Galatea Resurrects #15 (A Poetry Engagement)

Issue No. 15 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2010-12-05T23:50:00.000-08:00

Dec. 7, 2010

[N.B. You can click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article.]

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
By Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Camille Martin reviews SALINE by Kimberly Lyons

Patrick James Dunagan reviews DEAR SANDY, HELLO: LETTERS FROM TED TO SANDY BERRIGAN, Edited by Sandy Berrigan and Ron Padgett

Jon Curley reviews AUTOPSY TURVY by Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason

Eileen Tabios engages HAD SLAVES by Catherine Sasanov

John Herbert Cunningham reviews SELECTED POEMS OF GARCILASO DE LA VEGA, Edited and translated by John Dent-Young

Kathryn Stevenson reviews MONEY FOR SUNSETS by Elizabeth J. Colen

T.C. Marshall reviews VANCOUVER: A POEM by George Stanley and IN THE MILLENIUM by Barry McKinnon

Eric Dickey reviews AS IT TURNED OUT by Dmitry Golynko, Edited by Eugene Ostashevsky. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Rebecca Bella with Simona Schneider

Peg Duthie engages THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF GRAVITY AND GRACE by Ernesto Priego

Patrick James Dunagan reviews UNTAM’D WING: RIFFS ON ROMANTIC POETRY by Jeffrey C. Robinson

Harry Thorne reviews NEIGHBOR by Rachel Levitsky

Michael Pollock engages "El Dorado" by Edgar Allan Poe, 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

Barbara Roether reviews FIRE EXIT by Robert Kelly

Allen Bramhall reviews SITUATIONS by Laura Carter

Eileen Tabios engages 1000 SONNETS by Tim Atkins

Eric Hoffman reviews ESCHATON by Michael Heller

Jon Curley reviews 100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE by Julie Carr

Genevieve Kaplan reviews NETS by Jen Bervin and THE MS OF M Y KIN by Janet Holmes

Aileen Ibardaloza reviews 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

John Herbert Cunningham reviews COLLECTED POEMS by Dylan Thomas

Eileen Tabios engages 2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS by John Bloomberg-Rissman

Allen Bramhall reviews NOT BLESSED by Harold Abramowitz

Moira Richards reviews A IS FOR ANNE by Penelope Scambly Schott

Peg Duthie engages "GOTHENBURG" FROM THREE GEOGAOPHIES: A MILKMAID'S GRIMOIRE by Arielle Guy

John Herbert Cunningham reviews DISJUNCTIVE POETICS: FROM GETRUDE STEIN AND LOUIS ZUKOFSKY TO SUSAN HOWE by Peter Quartermain

Rebecca Loudon reviews GOD DAMSEL by Reb Livingston

Eileen Tabios engages REQUIEM FOR THE ORCHARD by Oliver de la Paz

Kristi Castro reviews EDGE BY EDGE, collection of poetry chaps by Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter

Allen Bramhall reviews I-FORMATION BOOK 1 by Anne Gorrick

Lynn Behrendt reviews I-FORMATION BOOK 1 by Anne Gorrick

Eileen Tabios engages Lynn Behrendt's review of Anne Gorrick's I-FORMATION BOOK 1

Michael Caylo-Baradi reviews MISSPELL by Lars Palm

John Herbert Cunningham reviews PENURY by Myung Mi Kim

Albert B. Casuga reviews TRAJE DE BODA: POEMS by Aileen Ibardaloza

Richard Lopez reviews SOME SONNETS, Edited by Tim Wright

Eileen Tabios engages APPARITION POEMS by Adam Fieled

L.M. Freer reviews BEATS AT NAROPA: AN ANTHOLOGY, Edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright

Moira Richards reviews (MADE) by Cara Benson

Thomas Fink reviews DRUNKER/HOLDING EMBER by Raymond Farr

Edric Mesmer reviews ON SECRETS OF MY PRISON HOUSE by Geoffrey Gatza

Peg Duthie engages EATING HER WEDDING DRESS: A COLLECTION OF CLOTHING POEMS, Edited by Vasiliki Katsarou, Ruth O’Toole, and Ellen Foos

Eileen Tabios engages BEHAVE: CALIFORNIA RANT 66 by Steve Tills

Jim McCrary reviews MR. MAGOO by Steve Tills

Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews AUTOPSY TURVY by Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason

Margaret H. Johnson reviews MANHATTAN MAN (AND OTHER POEMS) by Jack Lynch

Eileen Tabios engages AT TROTSKY'S FUNERAL by Mark Young

Marianne Villanueva reviews ERNESTA, IN THE STYLE OF FLAMENCO by Sandy McIntosh

Hadas Yatom-Schwartz engages “Nathan, in the Ancient Language”, a poem in ERNESTA, IN THE STYLE OF THE FLAMENCO by Sandy McIntosh

Patrick James Dunagan reviews COLLECTED POEMS / GUSTAF SOBIN, Edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Ed Foster

Jon Curley reviews CLEANING THE MIRROR: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS by Joel Chace

Tom Beckett reviews CLEANING THE MIRROR: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS by Joel Chace

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews AT THE FAIR by Tom Clark

Peg Duthie engages 32 SNAPSHOTS OF MARSEILLES by Guy Bennett

Jim McCrary reviews THE HAY(NA)KU FOR HAITI SERIES, Edited by Eileen Tabios

Kristina Marie Darling reviews THE FRENCH EXIT by Elisa Gabbert

Anny Ballardini reviews BRAINOGRAPHY by Evelyn Posamentier

Richard Lopez reviews 2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS by John Bloomberg-Rissman

G.E. Schwartz reviews THE FUTURE IS HAPPY by Sarah Sarai

Kristina Marie Darling reviews TINDERBOX LAWN by Carol Guess

Eileen Tabios engages DIWATA by Barbara Jane Reyes

Peg Duthie engages DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY by Macgregor Card

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews ADAMANTINE by Shin Yu Pai

Jeff Harrison reviews GRIEF SUITE by Bobbi Lurie

Allen Bramhall reviews OPULENCE by Stephen Ellis

Peg Duthie engages SPRING HAS COME: SPANISH LYRICAL POETRY FROM THE SONGBOOKS OF THE RENAISSANCE by Alvaro Cardona-Hine

Jim McCrary reviews CARRY CATASTROPHE by Megan Kaminski

Moira Richards reviews THEN, SOMETHING by Patricia Fargnoli

Eileen Tabios engages KING OF THE JUNGLE by Zvi A. Sesling

Genevieve Kaplan reviews POETS ON TEACHING: A SOURCEBOOK, Edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Kristina Marie Darling

FOCUS ON POETS
Tom Beckett interviews ANNE GORRICK

Thomas Fink interviews JOANNA FUHRMAN

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEW
Lisa Bower reviews SKIRT FULL OF BLACK by Sun Yung Shin

Eric Dickey reviews LIGHT FROM A BULLET HOLE: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED, 1950–2008 by Ralph Salisbury

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Hay(na)ku for Haiti--a Haiti Relief Fundraiser

BACK COVER
No Deer Were Shot For These Shots!

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2010-12-05T23:40:00.000-08:00

Of course, I’d like to share my son Michael’s first published poem, HERE! 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!

So, to official bidness: Thanks as ever to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have 72 NEW REVIEWS this issue! And this issue is also special because Michael offers his engagement with a poetry project through a drawing--HERE is his engagement with Edgar Allan Poe's "El Dorado"! When not blathering on about my son, I like to track GR's progress, so here are some poetry-lovin' stats!

Issue 1: 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)
Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)
Issue 7: 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 9: 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)
Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)
Issue 15: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 4 projects were reviewed twice)

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

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews
Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews
Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews
Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews
Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies HERE. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is March 15, 2010.

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).

*****

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).

*****

Wait for it! One more photo of Michael--here he is having moved from dog bed to actual reading chair as he becomes The Light of My Life This Holiday Season!

With much love, poetry and fur,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
December 7, 2010

SALINE by KIMBERLY LYONS

2010-12-05T23:00:00.000-08:00

CAMILLE MARTIN Reviews

Saline by Kimberly Lyons
(Instance Press, Boulder, CO, 2005)

Kimberly Lyons’ Fleeting Continuum

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 Saline) “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.

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.”

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”:

Peripheral snaps, like a flyswatter
with no sweat
fits of sound without shape
the kitchen
of September a cellular
lab
ricocheting
from hair, hives
globs of orange smell
the moon’s raincoat &
newspaper dregs
diaphanous in its costumes
the soul
decorated with beads &
bottlecaps
words grow inward
edges ephemeral as this page is.

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.”

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.

At the end of this poem is a meta-poetic gesture that recurs in several poems in Saline, 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.

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 Saline. 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:

is that possible
the denizens of a poem
coming through the mist whack
a curtain completely uncertain as
to how wavelengths prevail.

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”:

At the moment,
which is transient, doubted
and crowded
visualize

a tremulous lavender ball
vulnerably rotating in its
cubicle of the cosmos

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.

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 Saline a centripetal energy that counters the centrifugal force of its blooming, buzzing confusion.

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:

LUNE

After the milk
thins
an emergence of
magnolias framed by grooved green
lips
and a silver spoon fits inside a gray
rim
as the moon, of course, hangs
all day.
Turn out the light
after eating cereal in the middle of the night
in the kitchen
and suddenly the moon
gray as a flower
at the bottom of a bowl of milk.

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.

Ending the book is Saline’s 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:

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.
It’s said, trauma produces snapshots of unlinked memory. So does love.

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.

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 memento mori at the heart of the phantasmagorical parade.

*****

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 Sonnets (Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2010) and Codes of Public Sleep (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.

DEAR SANDY, HELLO: LETTERS FROM TED TO SANDY BERRIGAN, Edited by SANDY BERRIGAN & RON PADGETT

2010-12-05T22:55:00.000-08:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Dear Sandy, Hello: Letters from Ted to Sandy Berrigan edited by Sandy Berrigan and Ron Padgett
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minn. 2010)

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…

* * *

“Your Husband Forever”: Rimbaud, The Sonnets and becoming ‘Ted Berrigan’

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, The Sonnets.” 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, Talking in Tranquility and On the Level Everyday, 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.

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 Spontaneous Zen Parable from a letter dated April 23, 1962:

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.”

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.”

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.”

Signed,

“The Snake.”

Notable—in addition to his use of “The Snake” as a sign-off which also occurs in Sonnet LXXVII—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.

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 say 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.

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:

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:

DICK                                                               ME
Francois Villon                                     Albert Camus
Thomas Wolfe                                     Percy Shelley
Albert Camus                                     Lord Byron
Walt Whitman                                     Rene Rilke
Percy Shelley                                     Ralph Emerson
Andre Gide                                     Bernard Shaw
Rene Rilke                                        Ezra Pound
Paul Goodman                                     Thomas Wolfe
Arthur Rimbaud                          Alfred Whitehead
John Milton                               Friedrich Nietzsche
                                                         Arthur Rimbaud
                                                              John Milton

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.

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 The Sonnets 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 Vanitas in 2009.

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 The Sonnets:

Where, dying all the blue, the maddened flames
And stately rhythms of the sun, stronger
Than alcohol, more great than song,
Fermented the bright red bitterness of love.
…
I’ve seen fermenting everglade-like weirs
Deep in whose reeds great elephants decay;
I’ve seen vast oceans crashing into ruin
And calm horizons cataracting away,
…
Sometimes when I grow weary, feel betrayed,
The gently rolling sea sets me at rest,
Lifting her shadowy waters up for me,
And I fall on my knees, womanly.
…
The only traveled sea that I still dream of
Is the cold black pond where once
On a fragrant evening fraught with sadness,
I launched a boat fragile as a butterfly.

Just when Berrigan may have finished reworking his version is unclear (Vanitas supposes “circa 1963”) 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 Vanitas copy.) And she writes of the “final version being more idiomatic and modern and concise—much less 19th Century I guess.”

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 The Sonnets. 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:

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.

While with the breakthrough of Berrigan’s conception of ‘form’ evidenced by The Sonnets, 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 his Rimbaud is indeed his “own meter rhyme rhythm” which he later heavily exploits in order to create the dizzying array found within The Sonnets.

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 The Sonnets (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 The Sonnets 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 The Sonnets to revel in words as discrete substances contained within themselves allowing for them to interact with each other without his intervention.

Berrigan’s “Drunken Boat” details the immersion he himself is in the process of to become the poet ‘Ted Berrigan’ author of The Sonnets. 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.

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.”

Berrigan doesn’t mince words when offering Sandy his advice in regards to her situation:

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 kill your soul. 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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

I wrote a long time ago a poem called Prayer, addressed to a fierce old prophet like poet, whose poems were giving me inspiration:

Old Father, I am young.
I am afraid. Teach me
to run, that I may learn
to fight.

Sing I would, many songs,
and many candles burn.
teach me to fall, that
I may learn to stand.

Old Warrior,
guide me now. Help me believe
the necessary lies.
Teach me to hate.

I would preserve my love.

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:

I love you, Sandy, Sandra, my eternal wife.

Your husband forever,
Ted
I love You.

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:

                                                                                                            I love you.
I love you.

                                    I love you.

                                                                        That’s what I want this letter
                                    to say.
                                                                     I am and mean to stay
                                    your husband
                                    forever and ever,
                                                                                                            all my love,

Ted

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.

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 Sonnets 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 Glossary of Names (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” does bear the dedication for Sandy, the vast majority of Berrigan’s own published writings infrequently, if at all, acknowledge any role of hers in his life as a poet.

At the end of these letters comes Scrapbook Facsimiles (available for on-line viewing here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=240368)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 The Sonnets. 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.

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.”

Alone & crowded, unhappy fate, nevertheless
I slip softly into air
The world’s furious song flows through my costume.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco. His critical essay on Creeley's debt to Stevens is slated to appear in Fulcrum 7 anytime now. Poems and such will be appearing in the next issue of Amerarcana. This Spring Post Apollo Press will publish his "There Are People Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk": A GUSTONBOOK.

AUTOPSY TURVY by THOMAS FINK & MAYA DIABLO MASON (1)

2010-12-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

JON CURLEY Reviews

Autopsy Turvy by Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason
(Meritage Press, San Franciso & St. Helena, CA, 2010)

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.

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 Autopsy Turvy 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.

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 Bee 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.

Autopsy Turvy 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:

I
do solemnly
sway. I will

faithfully excrete the
offense of present

participle
the unisex
starkness of ambush,

and will prescribe,
prostitute, and
defecate

the consternation (constipation)
of the unkempt

statesman. Go help
me gobble.

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:

You left your body at home
when you headed for college.
It would have been vestigial there.

It was July,
so I was naked.

I tried it on,
Wanting to know what it felt like
to dance in it.

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.

As mentioned, we can never perform an autopsy on Autopsy Turvy 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 Ulysses: “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: Autopsy Turvy 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.

*****

Jon Curley's first collection, New Shadows, was released last year by Dos Madres Press. His critical study, Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland, will be published next year. He lives in New Jersey, where he teaches in the Humanities Department of New Jersey Insitute of Technology.

HAD SLAVES by CATHERINE SASANOV

2010-12-05T22:35:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Had Slaves by Catherine Sasanov
(Firewheel Editions, Danbury, CT, 2010)

This book writes itself—by this, I mean that there’s a sense of urgency in the words rushing out to imprint pages into life.

There’s a rush 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 Had Slaves 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.

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…Had Slaves pieces together lives endured from slavery to Jim Crow across a landscape lost beneath big box stores, subdivisions, and tourist sites. Avoiding Gone With the Wind 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…”

Reading through the poems, one gets the feeling that these poems’ voices have been waiting—longing!—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 interview she did with Ellen Steinbaum:

“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.

“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 ‘Gone With the Wind’ 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.

“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.

So let’s have some poems speak on behalf of themselves…and those whose blood and flesh first created their lives:

Four Hundred Acres of Missouri

For Flora, her children Ben and Eliza, 1833

The first time you saw all of it, did your eyes gag, dreaming of escape? Row on row of oats and corn—all muffle and impede. 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. Where are my ancestors’ hands in this? 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.

Heir
For Eliza

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? Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Isn’t that what old masters say just before they die? So your new one comes with his receipt: Received of A.A. Young, John P.: The girl named in the will. That name’s Eliza, but all he thinks if filly, maybe mare; is wealth to reproduce itself. He cares. Did he take his long, hard look between your legs? Was he born to father a little property out behind the barn?

The effect of research, more discoveries, naturally can’t help but affect the researcher…and such also shows up—often movingly—in the poems:

Easter, Reconstructed

Down the cold hall of daguerreotypes

I searched out every piece of anonymous metal
looking for your face. Sought proof
that someone treasured you
if only on

a bit of tin.

But you came line-drawn,
rough-sketched,
out of an ink gone Rorschach.

A woman subject to interpretation.

The census taker as itinerant artist, pinning down
one final glimpse of you.

Or the first four stanzas of this poem:

Crude Music
For Eliza, Isaac, Daniel, and Diana

And what of my own hands in this?

I finally come to flesh you
out, flesh you

into what are not

unimaginable situations

This is fraught stuff. Here’s another poem in its entirety:

Revisionist (History)

            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.
            Carl B. Boyer, white interviewer
            Slave Narratives: Missouri, 1936-1938

Let me herd the heirs
into the yard,

so at that distance, this
can pass for prayer:

Three women standing
around the master’s bed,

prodding the old man
with their tongues,

exultant that he’s dead.

***

The source of many poems—often directly “found” from archives—is at times incomplete. Sasanov notes that

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.

“In writing ‘Had Slaves,’ 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.

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.

Willed, Bequeathed: Edmund, Walked Towards Tennessee,
Is Never Seen Again: September 1860

The sky, the bloody
meat of it,
sutures itself
with geese

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.

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":

                                                            Watch how
in lieu of herding slaves,
                                    my hands herd words
                                                     across the page,

And I hold back
                                    whole trains of thought
                                                                        with just a speck of ink.

The combination of caesuras and the placement of the phrases across the page facilitate the notion of “herding slaves.”

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 Had Slaves, I felt the complicated turmoil that the poet must have undergone as she created these poems. And why not? As the author says,

“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."

Had Slaves is important for expanding the light on the legacy of American slavery. It is a most moving testament.

Had Slaves not only has my highest recommendation—these poems, and its author, command Respect.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE, William Allegrezza over at p-ramblings HERE and by Leny M. Strobel at Moria Poetry HERE. Mr. Harp also reviews her NOTA BENE EISWEIN over HERE. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY 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.

SELECTED POEMS OF GARCILASO DE LA VEGA edited & translated by JOHN DENT-YOUNG

2010-12-05T22:30:00.000-08:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Selected Poems of Garcilaso de la Vega edited and translated by John Dent-Young
(The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009)

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)

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)

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.

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.

For example, here is Sonnet XXIII:

While colors of the lily and the rose
are displayed within the outline of your face,
and with that look, both passionate and chaste,
storms grow still in the clear light of your eyes;

and while your hair that seems to have been mined
from seams of gold, and seeming too in flight
about that neck, so white, so bravely upright,
is moved and spread and scattered by the wind,

seize the sweet fruits of your joyous spring,
now, before angry time creates a waste,
summoning snow to hide the glorious summit;

the rose will wither in the icy blast
and fickle time will alter everything,
if only to be constant in its habit.(43)

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.

And here is Sonnet XXX subtitled ‘To Boscán from La Goleta’:

Arms, Boscán, and the fury of rampant Mars,
that, cultivating with their modern power
the soil of Africa, persuade the empire
of Rome to burgeon in these parts once more,

have reawakened, brought again to mind,
Italy’s art, Italy’s ancient valor
by means of which, with gallant deeds and power,
Africa was laid low from end to end.

Here, where once the Romans, looting and burning,
kindled profligate flames that left the whole
of Carthage nothing but a name alone,

love invades my thoughts, turning and returning,
to torture and set fire to the anxious soul,
and I in tears and ashes am undone.

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.

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 tercetos encadenados, 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:

Here, Boscán, where the great Mantuan locates
the ashes of old Anchises, the illustrious
Trojan, whose name and fame he celebrates
            all of us are gathered under the glorious
banners of the present-day African
Caesar, we who returned victorious;
            but we differ in our aims, for some can
hardly wait to gather in the harvest,
to reap the crop that with our sweat was sown,
            while others, who say that virtue is their friend(99)

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 endecasilabos sueltos, 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 XEclogue.

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:

Of two shepherd’s melodious laments,
Salicio’s and also Nemoroso’s,
I shall sing, reproducing their complaints;
to that delicious song the curious sheep
listened, forgetful of the joys of feeding,
while they attended to the tale of love.
            You, who through your deeds have earned
            a worldwide reputation
            and title beyond compare,
whether at this moment given over
entirely to the government of your realm
of Alba, or whether engaged elsewhere
            resplendent in your armor,
taking the warlike role of Mars on earth,(121)

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:

            Even in the depths of winter, the water
of this clear spring is mild and sweet, while in
the summer, snow itself’s not cooler.
            O limpid stream, how clearly when I look in
your water I see in memory the day
that has my soul still shivering and burning!
            In your transparency I saw my joy
become all muddled and confused; when I
next saw you I lost my true companion.(149)

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 octave real, and I have attempted, where possible, to follow the rhyme scheme (abababcc).”(119) We can see the effect of this in the first stanza:

That pure and honorable sense of duty,
illustrious and most beautiful Maria,
I have had to celebrate your beauty,
your wit and intelligence and your rare
quality, despite the adverse destiny
that forces me to turn my steps elsewhere,
will always be in me as firmly fixed
as the body and the soul are intermixed.(181)

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 The Courtier. He also provides extensive notes to each of the translations.

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.

*****

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

MONEY FOR SUNSETS by ELIZABETH J. COLEN

2010-12-05T22:20:00.000-08:00

KATHRYN K. STEVENSON Reviews

Money for Sunsets by Elizabeth J. Colen
(Steel Toe Books, Bowling Green, KY, 2010)

Money for Sunsets, 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.

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.”

The images foreshadow an end.

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).

That’s what Colen does here. Divided into “Your arsenal,” “silence,” and “refraction,” the poems in Money for Sunsets, 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.

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.”

Making it clean is not that simple, though, for “Love is never clean like memory.”

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?

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.”

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.

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.”

Or in “If Not for the Boy,” where, “Upstairs, my mother has become an end table”:

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” (?).

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.”

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 to him”?

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.

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 do 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.

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 disguised by chronology and causation—but that story is absent, oceanic.

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.

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.

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 must 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 are these people? They’re not subjects here.

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.

You have to go to the ocean sometimes to see what will wash up. The ocean is honest, doesn’t hide what happened anywhere.

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.”

Money for Sunsets 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.

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.

*****

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.

VANCOUVER: A POEM by GEORGE STANLEY and IN THE MILLENIUM by BARRY MCKINNON

2010-12-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

Vancouver: A Poem by George Stanley
(New Star, Vancouver, 2008)

and

in the millenium by Barry McKinnon
(New Star, Vancouver, 2009)

TWO PLEASE

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.

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. Vancouver: A Poem (New Star, 2008) and in the millenium (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.

“Vancouver is breaking through
your understandable reticence.”
(Stanley 42)

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.

“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. Walking Vancouver: 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).

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 Coming Community: “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, The Fire 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).

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 Bach’s belief 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).

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” (The the. 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 Vancouver: A Poem, it is what makes the poetry insist that “this is not my city” (3 & 74).

In Barry McKinnon’s slightly more recent publication, in the millenium, his adopted city of Prince George figures heavily and centrally. In “Prince George (Part One),” dedicated to Stanley, we have these gists and piths:

when a city becomes its coldest hearts
we live in the illusion of its habitat
                   (105)

the they. The who, the us in the disintegrated
disintegration—nothing can be known; its own hopeless
statement—the north / everywhere (but not revealed)
                   (106)

the city exists / knows itself / cannot change
easily
                   (108)

the density of context peeled was revealed to a momentary
sense of simplicity, that it could be known, and therefore, the
man could know himself, being a city : unto himself
                   (109)

to work
a language in its attempt to equal
the anxious swirl in an angular world of charts, graphs—
the gizmoed patter claimed & believed as real—that any power
required subservience to its whacko notions, be revealed as public
sense: not agreement, but truth of one’s condition faced
                   (109)

in shame that now the city can not be made
                   (107)

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).

This poet defines his defiances in a Philly Talk “post Response: Supplement” inserted in “Head Out” for his great companion Cecil Giscombe (whose own Giscombe Road 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 in 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 at the same time—to reveal accurate processes of mind and life moving to their jagged truths” (68).

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” (Vancouver 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” (Vancouver 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” (Vancouver 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.

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 At Andy’s (2000) and read “The Puck.” For an envoi to the Olympics, we can borrow from Stanley’s “Word On the Street” in Vancouver:

Vancouver will continue on in peace,
undeserved, no, deserved,
by the ones with no guile in their hearts,
no time for guile—

lose your need
to be one with (them)
(118)

And from “The Tank”:

The mind is this street
only the interiors
around it
arranged
differently
(124)

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” (The Holy Forest. Berkeley: UC P, 2006: 144). If, we should say with Barry McKinnon, “its activity is also its own resistance” (in 107).

*****

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.

AS IT TURNED OUT by DMITRY GOLYNKO

2010-12-05T22:05:00.000-08:00

ERIC DICKEY Reviews

As It Turned Out by Dmitry Golynko, Edited by Eugene Ostashevsky. Translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Rebecca Bella with Simona Schneider.
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2008)

As It Turned Out 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.

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.

The opening section Passing the Church of the French Consulate makes a strong statement about liberation and abandoning old ways of thinking.

I stole gooseberries, crowfoots in the municipal gardens of Tartu,
tried on the pike skeleton of the mahogany cathedral
in place of my vertebral column—the card I got, got topped,
the Mammy of God placed into my hands a vial—it shattered

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.

The third section, Elementary Things, 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.

an elementary thing respects the poverty
of logic, language, the homeless, so on
many birds have gone dead and blind
not just swallows but also wagtails
warblers, chaffinches, corncrakes
rereads the ornithological atlas
the pushers gone extinct and the madcap hawkers
it’s time for the elementary thing to skedaddle
before somebody took care of it

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?

In the fourth section of the book, The Faun and the Few, 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.

In “the faun and the unskilled” Golynko writes:

the faun knows how to look after
cheer up, scrub a pot
fill out necessary forms
betray someone, when it’s unbearable
suck caramels and cherry drops
nibble on halvah, clean fennel
get cash from the beat-up bankomat
the unskilled is also completely used to
breaking it down, when necessary

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.

In the fifth section, The Revered Categories, 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:

the situation’s desperate, there will be gossip
a femme fatale, gonorrhea, knocked up, the breeding ground
of seals, squeak-thing, rattle thing, one hoo-hoo

gone mute, third-grade cursive without pressure,
recommendations for users, hoarfrost on, shit,
what are you after, thrice-kissed in Christ, dillweed
crushed fine, what a numbskull, missed the date,

the testosterone level, ananke kicked in
lips search for someone, is the prisoner
whistling, is the mariner, the kid who stayed back
got a banana

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?

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.

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:

whip it out, yeah, nail it down
a man in a black raincoat
looks at himself, what a
stud, they’ll give it to him

right here, and where he’s going
further on also, and he knows
how to take it, sour cranberries
in a soaking bowl, the choice is huge

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.

The final section of the book, For The Checkmark Or For, 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”

a pizza slice of chinese make
is taken out of the refrigerator
freezer crystals flow all over the frying pan
but not out of love, likewise two chicken

cutlets lie together on the bed of a griddle
out of desperation, having imagined
the continuation of their union, we’ll have
to hold our noses, we’re not savages after all

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.

*****

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 Blazevox, Rhino, West Wind Review, Manzanita Quarterly, International Poetry Review, and Blue Collar Review. 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 To Topos: Poetry International and lives in Corvallis, Oregon.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF GRAVITY AND GRACE by ERNESTO PRIEGO

2010-12-05T22:00:00.000-08:00

PEG DUTHIE Engages

the amazing adventures of Gravity and Grace by Ernesto Priego
(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2009)

Quirky, yet profound. Template-bound, yet idiosyncratic. Sandman meets xkcd. 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 Sandman or xkcd 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.

In his afterword, the author states that “writing the poems in this book felt like reading a monthly comic book,” that “The Amazing Adventures of G & G 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 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Abbey Road, Stan Getz, Billie Holiday, Dolce & Gabbana, The Blue Angel, and a host of other creations and brands.

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”).

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.”

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 Nouvelle Vague film, where the characters are at once both larger than life and yet specific to the moment we happen to peer at them.

*****

Peg Duthie shares a house in Nashville with a tall man, a large dog, and a short piano. She blogs about poetry at Vary the Line and tweets about it now and then (@zirconium).

UNTAM'D WING: RIFFS ON ROMANTIC POETRY by JEFFREY C. ROBINSON

2010-12-05T21:56:00.000-08:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

UNTAM’D WING: Riffs on Romantic Poetry by Jeffrey C. Robinson
(Station Hill of Barrytown, 2010)

LETTER TO GLASGOW, 12-03-2010

“Someone said it… no great art without great theories… & I believed in it… and so I have great theories…”
- Ted Berrigan
Interview and Reading on In The American Tree, hosted by Lyn Hejinian & Kit Robinson, KPFA, Berkeley, 1978 available on-line @ PennSound

Jeffrey C. Robinson’s cuts & re-mixes, “riffs” as he terms them, call to mind, as Anne Waldman notes in her P(riff)Face, the “minimalization a la Ronald Johnson” evident in his R A D I OS where Milton’s Paradise Lost is played as source text, along with the narrative commentaries and poetic re-imaginings of Keats’ life & work in Tom Clark’s Junkets on a Sad Planet or the similar fun-jinks found in his The Mutabilitie of the Englishe Lyrick. 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.

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.

Lying on banks in tall grasses begetting begetting
              Again again the wandering cry lying together
           Still begetting the breathing beloved wet songs
              Full fledged sparrows mouths closed so full
Nests            dull evening lying full close breathing
           Wm. met me lying breathing close the wandering
                    Cry Cuckoo coo continually Wm. met me
I and Wm. and swallows and thrushes employed lying
           Breathing breaking down failing lying down again
                 Lying on sloping turf melting astonished
         On my couch like the grave employed in bliss
(pg. 71)

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.

                                             Single
                                 Thrilling
                      Nightingale
Breaking
           Bending
                       Things
                                   Singing             -ing
                       Spring-time
            Reaping
                                  Sings
                       Ending
Overflowing
(pg. 36)

“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)

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:
sing
the matchless pleasure
of gypsy girl
stirring air in her
laboring shape
(pg.45)
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)

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)

May sweet May blithe May blithe
Flora blithe May blithe Flora blithe
May blithe blithe blithe Flora from
His couch upstarts blithe Flora blithe
May season blithe May season of
Renewed delicate leafy blithe May
(pg. 82)

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 unfinished song” (pg. 83) and thus “blocks of predictable Romantic idiom” are here merely transformed into blocks of predictable procedural constructs of Modernist experiment.

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,

And very few to love;
Is shining in the sky.
The difference to me!

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)

Beside the springs of Dove.
Half hidden from the eye!
When Lucy ceased to be;

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)

it
            reads
                       the more
                                  richly for it
and will I hope
                       encourage             me to
write
(pg. 94)

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)

A Postlude:

“Graves of Shelley and Keats” (pg. 110)
at the feet of whose long buried bones
Gregory Corso’s fresh (by comparison) ashes
now lie with rent coming due
without other home to turn to
turns out you may evict the dead after all
those who have nowhere else to go
having gone where none know or dare
begs the question
“over time where do poems reside?” (pg. xiii)

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco. His critical essay on Creeley's debt to Stevens is slated to appear in Fulcrum 7 anytime now. Poems and such will be appearing in the next issue of Amerarcana. This Spring Post Apollo Press will publish his "There Are People Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk": A GUSTONBOOK.

NEIGHBOR by RACHEL LEVITSKY

2010-12-05T21:55:00.000-08:00

HARRY THORNE Reviews

Neighbor by Rachel Levitsky
(Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2009)

Love Thy Mystery Neighbor

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, Neighbor: “I miss my nasty neighbor./ Who talks loudly into the night on the phone, when he is not snoring” (“Dawn”).

Neighbor 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 Bomblog, “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.

Neighbor’s first section explicitly connects the narrator’s relationship with her neighbor to wider political concerns:

I’ve decided to use my obsession
with my neighbor as a context
for a discussion of the State.

I confess this isn’t the only thing I want.

(“Neighbor”)

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, Neighbor 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.

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:

I suspect he likes alternative rock
works with computers
and is straight

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?”

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:

SUNLIGHT-AT-DUSK:

If you peer at a 42 degree angle
your feeling state may change.
The butterflies have arrived.

NOETIC N. DELIRIUM:

I am concerned about the safety of the creatures
in the sea. It has been so long.
What are they saying these days?

“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 Neighbor, 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.

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.”

Despite this hopeful image and the movement towards increased intimacy, the book ends on a note of resignation. In the final poem of Neighbor, “Proximity, Intimacy, Affinity,” religion comes between I and You: “when you believe in god, none of you make sense.” Communication is once again stymied:

try as I might
to envision

the square upon which
the corners are not churches

I have failed
to replace them.

While the final lines might speak of failure, Neighbor 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 Neighbor, 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.

*****

Harry Thorne's poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Chain, How2, Octopus Magazine, and Textual Practice. His essay on Ted Berrigan's C Magazine can be found in Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School edited by Daniel Kane and published by Dalkey Archive Press. He lives in Beacon, NY.

"EL DORADO" by EDGAR ALLAN POE

2010-12-05T21:50:00.000-08:00

MICHAEL POLLOCK Engages

"El Dorado" by Edgar Allan Poe, 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
(Stonehenge Books, Mexico, 2009)

[Editor's Note: The text below is based on a conversation with my son, Michael Pollock]

After reading Edgar Allan Poe's "El Dorado", Michael drew the following poem in response:

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.

*****

Michael Pollock is in 8th grade. The son of Galatea Resurrects' editor, he is being raised with the idea that poetry is part of everyday life.

FIRE EXIT by ROBERT KELLY

2010-12-05T21:45:00.000-08:00

BARBARA ROETHER Reviews

Fire Exit by Robert Kelly
(Black Widow Press, Boston, MA, 2009)

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 Fire Exit and sets it clearly apart from other work.

A book length poem of more than 200 pages, comprised of 132 separate numbered poems, Fire Exit 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 Fire Exit 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.

poetry is language sitting around
gossiping about its family
talking drunk or sober always about itself

because as the sophophilers explained
all that language really
understands is language

all it can talk about is self
maybe itself or maybe another self
but never the actual selfless other

the thing attended to, the grail out there
here where we have come
flapping our hands like exhausted eunuchs

wondering what turn of the cloth is left
to puzzle our cunning fingers
before the naked empress stands alone

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?

This is a primary issue in Fire Exit, if we approach language with a sense that meaning is an inconvenience, if we stay safely in flarf, or nomina babara, et al, as Kelly writes in #74, is our poetry then “gilded or gelded” and is either a good idea?

free language abandons standard function
and sneaks into your mind direct
without the “inconvenience of meaning”

natural noise ill-guided by our codes
gilded? gelded? both of these
nomina barabara without a hint of child

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.

When I am inside you I don’t understand
The way you understand yourself
Everything else is a meadow

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 yourself. 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 Fire Exit, 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:

irrelevant grammar of flowers
no one picked fall from the sky
still it’s dark in here, gasses form

Irrelevant grammar of flowers is a compelling image on its own, but in the next line we find that these flowers, no one picked, are falling from the sky, 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.

In this world of the actual that exists beyond the Fire Exit 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.

with a sound like trumpets riffing under the sea
to wash your face
light cleans your ears he thought

remember to forget
this later, the true
nature of nothing is another thing.

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.

light is like a map
the word it shows
a lost river off the Amazon and never come home

to that thick Greek Grammar saved his life
night after night
when the spooks walked out of his head and lurked

soft as silverfish in cellar dust
since grammar seemed the safest art
no monsters vex a conjugating scholar

and Mahler hums on the record changer…

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 Fire Exit 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 scholar and Mahler 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.

one word itself is a whole religion
no I answered, here there is no is,
we have sailed at last beyond the proposition

touch me it said and someone did
here all the stories end
after seven hundred years of snowy searching

bruised by implication
the book falls silent
life itself is an encryption-

the history of literature tries to conceal
how each age hides this secret
writing is always to someone.

It’s hard to say whether he would be read more if he wrote less; or whether a work with the atomic power of Fire Exit, 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.

*****

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 The Middle Atlas, and is at work on a novel about Ohio.

SITUATIONS by LAURA CARTER

2010-12-05T21:40:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Situations by Laura Carter
(Available for download at Ungovernable Press, 2008)

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!

Narrative is story, histoire, 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 Situations.

Situations 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. Situations 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.

Situations 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 Situations sounds too thoughtfully Wastelandish, but imperative delights abound.

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 O strikes me the same way.

I do not want to sound negative when so much here is appealing. Nuggets like the following pop from the flow of verses:

            Meaning as an EVERYTHING:
                        the poor women are still buying fish
                                    & photography moves in inches
(“Silver Ocean”)

Or this:

Lamented culture of unease: pity
the anchor its lack of luster,
(“Taxi”)

Or this Blakean reply:

the tiger is a machine burning bright
with ribbons tied to the ordinary!
(“Reversal Leads Further”)

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 the author. Think of the two goalposts of the so called New York School of Poetry, Ashbery and O’Hara, and their use of first person.

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 one, 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.

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. Situations 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.

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?

She is a poet, for sure. Situations 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.

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.

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.

*****

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. / Simple Theory / (Potes & Poets Press) was his first book. He maintains a blog called Tributary (http://tribute-airy.blogspot.com/), and a life with Beth and Erin. He is also the author of DAYS POEM, Vol. I and II (Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco).

1000 SONNETS by TIM ATKINS

2010-12-05T21:30:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

1000 SONNETS by Tim Atkins
(if p then q, Manchester, U.K., 2010)

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one
way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out
would be another, and truer, way.

clean washed sea

The flowers were

These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will,
something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the
truth, perhaps, but—yourself. It is you who made this,
therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on

to divide all
—John Ashbery/The New Spirit

The book's epigraph by John Ashbery, and epigraphing this review, is so lovely, and quite fittingly indicates the underlying concept to Tim Atkins’ 1000 SONNETS. 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 The New Spirit's excerpt, is that the poems—with all of its gaps—be as moving as Ashbery’s epigraph.

To cut to the chase, these poems are wonderful.

It’s been a pleasure to take Atkins’ 1000 SONNETS 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 1000 Avant Garde Plays” (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:

SONNET 62

………………….
Took
………………….
………, truly, stroke
.
.
.
2/3223/3223/3223/2/3223//
.
.
.
Section
/
breaks//Borough

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”…?

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:

SONNET 42

In the beginning
…………………………………..
among genuine monsters
………………….
………………….
entry in which
……………………….
brachiopods on mopeds
sine b = constant tide
……………………………..
……………………………..
hands hot & moist
east of evesham
, ride

Even the title may hint at incompletenesses, at absence. It says 1000 SONNETS 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 THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. 1 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 1000 SONNETS, 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.

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.

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

SONNET 121

Barcelonas
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
dense cones
.
.
.
.

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.

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—

SONNET 2

hark
fog
I
don’t
see
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..
..

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!

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.

Anyway, 1000 SONNETS 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!

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE, William Allegrezza over at p-ramblings HERE and by Leny M. Strobel at Moria Poetry HERE. Mr. Harp also reviews her NOTA BENE EISWEIN over HERE. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY 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.

ESCHATON by MICHAEL HELLER

2010-12-05T21:25:00.000-08:00

ERIC HOFFMAN Reviews

Eschaton by Michael Heller
(Talisman House, Jersey City, N.J., 2009)

Midrashic Explorer

“I think the world is very big, and a piece of canvas is very small.” – George Oppen

Michael Heller’s newest collection, Eschaton, 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, Eschaton 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.

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 opposed, 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 Contemporary Literature, “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.”

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 historicalness of being--of being in this place, in this time.

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 Eschaton is that of Jewish identity, specifically, the Jew as post-Diaspora preserver of culture, of the Jew of the Midrash, as interpreter/explicator.

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 On the Way To Language, 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.”

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 Torah. 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 Exodus 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.”

In his essay, “Diasporic Poetics,” included in his excellent, career-spanning collection Uncertain Poetries, 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 is exilic, and . . . that whatever my religious inclinations, the world has labeled me a Jew.” The epigraph from Ruth, 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 written. He refers to davar, 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 Yod, fist-shaped / with extended finger, marks where the letter / is made free, davar twining aleph into its thing.” The Yod, Heller tells us in his helpful but not ostentatious notes, is an instrument used by a Rabbi to point to words read from the Torah, while aleph 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.”

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?

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:

Wasn’t this how the past
was to come back,
haunting in its dense compactions?

Life as pointillist,
a comic wink of love missed,
of words unsaid,

and only the writing
had been this fog
surrounding”

(“East Hampton Meditations”)

----

You led yourself or were you led by her who once
lived on Cragmont and whose voice has its own sweet
rill running uphill with a freedom teasing you
from any turn or enjambment until sound disappears
into the air, into a wordless breathing of light
the late sun strikes from the bridges and windows.

(“Creeks in Berkeley”)

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.

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 Benjamin, itself derived from Benjamin’s letters, all of it reworked by Heller into the poem's language. The italicized dream portion of the poem (“He climbed a labyrinth, / a labyrinth of stairs, / past other stairways / descending) 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:

They too have created infinities, blind alleys, endless monuments to
iniquities, a multitude of pains for others to bear.

They will outlive their brief immortality and leave a grubby ration of
murderous hopes

(“Letter & Dream of Walter Benjamin”).

The same could be said for our last administration, or to the terrorists that startled and excused them into waging two major wars.

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 September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond 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:

...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.

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.

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. Eschaton registers the increasing refinement of this contemporary master.

*****

Eric Hoffman is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which was The Life of An Unfortunate Artist (Rag and Bone Books, 2009). Last year, his George Oppen festschrift All This Strangeness was published in Big Bridge. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and son.

100 NOTES ON VIOLENCE by JULIE CARR

2010-12-05T21:20:00.000-08:00

JON CURLEY Reviews

100 Notes on Violence by Julie Carr
(Ahsata Press, Boise, Idaho, 2010)

The dark meditations of 100 Notes on Violence 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.

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.

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:

I would seriously propose a theology of language…This would
comprise a critical examination of the grounds for claiming
(a) that the shock of semantic recognition must also be a shock
of ethical recognition; and that this is the action of grace in one
of its minor, but far from trivial types; (b) that the art and literature
of the late twentieth century require a memorializing, a memorizing
of the dead… (1)

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.

In Note 59, Carr writes:

The book about violence must be a book of quotations.
For everyone speaks about violence.
Is a book of memories, for everyone’s life is riddled.

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 100 Notes on Violence 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.

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 Notes 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.”(2)

_____________
1. In Collected Critical Writings. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 405.

2. Fanny Howe. The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Art and Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003) p. 23.

*****

Jon Curley's first collection, New Shadows, was released last year by Dos Madres Press. His critical study, Poets and Partitions: Confronting Communal Identities in Northern Ireland, will be published next year. He lives in New Jersey, where he teaches in the Humanities Department of New Jersey Insitute of Technology.

NETS by JEN BERVIN and THE MS OF M Y KIN by JANET HOLMES

2010-12-05T21:15:00.000-08:00

GENEVIEVE KAPLAN Reviews

Nets by Jen Bervin
(Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, 2005)

and

THE MS OF M Y KIN by Janet Holmes
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2009)

Even at first glance, Nets 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.

The contents of Nets 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 Nets are cleverly presented here: http://www.conjunctions.com/webcon/bervin.htm.) 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 Nets (itself taken from Shakespeare’s title: THE SONNETS 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.

While the individual poems of Nets 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.

Janet Holmes’s THE MS OF M Y KIN 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: http://www.shearsman.com/archive/samples/2009/JHsampler.pdf and here: http://www.coconutpoetry.org/holmes1.htm), 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).

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 // cheated / 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.

While the title, THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON 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). )

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.

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 Radi Os, Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow, Tom Phillips’s A Humument) 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.

*****

Genevieve Kaplan's poems and essays have appeared in a variety of journals, including Jacket, Gulf Coast, and jubilat. Her first book of poems, In the ice house, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press, and she edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, which publishes literary translations.

TWO HAY(NA)KU ANTHOLOGIES edited/curated by IVY ALVAREZ, JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN, ERNESTO PRIEGO, EILEEN TABIOS, JEAN VENGUA & MARK YOUNG

2010-12-05T21:10:00.000-08:00

AILEEN IBARDALOZA Reviews

The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, Curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego & Eileen Tabios
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco and xPress(ed), Finland, 2010)

and

The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II, Edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco and xPress(ed), Finland, 2008)

Encounters on a Kitchen Table: Miss Daisy Hawkins, an old Sinatra song and the Daisy Chain Poems

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.

To me, the process (and genesis of Eleanor Rigby) is somewhat akin to the history of the Hay(na)ku, 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 Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac 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]

In August 2010, Meritage Press and xPress(ed) released The Chained Hay(na)ku Project 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 renku, a modern style of Japanese collaborative poetry; and again, McCartney's Eleanor Rigby where lines and ideas had been contributed by others (such as John Lennon, Ringo Starr et al). [4]

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.

JOHN (Claremont, CA): I could be done, if everyone wants to be done, but, really, I’m not quite done.

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]

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:

Each
book stays
still like clay,

while
the moon
pretends to marry

signing
her name
with purple blood. [6]
…
See how poetry
lit me
purple

from within, then
turned me
blind. [7]

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”.

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]

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:

Planes
And trains
Surgically removed me

From
The familiar
contours of home.
…
Home,
Where the
Heart bleeds on,

Transplanted.
Another self
Translates another truth,
[9]

“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:

the dunes mourn
the leaving
waves

the waves mourn
the towering
dunes
…
yellow
pages stain
chained in time

faint
in tidal
pools so shallow

where starfish swallow
a lemon
moon. [10]

“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:

To
Cap or
Not to cap… [Jean Gier]

Is
that the
Question, you ask? [Tom Novack]

…

The
painted word
makes me sing [Joselyn Ignacio]

But
Does cap
Make you sing? [Kate Coulter] [11]

“Daisy Chain Poems” by Jean Vengua, Michael Fink and Margo Ponce is rhythmic, delightful, whimsical, with some parts unmistakably suggestive of folk tales:

Gloss,

lady floss,

shiny men spin

red

candy resin:

gingerbread grin. Bring

toil

bring trouble

stir the bubbles [12]

The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II, 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.

“A Stop & Shop in Connecticut” by Scott Keeney is amusing in its mischievousness:

O cover girl
who has
undone

all
but—oops—
one blouse button, [13]

“Modernité” by Rebeka Lembo is striking in its incantatory tone and skilled use of repetition:

grief
that knows
not of tears

grief
that comes
out as noise

grief
that knows
not of fears

grief
that comes
out as voice.
[14]

Ernesto Priego, employing the ducktail and reverse hay(na)ku forms, writes one of the most evocative and melodic poems in the collection:

Before dying it
is said
Memory

brings back all
you once
loved.
…
I wish I
had that
dragonfly’s

memory span, to
forget you
now,

before finally dying
and seeing
you

back. [15]

“Respiration” by Christopher Rieder is catchy in tone, and lovely as Sinatra’s head filled with “something [un]stupid”:

(“fill
my head
with your perfume,”

to
paraphrase the
old Sinatra song)
…
breathe
out; breathe
in, breathe out.

I
inhale, and
catch your scent;

I
exhale, and
sigh your name. [16]

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 The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, 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]

----------
[1] Gary Lehmann, “It All Came Down To a Serious Relationship With Eleanor Rigby,” Eclectica Magazine, accessed October 14, 2010, http://www.eclectica.org/v9n3/lehmann.html.
[2] Eileen Tabios, “The History of the Hay(na)ku,” in The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II, edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young (St. Helena & San Francisco, California: Meritage Press and Puhos, Finland: xPress(ed), 2008), 134-141.
[3] “Introduction,” The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, 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.
[4] The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 206.
[5] “Four Skin Confessions,” The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, pp. 115, 117.
[6] “Four Skin Confessions,” p. 7.
[7] “Four Skin Confessions,” p. 29.
[8] “Four Skin Confessions,” p. 146.
[9] “Transplant,” pp. 94-95.
[10] “lemon moon,” pp. 60-61.
[11] “Editorial Hay(na)ku,” p. 81.
[12] “Daisy Chain Poems,” p. 69.
[13] “A Stop & Shop in Connecticut,” The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II, p. 55.
[14] “Modernité”, p. 67.
[15] Untitled, p. 93.
[16] “Respiration,” pp. 100-101.
[17] There was a prior first volume of hay(na)ku: the now out-of-print The First Hay(na)ku Anthology co-edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young.
[18] “Four Skin Confessions,” The Chained Hay(na)ku, p.116.

*****

Aileen Ibardaloza is the author of TRAJE DE BODA: poems (Meritage Press, 2010) and associate editor of Our Own Voice Literary Ezine.

COLLECTED POEMS by DYLAN THOMAS

2010-12-05T21:05:00.000-08:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas
With introduction by Paul Muldoon
(New Directions, New York, 2010)

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.

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.”

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.

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 18 Poems. 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, Under Milkwood.

Thomas’s ‘Prologue’, which opens the poems, is a prime example of his overt overextension of sound:

O my ruffled ring dove
In the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent stock,
Coo rooing the woods’ praise,
Who moons her blue notes from her nest(xxiii)

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.

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’:

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.(1)

‘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.

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.

*****

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

2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS by JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN (1)

2010-12-05T21:00:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS by John Bloomberg-Rissman
(Laughing Ouch Cube Publications / Leafe Press, Nottingham, U.K. and Claremont, CA, 2010)

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 HERE; the series is available HERE). 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).

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

2ND NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS, REGULATION AND POLICY MANAGEMENT BRANCH, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS AND REHABILITATION

by John Bloomberg-Rissman

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.

Because this was an editing document, it contained various editing formats, like the underline indicating added text and the ~~strike-through~~ 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.

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.

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:

Inmates sentenced to death shall have the opportunity to choose to have the punishment imposed by lethal gas or lethal injection.

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 Galatea Resurrects reviewer Steven Fama notes about a similar project also released this year:

"Tragodía – 1: Statement of Facts, 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)...

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 2ND NOTICE..., without needing to immerse one's self in actually reading every word of the manifested poetry project. In the case of 2nd NOTICE..., 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.

Do I shortshrift 2ND NOTICE... by not reading the whole thing before writing up 95% of the review? You can judge me by writing a review of it; a review copy is available through Galatea Resurrects! 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.

It should be noted, though, that Bloomberg-Rissman seems to suggest that 2ND NOTICE... extends the genre of art being created through recognition/finding. The cover of 2ND NOTICE... presents three statements and its authors underneath ~~strike-throughs~~:

Beantwortung Der Frage: Wast Ist Aufklarung? ("Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?")
--Immanuel Kant

Notes on Conceptualism
--Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place

"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!"
--Gary Sullivan

The above are replaced by

"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'."
--John Bloomberg-Rissman

Now, I've said I admire the conceptual underpinning. But where does it get tired? At the point of 2ND NOTICE... 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")

If the inmate continues to refuse to comply with orders, an emergency cell extraction will be authorized.

attests to the power of its words (an "emergency cell extraction"?! ) and why 2ND NOTICE... 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:

Disposable gown
Facehead protection
Rubber gloves
Padded gloves
Leg protection

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.

*****

A fabulously effective part of 2nd NOTICE... 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:

The root of the illustration is 2ND NOTICE...'s description of the trays presenting lethal injection chemicals and salines:

(1) Two identical trays shall be prepared.

(A) Tray A shall be color-coded red and will be the primary tray used for the lethal injection process.

(B) Tray B shall be colored-coded (sic) blue and will be the backup tray.

(2) Each tray shall have eight color-coded syringes to match the tray and be labeled by content and sequence of administration as follows:

#1 60cc syringe 1.5 grams Sodium Thiopental
#2 60cc syringe 1.5 grams Sodium Thiopental
#3 60cc syringe 50cc saline flush
#4 60cc syringe 50 milligrams Pancuronium Bromide...
#5 60cc syringe 50cc saline flush
#6 60cc syringe 100 milliequivalents Potassium Chloride
#7 60cc syringe 100 milliequivalents Potassium Chloride
#8 60cc syringe 50 cc saline flush

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.

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 hand (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.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE, William Allegrezza over at p-ramblings HERE and by Leny M. Strobel at Moria Poetry HERE. Mr. Harp also reviews her NOTA BENE EISWEIN over HERE. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY 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.

NOT BLESSED by HAROLD ABRAMOWITZ

2010-12-05T20:50:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Not Blessed by Harold Abramowitz
(Trenchart: The Maneuvers Series, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles, 2010)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each section runs two or three pages in length. Abramowitz writes simply, for the most part. Many sections begin in media res. Repetition of phrases occurs subtly, provoking vaguely like a gnat.

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.

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.

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.

One might categorize Not Blessed with, say, The Ring and the Book or Rashomon, 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.

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 The Third Policeman. 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.

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.

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.

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 Not Blessed so the first time. Later readings can partake of comparison. The rhythm of repetition and key change produces a subtle dazzle.

Not Blessed 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.

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. Not Blessed is not roisterous like O’Brien’s works, but it contents me to think Abramowitz honours O’Brien with this work.

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. Not Blessed 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.

*****

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. / Simple Theory / (Potes & Poets Press) was his first book. He maintains a blog called Tributary (http://tribute-airy.blogspot.com/), and a life with Beth and Erin. He is also the author of DAYS POEM, Vol. I and II (Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco).

A IS FOR ANNE by PENELOPE SCAMBLY SCHOTT

2010-12-05T20:45:00.000-08:00

MOIRA RICHARDS Reviews

A is for Anne by Penelope Scambly Schott
(Turning Point, Cincinnati, OH, 2007)

What more enticing way to learn history than through poetry? Penelope Scambly Schott’s A is for Anne tells, with poems, the story of a woman of whom a Reverend Peter said something along the lines of:

You have stepped out of your place: You
have rather been a Husband than a Wife, and a Preacher
than a Hearer, and a Magistrate than a Subject.

--“My Second Trial: March 22, 1638: Day Two: the afternoon on which I am Cast Out”

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:

For the man is not of the woman,
but the woman is of the man.

--“Unpleasant Weeks Aboard the Griffin”

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:

… my father’s dearest scholar:

see how he leads me through deep waters.
Denied his parish, my father ravishes me

with argument of fiercest precision,
chapter and verse correctly quoted.

“Daughter of a Dissenter”

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…

Papa’s finger longer than my hand.
My older sisters learn their stitches,
and I, my letters. Our Queen reads,
so why not Anne?

--“Reverend Francis Marbury is under House Arrest for Preaching against the Church of England”

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:

                                 …Who said

it was duty? I grow in beauty
under his hands. To know

my husband as Eve knew Adam
as Rachel knew Jacob, as Mother,

Father. It’s a wise God
devised this jointure of flesh.

                      I applaud His gentle rod.

                                 --“I Like It Well”

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,

An ever larger meeting. They spill
from parlour to kitchen.

So many listeners. I am sure
of myself in my husband’s chair.

--“Now Also on Thursday Nights”

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),

If my dear father were alive today,
I know exactly what he’d say: Piffle.

As I do too.

--“The Great Comet of 1618”

A is for Anne brings its sassy protagonist to life. She is bullied, betrayed by friends, and even manipulated in way reminiscent of recent political events:

Is Boston too small for more than one opinion?
If am not with them, must I be against them?

--“Private Interrogation at the Home of Mr. Cotton, October 25, 1636”

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: http://www.annehutchinson.com

*****

Moira Richards lives in South Africa and hangs out here
and here.

"GOTHENBURG" FROM THREE GEOGAOPHIES: A MILKMAID'S GRIMOIRE by ARIELLE GUY

2010-12-05T20:40:00.000-08:00

PEG DUTHIE Engages

“Gothenburg” from Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid’s Grimoire by Arielle Guy
(ypolita press, 2007)

For me, reading the chapbook “Gothenburg” was like perusing the transcript of a sketchbook. On some pages, the narrator shares her thoughts in the form of prose paragraphs. On other pages, they appear as short, irregular fragments—too orderly and deliberately positioned to be described as islands or floaters, but the white space between and around the phrases immense and present as the texts it surrounds. The unconventional punctuation (including dashes following commas, and spaces preceding colons and semicolons) contributes to the impression of stop-and-start jottings—of someone repeatedly distracted as she tries to set down her thoughts.

The dropping of vowels and other departures from formal spelling also foster the sense of haste—and also of intimacy. The narrator trusts whomever is reading her words to decipher them, either by knowing her well enough or by taking the time to sound out the missing and the approximate. This is particularly true within “Geogaphy”:

My eye in high winter
one hpon, delicate llid.

Hesisation. “When do I get out?”tarnilla asks.
Letters, numbers, script we read
changed symbols.

Pakebi, ose
theere light in the orthouse, flesh in the whell.

Trhe way disaster strikes. of feather.

dhattaered clavicle, houseing heart.
-unleashed on the siuspected : pwettern of oil in brouth

I still don’t have a handle on whether there’s more to the word “Geogaphy” than just the missing “r,” although I would hazard that there’s a playfulness on display: the entire chapbook is full of unexpected space, so one could argue that it’s an exhibit of gaps rather than graphs. For instance, in “Prayer,” the visual delay between “recognition’” and “: this happened before” conveys a pause in the narrator’s own processing of her surroundings—a long gulp of breath between seeing something and connecting it to the known:

recognition’ :this happened before,

A few lines later, there’s a similar stretch of space that suggests a search for just the right word:

fossil-rich: blooming on the —curve.

The dash in front of “curve” portrays the suddenness of locking onto that just-right word.

“Gothenburg” is a sampler of mystery and texture. I found myself less interested in the overall narrative and more in lingering on certain choice phrases, such as

Space like a period within outstretched cloths [“Threadnotes”]

Stronghold the heart in a paper bag, bound with string and string and string [“Telemetry”]

glossaries in tight braids, letters arranged as silence [“Avar”]

one window lying justified at our feet [“Incline”]

etched into my hand with the pin containing your borough [“Book of Constellations”]

“Gothenburg” is populated with boats and tarot cards, windows and fish. Michael Cowell’s cover features a woman in a plain dress, cards spilling from her left palm. Did the man standing behind her jar her hand, or is he providing her someone to lean against? The cards seem almost garish compared to the somber palette used for the rest of the scene—the washed-out blue of the harbor sky, the stark black cranes, the brown and gray specks and spatters that both frame and stain the piece. The rough, jagged shapes in the foreground of the back cover—are they chunks of city concrete or the backs of abandoned cards? Like the texts inside, the illustration contains hints of both decision and stagnation, complementing the mood of observations such as “even in summer, the dark was deep” (“Book of Constellations”), as well as the inventory of curiosities such as (within the same poem) a map that depicts a fortune-teller sketching out the patterns of the stars in red.

*****

Peg Duthie shares a house in Nashville with a tall man, a large dog, and a short piano. She blogs about poetry at Vary the Line and tweets about it now and then (@zirconium).

DISJUNCTIVE POETICS: FROM GERTRUDE STEIN AND LOUIS ZUKOFSKY TO SUSAN HOWE by PETER QUARTERMAIN

2010-12-05T20:31:00.000-08:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe by Peter Quartermain
(Cambridge University Press, New York, 1992. digital reissue 2008)

Peter Quartermain is one of those great critical writers ranking along with Marjorie Perloff, Helen Vendler and Rachel Blau Duplessis. He taught at the University of British Columbia, in Canada, for over 30 years retiring in 1999. He and his wife, Meredith Quartermain, a gifted writer herself, ran Nomados Press where they published chapbooks. The poets covered in this book have been his interest for a considerable time. Thus, he brings a wealth of insight and knowledge to bear on their work.

This breadth of knowledge becomes evident immediately in his extensive and well-wrought introduction. Take, for instance, this statement from p. 9:

Meaning is problematic for each of the writers discussed in these essays, and it is precisely that problem which makes their work so intransigent and so attractive. Stein’s writing foregrounds linguistic rather than thematic or narrative procedures and connections while demonstrating that coding is not the motive for writing, or rather, that decoding is not where it leads. Writing does not bend toward a singular Truth...Characteristically narrative, Bunting’s writing moves meaning to the periphery, as does Zukofsky’s, giving primacy to sound: ‘the meaning is hardly ever of any importance,’ he said; and he once praised Persian music to Zukofsky because it is what he called ‘multilinear’ rather than monolinear.

The first chapter focuses on Gertrude Stein. Titled ‘A Narrative of Undermine’: Gertrude Stein’s Multiplicity’, Quartermain focuses initially on some specific examples of Stein’s work. He opens with an examination of her ‘Sentences’ from 1928 before going back to explicate some examples from Tender Buttons, probably Stein’s best known work. Here he does an excellent job About the excerpt from ‘Sentences’, he makes this statement:

The transformational strategies in which her writing abounds render impossible the reader’s possession of meaning, for in rendering inaccessible to the reader the customary contract with the author as authority it undermines the reader’s sense of his/her own certainty as arbiter of the meaning of the text. Stein’s attack on notions of clarity radically undermines our notions of knowledge: It is difficult to know what we know, or even that we know, for we can only see clearly (and therefore ‘know’) what is static. Her writing, completely antiauthoritarian, cultivates its own indeterminacy of meaning because it takes place in and is part of a world that is itself indeterminate.(23)

Calling Lifting Belly “A great love poem, a celebratory hymn to domesticity”, Quartermain goes on

one of the great referential poems of this century, yet, paradoxically, it draws much of its energy, beauty, and humour from its strategy of almost completely withholding reference from the reader. Profoundly transgressive in that it records a relationship that is ‘illicit’ (hence not to be written), the poem assaults the standard interpretative notion of meaning as an ‘essence’ that must be extracted just as it assaults the standard interpretative practice of peeling away ‘layers’ of signification through abstracting and then explicating ‘key’ words and phrases which will ‘unlock’ the text. Lifting Belly is predicated on the paradoxical desire to write out the humour and affection of sexual and domestic love while at the same time preserving and protecting it through a cryptic style that, on one hand, encodes certain references and thus withholds them from the reader, and on the other records in a more-or-less daily journal the events of the day.(29-30)

Unfortunately, when he takes his focus from the specific and enters into a more general discussion, as he does with Patriarchal Poetry or even Lifting Belly, he seems to lose that insightful ability he has already proven capable of.

Fortunately, this is not true of the chapters (2-4) that he devotes to a discussion of Louis Zukofsky. Perhaps this is because of the way he approaches this poet. Chapter 2, titled ‘Recurrencies: No. 12 of Louis Zukofsky’s Anew’, begins this discussion by focusing on the specific allowing him to make such statements as
So, too, with this poem, save that the things in it are bound together by the sight

and more particularly by the sound of the words, by the language, in which they occur, and by the poet who records them. And the poet does not himself presume to gloss either what give rise to the poem, or the poem itself. For to do so would be to say what it ‘means’, and one sense of ‘mean’, we should recall, is to intend, to have intentions. Instead, the poem enjoins us to stare in wonder, as well as to stare, wondering(55)

He concludes

The dynamics of the poem arise, in part at least, from the tension between a desire to let the reader into the poem, and an urge to keep the reader out lest in its ease of entrance the poem disappear. And both feelings border on necessity, for the poem’s existence. The pressures thus generated shape the rhythm of the poem, as well as compress the syntax. What results is a tough notty Grace; read the poem aloud, and notice the transformations – sight, sound, and sense.(59)

In the next chapter, titled ‘Instant Entirety: Zukofsky’s ‘A’, he provides an overview of Zukofsky’s lifelong poem – a poem Zukofsky spent 26 years writing. Recognizing the problems with the writing of a long poem of this nature, problems which Basil Bunting had warned Zukofsky of, Quartermain states that “What is most immediately evident, however, is that Zukofsky tackles the formal problems time poses in the composition of a long poem by deliberately building discontinuities into its structure.”(60) Quartermain then goes on to state that Zukofsky had learned a valuable lesson from watching Chaplin’s Modern Times, this lesson being the concept of ‘instant entirety’:

This concept of the ‘instant entirety’ has its prosodic implications for conventional views of formal coherence as a consistency of formal repetitions, architecturally or musically predictable, are not available to a poet whose prosody and form, like Zukofsky’s, are so closely linked to his ideas about music. Recognizing that ‘each poem has its own laws’ – that any poem, that is to say, inevitably (be it ever so slightly) modifies its own formal principles as it proceeds – Zukofsky took as a structural principle for ‘A’ the notion of prosodic variety.(62)

Such insights into the overall structure of ‘A’ go into the making of chapter 4, ‘”Not at All Surprised by Science”: Louis Zukofsky’s First Half of ‘A’ – 9’. Beginning with what Quartermain refers to as an ‘upside-down sonnet’, Quartermain states that “If you read it aloud without paying much attention to the sense it sounds gorgeous, unlike any other poem in the English language. But the ear seduces you into figuring out what it says, and you pause, and consider.”(71) In addressing himself to the multiplicity of themes that goes into the making of ‘A’, Quartermain says

The vocabulary drawn from Marx misleads the unwary reader, for readers (and indeed some writers!) of poetry in this century have been in the habit of supposing that a poem addresses itself to one frame of reference only, and that if there is any ambiguity in a poem, then that ambiguity serves to intensify and render more complicated a ‘central theme’ of the poem, or to reveal a covert theme or ‘point’ of the poem which must then be reconciled to the overt statement/s the poem makes. Talking of the ‘resolution’ of tensions and ambiguities in the poem, such readers have often identified that resolution with what they also call the poem’s (and the poet’s!) ‘integrity’.(87)

This does not conclude Quartermain’s interest in Zukofsky. It is just the conclusion of discussion of Zukofsky’s poetry per se.

The next two chapters examine influences on Zukofsky’s work beginning with William Carlos Williams and continuing with James Joyce. In ‘‘Actual Word Stuff, Not Thoughts for Thoughts’: Williams and Zukofsky’, Quartermain examines “where the end word of a line...ends one statement but unpunctuated also starts the next, acting as the pivot on which the next line turns...a grammatical/syntactic play known to students of classical Greek, as apo koinou – and in Williams’s hands it is, as syntactic play, as play of meaning, the play of the mind, a form of logopoeia.”(93) Quartermain contends that Zukofsky uses this for different purposes than Williams: “the line break in Williams serves to intensify what the poem says – he is playing around with meaning; but Zukofsky plays around with meaning for the sake of the sound.”(95) In ‘‘Only is Order Othered. Nought is Nulled’: Finnegans Wake and Middle and Late Zukofsky’, Bottom: On Shakespeare and Catullus are considered from a Joycean perspective. Quartermain makes much of the numerology at play in Zukofsky’s Bottom but never once puts forth the idea that this is important to Zukofsky as a result of his Jewish heritage – something Zukofsky greatly played down but is nonetheless present. I confirmed my suspicions of a Kabbalistic influence with Adeena Karasick who advised that “Gematria is Jewish numerology (Kabbalistic).” Quartermain succinctly summarizes this chapter in the following statement:

A salient feature of Finnegan’s Wake is that the very punish nature of the book invites us to translate while ensuring that translation is impossible; a similar punishment lies in store for the reader of Catullus. This strategy, of withholding intelligibility while seemingly offering it, is absolutely essential to both books...It is not, of course, that neither book is intelligible, but that they profoundly disturb our notions of intelligibility: Like the world, the text must stubbornly resist the straitjacket of determined meaning and the singularity of intellectual order. The writing does not offer a vocabulary as a lexicon of terms but as a repertoire of activities..., and the question, reading both Joyce and Zukofsky, is not a question of meaning but of procedure.(118)

Most of the remaining chapters, dealing with such luminaries as Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Guy Davenport, etc. are what I would term ‘throw-away’ (or ‘add-on’, if you prefer) – articles that have been flitting around a desk or filing cabinet for some time and need a place to roost. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense but merely that they are not of the same significance as what has been discussed. There are two that do stand out. The first is the one titled ‘Robert Creeley What Counts’. Now normally, when poetry is discussed, the grammatical construct that incites interest is the verb. In fact, Quartermain, in a backhand approach, cites this brief passage from Stein “why after a thing is named write about it”.(155) Yet, Quartermain finds, in a passage that cites another, contradictory, passage of Stein’s: “Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not...It is a vocabulary entirely based on the noun” before it turns to a passage related to Charles Olson who was alleged to have said to Creeley “A right noun...is worth every color in the business. Actually a noun carries all the color with it, and rightly used, gets back, all that light has done with it, yes?”(156) Thus it would appear that in this lineage the noun has supplanted the importance of the verb. The other chapter is the last which deals with Susan Howe ‘And the Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe’. This is a great introduction to the contortions that Howe puts language through in codifying her poetry.

As a postscript, I was going to combine this review with a review of the 2006 release by Library of America of Louis Zukofsky: Selected Poems, edited and with a foreward by Charles Bernstein which is the most recent release of Zukofsky’s poetry until I discovered that New Directions will be reissuing on December 10, 2010 both Zukofsky’s Anew and his A.

*****

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

GOD DAMSEL by REB LIVINGSTON

2010-12-05T20:30:00.000-08:00

REBECCA LOUDON Reviews

God Damsel by Reb Livingston
(No Tell Books, Reston, VA, 2010)

The first few times I read God Damsel I got stoppered up against what I saw as symbols and word play. I knew there was a depth to the book but my limitations didn't allow me to find it. I'd read a few poems then wait a month, then read a few more. I am a slow reader of poetry but when it's poetry by a writer I know and trust, I'll take the time to allow a book to work on me. The last time I read God Damsel it made me weep. I originally read this book as a kind of Tarot reading and I'm still not entirely convinced that this interpretation is untrue. There are the obvious Major Arcana:

The God Damsel
The Holy Gigolo
The Concubine
The Fishyman
The Apron
The GOURD
The God Shameman
The Woe-dodo
The Tempest
The Shepherd
The Sultana
The Lamb

There is the odd look of the poems—formal, like hymns or Biblical passages but the narrator, the I of these poems, the God Damsel, is slippery. She weaves in and out. She lives in different parts of the body; the womb, the gut, the brain, the mouth, the eyes.

Diminished Prophecy

Do not be at ease, for I will mislead you: I will beam with
one and sweep with the other, for I have two detached
peepers.

Like all mothers, God Damsel has eyes in the back of her head and other places as well. This is a woman with power. This is a sexual, strong voice and believe me, you don't want to fuck with her.

Spell for Ceasing the Pandering to the Daybroken Spiral

O sallow-hued beam who forflakes by supine rod and
who limps on the slack, I will not be slack for you, I
will not suture to you, your blood shall not brine into
mine, for mine embered and calls herself Sea-Slag. If I
am not slack for you, sucking coal from you, your blood
shall not brine into mine. I am once upon a moancroak,
my patronage comes from the torsos of minnows, the
inception of Czarina who submerged into Sultana who
emerged from Damsel who dined with Apron who served
Woe-dodo. I am She who was snatched by the Ostrich-
Goose and clogtied into Bombshell by Harpy; I have
moonwoke, I am the slighted Prophetess of GOURD, I
am shroud-green and gloss!

The above poem is a kind of Genesis, some begets you could say, and possibly a key to the tale of God Damsel though it appears fairly late in the book. This book, this story, is an ancient one. Woman takes a lover and things go well and then things go horribly awry. There is hot blood and spilled blood. There is revenge and spurning and hurt and deep play. Livingston didn't pull any punches in these poems. There are love poems and hate poems and warnings and gasps and wicked funny raunchiness. The narrator lives in Tabernacleville which completely cracks me up every time I read it. I grew up there and most of us have at least driven through it at some point in our lives. It’s upright, uptight, proper, expected, moral, a place where blindness is obligatory. Damsel’s husband snores and gobbles his meals and she feels vacant and bored and trapped and perhaps a little bit unglued.

The First Chronicle of Marriage

When the afflicted meadow prevailed, but the
vestal cottage did not, when the thinking
thingamabob existed, but the hymnotic
tomato did not, when mental somersaults
reigned, but snickering laments did not, when blindness
was obligatory, but trinkets were not, when shepherding
and mewling bellowed, when kitchens had mancatchers
—I was the grandmother of middling gourds, ancestress
of the beaten squash, I was the mama and papa of
pumpkins, the cousin of misused zucchini.

The cast of characters in God Damsel are slippery. They inhabit each other at times, switch places, switch partners, switch voices and attitudes. The book is separated into sections; the Diminished Prophecies, the Litanies, the Chronicles, the Laments, the Spells, the Deaths, the Hymns, the Proverbs, the Epistle of Damsel and, finally, a remembering. Livingston's language is lush and dense, and at times I found her use of portmanteaus almost over the top; boundswell, handsmite, wailhouse, dayache, faithfulwaste. It is almost as though she doesn't trust the power of her own language and she should. It is remarkable. Her lexicon is ripe and inventive, solid and spinning, and Livingston is the perfect guide for a book that takes the reader through portal after portal.

God Damsel is written with honest love—love for the human condition, love of language, for wordplay and compassion. It is a fairytale, an enchanted forest, a meadow, but be warned. This is no Disney tale. Dangers and raw emotion abound, butchers, fetishes, boredom, rage. Read it with one eye closed and everything changes tips like a Victorian optical illusion. As I was writing this, just now, unfortunately in Blogger, I lost half the review when I tried to save it, and now I have switched to Word, and I was looking for a poem I had typed before and I said, Did I hamstring the fucking butcher? and realized that even inside this review I had come under the spell of Livingston’s writing and ahh, thank goodness, here it is.

The Shepherd of GOURD 1:1

The Fishyman, who cast me, hawked me to one
Damsel in Tabernacleville. Grinded,
breathy, I whetted her, amen, yearned for
her as a butcher.

I am thankful for the dense short lines of these poems, which lend them the feeling of hymns or proverbs or even perhaps a primer for those of us more earth-bound. There is tremendous strength here. When I read these poems I get a tightness in my chest, the heart place. These poems ache. There is no fluff here, there are no filler or bridge poems in this collection. The cover and inside artwork by Mary Behm-Steinberg perfectly accompanies these splendid off kilter heartbreaking poems. God Damsel is a ladder. Climb it if you dare and have a look at the view. If you dare.

Diminished Prophecy

My GOURD will refill them, because they snickered and
hindered; they will waddle nameless among the stumps.

*****

Rebecca Loudon lives and writes in Seattle. Her most recent collection of poetry is Cadaver Dogs (No Tell Books.) She maintains a blog at http://radishking.blogspot.com. She is a professional musician and teaches violin lessons to children.

REQUIEM FOR THE ORCHARD by OLIVER DE LA PAZ

2010-12-05T20:25:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Requiem for the Orchard by Oliver de la Paz
(The University of Akron Press, Akron, OH, 2010)

Oliver de la Paz's poems in Requiem for the Orchard are confidently written; that is, the author may not have been feeling confident at the time he created the poems, but the poems come forth with an assurance that's even more impressive given the themes of coming-of-age as a boy and as a new father. That, despite such usually fraught topics, an assurance presents itself is a compliment to the poet's prowess (and maturity). But it wouldn't surprise me either if the effect results from a prior deep meditation (whether conscious or subconscious) by the poet on his small town past--that before the first word of these poems were ever written, there was an internal deep holding of a turbulent past that alchemized into poetic gold.

As regards this small town which the poet at times found stultifying, the poet shares the early desire to leave; from "Self-Portrait as the Burning Plains of Eastern Oregon":

...A book of matches and a boy was never
an accident. Nor was the little recourse I had in those days.

Boredom was an arrow shot straight into the ground. But I'm here now.
My name is not a fire. My name is not a story of fire.
I've got nothing in common with that element, save contempt

for the place of my youth and a hunger for air.

But I am not sure that the existence of these poems manifest a returning to a past as it seems like the poet carried the past with him wherever he went (yes, here I am saying "poet" rather than "persona", because I believe the poems to be autobiographical; but if I'm wrong, chalk it up as yet another achievement for believability, for authenticity) . Too much love exists (even if only in hindsight, yet hindsight is the space from which these poems are written); for instance, from "Ablation as the Creation of Adam", there is the oft-too rare acknowledgement of this one significance of origin:

In the beginning, there was a whole me.

if only because, as the poem continues, there was not yet "an end" to be seen.

Such quality of attention also logically evidences itself in the specificity of details throughout many poems, which serve to further draw in the reader and create empathy. As in, from "Self-Portrait on Good Friday as an Altar Boy":

This was the year of the long winter, and snow still hazarded
the pathways. I was contrite, tired of the flat whiteness of everything.
Junior high was a monument on a hill, light years from where I knelt
a stoop below the priest. I, too, raised my arms, holding the red book
up so he could read, his voice booming over my head.
This was the time of the long word. Sermons lasted forever.
The world was dark with the smell of salt on sidewalks,
and the sky from the doorway showed clouds, heavy and on the move.

Throughout, there is a lyrical musicality that make the poems a joy to read. If a requiem has more than one definition, the definition these poems manifest would be the third option according to Merriam-Webster: "a musical composition in honor of the dead." The dead, of course, live again through poems (I initially thought to write on de la Paz's book to see how it might relate to the author's Filipino roots; I'm experimenting with indigenized Filipino literary criticism. But, like a poem, this review transcended its intention to become something else ... except that in indigenized culture, there is no time-passage, thus obviating death.)

And, then there is even "the keeper" of a poem (and many poetry collections don't contain such a Poem) that is just PERFECT / PURRRRR-FECT. This sprung whole and purrrrr-fectly formed (in pitch, balance, evocativeness et al) from the pen underneath the poet's brow; let's let the poem sing on its own without a critic's brass:

How You Came About in the World
Bewilders Me as a Cherry Tree Flowering

In the beginning there was
the dark of an empty box
and a hum of static
you can sleep to.

Wasps defended
the vespiary above
the picnic table, now
dust. Everything

was humorless and gray.
Empty cups lined
our cupboards.
Garages smelled
dull, like old oil.

I wanted to walk out

but there is nowhere to go.
Not even the straight roads to town
could take me
past the rubble.

Therefore, you were
a river of ribbons and
confetti from a pinata--
as if suddenly when I stood
to look out the window,
sunlight hit the tree and
it blossomed.

The dirt of hard labor in orchards to the ferocity of boys to the fears of parenthood, among other things, create a hardscrabble soil for these poems, these blossoms. But in the poet's hand, these also make a fertile ground made ever more abundant by de la Paz's wisdom and compassion. Arduous birth, yes, but these poems are lovely, beloved creatures.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE, William Allegrezza over at p-ramblings HERE and by Leny M. Strobel at Moria Poetry HERE. Mr. Harp also reviews her NOTA BENE EISWEIN over HERE. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY 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.

EDGE BY EDGE by GLADYS JUSTIN CARR, HEIDI HART, EMMA BOLDEN & VIVIAN TETER

2010-12-05T20:20:00.000-08:00

KRISTI CASTRO Reviews

Edge by Edge, collection of poetry chaps by Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter
(Toadlily Press, Chappaqua, N.Y., 2007)

Running Together But Standing Apart: Toadily’s Four-In-One Chapbook Edge by Edge

The cover of the four-in-one chapbook Edge by Edge is a photograph of different crayons lined up in an uneven row as waxy trails of color flair under them. The crayons look like they are melting into each other becoming one. This image is a photograph of a detail from the artwork “MELD” by Elizabeth Levin. Meld is what the four distinct voices of Gladys Justin Carr, Heidi Hart, Emma Bolden, and Vivian Teter do in Edge by Edge do. By putting these four chapbooks in one book, each individual contribution becomes stronger. At first glance, these four poets might not even seem very similar, but on close inspection, tiny threads of connection can be found that make the reading even sweeter.

The first book in Edge by Edge is Augustine’s Brain—The Remix by Gladys Justin Carr. There is something surreal about these poems.. In “The Bench,” Carr writes, “Are you hungry? there’s some Kierkegaard/ in the fridge, she, laughing/ are you a madman or a poet?” Later in the poem which tells of a chance meeting on a bench of a she and a he, the words between them “are torn , curled in rags and swags of syllables.” The surreal vein continues as Carr writes,

she in lowercase asks

(if he reads her right)

May I warm my hands

In your pockets? Of course,

But beware of slugs, scamps,

Demons, poppycock, pride

The subject matter and use of humor and wordplay in these poems is astounding at times. A reader wants to share line after line of her playful energetic poems.

In the poem “Personals,” which reads like a set of personal ads, Carr places Basho in the same line as OutKast and then ends the poem by saying, “I could kill you with my tiny knives/ that glow like fireflies but there are so many/ other ways to say I love you./Try e-mail.” Carr is a master at having each line of her poems open up the poem in a completely different way. Carr ends the poem “Her Face Becomes a Garden” with the lines “her future overgrown/with wings/ that cannot fly.” These lines stand out with multiple readings of Edge by Edge because Carr is not the only poet of the four who brings wings into her work.

Heidi Hart’s In Ordinary Time follows Carr and steps even more deeply into the nature that hovered quietly around Carr’s poems. The wings in Hart’s poems come from insects, a cricket with a broken wing, and a helicopter. In “Cherubim,” Hart writes, “After the funeral we hear a chopper’s grinding/ heartbeat overhead.” Hart’s world is not as surreal or comical as Carr’s though their poems do not seem out of place next to each other. These poems are in ordinary time, but there is something magical in the detail with which Hart examines this ordinary time. Violence, grief, and death are commonplace in Hart’s poems. In the title poem, Hart says, “we’re flotsam, I’m thinking.”

This thinking on ideas and life are a common thread throughout Hart’s poems. In “Horse Chestnut Harvest,” she says, “and so I grieve/ to think of snapping free from what may be/ the only heaven, here.” The body itself is central in Hart’s musings, and she devotes equal attention to the nameless bodies on the other side of the world, a Neanderthal body, and her own body throughout the poems. In her last poem, “Door Psalm,” Hart says, “There are doors/in and out of the world.” This seems a fitting way to end because not only does it keep with Hart’s tone and focus on the body, but it also prepares the reader who is about to step through another door into a new poet’s voice.

Emma Bolden’s How to Recognize a Lady shares some of the wordplay and humor of Carr while focusing on the body like Hart but in a completely different way. It starts with an excerpt from Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette that tells when to use “woman” and when to use “lady.” This excerpt sits across the page from Bolden’s title poem that takes the form of a list. Bolden writes, “She is the twelfth rib gone stray. She is the side stuck/with whalebone stays.” The poem “Will and Testament” begins with the line, “I come from a long line of pistols, hilts hefted in pearl-ringed hands.” Bolden’s images provoke laughter, thought, and anger.

Bolden’s poems employ a lot of past tense which make a reader think the death that circles the poems is the only reality that makes sense in some cases. The voice in the poems is a (by her own words) “good girl” who agreed, who tried, who was. There is an undercurrent of anger that is cut by alliteration and rhyme. In X, she says, “I pared my mouth down to knife’s/ mirror, found fame by wounding with glimmer and glare.” Bolden sounds like a more modern verse version of Kate Chopin. And again there are wings. The poem “The Confessional” begins, “Bless me Father for I have plucked/the smooth down from my wings/and fried them in oil, served them/to him on a fair Friday night.”

Vivian Teter’s Translating a Bridge is the last chapbook in Edge by Edge. The idea of words themselves is important from the start in her poems. In the title poem she says, “Is it/ salve or salvage?/ Seek, seeking, or/ singing?/ Hurry to translate/at brink of/day.” Another poem is titled “Meditation on ‘Tok,’ the Dinka Word for ‘One.’” This poem is dedicated to Dut Akech, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Teter wants to erase the pain. She says,”Dut, we share only one heart and it beats for a world more just/ and for turning back from the brink.” An important idea in these poems is the connection of human kind as a whole. Nature is present in every poem. This is a nature that sustains people not only with its beauty but also with its rain and single leaves as food.

This chapbook makes a reader think back to all the threads in the other chapbooks in Edge by Edge and makes a reader want to draw all the threads together into a tight ball of humanity. Teter is searching for something that will “pull us all/ from our rapid, collective falling.” There are feathers and birds in Teter’s poems that make readers see the wings of the other poets, but Teter also has flames in her poems. Teter’s last poem is called “Two Last Reasons for Words,” and it ends on an optimistic note saying, “Sweet Being (brilliant/ against gray sky) there is always time/ (always!) to open/ to flame.”

In the introduction to Edge by Edge, David Rivard says, “Maybe it’s true that, as Tomas Transtromer suggests, we can think of poems as meeting places, places where a connection is made and we’re surprised into recognizing ourselves and the world. Edge by Edge…sets four very active and impassioned voices in motion, and it asks us to let those voices pass through us as they travel toward each other. They air us out and enrich our oxygen, and we’re all more alive for it.” These four chapbooks are each strengthened by sharing the same space.

*****

Kristi Castro is a poet and English 101 instructor. With two faraway friends, she posts food challenges and responses on distantpicnic.com. She runs the small press Fret Punch and is always on the lookout for work about cheese. When she isn’t writing or grading papers, she can be found cooking or dreaming up food projects. One day she wants to open a non-profit that engages the community through food, art, and writing.

I-FORMATION BOOK 1 by ANNE GORRICK (1)

2010-12-05T20:10:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL REVIEWS

I-FORMATION BOOK 1 by Anne Gorrick
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2010)

I-Formation is a book of dedicated density and extent. I think of it as a work that burrows, and will use several paragraphs to explain that. Presumably, it begins a larger work, but the 87 well-packed pages of this book consist of two lengthy series. That is what is before me, that is what I review.

I said ‘well-packed’ concerning this book and referred to its density. This impression derives from the work’s orthographic display. Gorrick alternates verses between flush left margin and tabbed 1” in. This releases the lines from a prosy expectation; each verse exerts within its own isolation. One notes a narrative momentum but also a vertical impulse of consideration. That vertical impulse brings to my mind the act of burrowing.

Gorrick nestles into the activity of words. Her syntax is largely ‘normal’. She grants the language she uses the space of active imagination without the roughshod of disjunctive intensity. The metre is prosy, let us say, but carries the citation of a vigourous language. Vigour, you see, resides in surprise and action. Gorrick carries us lightly into surprise.

I verge on the blither of blurb (more on blurbs anon) but I really mean to mean something here. I see in Gorrick’s burrowing an active process. She shapes the world, or it shapes her, by the continuing act of her writing. The singular poems in this collection, many of which were published elsewhere first, represent parts of some whole that she writes to reveal. This is assumption on my part.

Gorrick relies on series for both of the works presented here. The first, called “Her Site of Reversible Destiny”, offers nine sections. The section names define the growing season of a garden, The February Garden, The March Garden, through to the October Garden. The poem, then, becomes an installation in words of the gardening habit.

As any gardener knows, every present moment in a garden includes past and future. The seeds that will grow and the flowers that have blossomed tangle each moment with intersections. The sections of “Her Site of Reversible Destiny” resonate with intersections. Memory, reference, and allusion combine to evoke the nexus of that tangled moment of consideration.

How much of her need per ton of work?
The attraction to first flowers constrained
Peter typed the maple trees out of his fingers, pale as feet
These five large lilies will throw their
Singular stink around one evening in August

Thus begins The February Garden. Note the collected variance of impressions, hope, languor, trepidation, and expectation. Syntax looks regular, yet odd implications result. That first question delivers an impending criticism, whether of the poem or the garden, the reader must decide. Many such questions arise as one reads.

Gardens, it may be understood, refuse the notion of strict narrative payoff. You may want to gain the result of a fat tomato or beauty rose, but you have to ride the whole process, and still the whimsies may throw you off your goal. This is a great match to the poetic process, which may be as process-oriented as kiss my hand, yet the results are as the winds and wild made them.

“Her Site of Reversible Destiny” is no Shepherd’s Calendar, thou it may be of the same tradition. Its adjustments are quicker than calendar prerogatives, the timely surety present in the harvesting life. The harvest that Gorrick suggests engages a constant process of discovery. Change burrowing to tilling, if we must maintain metaphoric consistency.

“The Michelangelo Variations” make up the second half of I-Formations. We will say that the four pieces of “The Michelangelo Variations” were inspired or influenced by the work of the forenamed artist. Such influence seems to be a side matter however. A narrative conveys itself piecemeal and consequentially thru these pieces. Not a story in the sense of fulfillment, but instead a generous ride thru an oddly familiar neighbourhood. Gorrick posits the claim of studied facts, but not of narrative resolve. This again demonstrates to me a writing process tuned to a shifting diurnal provocation. Her writing, I’m thinking, is a chain of events. Fulfillment does not necessarily reside in resolution.

The title of the book grabs me. In American football, the I-formation consists of quarterback, who doles the ball out, fullback, who acts as battering ram, and tailback, who scampers with the ball. A neat writerly image appears. Choices are seeded in a collaborative process. All participants act within a processual imperative determined by the defense. Within the metaphor, the defense becomes the writing moment.

How does the momentary urge to write negotiate the present’s particulars? I forget who once wrote or said—Creeley or Williams, I think—he wants to write something but is saying it anyhow. That sense of will and result infuses Gorrick’s work here. Gorrick asserts a practical response, delivering an impulsive fund within the directives of her practice. Surprise allocates expansion.

Gorrick writes a wolfishly hardworking delivery. Narrative’s propulsion finds great extent as she practices the words she writes. Her process of discovery withholds controls. The quarterback decides where the ball will go, or the situation (the moment) finally does, and the collaboration of forces settles the tune.

Anne Gorrick’s book is both adventurous and personal, without seeming to weigh heavily with either engagement. I would like to see the larger work that I presume awaits Gorrick’s indices. She seems to be making a grand oeuvre in the way that, say Robert Duncan did, constantly accruing within the scan of her fascinations.

In conclusion, realizing that review only indicates ingress to a work, I would like to be on record as saying that two of the three blurbs for this book lose me. Geof Huth provides a thoughtful key for entrance into these works, as much as a few sentences can do. Kimberly Lyons and Lori Anderson-Moseman clutter the back cover with rat-a-tat. This observation has nothing to do with Anne Gorrick except, gee whiz, why smear the windshield? Anne Gorrick’s work is not a viscous prattle, so why associate with MFA code words? I find Gorrick’s work here a direct instigation in the poetic realm. The blurbs of Lyons and Anderson-Moseman blither. They should be reported.

*****

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. / Simple Theory / (Potes & Poets Press) was his first book. He maintains a blog called Tributary (http://tribute-airy.blogspot.com/), and a life with Beth and Erin. He is also the author of DAYS POEM, Vol. I and II (Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco).

I-FORMATION BOOK 1 by ANNE GORRICK (2)

2010-12-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

LYNN BEHRENDT Reviews

I-Formation Book 1 by Anne Gorrick
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2010)

“I had a wish to determine what I was”
--Jasper Johns

The cover of Anne Gorrick’s new book of poetry, I-Formation, is a photograph of an encaustic and pastel work by Gorrick herself, entitled “After Usuyuki,” which refers to Jasper Johns’ series of prints, “Usuyuki,” which consist of crosshatch marks on a grid-like surface.

The image on I-Formation contains the text, “after Usuyuki,” handwritten over and over again in a crosshatch pattern across what appears to be a weathered surface. The print has some kind of screen or fabric texture embedded into the surface as well, and the piece is richly smudged and blurred. The image accurately captures the multi-layered pentimento-like density of the 87 pages of poetry within.

The book contains two long pieces. The first serial poem in the book, “Her Site of Reversible Destiny,” consists of nine sections spanning from “The February Garden” all the way through “The October Garden.” The poems are visually comprised of block-like stanzas of text, with the margin depth alternating every other stanza. This creates a woven appearance. Starting in the 3rd section, the page patterning becomes even more intricate when a series of vertical-type stanzas consisting of only a few words sprout up to the left of the more deeply indented stanzas. The visual form of the poem organizes the words on the page so that the reader is immediately encouraged to read the text in several simultaneous versions. The poem might be seen as:

The garden at work on the idea of itself
Each year, filled with a metric ton of necessity
the distances measured in arm’s lengths

The poet is working with language as if it were gardener’s soil: turning it, sorting out stones and setting them aside, deadheading, and letting blooms occur in unexpected places. Repetition, used elegantly, is key to this poem, and functions as a kind of sonic cross-hatching. Phrases and words might reappear several times, not at all chant-like, but in new combinations, as the poem composts and renews itself into organically hybrid phrases and lines.

The language is lush:

Dame’s rocket at that cat clamping place
and roses spiced with tented spiders

and the imagery is surprising, rich, and mysterious:

The He is tall, next to a white car underneath a red pine
swallowing 300 Thalias

“Her Site of Reversible Destiny” is reminiscent of certain kinds of encaustics wherein layers and layers of beeswax of different degrees of opacity are fused together so that the artist’s intention is recorded, as it changes, and what a viewer (or reader) is left with is a kind of semi-translucent layering of versions and rewritings that cross (hatch) over the surface of time. This allows the reader to see how the poet’s mind works, making it a real delight, particularly for other poets, to read.

The second grouping in I-Formation is a fabulous series called “The Michelangelo Variations” that begins with a poem called “Pieta,” and these lines, defining the poem’s intention from the outset:

Mother wrap us in your thorns
sentence is open ground

It doesn’t have to do with
the temperature of objects
but with propagation through the material

A dialect of flesh

The “Variations” uses a vast array of material for its fodder, including the creation myth, Michelangelo’s sculptures, car racing, and the natural history of the Hudson River Valley. It’s a wild, fluid, fast-moving, and wonderfully intense poem. The stanzas shift from single to double-spaced in such a way as to give the poem the appearance of breathing. Sections of powerful prose are inserted into the poem as well:

The theatre of panic and panic itself. Leave things behind. Tree of indifference, tree of hope. The needling green, the complicated arms. And the sky, an exploited ruin, a paint can in the fire: char, rust, gas. Wax the cerecloth. Wrap the dead and place them up there to burn.

and

She is a stagnant shape of wind. She is ancient movement trapped. Stand where the limb meets the trunk, back against the trunk as if looking out a window. There are monkeys everywhere, grey and familiar childhoods swinging around fat limbs, until one becomes trapped upside down and the others rescue it. A man says, “why don’t you try it?” She can’t. They must get down he says. They can’t. So they jump. She feels her pelvis disintegrate. She is in the grass now, smiling because she can’t believe she’s alive and recently fucked.

The poem is instructive, exciting, and at times reads as ritualistic and even oddly tribal:

Science of fluids in motion

Cut the heart from the barn owl

Place it to the left of the sternum

There. She will tell you everything

—and she will tell you everything. I-Formation is an intelligent, lovely, strong book of innovative poetry, well worth the read. You can download a PDF sampler excerpt here, check out Tom Beckett’s review of the book here, and buy it here.

Keep your eye out for I-Formation, Book 2, to be published by Shearsman in 2011.

*****

Lynn Behrendt is the author of The Moon As Chance, Characters, Tinder, Luminous Flux, and, soon to be released by Lunar Chandelier Press, petals, emblems. She co-edits the Annandale Dream Gazette, an online chronicle of poets’ dreams, as well as Peep/Show Poetry, an electronic publication of innovative contemporary poetry.

LYNN BEHRENDT'S REVIEW OF ANNE GORRICK'S I-FORMATION

2010-12-05T20:00:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Lynn Behrendt's review of Anne Gorrick's I-Formation Book 1
(Galatea Resurrects, December 2010)

It was unexpected, but such is Poetry's power. While formatting Lynn Behrendt's review of Anne Gorrick's I-Formation, I ended up in that space -- both from the loveliness of the quoted excerpts from Gorrick's poems and Behrendt's appreciation -- of writing a poem, of being compelled to write a poem! By the less-than-a-minute required to finish formatting Behrendt's review, the poem was done. For what it is, here it is--

How Roses Came to be Fearless

The secret to transcending panic
is theater--

Ignore memory's stagnant
gleanings, leavings--

Always believe in existence--

that your bed
is trashed from his hand
and lips on your flesh
and you are awake
for the first time in decades--

Finally, a poet discovers
the heart in an owl
(thank you, Anne Gorrick!)--

Those black motes in eyes
spreading while we sleep
define absence
(not evaporation but original lack)
of vision--

And when one refuses
in gratitude
to eliminate the dying rose
from the vase
expect other blooms
to hasten their demise
to mere perfume--

We all can be better
truly
than we are.

--there was an "I" but she just as easily slipped away and all I'm left with is, What just happened?! Well, c'est la vie! And I suspect I owe Anne Gorrick gratitude ... off now to read her book for moiself!

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE, William Allegrezza over at p-ramblings HERE and by Leny M. Strobel at Moria Poetry HERE. Mr. Harp also reviews her NOTA BENE EISWEIN over HERE. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY 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.

MISSPELL by LARS PALM

2010-12-05T19:55:00.000-08:00

MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Reviews

misspell by Lars Palm
(ungovernable press, 2008)

Into the Spells of Mispllng

Inside the sound of words are entanglements fighting for coherence, or some sense of it, at least. Approximations of this coherence can materialize in imagination of the speaker, especially through the visuality of text, a compact architecture of curves and lines furnished by constitutions of desire in writing and printing presses, processes that may formulate a sense of accessibility and familiarity, through journeys in reading. Thus, implicit in certain theories of language is a dance that intimates copulation of perceptions between text-image and its equivalent sound, whether through orally-conveyed sound or sound produced that cannot easily be translated into decibels recognizable by human-ear – sounds of silence, or those in meditation, which may also include sounds in structure of movements, the sonicity of action, especially in the context of physical vibrations and physical geometries. And in this dance are certain modes of producing rules or memory set in principles, to activate hierarchy of evolutions, and inherent devolutions in progressions.

Over space and time, the equation of text-image and its corresponding sound builds certain set rules that can be viewed as proper usage. In this sense, grammar, syntax, or spellings are sentenced to be, within certain regimes of correctness that proposes intellectual assimilations and inter-cultural impositions, for the sake of universal coherence embedded as lyrical and hypnotic simulations in power structures. However, this kind of dictatorship may only be hard and brutal to a point, because in the long run, it succumbs to developments and changes. For example, mispellings do not have to suggest grammatical crimes and misdemeanors in someone’s imagination all the time, but can suggest another realm of concatenating and validating the chaos and entanglements of language-rules in that imagination. Lars Palm’s “mispell” quietly explores some suggestions of this realm, one that yields to abridgements of poetic delivery in consciously or unconsciously misspelled words.

The image and sound of contractaracts inspire an array of suggestions that include: contras have cataracts, those who had or have contracts with the contras have cataracts, cataracts are contracts, cataracts in contracts, contraction of cataracts, or, simply, acts made by contractors; and too, lazy tongues can slide the term into sounds that pair ‘contra’ and ‘contracts’ with ‘carats.’ Here, the c’s and t’s compete for sound recognition through repetition. This competition appears to summon a group of words together, to approximate a moment of fusion, when pronouncing and enunciating terms, a sort of assemblage, to experiment on constructing a new word through sound, and then the probable text-image for that sound. In some sense, there’s hint of quiet chant here, in the repetition of c’s and t’s, as though to meditate on the fusion of ideas, in this group of words.

Now verbal attack from a tribe appears to be the immediate meaning of diabetribe; but certainly, the term does not appear to exclude series of meanings associated with ‘diabetes’, ‘tribe’, and ‘diatribe.’ In many ways, the relationship between ‘tribe’ and ‘diatribe’ in the term dominates in the sound derived from the text-image; thus, this relationship quietly elides ‘diabetes’, as though one’s inclusion of that term in the primary relationship is an intrusion. Here, excluding ‘diabetes’ in that dominant relationship is logical, because of its immediate attachment to the medical field. ‘Tribe’ and ‘diatribe’ have a closer relationship, not because of the text-image ‘tribe’ but that ‘tribe’ can be easily associated with unified elements, a one-ness reducible to voice, or unity as voice. The idea of voice in ‘tribe’ echoes human sound-waves that can be associated with ‘diatribe’, a term that can be related to executions of voice, modes of insistence, persistence, and forcefulness that unifies. If we insist on this internal association or perhaps even internal rhyme of voice in diabetribe, this term could have highly political suggestions, especially when used by groups that exist on shifting paradigms of puritanism, fanaticism, and fundamentalism.

Now the inclusion of testicicle and testosteror, in this collection, appears to humor certain elements in, or among the gatekeepers of machismo's grand hypeboles. Both appear to have some categorical relationship with our imposed meaning for diabetribe, especially the phallic energies in terror and the pointiness of icicles. The unification of ‘testicle’ and ‘icicle’ appears to compose intensified ideas of bulginess in testicicle. 'Testicle' is an obvious element here, but since it rhymes with 'icicle', this tonal kinship deemphasizes our wintry associations with 'icicle' and emphasizes instead its geometric shape, re-calculating the innocence of its conic appearance into the lexicons of Priapus. On the other hand, testosteror no doubt finds easy memberships in those books as well, a term that unites ‘testosterone’ and ‘terror’; terror's phallic dimensions, here, can be attributed to its energy to colonize and penetrate, calculating explosions of horror on the subject of its intentions. However, part of the hidden elements in testosterone-charged terror in testosteror is 'error', which can also be calculated in the text-image of that misspelling. The delicate idea of error deserves some consideration, here, since terror functions under duress of fear, miscalculations, or uninformed apprehensions; thus, intentions imbued with terror, specific to context, are bound to make mistakes, terrific or terrible.

Palm’s curious array of mispellings include: eyesbox, leapfog, leapear, misbeshaving, murderead, plazenbo, principipe, repentition, sunride, war on hugs, well-red, and orchastrate. Again, these mispellings sound like misdemeanors in the English language. However, cultures and sub-cultures that use English as tool for social organization, cohesion, and management may disagree with the idea of misdemeanors here. Group identity in sub-cultures often twists and/or re-invents rules of a hegemonic language to emphasize its rebelliousness or underline an extended identity from dominant culture. For example, the term chillax, whether used as noun or verb, may have experienced intense evolutions in usage, in the hyper-charged, giddy behavior of youth-oriented, social-networking websites, such as MySpace. For some, that term can sound like truncated, pharmaceutical description for a specific laxative; but to many, especially among cool-driven young-adults, it emphasizes multidimensional states of being in a relaxing vibe among friends. In some ways, among speakers of the English-langauge, when the eye sees Palm’s mispelled text-images, they can inspire that eye to exoticize their odd familiarity, before being seduced to tour into sound-waves they produce, like rogue grace-notes that may invite a curious tidal feel, in one's larynx, for being transported into twisted extensions of speech in daily life. In this sense, poetry can thus be derived in the rhythms of these grace-notes, in addition to internal rhymes forged and forced, in the fusion of terms, through mispellings.

Now Palm's stand-alone terms are not necessarily poems. But their visuality or materiality on a page, published by a press that disseminates works of poetry heightens our perception of them as poems. But what helps prepare the eye in perceiving and reading the book as a book of poems is the presentation of the terms or poetries; they each occupy a page or a blankness that stands for certain vacuities in the imagination of language, an absence in which vague emergence occurs in the center of pages, in this pdf- ebook. The emergence is celebrated, by locating the poetries in spaciousness, in order to stimulate concentration in the probable poetries these terms might inspire.

The text-image leapear does not look like a conventional term, and drives the eye to assume it’s a typographical error of the phrase ‘leap year.’ But if we omit the idea of error in the term, the notion of ‘ears leaping’ is quite surreal, highly poetic. Our focus on the term or word, here, somewhat echoes Gertrude Stein in the line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”, from the poem “Sacred Emily.” The repetition of the term ‘rose’ is sonic experience that lets the rose bloom in the mouth and imagination of the speaker and reader; if the first ‘Rose’ is a person, then she is surrounded by roses—whether yellow, white, or red—after the line ends. Thus, rose, in some ways, becomes a lace of roses, or the center of a flower whose petals are roses, and that these petals are in a state of infinitesimal present-tense, blooming and rising, primarily because of the is-ness of ‘is’, and more so, the line itself does not end with a period. The singularity of a text-image’s body, therefore, is a receptacle of perceptions, a memory of something in the physical world, signifier, part of a hierarchical, poetic system, the sign system called language.

While the idea of misspellings is viewed as misdemeanors in the realm of proper language usage, our hectic, technology-saturated social-lives thrive on acts of necessary misspellings to convey messages in social networking sites and applications, especially in cell-phone texting. Here, misspellings are attempts to squeeze perceptions, through reduced number of keystrokes. In general, evolving acceptance in the conscious omission of vowels in texting is eroding the idea of misspellings as grammatical errors, gradually turning it into a category in grammar, one that also embraces numbers as letters, initialisms, characters from other languages besides English, and other methods of abridging written text. In this light, Palm’s mispellngs is an aggressive participation in the economization of written text in English, that while ordinary sentences already have elements of poetry or are inherently poetic themselves, our ineradicable devotions to the accelerations and rush of daily-life could further truncate sentences in2 shrtr poetic gesticulations that somehow approaches states of quietude in the gesture-saturated, sensual vocabularies of body language.

****

Michael Caylo-Baradi lives through California. His work has appeared in BlazeVox, Kartika Review, Latin American Review of Books, Metazen, Our Own Voice, PopMatters, and elsewhere.

PENURY by MYUNG MI KIM

2010-12-05T19:50:00.000-08:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Penury by Myung Mi Kim
(Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond, CA, 2009)

Myung Mi Kim’s biography is about as opaque as her poetry. Given that her first book, Under Flag, was published by Kelsey St. Press in 1991 and has been reprinted twice -- in 1998 and again in 2008 -- you would think that there would be a plethora of information about her. You would be wrong. The most extensive source is Wikipedia which provides the following:

Myung Mi Kim (born December 6, 1957) is a Korean American poet noted for her postmodern writings.

Kim and her family emigrated to the United States following the Korean War, when Kim was 9 years old. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa and lectured for some years on creative writing at the San Francisco State University. She is currently Professor of English at the University at Buffalo.

That great anthology put out by Wesleyan University Press in 2007, American Poets in the 21st Century, merely provides a list of publications along with the statement regarding her professorship at the University of Buffalo.

Perhaps this is as it should be as it allows her poetry to speak for itself – in an extremely sotto voce laryngitic sort of way. Warren Liu, in ‘Making Common the Commons: Myung Mi Kim’s Ideal Subject’, found in the above-mentioned Wesleyan publication, begins his essay in this manner:

One salient feature of Myung Mi Kim’s poetry that general readers and academics alike agree upon is its intense and at times unrelenting opacity. In her first three books, Under Flag, The Bounty, and Dura, the poems concede very little to a reader in search of either narrative, speaker, subject, or even location; instead, they construct meaning through accretion, fragmentation, translation (and mistranslation), and disjunction.(252)

Kim, in a Youtube video, refers to Penury as a “mourning book”. She indicates that the period of creation was from February 2003 to February 2006 which was the period during which “America has been in Iraq.” She describes the book as proceeding

by accretion, by adumbration, moving around different elements, there is a lot of transcription which are me literally transcribing whatever it happen to be, whether it’s spoken, whether it’s document, whether it’s...something that is archival material...I’m also trying to pose the question “What is the necessary work of mourning both as bodies in social space trying to, in some sense, negotiate...the violence of militarism on human bodies, the notion of war and ecological degradation, my continuing concern about linguistic oppression or a certain attempt to address the...problematic of the ideology of monolingualism.

In an interview conducted by Yedda Morrison in December 1997 titled ‘Generosity as Method: An Interview with Myung Mi Kim’, Kim discusses poetry as liberation and the authentication of a writer’s experiences:

I think there is always some kind of invisible, constant, millisecond-by-millisecond negotiation between the form and its divestment, between the poem and the world, that you’re engaging every time you decide to write anything. However, any poem having any kind of cultural translation in the Twenty-first century – frankly, it isn’t going to happen...

It’s so problematic for writers in our historical moment. Again, I think that I would answer that concern by saying that there’s some awareness on my part, different from even five years ago, that we need two actions simultaneously. The first task is undertaking the kind of devotion and conviction towards authenticating the work you must do, the work we each must undertake, and that forms the basis for a much larger vision for a mobilizing potential for poetry...The second thing is to work out as many different models of where poetry can exist, where poetry can be inserted, can be read, experienced, performed; what are the various different ways that we can make poetry have contexts...Poetry is simply how you participate in language, and we all do that.(4-5)

She goes on, on p. 10, to discuss the response to her poetics:

It’s so disturbing to me that when the surface of the poem behaves in a way that signals no single, clear, traceable narrative strategy, the text suddenly becomes alarming. It immediately becomes an issue of ‘what are we being told?’ or ‘I don’t understand.’ Meanwhile, if the reader would simply remove that initial response and ask what is there to be understood, then there would be no impediment to receiving the story, because the story is larger than the issue of not understanding the strategies by which the story is being told. The story is there, it has a kind of enduring quality, a permanence and scale, a specific weight of history and experience which will be communicated. We need to get beyond the anxiety around not being told in a way were accustomed to and discover new ways of listening.

Take all the white space on Kim’s pages – and there is a lot – as a sea of silence or of white noise, it’s all the same, and each is an interrogation technique, a means of torture, out of which soundbites emerge like eruptions to disrupt the surface, disturb the shadows, ripple across the ideology, rip the curtain shielding hegemony. The story is in the silence - the way Myanmar’s military regime attempts to silence Aung San Suu Kyi, the way Iran’s Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani attempts to quell dissent, the way the Bush regime attempted to hide the ignominies of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, attempted to squelch the release of the photos, attempted to silence dissent by creating an artificial divide “You’re either for us or against us!” And so we receive only fragments of voices attempting to emerge from the swirling miasma of conformity before they are quickly struck down. The voices of the minority seeking to announce identity, seeking to shout “This is who I am!” before they merge back into the masses.

Examine the instances. There is the staum │ stam which brings to mind the term ‘sturm und drang or stammer implying the way one walks after being hit by a sturm und drang which, of course, brings to mind ‘Desert Storm’. Kim operates on the level of multiplicity, each fragment capable of a multiple of interpretations. She offers no guidance, which is as it should be for to extol one is to silence others and would not fit into her postmodern perspective. There are no titles to announce, to disturb the meditation.

This minimalism expands to fill the mind. Take “within a few years it learns to read – if it is a boy – and in this place / the catalogue of books may be inserted”(23) ‘It’ defines the perceptual space as mechanistic. ‘It’ also defines the gender divide. Why “catalogue of books’? Is this a reference to the canon? A refutation? And in this era of expanding and alternate canons, which? Why ‘space’? What ‘space’? ‘Inserted’ as a mechanistic process such as programming a robot? Kim provides only questions. We, the readers, are forced to accept responsibility for the answer(s).

Is that a good thing?

*****

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

TRAJE DE BODA: POEMS by AILEEN IBARDALOZA

2010-12-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

ALBERT B. CASUGA Reviews

Traje de Boda: Poems by Aileen Ibardaloza
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, CA 2010)

Traje de Boda: Poems by Aileen Ibardaloza is a big debut poetry collection for its slim size (71 pages).

Fearless in its breadth (themes of historical archetypes, knotted loves, truncated lives, Jungian palinodes, bridled erotica, and an avid exercise of literary pastiche from glossa to hay(na)ku (tongue-in-cheek haiku-variant transformed to “hay(na)ku”, a Filipino interjection akin to bluster sighs of omigod! Good Lord, or simply Oh My!).

This collection is a mosaic shaped into an intriguing tapestry by a fearless literary pasticheuse.

It is mainly a celebration of betrothal, weddings, nuptial habiliments and fashion woven into the context of history (viz., Filipino hero Jose Rizal writing a farewell note to his dulce extranjera -- beloved foreigner -- on his day of execution), remembrances of iconic mothers, fathers-giving-away-daughters-in-weddings, and the ineluctable (also inscrutable) changes of lives from house furnishings to migration exiles.

Ibardaloza is most sensitive to these generational changes in a poem dedicated to her mother, “The Hay(na)ku of the Broken fourth Wall.” Without sounding maudlin, she limns in the hay(na)ku structure (an invention of Philippine-born American poet Eileen Tabios, and also the Meritage Press publisher of this debut collection) the saga of two women -- Ysabel and Cecilia -- who take diverse paths from a genteel colonial past to a ravaged contemporary life of struggle and guile in a gated-mansion that would find itself converted to a bar.

The Philippine-born Ibardaloza, now Northern California based, regales in her use of the new-found hay(na)ku like a student showing her teacher-sensei-maestro, how adept she has become.

Nevertheless, she is at her best when she uses longer lines, her free verse capturing a more lambent spirit, a more urgent voice: In “Palinodes”, she is unafraid of neither erotic images nor recondite allusions. “We regret each other/ ‘s li(v)es./ Particularly the one where/ a phallus rises up/ out of the hearth fire,/ an Etruscan mother-right.” Lies and lives confirmed and denied. The ambiguity is a distinct poetic skill.

She has not, however, mastered the use of the “glossa” in the poetic verve that Canadian poet P.K.Page used it. “Road Trip (A Found Poem)” falls short of the demands of this form which uses quoted lines as ligne donees (given lines) of poems developed from them. This is an equivalent of the Ekphrasis which springs from a picture or a visual image.

In her “After Eileen Tabios’ Footnotes to the Virgin’s Knots by Holly Payne”, the footnoted lines would have served as the given lines whence the poems would spring. This is how the glossa works. Ibardaloza missed that.

Ibardaloza ‘s real voice is what she uses in poems like “Across the lonely beach we flit/ Like shorebirds, lingering. Wind and/ water brush against sand and sky. I / feel the sand beneath me. / You engage the wind. I/ follow until you are unseen to me. / I will wait for you/ here, where waves break toward/ the shore. Hear my call, rare wanderer./ I will love you then.”

A poet who can write a love poem is a poet, indeed. This poet can write love poems (see “For Paul,” and “Eve of St. Francis.”

Ibardaloza might just be missing where her voice is most authentic --
- she seems to be obsessed with her narrative use of the hay(na)ku (a three line stanza that starts with one word, followed by a two-word, and sandwiched by a three-word third line. The classical haiku is made up of three lines with a 7-syllable line enveloped by a first and third lines of 5-syllable each).

A debut collection like Traje de Boda promises an impressive future for a young poet like Iabardaloza, a microbiologist by training, but the caveats of a sustained poetic life still lies in how she matures beyond fascination with “novel” equipment for her aesthetic experiences.

An authentic poetic voice and an achieved aesthetic experience are among these caveats she should heed while she could.

*****

Albert B. Casuga, a Philippine-born writer, lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, where he continues to write poetry, fiction, and criticism after his retirement from teaching and serving as an elected member of his region's school board. He was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. A graduate of the Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas (now University of Santo Tomas, Manila. Literature and English, magna cum laude), he taught English and Literature (Criticism, Theory, and Creative Writing) at the Philippines' De La Salle University and San Beda College. He has authored books of poetry, short stories, literary theory and criticism. He has won awards for his works in Canada, the U.S.A., and the Philippines. His latest work, A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems was published February 2009 by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. His fiction and poetry were published by online literary journals Asia Writes and Coastal Poems recently. He was a Fellow at the 1972 Silliman University Writers Workshop, Philippines. His works include: Summer Suns (short story collection with Cirilo Bautista, Manila UST Press 1962); Narra Poems and Others (poetry collection, San Beda Publications, Manila 1968); Still Points (poetry collection, Flores & Asociates, Manila 1972); In A Sparrow's Time (poetry collection, Infocom, Canada 1990); Songs for my Children (poetry collection, Infocom, Canada 1996); The Aesthetics of Literature (Literary Theory and Criticism, De La Salle University, Manila, 1972); Editor: Man in Search of Meaning: Literature (Humanities Series, Asia Foundation & DLSU Textbook Committee, Manila 1970); Man and His Literary Past: The Classical Tradition (Asia Foundation & DLSU Textbook Committee, Manila 1971); A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, Manila, 2009).

SOME SONNETS edited by TIM WRIGHT

2010-12-05T19:40:00.000-08:00

RICHARD LOPEZ Reviews

Some Sonnets edited by Tim Wright
(Tim Wright, Winter 2010)
　
The other day I was looking for some work online by Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun. I found a reading at youtube.com under the auspices of U.C. Berkeley. The reading series is called Lunch Poems. Salamun was introduced by Robert Hass. There was nothing wrong with the reading and I thought Salamun was a very good poet. And yet the whole thing seemed so polite, so mannered, so official and, for me, so boring. So I shut the reading off about mid-way and went looking for something else to do.

Thank god for DIY publishing and for blogs. If I can make an analogy, the Lunch Poems reading series is like AOR rock&roll of the 1970s while blogs and publications like the one under review are like a night at CBGBs watching the Ramones play. Nothing wrong with a radio-friendly band like Boston but I prefer the raw vitality and DIY attitude of the Ramones.

A few weeks ago Prague-based aussie poet Ryan Scott sent me a home-made anthology of sonnets composed by Australian poets. It was like a breath of fresh air. Most of the poets are bloggers and all attack the form of the sonnet like it was just invented by them. This is my sort of poetry and my kind of publishing. Don’t wait for someone to recognize your genius. Just go and get the work out yourself whether digitally like in blogs or in paper form like this book.

What I find both fascinating and enervating is the way in which the publisher and editor, poet-blogger Tim Wright, ordered the pieces within the two covers. They are randomly shuffled and printed without names attached. Thus if the reader wishes to know the author of a particular sonnet then she’d have to keep her finger on the table of contents and scan for the title and the name of the poet. I like names and I like names attached to the poems I’m reading. But then I gave in to my reading immersing myself in the experience of reading like I was exploring newly formed peaks and valleys. The topography yielded some surprises. A few poets are brand new to me while others I know fairly well. I tried matching sound and style to the names of the contributors and I got maybe half of them right. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find inside by the wonderful poet Michael Farrell:

sonnet for nick whittock

that love like a bat can tap a balls weakness
send it filthy & red to the fence,
result, you sweat, say nice words, isnt irony;
its what mostd expect an opener to make,
with wristy perfection; until the next singing
loves a chucker, & theres times id walk.
the selection was in the news before i knew;
gulls squawk, lbw, the ball separated itself from me;
i disdain the box, let love do its worst.

A few of these sonnets are in traditional form while the majority are experiments, like the nine-line poem quoted above, of the kind began by Ted Berrigan and even, might I suggest, John Berryman and with more than a dash of Gertrude Stein and a pinch Jackson Mac Low. I loved the lot of them. A few of the contributors are Ted Nielsen, Ryan Scott, Jill Jones, Tom Lee [whose piece ‘FOURTEEN‘ had my blood pumping], Stu Hatton, Derek Motion, Corey Wakeling and Kate Fagan. If you’ve read a few poems by contemporary aussie poets or recognize some of the names above then you know there’s some high-quality, high-powered writing inside. Some Sonnets come highly recommended and might even cure what ails you if your malady is like mine as I described it at the beginning of this review. I’m not sure how to get a copy of this book and it appears there’s only 100 printed. I suggest going to Tim Wright’s blog, http://swimswam.wordpress.com/, and leave a comment asking for a copy. Then click thru Wright's links and read the blogs of many of the contributors of this excellent collection.

*****

richard lopez writes poems and reviews. drop him a line and say hey at reallybadmovies.blogspot.com

APPARITION POEMS by ADAM FIELED

2010-12-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Apparition Poems by Adam Fieled
(BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, N.Y., 2010)

One is immediately struck by how the design of the book enhances the theme-as-indicated-by-title of Adam Fieled’s Apparition Poems. That is, the front and back covers are all white, and the text of title and author seem formed by shadows rather than ink—the cover is basically a pleasing white-on-white visual art space.

The interior design also enhances the notion of apparitions in that most of the pages are white spaces. The book is sized at (approximately) 7.5 X 9.5” which means many of the short poems take up no more than one-sixth of the page-space.

So. Apparitions. Two of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of the word are (1) “ghostly figure,” and (2) “the act of becoming visible.” Which is all to say, at least for the early part of the book, it seems that the poems are ghosts of what they may have hoped to offer. These early poems are my favorites in the book—I found them luminous, moving, lyrical, among others. But they do seem deliberately—if evocatively—incomplete. Like fragments:

# 1089

I love you,
I love you,
I love you—

clouds are
moving in
behind us,

storms are
forming in
front, blue

sky purple,
green grass
yellow, all

things pale
to this dark—

Or like beginnings:

#1084

Poems are train-wrecks
that move—to stand
on tracks, to do so solidly, is
suicide of the high order—

to die by force of wreckage—

Or thoughts evaporating almost as soon as they were … thought:

# 1069

There comes a time
history’s viability in
impressing us goes

out our mind’s eye,
we are ghosts then,
we join the “rest of,”

until someone’s lips
hips us to secrets, in
case we forgot, that

nothing ever happed,
nothing ever got writ.

Positions (bodies?) become (narratively) clearer about a third-way into the book. And so I came to realize that the apparition here isn’t (just) the form of (some of) the poems. There’s a presence (persona) flitting through the pages which remains just out-of-sight to be mysterious; the non-dead author has definite opinions. The author’s self-awareness and keen observations, however, often manifest themselves in wit or dry humor, thus avoiding the unpleasantness of didacticism:

# 1573

This guy thinks he knows
what’s really real, writes a
book, I do the same thing:
but whoever says this is in
a chain of unreality which
reality will quickly undo: I
know whoever says this is
lost in a maze of illusions,
which must be stymied: it’s
something you only say if
you’re deluded; but then it
means you know you’re in
a maze of delusions, which
is what’s really real: a bitch.

Or, at one point there were several sex-related poems presented near enough each other that as one reads through the book, one could get irritated (as I did), only to end up at

# 1249

Despite what I write, there’s
not much sex in the world—
walk down Walnut Street,
take an inventory—how
much sex are these people
getting? This one fat, this
one ugly, this one old, this
one a baby, a couple married
twenty years, or ten, or five—
not much sex in these lives.
But media, movies thrive’
on representing this tiny
demographic: single, young,
promiscuous. Crowds come.

What a hoot! There’s certainly enough playfulness in the book to elicit cheer.

Ultimately, though, Fieled but gets back to the basics:

# 1480

How horrendous, to realize there
are people in the world with no
soul, walking zeros, hollow spaces,
dead end interiors, permanently
frozen faculties, how horrendous
to watch how they borrow words
of others to sound profound, but
each echo reveals there’s nothing
behind it but the kind of charred
silence that comes after a corpse
is burnt—how horrendous, how
it makes some of us cling to what
we feel, how we feel, that we feel,
and that everything we feel is so
precious, specifically (and only)
because it is felt, and stays felt.

The problem, of course, is that it takes two to tangle:

#1512

Do you
know I

tried to
reach, I

did, but
you’re a

far away
planet, I

can’t, its
rings all

around, I
can’t see

surface, I
want to,

can you
change

orbits for me

once?

But if the poems are all gestures towards connections that may never occur, what is the stance with which one might react to such apparitions? Well, it could be the following poem—unembodied, but still optimistic:

#545

Words are spirits,
words wording
through us like
savored pulp.
Words, strained
or comatose,
plucking laurel
for some lucky
fuck. Substantive
spirit words, cored &
pitted, wait to be bit
like knowledge of
good & evil, stems.
Not a cask or a flask—
Some vessel from
nether regions of
Venus. Easy to be
dispirited, cored,
yet stem systems are
permanent. Say them.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) is reviewed by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE, William Allegrezza over at p-ramblings HERE and by Leny M. Strobel at Moria Poetry HERE. Mr. Harp also reviews her NOTA BENE EISWEIN over HERE. If the former book gets you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY 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.

BEATS AT NAROPA, Edited by ANNE WALDMAN & LAURA WRIGHT

2010-12-05T19:30:00.000-08:00

L.M. FREER Reviews

Beats at Naropa: An Anthology Edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2009)

Several weeks ago, while sitting with a group of doctoral students in a colorless, windowless midtown Manhattan classroom, beat poet Diane di Prima posed the following question: “Can you think of anything at all that you really believe a poem should not do?”

The question focused the wandering energies in the room, charged the ensuing silence with power—and simultaneously calmed the anxieties of twenty-odd prototypical New Yorkers, who reveled, childlike, in the resulting sense of possibility. That poetry remains an able vehicle for anything—indeed, ought to be considered the most able of vehicles, for everything—is an optimistic position one does not often hear openly espoused, much less promulgated, in a city where pessimism seeps in like leaking rainwater, quickly saturating both body and soul. The bright burst of energy and color that di Prima’s question generated lodged under my breastbone for weeks, making an unseasonably warm October in this city also unseasonably cheerful. Dour sound bites about politics and the economy, the MTA or Afghanistan, none seemed as lasting as the idea that a poem should be able to do anything, and everything.

The driving force behind Anne Waldman and Laura Wright’s 2009 Beats at Naropa: An Anthology (Coffee House Press) is a similar moment of coalescence, founded in a lasting belief in the value of aesthetics as a means of healing a pessimistic society. And for Waldman, that synergistic moment is further rooted in and fueled by the history of the school itself. Describing the decision to found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (now a part of Naropa University), Waldman asserts in her introduction to this volume that among the co-founders of the school there was a similar “commonality of spirit,” a moment of a shared sense of possibility. And out of this mystical “chrysalis,” there emerged an educational endeavor designed to cultivate both an “‘outrider’ tradition” of poetics generally, and succeeding generations of Snyderian “wild minds” in particular (11-13). And in the decades since the founding of Naropa, the learning and sharing that has gone on in the mountains of Boulder is certainly an example of the lasting power of such moments in time, both spiritually and poetically.

This anthology consciously pushes for a wider definition of “beat poet,” however, including transcriptions of events and talks which not only cover Naropa’s entire history from a chronological perspective, but which also include individuals who are at best tangentially associated with, or even consciously reject, the label in question. In doing this, Waldman asserts, the anthology purposefully hopes to generate its own sort of thematic consistency. Claiming that “I believe the term applied here coalesces—maybe for just a brief moment—a kinship that was so important to Allen Ginsberg,” Waldman’s introduction finds coherence in friendship, community, and historic alliances between poets (14). However, in taking such an ever-evolving concept as “kinship” as the lens through which we are to view these transcribed talks and panels, the anthology risks feeling more like a series of weak connections rather than strong, and occasionally strives too hard to find common ground. For the reader new to Beat poetics, this may be particularly difficult; without a knowledge of the web of personal relationships behind these pieces, the anthology as a whole might easily feel ungrounded, far from the historic sociopolitical realities from which it actually emerged.

That said, Waldman and Wright have strategically chosen to print texts which might well awaken a casual reader to the interpersonal intricacies behind the Beats’ aesthetic manifestoes. One of the strongest aspects of Beats at Naropa is the inclusion of pieces that look back at the history of this poetic movement. Collecting a 1999 talk by Michael McClure about the Six Gallery reading, a 2000 panel discussion about “Women and the Beats,” and interviews both recent (with Ed Sanders) and past (with William Burroughs) alongside the more esoteric pieces gives the anthology as a whole some of the benefits of self-reflection, a maturity which generates not only a historical but a thematic context. Passages such as McClure’s reminder that the formative 1955 reading “was nothing too elegant,” and Sanders’ commentary on the meaning of Kerouac and Ginsberg’s differing votes in the 1960 presidential election, readily illuminate the history of the Beats for those readers who are in the early stages of a poetic encounter (17, 142).

Unfortunately, these moments of enlightenment are haphazard, scattered throughout the anthology as a whole. While this might well be a nod to the impossibility of a truthful linear narrative, or an attempt to avoid developing a chronologically hidebound, “museum piece” of a book, it also often limits the audience of this text to those insiders who might already be aware of and receptive to the poetic theories dispersed within it. As Gary Snyder notes in 1983’s “Basic Definitions,” the switch from an oral to a written tradition “makes the literary experience…more solitary,” as opposed to the “social experience” it had been in “preliterate times” (31). Similarly, the switch from attending a lecture on poetics to reading a transcription of said talk can close down what was originally an open, even communal experience.

So can a poetics anthology genuinely transmit the energy within those moments of awareness and insight that define its past? It is again in the words of Diane di Prima—whose 1997 speech, “By Any Means Necessary,” concludes Waldman and Wright’s collection—that we might find inspiration. Explaining her ambivalence about the then-nascent powers of the Web, di Prima argues in favor of the handmade broadside or little magazine, noting that “Each time you do it, you’ve made an object. Even if it’s a note to a friend, it’s something that stays around, and sometimes other people see it or use it a long time later.” And while it’s true that such objects can similarly become artifacts, “and thereby you’re freezing the moment,” you’re also transmitting your own energies to your readers via that object, building a relationship between poet and audience that to some degree may help mitigate the social losses that come with near-universal literacy (197). Ultimately, Beats at Naropa does function as a sort of updated, not-so-little magazine, a chronicle of both past and present, and in its scattered nature it occasionally manages to transmit the same sense of poetic possibility which can yet be found in readings, classroom discussions, or conversations between good friends—the kind of kinship-building which still happens for us all.

In 1975, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche—the founder of Naropa University—moderated a “Poets’ Colloquium” at the school, engaging nine poets in conversation with him and each other. In the midst of this often chaotic transcript, Allen Ginsberg ably articulates the potential power poetry may yet have in contemporary society. Asked by Trungpa how, exactly, “poetry would help people,” Ginsberg stated, “It’s you who learn” the “agreements and contradictions” of society “for other people to understand,” that the role of the (Beat) poet is to observe and transmit all he or she sees, however (dis)orderly it may seem to be (173). And while this ultimately emerges from a particular experience of selfhood, of individual behavior and habits of mind, Ginsberg asserts, when pressed by Trungpa, that this will absolutely “help society,” because it allows for the expression of experiences which have either been poorly portrayed or ignored completely, thereby generating a more complete picture of society as a whole (173).

The optimism of this statement, the assurance that poetry can provide aid, inspires me—much as Diane di Prima’s words did on a rainy October night some weeks ago. A poem cannot always solve your immediate material woes. It can’t always stop the MTA from raising subway fares, or get the U.S. out of two wars. But as we head into the darkest nights of the year, the Beat poets remind us: there is nothing a poem should not do. And poetry can always help.

*****

L. M. Freer is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she studies twentieth-century American poetics. She hopes to eventually emerge from her own “chrysalis” as an “outrider” scholar of the inventive and unorthodox.

(MADE) by CARA BENSON

2010-12-05T19:25:00.000-08:00

MOIRA RICHARDS Reviews

(made) by Cara Benson
(Book Thug, Toronto, 2010)

A first reading of Cara Benson’s (made) had me intrigued, interested, yet rather flummoxed. What to make/how to make something of poetry that resists the linearity of narrative upon which I’ve depended for decades of reading?

In subsequent readings I do find a snippet or two of narrative and I home in on them, partly as I might on a chance-met compatriot in an exotic foreign country but mostly because as in this, the first piece in the book, the poet with just a few words, evokes so compelling a sense of intensity that I must have more...

Bobbed sunflower head heavy from the yearning fulfilled. What effort to make love with such a star. Yellow sight, beholden to those who revel in brief, yet luminous day-night. Alchemy’s errand, the draped field. Undertow in stalks; waving pull of roots uprising…

(pg 7)

…and then back to the more strange-to-me aspects of the book. Almost every page has one of its words set apart in larger, bolder font than the rest of the page’s text. Titles, perhaps? No… it seems not… more like word-as-punctuation, or word-as-response to the text. Again, the poetry subverts and teases my expectations, my preconceptions… brings to me an almost tangible sensation -- rather like hovering in that zone between wakefulness and sleep:

Rocks come in sheets: gypsum plaster between paper. There is a softness to the touch, surface scratchable by fingernail. Hung. Taped. Sealed. Papered. Ornamented. Pink fiber concealed. Protection. Separator of wind. View. distribution, all…

What appears like candy to keep us warm, can injure upon a brush. And White can bruise a forehead.

Slumberland

(pg 32)

I am an accountant by trade, used to creating order, making some kind of ‘sense’ from the unordered. I’ve learned to expect that everything is somehow part of a pattern, just waiting to be discovered, and so I flip the pages of (made), focussing only on the large ‘not titles’ words. Perhaps therein lies the unifying thread of the work:

“mise-en-scène” -- setting the stage… ok…

“Nomothetic” -- establishing law/order… I knew it!

but then, “Over(t)” and later,

“me-tooism” -- and the text once

more refutes, rebukes my attempts to pin it to patterns. And laughs at me, too?

So, no pattern. And, I suspect, the title enclosed as it is in brackets, means to tell me that this text is complete, and not something for me to re(make) into conformance with my expectations. The very last words in the collection read in large type, “let be”

Right. I must go to this work to engage with it, not attempt to bring it, drag it into the confines of my experience. I page backwards and forwards at random -- let my eyes fall where they will -- on a colour; orange…

Earth holds its own orange. Centre roiling within a crusted home. Striation sublimation nonesuch retaliation. Battleship rotation. Cracks in the well: deep cuts: stone skin. Gray head sprout buttercup to endeavor mend, but storm…

(pg 53)

Wonderful mouth-filling sounds and a vivid and motile picture in my head. I flip again, looking for more – ‘mush’ catches my eye and again I’ve found orange…

Rot mush pumpkins on the swept front porch. Some orange beside bricks. No faces. All swells and rind. How does a fruit see its way up the vine to blossom as it does? The pregnancy aborted by the screen door…

(pg 43)

at the end of that piece, the large word “stigma”.

A total shift in mood… the text creates a sense of menace, brings the ambient temperature down a few notches. Now (made) is no longer making fun of me, it’s making fun with me!

The book is printed in landscape mode so the poetry runs free in long, long lines across the pages -- far longer than I’m able to reproduce here -- and it invites me to run with it too, free of my pinning/fixing/logic-based approach to poetry. Back to the start of the book, left-brain stashed firmly in a bottom drawer, and like a nude swimmer, I dip first my toes and then slide my whole body into the water/flow of the text and allow it to wash me with its images, allow it to lift and draw me into the intersecting currents of the poet’s imaginings. As the poetry on page 9 suggests…

… Do not pause onscreen. Wander, but delete, too … The eyes alone cannot see…

and page 55,

… What flails away in the black from bang a stratospheric state of perception. Some would say “illusion.” This is illusory. So it is still, after all. Is the one you? Yes. Yes you. After all else what is. If this is in your hands, it is only here because you hold it. When you “put this down” what will become. What a sticky story (it was).

and

… What the word will become cannot be known.

To guess is to contradict.
To wonder is to die.
To say so is another matter, all together.

(pg 61)

Nothing more for me to say, just surrender… flow with the poetry as it goes…

…. “let be”

*****

Moira Richards lives in South Africa and hangs out here
and here.

DRUNKER/HOLDING EMBER by RAYMOND FARR

2010-12-05T19:15:00.000-08:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Drunker/holding ember by Raymond Farr
(Blue and Yellow Dog Press, Ocala, Florida, 2010)

Often in Raymond Farr’s Drunker/ holding ember “words” seem to “become dissidents” against legible intention, and “they Molotov like cocktails” (18). In “A Language I Study to Resemble,” for example, phrases like “a lob that is missing” (10) simultaneously undermine and underscore visible presence and even existence. Where, if anywhere, is the lob that should be “here”?

In the couplets, “Looking up dice/ I cantilever over// The wall is a voice/ I see with my hands” (11), the opening gerund can mean either that someone is in a position to see the inner material of solid objects physically above him/her or that the person can try to discover the significance of these agents of chance by looking elsewhere. To “cantilever over” involves a lateral move dissimilar to usual modes of walking, running, and driving—perhaps a use of metonymic association rather than linear thinking or straightforward narrative development. Farr is as interested in obstruction of communication as he is in intersubjective successes; in the second couplet cited above, a barrier “speaks” to the persona—if such a traditional term should be used—through synesthesia involving displacements among three of the five senses. Speech in this book frequently comes from an unusual place to create odd miracles: “My henchmen’re herons whose gonads/ Speak ladders” (57). The speaker is poetically enabled by stately birds which articulate an elevated state through sexual desire. But my stilted paraphrase leaves out the breathy impact of “h” alliteration, the preponderance of concluding “s” sounds, and the assonance linking the last syllable of “gonads” and the first of “ladders,” both words in trochaic form.

Within the continual disruption of ordinary sense and continuity in Farr’s poems, which range from two to six pages and which often go a third or a halfway down the page, a few persistent themes can be discerned. One topic is (often laudatory) exploration of sources of aesthetic inspiration: “Dada’s a fire door/ Open when closed” (59). As in much avant-garde work, limitations and proscriptions open up fiery departures from convention. As the title of “Dear Dali, You Are Super Inflammable,” Salvador Dali’s surrealist painting is so “flammable” that it transcends whatever resistance would damage or destroy it:

4 am: eine indische dichtung

Fiery in red bedclothes I go up

Spiffy as a cardinal
I Dali a crucifix
I am clawed ever bellicose
I woe woe woe my boat till speech is a pen colder than Norway

Is painting a motor?

I culminate a truth carved out of mangos
& climb. (26)

Metrically, most of the poems in the book bundle small units of perception/language by alternating between monostichs and couplets, with an occasional tercet, but this passage includes a quatrain along with the one- and two-line strophes.

First, Farr cites the subtitle of Hesse’s Siddhartha, which translates into English as “an Indian poetry,” as though, a European understanding of the historical Buddha’s life is hovering around a scene that will turn out to represent the culmination of Jesus’. The “fiery”-pajama-clad speaker, rising very early or perhaps dreaming lucidly, is “spiffy,” in contrast to Dali’s richly spectral colors, and the suggestion of his “crucifixion” clashes with that of the painter’s mostly naked Jesus, because the former is linked either with a bright red bird or a Catholic prelate in a red hat. But “going up” is not necessarily to a crucifixion; it could be ascent to a surreal experience. The fourth line in the passage can be read as three noun clauses without a verb, indicating an appositional identification between “I,” the painter, and the dazzling crucifix to be found in one of Dali’s paintings. But “Dali” could be a verb that suggests that Farr makes symbolic use of a crucifix as the painter does—to jostle ordinary associations and to express “woe,” not so much about the persecution of Jesus, but about what modern Christian institutions do to human imaginations. Extremely “cold” speech/writing takes “bellicose” action against tepid linguistic or pictorial norms, yet vibrant energy (“a motor”) and sensual celebration (“carved out of mangos”) are both the sources and effects of the artist’s remarkably inventive process.

A fascination with and rage against contemporary commercial culture is an important thematic component of Farr’s book. In the final tercet of “Ravage Poetics Fences Haiku Breathing on Metro,” the poet’s desire to “goof with” the hegemonic power of TV and the web is aptly revealed: “My elixir’s gone mad/ I goof with the signal/ The cable’s my guide” (42). As “Spare Room Goes Up in Dust Mites” has it, “AUTO MAKERS bleeding stock market dough/ Is not good enough a poem” (43), but a poem that exposes the “bleeding” without allowing the polemical to override the “drunker” reaches of language at play may be “good enough.”

In “Call ‘It’ a Nightmare’s Budding Couture,” fragments of quasi-sensible reference and quasi-narrative evoke the nightmare elements in the existence of one who lurches through consumer culture, satisfying small impulses only to encounter new ones and bathing in advertising fantasies of pseudo-abundance: “In fantastic swinging azure fact(or)(y)/ Of daydreams” (21). The poetic elegance of “azure,” as in Mallarme’s work, is reduced to a component of media manipulation, and a “fact” is chopped into a “factory’s” productions of “factors” that push the consumption of this “or” that (“x” or “y”).

Unlike surrealism’s effort to free the unconscious from conditioning, the media (and perhaps conventional religious institutions that utilize it) “stage” the dreaming process in advance for consumers, or one might say that “hooked” dreamers submit to the staging:

Staged dreamers ogle heaven’s tv
Hooked for clues it gives

I am
I want
To

Stampede my demons across deli fromage
Into rippling muscles
Of alien wind chimes. (22)

The second strophe concisely notes how ad culture links presumptions about desire to those about individual identity, but then the speaker’s aim is revealed, not to stamp out “demons” but to get them vigorously “across” the consumption of “deli” cheese (spruced up with a French translation) into synesthestic confluence of kinesthetic heft and what is usually an ethereal auditory experience so that they can either be exercised or exorcized.

Farr is adept at presenting images of cultural entrapment in situations of repetitive media bombardment—“Eternal reruns/ Of savage Brillo commercial advantage” (23)—and psychological habit that feels physical: “I too am much too o’clock/ Revolving like ravens locked in a cloud” (24). Note the surfeit of “o” and “oo” sounds in the first line of the second passage, and the marvelous play on solidity/airiness in the second line.
He also displays a strong awareness of how easily oppositional impulses are coopted: “It’s caption me time in counterculture” (22).

In Farr’s work, which uses the “I” liberally only to fragment it, “language” is “spurious as identity.” The reader who is “holding” each “ember” of sense and non-sense may get burned but can also find these “drunker” uses of language socially illuminating and imaginatively charged.

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of six books of poetry and two books of criticism. He is also co-editor of a 2007 collection of essays on David Shapiro. Marsh Hawk Press will publish his next poetry collection, Peace Conference, in 2011. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). Fink’s paintings hang in various collections.

ON SECRETS OF MY PRISON HOUSE by GEOFFREY GATZA

2010-12-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

EDRIC MESMER Reviews

On Secrets of my Prison House by Geoffrey Gatza
(BlazeVOX, Buffalo, N.Y., 2010)

Keep off the path, beware the gate,
watch out for signs that say "hidden driveways"

Fear of the public cyberspace may revivify the marketplace of arcades past. But replacing yesteryear’s space with the coded language of group isolation presents new fears, evacuating arcades on the upshot. Needn’t we fear the ethos of reorganized discourse? we feign to ask. In the interest of these conflicts, let’s heed an unspoken axiom from poet-publisher Geoffrey Gatza: There’s nothing to fear but nothing itself. [i.e. “Ex nihlo nihlo fit” (15).]

Now picture a device wiring your virtual Facebook wall through your iPod, on shuffle, and listen. Next, subtract the mechanization of randomness, replacing it with a poetics capable of synthesizing the former invention: That’s what’s “now” in the poetry of Gatza’s Secrets of my Prison House, if the application of temporal vocabulary still bears resistance.

There are no recommendations
I cannot tell you how butter tastes
I could barely stand up; there was a car crash (12)

read the amalgamated semes of this authorial playlist, each a wailing wall of one’s own overheard. Consider further lines from the poem cited above, “Everybody Has An Ashbery Of Their Own”:

Spoken from the heart, the levies broke
The idea runs counter to the team effort (ibid)

noting referential signs of heart-wrought emotion, commercial lyricism, natural disaster, and metaphoric fulfillment, abutting near-commentary in the antiphon of counter-inspirational rhetoric. (But I’ve now said “rhetoric”, and) As the title clues in, non-referential polysemes may employ or deploy meaning against its retail value.

It is how history unfolds onto paper
and how one can display one bit that unfolds layer of relevant history
upon personal interest that makes the curator an artist! (14)

So states a poetics culpable in the collage of signs necessary to imbricate poetry through the densely discursive experience of this now when “[t]he only authentic man in the room is not sure if he is a fraud” and “[t]he elephant on their shoulders just got heavier” (18; 85). Lists, alphabetical conceits, and bulleted sequences encapsulate a lengthy section of word games. And while not all tennis courts make for small talk, consider the coined jingoism of interesting conflicts in

disappflyointment (36)
solicitwitter (39)
fashionlightenment (49)

and

Totalbeefrecall (62)

The last using degrees of inked emphasis to deliver polyphemal delight—Did I not yet mention delight, seme to pheme?

If Polyphemus bears referencing then “like a guillotine everything falls into place” when we revisit the use of recombinative phemes of communication, and the polyglottal ability to speak the many semes of coherence into the poem, even while

15. Poetry no longer exists
16. Physics cannot prove it anymore (18; 20)

Pheme, after all, is the groomer of fame and rumor, reporting with Virgilian feet grounded in the polis and head among the ether.

*****

Edric Mesmer’s poems have appeared in BlazeVOX, Aufgabe, and currently in the latest issue of Vanitas. A graduate of SUNY Geneseo and the University of Manchester, Edric works as an adjunct teacher, freelance researcher, and part-time shopkeep; also, he collates the recently reinvigorated Yellow [Edenwald] Field, a journal of poetry and visual art, due out in the Fall of 2010.

EATING HER WEDDING DRESS, edited by VASILIKI KATSAROU, RUTH O'TOOLE & ELLEN FOOS

2010-12-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

PEG DUTHIE Engages

Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems edited by Vasiliki Katsarou, Ruth O’Toole, and Ellen Foos
(Ragged Sky Press, Princeton, N.J., 2009)

Of the books I read to review this year, this anthology is easily my favorite. It is well-designed and well-curated. I found myself marking poem after poem as one I would want to revisit later. As Vasiliki Katsarou mentions in her introduction, “Poets from far and wide have responded poignantly and with humor to our call for poetry about clothing.” The editors clearly had a generous selection of good submissions to choose from, and the final selection includes both modern classics (such as Billy Collins’s “Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes” and Maxine Kumin’s “How It Is”) and oughta-be classics by poets whose work I haven’t encountered anywhere else.

There are sassy, mouthy poems; poems of yearning and of mourning; reflections on gender, reflections on power, and reflections on reflections. There are several varieties of silly, including vicious (Janis Butler Holm’s “If Paris Hilton Wrote Poetry”), droll (Wally Glickman’s “Makinglove” – “I’ve never been so smitten / by any muff or mitten”), and flowery (Rachim Baskin’s “Forsythia, you floozy!”). The better-known poets in the collection include Margaret Atwood, Lynn Emanuel, Jorie Graham, Jean Hollander, Paul Muldoon, and Charles Simic. There is a Susan Stewart translation of “The Apron,” a poem by Alda Merini (“one of Italy’s most important living poets” and twice nominated for the Nobel Prize). Li-Young Lee is invoked in John Estes’s “A few chemicals mixed together and flesh and blood and bone just fade away!”

One of the most appealing aspects of this collection is how many stories it contains, and stories within stories. Marcia Aldrich’s “White Blouse” mentions a suicide attempt, while Shoshauna Shy’s “What Shall I Wear to Meet Your Wife” rejects at least four articles of clothing in the course of determining what’s appropriate. Maxine Sussman’s “Packing for College” addresses a child about to leave home (“Some things / in your toss pile I regret, but why / should I save what you don’t want?”), while Michael R. Brown’s “Parents Held Hostage by Hatless Teen” simmers with the danger awaiting a child outside the home (“knowing our son had put a price / on his head with the hat he’d bought”), and Alice Friman’s “Diapers for my Father” ruefully conveys the panic inherent in the shopping expedition for the items in question, neatly bookending the piece with allusions to Hamlet. Juditha Dowd and her female partner’s grief “For the One Who Will Not Be” is depicted in a vision of tiny coats marching away, while Lynne Shapiro’s “Your Dead Mother” and Daniel W.K. Lee’s “Ties” take shape around the absence of beloved parents. Lesley Wheeler writes of being young, Jewish, and terrified in “Dressing Down, 1962,” and Beatrice M. Hogg’s fond tribute to Richard H. Person, “Fabulous,” vividly portrays a man who looked good in everything from “African caftans” to “US Air Force full dress uniform.” Later in the book, Wanda S. Praisner takes a long look at a photograph of a dress worn by Empress Elisabeth of Austria.

I also relish how frank this collection is about sex. I didn’t expect to like Jan Beatty’s “When Foucault Entered the Body,” but “My friend Aaron said he’d like to give Sean Penn / a tongue bath, & I guess that’s clear enough” is a killer opening no matter how you slice it. John L. Falk declares that “To shed clothing for a woman / Is to don dominion,” and also that “A naked woman with a pen knife / Could rip the day or night sky / Open with a shrug, or the slightest / Flexing of her wrist” (“Clothes and Power”). Shaindel Beers’s “Taking Back the Bra Drawer” bitterly glares at past and future in the wake of a sudden breakup--

I want him here to the degree
of absenting myself. I will be any woman –
one who hasn’t slept with other women, or
who hasn’t been married before – one who will
sew by hand until she is needle-pricked dry.

--whereas Erin Elizabeth Smith seems flummoxed by the contents of her closet, which include a lime halter dress, an orange tube top, and ruffled zebra print: “I barely know myself / through these – what floors they’d slept on, / while I thrashed in some bed.” Mmm!

Last but not least, the poems about red clothing were standouts for me. (I resisted the color as a child -- I associated it with being Asian, which was something I mightily resented back when it was a reason for other kids to pick on me. Now, of course, there being plenty of other reasons for people to pick on me, I wear red as often as I wear black, and I’ve even completed a 5K in a scarlet evening gown.) The anthology spotlights other colors as well -- a white t-shirt, a yellow blouse, a blue dress – but it’s the reds that call out to me: Jane Knechtel ‘s red bra, Christina Lovin’s red hat, Eve’s red dress (given voice by Diane Lockward), and - a favorite among favorites -- Kim Addonizio’s “ ‘What Do Women Want?’”

I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want.

*****

Peg Duthie shares a house in Nashville with a tall man, a large dog, and a short piano. She blogs about poetry at Vary the Line and tweets about it now and then (@zirconium).

BEHAVE by STEVE TILLS

2010-12-05T19:00:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Behave: California Rant 66 by Steve Tills
(dPress, Sebastopol, CA, 2004)

Among the adoption stories I've recently heard is of a child who once screamed for two hours protesting against attachment (to his adopting parents). Steve Tills reminded me of that tale with his collection Behave, except that it seems more to be a long rant for attachment. Behave contains 74 pages of poems, each entitled as a numbered rant, that is, "Rant 67," "Rant 69", and so on to the last "Rant 171."

By the way, it seems to me that Behave could be a book-length poem and that the poem-breaks (viz new titles) are akin to line breaks or stanza breaks -- spaces to pause but not end. Such a rant, though, would be longer than the two hours from my recalled adoption tale because the first poem isn't a "Rant 1" and the numbers aren't chronological (there isn't, for instance, a "Rant 170"). This implies the rant began long before the first poem was writ (or presented) and that some rants just lapse into speechlessness but nonetheless continue despite the lack of words.

Thus, one of the collection's strengths is the high-energy it maintains throughout, even as there are back-and-forth riffs and puns that evoke jazz. Here are three poems:

Rant 150

Something
in the way
you'd move
those pawns
from around

the queen.
The bishops
are just so
black and white.
At night,

the castles
drop like skies;
they drop
from the sky
just like that.

The king
surrounded himself
until there wasn't
any room to live
in.

Rant 151

So anyway,
the king surrounded
himself
until
there was no room

to give in.
To live in.
Maybe.
it's true
the pawns

crowded around
the queen
and she found
sleep
difficult

at night.
The pawns
crowd around
the queen
and she can't breath.

Rant 152

Something
in the way
you'll move
those pawns,
files of shame,

for the queen.
Remove her
like no other.
The pawns,
they protect

her from what;
they protect
you from lust.
All she couldn't
do was dance.

All you
wanna do
is remove
those lancets
from your guts.

Much word play, indeed.

But why do I call this a rant for attachment? Because there's too much caring displayed amidst the play. These aren't just text games. There is an interest in the reader--as in this excerpt from "Rant 126":

Your E-mail fails
to communicate.

No one sees through
your screened words,
sees what you're really like,
but I know you

in the full depth of your despair.
I shrug
and we embrace
what
isn't monitored by Bill Gates

So while a messed up world--

Read the Tao Jones, what's fixed
for oncologies of capital interest,
what's anthologized; wahts are not
who's whose that's what James Watt
did for paper. There's a lot
of currency in things like American
trees, phone trees. AT&T
has a book of names for making connections,
but all these little numbers
oughta go up in smoke; history
repeats its myriad and marketable
selves; more conglomerations of predigested
interests pile up on shelves.
There's enough pulp friction between
our ears.
--from "Rant 128"

--might tempt one into solipsistic play, these poems don't just deconstruct words, flinging letters about. These poems have something to say that can be summed up as

I PROTEST!

And as one looks around at the world, one can't help but empathize. But Tills' genius here is that he may rant, but he doesn't just rant. He still looks out for reasons to attach to each other despite the "hierarch[ies] / we constructed / ourselves" that makes us all "slaves." With his failure to wallow in the despair that generated his rants, Tills' poems thus come to deserve attention -- from "Rant 128":

Listen, Operators, I want to make it
a person-to-person plea here,
but you've got to get off the bottom line.
Get out and touch someone.
Take a collection and shove it
into your hard drives. Spare a dime
or two for real books, not advertising
brochures.

MR. MAGOO by STEVE TILLS

2010-12-05T18:55:00.000-08:00

JIM MCRARY Mini-Reviews

Mr. Magoo by Steve Tills
(Loose Gravel Press, Arroyo Grande, CA, 1997)

This is, belated yet, a collection of work by Mr. Tills from 1997 here now brought up in 2010. Perhaps lying in the rough all these years….or not. Out of play for sure. But to kick off a new imprint and re-birth of Loose Gravel Press
what could be better. So here is the deal….this guy I know and you know that because we all read the same stuff.

That said I just spent time overlooking this Mr. Magoo. And it kills me. Why not. Fresh for sure because like all the good ones Tills knew what was funny almost a decade ago and knows it is still. That is the deal here too. Mr. Magoo indeed. How Can you not. Laugh. Here this (is that Blackburn) excerpt:

“What d’ya do for a living, Guy?”

“Ah, Clockwork. Clockwork’s
my trade.”

“Long time?”

“Yeah, been doin it for a long time.”

The whole thing is to be read and read aloud and read in public and passed on. For the right reasons.

*****

Jim McCrary blogs at http://wwwresistingpoetry.blogspot.com/. This is him with cat:

AUTOPSY TURVY by THOMAS FINK and MAYA DIABLO MASON (2)

2010-12-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS T. SPATAFORA Reviews

Autopsy Turvy by Thomas Fink and Maya Diablo Mason
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2010)

Challenging Perspectives

"The reverse side also has a reverse side."
-Japanese Proverb

Dr. Thomas Fink’s and Maya Diablo Mason’s Autopsy Turvy ventures to address a variety of sensitive topics in a subtle, cryptic style with an unconventional perspective, topics readily avoided, indeed evaded, by writers and readers alike. These issues by their very nature impose a stigma, perhaps initially deterring the reader from fervently reading through the book’s various poems, actively discerning its wealth of insight and perspective. For this reason, its audience must read with an open mind, receptive to the wisdom contained within the verses. The poetry is primarily a collection of free-verse lyrics, odes and allegories, simple in verbiage yet profound and provocative.

Lyrics such as “Preposterous” challenge the Eastern contempt for the ego, while “Destiny’s Day Off” poses a unique philosophical perspective advocating the concept of Divine intervention, conceptually synonymous with freedom’s enigmatic necessity for limitations illustrated in “You Have To.” “Soul Fumes” presents an allegorical, metaphorical viewpoint of the afterlife. Drugs and emotional anguish are prevalent throughout Autopsy Turvy in such pieces as “Now What’s for Dinner Tomorrow?” as well as the lyric bearing the book’s title. “Medicine” is illustrative of the Eastern concept of cause and effect or the Day of Judgment in Christian theology. “Halloween Tree,” “Interesting” and “A Huge Amount of Time,” although lyrics to be appreciated, may provoke feelings of despondency and embitterment for the reader who relates to lost love, rejection and abandonment.

The ego has widely been the object of contempt by Eastern theology while providing the sustenance for individualism and achievement in the West. But who are we in the absence of this identity? This question is addressed in “Preposterous,”: “I/won’t be/blanched” (lines 13-15). Is the ego the foundation for psychological integrity, or is it a phantom to be rejected?

Western ideology typically denounces the abdication of individual responsibility and accountability to a higher power. Yoga, for example, parables the higher source as a luggage rack to where the lone weary traveler need simply place his or her baggage or burden. But what if destiny ceased to assume authority and control over one’s actions and future? Imagine a life without predestination. These considerations are prompted as one reads “Destiny’s Day Off,” an ode to fate and Divine supremacy: “How/could we obtain/enough soap to/wash the ocean?” (lines 13-16).

What is the hereafter? This universally posed question is answered in “Soul Fumes,” an allegory symbolically depictive of an “[a]bandoned cigarette [fume]” whose light has ceased to glow, leaving its ember in the wake of its physical extinction (line 1). The cigarette and its ash are analogous to one’s mortal existence and disembodiment upon his/her passing, the metamorphosis from one form of life energy to another.

Substance abuse—an act of desperation, a destructive opiate for emotional suffering, a suicidal act and exemplary plea for attention, for help—this is what the speakers of “Autopsy Turvy” and “Now What’s for Dinner Tomorrow?” are expressing in these thematically comparable lyrics. The former “[makes] reservations at the graveyard” while the latter seeks notice by paradoxically starving her-/himself to demise, the only source of sustenance being a narcotic herb (line 2; line 1, 8-10).

Eastern philosophy terms it the concept of dependent origination, commonly referred to as karma. Dr. Fink and Mason call it “Medicine,” a free-versed, contemptuous assault on the avarice of the wealthy: “Others, paid in caviar, die tomorrow,” reminiscent of the Christian belief in Judgment Day (line 15; Mt. 12:36). But what is karma, Judgment Day? Is it a Divine or causal manifestation of reflection or retribution?

The rejected lover will appreciate “Halloween Tree,” “Interesting” and “A Huge Amount of Time,” three lyrics expressive of the abandoned and alienated forlorn desperate for reciprocated love and acceptance, contextually synonymous with author Sandy McIntosh’s “Among the Disappointments of Love”: “Mortified, outraged, I gorged myself” (line 38). “Unharmonized sentimentality becomes mutant concrete” in “A Huge Amount of Time” (line 11). “Interesting” expresses the discouragement of the forsaken, uttering a bitter and apostrophic “Take that, happiness!” (line 9).

“You Have To” poses a paradoxical notion of freedom, suggesting that liberation is ironically nonexistent if devoid of limitations:

If
no ‘have to’
existed would what
has to
be
done,
be done?
(lines 11-17)

Dr. Fink’s and Mason’s ironical concept of freedom is reminiscent of Manhattan Man’s Jack Lynch’s allegorical “Evening,” metaphorical of the predictable and ultimate end of one’s plans, hopes and yearnings antithetically signifying the conclusion of freedom and the threshold of predictability, certainty and bondage.

Is the identity indeed an entity for one’s self to divest or cherish as considered in “Preposterous”? Certainly, its need for recognition if taken to the extreme may resort to self-dissolution and sabotage, as we see in “Autopsy Turvy” and “What’s for Dinner Tomorrow?” Is Divine intervention a belief to be condemned or appreciated, as posed in Destiny’s Day Off”? Is the afterlife another form of energy, as proposed in “Soul Fumes”? Is “Medicine” in fact a punishment, a self-reflective or Divine-authorial judgment?

Dr. Thomas Fink’s and Maya Diablo Mason’s Autopsy Turvy embodies reality and profundity and will be appreciated by a self-reflective, spiritually motivated seeker of insight and wisdom as s/he discerns a deluxe menu of entrées for deliberation.

+++++++++++++++++++
Works Cited

Fink, Thomas and Maya Diablo Mason. Autopsy Turvy. San Francisco & St. Helena: Meritage Press, 2010. Print.

Lynch, Jack. Manhattan Man and Other Poems. New York: Reed and Quill Press, 2008. Print.

McIntosh, Sandy. “Among the Disappointments of Love.” Ernesta in the Style of the Flamenco. New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2010. Print.

*****

Nicholas T. Spatafora is an educator at Joseph Pulitzer Intermediate School in Jackson Heights, Queens and an English Professor at the City University of New York. He holds two graduate degrees from Hunter College in New York City and has enjoyed a successful career in education spanning twenty four years. Contemplating a life in Catholic ministry, he attended Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in New York. The author is a member of the Tao Society in Tai Pei, and prior affiliations include the Religious Society of Friends and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. Spatafora is the author of Hurt, the feature article “Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: A Fictional Account of the Life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha” and “A Review of Jack Lynch’s Manhattan Man and Other Poems,” also featured in Eileen Tabios’s Galatea Resurrects. He and his wife Hsiaochen (Judy) reside in Flushing, New York.