I think that this is a direction in prose poetry that I can truly handle. The Spahr persona (full disclosure: I am not Boyd Spahr) has previously been involved more as impresario than author (he/she produced the politically flavored ORDER & DECORUM site that so willfully impaled the US House of Representatives with verse commissions last year) but, it seems, has all along been formulating some ideas about how all this is supposed to come together:

A combination backbone, crew soul, all waterlogged,
and it screws up your view, reason you put your foot down;
play ball or play whatever, and she was sort of into
about his being my place in heaven for systems.
They had clean thoughts, as a serpent and as harm,
enough to fondle changes, a car was running away,
and all kinds of aspirin. Make a great many cute offers.

Okay, so it carries many prose poetry tics: voice shifts, pronoun shifts, gratuitous cut-ups. But the poem's images are clipped before they can be fully struck, or are so stranded from their linking participles as to be floating. Yet much of the sentence structure's still pretty compelling, especially at the heart of the piece ("and she was sort of into about his being my place for systems"). And, far from using the dislocation of shifting pronouns to make me plainly not care, the 'she to me to his to they' seems more calculated here, more scientific, more of a digested tree of relationships. Symmetrically fractal? Oh, perhaps. The unbalance seems positive, though, and while some of the volition can seem pat ("They had clean thoughts, as a serpent and as harm") and the struggles for voice are overdetermined at times (why 'all kinds' of aspirin?) the tone- and tense-shifts act to expand, rather than dull, the forward movement.

Here's another one:

Hypnotizing Buck to take out of bankruptcy. And the
carrying a torch, and yo! we hauled down rugs and
sported with delight. And he takes the lid off the
capability in those days, to that sick white man,
gimmick on a camera or a treatment to such and such.

Now, the soft-focus failings of its last line notwithstanding, this is a work with some velocity, and a narrative foreground that leans more towards tantalizing and away from obfuscating. And while a little less all-over-ness might benefit the poetry here, I think it could also be detrimental to its science. And I think it might be the science of this work that attracts me to it:

Their children being you, Sparks. But too man
fuck this jealousy. She was to him? Or how can he be
anybody if he were so? I figure out some way to
have the crew take him about what he's done.
And they made a Siberian know in Arabic, they call it
it was different, APPLE to move out of the hotel.
Most of it was inspirin' Jew. Right away she, she––
that is no very astute about that. No drugs, nothin'.
And didn't have any prob. But almost every device
and did have, and having go all efficient stenograph.

This gets me curious about the compositional methods, while reinforcing this concept of a 'scientific' approach. Yes, with the thicker occurrences of dialogism, this work also has an 'antenna' modality--akin to faulty transcriptions of taped/received conversations--that reminds me of previous attempts at prose poetry as transmission, one successful model being Noah Eli Gordon's THE FREQUENCIES. But I think this work also succeeds because it may be less molded than it seems (the first poem in this collection ends with "...in the sun make acres of me which is studded with antenna elements"). Musicians, and I'm a terrible one, often talk about the relevance of shifting 'time signatures' within modes as diverse as bebop and ambient post-rock: CAN ARBOREAL KNOTWORK HELP BLACKBURN OUT OF FREGE'S ABYSS? feels, in the character of its 'time signatures', like a succesful EP of "math rock", a style whose radical shifts in tempo and pitch are less motivated by theme/harmony/volume than by a more arbitrary notion of 'switching it up before it gets good'. As poetry, it can be frustratingly, thrillingly atonal.

This atonality often appears in these poems like too many tiny bones in a tasty fish, and, as a whole, I did not, and you probably will not, leave off your reading of this work a changed person. But the charged spaces hit within feel frequently new. There is more of an urge toward spoken dialogue in its full theatricality, but divorced from setting; an earnest 'fuck it' air to the experimental combinations ("...only partially through the Mormon webs / and the theory of its Kelly style", "a respect sociologist", "he for the alkaline batter", "Juan sees apples and golden horses", "& man can he laugh cute, / infrared man". &etc.) and reverence for the the disarray of results. Let's just say that I like the fuck-ups, too.

I'm becoming re-convinced, in short, that the prose poem--that tiresome and unwieldy, dang thing--is on its way forward again. While these poems haven't reached the destination yet--alot of the themes wielded, names dropped, hesitancies noted, and actions undergone will need to circle back and be incorporated into each other with much greater weapons before a real SYSTEM can be attained--I think, written pseudonymously, and available as a free download no less, that these works might be part of what's pointing the way out of the mud.

*****

Brandon Downing is a filmmaker, visual artist, and writer, originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2000, he has lived in New York City. His books of poetry include LAZIO (Blue Books, 2000), THE SHIRT WEAPON (Germ, 2002), and DARK BRANDON (Faux, 2005). Some of his photographic work can be seen at www.brandondowning.org. A new DVD Collection, DARK BRANDON // THE FILMI, is forthcoming in late 2006. He is currently finishing a monograph of his literary collages under the title LAKE ANTIQUITY.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:50 PM 0 comments

SYMBIOSIS by BARBARA GUEST & LAURIE REID

DAVID B. GOLDSTEIN Reviews

Symbiosis by Barbara Guest (poet) and Laurie Reid (artist)
(Kelsey St Press, Berkeley, 2000)

In her essay “The Shadow of Surrealism,” Barbara Guest writes:

I confess that often when looking at art I do not ask what it means, or how was the paint applied, the color chosen, but what has led the artist into this particular situation, what permits this particular piece of work, and how it is solved. (Forces of Imagination, Kelsey St, 2003, p. 53)

I love many things about this passage and will work my way into a few of them, starting with the disappearance of the word “problem” from the construction “how it is solved.” For Guest, at issue in writing is not the solving of problems but the solving of situations and permissions. The writer locates herself somewhere out in the open, perhaps frighteningly so, and then begins to solve that openness. Robert Duncan also speaks of this vulnerability when he calls the point of poetic origin “the place of first permission.”

Guest’s genius as a poet is her ability to solve openness without resorting to closure. Both on the page and in the mind, her poems remain airy, stretched, full of spaces, while still offering the reader densely layered structures. It is like observing the movements of a spider suspended on her barely visible web or watching a snake in the grass: what appears as emptiness or wandering reveals itself to be focused, crucial. Like snakes, Guest’s poems move in order to stay alive.

The particular permission of Symbiosis is collaboration: between poet and artist, word and image, language and print, imagination and stillness. The book opens with an italicized fragment, as if a dedication: “A writer and an artist working together establish a Symbiosis, as in Nature, where dissimilar organisms productively live together.” Productivity in dissimilarity is the hallmark of this collaborative venture. Guest, who as a young poet was heavily influenced by abstract painting, has always asked what art can teach her about poetry. Here she learns from Laurie Reid, an accomplished artist whose work shares the spidery-snaky quality of Guest’s prose (Reid’s work also appears in Guest’s book of essays, Forces of Imagination). Reid’s activity in the book consists of long, draped lines that look like washed-out watercolor or Chinese calligraphic ink, an ambiguity that becomes one incarnation of the border between painting and writing. The lines divide the page into ghostlier demarcations, keener spaces. Guest’s text perches delicately upon Reid’s weaving shapes, noticing and conversing with them. The text is exquisitely letterpressed in soil-brown ink (the book’s other essential collaborators are the printer, Peter Koch Printers, and the designer, Robert Rosenwasser), giving the book an auratic, artifactual quality that belies its price.

To discuss the book as the sum only of its words, rather than as the interaction of figures in a space, would do the book a disservice. On every page, the words and images act in concert, changing our understanding of each. (In the passage quoted above, for example, an ink splotch occurs over the phrase “as in Nature,” preparing the reader for the book’s interest in organic shapes and colors, elemental structures). The book unfolds in beautiful difficulty, with Guest’s lines darting and pulling against themselves while Reid’s lines weave a layered understory. Here’s a scan of the first page of the poem:



The poem tosses questions at us. What is this “wool fable”? Is “hiss” an admonition to the reader? If so, why should we hiss? How does wool turn? What are we to do with the sudden tense and voice shift from the imperative to the active past of “envied”? Working what in layers? Meanwhile the art both explicates and directs us toward the negative space of experiencing without interpreting. “Wool” connects with Reid’s lines both in color and shape (in the sense that these lines weave the page); Reid’s lines too “work in layers,” envying the circle by gesturing toward circles but never completing them; her lines both hold volume and negate it, fading away on the lower left while thickening on the top and lower right. The ink splotch on “fable” emphasizes the space between Guest’s lines, which become both “close and away” by virtue of our newfound attention to the space that separates them.

As the work unfolds, a meditation emerges regarding the nature of collaboration or symbiosis. Like most of Guest’s work, the book enacts its own subject matter: it “is” what it is “about.” Using the unit of the incomplete arc—phrases, questions, quotations, lines that extend past the page—the poet and artist feel their way into a grammar of collaboration. “Is symbiosis aflame”? “Will it belong”? There is fear in these questions, yet the book finds its steady assertions too: “each day autumn. Day wakens, no break in the/ thread.” On a page marked by two painted asymptotes that almost but do not quite touch, Guest writes, “This is the point where the strophes meet,// one line interweaves with another,” although precisely the opposite is happening on the page. Her assertions offer themselves to us more as figures than as certainties. They are true in some sense but lightly so; they are true elsewhere, just beyond the page we currently inhabit.

The reader looking for answers in Symbiosis will get none, exactly. The book does not build to a series of propositions, but rather keeps shifting sidewise, coming at the issue of collaboration from various perspectives: structural (“Positioning the strophes/ ended in calm”), analogical (“Knitting or singing a song”), metaphorical (“Remarkable basins,/ you give me ten years”), natural (“the blue// magnolia nestled; the wild berry, also”), etc. Alongside these explorations, the poem in its second half enters a more defined narrative space. A character emerges, a “she” who both seems to personify symbiosis and can move through it, evaluate it. “She is not so silly/ as they thought in her mantle,// coming from outside,” we are told. The outsideness of this figure allows for greater flexibility: “She is more fluid,” “She can read the image in the overlapping/ even from outside,/ those parts that overlap.” Through this female realization of movement and observation, the poem takes on a body, or rather explores the way language and image already partake of bodies, how they are outside of the body yet a part of it. This originary symbiosis—of the body that creates and the art object that is created—is where the music of poem, in a moment of gentle surprise, comes to rest: “Pushed her leg through the rippling// image changes.” The figure enters, at least for a moment, the creative act itself. Writing changes the image (“the rippling image changes” when writing moves into it) and the image changes writing (“image changes” what it touches). Meanwhile Reid’s lines swirl around and under the text in the unusual freedom of a disturbed pond. With Guest’s death this year, the image of her work has indeed changed. Yet still it ripples.

*****

David B. Goldstein is a poet, critic, translator, and journalist, and is the author of the poetry chapbook Been Raw Diction (Dusi/e, 2006), online at dusie.org. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Jubilat, Typo, Epoch, Alice Blue, Zeek, and The Paris Review. He currently teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at The University of Tulsa.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:50 PM 0 comments

EYE AGAINST EYE by FORREST GANDER

CRAG HILL Reviews

Eye Against Eye by Forrest Gander
(New Directions, New York, 2005)

A Book That Grows: Forrest Gander’s Eye Against Eye

Has a book been so compelling that when you’re done you don’t want to put it down? Then when you finally do, you pick it right back up to sift the pages, stopping to read a poem here and there, or, if you can’t resist, reading the book again in its entirety? Or, if you pried the book out of your hands/eyes/mind, is it one of those books you leave on your reading table rather than shelving it with the other “finished” poetry books?

Forrest Gander’s Eye Against Eye has been one of those books for me this year. However, it didn’t start out that way. The first section, “Burning Towers, Standing Wall,” was unengaging; I didn’t gain anything from re-reading it (first read it in The Blue Rock Collection). An evocative poem of a visit to Mayan ruins in Tabasco Province, Mexico, it also didn’t seem to fit in stylistically with Gander’s work in the remainder of Eye Against Eye. The poem, enriched by the vocabulary we’ve come to know in all Gander’s work, develops as a conventional lyric poem. It moves through descriptions of the ancient, almost mythic wall, its makers and destroyers, its visitors, insect and birdlife, image to image interspersed with commentary:

Some of the sounds bouncing from the stones are
nearly the same sounds they heard—resonant
human voices and the perwicka perwicka
of a quetzal in flight at a distance—
and give us access to them almost
through grinding cicadas and crickets
thrumming serrated thighs
through their domestic acoustics...

The appealing self-awareness of the poetry–poem knowing it’s a poem–in the later poems in this volume is absent, and the radical fissures, crevasses, sudden chasms that underscore the other poems, have not yet evolved.

Spread throughout the book, binding the other sections together, the four “Ligature” poems create attention through the disjointed transitions between sentences and groups of sentences in a way that “Burning Towers, Standing Wall” did not. A narrative and a metanarrative at once, the first “Ligature,” in a “sequence of dark non sequiturs,” constructs a turbulent relationship between a father, mother, and an adolescent boy. It’s a jarring poem to inhabit, a ligament stretching, straining to make a transition from the aching ambience, the angry nostalgia, of the Mayan ruins to the quick turning, traveling, of “Present Tense.”

The eleven poems in “Present Tense” jostle the reader from Fire Island, Lake Ontario, Narragansett Bay, Mississippi, San Francisco, Laguna Beach, to unnamed places, personal and universal, the reader must map. Many of the phrases of the poems, whose lines have no end punctuation, accelerating the already rapid pace, stand alone–“quartz and alkali feldspars, an intimate graphic intergrowth”–while many skip down the page in tight partnership:

Dribbling down our steep street
mulberry stains resemble a meteor shower
a wrinkle of gravitational waves passes through
our inquiry is given to us whether we can speak it
in the world’s terms by the world

to finally fuse in the last seven lines:

should you fall
should you hollow inward
wake from dreams worn out and dull as a horse
should you crack and spill the yoke of yourself
you will find in me a stay
and this the promissory note of indebtedness
a proximity that cannot be unhooped

“Ligature 2” is a sinewy walk, perhaps in a narrow street in Mexico, traveler struggling with communication with passerby and with his son who, later, flails back: “At the hotel, sunburned and disconsolado, the boy immelmanning across the pool for an hour.” Still struggling, the man arrives at what he needs, if only in his dreams: “I remember dreaming last night that he loved me.”

In my first reading, the book took off starting with the series of poems, "Late Summer Entry: the Landscapes of Sally Mann," poems accompanied by photographs (albeit poorly reproduced). These poems work on several levels: as description of key elements in the black and white photographs:

                                         --the ditch
gaping like a grave for the tower,
catfish heads scattered in the dirt, and
                                                    ditchwater dull as resin.
("The Broken Tower," p. 57);

as meditation on how technically the photo moves the viewer:

Enmeshed in a field of concentric force, the spectator is drawn toward a wormhole of brightness, not depth but another dimension entire. A light which is life source.
("Ivy Brick Wall," p. 51);

as description of a transaction between poet, reader, and photographer:

At the same time, the blemish
joins together the realms
of seer and swimmer
in our experience of plunging
into and out of the image.
("Bridge & Swimmer," p. 55);

as surface from which the poet sees the unseeable:

and shadows
               condense into a living blackness
where non-being stirs, where the swirl
of unborn things,
                                             like a nursery of spiders,
stirs beyond our senses.
("Photo Canto," p. 41);

and as celebration of how object in concert with audience perception becomes a creative force in itself:

It is this originary force that transforms the ordinary into the exultant. Here, where light authors act and meaning, where whelming ivy overwrites brick wall.
("Ivy Brick Wall," continued from above).

Three of the poems have yet another dimension. Printed in two columns (left column left justified, right column winding down the page), "Road and Tree," "Collodion," and "Argosy for Rock and Grass" can be read across columns or down each column, left then right, creating some startling juxtapositions, tightening connections within the poem:

But to fault                the image for its lack
of correlative, we would                miss its fullness
coming to be.                The river is named
The Holy Ghost. We believe                what we do not know.
(the end of "Argosy for Rock and Grass," p. 53)

Unfolding in San Francisco’s Mission District, “Mission Thief” is an intense narrative. It begins slowly, deliberately, with the poem’s speaker strolling with a partner down the streets. Then a man veering near on a stolen bicycle cuts into the poem, racing up the street past the couple. The poem’s action multiplies, fractures, hand against stucco, neck, dance of spectators, the man who has lost his bike trying to keep up running, desire/doubt to intervene, a panoply of emotional responses. The swirl of activity crystallizes near the end, a looking back:

the rest of us unrescued
stopped in time transfixed
to this stark spectacle of our separateness
making its stand
hammering its horizons home
behind which
each of us says I don’t know
who you are
you never broke through me

“Ligature 4” ties up the volume. All four poems speak of a young boy, one who has perhaps grown up by the end of this poem, grown up and into himself and away from his parents, a tightening or a loosening of the ligature:

Throwing himself into the back seat after wrestling practice, mat burns on
his cheek and forehead.

His muteness an onomatopoeia of the rising moon.

As it stands now several readings later: this is one of those few books I can't put on the shelf (Tom Beckett’s Vanishing Points is still one of those unshelved books, over a year after its publication; it's on the table behind me as I type, ready for perusal at moment's notice). Minus "Burning Tower, Standing Wall," Eye Against Eye is an astounding collection.

Gander is a master of the multiple, of the manifold. Though he may point to something in a phrase, he diverts–yet includes, not excludes, creates not destroys–attention by the next phrase. Read the book through, then re-read and re-read the later poems, then re-read the first half. Then re-read the whole thing. Then browse, gaze and graze....The book grows!

*****

Crag Hill edited SCORE, one of the premier visual poetry magazines in the United States & SPORE for nearly twenty-five years. Poems have recently appeared in Aught, Generator, Eratio, Shampoo, & Sleeping Fish.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:48 PM 0 comments

HERE, BULLET by BRIAN TURNER

ABIGAIL LICAD Reviews

Here, Bullet by Brian Turner
(Alice James Books, 2005)

Those inclined to believe Auden’s often quoted view that “poetry makes nothing happen” should read Brian Turner’s book. One would be hard pressed to think of a contemporary volume of poetry more relevant to our political times, and which grasps so lucidly, so compassionately, the types of responsibilities we face.

Here, Bullet is remarkable not only for the experience which compelled it, but also for the honesty and cultural sensitivity which underlies its poems. Turner, who wrote the volume while serving as a solider in Iraq, approaches his writing with no other agenda than to remain faithful to his experiences. With so many ways for war poetry to go wrong, it’s amazing what Turner accomplishes. No moralizing here. No apocalyptic prophesizing. No rants or diatribes or gratuitous descriptions. And perhaps best of all, no esoteric over-allegorizing of the postmodern, gimmicky bent. With lyric simplicity and most admirable restraint, Turner approaches each subject matter from a learner’s standpoint. In fact, two main features lend the volume with the instructive impetus of a travel narrative.

First, Turner introduces the reader to the cornerstones of the Arabic language: references from the Qu’ran and various Arabic texts emphasize structural and thematic breaks, proverbs or quotes introduce poems, and everyday words become incorporated into Turner’s language. The opening poem called “A Soldier’s Arabic” tells us that habib is the word for love and maut for death. In “What Every Soldier Should Know” the speaker instructs that Sabir el khair means “Good Morning” and Inshallah means “Allah be willing.” In “Two Stories Down,” the use of Arabic is reserved for the emotional climax of the poem, quoted in full below:

When he jumped from the balcony, Hasan swam
in the air over the Ashur Street Market,
arms and legs suspended in a blur
above palm hearts and crates of lemons,
not realizing just how hard life fights
sometimes, how an American solider
would run to his aid there on the sidewalk,
trying to make sense of Hasan’s broken legs,
with words in an awkward music
of stress and care, a soldier he’d startle
by stealing the knife from its sheath,
the two of them struggling for the blade
until the bloodgroove sunk deep
and Hasan whispered to him,
Shukran, sadiq, shukran;
Thank you, friend, thank you.

In drawing from Arabic sources to frame and punctuate his work, Turner takes the first and most essential step to cross-cultural understanding, which is, to view as much as possible from the other culture’s frameworks and assumptions rather than imposing one’s own.

Second, the recurrent tableau-like quality of each poem – the move or series of moves to focus upon a particular subject within its particular setting – gives the reader a sense of the everyday lives of people in Iraq, of their everyday habits, of their everyday sights and sounds as they are interrupted by the ongoing war. In “The Al Harishma Weapons Market,” the poem’s speaker surveys the surroundings before focusing upon Akbar, a father who comforts a son frightened by gunfire; in “Eulogy,” prisoners of war and their captors are suddenly and momentarily distracted by the sound of Private Miller’s gun as he commits suicide; in “Autopsy,” descriptions of the medical procedure being performed blends with procedures of memory.

Each time, there is a concreteness and definite sense of place to Turner’s writing, as well as a continuity between internal and external landscapes. These series of tableaus are not isolated, however, and part of the political import of Turner’s work takes effect when these tableaus interconnect and comment upon each other, reflecting ultimately the changes and transformations resulting from the war. Perhaps the most brilliant enactment of this can be found in “2000 lbs.” in which the poem’s movement along the circumference of an exploding bomb demonstrates, most likely with deliberate ironic intent, that violence is, indeed, a democratizing force, as desires and sufferings of Iraqis and Americans echo, reflect, overlap and in the end, become indistinguishable. These culminate in the description below, which rejects the us-against-them dynamic of war in favor of overwhelming oneness:

And the man who triggered the button,
who may have invoked the Prophet’s name,
or not – he is obliterated at the epicenter,
he is everywhere, he is of all things,
his touch is the air taken in, the blast
and the wave, the electricity of shock,
his is the sound the heart makes quick
in the panic’s rush, the surge of blood
searching for light and color, that sound
the martyr cries filled with the word
his soul is made of, Inshallah.

Discussion in the poetry workshop where I first encountered Here, Bullet most contentiously revolved around Turner’s vaguely rendered stance on the war in Iraq. The attending restraint in Turner’s desire to maintain the utmost respect for the sufferings of all those involved in the war by way of resisting direct commentary is often too easily confused for political indeterminacy. The following lines from “Caravan” make clear enough, I think, his opposition to the war:

Today, in Baghdad, a bomb
kills forty-seven and wounds over one hundred,
leaving a crated ten feet deep. The stunned
gather body parts from the roadway
to collect in cardboard boxes
which will not be taped and shipped
to the White House lawn…

The implication that the White House be visually tied with coffins, that people both inside and outside the White House physically confront and also be confronted alongside actual human casualties from the war, signals an opposition to destruction and violence, and by extension, to the political decisions that have led to them. Although this is as far as Turner gets in voicing an anti-war stance, the eerie imagery of the White House as war mausoleum speaks to the intensity of his convictions. The fact that Turner waits until this penultimate entry in his volume to deliver his harshest criticism against the war only heightens its effectiveness, as he allows readers to derive their own conclusions from descriptions in prior poems. Wisely opting against closing his volume with political criticism and choosing connection over rupture, Turner shifts the focus back toward humanity’s binding mortality in the final poem to follow called “To Sand”:

To sand go tracers and ball ammunition.
To sand the green smoke goes.
Each finned mortar, spinning in light.
Each star cluster, bursting above…

What Turner effectively “makes happen,” to return to Auden’s quote, is to instill an awareness of the totality of war and to promote a responsible manner of conducting oneself amidst enormous uncertainty. By “totality of war” I mean most of all the sameness that exists at the core of perceived differences – this I think is the point that Turner repeatedly returns to. When confronted by strangeness, newness, violence, or cruelty, Turner shows that first we should look, then we study, then we try to understand, but always, we connect. Here, Bullet is a moving, marvelous read, and a very important lesson.

*****

Abigail Licad grew up in Antipolo, Rizal, Philippines and immigrated with her family to California at age fourteen. She received a B.A. from UC Berkeley and an M.Phil from Pembroke College at Oxford University, both in literature.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:47 PM 0 comments

LYRIC POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ by KENT JOHNSON

DAVID BAPTISTE-CHIROT Reviews

Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War by Kent Johnson
(effing press, Austin, TX 2005)

WITH

An Afterword Engaging Charles Bernstein’s “Enough”

LANGUAGE, THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR
for Jaroslav Hasek & his Good Soldier, Schweik

Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions!
Let the old propositions be postponed!
Let faces and theories be turn’d inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results!
Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery!

Let the theory of America still be management, caste, comparison!
(Say! What other theory would you?) . . .
Let nothing but copies at second hand be permitted to exist upon the earth!
Let the men of These States stand aside for a few smouchers! Let the few
seize on what they choose! Let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey!
Let books take the place of trees, animals, rivers, clouds! . . .
--Walt Whitman, “Respondez!”

No one can say what will be “real” for people when the wars which are now beginning come to an end.
--Werner Heisenberg

Someone has said it that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think. The widespread mental indolence so prevalent in society proves this to be only too true. Rather than get to the bottom of any given idea, to examine into its origin and meaning, most people will either condemn it altogether or rely on some superficial or prejudicial definition of non-essentials.
--Emma Goldman

I first offered to review Kent Johnson’s Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz a few months ago because the two or three poems from it I knew were refreshingly disturbing. In them, smooth skinned American surfaces slid seamlessly into obscene scenes of horror, with poets among the participants. They reminded me of various lines from “Respondez!” one of the “Rejected Poems” Whitman chose to exclude from LEAVES OF GRASS, among them:

Respondez! Respondez!

Let every one answer! Let those who sleep be waked! Let none evade!
Must we still go on with our evasions and sneaking?

Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz appeared a year ago, the poems themselves having first appeared in various magazines, blogs, presses and anthologies. Events since, especially those this summer, have meant the book’s relevance is very much alive and its scenes and interrogations even more disturbing.

The original poems are bookended by two additions: “By Way of Preface” and “By Way of Afterword”. The Preface is a letter addressed to Campus Watch, to whom the proceeds of the book, unless declined, are to be donated. After reading “a diatribe on the poet and activist Ammiel Alcalay, published in the The America Thinker on March 4 (2005), Johnson asks to be added to the list of poets under surveillance, and provides his credentials for this honor. The offer of royalties is made because the poet believes the organization’s “proto-fascist activities are an excellent stimulant to the defense of American values, like civil liberties and other stuff.”

On the surface this seems like light hearted nose tweaking of a ponderous guard dog. It’s just below the surface that things get unsettling. Why is the poet in such a dog gone “me, too, me, too!” rush to get on this list--and to the extent that he’ll pay for the group to spy on himself and his friends? A make-believe game, a dangerous game--or a completely cynical one? What if he’s taken seriously? Or, to punish his outrageous behavior, what if Campus Watch refuses both to list him and accept his money? Or takes the money and doesn’t list him? Or, satirically, self-mockingly, yet also seriously, consider this scenario: Pity the poor poet deprived of yet another form of recognition! And after such service in Left Wing causes! And even with the new anti-war poems! How can one be denied such “street cred” as a radical? Ah!--(light bulb goes on in balloon above the cartoon poet’s head)--why not help fund the persecuting organization and ensure that its activities draw attention to oneself as a “standup guy” staring into the faces of oppression, a poet who “speaks out” for civil liberties in their time of distress. Didn’t Lee Harvey Oswald distribute “Hands Off Cuba” literature with the same address as an anti-Castro organization? Cannot poets also be involved in some strange double dealings to advance not the cause but the career? Or both at the same time? Be double agents or multiple agents in the grand tradition of Christopher Marlowe?

On the other hand, the Preface may just be a prank, which conveniently contains the poet’s CV of radical activities over the decades, mixing facts and fantasy, horror and humor in an unbalancing mode of address. (“Forgive me for being a bit disorganized in my thinking and for using the come-sap of ideology like the ants do.”)

“And if not why not”, as Gertrude Stein would say.

“Why not” I think is that faced with many by-ways of reading the Preface, the reader is alerted to the instability of the surfaces of language, which can be used in all sorts of ways as maskings, camouflaging, and coverings up, mirrorings, costuming and the Emperor’s New Clothes. What makes Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz “news that stays news” (a Pound criterion) is that the examination of the surfaces of language and its capabilities of being manipulated as maskings and mirrorings isn’t directed at others only, but at the poet himself primarily. A Yeats criteria: “Out of the quarrel with others we make politics, out of the quarrel with ourselves poetry.” Trying to confront what’s behind the surfaces and look into the area of overlap of the two quarrels is the work of interrogating going on in these poems “submitted to the war”.

“Times of quickening crisis famously clarify things previously obscured by cultural inertia,” Johnson writes in the “Afterword”. This originally appeared as a web piece, linked to the talk to which it refers and was later printed in a journal. The web address of the original talk is included in the Afterword here. “Bernstein’s ‘Enough’” takes to account the talk of that name by Charles Bernstein in which the poet implicitly attacks the “righteous monologue” and “digestible messages” of the Sam Hamill-edited immensely popular Poets Against the War. For Johnson this is a “moral decree . . . astonishingly blind to the ironies of its own arrogance”. Bernstein’s argument is that in opposing the language of Bush and Co. poets should “eschew the language of social and linguistic norms” and instead employ “ambiguity”, “complexity”, and “skepticism” in exploring the ways such “norms” “are used to discipline and contain dissent”.

For Johnson, this is a thinly veiled response to a previous talk by Eliot Weinberger, in which that writer had pointed out that the anti-war poetry that is great and remembered, is almost always written in the “norm”. Johnson finds Bernstein’s position to be “exclusivist and fundamentalist” and its “righteous ideological dispensations” to be “an ironic after-echo of the intolerant leaders he would oppose”. Bernstein and his “avant-garde” circle, for all their insistence on a radical theory and practice, are seen as being left behind, sniping at “poets speaking out with courage and force”. The “post-avant” poets formerly accused by Bernstein and Co. of a lack of activism, Johnson sees now among poets speaking out and leaving the old guard behind.

This is one of the hopeful moments in the book: that poets will speak out regardless of surveillance by Campus Watch and Big Brother, and regardless of policing by the Guards of the “avant-garde”. Yet that there should even be a question about this indicates a disturbing “State of the Union”: when both Big Brother and “radical, oppositional poetics” come down on poets speaking out against a war, there’s something deeper rooted in a society that is showing its face. And it ain’t pretty.

The nine bookended poems appear in various forms, forms of address, and forms of authorship. “Mission” is “after Archilochus”, “Baghdad” is based on the sound patterns of the children’s poem “Goodnight Moon”, “Forwarded Message Follows” is an email from “Osama Husein”, “The New York School (or: I Grew Ever More Intense)” is in “a new poetic form . . . I have christened the Mandrake”, “Green Zone Renshi-Renga” is a collaboration with Jack Kimball, and “Poem Upon a Typo Found in an Interview of Kenneth Koch Conducted by David Shapiro” is a numbered series of lines done in a variety of styles and stages of the English language. The remaining pieces include a prose poem, an irregularly structured poem/prose poem and one straight forwardly structured poem. Each one is a discrete piece and at the same time interrelated with all the others, like beads on a string made of a few continually intertwined threads.

“Mission”, “after Archilochus”, which opens the series, immediately introduces the theme of poetry and war, here waged by “civilized” poet-warriors in a foreign land. The pen and the sword march together, sharing the same hands--

. . . We gathered strength for a fortnight, writing poems and sharpening our swords by the sea . . . At a small waterfall we stopped to rest on some moss and gazed at our golden helmets and shields in the reflecting pool.
We spoke in low voices of the beauty around us . . . We spoke of time,
and friendship, and truth. Then each of us drank deeply from the pool.

Aided by the gods, we stormed Smyrna, and burned its profane temples
to the ground.

Archilochus’ soldiers are the “blond beasts” of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals –-gazing into the pool the only reflection they see is the golden glory of their helmets and shields, not their own individual faces. There is no questioning of self or the contingencies of the moment. Everything is seen in the glow of a heroic gods-blessed eternity: "time, friendship, and truth” situated in a place of beauty. Storming and burning profane temples is all in a day’s work, a blitz among many along the conquering way. All the detail of the piece is concentrated in the heroic, “civilized” moments of preparation, of life in the camp--“writing poems and sharpening swords”, contemplating glory in the reflecting pool, “the beauty around us, the dark, darting trout, and the strange, haunting songs in towering trees”. The battle (“stormed . . . and burned”) and place destroyed (“Smyrna . . . its profane temples”) get one sentence and one adjective, to mark their incidental character in the over arching narrative of glory. “We came, we saw, we conquered.”

“Writing poems and sharpening our swords by the sea”--“our golden helmets and shields in the reflecting pool.” O, idyllic, halcyon days! Small wonder that poetry’s first modernist movement, Italian Futurism Marinetti-style isn’t so much a “progressive” acceleration as an apocalyptic nostalgia, a “science-fiction film set in the past” as Fellini said of his Satyricon. “ We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness . . . We will glorify war . . .” Marinetti announces in The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). No Apollonian, Archilochian Classicism for the former Symbolist--Marinetti chooses the Dionysian--a “radical, innovative poetics” (to use the current term) of the intoxications of speed to forge his avant-garde. “(We were) like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their hostile encampments . . . We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.”

It’s speed that brings about Marinetti’s formal innovations in poetry--“parole in liberta”--words, syllables, letters, numbers, scattered in freedom, spatially, visually and sonically across the page and bellowed forth from megaphones. These formal elements come from the effects of speed on the warrior-poet’s body, nervous system and consciousness: “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”

Militarism and patriotism are an integral part of Marinetti’s poetic manifesto, as well as the destruction of libraries and museums--a rather paradoxical desire in the light of patriotism until one recalls that libraries and museums are endlessly made anew from the destruction and looting of the old ones, both in “reality” and symbolically, by “taking over” or “securing”, “hi-jacking” a tradition, style, form, technique, and not simply its objects. In Marinetti’s Futurism, with its hyper techno-speeds and formal innovations, the relationship with war as “the world’s hygiene” and glorification is a nostalgia for the sort of Classical purity Archilochus’ poet warriors have. A nostalgia of comparisons nurtured, after all, by museums and libraries: “A racing car . . . is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

In a very forceful way Marinetti set a standard by which poets have been judged and judged each other since--how to be formally avant-garde in poetry, ideologically avant-garde in politics, and ethically correct in relation to patriotism and war. And--both avant-garde and ethically/politically correct in relation to the speeds of technologies which themselves are deeply implicated in everything from experimental poetries to experimental cyber bombs and systems of control.

Marinetti fought in World War 1, became a Fascist and part of Mussolini’s inner circle. He was joined in Italy by the great American poetic innovator, Ezra Pound, of whom Charles Olson observed, “Pound was a Lenin in poetry, a Czar in politics.” Bernstein and the Language Poets have been determined to avoid this Modernist split, and be radical in both form and ideology/theory. A contemporary Marxist critic noted of Marinetti’s introductory Futurist tour of Russia that radical ruptures of syntax, transgressions of grammar, wild displacements of typographies, techniques also used by Language Poetry, may change language relations on the page but not property relations on the ground. Using a variety of Postmodern theoretical approaches, Language Poetry claims that by changing the structures of power relations in language, those in the world off the page may be changed. The questions of speed and control within real global time as examined in the work of Paul Virilio have opened areas for investigating language which are just beginning to be developed, reopening many of the issues Marinetti raised.

Paradoxically it is also via the “absolute” of speed that Archilochus’s Classical warrior poets reverse the “science fiction film set in the past” and camp out here & now, among the avant-garde, the post-avant, the postmodern poets who inhabit the disturbing landscapes of Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz.

And just what are these Archilochian warriors doing here in the post Auschwitz landscapes? They speak like “civilized” people--of “Pylos, barbarian town” and “lovely Asia” and burning “profane” temples--they write poems and have gods. Are they here as foils to the post-Auschwitz poets’ interrogations, self-reflexive interrogations and interrogations of each other on the subject of writing poetry during war times, or, are they in the Nietzschean sense warrior poets from a period further away both historically and metaphysically than such interrogations will accept? That is--they exist outside the Jewish, Christian and Moslem traditions involved in the wars in the book, pagans, without rassentiment. Looking into the reflecting pool they don’t see a self, an ego, a “subject” in the post-modern conception of this. All they see is the golden glory of armor--helmets and shields, which in turn their poetry will reflect. Archilochus on his métier:

I am a servant of the kingly wargod Enyalios {Ares}
               And am also skilled in the lovely arts.

Archilochus is credited with developing the swift speeds of the iambic, the better to deliver his messages than the slow speeds of epic hexameter. The bastard son of a nobleman and a slave, a career soldier who died in battle, a poet who had statues erected alongside and celebrated on the same day as Homer’s and his verses read for victors at the Olympics games, Archilochus and his “Mission” via the absolute of speed are pagan warrior poets calmly overlooking the tortured and torturing persons, scenes and language of the following poems. The calm eye in the storm, “Mission” presents everything that supposedly no politically--and formally--correct “avant-garde” poet today would write.

Yet isn’t it also a desire of many “radical innovative” poets to be writing both for a good cause in times of war and writing formally on the good side in a war of words? Isn’t there a secret desire to be the poet warrior of poet warriors, and not make the mistakes of those of the past? (Become a Fascist as Marinetti and Ezra Pound did for example.) To be politically and formally correct, to be perfect?! And by poet warrior I mean also the poet warrioring against war, fighting for the best cause, Peace, and finding the best formal ways to do so. (Language poetry, for Bernstein.)

In short—to be the anti-Archilochus?!

(One shouldn’t overlook the fact that for his time Archilochus was “avant-garde” in his development of the iambic, and in “Mission” he’s part of a small advance group--“avant-garde”--of ten soldiers sent out on their own. Hard to beat this guy at his own game! As a poem of his puts it: “The fox knows many tricks/the hedgehog only one. /A good one.”)

What makes Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz disturbing, powerful and rawly fascinating is that it’s a book of interrogations of interrogations, and of pronouncements which purport to be interrogations. Subtitled “eleven submissions to the war”, the book has these words printed on the cover within Scott Pierce’s stylized version of the famous image of Private Englund holding on a leash the naked curled-in-a-fetus body of an Iraqi POW in the Abu-Ghraib prison. Little winged Cupids fly abut the image, their bows merrily loosened from having shot their arrows. If anything, the Hallmark card Cupids make the image and the words “Auschwitz”, “submissions” and “war” even more sickening. Still, “submissions” are what poets do give of themselves as poems, to be interrogated and determined if they are “news that’s fit to print”.

I noted that Johnson isn’t restricting his interrogating to others, but very much includes himself as well. By using both parts of the Yeatsian dictum that the quarrel with others is politics, and the quarrel with oneself poetry, Johnson opens up his poems to a rawness and vulnerability that’s at brutal and black humor odds with the smooth surfaces of “radical artifice” Bernstein advocates. While advocating the use of “skepticism”, Bernstein’s interrogations are restricted to language and aesthetics and attempt to close themselves off from being questioned by either himself or others. Johnson on the other hand submits himself to his own self-interrogations and those of the reader’s. After all, if you’re going to invite Campus Watch, that’s one thing and inviting the surveillance of “the war” is another, but a further far more rigorous one is that of your fellow poets. So as they say, you better take a good look at yourself and “get your story straight”, “get yourself right with God” as you hear people say as they disappear between the guards, down the corridors of merciless eyes, brutal words of hate to the obscenity of torture by “good people”.

Two poems foreground the poet’s situating himself in scenes shifting back and forth between poets and poetry, war and horror: “When I First Read Ange Mlinko” and “The New York School (or: I Grew Ever More Intense)”.

“When I First Read” opens with a scene that’s straight out of the New Yorker with a weird anti-dash of Poe’s “Raven” tossed in to heighten the cocktail hour effect. Here the anti-Raven is a flock of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks: “truly extraordinary, what I saw and heard inside that sudden gift--luxuriant spring efflorescing into a drug-like aureole, as if
it
               were
                           some
                                    message
                                                from
                                             beyond,
which I know
it wasn’t.”

The poet is reading Ange Mlinko in The Poker (though no Poe fireplace in the room) and has “started to bat my eyes, seductively” when his wife calls him for “your date with the grill”. But it isn’t this that interrupts his visionary moments with the Grosbeaks, it’s instead:

. . . for no reason at all, totally unbidden, in all that flocked music and gilded light, I remembered reading, as a passing mention in a buried article somewhere, of four little girls incinerated in a mud compound by a missile fired from a pilotless drone, a compound in a dry and lonely place, where fine carpets were made by orphans for the foreign trade. I know it’s possible that I’m just writing that I thought this then so to suggest my moral sensibilities to you, using a tragedy that is not mine to give some moral pressure to a poem
that
               up
                           until
                                       now
                                                   hadn’t
               been
about much at all. I admit
I am not sure myself! And I admit that my having
written it means nothing, anyway, in the end. But the girls did
die, “were evaporated,” at least that’s what the little article said, and no matter how self-reflexive I get, or
how suspicious you become of my quaint
and insecure prosody,
those dirty-haired,
often-raped
               kids
                              will
                                             still
                                                            be
                                                            dead
and never thought about again, by you or anyone.

This section of the poem uneasily tries to make its unsteady way through its own self reflexiveness, self doubts, self-interrogations and past the eyes of the interrogating reader. The initially passive forms of self doubt (“It’s possible that I’m just writing that I thought this then to suggest my moral sensibilities . . . “) shift to guilt (“I admit I am not sure myself! And I admit that my having written it means nothing, anyway, in the end.”) and into self-defensiveness. “But the girls did die . . . no matter how self-reflexive I get, or how suspicious you become of my quaint and insecure prosody, those . . . kids will still be dead and never thought about again, by you or anyone.” The final line is the kicker, a doubling of death—the kids will stay dead, and neither you nor I think of them again. They will have a negative permanence, and a permanent negation. A nasty little brew of spite and contempt proclaimed with a certain triumph!

There’s a brief interlude, in which the Grosbeaks sing and fly away, and the poet sighs theatrically, “just one of those campy outburst things you’d never do in public, I suppose, lest you lose a portion of your cultural capital irremediably.” Even in this small private moment, the uneasy poet is haunted by the sense of surveillance and judgment. Supposedly “safe at home” he’s literally and figuratively interiorized a form of “homeland insecurity”. “I admit I not sure of myself!” he’s told the imagined interrogating reader, and campy theatricality might be interpreted as a further sign of deep seated guilts, hidden secrets, fugitive desires. The War on Terror has allowed the forces of Homeland Security to be turned into a form of interior terrorism that can enter at any moment any home in the homeland and interpret any sigh as a confession to just about anything the interrogators want it to be. And Homeland Security can be anyone in these strange times. Campus Watch, Charles Bernstein--your own wife! It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers revisited!

Snapping out of it, the poet says--“Anyway, there you have it. That’s ‘my story.’” “My story” in quotes making it clear that yes, he has gotten his story straight now to tell the interrogators. “I slapped The Poker shut, waddled downstairs, and
threw
a match
on the fuel-soaked
briquets.”
               Let the grilling begin!

“The New York School (or: I Grew Ever More Intense)” is preceded, as it is supposed to be in this new poetic form, by an author’s note, which in this case explains what the Mandrake is. The Mandrake is made up of fourteen stanzas, seven of them “flower” and seven “fruit”, alternating with each other. The flower stanzas may be written in any meter, rhymed or not, and of any length, and may include prose. The stanzas must refer to one or two poets of a preceding poetic generation, who must be contemporaries of each other, and “each stanza in the flower must exhibit some sense of parallelism in theme and syntactic logic to its companion flower stanzas.”

There are no guidelines for the fruit stanzas other than that they be totally dissimilar as a whole from the flower stanzas in themes and tone, be written in prose and most of them be quoted material. The fourteenth stanza has one further stricture, that it must have some reference to the morel mushroom, seasonal companion of the Mandrake aka May apple as it was known by various English poets of the 16th and 17th centuries.

The first flower stanza:

I turned over the bottle of shampoo, and Frank O’Hara came out. I rubbed him all into my head, letting the foam rise, knowing I was just warming myself up, excited by the excess of what was to come. Soon, I began to make noisy climax sounds. The scent of oranges and oil paint from a general store in the outlaw town of Shishido (with all its exotic wares) filled the stormy air.

The first fruit stanza:

I couldn’t help it, I thought of this: “One day, a fortnight or so after my mother’s death in Shishido, I was up in the hills playing with some friends. Suddenly one of them said, ‘Look, the baby’s hands are all swollen.’ I touched the baby, which was still strapped to my back, and screamed—it was stone cold. My friends began to panic and jump up and down, shouting ‘It’s dead, it’s dead.’ It felt awful having something dead tied to me, so ripped off my jacket and dropped the baby, before joining the others as they ran back down the hill as fast as their legs would take them, shrieking.”

All subsequent flower stanzas begin “I grew ever more intense” as the poet uses shaving cream (Barbara Guest), after shave (Ted Berrigan), toothpaste (James Schuyler), deodorant stick (Joseph Ceravolo), mouthwash (Kenneth Koch) and hand soap (John Ashberry) to clean up. Between each of these, the fruit stanzas begin “I couldn’t help myself, I thought of this.” And horrific visions of war in cities and landscapes with Asian and Middle Eastern names will appear before the poet’s eyes, obscuring his visage in the mirror, which is sometimes explicitly named and most times implied.

The flower stanzas grow out of combined roots of “Mission” and “When I First Read Ange Mlinko”. The warrior poet in “Mission” gazes into the pool and sees the gold reflections of shields and helmets which in turn are reflected in his poems. In “New York School” Kent Johnson watches himself squeezing poets out of the various toiletries items, like genies or geniuses from a bottle. Or as we now know, the various ingredients for making a bomb aboard air liners. Scrubbing, tooth brushing, shampooing, lathering, splattering on aftershave, he’s practicing another version of Marinetti’s “war, the world’s hygiene”. The processes of all this cleaning, all this hygiene induces in him a shocking series of visions of war’s disasters and horrors.

In “When I First Read Ange Mlinko” the poet also had visions, but without the certainty and vividness he now has. I think the difference is the combination of the warrior poet’s mirror and Marinetti’s war as the world’s hygiene. As the poem moves to its final resolution, with the poet using the toiletries to clean up himself and his image in the mirror, it brought to mind the famous trope: “For now we see, as through a glass darkly.”

Small wonder “Mr. Kent” as he’s called in the “Forwarded Message Follows” poem, feels “ever more intense”! It’s no longer a simple household cleaning agents high, or NY Poets buzz, but a sure fire chemical “bomb head” he’s feeling.)

As in so many of the poems and the “Preface” and Afterword”, some “postmodern” poets appear among the far-scattered landscapes of the globalized War on Terror. Here it’s via memory in one of the flower stanzas:

. . . an overdetermined smell (for these are the smells which the pleasures of peace provide) the smell I smelled in Leningrad in 1989, when, wedged between Barret Watten and Ron Silliman, I entered the closet-sized cloister of a Shinto temple to look at the mummified middle finger of the Russian saint Nishiwaki Junzaburo under glass. We looked at each other sidelong, like fish, each hatching our private plots, pretending we weren’t looking at the other.

Ah! . . . The overdetermined smell of the former Marxist city and American language poets . . . and each poet under the surveillance of the others . . . a morphing of the Cold War into new forms of covert agents as the old spies come in from the cold. Smells play a large part in each of the fruit stanzas, evoking different parts of the world, different time periods, and bizarre beings such as the Great Leader and his Four Eternal Qualities and the evil Lord of Quietude. (The dread Nemesis of Ron Silliman, Lord of Languagitude)

In “When I First Read Ange Mlinko” the poet “remembers reading” the article about the four dead girls yet has to admit he isn’t sure if he is acting in good faith in putting them in the poem. Is he manipulating them simply to apply “moral pressure” to make up for the poem not having “been about much at all”? He can’t confront the question other than to peevishly reassert that the girls are dead. There really isn’t any connection to them except as bodies to be exploited.

In “The New York School” fruit stanzas the scenes thought of have none of this abstract, self reflexive, unsure, bad faith quality to them. They are raw, direct and brutal. Child warriors, cannibalism, an entire city on fire, mummified bodies from which blood has poured out at every orifice, drugged America soldiers raping, killing and partially eating a young boy and selling the rest of the meat to a merchant in the market, a girl emerging from a burning car in which her dead family lies, walking in circles in shock while she bleeds to death. . . and in between, during the flower stanzas, the personal hygiene going on, echoing “war, the world’s hygiene” as the poet is visited by the genius of one NY poet after another, by all sorts of evocative odors and shifting scenes of memory and imagination.

With its fourteen stanzas instead of lines, the Mandrake may be thought of as a form of sonnet, and a Shakespearean one, with its turn and resolution coming in the final couplet.

In the final stanza of “New York School” the poet for the first time doesn’t think of a scene of horror. Instead he recalls a recent day of morel hunting with his son, in his last spring at home before leaving for the university. The poet looks at the son and recalls, echoing the first fruit stanza, how “he once (was) swathed and strapped to my back”. He watches and listens as his son happily gathers huge amounts of morels. Sentimental thoughts come to him and he shields his tears from his son. Where have the years gone, how is the world so filled with suffering? The poet begins his self interrogation--and to his own surprise finds this:

I guess when you think about it, I thought . . . I guess I’ve been pretty lucky after all, enjoying the pleasures of calligraphy and sake in all the surplus time the labor of others has more or less made for me. Some of us are like rain, and others of are like the thirsty ground, and others of us are like parasitical mushrooms, especially poets, and that’s just the way things have come to be. The truth is that I felt like running down the hill as fast as my legs would take me, shrieking, seeking I do not know what. But I gathered my composure and turning toward him said, in a deep fatherly voice, Ah, that is wonderful son! {The son has been finding one mushroom after another} The gods of the forest are smiling upon us today.

“For now we see, as through a glass, darkly/But then, face to face/For now I know in part/But then shall I know in full/Fully as also I am known.”

The best known poem in the book is one of the few I had read previously. “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, or: “Get the Hood Back On’” is made up of six sections spoken by American soldiers, three male, three female, introducing themselves to an Iraqi prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison. In bland friendly terms they list their accomplishments and interests and belief in and love for the truth, before launching into vile descriptions of the tortures they will inflict to soften the prisoner up for interrogation by Military Intelligence.

The final speaker is a poet--“I’ve had poems on the Poets Against the War website and in American Poetry Review and Chain . . . have a blog . . . dig Arab music . . . I’m really progressive . . . “ --and his method is unique in its instruments and ends. Unlike the others, he is not interested in softening up his prisoner. Instead, he is going to murder him--by beating him to death with two hardbound academic poetry volumes bookending his head. One volume will be

“experimental and the other more speech-like . . . and I’m going to do it until your brain swells to the size of a basketball and you die like the fucking lion for real. You’ll never make it to MI because that’s the breaks; poetry is hard and people go up in flames for lack of it everyday. By the time any investigation gets to you, your grandchildren will have been dead over one thousand years, and poetry will be inhabiting regions you can’t even imagine. Well, we did our best; sorry we couldn’t have done better . . . I want you to take this self-righteous poem, soak it in this bedpan full of crude oil, and shove it down your pleading, screaming throat.

Now, get the hood back on.

The book Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz bookends the poems between Campus Watch and its supposed opposite “Bernstein’s ‘Enough’”; the poem “Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz” pairs Language style poetry with its supposed opposite, “speech-like” verse in bookending the prisoner’s condemned head. In the book, supposed opposites are seen as united against popular protest. In the poem, supposed opposites are seen wielded as matching arms in illegally murdering a prisoner of war.

Both book and poem take their titles from the famous quote by Theodor Adorno, quoted in full by Johnson, an important distinction, as usually only the first part is cited.

“I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric . . . {But} literature must resist this verdict.”

For Adorno it is not “simply” the event of Auschwitz which makes lyric poetry impossible, it is that the event happened in the language in which lyric poetry was written. Once this has happened, the language is contaminated with the event, poisoning and corroding language so that writing lyric poetry becomes a barbaric act. Literature must resist this—but how?

In his Bremen Prize speech the great lyric poet and camp survivor Paul Celan said of language’s and his own lyric poetry’s resistance:

It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through a thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened, yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.

In Kent Johnson’s Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, both book and poem present many forms of current language passing through the happenings of the Iraq War at home and abroad. Johnson can’t say, as Celan did, that he and language have “passed through this happening” for it is still very much going on. What he does offer is a powerful sense that resistance, like language, is not lost. If one chooses this--resistance and what language that remains--there will be all the horrors Celan speaks of, and much of it happens unseen, to oneself, and “(gives) back no words for that which happened.” What does pass through and remain and comes to light, will be “enriched”--and in this way lyric poetry resists and finds its way free of the contaminations and corrosions of the “deathbringing” happenings. By using the ancient trope of a journey through darkness to light, Celan links the language of his lyric poetry with that of Orpheus’ journey through the underworld and his return to light. Orpheus also remains--his remains remain--embodied in the 14 stanzas of “The New York School (or, I Grew Ever More Intense)," the Maenads having torn him into fourteen pieces. And even in pieces, it is said, the poet went on singing his lyrics.

When the pieces in Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, and then the book itself, first appeared, they were parts of the early and evolving discussions on how contemporary American poets might find ways in their writing to protest the War in Iraq and the Bush administration. With the events of this summer in Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Iraq, these questions have been resurfacing on poetry e-lists and blogs again. When the online journal Big Bridge announced that it was going offline for a month as a protest of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the predominant response was one of ridicule. Only a few poets announced their support. The journal’s editor was accused of self promotion and disguising a summer break as a conveniently timed protest, an act of bad faith. The surrounding discourse was on a par between Jay Leno and Rush Limbaugh. The dark side of being caught between the edicts of the Bush government on the one hand and the “radical innovative alternatives” of which Bernstein speaks on the other can, it seems, be like being the Iraqi POW being beaten with opposing volumes of poetry by an American poet. The discussions have moved on to focus on more abstract questions of poetry and politics, with its being taken for granted that Bernstein’s positions, like Bush’s, can seemingly be counted on to “hold the course.” I think that with the continuing intensifications of the situations and events in the Middle East and the coming American elections, reading Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz in the contexts of these events and continued discussions will go on being a very powerful and thought provoking experience for quite some time to come and most highly recommend it. You may need to read it more than you know. I’ve showed the book to a lot of people, especially young people, and the most common response has been why aren’t there more poetry books like this about the war--raw, graphic, disturbing, and talking about poetry and the war--like it really is a matter of life and death--what they can have to do with each other--

I would also add that everybody finds many sections of it absolutely hilarious.
And that’s a natural born fact Jack.

Respondez! Respondez!


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


By Way of An Afterword: An Appendix

“By Way of Afterword Bernstein’s ‘Enough’” has that statement’s web site link attached so the reader can hear Bernstein’s story as it were and find out for oneself what it is all about. As a responsible reader I did this and include as an appendix to my review this review of what is an appendix to the book Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz. Reading “Enough” I found very useful in better understanding not only Kent Johnson’s response to it, but many scattered aspects come across through time in statements, attitudes and arguments put forward by various writers influenced by or aligned with Bernstein’s poetics.

“Enough” was presented on 9 March 2003 at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the Launch for the O Books anthology Enough: poetry and writings against the war, edited by Rick London and Leslie Scalapino. It was published the next day to the Poetics list and has circulated on various blogs and web sites since.

Interestingly, “Enough” begins with a standard George Bush message: “Stay the course”. “In these difficult times, let us not draw away from our poetics in an attempt to redress the ominous possibilities of future U.S. government policies or the onerous effects of current government policies.” Bernstein also invokes another tactic Bush has pushed to the maximum, the use of “our” in setting up a dichotomy of “us” against “them”. One learns pretty early in life to pay attention when people begin using the word “our”. How inclusive or exclusive is “our” particular “ourness”? In this case, one takes it “our poetics” refers to the people in the room and the anthology and by extension people sympathetic to Bernstein’s poetics. This is an exclusive “our”.

Bernstein quotes Bush’s “State of the Union Speech”, “America’s purpose is more than to follow a process; it is to achieve a result.” For Bernstein, “This statement alone provides sufficient evidence to oppose his policies. What our America stands on, its foundation, is a commitment to process over results, to finding by doing, to thinking by responding. Solutions made outside of an open-ended process compound whatever problems we face.”

Bush says, “America’s purpose” and Bernstein opposing him says, “what our America stands on”. Again--how in--or exclusive is this “our” and the “we” that follows? Do these still refer only to the poets who share Bernstein’s poetics? Where does Bush’s America end and Bernstein’s begin? And what if one doesn’t feel included in either of these “our Americas”?

Bernstein continues: “If we are to talk of ‘poets’ against the war, then what is it in our poems—as opposed to our positions as citizens—that does the opposing? Perhaps it might be an approach to politics, as much as to poetry, that doesn’t feel compelled to repress ambiguity or complexity nor to substitute the righteous monologue for the skeptic’s dialogue.” Is this saying that the poet’s approach to politics is already in place in approaching the poem? So that whatever it may look or sound like, the poem is always already oppositional when done with this approach of “ours”? And in this way, there is no need to say anything so simple and unambiguous or monological as “stop the war” or “no blood for oil” or “Bush the Butcher of Baghdad”. An advantage of this approach to a “radical, innovative poetics” is that since it posits as a given of its existence its oppositional character, it doesn’t need to articulate anything directly oppositional in words. To be blunt, it doesn’t leave a paper trail. As the saying often seen as a chilling reminder on institutional walls has it: “if it’s not in writing, it never happened.” If the opposition is in the approach, but not expressed in a directly recognizable way, it didn’t happen. (A perfect defense lawyer’s argument, if needed.)

The political approach dispensed with, Bernstein takes on the moral question. “At this trying time, we keep being hectored toward moral discourse, toward turning our work into digestible messages. This too is a casualty of the war machine, the undermining of the value of the projects of art, of the aesthetic.” Who exactly is doing this hectoring? And how is the war machine undermining the value of the aesthetic? Johnson suggests that this is Bernstein’s attack on the Poets Against the War website with its monological, digestible messages to which Bernstein refuses to conform, in the name of preserving the aesthetic in the face of a moral onslaught. No righteous monologue will quell the voice of art’s skeptical dialogue!

Yet in his next line Bernstein states with immense monologic righteousness that “Art is never secondary to moral discourse but its teacher.” One takes it that he means “our” art, the art of his circle, and not the art of the Poets Against the War rabble. As with politics, Bernstein can eschew “monologic righteousness” in poetry, because in his Art he is teaching moral discourse, it is already always there in his work. His morality is the highest, purist form of all. It is Art.

A further value of Art is that it is “unregulated by a predetermined message”. (Isn’t this the dream come true of corporations under the Bush administration?) For Bernstein this means that in times of crisis art can “explore deeper the roots of our alienation and offer alternative ways not only to think, but also to imagine and indeed to resist.” This is disingenuous, because the only alternative ways that one is being offered are those which one is allowed to see, think and imagine within the grid set up by the approaches, statements, directives, rules, set down by Bernstein. The actual small message itself may not be predetermined but the Language within which it is being delivered is. This is the language of Bernstein’s “our”. “Our poetics, our America, our poems, our own forms of ethical aesthetic response.” An alternative yes, but an unregulated one free of predetermined messages, no.

Having claimed Art as the teacher of morality, Bernstein next announces that “Poetry offers not a moral compass but an aesthetic probe.” (What an unfortunate analogy! Sounds like a colonoscopy.) This will “provide a radical alternative to the outcome-driven thinking that has made the Official Morality of the State a mockery of ethical thinking and of international democratic values.” Again, Bernstein is asserting that Art--“an aesthetic probe”--is a morality higher--“a radical alternative”--than any other. “Our art” to be sure. He next devotes a lot of high minded outrage to the outcome- driven evils of the Bush seizure of power via the right wing courts. This is all fine and good, but that was then and this is now, and the reason for the evening’s gathering is the impending war.

In his attack on the Supreme Court, Bernstein once again returns to the word “our”--only now he has suddenly greatly expanded its inclusiveness. He is writing of the contempt the Justices have “for the shared meaning of our common language, shared meanings that are the foundation for the system of laws to which we have given consent through the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.” There’s something a bit jarring in Bernstein’s shifting of the word “our” here. All his previous “ours” have been exclusive, and he has been championing an exclusive language, an exclusive poetics, an exclusive Art and morality. All of a sudden he is speaking of “our common language” and “shared meanings” as though he is “one of us.” Spoken like a true politician! First, go after the base, hammer away at what makes your side special, strong, beautiful, right, and impervious to outside pressures. Then throw the doors open to all the little saps and tell them see, I’m like you, I’m against those rotten crooks in high offices. See, we speak the same language, we share the same values. We’re all in the same boat. Don’t listen to those dull, conventional one-note harping Poets Against the War, come join me in the open-ended process of ambiguity!

I’ve only come up with one explanation so far for a rather puzzling aspect of Bernstein’s conclusion:

“Unilateralism” is not just the course the Executive Branch is pursuing, with disastrous consequences, in foreign policy, but also the policy it pursues domestically, in its assault on our liberties, on the poor, and indeed on our aspirations for a democratic society.

“Unilateralism” actually would seem to describe Bernstein’s own “go it alone” approach, being neither with the government, nor with the Poets Against the War, staying the course of “our” poetics in the face of whatever is to come. To suddenly conflate the unilateralism of “our poetics” with “our common language, our liberties”, “our aspiration for a democratic society” while still rejecting the Poets against the War shows how exclusive the interpretation of “our common language” is. What is puzzling at first and then offensive, is the inclusion out of nowhere of the poor in this equation. In a moment of sound byte political nostalgia for “shared meanings” and sentimentality over “our common language” which he has spent his whole speech distancing himself from, Bernstein out of the blue suddenly seizes on every elitist’s favorite Dickensian image--the poor. The good old generic poor. Always there when you need them! And millions of them, too! Sandwiched between the “assault on our liberties” and “our aspirations for a democratic society” humbly lined up for their fifteen minutes of charity!

At a time of crisis, Bernstein, like Bush, is asking his listeners to make a choice--you’re either with us or against us. Rather than allying himself with fellow poets against the war, he chooses and dictates to others to choose, a unilateral placing of “our poetics” above the lesser forms practiced by other poets in their expressions of protest. Every poet believes his or her poetics is better than others’, but in moments of crisis, if poets want their protests to have an effect, they unite in struggle. Perhaps the problem here for Bernstein is that this is “outcome driven thinking.” That is, it wants the protests to have an effect, to have a certain amount of impact and success. For Bernstein, this goes against his claim to believe in process as being primary. Does this mean that Bernstein does not want protests to succeed, or at least make an impact? Or simply not succeed or matter unless accomplished on “our” terms? How long are poets supposed to stay divided, with some not even believing in results, while those who believe in results steam roller over them, bringing ever more silencing laws, insane domestic and foreign policies? It’s not a matter of changing how you write, to work alongside a fellow poet, write any way that you want, but take some action.

The crisis continues in ever new forms, elections are approaching, Iraq is exploding, the invasion of Lebanon may begin again at any moment, the killing and destruction in Palestine goes on unabated, poverty is growing steadily, gas prices are going up . . . winter will be coming . . . the poor getting colder and colder . . .

“And if there is one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.” --Antonin Artaud, Preface to The Theater and Its Double

*****

david-baptiste chirot was born in lafayette, indiana, grew up in vermont. lived in gottingen, germany, arles & paris, france, hastveda, sweden, wroclaw, poland, boston and milwaukee. since 1997 essays, poetry, visual poety, performance/event scores, sound poetry, prose poetry have appeared in 90+ print journals, dozens of web journals and sites, 300 mail art calls. several books: found rubBEings (Xerolage 32) ANARKEYOLOGY (runaway spoon) REVERBERATIONS (Lulu) ZERO POEM (Traverse) tearerISm (singlepress) HUNG ER (neotrope) and chapbooks, work in many anthologies in USA and UK. google search david baptiste chirot / blog: davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com

posted by EILEEN @ 11:43 PM 0 comments

CORNSTARCH FIGURINE by ELIZABETH TREADWELL

ANNA EYRE Reviews

Cornstarch Figurine by Elizabeth Treadwell
(Dusie, 2006)

As children our minds are open to exploration. We concoct potions and conduct mad scientific experiments caught within discovery’s grasp. Who will forget the first time they mixed cornstarch with water and wondered whether it was a liquid or a solid, according to defined states? Elizabeth Treadwell’s writing is one such enigma and her new book Cornstarch Figurine elucidates its prowess. Her poetry’s flexibility is that of an acrobat’s guaranteed to stretch the brain’s elastic, yet it is solid and grounded in matter not easily created nor destroyed. Treadwell is able to tap into one’s explorative mind through her mastered playful and complex use of syntax. Invited to witness phrase structure trees branch and root into and out of one another, much as compounds move in and out of phases without losing their properties, we discover that what we might not be able to see is matter. As from "Portraiture":

holy. barn. entry. silver and gold narrativity. once in every generation
name. a simple evening. monographs all at once. remaindered.
bridegroom lightly anarchy. the anarchy of myself, she sembled, she
could barely speak but nod, palms flat against the ground. arbiters
of the true. portrait of explicit. neither in nor out. hearsay. to forsake
entirely. achromatic fleur.

Elizabeth Treadwell’s verse has the immense ability to reveal narrative through parameters or lines that sketch form’s suggestion enough so that it is not lost in either concreteness or abstraction. Through careful cuts and meticulous lines she is able to illuminate precise points of a story or character that pierce their fundamental significance or heart. In "Portraiture" she recreates a history and begins to frame a woman whose mystery unfolds into further mysteries. Almost akin to a story within a story within a story within a person:

                               her past emptied out behind her, and
though she strained, she could not see the frames.

At the same time she recognizes that these points do not appear the same to each individual perspective and addresses their discrepancies. In "The Lovers of Petra Sloven" she paints a historical figure’s portrait by unveiling how different, “some”, people interpret her. Each fragment is a slice of the whole, a slice of the truth that will build, ultimately, into a more intricate figurine. However fluid the description flexes, there remains a firm substance to this character that comes off of the page and questions one’s own interpretations.

               The doors to her innards were imagined by them in rich and
flapping detail. “Oro!” screamed one. “Neverland!” another. And yet
one more just grunted.
               The lines of her orchard were strict for some, for some they
were fence-sitting; still others found them floaty.

Treadwell is a form dancer, comfortable in its constant morphing of frames. Utilizing language’s musicality and incantatory possibilities, Treadwell builds word structures that are a delight to hold in the mouth as much as they are to salivate over intellectually. Even the book's cover is done up in pink and white stripes, reminiscent of the old fashioned Brach’s candies behind display cases in the corner stores of our youth. The poems inside its covers were written between the years 1992 and 2002 and are organized into nine sections with titles such as “Milk & Relic” and “My Hello Kitty Rulebook.” Each section contains anywhere from three to eight poems that build and play off of one another to conceive new contexts, relationships and conclusions. The poems found within each section range vastly in form yet, their content speaks directly to each other. Some of the poems (within their sections) were written in relatively the same time period and others with great distance in between. Regardless, it is very difficult to discriminate between earlier work and latter because Treadwell’s lexicon is so distinct and well developed.

Looking closely at the poems, "Echo" and "Through the Palace Arcade," in the section, “Donkeyskin” one is able to find transparencies in their contents that otherwise vacillate in form. Echo is a short two line poem, similar to an Emily Dickenson aphorism and opens the section:

how long ago a girl has been
cut out of the advertisement

This at once suggests that “a girl” is perhaps excluded from bartering possibilities when she has been “cut out” and hung on a wall. Yet, in being removed, the real “girl” is perhaps liberated from the world of sale entirely. These two short lines have countless interpretations as so much of Treadwell’s work does. Similarly in "Through the Palace Arcade," we move through the shades of what “a girl” could be as well as investigate whether or not she exists fully in a recognized dimension.

***
Her methods of hesitation

It was as a girl that she first spied looking glass and through banister
Her prince.

Tyrannized space : secret dividing
_________________

This poem not only utilizes the underline as a punctuation/literary device but uses semi colons as well, to at once set up a comparison as well as a division. Her freedom with these tools is not something completely unconsidered, rather her use of them leads to a greater flexibility of interpretation. Recognizing in full the work of her predecessors like Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein, Treadwell’s verse is extremely versatile.

Elizabeth Treadwell has been the director of Small Press Traffic for six years. Cornstarch Figurine makes apparent her exposure to and consciousness of the experimental realm. One can immediately discern that this is a book of no small consequence and in affect has taken years to perfect. Constant throughout her work is her willingness to buoyantly investigate languages boundaries and push their limits while remaining anchored in gut substance. From "Bunny (a sci-fi horror)":

“the way language gets codified blabla”; by the next zoo;
fantastic, everyday whatnot; holy vile landscape or land; butter.
Parti(cita)tion or substance one: columbine high or the first door, the
first exit taken.

Once hailed by Carol Mirakove as the “queen of the prose poem,” Cornstarch Figurine proves Treadwell’s reign to extend into the outer regions of what is considered prose. Punctuation, diction, syntax and form evolve from Treadwell’s use into things that demand questioning, re-evaluation, and new utilization. Her invigorating experimentation is presented entrancingly, Cornstarch Figurine is something to marvel at, hold and wonder with. To use Treadwell’s own words, it is:

the philosophical potion of
the basic understood experimental

*****

Anna Eyre is a professor of English at UNM-Taos. She is also a reading tutor for middle school students at Taos Pueblo Day School and served as the assistant editor for the 2005 edition of Traffic. Her chap book Metaplasmic was published by effing press in 2004.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:40 PM 0 comments

INSECT COUNTRY (A) by SAWAKO NAKAYASU

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

Insect Country (A) by Sawako Nakayasu
(Dusie, 2006)

It’s difficult to use words as visual material—the balance of reading vs. seeing the words often gets, um, imbalanced. Sawako Nakayasu’s chap, Insect Country (A), makes this tension irrelevant with one of the most charming entries I’ve experienced into a poetry publication.

I refer to the first poem (of six) which begins with the phrase “A trail of anything…” The poem takes up six pages, each of which presents one line in the middle of the 4.25" X 6" page. As I flipped through the pages, I came to cease reading the text and just follow the line as black marks across the page…as if they were not words but, indeed, ants marching off somewhere.

It was only after my eye cheerfully followed the ants to the end of the poem that I flipped back to read the words. By this point, I was quite charmed, only to have the (my) engendered good mood brighten further at the gem presented by the poem’s text, beginning with

A trail of anything—insects, hamburgers, bicycles,





Popsicles, miniature lightening bolts, road maps—anything, all of it, all





and later to end with

all of it—seeing it, wanting it, nearing, fighting for, quietly, no—silently





Crowding, my small, and—





That dash as an ending is on point, both visually extending the horizontal linear pattern as well as symbolizing how a good poem extends its life beyond text and border of the page. That life, resonance, is facilitated by what all poems share in this chap: a quirky surrealism that bites, but with such small teeth (insect-sized, get it?), that the bites do not repel.

Such delicacy on the poet’s part is admirable, and enchanting. And particularly admirable because the poems’ expanses are huge even as they relegate large issues into insect-sized (sorry, couldn’t resist) bits--which is to say, intimacy--through phenomenology. For example,

Girl Talk

We are sitting around the table eating and
drinking and exchanging stories about
flashers, gropers, underwear thieves, your
general assortment of urban perverts.
When I tell the story about the man who
came up to me and opened up his bag and
offered me one of a teeming million
wriggling ants in his bag, the whole table
goes silent and I am reminded all over
again how hard it is to get along with the
women in this country.

That suddenly coarse (coarse, only due to the deftness of the chap’s overall sensibility) reference to immigrant problems is a blunt (and by being blunt even more effective) example of how these poems, charming though they may be, are hardly “lite”.

It seems fitting that Insect Country (A) is from that marvelous series put together by the Dusie Collective wherein participants make hard-copy, often hand-made, chaps from texts available elsewhere as .pdfs at http://dusie.org/. I’ve seen many of the hard-copy chaps from this series and the visual manifestations are often entrancing. Insect Country (A), with just text on white paper covered by a yellow cover featuring the black-ink (reproduction of a) drawing of an eye, is actually one of the most minimal of the Dusie chaps that I’ve seen. Yet, it evokes for me the multi-layered design and commercially-printed GRIFFIN & SABINE series by Nick Bantock—published by Chronicle Books (San Francisco) and printed on glossy, excellent quality paper. The poems in Insect Country (A), however, need no further embellishment to offer as huge an impact as the multi-color, overtly visual GRIFFIN & SABINE books--such is the power of poetry, as crafted by Nakayasu’s hand.

Insect Country (A) is an admirable project, and idiosyncratic enough to make me sigh, I love how this poet’s mind works.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS her dogs who often lie under a poker game here. Her latest poetry collection is THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I whose 2006 sales proceeds will be donated to SAVE DARFUR.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:25 PM 1 comments

BOXD TRANSISTOR by JON LEON

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Boxd Transistor by Jon Leon
(Coconut Poetry, 2006)

Boxd Transistor is an e-chapbook by Jon Leon, available online from Coconut Poetry. Leon is a writer who I've not read before, so tabula rasa for me. This presents the challenge of my finding my way. I groped a bit when I began reading this work, trying to catch what he was doing. That's called challenge, and challenge is good. His writing favours disjointedness. I could believe that he cuts up his work, because of the fragmentary nature of many of his phrases. In that sense, the work reminds me of Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath. Whether he does cut up doesn't matter, I must simply read what's put before me; cut up certainly is the effect. In Boxd Transistor, one finds many apparently truncated sentences. Verbless phrases abound as well. What to make of this? Here's my guess. Leon's writing displays a hurry and agitation. Call this a sensitivity to the incompleted moment. I was listening to a group of teens talking the other night. They were in another room but were easily heard. Their conversation darted about, excited, desperate, congenial. Yes, they went all around the subject because they didn't know it was one. And yet some entity in that room, called Their Conversation, which never ends (not really), made an agreeable connection with all of them. That's the feeling that I get from Leon's work. His own darting, desperate and wry congeniality exists in and as these poems. I see that as process coming awake. The poet confronts the terms of poetry beyond those emailed from excellent professors and the like. I guess that's an assumption that I make, but I mean it more descriptively. Anyway, I give but a partial picture if I speak only of the fragmentary nature of the poems here. One also hears a plaintive, funny voice. There again I note a resemblance to Tennis Court Oath tho I don't mean to hang any influential albatross around Leon's neck. Once again, I am trying to describe an effect here. With both writers, it seems like an embrace of disintegration, tho golly, I hate tagging anyone with such a dull critic phrase. One can infer something of a narrative in Leon's poems. Not stories exactly but, let us say, guarded instants. Narrative is a funny thing because, seriously, how linear can we really be? I'll tell you: not very. We hop from idea to idea, impression to impression. I wish I could hear Leon read this work, because I'm not confident that I hear the sound well. His abruptness sometimes sounds like a carefully orchestrated clatter of plates. I don't know if this is good, meaning I stumble at times with the truncation and ellipsis. My question would be: do all phrases (lines) carry all they should? It's hard to tell, but I'll admit that this is my problem. I can't speak for Leon, that is. I meant to quote some of the humourous, quirky nuggets—the breath of non sequitur—that fill this chap, but I believe I'll just cite their existence. I think more importantly I should suggest to Honoured Reader what I infer of the tracking of this work. Jon Leon distills the language and events around him. It strikes me as an energetic and exacting exercise. You can either read Boxd Transistor online or download a pdf of it here. You can print out the pdf (including cover) and staple it into a non-virtual chapbook. I say you can, because I never figured out how to print it in proper alignment so that the book would collate as it should. Not to let that detract from the work, which is itself, serious poetry. Kudos always to any way to make work easily available.

*****

Allen Bramhall has published one book, Simple Theory (Potes & Poets Press, 2002), maintains an electrifying blog called Tributary, and shares a birthday with Herman Melville, Jerry Garcia and Lt. William Clark.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:20 PM 0 comments

NOT EVEN DOGS by ERNESTO PRIEGO

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

NOT EVEN DOGS by Ernesto Priego
(Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco, 2006)

I got Not Even Dogs by Ernesto Priego, a collection of hay(na)ku. the hay(na)ku format is simple to the point of wicked simple: one word line, then 2 word, then 3 word, or turn that upside down. its value consists in how it places emphasis on each word. or put better, each word is weight bearing. Priego uses the form here exclusively as a stanza. altho the form presents a haiku-ish potential as a brief meditative measure, it also links nicely. Priego writes easily within the format. a micro/macro simultaneity occurs (sorry for that lump of a phrase), in which one reads the poem as a whole, but also sees each stanza discretely, poems within poems. one poem hangs on a sore throat (I infer). These are the first lines:

Maybe
the cactus
in your throat

Doesn't
let you
sleep at all

the poem ends with this question:

whadda
want to
say without pain.

the poem, then, presents this physical sense (or demand) of writing, or
speaking forth generally. but verses jump out singularly for me:

Rough
and dirty
in your throat

Get
in there
like a desert

The
green, black,
dusty present pain

A
white page
full of sand

(I just noticed that Ernesto capitalizes the 1st word of each stanza, which, let us say, defines porous limits). see, the verses can be read out of order, as you find them, but also narratively. I learned an emphatic attention from Robert Grenier (not to say I utilize it well, just that he provided a rich exemplar), in which the reader gives every word all chances to, um, mean something. consider all definitions, yup, peer at etymology, okay doke, but also, perhaps weirder, be prepared to see lack in black, age in page. look at all possibilities. I think Ernesto Priego possesses that attention. that he is bilingual adds a consternation and question, in the sense that he has these 2 languages, but Poetry is his mother tongue. that sounds like a floppy statement but give me a chance. Poetry is Priego's lingua franca. His language is largely ordinary and conversational. which is sneaky, because his words reveal such depth and perception. hay(na)ku's pace works perfectly with his thoughtfulness. I want to note the book design by Michelle Bautista. the central columns of the poems are offset by larger boldface repetitions of the 1st stanza, essentially performing title duty. this demarcates the poems from each other and is visually gratifying. I mean, even if my description doesn't zackly make it sound so. altogether a lovely book.

*****

Allen Bramhall has published one book, Simple Theory (Potes & Poets Press, 2002), maintains an electrifying blog called Tributary, and shares a birthday with Herman Melville, Jerry Garcia and Lt. William Clark.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:15 PM 4 comments

PACIFIC POSTMODERN by ROB WILSON

C.S. PEREZ Reviews

Pacific Postmodern by Rob Wilson
(Tinfish, 2000)

The Two Tourisms of the Pacific and the Submerged Racial Mountain

“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose [...] If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too [...] If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build […] tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand [...] free within ourselves.”
--Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”

Rob Wilson, in the first chapter of his chapbook Pacific Postmodern [Tinfish, 2000], differentiates between what he the calls the “two post-modernisms” of Pacific writing. The first post-modernism is aligned with post-colonial “identity lyrics,” while the second post-modernism is aligned with “language-centered” experimentation. In this response, I argue that these “two post-modernisms” can be read, through Wilson’s own definition of touristic desire, as the “Two Tourisms of the Pacific.”

Wilson states that tourism “depends upon the globalization-of-the-local into a marketable image with lasting appeal, with enduring charm and mysterious claims to uniqueness” [21]. In turn, he describes how “under-theorized” poets, who engage in “preserving, affirming, and expressing ‘the local’” [20], push

“poetic language towards voicing a more trenchantly situated, affiliated, or localized postmodernism. A kind of ‘local’ based poetry that wanted to align itself with forces and forms of imagined identity that were coming to be called ‘postcolonial’ [...] Such poetry becomes a means by which local/ethnic/indigenous identity [...] could protect themselves against homogenizing forces of the cultural industry.” [1-2]

Although Wilson notes the value of the “postcolonial” aesthetic, he implies that these poets contribute to the packaging and furthering of what I call the “first tourism”: a kind of travel magazine aesthetic in a duty-free paradise.

Wilson articulates his indictment of these poets as follows:

“We don’t need the marketing of ‘local’ (or local-seeming) writers whose metaphors of exotic remoteness and aesthetic charm are all too close, in language codes and protocols, to the packaging patterns of the tourist industry and the marketplace of semiotic and cultural kitsch. We don’t need more writers of place and ethnicity who seek to ‘add a tinge of cultural authenticity for marketing purposes’ and would simulate cultural specificity and the mongrel languages of place for the purposes of historical laundering and self-aggrandizement as lyric hero” [24].

It has become too bad for “local” poets but “local” writing is no longer good decolonization strategy. No longer good for what Langston Hughes, in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” describes as “interpreting the beauty” (this “interpreting” too easily becomes a package for “marketing purposes”). It is no longer good to write lyric poems about grandfather net fishing or grandmother weaving baskets from coconut fronds because these poems might make too much tourists come.

To protect against the dangers of these “local” or “local-seeming” writers, Wilson argues for a “second postmodernism,” an aesthetic that allegedly resists the touristic gaze. My argument, however, is that this “second postmodernism” becomes a “second tourism” in that its aesthetic still functions within the desire of touristic packaging. The real danger is that the Pacific writer must choose between fulfilling the expectations of the colonial “first tourism” that is dependent upon “imperialist nostalgia,” or the expectations of a neo-colonial “second tourism” that is dependent upon “borderland fetishization.”

Here is Wilson’s “advertisement” for the “second tourism” of postmodernism:

COME TO HAWAI’I!!

“...a place where the 2 postmodernisms could mingle and meet in the mongrel-magical waters of the Experimental Pacific [...!] This magical, dirty, swirling, history-laden ocean is also a fluid and multiple space for Deleuzian ‘lines of flight’ and affirmative place-imaginings; expansive ‘Oceania’ visions and multiple contestations within the North/South transnational bind [...!]; sites wherein inflows and outflows can lead to mongrel innovation and push language beyond tired colonizing dynamics of white/other; sites wherein ‘the local’ as such is never merely defeated and passively absorbed by the ever-capitalizing world-system [...!]”
[11, 25-6]

Come see the devious pacific poets who “activate the play of languages and heritages of representation as in some inter-textual and deconstructive abyss that implicitly calls into question any under-theorized, stable, or reified version of ‘identity’, ‘voice’, or ‘sovereignty’ of meaning, cultural self, nationhood and so on [!]” [1]. Come see the “post-local” poets: deviant, distanced, estranged, irreverent, and anti-lyrical! Come see the pacific artist embrace heterroglossia! creolization! the carnivalesque!

Although Wilson critiques under-theorized, local or local seeming poets for an aesthetic that he believes depends upon a “marketable image,” he doesn’t seem to realize that, in his own celebration of the postmodern predicament in the pacific (a “contact zone” of “borderland consciousness”), he ALSO markets “a marketable image with lasting appeal, with enduring charm and mysterious claims to uniqueness.” Which is to say that Wilson’s acceptance and promotion of a “mongrel-magical” aesthetic is only different from the “first tourism” in content and form (e.g. it does not globalize the local), but it still maintains the imprisoning “structures of feeling” of the touristic gaze.

Both tourisms, both expectations, are a deterritorialization. If we reject the “local” as Wilson suggests, we allow ourselves to be forced off “local” semantic and prosodic territories. On the other hand, if we reject the aesthetic “reservation” of the “post-local,” we deny our post-colonial situation, and we lose the opportunity to create variable re-locations in the revisionist potential of dislocation.

Pacific writing must revision this predicament (we don’t need an outsider telling us what we need, etc): we must think outside of the touristic gaze. Both a “local” aesthetic and a “post-local” aesthetic can be valuable decolonization strategies, as evidenced by the history and politics of the “identity poets” and the “language-centered poets.” But no touristic expectation should determine our aesthetic freedom; we must displace the framed gazes of the “Two Tourisms of the Pacific” in order to navigate or de-navigate all possible semantic and prosodic territories. This will also us to know, “free within ourselves”, that conceiving all is possible, is in itself, a possibility.

*****

Craig Perez, originally from the Pacific island of Guam, has lived in California since 1995. Currently, he is completing his MFA at the University of San Francisco. He is also an assistant fiction editor for Pleiades, and the poetry editor for Switchback Online. His work has appeared in Watchword, The Redlands Review, and Quercus. You can visit his blog at blindelephant.blogspot.com.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:10 PM 0 comments

SING ME ONE SONG OF EVOLUTION by VERNON FRAZER

MARY JO MALO Reviews

Sing Me One Song of Evolution by Vernon Frazer
(Beneath the Underground Books, Conn, 1998)

An Unchained Melody

There was nobody to compose the song Vernon Frazer demanded to hear, so eventually he wrote it himself. Thirty-three years would pass before he finally decided which instruments to use.When he emerged from beneath the underground, Frazer held the keys of jazz and poetry. That was the moment he was unchained to freely express his genius and human longing.

What irony. A product of evolution skillfully arranges language into poetry which questions evolution, the process of which Charles Darwin contemplates, "What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature." Richard Dawkins views natural selection as the blind watchmaker, blind because it doesn't see ahead, doesn't plan consequences, or have a purpose in view. There is no devil nor designer, intelligent or otherwise; and as for the metaphorical watch, let's simply say it adjusts and repairs itself until time runs out.

Sing Me One Song of Evolution is not merely an education about Tourette Syndrome, nor an argument for adaptation and survival through creative writing. It's an exposition on reciprocal altruism. Frazer's signature existential phenomenology of alterity and existence/essence is obvious. This collection of poems is also not a call to prayer nor qualifies as victim genre. It is a holy rant sanctified by the tears of the reader. I pause and reflect after each poem, and immersed in anger and sorrow, I read on. The melody and counterpoint are woven throughout his choice volcanic utterances; between the warp of his lines; at the unwelcome margins of his loom; and in the blessed relief of its empty spaces.

The book begins gently, quietly as Frazer relates to the characters in "The Boy With Green Hair." I'm reminded of Dylan Thomas' understanding of The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees, Is my destroyer -and- Time held me green and dying, Though I sang in my chains like the sea. Some poets succumb to the sorrow, yet others fight on toward another destiny.

My earliest memory,
at three: crying after this movie
because I wanted green hair . . .

transformed my flicker of memory
into some small foreshadowing of destiny . . .

an afterthought wishing for
an Uncle Charlie while the kids
in school tore at the aura
my head fluttered and jerked . . .

(Please note that most poetry excerpts are not in Frazer's original format.)

Slowly and steadily, the anger and sarcasm simmer in the title poem, "Sing Me One Song of Evolution." It's the story of an Enrico Fermi (the Eagles) High School student, ostracized then punished, and Frazer's own memories:

For giving the unforgiving
Eagle the bird
Andy pays for his words

with a two-day suspension . . .

"He's always wanted to fit in, always
tried & found himself outside,"
I read his mother said to the press

Ah, yes! Thirty years of reflection
past my anguished introspection
& I still can't detect a change

but that the torturers
have turned teachers
& their kids wear their genes

The snarling ensues as he reflects on "The Sane, Nice People and An Afternoon Break":

. . . The sane

try their balanced
lives to balance

the rage
with which we eat
our skins.

Their
condescending kindness

is the madness
we measure with
our attacks . . .

then

the smattering
that starts them chattering so
brightly slights

my appetite
how unsightly my
hunger

seems to them.
I'm surly? Surely.
I'm not

like nice people

I'm strange to them
for wanting and finding them
wanting

for not wanting
to test the festering flesh
a life grip

beyond
the modest morsels they claim for themselves
like nice people

as they block
the way to my hunger . . .

and the nearly unbearable bring-your-kids-to-work day:

All morning the assholes
trotted in their kids. The office
oozed with oohs, ahs

& accolades just
for breeding. I snarled
The fools! Their fertile

clichés birthed from
barren lives make me puke . . .

I break away
when I can. Like today
when I watched

a schoolgirl hand
a dandelion to her crossing guard
& broke a grin.

Humor and anger fuel the outrageous "Machine-Made Madness At the Self-Service Pump" as he battles the faux communicator known as the computerized gas pump. This mock-u-mentary is hilarious stock dialogue also found in Frazer's works of fiction.

Few of us can do the "Demon Dance" like one who battles both a neurological disorder and Hodgkin’s Disease, who descends into chemo-hell and screams out jazz rhythms of the legendary John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. This poem must be seen and heard entirely to grasp the pain it depicts.

Brief, temporary relief is in the poignant tale of "The Secret Life of Blondie L'amour."

Frazer’s joyful experience with jazz shapes the poem, "In Memory of John Coltrane, 1926-1967" with the way he spoke to the ears at the edge of seeing, the golden sound soaring:

You have to hear
apocalypse
before you can know it

you have to see
apocalypse
before you can show it

before you can go
there
where

sound becomes light
& night a roaring glow
of peaceful thunder

"Guidelines for Going Postal over Guidelines at the Post Office" rants about guidelines for poetry contests and federal aviation security. Funny when he wrote it, but now alarming because it lands you in prison. Forget the psych-ward of a hospital.

"Tourettic Possession Rant/Dance" is the central movement of the book. This, "Discoveries of the Damned" and "Ranting in the Mirror" (an interview/dialogue with the personified syndrome, variously disguised) which comprise the last half of the book and are the best poems. He informs us that he "uses the unique construction of people with Tourette Syndrome that documents the experience and uses structures rooted in the Tourettic mind to express the experience of living in isolation. Several poems offer biting commentaries on the injustices inflicted on people with Tourette. Others offer light-hearted glimpses of Tourettic mental and social lapses. Many poems in this collection use Tourettic symptoms such as echolalia an coprolalia as expressive devices. Several jazz poems employ repetitive Tourettic phrasing the way a jazz musician uses repetition to structure a solo's theme and variations." To appreciate how Frazer accomplishes this, you must see these poems.

I AM THE DANCE OF MY SELF

the biochemical dance, neurons
entrancing my brain, rapture captured
in the Tourettic spin
serotonin & dopamine whirling

CHEMICAL ELECTRICITY !

I AM THE DANCE OF MY
supercharged cells, swelling synapses
motion & emotion merging,
urging the breakthrough to

THE PRIMAL LINK
_____________________

SURGING
_____________________

mind/body/instinct

SURGING

beyond the containment
of

SELF.

I AM THE DANCE OF
barriers breaking
-sound/speed/light-
through/with/against
. . .

POSSESSED

not by demons
but by its spin.
Some would call my energy sinful
& punish me for eclipsing
_________________________

DAY WITH NIGHT
. . .

They say the bastards burned us at the stake
as witches (but just hung us in Salem). We know
they shun us, now as then, for shunning the proprieties
of the justly organized & God-fearing societies

from which they exclude us.
We intrude, ticcing lips sneering.
throats clearing to challenge
the verities given

by the pre-Ordained
the Forgiven, for giving
Judgement to

the Unforgiven,
our faces bright
with the inner

light of possession.
Their faces bright with the inner
light of possession

"Discoveries of the Damned:" asks if he (or we) are the sum of our parts. Should anyone be medicated against their better judgment, only to become pleasant, slow and numb?

I AM THE SUM
that added himself up in isolation
that survived situations of gratuitous cruelty
in the mysterious forest
of people, schools, playgrounds & jobs
that is more than the night of my mind.
in the light of my mind, if doctors looked, they would see
the cruelty even they inflict on me
when their rigorous analysis dismisses my humanity
as I try to explain how I came to the way

I AM, THE SUM OF

. . .

Disinhibition, with its raw fight or flight, spontaneous utterances, and involuntary movements have been speculated as a missing link in human evolution. Disinhibition is also how profound acts of love begin. Vernon Frazer's poetry is the careful and voluntary craft of his staying and fighting. This is the hero's quest, a monomyth begun with necessity and ending when the hero emerges with something of great value for the community of the other wounded. Sing Me One Song of Evolution takes me uncomfortably deeper inside myself and brings me out again with an inspired appreciation of our unique gifts for others. But it is also an important creative link to his newest works: Avenue Noir, Holiday Idylling, and IMPROVISATIONS.

Once desperate and driven, he now can create the song of his life through his work and vice-versa. It may have taken millions of years to create the singularity known as Vernon Frazer, but it was worth it. If only more would "write" for each another such honest "poems" as we find in this collection, we will have traveled to the end of our present trajectory, this level of evolution -- communication with Other. He never had the luxury of being inauthentic, and he certainly knew that others would act in bad faith. Simone de Beauvoir said that relationship dynamics require the ethics of ambiguity, a struggle of the immanent with the transcendent.

And so nearly like the tides, when my emotion ebbs, or when I'm exceptionally cynical or reclusive, I return and hear his melody. I need its intimate honesty and passion. It's important to remember that we're not alone in this adventure; or that perhaps we are, but we have the privilege of engagement from time to time.

**********

Vernon Frazer can be contacted directly at: frazerv@bellsouth.net. Jazz/ poetry readings of The Sane, Nice People, and Demon Dance are available on CD.

*****

Mary Jo Malo describes herself as a continuing undergrad in the School of Hard Knocks. In a former life she worked as a sales, marketing, and advertising coordinator for a manufacturer of large electrical power apparatus. In 1993 she was disabled in an auto accident in the Rocky Mts. of Colorado. Never fully recovered and forced into early retirement, she’s had abundant time to pursue her favorite poetry and philosophy, cosmology and evolution. These days as novice to modern poetics, she’s been delighted to discover the Beat and post-Beat writers, among many others. She is host and moderator of the 'new and improved' Company of Poets, a poetics mailing list/discussion group. You can contact her directly at mary@unlikelystories.org to subscribe.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:01 PM 0 comments

PIECES OF THE SKY by GREG FUCHS

PHIL PRIMEAU Reviews

Pieces of the Sky by Greg Fuchs
(Dusie, 2006)

Pretty Little Things: The Poems of Greg Fuchs

Without a doubt, Pieces of the Sky is one of the smallest chaps you'll read this year. In fact, with only half a dozen poems contained in the pocket-size booklet (6 pages), it may well be the smallest chap you'll ever read.

But, like so many other wonderful things in life and literature, lack of stature is compensated for by fullness of content. Greg Fuchs' poetry is vivid and sly. His work is powerful and, as a certain title confirms, in the "American grain." Written with a clear sense of modesty and prudence, the work immediately brings to mind the Black Mountain School. Fuchs has a sharp eye for icons and archetypes from our collective past; his poems are full of wind, water, Indians, and dusty plains. Talk of "dreams and destiny" cannot help but bring to mind the early roots of a pioneer nation.

But to portray the mini-chap as a collection of nature poems (puke) would be entirely unfair. While Fuchs' meditations on the land and its history are pretty little things, he also knows what's up here and now. He does culture with mentions of Chuck Taylors, suburbs, and your aunt's pearls. He even tackles the state of foreign affairs. I mean, the state of human affairs. Take, for example, "The New Century Haiku", a poem that can be read in half a breath but lingers long after by virtue of its passion and idealism: "Come all ye/ this is your orange/ revolution/ be in the streets." While I think that he's a bit off (it's not time to occupy the streets, it's time to build new ones -- to be new ones), his optimistic allusion to the bloodless "revolution" in Ukraine is certainly timely and sweet.

This poetry is honest. It is readable and relevant. And while the verse is sometimes a bit too simple (there's a thin line between modest and meager), Pieces of the Sky is more than worth the five minutes it takes to finish from front to back. I look forward to reading a fuller gathering of Fuchs' work in the future.

Until then, suck on a few exceptional lines from "Atlanta", my favorite poem from Pieces: "We got high on whippets/ with the novelist's son/ & fell out of love."

*****

Phil Primeau is a writer from Rhode Island. His essays and poetry have been published in a number of online venues and print journals. He is operates PERSISTENCIA and edits Dirt, a 'zine of minimalist poetry and poetics. He can be contacted via e-mail at phil.primeau@gmail.com.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:55 PM 0 comments

EROSION'S PULL by MAUREEN OWEN

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

EROSION’S PULL by Maureen Owen
(Coffee House, 2006)

Not long ago we were listening to some Black Uhuru. I turned to Sam and said, “I should have been a reggae bass player.” “Dad,” he sighed, “everybody says ‘I should have been a reggae bass player.’” A few months later I finished Pope’s Iliad. I said to Alan (poet, publisher, editor, friend), “That may have been the greatest thing I’ve ever read. Why can’t I do that?” He sighed and said, “Sorry, John; that song’s over.” So, sigh for me, too, dear reader, because I’m sharing right up front a 3rd impossibility: I want to have written the poems of Maureen Owen. In every poem in EROSION’S PULL there’s something that makes me say, “so this is why poetry”. Sometimes it’s a line, sometimes it’s a line break, sometimes it’s a “verse paragraph”, sometimes it’s the whole magilla … As Bessie said of Spike Jones in The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek”, “I love to hear him talk.” I love to hear Maureen Owen. (Yes, I know I’m reading, but I almost always hear voices when I read …) So, if you’re looking for critique, look somewhere else.

All my reasons I want to have been the person who wrote these poems are old-fashioned. Wisdom. Beauty. Humor. Love. Sorrow. Compassion. Writ large, the “so this is what it’s like to be human.” Not that the poems are old-fashioned. I’ll go so far as to say they transcend fashion. I’m reminded of Philip Whalen, in the sense that Whalen went his own way, regardless of what anyone else might be doing. And somehow left the rest of us to play catch-up (there’s a lesson in that). It’s 5 in the morning, I’m not about to wake Kathy by rummaging for sources, but I remember Ted Berrigan saying something like, “Whalen? Whatever he does, do it, too.” Not that TB ever sounded like PW, and not like anyone should try to sound like Maureen Owen, but …

Let’s get to specifics. First, the titles alone are fantastic, maybe there are other titles like them, but if so, won’t someone point ‘em out? Poems in themselves, many sprawl all over the page. Here’s an attempt at some transcriptions, taken almost (yeah, right) at random:

flaxstraw broom         on a long handle               or
                                             perles Among hogges

That’s one. Here’s another:

darkness sprang the swans         from the shellacked pond

or
blue
cerulean
a kind of plum         blue gum
veins through skin
steel at twilight         think milk
vapor         over a soggy ground


breasts in motion in Matisse’s Goldfish and Sculpture

Here’s a third (and a good segue into the next aspect of her poems I want to talk about):

the gods are peeling off the temple walls
or        a guide is usually someone who’s        done this before

This poem is “for my mom”. Not “For My Mother”: “for my mom”. Owen’s poems are written in Real American Language. They’re not dumbed down (in fact I have to admit some of the time I don’t have a clue what she’s talking about); they’re not pumped up. No supposedly “poetic” language, which is often the result of the poet thinking she/he has to sound smarter/more educated/more knowledgeable than she/he really is. Of course, some might note there’s no such thing as the Real American Language. And I’d have to say right, of course, but I didn’t say that. Owen’s poems are written in a language I recognize from conversations overheard while standing in line at Some Crust waiting for my tea, while taking questions at the reference desk, while waiting for BART in Oakland, while walking around upper east side NYC, etc. If I had to give a name to her dialect I’d say it was something like post-Don Allen’s New American Poetry, with a post-beat post-New York School inflection. That’s amazingly crude. And it’s not as if she bailed out on growth and change 40 years ago. I’m guessing she’s well up on everything that’s happened in and to during her lifetime. And I believe she has at least one child: I’m guessing she’s listened to their punk skater gangsta goth nerd friends, too.

Let’s look at her instead of me; I’m bored with fumbling for descriptions. Here’s one of the most straightforward poems in the book. It’s also practically perfect in every way. [Note: in the book, line 4 breaks (or wraps) at the “the” before “sailors”):

O over every life-sized drought
               or a solid interval between crenels on a battlemented parapet
                              or                just say “no”

I can’t help you
I didn’t get up this morning
I didn’t pay my taxes on time
I didn’t return the damn video to the damn video store pick you up at the train station rescue the sailors trapped in the sunken sub
you can’t count on me
I won’t be there for you         I’m not
myself         I won’t drop in just to say Hi         When you
need a friend         forget it         don’t look over here a shoulder to cry
on that won’t be me, toots,         through thick & thin         Don’t
hold your breath         It isn’t me on that ringing phone         Do you have a problem?
I won’t be solving it

I particularly like the “rescue the sailors trapped in the sunken sub”. Where did that come from? From Owens’s equivalent of the bodhisattva vow: the desire to alleviate suffering wherever and whenever we hear of it. But every now and then we wake up and say, sometimes sadly, sometimes not, today I won’t be saving the world. Best of luck, all.

There are several other poems as straightforward as this. But many take twists and turns that are rather mysterious. Let’s take a look at the first verse paragraph of

They can’t handle the day shift         or
                              vespertinal jockeys

she was thinking        “I could just spit”
I could get falling down substance abused
I could burn myself with a cigarette I
could smoke        a cigarette        I could disguise myself
as mayhem        I could turn on the dancers        I
could stomp out the bluffs where they press
their lips together        & stare at the fat moon from
their snotty embrace        O half-baked idea!
rising a thousand years out of chalk dust        &
pleated yellow light        I could search for the
same weather        compare time to Paradise
a face in the window        patient & eager
as the beloved appears        to hit the road
temperature & the economy        the walls of state

I get as far as “mayhem”, thinking this is perfect, this is pure genius. “I could get falling down substance abused.” Yes. And yes, in 2006, smoking a cigarette is at least as self-destructive as burning oneself with one. But “I could turn on the dancers”, etc? What dancers? Where are we? Wild guess: maybe she’s alone somewhere “on the bluffs”, a little envious of those in view in the moonlight with their “significant others.” Of course, it doesn’t really matter; the language sings us through uncertainty, something language has been doing for the last thousand years; the point is, this poem is making connections on a less “public” level than the one I quoted above.

And in some poems, the connections (or leaps) between lines are even more personal or abstruse. But I never feel far away from the heart and soul of a living breathing human (and, yes, I know, there are lots of other things poems can do, many of them of great interest and value, but this is my review, write your own if you want to emphasize other aspects; this is what I value most … it’s what I’ve valued most for 35 years … it’s likely what I’ll value most halfway through my cremation …).

In a recent blog our editor noted that several reviewers in issue number 2 engaged with back cover blurbistas. I think the blurbs on the back of this book are great. Lazy bastard that I am, I’ll quote, and when you see who wrote them, you’ll say, “Who better to steal from?” Bernadette Mayer: “… Maureen Owen epitomizes … being in 67 places at one time …”; Susan Howe: “ … words and lines map, unmap, and revamp our everyday post-contemporary geographies …”; Cecilia Vicuña: “A quest for self-knowledge so deep it hurts with beauty.” Gorgeous as these quotes are, I will not give the blurbistas the last word. That I reserve for myself. First, I will give you the end of “the gods are peeling off the temple walls”, the poem for her mom:

…. Where is the home we
left behind        
& where        are our pajamas
the red ones with the blue cowgirls        twirling their lassos over their heads        as
they ride their buckskins at full gallop        they are you in the wild barebacked days
with your hair so long and black        you & your wild girlband on horseback
the selves of our own history
have forgiven each other

“The selves of our own history / have forgiven each other.” I want to have written that. I want to be able to have written that. As a poet and as a person. But I’m just me. Owen has blessed us all. I won’t take that back. She’s blessed us all. This is a wonderful book. I’m glad to have this chance to say thank you. “The selves of our own history / have forgiven each other.” Would that it were more often so. Donald Hall has just been made poet laureate. He’s a good guy and a pretty decent poet. But it won’t be the world I want to live in til they offer the job to Maureen Owen.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is humanities bibliographer for the libraries of the the University of California, Riverside. That means he buys stuff with taxpayer money (better books than bombs, eh?). He has authored half a dozen chapbooks, most recently with Bamboo Books, Culver City, CA, has published recently in BIG BRIDGE, LITTER and POETRY NOTTINGHAM, and is eagerly awaiting the print appearance of his first long work, TRAVELS TO CAPITALS, which has been accepted for publication. His current project is called ZHILI BYLI, which, when complete, will consist of 100 parts; he's currently up to part 40.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:50 PM 1 comments

EROSION'S PULL by MAUREEN OWENS

J. CSIDA Reviews

EROSION’S PULL by Maureen Owen
(Coffee House Press, 2006)

"When a great adventure's offered, you don't refuse it." That was a quote from Maureen Owen's masterful book AE (Vortex Editions, 1984). The statement is Amelia Earhart's, but it could serve as Owen's own motto; the inscription on her homemade coat of arms; her text tattoo.

She was raised as a Minnesota farm girl, and then a California race track kid. High school and college, then on to Japan to study Zen and give birth to two sons. Then writing, editing, and publishing books in New York City, balanced with country life in Guilford, Connecticut. She returned to Manhattan to help run the St. Marks Poetry Project and was living in the Twin Towers' neighborhood when two 747s shook her world on 9/11. She now resides in Denver, works for a publishing company, and teaches at Naropa University. If she was an athlete, she'd be an Olympic Heptathlon contender.

With the publication of Erosion's Pull, her tenth book, the reader feels fully the author's exuberance in the freedom of her work. The poems go where they will, each taking the shape of its individual spirit -- words often separated by the variable spaces of the poet's thought-breath. The book commences:

I think of Black
Beauty
when he was
pulling a cab

standing
streetside
under a lamppost
his dark harness gathering flakes
a jet horse becoming white                powder

a dark horse
disappearing

If Maureen Owen was ever a "derivative" poet, any evidence of that was long gone when I first heard her read in the 1970s. Nevertheless, Owen could, at that time, be considered one of the "St. Mark's Poets" -- due to her association with the Poetry Project that headquartered (and still does) at the Lower East Side church. But the St. Mark's gang spoke with many voices -- almost a Babel of tongues. The natural and immediate inheritance of the young St. Markers would, of course, be the work of the Beats. Ginsberg and Corso were part of the action until their deaths -- and their unbuttoned lives and openness to experience were attractive to the younger poets (this was not a group looking to get published in The New Yorker or Antaeus). Still, the young poets had to find their own way and make it new.

And, of course, the Great-Grandfather of the Beats was Whitman: expansive; celebratory, sexually candid and unembarrassed -- both connected and removed by a century from the St. Mark's world of the Civil and Gay Rights movements, Vietnam, and the triple assassinations.

But there is a figure in American letters who truly influenced the St. Mark's poets -- consciously, unconsciously, or just osmotically -- And this was the Doctor from Paterson, William Carlos Williams. I say this because Williams threw down the gauntlet long before Maureen or Bob Holman or Anne Waldman or Janet Hamill were born. Long, long ago Dr. Williams challenged the pervasive and (to him) sinister influence of the British tradition and its principal metric, the Iambic Pentameter. In its place, he put forth his notion of the Variable Foot (VF) -- a metric flowing from the natural and manifold cadences of American speech. In Williams' own work the VF worked wonderfully. Ginsberg and Paul Blackburn and even the Hartford mandarin Wallace Stevens hailed his achievements. But his way was not that of the Beats. For all their Modernism, they couldn't shake Shakespeare, Shelley, the Troubadours, or the miracle of French Symbolism out of their poesy.

So here I come back to Maureen. With no waving of the Stars and Stripes or any politician's patriotic gore stuck in her verse, there is no more American writer than the cosmopolite Ms. Owen. Before leaving Williams though, I want to quote one of his beauties, "Danse Russe." The poem describes the poet alone and active in a room while his wife and child and housekeeper are fast asleep in the early morning. In singular privacy, the Doctor dances naked before a mirror and sings softly to himself. The poem concludes:

If I admire my arms, my face
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades

Who shall say I am not
The happy genius of my household?

Now it's none of my business if Owen indulged herself in a similar way while the husband and kids were in dreamland, but I'm lucky enough to know from our acquaintance over the years, that she is indeed the once and future happy genius of her household. Forget about poetic theory, it's that personal quality that links her with Williams in the Pantheon of American poets. Here's a quote from Owen's wonderful book Zombie Notes (SUN/1985). The poem is "Winter is so punk". The lines unforgettable:

Remember when the word moonlight meant romance &
now it just means holding down two jobs

That is so Mo. The truly indefatigable, hard workin' woman who writes deathless verse between day and night jobs and alchemizes stress into laughter. Who walks on the dark side and comes out smiling.

On Susan Howe's WBAI radio show in the 70's, the interviewer asks Owen about being a poet while raising children on her own. A close paraphrase of the answer goes like this: "Oh the kids are great! Just when you're alone in the bedroom -- sitting there in despair and thinking about committing suicide, suddenly someone bursts in and shouts "WHAT'S FOR DINNER !?" This says much about Owen's own artistic persona. The Anti-Poete Maudit. Not that there's anything wrong about being Baudelaire or Verlaine, But they didn't have to get the macaroni and cheese on the table. Perhaps that lack of the necessary is what was at the root of their discontents.

Between then and now, Maureen has kept at it like the Green Lantern flying through time. Hearts in Space in 1980. Her great and very beautiful book on Amelia Earhart, AE in 1984, Zombie Notes in '85, Imaginary Income in '92, Untapped Maps in '93, American Rush in '98, and now the triumph of Erosion's Pull (with its dazzling cover painting by Yvonne Jacquette).

In Erosion's Pull, Owen truly is at the top of her game. All her imagination's magic is at her command. She can wax lyrical, switch rhythms on a dime, and rock and roll all night. The Waltz, the Lindy Hop, did you say the Watusi? -- all one to her. After 87 pages of the best roller coaster ride since the Cyclone, the poem "After W.C.W" appears on 88. It's a great riff on Williams "This is Just to Say". The confession of a household plum thief who asks absolution with the final four lines:

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Owen's update reprises regret over her own kitchen raid but takes her poem to spiritual and astronomic places while admitting (cheerfully) to domestic misdemeanors. The second stanza begins:

Forgive me Excuse me
               I drank the rest of the champagne
it was still bubbly

seven well wrought lines later Owen says:

I had to light a candle to
the virgin in her prime
               by now she was to me like
a suspect in a mystery

                              catching atoms

from the solar wind a treasured smidgen of the sun

                                             but
never mind
the champagne was cold
& full of tiny spheres

*****

J. Csida is a writer of both prose and poetry who works for the Goshen Public Library and Historical Society. He resides in the Hudson Valley region of New York State with his wife, the poet Janet Hamill.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:45 PM 1 comments

WHERE X MARKS THE SPOT by BILL ZAVATSKY

ANDREW MCCARRON Reviews

Where X Marks The Spot by Bill Zavatsky
(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, 2006)

“Another Chance In the Light”

In the preface of the fourteenth century mystical treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous author cautions readers not to continue unless adequately prepared to face the mysteries of heaven. The same can be said for Bill Zavatsky’s new collection of poems, Where X Marks the Spot, although we must replace ‘mysteries of heaven’ with ‘realities of earth’. In the tradition of Thomas Hardy’s Winter Words, and Wallace Stevens’ The Rock, Zavatsky’s new collection is mature in its ability to express complex, often contradictory emotions in straightforward language. His poems are the resonances of childhood, young adulthood, romance, marriage, divorce, and impending old age in the heart of a man who refuses to give in to the cancers of self-hatred and misanthropy. Unlike much modern poetry, Zavatsky’s work is never guilty of cultivating the opaque. It therefore distinguishes itself from a good deal of what has emerged from the New York School, a movement he was associated with during the years he ran the small press SUN and SUN magazine, and while a student of Kenneth Koch’s in the early 1970’s.

Zavatsky grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut and attended local schools before entering Columbia University, where he received B.A. and M.F.A. degrees. He has published two previous collections of poetry, Theories of Rain and Other Poems and For Steve Royal and Other Poems. He has also worked as a jazz pianist (and incidentally was a good friend of the late jazz pianist Bill Evans), a journalist (with articles in The New York Times Book Review and Rolling Stone) and as a translator, translating Valery Larbaud, Robert Desnos, and André Breton. Since 1985, he has been teaching English at Trinity School in Manhattan, where he continues to inspire students with an energizing mixture of humor and erudition.

Zavatsky is a confessional poet, but not a facile one He uses his own life as a site through which to celebrate and mourn experiences most of us share, whether we choose to talk about them or not. Take, for example, the following lines from the title poem “Where X Marks the Spot”,

               Then we arrived at the place
where, afterwards, I would never see you again,
at the parking lot near Times Square.
There I marked the sidewalk with X’s
visible only to me: “At this place
I was lost again,” they’d say to me
when I walked there in the future.
“Dig here and find what’s left of me,
or what I left behind, where X marks the spot.”

In these lines, the hopes we affix to other people, and the losses we incur upon their exits from our lives, are engrafted into a location (a parking lot) that forever resonates with the content of both emotions. We have all been to this parking lot, and must confront the realities of who we were should we return. The intelligence of the poem does not end here, however. Zavatsky tells a story of unrequited desire that simultaneously frames the hopeful incipience he experienced on the date, “I thought that I had not been / this happy in a long time with a woman / and was ready to become even more happy…” against the consciousness of its devastating outcome: “not knowing what you were soon to say to me / as we dined…”. Such juxtapositions reflect poems, in the words of John Yau (who recently reviewed this collection with the highest acclaim!), “…not made up of surface gestures. They are layered and sinuous, the direction of the narrative thrust turning, twisting, and jumping in ways that catches us up”. Yau goes on to explain how the influences of Surrealism, Futurism, and Cubism – and an adept ear for jazz – keep the poems from collapsing into the limited, solipsistic “I” that dominates much confessional poetry from the American twentieth century. Behind Zavatsky’s lucid narrative streams are intricate matrices of music, rhyme, juxtaposition, free association, and wordplay. His poems are modern without being flashy, sensational, or purposefully unintelligible.

I don’t like it one bit
when I hold you like that
and you hold me
and then go away

dropping kisses, those previews
of coming attractions
that I never get to see

kisses fallen to the pavement
like broken pairs of lips
I’m still trying to put together…

Personally, I am most impressed by Zavatsky’s emotional range. He is able to shift from objective contentment to subjective terror, from harlequinesque hilarity to undiluted devastation in the space of a single poem. And somehow, he is consistently able to find his way back to a smile, even if more Mona Lisa’s than Timothy Leary’s. In the poem “Not Me Any More”, students discover his first book of poems in the school library, on the jacket of which is a picture of him as a young man in the early 1970’s,

               They can’t believe that the old face
they’ve seen all year, the face that has yapped
at them, frowned, laughed madly, grown pas-
-sionate about Whitman or Williams, that this
worn-out face was once framed by golden hair that
reached to its shoulders. I laugh along with
them, It is pretty funny, after all, when the day
comes when you don’t look like yourself any more!

After a journey through Zavatsky’s world of strength and pain, humiliation and humor, the reader is left with the heartwrenching notion that his (or our) love for life increases in direct proportion to how deeply it wounds. Life’s wounds, and the specter of mortality, whether couched in humor or not, haunt Zavatsky’s book in a way that intensifies his unflappable commitment to “another chance in the light”. Where X Marks The Spot is a comforting, entertaining, and heartbreaking book that returns poetry to the art of direct expression without losing an ounce of sophistication or musicality. It should be read and reread for years to come!

*****

Andrew McCarron was born and raised in the Hudson River Valley. He was educated at Bard College and Harvard Divinity School and currently lives and works in Manhattan, where he teaches Religion at Trinity School and is enrolled in a doctoral program in Psychology at the City University of New York. He is also a poet and has published work in the Colorado Review, the Hudson Review, Octopus Magazine, and Hanging Loose Magazine.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:35 PM 0 comments

SLIP by CHRISTOPHER STACKHOUSE

EILEEN TABIOS reviews

Slip by Christopher Stackhouse
(Corollary Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2005)

In Slip, Christopher Stackhouse offers poems that, together, also offer a poetics: an aesthetics of slippage:

as a mark is made it becomes an image
as you make a mark you become the image
of an image making a mark
—from “Mark”

As the excerpt from “Mark” shows, Slip implies that how-to-write-well standard: don’t tell; show. What’s deft in this collection is how Stackhouse tells by showing the slipperiness of words. Or as the poem “Arthur Danto at the Guggenheim Lecture Notes, November 11, 2003”, quotes art critic Arthur Danto:

I think things that look alike almost never mean the same thing in art

A slip can occur paradoxically because you look closely at something. You peer. Eyes narrow. But (at least) two alternate paths result: you get more closely at the truth of targeted vision, or you miss the universe for the leaf.

Still, all visions require the attempt, and the matter may be one of allowing and dealing with that paradoxical demand of seeing clearly: uncertainty. One needs clear light to see clearly, but as the poem “Intensive” articulates, " brightness shifts". For me, the “shift” relates partly to subjectivity. What is learned depends on subjective factors. Thus, the poem is dubious that knowing "bests forgetting"—not because knowing does not best forgetting but because knowing is not the same as correctly assessing.

The charm of this collection is how it doesn’t slip into a feeling of helplessness over the constant need to consider/reconsider. There is redemption from constant questioning and reconsideration of answers. The redemption is form:

Understand form and make due with form
—Untitled

What better form to manifest Slip’s search than note-taking, including quoting others? Slip’s persona is not resting on a (artificially) sure footing, so why rely only on offering words written by its author? Here, to quote is to allow for not (yet) having answers—thus, the search.

That the fragments, jagged lines and breaks that crop up in note-taking is simply form manifesting content may be seen, too, in these lines:

the references in the painting hinting and by virtue extolling the elegance in the rough
—Extractions: From Poet to Draftsman

That’s right: “rough”-ness as form. This certainly can be (mis-)judged as sloppy writing. Stackhouse winks at such narrow readings with this two-stanza section from “Extractions…” where the second stanza can be seen as what would be more conventionally (through line-breaks) be considered a poem. That is, in addition to a reading of this section as the second stanza offering an emphasis on the first stanza’s points, the second stanza also offers how the poet need not be “rough” as in prosey.

I have been thinking increasingly about what you were saying with regard
to Richter, intimacy and the public address/space/exchange that paintings foster,

intimacy
public address
space
the exchange paintings foster

The attention to form is also visible through the use of quotes missing the ending quotation marks--before one reads/interprets the phrase, one already is reminded that the phrase itself may be incomplete, thus, open-ended:

“throwing darts
“the freeze
“preeminent thinker here’s a dart
“let’s toss off a few
“unlike me you are not restless
“how context apologizes for where aestheics fail
“living your life is killing yourself slowly

“the central freeze
“the cultural freeze
-- from “Arthur Danto at the Guggenheim Lecture Notes, November 11, 2003”

It occurred to me only in my fifth or so read of these lines that perhaps the lack of the ending quotation marks may not be due to the rationale I inferred. The lines, for example, may be from the same ongoing quote, thus perhaps obviating, in Stackhouse’s view, the need to put ending quote marks at the end of the lines. Then I second-guessed myself -- reconsidered -- for, why then, would the last line in the above excerpt still be lacking the closing quotation mark:

“the cultural freeze

So I’ll stick with my original read. And this attention to form heightens resonance through depicting the unknown (perhaps unknowable). It heightens impact because, after all, can the unknown be articulated, let alone be quoted?

But the form is not just narrated but also visually presented. There seems something a tad unnerving -- it makes one pause in the reading, anyway -- about expecting but not seeing that ending quotation mark. Such a small gesture, but with such a meaningful impact.

The form of consideration…and reconsideration. And the inevitable slip(s).

It's even okay that there's a weak poem in the collection. The matter is one of the slip from the standpoint of the overall collection -- there should be a flaw. I refer to the poem “Untitled for John Cage.” But I consider this a weak poem because it leaves me with a sense of déjà vu that makes me think the poem a bit banal. But banality is subjective -- if a certain reader had never read Cage's words, this poem could impress and linger more than it does for me whose shelves contain many Cage books. This, too, attests to the slipperiness of words -- how they obviously can signify and mean different things to different folks.

Thus, in “Extractions, the words:

the reading will be metaphorical or descriptive (this makes one look, this looks
like), but not so easily defining or denotative (this is).

“Extraction…,” like other poems in Slip, makes the reader move in (makes the reader converse back at/with the poem), as with a viewer moving closer to a painting to peruse a detail. This is exemplified with this excerpt that begins with an all-capitalized line, effective for suggesting a pause, deep breath, and then re-starting a (new) reading even when one is already in the middle of an existing reading -- as if the all-capitalized line is also a title of a different poem while still serving to continue an existing poem:

A DIRECTED INTERJECTION BEGINNING BELOW

what the surface connotes
causing consternation from the tension of the painter’s withholding
provost, the drama of withholding, controller, liberal
discipline and ascetic practice

the references in the painting binding and by virtue extolling the
elegance in the rough.
Extra Dry or slippery bodily emissions
emboldened, gesture filled and minutia magnified and made grand
by apposition juxtapositions. Holy, wholly hole. whole.

grade, scale, perception, flatness
the deeply felt versus the platitudinal
approach to art: he goes in through the door of his pedestrian day and finds valor in the bright valleys of his
awareness, his presence among the lint, the dust, the dirt, the air, the spinning axis of earth, the buzz, gravity

what can/will one extract from the painting
what moral value is considered, can painting alone impart moral values
can it change perceptions of ….. opposites, making them like --

at the brink of rendering someone else’s version of sameness turn
then find one of the many questions, ode to savoring the unction

directional, contrapuntal, siphoning from the cacophony
the harmonious tension a deux, surface, hand--

actually
how daring is clinical faithlessness?

Lastly, that form enables content is obvious in the physicality of the chapbook through which Slip is published:

--at 5” X 6”, the scale depicts intimacy (as may occur in prolonged viewing/reading/consideration)

--covers in silver, a color that shimmers and the beauty of a shimmer is how it manifests the illusion

--blue lines: 2 thin parallel lines slanted beneath, and subverts, a thicker, straight blue line

The above three elements also manifest a slip. As when you peer at a distant horizon, how that same horizon moves, how it temporarily disappears depending on how the sunrays glimmer and play with your eye…

…and I.

Make that : “I

An open-ended “’I” since our views are subject to change as much as our identities.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS her dogs who often lie under a poker game here. Her latest poetry collection is THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I whose 2006 sales proceeds will be donated to SAVE DARFUR.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:25 PM 0 comments

SIX CHAPS by BALLARD, THIBODEAUX, OPSTEDAL, GREENSTREET, HELD & BIANCHI

IVY ALVAREZ Reviews

Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript by Micah Ballard

Last We Spoke by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

9th & Ocean by Kevin Opstedal

Learning the Language by Kate Greenstreet

Grounded by George Held

American Master by Raymond L Bianchi


++++++++++++++++++

Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript, Micah Ballard
(Snag Press, 2004)

Micah Ballard’s Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript is an ambitious work the enjoyment of which derives in no small part from its aesthetic presentation as an object of beauty. The thick, deep-blue French-fold outer cover, the rubric capitals of Gothic script that start each section of the ten-part poem, the monochrome film still for the inner cover, the poems printed on creamy paper—such attention to detail in creating this chapbook is a satisfying manifestation of visual art’s engagement with poetry.

Comprised of highly rhythmic quatrains, the long poem begins:

                               That
being haunted by two hanged men
—are there more, have devils gouged
out our eyes sealed them in jars

rolling on the floor. Whatever the case
I will give you all my experiences now
in the name of the Countess who orders
me to tell my story regardless of the guests…
(‘I’)

Ballard’s language alludes to a more heroic and romantic time, a time of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Alexander Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, even the fictional storyteller Scheherazade’s The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. After such vivid imagery and intrigue, the promise of a cracking story of high adventure dissipates and one’s attention directed elsewhere. The language changes, the goal is altered and the modern world filters in. The new goal is this poem’s puzzle needs to be solved and a certain knowingness begins to make itself felt:

Talking in riddles will make the journey
More interesting, develop an intuitive
hyper-sensibility.
(‘V’)

The journey’s end remains to be discovered. The challenge lies in deciphering the riddle even though the rewards are yet unknown. The speaker of the poem confesses:

Ah, but I’m a prattler, bore, whore
who can still discover something
interesting in every story.
(‘VIII’)

The remedy is to simply give over to Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript’s evident delight in spinning a story, with its ever-present quest for “something interesting” that will be gained at journey’s end.


++++++++++++++++++

Last We Spoke, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux
(Auguste Press, 2004)

Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s Last We Spoke tackles the difficult emotions surrounding longing and loss. She attempts to name the ache of remorse while wrestling with the complexities of relationships and how this connects to life’s transience. Thibodeaux couples this with a subtle gift for assonance and rhyme.

In Thibodeaux’s poems, there are moments when cool observation can capture grief in its shifting form, such as in ‘For Shana Rae’:

There is a hummingbird at my window
a lily in the garden all I’ve known
has been lost in conversations
& quarrels                the moonlight
shines on a forgotten house
A woman sits alone stirring her coffee

In other instances, Thibodeaux lets the emotion overcome and overwhelm the crucial moment, weakening its power:

A crow cast a shadow on father’s house
               cries out like a child
the black beast of his soul
               cries out like an infant
(‘Tullulah’)

               the lies & deception
               run deep & long
               roar like monsters in my sleep
(‘Something wicked this way comes’)

…and occasionally lapsing into the rhythm of prose:

I pay forward the hard
               dollar for prescription drugs & therapy
(‘For Peter’)

Still, Thibodeaux’s ease with assonantal and off-rhyme is satisfying to read. This is evident in the previous excerpt’s rapid, successive repetitions of ‘ar’ in ‘forward’, ‘hard’ and ‘dollar’ as well as in the closing poem, ‘For All’:

be careful you’ll break everything with so much noise/
the sky will fall/and me I just sit there and don’t dare look/
the sun and your heart are made of the same material/
a world full of hope/my head smokes/night goes/

Such technique can persuade the reader to re-read this work. Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s evident love of words and subtle rhymes manifests in Last We Spoke, and promises much for her future work.


++++++++++++++++++

9th & Ocean, Kevin Opstedal
(Auguste Press, 2002)

Kevin Opstedal’s 9th & Ocean is an intriguing mix of intimacy, conversation and confession, with poems that considers the emotional links between people and place, whether it is on a boulevard or a place of the mind. The poems rush past in a kinetic dance of fresh and startling juxtapositions, strongly notable in ‘Trace Elements’:

The sky’s a various gradation of
blue electrics with bloody pink cloud smears
Saturday night rolling in
feels like Peruvian gin with a laudanum chaser

a small rubble of quartz
lighting the way

The conversational tone establishes a sense of intimacy tied up to confession and revelation, coupled with a strong, hallucinogenic quality, wafting through the collection like the breath of something intoxicating. While there is a tendency towards a punchline conclusion:

The sky driving rainy spike into the
silver-plated lungs of a dying summer
staggering on the sidewalk—
every time I think about it I get all
bent with warbly inverted stereo
piped in from Neptune’s garage

20,000 leagues beneath the pavement
(‘Sharks Patrol These Waters’)

…this serves only to underline Opstedal’s message.

Like ‘guide wires / pulled taut & humming’ (‘Leaving Palo Alto’), 9th & Ocean’s poems thrum with strange tension. Throughout, Opstedal’s inventiveness is striking. Here are the opening lines of ‘Available Light’:

Time is idling at 1200 rpms
With empty church folders from somewhere
But I feel okay in the face of the inevitable for the moment

A reader might feel lulled by the certainty and neatness in the phrase ‘I feel okay in the face’, which connotes a semblance of normality regained. But the line carries on, so that the speaker’s face which, because of that tricky ‘I’, by some odd transformation also becomes the reader’s face, solidifies the face of the inevitable, anthropomorphises it. This is a thrilling feat in the space of three lines. Kevin Opstedal’s nimble skill with words is both clear and splendid in 9th & Ocean.


++++++++++++++++++

Learning the Language, Kate Greenstreet
(Etherdome, 2005)

Kate Greenstreet’s Learning the Language is a meticulous blend of cartography, language exploration, fairytale and dreams, used to excavate meanings from a very strange world. Language is slippery and requires a measure of negotiation and careful attention. There are signs that must be understood, clues deciphered, meanings revealed:

I pondered the meaning
Of the letter—thx (lowercase,
period)—instead of thanks.
Decided I had said too much.
I waited to be asked.
Shoe that fits,
shoe made of glass.
(‘Pupil’)

Two poem sequences, ‘Yellow Book’ and ‘Learning the Language’, weave in and out of the collection, reminiscent of travel diary entries. Captioned black and white images are further clues that point the way, but where to and why? Puzzling out meanings from signs is appropriate here because the reader will be but a tourist in Greenstreet’s world, sharing in the experience of the speaker, who attempts to map the unfamiliar, be it in dreams or walking the streets of a new city.

We were finally in Europe.
The water in the fish-shaped font.
Coming down, we bought a souvenir.
I was always here.

My right mind
is a place,
as specific as our driveway.

I was always here,
But I was buried.
(‘A Story of Detection’)

While seemingly at odds with the rest of the collection, the tender and wistful tone of ‘Little Nut’ charts a similar attempt to gain a deeper understanding—in this case, a parent-child relationship—if only one had the right words.

One learns a language to understand and be understood, to make sense of a new world and to negotiate its particular pathways and pitfalls. Greenstreet’s poems require deep attention, the sort of furrow-browed concentration you would give if you were trying to find your way from somewhere unexpected back to someplace familiar. Kate Greenstreet’s Learning the Language is an intriguingly layered and thematically rich collection, paradoxically fractured yet carefully woven together. There is plenty to glean from its strange and wondrous pages.


++++++++++++++++++

Grounded by George Held
(Finishing Line Press, 2005)

George Held’s strong interest in nature was present ever since childhood. His second chapbook, Grounded, is a tranquil collection of meditative poems on nature, the passing of seasons and time. With careful grace, the poems examine each season’s tantalising variations. As a seamless complement to the poems within, the chapbook is also carefully constructed, with its whimsical cover image printed on a textured cover, green handmade endpapers and pale cream papers inside, saddle-stitched and all tied up with a thin, glossy-black ribbon.

The collection’s mood shifts from rueful observations of nature’s indomitable will…

Rain in May refreshes flowers
And grows the grass that must be cut
(‘Rain in May’)

…to pure enthralment:

Too rapt for fright, I heard cicadas chirr,
Hooves thump, mink drink, fish splash, although the roar
Of blood deafened me, and dark sealed my sight.
(‘Natural Quiet’)

Time’s progress marks the collection with an undercurrent that hints at Robert Herrick’s exhortation: ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’, though expressed less stridently than Held’s more pensive tone. There is no sign of regret or self-pity in these poems, yet they betray a gathering prescience of a life beyond the speaker’s own:

…it’s enough to make me feel sorry
I won’t be here to see the scene
And glad the scene will still be there
To be seen by other convalescent eyes.
(‘Stream of Life’)

Held’s enjoyment of musicality in language is very consistent and nowhere more apparent than in the remarkable ‘April Again’:

                               —even
with war drums in the distance—April
is neither cruellest, nor crueller, nor cruel.

This poem is a quiet stunner, with its subtle distinctions between nature’s cruelty and humanity’s capacity for violence. It deservedly won a Poets & Writers/Barnes & Noble challenge for National Poetry Month (April 2003). For this and other poems, George Held’s reflections in Grounded have a serene power that will linger long in the mind.


++++++++++++++++++

American Master by Raymond L Bianchi
(moria poetry, 2006)

A native of Chicago with Italian heritage, Raymond L Bianchi recently lived in Bolivia and Brazil, the effect of which manifests in Bianchi’s American Master as a forceful questioning of place and values. American Master is impressive for its immediacy in impact and energy, with Bianchi creating a work that successfully harnesses the electricity of a spoken word performance and tethering it to the ephemeral permanence of the printed page.

Throughout the ten-section long poem, the reader is both eavesdropper and confidante of a speaker declaiming entertainingly on such arbitrary subjects as Arnold of Brescia, the Swedish and IKEA, monks and Chicago poets:

A few Chicago poets are Chicago poets and their work is filled with a vigor that is upsetting and unabashed and rarely receives praise. A poet who hits the same comfortable notes wins prizes, a poet who uses harsh words ends up on the margins.
(‘6’)

Yet for all its randomness, American Master draws a number of important thematic threads together, exploring wide-ranging ideas of religion, race, history, art, philosophy, politics, pop culture, capitalism, materialism and greed, and all with a keen eye on the absurd:

Clots of Blood on the ground betrayal before the assembled host.

Tedious soul, tempting her often with these words:

40% 0ff sale today at Nordstroms!

Indiscreet soul robs Me of the honor due to Me, attributes it to herself, through vainglory, that which is really her own --

grieving murmuring concerning

Aristotle and Plato—Weber and Camus, all banal garbage in the face of
Heidegger, Madonna or especially Jennifer Lopez these are good for bling bling
the coin of the realm .
(‘7’)

Such short, sharp shocks abound in a skilful work that is all forward motion.

Bianchi’s work is a clarion cry, delivering a well-deserved jolt out of one’s complacency. American Master is something to be experienced at least once and not to be missed.

*****

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). She was awarded the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (USA) and the Hawthornden Castle Fellowship (UK) in 2005. Her poetry appears in journals and anthologies worldwide and online.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:10 PM 3 comments

20/20 YIELDING by SUNNYLYN THIBODEAUX

SUSANA GARDNER Reviews

20/20 yielding by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux
(Blue Press, 2005)

20/20 yielding is a poetic distillation of sorts, which concurrently balances a strangely lyric and non-lyrical poem as it struggles toward an ensuing clarity in the dissection of the daily and mundane. For the record, the “I” is never safe in this poem, and the poet seems not only aware of this but playfully chides the reader on toward what seeing might actually take place when extrication of self is no longer possible or necessary. Whether it be in reference to her initial (drunken) fluency in French--as are we ever truly fluent when we first experience the joy and possibility of a second language when drunk--or, merely brilliant in the impulse, foresight or lack of self-censure in way of this beautiful thing called yielding. The speaker turns out to be one of her most closely honed specimens:

a ruby grapefruit
is starting to mold
in the basket
               yo la tengo
               there’s a fine background

forgive it
a wall of incompetence

sky blue sequins
are the great adornment
of your name-brand
               hand bag
               there are six
new sun spots on each
shoulder & one awkward
shape on the cheek
               I don’t know how
to talk about them
without curiosity

did you notice
               I ate the grapefruit

20/20 yielding is at once a poetics of displacement and memory often fused playfully in a mimetic turnstile of thought and reflection. And as the “I” is precarious, this poem seems to visit the theme of a love, lost and the onward movement of self toward a possible extrication, and hopeful healing, which gives a deeper overall feeling to the mood, current and purpose here in light of all of the possible trappings of ego when observed on a magnified level, or at least certainly has the markings of an interesting, if not great, romantic hero.

                              remind me again
why you left me here
drinking alone -- misdirected
power trying to woo
you west

*****

Susana Gardner lives in Switzerland, where she writes and also edits dusie.org/, an online poetics journal. She is also pleased to announce, the first bookbook of Dusie, Cornstarch Figurine, by Elizabeth Treadwell, Dusie Press, 2006.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:05 PM 0 comments

OPENING AND CLOSING NUMBERS by ANNY BALLARDINI

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Opening and Closing Numbers by Anny Ballardini
(Moria Poetry, Chicago, 2005). Available as pdf here

I little knew what to expect with this book, which is a good start. I know Anny Ballardini mainly from her blog, where she highlights the work of others more often than her own. The poems here, I discover, vary in approach, or, I want to say, flow within different contexts. I see her process as one of dynamic absorption and expression.

Many of the poems in this book share a dailiness that one might've learned from William Carlos Williams, a gritty acceptance of local present events. Other works are dreamier, more disjointed and, well, hallucinogenic. Some exist within the context of influence, most notably the influence of paintings and of her reading. Her poems register and explore both the outer world and the inner. That exploration, based in curiosity, sounds to me like play. Play, we have come to realize, is a learning skill.

Without resorting particularly to humour, Anny's poems employ a certain good cheer, even the darker ones do. I detect no emotional heroism of the sort suffusing much poetry now. That segmented and impervious persona that we meet poem after unrisky poem offered by the dull journals and big poetry publishers appears not at all here. Anny commits to no formula as she writes, she has adventures.

Regarding context, these lines strike me as emblematic, by contrast, to what I mean:

“we're not listening or like to have our heads filled
because of minds protections of other minds”

I think Anny is unafraid of those projections. She allows distance to occur, vantage, but also warmth and nearness. The book begins with an apparently unfinished sequence of number poems. In these, she ruminates and riffs on numbers, like Stein and Creeley together. I find this sequence inscrutable in the way I find numbers inscrutable. Relationships and patterns divulge or disappear. In its way, it is a philosophic piece. It thinks in words.

I find that dreams and memory play strong in the work here. A poem called “Cows”, dedicated to her father, recalls a modest memory, an encounter with some cows. Time is bent closer with a druggy sort of skew as this vignette runs its little absurdity. The event's presence presses into a vision in words, as close as you can read:

“it took me some time to get my heart to a slower beat
to let my head be freed from the heat to breathe
& to distance those round beastly eyes from me”

Note the closeness! That closeness situates in a nervy sensitivity that I think takes some courage to muster. Done without the squeal of the Egotistical Sublime, without implemented drama. I was surprised (knowing no better) at the restraint as well as the strength of these poems.

Opening and Closing Numbers taps out at 170 pages. I like its play of extent. Largely written in a prosy ease, with long lines, to me it invites a slow reading, two or three poems at a time. I enjoyed the honest effort and poetic commitment in this book. It is a print-on-demand publication, available at http://www.moriapoetry.com. As a further part of the new publishing model, a pdf can also be had at that site.

*****

Allen Bramhall has published one book, Simple Theory (Potes & Poets Press, 2002), maintains an electrifying blog called Tributary, and shares a birthday with Herman Melville, Jerry Garcia and Lt. William Clark.

posted by EILEEN @ 9:55 PM 1 comments

WATERMARK by JACQUELINE POPE

CARLOS HIRALDO Reviews

Watermark by Jacqueline Pope
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, N.Y. 2005)

There is a meaningful silence in the poems of Jacqueline Pope that becomes the defining aesthetic of Watermark. Along with images of travel, home, rain, mist, fog, windows, and water, silence weaves through various poems unifying the book with a feeling of hope, longing and loss. From the first poem of the collection, “Raddled,” Pope tells us where we can find her speaker: “the gap where I gather.”

To understand Watermark as a whole and as collection of individual poems we must realize that in Pope’s best work what is left unsaid is as important as what is said. As the later poem, “First Lesson in Silence” attests, even in today’s world of loud, confessional, omnipresent media, the meaningful in life is found in what is implied, in what is suggested, in “leaving out leaving off,” in the gaps of our experiences, our memories and our dreams. To visually illustrate the point, some of Watermark's poems, like the aforementioned “First Lesson in Silence “and the hauntingly playful “O,” contain literal gaps, large spaces between words.

After all, gaps sometimes can be truer than presences. There are feelings and ideas that once stated become a lie. Pope conveys this truth more eloquently in her poem “O” than I can here. The speaker begins with the claim that sometimes the exclamation is “the only one/ that’s suited to my mouth.” Words once thought about, reflected upon, and revised lose the immediacy of the feeling or the idea. Stated words can go stale, but “O” can be “reliable/good as your word, even in the last line.” In the second stanza, the poem shifts from the conceptual to the visual. “O” is “the drum of rain/on the roof, the rasp/ of sorrow at the door/the exclamation of skies.” “O” is the embodiment and the delineation of the overwhelming feeling, the pain, the pleasure, the surprise. As the poem concludes with the lines, “O you are the register/ of leaving, longing after,” nothing needs to be specified because the details would just confuse the momentary for the essential. There are no grandiose declarations in Watermark, no pompous speaker making unverifiable claims about nature, art and life in general (like I can be accused of doing in this review).

In Watermark, there are poems about travel and poems about home. The opening stanza of “Dream on a Train” describes the perfect confluence in travel between movement, time, and discovery:

Drawn on a line
fixed to the future,
drawn to a point,
pulled through a frame.
Drawn to the horizon,
destination deferred.

It is not the arrival that gets us excited about traveling, for we are often disappointed once we get there. It is the movement itself that excites us. The train, better than a ship surrounded by uniform water, a cramped plane surrounded by air, or a car stuck in traffic serves as the perfect metaphor for the process of constant discovery implied in the act of traveling.

Of course, any activity performed too often can become stale and routine, even traveling. The latter poem “Vagabond” serves as the oppositional reflection of “Dream on a Train.” Here the speaker addresses a traveler who instead of finding a sense of discovery “got used to guesswork/ and gesture, looking on blank.” The beautiful, natural scenes, the awe inspiring urban monuments, and the melancholy inducing “Street of Endless Prayer” start to blend into an empty canvas after a point. The sense of escape implied in travel can also become a trap, “where nothing can say/ what you are, where you’re going.” The traveler finds himself “circling a homeless/ town,” looking at “the map/ that leads you out, that leads you on” to yet another town and another place in time. In the time and life experience that it takes to move from “Dream on a Train” to “Vagabond,” one can imagine a person saying to another, “Did we see that in Rome or was it Paris?”

Perhaps this imagined conversation about past tourism can take place at home while looking fondly at an album and thinking unpleasant thoughts. In “From the Album,” a couple sits together doing just that. It may be that the speaker is addressing her partner directly. However, the poem works better as the quiet rumination of a disappointed speaker. The words on the page are hard-hitting, but the tone is too cool, matter-of-fact to reveal a direct confrontation. Instead, the speaker thinks:

There you are, soured
but sitting upright,
the beat of your breath
under lock and key.
You won’t look at me.

The relationship has not been good for a while and perhaps it never was. There is no romantic glorification of the past here. From that start, the partner was uptight, defensive, and standoffish. And what starts bad continues badly.

Despite the strengths of “Vagabond” and “From the Album,” the best poems in Watermark are those in which the speaker engages in a process of self-discovery and self-revelation. Out of the many that fall in this category, the standout poem is “Goodbye to All That.” Pope illustrates how no one else is a match as an oppressor to the mind of the self. The poem reads as affirmation by elimination. “Goodnight, goodbye,/ I undo all I’ve said and done.” The speaker finds herself at an imaginary fork in the road where she promises to change all her limiting habits, “all the evenings spent upstanding/ (wallflower, dormouse, doorflower)/ given the same going over.” She will abandon her “life in corners.” However, what she is leaving for, what that positive alternative can be, we are given no clue. She declares, “Time’s/ worn through, and I’ve resigned.” But as a reader, me thinks the speaker does protest too much. If she is resigning to “all that,” what is she hiring on to? What is she saying “yes” to? By remaining silent about an alternative, the speaker reveals that she doesn’t have one. This is the self making an emancipation proclamation to the self that we are led to believe will not be fulfill anytime soon. Again, Pope’s best poems gain in significance for what they don’t say as much for what they say.

*****

Carlos Hiraldo is an Associate Professor of English in the City University of New York. He has published various poems and reviews. His book "Segregated Miscegenation" was published in 2003 by Routledge.

posted by EILEEN @ 9:51 PM 0 comments

FEMME DU MONDE by PATRICIA SPEARS JONES

JANET HAMILL Reviews

Femme Du Monde by Patricia Spears Jones
(Tia Chucha Press, 2006)

As it was for Frank O'Hara, so it is for Patricia Spears Jones. "…Poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete…." And it's more than the union of the ordinary and the intangible in their work that brings to mind a kinship between the two poets. They share a familiarity of place (New York and Paris, though I don't think O'Hara ever ventured west of the Hudson) and a love of referring to place. It is as if landscape and the street and architecture of cityscape are necessary grounding for the internal journeys of their poems. Their identities are interdependent with place. Place is an extension of their bodies and souls, not in an omnipresent, Whitmanesque sense, but in a humble, transcendental way. For who knows where the poet ends and the physical world begins.

Femme du Monde is the third collection by New York-based poet Patricia Spears Jones, and in it one gathers a strong sense of a woman moving from geographical place to place, victorious -- the sophisticated lady, invulnerable. A little scared, a little weary. She has been there, done that, and then some. She may be trailing a Mercedes with Texas plates over the Mississippi, strolling the Quai Voltaire, or waiting for a cross-town bus. Wherever she is, she's in for the "long haul." And whatever the place or circumstance, her aesthetic antennae create an invisible shield behind which she safely extracts the essence of her experience. The shield is her magic armor -- the suit under which the poems get under her skin. It may not be completely impenetrable. Love is lost; friends die too soon; the heat of the 4th of July on Long Island Sound conjures visions of "the hell on earth" of "slave ships gorged with cargo and rum" flowing "north from Barbados to New England." The old woman singing La vie en rose on the Paris metro smells of "cheap tobacco" and "unwashed garments." John Wayne wants to kill Monty Cliff in Red River and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof isn't just about Liz's lingerie, it's about Big Daddy's "C.A.N.C.E.R" and the black servants cashing in their patience. The suit has a few dents and tiny holes, but it's thick enough. It allows the poet's "knotted heart" to untie itself; and with Spears Jones's world-weary sense of humor, that sufficiently creates just the right barrier, in a "life held together with wishful thinking and krazy glue," to see and feel "jazzmen in the falling stars."

I was thoroughly seduced by Femme du Monde, by the grit and blood, wit, flesh, bone, and spirit of which the poems are made. From the particular they move to the universal, effortlessly. From the body they dissolve into space. The world they reference is mundane. The world they reference is marvelous. The senses perceive, the poet distills, and life is reduced to a healing elixir.

*****

Janet Hamill is the author of four books of poetry and short fiction, Lost Ceilings being the most recent. In collaboration with the band Moving Star, she has released two CDs of spoken word and music -- Genie of the Alphabet and Flying Nowhere. A strong proponent of poetry's oral tradition, Janet has read and performed at The Poetry Project, The People's Poetry Gathering, The Bowery Poetry Club, the Andy Warhol Museum, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, and London's Meltdown Festival.

posted by EILEEN @ 9:50 PM 0 comments

THE ACHING VICINITIES by JEAN VENGUA

ERNESTO PRIEGO Reviews

The Aching Vicinities by Jean Vengua
(An Otoliths Chapbook first published in Otoliths, issue one, part one, Southern Autumn, 2006, Ed. Mark Young, Available here.)

A chapbook should function as a window into the poetics constructed by a singular voice. Unlike larger or more “formal” poetry collections, a chapbook is understood as a special delivery, an advance selection of a larger work-in-progress that should, however, offer the coherence of a particular poetics, the foundations, through fragments, of a specific manner of seeing and transforming the world through the mediation of the poetic performance. A chapbook should open up, with crack and thunder, the regularity of everyday discourse with a distinct proposal that would allow the reader to say, “This is this poet’s voice at this particular moment”.

Jean Vengua offers with The Aching Vicinities a sample of a powerful corpus of formally and tonally divergent works that nevertheless share a common “foundation”. This goes beyond the construction of a lyrical persona or the identification of a grammatical subject or a speaking agent. Instead, the common ground that holds Vengua’s edifice (or collection of edifications or buildings; a neighborhood perhaps) is a plurality of enunciation resources, different poetic forms guided by various singular and plural, personal and impersonal subjects. This heterogeneous, polymorphous voice builds, indeed, a poetic heteroglossia that nevertheless shapes a common figure of the world as seen through the eyes of a poet.

The world that Vengua creates is not easily definable, though. Her chapbook offers a mere glimpse, a blurry image of what her poetics seem to wish for: grasping a sensation, stopping, with sharp needles, the hectic wings of a multicolored flying insect, detecting the surrounding areas, the aura of unstoppable happenings, the aching experience of writing life and the experiencing of life by writing. This is to say that her poetics is not a question of pure mimesis. Instead, her voices’ utterances do not refer to a specific, easily definable extra-textual referent. In other words, it is hard to say what Vengua’s voices are talking about, because her poems here do not belong to her as an empirical subject but to a diverse series of strategies that are independent as textual artifacts.

The Aching Vicinities is composed of 18 poems in different forms, including poetic prose, hay(na)ku and couplet sequences. The first poem, “Foundation”, sets the construction up, moves the following pieces forward and establishes the chapbook’s discourse:

no holds

no handles

no home

no bricks


nor this

There is a breath here, the alliteration of the “h” inspiring sound that contrasts with the dry -- yet cold -- sound of the fourth line, which in turn builds up the conclusion of the last line, mixing the sounds of the “r” and the “h”. There is no explicit grammatical subject here; the repetition evokes an impersonal prayer, the deletion of the abandoned, hopeless subject. The foundation of the whole chapbook lies here: an acknowledgment of hopelessness, the expression, if you will, of the transcendental homelessness expressed by writing. There is nothing to hold to here, Vengua seems to say, nothing but this, and not even this, that is here without being something concrete. This sensation of abandonment, the dialectics between writer and body, between voice and organs, pen or keyboard and fingers, skin and veins and organs, will be set in motion by this tangential approach to the vicinities of pain.

Through the 18 poems included in this chapbook, Vengua approaches the question of the multiple, always-shifting writing being. One and the other and never one at the same time, the voices that inhabit The Aching Vicinities are abandoned to themselves, becoming them and the other, the reader (“I am you”, the voice of “On Work” says), alone and naked, free but possessed by responsibilities, embarrassed and embarazado/as (pregnant) with nothingness and darkness.

In “The Problems”, a prose poem in three numbered paragraphs, the impersonal voice of the imaginary essay writer says:

Let us return to the problem of the missing.

“The missing”, which is the title of another poem in the chapbook, this “hole in your beast”, that which is not there while always being there, somewhere not here but always somewhere, is indeed The Aching Vicinities’ foundation, the space between words and stanzas, the empty, silent space of the page surrounding the printed words, but also what is not there, on the written words, the black typography, the meaning left out, what the voice was unable to express. Think of

The clicking of a laptop at rest

that the voice of “Oh” invokes to remind us of the silent hissing of the end of work. The missing is indeed that “nothing” that the poet does when she writes, the absolute “uselessness” of poetry caused by its indelible, abstract-yet-concrete nature. In other words, The Aching Vicinities speak of the phantasmatic (or ghostly, which is not the same but is related) essence of poetry.

In “It’s Nothing”, the voice says:

I am going nowhere. I am nowhere. I am making nothing.
I’m making something. Something happens, as I see it.
It happens. It’s nothing. This is something.

The self-referential nature of language expresses here the aporetic performance of the poet; the construction of nothing and, with it, the creation of something. “No-Thing” is the spectre itself, brought to reality by the word. “Speak to it, Horatio”, Shakespeare had it said, because the ghost needs to be addressed, needs to be written and pronounced.

The study of spectres is also a study of mourning, and, of course, there is no mourning process that is not at the same time an experience of pain. The Aching Vicinities proposes an approach to the nature of writing as an aching process, and, while at it, an approach to pain as a phantasmatic performance, as what cannot be fixed or detected, which is there without being anywhere, and which certain writing can help become tangible and real.

ache translates to both hunger and habits of escape,

reads a line in the poem which gives the chapbook its title. The hunger, the expression of the missing, desire without referent, the (mourning) rituals in which we engage in order to keep on. The poem deals with the contradiction, (aporia, pharmakon) of writing, exercised by a living body (“the body jerks/to life feeding on/ particles of apprehension/”, Vengua writes). Poetry as a “habit of escape”, is, for Vengua, always related to desire. In the “Want” hay(na)ku, we read:

Sometimes

I write

because I want


to

escape but

I can’t escape

.

Impossibility: there is no escape here, but there is no home either. This is the expression of the curse of the poet who does not trust nouns; poetry where the “objects object”. A curse, but also a blessing; a poison, but also a remedy: the aching won’t go away, because it is never anywhere but here, right now, in the expression of a voice which is never the same.

“Desire”, the poet writes, “to modulate between the general and the specific. Or else to delete” (“The Conditions”). This is the guiding force of her writing, a poetic agenda, the alternation between presence and absence, the site of the blinking cursor, between typing and “delete”, between “enter” and the closing of a laptop. By addressing this dialectic between something and nothing, The Aching Vicinities draws the circumference of an area that has no perimeter. Pain can only be addressed indirectly; names can only approach, from a distance, the object they wish to contain.

The Aching Vicinities appears at first as an experiment in different poetic forms, but after a few readings it becomes an apparition, the invocation of spectres, the scholar’s attempt at speaking to a genealogy of skulls. Jean Vengua’s chapbook works as a medium to her poetics, possessed by absence and haunted by the presences of what is no longer there.

*****

Ernesto Priego was born in Mexico City in the mid-seventies. He is the author of Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006), a collection of hay(na)ku. His translation of Jessica Abel's award-winning graphic novel La Perdida will be out this year in a hardcover edition from Astiberri (Barcelona). He will be pursuing his PhD at University College London starting this Fall.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:59 PM 0 comments

FILM POEMS by MARK LAMOUREAUX

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Film Poems by Mark Lamoureux
(Katalanché Press, 2005)

My starting point: chapbooks don't often satisfy me. Usually, they're used as repositories of work until the author publishes a realbook. That's okay, but I like to see more sense of mission in the little trifle. This chapbook fulfills that sense for me: it int a little trifle. Its 26 pages of poems present an artistic vision, an operative dynamic beyond simply anthologizing some new work. It goes like this, paraphrasing the introduction: the poems were written in a darkened movie theatre whilst movies played on the screen. Okay, I call them movies, Lamoureux calls them films. The poems are reactions to these visual experiences, tho that sounds terribly bald and flat. Let's say that the movies instigate the poems. Lamoureux writes in the intro that these poems “attempt to mimetically simulate the experience of viewing the films”. From those words I glean that this chapbook embraces a working method. This book is a project. The name of the film and filmmaker labels each poem but, sooth to say, I know next to nothing about any of these films. Forgive my ignorance. Stan Brakhage is the only name I've heard of. Luckily, these poems don't depend on one's knowing the films (Lamoureux states that he'd seen none of the films prior to writing the poems), tho obviously I cannot declare how much a knowledge of these films could expand my experience of the poems. I learned from Jackson Mac Low that keeping method of production in view compels the reader to see the poem's landscape differently. A matter of watching the machinery at work [he said with metaphor at MIXED setting], without any suggestion that this is the right way to make poems, only that they arrived in this fashion. The poems here make use of tab space, tho I assume Lamoureux handwrote initially. The generally short (one or two word) limes derive a vertical or columnar reading from this mechanically strict spacing. You can read phrases horizontally, but vertical phrases also appear as your eye runs downward. The shorter poems are more mysterious. Here is a short one (complete).

Jeff Sher
“Turkish Traffic"


               Brillo                               rhumba

               flytrap                               motion

               static

               cathedral

All six words are set off so that you can stare at each one separately. Each line can be read as a unit, each column can be so read. The first two lines form a unit, the last two lines form a unit. Do you see how these various simultaneous readings work with and against each other? Each poem reveals a compelling intersection of phrases in different directions. I found the poems tuned to Brakhage's films most interesting for, being longer, they allow myriad reading. Little narrative thrust occurs in the writing, certainly no discernible plot. I hesitate to say the poems are impressionistic, that suggests a blurriness that doesn't accurately portray the reading experience here. The words seem detached from determination but exist firmly, um, on their own, tho weighted and swayed by the various interrelationships evident in the poem's field. These poems invite a fairly radical reading but what's especially nifty, I don't feel radical in reading so. With this book by Mark Lamoureux, we (the readers) get to play with possibilities. How these short word-bursts inhere together suggests an enlarged minimalism. Pretty neat. Further neat is the chap's presentation. The cover is a wavy corrugated cardboard based, says Lamoureux, on the cover design of an issue of Film Culture. The pages are glossy, and gleam whitely (like a cinema screen!!!). All very thoughtfully done, with that tasty hint of the homegrown. I appreciate the adventure evident thru out this book, as well as its meditative calm. Sure, I would recommend this book: pleasures abound.

*****

Allen Bramhall has published one book, Simple Theory (Potes & Poets Press, 2002), maintains an electrifying blog called Tributary, and shares a birthday with Herman Melville, Jerry Garcia and Lt. William Clark.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:55 PM 0 comments

TWO CHAPS by ELIZABETH RABY and PAUL MARTIN

ANN E. MICHAELS reviews

Ten Degrees above Zero by Elizabeth Raby
(Jasper Press, Richlandtown PA, 2005)

and

Morning on Canal Street by Paul Martin
(FootHills Publishing, Kanona NY, 2005)

If we had no memories, how could we write poetry? It is difficult to imagine a literature of the immediate; and yet, immediacy is a term used to praise good poetry. The mature poet, no matter what his or her chronological age, balances immediacy and memory, honors both. Such a writer can present us with compelling pieces that are “about” long-ago events, employing details and perspective inventively, not just authentically. And I put “about” in quotes, because the resulting poems are seldom solely about one past experience; they provide significant, moving links with the present life of the reader, as well.

Both Paul Martin and Elizabeth Raby accomplish such balancing acts in the chapbooks under review. Raby’s book, Ten Degrees above Zero, opens with five poems that set scenes and seasons, including the title poem, where the geese are pushed downstream “against their desire” and the Cuban refugees are “afraid green was lost to them/forever. Still, they endured, even laughed./They had learned to hope against reason.” The poem “I Thought Freedom Meant Never Looking Back” begins a suite of pieces that evoke memoir whether or not they are based on the author’s experiences, and several of these give us swift, tantalizing glimpses of a mother-daughter relationship that is rich and complex but ultimately a bit veiled, as in “Romance.” In this brief poem, going through her mother’s scarf-drawer uncovers

...a bottle
of Chanel No. 5, crystal-
stoppered, sent by her sailor
brother from far Paree.
The unused scent, the whisper
of chiffon clinging to my probing
fingers—the beautiful secret
mother I desired.

Instead, mother is a person for whom leisure is foreign, “never at home in the life she achieved.” And what is the life we achieve? How do we define it, Raby seems to ask, in some of the other poems in this collection. The sixth-grade girl in “Poet-in-the-School” defines herself imaginatively, distinct from the mean, dirty girl she says other people know her as. The tourist of “In Transit” asks herself whether she would be a helper or a betrayer had she lived during the time of the Underground Railroad. In the last poem, “Ritual,” the woman immerses herself in pool water, “A rehearsal for her return to the elements...” We readers can appreciate this sort of need for touch and this immediacy in the experience of the lives we have achieved.

Paul Martin’s Morning on Canal Street owes even more to Mnemosyne than does Raby’s collection. Martin opens with a memory-piece and the book unfolds like a good story, through wonderment and confusion and sorrow—a perfectly-pitched progression of well-crafted poems, not a word out of place. From the slow-paced couplet stanzas of “The White Bird” (which ought to be anthologized over and over again so that more people could become acquainted with it) to the narrative speed of “Empty Bottles,” Martin’s poems manage, (like, say, Billy Collins’?) to sound simple and mean deep. In “Days, Years,” a snapshot narrative about remembering “my father working/on the railroad section gang,/pausing, at fifty-eight, to straighten/his back and catch his breath” becomes a hymn not to the workingman but to the wind, to endurance, to breath itself. Several moving poems allude to a brother’s illness and weave the mischief and ambiguity of childhood experiences into the work of the poetry. From “The River”:

Now, it seems, only pain
slows the days as long
as those we played away
summers on the island,
climbing trees, swimming
in that hole between the boulders
we named Stagecoach and Saddle...

...until, at the poem’s close, the boys lie “back in the coal silt, wondering/out loud where the river began/and where it ended,/growing quiet until there was only/the current’s slap and wash.”

In both of these collections, the poets’ perspectives are specific, keen, just slightly surprising. The subtlety of that surprise is what makes the difference between predictable memoir and insightful poetry that has something to teach, share, unfold. These are “quiet” poems that avoid edginess and do not rely on technical ingenuity to accomplish their tasks. Simply reading them is enough.


*****

Ann E. Michael is a poet, essayist and librettist whose work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Her chapbook More Than Shelter (2004) is available from Spire Press, and she has two chapbooks forthcoming in 2006, one from FootHills Publishing and another from Finishing Line Press. She is a recipient of a PA Council on the Arts fellowship in poetry and currently teaches at DeSales University. Her website is www.annemichael.com

posted by EILEEN @ 11:45 PM 0 comments

UNRAVELLING WORDS & THE WEAVING OF WATER by CECILIA VICUNA

CRAIG PEREZ Reviews

Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water by Cecilia Vicuna
(Graywolf Press, 1992)

What doors would listening together open? (54)

*
Vicuna’s Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water is a selection from 3 of her books: Precarious, Palabrarmás, and La Wik’una (some of the poems written originally in English, others translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger and Suzanne Jill Levine).

One enters the book at the moment of its premise: “if, at the beginning of time, poetry was an act of communion, a form of collectively entering a vision, now it is a space one enters, a spatial metaphor” (4). The construction of the book, its unravelling of complete collections into a woven selection, allows the reader to participate in the “act of communion” and collectively enter the “spatial metaphor” of the book. One could even say that the idea of “metaphor” is the most important metaphor in the book:

Metapherein: to carry beyond
                               to the other contemplation:
to con-temple the interior and the exterior. (5)

Metaphor, from the Greek
metaphora, from
metapherein, to carry or
transfer. Meta: beyond.
Pherein: to carry.
               Joan Corominas

The metaphor carries beyond, toward the most complex and the most specific forms of comparison; to the furthest limits of knowledge, to the essence, the heart of being, to its reason for being. (42)

The Indo-European root bher, to carry, also, to bear children. Latin ferre, to carry, confer, differ, fertile, suffer; Greek pherein, to carry, amphora, euphoria, metaphor. (45)

The reader is invited to “con-temple” the unravelling of etymology in an effort to “bear” a word’s “strings (cuerdas) of emotion” and its “shared bones, sticks and feathers” (4). What others might consider “refuse,” Vicuna refuses to discard (this parallels Vicuna’s artistic method of gathering “trash” and arranging them into a new space). She describes this method as “[rediscovering] a way of thinking: the paths of mind I traveled, listening to matter, took me to an ancient silence waiting to be heard” (4). Through reading, one discovers the paths of Vicuna’s listening to the paths of listening.

~
The serial poem, “Five Notebooks for Exit Art,” anchors the first selection from “Precarious.” The first section, “Connection,” describes the book’s aesthetic and ethical project:

The art of joining, union
from ned: to bind, to tie
zero grade form: nod
old English: net
Latin: nodus
               knot

David Brower said: ‘The earth is dying because people don’t see the connection’ between a hamburger and the death of the rain forest, air conditioning and the death of the atmosphere.

Eliot Weinberger said: ‘Do you know what a clue is? A ball of yarn or thread that Theseus used to come out of the labyrinth, thus anything that guides or directs in the solution of a problem.’

René Guénon says: ‘the connection protects.’

in Nahuatl, one of the names of God is ‘nearness and togetherness’ (. . . del cerca y del junto)” (6)

Vicuna’s “free verse etymology” and “associative quoting” knit the silences of the book. These techniques thread an undeniable ethical motive to an experimental aesthetic formation. Section 3, “The Origin of Weaving,” continues the thread:

“origin
from oriri: the coming out of the stars

weave
from weban, wefta, Old English
weft, cross thread
                               web

[...]

the first knot, beginning of the spiral:
life and death, birth and rebirth

textile, text, context
from teks: to weave [...] (11)

Words, as textiles, become text and expand its contexts to cross-thread a deep (almost desperate) pedagogical space. Although this runs the danger of becoming strictly pedantic, Vicuna deftly manages this precarious balance, (reminding us that “the precarious is that which is obtained through prayer”):

sutra: sacred Buddhist text
               thread (Sanskrit)

tantra: sacred text derived from the Vedas: thread

ching: as in Tao Te Ching or I Ching
               sacred book: warp
               wei: its commentaries: weft

Quechua: the sacred language
               derived from q’eswa:
               rope or cord made of straw

to weave a new form of thought:
               connect
bring together in one (10)

As the text listens to its own weaving, it compels us to consider our own act of reading as a “spatial metaphor” through which to internalize these “new forms.” In addition, the poem develops its own “spatial metaphor” to incorporate an exterior socio-political context:

pueblo: people
altar: “place for burning sacrificial offerings”

               we are the pueblo
               our house the altar

threshold: limit or doorway

lintel, the top of the threshold
from liminaris, the limit
and the most ancient tol: as in dolmen:
table of stone

               mesa and missa
(the mass, from “sending a message”)
               are also confused

(limit and lumen:
the light came to be one)

to confuse is “to pour together”

house and altar are intertwined

[...]

in Panama, the people made homeless by the U.S. bombing were called precaristas

favelas, callampas, pueblos jovenes, villas miserias, shantytowns by any name are all
               Pueblos de altares

~
“Palabrarmás,” the second selection of the book, was “born from a vision in which individual words opened to reveal their inner associations, allowing ancient and newborn metaphors to come to light.” The word, “palabrarmás,” weaves palabra (word), labrar (to work), armas (arms), and más (more). Vicuna articulates the word as meaning: “to work words as one works the land is to work more; to think of what the work does is to arm yourself with the vision of words. And more: words are weapons, perhaps the only acceptable weapons” (27). This selection adopts the methods of “Precarious” (etymology, epigraphs, lyric meditation) in a more incantatory approach. Listen to how etymology, rooting the depth of the poem, emerges as chant:

In consciousness, we unite two roots, kom, with, and scire, to know.

Kom, beside, near, by, with. Germanic ga, Old English ge, together. Latin cum, co, with. Suffixed form kom-tra, in Latin contra, against, suffixed form kom-yo, in Greek koinos, common, shared.

Sek, to cut, split, Latin scire, to know, “to separate one thing from another.” Old English scrim, shin, shinbone, “piece cut off.” Suffixed form skiy-ena, Old Irish scian, knife, Germanic skitan, to separate, defecate. Suffixed form sk(h)id-yo, in Greek skhizein, split.

Demo (the root for democracy), comes from the root da, dai, to divide. Suffixed form da-mo, division of society, demos, people, land. (Those who divide among themselves what there is.) (61)

And listen to how the quoted voices possess the silence of the page to form a textual chorus:

Name; the word seems to be a compressed sentence, signifying being for which there is a search.
               Plato, Cratylus (37)

. . . the explication of saman, ‘liturgical chant,’ from sa (she) + ama (he), developed at length in the Chandogya Upanishad, reminds the poet that by chanting he activates within himself a marriage between two forces, male and female; and elsewhere, the same text gives for the same word, a totally different explanation . . . This digression seemed necessary to underling the spiritually practical (and not intellectually discursive) value of the Hindu verbal elaborations.
               René Daumal, Rasa (39)

Language falls, comes from above as little luminous objects that fall from heaven, which I catch word after word with my hands.
               María Sabina (52)

Although these methods could be interpreted as fetishizing etymology and quotation, Vicuna manages to embed these aesthetic formations within deeper ethical motives. First, on the ethical value of quotations:

The common ground shared by these and so many other texts -- what does it say? That we are all thinking together, but expressing ourselves in thousands of ways that are both different and the same? Or that an ancient wisdom, suppressed and forgotten, is revived in the poetic thought of every era? (54)

And on the ethical value of etymology:

Words want to speak; to listen to them is the first task

To open words is to open oneself.

To discover the ancient metaphors condensed in the word itself.

A history of words would be a history of being, but this writing is only a meditation through hints and fragments -- from the imagination, for the imagination. (36)

We now see that Vicuna’s collage of voices provides a “proof” that a “common ground” of trans-national and trans-historical wisdom exists, despite the suppressive tendencies and forgetfulness of modernity. This suggests that poetry can revive our communion with ancient wisdom if the poet (and the reader) listens to words in order to open their histories and our own histories of being. It is this motive that “bears” the aesthetic formations of the book into a more profound ethic.

~
“La’Wikuna,” the final selection of the book, is composed of lyric poems with interspersed untitled pages that use the methods of “Palarbrarmás.” Vicuna’s translated lyric voice moves between weightless flight and freighted rooting. Here are some examples:

In the
wasteland

A reflection
dancing Alight

(149)

at dark

The edge rules
the line beats

Doorway eye:
beach glass green

(91)

Spiraling air

Chiselled trill

Song
Uncurving

(117)

threading eyelet

Your house built
from the same
braid

Weave on

(97)

The meditative lyricism in this last selection offers a nice balance to the more discursive methods in the previous two selections. These “songs” curve, weave, thread, and chisel the paths of listening. Vicuna’s voice, that reflection dancing alight in the wasteland, braids the textual “common ground” and “histories of being” to teach us how one can continue to “weave on” and contribute to the “household.” It begins to show us what doors listening together would open.
~
After reading Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Water, I found myself hoping that this review could be a way for us to enter reading as a “spatial metaphor,” an act of communion with a writer whose path involves listening to an “ancient silence waiting to be heard.” Vicuna, the most conscientious of poets, binds an ethical foundation with formal experimentation -- an intersection that makes this book a must read.

*****

Craig Perez, originally from the Pacific island of Guam, has lived in California since 1995. Currently, he is completing his MFA at the University of San Francisco. He is also an assistant fiction editor for Pleiades, and the poetry editor for Switchback Online. His work has appeared in Watchword, The Redlands Review, and Quercus. You can visit his blog at blindelephant.blogspot.com.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:40 PM 0 comments

ING GRISH by JOHN YAU and THOMAS NOZKOWSKI

JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT Reviews

Ing Grish, poems by John Yau and images by Thomas Nozkowski
(Saturnalia Books, Philadelphia, 2005)

SHIMMERING CHIMERAS

At first, it seems Ing Grish is the name of some Scandinavian anti-hero. Then the linguistic acid cuts in. It’s another example of how John Yau exacts multiple references from his narrative clues. In the new book, he teams up with artist Thomas Nozkowski (who offers reproductions of paintings and drawings) to posit an audaciously innovative collection of “Untitled Portraits” (as several of the poems are called). At times, the fit is so right, it feels like Yau and Nozkowski are illustrating each other as they perform duos on a stage with changing sets.

In these poems, Yau continues to populate his wordscapes with enigmatic personae dramatis. Demons, genies and one-eyed librarians make cameos in ever shifting scenarios that flare up, vanish and are instantly followed by new characters in elaborate situations.

In “Two Baboons on a Beach,” the language sheds the luggage of linear continuity and instead takes on a structural web that is cloaked in a narrative diction. Using the long sentences of the New York School, Yau stretches them out with regular adjective-noun double punch combos: “good Samaritan, gaggle of troubadours… two spinsters… smaller birds… bronze-colored man…tall ruddy translator….” He then insinuates these inventions into compelling circumstances: “clambered into its dusty cab… the guard gasps when he realizes the owl is missing.” Sometimes it’s as if you are reading fairy tales that indelibly meld together.

A droll air pervades the spellbinding tableaux. Sometimes the effects are culled from old-fashioned props such as dukes and tightrope walkers, casting an amber, if surreal, glow over the figures. Occasionally the farce is forthright: “The bull circles the outhouse marked OFF LIMITS.” In between all the action, the interwoven lulls become pastoral and add the perfect ballast: “…sunset flooding the interior of a tower… pebbles clatter down a tin roof…a green sky tinged with pink streams.”

Other poems show off further structures and part of the reader’s pleasure is in de-coding these devices and admiring the dexterity with which they’re discharged. Tom Devaney has written about the “dazzling surface” of John Yau’s poetry and it’s an apt notion. These poems hover impossibly above reality. Yau has created a kind of anti-gravity kaleidoscope that refracts the communicative nature of language. He re-presents the mother tongue as a sequence of hypnotic persuasions.

*****

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright studied poetry in New York with Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley. He’s the author of 10 books of poetry. For fifteen years he published Cover Magazine. He is also an art critic and poetry reviewer. Some of his recent work can be found on the following websites:

A Scathing Spoof of “President” Bush;

A long poem celebrating New York City’s community gardens can be found on the Brooklyn College magazine website.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:35 PM 1 comments

IN THE WEAVER'S VALLEY by WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

In The Weaver’s Valley by William Allegrezza
(Blue Lion Books, Espoo, Finland & West Hartford, CT, 2006)

The page before the first poem in William Allegrezza’s In The Weaver’s Valley offers a brief note about the book’s methodology, and it begins:

The governing rule in writing this collection was time. I set out to write five poems a day over fifty days.

In other words, there is a reliance on a concentrated focus for a significantly prolonged period of time. When such is deliberately part of the method, the mark of the work’s success, for me, is when, at some point in the process, the artist is tipped onto a higher level of play (that “zone,” in athletic parlance). In this zone, the poet ceases to write the poems and, instead, the poems write themselves.

The process is not unique, of course, to Allegrezza and I’ve seen it practiced in other arts like painting. Another example of this methodology of concentrated, prolonged focus is 100 MORE JOKES FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (Meritage Press, St. Helena, 2001) which features an etchings-based collaboration between poet John Yau and visual artist Archie Rand. The two passed etchings to each other, Yau offering words from which Rand can riff visually and vice-versa. I cite this example because Yau wrote an essay about methodology from which I conveniently can cite:

Archie [once] proposed that we do one thousand watercolors over the course of a weekend. His reason was simple. Only by doing so many works in a single sitting could we possibly get beyond our habits of thinking, seeing and doing.

100 MORE JOKES… memorializes 100 etchings done in one sitting and it is a work that does transcend the limits of the autobiographical I/eye or what Rand calls “habits of thinking, seeing and doing.”

So, as I read through Allegrezza’s book, I was interested in getting a sense of whether the poems came to be writ from the “zone”. I suggest the answer is “Yes” --compare this poem on Page 8 (all the poems are untitled except for numbers and dates):

“I have played in the snow
as bombs were falling”

the contrasts that instruct

               some ancient scribe
               laughing covers his eyes
                (no soft voice calms him)

               ears                guards
                               situations                revival

“I would ask for forgiveness”

with the book’s second-to-the-last poem on Page 249:

white mountains rose above the trail.
we looked at them momentarily
and then continued walking.

Though I generally found all of the poems effective as individual works, for me, the latter/later poem seems closer to the (im)pulse that created it into being.

Moreover, as one reads through the book, its energy arc never slips; it’s as if each poem was engendered by the prior poem so that the energy, if a line, is ever vertical. It's process-based work -- which would make sense if, ultimately, one agrees that the poems came to write themselves.

Nonetheless, what is also marvelous about this collection is how the energy does not remain abstract. There is a specific narrative overlay to the book that need not have been necessary as the work’s energetic drive, alone, already thrills. As I read it, that narrative may have to do with the futility -- but a worthwhile futility -- to poem-making. Here’s the last poem:

as the darkness approaches
the weavers leave the valley
the shades move away
and the voices grow silent

fragments remain
discarded in the meeting spaces
where embers still smoke
and papers have not yet
succumbed to time.

I feel those last two lines form an ending of unflagging desire -- of anti-nihilism. We all die: the poem does not say “the papers have not/ succumbed…” but says “the papers have not yet/ succumbed to time.” But there is living to occur during that period of “not yet.”

And yet, poetry is replete with paradoxes. And a prolonged focus on poetry, a long work, may lead one to the phrase that surfaces repeatedly, insistently, throughout the book:

“true utterance lost”.

So be it. Poetry’s power is how inarticulateness has never prevented Poetry from existing. But, again, the reader ends with a conclusion of Hope. And, here, form matches content: Hope, as energy, is ever vertical -- that is, forward-looking.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS her dogs who often lie under a poker game here. Her latest poetry collection is THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I whose 2006 sales proceeds will be donated to SAVE DARFUR.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:25 PM 0 comments

AFTER THE SINEWS by PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN

MELISSA WEINSTEIN Reviews

After the Sinews by Patrick James Dunagan
(Auguste Press, San Francisco, 2005)

Talk is vaporous. It rises. But like all things on our earth, it hasn't a prayer of escape. Gravity and smog keep talk anchored here, "spilling about piling up and/shutting us out against which/we rise to sing celebrate such/life we witness trapped by birth" ("Never More Than Extension"). Have a seat, son. No exit.

The judgments so levied in Patrick James Dunagan's After the Sinews (Auguste Press, 2005) are the witness of that choked up between-space of wires only so high above the concretes of California. The poems repeat what they hear, but it's not always clear that, by the time the words get to them, they've heard correctly.

These poems are a fog of news whose details are often obscured by the time they reach our witnesses. There are landmarks to guide us, sticking up through the fog, electric poles and relative pronouns, but we are mainly able only to see vague outlines of what's in front of us.

This strategy can be frustrating. The map is laid out in the opening poem, "Lost Angles":

‘Never want to be one’ those who say so
have turned that corner too far gone
from themselves to recognize the world
they’re creating distanced from the one
they follow led on by doubt mystery the
uncertainty which compels the imaginative
splendour that is the concern here as
the avenues empty struck with unimaginable
loss a blank space needing to be filled
granted such grace which goes unobserved
among the tangle of wires telephone cable
buses and streetcars guide to the tangible
realm we busy ourselves with conveyor of
fiction into fact that we may look out

in which "those who. . . have turned that corner" are never quite clearly recognizable, nor is their residence/destination: "the world/they're creating." This alienation from the concrete is palpable in the poem's maddening vagueness. Here we have city streets populated by wires and streetcars, but they seem mainly to be operating in "a blank space" of "unimaginable loss." Where the hell are we?

The map is a vague one and it's not clear that it will be of use as we venture further into The Sinews. It frustrates, as though it's referencing a conversation or poem that came before, yet it's the first of the series. There is no before, as such. This strategy may succeed in that it knocks us off balance from the get go, prepares us for disorientation to come, but I'm not sure that it works in the creation of a strong opening. It's a risk, at any rate, to so frustrate the reader from the outset, talking about vagueness vaguely.

Which isn't to say that these poems don't work. Ultimately it seems that Dunagan is relying on the gestural conventions of speech with their concomitant weirdnesses, circularities, abstractions, to operate as the ground, the concrete in these poems. While I don't think everything that proceeds from this premise succeeds, the successes are magnificent.

"The Choice," for instance, is just as maddening in its vagueness of reference, yet works beautifully, language eating its own tail:

Uprooted what love had I who
no sooner promised than soon
erupted in lie to bear full
brunt the promise which in
verse lies which says best is
the one so chosen who chooses
the life broken beat and
squandered straight out of
all they who must be that
one who lifts the sounds up-
ward spiral of danger the
harmful embrace of the life
so chosen to be lived prey
to those above as well as below

Words mutate -- lie becomes lies becomes life becomes lift becomes life becomes lived -- giving us something concrete (though at the same time abstract) to hang onto as we move from the very poetic syntax of the opening line "Uprooted what love had I who" to the somewhat mysterious closing in which the virtue of those who have chosen the life of being "lived prey to those above as well as below". The "nothing" of language becomes, suddenly, something here.

In the end, Dunagan means to kill his forefathers. He's thrown out the mandate of "no ideas but in things," so important to so many of his poet heroes, to posit that "being specific will not carry us further/past the Pacific than already others/before us have gone dimmed and dull." Words, speech, language – these no-things are it, the rope we must blindly hang on to as we move through the shit and smog of contemporary life. As in the poems in the Sinews, this reality can leave us hanging, but it can also, somehow, be extremely satisfying.

*****

Melissa Weinstein lives in New Mexico.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:20 PM 0 comments

THE POET SLAVE OF CUBA (A BIOGRAPHY OF JUAN FRANCISCO MANZANO)

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

The Poet Slave of Cuba (A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano) by Margarita Engle
(Henry Holt Publishers, 2006)


Cuba, oh, Cuba, when they call thee fair!
And rich and beautiful, the Queen of isles!
Star of the West, and ocean’s gem most rare!
Oh, say to them who mock thee with such wiles
Take of these flowers, and view these lifeless spoils
That wait the worm; beyond the hues beneath
The pale cold cheek, and seek for living smiles,
Where beauty lies not in the arms of death,
And bondage taints not with its poisoned breath.
--From To Cuba by Juan Francisco Manzano, Translated by Dr RR Madden

The Poet Slave of Cuba made my heart weep in every sense of the cliché. Capturing the true and horrible sense of enslavement, Margarita Engle has created a masterpiece. Adversity and heartache pulsate through this collection that ends with a beginning. Illustrations by Sean Qualls stand mournful sentinels over poems rich in their raw honesty. The work is truly staggering in the enormity of its task and Engle’s sensational success. Google The Poet Slave of Cuba and you will be rewarded with an astonishing array of reviews and articles all enthusing the haunting verse of Engle’s biography.

When my owner catches
               a whiff
               of the fragrance
               of words
               engraved in the flesh
               of succulent geranium leaves
               or the perfumed petals of alelí flowers
               then she frowns because she knows
               that I dream
               with my feathers
               my wings
--Juan

Engle’s describes an environment and concept foreign to most of her readers. She revels in this by using dramatic language to tell her story, while maintaining a faithful account of Juan Francisco Manzano’s life. There is ample opportunity to exaggerate, but she resists the temptation. The history of Juan Francisco Manzano is one typical of slavery. What makes it stand out is his legacy of verse and Engle handles this with subtle mastery.

Margarita Engle’s is a powerful voice. Her characters are sharply drawn and while there is sometimes a fine line between female and male voice, especially when Don Nicolás and Toribio are speaking, the female characters are sharply defined.

When I leave the country houses, city houses, palaces
               when I leave without him, ho, how he screams!
               Everyone laughs
               he’s inconsolable
               how amusing, they say,
               the child actually thinks he belongs to you–
               in that other way
               of belonging
--Doña Beatriz

The differences in his mistresses’ voices are a good example of Engle’s characterisation. The elegant and elderly Doña Beatriz is arrogantly patronizing. The repressed and frustrated La Marquesa de Prado Ameno is cruelly insane.

Some people can never be satisfied.
The poet-boy, for instance.
Nothing is ever enough for him.
I have to tell the overseers to teach
               the same lessons
               over and over
               locking his ankles in the stocks
               tying him to a cross like Jesus.
Or tying him to a ladder laid out on the ground
               face down, mouth down
               so he cannot speak
               except to count his own lashes out loud.
And even then, when he loses count
               as they always do when they pass out
               from shameful weakness
Even then, when the overseer makes him start over
               counting again from number one
               until he finally reaches number nine
And even when this is done nine days in a row
               still he bleeds and weeps,
               trying to show me
               that he has won
               he has triumphed once again
               he has proven that he can still
               make me sad.
Evil child.
--La Marquesa de Prado Ameno

However, we are encouraged to feel a sense of pity for these characters through the sensitivity of Juan.

I watch
as they arch their eyebrows
and flutter their open silk fans
each fan the graceful shape
of a single wing
even a free bird is helpless
with just one wing
--Juan

The women in this tyrannously male-dominated society are slaves as well. They are unable to exercise their minds, to fulfil their potential or realise ambition. They are as enslaved in their position as the slaves they own. The ability of Engle’s to skilfully achieve this level of realism in her biography is a great credit to her storytelling capabilities. Interestingly it is the women that play centre stage in this biography. The men are seen as marginal figures despite the apparent power with which they rule their empires.

Don Juan rules El Molino
               his plantation
               on this island of sugar
               and many other sweet illusions
--Juan

Don Juan is a shadowy figure. He never appears in the book but as a third party. Vague references are made to him and we receive a hazy picture. La Marques is a similarly undefined character. But while Don Juan appears an active Master, La Marques appears weak and despised by his wife. The only males given a voice are the Overseer, Don Nicolás, Toribio and Juan. The Overseer and Toribio are strong workingmen, while Don Nicholas and Juan are more artistic and dreamy. It is the women that dominate Juan’s life. Don Nicolás offers him respite, Toribio teaches him his trade, but the women fight for and against him. Juan’s life is one of uncertainty, of being pushed and pulled in all directions at once.

Is it true that King David in ancient Israel
really wrote such sad-happy, doubtful-hopeful
back-and-forth maybe-someday
no-not-maybe
these-are-promises, absolutely-definitely
but-we-have-to-wait
songs?
--Juan

Engle’s weaves an illusionary scene. Juan’s freedom is an illusion, his dreams are illusions, La Marquesa de Prado Ameno’s cruelty was inspired by delusions and the Doña Beatriz pretended Juan was her own child. This sense of unreality continues with references to rooster feathers, bones and magic that weave a voodoo spell around the reader. Curses wrap themselves around the Spanish masters and a hint of spirituality pervades the text. An almost fairytale otherworldliness with the rich scents and lush description conjure Juan as a 19th Scheherazade telling 1001 stories to maintain his sanity.

Engle’s Cuban-American ancestry is largely responsible for the power behind her imagery and description, and she has produced a remarkable book. Every verse feels touched with personal devotion and her need to get across the beauty and history of what she writes is overwhelming. Obviously the legacy of storytelling has been passed down to her through her Cuban ancestors’. Although it is aimed at older children, I personally feel it is going to find a more receptive audience among adults. If you buy a copy, treasure it and learn from it. This book is more a work of art than any others I have read lately.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds is the Poetry Editor for ezine Moondance.com and reviews regularly for other ezines and magazines. Passionately commited to the written word she is doing all she can to restore Poetry to its rightful place as Queen of literature.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:10 PM 0 comments

THE COUNTESS OF FLATBROKE by MARY MERIAM

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

The Countess of Flatbroke by Mary Meriam, with an afterword by Lillian Faderman
(Modern Metrics, New York, 2006)

From Pembroke to Flatbroke: Mary Meriam’s First Chapbook Travels a Lesbian-Feminist Terrain

While Virginia Woolf fantasized about what Shakespeare’s sister might have written, we know what Sir Philip Sidney’s sister wrote. The Countess of Pembroke, Mary Sidney, was a recognized and lauded poet and psalmist during her lifetime and thereafter; now she is the inspiration of Mary Meriam’s new chapbook, The Countess of Flatbroke.

The Countess of Flatbroke is one of the first chapbooks released by Modern Metrics, a new independent publisher in New York City run by poets seeking to promote verse, with a penchant for formal verse, through limited runs of chapbooks. In The Countess of Flatbroke, Mary Meriam displays her passion for the sonnet. Of the fifteen poems in The Countess of Flatbroke, eleven are sonnets or sonnet sequences. Meriam’s sonnets are not like Sidney’s with their concern for the pastoral and their required laudatory expressions for family and the court; Meriam’s sonnets, rather, reflect the realities of being the Countess of Flatbroke, an appropriate conceit for a penurious contemporary lesbian poet. In “The Bitter Side of Flatbroke,” Meriam writes,

Some people lead an easy life, from birth

to death, connected, pampered, lucky, rich,

convinced that smiling fate defines their worth,

quite safe and snug and settled in their niche.

I wonder why I can’t be one of them.

Meriam doesn’t dwell on the bitterness though, instead she evokes a lovely fantasy and then concludes humorously, “Perhaps someone will throw this dog a bone.”

It is, however, in the sonnets that move beyond the trope of the Countess of Flatbroke that Meriam’s work as a prosodist is strongest. “Proserpina Hymns,” an extended sonnet with a refrain, stretches the sonnet form and demonstrates Meriam’s skill with rhyme in quatrains such as this:

I dreamt I had a bullet in my chest.

I saw the wound. The blood was blocked from flowing

by metal lodged beneath my skin, but glowing

and pulsing red, a spot above my breast.


In the sonnet sequence, “Queer Elements,” Meriam writes,
                                             They laugh at me
again for being queer. Then take me, death,

untie me, fire, make me, set me free.

to fire I bequeath my final breath.

My hair begins to flicker bright and hot.

I’d rather die than be someone I’m not.

In her afterword to the chapbook, Dr. Lillian Faderman writes, “Mary Meriam’s poems are queer and quirky, funny and poignant, bold and brave.” Dr. Faderman concludes, “We can’t help but admire the considerable wit and acute perceptions that emerge from … difficult knowledge.” The Countess of Flatbroke is a welcome contribution to the world of lesbian literature with its humor and fantasy for contemporary lesbian life and its imaginative historical framework.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:04 PM 0 comments

THREE CHAPS by BRIAN HOWE, KENT JOHNSON & TOM CLARK

JON LEON offers mini-reviews of three chaps: GUITAR SMASH by Brian Howe; LYRIC POETRY AFTER AUSCHWITZ: ELEVEN SUBMISSIONS TO THE WAR by Kent Johnson; and THRENODY by Tom Clark


GUITAR SMASH by Brian Howe
(3rdness, Atlanta, 2006)

Brian Howe is pioneering a new type of poetry I’ll call Science Future. He pushes the boundaries of what a poem can be by assimilating technology, sampling, and repetition to transcend and skirt categorizations like modern, post, and avant. Little trace of the author can be found in Guitar Smash. It is poetry with a life of its own, organized through a process distinguishable from “human” poetry. That is, Brian Howe is an alien. Yet as “Posthuman Romance” exclaims, “The word ‘unnatural’ is never a compliment.”

In the posthuman world “Altering the structure of the English language/Making it more fucked up and fluid...” is completely natural. Accordingly, Brian Howe writes straight poems about the real world; aesthetically alert imidazoles synthesizing the copious amount of information transferred at a vamped speed. Guitar Smash, then, is wholly given over to the seduction of the present and that sentiment is embedded in the book and complicit “with the avant-garde...against meaning, history, intentionality, the final demise of modernism.”

When describing Guitar Smash the question of success or failure is a moot point. It is not even a book and therefore cannot be situated around the relative merit or demerit of its enterprise. Guitar Smash represents and reflects our world’s drive to advance at all costs. The costs of the process of appropriation and textual manipulation is a human cost and once we release our poetic variances upon the world we are alienated from them. Guitar Smash exists in the world as an inexchangeable, terminally unsaleable oddity. In the poem “Poetry” Howe, perhaps accidentally, architecturizes a plausible manifesto for the genre. The poem begins “poetry is passion/for real people/a political act” and goes on to assert “poetry is not something” and “poetry is not something I do.”

Poetry has endured a long tradition and is ever advancing. The most effective of young poets are the ones who question, and agitate the very definition and usefulness of the form. Howe does so with the spaces between the block of words in “Thermopoetics” which create a metronomic anvil effect, placing primary attention on the ear to enact a music. Any images or meaning associated with the squall roam like flashlights in a basement dive. The jagged cannonball rhythm pounds with a dyslexic beat to the raucous of an emerging and ________ generation.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War by Kent Johnson
(effing press, Austin, TX 2005)

Rat-a-tat-tat. What can one say about this book but that it is necessary. As necessary as "crispy girl," "four little girls incinerated in a mud compound," "head a little bit on fire," "often-raped / kids," "the making of bombs," "machete'd babies in the streets," "open eyed bodies on slow fire," "a fifteen inch dildo down your mouth," "torture prisons," and "we did our best" are unnecessary. Kent Johnson gives us all the tallied brutality we can stomach but with a big-shot heart and mindful sincerity. In the Preface to Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, a letter to Campus Watch, Johnson states in parentheses that "not everyone would judge it poetry!" It is poetry sine qua non, in the most classical and historical sense and simultaneously advanced-plus. A tendentious beach fire for the bland poetic notions so desperate in their idiotic will to persevere into the 21st century. Here, in only 40 pages, we can be scared, excited, endangered, and hopeful all together. The attention that Johnson directs to the startling details of current events could be an example in constructing a world of accountability, an integral activity lest we become like "Volvo driving academics" carpooling with "the girl . . . seemingly oblivious to the gunfire and screams." For in that world we would not need to call these poems "exceptional" or "brave" because all poems would be nothing other than. We can sense his contempt of retreat and muted protest in "Bernstein's 'Enough,'" an appropriate response to Charles Bernstein's argument in favor of "ambiguity," "complexity," and "skepticism" as opposed to anti-war poetry that is "overtly political and written in language that approximates the norm." Without action and responsibility we may only lower our heads in shame and imagine the Poet mocking us into exile; perhaps returning some lucky day to enjoy "surplus time the labor of others has more or less made." That husky labor in American Poetry is generously taken up by the efforts of Kent Johnson in his chapbook Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War. One may have to brush away the rabble and mob from the bookshelf to accommodate such commitment.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Threnody by Tom Clark
(effin' press, Austin, 2006)

Threnody opens with a prologue called “Dead End” describing the loss of the “heavy industries that built our world and shaped our lives”—the compulsion to press forward through time in this world which “has only one direction, forward, and one speed, this speed, and one destination, a dead end that repeats itself over and over.” Bleak, yes, and the book remains so during the course of its ten poems and eight pictorials illustrating the grim subject matter. A track which accompanies the reader on a darkly sentimental trip through the debris of ghostly absent industrial landscapes.

Threnody is a quick and minimal imagistic shutter of a near distant boompast. Clark communicates his elegiac reminiscences by way of highly readable and compelling poetry describing a “colorless world.” A melancholic tone pervades throughout the book.

3. Scroll

A junction we pass a switch the rails diverge
We are compelled along the right-hand set of tracks
The tracks on the left vanish into drifting snow
Snow blows toward us splats wetly and melts upon the glass
We approach a level crossing between low industrial buildings
Snow blowing from left to right across the tracks
At the level crossing a signal light a flagman a single forlorn pedestrian
               holding an umbrella against the stinging wind
We continue on between long empty loading ramps
Through interstices in guardrails and fences peek starved ghost trees
Time passes and all we know is this colorless white-gray world
These white-dark hulking shapes this wet gray-white snow
We’ve never been here
We will never be back
The tracks go on unscrolling
And we go on following the tracks
These endless parallels endlessly unravelling

Movement, time, and progress are detailed and stilted for a moment in a wistful snapshot—grainy and gray-white. With the sheds, ramps, powerlines, chimneys, abandoned factories, and vacant warehouses Clark’s poems move at the pace of memory’s unscrolling. Threnody is a memorial to modern times and a munificent reminder that “Poets sang lamentations once.”


*****

Jon Leon is author of Boxd Transistor. Some recent articles and poems appear in Jacket, Magazine Cypress, Ghost Play, and Dusie.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:58 PM 0 comments

BEGGARS AT THE WALL by ROCHELLE RATNER

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Beggars at the Wall by Rochelle Ratner
(IKON, New York, 2005)

She Speaks of It:

Ratner opens Beggars at the Wall with the poem, “Trying to Speak of It.” It begins,

Israel is marrow in bone,

eats away at you

from the inside

just like her olive trees

hollowing themselves in mourning

now that the Temple’s gone. . . .

It ends, “like all the other trees, I keep my fears inside.” I’d like to keep my fears inside, but they come spilling out at moments like this. Moments when Israel is at war. I can’t write this review dispassionately amid the current crisis (which is to say, war) that is raging right now between Israel and Lebanon, amid the conflict that continues between Israel and Palestine. I cannot pretend that the world is the same as when I first read the book five weeks ago. I cannot pretend that this book is not infused with the seeds of this war. I cannot pretend that these poems feel more urgent and more vital today as they are infused with many of the views and concerns that I, an American Jew, have at this moment. It is one of the great strengths of this book, I believe, that I feel such a passionate engagement with it.

I feel like the beggar, about which Ratner writes in the poem that gives this collection its title, “They are not allowed here.” Who is allowed here? Who is allowed at the wall? Who is allowed in Israel? Ratner’s book is about that struggle: the struggle between who is in and who is out; the struggle between Israeli and Palestinian; the struggle between American Jews and Israeli Jews; the struggle between men and women; the struggle between tourists and residents. She tells us in an early poem in the collection,

I can only do

what feels right to me,

mixing tradition with tradition

as Jerusalem herself does.

Ultimately, that is what Ratner does in this book, mixes tradition and discerns what feels right.

Beggars at the Wall is divided into four sections titled consecutively: One Direction Only, Relations, The Legs of Those Around Me, and Perspective. The text is accented throughout with photographs by Ratner from her travels.

The poems of this collection are strongest when Ratner exposes her struggles through relationships as in the poem, “Rabbi Marc,” where she reveals, “he takes pictures/of the Chagall windows,/though they’ve asked us not to./On these things, Torah takes no stand.” Equally strong are the poems where Ratner uses synecdoche with items specific to Israel, such as the menorahs in “Sabbath in Jerusalem” where Ratner writes, “they are wrought iron, heavy,/but I know I must bring light home/before I’ll believe in it.” The strongest poems of this book are in the final section, Perspective. Here Ratner connects her experiences in Israel with her life in the United States and experiences in her family. Each poem in this section sings with great emotional depth and complexity.

Although the urgency of this book increased while the current situation with Israel and her neighbors spiraled into war, Beggars at the Wall is not a book for a particular historical moment. It is a book by an accomplished poet that engages intensely with what it means to be a Jew in the United States and what it means to be an American Jew visiting Israel. Through that intense engagement, Ratner’s poems emerge transcendent and sublime.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

posted by EILEEN @ 10:46 PM 0 comments

SECRET ASIAN MAN by NICK CARBO

CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING Reviews

Secret Asian Man by Nick Carbó
(Tia Chucha Press, Chicago, 2000)

Was it Joseph Campbell, Jim Carrey, or Peter Gabriel who said a mask permits you to show what you truly are? (Peter Gabriel). Ang Tunay na Lalaki (Tagalog for “The Real Man”) serves Carbó well as the alter ego or mask through which he can express the truths of being an Asian man in America. Along the way, Carbó uses Lalaki, a pop icon in the Philippines “somewhere between Mr. Clean and the Marlboro Man” as well as many other names from popular culture to portray America as a land of glaring, glib, and preconceived notions. These icons could be seen as identities too defined to accommodate nuances of existence. Carbó’s complex use of the word “real” plays on our notions of what it means for a man of color to exert a presence in this culture. Finally, playing on his own biography, Carbó lets Lalaki find an artistic marriage in which Orpheus creates a ménage a trois with artist wife Sally: All must be shared. The poems vary from sturdy tercets, to faux found poems about Sally’s CV and Lalaki’s sleep apnea study. Lalaki even attends a workshop and his homework serves as the most abstract and dizzyingly playful of the volume. Carbó’s work is fun, accessible, full of transformations, and more genuine than a sanctimonious and distraught set of poems on outsiderdom could ever be.

The mix of proper pop culture nouns and Tagalog emphasize the contrast between Lalaki’s inner life, and the outer culture in which he finds himself, as well as giving the poems satisfying sounds. Secret Asian Man, or Lalaki, wants to,

“ride/the back of a carabao and bolt
up Madison Avenue screaming
like Tandang Sora or shout
hala-bira! hala-bira! hala-bira!” (15)

He’s not cowed or tempted by the culture around him, and seems to want to be as joyful as New York’s streets, even on his own terms, i.e. with “bad behavior” (15). But he notices soon that his hair has grown to make him look like “Tonto in the Lone Ranger” – signaling an unwilled assimilation. The transformation from one icon to another reminds the reader of the common experience of being mistaken for a member of another culture (Are you Hawaiian? Are you Mexican?), and the way Lalaki’s hair seems to betray him is a moving moment. By using these pop icons, Carbó avoids striking a received tone of indignation or nostalgia for a homeland; instead, he achieves a kind of slightly bittersweet humor and short-hands paradox.

La Virgen del Pelo Mojado isn’t safe from this funny/sad use of icons – his mother sends a wooden statue of her meant to help Lalaki find a good “American wife” (39). Joking about the novenas anxious mothers might request in their son’s honor, Carbó brings Lalaki into serious territory: Lalaki himself takes the wooden statue and “places her on the mantle piece, and begins/to arrange the flowers he bought…” (39). Lalaki’s religious gesture might be a new thing for him, might be a forgotten tradition. Driven by his desperation to find a woman, the poem gives a well-placed distraction from the hectic storm of icons, AOL sluts, and video nemises Lalaki must face on the street.

Although the icons help Carbó comment on set notions of cultural identity-- and he seems to be saying they are ridiculous, ubiquitous, unrelenting -- the word “real” has an indeniable importance in this work that counters and complicates the pop noise. In “Ang Tunay Na Lalaki Sips a Frothy Cappuccino,” the young Lalaki meets up with Orpheus who announces, “I’ve recently traveled to Manila through a poem by a poet named Nick Carbó.” (29). Here, actual poet and Lalaki collide in the reader’s mind, reminding one of mortality, the finite, the trace of the real within Lalaki’s escapades. The concept of “real” crops up during the course of this narrative series as a counterweight to the created ad icon at large in New York City. Meeting Carbó, Lalaki exclaims, “No shit! You’re a real person!”(49) un-ironically surprised for himself, but ironically surprised for the reader.The scenario allows Carbó to announce outright how the persona of Lalaki is helping him live out fantasies, albeit through the Western figure of poetry, Orpheus. But the reader doesn’t get the feeling Carbó is caught up Orpheus’ potential to be grandiose. Instead he uses Orpheus as the personification of the place where the pressure of the real on the imaginary creates poetic impulse.

The concept of the “real” becomes rich in the prose poem “Assignment” that chronicles Lalaki’s Hello Kitty industrial espionage assignment. He thinks about being Hello Kitty’s bodyguard, and thinks “All the children are crying and he realized this is real, this is not a stunt dreamed up by the toy companies…” The children’s hysteria about Hello Kitty doesn’t touch on reality per se; plastics, shipping, tired workers assembling Hello Kitty clocks, but rather on the reality of the love for Hello Kitty as an icon being real -- not just a publicity stunt (88). Lalaki’s exclamation about what is real, then, is a way for Carbó to draw an outline around the kind of reaction cultural figures receive. The reader can’t help but be reminded of the way old ladies might say an Asian girl, “Is so pretty like a China doll” or enthuse in some manner that seems to have no relation to a personal identity. Hello Kitty almost gets kidnapped by something dressed as a Power Ranger, and fortunately, Lalaki saves the day and the poem from becoming too heady (89).

Lalaki’s espionage job requires him to pretend to be married. Here, true reality and fantasy mix as the five final poems of the book, prose narratives, seem to hint at Carbó’s real life. Lalaki’s wife, a successful artist named Sally, films him, objectifies him, (“20 minutes – brown nipple/20 minutes – brown butt cheeks” (71) and finally catches him in his undercover assignment with another woman. Naturally, I don’t mean to imply marital strife is part of Carbó’s real life, but the notion that he feels Other, and a true feeling of remaining incognito in the success of a spouse, rises to the poems’ surfaces. Lalaki reminds Sally: “…you met the real me, the real man before I applied for this job. You’ll always have the genuine article at home and for the rest of your life” (92). The convergence in the final poems of Sally and Lalaki with Carbó and Denise Duhamel provides a wink to the audience that the married icon and his wife are just playthings representing the trials of shared artistic lives, some survived with love as in a good marriage, and deeply understood at a remove. With a wife whose success must surely at times feel like it eclipses his own, Carbó proves his own security to Lalaki, or his own reality in disguise, and to reader when he ends the book by wishing his creations and himself the best: “My wife Denise has wrapped the gift. We want to give them (Lalaki and Sally) a good life” (“Epilogue” 96).

On the cover of Secret Asian Man, a man with chartreuse skin, a trenchcoat, and automatic weapon immediately casts this titular persona as a protagonist, not simply an epithet, and Carbó follows through, letting his poems chronologically outline the life of Lalaki with playful and sometimes sad outlines on exclusion, and honesty about the challenges of the artist’s loves.

*****

Cynthia Arrieu-King is a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati and an echocardiographer. Her work is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Pilot Poetry, and Court Green.

posted by EILEEN @ 9:59 PM 0 comments

I LOVE ARTISTS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

THOMAS FINK Reviews

I Love Artists: New and Selected Poems by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 2006)

I Love Artists, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s New and Selected Poems gathers work from a 32 year span. The straightforward writing of her first book, Summits Move with the Tide (1974), published when she was 27, is represented by two poems that introduce an enduring interest in the perception of nature—often in the landscape of the southwest, where she has lived since then: “You go to the mountains/ stretch in the light aquariums/ and wait—/ stillness turns in its well” (“Perpetual Motion,” 4). The relationship of impressions of stasis and actual natural movement in this passage is further developed and questioned in later work. The idea that “the summit moves with the tide” (5) is interesting, but it took Berssenbrugge a while to learn how to make full use of such inventive observations in the context of a more complex poetic flux.

“Chronicle,” which conveys ancestral memories, and “The Constellation Quilt,” an account of a domestic patterning of astral mythology, collected from Random Possession (1979), follow the first book’s narrative impulse. However, “The Reservoir” and sections from “The Field for Blue Corn” show the poet trusting herself to encapsulate some degree of meditative drift about nature and other subjects in longer, looser poems.

The title-poem of The Heat Bird (1983) indicates a point of transition between Berssenbrugge’s early style and her signature mode. Lines, though not nearly as long as in later books, all of which have a necessarily horizontal rather than vertical format, are considerably longer than in the first two books. Even though the bird that the poet has mysteriously encountered is a presence in nearly all of the ten sections, the story of trying to characterize it is enmeshed with representations of other sensory experiences in nature, uncertain contact with a possible lover, a desire “to learn how/ to dance” (18), and most dramatically, radiation in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated: “And I can’t predict your trauma. Potent and careless/ as radiation here, which we call careless, because/ we don’t suspect anything” (17). Perhaps scientists’ deliberate pollution of the environment has forced the “bird” to absorb “heat.”

With Empathy (1989), Berssenbrugge establishes patterns that have endured for the last seventeen years: extremely long lines (sometimes in single-line stanzas), very abstract language that can be scientific, psychological, philosophical, theological, etc. interspersed unpredictably with highly sensory imagery, recurrence of motifs but a thwarting of narrative flow, and a title that refers to one thematic aspect but does not unlock the poem’s “meaning.” Further, poems tend to have several sections that span three to ten pages. Multiple “themes” are never laid out in an orderly, essayistic way. Usually, aphorisms knock against concrete observations without quite yielding their precise relation yet not seeming nonsensical.

In “Alakanak Break-Up,” the longest poem culled from Empathy, a witnessed transformation of “ice” into “foam” (30) occasions extended consideration of how an individual’s perceptual encounters with nature develop. The remarkable opening lines exemplify the “magic” of environmental processes: “To find out the temperature, she tosses a cup of water into the air,/ because it will evaporate before it hits the ground.” In the perceiver’s contact with “the event horizon,” active selection of focus is a necessary antidote to an “infinity” of sensory information that encourages undifferentiated seeing/thinking in such a scape: “You can focus on a cone-shaped rock/ in the bay. You can make it larger and closer than the ice/ surrounding it, because you have the power to coax the target./ This breaks up you settlement in a stretch of infinity” (31). Berssenbrugge goes on to include, without transitions, various other contexts of perception, including car and perhaps airplane travel. At one point, “you are a blur of speed concentrating on heading in one direction” (32), whereas, at another, “you look/ down on a break-up of little clouds over the plain, as if the house/ you are in suddenly rises, to relieve the nervous pressure of light” (37).

Berssenbrugge’s interest in multiple perspectives is not solely tied to nature but also to the social realm; it includes open-ended speculation about conditions of dialogue or “communication.” In Empathy’s title-poem, the poet speaks of a woman’s “feeling of identifying with [a man]” as comparable to “a quick flash or a signal” that longing can dangerously morph into a narrative whose “rhetoric” of closure resolves obstacles to empathic connection too simply: “When it is intense, tormenting and continuous, it’s using itself to construct a rhetorical story again./ This state of confusion is never made comprehensible by being given a plot,/ in the same way a complicated plot is only further complicated by being simplified. . . “ (48). Instead, “the speaking is a constant notation of parallel streams of thought and observations,/ whose substance is being questioned in a kind of oral thought at once open and precise. . .” (50). However worthwhile, the goal of “empathy for what is good in life/ from” another’s “point of view” (51) is thwarted by desire, “a problem of interpretation that enters the stream of emotion itself,” and by “a liberty of interruption, or exclusion” (50). For Berssenbrugge, location of stable identity for oneself and others seems elusive. “Time-lapse” photography, “those collages that verge on trompe l’oeil,” may approximate self as process, and “Empathy” ends with a simultaneous acknowledgment of the limitations of self- and other-representation and an attempt to honor the desire to communicate by utilizing the fiction of unified selves:

                              Only when she looks closely
does she realize that that head is really not the one connected to that body,
although everyday gestures or tensions accrete an intimacy she can recognize.
Be that as it may, real and constant luminosity of the parts can create
a real self who will remain forever in the emotion of a necessary or real person.
To deny this is to deny the struggle to make certain meanings stick. (51)

In Empathy and Sphericity (1993, represented here by one poem), Berssenbrugge speculates about what one might call “fate” as a limitation of freedom encountered in the act of perception and in one’s situation in culture and language, whereas in Endocrinology (1997) and the title-poem of Four Year Old Girl (1998), both written during a long illness after she was exposed to a pesticide, the poet contemplates the body as source of limitation. Endocrinology includes suggestions that difficulties of perception and random processes trouble our attempts to regulate our bodies’ inner workings: “Hormones are molecules, material, invisible. Their flow is random,/ mesh through which a body is sensed, not an image” (68). The poet’s strange personification and preposition-use indicate the way that the body’s dysfunctioning can overpower the conscious will; this is followed by a strong natural image with possible symbolic resonance and attendant abstractions: “Because she’s in a body, it makes decisions./ Black rock in a dry river, weeds tangled at the base, something heavy enmeshes with something light./ The material, of non-negotiable contingency, the feeling, . . .” (69). Later, we learn that “the sick, immortalized cells don’t know to stop growing” (71). But despite corporal determinism, individual subjectivity exerts whatever influence it can. Further, various passages allude to a sexual relationship between the sick woman, who “feels desire for the man touching her abdomen,/ that feels like love” (70) and a man who “loved her body as much as he loved her as an individual” (71).

Telling of the “fate” of “genetic disease” as “extreme genetic change, against a background of normal variability,” Berssenbrugge in “The Four Year Old Girl” often presents precise medical data and abstract philosophizing near passages representing strong emotion like “A girl says sweetly, it’s time you begin to look after me, so I may seem lovable to myself” (83). Sometimes, a single sentence will incorporate striking differences: “Between what occurs by chance and, ‘Mother, can you see I’m dying?’ is the same relation we deal with in recurrence” (85). The poem articulates the anxious disjunction between the tragically afflicted daughter’s perspective and her mother’s, conflict between the girl’s effort to assert belief in a stable identity and evidence of deterioration (including eventual blindness) that proves her “transitory,” and the difference between individual loss and consoling macrocosmic continuities: “A species survives in the form of a girl asking sweetly./ Nevertheless, survival of the species as a whole has meaning./ Each girl is transitory” (84).

Various poems taken from Nest (2003) and four new poems offer fresh approaches to issues of natural and social perception, dialogue (especially in “Hearing” and “Audience”), love, and family that have preoccupied Berssenbrugge since Empathy. Of Chinese and Dutch parentage and born in Beijing, the poet is drawn toward lament for the displacement of her Chinese origins in “Nest” and a charting of intergenerational (female) continuities and discontinuities:


My mother tongue, Chinese, has an immemorial history before me.

I was inserted into it, a motive for my language.

I learned it naturally, filling it with intentions, and will leave it without intent for other children.

My mother and I speak local language and sometimes our mother tongue, as in my dream, with its intent.

What to intend in changing the mother tongue of my daughter, compassion, not being ill, sleep in which a daughter resonates depth, like a bell. (112)


The adjective “immemorial” conveys temporal vastness and, in the potentially negative prefix “im-,” a hint of a cancellation of memory. The fact of the speaker’s “insertion” into Chinese and her “natural” appropriation of it as a vehicle for “intentions” is poignantly contrasted with the ambiguity of the verb “leave” (present or abandon) attached to a lack of “intent.” The poet’s dream of conversation with her dead mother involves the heartening nostalgia of a return to the “mother tongue.” However, holding herself responsible (though her parents moved her to an English-speaking country) and hoping her own parental intentions have been proper, she seems haunted by the difference in her own daughter’s original language. Fascinated with interstices, with liminality, Berssenbrugge “confesses” her linguistic “border” status: “I want to tell you what’s difficult to admit, that I left home.// Change of mother tongue between us activates an immunity, margin where dwelling and travel are not distinct” (113). Out of this, a rich multiplicity, as well as sadness, could emerge: “I feel the right to have my invitation accepted, an open house” (115).

Relying on a simplifying account of themes, a pastiche of quotations, and brief glosses, my commentary on exemplary poems in I Love Artists has registered only a small fraction of the intellectual, tropological, and affective complexity (at times, even productive disorientation) that comprise my reading experience. To approximate what transpires in a single poem would take a tremendous amount of space. This is especially evident in new poems like “Concordance,” in which the push/pull between adjacent lines can be hard to characterize, even as diction is relatively straightforward: “Then, it’s possible to undo misunderstanding from inside by tracing the flight or thread of empty space running through things, even a relation that’s concordant.// Seeds disperse in summer air.// Sunrays cease to represent parallel passages in a book, i.e. not coming from what I see and feel” (133). Negative space remains full of potential. In Berssenbrugge’s poetic collage-fields, there is a continual slippage from fixity and a demystifying play that, nevertheless, maintains the pleasures of the mysterious.

*****

Thomas Fink, a Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, is the author of four books of poetry, including NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY (Moria Poetry, 2006) and AFTER TAXES (Marsh Hawk Press, 2004), and two books of criticism. Beard of Bees will publish his e-chapbook, STACCATO LANDMARK, this fall. His paintings hang in various collections.

posted by EILEEN @ 9:51 PM 0 comments

PUTI / WHITE by PATRIA RIVERA

REME GREFALDA Reviews

PUTI / WHITE by Patria Rivera
(Frontenac House, Calgary, Alberta, 2005)

stringing moments of grace

. . . We urge
the poet to teach us to interpret dreams, cure sickness,
fall into trances, say what we believe – how not to break
the breath that makes us paint, carve stone and wood.
When life forces you into a corner, the river torrent will surge
like ink blacking out the tabloid warfare. We wake to
fleeting rain wetting the shaded tipica deep in the ravine.
- Dream Trilogy, 1

To encounter poetry is to be captivated by it. There is no other way. Gravitate one must, on first read; like being in love at first sight. One experiences a hesitant encounter with someone’s uncanny turn of phrases articulating one’s own unspoken life. To be understood is primal; it is a need that sustains the human soul. This is the poet’s calling without their ever knowing the power of their words.

Patria Rivera’s poems create landscapes. Emotional landscapes with painted titles such as “13 blossoms in a Minnesota museum,” “Women descended from birds,” “1000 Cranes,” “The geography outside,” “Dogteeth," among others. She is the winner of several awards and commendations and is on the rise among Frontenac House’s coterie of promising Canadian poets.

Rivera’s landscapes darken when her voice recedes into a stoical broadcast delivery that detonates yesterday’s headlines into shards and the flutter of human debris ("Suspicious cargo"). In response to a Boston Review article, “What’s wrong with Missile defense: An Interview with Ted Postol by Joshua Cohen,” she writes

They weep over what once was, linger.

Imagine first tenderness in everything,
how difficult the well of tears,
how impossible to think
it exists.
. . .
how enthralled they were with the omnipotence
of technology: the tumbling decoys,
the brightness and fluctuations in brightness
of balloon-covered warheads
tumbling end-over-end.
               They’ve seen those lights
               once –
alpha, beta, gamma – pikadon
of thunder brighter than a thousand suns,
pure, blinding,
searing the back of a seven-fingered
island.

In her recollection, she finds it
unthinkable
               how they’d forgotten
they had once been concerned with the
simple
and the marvelous,
that the world around them spun
on a drop of water,
how they had once been vulnerable.
(How they understood)

In a gentler but no less devastating poem, Rivera introduces us to a day in the life of a town, where villagers wait in line to use their new artesian well that was

. . .
brought in by the Reparations Bill.
               Potable water for this small dried-up hamlet.
. . .
               This water would be good enough
to go with morning, noon and evening meals.
                              Water worth the wait
for barrio folks lining up from sun-up to sundown.
. . .
By late noon, the sun had hidden behind a cloud.
The line up, too, seemed to thin
               as an old woman with a bucket
took her turn at the spout. She barely noticed
               her loose, long hair catch the spokes
                              of the waterwheel, pry the secret out
               of her scalp.
(Old woman at the well)

In Puti / White, her first published collection of poems, Rivera fulfills her “curiosity for the obvious, what’s behind objects, what’s behind desires.” ("Full Particulars"). Are these only for her private reminisces of her siblings, her mother, her aunts -- then why are we as intrigued when we find them on the page? Follow her many aunts whose retinue of names serendipitously ring out a poetic cadence:

Maria. Petra. Nicasia. Pascuala. Maxima. Aurelia. Ursula.

Aves: the surname of the dead.

Seven sisters, the seven stars of the skies,
all descended from birds. . . .
(Women Descended from birds)

There is the enigmatic unnamed brother who woke up from a long sleep; and a sister who “had a hard time telling [her] left foot from her right” and who slept in stairwells “even after falling many times.” ("1945") Is this the same or another sibling— this “sister home for the weekend”?

When she came home she did not say a word
               for a very long time.
. . .

Now when she jerks her hand to reach out to us,
her scarred knuckles coil, grey as her argument, marked
                              where cigarette butts
had tattooed targets on a mesh of veins.
               Under her skirt, they stuck a live cord,
ran current enough to light the bulb in her cell,
               the blurred plot of her coded life,
her questioners getting edgier with each turn.
(sister home for the weekend)

Rivera strings life’s moments, editing them into cinematic frames. She ushers the reader back into a portal of the past: childhood, twilight and the termination of play. She leads us into her particular moment, a similar disturbing loss that we blocked from our consciousness.

Dusk, and coming home,
we shook off the mud from our toes,
the dust of play from our legs.
Inside the house people talked
in low voices. Mother was back
from the hospital, bringing
you home, Naomi, in a shoebox.

               You were so small I
could barely
see your toes. Your fingers curled,
your lips blue and unmoving.
I waited for you to smile,
but you kept your eyes closed, even as
they lined
Father’s shoebox with Mother’s old lace.

They said you had to wait
for another bed of pinewood
because it was too late in the night.

I guess I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up you were gone,
and Mother’s old lace
was back on the altar with a lit candle.
(Naomi in a Shoebox)

Resilience either masks a child’s bewilderment or children are better at accepting life and disappearance. Such an experience hides in the folds, dormant. Neither a trauma, nor an angst. Just a shock to the system, absorbed and transformed by a poet into a moment of grace. This is Rivera’s gift, this ability to reach into a remembered time with utmost ease and clarity — delineating pain, divining life.

*****

Remé Grefalda lives in Arlington, Virginia. She is the editor of Our Own Voice, literary ezine for Filipinos in the Diaspora.

posted by EILEEN @ 9:03 PM 1 comments

RUMMY PARK by REBECCA LU KIERNAN

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

Rummy Park by Rebecca Lu Kiernan
(E-Published by www.deaddrunkdublin.com, 2006)

A Grand Passion

I love Rebecca Lu Kiernan’s poetry. It is passionate, raw, honest and strong. I imagine her after each poem either sitting back exhausted or striding joyously along the beach with her head thrown back, filled with exhilaration at the unloading of her creative soul and throwing sticks for her puppy as far as her superhuman feeling will allow her. In Rummy Park, Kiernan’s collection of poems and images offers one a journey into a no-holds barred relationship. Each of her poems in the series read as a love letter: to herself, to her former lover, to her present lover, to the future. This is poetry that aches with the legendary Grand Passion. Surreal images of ‘giant’ balloons, mannequins in buses, statues of angels and photographs of neighbourhoods at night work to create a basis from which the fictional Rummy Park springs. Rebecca Lu Kiernan’s words do the rest. Each image adds extra meaning to the poems, drawing just an ounce more out of the words and vice versa.

The up and down journey of this Grand Passion tells of the poet’s surrender to her emotions and instinct, of these being tempered by her memories and the fear her past relationship has not been wholly laid to rest, and of her struggle to remain herself. This surrender and fear are felt with every word.

Will you be my winter love?
Will you stay through spring?
Will you tell the other angels goodbye
And thanks for everything?
--2. Other Angels

The simplicity of this final stanza is childlike. She doesn’t demand, she asks. Humility and insecurity haunt every word. Images crop up again and again throughout this collection; the grey dog, suitcases, X, celestial beings: and each ties the poems together.

I was unbreakable before that night,
A kiss so unexpected and so kind.
I was safe, angelically certain
In the secret sanctuary of my
Criminal mind.

The universe spinning,
Stars raining down.
The green sea was a new voice calling.
You could not swim.
You crossed your arms.
My darling, I kept falling
Into the pedestrian green sea,
Calm, a silence that never spoke to me.
Or, is it that I could not hear
Until your wings thrashed so unwishingly near?
--37. Novice

I find Kiernan to be a chameleon with her poetry. She can write the softest most melancholy of lines but then a wicked sharpness is also part of her style. Kiernan’s words can slash across the page. Personally, I cannot get enough of her poetry. I can read it again and again, and I do. Kiernan holds nothing back. She abides by no rules. Take the poem "Say You Will", for example, the detail is excruciatingly precise. I didn’t know what my perineum was until I fell pregnant!

I have no right to ask.
You’ll maul me like the creature of my dream.
You’ll come in my hair on my wedding day
Deflowering the baby’s breath
In my tight French twist.
You’ll spill wine on my eggshell white gown.
You’ll crush my calla lily bouquet
Under your anaconda boots.
You’ll jam both my nipples into your mouth
Just as he says, “I do.”
You’ll take my panties down and spank me
With your monogrammed turquoise belt.
Of course,
You’ll tongue my perineum
In the reception line.
You’ll eat smoked salmon
Out of your black cowboy hat
And fall ass backwards
Into my seven layer cake.
After I have apologized for your behaviour,
You’ll break into our honeymoon suite
And just when I
Am coming on my new husband’s face
You’ll force me to ass fuck him
With a purple strap-on cock
At gunpoint.
See how you always ruin everything?
--56. Say You Will

The fact that Kiernan has also published a book of erotica may come as no surprise. She does not shy away from anything and I love the fierce freedom with which she writes. Despite some of the more explicit of lines, these poems are more romantic than any Mills and Boon or Barbara Taylor Bradford. One emotion, one memory, and one man after another beset our vulnerable heroine, and this reader couldn’t help but envy the adventure of that love. I consider Kiernan among the very finest poets of our generation. In her poetry are the finest examples of what poetry can achieve. So it is with a sense of frustration that I once again complain about errors being made in the transference of poetry on to the web. Any site that handles poetry and other writing should be especially diligent. Deaddrunkdublin.com has let Rebecca Lu Kiernan down with some sloppy proofreading. So when Rebecca emailed me with a taster of her next collection and said she hoped to get it published in print, I was overjoyed. I only hope the wise publisher that takes her work on proves to have less margin for error. Big things lie ahead for this poet.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds is the Poetry Editor for ezine Moondance.com and reviews regularly for other ezines and magazines. Passionately commited to the written word she is doing all she can to restore Poetry to its rightful place as Queen of literature.

posted by EILEEN @ 8:52 PM 0 comments

A NATURAL HISTORY OF SUCHNESS by STEPHEN ELLIS

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

A Natural History of Suchness by Stephen Ellis
(Auguste Press, 2001)

Stephen Ellis's work possesses a distinctive energy and acceleration. Often his poems flare out with centripetal intent. In trying to describe the concatenation of ideas that occurs in such instances, I'm tempted to apply the term run-on sentence. Not in the bad sense, certainly. His poems avoid hard stops because ideas are not so easily framed. His work proceeds with a spiraling intensity, deriving from a political interest that is anything but dogmatic. His poems begin suddenly and build momentum. I think the mantra of one idea immediately following the next applies here. Stephen actively thinks in his writing, poking margins, leaping intuitively. His poems don't resolve so much as comprise. Here's a poem from the book:


[THE WHOLE THING]

That it all comes down to nothing, vocabulary,
diction, grammar, syntax, style, all given over to
man's conception of God's having given him The Word
from elsewhere, a mediant place between

somewhere and nowhere that exists between our lips. Or that it is

a structure, struere, straw left in the image pressed by
the weight and shape of the animal that has already
got up and left. Evidences and intimations. Hear the pitter-patter
of little feet on the forest floor? It's your heartbeat. The sky's

blue. & all you have to do, you know, is “be here.” Like
what part of zero don't you understand?

* * * * *

This poem seems both a general address and a highly personal one. I mentioned Stephen's political interest. For him, I think political might mean unity of situation. The larger world's problems have much to do with what is internally wrong with us. Some of his poems are downright tender, others fit closer with rage (a calm and thoughtful rage, I should say). All rely on a seriousness and earnest resilience to find their music.

I've known Stephen for some years. He's exceptionally well-read and vastly interested. He doesn't write prettily but with a forceful integrity to the poetic moment. I admire his work greatly and believe it should be much better known. Gentle Reader, take it from there.

*****

Allen Bramhall has published one book, Simple Theory (Potes & Poets Press, 2002), maintains an electrifying blog called Tributary, and shares a birthday with Herman Melville, Jerry Garcia and Lt. William Clark.

posted by EILEEN @ 8:25 PM 1 comments

OFFICIAL VERSIONS by MARK PAWLAK

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

Official Versions by Mark Pawlak
(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, N.Y., 11217)

One critic stated that Mark Pawlak is "our most politically conscious poet." This fifth book of poetry by Mr. Pawlak proves that statement to be true. He harpoons politicians, posers, and power brokers, gathers poetic grist from tidbits of daily life, and shares his thoughts with whimsical humor or a sharp satirical edge. An introductory quote by Oscar Wilde reflects Pawlak's philosophy succinctly: "The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

Scattered among the roasts aimed at political spin-doctors, the gentle musings of "Hart's Neck Haibun" provides a deliberate, soothing contrast:

White birches'
lichen-crusted trunks
climb out of sight;
their branches
tickle tears
from fog's hem.

In "Aiming High," Pawlak memorializes unusual contenders for the Guinness World Book
of Records. The poet's tongue-in-cheek humor meets the solemn goals of eccentric people with delightful results.

"East-West Dialogue 2002" is a disturbing commentary on our times, in which a Russian and American worker compare notes on perks for business executives, communism, capitalism, free enterprise, and injustices experienced by the labor force. The ultimate irony is that, in the end, the American and Russian workers see the same outcome: Business as Usual for executives while workers get the shaft.

"20th Century News Briefs" are priceless. I'd like to quote every one, but space
limitations prevent that pleasure:

PRESIDENT CREDITED WITH INVIGORATING ECONOMY
               Night and day,
               at the South Bend, Indiana, A.M. General factory
               new Humvees roll off the assembly line,
               painted shades of sand.

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION REBOUNDS
               In fields that under the Taliban
               were barren of all but landmines
               cultivated flowers as far as the eye can see
               now bend their heads in the breeze –
               opium growing
               is once again a thriving enterprise.

EMBRACING AMERICAN VALUES
               Outside the gates of the U.S. compound in Kabul,
               lessons only recently learned
               about freedom of speech and assembly
               are being put to practice by Afghan students
               shouting slogans and burning American flags.

IRAQUIS VIEW AMERICANS AS LIBERATORS, SAYS PRESIDENT
               Citizens gather daily in the streets of Iraqi cities
               to dance and cheer in displays of gratitude
               around smoldering Humvees.

"Capsule History of Herat, Afghanistan" is a powerful poem best read in its entirety. Regardless of who might conquer or be conquered, women of the town look on through the narrow eye slits of their burkas.

From the official and unofficial versions of daily headlines, to the beauty Pawlak sees around him while vacationing at the Atlantic shore, his work is certainly unique and well worth reading.

*****

Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review; Review Editor for New Works Review; Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review and Irish News and Entertainment. Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.

posted by EILEEN @ 8:02 PM 0 comments

KLANG by ANDREW LUNDWALL

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

Klang by Andrew Lundwall
(Deep Cleveland Press, 2005)

Sitting with a difficult work sometimes leads to frustration, sometimes to a logical puzzle, sometimes to insight--I am sitting with Klang, a work whose title evokes the clanging of metal or simply of objects or ideas clashing, especially since the title rings in our ears as clang, though we’ve been given a k--the title itself clashes with our standardized spelling of it, as though to make us question if we’re really talking about clanging, which is to say that in reading this work the first thing I notice is that I have to be ready for the sucker-punch, for ideas coming from odd angles or from unusual syntactic combinations. In reading Lundwall’s words, I feel that I need to be hyperaware—logic itself might help in interpreting this work, but intuition is needed if not evoked from the poems themselves.

So I’m sitting with Lundwall’s words in front of me. To say that I’m just reading seems only part of the process--I feel as though I have a map in front of me with directions on multiple pages, and as I leaf through I find that the directions connect so that I must spread the imaginary grid on the desk in front of me to figure out a destination, a destination partially of my own choosing, but a destination none the less. At times Lundwall leads us a little, but he is fond of stepping back to trip us from behind into a chasm of images.

Take, for example, “Surprise Me With Learned Behavior:”

surprise me
with learned
behavior
saying this
watching
the clock
slowly
trickle
like leaflets
of blood
smooth
carnivorous
chunks
of white
meat
green maestro
steals a grain
watches
the lever
pop off
his last
late enter-
prise.

The beginning leads us with a rather straightforward command, but by the time we get to the clock’s slow “trickle” the narrative pulse blows into pieces with “carnivorous / chunks / of white / meat.” What do the chunks have to do with being surprised with learned behavior? Is it that learned behavior avoids the horrific? And who is the “maestro” from the end? Is the maestro the one teaching the learned behavior? Are we his “late enter-/prise”?

The process of questioning images, ideas, in a poem is basic interpretation, but Lundwall’s poems in Klang call for a response that seeks deeper into the poem and into the person interpreting them than many poems, so that the first section’s title, “The Riddled Within,” seems appropriate—we are not solving for a meaning but are coming to see the riddled in ourselves.

I am sitting with Lundwall’s Klang watching for connections, being amazed by the patterns that flash like glimmers on water, and examining my own reaction to odd sounds that emerge.

*****

William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria, a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His e-books and books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, Covering Over, Temporal Nomads, Ladders in July, and In the Weaver’s Valley.

posted by EILEEN @ 7:57 PM 0 comments

ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME by LYN LIFSHIN

LAURA STAMPS Reviews

ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME by Lyn Lifshin
(Black Sparrow Press, 2006, c/o David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., P.O. Box 450, Jaffrey, NH 03452, www.blacksparrowbooks.com)

Lyn Lifshin is a small press legend. For more than thirty-five years her poems have graced over a thousand literary journals, magazines, anthologies, and broadsides. She has written more than one hundred books and chapbooks, edited four anthologies, given hundreds of readings, and won numerous awards, including the prestigious Jack Kerouac Award.

This is her first poetry book published by David R. Godine. In the tradition of her two Black Sparrow Press books, this one is also a large collection. The poems are divided into sections and address several themes, including love relationships, family, and nature.

Lifshin is a master at weaving stories with her poems, whether they might be autobiographical, historical, or works of fantasy. The first sections of the book concentrate on family members. Lifshin slowly draws the reader from poem to poem, singing the joys and trials of her childhood in New England, as if beckoning us to step on one stone after another to cross a glistening creek. In SOME WINTERS CHAMPLAIN FROZE we learn bits and pieces about her father: "St. Mary’s against / the salmon sky. / Walking over the / bridge was freezing. / I wanted stories of / my father in a cold / hut in Russia without / radios like ours, only / wind and chickens. / I wanted a story of / sleeping in straw / with horses’ breath / for a fire, of silver / moon, black pines."

There are many poems about Lifshin’s mother, who died in 1990, poems that span her entire life, from her girlhood to her last days. My favorite is SOME AFTERNOONS WHEN NOBODY WAS FIGHTING, a poem that captures the joyous spirit of her mother: "Mother in her pink dress / with black ballerinas / circling its bottom / turned on the Victrola, / tucked her dress up into / pink nylon bloomer pants, / kicked her legs up in the / air and my sister and I / pranced through the living / room, a bracelet around / her. She was our Pied / Piper and we were / the children of Hamlin, / circling her as close as the / dancers on her hem."

There are poems of fantasy where Lifshin shatters into splinters of herself, creating characters that highlight different facets of her personality. A good example might be the title poem ANOTHER WOMAN WHO LOOKS LIKE ME: "gets on Amtrack, leaves / her suitcase on the / platform. Nobody she / leaves behind has a clue. / She isn’t a terrorist, / there’s no Anthrax or / fertilizer in it, only / a few explosive / words to someone / dead. She could have / just made a fire, / curled near the etched / glass as if nothing / had happened / yet or revised the past. / But instead, she’s coiled / what no one is left / to understand in the / lingerie pockets of a / shattered blue suitcase." Or AFTER NOT WRITING MUCH THREE MONTHS: "I need a name like / Estelle or Estralita / for magic, a way to / curl and live in a / lover’s hair. Some / one who dissolved / in last night’s dream. / Nothing still as a / Vermeer but dazzling, / full of wildness, / a Rousseau. I need a / jump start, words / like fibulae and retina, / a Ferrari of a verb."

The last sections shine with a delightful selection of nature poems, demonstrating, once again, this talented poet’s wide range of expression. In APRIL she tells us: "Yes, the loveliest, / a smudge of rouge / lips blotted against / dark boughs. Only / the pear and magnolia / ahead of the cherries’ / blush lace, almost / a haze, almost a no / blossom snow any / storm could send / swirling so by the / morning the lake / would have a skin / of rose, the trees / bare with just a fuzz / of green shaking."

Without a doubt, this is one of Lifshin’s finest poetry collections. She is a seasoned poet secure in her craft, and it is a pleasure to witness her immense talent maturing in such an exquisite fashion. This book is a must read for Lifshin fans and any woman who enjoys a good story. Highly recommended.

*****

Laura Stamps is an award-winning poet and novelist. Over seven hundred of her poems, short stories, and book reviews have appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies worldwide. The recipient of a Pulitzer Prize nomination and six Pushcart Award nominations, she is the author of more than thirty books and chapbooks of poetry and fiction.

posted by EILEEN @ 6:34 PM 0 comments

A PANIC THAT CAN STILL COME UPON ME by PETER GIZZI

CORINNE ROBINS Reviews

A Panic that can still come upon me by Peter Gizzi
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)

A panic that can still come upon me is a slim chapbook with the drawing of a sun setting and/or rising on its cover. Gizzi's books include PERPLUM AND OTHER POEMS 1987-92, and SOME VALUES OF LANGUAGE AND WEATHER. In an interview with Gizzi by Aaron Kunin in Rain Taxi, Gizzi explains, “If I’m not writing what’s there, (what he’s looking at) I’m writing what happens to me, what I receive at the moment of looking.” By this I think he means he writes a conditional poem, a poem made up of suppositions and statements. The book begins with the word "If" that heads its first line, "If today and today I am calling aloud." Thus the poem has instant immediacy. The reader is poised on the threshold of the poem. Gizzi further tells Kunin in his interview that he celebrates "if the conditional" because it allows for generative thought and doubt at the same time." In his chapbook, Gizzi's "if" sets up a series of conditions that serve as stage sets for the world of the poem, for his inner conditions as opposed to its exterior scenes of branch, pine boughs, bridges and water in the creek.

Gizzi's poem takes in the “leafy architecture” of the world, the meaning of the sun above our heads, the suppositions of reality, and the body of the poet in an effort to arrive at a sense of inner meaning. Successive suppositions exist in Gizzi's narrative of existence of the movement of the perceptive eye. His poetry is a series of pauses, a lament, and a way of looking backward and of treading water. The poem that makes up this chapbook has a lyric delicacy that makes the reader tread lightly through its shifting landscape as it balances objects like the book on the table, sky arching over nothing, a ship in deep water with the writer's mental perceptions, the flux of objects in the poet's world that add up to bodily perceptions, the trip of the poet's imagination. The chapbook, A panic that can still come upon me, is a welcome edition to his oeuvre.

*****

Corinne Robins' latest poetry collection is TODAY'S MENU published this September by Marsh Hawk Press. She is an art critic as well as a poet, author of THE PLURALIST ERA: American Art 1968-81 and four previous poetry collections. She teaches art criticism at Pratt Institue, Brooklyn, NY.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:58 AM 0 comments

FEATURED POET: DAVID BAPTISTE-CHIROT

Eileen Tabios Presents David Baptiste-Chirot

David Baptiste-Chirot. To "introduce" him, I refer you to his words at Otolith. Also relevant is his conversation with Geoff Huth. Of course, there's David's Blog.

Oh, but I did ask him for a "bio" and David replied: "let me see--who am i again? my poet witness protecttion bio or my real bio or my laternate bio or the
one i make anew every day bio [...] here we go with this: david-baptiste chirot: born in lafayette, indiana, grew up in vermont. lived in gottingen, germany, arles & paris, france, hastveda, sweden, wroclaw, poland, boston and milwaukee. since 1997 essays, poetry, visual poety, performance/event scores, sound poetry, prose poetry have appeared in 90+ print journals, dozens of web journals and sites, 300 mail art calls. several books: found rubBEings (Xerolage 32) ANARKEYOLOGY (runaway spoon)REVERBERATIONS (Lulu) ZERO POEM (Traverse) tearerISm (singlepress) HUNG ER (neotrope) and chapbooks, work in many anthologies in USA and UK. google search david baptiste chirot / blog: davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com"

Anyway, that "bio" checked off, I can share that I had known of David primarily through his images, specifically his "rubBEings" which are among the most moving, evocative and conceptually-sound art works I've witnessed/experienced. So I'm particularly pleased here to present David's words: selections from David's "AFTER RIMBAUD'S ILLUMINATIONS." His words, I find, are just as evocative -- and air-y -- as his images. But of course there still must be imagery and the first image is of Rimbaud -- xylol transerred xerox image with David's unique "rubBEings". Lastly, I believe David's texts practice what is summed up in the last image:

A DIRECT POETICS

TO TOUCH
                                             THE LINE

AND
               MAKE
                              IT
                                             SING

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



AFTER RIMBAUD’S ILLUMINATIONS

To zack pieper

At the fair her dress floats in the breeze. The loud voices of carnies trying to overpower reason. The stench of spilled wine. Her eyes hide behind her large lashes. Her bare arm is summer browned. Holding her hand I feel further away than the slight moon above the ferris wheel.

Entering the dark low doored bar. A smell of sawdust long unswept, wet and rancid. The bartender a giant African. Gesturing to the courtyard he says--"through there"--a small arch. In the courtyard rain is falling.

Wooden doors indicate the toilets. Two have no door. Opening the one door a man with pants around his ankles shrieks and is hopping and chasing me with a knife.

The girls in this town have large supple thighs. Below the knees, the legs bared, they swing their feet in time to the band. Sitting on the stone embankments along the ancient street, when they slightly part their legs in skirts the heat of summer rushes out into the evening.

The farmhouse in the distance. A few trees mark the sky at twilight. My friend is frightened, he has no papers. A dog barks and a man appears. Inside, they give us sandwiches thick with fresh butter.

I am the one walking continually these streets and alleys. All wall cracks and road holes are known to me. I am the one listening to the peripheral languages signaling from the hubcaps, the shining metals, the bright plastics, the painted woods. The construction site overwhelms me with its orchestrations of colors, sounds, shards-- its chaos and order exchanging forms. The melted snow runs in rivulets among smashed stones.

Puddles pool slick with oil. I am finding slowly fragments of myself here.

After all it is called a construction site.

He is showing me the way. Entering an abandoned brick building, we walk among shattered floor boards coated with mud and rust streaks. There is the sound of water dripping. Above us we can see through the next floor up--through to further floors above with gaping holes in cracked shattering wood. A pale rain of plaster dust lightly patinas our coats. It is very cold. In the long basement it is very dim. Near one light bulb there is a hole in the long metal pipes. A man is collecting water as it drips from a corroded hole. One arm has a belt wrapped around it. Another man is heating a spoon with a liquid in it. My friend brings me to meet a small man shivering in the dank air. Behind him is a row of prone people on the remains of mattresses. The man and my friend are speaking. Later the basement the damp the dust the danger--we will not care.

The path leads up a gentle slope among heather and thistles. The wind is making the trees murmur. The sky is a grey sea. There is a child I pass. He stares at me. Ahead lies a clearing. Walking steadily and quietly at the hill's top I sight the lynx ahead, standing in the path. He is staring at me and I at him. A pause in time. Then he moves off. I continue with my eyes changed.

We sing sitting in the crashed truck in the woods. It is a spring day --the sky is blue and white clouds are streaming in the breezes. A dead man sits inside the windshield shattered cab. His bloody face is staring, tilted towards us as we rock our seated bodies and look at him. We keep singing. It is a fine day to be getting high in among the trees. Perhaps he too would like a drink? Or join in a game of cards with us? He could draw the card of death. If it was bingo, his number would be up. Tilting he looks as though leaning towards the open window to ask directions. I do not know if to point towards--heaven or hell--

Jean-Pierre is cooking horsemeat in blood and wine with garlic. It makes the cramped L shaped apartment in the slowly collapsing building all the hotter. Marcel is showing me how to make plastiques. His hard hands work slowly so I may learn. For once we are not smoking with cigarettes hanging from our lips. We are not suicidal after all. Certainly not on such a night. Marcel says three girls are coming. We will fuck them in the ass. He says they are very tight this way. But no children you see, he says, no complications. The three stacked tvs are talking incessantly about the approaching moon landing. Some famous person is saying that in Jules Verne's books and Melies' very early film classic the French have been there first. You see what assholes they are Marcel says. They think they own history. With these little bombs we will make a hole in history and then--and then--the people will rush in. The little bombs are almost done and Jean-Pierre is calling us to come eat meat and blood and wine and garlic. We will light candles but not say Grace. The three virgins are coming for us. Perhaps one can enter heaven backwards. It is very hot in here. I am to meet someone. I do not know who. The evening light is dimming. A few street lights come on.



+++++++++++++++++++++++++



After thick rain. Mud boiling in the dirt roads, old logging roads leading uphill. Around lie the shattered trunks and the trees still standing are thin. Early evening and we are drinking cheap wine. The idea is that if the police find us, we can say we are drinking, not high on drugs. Not that the police come up here anyway. Must be just an excuse we use for drinking. The cheap shit we are drinking, you better have a good excuse for such bad taste.

The girl with him is very small. Her hair is a dun color and her eyes quick like birds'. She wears an old boy's jacket too large for her. She keeps moving her legs back and forth, making marks in the dirt road. She doesn't talk much he says. I like that. She looks up and smiles dimly. He hands her beer in a bottle. I know she's not much to look at he says. But look at her teeth. She has buck teeth, very sturdy looking ones protruding from thin lips. You see--in a pinch we use them for bottle openers.

Very dusty evening at the train station. A hot wind and lurid sun make the air feel on fire. Standing waiting are a long line of North bound Arab workers in cheap suits with small bundles. Some Spaniards are standing barefoot, craning their necks to peer into the incendiary distance. The station master wears a long dirty mustache. Women in brightly colored robes with their heads covered hold noisy small children. Some young couples are locked in embraces. One man has his hand up his girl's dress, and she her hand down his pants. A woman jerks a gaping child away. A few men are laughing and drinking wine, passing a large wicker encased bottle. The light to the East is gold. Every person in it a Saint in an icon in this moment in time. From the fiery West the train is approaching. Soon all hell will let loose.

I have been standing on this corner under a flickering street lamp for quite some time. It is dark and lonely here, a parking lot by a large supermarket and drug store set back from the River. A few furtive figures can be seen skirmishing in the bushes. A man suddenly appears, his arm bleeding. Fucking asshole he yells. You missed the damn vein. You blind or somethin’. A woman walks by crying. Behind her a man is making threatening gestures with his arms. A dwarf I have seen before some place comes up to me. Got a light. I do. He puffs his cigarette and slits his eyes. You waiting too. I nod. He walks off, begins to pace in a circle. The air is getting chilly. A dank breeze is coming up from the river. Looking into the distance all I can see are a few lamps glowing in thick black air. Not even a star to wish upon. Time is slowing into a taut agony. A seething hate begins to coil in my heart. I want to kill the man I am waiting for. I will do it slowly, too. I will begin with his sweaty belly he is so self conscious of. Stick it with thin blades I pull slowly to see the blood trickle and look up at his bulging eyes. To hear his shrieks will be a cooling balm. To smell the fear in him will be a musk unto the nostrils. I shall gather his hair in my hands and bow his head. There I shall slowly burn a cigarette. His pain shall be an offering. I shall knee him in the groin. As he doubles I shall throw hot oils upon him. His being shall be eclipsed in pain. He shall enter the endless corridors of suffering and journey past the mirrors of his torture. His damnation shall know no end. A soft slightly sickeningly sweet voice is beside me. I turn and he is there. I have it, I have all of it. And more, extra just for you. My whole being is rejoicing. I feel the healing waters run over me. He is handing me the benedictions. Suddenly I embrace him. I worship false idols. I am so very far from life. I have become someone else. The dirty River is glittering beneath the few lights along this stretch of it. I tie up my arm. I hope all the waiting has been worth it. God knows, I have been to hell and back. A little heaven might do.

We are trying to sleep on a traffic island on a highway somewhere near Lyon. There is a small roof for some reason here that we have crawled under. It is raining heavily. So heavily we can barely hear the sounds of the trucks rushing past. We pull out some smokes and bread. My friend is crying. I can't cry because I am older than him. I lie back and smoke. The smoke is curling and crashing against this concrete covering. Our world is going up in smoke and coming down like rain.

This is a very strange place. I am sitting on the edge of a bed looking out the window at a small yard flanked by extensions of this building I seem to be in. A laundry line hangs limp. A picnic table with a crow perched on it. The only sound I hear is someone yelling loudly over and over motherfucking motherfucker. The light has a yellow tinge to it. It slants and makes a line separating light from shadow on a building opposite. There is an alley, narrow and only partly made of bricks. A cat is moving slowly along it. The rest of the area is brown and yellow short grass in muddy looking dirt. A man is suddenly here looking at me. His face is quiet and his eyes are encyclopedias. You got time to get used to it bro. The best part is when the cat chases the birds.

I saw her smoking yesterday leaning against the brick wall behind the school. She had a curve to the way she brought the cigarette to her lips. She dragged long and slow and her cheekbones were the high lonesome sound of mountains in the spring. I knew that moment I wanted and needed to be with her. She and I the other of each other. We are finally to meet I realized. All my life for this moment, this face. Today I am walking up to her in the hall. She is leaning her back against a locker and her legs are stretched out. She is pulling them slowly up as I come closer. She is looking into my eyes. She has brown eyes like me. My other's eyes gleaming into mine. Her cheekbones are so high I feel them as horizons. Her thin lips open to smile at me. I am standing here--I slowly put out a hand towards her. Will you go out with me. She smiles so very bright. Yes she says. Yes. I am bending to give her my hand to raise her up to me. Her lips are parting and her eyes look into mine. Brown like mine. She is coming close to me. Now an arm is between us. Large and thick and blue. A policeman shoves us apart. Another one from behind me pulls me away. Three more policemen come and an official from the school wringing his hands. They pull me away so I can't hear what is going on. I can only watch. Hold on kid. My hands are pulled back and cuffed. Easy kid easy. The three policemen are bending over her while the first one cuffs her. She is kneeling on the floor. They take her arms and raise her up. She is looking over shoulder as they take her away. Don't forget I hear her say. I yell back. The cop jerks me from behind. You stay here kid. Another cop is standing by me. What is happening. The neighbors called. She shot her grandmother. You better forget about her kid. Am I in a movie I am wondering. It is happening so fast and so slow all at once. The air is filled with thick heavy blue. I want to see the sky in her cheekbones. I want to hear their high lonesome sound. They are leading me down the hall. What'd you see in her son. She's just a cold blooded killer. In her eyes I see my other of myself. The high lonesome horizon of the killer inside me.



+++++++++++++++++++++++++



to michelle greenblaatt


An October morning, light of burnished gold and blue. Fresh planed wood plank floors, Byzantine labyrinths leading from staircase to staircase. Man with me is sweating. Sawdust motes swirling thickly cling to his skin. Scratches and swears. “Like climbin the motherfuckin Himalayas.” Freshly painted studios and apartments wide open for airing. Higher up, no work yet done. Dirty floors, creaking stairs, stale smells, heavy air.
Man whose name I do not know, sweating man, pale flabby skinned cancelled eyes man . . . . sawdust caking you.
With each step I enter a different landscape. In each one I live completely.
Light filtering through ever thickening dust and dirt, light flickering in intensifying heat.
Eyes fixed upwards, seeing the skylight
White out, a white out.
Down a very dirty dark corridor. Windows here all boarded up. Light pounding futilely throbs my head.
A turn in the darkness. In the distance, light from a cracked-open door.
“Man you want is inside of there.”
Pushing the door . . . watching it swing slow motion open . . .
From a small skylight, a shadow cast in the dust.
Time is there, just time.
Standing and looking . . . all the time in the world he’d left behind, dust and shadows on the floor.
Not far from his bare feet hanging a kicked stool’s height from the floor, his small strangled son lay in dust and shadows.


In this darkened room among bodies on the floor drug coiled veins exist vampirically. A sexual structure of death is long abandoned. New forms of chastity mockingly adorn attenuated bodies. Of the scents of arousal there are no signs amid films of clammy sweat. Beaches of no sound watch waves break in wan light. Disconnected strands of mysticism lie among washed up waste. Pallid hands splay still among bleached mirrors. Inching along by the elbows a woman gasping for breath seeks a syringe. The monumental floor crumbs keep impeding her. The heavy door is locked and candles are burning. Air bubbles, air bubbles . . . you don’t want air bubbles in your shot . . . Among dimming memories, air bubbles burst, fly away . . . are absorbed among the thick curtains. Curtains, curtains . . . sing song-y sings . . . its curtains, curtains . . . slowly it’s curtains . . . inching along . . . gasping for breath . . . among bodies . . . on the floor . . . Curtains . . . it’s curtains . . . slowly . . . it’s curtains . . . sing song-y sings . . . sighing . . . sighing . . . air bubbles away . . .



+++++++++++++++++++++++++

posted by EILEEN @ 10:42 PM 0 comments

DAVID IGNATOW and ARMAND SCHWERNER

SANDY MCINTOSH Offers a memoir with reviews of

Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems by David Ignatow
(BOA Editions, Rochester, 1999)

Selected Shorter Poems by Armand Schwerner
(Junction Press, San Diego, 1999)
and
The Tablets by Armand Schwerner
(The National Poetry Foundation, Orono, 1999)

[First published in CONFRONTATION, No. 70/71 Winter/Spring 2000, Editor Martin Tucker]

Hamptons Found and Lost: A Memoir with Reviews

Everyone knows about the Hamptons--summer home of the rich, year-round community of painters (de Kooning, Pollock) and writers (Steinbeck, Albee)--and, lately, of Hollywood people (Spielberg, Baldwin) and rappers (Puff Daddy). Recent visitors in search of the idyllic summer life supposed to be lived there are inevitably disappointed by what they find: a relentless, choking, funeral procession of cars dragging its way between Westhampton and Montauk, crowded sidewalks and intersections filled with irate drivers and pedestrians. A photograph of Saturday evening along Main Street in East Hampton and one of Monday morning along 42nd St. and Broadway would be identical. And why not? Both would picture the same cars, the same people. And in both photographs, everyone would be pissed-off. This is a testament to the predatory real estate and tourist industries and to the greed of local governments that have never known when to say when.

However, there was a time when this was not the case. At Canio's bookstore in Sag Harbor last spring, the poet Harvey Shapiro, a long-time Hamptons familiar, read a poem called "For Armand and David" that touched on feelings shared by those of us who have considered the Hamptons a refuge for our poetic selves. "When we were young," Shapiro's poem begins:

And our children were young--
the water was such a mystery,
the sky so blue. Everything
breathed promise. The language
would blaze forth,
did blaze forth…

I came to the Hamptons in the late nineteen sixties to attend Southampton College. In its early years the college enjoyed the enthusiasm of the local arts community, and some notable artists and writers volunteered to teach. Out of the formative chaos of the early curriculum some odd teaching assignments were made. For instance, my freshman English literature instructor was Ilya Bolotowsky, the Neo-plasticist painter and disciple of Kandinsky. In his thick Slavic accent, filtered through a massive, drooping mustache, Bolotowsky led us into the mysteries of James Joyce, beginning with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and coming back full circle to an earlier version of the same book, Stephen Hero. These were works I reveled in, but that I now know after teaching English myself, would not be applauded as appropriate in the modern remedial freshman curriculum. In turn, Bolotowsky introduced me to his friend Willem de Kooning, who was visiting the college. Later, when I lived in the Springs, I would ferry de Kooning between his studio and his farmhouse when he was unable to bicycle between them.

David Ignatow came to the college after a teaching stint at the University of Kentucky. I took his poetry writing classes in both semesters and was lucky enough to get to know him and his family, who had recently moved to the Springs. Ignatow offered me his friendship and we remained friends until his death.

I met Armand Schwerner at a poetry reading at H. R. Hays’ home in East Hampton. Hays, the pioneering translator of Spanish-American poetry and of Brecht’s poems, occupied a central position in the Hampton’s literary scene. He made his large, modern home, built deep in the woods, a venue for readings and parties. Hays had invited me to this particular reading in order to introduce me to his friends.

During my final years in military school I had been writing poetry and compiling it in a thick loose-leaf notebook. I had shown some of my poetry to Hays and he had been encouraging. I arrived at his home for the reading and was immediately daunted by the size of the crowd. Certainly I was the youngest. Several poets preceded me, and when it was my turn I read the poem of mine that Hays had selected. Afterwards, the applause surprised and pleased me. Before I could sit down, someone asked me to read another. Others in the audience applauded. Flattered, I reopened my notebook looking for an appropriate encore. Time passed; the audience grew restive. As I flipped to the end of the notebook I panicked. I had seen an ugly, looming truth. Not one of those poems was any good!--a devastating realization that I had been deceiving myself all along, carrying around an impressive folder filled with what I now realized was self-indulgent crap. Nevertheless, I couldn't let the audience know about this. Thinking hard, I remembered I had recently written something that was more promising than my usual. I laboriously turned the pages searching for it, even though I sensed I was losing the audience. In the end, refusing to admit a truth that was nobody's business but mine, I took the chance and recited the poem from memory. The response amazed me. Everyone seemed to be laughing and applauding. Later, Hays introduced me to Allen Planz, who was then Poetry Editor of the Nation. He invited me to submit the poem to that magazine. It was only after I was back in the anonymity of the audience that I realized I had omitted to recite most of the poem's lines. Somehow, panic had edited me, cutting the inferior lines and leaving only the poem’s true heart. It was a strict lesson.

Hays introduced me to other poets at the reading. One group I was to make friends with and see frequently during the next twenty years included Harvey Shapiro, Si Perchick, Michael Heller, Michael Braude, as well as Ignatow, Planz and Schwerner. For the next five or ten years, many of us would be occupied teaching under wealthy federal and state arts programs, and this temporary public largess created the illusion (at least for me) that it was reasonable to call oneself a poet when asked to state one’s profession.

***

Posthumous poetry collections of David Ignatow and Armand Schwerner were published during the last year. Ignatow died in November 1997; Schwerner in February 1999. In the case of Schwerner’s poetry, two collections were brought out—a complete set of his well-known Tablets, including a CD of their live performance, and a volume of his lesser-known shorter poems. In the case of Ignatow’s poetry, a collection of last poems was notably edited by three people who were close to him: his daughter, Yaedi, Virginia Terris, and Jeannette Hopkins, who long-ago shaped the seminal collections of his work originally published by Wesleyn University Press.

Ignatow and Schwerner shared little of poetic method. Their cultural and religious backgrounds were similar—both grew up in New York City and both credited Walt Whitman as their literary forbear—but Schwerner was a poet who rejoiced in an abundance, often a manic torrent of language, while Ignatow frugally pared his words to a pointed minimum. Yet, in the company of other poets, painters, photographers, filmmakers and sculptors who spent summers together in the wooded community of East Hampton known as the Springs from the middle-1960’s, these two became great friends.

ARMAND SCHWERNER

Armand and his family lived in a small house off Fireplace Road. Armand’s wife, Dolores, was an artist whose work anticipated Performance art. Their two boys, Ari and Adam were blondes like their mother but had their father’s exuberant personality. When I first visited their home Ari, who was six, and Adam, who was eight, delighted in scandalizing me with a nursery rhyme written by their father:

Muck the Fuck

One room of the grey rat
two room for the cowlick
seven room for moose
and Muck the Fuck to celebrate;

he says: I fuck the moose
with cowlick; the grey rat
bears the urine
from room to room for the proper dance,
slippery floor for the moose-mad;
…
Room for the real.
Kitchen of shadows, bing.
If you don’t sing
what’s out there?

Rat moose cowlick prick
open your mouth a little bit
drapes are falling everywhere.
Foot in your ears.

Armand, aware that I was made uncomfortable by such things, made a point of instructing me in his version of a less WASPish life. Among several of his lessons I recall arriving home with him one late night and watching him demonstrate what he declared in his booming voice to be the best part of capitalism: the freedom to piss all over your own front lawn with impunity.

At the time Armand had published a small collection of poetry, The Lightfall. The Junction Press has included six of the best from this rare, early book in the Selected Shorter Poems. It is usually a mistake to look backwards at a series of poems and point out how they presaged a poet's later writing interests. It is, as the historian Herbert Butterfield has said, the equivalent of looking through the wrong end of a telescope. However, in these six representative poems one can find the poetic approaches and methods that occupied Armand’s attention throughout much of his life. A poem like “where the boat passes, improvise,” with lines such as “he sits with Stone the Death/ and munches by the Door// will he eat papyrus in the drummer’s hallway?” sounds right out of his later Tablets; in “the Other” lines such as “we are two bodies, a comb,/ hatband, brush, a mouth moving” suggest his later meditations of Sounds of the River Naranjana…; and so on. Of this first volume, only “the red horses of the sun” represents a kind of formality I don’t believe he ever sought again: “red is the color of spring/ it feeds that pattern of her flesh// it stutters in its course under the rare earth”—a poet’s student work.

In any case, I think Schwerner’s best poetic urges were realized in the hilarious and above all, loving poems inspired by his children and by that part of him that was childlike. Wonderful examples of these—such as “Muck the Fuck,” “poem at the bathroom door, by Adam,” and “what Ari says when he’s five”—are reprinted from his first two books. In his third book, he again realizes these antic urges, this time in his selection and translation of Eskimo poems. This infectious humor, I think, has been Schwerner’s saving grace (at least for lyric pleasure-seekers like me), for as he continued to write he became preoccupied with weightier subjects that he believed he must present with due, unsmiling seriousness. I’m not convinced that his rendering of Buddhist themes, for example, shows a lessening of his personal self-importance, of his intrusive presence in the poems—rather the opposite. However, despite this, these poems show him to be a poet of dedication and great, if naïve, ability—his naiveté demonstrated by the partial title of one book The Triumph of the Will. (When I asked him didn’t he know that this had been the title of Leni Riefenstahl's famous 1935 Nazi propaganda film, Armand protested that he had never heard of it.)

Although Junction Press' edition of Armand’s Selected Shorter Poems does not include some of my favorites, it does feature some of his most moving. We happened to be together in the Springs when David Ignatow gave us the news that Paul Blackburn had died. One of us—probably H.R. Hays—organized a memorial reading for Paul at the Old Post Office Theater in East Hampton. Armand’s poem was especially poignant. Its title describes it well: “a letter to Paul Blackburn preceded by a letter Rainer Maria Rilke wrote 13 days before his death in 1826 to Rudolph Kassner.” The poignancy of these lines continues fresh, and could serve as Armand’s own epitaph.

Sections of The Tablets have appeared in several publications over the years, but it is only the present collection that includes all twenty seven of them, along with copious notes and appendices. The Tablets are Schwerner’s best known work, mainly because he promoted them in a great number of live performances (at which he was an expert—the CD attests to this) and in print. Consequently, they have and continue to receive a good deal of critical attention. They represent supposed remnants of Sumero-Akkadian clay tablets as interpreted by Armand’s alter-ego, the Scholar-Translator. These poems embody the full range of Armand’s poetic power, as well as his great strengths and fallibilities as a person. Thus, the Scholar-Translator begins as a figure of fun—a pompous academic bumbling through his misinterpretations of the meaning of his translations—but later changes into an unsmiling authority—a man demanding, as Armand seemed to demand, that people take him seriously.

Armand was often as delightful a companion as his friends found him difficult to abide. In his later years, his incessant preoccupation with himself was only made tolerable by his ever-sharpening, ever-darker, explosive wit. During the last years of his life, Armand and I saw little of each other. Part of this is because, following his divorce from Delores (who owned the Springs house), Armand no longer had a base on Long Island. But much of our alienation had to do with our competing Buddhist philosophies. Even after his guru was exposed as a drunk and lecher—and mine as a womanizing thief—we rarely saw each other. I think we spoke only once or twice in his last two years. I had published an account of my Buddhist experience in a magazine to which he subscribed. He called to let me know how delighted he was to discover that I had made him a character in the story, identified only as “A.” I was thrilled to hear from him, and had indeed written him into the story, hoping it would break the ice between us. Our conversation that time embodied the warmth that had been missing between us for years.

DAVID IGNATOW

Reading this original, final collection of David Ignatow’s poetry two years after his death is a wonderful surprise. There he is, speaking to me again, not in the tired voice of an opera singer who has made one-too-many farewell appearances, but in the voice of Ignatow-the-Poet (as his wife, Rose, used to snidely call him), with his well-remembered Ignatow-voice, and inimitable Ignatow-preoccupations and ironies. At first the voice is quiet, abstract: “Fear is of the universe,/as is death,/ as is love, pleasure,/ intimacy and cruelty.” But then it picks up its familiar sonority: “Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton./ It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it/ with me—this other thing I will become at death.”

In the first section of poems in this book (which I take to be genuinely “last poems;” the rest, though previously unpublished, I suspect to have been written some time earlier), I visualize Ignatow coming to the screen door of his study, answering my tentative knock, his voice, thinner in his last years, and his movements slower, but his eyes demanding directness and honesty. I’ve told the story elsewhere about my early experience with him when, after I’d bragged of reading an unbelievably large number of books during a short period of time, Ignatow reacted as if truly hurt by my exaggeration. “You must use language responsibly,” he admonished me then. This directness is mirrored in the sobriety of these poems.

David, like Armand, could frustrate his friends by his obtrusive self-involvement. Harvey Shapiro tells the story of how one day David telephoned to announce “I’ve got wonderful news for you, Harvey!” Since Harvey was then in contention for an important poetry prize that David might know about he was thrilled by David’s call. However, it proved to be disappointing when David revealed that the “wonderful news” was, of course, about David, not Harvey. It probably never occurred to David that Harvey would be expecting to hear something else.

While their approach to writing differed greatly, Armand and David shared preoccupations in common, notably with personal mortality. Between David’s and Armand’s rendering of this theme, I believe David had the advantage, since his poetic postmortem was not burdened with the formality of some a priori philosophy or religion—whereas Armand’s was. The “last poems” in Ignatow’s collection testify to his unblinking examination of his own mortality that he began in Shadowing the Ground several years earlier. Armand’s “last poems” (which I suppose to be those recent ones in his Selected collection under the heading “uncollected”), while passionate and intellectually rigorous, still carry the unopened baggage of religious aspiration: “but this blood, which transforms/ the five poisons into the five knowledges, this blood/ of great passion, passionless, free of passion,/ this secret great blood, free of clinging…” (“blood”). These images are specifically Buddhist shorthand; readers not familiar with them may enjoy their exotic mystery but are not helped to face, along with the poet, the reality of Death Itself. In terms of a winning strategy, I give the laurels to Ignatow:

What I thought I was writing—
for the social good—turns out to be
for my own enlightenment;
no one is listening.
…
(“How I learned to be with others”)

***

I graduated from Southampton College in the spring of 1970 and that summer, as I had done for the previous three summers, shared a rental cottage in the Springs. One early evening, after my shift pumping gas, I was driving home along Springs Fireplace Road when I had to brake my car suddenly in order to avoid hitting an elderly man on a bicycle. He had swerved out of a side road, and crossed in front of me without looking. I pulled over to catch my breath. As I drew closer I recognized de Kooning, whom I had first met at the college in my Freshman year. I watched as he rode away, pedaling uncertainly, his bike weaving figure eights from left to right. At one point he seemed to lose interest in pedaling. The bike came to a stop, stayed motionless for a moment, then pitched over to the right, its rider falling gently into the thick, uncut brush and rolling two or three times until coming to rest near the trees. I shut off my car and ran over to him. He didn't seem hurt; in fact, he was smiling pleasantly, his eyes closed as if dreaming. I touched his arm and he looked up. He was okay, he told me, but could I give him a ride home? It was getting dark and he had no light on his bike.

I helped him into my car and loaded his bike into the back seat. He told me to continue east, then take the right fork before Barnes grocery store. He was living in a farmhouse opposite the Green River cemetery, he said, but this was only temporary, until they finished building his new studio. "I don't want them to finish the damn thing," he said with some bitterness. I asked why not? "Because when it's finished, I think I will be finished, too."

We drove on for a few minutes until he told me to stop. "I live right here," he said. He looked over at the cemetery and pointed: "All my friends are buried there."

I was curious. I helped him out of the car and to his front door, and when he was safely inside, I crossed the road to the cemetery.

It seemed a conventional graveyard with moldering tombstones. But then I caught sight of a grave marker that was odd. It was an obsidian monolith standing about four feet high. Engraved on its face was a man's signature: the painter Stuart Davis. Looking around in that section of the cemetery, I found other oddly shaped stones, each with the name of an artist or a writer I had heard of. In front of Stuart Davis' grave was a white marble square that marked the grave of Ad Reinhardt. I discovered the flat slate grave maker of Frank O'Hara, the New York School poet who had been killed by the only vehicle on Fire Island. Inscribed on it was his quotation: "Grace to be born and live / as variously as possible." Just north of O'Hara's grave was that of the writer A. J. Liebling, the war correspondent, boxing expert, world-class eater, and, for many years at The New Yorker, a critic of the press. Finally, at the end of the cemetery, almost in the woods, a great boulder with a bronze plaque marked Jackson Pollock's grave. I continued on, following the horseshoe road until I came to a fence. On the other side were objects--gravestones, I thought--that were extremely weird, even grotesque, resembling Native totem poles. I wondered about that section of the cemetery for a long time. (In fact, I learned eventually, the odd objects were not grave markers but rough carvings in the side yard of the sculptor Albert Price's house.) Later I described the little graveyard to my friends as a place "with dead people on one side and artists on the other." I visited the place often, even picnicking and napping on an artist's plot that was behind some trees, out of public view.

In December last year I visited the cemetery again. It has been expanded by at least a half acre behind Pollock's boulder. Artists and writers continue to be buried there, and who they were and what they are famous for reflects something of the upscale attraction of the modern Hamptons. Filmmakers such as Stan Vanderbeek and producer Alan Pakula are buried there, as is the celebrated French chef, Pierre Franey, to name three. The cost of graves, I understand, is prohibitively expensive, except for the very wealthy--as is everything else thereabouts. Even so, the cemetery was silent at my visit as all of the Springs had once been, even at the height of summer. I reflected on my encounter with de Kooning long before, and had the sobering thought that in subsequent summers an elderly artist wobbling on his bicycle in a Hampton's road would have little chance of surviving the tourist traffic, which is grim, relentless and unforgiving. In fact, I realized, the easy access I had in my time to the wonderful artists and writers living there is no longer possible. These days they all seem to remain cloistered in their compounds, their public appearances protected by bodyguards. "To the rich vacationers," Harvey Shapiro writes:

our lives meant nothing.
We kept investing them with meaning
until the enterprise broke us.
…
I see these same sights,
bleared now. Words
broken into stony syllables,
blackened in remembrance.

I thought of Armand, who died of cancer after losing his younger son, Ari, in a car accident. I thought of David, also, two years dead now. On a couple of occasions back in the 'seventies, Armand, David, Harvey, Alan, and others of us gathered during November or December to celebrate some last event before winter. A few times I remember Armand grunting a kind of benediction to end the season. "And now," he pronounced in his ominous tones, "for four months of shit." We'd look up into the grey sky, and that would be it till we met again next summer.

*****

Sandy McIntosh’s collections of poetry include The After-Death History of My Mother, Between Earth and Sky (Marsh Hawk Press), Endless Staircase (Street Press), Earth Works (Long Island University), Which Way to the Egress? (Garfield Publishers), and two chapbooks: Obsessional (Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry) and Monsters of the Antipodes (Survivors Manual Books). His prose includes Firing Back, with Jodie-Beth Galos (John Wiley & Sons), From A Chinese Kitchen (American Cooking Guild), and The Poets In the Poets-In-The-Schools (Minnesota Center for Social Research, University of Minnesota. His poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal, American Book Review, and elsewhere. His original poetry in a film script won the Silver Medal in the Film Festival of the Americas. He has been Managing Editor of Confrontation magazine published by Long Island University, and is Managing Editor of Marsh Hawk Press.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:55 PM 1 comments

STEAM by SANDRA SIMONDS

MARK LAMOREUX Reviews

Steam by Sandra Simonds
(Self-published, 2006; copies available from the author at wildlifepoetry@yahoo.com.)

[First published in Boog City, New York, June 2006]

“STEAMED, PLEASE.”

Critical time is not linear. Poetic time is not linear. In one blip, Kuhnian paradigmatic polarities are warring over a particularly fetching swath of the lawn (shirts=the lyric, skins=the lyric). In another, some are already building arks with the shards. Sandra Simond’s Steam is just such a vessel. Alternately sense- and myth- making, this intrepid volume subscribes to no weary narrative or lexical taboo. The book listens to the voices, and joins in. This one can think of no greater goal.

Ever the tinker. Simons unflinchingly proffers the right tool for the right job. Niggling time is adumbrated in “These days are Malthusian Footnotes” by a burst of velars:

“beating like uncle wound
or the coo coo clock’s beak’s
scheduled meeting with o’clock”

Said arpeggio is echoed later in “Bon Voyage” by a chugging train, proving it’s polyphony keeps the rail on time:

“you tick-tock
conductor, you black funnel-

pupiful
of the chu-chu’s
red soot.”

Simonds employs alternately “a syntax of / arbitrary motions” and a more mundane quotidian lucidity such as “city of’s”:

“announcement saying love is and is not comparing medica-
tions underneath
the storefront neon”

And

“you can’t belong to your own life
you just have to sit
there (“vivre”)”

The text’s profound strength exists in its shying neither from ambiguity nor nude plainsong. In its refusal to be deterred on any level, Simonds’ voice assumes a brazen authority, unafraid of its own momentum and revelatory in its own contradictions and metamorphoses. A particular zeal is found in its toying with subconscious, cultural and lexical detritus and verboten, as evinced by the following from the Matthew Barney-tinged “La Belle Dame Sans Papers”:

“My name is scrotum, Madonna,
Windex, tampon, Camp Electric Barb,
and I have a hard hat
made of jelly, crampons
welded to my gums.”

These culls from the cultural morass never ring gratuitous or untrue. Simonds is as willing to unnamed as name. Such specificities as “where the Rin Tin Tins / lick and lick” and “rotting bag of McDonalds” are contrapuntally offset by deliberate ambiguities (e.g. “Dutch painter X” and “[once upon a midnight we lived on...Mount...Up...There...” Unidiomatically, we may know Steam by its cover whereby swathes of disembodied and unanchored text disappear into a field of raw-cotton off-white.

The angel is in the details, as they say, and Steam’s mode of dissemination remains true to its agenda of unabashedness (the chapbook is available to interested parties gratis from the author). Accordingly, the collection closes with an offering to the underrated David Schubert in which Simonds tells (“why don’t you thank your fortune / why don’t you let down your hair?”) and shows:

Stranger, may I have your hand or a mirror, dear, may I have
a word
               of advice? Went to the valley and it was a red went
to the valley white.

A long-legged deer stood by the roadside and drank his
crystal waters.                May I have your soft step or a mirror, deer, may I
have a word of advice?”

*****

Mark Lamoureux is the Printed Materials editor for Boog City.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:50 PM 2 comments

NOLI ME TANGERE by JOSE RIZAL

ALLEN GABORRO Reviews

Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal, Translated by Harold Augenbraum
(Penguin Classics, New York, 2006)

and

When the Rainbow Goddess Wept by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
(University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1999)

[Review first published in Philippine News (July 26-August 1, 2006)]

Editor's Note: Galatea Resurrects reviews poetry publications/projects, as well as works in other forms by poets. This review of two novels by Filipino authors is featured here because Jose Rizal was also a poet.


You know that any hardbound novel has reached a new high-water mark when it gets so far as to be published in softcover. It is a sign of at least commercial, if not necessarily artistic, recognition. Such a novel, having made the leap from hardcover to paperback, can be the stuff that legends are made of. Or in more modest terms, it can be a creative genuflection reflecting the rich history of a particular culture. Either way, the piece, if worth its weight in salt, is destined to have a good, long shelf life.

Having first emerged onto their respective literary scenes almost a century apart, José Rizal’s momentous Noli Me Tangere (“Touch Me Not”) and Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s captivating When The Rainbow Goddess Wept have come out in paperback looking and reading as if they were both written yesterday. Rizal’s “Noli” was first published in 1887, in the midst of the Philippine revolution against Spanish rule, while original copies of Rainbow Goddess appeared in 1994.

Seeing the “Noli” in paperback is nothing new as it has been distributed before in paperback. What makes the 2006 version so special is that it was published by Penguin Classics, a branch of the distinguished Penguin Books publishing house. Rizal’s book is the first piece of Filipino literature ever to be printed by Penguin Classics, a publisher of some of the world’s finest works of literature.

Brainard’s Rainbow Goddess may fall well below the historical stature that has been conferred on Rizal’s more eminent Noli, but her novel is no less a poignant and intense expression of Philippine culture and history. Whereas the enduring appeal of Rizal’s Noli lies in part in its fertile exploration of the Philippines’s turbulent transition to modernity, the Rainbow Goddess does the opposite by transporting us back into the all but forgotten past, the past of home-grown mythological stories.

Published in paperback by the University of Michigan Press, Rainbow Goddess gives a harsh and indelible account of the toll that war can take on a person, especially on a nine-year old girl like Yvonne Macaraig, the novel’s main character. Macaraig becomes a reluctant eyewitness to the torment being endured by the Filipino people during the Japanese occupation in World War Two. She finds solace from the carnage and destruction in the Philippine myths and folktales bequeathed to her by bygone generations.

One of the functions of myth is to furnish meaning to existence, above all an existence jaded by something as terrible as war in its most cruelest form. For many Filipinos today, the adversary is modern existence which has alienated them from their genuine nature, indeed from their cultural identity. In Rainbow Goddess, Brainard manages a delicate balance between the daunting reality of the modern ethos and the existential wonders of Filipino mythological narratives. Brainard in short, is not just articulating a representation of Filipino culture—she is also saving Filipino readers, if for a time, from the turmoil of our modern lives.

An eternal source of national pride for Filipinos from all walks of life, José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere is considered to be the first major literary conduit for spreading a message of Filipino, and in a larger context, Asian, nationalism in opposition to colonial subjugation. It is in this novel where Rizal comes into his own as an egalitarian writer of conscience and justice. The Noli was an important milestone in the eventual christening of José Rizal as Philippine national hero and in his personal and public struggle to mold an autonomous Filipino identity.

Penguin Classics’s edition of the Noli is well-served by Harold Augenbraum’s English translation. His intelligent and finely tuned translation brings back to life the characters of the novel that Filipinos know so well. In the 2006 edition, we are once again enthralled by the cultured, bourgeois mestizo Crisóstomo Ibarra and his love for the prim and beautiful María Clara. We will also find ourselves loathing the infamous figure of Padre Dámaso and how he symbolized the immorality and corruption of the Catholic Church in pre-revolutionary Philippines. We also meet up again with the eccentric but sagacious Tasio the Philosopher, as well as with the rest of the Noli’s unforgettable host of actors.

Experiencing reading the Noli again will also remind us of the sacrifice that Rizal made for his country. Rather than continue his relatively comfortable life abroad, he returned home to teach some grand lessons, lessons that would galvanize the Filipino national consciousness and inspire critical but constructive contemplations about the meaning of being a Filipino.

Filipinos have been guilty of separating the past from the present-day. Through the language of writers like José Rizal and Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, this national fallacy is being perceived for the mistake that it is. As it happens, both authors’ books may be about events that took place long ago, but their significance is steeped in how Filipinos respond to the demands and complexities of our time.

*****

Allen Gaborro is an art and book reviewer for the Philippine News weekly. He is also a freelance writer who has written historical, political, and cultural articles. Allen is a member of the Philippine American Writers' Association (PAWA) of Northern California. He is based in San Francisco, California.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:42 PM 2 comments

ANTHROPY by RAY HSU

TIMOTHY YU Reviews

Anthropy by Ray Hsu
(Nightwood Editions, 2004)

[Review first appeared in idea&s 2.2 (Autumn 2005), edited by Diana Kuprel.]

In cosmology, the anthropic principle tells us that the universe we see is determined in large part by our own presence as observers: the universe had to evolve in the way it did for us to be here to see it. It is, in part, a statement about the interdependence of the observer and the observed. In Anthropy, the debut poetry collection from University of Toronto alumnus Ray Hsu, the metaphor for this principle is the photograph, generating a new world with each shift in focus: “even details / change, so that holding a camera meant your eyes / had to adjust to a new kind of light.”

Hsu’s book, which has been shortlisted for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Memorial Awards, is built on such changes in perspective. The protagonist of the opening section, “Third Person,” is Walter Benjamin, the first great theorist of photography. The poem “Benjamin: Nine Epilogues” stages Benjamin’s flight from Nazi-occupied Paris, “where the People become an endless film.” Film, as Hsu puts it elsewhere, is an “extended funeral,” a reanimation of that which is already dead. But in one of the most intriguing poems in the series, Hsu imagines Benjamin sifting through photographs in an abandoned basement jazz club. In the collage of images Benjamin creates--reminiscent of his Arcades Project, a massive collection of images of and quotations about Paris--the occupied city is “rebuilt as a gallery.” Its very lack of order, the opposite of film’s one-way narrative, is what allows it to come alive: “the aura of the lamp grew into the strange / faces of the people he knew.”

What might have been a series of theoretical reflections on images thus becomes a kind of autobiography. In subsequent sections, titled “Second Person” and “First Person,” Hsu offers a mixture of dramatic narratives and first-person lyrics, in voices ranging from a Cuban musician of the 1950s to a son recalling his father’s going to work in the morning. The surprising result, to borrow one of Hsu’s own conceits, is a portrait of the artist that moves in reverse, collecting a lifetime of “separate epiphanies” and “working downward to a simple root.” Yet that root still remains elusive. The collection’s final poem, “Deleted Scenes,” returns to the metaphor of film to muse on the way the author’s subjects exceed any single perspective: “But there’s so much that’s left out. I would have let them go on.”

At its best--as in the poem “Pneuma,” which juxtaposes the Trojan War and the defense of a Chinese city--Hsu’s verse, like that of Seamus Heaney, achieves a balance between intense diction and efficient, understated prosody. But his most impressive achievements are his prose poems (an example, the poem “Concordance,” is available at http://www.madpoetry.org/ madpoets/RayHsu/concordance.html), which give free rein to Hsu’s meditative voice, offering an intelligence that gently and almost imperceptibly disabuses its readers of every certainty.

*****

Timothy Yu teaches English at the University of Toronto. His poems and prose have appeared in Chicago Review, SHAMPOO, and Meanjin, as well as in Galatea Resurrects #2. He blogs at tympan.blogspot.com.

posted by EILEEN @ 11:41 PM 0 comments

A READING SPICER AND 18 SONNET by BEVERLY DAHLEN

DANA TEEN LOMAX reviews

A Reading Spicer and 18 Sonnets by Beverly Dahlen
(Chax Press, 2004)

[An earlier version of the review was first published in TRAFFIC: A Publication of Small Press Traffic, #1. Editor Elizabeth Treadwell, 2005-2006]

How can you write a critical review of Mother Earth? My bias is clear: Beverly Dahlen is my unacquainted mentor, my unknowing tour guide, my (unbeknownst to her) exacting fairy godmother. When I read her poetry, she often addresses my most pressing personal and literary questions and makes me laugh, but not without a price. Her books challenge and blow open held ideas about poetry and what it can do. Spending time with A-Reading Spicer & eighteen sonnets (chax press, 2004) proved no exception. In her working notes from years ago, Dahlen wrote, “Whatever else A Reading (1-7) might be, it is not a fiction.” This urgency about events, their (mythical) foundations, and repercussions is akin to how “A -Reading Spicer” opens:

A warning is soothing
               a part of the landscape of sound
                              in the inner ear
               this book nests in yr pocket hand
vests interest in the larger structure
               the complex merger
               global markets]

the recent flood receding all over town

Here and throughout the piece, the move from language to the work of poetry to community is seamless and dire, Dahlen’s call to arms. And there are many in this text. She skirts questions of the efficacy of poetry in political activism by living them out, showing the necessity of language in relation to social change:

something in the window reminds me
why I teach literacy                Marginalia
not among the life skills now

We and our language are what’s out in the streets just beyond the glass; words are action, the dialectic of people’s beings. And although the poem was written in 1986, its timelessness is keen and scary. Jack Spicer thought poets were time machines—ones who manipulate words so they can be used across time. This is true of Dahlen’s work:

the theme song of the news
                                             hissing and
buzzing              stopped
                              stopped in the ear

in yrs usefully
unexamined assumptions
the ground with yr head above it ] a thin artificial daylight
                                             the bottom line

Dahlen is on our side, but has a morbid hunch. “the blatant wellwisher’s hole in the face” could be ours. In A-Reading Spicer, she tests the formation of our fundamental myths, the structures that we exist in and replicate. Dahlen reminds us these are not just ideas we are dealing in, but lives. All through the book, she enlists broken words, afterimages, cartoon speech bubbles, crossed out & obliterated phrases that mark loss, destruction, and human error on the page and in the world. And the final borrowed lines of the poem which are presented in phonetic code are
themselves a code American slaves used to ridicule slave owners. They question religiosity, the unexamined, and the “current” day.

These concerns ricochet (humorously?! hauntingly?!) in “eighteen sonnets.” The series of these begin “…where do we get this st/uff is Shakespeare really so finders keepers?” And end with “…there is no/deeply hidden and intricate motive for un happiness hap/pines must be our lot in life if some can achieve it/then all must do so research on the brain indicates we/are close very close to this universal human goal we/will be happy anyway.” These short pieces, remarkably musical and hip, include face lifts, faded broken flamingos, chilling dreamscapes, our suburbs far and wide, and we never know for sure if the neighbor next door is dying in the
shower, who the death wagon is coming to get. But throughout all of Dahlen’s work, we are implicated, just by being who we are.

*****

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press, 2006) and Room (a+bend, 1999). At the moment, she is working on Q, a series of “home movies” about raising a child on the grounds of a prison, and recently co-edited Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community. Her work has appeared in Bay Poetics, 26, Ligature, mem, sonaweb, Moria, Shampoo, dusie, 14 Hills, and other publications, and has received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award for Poetry and California Arts Council and Peninsula Community Foundation grants. She currently teaches at San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco, and lives with her partner and 5-year old daughter in northern California.

posted by EILEEN @ 9:51 PM 0 comments

OXBOW KAZOO by JOHN OLSON

STEVE POTTER Reviews

Oxbow Kazoo by John Olson
(First Intensity Press, P. O. Box 665, Lawrence, KS 66044)

[First Published in The Wandering Hermit Review]

What are we doing when picking up a book if not looking for a little company? The prose poetry of John Olson is good company. I don’t often think of poems as delightful, but Olson’s are. I don’t very often read a prose poem and think to myself, “self, that was delightful!” But I do after reading certain of Olson’s prose poems. The poems themselves are full of delights because the poet is delighted to be writing them. Olson is having fun and so we do, too. He’s all hopped up and high on language and we catch a contact buzz by reading along.

               THERE IS a light in the meat of a word incinerating it, bringing it to mind, incarcerating it, releasing it, impregnating it with tense and experience. The light in the meat of a word anticipates a loom of integument. One word supplies the context for another word. Word to word affects razor and axe. Liquid in an amnion. Residue on a drawer. Yoruba yam or Asian bronze. Greek velour or Spanish string. The word is an eye looking back at you. It falls through your mind with the weight of a formula....
(from “Embryo”)

To play the “who’s he write like” game for a second, of his prose poet predecessors I find Olson most reminiscent of Breton and Stein. There’s a bounciness to the writing, a buoyancy. Less pissed off adolescent angst than Rimbaud. Not quite as completely butt-ass crazy as Artaud. Less of a storytelling impulse than Baudelaire.

Many of these forebears turn up in the poems in Oxbow Kazoo. Here, for example is the beginning of “Arthur Rimbaud On Horseback:”

               REMEMBER ARTHUR. Arthur Rimbaud on horseback. He is very well which is an advantage when he is riding.
               A horse is an architecture of muscle, decorum, and bone. Arthur is riding the horse before and behind. He is riding the horse trembling and
Californian.
               A bed of a river when it is very wide bares an elevator in the sand. Why is there an elevator in the sand? And are there rocks? Is there gunplay? Are there shadows that border the 17th century?

Here’s the fourth paragraph of “Gertrude Stein in Tennessee:”

               Suppose Gertrude Stein visited Tennessee would there be a renaissance and if so a renaissance of what? Would there be words would there be accuracy and pairs and concrete and survival? There would be marigolds marigolds and seams. Mosquitos, a mosquito, this mosquito is daily and along the river more, and along the river tracks. When and where and what and meaning. Gertrude Stein in Tennessee and a hound dog and a brooch and a pooch and a porch and a portico.

And here are the last two paragraphs of the poem in the collection with my favorite title, “An Accidental Treatise on the Paragraph Glands of Gravy Canyon,” which concludes with another nod to a forebear:

               Important conclusions can be drawn from a propeller. When the propeller turns, the sentence moves forward stirring material from the bottom of the mind and then veers into the horizon. This may be perceived as a slightly curving line, or mark denoting heaven and Saturday.
               The main reason for this assumption is water. In the course of time snow melted and rain fell and be came a fetus. If, then, we understand the process of development as a boundary continually expanded into thumbs and ligaments, we can see how Paris might be full of people, and poets like Guillame Apollinaire.

Beckett turns up too, as do Whitman and Dickinson and Picasso and Van Gogh and Chuck Berry and Jack Keruoac and Philip Lamantia and others. But enough on that theme. There’s lots else going on in Oxbow Kazoo.

For instance, there are a few fine examples of the Olsonian Sudden Flurry of Spurious Facts. What, you ask, is an Olsonian Sudden Flurry of Spurious Facts? Let’s just say that there are certain moves one looks forward to encountering when reading a new book by a writer whose work one’s enjoyed in the past, much as a sports fan will watch for a signature spinning slam dunk or such. I could, I suppose tell what an Olsonian Sudden Flurry of Spurious Facts is, or present an example, but it’d be better if you’d dive into Oxbow Kazoo (as well as Free Stream Velocity, Eggs & Mirrors, and Echo Regime) to see if you can’t figure it out on your own. In conclusion, a brief cento composed from three lines stolen from poems in Oxbow Kazoo:

You might say music is a lake floating down a river
Ink is a vast possibility of fluid sleeping in a pen
And the syrup pours slowly like the dream of a rose

*****

Steve Potter's writing has appeared in Arson, Big Toe Review, Blue Collar Review, Drunken Boat, Freefall, Knock, Pindeldyboz and 3rd Bed. He lives in Seattle where he edits and publishes The Wandering Hermit Review.

posted by EILEEN @ 8:26 PM 0 comments

THE 8TH WONDER TROUPE

ALLEN GABORRO Reviews

8th Wonder Performance Troupe

[First published in Philippine News, Oct 20, 2004]

The verve of 8th Wonder

SAN FRANCISCO — If Filipino Americans are not yet familiar with the 8th Wonder performance poetry group, they are bound to be soon.

This talented troupe of FilAm poets has performed in numerous locales and has received glowing coverage in various periodicals and radio stations. 8th Wonder has toured in several cities around the U.S.in front of sold-out audiences, acting out their poetry on stage with all the verve and theatricality they can muster.

The group’s performers are simply brilliant in expressing the angst, hurt, internal struggle, and the waves of emotion that many experience as they struggle to navigate the treacherous waters of a modern society and the expectations that it places on them.

8th Wonder’s members range from 24 to 30 years of age. The group consists of Isagani “Starr” Pugao, Jason “Kreative Dwella” Mateo, Jocelyn Deona “Hi-Five” De Leon, Irene Faye “Shortyrocwell” Duller, Lillian “Dirty Dot” Prijoles, Golda “Supanova” Sargento, and Alan “Quest” Maramag. Since its incipient beginning in 2000 as a provisional gathering of poets, 8th Wonder has arguably become the finest fellowship of FilAm performance poetry artists in the Bay Area.

Their work is a dynamic blend of street vernacular, introspective and philosophical verses, mystical chanting and vocalizations, cultural and feminist themes, urban social commentary, existential concerns and aspirations, and passionate yearnings for love and hope that will never fail to conquer hate and capitulation.

Listeners will be reminded of the late Puerto Rican poet Miguel Piñero and the famous Nuyorican Poets Café in New York that he belonged to, when they hear the intensity and the freethinking energy of every syllable, every word, every timbre, and every passage that the poets of 8th Wonder utter.

They will also hear elements of the counter-culture values of the Beat poets in the group’s poems, which are attempts to seek real meaning in an exasperatingly incomprehensible world.

Deeply personal and yet universal in scope, 8th Wonder’s poetry is as enchanting as it is natural, conscience-awakening as it is original.

This is certainly the case from Alan Maramag’s fast-paced, rap-like lyrics on the difficult transformation of a child into adulthood, and Jason Mateo’s poetry on his dreams and ambitions for the future, to Jocelyn De Leon’s soulful song-and-poetry evocations of a call for life, and the group’s all-female bit on being tough but loving “gangstas”.

All of 8th Wonder’s pieces show that its poets are wise and contemplative beyond their years, and blessed with artistic talent and daring that would make the celebrated Piñero himself shudder with pride in his grave.

At moments during their performances, the group displays both a transcendental and earthy physicality that complements the carefully-crafted verses of its poets. Transcendental because 8th Wonder is always pursuing that higher ground of social and spiritual idealism that the material world has given up on.

Earthy because the group has tethered itself to the real world and its human concerns and complexities. In either case, the audience can be forgiven for closely watching the poets’ body language and cadences as they flow seamlessly with their entrancing words.

Named after the famous Banaue Rice Terraces in the Philippines (often regarded as the “eighth wonder of the world”), 8th Wonder’s members are seasoned, deeply perceptive representatives of the Filipino community in America.

As insightful FilAms acutely aware of their Pinoy heritage, the group’s poets touch upon subjects dear to their community, with subjects such as cultural identity, identity politics, cultural assimilation, colonial mentalities, as well as the socio-economic realities of a capitalist society and how they shape FilAm attitudes. 8th Wonder also never misses a chance to invoke the distant past as it raises in sharp relief the uproo ted memory of the native traditions and history of the Filipino people.

8th Wonder’s members, every one of them intimately engaged in the FilAm community, belong to a long line of contemporary artists who see themselves as iconoclasts endeavoring to break the stereotypical images given to Filipinos.

Hence, their poetry is one not only of Pinoy camaraderie and pride, but also of the crusade to rescue the FilAm from the threat of anonymity and misrepresentation. Even more, 8th Wonder’s poetry is an entreaty to revolution, not in the political sense, but in the realm of ideas and opinions.

Such a revolution would help invigorate the burgeoning Filipino cultural renaissance in the U.S.

8th Wonder is an esprit de corps in constant creative motion, its poets using the power of the imagination and the spoken word to inspire FilAm to conduct a soul-searching of where we came from, where we are, and where we could and should be going.

That alone ought to make what this vigorous, socially- and culturally-conscious enclave of poets has to say quite valuable and redeeming.

*****

Allen Gaborro is an art and book reviewer for the Philippine News weekly. He is also a freelance writer who has written historical, political, and cultural articles. Allen is a member of the Philippine American Writers' Association (PAWA) of Northern California. He is based in San Francisco, California.

posted by EILEEN @ 6:03 PM 0 comments

OTIOSE WARTS by ARGOL KARVARKIAN

A FEATURE ARTICLE

SANDY MCINTOSH "Reviews"

Otiose Warts by Argol Karvarkian
(Univ. of University Press, Bergen, 2006)

This forty-fifth collection continues Karvarkian’s obsession with a miniature kind of poetry: lyrics gorgeously wrought, each with the grace and identicalness of a Faberge egg. It is curious that after Karvarkian’s decades of writing and publishing well-mannered volumes, his many readers may not recall his earliest work, which is characterized by a surprisingly primitive, even brutish sensibility. A far cry from the lapidary incrustations of his contemporary work, his earlier poems seem to have originated in a swamp: metaphors dense as quagmire, often expressed in grunts, such as “Bleep. Fsssssh. Poof.” Contrast this with the minimalist clarity and grace of a lyrical refrain from a poem in his newest collection: “This. That. This.”

I first met Karvarkian in Florida. I had recently married, and my wife and I shared a shack on stilts in an obscure part of the Everglades, where I could work on my literary criticism in solitude. Karvarkian was young, of course, with massive, unkempt hair and musky odor. The three of us became friends after we’d met at the local fishing-themed bar in town. Gradually, I began to notice the attraction Karvarkian and my wife shared, and so I wasn’t surprised when one day he took me aside and growled, “I’m leaving on a lengthy journey to reach the end of the world. And, oh yes, do you mind if I take your wife?” He was surprised, I surmise, by my gracious accession.

There then seemed to be an endless supply of wives in the Everglades, so I had no trouble marrying again. What did astound me, however, was that within a month of my second marriage Karvarkian reappeared, his long trip apparently cut short. He pointed his finger at my trembling second wife. “I don’t like this one,” he told me. “But your new one seems entirely lovable. Do you mind if I take her along on my infinite journey?” Of course I protested. Wasn’t one enough for him? But my new wife flashed her eyes and they hurriedly departed.

This left me in rather an awkward position. My first wife and I were no longer properly married, but she didn’t seem to be leaving the house, so we resumed our cohabitation with the proviso that I might at any time, should I wish to, take a new wife. And eventually I did.

It was at that time that Karvarkian reentered our lives. “Take this one back,” he ordered, thrusting my second wife at me. “Lemme have the new one.” Numbed, I could only allow her to go.

Now I was living with two former wives. After some time, I remarried. Moments after that ceremony, as if he’d been lurking beneath a trap door, Karvarkian abruptly appeared demanding the new wife in trade for the old.

This pattern continued for some years. Eventually I stopped protesting because I’d begun to notice that after each exchange of wives a new book of Karvarkian’s poetry would appear. Each time, I would read it with immense interest and greatly marvel at his progression of intellect and technique from volume to volume.

His eighteenth collection, Phlogiston You Bet, evidences what we might call the typical Karvarkian poem of the early middle period: distinctive language and budding obsession with the mysterious shadow figure, eventually to be known as the Procurer, so famously developed in later volumes:

A can of f*****g beer
collides with a f*****g cold thought:
Pimp me vittles,
that little b******d
better deliver
me f*****g flame-retardant
flapdoodle another beer
in f*****g skirts
or I crush his f*****g
smooch. (“A Bone Aren’t Made of Beer”)

By his thirtieth volume, We’ll Burn That Bridge Before We Invent It, his outlandish verbosity has given way to a diction both natural and unforced:

The notion of amber gosling
waddling, My sainted Procurer
in his red wheelbarrow.
“Ducky,” I coo. “Get me another
in her flowing skirts. This one’s gone dry.”
Gosling nestles, but tiresome Procurer
demands recompense.
Grudgingly,
I flip him the bird. (“The Pushover Prize”)

Although I support forty-six ex-wives on the meager receipts of my modest critical efforts, I can’t help but believe that I had something to do with the great Karvarkian’s evolution as a poet. After all, he seemed to extract a tangible grace from the women I married—and, I flatter myself—possibly because of my own connection to them. I’d also like to think that my judiciously crafted critical prose, which my wives have assured me they read aloud to him each evening, helped to discipline his earlier poetic unruliness.

I can think of no better evidence of this than this latest volume. Here he demonstrates, with a directness characteristic of his formative earlier work, what may be a final, summative reconciling with the Procurer, the mysterious shadow-figure:

Needles, needles.
Glockenspiel headstrong.
Ale may ail and skirt hurt,
but o my sissy-brother,
there is nary the consumer
absent the consumed. (“Elapsed Bumbershoot”)

Whether this mysterious Procurer will ever be brought fully from the shadows must wait on future Karvarkian collections, although much critically has already appeared. (See my The Mysterious Procurer in the Poetry of Karvarkian. Three volumes. Freemont: Univ. of University Press. 2004)

Still, if we are to consider the totality of Argol Karvarkian’s oeuvre, we must ask, what does it signify? What will be its influence? These beautiful Faberge egg-like poems, several dozen to a package: how are we to understand such exigent fragility? I think, in the end, they will share the fate of all delicately created things. Like Faberge eggs they will abide as objects that we can admire, but that, once having admired, we relegate to the collector’s shelf without further comment.

*****

Sandy McIntosh’s collections of poetry include The After-Death History of My Mother, Between Earth and Sky (Marsh Hawk Press), Endless Staircase (Street Press), Earth Works (Long Island University), Which Way to the Egress? (Garfield Publishers), and two chapbooks: Obsessional (Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry) and Monsters of the Antipodes (Survivors Manual Books). His prose includes Firing Back, with Jodie-Beth Galos (John Wiley & Sons), From A Chinese Kitchen (American Cooking Guild), and The Poets In the Poets-In-The-Schools (Minnesota Center for Social Research, University of Minnesota. His poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal, American Book Review, and elsewhere. His original poetry in a film script won the Silver Medal in the Film Festival of the Americas. He has been Managing Editor of Confrontation magazine published by Long Island University, and is Managing Editor of Marsh Hawk Press.

posted by EILEEN @ 12:54 AM 0 comments

BACK COVER

posted by EILEEN @ 12:01 AM 2 comments