tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48475350304238968742024-03-13T15:03:25.798-07:00Galatea Resurrects #15 (A Poetry Engagement)Presenting engagements (including reviews) of poetry books & projects. Some issues also offer Featured Poets, a "The Critic Writes Poems" series, and/or Feature Articles.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-19906285183520810092010-12-05T23:50:00.000-08:002010-12-07T21:20:45.189-08:00Issue No. 15 TABLE OF CONTENTSDec. 7, 2010<br /><br /><em>[N.B. You can click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article.]</em><br /><br /><strong>EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION</strong><br />By <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/editors-introduction.html"><strong>Eileen Tabios</strong></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>NEW REVIEWS</strong><br />Camille Martin reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/saline-by-kimberly-lyons.html"><strong>SALINE </strong></a>by Kimberly Lyons <br /> <br />Patrick James Dunagan reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/dear-sandy-hello-letters-from-ted-to.html"><strong>DEAR SANDY, HELLO: LETTERS FROM TED TO SANDY BERRIGAN</strong></a>, Edited by Sandy Berrigan and Ron Padgett <br /> <br />Jon Curley reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/autopsy-turvy-by-thomas-fink-maya.html"><strong>AUTOPSY TURVY </strong></a>by Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/had-slaves-by-catherine-sasanov.html"><strong>HAD SLAVES </strong></a>by Catherine Sasanov <br /><br />John Herbert Cunningham reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/selected-poems-of-garcilaso-de-la-vega.html"><strong>SELECTED POEMS OF GARCILASO DE LA VEGA</strong></a>, Edited and translated by John Dent-Young <br /><br />Kathryn Stevenson reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/money-for-sunsets-by-elizabeth-j-colen.html"><strong>MONEY FOR SUNSETS </strong></a>by Elizabeth J. Colen <br /><br />T.C. Marshall reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/vancouver-poem-by-george-stanley-and-in.html"><strong>VANCOUVER: A POEM by George Stanley and IN THE MILLENIUM by Barry McKinnon </strong></a><br /><br />Eric Dickey reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/as-it-turned-out-by-dmitry-golynko.html"><strong>AS IT TURNED OUT </strong></a>by Dmitry Golynko, Edited by Eugene Ostashevsky. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Rebecca Bella with Simona Schneider<br /><br />Peg Duthie engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-adventures-of-gravity-and-grace.html"><strong>THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF GRAVITY AND GRACE </strong></a>by Ernesto Priego <br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/untamd-wing-riffs-on-romantic-poetry-by.html"><strong>UNTAM’D WING: RIFFS ON ROMANTIC POETRY </strong></a>by Jeffrey C. Robinson <br /><br />Harry Thorne reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/neighbor-by-rachel-levitsky.html"><strong>NEIGHBOR </strong></a>by Rachel Levitsky <br /><br />Michael Pollock engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/el-dorado-by-edgar-allan-poe.html"><strong>"El Dorado" by Edgar Allan Poe</strong></a>, Spanish translation by Mario Murgia in EL CURVO Y OTROS POEMAS by Edgar Allan Poe, Edicion bilingue with Traduccion del proyecto Helbardot and Ilustraciones de Gustavo Abascal <br /> <br />Barbara Roether reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/fire-exit-by-robert-kelly.html"><strong>FIRE EXIT </strong></a>by Robert Kelly <br /><br />Allen Bramhall reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/situations-by-laura-carter.html"><strong>SITUATIONS </strong></a>by Laura Carter <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/1000-sonnets-by-tim-atkins.html"><strong>1000 SONNETS </strong></a>by Tim Atkins <br /> <br />Eric Hoffman reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/eschaton-by-michael-heller.html"><strong>ESCHATON </strong></a>by Michael Heller <br /><br />Jon Curley reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/100-notes-on-violence-by-julie-carr.html"><strong>100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE </strong></a>by Julie Carr <br /><br />Genevieve Kaplan reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/nets-by-jen-bervin-and-ms-of-m-y-kin-by.html"><strong>NETS by Jen Bervin and THE MS OF M Y KIN by Janet Holmes </strong></a><br /><br />Aileen Ibardaloza reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/two-haynaku-anthologies-editedcurated.html"><strong>THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU PROJECT, Curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego & Eileen Tabios and THE HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGY, VOL. II, Edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young</strong></a> <br /><br />John Herbert Cunningham reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/collected-poems-by-dylan-thomas.html"><strong>COLLECTED POEMS </strong></a>by Dylan Thomas <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/2nd-notice-of-modifications-to-text-of_05.html"><strong>2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS </strong></a>by John Bloomberg-Rissman <br /><br />Allen Bramhall reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/not-blessed-by-harold-abramowitz.html"><strong>NOT BLESSED </strong></a>by Harold Abramowitz <br /> <br />Moira Richards reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/is-for-anne-by-penelope-scambly-schott.html"><strong>A IS FOR ANNE </strong></a>by Penelope Scambly Schott <br /><br />Peg Duthie engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/gothenburg-from-three-geogaophies.html"><strong>"GOTHENBURG" FROM THREE GEOGAOPHIES: A MILKMAID'S GRIMOIRE </strong></a>by Arielle Guy <br /><br />John Herbert Cunningham reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/disjunctive-poetics-from-gertrude-stein.html"><strong>DISJUNCTIVE POETICS: FROM GETRUDE STEIN AND LOUIS ZUKOFSKY TO SUSAN HOWE </strong></a>by Peter Quartermain<br /><br />Rebecca Loudon reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/god-damsel-by-reb-livingston.html"><strong>GOD DAMSEL </strong></a>by Reb Livingston <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/requiem-for-orchard-by-oliver-de-la-paz.html"><strong>REQUIEM FOR THE ORCHARD </strong></a>by Oliver de la Paz <br /><br />Kristi Castro reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/edge-by-edge-by-gladys-justin-carr.html"><strong>EDGE BY EDGE</strong></a>, collection of poetry chaps by Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter <br /><br />Allen Bramhall reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/i-formation-book-1-by-anne-gorrick-1.html"><strong>I-FORMATION BOOK 1 </strong></a>by Anne Gorrick <br /><br />Lynn Behrendt reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/i-formation-book-1-by-anne-gorrick-2.html"><strong>I-FORMATION BOOK 1 </strong></a>by Anne Gorrick <br /> <br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/lynn-behrendts-review-of-anne-gorricks.html"><strong>Lynn Behrendt's review of Anne Gorrick's I-FORMATION BOOK 1</strong></a><br /><br />Michael Caylo-Baradi reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/misspell-by-lars-palm.html"><strong>MISSPELL </strong></a>by Lars Palm <br /> <br />John Herbert Cunningham reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/penury-by-myung-mi-kim.html"><strong>PENURY </strong></a>by Myung Mi Kim <br /> <br />Albert B. Casuga reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/traje-de-boda-poems-by-aileen.html"><strong>TRAJE DE BODA: POEMS </strong></a>by Aileen Ibardaloza <br /> <br />Richard Lopez reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/some-sonnets-edited-by-tim-wright.html"><strong>SOME SONNETS</strong></a>, Edited by Tim Wright <br /> <br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/apparition-poems-by-adam-fieled.html"><strong>APPARITION POEMS </strong></a>by Adam Fieled <br /><br />L.M. Freer reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/beats-at-naropa-edited-by-anne-waldman.html"><strong>BEATS AT NAROPA: AN ANTHOLOGY</strong></a>, Edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright <br /><br />Moira Richards reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/made-by-cara-benson.html"><strong>(MADE)</strong></a> by Cara Benson <br /> <br />Thomas Fink reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/drunkerholding-ember-by-raymond-farr.html"><strong>DRUNKER/HOLDING EMBER </strong></a>by Raymond Farr <br /><br />Edric Mesmer reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-secrets-of-my-prison-house-by.html"><strong>ON SECRETS OF MY PRISON HOUSE </strong></a>by Geoffrey Gatza <br /><br />Peg Duthie engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/eating-her-wedding-dress-edited-by.html"><strong>EATING HER WEDDING DRESS: A COLLECTION OF CLOTHING POEMS</strong></a>, Edited by Vasiliki Katsarou, Ruth O’Toole, and Ellen Foos <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/behave-by-steve-tills.html"><strong>BEHAVE: CALIFORNIA RANT 66 </strong></a>by Steve Tills <br /><br />Jim McCrary reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/mr-magoo-by-steve-tills.html"><strong>MR. MAGOO </strong></a>by Steve Tills <br /><br />Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/autopsy-turvy-by-thomas-fink-and-maya.html"><strong>AUTOPSY TURVY </strong></a>by Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason <br /><br />Margaret H. Johnson reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/manhattan-man-and-other-poems-by-jack.html"><strong>MANHATTAN MAN (AND OTHER POEMS)</strong></a> by Jack Lynch <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/at-trotskys-funeral-by-mark-young.html"><strong>AT TROTSKY'S FUNERAL </strong></a>by Mark Young <br /><br />Marianne Villanueva reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/ernesta-in-style-of-flamenco-by-sandy_05.html"><strong>ERNESTA, IN THE STYLE OF FLAMENCO </strong></a>by Sandy McIntosh <br /><br />Hadas Yatom-Schwartz engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/ernesta-in-style-of-flamenco-by-sandy.html"><strong>“Nathan, in the Ancient Language”, a poem in ERNESTA, IN THE STYLE OF THE FLAMENCO</strong></a> by Sandy McIntosh <br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/collected-poems-gustaf-sobin-eds-esther.html"><strong>COLLECTED POEMS / GUSTAF SOBIN</strong></a>, Edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Ed Foster <br /><br />Jon Curley reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/cleaning-mirror-selected-poems-by-joel.html"><strong>CLEANING THE MIRROR: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS </strong></a>by Joel Chace <br /><br />Tom Beckett reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/cleaning-mirror-selected-and-new-poems.html"><strong>CLEANING THE MIRROR: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS </strong></a>by Joel Chace <br /><br />John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/at-fair-by-tom-clark.html"><strong>AT THE FAIR </strong></a>by Tom Clark <br /><br />Peg Duthie engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/32-snapshots-of-marseilles-by-guy.html"><strong>32 SNAPSHOTS OF MARSEILLES </strong></a>by Guy Bennett <br /><br />Jim McCrary reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/haynaku-for-haiti.html"><strong>THE HAY(NA)KU FOR HAITI SERIES</strong></a>, Edited by Eileen Tabios<br /><br />Kristina Marie Darling reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/french-exit-by-elisa-gabbert.html"><strong>THE FRENCH EXIT </strong></a>by Elisa Gabbert <br /><br />Anny Ballardini reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/brainography-by-evelyn-posamentier.html"><strong>BRAINOGRAPHY </strong></a>by Evelyn Posamentier<br /><br />Richard Lopez reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/2nd-notice-of-modifications-to-text-of.html"><strong>2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS </strong></a>by John Bloomberg-Rissman <br /><br />G.E. Schwartz reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/future-is-happy-by-sarah-sarai.html"><strong>THE FUTURE IS HAPPY </strong></a>by Sarah Sarai <br /><br />Kristina Marie Darling reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/tinderbox-lawn-by-carol-guess.html"><strong>TINDERBOX LAWN </strong></a>by Carol Guess <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/diwata-by-barbara-jane-reyes.html"><strong>DIWATA </strong></a>by Barbara Jane Reyes <br /><br />Peg Duthie engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/duties-of-english-foreign-secretary-by.html"><strong>DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY </strong></a>by Macgregor Card <br /><br />John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/adamantine-by-shin-yu-pai.html"><strong>ADAMANTINE </strong></a>by Shin Yu Pai <br /><br />Jeff Harrison reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/grief-suite-by-bobbi-lurie.html"><strong>GRIEF SUITE </strong></a>by Bobbi Lurie <br /><br />Allen Bramhall reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/opulence-by-stephen-ellis.html"><strong>OPULENCE </strong></a>by Stephen Ellis <br /><br />Peg Duthie engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/spring-has-come-spanish-lyrical-poetry.html"><strong>SPRING HAS COME: SPANISH LYRICAL POETRY FROM THE SONGBOOKS OF THE RENAISSANCE </strong></a>by Alvaro Cardona-Hine <br /><br />Jim McCrary reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/carry-catastrophe-by-megan-kaminski.html"><strong>CARRY CATASTROPHE </strong></a>by Megan Kaminski<br /><br />Moira Richards reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/then-something-by-patricia-fargnoli.html"><strong>THEN, SOMETHING </strong></a>by Patricia Fargnoli <br /><br />Eileen Tabios engages <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/king-of-jungle-by-zvi-sesling.html"><strong>KING OF THE JUNGLE </strong></a>by Zvi A. Sesling <br /><br />Genevieve Kaplan reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/poets-on-teaching-sourcebook-edited-by.html"><strong>POETS ON TEACHING: A SOURCEBOOK</strong></a>, Edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson <br /> <br /><br /><strong>THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS</strong><br /><a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/critic-writes-poems.html">Kristina Marie Darling</a><br /><br /><br /><strong>FOCUS ON POETS</strong><br />Tom Beckett interviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/tom-beckett-interviews-anne-gorrick.html"><strong>ANNE GORRICK</strong></a><br /><br />Thomas Fink interviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/thomas-fink-interviews-joanna-fuhrman.html"><strong>JOANNA FUHRMAN </strong></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEW</strong> <br />Lisa Bower reviews <a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/skirt-full-of-black-by-sun-yung-shin.html"><strong>SKIRT FULL OF BLACK </strong></a>by Sun Yung Shin<br /><br />Eric Dickey reviews <strong><a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/light-from-bullet-hole-poems-new-and.html">LIGHT FROM A BULLET HOLE: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED, 1950–2008</a></strong> by Ralph Salisbury<br /> <br /><br /><strong>ADVERTISEMENT</strong><br /><a href="http://meritagepress.blogspot.com/2010/02/haynaku-for-haiti.html"><strong>Hay(na)ku for Haiti--a Haiti Relief Fundraiser</strong></a><br /><br /><br /><strong>BACK COVER</strong><br /><a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/no-deer-were-shot-for-these-shots.html"><strong>No Deer Were Shot For These Shots!</strong></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-80851640659734115882010-12-05T23:40:00.000-08:002011-03-27T18:38:54.066-07:00EDITOR'S INTRODUCTIONOf course, I’d like to share my son Michael’s first published poem, <a href="http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=3416"><strong>HERE</strong></a>! Here is Michael taking over a dog bed to read Achilles a story -- well, at least he's got a book in one hand ... along with ice cream on other hand!<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnt_4MKMFj2d-YkkwPHzll0HiEpOz224xGaIJKUbLVERr3arTlPIqnlImvC6Nwu8pyGQM4EM2vTZDU1FvRYA_eYkCU2Rc0tfpcfk_z5Iv-IQJ7zxEjW0QVx_LBMJrCFfwlz7AbEHoUeA/s1600/M+reading+with+A+on+dog+rug.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnt_4MKMFj2d-YkkwPHzll0HiEpOz224xGaIJKUbLVERr3arTlPIqnlImvC6Nwu8pyGQM4EM2vTZDU1FvRYA_eYkCU2Rc0tfpcfk_z5Iv-IQJ7zxEjW0QVx_LBMJrCFfwlz7AbEHoUeA/s400/M+reading+with+A+on+dog+rug.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5493243367479444738" /></a><br /><br />So, to official bidness: Thanks as ever to <em>GR</em>'s numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have <strong>72 NEW REVIEWS </strong>this issue! And this issue is also special because Michael offers his engagement with a poetry project through a drawing--<a href="http://galatearesurrection15.blogspot.com/2010/12/el-dorado-by-edgar-allan-poe.html"><strong>HERE </strong></a>is his engagement with Edgar Allan Poe's "El Dorado"! When not blathering on about my son, I like to track <em>GR</em>'s progress, so here are some poetry-lovin' stats! <br /><br />Issue 1: 27 new reviews <br />Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)<br />Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)<br />Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)<br />Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice) <br />Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 7: 51 new reviews <br />Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)<br />Issue 9: 65 new reviews<br />Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)<br />Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)<br />Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)<br />Issue 15: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 4 projects were reviewed twice)<br /><br />Of reviewed publications, the following were generated from review copies sent to GR:<br /><br />Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews <br />Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews<br />Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews<br />Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews<br />Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews<br />Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews<br />Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews <br />Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews<br />Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews<br />Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews<br />Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews<br />Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews<br />Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews<br />Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews<br />Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews<br /><br />I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies <a href="http://grarchives.blogspot.com"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is March 15, 2010.<br /><br />As of Issue No. 15, we are pleased to report that GR has provided 848 new reviews (covering 365 publishers in 17 countries so far) and 66 reprinted reviews (to bring online reviews previously available only viz print or in now-defunct online sites). <br /><br />*****<br /><br />As I've said before, your Editor is blind, so if there are typos/errors in the issue, just email Moi or put in the comments sections and I will swiftly correct said mistakes (since such is allowed by Blogger).<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Wait for it! One more photo of Michael--here he is having moved from dog bed to actual reading chair as he becomes <em>The Light of My Life This Holiday Season</em>! <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq8kR4Az7wAm0XD_8yGQh-iAttrOENcE0XAZnCvd_kbY043jBHVj019PnKeSV4O6VD4QCIvFcDpZbBlhyphenhyphen1MKijy-FXcr3TW7cdRI4CPuRgNDKqOmA_qQ5ngWGbs8UAc_qE5Uq_UhpXVA/s1600/palm+michael.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq8kR4Az7wAm0XD_8yGQh-iAttrOENcE0XAZnCvd_kbY043jBHVj019PnKeSV4O6VD4QCIvFcDpZbBlhyphenhyphen1MKijy-FXcr3TW7cdRI4CPuRgNDKqOmA_qQ5ngWGbs8UAc_qE5Uq_UhpXVA/s400/palm+michael.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5546691803211217602" /></a><br /><br />With much love, poetry and fur, <br /><br />Eileen Tabios<br />St. Helena, CA<br />December 7, 2010Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-71936280288807244312010-12-05T23:00:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:14:35.826-08:00SALINE by KIMBERLY LYONSCAMILLE MARTIN Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Saline </em>by Kimberly Lyons</strong><br /><em>(Instance Press, Boulder, CO, 2005)</em><br /><br /><strong>Kimberly Lyons’ Fleeting Continuum</strong><br /><br />The problem (and pleasure) of reviewing a book of poetry by Kimberly Lyons is that a review needs to generalize to an extent, yet my temptation is to pause at the details in the language, to become wrapped up in close readings of the images that flow in a continually morphing reverie. Nevertheless, in the face of such richness of language, I also find myself searching for strategies that might unlock (to use a recurring image from <em>Saline</em>) “the fuzzy vault / of the radio sphericity / of our signaling thoughts”—or, conversely, searching for Lyon’s semantic strategies encoded in what might at first seem to be a random collage.<br /><br />Most obviously, Lyons’ poetic language is remarkably sensual: within her hallucinatory succession of images are precisely-described phenomena, as in “a red scarf, thin as water,” “dolorous lilies,” and “rusted lantern.” Details of colour, temperature, shape, position, age, movement, sound, texture, and emotional quality abound. Moreover, the senses are often blended so as to suggest synesthetic experience, as in “orbs of noise” and “orange smell.”<br /><br />This strong empirical quality of the images invites us to juxtapose sensory experiences that might normally occur in different conceptual realms, to borrow Lakoff and Johnson’s term, and to consider their commonalities. The cognitive process encouraged in the reader is associative and figurative: metaphor and metonym create links among the words of a poem that might otherwise fly apart. To take the example of “Hives”:<br /><blockquote>Peripheral snaps, like a flyswatter<br />with no sweat<br />fits of sound without shape<br />the kitchen<br />of September a cellular<br />lab<br />ricocheting<br />from hair, hives<br />globs of orange smell<br />the moon’s raincoat &<br />newspaper dregs<br />diaphanous in its costumes<br />the soul<br />decorated with beads &<br />bottlecaps<br />words grow inward<br />edges ephemeral as this page is.</blockquote><br />The language of “Hives” produces odd juxtapositions, but the words are generally concrete, sensual: “globs of orange smell / the moon’s raincoat & / newspaper dregs.” The rapid succession of seemingly unrelated images is complicated by the ambiguous syntax: is it the soul or words that are decorated with beads and bottlecaps? Nonetheless, the images are decidedly not random. Metaphorically, the itching of hives might feel like “peripheral snaps,” which in turn suggests a “flyswatter” without the “sweat” that might accompany hives. That sensory experience could be synesthetically described as “fits of sound without shape.” In addition, metonymic threads link “kitchen” to “lab” and “cellular” as well as to “orange,” “globs,” smell,” and “bottlecaps.” “Diaphanous” resonates with “ephemeral,” “soul,” and “inward”; “newspaper” relates to “page.”<br /><br />The title suggests the centrality of the image of hives, with its pun on colonies of bees (suggesting perhaps the busy-ness of the words whose meanings “ricochet” off each other). The visceral connotations of this word are associated with images from other senses: sight, smell, taste, sound. Thus the centripetal energy in the poem derives from the linking of senses and images; their relatedness gives the poem a kind of musical coherence in its interplay of themes and motifs.<br /><br />At the end of this poem is a meta-poetic gesture that recurs in several poems in <em>Saline</em>, in this case, linguistic ephemerality. Lyons reminds us that the poem, although evoking sensory images, is composed of words, and these words “grow inward / edges ephemeral as this page is.” One edge of “kitchen” is the idea of mixing edible things: grains, herbs, meats, in a similar way that chemicals are mixed in a laboratory. Another edge of “kitchen” is the sensory images that it invokes, such as “orange smell,” “dregs,” and “bottlecaps.” And these semantic edges growing on the words betray their ephemerality in the shifting transience of meanings, which are as fleeting as the very page on which the words are written.<br /><br />The flip side of the theme of temporality in Saline is the richness of cognitive and linguistic possibilities. This theme, in fact, informs Lyon’s opening gambit in <em>Saline</em>. The first two poems, after a series of strange juxtapositions, culminate with a self-referential idea of endless creative possibilities. The ending of the first poem suggests that the oceanic range of such strangeness is not only for the dreamer, for “The mind can go anyplace / before sleep, you see.” The second poem echoes that kind of self-referential gesture:<br /><blockquote>is that possible<br />the denizens of a poem<br />coming through the mist whack<br />a curtain completely uncertain as<br />to how wavelengths prevail.</blockquote><br />The plethora of perceived images paired with the realization of their evanescence is nicely expressed in the “doubted / and crowded” instant in “Red Radio Flyer”:<br /><blockquote>At the moment,<br />which is transient, doubted<br />and crowded<br />visualize<br /><br />a tremulous lavender ball<br />vulnerably rotating in its<br />cubicle of the cosmos</blockquote><br />But within this moment, for all its presentation to consciousness of a myriad of fleeting phenomena, the mind invokes a singular object, a “tremulous lavender ball” that is fragile and vulnerable, yet saliently present to thought, cordoned off from the rest of the universe. Lyon beautifully suggests a moment of quiet focus and reflection on an imagined object, which paradoxically seems more present than the objects that crowd around one, jockeying for attention.<br /><br />Despite the proliferation and seeming confusion of images in these poems, recurring themes and motifs of traveling, death, liquidity, nothingness, presence and absence, light and dark, and language, as well as Lyons’ attention to the rich interplay of images, give <em>Saline </em>a centripetal energy that counters the centrifugal force of its blooming, buzzing confusion.<br /><br /> Moreover, in poems such as “LUNE,” Lyon demonstrates a more traditionally lyrical consistency through a focused, zen-like meditation on the reflection of the moon in an almost empty bowl of milk:<br /><blockquote><strong>LUNE</strong><br /><br />After the milk<br />thins<br />an emergence of<br />magnolias framed by grooved green<br />lips<br />and a silver spoon fits inside a gray<br />rim<br />as the moon, of course, hangs<br />all day.<br />Turn out the light<br />after eating cereal in the middle of the night<br />in the kitchen<br />and suddenly the moon<br />gray as a flower<br />at the bottom of a bowl of milk.</blockquote><br />Lyon delicately interweaves the image of a magnolia and leaves at the bottom of a bowl of milk, seen with the kitchen light on, with the image of the moon reflected in the shallow leftover milk, seen with the light off. Although this poem is more coherent than many of the others in this collection, it has in common with them the preoccupation with surface image, illusion, and the slipperiness of sensory perception.<br /><br />Ending the book is <em>Saline’s </em>title prose poem, a tour-de-force of the mind’s intense exploration of the proliferation of real and imagined objects and social interactions, each with its own context and connotative histories, floating in and out of the senses and cognition:<br /><blockquote> People are realized only partially. Experienced as split forces joined with split forces in my self. From my apartment window, the length of dirty white sill joins to the whitish extended field of snow. These intrusions force a cleavage, splinter elements. Some actions are so drastic and some withdrawals so complete that it’s like a bonfire. The slow accumulation and then sudden disintegration. The blackish pile, hardly differentiated from early winter air, and vestiges of the sun, merge. Body that suddenly houses a smoldering core of feeling.<br /> It’s said, trauma produces snapshots of unlinked memory. So does love.</blockquote><br />In this poem, Lyons themes of linkage and dissolution are played out on a social plane, and the result is a beautifully sustained engagement with bewilderment as the thinking subject attempts to make sense of it all.<br /><br />Kimberly Lyons’ poetry may perplex at first with its plethora of images, but a deeper meaning emerges with close attention to the ideas rebounding within the chaos. Lyons reminds us of the beauty that the reader can create within a myriad of possibilities. And her themes of disintegration and disappearance remind us of the temporality of creation: in short, a <em>memento mori </em>at the heart of the phantasmagorical parade.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Camille Martin, an American-Canadian poet, was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, and was a long-time resident of Louisiana before moving to Toronto. She is the author of <em>Sonnets </em>(Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2010) and <em>Codes of Public Sleep </em>(Toronto: Book Thug, 2007). Her work has been widely and internationally published in journals and translated into Spanish and German. A classical musician from an early age, she earned a Master of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music, an MFA in Poetry at the University of New Orleans, and a PhD in English at Louisiana State University. She teaches at Ryerson University.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-8346882620931090712010-12-05T22:55:00.000-08:002010-12-08T13:26:03.837-08:00DEAR SANDY, HELLO: LETTERS FROM TED TO SANDY BERRIGAN, Edited by SANDY BERRIGAN & RON PADGETTPATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan </em>edited by Sandy Berrigan and Ron Padgett</strong> <br /><em>(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minn. 2010)</em><br /><br />A brief recounting of the events leading up to these letters: Ted Berrigan met Sandy Alper in New Orleans during her first year at Tulane. After a weekend whirlwind romance they were married in Texas, stopped by the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, and then visited her parents in Florida who after making a swift negative decision towards Berrigan’s general person incarcerated Sandy in an institution for the mentally unwell. Berrigan was briskly sent out of town by local law enforcement. Having returned to New York City without his bride, Berrigan immediately begin writing to her, including her in his world… <br /><br /><CENTER>* * *</center><br /><br /><em>“Your Husband Forever”: Rimbaud, </em>The Sonnets <em>and <strong>becoming </strong>‘Ted Berrigan’</em><br /><br />This collection of letters is not only (as Sandy Berrigan muses) “perhaps the longest and most intense sequence of such letters Ted [Berrigan] ever wrote” it is also (as Ron Padgett notes) “the prelude to his masterwork, <em>The Sonnets</em>.” These statements guarantee this collection is indispensible to all readers of Berrigan’s work quickly dispelling any concern that publishing such letters is an invasion of privacy or posthumous mistreatment of Berrigan. The material contained within serves only to bolster the argument for his central position in developing experimental poetics and does so without surrounding his quite hip streetwise rap on how one lives and goes about the practice of being a poet beneath any uncomfortable layering of academic jargon. As with the two collections of Berrigan’s talks and interviews, <em>Talking in Tranquility </em>and <em>On the Level Everyday</em>, we’re able to thankfully read Berrigan on Berrigan, getting the skivvy on his own understanding of how he went about accomplishing the writing he did as he was going about it. <br /><br />That’s not to say there’s not plenty here to keep various sides of the Berrigan myth going. The beginning of his lifelong pill (amphetamine) use shows up throughout, not surprisingly, most amusingly in his <em>Spontaneous Zen Parable</em> from a letter dated April 23, 1962:<br /><blockquote>Dick Gallup went to the Zen master and said, “Master, speak about taking pills.” The master said, “Gallup, you got any pills?” Gallup said, “Yeah.” Then the master said, “Pills are a good thing.”<br /><br /> Sandy Berrigan went to the master and said, “Master, speak about taking pills.” Master said, “What’s your kick, baby?” Sandy said, “I just don’t think pills are right!” then the master said, “You are very wise. Pills are no good.”<br /><br /> Tom Veitch, observing these two incidents, said to the master, “God damn, master, that’s contradictory!!” The master replied, “God damn, I’m hungry, let’s go get some hash and eggs.”<br /><br /> Signed,<br /><br /> “The Snake.”</blockquote><br />Notable—in addition to his use of “The Snake” as a sign-off which also occurs in <em>Sonnet LXXVII</em>—is Berrigan’s non-committal stance on pills, they are simultaneously both “good” and “no good,” depending on who’s asking, as Berrigan explains to Sandy, “to comment on my own parable, since I’m the master in it[…] [the master] knew that he was expected to condemn or condone… when he saw that Gallup had pills, therefore was for them, he said they were good. When he saw Sandy was against them, he said they were bad.” Berrigan believes precisely that whatever works best for you individually is what works.<br /><br />At this point in life, Berrigan has been through the rigid structures of both the U.S. military and the University of Tulsa, playing by a set of imposed rules. He has decided going forward in life he’ll stick to his own rulebook. “The idea, thought, motto, joke, whatever else you want to label it, that I base my life upon, is a pure Zen doctrine, although I never read it anywhere associated with Zen. It’s ‘all those who are going to make it will, all those who aren’t, won’t.’” Importantly, he goes on to further identify poetry itself with his understanding of Zen. “Zen says nothing, gives no answers, makes you responsible. But it doesn’t <u>say </u>that. Words are words. What do they have to do with Zen. Zen is poetry. Zen is living. Poetry is living.” And as Berrigan repeatedly makes clear throughout the letters, poetry is to be the single most important focus and reward of his life. <br /><br />There is no question that Berrigan is spending his time intensively reading, constantly searching for examples of writing he admires and openly looking for examples as to how he should go about beginning his future life as a poet. In a letter from April 3rd, 1962 he reports to Sandy:<br /><blockquote>Last night Dick [Gallup] and I made lists of ten or eleven men, literary men, whom we thought influenced our lives, and still influence them. We made the lists independently, and then compared them Here they are:<br /><br /><strong>DICK</strong> <strong>ME</strong><br />Francois Villon Albert Camus<br />Thomas Wolfe Percy Shelley<br />Albert Camus Lord Byron<br />Walt Whitman Rene Rilke<br />Percy Shelley Ralph Emerson<br />Andre Gide Bernard Shaw<br />Rene Rilke Ezra Pound<br />Paul Goodman Thomas Wolfe<br />Arthur Rimbaud Alfred Whitehead<br />John Milton Friedrich Nietzsche<br /> Arthur Rimbaud<br /> John Milton</blockquote><br />The near identical lists for Gallup and Berrigan are no doubt unsurprising for those familiar with the history of their friendship (along with that of Ron Padgett and the artist Joe Brainard), these were poet friends who openly shared their notebooks and private thoughts with each other, indeed there are references in the letters to Berrigan reading through the journals of his friends and them likewise reading through his own. They as well came and went from each other’s living quarters, borrowing food and money, just as easily as words and influences. <br /><br />Many of the names in the above lists occur frequently in Berrigan’s letters to Sandy, but one that should hold interest for readers of <em>The Sonnets </em>is Arthur Rimbaud. In a letter of March 21st, 1962 Berrigan mentions that he’s “reading Enid Starkie’s biography of Arthur Rimbaud” and in a letter the very next day, “I’m working on a translation from French to English of a long poem called ‘The Drunken Boat’ by Arthur Rimbaud.” Up until fairly recently, copies of Berrigan’s translation were few and far between to be found. The only copy I ever remember seeing being a C Press (?) edition with artwork by Joe Brainard came across while browsing the wondrous stacks of Serendipity Books in Berkeley. Thankfully, this situation changed when a copy of the poem appeared in the Translation issue of <em>Vanitas </em>in 2009. <br /><br />Several lines in the following stanzas (this is only a sampling, there are several more phrases and lines in the poem easily recognizable) will be familiar to readers of <em>The Sonnets</em>:<br /> <blockquote>Where, dying all the blue, the maddened flames<br /> And stately rhythms of the sun, stronger<br /> Than alcohol, more great than song,<br /> Fermented the bright red bitterness of love.<br /> …<br /> I’ve seen fermenting everglade-like weirs<br /> Deep in whose reeds great elephants decay;<br /> I’ve seen vast oceans crashing into ruin<br /> And calm horizons cataracting away,<br /> …<br /> Sometimes when I grow weary, feel betrayed,<br /> The gently rolling sea sets me at rest,<br /> Lifting her shadowy waters up for me,<br /> And I fall on my knees, womanly.<br /> …<br /> The only traveled sea that I still dream of<br /> Is the cold black pond where once<br /> On a fragrant evening fraught with sadness,<br /> I launched a boat fragile as a butterfly.</blockquote><br />Just when Berrigan may have finished reworking his version is unclear (<em>Vanitas </em>supposes “<em>circa 1963</em>”) however it is clear that he sent drafts to Sandy during this period in 1962. While Sandy’s letters are not clearly dated, we know she was finally released for good on July 26th 1962 and in two letters written sometime prior to that date she mentions, “I read the revision of ‘The Drunken Boat.’ I feel so good that you dedicated it to me.” (No such dedication appears in the <em>Vanitas </em>copy.) And she writes of the “final version being more idiomatic and modern and concise—much less 19th Century I guess.”<br /><br />At any rate, Berrigan’s version definitely ended up serving (as did so much of his own recent work at the time) as textual site to pillage for workings of lines to recycle into <em>The Sonnets</em>. The letters demonstrate some of the thoughts concerning writing poetry which he was confronting and challenging himself to overcome. Sandy writes, “I wish you could explain the various changes. Some of them affect the flow and rhythm and style a lot […] many of the good parts you left the same.” And “I think it’s good to know the reason for picking certain words over others in translation. Some sound better but there must be other reasons.” Much of this Berrigan addresses (it is difficult to know whether in response or perhaps prior to Sandy’s remarks) in a lengthy digression running through several pages of a letter written on March 27th. He immediately distances his work from Rimbaud: <br /><blockquote>My poem is not meant to be considered a translation, and is called an imitation in deference to Rimbaud. The poet often uses other material, and the test of validity as art is how the poem itself stands up to itself. […] mainly it is a poem by Ted Berrigan. I myself do not know more French than you, if as much. The poem in its final version is almost all mine, each image coming to me as a result of the organic development of the poem, not because of Rimbaud used them. I did not hesitate to use my own meter rhyme rhythm et cetera.</blockquote><br />While with the breakthrough of Berrigan’s conception of ‘form’ evidenced by <em>The Sonnets</em>, such reference to “organic development” does not play as large a role in his poem-making, his preferences having given over to semi-controlled decision-based chance operations inspired to some extent by John Cage, it is possible to witness a feeling for it creep into later works where he spaces words round the page with a somewhat Black Mountain School splash of exuberance. However what is obviously being developed while he works on <em>his </em>Rimbaud is indeed his “own meter rhyme rhythm” which he later heavily exploits in order to create the dizzying array found within <em>The Sonnets</em>. <br /><br />Berrigan continues in the same letter, “Honey, I’d like to talk to you a little about the poem, mostly for my own benefit, to get straight a few things in my own mind.” He then commences an exegetical sketching out of his approach in writing the poem. It’s remarkable how possible it is to read Berrigan’s reworking of “The Drunken Boat” as providing encouragement for the possibility of his breakthrough with <em>The Sonnets</em> (shortly to come): “That is, life is a creative process, striving for more life, life as a flowing stream endlessly moving on toward high consciousness, more life, more light. In the first stanza the “I” of the poem says that he has shed all “masters” and is on his own, trusting his own whims.” What is holding Berrigan back from his imminent breakthrough is the concern with moving “toward high consciousness,” he’s shortly to realize how “more life, more light” is to be found within his immediate needs and circumstances. With the writing of <em>The Sonnets</em> comes Berrigan’s utilization of the fact, as he says here to Sandy (writing of the speaker in the poem), that he will “not turn back, away from his journey, which is in itself marvelous.” By catching up with words by way of removing much of his decisive will over them, Berrigan comes in <em>The Sonnets</em> to revel in words as discrete substances contained within themselves allowing for them to interact with each other without his intervention. <br /><br />Berrigan’s “Drunken Boat” details the immersion he himself is in the process of to become the poet ‘Ted Berrigan’ author of <em>The Sonnets</em>. He understands this involves sacrifice and that he must set himself apart from his own worries and concerns, likewise those of others. As he continues writing to Sandy of the speaker in “The Drunken Boat,” “He despairs and cries out, as Jesus cried that he was forsaken, ‘O let me burst, and I be lost at sea.’ But his very words deny their superficial meaning. He means to be lost from acrid romances, not lost from life. He goes on joyously. He does not look back and he regrets nothing.” Berrigan is set on his course towards becoming and living the life of the poet. He will accept no other priority, as later in life he says, “I lift my voice in song” and that is to be his sole role as he conceives it. These letters are testament to this gestation period when Berrigan is consumed with his desire to endure an overwhelming absorption of everything which he feels will push him through to a breakthrough point with poetry and “The Drunken Boat” serves as an allegorical and—as far as his recycling of specific lines and phrases show—literal launching point.<br /><br />The situation of Berrigan’s marriage with Sandy—her parents temporarily incarcerating her in an attempt to annul the marriage—is yet further evidence to Berrigan of restrictions he must overcome on his path to becoming a poet. As he continues his explanation of “The Drunken Boat” to Sandy, “This poem represents to me a manifesto against my own need to hate those people whom I must not be like. Through my love for you, which in itself required a great period of self-development by me, I feel I have reached a stage where I do not have to hate [them].” Berrigan feels he is “no longer afraid of succumbing to intellectual emptiness, or cynicism based on fear, or collegiate poeticism” because as he says, “I have killed in myself these elements.” He is defiantly assertive in his awareness that he is in a period of gestation, “if I am not always up to my best self even with you, it is because I am still trying to grow, still a baby. Have patience with me, my wife, have faith in me and in us, love me, and I will grow strong for you. I shall be forever your husband.” <br /><br />Berrigan doesn’t mince words when offering Sandy his advice in regards to her situation: <br /><blockquote>Get tough, honey. Get tough. Run away from the all, fast. And I’m not talking about running out of the hospital, although, I want that, too. I mean run from their outstretched hands, their offers to “talk things over rationally,” run away from sympathy with them. For now, they are the enemy. They want to be your friend. They really do. They want to help you. They want to make sure you are well-fed, clothed, and secure from pain and disease and hardship. The only catch is that you have to do it on their terms. If you don’t, then it’s the lock-up, the padded cell, the prison, the hospital. And their terms are very simple. You must <em>kill your soul</em>. You must destroy your spontaneity, your capacity to love, your generosity, your openness, your childishness, your big-eyed wonder at life. You must get your shoulder to the wheel, be responsible, make contributions to mankind, shape up and make money.</blockquote> <br />As always in these letters, Berrigan is constantly merging the current predicament and eventual resolution of Sandy’s incarceration over their marriage with his development as a poet. By their disapproval and intervention, her parents not only challenge Berrigan’s abilities as a suitor but also his chances of achieving the cultural freedom of the poet he aspires to be. As he tells her “Your contributions to mankind are measured by your income tax. Louis Alper [Sandy’s father] obviously makes more contribution to mankind than Ted Berrigan. Look at the record. What record? Why the only record available. The income tax report.” Berrigan consciously prepares Sandy for the transition in thinking necessitated by culture wide bias in general during this period to the lifestyle he proposes pursue. <br /><blockquote>Sandy, the deck is stacked, and so to win at this game, since we have to play, we have to have some new rules, or else a gun under the table. […] I know this stuff because my innocence is not like yours. What I have come from, going through things rather than from being beyond them. I’ve looked at these people carefully, and was very close to them once. […] I didn’t ignore them, I watched them […] I know how to play their games, and maybe I know how to beat them.</blockquote><br />Berrigan understands everything is on the line for him. His fight for his wife is equivalent to his fight for his right to live a life of the poet. In this respect, his love for Sandy is not separate from his love for poetry. He doesn’t want to, and isn’t going to be, beholden to anyone in his service towards it. Prior to meeting Sandy, Berrigan has been sorting out his own path towards becoming a poet and from the beginning it has been with the awareness that it would only be possible if he set the terms. In a letter from March 20th he draws the explicit parallel between his path towards being a poet and the current crisis in his marriage with Sandy: <br /><blockquote>These people, the doctors, and your parents, are evil honey. […] Those people are sick sick people. They would have it that a Dick Gallup who only wants to read and study and find love, and a Ted and Sandy who want to live and work together, are sick and immature. But it is they who are doing evil. We must give them evil for evil, until we are free.<br /><br /> I wrote a long time ago a poem called Prayer, addressed to a fierce old prophet like poet, whose poems were giving me inspiration:<br /><br />Old Father, I am young.<br />I am afraid. Teach me<br />to run, that I may learn<br />to fight.<br /><br />Sing I would, many songs,<br />and many candles burn.<br />teach me to fall, that<br />I may learn to stand.<br /><br />Old Warrior,<br />guide me now. Help me believe<br />the necessary lies.<br />Teach me to hate.<br /><br />I would preserve my love.</blockquote><br />After finishing transcribing the poem Berrigan shifts back to addressing Sandy, holding to the left hand justification of the poem, signing off on the letter while breaking his statements with line-breaks, retaining the look of a poem:<br /><blockquote>I love you, Sandy, Sandra, my eternal wife.<br /><br />Your husband forever,<br />Ted<br />I love You.</blockquote><br />Berrigan blurs his love for Sandy with his love for poetry, the latter, earlier passion equaling or even surpassing—if not at the very least buoying—the other. This is seen elsewhere in his sign-offs, as at the end of a long densely written letter from March 26th when he breaks out in jubilance, freely spacing his “love” around on the page: <blockquote> I love you.<br /> I love you.<br /><br /> I love you.<br /><br /> That’s what I want this letter<br /> to say.<br /> I am and mean to stay<br /> your husband<br /> forever and ever,<br /> all my love,<br /><br /> Ted</blockquote><br />Here is the ‘Ted Berrigan’ of the airy lines which sway across the page in later poems such as, “Many Happy Returns,” “February Air,” “Going To Chicago,” and his sections of the collaborative poem written with Anne Waldman “Memorial Day.” Sandy’s presence, both as muse and wife, however, is long gone from these later works. As Berrigan grew into his role of being the poet he matured and shed attachments that did not suit or otherwise match up well with his needs. <br /><br />There is more than a hint of what the future holds for the Berrigans in these letters. Sandy herself states the predicament well in her preface to the collection, “Ted had a dream of the perfect young innocent girl who would believe in him, trust him, and admire him. The “Chris” in his <em>Sonnets </em>is such a figure. I think Ted hoped that I would be that person. But he always needed more: more people to love and to listen to him. I was too inexperienced to know that.” Indeed, as Padgett takes note in the appendix II <em>Glossary of Names </em>(which appear in the letters) Carol Clifford who later married poet Dick Gallup, “became Ted’s girlfriend while Sandy was in Jackson Memorial Hospital, unbeknownst to Sandy.” There is no need for blaming Berrigan for or lingering over the failure of his first marriage, but Sandy is certainly hitting on something in the preface when she writes, “I also realize that I wanted the book published in order to validate my presence in Ted’s life.” Aside from Berrigan’s published poem “Words for Love” which unlike the recently published version of his “Drunken Boat” <em>does </em>bear the dedication <em>for Sandy</em>, the vast majority of Berrigan’s own published writings infrequently, if at all, acknowledge any role of hers in his life as a poet. <br /> <br />At the end of these letters comes <em>Scrapbook Facsimiles </em>(available for on-line viewing here: <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=240368">http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=240368</a>)a section of scanned images of pages from a scrapbook Berrigan began to make for Sandy during this time and added to in later years. Here are snapshot photos of some of the characters who make appearances in the letters (& The Sonnets): Ted, Sandy, Marge Kepler, Anne Kepler, Joe Brainard, Lorenz Gude, Ron Padgett, and Pat Mitchell (Padgett). There are also copies of a few previously unpublished poems, juvenilia perhaps, but invaluable all the same. For instance, one page is a handwritten version of Berrigan’s unpublished poem “Prayer” (included in a letter to Sandy mentioned above) with the name of the poet Ezra Pound pasted in above along with a profile photo of Pound pasted in the upper right corner of the page. Another is a collaborative poem, a line-numbered ‘sonnet’ written with Tom Veitch. In addition, being the unbelievably terrific human being he is Ron Padgett also includes an itemized summary of the contents for all 200 pages of the notebook. In this way, the reader gets as near visceral a feel as it comes to holding the notebook itself and it importantly makes, as do the letters, for a private testimonial (now made public) to Sandy’s role as muse and love. This is also a trove of further specific sources such as Rimbaud has been shown above to be, referenced throughout the letters, which Berrigan recycles in <em>The Sonnets</em>. Nothing else previously published so closely documents his reading along with his walking/talking company during this critical period leading up to the composition of his important first book.<br /><br />Sometimes poets are born and sometimes they’re made, occasionally as these letters show they are self-made. There are prices to be paid for all such transformations and after, once the losses have been tallied, the poet if nothing else is left with his skill to sing of them. It’s a trade off, as Berrigan fiercely laments in his poem “Red Shift.” <br /><blockquote>Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless<br /> I slip softly into air <br />The world’s furious song flows through my costume.</blockquote><br />*****<br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco. His critical essay on Creeley's debt to Stevens is slated to appear in <em>Fulcrum 7</em> anytime now. Poems and such will be appearing in the next issue of <em>Amerarcana</em>. This Spring Post Apollo Press will publish his "There Are People Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk": A GUSTONBOOK.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-62480047509689964562010-12-05T22:45:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:12:20.307-08:00AUTOPSY TURVY by THOMAS FINK & MAYA DIABLO MASON (1)JON CURLEY Reviews <br /><br /><strong><em>Autopsy Turvy </em>by Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason</strong><br /><em>(Meritage Press, San Franciso & St. Helena, CA, 2010)</em><br /><br />Collaboration by two poets defies mathematical formulation: the dyad is neither duality, pas de deux, nor the textual meeting of two minds. The resultant poems generate a voice melding consciences into an emergent third. The triangulation of the two poets with the poem therefore proliferates an aggregate of sensibilities attributable to each voice and yet with space opening into an ineffable extension of each. The signature of the two poets fusing and coalescing becomes a script whose text vexes any reduction to individual subjectivities.<br /><br />Often, onto the collaborative poem is conferred the peculiar conjunctive and disjunctive designs of minds in simpatico however their modes of poetic construction diverge. Yet the possibilities of filial poetry—generationally vertical or horizontal—remain under-studied. The poems in <em>Autopsy Turvy </em>are written by a father and daughter duo, noted poet and critic Thomas Fink and his daughter, Maya Diablo Mason. How do biology and poetry relate? Does a share of DNA render a certain kind of amalgamated style? Does the reproduction and production of poems and bodies anthropologically and poetically in relation determine the eventual ends of such art? These are certainly questions that come to mind while reading this accomplished collection.<br /><br />Inevitably, clever schtick and loosey-goosey jokiness will obtain in the closeness of family and, indeed, familiarity. A few poems suffer “[a] strip of gibberish,” however, in general these poems successfully merge controlled chaos with an enriching, lively attitude to myriad subjects and interests. The <em>Bee </em>poem sequence showcases riddles and narratives mostly attentive to financial and family concerns. Roving across the terrain of shared and separate domains, the poems allow glimmers and insinuations of whose voice is being voiced: father? daughter? Fortunately, none of the poems are schematic or so mechanically rendered as to illuminate which lines were written by each poet or whether even individual lines were micro-collaborations. The mystery of paternity or daughterly exchange remains undecoded, arguably granting anonymity to the poems despite their acknowledged sources. The two poets become one shining, unbreakable Poet-maker and the actual strategies of collaboration left unknown. Such mystery in poetry is much needed and welcome.<br /><br /><em>Autopsy Turvy </em>commendably brandishes a whole range of moods, rhetorical dispensations, and narrative directions. “Preshrunk Oaf Offense” prances giddily through puns and stunning disarrangements of semantic structures and appropriated text:<br /> <blockquote>I<br /> do solemnly <br /> sway. I will<br /><br /> faithfully excrete the <br /> offense of present<br /> <br /> participle <br /> the unisex <br /> starkness of ambush,<br /><br /> and will prescribe,<br /> prostitute, and<br /> defecate<br /><br /> the consternation (constipation)<br /> of the unkempt<br /><br /> statesman. Go help<br /> me gobble.</blockquote><br />Here the mild naughtiness of scatological humor domestically emplaced joins with a larger political/historical commentary, the “offense of present.” It is a playful riff that speaks to localized and more generalized territory. The playful reserves exemplified here can also be trained into tender expressions which underscore familial bonds with crafty poetic license. “Inheritance” is a strong case in point:<br /> <blockquote>You left your body at home<br /> when you headed for college.<br /> It would have been vestigial there.<br /><br /> It was July,<br /> so I was naked.<br /><br /> I tried it on,<br /> Wanting to know what it felt like<br /> to dance in it.</blockquote><br />The animation of relationship here foregrounds the possession and dispossession of family in its developments and dispersals. Absence and presence are tethered to a ghostliness underscored by the ghosts of the poets themselves for whom a precise marker of identity cannot be ascribed. So again, multiple perspectives fly from the two unstably paired poetic voices and the poem-as-experiment (after all, collaboration pressurizes the experimental energies of poetry-making) confirms the unflagging creative energies of these two poets. <br /><br />As mentioned, we can never perform an autopsy on <em>Autopsy Turvy </em>to extract determinate identities. I know and admire Fink’s individually-written poems. This is the first occasion I have enjoyed Maya Diablo Mason’s work. Who is who, which is which, and who is the better maker? Impossible, qualitatively, to say. As Stephen Dedalus insists in <em>Ulysses</em>: “Paternity is legal fiction.” So perhaps daughter has outrun father or father still guides the poetic path. The point, all in all, is moot. Assured poems rely on mastery and not justifications and novelties: <em>Autopsy Turvy </em>is a volume of fully-fledged, trickster-spirited verse regardless of the author’s origins and relations. Collectively and/or separately, the poems of Fink and Diablo Mason will be very welcome in the future. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Jon Curley's first collection, <em>New Shadows</em>, was released last year by Dos Madres Press. His critical study, <em>Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland, </em>will be published next year. He lives in New Jersey, where he teaches in the Humanities Department of New Jersey Insitute of Technology.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-77862283096254596032010-12-05T22:35:00.000-08:002010-12-08T12:40:15.302-08:00HAD SLAVES by CATHERINE SASANOVEILEEN TABIOS Engages<br /><br /><strong><em>Had Slaves </em>by Catherine Sasanov</strong><br /><em>(Firewheel Editions, Danbury, CT, 2010)</em><br /><br />This book writes itself—by this, I mean that there’s a sense of <em>urgency </em>in the words rushing out to imprint pages into life.<br /><br />There’s a <em>rush </em>similar to what one may glean from certain forcefully-created “first draft-last draft” type of poems. Such energy, thus, is even more impressive in Catherine Sasanov’s <em>Had Slaves </em>because the poems resulted from four years of deep research into the family history of the poet—a history that began when Sasanov discovered her ancestral slaveholding past.<br /><br />After Sasanov stumbled across the words, “had slaves,” in family papers, she embarked on researching (in the publisher’s press release words), the “slaveholding among her Missouri ancestors and the fragmented evidence left behind of the 11 men, women, and children held in their bondage…<em>Had Slaves </em>pieces together lives endured from slavery to Jim Crow across a landscape lost beneath big box stores, subdivisions, and tourist sites. Avoiding <em>Gone With the Wind </em>stereotype, Sasanov takes her readers to slavery’s less expected locale: where big house means log cabin and plantation is a small grain farm with tarantulas mating in the corn. An unflinching look…”<br /><br />Reading through the poems, one gets the feeling that these poems’ voices have been waiting—<em>longing!</em>—to be heard for a long time. The feeling escalates as one reads deeper into the collection. Such a sense is also testimony to the book’s history; here’s an excerpt from an <a href="http://blog.ellensteinbaum.com/2010/03/new-on-bookshelf-had-slaves-by.html"><strong>interview she did with Ellen Steinbaum</strong></a>: <br /><blockquote>“I’ve come to my subject as a first generation northerner on my father’s side. Except for two pieces of paper in my family's possession (an 1857 will where my ggg-grandfather, Richard Steele, leaves nine men, women, and children to his family members, and a note left by an elderly cousin where the words had slaves appear) there were no other written or spoken traces in my home of my bloodline's involvement with slaveholding. For that matter, except for the mention of a handful of events, the lives of my white ancestors were shrouded in silence, too. As if the past couldn't endure the journey from Springfield, Missouri, to Rockford, Illinois, the city my father settled in after WWII and where I was born and raised. <br /><br />“It still takes my breath away to think that I could have gone to my grave without any idea of my family's slaveholding past, that something so terrible could have been swallowed up in silence. It didn’t help that I also grew up with a very ‘<em>Gone With the Wind’ </em>idea of the landscape it took to nurture slavery. A small Ozarks grain farm with tarantulas mating in the corn wasn’t my idea of Tara. As if slavery couldn’t survive outside of an environment rich in moonlight, magnolias, Spanish moss, oak alleys, Southern belles, mammy, and the big house. These revelations really drove me to work against myth and bad history regarding where slavery took place, and who was involved in it. God-fearing ministers held slaves. Revolutionary War soldiers fighting for freedom owned them. Small landowners and men who supported the Union troops during the Civil War kept them. Examples of all four of these slaveholders exist in my bloodline alone. <br /><br />“I traveled to Southwest Missouri in 2006 to do field and archive research, trying to find out what happened to the Steele slaves and freedmen. If I hadn’t come to the area already knowing that slavery was a part of its landscape, I would never have guessed it. Evidence that the black Steeles ever existed kept coming back paper, kept coming down archival, since every visual trace of slavery has been passively or actively eradicated from Greene County except in words. The evidence lurks in census, probate, and court documents, in business ledgers, doctor’s notes, bills of sale, tax lists, wills, appraisal sheets, death certificates, land deeds, Civil War pension files, marriage licenses, and plat maps. Paper as a kind of amber preserving the past.</blockquote><br />So let’s have some poems speak on behalf of themselves…and those whose blood and flesh first created their lives:<br /><blockquote><strong>Four Hundred Acres of Missouri</strong><br /><br /> <em> For Flora, her children Ben and Eliza, 1833</em><br /><br />The first time you saw all of it, did your eyes gag, dreaming of escape? Row on row of oats and corn—all <em>muffle </em>and <em>impede</em>. Four hundred acres of Missouri. World precisely measured out with no perceptible edge. Misery loves its regional variations, but stays partial to the whip, a white man in a slave girl’s bed, the flaying of a back. <em>Where are my ancestors’ hands in this?</em> All they hold for me to see: Bibles and a walking stick. Antique empty air. Their tintypes smeared with lockjaw dreams (cracked emulsion, dirty metal): The master’s hands sliced open on his photo. Orders caged-up in his teeth. Pure reverie. Pure didn’t happen. Like your escape through all the stunted sustenance, what wouldn’t even reach the shoulders. Like the man with the map inside his head waiting for you in the corn.</blockquote><br />Or<br /><blockquote><blockquote><strong>Heir</strong><br /> <em> For Eliza</em><br /><br />Did it start with casual inquiries about your health? Barely concealed greed? A prayer the old man would die before you’re out of prime? The heir wondering which you’d be: Girl to give birth to a bit of profit? Barren breeding stock? <em>Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. </em>Isn’t that what old masters say just before they die? So your new one comes with his receipt: <em>Received of A.A. Young, John P.: The girl named in the will. </em>That name’s <em>Eliza</em>, but all he thinks if <em>filly, maybe mare</em>; is <em>wealth to reproduce itself</em>. He cares. Did he take his long, hard look between your legs? Was he born to father a little property out behind the barn?</blockquote></blockquote><br /><br />The effect of research, more discoveries, naturally can’t help but affect the researcher…and such also shows up—often movingly—in the poems:<br /><blockquote><strong>Easter, Reconstructed</strong><br /><br />Down the cold hall of daguerreotypes<br /><br />I searched out every piece of anonymous metal<br />looking for your face. Sought proof<br />that someone treasured you<br />if only on<br /><br />a bit of tin.<br /><br />But you came line-drawn,<br />rough-sketched,<br />out of an ink gone Rorschach.<br /><br />A woman subject to interpretation.<br /><br />The census taker as itinerant artist, pinning down<br />one final glimpse of you.</blockquote><br /><br />Or the first four stanzas of this poem:<br /><blockquote><strong>Crude Music</strong><br /> <em> For Eliza, Isaac, Daniel, and Diana</em><br /><br />And what of my own hands in this?<br /><br />I finally come to flesh you<br />out, flesh you<br /><br />into what are not<br /><br />unimaginable situations</blockquote><br />This is fraught stuff. Here’s another poem in its entirety:<br /><blockquote><strong>Revisionist (History)</strong><br /><br /> <em> The negro Mammy was no fiction of a later day novelist, but genuine, gentle, untiring, faithful…on her broad shoulders was carried the generation which made the early history of Missouri fascinating and great.</em><br /> Carl B. Boyer, white interviewer<br /> <em>Slave Narratives: Missouri, 1936-1938</em><br /><br /><br />Let me herd the heirs<br />into the yard,<br /><br />so at that distance, <em>this</em><br />can pass for prayer:<br /><br />Three women standing<br />around the master’s bed,<br /><br />prodding the old man<br />with their tongues,<br /><br />exultant that he’s dead.</blockquote><br /><br />***<br /><br />The source of many poems—often directly “found” from archives—is at times incomplete. Sasanov notes that <br /><blockquote>Paper as a kind of amber preserving the past. Its data are often untrustworthy, sometimes on purpose, sometimes from sloppiness. And while I logically knew that the information I looked at translated into human beings, the language of slavery is often constructed to make it easy for readers to distance themselves from the people being discussed. They can never be clearly envisioned. <br /><br />“In writing ‘<em>Had Slaves</em>,’ I became something of a forensic anthropologist, fleshing out the bare boned, fragmented information I was uncovering about the individuals my ancestors owned. I wanted to make real that it was lives my family held in bondage, not a bit of cursive on a page, or a group of names that could be lumped into a faceless, unindividuated mass called slaves. At the same time, I wanted to reflect on how difficult it is to resurrect the dead when one works within the straitjacket of a shamed history: the paucity of details, lack of images of the people one is discussing, and nothing in their own words. </blockquote><br />Sasanov says that the poem that most “embodies” such “absence” is the shortest in the book, something “written out of my knowing only that 19-year-old Steele slave Edmund was bequeathed by Richard Steele to his eldest son, a man who’d come up from Tennessee to collect him.<br /><blockquote><strong>Willed, Bequeathed: Edmund, Walked Towards Tennessee,<br />Is Never Seen Again: September 1860</strong><br /><br />The sky, the bloody<br />meat of it,<br /> sutures itself<br />with geese</blockquote><br />When I first read through the book, I hadn’t yet read the interview with Sasanov and I recall being most impressed by the above poem, admiring the poet’s technique of imagism. And it is due to her poetic prowess that Sasanov is able to do justice to her subject matter. She knows when to get out of the way.<br /><br />And she also knows when to allow her presence to infuse the poem, for instance this excerpt from the first poem “Sitting at the Mouth of the Great Slave Trading Route, the Slaveholder’s Great-Great Granddaughter Pens Her Preface to the Text":<br /><blockquote> Watch how<br />in lieu of herding slaves,<br /> my hands herd words<br /> across the page,<br /><br />And I hold back<br /> whole trains of thought <br /> with just a speck of ink.</blockquote><br />The combination of caesuras and the placement of the phrases across the page facilitate the notion of “herding slaves.”<br /><br /><br />Even when it’s difficult to create a poetry collection, that difficulty in the act of creation doesn’t always rise to the surface. In <em>Had Slaves</em>, I felt the complicated turmoil that the poet must have undergone as she created these poems. And why not? As the author says, <br /><blockquote>“Slavery officially ended in the 1860s, but many of the people who survived it lived deep into the twentieth century, nipping at the heels of my birth. It staggers me that John D. Steele, the youngest slave owned by my family when the Civil War ended, died only four years before I was born."</blockquote><br /><em>Had Slaves </em>is important for expanding the light on the legacy of American slavery. It is a most moving testament.<br /><br /><em>Had Slaves </em>not only has my highest recommendation—these poems, and its author, command <em>Respect</em>.<br /><br /><br />*****<br /><br />Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em>, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book <a href="http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios4.htm"><strong><em>THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) </em></strong></a> is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R3NDO9FGJAV385/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm"><strong>HERE</strong></a>, William Allegrezza over at <em>p-ramblings </em><a href="http://allegrezza.blogspot.com/2010/05/daily-glance-eileen-tabios-thorn-rosary_28.html"><strong>HERE</strong></a> and by Leny M. Strobel at <em>Moria Poetry </em><a href="http://moriapoetry.com/strobel.html"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. Mr. Harp also reviews her <a href="http://notabeneeiswein.blogspot.com"><strong><em>NOTA BENE EISWEIN </em></strong></a>over <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R2LDQCY1BOFYCM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher <a href="http://marshhawkpress.org"><strong>Marsh Hawk Press </strong></a>is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the <a href="http://meritagepress.blogspot.com/2010/02/haynaku-for-haiti.html"><strong>Hay(na)ku for Haiti </strong></a>fundraiser; as <em>THE THORN ROSARY </em>is priced retail at $19.95, this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-41955277813634981652010-12-05T22:30:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:11:28.337-08:00SELECTED POEMS OF GARCILASO DE LA VEGA edited & translated by JOHN DENT-YOUNGJOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega </em>edited and translated by John Dent-Young</strong><br /><em>(The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009)</em><br /><br />Although, as Dent-Young in his introduction states, Garcilaso de la Vega’s poetry was “the reverse of popular, in the more technical sense of the word, being inspired by literary and foreign models”, with their publication “in 1543, seven years after his death, he has been one of Spain’s most popular and critically acclaimed poets” whose poetry “changed the course of Spanish literature.”(1)<br /><br />This may not have been the case and de la Vega may have been just another soldier poet trying to entice the ladies with his wit and charm were it not for his nephew. A member of Emperor Charles I’s court, de la Vega was preparing to join up with Charles’s forces in their campaign against the Turks, when he was requested to witness his nephew’s wedding. His nephew being only fourteen, this was an arranged marriage through which it was hoped two powerful families would be united. Unfortunately, this marriage had not received royal sanction and, as a result, de la Vega was banished from Spain, after first spending some time imprisoned, following which he was assigned to serve under Don Pedro de Toledo who was the new viceroy of Naples. There, “he met Italian and Spanish humanists and came into contact with the new, post-Petrarchan generation of Italian poets: Pietro Bembo, Sannazaro, Tansillo, and Bernardo Tasso.”(8) This fortuitous contact led to his prominence as an innovative poet, the main innovation being “the introduction into Spanish of the verse forms of the Italians, their sonnets and canzone, their tersearima and ottava rima and above all the hendecasyllable.”(1-2)<br /><br />Dent-Young has grouped the poems into types. He begins with a selection of ‘Sonnets’. He then continues with ‘Songs’, then ‘Elegies and Epistle to Boscan’, before completing with ‘Eclogues’. There are also two appendices. <br /><br />We are fortunate that this is a bilingual edition. Translation from Spanish to English is incapable of capturing the intricate rhyme scheme of the original. De la Vega uses a variety of forms in his sonnets although all consist of two quatrains followed by two triplets. The predominant variation occurs within the triplets with that in the quatrain sometimes being quite redundant. In sonnets I and XI, for example, de la Vega creates a monody, each ending exactly the same. The rest of those included are abba abba. However, when we come to the sextets, we have: cde dce – I, XXIII, XXX, XXXIII; cde cde – V, XIII, XVII, XXV, XXXII, XXXV; cdc dcd – X, XI; and one very idiosyncratic one –XXXVII with the scheme cde efd. Subject matter varies as well, de la Vega equally adept at writing about war as about love. <br /><br />For example, here is Sonnet XXIII:<br /><blockquote>While colors of the lily and the rose<br />are displayed within the outline of your face,<br />and with that look, both passionate and chaste,<br />storms grow still in the clear light of your eyes;<br /><br />and while your hair that seems to have been mined<br />from seams of gold, and seeming too in flight<br />about that neck, so white, so bravely upright,<br />is moved and spread and scattered by the wind,<br /><br />seize the sweet fruits of your joyous spring,<br />now, before angry time creates a waste,<br />summoning snow to hide the glorious summit;<br /><br />the rose will wither in the icy blast<br />and fickle time will alter everything,<br />if only to be constant in its habit.(43)</blockquote><br />That insipid internal rhyme found in the third line of the second quatrain is no fault of the translator as it is present in the original. Line length varies considerably in the original as well from 11 to 15 syllables.<br /><br />And here is Sonnet XXX subtitled ‘To Boscán from La Goleta’:<br /><blockquote>Arms, Boscán, and the fury of rampant Mars, <br />that, cultivating with their modern power<br />the soil of Africa, persuade the empire<br />of Rome to burgeon in these parts once more,<br /><br />have reawakened, brought again to mind,<br />Italy’s art, Italy’s ancient valor<br />by means of which, with gallant deeds and power,<br />Africa was laid low from end to end.<br /><br />Here, where once the Romans, looting and burning,<br />kindled profligate flames that left the whole<br />of Carthage nothing but a name alone,<br /><br />love invades my thoughts, turning and returning,<br />to torture and set fire to the anxious soul,<br />and I in tears and ashes am undone.</blockquote><br />The Spanish Inquisition, it must be recalled, began in 1478 (interestingly, it was never officially ended until 1834). Is it this that imbues this sonnet with imagery of flames? Was de la Vega denouncing the auto da fe with his use of the word ‘profligate’ using the image of Carthage to mask his denunciation? It must also be considered that there was a sizable Moorish component to the population of Spain in de la Vega’s time and that the Moors were originally from northern Africa, probably from the same area as Carthage.<br /><br />Not that they aren’t interesting, but we’ll skip the canciónes, or songs, and move directly to the Elegies and Epistle for Boscán. There are two elegies, Dent-Young stating that the second “is more of an epistle than an elegy”(76), both of which were written in a form of terza rima which, in Spain, was known as a <em>tercetos encadenados</em>, or ‘linked tercet’. The rhyme structure of both is aba bcb cdc dad etc. Dent-Young makes a valiant attempt to capture that structure in his translation of Elegy II:<br /><blockquote>Here, Boscán, where the great Mantuan locates<br />the ashes of old Anchises, the illustrious<br />Trojan, whose name and fame he celebrates<br /> all of us are gathered under the glorious<br />banners of the present-day African<br />Caesar, we who returned victorious;<br /> but we differ in our aims, for some can<br />hardly wait to gather in the harvest,<br />to reap the crop that with our sweat was sown,<br /> while others, who say that virtue is their friend(99)</blockquote><br />We can see that at this point he begins to lose it. The translation doesn’t indent the first line which the original does. In fact, the first line of every tercet is indented in both which would appear then to be a convention making it possible for the reader to follow the complex structure. The Epistle to Boscan exists in a different world. As Dent-Young states, it is “the first poem in Spanish written in <em>endecasilabos sueltos</em>, or ‘blank verse’ (though this equates it with the Latin hexameter rather than Elizabethan blank verse).” As this innovation will not be detectable from the English translation, we will move on to the last part of the book, Eclogues, which should prove an interesting analysis given that we have a modern day eclogue, Lisa Robertson’s <em>XEclogue</em>.<br /><br />Dent-Young completes his translations with three eclogues, He indicates that he has “kept them in their traditional order, though, rather confusingly Eclogue II as written first.” He introduces Eclogue I through an apologia: “It has a complicated rhyme scheme, which I have not tried to follow, but I have kept to the pattern of long and short lines (in the original, hendecasyllables and heptasyllables).” To capture this, the entirety of a stanza, in this case the first, needs quoting:<br /><blockquote>Of two shepherd’s melodious laments,<br />Salicio’s and also Nemoroso’s,<br />I shall sing, reproducing their complaints;<br />to that delicious song the curious sheep<br />listened, forgetful of the joys of feeding,<br />while they attended to the tale of love.<br /> You, who through your deeds have earned<br /> a worldwide reputation<br /> and title beyond compare,<br />whether at this moment given over<br />entirely to the government of your realm<br />of Alba, or whether engaged elsewhere<br /> resplendent in your armor,<br />taking the warlike role of Mars on earth,(121)</blockquote><br />He begins his discussion of Eclogue II with another apologia: “In Eclogue II, which has 1,885 lines, I have made extensive cuts, but I have tried to provide enough to allow comparisons with the other eclogues...The whole eclogue is written in a variety of verse forms, including a long section with internal rhyme. It is also a mixture of genres, the history of the house of Alba being Garcilaso’s nearest approach to epic.” Again, the opening lines are:<br /><blockquote> Even in the depths of winter, the water<br />of this clear spring is mild and sweet, while in<br />the summer, snow itself’s not cooler.<br /> O limpid stream, how clearly when I look in<br />your water I see in memory the day<br />that has my soul still shivering and burning!<br /> In your transparency I saw my joy<br />become all muddled and confused; when I<br />next saw you I lost my true companion.(149)</blockquote><br />Of the final poem, Eclogue III, he states: “it is thought that it still awaited a final revision at the time of his death. It is written in <em>octave real</em>, and I have attempted, where possible, to follow the rhyme scheme (<em>abababcc</em>).”(119) We can see the effect of this in the first stanza:<br /><blockquote>That pure and honorable sense of duty,<br />illustrious and most beautiful Maria,<br />I have had to celebrate your beauty,<br />your wit and intelligence and your rare<br />quality, despite the adverse destiny<br />that forces me to turn my steps elsewhere,<br />will always be in me as firmly fixed<br />as the body and the soul are intermixed.(181)</blockquote><br />In completion of this work, Dent-Young has provided two appendices. The first contains two coplas. The second, a letter from him to Boscán and used as the prologue to Boscán’s translation of Castiglione’s <em>The Courtier</em>. He also provides extensive notes to each of the translations. <br /><br />Although we cannot know what it was that didn’t make its way into the selection (unless we speak medieval Spanish and have access to the source documents all of which is doubtful for the average reader), we can certainly appreciate what did – which is an excellent sampling of de la Vega’s poetry and the genres in which he wrote. For this, we should be thankful.<br /><br />***** <br /><br />John Herbert Cunningham is the host of <em>Speaking of Poets </em>– a half-hour radio show on Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, reviews and interviews. He publishes regularly in half a dozen literary magazines in Canada and the same number in the U.S. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with the free jazz group ECMW – Experimental Creative Music Workshop. He is currently studying the alto sax, the Chinese flute and the darbouka.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-6943513755843565242010-12-05T22:20:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:11:02.588-08:00MONEY FOR SUNSETS by ELIZABETH J. COLENKATHRYN K. STEVENSON Reviews <br /><br /><strong><em>Money for Sunsets </em>by Elizabeth J. Colen</strong><br /><em>(Steel Toe Books, Bowling Green, KY, 2010)</em><br /><br /><em>Money for Sunsets</em>, the debut poetry collection from Pacific Northwest writer Elizabeth J. Colen, exposes slant in the middle of slant’s heyday—when love becomes sin; money, speech; and things, people. <br /><br /> Inside her city, a fenceless border town set in a time of oil and empire, where “Here we are only bulwark and stockade, blockade and gunpowder” and “Here we take matters into our own hands,” dogs dig up bullets and bodies wash up on shores while some “we” “stray inside the sunset city, perilously close.”<br /><br /> The images foreshadow an end. <br /><br />The poet waits for it as she watches her companion prepare by filling her pockets with rocks, herself thinking “less weight the way to go” and, in “Somewhere We Burn,” laying out her own game plan: “Think of every last disaster you were a part of. Start from the start, make it clean. Make it right. Make it real” (67).<br /><br />That’s what Colen does here. Divided into “Your arsenal,” “silence,” and “refraction,” the poems in <em>Money for Sunsets</em>, like the title of Colen’s debut collection of prose poems, offer a concise and deviceless study in twists, especially the kind that have to do with desire—or bigger, choice. <br /><br />Tracking the sun, getting lost in her lover’s hair, leaving bones at the beach, and witnessing “each subject shriek about his or her death murdered or not,” Colen knows “Somebody’s got to be left to burn.” <br /><br />Making it clean is not that simple, though, for “Love is never clean like memory.”<br /><br />In “Home Before it Divided,” Colen fleshes it out: “Before baby and after. Not baby. Before Daddy’s slap. The reddened years of my face. Before the adults and after children. Before seatbelts. And me in between.” Here, memory marks a series of events defined by change or trauma. Their definition suggests “clean” means divisible. If love is not clean like memory, is love indivisible? Is there an amoral character to love? Do we wrongly divide it? <br /><br />In any case, it is unclean. In “Survival of the Species,” she says, “If I knew my mother would slap me for saying she married for money, I would have done it sooner. The red hand on my cheek speaks of love.” Six sentences later, Colen likes women “the way her mother likes men.” And suddenly, no love is clean: not a woman’s for a man, not a mother’s for her daughter or husband, not a woman’s or brother’s for a woman; not a girl’s for the red mark of mother love; and not God’s for her: “If my mother knew I liked women the way she likes men, she would have hung me. My brother likes women too. The Bible says he is O.K.” <br /><br />A sister likes singing hymns, a mom likes “the men who come.” Somebody likes this thing or that thing and there is hell to pay for liking one thing over another and nothing at all to pay for liking the wrong thing. Wrong pairings, desire gone haywire, a whole world’s store of wants sprung mad like a cheap machine—these are the twists Colen exposes, like someone who, stuck in the uncoveted seat between Mom and Dad before and after baby, might grow up thinking chronologies don’t add up to answers, wondering why a slap can slice time so much more easily than affections. <br /><br />Stuck between unloving lovers, you might grow up thinking about choice or lack of it: the choice to leave or not leave, for instance. Is this how Colen knows to read the face as a series of parts indicating whether one lives or leaves? In “Coasters,” for instance, “You’ve always had hubcap eyes. What I mean to say is you’re leaving now.” <br /><br />Or in “If Not for the Boy,” where, “Upstairs, my mother has become an end table”: <br /><blockquote>Her eyes are. Her teeth are, though not smiling, are. Her hands and nails are. Her hips and lips. Her knuckles and nose are. Her face altogether is is is. And her legs are legs. At last they are nothing but legs” (?). </blockquote><br />Moms vacate and chain-smoke, “pulling air from a Pall Mall.” Baby sisters seem to sink them like a stockpile of pocketed rocks; in a letter to her sister, the speaker recalls, “The rock was shiny and you.” Meanwhile, kids gnaw away at “callouses, yielding to yellow teeth, nails coming off in the water.” Yet, somehow, the poet learns well anyway because she is “never that stable, never that chair.”<br /><br />Is it from watching her mother, who used to “bring men home” then “fuck and fall asleep on the couch,” dead to her son’s calls, that she knows in “Waiting for Winter,” “The sun fucks the blue bluer”? Is it from Dad she knows choice becomes doing; preference, action: in “Grand Canyon,” for instance, “I say wife and my father hears knife. I think it’s got something to do with religion. I’m not trying to do this <em>to </em>him”?<br /><br />Stuck between unloving lovers, you might grow up thinking about the desire behind decision, about nominalization even—how some “love” becomes “preference,” reduced to “like” when others look on it, evacuating love and ushering in body parts instead. <br /><br />You might think of that twist as a projection when you witness body parts wash up on shores and realize a host of unchecked desires <em>do </em>kill—not girl loving girl after all, despite what she might have learned—but the unnamed preferences, like the lust for things that never warrants its own special name. <br /><br />When a war torn boy lies dead, “box of hair on a beach,” smelling “of candy and burn,” for instance, what he wore “could fit inside your palm or, if you like, could hang off the two fingers left of your right hand.” Colen doesn’t say who would like such a thing, but the sentence reconstructs a gestalt, a hole where the whole might be if we were honest: someone or something is responsible for the death of a boy—perhaps an enterprise mired in and somehow <em>disguised </em>by chronology and causation—but that story is absent, oceanic. <br /><br />How does a poet speak of a force having excused itself in the wake of its own giant spill? Colen approaches the story sideways, alluding to evil without letting it act. <br /><br />Beyond the sediment of cause and effect is something even more tangible than story: stripped bare, the entity that makes decontextualized bodies out of living people is a person with a preference. <br /><br />It’s a matter of preference to say “inside your palm” or “off the two fingers” when a boy washes up on the shore. And someone <em>must </em>like it, she hints, the way someone striking a deal like “money for sunsets” must want what? To sink the sun? Sell it? Try to buy it? Parcel it out like so many derivatives? Who <em>are </em>these people? They’re not subjects here. <br /><br />Here, evil is atmosphere—apparent as aftermath, felt as mood, absorbed by bystanders—the conditions of which Colen details in poetic straight talk, a course that never leads to the scene of a crime but to the place where criminality might be established. <br /><br />You have to go to the ocean sometimes to see what will wash up. The ocean is honest, doesn’t hide what happened anywhere.<br /><br />In “11 Bang-Bang,” a boy is scattered there; in “Slack Tide,” a body washes up; in “The Rules of Subduction,” “Find what could have been shell shards or the bones of human fingers—carpal, metacarpal, phalanges. Leave them at the water, untouched by the stick in your hand”; in “Money for Sunsets,” a girl gives in there; in “American Beach,” the poet once “lost everything there” where “hotels stand as monuments to what we haven’t yet destroyed.” <br /><br /><em>Money for Sunsets </em>is peopled by the ones navigating aftermath, post-crime, where crime has yet to be established, which is why lovers move “perilously close” through a city with a lease on sunsets inhabitants can rent piecemeal for the price of a dinner out. <br /><br />In the end, Colen promises one thing: “I am going to keep believing in the devil until the earth is proven otherwise uninhabitable”—because it’s the gestalt that needs vacating, the setting that’s corrupt. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Kathryn K. Stevenson earned her doctorate in English from the University of California, Riverside, where she teaches writing classes and obsesses about "adherence," or the bonds forged between peoples under duress--a theme that appears, magnified, in her fiction, non-fiction, and songs, which can be found at myspace.com/radiochord.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-77450535688975450032010-12-05T22:10:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:10:29.188-08:00VANCOUVER: A POEM by GEORGE STANLEY and IN THE MILLENIUM by BARRY MCKINNONT.C. MARSHALL Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Vancouver: A Poem </em>by George Stanley</strong> <br /><em>(New Star, Vancouver, 2008)</em><br /><br />and <br /><br /><strong><em>in the millenium </em>by Barry McKinnon</strong> <br /><em>(New Star, Vancouver, 2009)</em><br /><br /><strong>TWO PLEASE</strong><br /><br />After the Olympics were over, I realized the Canadians had won more gold than any other nation at one winter games. They also probably spent more gold for the right to show off British Columbia in images of trees, streams, mountains, valleys, vines, city lights, snow, and sunshine, all glitteringly rounded off like the neutralized accents of the nice people placed digitally in front of these pictures of their “home.” They won the right to celebrate by thousands in the streets where I had once marched to free Leonard Peltier from extradition. They bought the right to show first peoples as feathered dancers and not to show loggers or logging at all or the homeless who clog the city streets between Chinatown and Gastown’s tourist-trap bistro-bars that have replaced the old pubs. This is what some Canadians might call suc-cess and pro-gress. The Olympics are over; we have moved on to South Africa and another set of games.<br /><br />The old Olympiad brought out verses that have lasted down the centuries from the lyre of Pindar. I remember Robin Blaser in Vancouver and how gloriously he brought Pindar out of Greek for us, though there was Greek in the old pubs. The waiters at The Cecil used to appreciate an order of “Two, please said as “Tio se para kaló” before the topless dancers took over and then the bistro bit. Two poets who go back to when the Cecil served served trayfuls of affordable beer have published stunning new books in recent years, looking at their BC towns. Their works may be worth less than their weight in Olympian gold to most of the world, but we poets should join in celebrating them: George Stanley and Barry McKinnon. <em>Vancouver: A Poem </em>(New Star, 2008) and <em>in the millenium </em>(Vancouver: New Star, 2009) present a Canadian consciousness other than what you might have seen on TV. One puts Vancouver in a different light, and the other puts the very different city of Prince George in the literary spotlight Barry has been shining there for three decades.<br /><blockquote>“Vancouver is breaking through<br />your understandable reticence.” <br /> (Stanley 42)</blockquote><br />This simple sentence could be a motto for those Olympics as well as for Stanley’s own book, but it offers other candidates as well. Those lines are in the book’s strongest section, “6,” out of the thirteen that compose it. “6” images the homelessness the BC ad ignored even while protestors showed it to the world off-screen. Twelve sections of the book are titled with numbers, and one (between 10 & 11) is called “Seniors.” That section, written by an American immigrant in his early seventies, speaks up about another population not in the commercial. Stanley’s nearly Olympian effort to let the city be fully visible is not all about what he includes but more about how he includes things. Like McKinnon’s, Stanley’s consciousness has developed a syntax that comfortably interrupts itself to be inclusive. Both writers include the greatest interrupter: death.<br /><br />“City of death, city of friends” (49) ends a poem that centers around the demolition of a building and the re-installation of its classic cornice, “some figure of a nurse” that was “repositioned at about the same height on the new Cathedral Place building that had taken its place” (47). No matter that the truth of the matter slightly escapes the poem: the 1989 replacement of that 1929 building, with its tributes at three corners to WWI nurses, replaced them with replicas (Lee, John. <em>Walking Vancouver</em>: Berkeley: Wilderness P, 2009: 7). The poem has its sharp accuracies, though, in the stops and starts of long lines like: “Sky Train to Waterfront—faces reflected impassive as in an old T.S. Eliot poem—as if the set of the face belied the interior mind—and it does—try it—I could teach this to the young” (Stanley 45).<br /><br />These lines, like poems in themselves, add depths to the overall construction that Stanley comments upon by mentioning WCW as a guide occasionally from the first page on. This is not, though, a man & his city poem; neither Paterson nor Gloucester, Vancouver is present to the composition as a “real” that can call froth something like the concept Blaser spread around Vancouver. He found it in Giorgio Agamben’s <em>Coming Community</em>: “The world—insofar as it is absolutely irreparably profane”—the Irreparable as “an opening into our contemporary task” in the face of “the destruction of experience” --“seeing something as simple as neither ‘necessary’ nor ‘contingent’” (quoted in Blaser, <em>The Fire </em>from Berkeley: UC Press, 2006: 107-9). This shows in sections 5’s line: “& so there’s a mind—I can’t say––& summer’s over, the whole latitude is moving. If it’s there as an image—if it’s there as inhabiting the poem—that’s important, because it’s so for some I, almost random, but menaced by something that won’t die—but that—is in itself—death—“ (35-36).<br /><br />The challenge that George Stanley’s writing presents for us as it presents it for himself, in lovely Joanne Kyger “I hear thinking—I overhear” fashion, is the web of tension between that background presence of “something that won’t die” and the foregrounding of “things—to describe—not to describe” (35) as focused by a mind and what it may be “afraid to know” (55). This is the poetry of finding out not of declaring, of presenting not describing, of writing “without any justification, carelessly, ah yes” (66), without object. It has two beliefs that carry it (as <em>Bach’s belief </em>written by Robin Blaser from Charles Olson’s phrase does) through. “I will not believe in my own mind, then” is one along with the “belief tat the world has in its own / real time, of which we are part” (74).<br /><br />These practices and beliefs are the understory of a current in BC poetry half-a-century old now, referred to in the perhaps self-mocking title of a sequence by Barry McKinnon—“The Death of a Lyric Poet.” In it, McKinnon writes “if you could sing, the song / is all that wld go // anywhere” (<em>The the</em>. Toronto: Coach House P, 1980: 12). This set tells of “ceaseless / irritation” in his small northern city, and he allows the radio in as a voice of it—“to pile absurdity upon absurdity until / it becomes a town / a city: on the radio” (20). We hardly have that disembodied machine anymore, but the radio serves still as a figure for all that absurd and irritating voicing. In <em>Vancouver: A Poem</em>, it is what makes the poetry insist that “this is not my city” (3 & 74).<br /><br />In Barry McKinnon’s slightly more recent publication, <em>in the millenium</em>, his adopted city of Prince George figures heavily and centrally. In “Prince George (Part One),” dedicated to Stanley, we have these gists and piths:<br /><blockquote>when a city becomes its coldest hearts<br />we live in the illusion of its habitat <br /> (105)<br /><br /><em>the they</em>. The <em>who</em>, the <em>us </em>in the disintegrated<br />disintegration—nothing can be known; its own hopeless<br />statement—<em>the north / everywhere (but not revealed)</em> <br /> (106)<br /><br />the city exists / knows itself / cannot change<br />easily <br /> (108)<br /><br />the density of context peeled was revealed to a momentary<br />sense of simplicity, that it could be known, and therefore, the<br />man <em>could </em>know himself, being a city : <em>unto himself</em> <br /> (109)<br /><br />to work<br />a language in its attempt to equal<br />the anxious swirl in an angular world of charts, graphs—<br />the gizmoed patter claimed & believed as real—that any power<br />required subservience to its whacko notions, be revealed as public <br />sense: <em>not agreement, but truth of one’s condition faced</em> <br /> (109)<br /><br />in shame that now the city can not be made <br /> (107)</blockquote><br />That work on and of a language goes on in “Prince George Core.” More tragic than Stanley’s vision, McKinnon’s “city is organ. it sees itself. disintegrated. its body and mind its own demise” and “fucked / without a choice” (139). But still “that beginning illusion” stands: “I so lost in whatever task sought … in the fate of a force sent out to beat it” (140). McKinnon writes of “the mind as habitat,” but this is not as refuge; it is there as task, and a “complex mask” (142).<br /><br />This poet defines his defiances in a Philly Talk “post Response: Supplement” inserted in “Head Out” for his great companion Cecil Giscombe (whose own <em>Giscombe Road</em> is another fine book of BC body politic). The explanation reads thus: “The poem is in process that defies the static, the set, the static arbitraries that herd most populations through life and language.” This follows a clearly political thrust: “What has been mapped by manipulation and self-interested forces, from whatever source or reason, is firstly what the poet must at the most rudimental start of the thinking and writing process attempt to take apart” (69). These words comment on the work as a poetics statement, but they are <em>in </em>the work as well. And on the previous page, the book tells us that McKinnon sees Stanley too as companion: “he writes / builds a line that seems dismantled <em>at the same time</em>—to reveal accurate processes of mind and life moving to their jagged truths” (68). <br /><br />These two seems to write to each other somehow. Stanley challenges himself about the “no good” that comes of “hoping to sneak back into some sense of words–– / some house of being” after the experience of the “hot air” of the world words “have to come out of” (<em>Vancouver </em>88). In “Seniors,” Stanley moves literally through the world that gives writing its place in such poems as “Common Areas”: “When my fellow tenant and I are both going out, / we are each going into the world, into our secret lives” (90). McKinnon’s answer is in “the world / a contradiction of attempts at connection to it” (in 4), while he sees real life as moving “into and out of the language and world at hand” (68). Stanley’s response might be in his lines “Now the words tell of something so obvious / as to see the air in front of you” (<em>Vancouver </em>94). As one might “crave loneliness” as the “opposite” of a world of contradictions (in 4), the other tried to fend off the “raw longing to be alone” (<em>Vancouver </em>87). The balance found in Baudelaire’s famous prose poem on “Les Foules” comes through in Stanley’s words as “Multitude, solitude: these are equal, reciprocal terms, / for the fecund poet” (111). Together, these poets articulate a personhood true beyond its self and to it. If any of you might be nostalgic for Olson or where he would lead, try following these two.<br /><br />If you’d like to carry on where the Olympics dare not go, get these books from New Star. For the best in hockey poems, see another New Star book by George Stanley called <em>At Andy’s </em>(2000) and read “The Puck.” For an envoi to the Olympics, we can borrow from Stanley’s “Word On the Street” in <em>Vancouver</em>:<br /><blockquote>Vancouver will continue on in peace,<br />undeserved, no, deserved,<br />by the ones with no guile in their hearts,<br />no time for guile—<br /><br />lose your need<br />to be one with (them) <br /> (118)</blockquote><br />And from “The Tank”:<br /><blockquote>The mind is this street<br />only the interiors<br />around it<br />arranged<br />differently <br /> (124)</blockquote><br />But perhaps the last thought here should bring back the Olympian Pindar. As Blaser handed it to us, Pindar’s “Seventh Olympic Hymn” says: “art’s language / discloses powers without trickery” (<em>The Holy Forest</em>. Berkeley: UC P, 2006: 144). If, we should say with Barry McKinnon, “its activity is also its own resistance” (in 107).<br /><br />*****<br /><br />T.C. Marshall, AKA “Rev Doc,” AKA “Grampa Tom,” enjoys life in the California mountain village of Felton where he reads and writes and walks and talks much as he has ever since Norman O. Brown first dragged him up that hill as a nature guide and conversational foil once upon a time a long long time ago.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-33790170748036989002010-12-05T22:05:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:09:41.532-08:00AS IT TURNED OUT by DMITRY GOLYNKOERIC DICKEY Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>As It Turned Out </em>by Dmitry Golynko, Edited by Eugene Ostashevsky. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Rebecca Bella with Simona Schneider.</strong><br /><em>(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2008)</em><br /><br /><em>As It Turned Out </em>weaves a narrative of prosperity and loss as a result of communist Russia’s transition to free markets. Golynko’s rich language and broad-arching narrative is a study in how that transition affected the economic, environmental, personal and cultural persona of Russia and its people. It is a glimpse into the mind and heart, a spiritual journey of a newly subjugated people.<br /><br />Divided into nine sections, each section is a series of poems rich in language and metaphor that rewards with each reading. Its narrative arc is a broad and passionate tale about discovering the way to come to terms with our own condition as humans no matter how terrible or confused our world is. <br /><br />The opening section <em>Passing the Church of the French Consulate </em>makes a strong statement about liberation and abandoning old ways of thinking.<br /><blockquote>I stole gooseberries, crowfoots in the municipal gardens of Tartu,<br />tried on the pike skeleton of the mahogany cathedral<br />in place of my vertebral column—the card I got, got topped,<br />the Mammy of God placed into my hands a vial—it shattered</blockquote><br />Here, the poet relates the availability of resources, gooseberries, crowfoot, and locates the action in Estonia. He had been nourished on fish skeletons and the church, which was a poor substitution for a back bone. We have to wonder what is in the vial. Images raise questions. We have to keep reading to unlock the secrets and open the vial. This first section establishes the failure of communism at providing for the spirit and seeks to move beyond social preconceptions. It asks us to ask ourselves what acceptable behavior is when we are forced to survive. Like the first section, the second section, The Diary of an Ephemeral Death, asks us to define the boundaries of what it means to be wholly alive.<br /><br />The third section, <em>Elementary Things</em>, reduces the items of necessity to faceless objects. For example, each poem in this series of twenty-five is coldly titled the letters ET and a number, ET1 for the first poem in the series. ET17 captures the desperation a person might feel coming from a communist based economy to one which suspects that an elementary aspect of commoditized resources are themselves transient and impermanent as well. <br /><blockquote>an elementary thing respects the poverty <br />of logic, language, the homeless, so on<br />many birds have gone dead and blind <br />not just swallows but also wagtails<br />warblers, chaffinches, corncrakes<br />rereads the ornithological atlas<br />the pushers gone extinct and the madcap hawkers<br />it’s time for the elementary thing to skedaddle<br />before somebody took care of it</blockquote><br />Which is the more spiritual providing social system to live in? A system which provides are elementary necessities to live, or a system in which we are free to provide for our own spiritual growth?<br /><br />In the fourth section of the book, <em>The Faun and the Few</em>, Golynko takes a stance on the environmental implications of moving from a communist to a consumerist based worldview. Again, the poems are linked by their titles. Each poem’s title is named “the faun and un-” the subject of the poem, for example “the faun and the unknown” or “the faun and the unearthly.” Traditionally, a faun is perceived as a male figure, but Golynko questions the gender of a faun by suggesting that it is “perhaps a woman” as he states in the first poem of this section, “the faun and unfeigned.” By positing gender ambiguity, Golynko forces us to check our own gender biases.<br /><br />In “the faun and the unskilled” Golynko writes:<br /><blockquote>the faun knows how to look after<br />cheer up, scrub a pot <br />fill out necessary forms<br />betray someone, when it’s unbearable<br />suck caramels and cherry drops<br />nibble on halvah, clean fennel<br />get cash from the beat-up bankomat<br />the unskilled is also completely used to<br />breaking it down, when necessary</blockquote><br />Perhaps, Golynko suggests that nature is capable of undermining authority when a resource is overtapped, when a woman has reached the end of her rope, she can stop providing. The woman, like nature, should not be taken for granted by a consumptive system because she knows how to break it down. This section can be read as a critique of gender roles and a tip of the hat to feminism.<br /><br />In the fifth section, <em>The Revered Categories</em>, Golynko provides poems in a series that list categories of sadness, of misperception, of disappointment: “the category of pity,” “the category of condescension,” and “the category of stuckiness.” In “the category of intimacy” the poet describes the pitfalls and risks of intimacy in times of transition:<br /><blockquote>the situation’s desperate, there will be gossip<br />a femme fatale, gonorrhea, knocked up, the breeding ground<br />of seals, squeak-thing, rattle thing, one hoo-hoo<br /><br />gone mute, third-grade cursive without pressure,<br />recommendations for users, hoarfrost on, shit,<br />what are you after, thrice-kissed in Christ, dillweed<br />crushed fine, what a numbskull, missed the date,<br /><br />the testosterone level, ananke kicked in<br />lips search for someone, is the prisoner<br />whistling, is the mariner, the kid who stayed back<br />got a banana</blockquote><br />The anxiety of having quantum possibilities at our disposal can be overwhelming. But after “the Red October piano gets hauled out,” the poem says, the memory is sharpened and the capacity of meaningful intimacy is regained. The red October piano is obviously an image of communism. Does Golynko miss the old ways?<br /><br />Golynko trounces on language’s possibilities and weaves together a tale of skeptical uncertainty. We move from one shadow of communism to the shadow of corporatism. We are equally unsure and mistrustful, but the benefits offer more meaningful relationships within ourselves, with each other, with nature and with the world itself. Golynko carries on a tradition of poets raising questions.<br /><br />So when Golynko moves to the final sections of the book, he offers a cause for celebration on a new found freedom. In the section “Whip It Out,” the poems have a central character, a man in a black raincoat, who discovers freedom of sexual expression, where suppressed sexual urges implicate the old way of thinking and the new way of thinking allows the voyeur to be himself, despite the fact that he is a creepy pervert looking for a place to service himself in public. The section closes with the eleventh poem in the series:<br /><blockquote>whip it out, yeah, nail it down<br />a man in a black raincoat<br />looks at himself, what a<br />stud, they’ll give it to him<br /><br />right here, and where he’s going<br />further on also, and he knows<br />how to take it, sour cranberries<br />in a soaking bowl, the choice is huge</blockquote><br />Here, Golynko suggests that doors of opportunity are open. We do not need to suppress ourselves. We cannot avoid our destinies, where we are going.<br /><br />The final section of the book, <em>For The Checkmark Or For</em>, the poems run in a series of lost opportunities now regained. In the poem “not out of desperation,” the metaphor of new free-market foods to taste”<br /><blockquote>a pizza slice of chinese make<br />is taken out of the refrigerator<br />freezer crystals flow all over the frying pan<br />but not out of love, likewise two chicken<br /><br />cutlets lie together on the bed of a griddle<br />out of desperation, having imagined<br />the continuation of their union, we’ll have<br />to hold our noses, we’re not savages after all</blockquote><br />So, as it turned out, though capitalism is daunting, communism’s shadow looms over the evil, haunting specter of capitalism and a renewed world view. This book is an historical document of how the transition from the old to the new is difficult to navigate. But it is so much more than that. It is an exploration in language and rewards with each read. <br /> <br />*****<br /><br />Eric Wayne Dickey has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Oregon State University. His poems and translations have been published or are forthcoming in <em>Blazevox, Rhino, West Wind Review, Manzanita Quarterly, International Poetry Review</em>, and <em>Blue Collar Review</em>. He is a John Anson Kitredge Fund for Individual Artists grant recipient administered by Harvard University and a Vermont Studio Center Fellow. He co-edited <em>To Topos: Poetry International </em>and lives in Corvallis, Oregon.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-42407262554979358112010-12-05T22:00:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:08:53.983-08:00THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF GRAVITY AND GRACE by ERNESTO PRIEGOPEG DUTHIE Engages<br /><br /><strong><em>the amazing adventures of Gravity and Grace</em> by Ernesto Priego</strong><br /><em>(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2009)</em><br /><br />Quirky, yet profound. Template-bound, yet idiosyncratic. <em>Sandman </em>meets <em>xkcd</em>. The last description may be doing a disservice to all parties concerned -- if you were to pick up this collection specifically hoping for more Neil Gaiman or more Randall Munroe, odds are you would be disappointed, as it’s not very <em>Sandman </em>or <em>xkcd </em>in itself. However, those are the two pop-culture cornerstones that come to mind when I ponder how to describe this series of light, captivating vignettes, in which the narrator is bedeviled, mystified, and enchanted by two characters named Gravity and Grace, with guest appearances by Lust, Fate, Hope (whom Gravity identifies as her tall and gorgeous cousin), Patience (who is spotted smoking a cigarette while dressed in white), Disquiet (whose services include dusting books and massaging shoulders), and others.<br /><br />In his afterword, the author states that “writing the poems in this book felt like reading a monthly comic book,” that “<em>The Amazing Adventures of G & G </em>was the comic book I was never able to draw, and that the reader may notice that “their words are most of the times somebody else’s. If you don’t know where the words come from ‘originally,’ I might suggest googling them: you will discover other faces, other names for Gravity and Grace. In making them repeat other people’s words I meant no disrespect: on the contrary.” I confess I had not noticed this, but then again, the gaps in both my formal education and informal reading mean that many allusions sail straight over my head without jogging a single brain cell. That said, judging from the afterword, Prieto has quite a range: he refers to Kafka, Gaiman, Shakespeare, Simone Weil, and Michel Butor, as well as Superman (DC comics incarnation), Kathy and Lenny, Enid and Rebecca, and Maggie and Hopey (and if you recognize those last three pairs, you’re way ahead of me). The poems mention <em>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</em>, Abbey Road, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Dolce & Gabbana, <em>The Blue Angel</em>, and a host of other creations and brands. <br /><br />In the wrong hands, or if the reader isn’t in the right mood, this would be really annoying. That said, I didn’t find it necessary to be intimately acquainted with any of these sources to enjoy the poems: they are playful and undemanding, inviting the reader to linger if they so choose, but not so interconnected that one must, say, make sense of page 68 before moving on to page 69. The general formula appears to be two to eight lines about what Gravity and/or Grace are doing today (many of the poems beginning with “Today” or “This morning”), followed by a one-line observation or statement about an external character or element, often beginning with the word “Outside” (“Outside, the world jumps up and down, clapping to a single beat”; “On the street, Time and Sun make sculptures of the living”; “Somewhere, a shepherd trembles”). <br /><br />The personifications of Grace and Gravity are mercurial change artists who at times sound like cheeky young women and at others like crabby, cryptic biddies. They both start out with copper braids, but Grace gets “a little punk” (and is seen later “trashing her violin against the floor”) and Gravity dyes hers black (later, Grace is seen with black tresses as well); their wardrobes include a silk pink dress, a yellow bikini, black cotton underwear, a variety of stockings, a Hawaiian skirt, tall boots, and red shoes. Gravity pins the narrator to his bed while “Grace merely looks, slightly amused,” but it’s Grace who later insists “You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion” while arguing with Gravity about whether the narrator should have a beard. They mention “Sylvia and Virginia” as they inform the narrator that “we like difficult people, you know”; he casts himself as Orpheus to Grace’s Eurydice, singing lines from Dante to her “completely out of tune,” and later attempts to ref a game of footie “but am blind to offsides.” <br /><br />The cast list of personified concepts infuses the series with an air of unreality and fantasy, and yet it’s the personifications that keep the poems appealingly grounded. I’m particularly fond of the glimpse of Fate playing chess with Lust while Gravity skips rope in the garden, and there’s a rightness to Grace responding to an instance of heartbreak by busily folding paper and smiling “like someone plotting a crime.” In his introduction to the collection, Ohio poet Tom Beckett calls the adventures “something akin to a dialectical house party,” and I think that’s about right: perusing them is not unlike riffling through stills from a <em>Nouvelle Vague </em>film, where the characters are at once both larger than life and yet specific to the moment we happen to peer at them. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Peg Duthie shares a house in Nashville with a tall man, a large dog, and a short piano. She blogs about poetry at <em><a href="http://www.varytheline.org">Vary the Line</a></em> and tweets about it now and then (@zirconium).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-23294342727361500582010-12-05T21:56:00.000-08:002010-12-08T13:20:46.273-08:00UNTAM'D WING: RIFFS ON ROMANTIC POETRY by JEFFREY C. ROBINSONPATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>UNTAM’D WING: Riffs on Romantic Poetry </em>by Jeffrey C. Robinson</strong><br /><em>(Station Hill of Barrytown, 2010)</em><br /><br /><strong>LETTER TO GLASGOW, 12-03-2010</strong> <br /><br /><blockquote>“Someone said it… no great art without great theories… & I believed in it… and so I have great theories…” <br />- Ted Berrigan <br /><em>Interview and Reading on In The American Tree</em>, hosted by Lyn Hejinian & Kit Robinson, KPFA, Berkeley, 1978 available on-line @ <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Berrigan.php">PennSound</a></blockquote><br />Jeffrey C. Robinson’s cuts & re-mixes, “riffs” as he terms them, call to mind, as Anne Waldman notes in her <em>P(riff)Face</em>, the “minimalization a la Ronald Johnson” evident in his <em>R A D I OS </em>where Milton’s <em>Paradise Lost </em>is played as source text, along with the narrative commentaries and poetic re-imaginings of Keats’ life & work in Tom Clark’s <em>Junkets on a Sad Planet </em>or the similar fun-jinks found in his <em>The Mutabilitie of the Englishe Lyrick</em>. While the exercise(s) is not new, a good time is had and Robinson offers a fresh experience of the work of the English Romantics, encouraging in the spirit of enthrallment where the pleasure of language is felt. A large focus is given primarily to Wordsworth (Robinson has published extensive criticism elsewhere) and Keats, but Coleridge and others get tossed into the fray a bit as well. The very best that may be said of a book for poets may be said of this one: it generates writing. An invigorating text, poems get propelled pell mell here and there as the impulse to write lies infectiously strung throughout the whole. <br /><br />At the heart of the book is “The trickster Hermes,” patron saint of poets, stealers of lines. (pg. 114) On the back of the book, Anselm Hollo’s blurb: “speechless / an English like notes / of Anton Webern // winding through the weave / of the brain’s branches” takes its lead from Robinson’s liberties with his source texts, the generous feel he gives the soundings of words. <br /><blockquote>Lying on banks in tall grasses begetting begetting<br />  Again again the wandering cry lying together<br /> Still begetting the breathing beloved wet songs<br /> Full fledged sparrows mouths closed so full<br /> Nests dull evening lying full close breathing<br /> Wm. met me lying breathing close the wandering<br /> Cry Cuckoo coo continually Wm. met me<br /> I and Wm. and swallows and thrushes employed lying<br /> Breathing breaking down failing lying down again<br /> Lying on sloping turf melting astonished<br /> On my couch like the grave employed in bliss <br /><em>(pg. 71)</em></blockquote><br />This poem comprised of Robinson’s re-working of lines from Dorothy Wordsworth captures the staccato rhythmic feel of the repetitive days the Wordsworths spent together, while Robinson also rejoices in exuberant use of “-ing” whether present participle or gerund, as he does elsewhere.<br /> <blockquote> Single<br /> Thrilling<br /> Nightingale<br /> Breaking<br /> Bending<br /> Things<br /> Singing <strong>-ing</strong><br /> Spring-time<br /> Reaping<br /> Sings<br /> Ending<br /> Overflowing<br /> <em>(pg. 36)</em></blockquote><br />“She [Dorothy] records his listening to her breathing and rustling. If I concentrate very hard, blotting out my own world, I can just recover their silences and sounds,” and as far as this goes, all is well. (pg. 71) Of course, when taking such liberties there are always traps of self-indulgence which must be out-maneuvered, less the result be “of music, audible to him alone.” (pg. 84) <br /><br />As for Coleridge, Robinson’s riffs would do well with less “richly sensuous reverie” of such stuff as “wind against the wind-harp” (pg. 26) and further “wild and various” news of that “break / with faith” (pg. 29). Robinson’s results here lack any edginess. The sharp thrill of the original is gone. At its best, you come across the breezy clarity of an imagined Wordsworth, encouraged to:<br /><center>sing<br />the matchless pleasure<br />of gypsy girl<br />stirring air in her<br />laboring shape<br /><em>(pg.45)</em></center><br />When it comes to the matter of the “simultaneous uselessness and necessity of speaking to the dead” and “the juxtaposition of the eternity of death with the utter immediacy of speech” there’s often a looseness that pries its way into once tight language. (pg. 104) For instance, alternatively you may flip that last line to speak of the “eternity of speech” and the “immediacy of death,” with either arrangement, the truth is equally felt. The problem is that so often the powerful thrust of the original text is impossible to carry over intact into a newly imagined “real thing in the world.” (pg. xiv)<br /><br />At times while merging the marvelous with that which is less than, the language folds in on itself. The following example, culled from “careful review of the manuscripts of the May poems” Wordsworth’s “two poems on May composed between 1826 and 1835,” one beginning “While from the purprling…” shows a Gertrude Stein repetitiveness that does not succeed well. (pg. 80)<br /> <blockquote>May sweet May blithe May blithe<br /> Flora blithe May blithe Flora blithe<br /> May blithe blithe blithe Flora from<br />His couch upstarts blithe Flora blithe<br />May season blithe May season of<br />Renewed delicate leafy blithe May<br /> <em>(pg. 82)</em> </blockquote><br />Robinson teases round the question whether “blithe” does “go with ‘Flora’ or with ‘May’ ” testing the grounds of “visionary possibilities of words.” (pg. 81) But of course, the only end to such experiments remains “deathless <em>unfinished song</em>” (pg. 83) and thus “blocks of predictable Romantic idiom” are here merely transformed into blocks of predictable procedural constructs of Modernist experiment.<br /><br />Robinson takes delight in his re-envisioning, “I like what I just made” and there are solid station-points throughout where he offers up legitimate truths by way of example of how poems do work. (pg. 75) A well made poem like any solidly built structure, while being still integral to itself, does also fold and unfold, overlapping in places and is capable of being re-joined together in fascinating new ways each time without losing in its strength, functionality, or meaning. For instance, <br /><blockquote>And very few to love;<br />Is shining in the sky.<br />The difference to me!</blockquote><br />Is “the new last-line stanza” of Wordsworth’s poem “she dwelt among the untrodden ways” when rearranged, taking “the last lines” of each stanza to form a wholly new one. (pg. 75)<br /><blockquote>Beside the springs of Dove.<br />Half hidden from the eye!<br />When Lucy ceased to be;</blockquote><br />Would be the new second-line stanza, following the same pattern, such secrets of the poets are a delight and this book is worth reading through for the enjoyment of coming across them. The trick is to remember that it’s not always so easy. It is in the nature of poetry to follow Keats when he declares, “I shall certainly breed” and breed he does here, as Robinson does too, drawing on Keats’ letters and marginalia to produce fresh lineation of declaration. (pg. 98)<br /><blockquote>it<br /> reads<br /> the more<br /> richly for it<br />and will I hope<br /> encourage me to<br />write <br /> <em>(pg. 94)</em> </blockquote><br />If Robinson ever needs the encouragement he doesn’t show it. Finally, it is all a “plunge of song” into which any reader may now and again dive into as a writer and that doesn’t do one bit of harm to poetry at all. (pg. 89)<br /><br /><br /><em>A Postlude:</em><br /><br />“Graves of Shelley and Keats” (pg. 110)<br />at the feet of whose long buried bones<br />Gregory Corso’s fresh (by comparison) ashes<br />now lie with rent coming due <br />without other home to turn to<br />turns out you may evict the dead after all<br />those who have nowhere else to go<br />having gone where none know or dare<br />begs the question<br />“over time where do poems reside?” (pg. xiii)<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco. His critical essay on Creeley's debt to Stevens is slated to appear in <em>Fulcrum 7</em> anytime now. Poems and such will be appearing in the next issue of <em>Amerarcana</em>. This Spring Post Apollo Press will publish his "There Are People Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk": A GUSTONBOOK.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-9132364029694524092010-12-05T21:55:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:06:40.679-08:00NEIGHBOR by RACHEL LEVITSKYHARRY THORNE Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Neighbor </em>by Rachel Levitsky</strong> <br /><em>(Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2009)</em><br /><br /><strong>Love Thy Mystery Neighbor</strong><br /><br />As I write this, I can hear my neighbors across the street talking loudly and opening beer after beer, as they do every night. I could close the window, but there is something comforting about their noisy routines, even if, paradoxically, they are annoying. A similar ambivalence about the details of people’s lives can be found in Rachel Levitsky’s second volume of poetry, <em>Neighbor</em>: “I miss my nasty neighbor./ Who talks loudly into the night on the phone, when he is not snoring” (“Dawn”). <br /><br /><em>Neighbor </em>is much more than a catalogue of irritating behaviors though, even if it is crammed full with intimately observed details. Levitsky uses the figure of the neighbor to investigate what she calls in an interview with <em>Bomblog</em>, “spatial relationships as an ethical field.” This investigation spans four sections, each of which circles the figure of “my neighbor,” a term that relates to several different characters. In the top left hand corner of each page (except in the third section) is a description of a place, such as “door/foyer/stairwell,” and in the top right hand corner is the date when the poem was written in the unusual format of year/month/day. These spatial-temporal coordinates provide an appropriately architectural framework for the book’s exploration of everyday life in the close quarters of an apartment building. <br /><br /><em>Neighbor’s </em>first section explicitly connects the narrator’s relationship with her neighbor to wider political concerns: <br /><blockquote>I’ve decided to use my obsession<br />with my neighbor as a context<br />for a discussion of the State.<br /><br />I confess this isn’t the only thing I want. <br /><br /><em>(“Neighbor”)</em> </blockquote><br />The designation of “neighbor” suggests a relationship of physical proximity but emotional distance, and this itself serves a political purpose. Why should we care about someone different from us, even if they live next door? This question is central to Levitsky’s book, yet as the last line of the extract above implies, <em>Neighbor </em>is not interested in a purely philosophical examination of the “neighbor.” Instead, an investigation into the idea of the neighbor as a political construct is fused with the real dramas, irritations and obsessions of apartment living. The resulting poems are a mix of the theoretical and the personal, an impure blend that Levitsky’s use of different genres -- poetry, prose poems, and drama -- suits perfectly. <br /><br />In the second section, “Imago,” the narrator navigates the tension between the neighbor as a real person and the neighbor as a media generated stereotype. One poem has the stuttering title of “My My My What A Mystery Neighbor Is Probably Not A Psychokiller Although One Never Knows Until,” while another poem, “Patriots,” begins with the lines, “My neighbor probably/is not a terrorist.” In the “Psychokiller” poem, the narrator believes that she imagines her neighbor “better in the head,” as he is “one one never sees.” The neighbor’s invisibility drives the narrator to envision the neighbor as if he is part of a market research focus group:<br /><blockquote>I suspect he likes alternative rock<br />works with computers<br />and is straight</blockquote><br />The reliance on stereotypes underscores the lack of real connection, and leads the narrator to ask “how much can one/ shield away from display past the door?”<br /><br />The third section takes the form of a short and strange verse play called “Perfect California: A Family Affair.” The characters, who Levitsky notes can be played by any gender, include Rational Response and his/her opposite, Noetic. N. Delirium, as well as Luminous Cravings and Finger-in-the-ear. These characters engage in absurd and disconnected dialogue that at first may seem unrelated to the larger concerns of the book. Yet this dialogue mimics the often strained relations of neighbors, of people trying to connect, but who are frustrated by a wall of misunderstanding: <br /><blockquote>SUNLIGHT-AT-DUSK:<br /><br />If you peer at a 42 degree angle<br />your feeling state may change.<br />The butterflies have arrived.<br /><br /><br />NOETIC N. DELIRIUM:<br /><br />I am concerned about the safety of the creatures<br />in the sea. It has been so long.<br />What are they saying these days?</blockquote><br />“Perfect California” was performed during the “Plays on Words: A Poet’s and Theater Festival” in 2006, and it is easy to imagine the play finding a home on a stage dedicated to experimental drama. Yet, in the context of <em>Neighbor</em>, the play deepens the book’s thematic exploration of the difficulty we have connecting with the people who live next to us but not with us. <br /><br />After the abstractions of the play, the reader is transported into the final section of the book, which is also the most intimate. Here the wall that separates the neighbor from friend or lover begins to crumble: “The neighbor has become a friend./ So desire rises in him” (Wee Hours). This reconfiguration of daily relationships offers the hope of a less self-centered existence. In the prose poem “Earthworm/Grass/Snake,” Levitsky offers the image of an all-encompassing dew to counter that of the single solitary self: “In a world where ones (each and every) dissolve, dew settles on any.” <br /><br />Despite this hopeful image and the movement towards increased intimacy, the book ends on a note of resignation. In the final poem of <em>Neighbor</em>, “Proximity, Intimacy, Affinity,” religion comes between I and You: “when you believe in god, none of you make sense.” Communication is once again stymied: <br /><blockquote>try as I might<br />to envision<br /><br />the square upon which<br />the corners are not churches<br /><br />I have failed <br />to replace them. </blockquote><br />While the final lines might speak of failure, <em>Neighbor </em>itself is a successful cross-genre exploration of our relationship with the “strangers” that surround us. They may even be “nasty” and “talk loudly into the night” but their very nearness provides us with an ethical obligation to try and connect. By the end of <em>Neighbor</em>, the three terms in the title of the final poem “proximity”, “intimacy” and “affinity” – gain new significance, and the reader is left admiring Levitsky’s reimagining of the everyday. <br /><br />*****<br /> <br />Harry Thorne's poems, essays and reviews have appeared in <em>Chain, How2, Octopus Magazine</em>, and <em>Textual Practice</em>. His essay on Ted Berrigan's <em>C Magazine </em>can be found in <em>Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing</em> after the New York School edited by Daniel Kane and published by Dalkey Archive Press. He lives in Beacon, NY.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-36755704479598399692010-12-05T21:50:00.000-08:002010-12-07T20:04:19.966-08:00"EL DORADO" by EDGAR ALLAN POEMICHAEL POLLOCK Engages<br /><br />"El Dorado" by Edgar Allan Poe, Spanish translation by Mario Murgia in<br /><br /><strong><em>EL CURVO y otros poemas by Edgar Allan Poe</em>, Edicion bilingue with Traduccion del proyecto Helbardot and Ilustraciones de Gustavo Abascal</strong><br /><em>(Stonehenge Books, Mexico, 2009)</em><br /><br /><em>[Editor's Note: The text below is based on a conversation with my son, Michael Pollock]</em><br /><br />After reading Edgar Allan Poe's <a href="http://www.online-literature.com/poe/577/"><strong>"El Dorado", </strong></a>Michael drew the following poem in response:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0cop3JONr4nR7s0JcQERVxTJh1Y0uScH_Y6OvujOcUVFgo5jB7XxBLeV14T4sUPej1aqx86PNuoegaqh84hJLAdEJewC7MsGomra0uwPkanPP9hIXhfaTCAIlCP2FmiS8GcfRivQyJU/s1600/eldorado.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 291px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0cop3JONr4nR7s0JcQERVxTJh1Y0uScH_Y6OvujOcUVFgo5jB7XxBLeV14T4sUPej1aqx86PNuoegaqh84hJLAdEJewC7MsGomra0uwPkanPP9hIXhfaTCAIlCP2FmiS8GcfRivQyJU/s400/eldorado.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5481582133656519954" /></a><br /><br />Michael liked the poem in that, in his view, it counsels that regardless of continuous failures, one should keep trying -- keep moving forward! Thus, the knight in the picture, despite a wrinkled chin bespeaking old age, sits straight (as straight as he can) as he continues to urge his horse to continue moving forward. Note, too, how the star emblazoned on the knight's chest mirrors the stars in the distance, symbolizing how he ultimately will be one with his goal.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Michael Pollock is in 8th grade. The son of <em>Galatea Resurrects' </em>editor, he is being raised with the idea that poetry is part of everyday life.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-39921672501636080212010-12-05T21:45:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:52:48.107-08:00FIRE EXIT by ROBERT KELLYBARBARA ROETHER Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Fire Exit </em>by Robert Kelly</strong> <br /><em>(Black Widow Press, Boston, MA, 2009)</em><br /><br />It’s difficult to talk about a new book by Robert Kelly without considering the fifty books of poetry that have come before. Of course quantity isn’t always quality, but in Kelly’s case quantity is one of his qualities. His intimacies with language are immersive; he is in poetry as the rest of us are in air. Conversant with all that touches on language Kelly has worked in a multitude of poetic techniques, lexicons, references, dictions, and purposes. This last quality, a sense of almost expository purpose, seems to smolder through the language in <em>Fire Exit </em>and sets it clearly apart from other work.<br /><br /> A book length poem of more than 200 pages, comprised of 132 separate numbered poems, <em>Fire Exit </em>is composed entirely in compact three line stanzas. This three-line structure gives the work its formal coherence as well as its compact incendiary energy. While ranging widely in imagery, the subject that is exposed in <em>Fire Exit </em>is poetry itself; and in particular our contemporary relationship to it in this post-post present. The title urges us to rise from our seats and get outside as quickly as possible to have a look at this. While never less than noble and erudite, you can still feel Kelly waving his arms here saying, over here, look, see this, listen will you? This excerpt is from #35, a poem that makes explicit many of the books implied concerns.<br /><blockquote>poetry is language sitting around<br />gossiping about its family<br />talking drunk or sober always about itself<br /><br />because as the sophophilers explained<br />all that language really<br />understands is language<br /><br />all it can talk about is self<br />maybe itself or maybe another self<br />but never the actual selfless other <br /><br />the thing attended to, the grail out there<br />here where we have come<br />flapping our hands like exhausted eunuchs<br /><br /> wondering what turn of the cloth is left <br />to puzzle our cunning fingers<br />before the naked empress stands alone </blockquote><br />Depending on our own ‘school’ preferences we could give a name to the sophophilers, and although Kelly includes himself among the “exhausted eunuchs” we suspect he’s just being polite. We might hear a prevaricating Penelope in that last triplet killing time at the loom, but the empress here strikes me as the one with no clothes. Her clothes are gone, stripped we imagine as language has been stripped in so much poetic practice of its ‘associations’ but still marching down the street. Is she marching along pretending importance, as the emperor does, when really there’s nothing there? <br /><br />This is a primary issue in <em>Fire Exit</em>, if we approach language with a sense that meaning is an inconvenience, if we stay safely in flarf, or <em>nomina babara</em>, et al, as Kelly writes in #74, is our poetry then “gilded or gelded” and is either a good idea? <br /><blockquote>free language abandons standard function<br />and sneaks into your mind direct<br />without the “inconvenience of meaning”<br /><br />natural noise ill-guided by our codes<br />gilded? gelded? both of these<br /><em>nomina barabara </em>without a hint of child</blockquote><br />Kelly doesn’t so much answer this question as demonstrate. His work here is in opposition to the emptying/dis-contexting (insert whatever label you like) of so much postmodern work; instead he fills words with each possible meaning, and listens for what follows. He embraces or confronts all the shifting references that are indeed held, however momentarily, in a single word or line and lights them up for us to see. He accomplishes this by remaining fiercely attentive to every possibility, semantic and syntactic in each line. The book’s opening verse, #1 is a case in point.<br /><blockquote>When I am inside you I don’t understand<br /> The way you understand yourself<br /> Everything else is a meadow</blockquote><br />We could read a man inside his poem, or his reader, or a man inside a woman, either way he doesn’t understand; (if it is a man & woman that’s no time to bother with understanding) but then we learn what the speaker (the I) doesn’t understand isn’t his own situation at all, but the way readers (you) understand <em>yourself</em>. The switch from I to you creates a spark, so to speak, a dichotomy of knowing and knower which needs to be contrasted with, what a meadow is, a lush clearing. It’s hard on poetry to parse it line by line because of course it’s the resonances created by the reading (saying) of the line in time with the reader’s consciousness that creates the real action of these poems, the play and music. But it’s useful in <em>Fire Exit</em>, to look closely at how Kelly is breaking those lines against each other, flint on flint, because this is where the spark and friction of the work is found. Further along in #1 he writes:<br /><blockquote>irrelevant grammar of flowers<br />no one picked fall from the sky<br />still it’s dark in here, gasses form </blockquote><br /><em>Irrelevant grammar of flowers </em>is a compelling image on its own, but in the next line we find that these flowers, <em>no one picked</em>, are falling <em>from the sky</em>, even though its dark in here. Flowers move from subject to object, with object becoming subject and subject becoming modifier. This subject/object shift is a basic trope of Kelly’s language throughout the book. We is it, it is we. No subjects are without the ability to act, no verbs lack a being.<br /><br />In this world of the actual that exists beyond the <em>Fire Exit </em>sign of the darkened theatre, in this outside world where we are, real things are always happening, and Kelly’s language happens inside of them. People walk around in these poems, storms tear up the beach, wives give advice, and morning comes; as in poem #30. <br /> <blockquote>with a sound like trumpets riffing under the sea<br /> to wash your face<br /> light cleans your ears he thought<br /><br /> remember to forget<br /> this later, the true<br /> nature of nothing is another thing.</blockquote><br />Whether or not you agree that there is no possibility of absence in reality or in language, a pleasure of this collection is that insights come with a man washing his face, or they come with a face. In section #43 (at four pages one of the longest) the poet is remembering his childhood. He reveals here is own sense of being someone who not only uses language in every possible way he can, but whose life has in some sense always been used by language, with the great mystery this implies. Kelly never gives up on this mystery; he too has been the object of his own subject, and he knows it.<br /><blockquote>light is like a map <br />the word it shows<br />a lost river off the Amazon and never come home<br /><br /> to that thick Greek Grammar saved his life<br /> night after night<br /> when the spooks walked out of his head and lurked<br /><br /> soft as silverfish in cellar dust<br /> since grammar seemed the safest art<br /> no monsters vex a conjugating scholar<br /><br />and Mahler hums on the record changer…</blockquote><br /> Here the terse tone has softened, but only to show some new aspects of association. Maps we think should show worlds, but this map shows a rhyming ‘word’ instead, the world is word here. We start down that lost river into word, and might never come home again, but Kelly changes his mind and drags us with a “to”, to the Greek Grammar book that saved the child with the discipline of language and its “conjugations.” We might even read much of <em>Fire Exit </em>as the conjugation of images; here the Amazon River, a Greek Grammar, and cellar steps are somehow cases of the same image. In the final lines <em>scholar </em>and <em>Mahler </em>remind us again that association is always a kind of rhyme, aural or psychic. One is also reminded of Williams, “no ideas but in things,” because each idea in Kelly’s work seems to find its meaning through its action in the line, an action that it has been called to by the poet, who found the word somewhere and made it do something it was not doing before. Called it into motion, animated it in order to show us what it might do, or rather what we might do with it. For Kelly refuses to accept the wisdom that we approach poetry as citizens, Marxists, feminists, capitalists, or anything other than humans trying constantly to talk to one another. It’s hard to say more than #90.<br /><blockquote>one word itself is a whole religion<br />no I answered, here there is no is,<br />we have sailed at last beyond the proposition<br /><br />touch me it said and someone did<br />here all the stories end<br />after seven hundred years of snowy searching<br /><br />bruised by implication <br />the book falls silent<br />life itself is an encryption-<br /><br />the history of literature tries to conceal<br />how each age hides this secret<br />writing is always to someone. </blockquote><br />It’s hard to say whether he would be read more if he wrote less; or whether a work with the atomic power of <em>Fire Exit</em>, would find its target if it was slightly thinner, but it doesn’t really matter. If you’ve never read a work by Robert Kelly before, read this one. Kelly comes like a benevolent conquistador to our myopic literary daze and points with his mighty pen, to the door that has been there all along. <br /><br />*****<br /><br />Barbarba Roether is a writer and teacher living in San Francisco. She has a tall teenage son and a teaching job at a dangerously experimental school on the Peninsula. Former tutor to an Arab Princess and current surfing novice, she worked for many years in Bay Area book publishing. Her poetry, fiction and journalism have appeared in various magazines. She is a partner in the online collective Fellow Travelers, author of poetry chapbook <em>The Middle Atlas</em>, and is at work on a novel about Ohio.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-38100128236325241092010-12-05T21:40:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:48:28.007-08:00SITUATIONS by LAURA CARTERALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Situations </em>by Laura Carter</strong><br />(<a href="http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com/">Available for download </a>at Ungovernable Press, 2008)<br /><br />This chapbook-length work by Laura Carter brings up issues of narrative that we of the Post-Ante world seem required to deal with. The issues remain fresh today though they have existed for a century or more. I may become sidetracked in my lucubrations here but, hey Laura, I haven’t forgotten you!<br /><br />Narrative is story, <em>histoire</em>, even, as Carter has it. The modernists helped us to understand that narrative need not be a straight line chrono-logic, but can be chopped and ciphered by other meters. The story, then, can be evoked in different time frames and different viewpoints, and can be done so with an abundance of simultaneity and layers. Which brings us to <em>Situations</em>.<br /><br /><em>Situations </em>plays in the field of narrative. This does not mean it is not poetry. Narrative is a veritable tax on poetry, they are that closely twined. Narrative shows in the voice, in the deliberations of first and second person. <em>Situations </em>wins as poetry, not fiction, because the subject, finally, is poetry. Poetry is the subject of poetry, period. I’m not kidding, go check the books. Fiction’s impasse stands where tailored intentions force implications. Poetry doesn’t force, it just is.<br /><br /><em>Situations </em>presents a very present ‘I’, which can be confused with the author if you like. That does not matter because, as I said, the subject of poetry is poetry. The narrator is implied, as is, less firmly, an interlocutor. A give and take in poetry occurs between these two. At times <em>Situations </em>sounds too thoughtfully <em>Wasteland</em>ish, but imperative delights abound.<br /><br />Orthography tells us that Carter had issues with the narrative outbreak. She uses quotation marks, italics, dashes, line breaks, and such like to distinguish voices and time shifts. I think the effort proves too dedicated, asserting a punctuational tidiness to account for every nuance. That shows a lack of trust in the words themselves, begging your pardon. Use of the exclamatory <em>O</em> strikes me the same way.<br /><br />I do not want to sound negative when so much here is appealing. Nuggets like the following pop from the flow of verses:<br /><blockquote> Meaning as an EVERYTHING:<br /> the poor women are still buying fish<br /> & photography moves in inches <br />(“Silver Ocean”)</blockquote><br />Or this:<br /><blockquote>Lamented culture of unease: <em>pity<br />the anchor its lack of luster, </em><br />(“Taxi”)</blockquote><br />Or this Blakean reply:<br /><blockquote> <em>the tiger is a machine burning bright<br />with ribbons tied to the ordinary! </em><br />(“Reversal Leads Further”)</blockquote><br />Carter asserts a personal locus that is as interesting as the reader wants it to be. I’m equivocal because I do not want to feel constrained to care about <em>the author</em>. Think of the two goalposts of the so called New York School of Poetry, Ashbery and O’Hara, and their use of first person.<br /><br />When O’Hara uses first person, we hear an identity, one that just might have run track for Mineola Prep. When Ashbery uses first person, no one seems to be home. No <em>one</em>, that is. That placid, ordinary voice refuses to push. I sense with Carter an unsureness whether to allow the vigourous O’Hara side to stand forth or the circumstantial Ashbery side.<br /><br />Perhaps one should expect such lack of confederacy from chapbooks. Chapbooks tend to be short collectibles that hold the latest handful. I see them being less organic creations, but maybe my attitude is showing. <em>Situations </em>performs a snapshot brief of an author and an other. I feel an intention for completion but the tactic of the chapbook leans more toward appetency. Which, really, is an interesting battle to witness.<br /><br />Carter is very smart and intricate. Her writing shows causal surprises of great pleasure. The author in context needs to be addressed, however. Is she telling us her story, or Poetry’s?<br /><br />She is a poet, for sure. <em>Situations </em>abounds in technical experiment. Orthography, as I mentioned, is utilized strongly, too strongly, maybe. Her lines are well-crafted, I am happy to say. Modern metrics are fuzzy conceptions. We all play it by ear, as per Olson. Carter’ limns with a poet’s ear—please take that image and run with it!—not the prosy misadventures so commonly met.<br /><br />The poem “The New Live Image Intervention” frolics at a good pace with what we’ll acknowledge as Williams’ triadic foot. I hope Carter uses this technique often because the momentum is fine. Furthermore, those short lines fit the sort of surprise element that is essential in her writing. Partial phrases leap out vigourously from the context like poems within poems. I like that effect a lot.<br /><br />I think I will end this review without preparing a final assessment. I laid some cards on the table, and you can play them as you see fit. Poetry needs readers, not daunting schools of thought. This review provides one path for exploration. Where you go, Reader, is up to you.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Allen Bramhall was born by the banks of the Concord River in 1952 and has lived in Massachusetts ever since. He was educated at Franconia College and Lesley University, and in non-academic places as well. / <em>Simple Theory </em>/ (Potes & Poets Press) was his first book. He maintains a blog called <em>Tributary </em>(http://tribute-airy.blogspot.com/), and a life with Beth and Erin. He is also the author of <a href="http://meritagepress.com/dayspoem.htm"><em>DAYS POEM, Vol. I and II </em></a>(Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-70231866807831227022010-12-05T21:30:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:40:29.896-08:001000 SONNETS by TIM ATKINSEILEEN TABIOS Engages<br /><br /><strong><em>1000 SONNETS </em>by Tim Atkins</strong><br /><em>(if p then q, Manchester, U.K., 2010)</em><br /><br /><blockquote>I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one <br />way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out<br />would be another, and truer, way.<br /><br />clean washed sea<br /><br /> The flowers were<br /><br />These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will,<br />something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the<br />truth, perhaps, but—yourself. It is you who made this, <br />therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on<br /><br /> to divide all<br /><strong>—<em>John Ashbery/The New Spirit</em></strong> </blockquote><br />The book's epigraph by John Ashbery, and epigraphing this review, is so lovely, and quite fittingly indicates the underlying concept to Tim Atkins’ <em>1000 SONNETS</em>. The poems are sonnets viz the number of lines, but many of the “lines” are taken up by marks like slashes, a period or a series of periods or asterisks. Such marks stand in for, to paraphrase Ashbery, what’s been left out. The challenge then, at least to this reader who was quite taken by the <em>The New Spirit's </em>excerpt, is that the poems—with all of its gaps—be as moving as Ashbery’s epigraph.<br /><br />To cut to the chase, these poems are wonderful. <br /><br />It’s been a pleasure to take Atkins’ <em>1000 SONNETS </em>at face value. There's a context for the creation of these poems, e.g. how the title alludes to “Kenneth Koch’s hilarious sequence of short plays/skits <em>1000 Avant Garde Plays</em>” (to quote the book’s press release). But I ignore all that. I’m looking at what’s presented by the book, including the gorgeous epigraph from Ashbery that touches on the poems' technique. But if these poems are presented partly to present absences, I take that at face value without trying to refer to what might have been erased text. Actually, I don’t think there are any erased texts—the erasure is just implied because of the sonnet’s 14-line form. For example, this “Sonnet 62” that evokes (for me) the work of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen for seeming random and yet logical unto itself:<br /><blockquote><strong>SONNET 62</strong><br /><br />………………….<br />Took<br />………………….<br />………, truly, stroke<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />2/3223/3223/3223/2/3223//<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />Section<br />/<br />breaks//Borough</blockquote><br />But if there are no erased texts, how can there be an absence without there first having been something that later, uh, became absent? One answer could be that the absence was that of the reader, for it is the reader who could make the poem “whole” by judging it as, uh, “logical unto itself”…?<br /><br />And, indeed, inexplicable though it may be, what seems to be a writing of gaps is deceptive in that: there are no gaps. If something is created as a gap, that gap is the content…? So, say, a poem like “Sonnet 42” might look, with all those dotted lines, as if something is missing. But this reader, anyway, was moved to say nothing is missing. Why? Because, actually for this example, this poem sings! Be receptive to it--even as I recall, and this may heighten your receptivity, Jose Garcia Villa once saying one can "ignore" the commas in his "comma poems," whereby a comma followed each word, to respond mostly to the words:<br /><blockquote><strong>SONNET 42</strong><br /><br />In the beginning<br />…………………………………..<br />among genuine monsters<br />………………….<br />………………….<br />entry in which<br />……………………….<br />brachiopods on mopeds<br />sine b = constant tide<br />……………………………..<br />……………………………..<br />hands hot & moist<br />east of evesham<br />, ride</blockquote><br />Even the title may hint at incompletenesses, at absence. It says <em>1000 SONNETS</em> and yet there are only 125 sonnets in the book. So there’s something missing, yah? Well, not necessarily. I speak as one who once wrote a book entitled <a href="http://secretpunctuations.blogspot.com/"><strong><em>THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. 1 </em></strong></a>with no intention of ever penning more volumes. I simply wanted the title to convey the sense of the project’s continuity beyond the physical constraint of the book (or page). I think this point of view might be applicable to <em>1000 SONNETS</em>, if only because the poems are created to present seeming absences or gaps when, in actuality, they may just be allowing for a space for the reader’s engagement.<br /><br />On the other hand, there are 125 sonnets (if I counted correctly) and yet the last sonnet is a “Sonnet 124.” I think Atkins didn’t do this just to trip out a reviewer who might be doing a cursory read of his book. I actually think the inclusion of “extra” content (extra based on the numbering of sonnet titles) is a gesture for presenting more than what seems on surface to be presented.<br /><br />Anyway, that’s enough blithering about it—I don’t want to over-digress from my main point: in simply taking the poems at face value, I received much pleasure. For instance, I thought “Sonnet 121” is HILARIOUS! Here it is in its entirety<br /><blockquote><strong>SONNET 121</strong><br /><br />Barcelonas<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />dense cones<br />.<br />.<br />.<br />.</blockquote><br />Again, it’s difficult to articulate why one would consider these poems effective, e.g. why I think “Sonnet 121” is funny without any reasoning becoming about the reading of the poem vs. the poem. That’s the risk of poems reliant on gaps—who else fills in the gaps in a poem but the reader(s)? It’s not a critic’s explications! So if I found “Sonnet 121” hilarious, it’s about Moi—how, once, in Barcelona, I rounded an alley and stumbled across a parade of clowns in cone hats, then woke up from the dream that must have been….oh never mind.<br /><br />Okay, one more. And I think it’s significant that I want to keep blathering about this book—I find it, oddly, cheerful. Or is that, oddly cheerful? Anyway, I am cheered by engaging with it. So, one more: I found “Sonnet 2” playful—<br /><blockquote><strong>SONNET 2</strong><br /><br />hark<br />fog<br />I<br />don’t<br />see<br />..<br />..<br />..<br />..<br />..<br />..<br />..<br />..<br />..</blockquote><br />specifically, note how the two dots are not ellipses ( what absence?) and if you keep reading down the line, it’s possible that the poem becomes vispo on you and those two dots become… eyes. The gaze staring back! <br /><br />This particular poem also reveals (belatedly to me as this was the second poem in the book and yet I took so long to comprehend) how these marks may not be stand-ins for something else; these marks may be as legitimate as words in fleshing out a sonnet line.<br /><br />Anyway, <em>1000 SONNETS </em>filled me with delight. I don’t need to explain it—I just want to feel its joy which is offered so abundantly. Thank you, Tim Atkins!<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em>, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book <a href="http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios4.htm"><strong><em>THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) </em></strong></a> is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R3NDO9FGJAV385/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm"><strong>HERE</strong></a>, William Allegrezza over at <em>p-ramblings </em><a href="http://allegrezza.blogspot.com/2010/05/daily-glance-eileen-tabios-thorn-rosary_28.html"><strong>HERE</strong></a> and by Leny M. Strobel at <em>Moria Poetry </em><a href="http://moriapoetry.com/strobel.html"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. Mr. Harp also reviews her <a href="http://notabeneeiswein.blogspot.com"><strong><em>NOTA BENE EISWEIN </em></strong></a>over <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R2LDQCY1BOFYCM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher <a href="http://marshhawkpress.org"><strong>Marsh Hawk Press </strong></a>is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the <a href="http://meritagepress.blogspot.com/2010/02/haynaku-for-haiti.html"><strong>Hay(na)ku for Haiti </strong></a>fundraiser; as <em>THE THORN ROSARY </em>is priced retail at $19.95, this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-76090623781498049952010-12-05T21:25:00.000-08:002010-12-10T20:33:25.034-08:00ESCHATON by MICHAEL HELLERERIC HOFFMAN Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Eschaton </em>by Michael Heller</strong><br /><em>(Talisman House, Jersey City, N.J., 2009)</em><br /><br /><br /><strong>Midrashic Explorer</strong><br /><blockquote>“I think the world is very big, and a piece of canvas is very small.” – George Oppen</blockquote><br />Michael Heller’s newest collection, <em>Eschaton</em>, is, for the uninitiated, an excellent introduction to the work of this singular poet. For those already familiar with Heller’s poetry, a body of work spanning six collections, <em>Eschaton </em>is a culmination of decades of increased sophistication, maturation and sublimity in poetic form. Heller is that rarest of poets: a unique visionary whose work stands among the finest lyric poetry being written today.<br /><br /> I should begin by saying that Heller is an often outspoken critic of certain kinds of new formalisms in recent experimental writing. His work derives from his deep involvement with “Objectivist” poetics, especially as exemplified in the work of Oppen whom he has written about extensively. This is a tradition warily <em>opposed</em>, he argues in one of his many penetrating essays, to those forms of poem making that are primarily “concerned with certain procedures and creating certain forms before actually writing.” The Objectivists’ work derived in part from Pound’s argument with the formalism of his day, and so, too, does Heller argue with the academicism that engulfed poetry in the 1970s and which now seems finally entrenched both on and off campus. Heller’s critical work, like Pound’s, functions for the reader as way of approaching his poetry (though an appreciation and understanding of the poems in no way requires a familiarity with his criticism). Both the essays and poems are largely attempts to revitalize poetic language in a medium crowded out by theory, polemics and jargon, to establish what he calls, in his interview with Thomas Gardiner in <em>Contemporary Literature</em>, “counter-continuities” that “bring a meaning to a poem that could directly war with other meanings, not [seek for] procedures that out-foxed meanings.” Heller’s desire, as he puts it in the interview, is to imagine a poetics that would “bring a whole world to kind of lean or press against poetic language,” and in so doing open it up to what he calls “the vast socio-political, philosophical dimensions of its own language and terminology.” <br /><br />Heller’s poetry is rife with temporal shifts, quizzical ponderings, jarring transitions and philosophical struggle, animated by Heller’s incisive wit and the rhythm of his often spare language. The poems’ temporal awareness is often juxtaposed with the burden of history. Their visual equivalent might be described as a tapestry or a mural. For what is most apparent in all of Heller’s work, these most recent poems especially, is a sense of the <em>historicalness </em>of being--of being in <em>this </em>place, in <em>this </em>time. <br /><br />In more recent work, his poems have been concerned specifically with the historical burden of Jewishness. Heller has come into his own as a Jewish poet. Barely a noticeable concern in his earliest work, it has gradually become almost a major obsession. In fact, one could say that one of the central themes of <em>Eschaton </em>is that of Jewish identity, specifically, the Jew as post-Diaspora preserver of culture, of the Jew of the <em>Midrash</em>, as interpreter/explicator. <br /><br />The collection’s opening poem, “Looking at Some Petroglyphs in a Dry Arroyo Near a Friend’s House,” questions the concept of language reduced to some idea of its own materiality, that is, as anything more than “just stuff and the proof of stuff.” The petroglyphs, as human record and of a desire to communicate, are “just there, exposing all this / and we are deluded for thinking else wise.” And it is only love of the world, of others that “is at the end of it.” “On a Phrase of Milosz’s,” (the phrase being “He is not disinherited, / for he has not found a home”), Heller remarks how “History has mucked up” language’s ability to “resolve” experience: “the words / on the way to language dangling possibility,” he writes. (I note the quite intentional reference to Heidegger’s book <em>On the Way To Language</em>, a study of the metaphysical properties of language). Words are at best potentialities; they can only “dangle possibility.” We cannot resolve it, Heller contends, because “Being is / incomplete; only the angels know how to fly homeward.” We cannot be disinherited, Heller implies, because we never had a home to begin with. Instead, we have always been stranded among the ruins of a discourse that cannot possibly bridge the gap between word and world. Yet what the words do afford us, Heller maintains, is a “desperate situation . . . clarified.” “The worst thing is to feel only irony can save,” Heller concludes, and one cannot help but feel the statement is directed at much of modern discourse, poetry included. “The worst thing,” Heller warns, “is to feel only irony.”<br /><br />If words are inadequate, they still deserve our respect, Heller argues, just as the world is made inadequate to language for refusing to fit its neat, abstract concepts. In “About the Capitol,” Heller writes of “the city” that “drains language into rubble, into erotics / and wrath.” Other poems in this collection contrast the problem of world and word with Jewish identity, specifically the struggle of a modern urban Jew (i.e. Heller) reconciling his historical vantage with that of the <em>Torah</em>. One of the first of a series of poems dealing explicitly with Jewish identity and the problem of language is “The Heresy” which refers to the passage in <em>Exodus </em>20.25 that states “And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it,” a passage that relates to the Old Testament God’s ambivalence toward art and graven images The poem’s narrator has, “lost that god,” lost “divinities” and now must take “silence into time, marking their absence/in our late vocabularies in their conspirings,/these new mythologies as they fell from on high.” “Diasporic Conundrums” takes its inspiration from a passage from Ruth: “Call me not Naomi, call me Mara.” The poem is a meditation on the power of a name (“he who was given a name / has lost the right to silence”) and the responsibility of that name. A name, then, is another word. “Who will raise up / a name like Ruth, / put a name, / like a child, onto the air?” To say one’s name is to inscribe it onto the air. This saying / naming / writing interplay (for to name is to write and to write is to name) reaches, at poem’s end, a chilling conclusion: “The dead are dead. / This is certain. / This is what was written, / Why it was written. / This need not be said.” <br /><br />In his essay, “Diasporic Poetics,” included in his excellent, career-spanning collection <em>Uncertain Poetries</em>, Heller, trying to give some account of the poems above, observes: “a number of things were on my mind, all of which in one way or another entail diasporas: the story of Ruth in the Bible, that very postmodern idea that the world is displaced from the object it refers to, that the word <em>is </em>exilic, and . . . that whatever my religious inclinations, the world has labeled me a Jew.” The epigraph from <em>Ruth</em>, Heller tells us, “was the seed-phrase of the poem.” This phrase, he explains, “is here terrifying, heart-wrenchingly, to the perceiving function of the name.” Naming, as Heller points out, is a “primordial form of perception.” Naomi’s demand for another name (Ruth, meaning “bitterness”) enacts a “transformation of physicality into language.” Heller’s poem, he argues, “seeks to address the conundrums of inherited names as fixities and the relation of these fixities to the self.” Words, Heller explains, “have a two-fold power, first to draw one’s attention . . . and second, to be a naming - in this latter case, the ghostly powers of words resided, incarnating themselves in one until they were no longer capable of being recognized as mere objects of attention. Via the poem, words were physically incantatory, orders of possession, dilations of consciousness and its apprehensions.” The poet, Heller maintains, “is caught between a philosophical sense of his or her craft and a religious sense of the mysteries of the world.” Thus, in “Bandelette de Torah,” Heller sees Jewish identity as necessarily <em>written</em>. He refers to <em>davar</em>, a Hebrew word for both “word” and “thing,” which Heller finds symbolic of a peculiarly Jewish desire to conjure the physical thing through the act of naming: “The gold <em>Yod</em>, fist-shaped / with extended finger, marks where the letter / is made free, <em>davar </em>twining <em>aleph </em>into its thing.” The <em>Yod</em>, Heller tells us in his helpful but not ostentatious notes, is an instrument used by a Rabbi to point to words read from the <em>Torah</em>, while <em>aleph </em>is “the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, believed by the Kabbalists to be the primary instance of language, revelatory of all words and hence all of creation.” <br /><br />There is in Heller’s work a constant interrogation of language and the poetic process. In the “Chronicle Poet” writing becomes a “mere scratching . . . a shameful noise.” The poem seems to indicate the inability of the poet to chronicle his or her times. While the desire to chronicle is not in and of itself ironic (especially given Heller’s ambivalence about irony, his desire to be above all sincere, particularly in the poem), if the age in which one lives is in and of itself ironic, the poet suggests, how could not the poem be part of the irony?<br /><br /> While the themes of Jewishness and language and the relationship between the two are among the book’s primary concerns, Heller includes some fine lyric poems. “East Hampton Meditations” and “Creeks in Berkeley” stand out – demonstrating that Heller is not only one of our finest poets of the intellect, but also one of our finest poets of eye and ear:<br /><blockquote>Wasn’t this how the past<br />was to come back,<br />haunting in its dense compactions?<br /><br />Life as pointillist,<br />a comic wink of love missed,<br />of words unsaid,<br /><br />and only the writing <br />had been this fog<br />surrounding” <br /><br /><em>(“East Hampton Meditations”)</em><br /><br /><br />----<br /><br />You led yourself or were you led by her who once<br />lived on Cragmont and whose voice has its own sweet<br />rill running uphill with a freedom teasing you<br />from any turn or enjambment until sound disappears<br />into the air, into a wordless breathing of light<br />the late sun strikes from the bridges and windows. <br /><br /><em>(“Creeks in Berkeley”)</em> </blockquote><br /> But it is the final two sections of the book where the truly magisterial and mysterious alchemy of sight, sound and intellection occurs: having set forth his arguments and themes in the first two sections of the book, Heller accomplishes the truly rare feat of producing poems of stunningly original lyrical and imagistic exactitude, all the while possessed of an intense intellectual rigor. “Stanzas Without Ozymandias,” possibly the finest poem in the book, is inspired in part by the Shelleyan image of the broken statue of Ozymandias in the Egyptian desert and the desertscapes of southern Colorado where Heller spends his summers. Here, Heller utilizes the image of sand as representative of text: "grain fixed to speech," "the geometer / who mourned the mirror's lack" . . . "only the colorless semblances of their desires." The word is a pale shadow of an already muted recollection of experience. Of this poem, Heller remarks: “The unwarrantable sermons are what that kind of natural world tells us--remembering that what we derive from that world is already our projection on to it.” The poem is ambiguous without losing any of its clarity. It rewards repeated readings. <br /><br /> So, too, does my other favorite poem from this collection, “Letter & Dream of Walter Benjamin.” Benjamin, as most readers of Heller’s work know, is as much an influence on Heller as is Oppen. (In fact, Heller knew of Benjamin’s work prior to knowing Oppen’s). This poem derives from and distils a much longer work, Heller’s libretto for the opera <em>Benjamin</em>, itself derived from Benjamin’s letters, all of it reworked by Heller into the poem's language. The italicized dream portion of the poem (“<em>He climbed a labyrinth, / a labyrinth of stairs, / past other stairways / descending</em>) is almost verbatim from one of Benjamin’s recording of this dream. (In the libretto, it is the very last thing said/sung.) The poem appears to be an extended meditation on the Fall which is also a fall of language, the separation of language from object, as in "unknowable names" that should have been knowable, that might have kept us in an Eden of logos. Yet by that weird alchemy of the lyric, Benjamin’s proclamations and confessions become Heller’s. Benjamin’s lamentations concerning politics and politicians, though they derive from circumstances quite dissimilar from our own, take on an eerie familiarity to our difficult times: <br /><blockquote>They too have created infinities, blind alleys, endless monuments to<br />iniquities, a multitude of pains for others to bear.<br /><br />They will outlive their brief immortality and leave a grubby ration of<br />murderous hopes <br /><br /><em>(“Letter & Dream of Walter Benjamin”).</em> </blockquote><br />The same could be said for our last administration, or to the terrorists that startled and excused them into waging two major wars. <br /><br /> In the last poem of the collection, the stark, grief-stricken prose-poem “Mourning Field, Note Card,” Heller (who, when he’s not in Colorado makes his home in New York City) addresses the tragedy of those events on that September day in 2001, a poem which defies clichés or unearned sentimentality. It was rightfully included in the major anthology <em>September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond </em>and to this day stands out as a heartbreaking meditation on that day’s implications, not just for the city or the nation, but for humanity itself. For we are all, regardless of our separate identities, contained in this world and subject to history’s machinations, even in the smallest, most imperceptible ways. Walking past the iron railings bordering the walkways plastered with photos of lost family members, Heller observes:<br /><blockquote>...the faces of lost ones gazed out of photos. Grim details surrounded these: the company worked for, a floor in one of the World Trade Center towers, and saddest of all, identifying body marks, scars and moles. With words, the dead were being washed as in a funeral home, swathed in language, touched in secret places by words that only lovers or family members usually know. The disaster had traduced all intimacy. Similar photos and details papered the city. They covered phone booths and kiosks and were taped to the plate glass windows of storefronts and banks.<br /><br /> Like many faces on the notices, most of those in the park were young. They stood and milled around as young people do. And they spoke, and their writings on the long rolls of paper spoke, with that intensity only the young seem able to summon at such times as these. A few guitars were being strummed, playing old folk plaints of solidarity, weariness and misery. Overheard, the thick canopy of leaves, black against the night, absorbed these sounds, compounded and cupped them in the sickly-sweet smell of incense and burning wax. The crowds had driven off the pigeons, but in Union Square, the notices of the dead flapping in the breeze formed a new immense flock of anguish and grief roosting together.</blockquote><br /><br />Heller considers it his obligation as poet is to register these small, nearly imperceptible encounters. He does so with exceptional acuity. His poetry is rare, striking and subtle. <em>Eschaton </em>registers the increasing refinement of this contemporary master.<br /><br />*****<br /><br /><a href="http://erichoffmanpoet.blogspot.com/">Eric Hoffman </a>is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which was <em>The Life of An Unfortunate Artist </em>(Rag and Bone Books, 2009). Last year, his George Oppen festschrift <em>All This Strangeness </em>was published in <em>Big Bridge</em>. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and son.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-67455518886447893242010-12-05T21:20:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:37:27.969-08:00100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE by JULIE CARRJON CURLEY Reviews <br /><br /><strong><em>100 Notes on Violence </em>by Julie Carr</strong><br /><em>(Ahsata Press, Boise, Idaho, 2010)</em><br /><br />The dark meditations of <em>100 Notes on Violence </em>depend on instantiations and acculturation of recollected and performative violence, offering a vision of the abyss, which is to say, us in our contemporary world. This numbered sequence of poetic notes offers visceral, philosophical portraits of small town murder, international terrorism, eros and thanatos, physical force and its reverberations, bleeding and/or murdered bodies, the nature and denaturing of suffering, and the historical wounds running concentrically through the discourse and memory of humankind’s inhumanity to itself. Littered with quotations by Whitman, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Blanchot, and Kathy Acker, among many others, the book also freely encapsulates news reports, statistics, lists, scrawls, narratives, ditties, and feverish fragments. The poems themselves become seismic graphs of pain and their formal varieties are as multiple as the acts of violence to which they respond or relate.<br /><br />Carr’s inquiry into the origins, nature, reproduction, and extenuation of violence and its pathology recalls British playwright’s Sarah Kane’s dramatic investigation into the cruelty through which most acts of violence take root. Neither artist goes for the gratuitous gesture or shrill statement; their concerns with expressing, exposing, the various displays and determinants of violent actions serve as ethical procedurals rather than desensitizing or aestheticizing fripperies. As such, Carr’s poetics-as-forensics becomes purveyor of pattern recognition, delivering a potent, always off-putting because so disturbing, rumination on the nature of modernity, all too casual in its cruelty and too saturated with the stain of such sacrilege to see the redness in it. <br /><br />In her “Author’s Statement,” Carr remarks: “This is, for me, not a book about other people’s violence. Rather, it is an investigation into the violent experiences and tendencies we all harbor.” This modest and rather generalized statement does paltry justice to the power of her probing. Because so connected and reflective to the world which she allows to indict itself through illuminating its terrible tendencies, Carr’s poems are troublingly phenomenological. In his important essay, “Language, Suffering, and Silence,” poet Geoffrey Hill makes the argument that such a practice can take on theological shadowings:<br /><blockquote>I would seriously propose a theology of language…This would <br />comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming <br />(a) that the shock of semantic recognition must also be a shock<br />of ethical recognition; and that this is the action of grace in one<br />of its minor, but far from trivial types; (b) that the art and literature<br />of the late twentieth century require a memorializing, a memorizing<br />of the dead… <small>(1)</small> </blockquote><br />Recuperation, then, of some modicum of grace as the inverse of this grisly inquiry might then be a resourceful way of fashioning some end-goal for Carr’s project here. This richly rendered, sadly anthropological universe built out of a poly-verse of traumatic suffering and unstinting barbarity must become 100 notes for their remembrance and mitigation. The array of anecdotes and scenarios provides a dual function: they become both the material and metaphor of violence. The layering effect caused by their production and representation both emphasize the engulfment of violent propensity and, as a putative index, demonstrate that its commission to textuality can render it an encapsulated history through which the series of memorializing, memorizing the dead, the living, and the violently compromised, leads out of the book and into a less corrupted possibility. <br /><br />In Note 59, Carr writes:<br /> <blockquote>The book about violence must be a book of quotations.<br /> For everyone speaks about violence.<br /> Is a book of memories, for everyone’s life is riddled.</blockquote><br />Here is an Edmond Jabes of the slaughterhouse, one whose spatial reality surrounds us and duplicates itself ferociously. To think of these poems or notes or quotations as distillations of catharsis and containment would be to belittle the shock of semantic and ethical recognition to which Hill gestures and that this work expresses. However, the poems in <em>100 Notes on Violence </em>exude in their compositional and de-composing characterizations a fealty to confronting contemporary human reality and allowing it to articulate its vehement drive toward destruction. <br /><br />We are implicated and damaged, and we are not conscious of the snares in which we are caught “…for everyone’s life is riddled.” These <em>Notes </em>do result in a stunning and remarkable “book of memories,” reminding us that an alternative existence can be imagined. As Fanny Howe puts it, substituting war for violence: “After all, the point of art—like war—is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.”<small>(2)</small><br /><br />_____________<br /><small>1. In <em>Collected Critical Writings</em>. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 405.<br /><br />2. Fanny Howe. <em>The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Art and Life </em>(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003) p. 23.</small><br /><br />*****<br /><br />Jon Curley's first collection, <em>New Shadows</em>, was released last year by Dos Madres Press. His critical study, <em>Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland, </em>will be published next year. He lives in New Jersey, where he teaches in the Humanities Department of New Jersey Insitute of Technology.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-85725175699024037972010-12-05T21:15:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:35:29.278-08:00NETS by JEN BERVIN and THE MS OF M Y KIN by JANET HOLMESGENEVIEVE KAPLAN Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Nets </em>by Jen Bervin</strong><br /><em>(Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, 2005)</em><br /><br />and<br /><br /><strong><em>THE MS OF M Y KIN</em> by Janet Holmes</strong><br /><em>(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2009)</em><br /><br />Even at first glance, <em>Nets </em>is a very appealing little book. Its small (5x6 ½”) size and unassuming (paper-bag-brown, simply letterpressed, blurb-less, unlaminated) cover are inviting, and even the interior pages are visually pleasing. Poems are numbered, not titled, and printed on one side of the paper only—there is very little clutter. Certainly the whole package, meticulously presented by Ugly Duckling Presse, makes it clear that Nets is not an average book of poetry but something more like a literary-product-verging-on-becoming-an-art-object.<br /><br />The contents of <em>Nets </em>are, in author Jen Bervin’s own words, the result of “Shakespeare’s sonnets [being stripped] bare to the ‘nets’ to make the space of the poem open, porous, possible” (Working Note). In Bervin’s book, each poem is carved from a corresponding Shakespearian sonnet; Shakespeare’s poems appear in gray ink, while Bervin’s modified versions overlay them in black. (Some poems from <em>Nets </em>are cleverly presented here: <a href="http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/bervin.htm">http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/bervin.htm</a>.) The choice of presentation clearly invites a comparison between the poems—Bervin’s and Shakespeare’s—that is emphasized too, in the selection of the words themselves. Bervin writes, “I //////// use /// the whole, and yet I am not” out of Sonnet 134, and in Sonnet 135 she highlights every instance (there are thirteen) of the word “will” in the poem, calling out Shakespeare’s name as if he is some longed-after comrade or incantatory muse. (Or, if we read straight through the selected text, disregarding the unit of page or line, we find a sentence of clear acknowledgement: “I use the whole, and yet I am not Will” (135-135)). As the title <em>Nets </em>(itself taken from Shakespeare’s title: THE SON<strong>NETS</strong> OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, as reproduced on the title page) suggests, Bervin’s act of writing is more akin to fishing words from the sea of the original sonnet than actually composing a poem. Bervin’s speaker desires that Shakespeare “Bring me within / your wake” (117) and her resulting works are always “anchored” (137) by his writing.<br /><br />While the individual poems of <em>Nets </em>tend to be rather fragmented (I’m particularly charmed by the cryptic #49: “mine own desert, / this hand against myself.”), they are joined by their conceit as well as by Bervin’s deftness at the art of selection. Like Shakespeare’s sonnets, Bervin’s poems too explore love in its many forms, including the admiration for a “master” (20) and the emotional fulfillment to be had by working from within his text: “adding nothing” Bervin “prick’d [words] out for pleasure” (20). Certainly many of these poems foreground words typically associated with beauty or love: “tender” (128, 141, 145), “roses” (130), “heart” (93), “lips” (128,142), “pleasure” (20, 126), “desire” (45) to describe both the compositional process and human relationships. Everything about this intriguing book underscores a connection, both imagined and real, between Bervin and Shakespeare; because of the care taken in composition and presentation of this text, the resulting project is both an affectionate homage to the source poems and an attractive object we might keep on our nightstands.<br /><br />Janet Holmes’s <em>THE MS OF M Y KIN </em>follows a similar mode, as she forms the poems in her book out of “Emily Dickinson’s poems of 1861 and 1862, the first years of the United States Civil War” (Note on the Text). Unlike Bervin, though, whose creative project appears to be the result of a literary experiment in pleasure-seeking, Holmes’s work has an outside agenda: using Dickinson’s language to formulate a commentary and response to the events of and after 9/11. The devastated political landscape Holmes perceives in contemporary America and then works to examine in her book is reflected by the physical erasure of Dickinson’s poems (Holmes doesn’t include the original poems in grayscale, as Bervin does, but she represents Dickinson’s omitted words by leaving equivalent blank spaces instead. Useful examples can be seen here: <a href="http://www.shearsman.com/archive/samples/2009/JHsampler.pdf">http://www.shearsman.com/archive/samples/2009/JHsampler.pdf </a>and here: <a href="http://www.coconutpoetry.org/holmes1.htm">http://www.coconutpoetry.org/holmes1.htm</a>), as well as the tone created by the words selected. However, little of Dickinson’s sense of questioning and wonder shows through in Holmes’s text. Instead, readers receive a bleak vision where “‘Hope’” is no longer “the thing with feathers” that can comfort us “in the chillest land” (Dickinson #314); in Holmes’s world “‘Hope’ is the // tune without the /// Bird” and “the chillest / strangest /////// sunshine” (61). <br /><br />Pushing Dickinson’s poems to fit in a contemporary context, Holmes chooses words and phrases that emphasize the wars in the Middle East and criticize U.S. foreign policy, often glossing over the original intent or context of the poems. She writes, “It matters // that the oil / is gone” (24), “Men / of // Faith slip— and / see / Evidence— ////////// in lies—” (98) and makes note of “the surge” (7), “Decades of Arrogance” (31) and states, criticizing President George W. Bush’s election win in 2000, “You // <em>cheated </em>/ grinning” (12) and “Mine— the Election! / Mine / Mine” (120). Holmes’s book communicates an overall disapproval of our current political state forcing Dickinson’s widely varied subject matter into the narrower realm of protest. <br /><br />While the title, <em><strong>THE </strong>POE<strong>MS OF </strong>E<strong>M</strong>IL<strong>Y</strong> DIC<strong>KIN</strong>SON </em>implies, through the selection of the word “kin,” some mutuality between the poets, a sense of emulation or admiration is not particularly detectible. Instead, something of a scavenging quality appears in the text. The way Holmes chooses to combine multiple Dickinson poems in order to create a single new poem, emphasizes white space, and draws poems across multiple pages makes the work less connected to the original text. Holmes’s numeric titles are needlessly complex and even at times misleading; she explains “Each poem…is titled by the year in which Dickinson composed the original(s), its order in the current sequence, and (in parentheses) the Franklin numbers of the erased poems” (Note on the Text). While Bervin’s poem #11 obviously comes out of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 11, Holmes uses a looser rule for linkage: two of Holmes’s poems may contain language from the same Dickinson poem, or language from one of the source poems noted in a title may not actually appear in the accompanying Holmes poem. (For example, bits of Dickinson’s poem #342 “How noteless Men, and Pleiads, stand,” are found in Holmes’s “1862.18 (336-342)” (76-78), but not in “1862.19 (342-347)” (79-81). ) <br /><br />Holmes’s book, which from outward appearances (5½ x 8½”, laminated cover, blurbs on the back, double-sided printing) is the more traditional of these two books of erasure, is actually more controversial (both politically and literarily) and more ambitious. The way she attempts to bridge the gap between two time periods and two completely different wars is impressive. Though it wouldn’t have occurred to me to read Dickinson in order to better understand our recent foreign policy dilemmas, the fact that Holmes brings her words into the discussion adds depth to the debate.<br /><br />Both authors use a method of modifying canonical verse to create new and surprising books of poetry, but their projects are uniquely different. Books like these, which are the result of a project of erasure and revision (rather than composition) are hard to quantify—Are they poetry? Are they plagiarism? Are they conceptual art? Are they moving?— but exciting to examine. The danger, perhaps, is that the idea of the book could be more thought-provoking than its contents. Both of these books (as well as others in the same vein: Ronald Johnson’s <em>Radi Os</em>, Mary Ruefle’s <em>A Little White Shadow</em>, Tom Phillips’s <em>A Humument</em>) are well worth reading as much for what they say as for how they say it. Even beyond that, these odd texts are important because they implore readers to re-examine what we think a book of poetry could contain and how it should be presented.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Genevieve Kaplan's poems and essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including <em>Jacket, Gulf Coast</em>, and <em>jubilat</em>. Her first book of poems, <em>In the ice house</em>, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press, and she edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, which publishes literary translations.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-16286008190274727152010-12-05T21:10:00.000-08:002010-12-08T08:37:06.939-08:00TWO HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGIES edited/curated by IVY ALVAREZ, JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN, ERNESTO PRIEGO, EILEEN TABIOS, JEAN VENGUA & MARK YOUNGAILEEN IBARDALOZA Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em><a href="http://meritagepress.com/chained.htm"><strong>The Chained Hay(na)ku Project</strong></a></em>, Curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego & Eileen Tabios</strong><br /><em>(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco and xPress(ed), Finland, 2010)</em><br /><br />and<br /><br /><strong><em><a href="http://www.meritagepress.com/haynaku2.htm"><strong>The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II</strong></a></em>, Edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young</strong><br /><em>(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco and xPress(ed), Finland, 2008)</em><br /><br /><strong>Encounters on a Kitchen Table: Miss Daisy Hawkins, an old Sinatra song and the Daisy Chain Poems</strong><br /><br />Paul McCartney “didn't really like [Miss] Daisy Hawkins”. She just didn't seem to complete the picture of someone “pick[ing] up the rice in the church where a wedding has been”. [1] She, however, was a powerful originative figure in that she “gave” McCartney the first line in what would be one of the greatest and most celebrated songs in history.<br /><br />To me, the process (and genesis of <em>Eleanor Rigby</em>) is somewhat akin to the history of the <a href="http://haynakupoetry.blogspot.com"><strong>Hay(na)ku</strong></a>, a 21st century poetic form invented by Eileen Tabios. Inspired by Richard Brautigan, Tabios began a “Counting Journal” which would later evolve into a poetics blog. In the blog, she writes about reading the <em>Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac </em>where she found references to American haiku and three-word lines. Shortly thereafter, Tabios inaugurated the “Pinoy haiku”, later renamed, HAY(NA)KU (a tercet with one-, two- and three-word lines; also, a very Filipino expression equivalent to “oh!” or “oh, well”; and most importantly, a term which resolves the prosodic and postcolonial concerns of “Pinoy haiku”, as pointed out by Vince Gotera). [2]<br /><br />In August 2010, Meritage Press and xPress(ed) released <em>The Chained Hay(na)ku Project </em>curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego and Eileen Tabios. This is the third Hay(na)ku anthology and it differs from the first two in that it is collaborative. A call was sent out in 2007 inviting poets to team up with at least two others to create “chained hay(na)ku” using either the traditional form or any of its variations. [3] The process is not unlike the <em>renku</em>, a modern style of Japanese collaborative poetry; and again, McCartney's <em>Eleanor Rigby </em>where lines and ideas had been contributed by others (such as John Lennon, Ringo Starr et al). [4]<br /><br />The weightiest and most interesting part of the anthology, for me, is the section containing the “Commentaries, Open Conversations and Notes on Collaborations”. It is always startling and fortuitous to be given a glimpse into any poetic process. The conversations on “Four Skin Confessions” are thoroughly edifying, a sort of sub-rosa report on the makings of a collaborative poem as well as the workings, dynamics and quirks of the poets. The first conversation answers the question, “Is the Poem Finished?” Here, with the mood and tone at times, hilarious (see page 126, 2nd and 3rd to last paragraphs), at times, wired (page 127), the poem's co-authors (and the anthology’s curators) engage in discussion about whether to end the poem or not. <br /><blockquote>JOHN (Claremont, CA): I could be done, if everyone wants to be done, but, really, I’m not quite done.<br /><br />EILEEN [St. Helena, CA]: I guess what I’m thinking is that if someone says the poem is not done based on the poem itself, that’s one thing. If it’s for the reason John raises, I’m intrigued by its implications as to collaboration and authorship. [5]</blockquote><br />The conversations are dotted with elements needed to effectively complete any collaborative poetry project – artistry, community spirit and openness. Another important feature of linked verses, for me, is seamlessness – the easy flow of lines from one poet to another, where the reader is almost always unable to tell which is which and who is where. So I was tickled to find the “purple clue” in the email conversation:<br /><blockquote>Each<br />book stays<br />still like clay,<br /><br />while<br />the moon<br />pretends to marry<br /><br />signing<br />her name<br />with purple blood. [6]<br />…<br />See how poetry<br />lit me<br />purple<br /><br />from within, then<br />turned me<br />blind. [7]</blockquote><br />Over 200 stanzas apart, notice how the lines of the fourth and fifth quoted stanzas complement the lines of the first three, imparting a feeling of “roundedness”. <br /><br />Particularly rousing, too, is Conversation #2, which recounts how the poets arrived at such an unusual and provocatively intriguing title. The poets tinkered, disputed and finally voted off other possibilities and permutations (page 138) and came up with “Four Skin Confessions”; as to meaning, Alvarez wisely advises, “People will make their own interpretations when the time comes. We can't direct it.” [8]<br /><br />The poem “Transplant” by Liz Breslin (Wanaka, New Zealand), Kunal Dutta (North London, UK) and Lucy Morris (South London, UK) epitomizes the borderless nature of hay(na)ku, as well as the fleetingness and poignancy of home:<br /><blockquote><center>Planes<br />And trains<br />Surgically removed me<br /><br />From<br />The familiar<br />contours of home.<br />…<br />Home,<br />Where the<br />Heart bleeds on,<br /><br />Transplanted.<br />Another self<br />Translates another truth, <br />[9]</center></blockquote><br />“lemon moon” by Mary Garsson, Adele Mendelson and Edna Cabcabin Moran is rich in imagery, and somewhat reminiscent of a sixties' subculture; the tone is haunting and eternally young:<br /><blockquote>the dunes mourn<br />the leaving <br />waves<br /><br />the waves mourn<br />the towering<br />dunes<br />…<br />yellow<br />pages stain<br />chained in time<br /><br />faint<br />in tidal<br />pools so shallow<br /><br />where starfish swallow<br />a lemon<br />moon. [10]</blockquote><br />“Editorial Hay(na)ku” by Jean Gier, Tom Novack, Candida Kutz, Jeff Hansman, Joselyn Ignacio, Kate Coulter, Liza Li, Mary Vezilich and Mike McGuire is pure fun: <br /><blockquote>To <br />Cap or<br />Not to cap… <em>[Jean Gier]</em><br /><br />Is<br />that the<br />Question, you ask? <em>[Tom Novack]</em><br /><br />…<br /><br />The<br />painted word<br />makes me sing <em>[Joselyn Ignacio]</em><br /><br />But<br />Does cap<br />Make you sing? <em>[Kate Coulter]</em> [11]</blockquote><br />“Daisy Chain Poems” by Jean Vengua, Michael Fink and Margo Ponce is rhythmic, delightful, whimsical, with some parts unmistakably suggestive of folk tales: <br /><blockquote>Gloss,<br /><br />lady floss,<br /><br />shiny men spin<br /><br />red<br /><br />candy resin:<br /><br />gingerbread grin. Bring<br /><br />toil<br /><br />bring trouble<br /><br />stir the bubbles [12]</blockquote><br /><br /><strong><em>The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II</em></strong>, edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young and released in 2008, is comprised of single-author poems. It is reflective of the beauty of the hay(na)ku form – that is, pleasurable and “deceptively simple” to write as well as read. The anthology features different variations of hay(na)ku including traditional, reverse, sequence, ducktail and visual.<br /><br />“A Stop & Shop in Connecticut” by Scott Keeney is amusing in its mischievousness:<br /><blockquote>O cover girl<br />who has<br />undone<br /><br />all<br />but—oops—<br />one blouse button, [13]</blockquote><br />“Modernité” by Rebeka Lembo is striking in its incantatory tone and skilled use of repetition:<br /><blockquote>grief<br />that knows<br />not of tears<br /><br />grief<br />that comes<br />out as noise<br /><br />grief<br />that knows<br />not of fears<br /><br />grief<br />that comes<br />out as voice.<br />[14]</blockquote><br />Ernesto Priego, employing the ducktail and reverse hay(na)ku forms, writes one of the most evocative and melodic poems in the collection:<br /><blockquote>Before dying it<br />is said<br />Memory<br /><br />brings back all<br />you once<br />loved.<br />…<br />I wish I<br />had that<br />dragonfly’s<br /><br />memory span, to<br />forget you<br />now,<br /><br />before finally dying<br />and seeing<br />you<br /><br />back. [15]</blockquote><br />“Respiration” by Christopher Rieder is catchy in tone, and lovely as Sinatra’s head filled with “something [un]stupid”:<br /><blockquote>(“fill<br />my head<br />with your perfume,”<br /><br />to<br />paraphrase the<br />old Sinatra song)<br />…<br />breathe<br />out; breathe<br />in, breathe out.<br /><br />I<br />inhale, and<br />catch your scent;<br /><br />I<br />exhale, and<br />sigh your name. [16]</blockquote><br />I confess to using the Filipino expression “hay, naku” quite frequently and with much gusto. The hay(na)ku poetic form, however, engenders, for me, everything that is good about being Pinoy – affinitive, welcoming, innovative. Interestingly, it occurred to me that the kitchen table; Miss Daisy Hawkins (or my gathered notes on her) and an old Sinatra song; and Hay(na)ku volumes II to III [17] and me, make a visual, actual tercet – which, I like to think, is hay(na)ku in motion, and indicative of the form’s (or poetry’s, in general) ubiquity. To sum it up, Priego, in <em>The Chained Hay(na)ku Project</em>, says it best: “I have both fallen in love with the process and the outcome. I am both in love with the idea of enjoying the process itself and also acknowledging that the poem has taken a life of its own.” [18]<br /><br /><small>----------<br />[1] Gary Lehmann, “It All Came Down To a Serious Relationship With Eleanor Rigby,” <em>Eclectica Magazine</em>, accessed October 14, 2010, http://www.eclectica.org/v9n3/lehmann.html.<br />[2] Eileen Tabios, “The History of the Hay(na)ku,” in <em>The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II</em>, edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young (St. Helena & San Francisco, California: Meritage Press and Puhos, Finland: xPress(ed), 2008), 134-141.<br />[3] “Introduction,” <em>The Chained Hay(na)ku Project</em>, curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego & Eileen Tabios (St. Helena & San Francisco, California: Meritage Press and Puhos, Finland: xPress(ed), 2010), 1-2.<br />[4] The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 206.<br />[5] “Four Skin Confessions,” <em>The Chained Hay(na)ku Project</em>, pp. 115, 117.<br />[6] “Four Skin Confessions,” p. 7.<br />[7] “Four Skin Confessions,” p. 29.<br />[8] “Four Skin Confessions,” p. 146.<br />[9] “Transplant,” pp. 94-95.<br />[10] “lemon moon,” pp. 60-61.<br />[11] “Editorial Hay(na)ku,” p. 81.<br />[12] “Daisy Chain Poems,” p. 69.<br />[13] “A Stop & Shop in Connecticut,” <em>The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II</em>, p. 55.<br />[14] “Modernité”, p. 67.<br />[15] Untitled, p. 93.<br />[16] “Respiration,” pp. 100-101.<br />[17] There was a prior first volume of hay(na)ku: the now out-of-print <em>The First Hay(na)ku Anthology </em>co-edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young.<br />[18] “Four Skin Confessions,” The Chained Hay(na)ku, p.116.</small><br /><br />*****<br /><br />Aileen Ibardaloza is the author of <em><a href="http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/traje-de-boda/6359820">TRAJE DE BODA: poems </a></em>(Meritage Press, 2010) and associate editor of <em>Our Own Voice Literary Ezine</em>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-52611109034531517132010-12-05T21:05:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:28:07.139-08:00COLLECTED POEMS by DYLAN THOMASJOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews <br /><br /><strong><em>Collected Poems </em>by Dylan Thomas</strong><br />With introduction by Paul Muldoon<br /><em>(New Directions, New York, 2010)</em> <br /><br />Two or three years ago, I attended the Winnipeg New Music Festival. One of that festival’s draws was a group called Scrap Arts Music. The house was packed. Four males and a female brought what appeared to be stainless steel kettle drums and other assorted home-made percussion devices onto the stage to the accompaniment of flashing laser lighting. They proceeded to create a barrage of sound. Once in a while, they would go off stage to whirl a new instrument on. The music was loud. The lights were bright. The audience was mesmerized never once realizing that what they were witnessing was your average taiko group souped up with glitz and glitter and very little substance.<br /><br />Dylan Thomas is like that. He just may be the most overrated poet in poetic history. Sound, not substance, was his forte. And the popular poetic audience ate it up never once concerned with what he was supposedly saying, just that he said it in his Gaelic barrage of alliteration and rhyme. As Wikipedia says: “His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his sonorous voice with a subtle Welsh lilt became almost as famous as his works.”<br /><br />This is not to say that everything he wrote fell into this category. Some of it was, in fact, quite excellent such as his famous villanelle, ‘Do not go Gentle into that Good Night’ which has become the standard against which every other English villanelle is measured. But there is a great deal of chaff (another word for ‘crap’) mixed in with the wheat.<br /><br />Born, in 1914, into a fairly well-off family in the Uplands area of Swansea, South Wales, it was as if he was born to be a writer. His father was an English master who taught English literature at the local grammar school. Although his father gave Welsh lessons in the home to other children and although both parents were bilingual, they never encouraged Dylan and his sister, Nancy, to learn it speaking only English to them. Leaving school at 16, he became a journalist with the South Wales Daily Post from which position he was quickly ushered out. He became a freelance journalist for awhile. Shortly after leaving Wales for London, he published, on December 18, 1934, his first volume of poems <em>18 Poems</em>. It was during this time that he became an alcoholic which would lead to his death in New York on December 9, 1953, not yet forty years of age. Shortly before his death, he wrote perhaps what he is best remembered for - his play, <em>Under Milkwood</em>.<br /><br />Thomas’s ‘Prologue’, which opens the poems, is a prime example of his overt overextension of sound:<br /><blockquote>O my ruffled ring dove<br />In the hooting, nearly dark<br />With Welsh and reverent stock,<br />Coo rooing the woods’ praise,<br />Who moons her blue notes from her nest(xxiii)</blockquote><br />This may have been the darling of the New Critics who would have been fascinated by all the double-‘O’ sounds mixed in with the single ‘O’s but hindsight prevents us from revelling in this morass of cacophony. <br /><br />But it is not just the sound. The images are also over-the-top. Take the second stanza of the first poem ‘I see the Boys of Summer’:<br /><blockquote>These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,<br />Sour the boiling honey;<br />The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;<br />There in the sun the frigid threads<br />Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;<br />The signal moon is zero in their voids.(1)</blockquote><br />‘jacks of frost’ is about as corny a line as one can get. I suppose we should be fascinated by the near rhymes of ‘hives’ and ‘nerves’ or ‘threads’ and ‘voids’ but, really, are we? Syntax groans under the torture of Thomas’s twisting. And, again, with those ‘O’ sounds. If you have to strive so hard to create an iambic pentameter, as Thomas did in that penultimate line “Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves”, then why bother? Clearly what is called for is a little restraint – something which Thomas lacks. Compare this with Frost, Thomas’s contemporary who also trades in sound, and you’ll hear what I mean. Frost is controlled, subtle. He recognizes that sound should not overpower sense; and, although he also engages in the twisting of syntax, it is generally for the sake of sense, not sound. Again, I don’t wish to leave the impression that Thomas is all bad. In fact, in the very same poem, he is capable of creating lines like “We are the dark deniers, let us summon / Death from a summer woman”(2). This is an incredibly evocative line; the play between ‘summon’ and ‘summer woman’, the way it splits the sound of one word between two in the following line, is poetic genius. But then, in that same stanza, he internally half-rhymes the words ‘worm’ and ‘womb’ - “The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp, / And from that planted womb the man of straw” - which again demonstrates a lack of restraint, again that sound has assumed prominence.<br /><br />Perhaps the argument can be made that I’ve not given Thomas sufficient credit. Indeed, I’ve only considered the first two poems of this volume. However, if we consider for the sake of argument that the second is an early effort (although we are not provided with dates), this is not the case with the first, written by Thomas to accompany his Collected, which is the worst of the two. Yes, you will find works of genius within these pages. But the best that can be said for Thomas was that he was a mediocre poet who blinded many with his terpsichorean turn of phrase forgetting that, once the glitz and glitter has dissipated, something more than sound must be left upon the page.<br /><br />***** <br /><br />John Herbert Cunningham is the host of <em>Speaking of Poets </em>– a half-hour radio show on Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, reviews and interviews. He publishes regularly in half a dozen literary magazines in Canada and the same number in the U.S. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with the free jazz group ECMW – Experimental Creative Music Workshop. He is currently studying the alto sax, the Chinese flute and the darbouka.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-36229934276789235912010-12-05T21:00:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:27:01.873-08:002ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS by JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN (1)EILEEN TABIOS Engages<br /><br /><strong><em>2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS </em>by John Bloomberg-Rissman</strong><br /><em>(Laughing Ouch Cube Publications / Leafe Press, Nottingham, U.K. and Claremont, CA, 2010)</em> <br /><br />Things get old--and new again!--so quickly in these times of advanced printing and internet technologies. Back in early 2006, I wrote a series of poems where I basically copied the text of responses to mail order bride/sweetheart notices and just reconfigured them into couplets (a sample is available <a href="http://mutyapower.blogspot.com/2006/02/xoxoxo-right-back-atcha.html"><strong>HERE</strong></a>; the series is available <a href="http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios3.htm"><strong>HERE</strong></a>). At one point, I submitted the series to a potential publisher; however, the publisher replied that while they found them interesting they wished I'd done more with the raw material (e.g., tinkered with the text).<br /> <br />Well, fast forward to today and several projects are creating poetry (that some might limit into "conceptual poetry"--personally, I don't believe in said limit) by using 100% found text. The latest example to dance its way into my In-Box is <br /><blockquote><em>2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS, REGULATION AND POLICY MANAGEMENT BRANCH, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS AND REHABILITATION</em> <br /><br />by John Bloomberg-Rissman</blockquote><br />Basically, the work is a document that the poet received as a .pdf. After printing it out, Bloomberg-Rissman then slapped a cover 'round it and ... a poem was born! The document was a text that was modifying regulations on how the death penalty is to be administered in the state of California. <br /> <br />Because this was an editing document, it contained various editing formats, like the underline indicating added text and the <del>strike-through </del>indicating deleted text. Based on just the first page, the editing changes offer much of what's poetic about the document, I mean, poem. For example, at one point, "person" was deleted and replaced with "inmate". A possible interpretation could be how "inmate" allows for a distancing effect from the "person" soon to be killed.<br /> <br />When the word "warden" also was edited to reflect the capitalization of the first letter into "Warden," it gives additional weight to the role of said Warden.<br /> <br />One doesn't have to rely on those parts of the text that are being edited. Just this sentence, copied a hundred percent and presented forthright, bludgeons with no other needed ornamentation:<br /> <blockquote>Inmates sentenced to death shall have the opportunity to choose to have the punishment imposed by lethal gas or lethal injection.</blockquote><br />If one goes through the rest of the poem beyond the first page, I'm sure one can come up with other effects that existed without any need of aid by the poem's author, John Bloomberg-Rissman. The concept, of course, is not new--occasional <em>Galatea Resurrects </em>reviewer Steven Fama notes about a similar project also released this year:<br /> <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2010/08/poetry-from-law-part-5.html"><blockquote>"<em>Tragodía – 1: Statement of Facts</em>, by Vanessa Place... is in one sense, and perhaps mostly, a conceptual work: its text is entirely borrowed from another source and presented as poetry essentially as it was found. Such appropriation and re-purposing is a well worn and easy trick, especially in visual art (see Marcel Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, 1914/1964)...</blockquote></a> <br /> I get the concept and I appreciate it (after all, I've done it!). But the thing with concepts is that one can appreciate it, as I do in the case of <em>2ND NOTICE..., </em>without needing to immerse one's self in actually reading every word of the manifested poetry project. In the case of <em>2nd NOTICE...</em>, I wrote the first draft of this review without bothering to read the rest of the poem after the first page. There's a concept to this project and my "review" relies on the concept. <br /> <br />Do I shortshrift <em>2ND NOTICE... </em>by not reading the whole thing before writing up 95% of the review? You can judge me by writing a review of it; a <a href="http://grarchives.blogspot.com">review copy is available through <em>Galatea Resurrects</em>! </a>Anyway, there's a concept to this project and my "review" relies on the concept. I actually admire said concept--my take on it, as I've blathered numerous times elsewhere, is that Poetry exists all around us, and the role of poets can be just one of recognizing what already exists vs. a more interventionist authorial act. <br /> <br />It should be noted, though, that Bloomberg-Rissman seems to suggest that <em>2ND NOTICE... </em>extends the genre of art being created through recognition/finding. The cover of <em>2ND NOTICE... </em>presents three statements and its authors underneath <del>strike-throughs</del>:<br /><blockquote><del>Beantwortung Der Frage: Wast Ist Aufklarung? ("Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?")<br />--Immanuel Kant<br /> <br />Notes on Conceptualism<br />--Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place<br /> <br />"YEAH, MM-HMM, IT'S TRUE / BIG BIRDS MAKE / BIG DOO! I GOT FIRE INSIDE / MY 'HUPPA'-CHIMP (TUM) / GONNA BE AGGRESSIVE, GREASY AW YEAH GOD / WANNA DOOT! DOOT! / PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF! HEY!"<br />--Gary Sullivan</del></blockquote><br />The above are replaced by<br /><blockquote>"TO THOSE WHO SAY, 'THIS ISN'T WRITING, IT'S TYPING', i SAY, 'NO, NO, NO, THIS ISN'T TYPING, IT'S JUST DIGIMECHANICAL REPRODUCTION; ITS NOT EVEN CUT N PASTE'." <br />--John Bloomberg-Rissman</blockquote><br />Now, I've said I admire the conceptual underpinning. But where does it get tired? At the point of <em>2ND NOTICE... </em>which is a received .pdf sent to a printer and then covered by a cover? (Note that Bloomberg-Rissman didn't want to lose even the original formattings of the document.) But of course it all depends on what is done with the concept. For instance, the choice of which text to "find" into a poem is an authorial decision that matters. Indeed, at this point of this review, I decided to open the book randomly. That it opened to a page that contained this passage (as regards the "Administration of Lethal Injection Chemicals")<br /><blockquote>If the inmate continues to refuse to comply with orders, an emergency cell extraction will be authorized.</blockquote><br />attests to the power of its words (an "emergency cell extraction"?! ) and why <em>2ND NOTICE... </em>is worth increased attention through having been made a conceptual poetry project. Or, on the same random page, check out this passage that could certainly be a list poem as regards precautions that staff is supposed to take while administering lethal injections:<br /><blockquote>Disposable gown<br />Facehead protection<br />Rubber gloves<br />Padded gloves<br />Leg protection</blockquote><br />Like a poem, what's described here is a different world, and it is ours, even that of ye proverbial nuclear family sitting all cozy in their warm living room.<br /> <br />*****<br /> <br />A fabulously effective part of <em>2nd NOTICE... </em>is actually the back cover, which reproduces a drawing by Rebekah May of what Bloomberg-Rissman described as "a child's version of an execution." To wit:<br /> <br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijKpTWUNw5O60h9UA1AJdIwkNng7BqvKFacdF8WtzJZjfijWGYpCDk1nwEv1q1Zc2lu-5AombW7zVqvqS_iivkbgeh8KvH5xOpfUBUsNlRCVhksclrGF9qhux05QetlZ72_2jmWSoNsYY/s1600/may+drawing.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijKpTWUNw5O60h9UA1AJdIwkNng7BqvKFacdF8WtzJZjfijWGYpCDk1nwEv1q1Zc2lu-5AombW7zVqvqS_iivkbgeh8KvH5xOpfUBUsNlRCVhksclrGF9qhux05QetlZ72_2jmWSoNsYY/s400/may+drawing.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517254092545185506" /></a><br /> <br />The root of the illustration is <em>2ND NOTICE</em>...'s description of the trays presenting lethal injection chemicals and salines:<br /><blockquote>(1) Two identical trays shall be prepared.<br /><br />(A) Tray A shall be color-coded red and will be the primary tray used for the lethal injection process.<br /><br />(B) Tray B shall be colored-coded (sic) blue and will be the backup tray.<br /><br />(2) Each tray shall have eight color-coded syringes to match the tray and be labeled by content and sequence of administration as follows:<br /><br />#1 60cc syringe 1.5 grams Sodium Thiopental<br />#2 60cc syringe 1.5 grams Sodium Thiopental<br />#3 60cc syringe 50cc saline flush<br />#4 60cc syringe 50 milligrams Pancuronium Bromide...<br />#5 60cc syringe 50cc saline flush<br />#6 60cc syringe 100 milliequivalents Potassium Chloride<br />#7 60cc syringe 100 milliequivalents Potassium Chloride<br />#8 60cc syringe 50 cc saline flush</blockquote><br />Though May is visually representing the A and B trays of lethal injection ingredients, I also appreciate how the trays, by being labeled with the letters "A" and "B", can imply that what's being injected is text into the author's (writing) arm. It's aa result certainly befitting the project's underlying concept. <br /> <br />It's a nice drawing (done with markers) by May that, for me, elevates the project beyond being another "found poetry" work -- I'm happy to see the presence of her <em>hand </em>(pun intended), versus, say, a xeroxed image or collage of xeroxed images. And it's a paradoxical ending by reminding the viewer/reader that conceptualism is just one way. For the one conceptual failure in art-making is the insistence that its way is the only path.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by <em>Galatea Resurrects</em>, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book <a href="http://marshhawkpress.org/tabios4.htm"><strong><em>THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) </em></strong></a> is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R3NDO9FGJAV385/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm"><strong>HERE</strong></a>, William Allegrezza over at <em>p-ramblings </em><a href="http://allegrezza.blogspot.com/2010/05/daily-glance-eileen-tabios-thorn-rosary_28.html"><strong>HERE</strong></a> and by Leny M. Strobel at <em>Moria Poetry </em><a href="http://moriapoetry.com/strobel.html"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. Mr. Harp also reviews her <a href="http://notabeneeiswein.blogspot.com"><strong><em>NOTA BENE EISWEIN </em></strong></a>over <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R2LDQCY1BOFYCM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm"><strong>HERE</strong></a>. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher <a href="http://marshhawkpress.org"><strong>Marsh Hawk Press </strong></a>is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the <a href="http://meritagepress.blogspot.com/2010/02/haynaku-for-haiti.html"><strong>Hay(na)ku for Haiti </strong></a>fundraiser; as <em>THE THORN ROSARY </em>is priced retail at $19.95, this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-45161089070005016032010-12-05T20:50:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:25:47.757-08:00NOT BLESSED by HAROLD ABRAMOWITZALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>Not Blessed </em>by Harold Abramowitz</strong> <br /><em>(Trenchart: The Maneuvers Series, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles, 2010)</em><br /><br />This unusual book tells a story, and tells it again and again. That story permutes thru twenty eight versions. The book’s crux reveals itself: how Abramowitz takes the meager narrative and stretches it the length of seventy five 3”x8” pages.<br /><br />Teresa Carmody provides a useful introduction that I wish were placed in epilogue territory. The reader (I think) needs a chance to scope Abramowitz’s experiment free of elucidation. A minor point but still. You won’t ruin the experience by reading Carmody’s insights first, it just seems afterwordish to me. Carmody effectively quotes Stein, who essentially remarked that repetition does not exist, but insistence does. The point bears nicely on this book.<br /><br />The basic story is meager, as I said. Recounted in various modes and styles, the gist is of a boy who lives with his grandmother near a lake. He goes for a long walk and “may have gone too far”. A policeman appears and believes that the boy is lost. The boy reacts with gratitude then anger. Each section of this book includes some tilling of that field.<br /><br />Saying that a gist exists plays right into Abramowitz’s thesis, if thesis it be. What I tell you of the plot lines up with the other twenty eight versions of the story. Inconsistency reigns among the details, to the point of opposition, one version from another.<br /><br />Each section runs two or three pages in length. Abramowitz writes simply, for the most part. Many sections begin <em>in media res</em>. Repetition of phrases occurs subtly, provoking vaguely like a gnat.<br /><br />The first section and numerous ones following refer to a ghost story. This story is in fact “The Open Window” by H.H.Munro, also known as Saki. I remember reading this story, an anthology staple, in elementary school.<br /><br />In the story, a child regales an overly nervous visitor to a house with a tale about dead family members. The child explains that they died while hunting, so a window remains open for them to return. The child in fact recounts the predictable actions of still living people. When the hunters return, and climb thru the open window as the child described how they would, the visitor runs away in fright.<br /><br />Abramowitz never mentions the humourous part of Saki’s story, and in fact neglects to indicate anything of this ghost story except that it involves a hunter. This neglect suggests the selective fluidity of details. As one reads the various versions, one notes the change in tone and mode of each. One realizes how inconstant narrators can be.<br /><br />One might categorize <em>Not Blessed </em>with, say, <em>The Ring </em><em>and the Book </em>or <em>Rashomon</em>, but it is not so much different views of the same events but different emphases. It is as if the narrator were in a different mood with each version. Each version, each section, bears a definite approach. Sometimes the narrator is wordy, sometimes brief, sometimes hearty, and so on. One could think that Abramowitz used certain authors as exemplars. For instance, one section resounds for me with the amiable resource of Laurence Sterne (in a half-baked way); another has the wordy intensity of Poe. It does not read as a what if this or that author wrote the narrative but rather as an exploitation of tonal shift.<br /><br />The first section, perhaps catching me unaware, made me think of Flann O’Brien. The boy’s story conveys for me the detailed, slightly odd and mildly grim landscape of <em>The Third Policeman</em>. The recounted memory seems to invest a plangent land of intense, dreamlike directive, even as the narrative barely emerges from the ordinary. Other sections suggest someone in counseling, someone giving a speech, someone being interviewed. Abramowitz leaves the reasons for any of that up to the reader.<br /><br />The boy, never named, endures an odd anger at the policeman’s actions. His relief at the policeman’s apparent kindness becomes aggravation because the policeman failed to recognize that the boy and his grandmother were well known in the region. The narrator intimates future notoriety, but we never learn what that notoriety might entail.<br /><br />The policeman himself proves especially fluid in character. We see him helping the boy, bullying him, belittling him. We can wonder consistently whether we are getting “the real story”. Of course we are not. We get what the narrator gives us.<br /><br />As I read, I found myself scanning forward quickly, to see the next change on the theme. I believe one can allow oneself to read <em>Not Blessed </em>so the first time. Later readings can partake of comparison. The rhythm of repetition and key change produces a subtle dazzle.<br /><br /><em>Not Blessed </em>does not sound like Stein, but you will likely hear a Steinian rapture in its insistence. The redolence of humour and oddity that infuses the little narratives blesses the book with a depth greater than mere experiment.<br /><br />Though much is of the ordinary, Abramowitz does supply a quirky aspect. In a number of the versions, the boy encounters another boy. This second boy is on a parallel road that our hero can never reach. This unreachable doppelganger adds a weirdness that again provokes in my mind Flann O’Brien’s landscapes of impulse and received detail. <em>Not Blessed </em>is not roisterous like O’Brien’s works, but it contents me to think Abramowitz honours O’Brien with this work.<br /><br />We all recognize fiction, even against our will, as a firmly resolving plan of action. Yes, satisfaction exists in such resolve, but that resolve is a fabrication. <em>Not Blessed </em>adds to the literature that questions that determined resolve. It faces the narrator’s testimony with inquisitiveness rather than blind faith. For that, and for other marvels, I give it thumbs up.<br /><br />*****<br /><br />Allen Bramhall was born by the banks of the Concord River in 1952 and has lived in Massachusetts ever since. He was educated at Franconia College and Lesley University, and in non-academic places as well. / <em>Simple Theory </em>/ (Potes & Poets Press) was his first book. He maintains a blog called <em>Tributary </em>(http://tribute-airy.blogspot.com/), and a life with Beth and Erin. He is also the author of <a href="http://meritagepress.com/dayspoem.htm"><em>DAYS POEM, Vol. I and II </em></a>(Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco).Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847535030423896874.post-38464110785566727162010-12-05T20:45:00.000-08:002010-12-07T19:24:34.340-08:00A IS FOR ANNE by PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTTMOIRA RICHARDS Reviews<br /><br /><strong><em>A is for Anne </em>by Penelope Scambly Schott</strong><br /><em>(<a href="http://www.turningpointbooks.com">Turning Point</a>, Cincinnati, OH, 2007)</em> <br /><br />What more enticing way to learn history than through poetry? Penelope Scambly Schott’s <em>A is for Anne </em>tells, with poems, the story of a woman of whom a Reverend Peter said something along the lines of: <br /><blockquote> You have stepped out of your place: You<br />have rather been a Husband than a Wife, and a Preacher<br />than a Hearer, and a Magistrate than a Subject. <br /><br /> --“My Second Trial: March 22, 1638: Day Two: the afternoon on which I am Cast Out”</blockquote><br />Grrr… sooo irritating – albeit said almost 400 years ago but, horribly, probably still endorsed by many, even today. Scambly Schott provides a family tree at the beginning of her book of poems about Anne Hutchinson and this reveals that she birthed and raised fifteen(!) children – she must have been pregnant more than eleven of her thirty years of married life! How on earth did she find the time and energy to (often) be reminded, rebuked along the lines of:<br /> <blockquote>For the man is not of the woman, <br /> but the woman is of the man.<br /><br /> --“Unpleasant Weeks Aboard the Griffin”</blockquote><br />More disturbingly, I notice that she and six of her youngest children all died in the same year – 1643. Fire? Disease? I force myself to not page immediately to the end of the book. I begin at the beginning and learn that from early girlhood Anne was:<br /> <blockquote>… my father’s dearest scholar:<br /><br /> see how he leads me through deep waters.<br /> Denied his parish, my father ravishes me<br /><br /> with argument of fiercest precision,<br />chapter and verse correctly quoted.<br /><br /> “Daughter of a Dissenter”</blockquote><br />And that the girl who was to become good friend and midwife to Mary Dyer, one of the “Boston Martyrs”, was groomed early to follow her father’s lead…<br /> <blockquote>Papa’s finger longer than my hand.<br />My older sisters learn their stitches,<br />and I, my letters. Our Queen reads, <br />so why not Anne?<br /><br /> --“Reverend Francis Marbury is under House Arrest for Preaching against the Church of England”</blockquote><br />Through pages of persona poetry, mostly in the voice of Mistress Anne Marbury Hutchinson, I learn that she married in her early twenties; through Penelope Scambly Scott’s deft word craft I learn that Anne is a sensual wife; I learn too, that Anne or Penelope or the both of them have a fine knack for subtle erotic word play: <br /><blockquote> …Who said <br /><br />it was duty? I grow in beauty<br />under his hands. To know<br /><br />my husband as Eve knew Adam<br />as Rachel knew Jacob, as Mother,<br /><br />Father. It’s a wise God<br />devised this jointure of flesh.<br /><br /> I applaud His gentle rod.<br /><br /> --“I Like It Well”</blockquote><br />And so the life-story-in-poems of this no-nonsense mother, midwife and lay-preacher continues and narrates that, weekly, she gathers of an evening in her home,<br /> <blockquote>An ever larger meeting. They spill<br /> from parlour to kitchen.<br /><br /> So many listeners. I am sure<br />of myself in my husband’s chair.<br /><br /> --“Now Also on Thursday Nights” </blockquote><br />The quote above begins to shed some light as to why the first quote in this review, from Reverend Peter, was directed at Mistress Hutchinson. A strong and outspoken woman is bound to be quashed sooner or later and the Boston patriarchs were not, for long, about to put up with one who was not shy to say (again, often),<br /><blockquote>If my dear father were alive today,<br /> I know exactly what he’d say: <em>Piffle</em>.<br /><br /> As I do too.<br /><br /> --“The Great Comet of 1618”</blockquote><br /><em>A is for Anne </em>brings its sassy protagonist to life. She is bullied, betrayed by friends, and even manipulated in way reminiscent of recent political events: <br /> <blockquote>Is Boston too small for more than one opinion?<br />If am not with them, must I be against them?<br /><br /> --“Private Interrogation at the Home of Mr. Cotton, October 25, 1636” </blockquote><br />I’ll not give away the end of the story, nor tell any more of it here. Penelope Scambly Shott’s book tells it compellingly and in the after notes, fills in background detail and bits about subsequent events, some of which took place just a few years ago. She also lists a pile of reference materials for those curious to know yet more, the most easily accessible of which is this website: <a href="http://www.annehutchinson.com">http://www.annehutchinson.com</a><br /><br />*****<br /><br />Moira Richards lives in South Africa and hangs out <a href="http://www.darlingtonrichards.com"><strong>here</strong></a><br />and <a href="http://www.redroom.com/author/moira-richards"><strong>here</strong></a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0