Galatea Resurrects #6 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 6

2007-05-24T23:59:00.000-07:00

May 24, 2007

[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 can click on the individual links below to more quickly get to a review that interests you.]

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
By Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Brenda Iijima reviews CONCORDANCE by Mei-mei Berssenbruge with art by Kiki Smith

J.O. LeClerc reviews LUNCH POEMS by Frank O'Hara

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews INSTAN by Cecilia Vicuna

Monica McFawn reviews CHANCE by Daniel Becker

James Owens reviews BORN IN UTOPIA: AN ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ROMANIAN POETRY, Edited by Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur with Edward Foster

Tim Peterson reviews NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY by Thomas Fink

Andrea Baker reviews NECESSARY STRANGER by Graham Foust

Theresa Tensuan reviews UPROCK HEADSPIN SCRAMBLE AND DIVE and AMERICAN KUNDIMAN by Patrick Rosal

Tyrone Williams reviews NEGATIVITY by Jocelyn Saidenberg

Ivy Alvarez reviews UNBOUND & BRANDED by Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Eileen Tabios reviews POET’S BOOKSHELF: CONTEMPORARY POETS ON BOOKS THAT SHAPED THEIR ART Edited by Peter Davis

Chris Pusateri reviews PICTURE OF THE BASKET by Sarah Mangold and NEW COURIERS by Dana Ward

Eileen Tabios—and Denise Levertov—review IN A DYBBUK’S RAINCOAT: COLLECTED POEMS BY BERT MEYERS Edited by Morton Marcus and Daniel Meyers

Patrick James Dunagan reviews ABSURD GOOD NEWS by Julien Poirier

William Allegrezza reviews EMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS by Stacy Szymaszek

Alexander Dickow reviews THE BIRD HOVERER by Aaron Belz

Thomas Fink reviews I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU by Amy King

Lisa Factora-Borders reviews A SLICE OF CHERRY PIE Edited by Ivy Alvarez

Alexander Dickow reviews FLOWERS OF BAD: A FALSE TRANSLATION OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S LES FLEURS DU MAL by David Cameron

Eileen Tabios reviews WALKING THEORY by Stephen Vincent

Celia Homesley reviews ORIGINAL GREEN by Patricia Carlin

Eileen Tabios reviews THE IMMACULATE AUTOPSY by Todd Melicker

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews BRAIDED RIVER: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1965-2005 and GUESTS OF SPACE by Anselm Hollo

William Allegrezza reviews WATCHWORD by William Fuller

Monica Fawn reviews BETWEEN THE ROOM AND THE CITY by Erica Bernheim

Eileen Tabios reviews FORTY-FIVE by Frieda Hughes

Laurel Johnson reviews SKIRT FULL OF BLACK by Sun Yung Shin

Pamela Hart reviews CASE SENSITIVE by Kate Greenstreet

Eileen Tabios reviews THE JUROR by George Dawes Green

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews A STRANGE ARRANGEMENT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by C.J. Allen

Frank Gampietro reviews THE HUMBLE TRAVELOGUES OF MR. IAN WORTHINGTON (WRITTEN FROM LAND AND SEA) by Sandra Simonds

Derek Motion reviews PEEL ME A ZIBIBBO by Pam Brown

Ernesto Priego reviews MORTAL by Ivy Alvarez

Jeannine Hall Gailey reviews MORTAL by Ivy Alvarez

Eileen Tabios reviews WHAT'S THE MATTER by Jordan Stempleman

Addie Tsai reviews THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST: THE COLLECTED POEMS, COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED Edited by Edward Connery, COLLECTED POEMS 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott, and WHAT THE TWILIGHT SAYS: ESSAYS BY DEREK WALCOTT

Eileen Tabios reviews LITTLE WAR MACHINE by M Sarki

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews BECOMING THE VILLAINESS by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Ivy Alvarez reviews from A BANNER YEAR by Kate Colby

Eileen Tabios reviews PARTS OF THE JOURNAL: NIGHT by Richard Lopez

Julie R. Enszer reviews FALLING INTO VELAZQUEZ by Mary Kaiser

William A. Sylvester reviews SOMEHOW by Burt Kimmelman

Eileen Tabios reviews POETRY DAILY ESSENTIALS 2007 Edited by Diane Boller and Don Selby

Julie R. Enszer reviews THE GREAT CANOPY by Paula Goldman

Fionna Donney Simmonds reviews THE TAR PIT DIATOMS by Sandra Simonds, OTAGES by John Bloomberg-Rissman, and ISHMAEL AMONG THE BUSHES by William Allegrezza

Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor reviews KOOL LOGIC: LA LOGICA KOOL by Urayoan Noel

Laurel Johnson reviews WHITHER NONSTOPPING by Harriet Zinnes

Mark Young reviews THE BEAUTIFUL DAYS by A.B. Spellman

Sandy McIntosh reviews SAINTS OF HYSTERIA, A HALF-CENTURY OF COLLABORATIVE AMERICAN POETRY, Edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, and David Trinidad

Appendix Article to Review of SAINTS OF HYSTERIA: “Filmmaking with Norman Mailer and Ilya Bolotowsky” by Sandy McIntosh

FEATURE ARTICLES
Nicholas Manning on "A Worldly Country by Young Up-And-Comer John Ashbery"

Addie Tsai on “’The Hairy Caterpillar’: An Exploration of Image”

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Joyelle McSweeney reviews LILYFOIL + 3 and CHANTRY by Elizabeth Treadwell

Craig Perez reviews composite. diplomacy. by Padcha Tuntha-Obas

Thomas Fink reviews THE AFTER-DEATH HISTORY OF MY MOTHER by Sandy McIntosh

Eileen Tabios reviews CORNUCOPIA by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

BACK COVER
Self-Explanatory

EDITOR'S INTRO

2007-05-24T22:54:00.000-07:00

We are delighted to welcome the summer with Galatea Resurrects' (GR) sixth issue. I never expected this project to last this long. But it's fitting since Poetry is timeless, which is why GR is open to reviews of all poetry projects and not just new releases -- an invitation taken to heart by J.O. LeClerc's review of the oldest book to be reviewed to date by GR: Frank O'Hara's 1964 collection, LUNCH POEMS!

GR is an all-volunteer operation--and I'm delighted its momentum continues to be healthy, as shown by the following stats:

Issue 1: 27 reviews

Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)

Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)

Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)

Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)

Issue 6: 56 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)

Of these engagements, the following were generated from review copies sent to Galatea Resurrects:

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews

So I continue to encourage publishers and authors to send in review copies. Reflecting the logistical support of the internet, reviewers from around the world are paying attention. For information on submission and review copies, go check out Galatea's Purse.

*****

Your editor is "blind" and so there can be typos or other errors in the presentation of the articles. Please feel free to let me know. Given Blogger's format, I can easily make corrections to the engagements.

*****

And then there's the GR constituency who reads each issue as a metaphor for my dogs' lives. Well, the latest is that, here in wine country, I've began to consider labels for my future Galatea wines. In the wonderful tradition of Mouton Rothschild offering the images of artists on their labels (and Tsk, tsk, by the way, to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol and Tobacco for censoring Balthus), what would you think of this image of Moi and Achilles, painted by Clare Rojas:

Achilles really does paw at my hand like that! So that would be the front label. And on the back? But of course, poems! Would have to be short poems, perhaps the hay(na)ku. But poems for sure! Meanwhile, here is Achilles chasing Gabriela through the vineyard--ah, the ecstasy of happy dawgs!

Dog Poetics really is relevant to Galatea Resurrects. Because dogs are pure Love.

With much Love, Fur and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
May 24, 2007

CONCORDANCE by MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE and KIKI SMITH

2007-05-23T23:55:00.000-07:00

BRENDA IIJIMA Reviews

CONCORDANCE with poems by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge and art by Kiki Smith
(Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, 2006)

The book’s face is a 9’x 9’ square with a painted owl visage on sandy colored ground. A bush-like mound, fully frontal with a penetrating (not ominous—sad, perhaps) stare in indigo ink and dull gold is how the owl is rendered. Concordance, the title falls simply across the upper top portion of the book while at the bottom, camouflaged within the owl’s feathers are the names Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith. The back cover is a mirror image of the art work found on the front cover, except that the owl is now positioned more to the left side and is cropped slightly. Press information, an isbn number and the price are now nestled within the owl’s feathers.

Concordance opens up with this dedication: “for the frogs and the toads”. I don’t think this is merely whimsy. Toads and frogs and canaries in the coal mine warn of impending environmental issues. Toads and frogs are particularly sensitive to toxic chemicals that have been released into the ecosphere—they are the first to show signs of disease and distress. Eleni Stecopoulos’s insightful talk: Composition by Electromagnetic Field: Weiner, Berssenbrugge, and the Poetics of Sensitivity which she presented at the CUNY Conference on Contemporary Poetry in November, 2005 highlighted the ways in which Berssenbrugge as a poet registers the unseen but bodily experienced presence of chemical disturbances as she moves within various environments. Substance is chemical and biological systems interact and are in flux with these components. The mind and the body are nothing more: chemical substances within biological systems, interactive, or?. These substances, in particular formations are able to generate the imaginative thought patterns and bodily expressions humans have. Substances flowing within and among substances—this is our condition. Our membranes are permeable. (It is interesting to contemplate how history can be understood (or is understood) chemically.)

Concordance is a book conjoining two artists and contains two works plus the visual responses that accompany these poetic texts. “Concordance” is the first section and is printed on a slightly thinner, stiff, sand colored paper that the cover is printed on. The second piece in the book is titled “Red Quiet” and is printed on a vibrant red, soft, slightly translucent rice paper without drawings by Smith. This is how “Concordance” begins:

“Writing encounters one who
does not write and I don’t try
for him, but face-to-face draw
you onto a line or flight like a
brake that may be extended,
the way milkweed filling space
above the field is ‘like’ reading.”

The words are enigmatic and ethereal but also, connected to terrestrial happening— immediacies. The enigmatic and ethereal have to do with the internalizations, transformations of thought, recalibrations that happen between outside and inside. The traceries of sight are both artists’ gestures. Tugs of animal, mineral and spirit. “Writing encounters one who does not write”—is this a reference to the owl, does the owl allude to infancy and pre-cultural states? The ever presently returning query: Nature ? Culture? Culture? Nature?

“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.”

Where do the aporias form—in the gap between speech and language? On the boundaries of semantics, semiotics, as objects meet up with materiality? When meanings become malleable through time and space? Between the space of the personal and the social—an irreconcilable space where the social can never quite fully account for all that is personal and visa versa? Between what is animal and that space that is thought of as other and in addition: humanism (is there such a space, really?)? Or is it within imagination, where a concrete term can have burgeoning additional, connective meanings? In these unspeakable, transcendent situations the world fluctuates. Perhaps, in these unmentionable but fertile zones concepts are formed—temporary crystallizations out of mutable ground.

“Seeds disperse in summer air.

Sunrays cease to represent parallel
passages in a book, i.e., not coming
from what I see and feel

Relation is in the middle, relay,
flower description to flower
becoming of the eye between light
and heart.

Kiki Smith’s drawings are tiles. If the book were dissembled and arranged edge to edge, a single image would emerge except that the images are printed on front and back sides making this physically impossible—they can’t be re-arranged like a Rubik’s Cube. There is a witty placement within the book. The image that follows the table of contents is a detail of a frond. At the very bottom of the page there is the same texture as that of the owl’s head. On turning a couple of pages, the owl indeed shows up—with the top portion of its head cropped. So the book introduces the visual world from top down. The images are animal, particle and vegetal. A human hand reaches for a milkweed pod. Ants crawl over flower sepals. An iconic bird (not the owl), a dove is a curvaceous shape that breaks up the square page. A frog shows up in the middle of the book. There isn’t a boundary separating the animal from the human.

“Warmth, which was parallel, moves
across the shard, smoothes and makes
it porous, matter breath, light
materializing dear ants and dear words.”

What does this have to with animals: animals who engage in language acts and those that are seen as not able to engage? As Giorgio Agamben points out, “Animals are not in fact denied language; on the contrary, they are always and totally language. In them la voix sacrée de la terre ingénue (the sacred voice of the unknowing earth—which Mallermé, hearing the chirp of a cricket, sets against the human voice as une and non-décomposée (one and indivisible)—knows no breaks or interruptions. Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language—he has to say I. Thus, if language is truly man’s nature (and nature, on reflection, can only mean language without speech, génesis synechés, ‘continuous origin’, by Aristotle’s definition, and to be nature means being always-already inside language), then man’s nature is split at its source, for infancy brings it discontinuity and the difference between language and discourse.” (Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, p. 59) And Agamben goes on to state that this discontinuity and difference is what institutes historicity. And, stated in a slightly different way Judith Butler contends, “The ‘I’ emerges as a deliberating subject only once the world has appeared as a countervailing picture, an externality to be known and negotiate at an epistemological distance. (Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 110-111) Yes, it seems, a mirror so often gets in the way—of continuousness!

“Since animals don’t judge, their
evolving cosmic skills are a source
of richness for us.”

For Berssenbrugge there is concordance—with animals, when humans, in a tentative, dissipating (now a definitive creative act) can be seen as animals. The dynamic shifts when humans claim otherwise and gain additional power by separating themselves out of the continuum. With genocides and mass extinctions happening at unprecedented, accelerating speeds, these understandings are vital to consider.

“Color is a mirror where we see
ourselves with living things, scarlet
neck feathers, infant asleep across
your heart, like-to-like.

Attention gives light shine on a
baby’s calf; as he hears what I say,
I become that.

‘Red Quiet’ is the pulmonary interior—what surges through: psychic states, ghost particles, words spoken, vibrations, sex, love, floral blossoms. This sequence at first seems to me to be more intense because of the experience of reading text against glowing red (almost damp) paper; my body response to the color saturation. The tone of this poem is slightly more confrontational than the opening sequence—intensified by this heightened presentation. The poem begins with eye contact and how this will feed awareness—human to human.

“I look into his eyes and feel my
awareness expand to contain what he
will tell me, as if what he says is a
photography of landscape and in my
mind will be a painting of “Hill,”
“Part of the Cliffs,” “Purple Hills.”

These words are the opposite of
Verisimilitude.”

Here, vulnerability unravels: impression on impression. “Listeners, like water, resonate dread/in a blue vase, in glasses. There is ever so slightly a register of claustrophobia whereas; in the opening sequence there was expansiveness: the open, the outside while also being inside too: wave lengths of music emanating, dream visions. “Red maintains a strong impression/of the body, while consciousness/flows along its inner images.” The reader suddenly is without tangible imagery (Kiki Smith’s). Now mind and body generate images from our insides; it is a startling transition. “I send out an emotion of warmth,/welcome, the way scientists erase/sound with sound.” This move of articulation from visual to verbal is an intense shrinking and an act of concentration. This is the domesticated (acculturated) space of standardization, yet the imagination flourishes here (also).

The way these two texts are presented shakes up Western notions of time. Time is not separate, acting on its own accord. It is tied up to situation, to atmosphere. Each inference is a revolving universe that brushes up against other inferences but they are all one time. Time isn’t an arrow. Time isn’t a point along a path. It is incidence and inference, a morphic field, a reoccurrence and a resonance. “Friends witnessing grief enter your/consciousness, illuminating your form, so quiet comes.” Seeing is conducted with feeling; here the poetic is not privileged over lived occurrence. History is not supplanting the lived (this need not be paradoxical). And too, time buds and saturates as if osmosis, mitosis. An instance in/of time shifts (in and out and among) space (s), shape shifts out of the sheath imposed on by the Greeks, [periechón]. The eye is no longer the dominant eye witness position—Berssenbrugge reveals an immersive eco body sensorium and maybe there isn’t all word to represent this perceptive stance.

*****

Brenda Iijima is the author of Around Sea (O Books). Animate, Inanimate Aims is forthcoming from Litmus Press in May, 2007 and Eco Quarry Bellwether will be released this summer from Outside Voices. Lately she has been working with sound artist Austin Publicover to produce Council of Worms, a collaborative cd. She lives in Brooklyn, NY where she runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.

LUNCH POEMS by FRANK O'HARA

2007-05-23T23:50:00.000-07:00

J.O. LECLERC Reviews

Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara
(The Pocket Poets Series # 19, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1964)

A Retrospective Appreciation

I was born in 1946 -- 20 years after the poet Frank O’Hara’s birth, and a year or so after O’Hara served as a Sonarsman aboard the destroyer USS Nicholas in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. During my early childhood, O’Hara attended Harvard on the GI Bill, roomed with Edward Gorey, met a guy named John Ashbury, and published some of his poems in The Harvard Advocate.

About the time my family moved to Roslyn, New York (about an hour from Manhattan via Northern Boulevard), and my father was teaching me how to play Catch, O’Hara got his M.A. in English Literature at the University of Michigan (my late sister Carol took her Masters at Ann Arbor about 10 years later).

In the fall of ‘51, O’Hara moved to Manhattan with his friend and lover Joseph LeSeur. After settling into his new apartment, Frank got a gig working the front desk at The Museum of Modern Art. By the time I got my first pair of glasses, and the New York Giants swept the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series, Frank O’Hara’s brilliant career was well underway.

O’Hara was a man of energy, intellect, wit, and warmth. He made friends with hundreds of the flowering petals that populated the wild, beautiful, effulgent garden of art that was Fifties New York. That was the City of Abstract Expressionism and its spark points: The Janis Gallery, The Cedar Tavern, the lofts of Lower Broadway, Duane Street, and Coenties Slip (there was no SOHO, no TRIBECA in them thar days). Among that crowd, O’Hara had friends like Bill DeKooning, Joan Mitchell, and Larry Rivers. Painter/Horn man Rivers connected O’Hara to Big Apple Jazz and its great downtown haunts: The Village Vanguard, The Half-Note, The Five Spot.

From O’Hara’s "The Day Lady Died"

…, I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with
her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

The last five lines of the poem live as elegy and homage to the great Billie Holiday. O’Hara saw her in her decline -- drug and booze wasted. Fated to die under police arrest in a lonely hospital bed.

But the preceding 25 lines tell about a day in New York City -- Mid July -- 1959 (the baseball Giants and the Dodgers have skipped to California since O’Hara has found his rightful home in Gotham). Shortly after noon, O’Hara gets a shoeshine (men did that in New York then) because he’s got a train to catch later on in the afternoon. He walks muggy streets and gets a hamburger and a malted (no fast food franchises then -- just Horn & Hardart’s Automats and Luncheonettes, and their poor cousins “Greasy Spoons“ -- otherwise you went to a “real” restaurant. He buys a literary magazine formatted in paperback book style called “New World Writing” -- he wants to know what the writers in Ghana are doing (magazines like that no longer exist, but then, neither does Frank O’Hara). He goes to a bank and then to a little bookstore The Golden Griffin. He buys a gift book for “Patsy” by Verlaine, with drawings by Bonnard.

He also considers books by Hesiod, Jean Genet, and the then darling of the White Horse Tavern, Brendan Behan (people still read Hesiod and Genet, but Behan’s up yours boyo charms are now faded Irish mist). The death of Billie Holiday becomes the catalytic center of whirling, spindrift memories. Memories of 1959 imprinted like the images of Bogart and Veronica Lake recall the ambience of the Forties. As the image of Louise Brooks makes vivid the now historical 1920s.

Prior to his military experience, O’Hara was a conservatory trained pianist. He would remain an excellent musician all of his life. He wrote articles for Art News in its glory days. The magazine contained scintillant essays and beautiful reproductions on the art of Pompeii, the Venetian Masters, and the Avant-Garde that found its true home and sanctuary in O’Hara’s New York. The “Avant-Garde” has long since transmogrified into “New Products” from corporate brain trainers, but when O’Hara lived, Jackson Pollock flung his articulate skeins of “energy made visible” (O‘Hara wrote a great monograph on Pollock -- one of Braziller’s Great American Artists Series) , John Cage made silence audible, “Modern Dance” met “Off-Broadway Theatre” met “Free Jazz” met “The New York Poets” met “Abstract Painters Painting Stage Sets”. The magnetic draw of New York was felt throughout the United States. Three Tulsa school buddies from Oklahoma came to the Apple to meet O‘Hara. Ted Berrigan - who would himself become a major figure in the downtown poetry scene - spread the “I do this, I do that” Gospel according to Frank. Okie Ron Padgett also saw O’Hara as a mentor and went on to a distinguished career as a poet and translator. Joe Brainard, whose 30 image cover for the 70th Anniversary Issue of Art News is a masterwork of modernist iconography, would find his footing with O’Hara and become one of the great draughtsmen, collagist, and set designers of his time. O’Hara was also a playwright, and Brainard designed sets for him.

In 1960, Frank O’Hara was made Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art. In September of 1960, I became a Freshman at Roslyn High School (four years behind Roslyn Basketball hero, Mike Crichton -- another guy bound for Harvard. Crichton didn’t shine in college hoops, but he did graduate Summa Cum Laude, was Phi Beta Kappa and became an M.D. He also guest lectured on Anthropology at Cambridge. As I write this review, Crichton has written 25 successful novels and has established himself as a film and television director and producer. He never became a Doctor, but he did create ER.

One of Crichton’s classmates was my buddy Bill Miller’s brother Chris. He went to Dartmouth. A sentimental education in New Hampshire turned out to be lucrative for Chris Miller. Based on his rowdy college experiences, he wrote the screenplay for a movie called Animal House. As far as I know, the party is still going on (Chris was Dartmouth Class of ‘62). Little did J.O. know that the tall guy and his pal’s brother were destined to be Titans of Pop Culture -- But Freshman LeClerc (very shy with all those strange but very desirable creatures in mini-skirts) had found a passion that he could put his hands on. His first high school sweetheart was Poetry.

Rather than study my Algebra and Russian (Cold War at the Freezing Stage), I buried my myopic head in Oscar Williams’ anthologies and tried to stop thinking about GIRLS (!) But the babes were in Oscar’s books too! Willie Yeats was tortured forever by his obsession -- Maud! Lorca (I didn’t know then the guy was gay. I did know he was great). The first poem of Lorca’s that knocked me out was "Preciosa" and the "Wind". The wind was howlin’ in the moonlight for Preciosa. She ran to the English Consul’s house. Preciosa wept and told her woes to her British protectors. But the wind was still bangin’ on the Brit’s White Towers. I knew how Preciosa felt. But I knew how the wind felt too.

‘Twas Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens that truly made me think poesy was the cat‘s pajamas. Pound’s Canto II (“Hang it all Robert Browning, etc”) and Steven’s Peter Quince at the Clavier -- which had to do with Susanna and the Elders (The story from the Apocrypha -- but you knew that) both blew me away with their word magic. I didn’t have the slightest idea what they were about -- but -- that didn’t matter! What mattered was the magic -- and I was on it like a hound dog on a fox.

My curiosity in things poetic, musical, and erotic compelled me to get on a Long Island Railroad train and get off at Penn Station (that’s 34th Street for you outtatowners). I would hang around midtown and go to movies like All Fall Down with Beatty and Saint, or Cape Fear with Mitchum and Peck, or La Notte with Moreau, Mastroianni, and Vitti.

From O’Hara’s "Ave Maria"

Mothers of America
               let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what
                              you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
                               but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
                              they won’t hate you
they won’t criticize you they won’t know
                              they’ll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing
                                             hookey

My soul grew with the silvery images of Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, Pasolini’s Accattone, Hitchcock’s Marnie. And the plastic bonk honk of Ornette Coleman’s Doctored Sax with Don Cherry (he of Oklahoma City) on Pocket Trumpet. The Stones roll in not to fade away (not gently into that Good). Trane and Eric WAIL at Philharmonic Hall on New Year’s Eve, 1963 -- and while they play India, I’ve got my raven-haired long-legged GIRL FRIEND(!) sitting next to me. Just short of two months before, the day I’m supposed to play Lysander in The Royal Crown Players Production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, a guy blows Jack Kennedy’s brains out in Dallas. Welcome to The United States of America.

A month before Marnie, I graduate (thanks to Dexedrine and the Biology Regents Exam) with an Academic Diploma from Roslyn High School. I head to Manhattan and sublet an apartment on West 10th right across the street from The Ninth Circle bar. My roomie is Chris Miller’s brother Bill. Within days we transform a sparkling little pied-à-terre into an animal house. Bob Dylan sings “Hey Mr, Tambourine Man” at Newport. My father gets an executive management gig out in LA with Capitol Records. The summer is very hot. My hair grows to a length midway between Mick’s and Brian’s. Come September, LBJ sends me a letter that says “Greetings”. Wham Bam Vietnam.

Remember, this is the “Make Love, Not War” generation. Unlike Lee Marvin, Paul Newman, Neville Brand, and Frank O’Hara, a lot of us long-haired fair-skinned rockers were not buying into The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or The Domino Theory. A lot of crew cut white boys and many, many of the Brothers y Los Hermanos joined up for the jungle rumble. But we had guitars, Marine Band Blues Harps, and sparkle red drum kits. Women tend to like musicians. Later for you, Lyndon. Hello Christie, Ginny, Patti D., Francesca, Michelle, Elaine, Kelly, Faith, Muffy and Rachel. My buddy Bill splits to Utica College (Jesus!) I move to Alphabet City and start playin out with my pal Wes (Guitar & Harp -- Blues, Blues, Blues). We’re hanging out at the Village Gate one Friday night and two of Les Femmes known to us come in with Brian Jones and Bill Wyman. I wind up in an all-night loft party jam with Wyman and a great, now not much remembered guitar player named Sandy Bull. Wyman has small hands, black leather chaps, and an amazing sense of pitch. We play R&B till the moon goes down.

What I describe above are not simply recollections of reckless youth. It’s a time of tectonic shift. The Beau Monde that O’Hara entered with the best possible preparation has now been rent five ways crossways blind by Presidential murder and a vain, and, therefore, doubly immoral war. O’Hara’s conservatory life, his service on a U.S. destroyer, his adventuring years at Harvard, at Ann Arbor, his arrival for Autumn in New York, his glory entry level job at MOMA -- all of that was now impossible for the youngbloods of my generation. There would be no April in Paris after the Battle of the Ardennes.

Toxic racial fumes explode. Watts. The welfare scramble to New York and the destruction of black families and black baptist churches. Martin and Malcolm both know they’re in somebody’s cross-hairs. “We Shall Overcome” is now not heard above the noise of urban collapse. The community of jazz masters becomes a battleground. Furious Black music counters the sterilities of peau blanc serialism and an end to a belief in “Europe” as the center of World culture. O’Hara’s world -- still grand enough to fill his senses -- is beginning to deflate. JFK (and “Jackie”) gone. And with them, gone is the world of Pablo Casals at the White House. Gone the progressive cadence of ‘racial integration”.

The Art Market is still huge -- but “Art” starts its retreat from the center of American life. Arthur Miller tucked away comfortably in Connecticut, Tennessee Williams drugged and drug down in Key West. “Broadway Drama” is becoming just another cracked and curling sepia photograph.

Here’s a connective to the good young days: Frank the aesthete par excellence contemplating a saw mill. If O’Hara’s in the woods, can Frost be far behind?

From O’Hara’s "Poem En Forme De Saw"

if I stay right here I will eventually get into the
newspapers
like Robert Frost
willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I’m so damned literary
and at the same time the rivers rushing past remind
me of nothing

Willow trees as Othello’s wife. Tragic? Strangled by Iago’s inexorable hatred? Such are the rushing rivers of Frank O’Hara’s meditations. Tumbling over the rocks and timber of last night’s cocktail party thoughts. As the sixties start to become “The 60s”, Hartigan and Frankenthaler are paid less attention. Warhol and his Factory workers will labor at the marriage of beauty and Capital. Donald Judd will have us contemplate the Isness of blonde wood, of aluminum geometry spray-coated with industrial hues.

I formed a Rock and Roll Band in 1965 (just like 10,000 other young men and women did). We recorded Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love? And Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me at a NYC recording studio for Chess Records. Somewhere black vinyl discs step down their half-lifes. We rejected the contract that Chess offered us. Our drummer was busted and strung out. We re-grouped. Somewhere we recorded a song about astronauts called Gemini Blues. Twang, bang and Gus Grissom sleep in the black platter mystery tomb. That group broke up. I studied jazz piano with John Mehegan and Lucia Fitzpatrick. One day, Marian McPartland showed me how to play Willow Weep for Me. I started working blue collar. I was thinking about going to Mexico.

In the wee hours of July 24th, 1966, Frank O’Hara stood still as a beach buggy drove toward him. O’Hara didn’t move. The buggy didn’t stop. Frank died the next day. He was 40 years old. I was 19 -- going off on a tear.

From O’Hara’s "Five Poems"

I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?

I have made some progress in life -- and I have been lost in dark woods. I’ll always have the poetry of Frank O’Hara in my heart.

*****

J.O. LeClerc is a writer and musician who lives in the Hudson River Valley.

INSTAN by CECILIA VICUÑA

2007-05-23T23:45:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN reviews:

Instan by Cecilia Vicuña
(Kelsey St. Press, 2002)

- When a girl is born, her mother puts a spider in her hand, to teach her to weave. (Cecilia Vicuna, “The Glove”)

- According to E. A. Wallis Budge (The Gods of the Egyptians) the root of the word for weaving and also for being are the same: nnt.

The Kelsey St. Press press release for Cecilia Vicuña’s Instan describes Instan as “a long poem, a series of drawings, a fable, a multilingual dictionary …”. That’s as good a place to start as any. But who familiar with Vicuña’s work would expect anything less than something that ignores as many boundaries as it can? As Lucy Lippard notes “Vicuña has never accepted the boundaries between cultural disciplines, creating a terrain of her own in the interstices …” One of her earliest works is dated 1966, a tiny precario in which a circle, a spiral and other lines have been traced in sand, surrounded by upright sticks and feathers and bits of ice plant that look to my eyes a little like waving (or drowning) hands. Perhaps the most interesting feature of this “earthwork” (in this context, at least) is that laid into the circle is a circlet of what appears to be hair or thread.

In her “autobiography in debris”, quipoem, the image of this work is preceded by an even earlier work: three pages that look remarkably like the drawings in the first section of Instan. A drawn line (a thread?) precedes from the outer margin of the first of these three pages through the typeset words “the quipu that remembers nothing, an empty cord”, through the gutter onto page two, then as it approaches the outer margin of the second page begins to loop itself into letters (“is the core”), to resume at the outer margin of the third page after a brief moment with the typeset “the heart of memory”. The line continues on into the gutter of page three.

The line – or thread – connects. In 1990 Vicuña wrote a piece called “Connection”, which she defines as “the art of joining, union / from ned: to bind, to tie / … / Old English: net / Latin: nodus / knot”. She goes on to quote David Brower: “The earth is dying because people don’t see the connections”; Rene Guenon, who notes that “the connection protects”; and that “In Nahuatl one of the names of God is “nearness and togetherness.”

This juxtaposition of drawn line/thread that passes through typeset words, turns into words itself, and runs right into the photograph of the beach precario made of traced lines, found objects and worked hair or thread, is more than an example of her refusal to accept “the boundaries between cultural disciplines”. It’s a refusal to accept the forces that separate and diminish us. By breaking down boundaries, she’s trying to save the world. “The connection protects.” She’s dead serious.

So, though the drawings in part 1 of Instan are indeed drawings made of letters and lines/threads that turn those letters into words, as well as lines are all looped words, as well as words that loop themselves and leave out (become?) the lines/threads, I see them as much more than just that. And the multilingual nature of the rest of Instan is not simply a reflection of her history as an exile, though that’s not ignored. The whole book is composed of “knots for climbers in the rope of the world.” She weaves. She connects connects connects.

Since I can’t reproduce the drawn/woven here, I’ll just pull out a few phrases that jump at me: “time-------tongue”; “luz-------del-------portal”; changing -------the-------heart”; “re-------late”; la-------leche-------de-------teta-------común”; “word-------loom-------star”. You have to picture my dashed lines as unbroken whirls and swirls and the words as part of them.

Part 2 is called “el poem cognado / the poem”. Though part 1 is multilingual I think that here in part 2, perhaps because line follows line down the page in a much more traditional sense – the poem looks like a poem, at least as I (dare I say we?) have been conditioned to expect it to look (and dear god yes I know millions of poems don’t look like this) – the intermarriage of languages becomes much more apparent and effective:

… luz y del qué
the space
between words
imantando
el cruzar …

At least some of the text in part 1 (perhaps all – I suspect all – I didn’t check) reappears in part 2:

… a pond
res ponds

libar
the way
you
re spond

corazón
del aquí

why are
we here?

luz del
portal

mei
del migrar

changed
heart …

I noted above my sense of her mission. Here she makes it explicit:

changing
the heart
of the ear
th …

Part 2 ends:

word
loom
star

life’s
breath

el instan

estrella
interior

el
e
star.

Part 3 is called “fabulas del comienzo y restos del origen / fables of the beginning and remains of the origin”:

               Silence
                          turns the page
                              the poem begins.
                                             alba del habla, the dawn of speech.

What we have here is a collection of textual (and though I’m not the first to note it, I can’t help but mention here how close that word is to textural) fragments that point towards “the” (!?!) origin, and what remains of it. But why/how expect more than fragments? What myth remains whole? What anything remains whole? If our world (our myths) did remain whole then there would be no need to reconnect time and tongue, to weave it all back together.

Throughout the whole work, but particularly in this section, Vicuña puts her faith in the artist’s “weak Messianic power”, to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase. This is from number two from his “On the Concept of History/Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply.

In other words, we can more or less redeem the past by more or less taking care of business in the present (since those in the future will continue to be endowed with the weak Messianic power, if we give them a chance – if we give them a chance – they’ll be able to exercise their own power themselves. In a way, then, we redeem the past by making a decent future possible – see how important we are? The past and the future depend on us). Vicuña:

An instant is present,
               it “stands,”
                              a filament of sta, a state of being, stamen,
a thread in a warp,
                              a web in ecstasy.

A bit later:

… “yes, it may be so.”
To be not an estar, but a way of being.”

And the fable proper hasn’t even commenced. To simplify greatly, to pull one thread out of a fabric and pretend that the thread is the fabric itself (it’s either that or simply quote the whole thing): “you and I are the same … dis solve into union … Corazón del tiempo, el instan … the handiwork of peace, the search for a common ground … the music of am … El am del am or … we are only exiled from the inner estar … Love in the genes, if it fails / We will produce no sane man again (George Oppen)”. Remembering Lippard’s “Vicuña has never accepted the boundaries between cultural disciplines …” one might be tempted to add that she has never accepted the boundaries between people (or peoples), at least to the degree that the boundaries become walled-off, patrolled and dangerous borders.

The last two sections are an endnote describing the genesis of and some of the intent behind Instan, and a glossary. Both are worth reading, continuations of the “themes” (if one can speak about “themes” without unraveling the fabric) already presented, and contain lovely twists.

While a vision of merging into oneness and “the all” can be misused to (pretend to) shoo away suffering and dread (e.g. of death) as simply an illusion (see the opening pages of Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption for a little insight into how that’s done and what’s wrong with doing it), I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Her quote from Oppen seems to indicate that when Vicuna says “you and I are the same … dis solve into union” she doesn’t want us to lose our individuality, to disappear. She simply wants us to get a little closer to sane. And to get along a little better with one another, and with the planet with which we share this little corner of the universe.

Oppen writes, “We will produce no sane man again” (emphasis mine). “Again” isn’t Vicuña’s word, though she quotes it. Were we ever sane? Whole? My feeling is that I live in a world after any sense of wholeness or sanity has been irredeemably and entirely lost, in which meaningless fragmentation is the always-already, so I tend to think of wholeness as mythological. Maybe when we were hunter-gatherers … back in the garden … but even then … Were we ever anything but fragments? That I don’t really believe in a once-upon-a-time-we-were-all-woven-together, or that one day we could or will be all-woven-together, doesn’t mean I don’t love what Vicuña’s trying to do here. My use of “love” is not hyperbolic. What could be more necessary? What could be more beautiful? What could be (will be) more tragic if (when) we don’t make it?

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman’s most recent publication is OTAGES; a new chapbook from Bamboo Books, WORLD ZERO, is in press; and later this year, with any luck, NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING, a 200 pp. hay(na)ku, which in fact includes very few sounds of his own making, will be published by Leafe Press. Recently, he has begun to incorporate photos into his work, which certainly wasn't expected.

CHANCE by DANIEL BECKER

2007-05-23T23:40:00.000-07:00

MONICA MCFAWN Reviews

Chance by Daniel Becker
(H_NGM_N Chapbook Series #2, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 2005)

It may be unfair or unfounded to use the biographical knowledge of Daniel Becker's career as a physician on which to base a review of Chance. Yet Becker's career does factor into his work directly, and any reviewer should thus be allowed to reference it--as long as she restrains herself from comments such as "Becker peels open the human experience with the slow, precise scalpel-drag of language."

The truth is, the aspects of his career that Becker seems to use in his work are more broad and suggestive than a surgery metaphor could cover. Becker's poems engage guilt, responsibility, and chance--three things that certainly factor into any human life, and perhaps a physician's most acutely. You'd think that Becker's poems would explore the limits of responsibility, mourning, perhaps, the emotional distance his role demands. Becker, instead, explores the strange joy that comes from this professional necessity, and the larger implications of opting out of guilt.

If you think about it, guilt is a very limiting, ego-driven emotion. People who feel guilty spend their time communing with their conscience, and believe themselves instrumental enough to have created a wrong (a somewhat solipsistic assumption). The downward cast, inward looking that guilt necessitates surely limits one's field of vision. Becker seems to imagine a different mode of being where chance replaces human agency and guilt is traded for an intense observation of fate rather than a self-torturing belief in one's part in it. In "The Expert Witness Gets Deposed," Becker's description of the river seems to describe this languid approach to fortune and mistakes:

like a citation bass but triple spaced and lifted up
out of the water, the river lazily correcting itself,
unconcerned with loss, moving out to sea.

"Lazily correcting itself" is particularly compelling image, because it is such a perfectly apt contrast to the human response to mistakes. A river, should it splash or sway off route one moment, settles back into its groove the next. There's no need for self-reflection or regret. The river is also "unconcerned with loss," but in a whistling-with-your-hands-in-your-pockets kind of way. The good way.

Becker's poems, however, aren't recommending we make like a river and move out to the sea of amorality. Rather, Becker is most interested in the brief moments we free ourselves from guilt. Not because this is a preferred mode, but because it is so rare an occurrence that it begs study. Becker's funeral poems are best, because of the narrator's liberation from guilt and self-reflection. Becker's "In Memoriam" seems to be about briefly stopping by a former patient's funeral before dashing off to more pressing responsibilities. The premise alone seems calibrated for maximum guilt--how can the speaker treat a funeral like just another part of a harried day? But Becker's narrator has no qualms. As he gazes around during his brief, obligatory stay, he notices the stained-glass saints, who seem as much apart from the nitty-gritty of saint hood as he is from death:

The windows are too kind--
saints in post-beatitude poses
as if their share of suffering

is over, blame placed, sins forgiven,
and all they have to do now
is exemplify faith and endurance

The narrator's distraction--he counts these "panes of stained glass" rather than dwelling on the deceased--could be read on as a comment on the poetic mode itself. To be a poet may be nothing more than living in the blind spot--blocking out the essential to tease out the implications of the details. Both the saints and Becker's narrators exist as if everything has happened, and they are merely left to survey the damage or erect themselves in memoriam to it. They are at once both irrevocably removed and inextricably involved--a paradox perhaps common to both doctors and poets.

*****

Monica McFawn is a writer living in Michigan. She also trains dressage horses and teaches humanities. She moderates Litandart.com, a forum dedicated to tracking the state of both visual art and literature.

BORN IN UTOPIA:...ROMANIAN POETRY, Edited by CARMEN FIRAN & PAUL DORU MUGUR, with EDWARD FOSTER

2007-05-23T23:35:00.000-07:00

JAMES OWENS Reviews

Born in Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry Edited by Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur with Edward Foster
(Talisman House, 2006)

Romanian poetry slips across borders in disguise. It is easy for American readers to forget, or never to have noticed, that Tristan Tzara, whom we might think of as a French poet, and Paul Celan, an indispensible figure of modern poetry in German, were both in reality Romanian poets. Tzara and Celan both shaped significant bodies of work in their native language before the winds of the World Wars blew them west to stake out holdings in their more internationally familiar, adopted idioms, and it seems symptomatic that Celan’s Romanian poems have been dribbling slowly into translation only during the past few years or so, while Tzara’s have never been widely available. Other Romanian poets have drifted into Russian, or, especially after 1989, English.

The countries of Eastern Europe seem to breed good poets thicker on the ground than anywhere else on the planet except, maybe, Ireland. The Poles have clearly won out in finding the right translators during the past three or four decades, with Czechs, Slovenians, and Hungarians putting in a fair showing, as well. Now Born in Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry, edited by Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur with Edward Foster, makes it clear that the relative obscurity of Romanian poetry has been a historical accident, never a matter of lesser quality. This rich and readable book, as ably edited and translated as it is, is only the first lines of an account of Romanian poetry still to come, one hopes, from future translators out there somewhere muttering conjugations in their sleep.

Andrei Codrescu, who has been writing in English since the 1960s, addresses some of the difficulties of bringing this poetry over to another language in his introduction. On the one hand, “Romanians, whether in the depths of the Transylvanian provinces or in the better parts of Manhattan, respond to the word ‘poetry’ with a straightening of the shoulders, a chin-forward movement, and a far-away gaze. ‘We may not be sure of many things,’ they say with that rearrangement of the body, ‘but we are sure of our poetry.’” On the other hand, Codrescu writes, “Great (or even good) translators into English are harder to find than tzuica in Mississippi, and that’s not because the language is difficult but because Romanian poetry created complexities within the language that lose their meta-shivers when transferred to another bottle.”

History lies heavy on Romanian tongues. Much of the complexity that Codrescu mentions comes from the paradox that Romania has been both geographically remote and a cultural crossroads, at once, ever since the Romans founded an outpost on the shore of the Black Sea (and exiled the poet Ovid to languish and die there). The language is Romance, a legacy of the empire, but ballasted with the influence of Slavic neighbors and salted with important reminders of the Ottoman Turks who ruled there for centuries. Add the first and second world wars, the isolationism and repression of the Communist decades, the stark horrors of the Ceausescu regime, and even a foreigner can get a glimmer of the problems facing a translator.

The translators of Born in Utopia, especially Adam Sorkin, who did the most, have acquited themselves well. Their versions of the poems are clear and affecting and usually make respectable poems in English, even if a Romanian reader might lament lost subtleties.

The first poem of the book seems carefully chosen to evoke the delicate and audacious balancing act that any work of translation inevitably turns into. Tudor Arghezi’s “Come On” begins, in Sean Cotter’s translation,

If your eyes would like to see
The unseen and unknown, you could
Come into my house, possibly, you could
Abandon yourself to the danger of my raft.

It becomes clear before long that Arghezi’s speaker is weighing religious questions -- “The healing clap of mystery / Churns inside me” -- but the lines could apply as well to the erotic strangeness of a reader’s encounter with poetry from another language and historical context, everywhere unfamiliar, yet shot through with off-kilter recognition:

In the language of barbarians
I would tell you stories,
I would let the wisdom of that country,
Like dust,
Like sand from the fields,
Sift into your hand.

One of the recurrent themes of the poems in Born in Utopia is the nature and purpose pf poetry itself. Romanian poets, more so than American ones, are disposed toward the sort of unselfconscious reflection on their own craft that takes seriously both its limitations and its possibilities. For example, Ion Pop’s lyrical ars poetica, “Moment,” translated by Adam Sorkin and Liviu Bleoca:

In the upper corner of the window
I see walnut leaves quivering
in the noon wisp of wind,
and a starling feather floating down.

All I can do for it
is put it down here, to catch in coal black,
on the point of my pencil,
its gold:
maybe to make its fall slower, slower.

As might be expected, there are plenty of poems here that seem drenched in the violent history of the 20th century, such as Marta Petreu’s “In Memory of Cruelty” (translated by Sorkin and Christina Illias-Zarifopol). The opening lines:

Touch me. Slowly walk your fingers over my body
feel my skin on the inside
softly completely compassionately. I used to be in it

Yes. I. Just me. Identical to myself

Caress my skin on the inside. Wet your hands
with the sticky smell of blood
gather blood in your palm as in a clay saucer
taste it with the tip of your tongue: it used to be my blood

Or Stephan Augustin Doinas’s “The Great Crippled” (translated by Sorkin and Liliana Ursu):

how could you
cripple me more?

my chest
is a hole

my heart -- a clot of gore

But one impressive fact about this book is that the dark side of history does not dominate. Perhaps the shape of Romanian poets’ resistance to the forces of destruction and chaos is that they also write about -- Who would have expected it to be otherwise, really? -- love and beauty and nature and childhood and art and boredom and television and travel and sex, to name a few things.

Some of the last poets in Born in Utopia are those young enough to have come into their own after the dissolution of Romanian Communism. Adina Dabija expresses something of their historical moment, detached from the past, uncertain about the puzzling future, closing the book with another ars poetica, “On Love, with Time” (translated by Mona Momescu).

We don’t even imagine that we exist
Together we are somebody’s cake on the moon
that eats us slowly
with your mouth, with my fingers,
with my scar caressing your scar,
with my pain kissing your pain
until nothing of us is left

Born in Utopia is such an abundant book that it seems unfair to single out particular poets for mention, leaving dozens just as deserving to await discovery quietly. And there are important discoveries to be made here. Any reader new to Romanian poetry but willing, in Arghezi’s words, to abandon herself to “the danger of [this] raft” will be setting out on a voyage that may take a lifetime to complete but will be worth every stop along the way.

*****

James Owens's book, An Hour is the Doorway, is scheduled for publication in 2007 by Black Lawrence Press. His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Blue Fifth Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Boxcar Poetry Review. He is a staff reviewer for The Pedestal.

NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY by THOMAS FINK

2007-05-23T23:30:00.000-07:00

TIM PETERSON Reviews

No Appointment Necessary by Thomas Fink
(Moria Poetry, 2006)

In Thomas Fink’s new collection No Appointment Necessary, the author continues to investigate a series of invented and borrowed forms, including a series of shaped poems, Yinglish Strophes, and Haynaku Box sequences. Each of these forms provides a slightly different means for Fink’s ongoing exploration of a sardonic political critique of referentiality, which at times also becomes a kind of “targetless parody” in the tradition of Shapiro’s reading of Ashbery. Fink’s weird speaker talks in a kind of colloquial tough-guy shorthand, now commenting on politics, now addressing a series of fragmentary scenes or foregrounding dead metaphors:

“order
diva. That
underbudgeted chorus of
ironed
tigers has
ignited its own
props,
and the
big cleanup will
come
out of
many sore pockets”

Oddness, surprise, humor, and the grotesque are all central to this project which at times creates a texture not unlike that of Jackson Mac Low’s poetry. Common to much of Fink’s writing, this texture is most prominent in the first series of shaped poems in the book, which are each shaped like a sickle or a backwards question mark. This passage is from “Responsible Fires Inserted” (Editor’s Note: To compromise with Blogger format, the poem is presented with a series of periods which the reader should ignore as the insertion of periods is done to shape the text the way the poet intended for the poem):

………………………“The
……..upper business com
……..-mune asks, ‘Why
……placate the screw-
….ball executioner’s
…exegesis? An auto-
…..crat ally narrowly
……..blown? Gnat
……….sledgehammer.
………….Bright lidded
……………troops will
……………….serve.”

Here elaborate theoretical words such as “exegesis” are set into the unlikely context of a speaker who sounds like he could be reading news headlines. Is he talking about homosocial relations, the military industrial complex, the phallus, or something else? How seriously are we to take the glib shorthand utterance “Can’t bitchslap government”? All we know is there’s a slyly cynical, wisecracking quality which cuts across the various sentences, establishing a consistent tone, rhetorical context and direction for the politics of the poems, which might be liberal but might also be described as a bleaker position of a leftist critique of the left: “Wart / paid for / by liberals / les miserables / illegibles alike.” Could fashion be to blame? “What’s toxic / tomorrow / might be loveable now.” In this situation, the reader is continually drawn back to the language as a context and the ways in which stating the problem might be the problem. The poems have trouble taking their own metaphors seriously, because it all seems somehow pre-commodified, and the individual words are implicated: “A drained camel / has blushed casual Disneyland / quicksand” which leads to “Hollwood bacon crawl,” a conflicted attitude towards postmodernity.

The critique of the system of reference here attempts a critique of other political systems, as in some work by David Shapiro or the arguments of the Language poets. The echo of a context is continually established only to have the subject and the speaker’s location in a scene change sentence-to-sentence, as in “The rondelay in the air is”: “Please don’t maul the display goose / Reaching the entrance, she removes glasses.” What display goose, and what glasses? Such moments of partial imagery in Fink’s poetry acts as props for a kind of private objective-correlative that, you guessed it, figures an attitude of bemused critique. It’s important that this critique in Fink’s writing is somehow continually thwarted by the sardonic simulacrum of reference that lies waiting for it, because that’s where a great deal of the pleasure and humor in the poetry lies. The “Yinglish Strophes” in this book continually demonstrate a kind of loving ambivalence toward the author’s linguistic and cultural heritage, foregrounding the bizarre moments in a syntax that is also native to his family: “There is a lady very old / and she paints gorgeous.” The affectionate simulacrum of Yiddish-influenced syntax here reminds us that identification in language is a complicated process, an always elusive, incomplete project with a shifting ground.

*****

Tim Peterson is the author of Since I Moved In, recipient of the first Gil Ott Award from Chax Press. He edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and is a curator for the Segue Reading Series in New York.

NECESSARY STRANGER by GRAHAM FOUST

2007-05-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

ANDREA BAKER Reviews

Necessary Stranger by Graham Foust
(Flood Editions, 2006)

I. Sneaky Goodness that Works When it Shouldn’t

Necessary Stranger is a book to judge by its cover. Meaning, before you even notice quite what it’s doing, what it’s doing will be bringing you a smile. It’s very fast like that. Its vision happens to you even before you notice that it’s agile and spry, but not right with the world.

It has a plan though and it’s stated right up front. The first poem begins, “Look at the sky, go/ back inside.” The plan is, look broad, but go back to the small. Or, make small from the large, reducing to microcosms.

This is that first poem in its entirety:

1984

Look at the sky, go
back inside. Cocaine
makes its way to Wisconsin.

The TV’s thick with burial, hilarious
with seed. And while the moon,
my mind, and the real world stay home,

I will walk walk
walk unkilled around
a new year’s clumsy gallows.

Anything’s impossible. I’m not
you. Here’s to music
to be in the movies to.

Plain language is used plainly. Faux-innocence (“I will walk walk/ walk”) doesn’t deceive, but winks like a man pulling a quarter from behind a child’s ear. And playfulness is mirrored by odd negations (“Anything’s impossible.”) Contradiction is part of the fun and games, but also something to keep a leery eye on.

The poems here are often wry and occasionally, even vaguely collegiate. Take this stanza excerpted from the poem “Panama”:

If only I couldn’t
understand, I’d imagine
some sarcastic new Christ and say
something someone would say

The phrase, “sarcastic new Christ,” is on the verge of staking too easy of a rebellion and the idea of, “say[ing]/ something someone would say” is a tad on the familiar-cleaver side, but both phrases, even placed next to one another, work in this poems because they are redeemed by the desperate tone of surrounding negations:

Birdsongs now

In the trash-
thicketed blackout.
I want something to not
do with my hands.

In poetry, I’ll always cheer for things that work when it seems they ought not. That success alone makes this book well worth reading.

II. Oh, but there’s more!

I certainly can’t neglect to mention the force with which Necessary Stranger locates itself in the Right Now of Poetry and the Right Now of America, which are both places where, of course, “my neighbors cough and/ wave and wave and frown” and, “It’s a/ dream I’m not ashamed.” (Oh! Just look at those line breaks! Meaning doubles when it’s maimed.)

“Barest Gist” is one of the most successful poems in the book. Here it is in its entirety:

Barest Gist

The way the days gray
over is almost
a system

we believable slaves
blink back.

I move around
my many-cornered
heart some.

There are acres ever through me
flags refuse.

I can’t explicate this poem, or don’t want to. I love its nimbleness, other than that I just want to rest in its wow. This is how I like my poems; I want them to happen TO me when I read. This book delivers. And it’s fun. There are scads of choice lines like, “A brawl/ of water, the sea/ is not radiant,” in which I don’t receive new information, but I do get to think, yes, yes, radiant things are deigned their radiance in American spiritual frustration. And no, “It doesn’t seem/ to want to rain.” This book lives exactly where I live. I don’t mean that it’s trendy; I mean that it’s true.

In a poem entitled “Google,” “The sky goes/ every way.” Here I say, yes, google is some new perversion of the unbound sky. And in the poem, “Historyless”:

Leaking away,
I’ll drop
you, shape.

Go ahead and feed me that hole.

The only thing I know to say is that, yes, many people I know feel this way. Do “Go ahead and feed me that hole,” which must be some sort of homeopathic cure for the larger emptiness because I suddenly feel a temporary lifting of the weight of it all when those words arrive so exactly as they’re needed, each one stacked carefully and precariously on top of the other.

In, “Poem with Hands and Tools” Faust writes, “ The loud/ pain makes her/ my necessary stranger.” The loud angst of this book will make it yours.

*****

Andrea Baker was the recipient of the 2004 Slope Editions Book Prize for her first book, like wind loves a window. She is also the author of the chapbooks gilda (Poetry Society of America, 2004) and gather (moneyshot editions, 2006). She maintains a blog at andreabaker.blogspot.com.

2 BOOKS by PATRICK ROSAL

2007-05-23T22:20:00.000-07:00

THERESA M. TENSUAN Reviews

Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive by Patrick Rosal
(Persea Books, New York, 2003)

and

American Kundiman by Patrick Rosal
(Persea Books, New York, 2006)

In his first collection, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, Patrick Rosal established himself as a poet whose words rearticulate the world. From the dark corners of “Nine Thousand Outlines” in which the poet traces out a story of violence and violation that

…starts in the armpit of a god -- the plots
of fishbone and vinegar a history of nails
a war or two a swan some saints of course some
slaves… (6)

to the declarations of the poem “Who Says the Eye Loves Symmetry” that sings of the visual pleasures of “unpainted pickets/cracked planks,” Rosal’s poetry compels a reader to view the world afresh, to take in the full measure of its funk, its pain, and its unexpected beauty.

Uprock spins the rhythms of Kurtis Blow and riffs off of the inflections of Audre Lorde, creating a framework in which the poet paints tableaus of sons keeping vigil at their mother’s death bed, of the gravel lots and strip malls of Edison, New Jersey, of a child staggering on a sidewalk in the wake of a hit and run. The beauty of Rosal’s language and the clarity of his vision compel a reader to look closely at scenes from which one would normally avert one’s eyes; in the hands of a lesser writer such scenes could be mere spectacle, turning a reader into a casual voyeur but Rosal transforms his readers into witnesses compelled to bear the full weight of the poet’s revelations.

In his new collection American Kundiman (Persea Books, 2006), Rosal opens new poetic registers, drawing from both new vernaculars and traditional lyric forms. In addition to the rhythms and inflections of black literary traditions and b-boy speech, the poet incorporates the soundscape of Tagalog through the invocation of Emmanuel Lacaba’s “Kundiman” (gracefully translated by Paolo Javier) and highlights the trace that mother tongues leave in the words of those who find themselves on American shores, from the manong who is the subject of the fabulously titled poem “Tito Teddy with a Cigarette Dangling from His Mouth Uses My Arm to Illustrate a Jiu Jitsu Bone-Break Move from His Coast Guard Days” to the father for whom English “rises from [his]/ankles into his belly from his torso into his limbs/ like molten glass.”

In “As Glass,” English is a medium that leaves father and son immobilized -- “all the lexicons/of sadness and delight turning cold and hard” (46), an impasse broken by a long distance phone call from poet to father in Spanish which enables him to speak to his father “with an affection/whose prepositions point in all the wrong directions/but for six full minutes we are unfamiliar/with one another’s rage For once/we are laughing at the same time/It’s simple: we don’t loathe one another in Spanish/like we do in English” (43). This moment speaks to the tangle of familial relations, national histories, and circuits of mobility and displacement that at times bind generations together, at times sunder those ties; Rosal’s poetry is shot through with unexpected revelations -- an old colonizer’s tongue can momentarily open up a profound connection, distance can be a necessary element of intimacy.

American Kundiman reanimates a Filipino lyric form that helpfully glossed in an opening note as “a traditional Filipino song of unrequited love” that became a site of cultural resistance and transformation during 400 years of Spanish colonization and the ensuing American occupation. Rosal casts the kundiman as “coded desire, a manifest longing in song, a beloved poetic subversion” (xi) and frames this body of work as one that honors the kundiman’s spirit -- literally as well as figuratively opening up a circuit of inspiration. The middle section of the collection offers a cycle of poems with titles like “Kundiman in which a B-Boy Contemplates How Rome (Like Many Fallen Cities) Was Not Built in a Day” and “Kundiman Ending on a Theme from T La Rock” which praises

…Your flow
Your funk Your every-
day nasty Your very
revelry Your break-
neck scat the loot
you boost Your
rags Your seven-
thousand-island
slang Your hype
Your hips Your spit
Your sickest wit
and snip Your every
severed syl-
lable… (33)

The hypnotic ebb and flow of Rosal’s words remakes the reader’s own relationship to language, conveying both the poet’s and the reader’s power in re-envisioning the world. This kundiman’s litany conjures the power of untamed tongues that know the pleasures of “The sweet/convections of soy sauce vinegar garlic” (“Instructions on the Painting of a Portrait of My Mother” 63) that relish the “consensus of sweat and blood/and bloom”(“The Blue Room,” 50) as well as the “rich/bitterness we’ve learned to live on for so long/we forgot how -- like brothers --/we put the first bite in one another’s mouth” (“About the White Boys Who Drive By a Second Time to Throw a Bucket of Water on Me,” 42).

While not labeled a kundiman, Rosal’s “Ode to the Hooptie” is one of the collection’s finest refigurations of the form:

This is for those cars—early model
Part rust/part primer a patch
of clear coat still holding on
to the bumper—chugging mid-day
down I-95 packed to the rear
window: milk crates blankets books
Someone in there is determined
To move on… (52)

Rosal’s love songs to those outside the conveyances of upward mobility, his ability to convey the grace of characters cast as convicts and beasts, his celebrations of the mothers and lolas and lovers who hold the world in balance all establish him as a poet of extraordinary creativity, breadth, and force. On my shelves, Rosal’s books rub shoulders with collections by Al Robles and Muriel Rukeyser -- fit company indeed for a writer who is transforming the voice and verse of America.

*****

Theresa M. Tensuan teaches contemporary American literature at Haverford College; she is currently at work on Breaking the Frame, a study of the figure of the misfit in autobiographical graphic narratives which will be published by the University of Mississippi Press.

NEGATIVITY by JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

2007-05-23T22:15:00.000-07:00

TYRONE WILLIAMS Reviews

Negativity by Jocelyn Saidenberg
(Atelos, 2006)

Near the end of “(New, Improved) Strange Matter,” a prose poem from her 2002 book, Etym(bi)ology, Liz Waldner writes, “ On my body. Of. At. To. For. With. In the body. Is the word.” In her work before and after, Waldner picks at the scab of language, the index of separation, of the wounding called birth, consciousness, entrance into the symbolic order of the world, etc. Healing that breach, language refuses removal from the skin, refuses excavation from the body. And yet, language can never be located, as the list of prepositions above suggests. It appears to have any number of positions in relation to the body. The struggle to locate language by triangulating the self, the self’s body and the other is hampered, first and foremost, by the ideology of carniphobia, the foundation of, among other irrational fears, xenophobia. It is not insignificant that those who have been most interested in the relationship between body and language are subalterns, those at the margin of, if not absolutely outside, normative sexual and gender determinations. Like Waldner and others, Jocelyn Saidenberg has been exploring the foundation of ideology in general—the enabling confusion between the body and language (it gives rise to both the “natural” and the “artificial”) in her writings.

In her most recent book, Negativity, Saidenberg continues the exploration of what, in CUSP ((2001), she provisionally named as “the de-emphasized.” This was merely one term in a series of (mis)nomers that tracked the elusive, receding horizon of what Elizabeth Willis, following William Blake, aptly named as the title of her first book: “the human abstract,” remainder and necessity. For Saidenberg this “abstract” can only be glimpsed in passing, in medias res, for we always find (and lose) ourselves already interpellated in a network of relations. In this situation the body appears as the material cognate to—and so antithesis of—the Cartesian idealizing cogito qua sum. How, then, to “know” the body outside its predetermination by consciousness? How to pose the amniotic against the semiotic when the structure of such oppositions is predetermined by the latter? These problems regarding the eros/logos dynamic have far-reaching consequences; they are, least of all, “personal,” though the dynamo is set into motion as a “private” concern. For what is personal is simply the given, how one has been shaped and filled out, so to speak, by one’s culture. However, the “social construction” of the self is hardly absolute; were it so, resistance or “identity,” in any significant sense, would be foreclosed, literal impossibilities. Yet, resistance itself, the self that resists, is not born ex nihilio, which means the social is the site of both ideology and the resistance to ideology.

For Saidenberg, as for so many, writing turns out to be one site where resistance is enacted, “is the inch of place and the times when we did and us spoke to me, reading spoke to me its deficit, sufficient forces to follow…” (27); however, the point of reading is not construction but destruction of that “forc[ed]…little thing’s personhood.” (20)

Yet the body—and this is its scandal—resides outside all ethical and moral systems. And are not all systems of thought and action—especially religious and political systems—sundry essays at managing, controlling, the body, “sundry essays” because language is the first and foremost attempt at reigning in and over the body? Since there is no way “out” (silence and death do not escape systemization), one can only repeat and reenact negation, not only the negation of negation but also the negation of the negation of the negation…until a work comes into being as the cessation of this logic of deferment.

In Negativity Saidenberg recognizes a self, as she must, initially, through the lens of the normative, but there is no making a heaven of hell. After all, “degradation is but one solitude more and yet another dark wall brooding gloomily.” (32) Saidenberg’s “I” is, in all these poems, polyvocal, not out of some kind of aesthetic tribute to postmodern indeterminacy but because the assertion of an “I” is, here, a kind of hope, an insistence, though the moment it is asserted it is doubled (at least), figured as, to paraphrase English rock singer Joe Jackson, another me—or, as Saidenberg suggests, “merely” “The Quite-Quite”: “I’m the Quite-Quite, Quite-Hideous, Quite-Wastebody, Quite-Lowmurmur.” (42) The moment we utter or write we double ourselves, and each subsequent assertion of a stable “I” (or complete “work’) is only part of the serious game of sincerity we play before different audiences, to say nothing of ourselves.

And what comes “out” is what was put “in, and so in a move familiar to postmodern aesthetes and the uttered marginal merely trying to survive, Saidenberg shuttles, moving back and forth between desire and guilt, assertion and indecision, agency and objectification. This movement could be described otherwise: circumnavigation of a circle, spinning one’s wheels, etc. The structure of this book—its sections, subtitles and individual poems—constitute circles within circles. “Dusky, or Destruction as a Cause of Becoming” begins with this typical conundrum-dilemma shuttling: “1. to tell back dear, dusky, be told to tell…so that I turn and turned…” (17) And the book ends with the body still exhuming what wails but is not heard (itself): “…carnal excavating relentlessly. inaudible slow. howling recalcitrance behind the music. beneath the ground.” (117) Still, to one’s body one goes through, loops around, the Good Book—the Bible, the law and literature—that constitute our collective revulsion toward the body. As Kathy Acker discovered, Saidenberg must confess, must self-abhor (from “The Crave”: “I place myself lower than dirt, will keep digging, filthy, hands taught, in darkness all in order to not. [Infer: that I like it] Here in the dirt I am an inductor, I attract and gender myself in accordance with my habit, attraction, unheeding, steadfastness that wants only to weep over itself, limping further along, in the poured concrete cage, weeping over itself it sheds attraction, ridding and taking its shape dreaming again, that lull.” 39), and yet the “residue” (“The Beginner”: “falling the figures turn their back on falling…” 73), what remains, however much a mere “stain” (from “One of the Spurned”: “Being rotten being stained the stain itself, drained or blocked, I gift me, or that malingering temptation to return, somewhere in the inbetween: that crossroads. I bend down and kiss, marking the confession, signing the poison.” 40) is also a beginning, a matrix, for confession and self-revulsion do not annihilate. As children know, dirt, minutiae incarnate, tastes good: “That description excites me, discursive in its minute detail.” (37) This sentence from “I’m in Heat,” the first poem of the section Not Enough Poison, signifies desire as inescapably bound to language, why one reads and writes, however much caged: “the room was lit.” in the middle of the poem “The Cockcrow” (surrounded by seven lines) is also the middle of this book (67). The path to the body turns out, is turned out, “to be” illuminated by precisely what delimits: the privilege of reading and writing (by) “lit.” And the association of reading with castration (cf. Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, etc., to say nothing of the Islamic-Judaic-Christian triumvirate in general—cf. “In This Country”) simultaneously wounds and heals: “The gash, not separating but unifying the abrasion to all the impure, non-separated…Blending into the boundaries, coterminous sore on the visible, not presentable superannuated surface of self.” (38)

Saidenberg thus calls into question oppositionality itself, including that initial amniotic/semiotic one, but she no more than anyone cannot speak or write outside these enabling dualisms. Though “The Beginner” begins in heteroglossia, “the figures” approach—or one is drawn to the figures. A self is “upthrown,” “light/scattered” into self-disgust/revulsion. That first rope that bound and nourished one’s body to/in the womb is replicated in the outer world. “Beckon” re-imagines Odysseus’s journey—yet another circle—as driven and pulled, and so the scene of the Sirens, like the episodic on general, enacts circles within circles: one is beckoned from, bound to the mast(er) that sails “ere/ear” a self. The rope of language insinuates itself as listening; its binds from within. As “Carnal” reminds us, this rope is the first ruler, first meter, measure and standard that reigns in possibility. Self-revulsion is thus a necessary precondition of other-revulsion, but what happens, this book asks, when the other mirrors the self, when the other is a double of the self? Same-sex desire undercuts the dialectic, those interwoven strands that naturalize the order of binary oppositions. Saidenberg’s gerunds and participles enact the serpentine even as the profane indicatives and imperatives (“Hey Fuck Face,” “Fuck Death”) explode through the decorous constraints of the twine. It is, then, the twin (of sexual orientation, of literary idealism, of political and religious capital and so forth) that threatens to unravel prevailing orders. For the twin, the double, is an index of non-productivity, redundancy, one too many: Jocelyn Saidenberg’s Negativity marks—and remarks—this emblem of re-instantiation, re- and de-sistance.

*****

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. His book, c.c., was published by Krupskaya Books in 2002, the chapbooks AAB and Futures, Elections were published in 2004, and a chapbook, Musique Noir, was published in 2006. New work is forthcoming in fasicle, Combo, Cincinnati Poetry Review, and West Coast Line. A new book, the Hero Project of the Century, is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press in 2007 and another book, On Spec, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2008. He is currently writing a book for Atelos for publication in 2009.

UNBOUND & BRANDED by CHRISTINE STEWART-NUNEZ

2007-05-23T22:14:00.000-07:00

IVY ALVAREZ Reviews

Unbound & Branded by Christine Stewart-Nuñez
(Finishing Line Press, 2006)

Following her first chapbook The Love of Unreal Things, Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s second chapbook Unbound & Branded is based on ‘a forty-page portfolio of artists … responding to supermodel Kate Moss’. Using the image of Kate Moss, she examines every woman’s complex relationship with her body, as it is viewed through the lens of media and art. By turns interrogatory, irreverent and self-possessed, the poems mirror the longing, absurd fascination, frustration and anger directed at society’s concept of the idealised female body.

Still fashionable, her slim torso free
of marring muscles; raised nipples
look metallic. A wedding ring—
her only adornment—shines
like a sold sign for the display.
(‘Embodied’, p. 7)

The danger in portraying fashion’s superficiality is an involuntary artfulness in the poems themselves. Only when ugliness intrudes does real life bring such artificial constructs into relief:

Reporters still call you girl. Now that you’re out of rehab,
the press will search for signs of too much Stoli.
Dear daughter of Twiggy: There’s nothing simple
about being you. Absolutely fabulous.
You drink twelve cups of tea a day.
(‘Flying Eyes’, p. 18)

Other poems in Unbound & Branded identify the uneasy relationship between the viewer and the object of the viewer’s gaze. The language in ‘Red Light District’ suggests that beauty engenders violence and degradation: ‘cluster on her neck // like a bruise. / Long hair a slap’ (p. 17). In ‘Between the Lines’, the speaker’s proprietorial concern over an incompatibility between an artist’s portrayal of Kate Moss and her own personal vision of a ‘typical Kate’ gives way to a sense of loss: ‘I know this absence is mine’ (p. 21). So how does an image or object return the gaze of the viewer? Perhaps Stewart-Nuñez’s answer lies in her poem, ‘She Who Gazes’:

bodily, female, gazing out

from a page, but I’m no closer
to knowing her than

when I first traced my name
across her lips.
(p. 22)

Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s Unbound & Branded is a cohesive, thoroughgoing exploration of both beauty and the beast that is the media and society at large.

*****

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Red Morning Press, 2006) and three chapbooks: 'what's wrong, 'catalogue: life as tableware' and Food for Humans. She also edited 'A Slice of Cherry Pie', a chapbook anthology of poems inspired by David Lynch's Twin Peaks. The Australia Council for the Arts and Academi recently awarded her a grant to write poems for her second manuscript. Her poetry appears in journals and anthologies worldwide and online.

POET'S BOOKSHELF Edited by PETER DAVIS

2007-05-23T22:10:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

POET’S BOOKSHELF: Contemporary Poets On Books That Shaped Their Art, Edited by Peter Davis
(Barnwood Press, Selma, IN, 2005)

What a fabulous anthology concept! Poet’s Bookshelf can top a list of books for recommending to, not just poetry lovers but, those who don’t follow poetry but are curious to learn more. For Poet’s Bookshelf, by showing how poets are in love with poetry, can make the reader fall in love with poetry, too. This book, also replete with deep insights, is a far more attractive alternative than other anthologies to which people usually turn for poetry introductions.

Poet's Bookshelf was created as a result of editor Peter Davis’ desire to know which books had a profound impact in shaping various poets’ poetics and poems. From the Editor’s Preface:

When I was studying for my MFA I was required to read 25 books, of my choosing, per semester. Once, I asked one of my professors to give me some suggestions and she gave me a list of 30 or so writers that she thought I should read. I didn’t know if these were writers that were personally important to her, or if they were simply writers she thought might become important to me, but, either way, I thought it was a great list. Soon after, I got the idea for this book and began asking leading contemporary poets to respond to these prompts:

1) Please list 5-10 books that have been most “essential” to you, as a poet.
2) Please write some comments about your list. You may want to single out specific poems or passages from the books, discuss how you made your decisions or provide thoughts about the importance of these books in your life. Feel free to write as much as you would like.

It’s an anthology concept that transcends the “best of” listing to which certain anthologies lapse, though at least one respondent here clearly was stuck in that POV. It’s also an anthology concept that transcends poetic styles, which makes it attractive to poet-readers of all stripes.

What makes this anthology a great read are the so many different ways with which the 81 poet-participants responded to Davis’ query. For instance, it’s often nice to learn the first time that a poet gets “swept away” by a poem, such as Nin Andrews:

I still remember the first time I was swept away by a poem. I was thirteen, working in a bookstore after school, still wearing my kilt and knee socks, when I flipped open Yannis Ritsos’ book, Gestures, to the mystical little poem, “The Third One”:

               The three of them sat before the window looking at the sea.
               One talked about the sea. The second listened. The third
               Neither spoke nor listened; he was deep in the sea; he floated.
               Behind the windowpanes, his movements were slow, clear
               In the thin pale blue. He was exploring a sunken ship.
               He rang the dead bell for the watch; fine bubbles
               Rose bursting with a soft sound—suddenly,
               “Did he drown?” asked one; the other said, “He drowned.” The third one
               looked back at them helpless from the bottom of the sea, the
               way one looks at drowned people.

I felt then as I feel now when I read Ritsos, as if I were holding my breath, listening and looking through a keyhole at another world, which is in fact this one, only suddenly lit, more beautiful, and terrifying…Which reminds me of Rilke’s lines: “For beauty is only the beginning of Terror, which we are still just able to endure.”
(P. 15)

Swoon!

Part of the enjoyable education one gets from a project like this are the unexpected. I looked for names beyond the usual-usual invoked, such as these authors whose mentions ran in the double-digits—the numbers within the parentheses are the number of times these poets were cited:

William Carlos Williams (17)
Emily Dickinson (16)
Walt Whitman (16)
Frank O’Hara (12)
William Shakespeare (11)
William Butler Yeats (11)
Wallace Stevens (10)

Not a particularly surprising list, yah? But check out the more unique mention by Antler of Francois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel because

“Rabelais proved for me that triumph of humor and extended imaginative playful delight in exploring any subject, especially sexuality, at any length and on every level”
(p. 18)

or Angela Ball’s mention of Jean Rhys’ Good Morning Midnight (a personal favorite novel of mine) because

books for me (and not just poetry, of course—novels, and stories and plays) have been a way to loosen my construction of experience, to let me respond with something other than plain, bred-in-the-bone bewilderment and despair. // This brings me to Jean Rhys…[who] found her vocation through a back door. After being discarded by her wealthy lover, Rhys the actress/chorus-girl/masseuse bought a notebook and colored pens and sat down to record her story, becoming a writer in the process. My poem-bio of her in my book Quartet imagines her saying:

               Only the books matter.
               If I stop writing my life
               It will have been a failure.
               I will not have earned death.
               Only writing is important, only books
               Take you out of yourself.

Writing isn’t only a way to escape the self, it’s a way of exposing socially accepted hyporcrisy. To do her experience justice. She enlisted the objectivity of craft. Far from a complaint or lament, Rhys’ work is an indictment and a vindication. As my colleague Steven Barthelme says, “Next to Jean Rhys, everyone else is just kidding.” In her introduction to Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels, Diana Athill declares:

               …the writer must be able to stand back from the experience far enough to see the whole of it and must concentrate with a self purging intensity on the process of reproducing it in words. Jean Rhys could stand back, and her concentration on the process was a s intense as that of a tightrope walker. As a result her novels do not say “This is what happened to me,” but “This is how things happen.”
(p. 24)

Or check out Clayton Eshleman citing Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of Orgasm because

Reich argued that the goal of individual life was self-regulation, and that the “function of the orgasm” was to enable the individual to become self-regulative and creatively response. For Reich there was no contradiction between sexual fulfillment and imaginative realization—they wer antiphonal, mutually reinforcing. Reich’s position hit me like a thunderbolt: and it emboldened me to do something I had never done before: to cut through all obligation and to proclaim my right to live for myself alone, on the assumption that such was fundamental to do anything original as a poet.
(p. 64)

But then Eshleman continues—a poignant moment, “The downside of this personal revolution was my guilt for what I had first put my wife through, and then my mother.”

Or check out B.H. Fairchild’s mention of Ernest Thompson Seton’s Biography of a Grizzly because

We use the phrase, ‘It changed my life,” rather too easily these days, but I think that Biography of a Grizzly, read when I was a boy of ten, actually did that. Arriving at the last unforgettable page of this story, when the old bear goes into the last canyon, where he knows he will die, I came to understand something about nobility and dignity and the Greek sense of tragedy long before I had words for such things.
(p. 66)

or Gabriel Gudding who explains why he “adores” No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935, edited and transcribed by Sarah Simons:

No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again is a book of fascinating but totally mad and, I guess, ‘ignorant’ letters written to the astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory by laypeople who earnestly want to convey their individual and often bizarre understandings about the stars, planet’s geometry, cosmological origins and other features of the universe. Theories contained in the letters are arrived at by the writers’ own experiments or intuition. So captivating and happy-making are the letters, stuffed as they are with non-sequitur and invention, they’ll reach anyone lost in the farthest grief (trust me, I know); they stand, for me, as testimonies to the glorious resourcefulness of the human imagination, of poesis, in the face of appalling ignorance and scant access to facts. I adores this book.
(p. 79)

or Dara Wier on Michael Faraday’s The Chemical History of a Candle:

I include…The Chemical History of a Candle for its absorbing, precise and obsessive philosophical analysis of everything regarding a candle; by being fascinated with this book the idea of what abstraction might be slowly began to dawn on me.
(p. 185)

These moments brought the Poetry to life—rather than, say, J.D. McClatchy’s unsurprising three-title list of Shakespeare, The American Heritage Dictionary and Virgil’s The Aeneid. While McClatchy’s list is as legitimate as anyone else’s, Poet’s Bookshelf doesn’t lapse to textbook dryness because other poets were willing—or maybe, I should say, had the time (and not all poets have the same amount of time to respond to queries like Davis’)—to reveal more about their personal experiences with poetry. This personal involvement need not bypass serious criticism; here is Wanda Coleman on one of the books on her list, You Better Believe it: Black Verse in English, edited by Paul Breman (if you don’t know, Coleman is African American):

I know I’m presumed to like African American poetry, but I find most of it written prior to the 1970s terribly uninteresting, and embarrassingly bad and corny (like most African American visual art), and imitative of better craftsmen of the Caucasian persuasion for obvious reasons; however, some of the finest of what’s excellent in diverse Black voices is found in You Better Believe It. Sorry, but I’m not a big fan of Langston Hughes, even if I respect his “contribution” and voted for the stamp. I was invited to contribute to this anthology back in the day, but my naivete and paranoia (at the time) kept me from submitting work. I’m now glad that I didn’t, because at that time my fledgling work was as bad as some of the worst in this collection. Thanks goodness, I don’t have to live that down. Whew.
(P. 42)

My one wish on this book is that it would have been nice if the poets were more specific as regards mentioning examples of their work that reflect the cited inspirations. That way, a reader could check out that poet’s work to see how that resulted from the (poetics) process that the poet described. But that’s a minor quibble and the Editor’s Preface certainly alludes to the time constraints on many poets who were contacted as regards this project.

*****

I had to smile over Timothy Liu’s contribution which begins with his mention of an old mentor who once counseled:

"If you want to be a great poet, then read five books of poetry a week for the rest of your life."

I heard of Liu practicing this when I interviewed him for my first book BLACK LIGHTNING. In fact, I thought it, too, to be a great idea and, indeed, I still try to read at least 5 poetry books a week.

More significantly, Liu’s essay is a marvel of compression regarding an expansive subject matter whose borders are not necessarily visible/defined (Eshleman, for one, turned in the longest response at 12 pages, and the length was warranted for him; other poets caveated their contributions by admitting they could have responded at greater length).

I wish to replicate Liu’s essay for revealing a poet who’s found the gold from sifting through many shades of brass…and so I will! Here is Liu’s essay, certainly bespeaking a wonderful mind:

FIVE BOOKS
By Timothy Liu

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T
Simone Weil, Waiting for God

If you want to be a great poet, then read five books of poetry a week for the rest of your life. That’s what I overheard the Mentor say to the Young Poet over fifteen years ago. If you do the math (and the reading as I have done), that’s 3,900 books. So I will not be recommending specific poetry titles per se, but rather recall the infamous words of the late Joseph Campbell: “Follow your bliss!” What remains are a few books I have found to be indispensable companions on the journey toward the Promised Land, call it Parnassus or what you will. Some of these titles I have read over a dozen times, others just once. Each offers its own particular sustenance, its own kind of lastingness.

What is poetry without a consciousness of its own poetics? Can one imagine literature without theory? Not in any kind of responsible writerly way, only by way of enchantment found perhaps in one’s readerly innocence once upon a time. As a primer, then, Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text maps out the seductive relation between writer and reader that serves as the sublimated base for attentions to fixate upon: the art of the textual striptease. A quickie demonstration on how to shake that money-maker whether bedecked in prose or verse, inspiring all the nations to go a-whoring.

Hot on the heels of such wanton philosophy comes literary history to the rescue, the contextual mise en scene for the various performances of verbal debauchery. Octavio Paz’s Children of the Mire documents his international travails through the landscape of belles-lettres. If I seem partial to disunited states, it’s only as necessary antidote to the provincial epidemics of internalized xenophobia that have broken out on our Continent sinces its bloody founding. Now at the End of Wilderness, the trailhead’s clearly marked: Modern Poetry From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde. These campfire chats, disguised as Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, bear resemblance to noble initiatory rites.

For further ruminations under an Abrahamic tent of stars, one only need contemplate W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, our author himself having been untimely ripped from our company and returned to cosmic dust via la forza del destino, alas. The past is too much with us, our Guide seems to say, as we follow him along the Eastern Coast of England, no longer sure just which world we are walking in. What remains is pure mystery, sentences as spells that conjure the sublime in a genre that has no name. A crash-course, then in the Elegiac, the root of all poetic discourses that straddle the epic/lyric divide, time’s horizontals endlessly derailed by a series of spirals whose verticality hurls us from the profaned mundane into some eternal realm.

If Sebald inhabits a world dominated by masculine imagination, then surely Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T would offer a complementary portrait of a Guide who journeys by staying in place, East Germany in fact, imprisoned as it were by domesticity and a life cut short, the flow of cause and effect difficult to ascertain. When if not now? is the rallying cry throughout its pages, a contemporary summons to carpe diem not served to Marvell’s Coy Mistress but to Shakespeare’s imaginal Sister. And indeed, have we not all played Cinderella to the masked fetes of Literary Soceity to which we have been denied formal invitation? How then gain access to princely Parnassus if its gates remain forever shut against it?

Simone Weil offeres no glass slipper. She never even makes it to the ball. Hers is a time of ashes, not for herself alone, but for humanity. Hers is the Martyr’s striptease, not of raiment but of the Flesh itself so that Spirit might eventually be reclaimed by the Bridegroom who never arrives, at least not in this life. Waiting for God transcends earthly ambition. It is the poetry of prayer itself, only to be answered in cloistered death. It puts vanity in its place, all books to be burned when the Earth is baptized with Fire. Poetry then will no longer be necessary. But until we can be brought back into the Presence, there must be those who have gone before us who can somehow show us the way.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...

CHAPS by SARAH MANGOLD and DANA WARD

2007-05-23T22:05:00.000-07:00

CHRIS PUSATERI Reviews

Picture of the Basket by Sarah Mangold
(dusie kollektiv, 2006. Downloadable here.)

and

New Couriers by Dana Ward
(dusie kollektiv, 2006. Downloadable here.)

For better or worse, chapbooks belong to the category of ephemera. Produced furtively and dispensed like contraband, their transient nature causes many to question their “enduring worth.” Often considered secondary to longer and more expensively-produced “book-books,” they garner little notice and even less critical attention. They are, in the words of their numerous detractors, little more than printed indulgences—the bon-bons of the poetry world. As part of a market logic in which the cultural value of an object is determined by how much money surrounds it, many readers view with suspicion a book that is traded, bartered, even gifted—as if its very mode of distribution made its contents suspect.

But dismissal, as we all know, is simply an inability—or more often, an unwillingness—to deal seriously with something. If one explores the history of the chapbook, one will unearth a rich past. Descended from such forms as the pamphlet and broadsheet, the chapbook was originally meant to dispense information about current events to a community. Poetry chapbooks serve a similar role: since they are quickly produced, they represent what is new in poetry. Longer books often spend years in production, waiting for their numbers to be called, while chapbooks appear at a much quicker clip. It is this immediacy which makes the chapbook among our most intimate formats. But while poets spend considerable time pondering the notion of “community,” they frequently ignore the fact that few formats have done as much to link writers with their contemporaries.

****

About two years ago, dusie magazine—the online brainchild of Swiss-based US expat Susana Gardner—rolled out its first issue; scarcely a year later came Dusie Press, an imprint which has since published perfectbound books by Elizabeth Treadwell, Logan Ryan Smith, and others.

In the winter of 2006, Gardner invited forty-two poets to participate in the dusie kollektiv. Each poet would write and produce a chapbook in sufficient numbers to ensure that every other participant would receive a copy; in addition, an electronic copy of each title would appear on the dusie website for free download. That summer, forty-two writers produced forty-two small books and sent copies of their handiwork to forty-one others, located all over the United States and Europe. A loose community formed around this project, for as Derrida writes, “the offering is never a simple thing, but already a discourse.”

****

I was the recipient of two such gifts from a pair of poets whose styles were so divergent that I could scarcely believe they could be accommodated by a single project. The first, Picture of the Basket, written by Sarah Mangold, provides an intense and intricate line, one whose montage seems a lesson in compression culled from the Objectivists. John Olson once quipped that Mangold’s poetry was “like Reznikoff at a sewing machine,” which seems an apt description, if one bears in mind that the machine is guided by a human hand. In Olson’s analogy, the machine is the writing process: the joining of two planes to form a shirt, an airplane wing, or a recollection.

Mangold’s poetry operates in the space where the present becomes the past. As we read, we note that this chapbook is filled with days: its component poems are titled “Day 1,” “Day 2,” and so forth. The clipped yet precise lines ask of the reader what method acting demands of the actor: a “sense memory” where the stimulus is attached to an idea, a line, a fragment that carries with it all of its past contexts. Mangold tells us of:

tasks and arrivals
a definitive the
it is possible to disappear

upstairs into immaculate research
if you’d like to speak
yes there are institutions

These institutions—and their attendant conventions—manufacture the very past that Mangold’s poems hope to cross-examine. Her treatment of history (and its relationship to the present) is where Mangold most closely resembles Charles Reznikoff. Her poetry is a kind of testimony, one in which an historical context is introduced. Because legal testimony occurs under oath, the witness is asked to tell the truth. Anyone with a television set is familiar with the phrase: do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? This is an important distinction: the witness is not sworn to recall events; she is asked to answer questions truthfully.

My reaction to the word truth is a physical one: I flinch when I hear it. And why this reaction? Well, for me, truth is not unlike similarly nebulous terms like happiness, liberty, and postmodernism: it is an abstraction made meaningless through overuse. But for me, Mangold’s search for truth—for believable testimony, for “poetic” truth, if you like—is about more than rescuing abused terms from meaninglessness: it is about affording the past a luxury usually reserved for the future. Mangold’s poetics regard the past as the province of possibility, one in which events are unsettled and far from static.

the return flight is becoming longer
how the heart bends
bravely entering into
being the younger

These poems are intensely meditative and deliberate, almost monastically so. Their personae are pronouns that, having been introduced, fall away gracefully like dancers. These “Days” and the lines that comprise them are finite intervals, in the process of being reduced to carbon. As Mangold writes, “I have a way of seeing but it’s almost gone.” When a way of seeing is gone, one’s observations have ceased being a day and have now become a “Day.” It is the transfer of particulars from the present tense to the past, and the codifying of memory, from sensory perception to the written word, which in its turn will be revisited, revised and reified. The present becomes the past which becomes the present.

Reading through this chapbook, I am reminded of the painter Willem de Kooning, who was known for extensively revising his artwork. Having painted an image, he would study it over a course of days, weeks, or even months, adding detail as he went along. Vexed by his questioning, he would often paint over the canvas with white primer and begin anew. He would repeat this process until the layers of paint became inches thick, leaving a mini-history of images, each coat the accumulated evidence of weeks of painstaking labor. These effaced layers became part of the end product so that a painting contained its entire history.

There is evidence that Mangold works in much the same way: her deliberate and methodical lines belie a process of meticulous revisiting, similar to the way one would form an image on a canvas, only to efface it in favor of an emerging truth. Most witnesses are witnesses by accident: they are in the right place at the right time. For Mangold, the “right time” is wherever one finds oneself—it is an invitation into a fleeting scene slipping quickly between tenses.

****

If Sarah Mangold is Reznikoff at a sewing machine, then Dana Ward is Florence Nightingale with a staple gun. The poems of Ward’s chapbook New Couriers read like strips torn from the platonic bed and reconfigured into a bed of nails. And like a torture device, these poems ratchet the reader into an excruciating state of wakefulness.

Our youth was mild, & rusted
the western light’s bruise
covered up on our neck by grape
leaves, & by honeysuckle
always one stress past the play of the
line so it never occurs.
Here & there they are calling our number
the ants represent, represent

Despite his lyrical lines, Ward is no romantic. And if these poems are songs, they are songs of experience. Objects, like grape leaves and honeysuckle, are introduced, then scrubbed out because they are

always one stress past the play of the
line so it never occurs.

It is not the commentary, but the lyrical lilt of the poems themselves that erase the objects just posited. In the moment before the lyricism achieves flight, the lines unzip into enjambment so that no sooner do we rise than we are brought rudely back to earth with the force of a crash landing. In short, Ward denies the lyric its usual conceits—its song and lilt—by lending them and suddenly rescinding them, by granting and crudely reclaiming them.

The war you blew out of my hands laid its head in my lap
I asked for its other names too
they swam in the pooled crystal wafers
I found in the ink
a set of trees lovely with age
given the leaves that are ensigns of May Day
The trebled green wicked & sweet

.
Because this small book is so fiercely aligned with action, it construes experience as an act that occurs even as one reads. While the romantic would mourn the loss of an earlier innocence, Ward concedes that he cannot mourn what he never possessed in the first place. In these poems, nature is not afforded its usual privileged place in the poetic landscape. Instead, all objects, be they natural or synthetic, are viewed with skepticism, as if the pastoral world was no less capable of duplicity than its urban, man-made counterpart. Appearances are exactly that—surfaces interpreted by our imperfect senses. Thus, when “the ants, represent, represent,” the insects themselves become secondary: they are defined by their actions. Each time the ants represent, they present themselves anew until their increase becomes exponential. They grow larger, more present, more menacing.

Psychology tells us that most violence originates spontaneously, and those who perpetrate it often mention the thrill of the moment, the instant when things cease to mean and proceed to “represent, represent.” In this instance, one action sets others in motion like a falling line of dominoes. Unlike Mangold’s work, in which the prolonged study of a singular interval renders it unbearably bright and sharp, Ward’s poems act. Where Mangold focuses on creating presence (as condition), Ward presents objects which are denied their semantics by the very ways in which they are animated. The images of New Couriers present and re-present to produce a frightful amphetamine lapping that is like the hungry sex of strangers. A chapbook both “wicked & sweet,” New Couriers presents a new view of the lyric: one in which the song is a scream.

****

Chris Pusateri is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Music for Film (Left Hand, 2006) and Flowers in Miniature (Big Game, 2006). Other new work has appeared in Xantippe, Verse, The New Review of Literature, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.

IN A DYBBUK'S RAINCOAT by BERT MEYERS

2007-05-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS [and DENISE LEVERTOV] Review

IN A DYBBUK’S RAINCOAT: Collected Poems by Bert Meyer, Edited by Morton Marcus and Daniel Meyers
(Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series/University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2007)

For about a year now, I’ve been paying attention to Collected Poems. I read such books not just from an interest in a specific poet but because I’m curious to see what the volume of any one poet’s output suggests about how a poet lives. For my purpose, the quality (however that is judged) of the poems is just one “test.” I’ve also been interested in poetic development, how poetry affects the poet’s lifestyle—perhaps I’m curious most about how the decision to live as a poet comes to matter.

Bert Meyer’s IN A DYBBUK’S RAINCOAT, is the type of discovery I’ve hoped to make during my exploration of various Collected Poems. Meyers, indeed, is my favorite discovery so far among poets I read for having Collecteds—a significant number of which I pick up at random. Meyers’ bio in the book reveals that he dropped out of high school to become a poet and, over the next 18 years, worked at a number of manual labor jobs (janitor, carpenter’s apprentice) before becoming a master picture-framer and gilder. Though he never took undergraduate classes, he was admitted to the Claremont Graduate School “on the basis of his poetic achievements. By 1967, he had completed all work for a Ph.D. in English literature and was hired to teach poetry workshops and literature at Pitzer College. Over the years he published his poems in many journals and in five books. In 1979, shortly before his death at the age of fifty-one, Meyers assembled a slim volume of those poems he considered his best work.”

That slim volume is the basis of IN A DYBBUK’S RAINCOAT. Given the difficulty of this manuscript finding a publisher (having circulated for about 20 years, and before the days of POD technologies), kudos must be given to its publisher, University of New Mexico Press/Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series. Apparently, this manuscript (or an earlier version) was even once accepted by a publisher but who then went bankrupt (okay poets, let’s all do a collective wince here).

Meyers’ poems are lush, gorgeously imagistic, witty, slyly humorous, and replete with lines that make me wish I’d written them. Here’s a sample poem—check out those “sonorous nipples—each one a lozenge full of memories”!

Untitled—Or, “To Be A Poet”

I turned to poetry the way a man turns to a woman,
in order to live; the way an animal moans or a
bird sings, to relieve myself of pain and joy.

Words, to me, are sonorous nipples—
each one a lozenge full of memories under the tongue,
a liquid in the throat.

I found Whitman and believed a poet should express
his country; Rilke, and pitied my middle-class self for
a while; Blake and saw politics in every line;
Issa and wished to be so compassionate and humble.

Emily Dickinson taught me to rely on metaphor; Yeats
showed me the value of music in a time of portentous prose.
Ten years as a picture framer and gilder convinced me that even
poems should be beautifully made.

I’ve known waitresses and janitors form whom great
images flowed like traffic on a freeway. I prefer
fairy tales to most literature and I believe that the last stanza of
“Mary had a little lamb” is more profound than The Cantos
or The Waste Land.

But now, rather than trying to say something that’s been said better by others, let me—in the great tradition of poets steal…, I mean, collaging other peoples words—present an excerpt from Denise Levertov’s engagement with Meyers’ poems, which is presented in the book as its Introduction:

Bert Meyers’ work seems all to have been lyrical; he was not drawn to the epic, narrative, or dramatic modes and eschewed the hortatory or didactic. For clarity of discourse, I would reserve the term “major” for poets whose range of genres and also quantity of work seem equal in breadth to the depth of their poems. But the term “great” should be applicable to those who produce deep and exquisite work in fewer modes, or in a single one: though here too some sense of abundance seems to form part of what “great” implies. I feel Meyers can be called great because of the extraordinary intensity and perfection of his poems and the consistency with which he illumined what he experienced, bodying it forth in images that enable readers to share his vision and thereby extend the boundaries of their own lives.

The image is unequivocally at the center of his work; indeed, a sequence of short poems…is named simply “Images.” Often there are single lines, or brief syntactic units, within longer poems of his, that seem fully poems in themselves—random examples would be:

Night lifts the moon like a coffee cup
from the skyline’s cluttered shelf,

Or

Fog—
Sailing for hours
in the same spot;
and the joyful sound
of the invisible sea.

Or this:

All around me, butterflies,
ecstatic hinges,
hunt for the ideal door.

It is apparent that Meyers himself recognized, and cultivated, this ability to find images that can function autonomously;…

…But he also knows that the image was a building block out of which he could construct longer poems: one of his strengths is the way in which every longer poem of his is built up of an accumulation of such image blocks, each of which has such integrity that the whole edifice is dense and strong. In this way his poems, like the best haiku, are capable of imparting a sense of his life and values, his emotions and deepest loyalties, with a minimum of stated opinion.

[…]

Though he did not like “engaged” poetry, feeling that it violated what he believed was the essentially evocative and non-didactic nature of the art, he at times encompassed historical comment, e.g. “Arc de Triomphe”:

Nothing but gray seen through the arch
as if triumph were an abyss
into which a nation marches

And in a poem such as “Saigon”…he did make a very direct criticism of the corrupting influence of the United States—the poem’s epigraph is, “In our own image we created them,” and it describes teenage thugs in pre-liberation Saigon:

Their smiles are gun belts,
their brains, nuclear clouds;
and they speak a dialect
that sounds like money …

Around them, the landscape’s
a flag that fell from the sky:
red roads, bloody stripes;
whitened by bones
and stars that explode;
blue, like genocide’s queer smoke.

+++

The excerpts from above should indicate the marvels to be found in Meyer’s long-delayed book. But as a Collected Poems project, it’s also enhanced by other facets of the book which incorporates Selected Prose By, and Articles On Burt Meyers. In this sense, editors Morton Marcus and David Meyers should be lauded for their editing.

Much of the luminosity—radiance!—in Meyers poems can be traced to his lucid vision as a person. His encounter with Garrett Hongo, a former student, is recounted here. Specifically, Meyer had encouraged Hongo to write poems about his (family) history which includes the shameful period of the U.S. incarcerating Japanese Americans in camps during World War II. One cannot underestimate the sensitivity and awareness—and risk—required for Meyers to have raised the camps to Hongo whose parents had been interned. As Jack Miles put it in an article published in the Los Angeles Times:

Bert Meyers, a Sephardic Jew whose parents had come to Los Angeles from Spain via Brooklyn, knew why Garrett Hongo was pissed off at a time in Hongo’s life when Hongo himself did not know. Yes, Hongo’s parents had been in the camps. This was to be one of Hongo’s subjects, among those that would win him the Lamont prize in 1987, but he didn’t know it yet. How did Meyers know it? He couldn’t, in fact, have had more than a hunch, but such hunches only come to teachers who are watching their students’ every move, thinking about them with intelligence and love, and willing to push them to the brink to open their eyes.

…Not all Japanese American writers are called to write about ethnic identity. With the wrong Japanese American student, Meyers’ [approach to Hongo] could have been a clumsy and perhaps a crippling mistake. Meyers took a chance, then, but he was the kind who watches closely enough o know when and with whom to take such a chance.

Later in the article, Miles would observe generally about poetry but with Meyers presenting the proof: “Poetry proceeds by a heightening of the precision and clarity of ordinary perception.”

IN A DYBBUK’S RAINCOAT presents a poet who made a difference and did so by living the way he wrote his poems: with an attention embodying Love. Bert Meyers' Collected Poems manifests “Poetry as a way of life” in the most inspirational way.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...

One can say many things about Denise Levertov's accomplishments, but to quote simply from the UNM press release for this book, she is "an accomplished American poet and teacher who was poetry editor at The Nation."

ABSURD GOOD NEWS by JULIEN POIRIER

2007-05-23T21:55:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Absurd Good News by Julien Poirier
(Insert Press, 2006)

LOVE FOR MY LIFE AMONG THINGS

The body is a characteristic thing. Pressures it exacts upon its environment, along with such pressures exacted upon it, spur on the job of living. Where attention is laid comes care for the action occurring. Habits and forced behaviors, the crummy work of making a living, combine with chance and unknown quantities, taking a different street, going for a walk for no good reason, to bring about the corollaries art is concerned with. Old story, maybe, what isn’t seems rather naïve to any reader who’s paying attention. For those doing the writing the very thing is to remain physical, that thing you is.

MY SKELETON
                              my skeleton
               first off, depends upon
                                             no
                              though compleat
                              has the advantage
                          blacked out
               winds turn
                                                            blindness to
                              coals
               plus he’s sweet
and I can’t believe we’ve never spoke
                              an analogy
                              the scarred bowler
               my asshole
                              he peeps through
                                             piccolo
                                             predates me
                                             and he knows
                              flowing points
               when I dance

Poirier explores further. He finds the other inside the thing his body is; that sweet believer, total support on which his frame is hung and both dances with and upon. Poirier’s true grace is his willing embrace of abrupt jumps line to line, banging meaning around, syllabics up against good common sense.

WHY SAY NOT

Why say not when I fender garden water in?
a cream coupe the nebulous puppies
sleep off their hunches
& the sound of money
is the only lunch coming
her guitar
and trawled by suns, elucidate
their sexy waterskin
suns rush over the big problem
is they don’t rush. we are chortling
tricked by their heat, cold in hand
smooth customers
on the dime cool clover

Consonants are employed in the pursuit of joy. How terrific is that. Poetry is not limited to that serious business having to do with language, but, oh yeah, it’s about play, too, that serious business having to do with language. As Blackburn says, “My song’s of JOY, I’ll make it now”. Poirier’s traveling the same good old road as those troubadours Blackburn holds dear.

to the chime
sweet seedy & beckoning
green
gone & sexy
(“FRA”)

This isn’t some hallowed out insensitivity lacking swing. This fellow human named Poirier weaves his days and nights throughout every page. His words are visitors to the reader, accompanied by his cartoon sketched characters who tag along for the ride scattered with frequent delight throughout these pages. In “KID V. KIDARSKY” there’s encouragement, “Buck up, Oberon” that’s both playful, “MAX JACOB LOOKS LIKE A PINSTRIPED SEAL / your mama” and at turns serious, “if you’re not fixing mailboxes / you’re metering paradoxes” reminding the reader there’s work to be done which by necessity is cared for outside of the page. What matters is the world and the experience of it. To share with others and learn from that sharing, sharing it in turn, that all may have further opportunity of experience. Part of this endeavor is always to provide warning less the reader like Poirier as much anyone else too often dwell in that common sense of loss the human mind is fraught to giving itself over to time to time.

THE DONUT

I return to the colony
                              only to find the donut
                                             an utter cipher
                              though
a perilous beauty
tempts me to embellish
                              and risk destroying
                                             its nature
to be open-ended, hardly
                              at all
dead as some
say my nature is
                              but too alive
                                             for my passion
                                                    I doubt
And crush the thistle

Thankfully Poirier is never fully lost to such darkness and repeatedly emerges in the dance song is. His words are energy in Blake’s sense: they delight in their own form. Such pleasure creatures of the human world desperately lack Poirier gives to his reader.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in the library at the University of San Francisco. He has published poems and chapbooks with Auguste Press, Blue Book, Chain, Mirage#4 period(ical), Pompom, Red Ant Press, and Snag Press.

EMPTIED OF ALL SHIPS by STACY SZYMASZEK

2007-05-23T21:50:00.000-07:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

Emptied of All Ships by Stacy Szymaszek
(Litmus Press, New York, 2005)

Stacy Szymaszek’s Emptied of All Ships is a troubling book, but troubling in a good way. On first glance, it’s easily recognizable as utterly American—one can even hear echoes of Melville in lines like “Call it James,” but it is the easy to recognize aspect that most makes the reader see how different it is. Take the line above. Melville’s famous opening line is “Call me Ishmael.” Melville brings up the question of whether or not the narrator is really called Ishmael; he brings doubt into our minds, but we don’t wonder about whether or not Ishmael is really a male—Melville doesn’t bring into the foreground issues of gender, but Szymaszek definitely does. “Call it James.” Is it a person? Is it male, female, or other? Are our conceptions of gender too strict to describe James, a lover in the book? Szymaszek, I believe, answers yes in this book. James (a traditionally male name), in the section Some Mariners, becomes both a lover/ex-lover and a persona for the poet, but he/she/it is a more complicated character to tie down (pardon the play) than most of Melville’s characters, but let me come back to him/her/it.

The book is composed of many poems, some of which originally came out in chapbook form, that all connect together well due to the theme of the book, which is basically the sea and what happens on/in it. However, even the sea is not just the sea in this book:

every sea
a battle scene
cast anchor
and survey
promptness
of sharks. (32)

The sea as almost a character itself in the book, as it could be seen as one in Moby Dick, represents many different things, from the unconquerable to the space of desire to the space of discovery to the space of mainstream society. The sea as presented is multi-faceted and changing. Take, for instance, these lines:

beneath the tarpaulin

you are the sea monster

I am your sea. (60)

Obviously, the sea is both a space of desire and a representation of desire in this section, but in the section quoted above, the sea is a “battle scene,” the place where wars are fought to figure out who is in charge or claim control of a space.

The poems in the beginning of the book explore the sea, the people on/in it, and voyaging into it (though “emptied of all ships”). The people who pop up in these poems are sailors in Melville’s sense—they are not ordinary people tied to safety, tied to bank accounts and traditional beliefs of society; rather, they are people on the fringe or are people ready to explore the edge of safety or of what lies just beyond safety. We could call them outlaws or outcast, but that would not quite be accurate. They seem more like bits of our psyches loosed from the mooring.

The poems from the first part of the book set the stage for the section Some Mariners, easily the most fascinating section of the book, not just for the style, but for the way this section mimics and speaks out against other American works. The character James is just the tip. He is our Ishmael, but we are even more doubtful about who/what he/she/it is. He could be a she, but she could be an it. We are told something is wrong with James’ arm and that one of his arms is a feeling arm, and beyond that, we see James and the narrator engage each other on various levels. Sometimes James and narrator appear to be involved sexually, but sometimes the narrator seems to be involved with another “you” sexually. Is it James? Was it ever James really? Sex and desire permeate this section of the book, but the construction of the section is also fascinating. Included in the individual poems that make up the section are translation attributed to James. Do the translations deal with trans-lating as much as trans-locating James?

Szymaszek’s Emptied of All Ships provokes many questions with language that is both evocative and subtle; moreover, this book signals a new way of perceiving in American culture of desire and leaves the reader waiting and wondering what Szymaszek will do next.

*****

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, chapbooks, and books include In the Weaver’s Valley, The Vicious Bunny Translations, Ishmael Among the Bushes, Covering Over, Temporal Nomads, Lingo, and Ladders in July. His book Fragile Replacements is forthcoming in 2007 with Meritage Press.

THE BIRD HOVERER by AARON BELZ

2007-05-23T21:45:00.000-07:00

ALEXANDER DICKOW Reviews

The Bird Hoverer by Aaron Belz
(BlazeVOX Books, 2007)

There is only one reason it is difficult to be humorous. This difficulty lies in the fact that all of the things you think are funny, are not; whereas all of the things you think are not funny, are funny, except for the ones that are not. The other reason it is difficult to be funny is that funny things are only funny when they are not difficult, but rather effortless (rather effortless, which is not to say somewhat effortless, but instead, instead effortless or effortless on the contrary, meaning entirely so), which is an extremely difficult thing to be. A friend once told me that there are two things that are always funny: falling down and Something Inappropriate. Oh, and falling down in Something Inappropriate. Aaron Belz is all of these things except for one: he is humorous, funny, difficult, whereas, extremely, on the contrary, and possibly even falling down at this very moment, hopefully not in Something Inappropriate. His new book, The Bird Hoverer from BlazeVOX Books, is also effortless. Take, for instance, his sestina, “Pam,” featuring this form’s requisite obsessive psychology (see my forthcoming article, “‘Pam, a psychoanalytic reading’”), and toothpaste. “Wherever I Go” is effortless, and it’s also about marriage, which is difficult, but often funny, at least for those who are not married, which, because both funny and difficult, would seem to disprove my theory:

Wherever I go
there are two of you:
one telling me what to do,
the other what not to do.

I’m going to stab you with a fork.

Humor often relies on the element of surprise, like refried beans and some pregnancies. The surprise here lies not in the closing line, but in the immediate abandonment of the doppelgänger motif (“Wherever I go / there are two of you”). We were naturally expecting the Funny Poet to surprise us by developing the motif in some unexpected way, it being an appropriately literary motif (not to mention its pedigree in the comic tradition: think Plautus). Instead, Belz surprises us with an entirely unrelated punchline (a jab, to be precise). Since many readers of contemporary poetry -- especially the smug and self-conscious (as opposed to effortless) varieties with pretentions to the humorous, frequently encountered at poetry readings, especially in New York, and in reviews of funny collections of poetry, especially those written by people who speak French -- have grown to expect indirection, kitchen utensils may occasionally come in handy.

***

Not that Aaron Belz fails to provide us with the proper (dirty) Habits of Humor necessary to establishing his comic face and poetic texture. Among my favorite of these is a frequent recourse to the unusual name and the invention of characters: Mr Aptitude Barnaby Filament Drood and an acne-pocked man by the name of Good luck (“Fifteen Poems That End With ‘Good Luck’”), the aforementioned Pam, and the Revolutionary Mr. Eddy Williamson (“Seven Bastions”), to mention a few. A fascination for the trivial fascinations of large, greasy, potato-shaped, tabloid-reading individuals results in an unapologetic and ironic fascination with Stardom, a fascination which dominates the second half of The Bird Hoverer, entitled Names of the Lost -- perhaps a reference to the self-destruction to which stardom often leads, or to the ephemeral nature of notoriety, or to Belz’s occasional Biblical subtext. The Bird Hoverer features poems about Ernest Borgnine, Meryl Streep, Tim Burton (exploding), and Ben Affleck’s daughter. He doesn’t forget our “own” stars, doubtless not so different from the others: Walt Whitman, Pushkin, Louis Zukofsky. Poets or actors? One way or the other, “Life is a dirty secret / that literature exalts”, to quote the high-falutin’ philosophicalness with which Aaron Belz almost closes his collection:

For instance,
I am not wearing pants,

but that’s not all:
I never do

When I’m alone
And thinking of you [...]. (“Life Is a Dirty Secret”)

***

Belz’s seamless shift from a truism of proverbial flavor to Suddenly-Naked-Man slapstick à la John Cleese is a sole example among dozens of the poet’s mastery of the parodic and the burlesque (see the Biblical and ritual allusions of “A Horseshoe of Roses,” or the Melvillian exaggerations of “Michael Landon as a Melville Character”). Aaron Belz loves to collide incompatible semiotic codes, disparate stylistic registers and clashing Spiderman underpants.

***

Some of Aaron Belz’s poems may suffer from a certain taste for the gimmick, the procédé, such as the Mad Lib (“Ernest Borgnine Mad Lib”) or the comic effects of a predetermined refrain (“Fifteen Poems Ending With ‘Good Luck’”). On the other hand, some of Aaron Belz’s poems may benefit from a certain taste for the gimmick, the procédé, as a welcome antidote to the sometimes excessively literary, self-consciously baroque humor of a James Tate or people who speak French, for instance. On the other hand, Belz demonstrates his versatility in more daring, baroque pieces such as “That Pen,” naturally my personal favorite in the collection (and the source of its title, The Bird Hoverer):

How prosaic of you, banal proselyte in
my terrace, frog-leaping concugard.
dirt that pen, you hopper slash chanter,
without the ostentation of the upper-gard.

Here, Belz indulges in the kind of amphibian linguistic squishiness that most appeals to me as a poet, colliding a series of enigmatic punchlines without their jokes. He here reveals a more unfamiliar (to the poetry-reading public at large) Belz who crosses the buttons, pushes the line and transgresses the envelope of the comic and poetic possibilities of language. Like a jazz solo, Aaron Belz shows off in “That Pen,” while elsewhere disguising his inventiveness in favor of his usual effortless comic idiom. The two modes, of course, -- that of the performer (actor) and that of the poet, or of laughter and song -- never being mutually exclusive, but rather in dialogue with each other, much like Belz himself:

I love you, I muttered,
as if to myself. I love you
too, I muttered back. (“Bells”)

Once again, Belz surprises here less in his doubleness than in the casual, straight-faced verbal gesture “as if to myself”. Like a line in a Marx Brothers film, it passes almost unnoticed. The best ironists are those who continually sneak up on you without ever saying, “Boo!”

***

Adam Fieled recently gave an “angst-inflected” reading of Aaron Belz’s new collection. I don’t agree. I think Belz’s greatest strength lies rather in Silliness: an exceptional gift, contrary to popular belief, but of a generally light-hearted, effortless and airy sort suggested by the hummingbird on the cover and the birds featured in many of the poems. But I’m perfectly happy to give Fieled the benefit of the doubt, and grant Belz the appropriately contradictory label of “gravely hilarious,” “by turns melancholic and comic” poet, as indicated on the book’s back cover. Either way, or both ways, Fieled and I certainly agree about the most important part: “It’s got heart,” and it’s endlessly entertaining, which is a rather difficult, which is not to say somewhat, but rather (which is to say, instead), quite a difficult thing to accomplish.

***

Alexander Dickow is glad he got through this review without alluding to Monty Python. John Cleese doesn’t count. He has translucinated several poems by Aaron Belz into French, writes poetry, maintains a weblog called Voix Off, and currently resides in New Jersey.

I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU by AMY KING

2007-05-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

I’m the Man Who Loves You by Amy King
(BlazeVox Books, 14 Tremaine Ave., Kenmore, NY 14217, 2007)

Who is this “I” who claims—in both the title-poem and title of Amy King’s second book—to be “the man who loves you,” and who is the “you,” for that matter? Does King herself, a lesbian woman, declare her love for a female addressee, as though she were courting her as a man? Is she appropriating a patriarchal authority, not only to try it on, but to critique or parody its authoritarian exclusivity? Does she parody a straightjacket of gender norms by misrepresenting herself in order to suggest, a la Judith Butler’s notion of gender-performance, a multiplicity of performative possibilities available, despite societal strictures, to anyone, regardless of biological origins? Does King utilize the poetic persona of a man who loves either another man or a woman? And how can we be so sure that “love” signifies sexual love? “I’m the male father who loves you, my son or daughter”; “I’m the male mother (!) who loves you”; “I’m the son/male daughter who loves you, my mother or father”; “I’m the brother/male sister who loves you,” etc. A perusal of the title-poem—and we should not assume, contemplating such an uncanny poet, that it stands as a synecdoche for the entire book—may help us approach these questions; here are some pertinent lines from its midsection:

I put on my long black dream and stepped into the world of women
to live among my female brothers who know how to grow
up on ink that occasionally vanishes & candles that eat at the wick;
I understood then not to let the germs that occupy my body
infiltrate my mind because they are programmed to dislodge
the thoughts that set me apart as a matter of defining my essence,
that aspect of personhood that surpasses stuffing wads
of cash into every pocket while pretending nothing’s wrong here;
I put myself into this box of unerased sentences. . . . (34)

The poem happens to be a page-and-a-half-long sentence. A full gloss would likely be doomed to vertigo, but I see distinct clues that King’s intricate troping and humorous image-slinging serve the general deregulation of gender constraints. “The long black dream” reveals the wish-fulfillment of one who longs to “live” in a community of women—perhaps more specifically, evolving women writers who thrive both on what is clear and the obscurities that “eat at” illumination—and yet the term “female brothers” gives pause. Are these women who eschew traditional “sisterhood” for the cultivation of “brotherhood”? (If so, how would that “brotherhood” be manifested?) Are they heterosexual women whom a lesbian is willing to treat as she would her brother? Does this “world of women” include transgendered members who were born male? Do more than one of these possibilities apply? After the semi-colon, in a bizarre, non-Cartesian dualism, the speaker warns us that effects of a particularly gendered body, figured as infection, can weaken the thinking subject’s ability to resist coercive, socially constructed definitions of “essence” and hinder achievement of an “aspect of personhood” beyond ordinary gender constraints. Vigilant consciousness of what one is up against, along with creative strategies of thinking “otherwise,” might combat the “disease”; being “natural” and unselfconscious would not. After reflecting on the limitations of rhetorical strategies such as “transparent confessions” and “this type of artificial language,” the speaker “confesses”: “though I adhere/ in something of a masculine vein that can be coaxed open but/ is more often dilated than narrowed into a permanent voice-style. . .” (34-5). No single “voice-style,” however gendered, can cage the speaker in a closed, hardened identitarian “essence,” as the “vein” can “dilate” to permit expansive exploration of alternative styles.

One of King’s impressive accomplishments is to “rewrite” a poem by a significant precursor in her own terms. The title “And Ut Pictura Poesis Calls Her Name” signals the poem’s relationship to John Ashbery’s 1977 poem, “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name.” In Savage Sight/Constructed Noise: Poetic Adaptations of Painterly Techniques in the French and American Avant-Gardes (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2003), David Lehardy Sweet notes that the “famous Horatian dictum” in Ashbery’s title “presents the relation of poetry and painting,” not only “as one of harmonious parallelism” but of “mutual attraction,” as though innovative poetry must “court” painting, an “independent, anomalous, alienated”—problematic—“lover” (239-40). According to Sweet, the “poem offers instructions on how to write a new kind of poem-painting. . . that double as friendly advice on how to ‘get a girl’ (or guy),” while “modernist juxtapositional strategies” interrupt these teaching moments (240). King’s titular revision foregrounds Sweet’s sense of Ashbery’s discourse on the performative function of a poem-painting more directly than the precursor’s title, with its constative use of the copular verb. In fact, King presents the theme of eros much more overtly than Ashbery does. I will quote a set of passages that include substantial mimicking or playing off the language of Ashbery’s poem:

I think of you, the mistress of ceremonies with your fist held
In a tiger’s grin, a bouquet resembling delphinium
Between your teeth. Every man I love becomes a woman.
But first, there is the critique of the human subject,
Where “subject” comes out into the open, lights his fingertips,
And disappears a gold-plated elephant, entirely remaining
A free-agent unmoved by clock-ticking acrobatics. . . .
Eventually, she approached me about a missing kiss—
Mechanics of another kind? Two lips, tender teeth, a tongue
Dewy wet. . . .
Someone should study
The extracting power one has with another: only everything’s
A signal when you turn your radar on. Interlocking legs twirl
Voices out of words. The smallest story of two people coming
Together imitates a circus tent in winter holding
Everyone beneath it. The sheer beauty of ten thousand minds
Colliding with seesaws airborne, trampolines, top hats,
Harmonized buzzsaws,. . .
A lush masquerade blends discord to dance to,
So that understanding may begin with seclusions,
Ignite collusions, and a body may ask,
Where do you live? (15)

“Delphinium” serves in the middle of Ashbery’s poem as an example of a flower that a poet-painter could use to give specificity and a romantic tinge to the composition, whereas King employs it in the first sentence as a comic detail in the picture of the woman she contemplates amorously. “Delphinium” includes poisonous leaves, so the fact that the “mistress of ceremonies” (a phrase that seems a euphemism for a sexual aggressor, even a dominatrix) has something “resembling” this flower in her mouth allows for the possibility that her pose involves risk or daring, as seduction often does. Also, while the word does not derive from “Delphos,” its sound suggests an allusion to the Delphic oracle, as though both poems might include (or question) prophecies about love’s fate.

King’s second sentence seems to “confess” that the speaker falls in love with women who resemble men she holds dear, thus acknowledging a heterosexual component within homosexualty and troping on the rather ambiguously gendered sexual references of Ashbery’s poem (and in fact, in a great deal of his work before the eighties). What if the verb “becomes” signifies that men she “loves” (loves how?) seek to adopt the subject position of women through transvestite or transgendered crossing? The difficulty posed by these two divergent readings may imply a critique of the presumption that gender is stable. The stock phrase, “the critique of the human [decisively gendered] subject,” situates King, born around the time that the precursor poem was published, as conversant early on with the theoretical basics of Poststructuralism and Cultural Studies in the same way that Ashbery’s parallel reference to “self-analysis” reflects early acquaintance with Freudianism and pre-Lacanian post-Freudianism. (Indeed, Self-Analysis is the title of one of Karen Horney’s books.) In the seventies, Ashbery may have been aware of poststructuralist lingo, especially since he lived in France for a decade (until 1965), but the Freudian/post-Freudian discourse was a staple of his formative years; it provided the kind of near-clichés he could fall back on much more easily. For Ashbery, those who are “bothered about beauty” should “come out into the open, into a clearing,/ And rest,” whereas King envisions a speaking “’subject’ [coming] out into the open,” making a stable self “disappear,” and transforming “himself” into another entity to demonstrate his (free) “agency.” Both poets exploit the notion of “coming out” as public revelation of gay identity, but King’s language reflects an additional sense that being a free agent includes the destabilization of historical (“clock-ticking”) rules about gender performance, not just sexual activity.

Three further examples—and there are quite a few more—should provide a sufficient sense of effects that King produces through her collaging from the precursor poem. Ashbery’s phrase, “She approached me about buying her desk,” which seems to be an example of how “dull-sounding” language can be incorporated into a poem-painting, may refer to a pretext for seduction, but King’s substitution of “about a missing kiss” presents a more obvious case of sexual “mechanics,” and the subsequent “two lips”/tulips pun points back to the sexualization of flowers in the opening image of “delphinium.” A more highly charged sexuality is also evident when Ashbery’s “we were a seesaw” is transformed into King’s “seesaws airborne,” followed in the next line by the phrase, “harmonized buzzsaws” (“velvet buzzsaw?”). Finally, whereas Ashbery writes, “Something/ Ought to be written about how this”—Love? Vulnerability? The final clash between “an almost empty mind’s” “austerity” and a “lush” desire for communication with others?—“affects/ You when you write poetry,” King calls on “someone” to “study” how erotic relations enable “one” to have “extracting power.” She is fascinated with the violent results of the self’s inability to keep its saliences hidden from another’s psychological intensity. The older poet concludes with a wistful impression of nomadic desire and a play of provisional “understanding” and its “undoing”; King does not deny these insights, but the emphasis throughout her brasher, more viscerally surreal text is on the intricacies of the poet-painter “calling” (soliciting) the other’s “name” and “her” own emergent identity-formation(s) (as part of that dynamic) and interpreting responses to those calls.

“How to Get to Here” is a poem that provides an especially complex articulation of gender (and) identity. In the opening strophe, the poet marks the transition from an Ellisonian “self” (“invisible” to a societal “grid”) to a visibility constituted only by the speaker’s service to unstable others:

I had been invisible, untrained, disappearing off the grid
for some time, until you asked me to pass the breadsticks
in that split moment of schizo-panic. To give up
a technicolor coat is a brave tragedy with many layers;
we’re drawn to any labyrinth, perfection at the center
of artistry like the lifelong oil & grease of small town mechanics. (30)

As a trope of multiplicity, the “Technicolor coat” makes the wearer’s identity too complex or, punningly, “layered,” for people at the dinner table to see. Visibility’s advantages, unfortunately, are purchased with the tragic relinquishment of decentered nuance and fluidity. Perhaps fed by the genre of confessional autobiography, a community embraces the presumption that a (human) labyrinth can be negotiated successfully, that a marvelous “center” exists and can be discovered. However, the final simile, though readable as a critique of class snobbery ignoring the accomplishments of auto mechanics, is disorienting enough to suggest that “oil & grease” is more about diffusion and clouded visibility than it is about a labyrinth-threader’s quest-fulfilment. In the second strophe, although the speaker “wears” sincerity to simulate a sense of community based on common mortality, each individual’s ignorance of when s/he will die—usually considered a blessing but labeled as a “stigma” (mark)—lessens the emotion impact of eventual demise and hence, the binding potential of involuntary “conformity”:

So then along, you wear your dog well, the sitting in
backdraft hotels at darkly-lit tables by solicitous candles
gathering conformity of personal death to every else’s,
which doesn’t hit like the stigma of not knowing when.
Most acts attempt to imitate that knowledge: (30)
The charmingly outrageous generalization capping the strophe (but pointing with a colon to the next) regards “most” human action as fiction-making intended to compensate for the most profoundly unknowable and final experience. Human intensity “copies” the supreme intensity of dying; this includes the realm of love/loving:

A person can invent love just by loving.
Though not exactly, it’s the closest arc anyone spins on.
And then the lack of love finally ends
in a dead end of fucking to cover up the hole
where love should play on a regular spontaneous basis.
Some assume the hole is an absence
that longs to be filled. But it’s not a metaphor
of another sort or a pause enacting the turning of pages. (30)

The distinction between the noun “love” as a state of being and its gerundive form as activity—the disjunction between an abstract quality which people might characterize divergently and actual behavior—is both denied and preserved in the verb “invent,” which suggests the creation of narrative structure yet carries the Latin root, to come in, into, or upon (“How to Get to Here”): to reach, attain. The qualifier, “though not exactly,” challenges the full success/access of invention in both senses. The actual lived narrative of a relationship goes past the intensity of perceived or imagined love to realization of “lack of love” and the “dead end,” a sexual encounter, that concludes the lack and, presumably, the union itself. The “dead end of fucking” either depends on the binary opposition fucking/making love (involving any pairing of three kinds of gendered beings) or on a lesbian’s affective and/or political critique of heterosexual intercourse, but “the hole” is a larger “area” of ambiguity.

Lacan, following Freud, reads desire as a lack, and a (metonymic) chain of signifiers deployed to fill the lack is never able to convert absence into plenitude (presence). If King’s speaker negates the metaphorical status of “the hole,” that does not mean she is calling it a literal entity or non-entity—and her slippery rhetoricity is far from equating “hole” and “vagina,” though “some” might “assume” it—because the word might be regarded as a part of the chain of metonyms that buzz around Lacanian lack. But wait a minute: couldn’t she be using the trick of enjambment (now you don’t see it, now you do) to declare that the hole is “a metaphor” but “not. . ./ of another sort”? What other “sort” (sorting)? Is the hole a trope of its own non-substantiality rather than a personifiable figure tied to “longing” by a substantial other? To look at the second half of the sentence, is it constitutive of a temporal interval without the metonymic insistence that this “pause” must be bound up with textual/sexual motion or progress? Perhaps King articulates respect for the integrity of the gap as it eludes assimilation into a narrative that defines, places, domesticates, and subordinates “qualities” of absence to a presence that would presume to master desire. Another reading could be spun off the idea that “hole” is a trope for the irreducibility of death, which always shadows “love,” “loving,” “fucking,” spontaneity, etc. King returns to abstract thinking about the hole in the poem’s last line, but not until she has dramatized the symbolic actions of a “we” (an erotic we, a generalized we?) that supplants the “I,” “you,” and “a person” of the three earlier strophes:

We were meant to crossover dress without the joke of a mirror
that plays us as stationary and permanent.
The effect of a next apocalypse has us on sofas nightly
whispering to our fetal inner ears we’re privately
perfectly satisfied in spite
of the restless legs and finger aches that brought the body here.
This love and hole are inaccurately reconcilable, initially forever. (30)

The phrase “crossover dress” presents a particular social choice while simultaneously including a very legible trace of its opposite. If “we were meant” to cater to a majority to gain popularity, “we” could also defy mainstream authority with sartorial gender-bending. However, haven’t mass media and consumer culture already contextualized cross-dressing in ways that make it “cross over” into normative cultural institutions, where oppositional possibilities are blunted? And doesn’t “the joke of a mirror”—the kind planted by major cultural advertising to stabilize parameters of self-image, as well as to install a permanent lack—ride roughshod over the idea that “we” can construct our individual images as provisional “stands,” subject to continual transformation? Even if “we were” not “meant” to be “play[ed] as stationary and permanent,” we are coaxed to perform critical surveillance on ourselves to develop a fixed self-image that is then presented to the world for consumption.

Whether the “next apocalypse” is a personal, interpersonal, or political crisis, it is debilitating enough that people may not want to take on the added burden of admitting to themselves that they are not “privately/ perfectly satisfied.” However, sexual “restlessness” becomes a symptom that is hard to ignore. King’s concluding line places her two slipperiest signifiers, “love” and “hole,” each of whose different possible meanings can be regarded as “inaccurately reconcilable,” into the possibility of a reconciliation that lacks accuracy (“truth” transcending “fictions” of self- and other-fashioning) but, at least sometimes, “it must give pleasure,” to re-cite Wallace Stevens. The near oxymoron “initially forever” elegantly represents both the spontaneity and repetitive character of the drive toward overcoming the disjunction between the imagined signifieds of these quirky signifiers, as well as giving a sense of the dawning of inaccuracy’s negative truth. And the poem has fulfilled its promise of telling the reader “How to Get to Here” by getting her/him sufficiently lost, since “here” is a “place” of active speculation.

*****

Thomas Fink, Professor of English at CUNY-LaGuardia, has authored 4 books of poetry, including NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY (Moria, 2006) and 2 books of criticism, including A DIFFERENT SENSE OF POWER (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001). He is also co-editor, with Joseph Lease, of the forthcoming, BURNING INTERIORS: DAVID SHAPIRO'S POETRY AND POETICS (Fairleigh Dickinson UP). His paintings hang in various collections.

A SLICE OF CHERRY PIE Edited by IVY ALVAREZ

2007-05-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

LISA FACTORA-BORCHERS Reviews

A Slice of Cherry Pie: A poetry chapbook anthology inspired by David Lynch's Twin Peaks series Edited by Ivy Alvarez
(The Private Press, U.K. and Half Empty/Half Full, U.S., 2006)

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” This question, alongside the unforgettable picture of the vanished homecoming queen has elicited a collection of poems that explore the mystery, oddities, and fascination with a cancelled 1990s television show. In A Slice of Cherry Pie, Ivy Alvarez edits a combined work effort that yields just as many unanswerable and eerie rhythms as the show itself.

Unless somewhat familiar with the Twin Peaks culture, readers may find some slices of pie lead to mystified appreciation, as if trying to complete a connect-the-dots puzzle when it feels like some of the dots are invisible. Each author is a master observer and each work is a grateful tribute to the lingering memory of inspiring fiction while ushering readers to recall their own haunting lives and memories.

The Twin Peaks connoisseur will easily fall back into the stilling forest, as Maureen Thorson writes in “Sayonara, Cherry Pie”

We know where we are. Gumshoes. A noir.
Time’s lost; there are mountains-an endless,
Evergreen forest. Deep woods here. It’s true,
Isn’t it, that you can enjoy the style

Of a situation, even when the situation is grim.

Alvarez edits a deep chorus, stringing up our recollections of townies we used to know, characters from our own lives we remember from our own past. Sometimes we grieve in remembrance and sometimes we breathe relief. Readers are taken through the troubled portrayal of Siobhan Logan’s “Traffic Light Girls.”

Oh those luminous Lynch girls
those troubled six and seventeens
even stabbed and drowned
and smashed and blown
to smithereens

Emilie Zoey Baker’s no-title enigma begins with staccato depictions in a high school yearbook style that sketches each major Twin Peaks character. Using flowing euphemisms and clever antics for her favorites, Baker recalls the boy, “who never stopped having nightmares,” and the fallen queen’s name that must be deciphered with a mirror. Similar to high school, the reader will remember the adolescent regret,

Why didn’t the angels tell you he was spooning you the whole time?

to the romantic observances,

You are the bobby pin in your true love’s hair.

The poems are piercingly vivid. My two favorite images come from the emotionally brittle, “Haikai-No-Renga for Diane” by Andrew Wilson

Plastic chrysalis
unraveling by the lake-
stillborn butterfly

and Eileen Tabios’ “;The Collapse of the Last Log.”

; the sunray sears the stallion
; a car fender sears her thigh
; implode

There are parts of the collection that swing away from the lovely particles of memory to strike a much different tone. From the cautionary last stanza of Jilly Dybka’s “The Log Lady’s Log Whispers to Her”

My log does not judge. It can only proclaim.
Don’t close your eyes or you will burst into flame.

Original. Ghostly. A vertically-written piece, Elena Knox accompanies “Palinpoem for Pete’s Sake” with a black and white photo of a perfectly shaped, empty staircase with one word imprinted on each ethereal step:

yes
says
Cherry
but
nobody
loves
caffeine
like
her
teases
mercilessly
and
corners
quick
cuts
bloodflow
down
stream
rapids
now
right

It is the simple yet profound symbolism of both poetry and mystery that lures us deeper. Two pieces are magnified by its cavernous insight. As life can be gentle and delicate, as is Maike Zock’s, “Life’s Little Secret.”

As the blue rose buds
Mysteries of life unfold
Pinned on a red dress

With a theme of attentive self-analysis, Daniel Lloyd’s writes (untitled)

I feel like a wild person
Trapped inside a quiet person
How frustrating for us both.

Seductive, with eccentric bread crumb trails that lead into the deep green of Twin Peaks, readers will be twisted, wondering, brow-wrinkled and pondering, yet again, what makes the peculiar characters and their stories so compelling. With its sharp imagery, clever and unbounded nature, this collection reads almost philosophical, directing its unconventional arrows to the unexplainable and the maybes of life. Collin Kelley’s, “Sometimes Her Arms Bend Back,” captures this.

Maybe we are both dead, maybe
Twenty-five years is really just a blink,
Fades like the taste of my favorite gum.

When finished, I contemplated how to summarize this evoking. The second sentence of the final poem, “Diane Dreams of Dale’s Voice” by Jared Leising best describes my experience:

It struck me again earlier this morning…the cherry pie is worth a stop.

*****

Lisa Factora-Borchers is writer and f(p)eminist activist. She has moved 10 times in the past ten years and has finally agreed to settle in Boston with her life partner for the next five years. Lisa reviews independent manuscripts and is a contributing writer for the Feminist Review and her work has been published in Fragments.

FLOWERS OF BAD: A FALSE TRANSLATION OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE'S LES FLEURS DU MAL by DAVID CAMERON

2007-05-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

ALEXANDER DICKOW Reviews

Flowers of Bad: A False Translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal by David Cameron
(Unbelievable Alligator/Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007)

Flowers of Bad: A False Translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. How could I not review a book with such a title? As a transgressive “translator,” the lopsided splendor (the highest and perhaps the only form of splendor, in my view) of David Cameron’s title instantly, how do you say, carried off my adhesion. As a bilingual poet in French and English, how could I not relish the idea of seeing Baudelaire’s excessively revered poetic monument deflated (although something tells me Charles would join in the fun without a second thought)?

My very high expectations, as one might expect, were at once disappointed and fulfilled: I did not necessarily find what I imagined, nor always what I desired, but I did find a good deal worth talking about, and as a poet, worth talking to (poetry being a kind of conversation).

***

As is unfortunately often the case, in my experience, with “experimental translation”(1) —if not experimental writing in general—the processes David Cameron used to produce his false translations are sometimes as compelling as the resulting poems (which does not necessarily mean uncompelling). Cameron describes these processes in his afterword, which recounts the hilarious story behind the creation of Flowers of Bad, meanwhile rendering homage to Cameron’s former teacher, dedicatee and admired model Jackson Mac Low.

Because of Cameron’s faulty (as he himself admits) French, many of these translation processes are automatic in nature: that is, undertaken according to predetermined “rules” à la Oulipo,—such as Cameron’s anagrammatic transformations of Baudelaire’s poems (notably the virtuosic “A.M. Sequel,” which purportedly took Cameron three-and-a-half months to create)—or according to the word-associations sparked by partially understood or opaque French words (according to their sound, spelling or meaning). In both cases, the poet as conscious composer is somewhat removed from the equation. The results, too often for my taste, tend to resemble Tristan Tzara’s more or less random word-jumbles. For example, Cameron’s “Two Good Sisters” translation method yields the following stanza:

Knock hard on your view the object                symptomatic of farmers of livestock
               This morning in a boat the quarry.
The water tower after the sentry’s watch ended, his fly undone and quail
               eggs falling forward
               On the blazing wheat fields                or some blue
(“Une Charogne”)

Cameron explains that the “Two Good Sisters” technique was developed somewhat late in the game (he presents his methods in the order in which they were “discovered”), and the reader’s eventual fatigue with these kinds of dadaist nonsense-poems perhaps reflects the fatigue Cameron admits he felt towards the end of the Flowers of Bad project (see Afterword, 211). On the other hand, those who have actually read all of Baudelaire’s original Fleurs from cover to cover may find it difficult to hold Cameron’s impatience against him—having themselves lived through the ennui of reading Baudelaire’s poem over and over again. (Think you can’t relate?...Remember reading Leaves of Grass all the way through? Yeah, like that bad, man). In any event, fans of real Surrealist poetry, however, will not find aleatory word-music bothersome, and even Surrealism’s harshest critics will admit that automatic writing techniques create the occasional miracle, so that the game is worth the candle, shall we say. For instance, one of Cameron’s freer compositions leads to this amazing tour-de-farce:

Cowards! Chimpanzees each interview
Bluffing fell-out crash investigators
Over soups. Whores matching grasslands
With thuggery, lisp astride me as gulls pass!
(“L’Irrémédiable”)

***

A “false” translation which advertises itself as such immediately begs the question of how we should approach it. Does it stand alone as an entirely original work? Or should we compare the mistranslation to the original, in effect measuring its distortion (parodic or otherwise)? The jury’s permanently out on the matter, of course. As a single member of this very large jury (although soon to be struck from the roster, perhaps), I felt divided myself concerning David Cameron’s work: on the one hand, the examples above already demonstrate that these poems bear a greater resemblance to just about anything post-Tzara, than they do to Baudelaire’s rigidly disciplined classicism. The contrast would suggest that Cameron’s poems should be read on their own terms, without reference to Baudelaire. On the other hand, as a reader familiar (i.e., to the point of nausea) with good old Chuck, I couldn’t help but find myself most attracted to those pieces which engaged in more direct forms of parody, or which somehow resembled or responded to the Fleurs. My favorite of these is another nonsense-poem, one of the most striking in Cameron’s collection, developed by replacing the words of Baudelaire’s poem with a set of predetermined words, according to matching initial letters and grammatical function:

Below the embers, below the ventilators,
Medications, backgrounds, naiads, medications,
Beyond the salamander, beyond the embers,
Beyond the checkrooms of existential salamanders,

My ember, you mirror with accomplishment...
(“Ember”)

By preserving Baudelaire’s tightly controlled syntax and the French language’s high concentration of latinate words (ventilator, existential...), Cameron has produced a poem that sounds exactly like Baudelaire. Likewise, Cameron’s limited predetermined lexicon results in symmetrical repetitions that perfectly mimic Baudelaire’s own obnoxiously tiny lexicon.

Results like these produced enormous hysterical laughter chez moi. Revisiting old favorites or tired-out anthology pieces, I was pleased to discover such familiar incipits as “Je suis la pipe d’un auteur” (= “I am the pipe of an author”) rendered in equally Freudian terms as “I am the exhaust pipe of my mother’s car” (“The Pipe”). I eventually realized Cameron’s prunetree corresponded to the Baudelairian prunelle (=pupil—of the eye), and that bells had a strange tendency to involve very attractive women (and in Baudelaire’s poetry, that makes for more of a din than Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells”) (see “Beauty”). Oh, and Death happens to be a guy named Mort—short for Mortimer (“Le Voyage”). Though not aimed at Baudelaire per se, I also welcomed Cameron’s occasional mockery of the French language, for instance in this silly stanza:

If you go Madame, to a true country of gloire
‘Neath the docks on the Seine, or by the green Loire
Doorbells will ding in the stately manoirs.
(“A Woman Cried Olé,” author’s italics)

Cameron’s burlesqued version, while above all comic in intention, has the merit of pointing out how stylized and conservative were Baudelaire’s poetics. As Cameron’s ornate-sounding French rhyme suggests, Baudelaire indeed prefers a stylized, “poetic” language, a tediously “noble” poetic diction (even when treating so-called “modern” themes, often already exploited by earlier French Romantics). David Cameron, in fact, does a much better job than Baudelaire of infusing Les Fleurs du Mal with the ruckus and dirt of urban life:

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city
Changes too quickly, I have broken another heel getting drunk in a motel) [...].
(“The Swan”)

Breaking a heel on the way home, not to mention the Laundromat addressed in the same poem, are a far cry from Baudelaire’s tiresome, mythologized Prostitutes. Cameron doesn’t neglect these either, but not without thoroughly deflating Baudelaire’s misogyny, revealing it at last as thoroughly trashy:

You put the universe under your thumb
You bitch! The mood has been torn apart by your cruel donuts.
[.....]
-- From you, vile animal, fall the wages of tragedy!

What big teeth you have! How subtle your idiocy!
(“XXV”)

To conclude: David Cameron deflates or critiques Baudelaire’s misogyny, his Romantic bad taste, his rigid classicism and his boring lexical palette. In short: David Cameron improves Baudelaire.

***

And on their own terms, without reference to Baudelaire and his weaknesses? Well...aside from the aforementioned excesses of Surrealist automatic writing, David Cameron is funny, as must already be clear from the above examples. The subtitle of “Don Juan in Furs,” an allusion to the translator’s frustrations, had me literally in tears:

(what the fuck is mugissement?)

(The answer is almost as funny as the question: it literally means mooing, but is sometimes used in reference to the sound of the ocean.)

***

In homage to David Cameron’s noble enterprise, I offer him, in closing, my own false translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Brise Marine,” translated using a flexible variant on my “Thesaurus Method.”

Maritime Waft

The chair is sad, alas! and I’ve interpreted all the lingerie catalogues.
To leak! To leak off that-a-way! I can smell that the birds are shit-faced
Among the unidentified spew and the upper atmosphere!
Nothing, not even elderly gardens reflected in eyeballs
Will hamper this heart skinny-dipping in the sea,
Oh nights, neither the unoccupied intelligibility of my machine-gun
Across the vacuous term-paper defended by pastyness,
Nor the juvenile spouse suckling her toddler.
I’m getting outta here! Oh clam rejecting your mast,
Erect your anchor for a foreign temperament!
One last Boredom, upset by bloodthirsty expectations,
Still believes in the supremacy of hankerchiefs’ goodbyes!
And, perhaps, the mast inviting storms for dinner
Is like those that a fart wilts on shipwrecked vessels,
Fallen, mastless, mastless and bereft of juicy islets...
Yet, oh my heart, comprehend the pirates’ sea-chantey!

+++++
Footnote 1: The terms for translinguistic writing practices are as infinite in number as they are inadequate to describe the vast diversity of practices involved. This diversity cannot be subsumed under any single term.

*****

Alexander Dickow writes poetry in French and English, which has been published in journals such as Sitaudis, Il Particolare, RealPoetik and MiPOesias. He maintains a blog called Voix Off, and is working towards his PhD in French at Rutgers University. He also grew up in Idaho.

WALKING THEORY by STEPHEN VINCENT

2007-05-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

WALKING THEORY by Stephen Vincent
(Junction Press, New York, 2007)

After reading the first poem, I didn’t anticipate that I would become so charmed by this book. The first poem—certainly along with the title WALKING THEORY—suggests this collection is a series of poems related to a poet’s walks, which is fine, but I initially found it hard to care where he paced. Here is the first poem

Left house at 21st near Dolores, up 21st across Church up to Sanchez, on to a right on Noe, a short left on Liberty, met Andrew at his house, walk back up Noe, a right down 21st across Castro and up over Colllingwood and west down across to Diamond, a slight jog over to and west on up 21st, right and north on up to Douglass, left up Roma, west across Market pedestrian over pass on to Corbett, right down and north up Clayton to a left down Carmel to a left up Schrader to a right on Belgrave, west across Stanyan to dead end at Sutro Forest, the trail up west, slightly south back on to Clarendon down to Laguna Honda, flat north on to 7th, left on Kirkham, right on 8th, left on Judah, west gradually on down out past 43rd to touch the beach, cross back over to Fulton, take the McAllister bus east to Shrader, one block across to Hayes, turn east to Clayton, south across the Park Panhandle, across and east on Oak to Ashbury, south and up to Haight, east down to Divisadero, up and south to Lloyd, east down to Scott, one block up to Duboce, west up Castro, south to Castro to Market and up to Liberty, east up to Andrew’s house, further up the Liberty steps, slightly down to a right on Sanchez, south up to the 21st, and east, straight down across Church, and Chattanooga to my house near Dolores.

But, immediately, with the second, third, fourth…poems, Vincent fleshes out what occurs between the lines, the ruminations between his steps. The poems show that he walks as much through his mental landscape as San Francisco and other terrains…and I’m drawn in viz an effect that while, gentle, is compulsive. The second poem, “Elegy in Red,” starts

Grieve in the morning
Grieve in the afternoon.
Grieve, Grieve.

Your mother. Your father.
Your friend. Your lover. The brother,
sister, son and daughter.

Unto the fourth day, unto the fifth,
upon the waters. Upon the night. Upon the day.
Grieve

The third poem, “Elegy’s Laundry” starts

Angus nearby, near gone,
tender as the molted skin.

The royals are out,
wings lavender, blue and maroon.

Tight on the lower line,
sweat pants, tights, t-shirts & halters.

The royals are out,
Angus.

*

The bridge to light.

*

The grooved roof.
The green-whorled plant
Wind, stroke, water.

A molting we will go,
A molting we will go,
Earth & Sea,
Flower & tree.

*

God is a set of trees.

In each of these poems, the beginnings are compelling—continuing that “Let’s just go” momentum (a line from the fourth poem “A Walk to Limantour Beach”). Would that be the “theory” part of WORKING THEORY?

Undoubtedly, what contributes to these poems’ forward-momentum is Vincent’s mastery of the line-break—I am encouraged to pause where he breaks and such deepens my consideration of the lines.

Fittingly, since these poems are in the Section titled Walking Elegy, the poems also are propelled by a voice very conscious of others’—thus, his own—mortality. The search for meaning is tinged with losses and anticipation of more losses. Here’s how the fifth poem starts:

Walk from home to 24th—coffee & scone—
               to walk with
up 24th to Diamond to Romero cross
Market to Rooftop down Corbett,
up Clayton, up the Pemberton Steps
to Twin Peaks Drive, up steps to Tank Hill:
               Pink Triangle
            Pink Cunt
The canvas floats suspended,
               down Twin Peaks
transparent, unveiled under barely lifted, thin gray fog,
            Gay Pride weekend in the city
Don’t they know my father’s dead
and I am risen to look over the bay
               over the city?

The above excerpt is also the last poem to the first of the two books’ section. The poem and section closes well and movingly with

The poet’s widow in a lemon top,
A little pigeon-toed,
wanders these hills variously,
smiles rhythmically at each passerby,
perpetually, it appears, wounded and alone.
I know the woman from long ago
but can’t bring myself to say hello.

Home to Sandy’s garden, open roses,
apricot, white and yellow,
the flowers I can never fully name.
Absence is presence,
father, gradually, an unfolding flame.

++

Section II is comprised of a long poem “Walking Theory.” Here we see that my earlier question of “Let’s just go” as the “theory” is simplistic. “Walking Theory” shares a multiplicity of theories, including but not limited to

1) Driven out to walk. No Kingdom, look closely. New Kingdom: looking.

and

2) “Walking is weaving. Feet, the pedals. Eye, the needle. Rhythm. Breath. Rhythm. Word. Image. Thought. Erase. Twine. Word. Image. Rhythm. Pedal. Twine. Eye. Pedal. Woven. Thought. Erase. Continue.

And the third part begins

3) Empathy…

Empathy is key. The landscape isn’t just interpreted for use in a poem. The terrain also is respected, and the poet’s eye acknowledges it, as it is, into poetry:

Morning Graffiti on the Trolley Causeway
Between Liberty and 20th:

               Socialist Health Care
                              Please!!

                                             *

               FUCK YOUR JOB

                                             *

               Don’t Hold Grudges

Indeed, after the above excerpt, I returned to the first poem of the book and with which I began this review—I feel a poignancy there now where, once, I felt indifference. I feel now the significance of the poem starting and ending with the same point: the poet’s Home. A metaphor, say, for how a person can go out into the world and search for something that’s always been within herself.

These poems heighten the reader’s keenness of observation. WALKING THEORY is one of those works that can shift the reader’s mindset to view the world in a different (hopefully more lucid) way. For me, my experience with walks can now be divided into two: before and after reading this book. And the thing with attentiveness is that you’ll often notice things you might miss before having witnessed how someone else can do it—walking, observation, rumination—so well.

And so this book evokes a walk I once took in San Francisco, a city I still don’t know that well so that I don’t remember the street. There was a used bookstore on that street and I entered. I walked through its bookshelves and among the volumes on them, then picked up a few to accompany me home.

Before the cash register, as I waited for the cashier to ring up my acquired publications, I noticed a lovely poem on a card (or small broadside) beneath the counter’s glass. I enjoyed reading the poem, and said so to the cashier, who, smiling, then identified himself as its author.

Later, since he said he’d welcome them, I sent him a couple of my poetry books. He would come to follow up with an e-mail requesting to read some of my poems on some radio show (whose territory, I think, covered Marin County). I never heard the radio broadcast, but I believe the poems were read with some collaborative mix involving jazz.

I didn’t think of this incident again until I read WALKING THEORY, because I remembered the name of the poet behind the cash register as soon as I saw his name in the book’s list of “Other Books by Stephen Vincent” facing the title page. The list includes “Five on the Western Edge, with Beau Beausoleil, Steve Brooks, Hilton Obenzinger, and Larry Felson (San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1977)”.

Beau Beausoleil. Isn’t that a lovely name--how could I have forgotten it? Beau Beausoleil is the poet I encountered in that walk years ago. I didn’t know who he was and still don’t. But, now I know that Vincent, in some fashion, has kept company with this generous stranger. Which is to say, beyond my personal example, WALKING THEORY lifts terrain to the page, which reciprocates by bringing the reader back to the actual landscapes of the world. If a drawing, this book could be a gesture-laden enso. A glorious circling and circle.

Last but not least, WALKING THEORY leaves me ... so happy! Well, what a gift! And why not simply conclude as a “critical” response that a book leaves one happy? After all, Vincent’s “Walking Theory” also posits:

“In an odd country go intimate”

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...

ORIGINAL GREEN by PATRICIA CARLIN

2007-05-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

CELIA HOMESLEY Reviews

Original Green by Patricia Carlin
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2003)

Patricia Carlin’s book of poetry, Original Green, is an impressive collection. Her confident voice delivers poems rich with wisdom, insight, cleverness, tenacity, beauty, and strength. Her subjects range from the everyday, as in “My Mother in Winter” and “Long Marriage” to the mythological, as in “Orpheus Scattered” and “Persephone Returning” to the philosophical, as in “The Book of Nature” and “Ontology.” Whatever she writes about, it is clear that she has studied it thoroughly, knows it well.

Carlin’s ability to describe subjects in clear, nearly stark detail, combined with her enjambed lines (in many of her poems), create an effect of falling through the poem, a rush of naked, vivid images, as in this passage from “Tracking the Long River”:

. . . Half in the current,
a scythe-billed crane

stabs through the surface. Impaled,
jerking, an orange frog
flickers, tongue-like, lucent.

The crane shimmers.
Sometimes I think what lives,
lives to give pain.

Though a more lyrical poem, and one from the perspective of a mythological character, the same effect takes place in “Persephone Returning.” Here is one brief passage to illustrate:

I’m a girl
again. Grass brushes my bare legs
when he takes me down,
breath hot
as the vent he comes out of.

In intense, sensual poems like these, the reader cannot pause or look away. It is like witnessing a suspenseful scene in a movie, eyes glued to the screen.

Some of her poems function in almost opposite fashion. They move more slowly and methodically, with less intense language, and longer lines, and the power of the poem seems to come from the accumulation of images and insightful reflections, which, in all their wisdom, teach us something important. However, like in all good poetry, one can’t necessarily articulate what has been taught. One has time to pause and reflect throughout such a piece. A good example is “On Looking at a River in Ulster County, N.Y.” Each short stanza describes one aspect of the river from a different perspective. For example:

It is not
the same river
Heraclitus could not step in twice.

Clattering over rapids it reflects nothing.

In winter sharp ice broke off at the rapids.
The glint of sun on ice stabbed through closed
eyelids.

How exact the river is.
To describe it,
even the smallest piece of it,
would require a different page minute by minute.

The river remembers nothing,
not the ice, or the summer sunlight.

The experience of this poem is a Zen one, as if the reader had just savored a poem from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.

Carlin’s opening poem, "The Box Turtle” is told in a similar fashion, though the poem’s ending seems to “turn the poem on its head,” using a kind of psychology on the reader, entreating us to consider the nature of the turtle’s existence, of our own existence, and of poetry. One must then continue to reread the poem in order to further extract its kernel of meaning.

It is difficult to describe the way in which Carlin’s poems force us to contemplate. Perhaps Phillis Levin comes close, when she says of her work, “”Doors keep opening, even in the most unlikely spaces, and the rooms they lead to alter our entire perception of the place we thought we had entered.”

In several of her poems, Carlin asks us to consider conceptions of reality, and to contemplate our relationship to nature. Her poem “The Book of Nature” somewhat humorously offers both “Old World Strategies” and “New World Strategies” with which to consider nature.

Here are her “Old World Strategies:”

Plato goes spelunking. Bishop Berkeley
follows him. Plato turns to Berkeley with a cool,
superior smile,
gesturing toward the shadows. The Bishop kicks a
stalagmite.”

In "Ontology," she begins by telling us, “Things are what they are,” and ends with “The world is a mouth opening into silence.”

These poems ask us to pry the doors of our realities open, to consider the mysteries there.

It is not just the individual poems, but also the collection itself that continues to surprise. Carlin utilizes a wide variety of poetic techniques, styles, and forms, (including the Ghazal) to keep the reader intrigued and guessing as we journey through the pages. In this respect, she is playful, and breaks new territory, for example, in her poem “Revision,” in which the first six lines are literally crossed out.

Throughout the collection, her ability to shift from narrative to lyrical, literal to abstract, continues to impress. Consider the different experience of these two poems, passages below:

The Box Turtle
can live for up to a hundred years.
Unless the water dries up or the land is cleared
he will spend that hundred years
In the same square-mile patch of woodland.
-from “The Box Turtle”

All around
a river of noise is flowing through silence.
The grass
is dripping with wild white
trumpet-shaped flowers.
Lie down.
Be a body in the body of grass.
-from “The Body of Grass Doesn’t Speak, Doesn’t Listen

And throughout these varied pieces, Carlin often paints with light, stunning the reader with depictions of sunrise, in this case:

Pale lemon and rose thicken,
arrows of light shoot upward.
The days are like water,
visible only by what moves through them

lemon-colored, blazing,
light of the sun rising
over rings of water . . .
-from "Aubade"

Or of sunset, in this case:

“ . . . Clouds, pushing down on the sky,
catch and intensify the last light, focus it like a
magnifying glass
so the yellow and copper leaves burst into fire.”
-from "Landscape with One Bridge"

And many of Carlin’s poems are treatises on the female experience. We experience the world through the eyes of characters such as Persephone, Circe, Madama Butterfly, and the narrator herself. As a woman, I found her poem, “In the Shadow of the Parthenon” which uses repetition effectively to highlight the emptiness of girlhood/womanhood, quite moving. Its emotional impact is that of the song “Lonely Girls” by Lucinda Williams. Here is an excerpt:

. . . A girl can be a wave,
a white
wave breaking
on a distant shore. A girl
can be nothing.

Nothing returns as itself.
Wavering
girls
leave their white
bodies.

They are broken into mothers,
mothers are broken into nothing,
into wave after wave
of white
girls . . .

“Original Green’s” introductory quote by Heraclitus, “If they are gods, why do you grieve? If you grieve, no longer think them gods.” is an ideal framework within which to consider, and reconsider the many themes and the accumulated wisdom that governs this masterful book.

*****

Celia Homesley has lived most of her life in Northern California. She earned her MFA at San Francisco State University, and she has taught English/Creative Writing at a myriad of colleges, most recently Humboldt State University. She is the author of Body of Crimson Leaves through Backwaters Press, and she lives in Arcata, CA with her husband and son.

THE IMMACULATE AUTOPSY by TODD MELICKER

2007-05-23T21:00:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

the immaculate autopsy by Todd Melicker, with illustrations by Jason Buchholz
(Achiote Press, Spring 2007)

Birthed from the tip of a thorn .. The vagina lurks within the pear ... Sutured with steel nails ... Feeling your way to map the robot’s anatomy ... The lung labors en compas with the laboring heart ... The bird atop the electrical wire is plastic but what is seen from the highway is bird squatting in full equanimity

The above is a phrase-cloud that came to mind as I read through—I want to say, leaf-ed through—the immaculate autopsy, an elegant eight-part poem by Todd Melicker with illustrations by Jason Buchholz.

I suspect that my phrase-cloud has seeded a new poem. That birth-ing testifies to the deceptive power of the immaculate autopsy. Deceptive, I think, because the words seem to drip across and down the pages—a manner which belies the many layers of the work, not the least of which is an implied density of research, e.g. perhaps into biology, religion and botany. I use the notion of “drips” partly because of the fragmentary nature of the text, and how the words are placed against the page as if the poet deliberately dripped the words into their positions. There is much indentation and caesuras as the poem unfolds.

The effect of the poem deepens, however, not due to its surface but, because of epistemological effects:

numbers & fruit commence
on the fingers
we’re gathered & dis-
persed. Calcium builds a house
& eats it

Or, savor this:

all cathedrals are cavities: the intimate
pharmacy of blood: the hrt moves
against gravity, like a cicada

I assume that my reading is affected by knowing that the immaculate autopsy is one of two inaugural, concurrent publications by Craig Perez’s brand spankin’ new Achiote Press—an effect that encourages me to consider this chap to be the press’ first seed. A seed for Achiote Press’ growth. But also a seed as facilitated by the truncation of many words, e.g. “lves” and “hnd”. Thus, the poem blossoms to maturity only if the reader reads the words as not mere sound-pronunciations but notions to be invested into meanings such as, respectively, “lives” or “loves” and “hand.”

“Hrt”, which is used several times, is particularly effective as it raises the question: “heart” or “hurt”?—

motion of two spoken, one thing we have heard:
‘in our chst, the mary. in her chst, the chrst. in his
chst, the hrt. in the hrt, a thorn with a halo.

Thus, it seems apt that I respond to the work with the beginning of one of my own poems. I believe the power of art can be shown in its ability to inspire new art. To seed.

And the immaculate autopsy seeds new work also simply because of resonant language:

the offering carried to the
bone, the body of the bone. a numerous
splendor, we form the arch
inside the neck, lying on the voice
box; we sleep as slender
vowels.

the nerve is to be sought for,
as it leaves the muscle

                              division @ exit.

                              the remainder
                                             ascend

“immaculate”, of course, can’t help but hearken the immaculate conception of the Christian Mary, daughter of and mother of God:

mary tilts her head, the long
neck of heaven, the black
kisses pull back the skin : we’re
only our an(atomy. the cut stem
h(ours ascend, to which give
branches : all arteries as offerings : the sorrowful
neck of mary

So this poem may autopsy, too, Mary whose inner life as the virgin mother of Jesus Christ—hearkened in the poem as “chrst”—can only be imagined. The required exercise of our (reader’s) imagination befits the truncated words. About Mary’s true feelings versus that ascribed to her by a religion’s priests, any conclusion is inherently incomplete. Just as meaning, already inherently in flux, is destabilized even more by incomplete spellings:

a woman is a paper doll,
punched from foliage & light
we’ve touched her hnds for
help so many times they crumbl

And just as the words “crumbl”, so do the images presented by Buchholz. The images don’t so much illustrate as facilitate the poem’s search. These reproductions of ink drawings are not abstract but neither are these shapes fixed-ly recognizable. An example is what looks like an upside-down “Y” but whose shape implies a human body which, in turn, looks to be holding up some sort of flower whose long stem makes it almost as tall as the human. But all of the deftly-drawn images, not withstanding or perhaps due to their mysteries, are powerful in that they make the viewer wish to define what they are seeing—which is to say, they draw in the viewer, engage the viewer, and even haunt the viewer.

Haunting, in fact, is a good way to summarize both text and images. With this lush and fertile the immaculate autopsy, Achiote Press is off to a great start in manifesting its vision, as partly articulated by how the press was named: “the achiote plant represents the unrepresentable: the transnational, migratory, adaptive.” The press’ vision statement continues—in an articulation that can be used to summarize as well the particular impact of the immaculate autopsy:

Achiote press asks what it means to bear witness, to use adaptation as resistance, to cross borders, to map ourselves onto a dislocated world, to speak in exile, to suffer diasporic hunger and to make art in windburned, local fields of perception. The journal is named by the”

Yes, the press statement ends there…deliberately and organically incomplete.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...

2 BOOKS by ANSELM HOLLO

2007-05-22T20:55:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews:

Braided River: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 by Anselm Hollo
(Salt, 2005)

and

Guests of Space by Anselm Hollo
(Coffee House Press, 2007)

1.

A few years ago, when Anselm Hollo experienced some heart problems, I sent him the following letter:

Yesterday, while visiting Tom Raworth’s web site, I saw that you have suffered a health crisis. It seems possible you might stand some cheering up, and that a gushy fan letter might do the trick.

In the late 60s I was still in my teens. A sequence of events too tedious to rehearse here brought me to what Anne Waldman has called a vow to poetry (little did I know how completely great and crazy would be the consequences …). I showed my early poems to Jack Shoemaker, who at the time worked at Serendipity Books (my father was a book collector; that was my in). Jack’s words: you haven’t read much, have you? Here’s some Pound, here’s some Olson … I walked out of the shop with your The Coherences.

That was the beginning of a lifelong Hollo-habit. Its latest manifestation: just last week we were in San Francisco. While in the poetry room at City Lights, I came across your translation of Saarikoski’s Trilogy, which of course I had to have. In addition, while I was deciding whether to pick up some Andrew Schelling (whose name I’ve known but whose work I haven’t read) I saw a quote from you on the back of his Old Growth, which swayed me towards purchase.

O, you have much for which to answer …

It’s undoubtedly true that I have internalized aspects of your poetics (as I’ve under- and misunderstood and twisted them) and brought them over into my own work. But every so often my debt rises to the surface where I’m conscious of it. I will take advantage of your current state to force one poem upon you, where the debt (and homage) is explicit:

[Dear reader of this review, I will not take advantage of your “present state” to force the poem on you … that would be really tacky, methinks … as it was probably tacky to force it on Hollo … but what’s done is done … ah, well …]

Thank you for everything, and best wishes for a speedy and full recovery.

Sincerely,

I start here so you will know that for better or worse I’m not exactly an unbiased observer.

2.

Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence: Selected Poems 1965-2000 appeared in 2001. Braided River: New and Selected Poems 1965-2005 appeared in 2005. You might wonder (I did) why the need for another selected so soon? Well, as best I can tell from a quick comparison of the tables of contents, these volumes only share one poem in common. So they should be considered complementary, rather than redundant.

I’m intrigued, though, by that one-poem overlap. The poem is called “The One”, and is from The Coherences (1968). Let’s take a look:

The One

               The one
long hair in my beard
                              this morning
makes me smile:
                                             it’s yours

In many ways, this is an archetypical Hollo poem. First, it’s written under the sign of Pound’s “Use no word that under stress of emotion you could not actually say.” Second, it’s a love poem. Love is another sign under which Hollo lives and writes, though it’s not always and often is not a Valentine’s Day kind of love. Love as I mean it here often means so damned glad -- so damned amazed -- to be alive, in spite of it all, because of it all. And that you are here, by my side. I should add that, though it’s not evident in this poem, said love is one side of a coin, the other being a righteous wrath that there are those among us so fucked up they’re willing to ruin life for the rest of us.

This is beginning to sound like a natal chart. So be it. Hollo: born (as “Anselm Hollo the Poet”, at least) under the signs of straight talk, love and wonder.

My notion that the straight talk, love and wonder aesthetic has been Hollo’s throughout his career is borne out by recent (2002) testimony: Tyler Doherty’s “Raven’s Revenge” (Hollo = raven in Hungarian; for reasons unbeknownst to Hollo, his grandfather adopted the name after “a family dispute” -- see his Corvus, 1995). The poem describes another poem of Doherty’s, in which “some raven flopping off / into the distance” carries “mountains / rivers / in [its] beak”, read aloud in one of Hollo’s Naropa workshops. Here’s how the poem ends:

                                             & Anselm who knows ravens
                              almost before I’d even finished the
               line had begun to rumble that

Subterranean Mutter-Chortle
his finely tuned Preciousness Detector

registering off the charts as he sd

                                                “Why don’t you just
                              have the raven carrying Gary Snyder’s
                                             Mountains and Rivers book in its beak?!”

(I don’t know whether “Raven’s Revenge” has been published separately, but I found it in The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry.)

3.

It’s not as if my sense that there’s archetypicality to this relatively early poem, and a lifelong commitment to a no bullshit aesthetic, blinds me to the evolution of Hollo’s work over the years. One of the great pleasures of an encounter with Braided River is what Eileen R. Tabios (yeah, that’s right, suck up to the editor …) has called the inevitable narrative arc. It’s always found in retrospect, of course, it’s not as if most poets plot an arc at age 20 and actually follow it out through the rest of their careers. It’s more a “so, it’s all come to this.” In any case, it’s interesting and poignant to observe. And it’s often a challenge to keep up with “the growth of a poet’s mind.”

In Braided River one can see Hollo’s poems lengthen, into spaces where more and more can happen, where there’s room. Room = space = time = “big-world (planetary) awareness”, said awareness more or less equal to the “human condition” as the existentialists used to say. Sometimes these spaces take the shape of sequences or serial poems.

At the same time one can see him take into account more and more of “the world”, one can also see his work respond to all, well, maybe not all, but many of “notes and possibilities” heard in the sonic and inscribed textual landscape around him. Rather than build my own airy castle called “Hollo’s Poetics”, I’ll let him speak in his own prose voice a minute. This is from an essay called “Oh Didn’t He Ramble” (Caws and Causeries, 1999):

On (my) personal bias -- important to declare -- it seems to me that I have always been (not unpleasantly) “torn” between

a) a poetry that is both transparent, or, if you wish, limpid, and intelligent, that seems to be “saying itself”: “My poetry is just talk” -- Ted Berrigan; that runs word-thought/word-feeling by me with economy and elegance, sometimes playing with different levels of available rhetoric, switching back and forth between them, and has some surprises in it the way good conversation does, often of a humorous nature -- and
b) the total Sargasso Sea of Signifiers, from Joyce to Stein to Bruce Andrews. I remember Ted telling me once that he cherished the works of his friends Aram Saroyan and Clark Coolidge “because they do my research for me.”

Saroyan and Coolidge do much more than that, of course, but every poet takes what s/he needs and leaves the rest. Here are three excerpts from “Fool’s Paradise” (No Complaints (1983)):

Watch it
go by

“Oil is an act of God”
“Come Home to America”

“You always laughed at these things
it took a little time                but you laughed”

Someone in movie                Some remarkable dreck
I step into, slip

“You’ve sublimated that into ‘oops-a-daisy’”

Dreaming, deprogramming then awake
convulsed with rage-mirth at suave golem-blather
chewed ends of blond-gray Fu Manchu
grown out of stoned middle-aged chin

Object speaks
Object has spoken

in irritable parentheses



In the great return engagements
between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
we’ll experience many surprises

As for the news, it’s still punched in and out
by obedient punks                I know, I was one
for almost a decade

Until one day on a very ordinary bus
suddenly deprived of impressions                I became aware
once more                Of the painful and weary
and tired of all sensational beauty tips tricks and freebies

It was the time of early to mid-period Rolling Stones
Their diction was excellent then                It was a help
as was Herbert Marcuse



There’s this Assyrian rite
survives in southern Italy:

a year after death,
you dig up bones

and take them home,
and polish them, and talk to them.

“Dear Aunt Maria,
“Dear Uncle Gesualdo” et cetera
All night, all day
you polish them, talk to them

then put them back
in the ground.

4.

Braided River concludes with two sections of previously uncollected poems. I read these later works as those of a poet become ruminative, touched to sighs if not to tears by the reality of mortality (his and so many of his friends’) and the impossible beauty of the “human condition” (though don’t think for a second he’s lost his “Preciousness Detector” or his good black humor), and the necessity for love in the face of it all. I see complete continuity with his youthful concerns. Here’s the last poem in the book. In some ways this can be read as another version of “The One”, 40 years on:

Remembering How Paul Blackburn Made Those Old Troubadours Sound

“Old age not for sissies” -- pas de question!
“May you stay
               forever young” -- a big fat lie. Pas de question.
“Don’t be so literal” (well, maybe he is
               that literal kind of poet. Perceval,
               if you wish, so dumb he seems brilliant).
Where were we. Ah, my lady, it is your birthday tomorrow
& I wish for you all the happiness humanly possible
               in this totally fucked-up world. I know,
                “fucked-up” is not polite parlance -- does,
               in fact, indicate an impoverishment of the author’s
               language -- yet
               I think, my lady, you will agree it is not
                              entirely inapposite, non? HOWever. It is,
has been, & one hopes, will be for a while longer
my incredible good fortune to share lives
               with you, My lady,
               & only the gods know what you, as they say,
                “get out of it”
but I do know that you are my Paradiso
(my secular paradiso: Oh, I’m SO secular!)
& that I can’t even begin to express my gratitude
               in any but this, the most private yet public way,
               mon amour
               who slept next to me in a narrow cot
               while I made my way back from the devastated
               yet deeply bewitching cities of the dead
                              through many a night.
               And in my conscious moments, my love for you
                              knew, & knows, no bounds, except for those
               prescribed by present, early twenty-first century,
                              impossibility
                                             to live
                                                            for ever
                                                                           with you

5.

In some ways Guests of Space continues Rue Wilson Monday, the longest section in Braided River, and some of the other late work collected there, in the sense that it too is “a hybrid of day book, informal sonnet sequence (though more “simultaneist” than chronological), and extended “laminated” essay-poem” (Rue Wilson Monday, 2000, “A Note”, not found in Braided River). I will lean on a couple back cover blurbs to explain what’s going on:

Death! Truth! Meaning of Life! / Love! Romanticism! Loss! Reality! Consciousness!

Please don’t miss the slash between life and love. That slash may not be everything … but then again …

Hollo … [invites] us into his conversation with poets and thinkers, both here and gone, on subjects that range from politics and philosophy to creativity and mortality.

When it comes to the “here and gone” in the context of these poems the emphasis has to be placed on the “gone”. That only makes sense, given that Hollo is now in his seventies. Hell, I’m only in my fifties and “Death!” and “Loss!” raise their ugly mugs way too frequently. Twenty years on, and … damn, I’ll be whimpering in my beer (or, more accurately, in my sparkling water, since I don’t drink anymore). This is one place where Hollo is certainly a better man than I, or, perhaps less ridiculously put, an inspiration. Though he’s feeling his mortality, there’s no sense of self-pity in any of these poems. Here’s the first:

Guten Tag Herr Schopenhauer Bonjour Monsieur Cioran
good morning Mr. Swift how are you Mr. Burroughs
once again history the unstoppable proves you right
species no better than smart rat (maybe not even as smart)
evolutionary leap? my foot, my foot in three-foot hole
but let all peaceful mutants leap for spring
calloo callay, while they still may --
watch it! don’t twist that ankle!
don’t step into that three-foot hole!
“and wisdom has not come” “against wisdom as such”
oh, it is apt to give a gopher tantrums!
anecdotal befuddlement, infinite terminators.
toujours a mountain eased a previous you;
should it feel easier, writing? I don’t think so. No.

From Rue Wilson Monday on, many of his poems have included footnotes. “Guten Tag …” is no exception:

“and wisdom has not come”: “Wisdom has not come, says Pollagoras. Speech keeps strangling itself, but wisdom has not come.”-- Henri Michaux, The Old Age of Pollagoras (trl. By Laura Wright). “against wisdom as such” -- Charles Olson, in Against Wisdom as Such, pp.260-264, Collected Prose: “I take it that wisdom, like style, is the man – that it is not inextricable in any sort of statement of itself …” “gopher tantrums” -- minor “Ghost Tantras.”

I take it that these footnotes … are the man, -- that they are not extricable …

The last poem in the book, for Harris Schiff:

Boots on a treadmill             “Do not lean on this wall
It is not secured to the floor”
Do not lean on this heart
It is not secured to the brain            Boots on a treadmill
Well, here comes another book of poems …
What are the findings? Boots on a treadmill
Stagger on yes bloody well stagger on
George Orwell’s four motives for writing:
Sheer Egotism            Aesthetic Enthusiasm            Historical Impulse
The desire to record things as they are
For posterity            & last but not least
Political Purpose -- the desire to push the world
In a certain direction
Stagger on yes bloody well stagger on

“Death! Truth! Meaning of Life! / Love! Romanticism! Loss! Reality! Consciousness!” To steal a bit from Bernadette Mayer, “Hoo! Hay!” What else do I want from poetry? I have been reading this man all my life. I plan to continue.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman’s most recent publication is OTAGES; a new chapbook from Bamboo Books, WORLD ZERO, is in press; and later this year, with any luck, NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING, a 200 pp. hay(na)ku, which in fact includes very few sounds of his own making, will be published by Leafe Press. Recently, he has begun to incorporate photos into his work, which certainly wasn't expected.

WATCHWORD by WILLIAM FULLER

2007-05-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

Watchword by William Fuller
(Flood Editions, Chicago, 2006)

In Watchword William Fuller takes us along the edges of the rational, of the conscious, of the real in a moment of exploration through language.

I omit your words
blending together just now
ecstasy of my writings
in gardens copied out
at seedtime
along the edge of shadows. (12)

“The edge of shadows” is an appropriate phrase for this collection as a whole. Fuller likes to explore edges, the spaces where things change into other things. Even his language mimics this exploration, for he shifts language patterns quickly, changing often in one poem from the language of the business world (“A more broadly based plan emerged / from a substantial increase in pressure”[38]) to more “traditional” poetic language—we could easily label this something like neo-Romanticism—(“deeply hung with woods / and arrows, Eros, in this [burnished] bag / with a black-capped chickadee”[44]). These shifts in language patterns seem like explorations themselves, but they also suggest to the reader the ways that language is a social creation connected through many various uses that we often do not acknowledge in poetry. It’s this acknowledgement in his poetry that laces it with social commentary on how ideology is embedded into our language and on how our language is transforming in the modern world. Take, for example, these lines from “Riding North,” an excellent poem which takes up the theme of exploring consciousness:

quickly the ship—
stands against reverence for authority
because not intelligible
a repetition of the forms of doubt
a hunting scene with warplanes on the roof. (42)

Beyond social commentary and exploring edges, Fuller’s language has a quiet and controlled aspect to it. The language, even as it changes, always seems appropriate to the poems. Unlike the work of many poets, there are no unfinished pieces in the book, even if the exploration is left open. Fuller’s hand is precise, and that precision is necessary for his close look at language, of its shifts and changes, but even though at times dense, his work does not stray away from the lyrical:

what I
could not say when confronted
with observed facts—there was once
a time—or subsidence of the future—
when the rational was pain
and everything nested inside it
no easy thing, but I could adjust to that. (61)

Most of Flood Editions books are incredibly good, and this book is no exception. Fuller’s work is engaging on a deep level like only the great works are. Watchword is definitely one of the best books that I have come across lately and is one that should be on any reader’s shelf.

*****

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, chapbooks, and books include In the Weaver’s Valley, The Vicious Bunny Translations, Ishmael Among the Bushes, Covering Over, Temporal Nomads, Lingo, and Ladders in July. His book Fragile Replacements is forthcoming in 2007 with Meritage Press.

BETWEEN THE ROOM AND THE CITY by ERICA BERNHEIM

2007-05-22T20:45:00.000-07:00

MONICA FAWN Reviews

Between the Room and the City by Erica Bernheim
(H_NGM_N Chapbook Series #4, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 2006)

A great one-liner is like a landing helicopter or a rolling horse--it clears a space for itself. When a line in a poem achieves a pithy truth, the rest of the poem seems to part around it. Wallace Steven's poetry, for instance, makes way for his epigrams by surrounding them with silence, or with lines that stylistically go an opposite direction. In Steven's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," the line "The death of one god is the death of all" is preceded by a line break and followed by a looser sentence that extends over three lines. This is just one example of one-liner etiquette in poetry. However a poet might manage it, the unspoken rule is that the more complex the idea, the more breathing room it warrants in the poem. This courtesy allows readers enough room to stroll around it, see it from all sides, and really figure it out.

Erica Bernheim's Between the Room and the City all but abandons this nicety. Bernheim's aphoristic lines are packed so tightly that there's no wiggle room for the reader to have a thought in-between. And the ideas themselves turn over so quickly--they're often negated or dropped by the next line--that it is unclear which ideas are purposely throwaway and which are central. While this quality might first read as a looseness or lack of control, the poems ultimately create the opposite effect. It's as if Bernstein is rushing us quickly past the poem before we can turn and gawk. The peripheral, half-formed impression seems to be her subject, and she makes certain that our experience of the poem matches. This passage from "Excuse Against Gravity" is one example:

Sleep is for those who need it.
The story I do not want to tell is here,
re-born, ragged, remiss, missing
people look for: they forgot there is no why.
There is no why. What ghost of who.
There is no ocean. There
is no more city. Nothing is missing that could swim.
The smell of guilt is overwhelming.

Sleep, guilt, stories, swimming--the reader watches each of these possible thematic footholds go under before they fully appear. Bernheim whizzes us past it all before we can truly tease out what a single one of these lines might mean. In some ways, this is an impressively intimate voice because it presumes an understanding without any need for the speaker to elaborate. It's like a mind talking to you in the way a mind talks to itself. Perhaps slowing down or elaborating would compromise the authenticity of these poems--when, if ever, is the mind slow or complete?

Such an approach asks a lot of readers, and it often pays off. Still, Bernheim's speakers are prepared to demand even more. In "Notes Left Behind for the Zookeeper," and several other poems, Bernheim uses the second-person address, rattling off obscure demands even the gamest of readers couldn't follow:

Do not ask me for anything
you'd want. Do not charm me
with your hint of rosemary, what that
meant once, and what it means
now is cold. Come to me exhausted
and missing another tooth; I will fashion
you something in a burlap pellet.

There is a great familiarity and trust in the speaker's confidence that we, or the "zookeeper" would understand this advice. Yet this sense of connection is undercut by the extreme specificity of the speaker's directions--the private language that keeps us out even as it assumes our sympathy.

Paradoxically, Bernheim's lack of regard for the reader--her tightly packed one-liners and inward language--is her way of keeping us close. Bernheim lets us in on a mind mid-thought, too absorbed to either universalize itself nor linger on its "good lines" Ultimately, the power of these poems might be in their ability to win our sympathy before our understanding. For the reader to understand completely, Bernheim seems to imply, the poems would have to compromise their inwardness, and thus their truth: "If you believed me,/I'd no longer be believable."

*****

Monica McFawn is a writer living in Michigan. She also trains dressage horses and teaches humanities. She moderates Litandart.com, a forum dedicated to tracking the state of both visual art and literature.

FORTY-FIVE by FRIEDA HUGHES

2007-05-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

Forty-Five by Frieda Hughes
(Harper Collins, New York, 2006)

Frieda Hughes' Forty-Five short-circuits itself. These poems should have been presented with the forty-five paintings that Hughes, a poet-painter, created for a project of one poem and painting each for each year of her life (she was 45 years old when the project ended). I'm frankly surprised that the poems and paintings are not presented together when the publisher, Harper Collins, is presumably the kind of publisher who can afford to have done such. So my first criticism is directed at Harper Collins or whoever was responsible for the presentation’s lack of vision (unless, of course, there’s a good excuse that prevented both poems and paintings from being presented together).

Now, Forty-Five certainly can be argued to work on its own as a collection of poems. I guess the test is this: would this collection have been of interest were it not for reading them for another reason besides the "Entertainment Tonight" perspective of what revelations, if any, they might shed regarding her family? If you don't know yet, Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. But despite containing relevant autobiographical references, the poems still have to be effective in such a way as to transcend biography (that’s why this is a poetry collection, not a biography). Well, some poems in Forty-Five get there and some don’t. What would have made this judgment of the poems not so important would have been if the poems and paintings were presented together.

Forty-Five’s constraint of a poem for each year in the poet’s life is an interesting and imaginative concept. But some poems fall flat, partly for not doing something exciting with the form to charge up the language. Consider the first two stanzas in “TWENTY-SIXTH YEAR”:

I was finishing an art foundation, drawing faces huge,
So they gazed from the wall on their two-foot tall
Terracottas and blacks, for my end-of-year.
And I pushed weights until
My shoulders could almost
Walk on their own. I swam
With air force friends from Chivenor,
My country life about to end,
Precarious for food and electricity,
Each shilling measured out
For petrol, or a single pair of shoes.

The husband who had once
Hounded me to misery
Introduced his new wife,
Took us for a drink
And became a friend again.
The con-man boyfriend
Who had dismembered all aspects of my life
Was jailed for fraud—though not of mine—
I couldn’t relive that in court
And go through it all
A second time.
And Central St Martin’s gave me a place
At the end of my art course in Devon.
Though London was the heaving mass
I’d wanted to avoid, the millions of people
Crawling over and around each other,
Refusing to admit they were too many.

And so on. The “TWENTY-SIXTH YEAR”, for me, is a tad of a yawn except insofar as one finds Hughes’ biography interesting. But there’s a constant sense of pain simmering within the collection, and perhaps the poet had to use language that had to be a bit dispassionate given the subject matter. It can be effective; when one juxtaposes the poem from the 3rd year with, say, that of the 34th year, one can see how the unadorned tone serves to shine in high relief both the highs and lows of a life. Here is the 3rd year’s poem in its entirety:

“THIRD YEAR”

My thoughts were complicated,
Too hard to describe by the frustrated
Tongue in my mouth, too weak
And tangled in syllables to allow me to speak.

I wanted to grow faster still,
Improve upon my verbal skill
And ask the questions plaguing me
To define clear boundaries of safety.

Some things were given—company,
A brother who would play with me.
Some things were taken—a father told to go,
The home I’d grown to know.

And at the loss my memory
Crawled into a black hole for safety,
Where before each tiny thing I saw
Imprinted, I remembered nothing any more.

My mother, head in oven, died,
And me, already dead inside,
I was an empty tin
Where nothing rattled in.

Contrast the above with the clear jubilance—despite the same spare language—of the first stanza of “THIRTY-FOURTH YEAR”:

Painting, painting, a one-woman show the thing
I worked for. Fattening, head in the fridge
To avoid a smoke, I garnered the proportions
Of a well-fed porpoise, perched at the pool-edge
In between more paintings,
Until they were all done.
Back in England my September exhibition
Grew closer. My father typed
The name of every single friend he’d got,
And some he’d not, thinking
They should come.
I wrote each one and they
Turned up in droves, except for him.
He came before, quietly, to see
Everything, his face a lantern
In the light of all that colour, his grin
As good a thing to frame.

Contrast further the above first stanza with the second stanza in the same poem (I think the contrast between the two stanzas, one immediately following the other, is effective for its stark comparison of joy and pain):

In England, the four months pregnant cyst
That buckled me, was left inside
As medical economy.
In Australia they took it out
By laparoscopy, and found the English missed
The real cause of my years of monthly misery,
Endometriosis.
Now I became a testing ground
For different kinds of pill
To alleviate the symptoms
That made me ill.

“THIRTY-FOURTH YEAR” exemplifies how a poem need do nothing but to tell it like it is in order to be successful. But that the “THIRTY-FOURTH YEAR” is more effective than others implies how the same linguistic approach need not have been taken to all of the poems.

Of course, one can lapse to just noting that some poems work better than others—which is just how poetry collections work. But it needn’t have been this way. Forty-Five becomes an impressive project when looked at the way I feel the project should have been published: in conjunction with a set of paintings, 45 paintings—one for each year. Indeed, the book Forty-Five was released with an exhibition of the associated 45 paintings. Fortunately, viewers/readers can go to http://www.friedahughes.com/f_books.cfm?detail=3 to see the paintings.

These paintings are fabulous (at least per their reproductions on the web). They are not only vivid images that attest to Hughes' talents as a colorist, but they offer biomorphic forms that logically attest to body/humanity. Their evocation of the body harmoniously fits with the authorial intention and conceptual underpinning to the poems.

Moreover, that the paintings are more abstract than figurative mean that the pairings are not likely to interfere adversely with the readers’/viewers’ imaginations in responding to the works. Here, 1 + 1 is more likely to be greater than 2.

On one level, I consider the poems as captions for the paintings, and perhaps the notion of "captions" lowers them from a standard of being "poems." But they are above-average captions, at least. I don't mind saying that about the texts because I can say that Hughes is capable of writing more effective poems; several of Forty-Five’s poems falter besides her more impressive poems in her debut collection, Wooroloo (Harper Perennial, 1998). It is when the project is considered as text and images inseparable from each other that we have a poetic project which proves the necessity and urgency of its existence.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...

SKIRT FULL OF BLACK by SUN YUNG SHIN

2007-05-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

Skirt Full of Black by Sun Yung Shin
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2007)

Millions of Koreans live in 140 different countries around the world. Sun Yung Shin is one of those immigrants -- a poet, writer, and teacher of Buddhist heritage and Catholic upbringing who often feels like she's in a cultural, racial, and linguistic limbo. Because of her unique situation, she makes sense of life through words, sounds, and meanings. Through her skill as wordsmith, English and Korean become a Universal language.

This excerpt from "Immigrant Song" is a poignant testament, a "hard lyric" sung by immigrants in every land, in all times:

This is our gene flow
How do you like our genetic drift
A riff, a rift, a raft…
Too rough for the second half

Take us under, take us downhill
Paint pangenesis all over your dancing body
The new party god
Keep the beat going, don't stop, you can't stop

I found most interesting and enlightening the segment titled "Vestibulary," where Shin created narrative images in English inspired by the shapes of Korean letters. The beauty here is in the reading, and understanding. I can't replicate the actual letters as drawn, only the equivalent as written by the author, but you needn't read nor speak Korean to appreciate the message. I chose two letters in example:

Niun --

Visual signals are sent to the brain about the body's position

in relation to its surroundings. Foreign fragments sewn. Shroud.

A borrowed shovel bit the soil while I beaded a prayer on bended
knee. Outside, a blackbird took a view of the church's corner.
Autumn brings the wet kiss of a deep red leaf.

Mium --

white room -- green field -- silk square;

single tooth, lonely tongue;

vacant cradle, empty pillow;

palm print on brushed steel.

These excerpts from "Until the Twenty-Second Century" courageously transform loss into hope and love:

I laid my childhood to rest at the end of the tracks of the twentieth century
Like Hansel's breadcrumbs
And they were eaten by birds and small, wild animals

If you wait for me, I will meet you in the twenty-second century
After the crumbs and pebbles are spent and lost in this one

Skirt Full of Black is a powerful commentary on Sun Yung Shin's own life and the lives of women and immigrants everywhere. Her work is experimental, exceptional, vibrant, and highly recommended.

*****

Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review and Review Editor for New Works Review. Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Kansas with her husband of forty-plus years.

CASE SENSITIVE by KATE GREENSTREET

2007-05-22T20:30:00.000-07:00

PAMELA HART Reviews

case sensitive by Kate Greenstreet
(Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, 2006)

From Ulysses to mystical poet Mirabai, who traversed the Indian countryside to honor Lord Krishna in the 16th century, the road trip narrative is an ancient device used by authors who seek to explore the seeker lurking in all of us. Characters head out on the road or ocean or city street when their lives reach an impasse or a turning point. They need to clear their psyches or they need to get home. They are looking for something they lost or something they want to possess. They set off on a quest to bring back boons, as mythologist Joseph Campbell explained. Or maybe they’re using the road as way to start over.

Some or all of these motivations are at the core of Kate Greenstreet’s enigmatic book, case sensitive, published last year by Ahsahta Press of Boise State University. I say enigmatic with much admiration because Greenstreet has written a beautiful book of poetry that is mysterious and compelling, that contains a story but doesn’t tell one, that has prophetic moments and lines that in their associative qualities leave the reader feeling off course. This is good. Underlying this book is the idea that poetry needn’t organize experience and language into neat packages

In case sensitive, we’re told from the start to expect perplexity. “Many things about the story are puzzling. /The women cooking, the men/swimming in the sea. / I believe we need light/inside the body.” These opening lines from the first section titled “Great Women of Science”, demonstrate that this book won’t follow the usual story-telling route. This declaration is upheld in the structure of the book as well. Greenstreet has explained it contains five chapbooks made by a character that, together, “can tell a kind of story.” The book includes references to emblematic items the character has brought with her on her cross-country drive. In quoted text and footnotes, the reader encounters the letters of Lorine Niedecker, writings from artists such as Agnes Martin and German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, as well as Marie Curie and Heidegger. The interspersing of these figures serves to illuminate the narrator. And it adds to the fun of reading the book. I liked the footnotes, a recent trend in fiction as well.

Language is everywhere as she makes her way cross country. It’s the landscape seen from the car, more than mountains or waves of corn fields. And just as the landscape changes so does the language-scape. Some of the writing reads like prose, other times it declaims like poetry. I love how the writing can shift gears. A poem in the chapbook [SALT] opens with mysteriously opaque lines. These accumulate in their odd and beautiful imagery and then give way to stanzas that read like memoir or personal narrative.

My favorite chapbooks are [SALT] and the Book of Love, both of which look at how mothers and daughters work or don’t work things out. The sections in [SALT] are headed by titles that relate characteristics of the chemical compound, a metaphor for this complicated relationship. The dilemma of salt (“has been used to seed clouds” vs. “raises the boiling point”) comes to a kind of resolution in the next section, the Book of Love.. What’s lovely about this section is the way Greenstreet weaves thought, quoted text, and narrative play to make a kind of patchwork of associations that illustrate how we come to forgive and finally love difficult people, while also coming to understand what it means, as she notes, to be “inside the world.” The last poem in this chapbook seems representative of the overall aesthetic at work in case sensitive.

Fragment. No Suggestions.

Did she say who sought refuge
in unhappy love

Day by day, we’re moving into night

Slight accent, and the falling
“Leave a window open”

“Which of these is life? the true life?”

It’s meant to be sad and bright, lit up
like the boat of the dead

I thought 2 hands would be 2 people.

The next section, Where’s the Body, is lighter, almost humorous. Check out the headings--seemingly taken from a how-to book on mystery writing. The final section, Diplomacy, while not really tying things up (an aesthetic not at all part of this journey) does connect some loose threads, though others remain wonderfully unraveled. But there’s a completion. The road ends. Along the way what’s been broken has been re-made into something, stronger perhaps. At least re-knit, as the last lovely poem reminds us, “You know, sometimes a message from me may seem mixed. But do try to recall the idea that messages join, somewhere.” Read this book, puzzle over it. Greenstreet’s language is worth the journey.

*****

Pamela Hart, a former journalist, is a poet and teaching artist. She leads workshops at the Katonah Museum of Art and collaborates with the museum in its visual literacy program. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published recently by Toadlily Press as part of its Quartet Series, entitled The Fifth Voice. Her poems have been published in journals like Kalliope, Rattapallax and Lumina and can be found on the web at toadlilypress.com.

THE JUROR by GEORGE DAWES GREEN

2007-05-22T20:25:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

THE JUROR by George Dawes Green
(Warner Books, New York, 1995)

I decided to review this novel because George Dawes Green’s bio reveals him to be a poet (“a poet whose work has appeared in The Ontario Review, Carolina Quarterly and other literary publications”); Galatea Resurrects is open to engaging with all works by poets, not just poetry collections.

I don’t need to say much about the novel’s plot—it’s in that well-mined group of jury-tampering fiction—except to say what’s necessary: it’s an enjoyable read with its hang-loose wit. It has its own twists that are pleasant to the mind: perfect “beach reading,” as they say.

What made me wish to write about this book for Galatea Resurrects is how Green incorporated references to poets and poetry within the novel. Derek Walcott is tweaked here as a representative for poetry:

Slavko Czernyk hunkers down tonight in this old clawfoot bathtub because his tightass landlord still hasn’t turned on the heat and this is the only way to get warm. He lifts his foot out of the water and gets a toe-grip on the H knob. Twists it.

Treats the tub to a nice scalding pick-me-up.

He’s chewing a Nicorette and smoking a Lucky Strike at the same time. A cupful of Jim Beam (with a drop of honey) rests on the tub sill. He’s holding a book above the waterline. The book is called The Essential Derek Walcott. He owns this book because once a woman told him that Derek Walcott was the greatest poet ever, oh my god. He was in love with this woman. He still is. So he keeps the book at all times in this bathroom across from his office, and whenever he takes a crap or a bath he opens The Essential Derek Walcott and makes a stab at civilizing himself.

He glares at a poem.

The poem taunts him.

The poem says things like

…and read until the lamplit page revolves
to a white stasis whose detachment shines
like a propeller’s rainbowed radiance.
Circling like us, no comfort for their loves!...

He squints. He tries that part again. He still doesn’t get it. He turns the book upside down and reads:

[same excerpt as above except the words are upside down]

This is never going to work. He takes a long pull from the Jim Beam, a long pull from the Lucky, and turns the page.

In his office across the hall, the phone rings.

Who have we got here? He wonders. Who’d be calling the Czernyk Detective Agency at this hour?

Probably Grassman Security. They’re on a stakeout and no relief and Slavko, could you please hustle your ass down here? So you can make eight bucks an hour sitting with Bill Farmer in a colder-than-shit Mercury Zephyr and keep tabs on a murky motel door across a murky street and listen all night to Bill Farmer’s two-part encore-and-fart harmony, OK, Slavko?

All the god damn livelong night, how about that, Slavko?

No thanks.

Thanks but I’d rather stay here and read, read until the lamplit page revolves to a white stasis whose detachment shines like a propeller’s rainbowed radiance, you know what I mean?

All perfectly amusing. Later in the story, the detective Slavo Czernyk attempts his own poem, mirroring at this point a plot line where Slavo has fallen in love with a new woman:

Slavo is sitting on the floor of his office at three in the afternoon. He’s writing a poem, which is called “It Doth Suck,” and though it’s his first poem it’s a goddamn good poem. He reads over what he’s got. He reaches to his left for the bottle of Jim Beam. He doesn’t look because that would involve turning his head to the left and it hurts too much to turn his head to the left. Or ot the right, for that matter. So he reaches without looking, and puts his hand into a quart takeout container from Luk Dhow. Last night’s supper. His hand comes back wearing the quart container like a glove. Presently he figures out that it’s not a glove. He shakes it off him.

He forces himself to turn his head. Finds the bourbon and gives it a yank.

While licking his hand he rereads his poem:

IT DOTH SUCK

Sucks, huh?
All pretty sucky? What do you say?
Fuckhead, hey fuckbrain, cat got your tongue?
It genuine sucks.
What did you think, it was going to get better?
Be glad to answer that, but I can’t because of
The BEEP BEEP BEEP
From that semi outside on Main Street..
It’s backing up!!
For shit’s sake,
In traffic, everybody’s pissed. BEEP BEEP BEEP,
It says, so loud I can’t think.
It’s the National Anthem
Of my life. God it sucks. Okay? And this here,
This is my poem. Juliet, I had wanted to not send
It to you, but now I’ve got a new girl
To not send it to.

Is there a minimum number of poems, he wonders, to qualify for the Nobel Prize? Wouldn’t just one be enough if it was a real corker?

All still perfectly amusing. And, by the way, if Derek Walcott inspires a reader to write a poem (no matter how sucky), that’s a compliment to Mr. Walcott, yah?

There’s another scene later in the story where the bad guy stalks one of his victims at a poetry reading. This is all to say, Green does a good job integrating poetry-related scenes into this genre crime story. Good enough to do the job.

But Green also used an interest in Taoism to help develop one of the characters. And I can't help but compare the integration of poetry and Taoism--both topics that need not have been chosen to flesh out the novel’s primary crime plot line (it's a genre novel and Green probably could have used other interests like baseball or Marxism or antiques or wine(!) in developing his story). And in comparing how he dealt with Taoism and poetry, I think Green did a better job with Taoism--specifically in terms of seamlessness. The references to Lao Tzu’s teachings seem more integrated into the story. On the other hand, the references to poetry maintain a sense of arbitrariness to their existence within the novel (even though such arbitrariness doesn’t get in the way of the enjoyable read).

One could argue that Green simply did a better job on using Taoism for character development. But what I’m considering about the inescapable artifice evoked by the poetry references is how the artificiality might mirror the current role of poetry in mass culture: that Poetry is something separate, an Other, from everyday life.

I doubt that this result was part of Green’s intention. But it’s a result that elevates the novel beyond its genre of criminal fiction, even as, for a poet like me, it’s a result that, um, kind of depresses.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...

A STRANGE ARRANGEMENT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by C.J. ALLEN

2007-05-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN reviews:

A Strange Arrangement: New and Selected Poems by C.J. Allen
(Leafe Press, Nottingham, 2007)

C.J. Allen was born in 1958 in Leeds and lives and works in Nottingham. I’m a transplanted Chicago Jew who’s lived most of his life in Southern California. So I have a few questions:

What’s the difference between color and colour?

Does Takla Makan really signify something like “you’ll get in but you’ll never get out”? Or is the joke (if it is a joke) clear to locals but lost on me?

What does a quatrain signify if you’re writing in Nottingham?

What does rhyme?

How does anyone read anyone? I think this is an ethical question, but …

I’m sure I don’t have any answers.

The earliest work in A Strange Arrangement are from Allen’s The Art of Being Late For Work (1994). The most recent are dated 2006. From the first, Allen’s concerns are love, memory, history and poetry. Technically, these poems are what Ron Silliman would probably label School of Quietude: they posit a reasonably consistent “I”, they are not particularly dialogical, and they are relatively traditional in form.

But: let’s look at that “I”. Allen, in “Sailing Around the World”, calls it “that prince among pronouns, / the simple downstroke” and, lest anyone think he thinks there’s anything else simple about the “I”, the poem continues “Squeezed behind it, the labyrinth of identity.”

And let’s think about whether poems need to be dialogical. Does more dialogical poetry automatically invoke a higher ethics than less dialogical poetry written in relatively “closed” forms? Is less dialogical poetry something that necessarily does some sort of subjugating of the Otherness of the Other?

I can follow the argument. Once again, I’m sure I don’t have any answers. But I do have an opinion: I find myself in emotional agreement with those, e.g. most prominently Levinas and Irigaray, who emphasize that our history is one long subjugating of the Otherness of the Other, and that for us to have any chance to survive, that subjugating has got to stop. But I don’t find myself in emotional agreement with the notion that some poetic procedures automatically further our chances for survival. Neither Lucan nor Virgil could be described as post-avant, though both recognized the nasty side of subjugating behaviors very early on. Whereas several thousand years later Pound, who would have to be described as post-avant in the sense of having created works that only succeed when “completed by a reader” still didn’t get it (that may be too harsh, but he certainly made a botch of his understanding). So, my opinion is that while there is a spectrum of poetic stances/practices, there’s nothing intrinsically ethical about any particular stance or practice.

“Wood Asks” is a good poem to look at in this context. In some ways it is -- or appears to be -- among the most “subjugating”, the most “violent” in the book.

A “response to the photograph ‘Early Morning, January, Commonhill Wood No. 4, The Chilterns, 2004’ by Robert Davies”, “Wood Asks” begins

Do you remember being in this forest
when air was the colour of tracing paper

and trees were brushed on a wash of mist
like x-rayed bones, like a diagram

of the lung?

One could argue that Allen’s use of “you” does appear to implicate the reader in a non-dialogical situation, which subjugates the reader, forces her/him into Commonhill Wood early one January morning without that reader’s consent … until one reaches the last couplet, which reads

Do you remember being in this forest
and what it was you were doing there?

At which point this reader at least realizes that the “you” probably refers to the photographer, with whom Allen (or less believably, the wood) wants to engage in … a dialogue!

It should be added that SoQ vs. post-avant is a really reductive way to look at poetry and that my reduction of the difference between them to dialogical vs. non-dialogical is a further reduction yet. In his The Man Without Content, Giorgio Agamben seems (I emphasize seems; I haven’t finished the book yet) to suggest that the ethics of art doesn’t necessarily involve a dialogical approach, or even a “subject of the aesthetic experience” at all. It may not even involve an ethics (that’s right: an ethical art may not involve an ethics). Art involves an artist. And it does involve an encounter. But ...

At one point early in his argument Agamben invokes Rimbaud and writes

Thus the “embarkation for the island of Cythera” of modern art was to lead the artist … to a competition with the Most Uncanny, with the divine terror that had driven Plato to banish the poets from his city. Only if understood as the final moment of this ongoing process, through which art purifies itself of the spectator to find itself faces by an absolute threat, does Nietzsche’s invocation in the preface to the Gay Science acquire all its enigmatic meaning: “Ah, if you could really understand why we of all people need art …,” but “another kind of art … an art for artists, for artists only!”

If some want to argue that Agamben’s suggestion is more apposite to modern art and that the suggestion that a post-avant vs. SoQ “situation” more befits the postmodern, well, I will only say that T.J. Clark notes somewhere in his Farewell to an Idea that what is called the postmodern is really the triumphant fully-modern-at-last, that the period of “modern” art was the period of the modern’s coming-to be …

All I mean to get at by this whole discussion is that the jury’s still out on how to understand, how to stand in relation to, art. How could it be otherwise while we’re still in the middle of art’s -- and our own -- story?

So, whether these poems are “SoQ” or whether they’re “post-avant”, whether or not those labels really mean anything, just read, just read, and don’t worry … Allen will treat you decently.

And as far as form goes, as far as I’m concerned, Allen’s in control of his. And he’s in control consciously. He writes in “Needs Must”:

… My work for today?
How to be a Difficult Poet without Boring You.

I intend to go right to the edge of the map
but not fall off …

And fall off he doesn’t; he’s in full control of his material. Note: some poets like to fall off the map, some don’t; it’s no big deal. Since I’m the reviewer I get to pronounce: the only “real” rule is the “no bullshit” rule. Allen adheres to it.

Whether his focus is the present or the past, in many of these poems Allen shares himself with the reader (and no, I won’t write “shares a persona”, because if there is a persona, if feels very close to the bone). If we want to invoke an ethics: How can an I be with an other if an I doesn’t give its self away (even if the “I” is “a bourgeois artefact”? )

Here’s a poem in which he invokes memory. It’s memory he can’t really have, at least not as presented (can he?):

‘So What’
(the Miles Davis group, 1959)

A kind of falling away;
a phrase as clear as a photographic negative
held to the light then replaced on the relative
obscurity of the tabletop. A stray

beat trapped on a dimpled snare-skin
with a fly-swat snap.
Miles is on top
floating notes on the thinnest of thin

air. Who cares that one of the tape machines
is running a semitone slow? Not me.
I’m still in the milky haze

of the crib, soaking up my father’s besotted gaze
when Coltrane’s
solo starts to set everything free.

I think this is interesting because it conflates two consciousnesses: his baby consciousness and his current consciousness. Obviously, when he was in the crib he wasn’t aware that he was listening to Coltrane, etc. etc. But as an adult he can look back and see that in some senses Trane’s work in the late 50s was indeed a giant step (forgive me …) towards setting “everything” (well, at least some things) free, which his work a few years later certainly well, hey, I was a suburban teenager and even I had some of those Impulse! albums … So, though Allen didn’t know it was happening when it was happening it was happening … and now he knows it, and now he can say it was happening … and this makes the first stanza come clear, as the release of a hidden understanding. Which probably helps him -- and the reader -- understand a bit the course his -- and our -- later 20th century life.

Allen must have had pretty terrific parents, by the way, if they were saturating their baby in Miles and Trane.

“Bicycles Round a Tree in West Yorkshire” in another poem in which he invokes memory; this time it’s a conscious memory. In this poem, three boys from three different villages meet. The first six tercets describe the boy’s bikes, but this is no nostalgia-trip: “We’re talking different kinds of class-distinction here.” These boys seem to have been born with an awareness of “social hierarchy” and that it’s inescapable. So there’s a little irony in the poem’s conclusion. After they’ve ridden to the top of the hill where they must part, and each ride off to their separate classes and homes:

… what farewells we have
[blow] back and away over our innocent shoulders.

This is a very aware poetry.

I’ve read enough English poetry to be able to say with (some) certainty that Allen’s poetry is quite English. I can’t quite tell you exactly what that means, though. I remind myself of a man I once worked with, who, upon picking up an old book and hefting it a few times, said, “South German monastic binding, about 1520.” I asked him how he knew. All he could say, “When you’ve handled as many of these things as I have … well … you just know.” I wish I could be more definitive. In part, it’s an attachment to the local, to place. There are poems here with names such as “A Hill in Lincolnshire”, “The Galloway Field at Ashington Colliery”, and those I’ve already mentioned, “Bicycles Round a Tree in West Yorkshire” and “Wood Asks”, a poem that concerns itself with a photo of Commonhill Wood.

It’s not that poets from other places don’t concern themselves with their places, sometimes quite specifically and in depth. But it’s the sense that here we find almost every place invested with the significance and weight of a people’s history. That seems particularly English to me.

This poem, while it’s “after Martial” seems particularly English in a different way:

Epigrammatic
after Martial

Happiness? A steady income
from a steady job; an agreeable hearth;
no correspondence with solicitors;
not too much work in town; a chilled
mind in a well-filled body; old saws
and cherished friends; a healthy appetite;
good, plain food; quiet evenings;
a loyal partner with a sense of adventure;
sufficient sleep but not too much;
acceptance of whatever’s yours;
side-stepping sarcasm and power games;
no fear of the end and no desire for it.

One obvious tip off is “solicitors”, of course; perhaps “agreeable hearth” is another. But it’s not just the details. It’s not just the details. Perhaps it’s the movement of ideas … (ideas but not in things?). Perhaps it’s the tone: low key, conversational …,

I like this book. I enjoy these poems. I like Allen’s POV. I wouldn’t mind meeting him. Perhaps what I like most is that Allen takes his work, his craft, seriously. He takes it seriously enough to know that what he’s doing, what all poets are doing (regardless of whether they’re “post-avant” or “SoQ”) is indefinable. In a sense, though Allen intends to go right to the edge of the map but not fall off … there is no map. One last poem, which I quote in full (and which reminds me, probably not by accident, of Bunting’s “What the Chairman Told Tom”), obliquely makes this point:

Advice from Parnassus

Literature is a fine career for a young person.
It’s so straightforward. You just write
down your deepest feelings. In fact
they don’t even have to be deep, any feelings
will do. The media can’t get enough.
Everyone knows this.
If you want to you can describe mountains
or sex scenes, what people say, the way
they stare into each other’s eyes
as if desperately trying to decode secret messages.

There’s so much scope. You slide your coin
in the slot, take a swing at the horizon
and see what comes up. It’s a breeze.
Don’t waste your time on cybernetics,
the greasy corporate pole. That sort of thing
is strictly for numps and loobies. Drop by
any time, and remember, when you enter a room
carry yourself magnificently, especially your head,
which you should think of as a vase of lilacs,
preferably painted by Chardin.

Finally, it should be noted that A Strange Arrangement is the first full-length offering from Leafe Press, which has concentrated on chapbooks in the past. This book has good production values. And a great cover photograph, by one Jean Schweitzer. Not only will I keep my eyes open for new work from C.J. Allen, I’ll be looking for Schweitzer’s work as well.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman’s most recent publication is OTAGES; a new chapbook from Bamboo Books, WORLD ZERO, is in press; and later this year, with any luck, NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING, a 200 pp. hay(na)ku, which in fact includes very few sounds of his own making, will be published by Leafe Press. Recently, he has begun to incorporate photos into his work, which certainly wasn't expected.

THE HUMBLE TRAVELOGUES OF MR. IAN WORTHINGTON...by SANDRA SIMONDS

2007-05-22T20:15:00.000-07:00

FRANK GAMPIETRO Reviews

The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington (Written from Land and Sea) by Sandra Simonds
(Cy Gist Press, New York, 2007)

Here is what we know while reading Sandra Simonds' fascinating chapbook, The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington (Written from Land and Sea): The island on which her main character, Mr. Worthington, lives, is real. Bouvet island is indeed, "the most remote island on the planet" (thanks Wikipedia). It is located somewhere near Antarctica (but, actually, is not even very close to there). Bouvet Island is uninhabited. We also know that Mr. Ian Worthington lives in the future. Sometime around, "44444444444444," or perhaps, long after that since Mr. Worthington refers to the date as that of a war fought long ago. We also know that Mr. Worthington has a friend/lover/wife named Camille whom he writes to and sends poems and notes for poems. And we know that others inhabit/ed the island including a man named Abdul who takes (took) care of Mr. Worthington, six flying squirrels named Lucas, Torch, Hindleg, Maximus, Penny, and Richard Nixon, and a nameless amputee who lives in a stained glass teepee (he may be long dead at the time of some of the letters). But other than these "facts" which serve as a kind of hanger on which this most excellent poem/story hangs, anything is possible.

Ms. Simonds knows exactly how much of the facts we need in order to take huge imaginative leaps with her into the mind (perhaps, the psychosis, would be more accurate) of Mr. Ian Worthington, the future, the island itself, and the dream images of the author herself. What a huge success. Even the chapbook's length is perfect (12 pages) in that one feels satisfied reaching the end while wanting more. Mr. Ian Worthington, a blip in the radar of the fictional future, as a persona, deserves no more, but because Ms. Simonds is such a terrific poet, not one word less.

But The Humble Travelogues . . . isn't just structurally brilliant. It's the images and word play that serve as the meat and potatoes of this collection. When Mr. Worthington says, in one of his letters to Camille written in 3/4/6895, "My little acre of tar—yes, it is far away—but really what isn't" one is struck by the distance we try to ignore in our everyday relationships with others. Ms. Simonds tweaks the cliché that every one of us is an island. She suggests instead that not only are we islands but, worse, we are, metaphorically, stuck in the absurd future and we are more or less psychotic, and we are, futilely, telling ourselves that we are not scared.

Ms. Simonds is a protégé (known or unknown to Ms. Simonds) of another wonderfully enigmatic poet named Mary Ruefle. The two are compadres because both convey the cold, weird distance between the self and others. Simonds is also, structurally, a cousin to Ashbery. While reading "The Travelogues . . . " one easily thinks of Ashbery's Girls on the Run. But one is also happily reminded of the rock band the Flaming Lips and Godard's Alphaville because like Godard and the Flaming Lips Ms. Simonds creates a world that is so cool and hip and then questions the nature of what it means to be cool and hip. When Simonds says through one of Mr. Worthington's notes on a poem, "I lived alone. // Poured silver confetti through a sieve, // ate lint from an empty tin can of chickpeas." it is Ms. Simonds giving us the cool image of the silver confetti only to take it away, somehow, unfashionably, with lint and a can of chickpeas. The psychosis of Mr. Worthington, through the dreaming on the page of Ms. Simonds, performs so eloquently, a series of phrases and wordplay of sense and nonsense that swings back and forth like a pendulum from the cool to the un-cool.

If anyone deserves a prize for mastering the chapbook genre, it is Sandra Simonds, for the The Humble Travelogues . . . is a chapbook masterpiece.

*****

Frank Giampietro's first book of poetry, Fear of Takeoff and Landing is forthcoming from Alice James Books in the fall of 2008. He is currently enrolled in the PhD program in creative writing at Florida State University and is the on-line editor of The South East Review, and the founding editor of thefovea.org. His poems have appeared in journals such as Columbia Poetry Review, CutBank, and 32 Poems.

PEEL ME A ZIBIBBO by PAM BROWN

2007-05-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

DEREK MOTION Reviews

peel me a zibibbo by Pam Brown
(never-never books, 2006)

The first page of this chap tells us it contains ‘five poems for friends’. I straight away thought of how I am not one of these friends. Should I read the poems? I got an email from Pam once, asking me to pass along a url to someone, but that’s all. We have never spoken. Well anyway I did read the poems. I guess, at least, I do not have to make any kind of disclaimer in this review. The chap was not dedicated to me. But, if you read this chap -- as you may well -- you will get acquainted with the friends in question. It is a good thing. They include people from the title poem:

hi Kurt hi John T,
hi Nick, Paddy, hi Shakespeare,

And there are others. These helloes are indicative of the poetry’s relaxed and comfortable tone. Perhaps it is familiar -- I have heard it called ‘journalistic poetry’ -- and perhaps there is a tradition of it, existing somewhere. I don’t know. In my definition it’s a type of writing that admits some very personal elements, because, the poet is talking to you the reader, but also to her friends at the same time, and moreover doing it on purpose. What you tell your friends might differ from what you tell an audience. Your friends will ‘get’ your specific references. But will the international poetry reader have much tolerance for a poem like ‘Sydney poets’? Will they have been here:

time ticks on: quarter to
four Saturday arvo,
Glebe

and do they know what it’s like? Are they likely to have read At the flash and at the Baci by Ken Bolton? I’ve done these things -- Glebe is particularly nice & nostalgic for a summery afternoon book-launch -- but to answer these ponderings I would say it doesn’t matter. Like allusions to classical figures and tropes in other works, you might feel invited to follow these tangents and discover more. Or not. Brown’s poem ‘Day and night, your poems’ led me to pull out the Bolton poem in question and delight in a sort of dialogue. But then that isn’t absolutely essential, as the poem is an absorbing meditation that any poetry reader (or person, if those things differ) will ‘get’. For example, ‘Day and night, your poems’ goes like this at one point:

                                             what do I remember ?
            how many lines from the hundreds and hundreds, probably
thousands, of poetry collections I’ve read
               and the poems submitted to the magazines I’ve edited?

Poets will make up a big part of any poetry audience. And poetry is about communication; this naturally works on levels both micro & macro. It should be acknowledged in the poetry.

Like an unstructured ‘what have you been up to?’ letter these poems invoke and roam over many images, topics. The focus shifts back and forth between Brown’s personal life and culture in general and it works. I particularly liked this movement: the small becomes a larger question, or vice versa. ‘Today there is much more heritage than there used to be’ begins by discussing anachronistic homes & social optimism, but then the view disrupts abstract thought, and

a lightning flash
interrupts computing --
I imagine your stormy view
over Elizabeth Bay, beautiful
night-dark, night-light,

It is nice to follow a poem as it makes an unexpected change in direction or momentum. Nice is the word for it (I stand by the word). Sometimes a change is only indicated by the ambiguous asterisk, and this is valid, the day might have changed even the subject matter or the memory. Like Faulkner’s changes in The Sound and the Fury interruptions are not spelt out, simply gestured towards. Yes I like that.

But what the hell is a zibbibo? I thought it was some kind of exotic banana, or something, and that felt like a cool allusion -- it’s not just a banana she wants a friend to peel for her, it’s a suave variety I’ve never heard of (ah the exoticism of other people…). But then later I googled it, and it seems the zibibbo is a specific variety of grape. Even better. Grapes are hard to peel -- the image of poet as a roman emperor is funny.

Now I become hesitant about saying too much more, or giving more examples of the passages I liked most. And that’s because the book is too small. Despite my very positive feelings about these poems, this is a serious point I’m making. Pam you need to give us more! Five poems only touches the surface of where you are at (I conjecture). I really enjoyed peel me a zibbibo, I enjoyed being privy to the way a poet thinks, writes, and converses at the same time. But I also sensed sadness -- doubt, nostalgic memory, people who are anywhere in the world but with you…and I want to know more about that.

Oh what the hell, here’s an image to close (again, from the title poem):

awake and refreshed
tho with nothing on the page

*****

Derek Motion is currently a phd student &tutor at Charles Sturt University. He spends much time reading blogs &attempting to discover new chapbooks from all over the world. He also writes poems, some of them he posts online at http://derekmotion.blogspot.com/

MORTAL by IVY ALVAREZ (1)

2007-05-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

ERNESTO PRIEGO Reviews

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez
(Red Morning Press, Washington DC, 2006)

Mortal, by Ivy Alvarez, bites. What strikes me as truly significant is the unity in difference here: Mortal is a delicate tour de force, a subtle traumatism, if you excuse the oxymorons, where different poetic voices are sheltered under the same coherent style. There is a voice here, inside all those personae, including Demeter and Persephone, but also mothers and daughters, old and new voices coming from beyond and beneath and right here.

I have read Mortal several times and the image that comes to mind -- if I had to find some kind of translation for what it does -- perhaps would involve that of a broken steel net, maybe like those used in tropical countries to leave the insects out of the house. Picture the metal thread, and an innocent hand accidentally getting pierced by it, a thin river of blood coming out of the epidermis; an antigravitational drop of red liquid stuck in the pointy end of the slightly rusted iron, like the finger of a girl's hand just in the instant before she lets go of her brand new Sunday red balloon.

Alvarez's poetry is full of teeth, fangs, bones, animals inside the body, blood, milk and other bodily fluids, enamel, insects, fish. The poet makes use of prodigious alliterations to describe the organic, always-flowing nature of her tropes. Formally, Alvarez moves from couplets to blocks of prose, but always with a profound understanding of the rhythmic, musical nature of her vocabulary, which shines always individually through constant anaphora and repetition.

Like animals and the body, the motif of rain haunts her poems, once and again, once and again, the word falls on us with the sound of a storm against a fragile, improvised metal roof: rain stands for a playful bending of oppositional sets (liquid versus hard; exterior versus interior). The rain of Ivy Alvarez bends the trees while being the meaning of home.

Rain and teeth are pervasive motifs, and they echo and frame a poetics of the flow, the beat, the pulse. When the poet writes "I am a pulse. I cannot stop beating, beating" it finally becomes clear whose ghost is standing by her doorstep: Mortal is possessed by Sylvia Plath's ghost, but not as a shadow that obscures the play at work here. A poem like "Vena cava" is portentous, extraordinary in its simplicity, in the way the words are allowed to breath, to stand on their own, solitary and surrounded by blankness, just to let the reader imagine unthought horizons, trespassable borders.

The poems in Mortal grow in the reader like teeth, they break the skin, grow inwards before finally seeking an exit out of the body, through the mouth, to become expression, to grind and bite in survival and in love, in sex and in everything which is pleasurable.

*****

Ernesto Priego was born in Mexico City. He is a poet,essayist and translator. currently doing his PhD at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College, London. His main interests are poetry, graphic narrative, pop music, the history of the book and print/ reproduction technologies, postcolonialism, cultural/critical theory, flanêrie and translation. He has released a translation of Jessica Abel's award-winning graphic novel, La Perdida (Astiberri Editores, Bilbao, Spain, 2007) and his first book of poetry Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006).

MORTAL by IVY ALVAREZ (2)

2007-05-22T20:00:00.000-07:00

JEANNINE HALL GAILEY Reviews

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez
(Red Morning Press, 2006)

Mortal, Ivy Alvarez’ first book of poetry, takes a familiar myth and destabilizes it -- Demeter, instead of Persephone, is snatched into the underworld, leaving Persephone alone and grieving. Alongside poems of mothers giving birth, a daughter struggling to come to terms with her mother’s breast cancer, and the fragile lives of flowers and insects, these mythological poems evoke a mournful and timeless struggle with mortality. The idea of matrilineage is explicit in the collection (which contains a poem of the same title;) not only the passing down of genetic factors for cancer, but the convivial sharing between generations of bodily characteristics, hope and desire, fear and struggle.

The book alternates between lyric and narrative poems, chunks of surreal prose poems next to short-lined, unpunctuated fragments. The second poem, “a memory of corn” is typical of the prose poems, setting an ominous tone for the next poem and a scene of a bucolic relationship before crisis:

“A sky blue with hysteria, roses blowsy and promiscuous, bees fat-bottomed and buzzing-it is a shaking, baking summer. Dee and Seph eat by the reservoir…Mother and daughter take a corncob each; shuck off its clothes and yellow filaments…”

Alvarez’ obvious delight with the language in these lines contrasts with the stark style and simple declarative sentences in the next poem, “Demeter and Persephone: The Abduction of Demeter,” which begins: “This time it is Demeter Hades wants…” and finishes with “The wet earth swallows. Demeter disappears. Persephone falls silent. The garden grows cold. Her mother is gone. There is only mud.”

This contrast continues throughout the book, each poem’s style and form serving a different purpose for the different speakers and storylines, different generations of mothers and daughters. The mythological poems give way to some startlingly intimate, touching poems about a speaker visiting her mother in the hospital. My favorite of these, “visit,” uses a brilliant device, changing the hospital’s sterile and forbidding scenery to that of a startling garden. “Silver-stamened needles/ stab her wrist” and “wires enclose her like roots/ sucking at the earth…” In these poems, the distance created in the surreal poems between reader and speaker disappears; immediately, we are with the speaker, experiencing the strange, hostile new home her mother lives in. Another poem that creates this intimacy is “Seph,” in which the speaker, ‘Seph’ (a winking shortened version of Persephone,) laments her inability to keep her mother’s assorted gifts of plants and her legacy, alive. Here’s the poem in whole:

“After she’s packed, Dee gives me two cacti
books, coffee, a framed degree, her fourth.

Coaxes this last gift, green blades gleaming,
dormant orchids in black pots, all leaf.

Eggshells a cracked mosaic. The whites shine.
‘Flowers in spring. They like shade,’ Dee said.

Gives me manure, blind to my panic.
Hands make their faltering awkward grab.

‘I won’t kill these’ my hollow mantra.”

In that poem, Alvarez voices every daughter’s anxiety -- that her efforts will not be enough to make her mother proud, to live up to her expectations. In the context of the other poems in the book, this anxiety is made more poignant by the fear that, no matter what the speaker does, her mother will probably not live to see whether the flower will survive or die.

This first collection follows an intricate series of characters in a confident and lush series of poems about one of the most difficult subjects a poet can tackle. I hope to see more of Alvarez’ work and look forward to hearing more of her otherworldly voices.

*****

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess from Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book were featured on NPR's The Writers Almanac and Verse Daily, and will appear in 2007's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. She helps edit The Crab Creek Review.

WHAT'S THE MATTER by JORDAN STEMPLEMAN

2007-05-22T19:55:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

WHAT’S THE MATTER by Jordan Stempleman
(Otoliths, Australia, 2007)

I decided to review Jordan Stempleman’s WHAT’S THE MATTER because just a few pages into the collection, the poems triggered an idea for a poetic structure that I might use to write new poems. This result is significant, not because others may care about how I write poems but, because it reflects one of the key tests for me -- but also for many writers, moithinks -- as to a literary work’s power, that is, whether it will compel the reader-who-happens-to-be-a-writer to write anew.

In this case, Stempleman’s poems triggered a notion of writing a poem, then editing it to begin with the 3rd or a later stanza -- to simply edit out the first stanza would not be the rule since that might just eliminate a warm-up stanza that’s not unusual to be found in first drafts. That’s the first set of poems which then would have a “pushed” energy into the poems (hopefully enervating the reading of the actual text). Then, in a “redux” series, I envision presenting the edited out stanzas as poems on their own, which in turn might generate a “push” energy beyond their last lines, manifesting the idea that the poem continues beyond the words on the page.

Here’s an example of one of Stempleman’s poems that got my thoughts going on this path:

As it works may remember

likely, there are stretches that are endless

in concentration, endless and tonight for in the bundles

hidden in the layers, the strangeness of the word,

used here, as shrunken areas, enlivened

fabrics in swell, and the sound of these possessions,

leak from each emptying involved

For me, I sensed an energy before the first word and continuing after the last word. It’s not a type of resonance dependent on (perceived) meaning (and how one might react to the gleaned meaning). It’s more pure energy -- such a strong energy that even its fragment is generative; perhaps it’d be like, if you happen to glance out the window at night to see a the landscape awash in white light, then you'd see in your mind's eye the image of the big fat bright moon (once, I actually experienced this phenomenon).

The generative effect of Stempleman's poems also stems from other elements in WHAT’S THE MATTER. For one, there’s a gentleness, a welcome hushed-ness, to several of the poems, e.g.

Boone

don’t know where to come from

to send word to the homes

or the houses we find do not lend

the remaining structures that sit

through a new family or endurance

the cuffed sounds of the children

they once wrapped or endured

a mood returns to the dream

that returns our presence

and sees the leafing visit

round and shambling

the coats of paint

a sincere late rain

the available time

where anything holds

and assures until moving

And even when a poem seeks to “goof around” the tone remains calm as in this hay(na)ku sequence:

Birthday Poem
-for Tom Beckett

My
heart, it
turns out, goofs

around, often while
it’s off
working.

It
calls this
nonsense, flirting, or

shooting
bedroom eyes
at the brain.

Certainly, there was a logic to my discovering a poem entitled “Cento: James Wright” as the lyricism and peace I sense in Wright’s poems are also present here.

The poet also reveals himself to be a philosopher in a number of poems, and this layer, when combined with other elements, create a, say, healing effect for a reader with a “sore [one] can’t trade” (“The Narrative”). It’s not easy to pull off the combination of intensity and, yet, easy-goingness here; the calm that pervades the book is not due to denial of reality’s harshness:

Nights

suppose I am a stand in for what totals the sleepless

conditions in those radiology wards

where the iron father says you should see what happens

when I eat enough muscles the earth no longer matters

and no one is struck by the face of planets paved light

or the sadness that they’d send for us

in the unfinished comforts they blindly advance

I’ve been talking primarily about the collection’s overall effect (tone) which, in turn, made me respond first to this collection as a book. It’s a hilarious -- and impressive -- irony because I realized AFTER my first draft of the review that Stempleman may have sidestepped the notion of organizing this project as a collection, versus just presenting a group of poems. That is, the Table of Contents reveals that the poems are presented alphabetically per their titles. (This is the first time I’ve noticed this in a poetry collection -- I’ve only seen something similar before in anthologies where each contributor is presented by the alphabetical order determined by their names.) This ordering implies no additional arc, in terms of the author’s intent, beyond whatever the reader gleans from the poems.

Realizing this certainly focused my mind anew on looking at the poems on an individual basis, rather than within the context of the book’s overall effect on me. It’s a satisfying experience since there are so many lovely lines throughout the book. “Boone” contains a favorite: “a sincere late rain”. Does one need to be a farmer or live in an agricultural community (as I do) to appreciate the aptness of this line? As I write this, I believe Napa Valley has received only 80%-plus of its average rainfall for the winter (the contrast against last winter’s 200% rainfall bespeaks the global warming effect). And as, in January and February, Napa Valley residents went back and forth between enjoying unseasonable spring days vs. the desire for rain, “sincere late rain” captures the relieved reaction to each rainy day that always also seemed belated. If only due to this reader’s farming perspective (grin) -- but which is also to say that philosophy never melts to abstraction but retains its link to the world’s “actual condition” -- I think this line is brilliant.

By the way, in case notions of hushed-ness, calm, gentleness serve to start you to yawning about what the book contains, it also should be noted that the poet has a sense of humor:

Peabo Bryson

Oh, not to be a dick, but

I would appreciate a little

variety in poetic approach

and strategy, especially since

this approach strikes me as

frequently fey and brittle.

Everything you’ve done

has had the same formal

strategy and poetic effect.

One problem with your

current approach, is that

it allows for absolutely no

emotional modulation or

specificity/complexity: it’s

all set in this vaguely

ethereal register that strikes

one as a assort of vacant

elevator music/dad music

for the experimental sort.

Well: wink!

All in all, if “there is nothing so beautiful / as something that’s found its way” (“Fluted”), then I’m happy these poems found their way into a book, got published, and are now available for your reading delectation -- specifically as a haven from, as the poet puts it in “Fluted,” the strident hollows that live / for this same world.”

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...

BOOKS by ROBERT FROST and DEREK WALCOTT

2007-05-22T19:51:00.000-07:00

ADDIE TSAI Reviews

The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, Ed. Edward Connery Lathem
(Henry Holt, New York, 1969)

Collected Poems 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott
(Noonday Press, New York, 1987)

What the Twilight Says: Essays by Derek Walcott
(Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, 1998)

“The World Is Too Much With Us”: Landscape and Wholeness

Robert Frost’s “Directive” & Derek Walcott’s “Sainte Lucie” (Sections I and II)

I. Introduction

In Larry Levis’s essay “The Gazer Within,” he states that:

…the authentic experience of any worthwhile landscape must be an experience of my own humanity…I am filled by, looked at by, the landscape itself; the experience is not that of a mirror’s but a true exchange, until even something as negligible as some newspapers lifting in the wind on a street, at night and before a rain, are somehow soiled by an ineradicable humanity, and by the presence of the dead, of the about to be born. (73)

Landscape—a framework of images that acts as a poem’s central trope—represents the conflicted, internal states of a speaker and inhabits a poem as its organizing system. Landscape moves the reader through the poem that also employs various modes of diction and syntax to craft the images in relation to the speaker’s internal concerns. And as Levis states, landscape must intersect with the speaker, and “be an experience of my own humanity.” Having written a poem, the poet has chosen the details of the poem’s landscape to become symbolic of the exchange. Richard Wilbur reminds us that Yeats once wrote that poets are “happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us” (Wilbur, 103). It begins with, to use Levis’s title, the gazer within: this gazer looks out to the world to find the “corresponding something outside” him to make his “inside” objective. Thus, even something that seems as “negligible” as blown newspaper becomes “authentic” and “worthwhile” because it has been seen with the gazer’s humane eye. This objective realm between the outside world and his inner being is an “exchange” because the objective becomes the subjective—the border between the two blurs to the extent that the poet and the landscape become two halves of the “experience” denoted in a poem.

But this exchange cannot only exist between the landscape and the individual gazer. Levis’s statement is a “revision” of the Romantic lyric tradition—one that described an individual presence in the outer landscape to reflect the speaker’s interior condition—that incorporates a communal “presence of the dead,” the alive, and those “about to be born.” The “ineradicable humanity” the landscape interacts with and is “soiled by” is a life-force that cannot be erased away. The “true exchange” comes to fruition when this landscape comes in contact with a human presence, an “ineradicable humanity.” This exchange suggests that the individual presence in a poem is as much acted upon by humanity as by the resources of landscape. It is this revelation about humanity, the individual, and landscape that reminds Levis that the exchange implicates others as well as his own self. Through this new lens, the individual reaches a greater understanding of the self and of his place within a larger community.

To fully understand this exchange, it is necessary to look to the lyric Romantic tradition Levis is in dialogue with, which first explored this exchange. M.H. Abrams defines the Romantic lyric poem in his essay “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” as one that:

begins with the description of a landscape visited in maturity, evokes the entire life of the poet as a protracted meditation on things past, and presents the growth of the poet’s mind as an interaction with the natural milieu by which it is fostered, from which it is tragically alienated, and to which in the resolution it is restored, with a difference attributable to the intervening experiences; the poem ends at the time of the beginning. (527)

In the Romantic lyric, the self acts as a lone individual in the outer world. The landscape serves as the point from which the meditation expands outward. The poet describes the landscape as a static, fixed object, and this source of observation propels him to meditate. But, as the poet meditates, his footing within the physical world blurs. Once suspended, the poet reaches an epiphanic moment that involves spirituality and the alienated self in the landscape with which he is familiar. The poet returns to the source he has meditated from, and due to the interaction between the mind and the outer world, finds it altered from its original view.

William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye During A Tour. July 13, 1798” (“Tintern Abbey”) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” illustrate this. In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth writes that there exists “in the mind of man: / A motion and a spirit, that...rolls through all things” (99-102), while in “Mont Blanc” Shelley states that “The Everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves” (1-2). The spiritual diction—“motion,” “spirit,” “Everlasting,” “flows,” and “rolls”—suggests that the individual facing nature attempts to return to the original source from which he has been “alienated.” For the Romantics, nature is a source of health, rejuvenation, and “ineradicable humanity” because humans are a part of that larger flow and scheme. Levis “revises” this ideal to incorporate a sense of other people as part of this wholeness. His more humane ideal sets up a triangulation of nature-self-collective, whereas the Romantic takes into consideration only the nature-self.

It could be said that one evolutionary strand of post-Romantic poetics seeks to make the issue of community or social coherence accountable to an individual lyric voice. Abrams further defines the lyric as a “deliberate endeavor to transform a segment of experience broken out of time into a sufficient aesthetic whole” (532). In the contemporary tradition, the lyric has been revised so that the landscape reflects the image of the individual as seen in the mirror of Nature and of a collective humanity. The community of the speaker’s world—the human presence apart from the individual speaker—represents the poem’s “humanity.” The language, through careful consideration of image, diction, syntax, and tone, effects a reconstitution of communal fragmentation. In other words, the poem’s world speaks to the speaker’s complicated emotional and social position. When the poem’s landscape has been fragmented, the speaker uses the landscape and the people within that landscape to show the complexities of the human condition and the struggle therein. This essay will examine how Robert Frost’s “Directive” and Derek Walcott’s “Sainte Lucie” (particularly sections “I” and II”) establish the landscape and the sense of wholeness and community after the landscape has been cracked in some way.

Frost and Walcott, as direct yet contrasting descendents of the Romantic poets, “revise” the Romantic lyric to include the collective where the preceding ideal focused only on the individual. “Directive” is in direct dialogue with Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much With Us.” The first line of Frost’s poem is “Back out of all this, now too much for us.” Published in 1947, “Directive” may have been informed by America’s historical condition at the end of World War II, but it is largely concerned with erosion and destruction as symbols of human losses through time: historical pain, loss of agricultural life, the unstoppable passage of time, abandonment of place and memory, and the diminishment of roots and origins. The destruction the poem enacts in the beginning, and the abandoned places Frost describes near the end, are metaphors for any loss. As the speaker moves the reader through the poem’s journey, “Directive” becomes a construction of what is no longer. The landscape begins with images of wreckage and move backwards to images of youth and fertility.

For “Directive” to enact this multi-tiered exchange, the poem must first create a structural grid to operate from. Frost navigates the reader via the form of blank verse, dictions that evoke destruction and fertility, and syntactical structures that consist of interweaving simple-declarative imperatives with consciously-formed winding passages that describe place in present newness and past erosion. This short and long syntactical deployment structures the reader’s sense of time. As the poem begins with a physical world “burned, dissolved, and broken off,” and ends with the source, a “children’s playhouse” and “waters and watering place,” the landscape is a symbol that interacts with speaker and community to try to make sense of its wholeness.

In “Sainte Lucie,” Derek Walcott, a Caribbean-born poet from the island of Saint Lucia, addresses the effect colonialism has had on the landscape, the individual, and the entire community. Walcott employs different syntactical devices throughout the five-section poem. The first section is formed entirely of sentence and clause fragments. Section “II” creates its heavily fragmented lens via a collage-effect of different dictions and syntactical structures. Walcott layers the diction of multiple languages—English, Patois and French—without any transition or transliteration of the non-English words, thus reflecting a fragmented speaker in his landscape and community. The fragmented syntactical phrases expressively break up meaning as they incorporate images of the landscape. The interweaving shifts in diction and syntax make whole in the first section what is fragmented in the second. In the third section, he recounts a narrative creole song (conte) that he translates into English in the fourth, showing two, separate linguistic and cultural identities side by side. The fifth section, “For the Altarpiece of the Roseau Valley Church, St. Lucia,” brings together landscape, people, and the individual self in that landscape.

II. Robert Frost’s “Directive”

The speaker in Frost’s “Directive” is a guide who takes the reader on a journey through the landmarks of time, personal history, and memory. The syntactical shifts throughout the poem enable the speaker to act as a figure of authority and as an equal companion. In its commanding yet guiding tone, the speaker addresses the reader as “you” and as the title indicates, guides the reader through the poem’s directive statements. Frost first establishes this soothing tone through prosody. By incorporating an American vernacular into the formal, metered blank-verse line, the tone feels calm and gentle.

To persuade the reader along, Frost uses a graduated tone that becomes increasingly commanding as the poem progresses. He begins by addressing the reader with the conditional—“if you’ll let a guide direct you / Who only has at heart your getting lost” (8-9). Through the use of contraction, the address, “if you’ll let,” syntactically shifts to colloquial English and lessens the formality of the guide’s voice, establishing an inviting, fatherly voice and friendly tone. The hypothetical “if” implies that the reader has the ultimate authority on whether or not to join the speaker, and the phrase “at heart” lends an unassuming air. The speaker takes on a role as companion, hoping the reader will join him as they dawdle together through a journey in time.

However, the tone becomes increasingly authoritative. In the lines “You must not mind a certain coolness from him / Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. / Nor need you mind the serial ordeal / Of being watched” (17-20), the tone is slightly more assertive. The phrases “must not” and “need not” imply that the speaker understands the reader’s possible hesitance but urges the reader to continue. Even though it is clear that the speaker is in full control of the journey, the diction effects a tone that is both authoritative and companionable.

The first imperative address doesn’t occur until the poem’s middle lines, “As for the woods’ excitement over you / That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves, / Charge that to upstart inexperience” (22-24). The qualifier “as for” with the imperative “charge that to” again gives the tone a supportive but commanding quality. The reader’s mistrust of the “woods’ excitement” is quickly answered by the one-line imperative “Charge that to upstart inexperience” to urge the reader to continue. When the speaker commands us to “make yourself up a cheering song” (28), “pull in your ladder road behind you / And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me” (36-37), and “Weep for what little things could make them glad” (43) without justification, the reader is able to acquiesce in the poem’s final line, “Drink and be whole beyond confusion” (61), due to the tone’s gradation from welcoming to directive.

In addition to reinforcing the rhythmical meter and vernacular voice, integrating the hypothetical statement, “if you’ll let a guide direct you,” accounts for the reader’s own suspicion. Throughout, the speaker acquiesces to this suspicion with a solicitous tone: “You must not mind a certain coolness from him” (17), “Nor need you mind the serial ordeal / Of being watched” (19), “As for the woods’ excitement over you…Charge that to upstart inexperience” (22-24). The tone of the poem’s speaker is constructed around what the reader experiences.

In addition to tone, the poem also moves the reader through the line; each line acts as a unit and ends at the end of a clause or sentence. There are only two sentences in the first 17 lines. The first sentence ends at line seven; the second sentence spans over ten lines, ending at line 17. With the long, sinuous syntactical structure of these lines, the poem enacts a meditative movement back in time, from the present-day “all this now” (1) to the far, geologic past of the Ice Ages, its “quarry” (10), “enormous Glacier” (16), and “great monolithic knees” (11), and engenders the breadth and expanse of time that the poem’s journey encompasses.

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town. (1-7)

Here, Frost orders the landscape temporally so that the images themselves move backwards. For example, the poem begins with images of death (“graveyard marble sculpture”) back to the obliteration of rural life (“The house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm”) to arrive at the physical markings left on the physical landscape by glaciations (“The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest / The chisel work of an enormous Glacier / That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole”).

The first seven lines use anaphora to enact this meditation in the past: “Back out of all this now too much for us,” “Back in a time made simple by the loss…” These repetitive constructions act as the poem’s temporal indicators. The break in the second line—“Back in a time made simple by the loss / Of detail, burned, dissolved and broken off”—illustrates the shifts between past and present. At first, the first two lines imply a movement back to a landscape of wholeness, away from what is “too much for us.” But instead, Frost shifts from the past’s preserved landscape to the present’s already-eroded landscape. The line break of “loss / Of detail, burned, dissolved and broken off” demonstrates the difference between the past preserved in memory and the present wear and destruction “of detail.” In other words, the landmarks in a person’s memory, “house,” “farm,” “town,” are “simple” for their “loss of detail.” To contrast, a present time holds the burden of wreckage in all its detail: “wear of iron wagon wheels” (14), “ledges show lines” (15), and “chisel work of an enormous Glacier” (16). The first seven lines effect this winding syntax back in time via an inverted grammar that delays the subject and verb until the fifth line, where it reaches its second anaphora—“There is a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm / In a town that is no more a town…” Again, Frost uses syntax to shift between time and memory. In memory, the mind envisions a house, a farm, and a town, but in actuality they are “no more.” The ordering of the syntax enables the poem to evoke this shift without needing verb tense to indicate time.

The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. (8-17)

The first sentence starts in the past, in memory, but the second shifts back to the present. The first half of the second sentence is constructed in perfect conditional. The main clause of the sentence—the road there may seem a quarry—is overshadowed by the perfect conditional address (as if it should have been) to the speaker. The syntax illustrates the speaker’s intent, “who only has at heart your getting lost.” Following the long dash in line 10 is an image of what the town used to be. The dash underscores the parallel between “quarry” and the qualifying image of the quarry’s personified “monolithic knees.” A quarry is “a rich or productive source” (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 391). The image symbolizes the reader’s expectation of the road in the past, “great monolithic knees,” and its present eroded state, “the former town / Long since gave up the pretense of keeping covered.” Frost also uses the conjunction “And” to separate the image of the “quarry” and further describe the worn town. The “And” used after the period in line 12 indicates the continuance of the sentence and the description of “the former town’s monolithic knees.” Line 13 echoes the construction of line five: “There’s a story…” This phrase is followed by a colon and like the dash after “quarry,” what follows the colon qualifies the preceding pronoun “it.” The last lines of this sentence—“The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest, / The chisel work of an enormous Glacier / That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole”—refer back to the “quarry,” though this time the image connotes a different definition: “an open excavation or pit from which stone is obtained by digging, cutting, or blasting” (391).

The images are first described in terms of their eroded condition, “wear of iron wagon wheels” and “ledges show lines,” and then in terms of what caused the erosion, “The chisel work of an enormous Glacier / That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.” In ordering the syntax by the image’s present condition and describing what acted on the image to lead to its condition, the syntax shifts the placement of time. Like Abrams’s model of the Romantic lyric, the poem begins with a speaker (and assumed reader) in the present looking back at a landscape; in this case, one that has suffered two kinds of erosion. In the recent past, the wagon wheels have traveled over the roads repeatedly, scoring the road and the landscape. In the further past, the glacier chiseled and lined the road with its advance and retreat. The phrase “Besides the wear...” suggests that along with the wagon wheels, the glacier also wore away the landscape. Breaking the line between “chisel work of an enormous Glacier” and “That braced his feet” delays the subject’s (“glacier”) physical action, “braced his feet,” not the erosion the glacier caused.

After the extended syntax of the first 17 lines, the syntax becomes much more direct and linear in its phrasing and clauses. The sentences continue to shorten until the final three lines—all of them end-stopped sentences. After line 17, the syntax complicates time throughout the poem by suddenly shifting from past to present, despite being written in present tense. Unlike the beginning inverted lines, these sentences are simple declarative and do not suspend their subject:

You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cell holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees. (18-28)

The diction alludes to a landscape that incorporates “the presence of the dead” and the individual presence, both of the speaker and reader: “haunt,” “being watched,” “as if by eye pairs out of forty firkins,” “light rustle rushes.” The phrase “still said” implies that others have felt the glacier’s ghostly presence as the reader “must.” Frost personifies the glacier and the woods, giving human sense to geological formations and erosions. In strong contrast with the glacier, the woods are brand new. The antecedent “they” in “they all” and “they think” refers to the woods in line 23. The wind-shaken trees feel “light rustle rushes to their leaves.” Before the glacial movements, these new trees didn’t exist (“Where were they all not twenty years ago?”). Frost’s diction choices differentiate between the different ages of the trees: “excitement,” “inexperience,” and “not twenty years ago” refers to the young age of the woods, while “shaded-out,” “pecker-fretted,” and “old” refers to the past, the apple trees which the new woods “shaded out.” The apple trees, by implication, are representative of an older, human cultivation of the landscape, while these new woods are representative of a new, freewheeling growth. But Frost gives them a light-hearted personification with the human-like, excitable pronoun, “they.”

The poem’s first 28 lines are concerned with personifying nature and images of cold dissolution (graveyard marble, the road worn by wagon-wheels, shaded-out apple trees), but not with human presence. Frost gradually moves from a detached view of the abandoned landscape to a tender configuration of humanity and cultivation. The first human doesn’t arrive until line 29:

Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain. (29-32)

The poem from here on becomes concerned with people and the ghostly presence they’ve left on the landscape. The tense shift from past (“once was”) to simple present (“may be”) suggests how time becomes malleable in memory. We don’t remember experiences as past but in a fixed, present state. Frost breaks the line between “was” and “who” to delay the action and the surprising figurative image of the worn road in order and create a parallel construction.

Once Frost integrates the human presence, the “Someone,” the poem addresses the landscape as it stands inside a human collective, and does so in the lines, “The height of the adventure is the height / Of country where two village cultures faded / Into one another. Both are lost” (32-35). This is a crucial moment in the poem. Because the landscape consists of images that no longer exist, a ghostly presence, an “ineradicable humanity,” haunts the poem. Despite what seems an absence of humans, Frost evokes human presence by charging the eroded landscape with what he imagines was there once, or could be now: the shaded-out, pecker-fretted trees; eye pairs out of firkins; the road it once was; someone ahead on foot creaking with a buggy of grain; coolness from a glacier haunting a mountain. The poem arrives at a divergence of humanity and landscape. This divergence is the first time in the poem Frost ends a sentence and begins a new one in the same line: in line 34, one sentence ends at “Into one another” and the poem’s shortest sentence follows: “Both of them are lost.” The two villages merge the way humanity and landscape merge in the poem—the villages are personified via the diction “each other,” “them,” “lost.” Frost uses syntax and image to illustrate the interchange between the missing human presence and the acted-upon landscape. As a result, neither humanity (community) nor the physical landscape is separate. Both are incomplete, “lost.”

Like the village cultures and the worker “ahead of you on foot,” the speaker and reader are both lost in memory, time and landscape. The first true directive and command to the reader is composed of the same syntax as the poem’s first address that invited the reader on the journey, and the lines following parallel the syntactical structure of the poem’s beginning lines:

And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house that is no more a house,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse in the children. (36-43)

The phrase “ladder road” doubly refers to the ladder used to enter the playhouse and the road which the speaker and reader have been traversing. The antecedent is the place to which the guide directs the reader, the place where “The height of adventure is the height / Of country...” The syntax is also in dialogue with the poem’s beginning lines. The first address to the reader, “The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you / Who only has at heart your getting lost” (8-9), is echoed in lines 36-38: “And if you’re lost enough to find yourself / By now, pull in your ladder road behind you / And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.” Both passages use condition and contraction: “if you’re” and “if you’ll.” The passage “lost enough to find yourself” also refers to the earlier “who only has at heart your getting lost.” The line “First there’s the children’s house that is no more a house” uses the same syntactical structure as the beginning lines, “There is a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm / And in a town that is no more a town.” A harness gall is a “sore on the skin of a horse’s back, caused by rubbing or chafing from a harness or loose saddle” (571). This image illustrates time’s erosion via its scale; an entire field diminished to the size of “a harness gall.”

The poem’s final lines dramatically return to the source of wholeness, of water and childhood. As in the Romantic lyric, the poem’s ending circles back to its beginning, metaphorically (it speaks of the place “Back out of all this...Back in a time made simple by the loss”) and syntactically:

Weep for what little things made them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.) (44-54)

The house is absolutely destroyed—only a grid of foundation in which the lilacs are growing like potted plants is left. When Frost states that the cellar hole is “closing like a dent in dough,” he suggests that the foliage is so thick that any touch to its surface can’t dent it. Nature has encroached upon the house the way the woods “shaded out” the agricultural apple trees. The beginning of this passage parallels the beginning, but it does so not by mere repetition, but by answering the questions proposed in the opening lines. If the reader began the journey thinking it a quarry, the guide consoles us by giving us the exact time and place “made simple by the loss”: a playhouse. The first reference to the “house that is no more a house,” “the children’s house of make-believe,” is followed by images evoking the destruction left in their absence: “Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, / The playthings in the playhouse of the children. / Weep for what little things made them glad.” The playthings and shattered dishes remain in the playhouse, but the human communal presence of the children is not there. The word “shattered” used to describe the once-inhabited playhouse emphasizes the fragmentation and search for wholeness.

Like the image of the geological erosion of the glacier, the natural source of water enables Frost to return to images of destruction and loss. The line inviting the reader on the journey, “The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you / Who only has at heart your getting lost, / May seem as if it should have been a quarry,” is answered in “Your destination and your destiny’s / A brook that was the water of the house.” Like the opening lines, Frost manipulates the syntax to delay the direct object of the line, the core of the sentence. Although the road is the subject, the quarry (“a rich, productive source” and “a mine”), is the pivot of the poem’s argument. The grammar is inverted in both cases. We are given the direct object before the subject-verb agreement, “The brook that was the water of the house” follows “Your destination and your destiny’s.” The poem has truly arrived backwards. The brook is “cold as a spring as yet so near its source, / Too lofty and original to rage. / (We know the valley streams that when aroused / Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)” The diction uses word-play and incorporates the intimate human landscape. The words “lofty” and “rage” operate geologically and as personification. The word “lofty” refers to both a human’s arrogance and a mountain peak’s height; “rage” to both the forceful motion of a spring and to anger. In the last eight lines, the speaker finally takes a presence in the poem and speaks for himself. It is in these lines that the poem arrives at unity. Frost integrates community, landscape, and individual:

I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it.
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. (53-60)

All the images of the landscape culminate in its fullness—the aging tree by the waterside, the broken Goblet, the Grail, the children’s playhouse. As the poem first directed us to a world of Troy in ruins, Frost’s reference to Saint Mark, the Grail, and the broken drinking goblet call us back towards legend and the epics of wholeness and fraternity, like “Beowulf” and “The Legend of King Arthur.” The religious diction at the end of the poem, “goblet,” “Grail,” “spell,” “saved,” “waters” implicate this ideal of wholeness in the landscape. The “instep arch” personifies the “old cedar,” referring back to the glacier that braced his feet against the Arctic in the beginning of “Directive.” After the loss of the village cultures, of landscape, and of memory, the religious charge of water, the source, invoke a spirit in the poem, one that has been in contact with both a human spirit and the spirit of the landscape. The inclusion of the world “beyond confusion” speaks to the alienation Abrams refers to in the Romantic lyric poem, and it is the source of water that ultimately connects the humans with the landscape, making both whole. It is here where the speaker and reader can return for the “ineradicable humanity” and for the “true exchange” between landscape and community, between fragmentation (the goblet, broken, is found in the arch of an old cedar) and wholeness.

III. Derek Walcott’s “Sainte Lucie”

A. I: The Villages

Like “Directive,” “Sainte Lucie” sets up the context of memory through a weathered, broken world haunted by the innocence of child-play. Similar to Frost’s playhouse, the place of child-play represents the source of wholeness and unity. Further, Walcott juxtaposes a destroyed, acted-upon landscape in the present with past images of children playing. This section—one long sentence running through 23 lines—builds prepositional phrases upon each other. And of the 25 used throughout the section, 17 serve as the beginning of a line:

Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery,
from these sun-bleached villages
where the church-bell caves in the sides
of one grey-scurfed shack that is shuttered
with warped boards, with rust,
with crabs crawling under the house-shadow
where the children played house;
a net rotting among cans, the sea-net
of sunlight trolling the shallows
catching nothing all afternoon,
from these I am growing no nearer
to what secret eluded the children
under the house-shade, in the far bell, the noon’s
stunned amethystine sea,
something always being missed
between the floating shadow and the pelican
in the smoke from over the next bay
in that shack on the lip of the sandspit
whatever the seagulls cried out for
through the grey drifting ladders of rain
and the great grey tree of the waterspout,
for which the dolphins kept diving, that
should have rounded the day. (1-23)

Lines two and 11 begin with “from these;” five and six with “with,” and 16 and 17 with “in” and are contained between the vague “something” and “whatever.” The repetition in structure and preposition gives the poem a sense of unity. The repetition of other diction occurs throughout the poem as well. Lines six and seven both use the word “house”: “house-shadow” and “house;” line eight begins with “net” and ends with “sea-net,” lines 13 and 15 refer to shadow: “house-shade” and “floating shadow,” and lines 20 and 21 use “grey” and end with images of water: “rain” and “waterspout.” Walcott also creates unity through sonic repetition with alliteration and consonance: lines three and six, “church-bell caves” and “crabs crawling;” line four, “grey-scurfed shack that is shuttered,” lines 16 to 18, “smoke,” “shack,” “sandspit,” “seagulls;” line 21 “great grey,” and lines 22 and 23, “dolphins,” “diving” and “day.”

Almost every line is end-stopped by punctuation or a prepositional phrase. The only exceptions are eight, 13, 16, and 22. These end on a living thing (“pelican”) or part of the landscape that has been personified, i.e. “sea-net / of sunlight trolling the shallows” is given the characteristics of a fisher. But none of these images reveal themselves until the following line.
The first ten lines are informed by images which are earthly, rustic, and eroded: “sun-bleached,” “caves in,” “grey-scurfed,” “warped,” “rust,” “rotting.” Walcott juxtaposes these with the image of child-play, the source of youth and childhood. The poem’s tone changes, however, when we arrive at the subject and verb of the long sentence in line 11 (“I am growing...”). The second half of the poem is then filled with images that lose grounding in the physical and take on an ethereal quality: “shade,” “amethystine,” “ladders of rain,” “floating shadow.” In contrast to the “crabs crawling” and the “children / under the house-shade,” this latter half is formed of living things airy in nature and suspended from the ground: “pelicans,” “seagulls,” “water spout” (of a whale), and “dolphins.” To achieve wholeness, Walcott balances the poem between earthly village-life and the paradisal Saint Lucia and its lyrical “secret.” Like the “I” in “Directive,” this first person is a conduit of unity among elements of human community and natural sublimity. In the Romantic outer world, the individual’s journey into landscape is about returning to the place where the self has not yet been “alienated.” And as in “Directive,” when Walcott asserts he is “growing no nearer / to what secret eluded the children,” he suggests that childhood is the last time the individual can reach the source and be redeemed from alienation. This section creates a landscape of encompassing breadth, imagistically and stylistically. The ending image further culminates the section’s wholeness, as the dolphin evokes the image of a circle as it “rounds the day.”

B. II

In the long poem’s second section, Walcott breaks apart the landscape he unified in “The Villages” by layering incomplete syntactical structures and various dictions of English, his indigenous Patois, and French. In order to explore how colonialism has affected Walcott’s view of language, Walcott does not define the Patois, but places the words next to its closest English referents, allowing the reader to see each language as separate yet unified, thus enabling Walcott to capture the duality of the fragmented and the whole. In addition, Walcott chooses English diction that evokes the history of the colonialism of other cultures, ones more commonly known than the history of a small Caribbean island. In this way, the landscape illustrates the duality Walcott has with language and how landscape reflects one’s identity.

Through the first 19 lines, Walcott uses this layered diction to address the physical landscape. No Patois word is directly translated, and the English only serves as context for reference. As Walcott catalogues the crop fruit of his island landscape, the poem takes us through history and time, from the colonial past of the island to Walcott’s own engagement with language.

Pomme arac,
otaheite apple,
pomme cythère,
pomme granate,
moubain,
z’anananas
the pineapple’s
Aztec helmet,
pomme,
I have forgotten
what pomme for
the Irish potato,
cerise,
the cherry,
z’aman
sea-almonds
by the crisp
sea-bursts,
au bord de la ‘ouvière. (1-19)

The first crop takes the reader to the first human established on the island. The word “pomme arac,” a “bright red fruit with velvety white interior,” is a hybridization of the French word for apple, “pomme,” and the Arawak (“arac”) Indians, the tribe to first populate the island. The fruit bears the burden of the island’s colonist history with France and the history of the Carib Indians who ritually ate the Arawak tribe (Coburn, 5).

The next two images blend the Patois with the closest English equivalents. An “otaheite,” a “pear shaped, apple-crimson fruit,” is juxtaposed with the English “apple,” which is wedged between “pomme cythère,” “a golden, bitter apple.” A “pomme cythère” is an actual apple where an “otaheite,” an “apple-crimson fruit,” has the qualities of one. Thus, the word “apple” is wedged in between the two Patois words for Caribbean fruit similar to apples. Situating English this way enables Walcott to transpose a meaning understood to his English-speaking readers while giving the reader two foreign words. The words “pomme granate,” (pomegranate) are sandwiched between “pomme cythere” and “moubain.” This is important to his implication of the landscape as whole because both “pomme cythere” and “moubain” are names for “golden apple.” The golden apple symbolizes the Christian paradise, and implies that St. Lucia is a kind of Eden. Historically, the pomegranate fruit’s seeds are a symbol of fertility and abundance for the Jewish. In Asia, pomegranates are offered to wedding guests to toss on the floor of the honeymoon suite to insure fertility for a newly-wed couple. The French for pomegranate is “grenade,” which suggests a bomb that scatters shrapnel like fruit scatters seeds, so that despite its paradisal landscape, the Eden metaphor is still fraught with complication given Saint Lucia’s history of colonialism, slavery, and poverty.

The French were the first to colonize Saint Lucia. As a result, the island has adopted the indigenous languages of Patois and Creole, dialects based on the constructs of French. Walcott transitions from the apple of paradise to crops that bear legacy to that colonialist history. The word “z’anananas” in line six refers to the French and pidgin word for pineapple, “anana.” By using “Aztec” to describe a fruit that grows in his own Caribbean soil, Walcott gives his reader most likely unfamiliar with Saint Lucia’s history an allusion to the Spanish invasion of the Aztecs in Mexico, a more familiar context of a colonized land. By using the helmet as a symbol of Mexico’s colonialist history, the choice in diction allows Walcott to project an entire indigenous people onto his own island landscape. And because the images in the first stanza build on each other without transition, the landscape and the individual speaker both become complicated with the traces of colonialist conquest and the physical landscape being described. In addition, the speaker evokes the fragmentation of lingual identity via juxtaposition of the varied layers of diction spliced together.

Walcott invokes another historical reference in the lines, “I have forgotten / what pomme for / the Irish potato” (10-12). Here, Walcott merges the French and English: the word “pomme” refers to “pomme de terre,” the French word for potato, which is followed by the English “potato.” Placing “Irish” next to “potato” also brings many associations: the potato famine in Ireland, the potato imported by the Spanish from the Andean Mountains, the Irish’s own experience with English colonization that forced them to increase their dependence on the crop itself. The apples, bananas, pineapples and potatoes of the poem are emblems of commerce and plunder, and the things done to lesser countries in the name of commerce and religion. St. Lucia is plundered by Spain, commercially, linguistically, and religiously. The Aztec defeat as shown in the pineapple is a shadow of that plunder; the potato famine is another shadow. He closes these series of images with the “z’aman / sea-almonds / by the crisp / sea-bursts, / au bord de la ‘ouvière.” The “z’aman,” like “otaheite,” is placed next to the closest English referent, “sea-almonds.” The last line in this description implies the trying colonialist burden of the island when Walcott uses the French phrase, “au bord de la ‘ouvière,” on the edge of struggle. When Walcott declares, “Come back to me / my language. / Come back, / cacao, / grigri, / solitaire…” he attempts to make whole what has been fragmented by unifying these layers of language and landscape without denying their fragmentation or pulling apart.

Walcott then fuses his images of the island’s agriculture with an encompassing description of the physical landscape:

Come back,
cacao,
grigri,
solitaire,
ciseau
the scissor-bird
no nightingales
except, once,
in the indigo mountains
of Jamaica, blue depth,
deep as coffee,
flicker of pimento,
the shaft light
on a yellow ackee
the bark alone bare
jardins
en montagnes
en haut betassion
the wet leather reek
of the hill donkey. (22-41)

The “cacao” is an apt transition from the detailed cataloguing in the previous lines because the cacao bean is another crop of the island that refers to a colonialist history: the Caribbean natives forced to work the cocoa plantations as slaves once the Europeans settled on the island. Further, the cacao fields and the “grigri,” fruit-bearing palm trees, are a distinct, wide-spanning feature of the island. The next two images describe birds native to the island. The “solitaire” is known throughout the region as a “mountain whistler” for its mournful, shrill song. The “ciseau,” the scissor-tailed frigate bird, is unique for its seven-foot wingspan and angular silhouette that can be seen throughout the island. It’s also important to note the line that precedes these images, “Come back to me, my language. / Come back.” Since the island’s colonialist and linguistic history is so fragmented, Walcott looks to the landscape’s essential features—high palm trees, the breadth of the cocoa plantations, soaring birds—to seek wholeness where it is lacking in language. Further, this is the only complete sentence and imperative in the section, spanning two short lines and formed with a direct subject-verb.

Walcott juxtaposes the images of the “solitaire” and the “ciseau” with that of the nightingale to represent his struggle for unity. Hoping to find the European songbird that has been such an emblem of Western literature, as represented by Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Walcott’s images of the Caribbean landscape set against “no nightingales” are his own argument for his “revision” of the Romantic lyric. Walcott yearns for the lineage of the nightingale to represent his idea of wholeness, a bird familiar to him as part of the tradition of Western literature. But the only emblems he can find in his own landscape, his “ciseau” and “solitaire,” are alien to the Western world. When Walcott does find a nightingale in the “indigo mountains,” the image is tainted with the plant’s history of slave labor. The use of “indigo” complicates the image as it associates its unusual color with the mountains. In addition to the dye, the word also refers to the plant the dye is made from, giving the image an earthly quality. Walcott describes the images without a defined syntactical structure and stacks each image on top of the next. And because each image directly associates to the one next to it, Walcott fuses dramatically different facets of the landscape together to create a unity that has a crystalline structure. Walcott repeats this pattern in the last lines of the first stanza. As with the birds, he categorizes these images by sense. The first image, “coffee,” evokes smell, taste, and sight. Like the preceding images, it refers to the landscape and the history of trade and commerce of the island. Coffee is made in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, which expands on the initial image of the indigo mountains. The “pimento” in the following line is a spice that encompasses varied flavors: nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and pepper. Like its Blue Mountain coffee, Jamaica is also known for growing the highest quality of pimento in the world. Walcott uses these images as a claim for the island’s Eden-like qualities. The “shaft light / on a yellow ackee” conflates the sense of sight. The “ackee” is Jamaica’s national fruit and one of the two main ingredients in its national dish, ackee and salt fish. Walcott wants the landscape alone to hold the beauty of the fruit as a beam of light reflects down on the tree. But all of these images are merged with commerce. The beautiful Blue Mountains are burdened with the trade of coffee, the smell of the pimento with the problematic commerce.

Walcott shifts from the images of the magnificent birds and world-famous pimento and coffee to images of the landscape’s elements. Unlike the sweet child-play of the first section, the elemental landscape in the second section is the “wet leather reek” of the donkey and the plain bark on the fruit tree. The word “betassion” in line 39 is the French equivalent to “savage,” and suggests that to Walcott, the source is a person that is rough and uncivilized. It also refers to the fierce and brutal attack of St. Lucia’s conquerors. To Walcott, the savage is likened to the features of the landscape from which Walcott has been alienated: bare bark of a tree, “jardins” (gardens), and “montagnes” (mountains). The placement and use of diction suggests that the savage is like the reek of “wet leather” on a “hill donkey.” The clarification of “wet leather” refers to the burden of labor and the commercial, man-made products from that labor.

As the poem progresses, the syntactical structures shift from a scaffolding of different language dictions to a linear structure more inclusive in terms of parts of speech, such as prepositions and verbs. The first three lines of the second stanza, “Evening opens at / a text of fireflies / in the mountain huts” (43-45) are a dramatic shift from the last stanza’s layers of subject after subject. The first two lines form an independent clause further clarified by the prepositional phrase “in the mountain huts.” As in the previous stanza, the next six lines are formed with words that describe what takes place “in the mountain huts”:

ti cailles betassion
candles,
candleflies
the black night bending
cups in its hard palms
cool thin water (46-51)

Walcott shifts from the vernacular English of the preceding prepositional phrase to a layering of Patois. A “hut” suggests a makeshift dwelling in which savages or aborigines take shelter. The Patois for tea and quail, “ti” and “cailles,” precede the French word for savage, “betassion.”

The “black night,” symbolic of the landscape, is personified via the subject-verb structure, evoking a human-like sky with its gerund, “bending,” and possession of a human body part, “its hard palms.” The remainder of the second stanza uses a construction similar to the first stanza. The next line uses direct subject-verb syntax and asks, “this is important water, / important? imported?” The importance and purity of water, Walcott implies, like all of the products of the landscape, are soiled by the burden of trade. The stanza forms a unity by fusing images of commerce with what Walcott sees as fundamental to the island:

water is important
also very important
the red rust rum
the evening deep
as coffee
the morning powerful
important coffee
the villages shut
all day in the sun. (55-63)

The repeated image of the coffee, “the evening deep / as coffee,” is enclosed between “the red rust rum” and “the morning powerful.” This merging of diction alludes to both the landscape and its imported, “important,” products. The image refers back to the first mention of the indigo mountains in line 30. The lines, “the villages shut / all day in the sun,” call our attention back to the first section and its ethereal landscape. The fact that the villages are “shut all day” suggests that the villages have been drained of activity. Further, the people are not working the plantations of the “important coffee,” because the villagers are harvesting the coffee in the fields. Walcott also evokes ambiguity in the landscape by appropriating the “be” verb to the description of commerce, “water is important,” “this is important water.” The images not burdened with commerce have no verb. Using diction and syntax, Walcott creates a landscape both commercial and pure.

The third stanza uses a similar syntactical structure as the previous two. The first line’s prepositional phrase, “In the empty schoolyard” (65), locates the reader, just as in the first lines of the previous stanza. The stanza also ends on part of the landscape: “and the small rivers / with important names.” The middle of the stanza syntactically mimics the stanza before it. Walcott again appropriates human qualities for the landscape by using the subject-gerund personification in lines 67 and 68, “the fruit rotting / yellow on the ground” while the human (“teacher dead”) mentioned in the preceding line is a fixed part of the island. In this case, the fruit takes on a human presence because of the dead teacher it has been juxtaposed with. The next six lines are filled with images whose diction refers to previous stanzas. The lines all start with the appositive “the,” just as in the preceding stanza. Lines 75-77 use the same pronoun-be verb-subject construction (“so you is Walcott? / you is Roddy brother? / Teacher Alix son?”) to ask a series of questions about a single subject. Both stanzas close with an image of the landscape clarified by a prepositional phrase: “the villages shut / all day in the sun” and “and the small rivers with important names.” The diction further creates a kind of fullness through its integration of the fragmented parts:

In the empty schoolyard
teacher dead today
the fruit rotting
yellow on the ground,
dyes from Gauguin
the pomme arac dyes
the earth purple,
the ochre roads
still waiting in the sun
for my shadow,
Oh, so you is Walcott?
you is Roddy brother?
Teacher Alix son?
and the small rivers
with important names. (65-79)

The words “fruit” and “yellow” refer to “pomme arac” in line 1, also repeated in line 70 (“the pomme arac dyes”). The words “dyes,” “the earth purple,” and “ochre” refer chromatically to the indigo mountains in line 30. The word “dyes” serves as both a noun for the blue dye and as a verb; the “pomme arac” is one of the original sources of the landscape that stains the “earth purple.” Gauguin serves as a metaphor for Western voyeurism of tropical, exotic imagery. The post-Impressionist French-Peruvian painter, who immigrated to France at age 24, spent the end of his life in Tahiti painting the island’s nude women as the figure of Eve in paradise. The reference suggests the exploitative manner the West Indies is depicted in art, and that the Western world sees the Caribbean as Edenic, despite its burden of colonialism.

This passage, like Frost’s abandoned playhouse, is filled with haunting absence. The “empty schoolyard” implies the absence of children and the “teacher dead” intensifies the ghostliness of the present landscape. The phrase “my shadow” refers to the search the speaker begins “Sainte Lucie” with: “I am growing no nearer / to what secret eluded the children / under the house-shade” (11-13). Walcott searches for the source in real people. The shadow is a symbol for his twin brother, “my shadow, / Oh, so you is Walcott? / you is Roddy brother?” Walcott reaches the source by merging the individual with his family and the community of the island. The “empty schoolyard” and “teacher dead” symbolize his own community, i.e. “Alix,” Walcott’s mother. To complicate it even further, Walcott creates a third layer that incorporates the source of water, “and the small rivers / with important names.” The words “small” and “important names” imply that the small rivers have been given grand colonialist names.

The next two stanzas use structure to give the poem unity. The third stanza does not end with a period but flows into the next stanza. The syntax of these stanzas is also more whole; each phrase that has a person as its subject has a qualifying verb. In addition, each image is also expanded with adjective or metaphor. The first two lines of the third stanza, “And the important corporal / in the country station,” unify the second and third stanzas by continuing with the same syntactical structure from the preceding stanza, “and the small rivers / with important names.” The lines “in the country station / en betassion” (81-82) also have a similar syntax to the first two lines of the second stanza, “In the empty school yard / teacher dead today.” The prepositional phrase locates the reader in the island’s geography, followed by the living thing inhabiting that location, and what that living thing is doing. The place in both phrases is a contained, man-made construction—in stanza two a schoolyard, and in the penultimate stanza a “country station.” A “country station” refers to lodging for tourists in outdoor destinations, as well as a watch-tower for guards or “corporals.” The following images of Walcott’s St. Lucia take in the collective community, himself, and the outer landscape:

And the important corporal
in the country station
en betassion
looking towards the thick
green slopes of cocoa
the sun that melts
the asphalt at noon,
and the woman in the shade
of the breadfruit bent over
the lip of the valley,
below her, blue-green
the lost, lost valleys
of sugar, the bus rides,
the fields of bananas
the tanker still rusts
in the lagoon at Roseau,
and around what corner
was uttered a single
yellow leaf,
from the frangipani
a tough bark, reticent,
but when it flowers
delivers hard lilies,
pungent, recalling (81-104)

Like the Gauguin allusion, the “corporal” in the country station is looking on the landscape through the window as if it were a painting. But instead of Gauguin’s colorful nudes, Walcott’s images are his own, real Saint Lucian natives. In the third stanza, there are two references to a human presence: “en betassion,” (“savages”) in line 83, and “the woman in the shade” in line 88. The humans are fused with the landscape. Walcott calls back the “cacao” image, but this time he uses the informal term “cocoa” for the powder derived from the bean instead of its agricultural name. By replacing it with a term associated with human consumption instead of one evoking a slave history, Walcott reclaims the history he urged in lines 22 and 23 to “Come back / cacao...” He describes the cocoa as “thick green slopes,” merging the island’s physical hills with the powder. Walcott reclaims the landscape by stripping the images of their colonialist past. The “betassion” aren’t referred to as plantation slaves but witnesses “looking towards the thick / green slopes.” Instead of personifying the landscape as human, the humans are, in a way, personified as earth. The “sun that melts / the asphalt at noon” isn’t personified like the night in the previous stanza. But the woman is personified as earth through juxtaposition: “and the woman in the shade / of the breadfruit bent over / the lip of the valley, / below her, blue-green / the lost, lost valleys…” (88-92) Walcott uses “lip,” a body part indicative of female sexuality, to lend the characteristics of the Saint Lucian earth. With the juxtaposition of the woman with “valley” and “breadfruit,” the woman also becomes a symbol of fertility and abundance. Further, because the image of the woman “in the shade” follows that of the “sun that melts / the asphalt at noon,” which is also in dialogue with the first section’s “sea-net / of sunlight,” and the penultimate stanza’s “still waiting in the sun / for my shadow,” the woman symbolizes the source, the “secret / under the house-shade” where the children played. This is a crucial difference in the structure of the last two stanzas in that Walcott now directly appropriates the landscape of source to the human in the earth, where the previous stanzas addressed the idea of the shadow-source in the form of a question. It is only when the living woman is fused with the “valley” that Walcott finds the original source of renewal, the “secret” that “rounded the day.” The next few lines’ images refer to the colonialist and commercial history that Walcott has shed now that the poem has arrived at its source: “the lost, lost valleys / of sugar, the bus rides, / the fields of bananas / the tanker still rusts” (92-95). The repetition of “lost” and the diction of “sugar,” “bus,” “fields,” “bananas,” and “tanker” refer to the colonial history Walcott built up in the preceding stanzas and to the conquest of the European settlers (tanker). Walcott links the shed colonialist images with the poem’s final images of the “frangipani” and “women” with “around what corner / was uttered…” (97-98) Walcott suggests, through the layering of different images and clauses, that one will miss the island’s true landscape and history if one focuses only on its history of conquest or commerce. The “frangipani,” a tree from the jasmine family, produces white “pungent” blossoms. Walcott uses the native plant to extend the metaphor of woman as earth. The three-tiered image represents wholeness because it expands outwards and culminates into a depiction of landscape that incorporates humanity, earth, history, and purity. Walcott describes the frangipani as “a single / yellow leaf” and “tough bark, reticent” that “when it flowers / delivers hard lilies, / pungent…” The diction works to create an image that is at once “hard” and as delicate as a “single” leaf. The flower recalls the names and bodies of the women whose names associate colonialism and war: “Martine,” “war-like,” “Eunice,” “good victory,” and “Lucilla,” the third-century saint martyred in Rome whom St. Lucia was named after. The woman, by any name, is described in terms of the earth:

Martine or Eunice
or Lucilla,
who comes down the steps
with the cool, side flow
as spring water eases
over shelves of rock
in some green ferny hole
by the road in the mountains,
her smile like the whole country,
her smell, earth,
red-brown earth, her armpits
a reaping, her arms
saplings, an old woman
that she is now
with other generations of daughters flowing
down the steps,
gens betassion,
belle ti fille betassion,
until their teeth go,
and all the rest. (106-126)

Walcott uses juxtaposition to appropriate the characteristics of the landscape onto the woman. The phrase “who comes down the steps / with the cool, side flow / as spring water eases” lends the water’s flow to the woman’s walk. The simile “her smile like the whole country” also transposes the landscape’s traits onto the woman. When Walcott places the woman’s body next to parts of the earth—“her smell” (also referring to the frangipani’s pungent perfume) and “earth, / red brown earth,” “her armpits” and “reaping,” and “her arms” and “saplings”—the woman becomes the landscape. When the human merges with landscape, humanity takes on as much importance as the earth, and the “gens betassion” (savage people) symbolize real humanity as a result of this exchange instead of as slaves, “belle ti fille betassion” (beautiful daughter savages). Walcott can embrace the island due to this exchange between humanity and landscape. When he addresses the women, he refers to himself as part of the landscape:

O Martinas, Lucillas,
I’m a wild golden apple
that will burst with love
of you and your men
those I never told enough
with my young poet’s eyes
crazy with the country,
generations going,
generations gone,
moi c’est gens St. Lucie.
C’est la moi sorti:
is there that I born. (128-139)

Finally, Walcott reaches wholeness with a paradise freed from the burden of colonialism. This time the speaker is given the qualities of the landscape, of the symbolic “wild golden apple / that will burst with love…” Walcott embraces the “country, / generations going, / generations gone” now that the landscape has been “soiled by an ineradicable humanity.” When Walcott ends the poem with “moi c’est gens Ste. Lucie / C’est la moi sorti: is there that I born” he embraces not only the history of Saint Lucia by speaking in French, but embraces language when he defines the non-English words in the final line.

IV. Conclusion

I have always seen the use—and the reception—of language as a subjective act. In childhood, I was immersed in a world of people speaking in Mandarin, a language I could barely understand. When my father would perform ancient and contemporary plays in Mandarin for the local Chinese community, I would fixate on the strange sounds of their dialogue, which was as incomprehensible as opera. My confusion only thickened when I became an adult thrown into the social constructs of Americans, facing each day with colloquialisms and idioms I had never heard before: “that’s old hat,” “be careful you don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” “red herring,” etc. The image-based phrases transferred meaning in such a figurative way that I found them puzzling. The idioms of contemporary American vernacular and the Mandarin dialogue of my father’s plays contained a kind of logic or code for which I didn’t have the tools to connect meaning. When I used these expressions, it was only out of imitation, an effort to become part of a world where I could use the same linguistic structures as others to communicate my own inner thoughts and feelings.

To me, poems seemed to operate via a similar sociolinguistic system I didn’t have access to. I felt displaced from certain poems because they seemed to use cultural or social referents from a construct I wasn’t familiar with. Certain narrative poems humorously described an American experience using cultural referents that would evoke an immediate response of laughter, leaving me dumbfounded, as if I had missed the punch line. When these references were used, I felt ejected from the poem’s argument just as I had been in the conversations of my youth.

To contrast, when I read poems that used landscape as a kind of logic to portray the speaker’s interior, I felt I had access to the poem’s meaning and resonance, to that poem’s self. Landscape, I felt, allowed me a way into the poem objectively. This framework enabled me to visualize the physical images used in the poem through the lens of my own perspective, my own experiences with that terrain, and see my own interior in a way that was visceral and metaphorical.

In the poems “Directive” and “Sainte Lucie,” both poets arrive at their “revision” of the Romantic lyric from startlingly different scopes of landscape. Frost’s rural New England earth is burdened by physical and agricultural erosion and loss. Walcott’s Eden-like Caribbean island of Saint Lucia bears the complications of colonialism, conquest, and trade. Each poet represents the divide and coming together in the self by demonstrating that divide and merging in the physical landscape. This exchange and interchange between landscape and humanity transposes humanity onto the earth, and the earth onto the self. By showing what has been fragmented in the humans and the physical world, Frost and Walcott demonstrate the humanity “as ineradicable,” both from the landscape, and the speaker himself.

++++++++

Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Coburn, Tyler. “Omeros: the Construction of a Holistic Linguistic System in Postcolonial St. Lucia.” Working paper, 6 Mar. 2003.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Henry Holt, 1969.

Jamaica Glossary of Terms Home Page. March 2004. .

Levis, Larry. “Some Notes on the Gazer Within.” A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Stuart Friebert and David Young. New York: Longman, 1982.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Mont Blanc.” English Romantic Writers. Ed. David Perkins. 2nd ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995.

Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948-1984. New York: Noonday Press, 1987.

Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998.

Webster’s New World Dictionary. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Wilbur, Richard. “Poetry and Happiness.” Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting The Banks Of The Wye During A Tour. July 13, 1798.” English Romantic Writers. Ed. David Perkins. 2nd ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995.

*****

Addie Tsai holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Forklift, Ohio, Born Magazine, Caketrain, and NOON: A Journal of the Short Poem. Tsai received a Pushcart nomination in 2006 and received third place in the Tin House Summer Literary Seminars contest for her poem "The Language of Breaking." She lives in Houston, Texas.

LITTLE WAR MACHINE by M SARKI

2007-05-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

Little War Machine by M Sarki
(Ravenna Press ,Edmonds, WA, 2004)

With abstract poems, I usually am able to enter their space and engage, which is to say, I manage to interpret the work into something specific to which I then can respond. I’m not calling the poems in M Sarki’s Little War Machine “abstract”, but the term arose because, while seeming to state something specific, their meanings actually elude fixed definitions. Witness the first poem:

HOT

I want to go
to Guatemala
and feel the

maddening drip
of its bulbous
grasses washing

my dead away.

I use the term “witness” because, as much as I read the poems, I seem to watch them more. It’s an interesting effect—the first that I can recall experiencing from poems. That is, the poems don’t call out to be heard. They seem to be entities totally unreliant on audience. I can picture these poems as sculptures standing deep within some rain forest perfectly content—well, perhaps not content but more like indifferent as to whether human traffic (readership) will come their way.

So what’s the significance of this effect? Especially given how the title of the book would imply a politics underlying the poetry. Don't politics, after all, usually demand to be heard?

I think this result stems partly from how the poems present mysteries which cannot be resolved to any fulsome satisfaction. Witness the collection’s second poem:

Lake

Every ripple
In the floor

Rises

To kiss his lips.

It could be a simple poem. One can gloss over it by simply appreciating the image and what it literally states. But it makes one pause, and not to enjoy the romantic charm. That’s the thing—I feel like it should hearken romance. But, instead, there’s something ominous about it. Instead of a lover, if only a Narcissus looking down at his/her reflection, I feel like there’s a policeman instead. A policeman looking into the lake for some murdered body. And I think this brilliant slippage occurs because the second line presents “floor” rather than, say, ‘water” which is what one might expect from the title of “Lake.”

A similar situation comes up in this poem:

Nearest Theory of the Spruce

It is thick, this
flesh he scores.
Her gift to him

for adoration.
The backdoor of
her ample stock,

naïve and jingling.

I read this poem as a man having sex with a woman from behind. And it doesn’t evoke “making love” versus “sex” despite the inclusion of the word “adoration.” There’s a dispassion to the tone—from the intellectual title (even if nonsensical, intellectualized) to the last lines whose descriptions bespeak a bystander rather than participant.

Also facilitating this sense of distance is an implied thumbing of one’s nose at preconceived notions of the sacred, which this poem for me exemplifies -- though I hasten, too, to draw attention to the neatly unexpected twist presented by the last line.

Long Robes Sublime

She sees her
sun now
as first love.

Aged beside
indifference.
Her lips

opening each can.

For me, Little War Machine is presenting a critical eye towards the world. Other poets with critical stances have lapsed to irony, religion, humor, rant, transcendence, despair, among others. Little War Machine doesn’t lapse to anything. It holds its ground to look and comment. It remains steadfastly grim.

In that grimness lies an unflinching eye whose poems are among the most impressive I have recently read. I still don’t really know why these poems are so effective. But I suspect it has to do with words as things. That their thing-ness precludes the sloppiness of multiple subjective interpretations and insist, indeed, on remaining stubborn mysteries. I mean, check out this poem

Beast

Winter came riding
on the back
of a gray seed.

I appreciate the poem without feeling any particular need to blather on and on about it. It is simply what it is.

These poems also refresh minimalism. For example

Blue Dirt

The sky blue.
And the earth brown.
The blue blue.
The brown brown.

This is deceptively simple. One read could be: What could reverse the natural order of things -- as in the title "Blue Dirt? One answer could be the way humans engage—the politics of humans. You, Reader, be the one to insert her a list of what’s wrong today, okay?

Of course that’s just one reading. More significant is that these poems shift your vision and you sense that as you leave the book and start moving on through the rest of your day, you are looking at the world … differently.

I note that this is a publication released in 2004. I don’t know how much attention it’s received but I certainly did not know of its existence until a review copy was sent to Galatea Resurrects. This book show why I’m not interested in having Galatea Resurrects review only “recent” titles. Poetry lasts…and I think those in Little War Machine deserve to be more known, deserve to last, even as I suspect they’re indifferent to the whole matter of eternal fame.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou. She can't do anything but shrug over the loudness of her Silences...