Galatea Resurrects #9 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 9 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2008-03-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

March 31, 2008

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

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
By Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Brian Clements engages nine books by John Yau: PARADISO DIASPORA; THE PASSIONATE SPECTATOR: ESSAYS ON ART AND POETRY; ING GRISH (with illustrations by Thomas Nozkowski); BORROWED LOVE POEMS; THE UNITED STATES OF JASPER JOHNS; RADIANT SILHOUETTE; CORPSE AND MIRROR; SOMETIMES; and 100 MORE JOKES FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD (with etchings by Archie Rand)

David Goldstein reviews TWENTY-ONE AFTER DAYS by Lisa Lubasch

Patrick James Dunagan reviews CADENZA by Charles North and DOING 70 by Hettie Jones

Séamas Cain reviews SKINNY BUDDHA by Sheila E. Murphy

Raymond John A. de Borja reviews NOISE PICTORIAL NOISE by Noah Eli Gordon

Shanna Compton reviews DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION by Cathy Park Hong

Eileen Tabios engages MAUVE SEA-ORCHIDS by Lila Zemborain, Trans. by Rosa Alcala and Monica de la Torre

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews RAPID DEPARTURES by Vincent Katz

Eileen Tabios engages IMAGINING A BABY by Bob Marcacci

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews PRAU by Jean Vengua

Thomas Fink reviews WHEN A WOMAN LOVES A MAN by David Lehman

Kristi Castro reviews SOMETHING BRIGHT, THEN HOLES by Maggie Nelson and [GROWLING SOFTLY] Edited by Juliet Cook and "drilled" by David Foster

Nicholas Manning reviews TEXT LOSES TIME by Nico Vassilakis

Stephen Vincent reviews WHAT’S IN STORE by Trevor Joyce

Eileen Tabios engages ZAMBOANGUENA by Corrine Fitzpatrick

Burt Kimmelman engages eight publications by Basil King: 77 BEASTS; BASIL KING'S BESTIARY; LEARNING TO DRAW / A HISTORY: TWIN TOWERS; MIRAGE: A POEM IN 22 SECTIONS; WARP SPASM; THE POET; IDENTITY; THE COMPLETE MINIATURES; and DEVOTIONS, WITH SELECTIONS FROM A PAINTERS BESTIARY AND 14 DRAWINGS FROM INTENTIONS

Tom Beckett reviews HARLOT by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Patrick James Dunagan reviews HOME AMONG THE SWINGING STARS: COLLECTED POEMS OF JAIME DE ANGULO, Edited by Stefan Hyner with an essay by Andrew Schelling

Juliet Cook engages FEIGN by Kristy Bowen

Anny Ballardini reviews DAYS POEM, VOLS. I and II by Allen Bramhall

Patrick James Dunagan reviews THE FINAL NITE & OTHER POEMS: COMPLETE NOTES FROM A CHARLES GAYLE NOTEBOOK 1987-2006 by Steve Dalachinsky

Karen Rigby reviews THE BEDSIDE GUIDE TO NO TELL MOTEL: SECOND FLOOR, Edited by Reb Livingston and Molly Arden

Nathan Logan reviews THE BEDSIDE GUIDE TO NO TELL MOTEL, Edited by Reb Livingston and Molly Arden

Eileen Tabios engages MY NAME IS ESTHER CLARA by Laurel Johnson; a FOURSQUARE SPECIAL EDITION OF FIVE POEMS by Maureen Thorson; and HERE, LOVE by Jess Rowan

Jeffrey Side reviews BEAMS by Adam Fieled

Jon Cone reviews LITTLE BOAT by Jean Valentine

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews OVERNIGHT by Paul Violi

Jeff Harrison reviews OPENING AND CLOSING NUMBERS by Anny Ballardini

Eileen Tabios engages AN ARCHITECTURE by Chad Sweeney

Jessica Bozek engages DUMMY FIRE by Sarah Vap

Ryan Daley reviews THE FRANK POEMS by CAConrad

Eileen Tabios engages CLEAVING by Dion Farquhar

Abigail Licad reviews THE ANCHORED ANGEL, SELECTED WRITINGS BY JOSE GARCIA, Edited by Eileen Tabios

Christopher Mulrooney reviews SELECTED POEMS OF GABRIELA MISTRAL, Trans. by Ursula K. Le Guin

Christopher Mulrooney reviews THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE SNOW by Yves Bonnefoy, Trans. by Alan Baker

Lisa Bower reviews TERRAIN TRACKS by Purvi Shah

Laurel Johnson reviews THERE ARE WORDS by Burt Kimmelman

Ivy Alvarez reviews A F I E L D by Anthony Hawley

Nathan Logan reviews WORDS IN YOUR FACE: A GUIDED TOUR THROUGH 20 YEARS OF THE NEW YORK POETRY SLAM by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

Eileen Tabios engages 2 POEMS FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL by Logan Ryan Smith

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews BLUE COLONIAL by David Roderick

Eileen Tabios engages LIST'N by Karri Kokko

Laurel Johnson reviews INDIAN TRAINS by Erika T. Wurth

Eileen Tabios engages THE HEART THAT LIES OUTSIDE THE BODY by Stephanie Lenox

Patrick James Dunagan reviews DON'T SAY A WORD by F.A. Nettelbeck

Eileen Tabios engages BEHIND THE WHEEL: POEMS ABOUT DRIVING by Janet S. Wong

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Four Poems by Ivy Alvarez: "Pear", "dumb", "The Tree" and "Parsonage Parlor"

FEATURE ARTICLES
"NOMADIC WAR" by Amy Levine

"MODERN IRONISTS: JOHN BERRYMAN, TED HUGHES, ROCHELLE OWENS, EDWARD DORN" by Rochelle Ratner

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Susana Gardner reviews ONCE UPON A NEOLIBERAL ROCKET BADGE by Jules Boykoff

Gina Myers engages LEARNING THE LANGUAGE and CASE SENSITIVE by Kate Greenstreet

Andrew Joron reviews BROKEN WORLD by Joseph Lease

Alfred A. Yuson reviews AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and PASSAGES: POEMS 1983-2006 by Edgar B. Maranan

Alfred A. Yuson reviews SORROWS OF THE CHAMELEON by Ella Wagemakers

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BACK COVER
An Editorial Board Meeting?!

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2008-03-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

A lot can happen in two years, especially in the internet. Two years ago when I began Galatea Resurrects (GR), blogged reviews weren't so common. But GR obviously fulfilled a need. A blog that I thought -- hoped! -- would manage to muster at least five reviews per issue just took off. And now reviews on blogs have blossomed elsewhere.

But this only makes me more honored that reviewers -- all volunteers, y'all -- continue to send GR their reviews or engagements. And I am delighted to share that, with Issue No. 9, GR continues to thrive -- bringing total new reviews to date to 470 (a summary can be seen at GR's List Of Reviewed Publishers). I had thought that last issue's new reviews/engagements numbering 64 would be a record. Instead, Issue No. 9 offers 65! Here are the stats showing showing Poetry's loveable relevance:

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

Of such, 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

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

*****

As 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).

*****

The poet-scholar-critic Timothy Yu recently presented a paper on poetry blogs at the "Markets: From the Bazaar to eBay" conference held by the University of Toronto's Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. You can see the paper HERE, but here's an excerpt:

Tabios also edits the blog-based book review Galatea Resurrects, a mixture of original reviews and reprints of print reviews that she regards as a form of “cultural activism” because it calls “more attention to poetry in all its forms, schools, approaches and other variety.” She also argues that blogs may allow “poetry to expand its audience beyond other poets”—in part, I would add, because most blogs do not require one to be a subscriber to read their content.

But, of course, Poetry is a gift economy -- hence, GR. And, yes, based on various emails, I know that it's expanded the audience for poetry -- it's even been a reference for some poetry/creative writing classes!

*****

For the past several months, I've spent much time on airplanes and other non-U.S. terroir. I, indeed, write this as I have one foot (with a non-matching shoe I suddenly realize) pointed to yet another airport tarmac. And so, no new dawg photo this issue, but I happily cheat with an oldie here with Achilles

because it's become a warm Spring in Napa Valley, purrr-fect for eating the French way, to wit, with a dog by your table at your favored eateries. May you eat well, drink well, and nuzzle well.

With much Love, Fur and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
March 31, 2008

NINE BOOKS by JOHN YAU

2008-03-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

BRIAN CLEMENTS Engages

The following books, all by John Yau:

Paradiso Diaspora
(Penguin, New York, 2006)

The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry
(University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2006)

Ing Grish. With Illustrations by Thomas Nozkowski
(Saturnalia Books, Philadelphia, 2005)

Borrowed Love Poems
(Penguin, New York, 2002)

The United States of Jasper Johns
(Zoland, Cambridge, 1996)

Radiant Silhouette
(Black Sparrow, Santa Rosa, 1989)

Corpse and Mirror
(Holt, New York, 1983)

Sometimes
(Sheep Meadow, New York, 1979)

100 More Jokes from the Dead, an etchings-based collaboration with Archie Rand
(Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco, 2001)

What Does John Yau See in Mirrors?

Frame 1: The first Yau book I read was Corpse and Mirror, back in the late ‘80s—the paperback edition with the Jasper Johns on the cover framed by black. One of my roommates had picked up a used copy for who knows what reason. I flipped open to “Variations on Corpse and Mirror” and was hooked. I was young. It had never occurred to me that one way to exercise the imagination was to thread together a few phrases, tear them apart, reconstitute them, Frankensteinish. It seemed like fun.

Frame 2: In the seventies a show for kids on PBS called Electric Company had an animated character named Letter Man. Letter Man’s special power was to change reality by rearranging the letters of words.

Frame 3: I was in New York on one of my trips in from Binghamton for some reading or another, slumming bookshops. In one shop, on 8th St., I think, from a table near the front of the store, a blast of blue and orange caught my eye—Radiant Silhouette. By now I’d read Corpse and Mirror many times over and Broken Off by the Music with similar joy at what I had believed to be sheer playfulness--the anagram taken to the level of the sentence, the poem, the book. But there now, the “Genghis Chan” poems and “Halfway to China” played off the “Radiant Silhouette” sequence and the prose poems of Childhood. Something slightly more complex than fun. Slightly. The cover—with mandala sun flaming in the field of gold, framed by blue—suddenly itself become an icon, a mirror.

Frame 4: Mirrors and things standing in for mirrors: moon, paintings, water, sky, snow, ice, corpse, parents, daughter, lover, shadows, frame, lens, photograph, window, memory, face, fish, an empty dish, poem, silhouette, cell phone caller ID, “John Yau,” a question, “the world through the camera of your own eyes,” jewels, eyes, light. Pick up any book of John Yau’s poems and see how long it takes you to find a poem without one of these in it.

Frame 5: Gradually a young reader might wake up. Realize that in “Cameo of a Chinese Woman on Mulberry Street”

                  Her face this moon a house

is something more than just lovely. That a poet’s early poems might provide keys to reading the more complex work to come, however different that later work might seem to be. Might come to ask what the poet seems to ask himself—what do these language games have to do with these other poems of diaspora? In either case, where is home?

Frame 6: On the train heading into New York from Connecticut to hear Yau read at Fordham, I hand Chris Gallagher (who had never read Yau) my copy of Radiant Silhouette, open to page 121. He reads “Two Kinds of Song” and “Corpse and Mirror,” asks “Where is this set?” “I don’t know,” I say, “In a land that doesn’t exist?” “I thought maybe China,” Chris says, “because of the soldiers and the statues and the king, the horses and chariot buried with him.” “I don’t know. Maybe it is China,” I say.

                  What the king remembers of his dream is not the dream itself.

Frame 7: In his most recent book of poems, Paradiso Diaspora, the language game is home; I myself am hell. Two words on different sides of the looking glass, just as

                  When a corpse meets a corpse there is a mirror between them

And it all takes place in the shadow of two towers falling, one corpse holding the hand of its daughter.

Frame 8: November 29, 2006, St. Mark’s, A Reading for Frank O’Hara’s 80th Birthday. Vincent Katz reads “Poem (At night Chinamen jump),” followed shortly by Yau, who introduces himself, “And now a reading by the Chinaman himself. What’s so bad about that word? I never understood what was wrong with it. It’s accurate.” He reads “To My Dead Father” and two other poems.

Frame 9: At the Fordham reading in October, 2007, Yau reads with Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge and Tan Lin. Janet Kaplan gives a knockout of an introduction for Yau that focuses on his language play, his innovation, his insistence upon the poem of active imagination during the moment of composition, and his resistance to easy autobiography. Yau gets up to read and says “That was a wonderful introduction. But I’m going to display my contrarian nature by starting off with my most autobiographical poem.” He reads “Ing Grish.”

Frame 10: http://poetportraits.blogspot.com/search/label/John%20Yau

Frame 11: 100 More Jokes from the Book of the Dead—a book from Meritage Press, collaborations between Yau and Archie Rand—etchings of covers to books that exist only within this book. “Noir Heraclitus in the Mirror Rain” could be an actual Yau title, and it is. Yau describes their method: The book began with long tables covered with copper plates, all more or less the same size. The challenge was to write backwards and do each in one shot, all of them without pausing to stop or look back… It was like listening to a tune that comes out of the air, note by note, and then transcribing it. Who knows who wrote the song?

Frame 12: “What I am saying right now is not being said by me” Osip Mandelstam, epigraph to Yau’s Borrowed Love Poems.

Frame 13: The funhouse mirror distorts by exaggeration, making the parts of oneself that are difficult to look at even more grotesque. It’s hard to look at oneself; in the funhouse mirror it’s hard to look but also fun to look, fun to distort even more. A poet who has difficulty looking directly at himself, for whatever reason (perhaps because he doesn’t believe that there is anything there to see, that the image in the mirror is simply “Noir Heraclitus in Mirror Rain”), might find use of the funhouse mirror. It doesn’t seem easy for Yau to talk about himself, and if it’s hard to talk about oneself it might be even harder to talk about identity, about ethnicity, about racism (unable to speak of the subjective as an objective—Wittgenstein). The funhouse mirror might be a way to use humor (but not humor, but humor, but not humor) to look at something that is hard to look at, something that the poet may not want to look at directly, especially difficult things that he may be expected to look at directly because of his ethnicity.

The funhouse mirror shows an image in flux of self at a moment, of not self, of parents, of daughter, of language, of imagined self, of inversions and anagrams and palindromes and sestinas, a cutup version of an absent original, rejoicing in incognito (Baudelaire). Over time and after the right changes, he might move on to a plainer mirror, smooth out some edges.

Frame 14: “830 Fireplace Rd.”—multiple variations on a Pollock sentence,

When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.

When I am my painting, I’m not aware of what I am.
When painting, I am what I’m doing, not doing what I am.

Frame 15: The modus operandi of tricksters is to have multiple meanings (to mean the opposite of what they say), to lead others to believe one thing is happening when in reality another thing is happening. A trickster might talk about issues he doesn’t want to talk about directly by approaching them obliquely, playing at silhouette. The trickster’s playfulness masks a deep seriousness, an absence, or a deep sorrow.

Frame 16: When is a silhouette radiant?

Frame 17: Richelle Ivarsson sent me a link to a video of Yau at a Jasper Johns opening at Matthew Marks gallery—the cameraman tries to interview Yau about Johns, but Yau mumbles his preference not to be interviewed, looks away at the work on the wall, as though looking to someone for help in getting him out of an uncomfortable encounter. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pYCwzdVBYs

He may be uncomfortable speaking about Johns on camera, but he certainly has no trouble writing about him. Yau also cites O’Hara on Johns in The Passionate Spectator: O’Hara says Johns recognized “that technique could transform matter (paint) [words], as well as subject (American flag) [diaspora], into an experience that was meaningful rather than purely aesthetic.”

Yau likes O’Hara’s word “pain” to distinguish Johns’s from works of formal irony. That mirror, “pain,” reflects back, distinguishing Yau’s work from mere formal experimentation but also from confession, in the first case by its presence and in the second by its difference. His instinct is against confession, but his instinct is also for a “free-wheeling” openness (O’Hara’s term), and how can one be open without including personal history? Yet, as Yau says when talking of Johns: he recognizes that the individual lives in a world of uninterrupted change but that society, which is the collective expression of individuals, repeatedly denies this fact. If reality, which is to say the world we inhabit, is continually reformulating itself, then how does one both recognize and accept a process which eventually subsumes us all? How can the individual be true to change and entropy, which is the stuff of life, rather than uphold the social ideals of stasis and its concomitant illusion that any one of us can exist outside time and chaos, which is the stuff of much art?

Frame 18: you have only to look through the camera of your own eyes to see what you’re talking about

Frame 19: Looking in the mirror, it is impossible to capture the past or even the present of what is there, just as it is impossible to capture both the speed and exact location of an electron. Yau explores the linguistic aura that surrounds the particle in the mirror, knowing it’s impossible to get a fix. His is a poetry of doing what it’s possible to do. Yau quotes Ashbery quoting Hélion: “I realize today that it is the abstract which is reasonable and possible. And that it is the pursuit of reality which is madness, the ideal, the impossible.”

Like Creeley, Yau is “skeptical of the ability of words to ground him in the actual world, its unfolding here and now.”

Frame 20: A Jasper Johns mirror: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/J/johns/target_4.jpg.html

Frame 21: In his “Introduction” poem to Paradiso Diaspora Yau stakes his territory: he’s visiting the land of those early poems, the 1974-79, some from Sometimes, poems like “Cameo” and “Their Shadows,” but making it clear that that old author isn’t him, cannot be him; nor is the author of these poems. He wants to take us there, but constantly realizes he can’t get there; he pulls the magic carpet from beneath our feet and his—

Doesn’t this sound like it might turn into a love poem or a prayer
Well, you are wrong, because a man of the people,
which I am not nor will I ever be,
doesn’t single out one above all others
as this is a hierarchical construction

The author is “someone who didn’t exist / before this poem / began writing itself down;” by the end of the poem, by the end of each line, both poet and reader are someone else. The face in the mirror is always the face of a corpse.

Frame 22: What am I now? And what am I now? And now? The unfolding poem, language, work: places to “be in ambiguities”—to subsist on the Diasporan’s question: “what if?” All stories become stories about beginnings.

Frame 23:

  Parents              —              self              —           Child
  Corpse              —              mirror              —           Corpse
  Paradiso              —                  —           Diaspora

Frame 24: Andalusia [1-8] = And I lose ya. He says it to the mirror, to the poem, to the lover, to the daughter, to the parents, and we say it along, we can’t help but look—even the birds / have stopped to look at their reflections.

Frame 25: He asks himself—what is the point of all of these language games? Pushing the same buttons repeatedly is sentimentality. What can that statement mean in the face of war, genocide, 9/11?, asks Genghis Khan—Private Eye / Private I.

“This lexical fracturing has something to do with the poet’s minority status in American culture. Not that he’s ever exactly gone in for identity politics; quite the opposite, his cross-grained stance could probably better be referred to by the yet-to-be-defined program that might be called “difference politics.”
--Barry Schwabsky

“The point is neither to assert the self, which would be redundant, nor to escape it, which is impossible, but to question it, to find out what it is made of—and at minimum, to be “able to tell others / that I am not who they think I am.”
--Barry Schwabsky

If Yau’s is an identity politics of someone who seems not to believe in persistent identity (W. B. Keckler), it is also complicated by the fact that he has been perceived as not-Chinese because he doesn’t speak it and not-American because he looks Chinese. One’s identity as a poet might provide some workingspace in the triangulated distance between what one is, what one isn’t, and how one is perceived.

Frame 26: In the last lines of “Ing Grish,”

I do not know either English or Chinese and, because of that,
I did not put a headstone at the head of my parent’s graves
as I felt no language mirrored the ones they spoke

For Yau, the struggle to find identity, to self-identify (and denial of identity is the same as struggle to self-identify) is a struggle to find language; thus the restlessness of Yau’s poems, the anagrammatic structure looking to hit on right combinations, the wanderings of an exile.

Frame 27: If the world is made by the combination of things in it and a sense of self is made by combinations of personal facts, knowledge, experience, then is the poem an attempt to compose reality or a reflection of it? It is both. The poem is the diasporan home: language dispersed and resisting dispersal. The old world and the new world, the now world, the head of Orpheus floating downriver.

Frame 28: It’s cliché by now to say so, but 9/11 changed most of us—not because it ended an age of irony as some have ridiculously claimed, and not because it forced us to see more clearly, but because it gave us an urgent desire to see more clearly.

From Yau’s last poem in Paradiso Diaspora, “In the Kingdom of Poetry:”

Don’t write poems
about yourself….

Don’t write about
what is happening in the world…

Whatever happened there
isn’t a poem…

Throw away
your memories,

bury your mirrors.

A litany of things a Poetry King might prohibit in a time of increased security measures, things not to do in poems, most if not all of which Yau himself has done, and more often in recent books. Yet under the irony there’s a sense that Yau really does have a distaste for many of these things. Is he uncomfortable with what he’s done? Is this simply irony? Trickster saying one thing, meaning another? Or does he simultaneously both mean it and not? It is redundant to assert the self, impossible to escape it. Of course he means it, and he can’t possibly mean it. If you followed his instructions in this poem, what would be left to write about? The desires engendered by catastrophe can ultimately lead to impossible strictures, the death of freedom, death of imagination (“The only war that matters is the war against the imagination/All other wars are subsumed within it”—Diane DiPrima, “Rant”). Better to embrace one’s “contrarian nature”—do it the way you’re not supposed to, under the radar, incognito, questing, now.

*****

Brian Clements is the author of Disappointed Psalms, poems forthcoming in Summer 2008 from Meritage Press, and of And How to End It, prose poems forthcoming in 2008 from Quale Press. He coordinates the MFA in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State and edits Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics.

TWENTY-ONE AFTER DAYS by LISA LUBASCH

2008-03-31T23:18:00.000-07:00

DAVID GOLDSTEIN Reviews

Twenty-One After Days by Lisa Lubasch
(Penngrove, CA: Avec Books, 2006)

With all due respect to Hemingway, the sun never rises in Twenty-One After Days. The book’s opening line gives us light, sure enough, but not sunlight:

lampshades will admit of the spectacular—are they hosts to other things? (11)

At the close of the first of the book’s five sections, the sun is setting, “in astonishment.” At other points one glimpses it fleetingly, through trees or via the uncertain technologies of vision:

opening in the sun (31)
nonetheless trying/ to escape, as sunlight (35-36)
sunlight filtering (56)
revealing in the trees, where light has splintered— (60)
where the sunlight streaks into visibility (67)
light settles in (75)

The closest one gets to an unambiguous sunrise occurs in this profoundly ambiguous passage:

Lately as the imperative mounts
towards the sun
(morning unchaining itself

from constancy),
it murkily invokes
its own despair:

Could momentum be lost
like a target
shaken from the wall? (37)

It is morning in these verses, but the sun is up there already, awaiting us; it is the “imperative” that rises, or morning itself, “unchaining.” But the acts of “mounting” and “unchaining” are hesitant, conditional. As the imperative mounts, “it murkily invokes/ its own despair,” darkening itself both elementally and psychologically. Murk is, after all, an aquatic term, describing the turmoil of disturbed depths—it is strange and poignant to find it here, in what appeared to be a climbing toward light. Nor is this a singular action, as evidenced by the word “Lately”: this murky invocation, this ambivalent unchaining from constancy, well it’s been happening for a little while now. “Could momentum be lost…?” asks the poem, shaken from its own murky speaking by a sudden flush of italics, like a blush of anxiety. The two stanzas leading up to this question are a perfect poetic description of momentum’s loss. No heroic flight of Icarus for this poetic speaker. This snippet of song—likewise the poem as a whole—is not about hubris, with its brave and silly climb and plummet. It is about the work of staying aloft, about the turbid and beautiful flapping of a speaker with wings.

Twenty-One After Days is Lubasch’s fourth book of poems. In the first, How Many More of Them Are You?, she had already found a voice; each volume since has deepened the complexity and range of her poetic project. Ironically, this deepening has taken the form of an increased focus on the poetics of failure, incompletion, and errancy; a quieting of the speaker; an interest in what falls into the interstices of meaning. The more confident and lyrical the work becomes, the more the speaker “murkily invokes/ its own despair.” The failures of sunlight in this book point to a truth of the larger work: Lubasch’s poetry is most engaged at the points “where light has splintered,” revealing “severance of each thing.” (60) In Twenty-One After Days, poetry is involved in “raising care to the level of error” (13), in observing, patiently, the incompleteness and fragmentation of the given world.

Pursuing the book’s interest in sunlight and its substitutes opens out into several questions. One of these concerns the poet’s relation to the imagery of the natural world. Descriptions of nature are everywhere—the entire lived space of the book seems rural or pastoral, with virtually no hint of urban landscape. But the pastoral geography is kept vague, indistinct. When images do anchor us, they do so only paradoxically:

Inner resting
Can produce
A translation

Becoming very quickly
More quickly than
Barns peaking in error

Leaving all windows to the door (39)

When barns peek into the poem, they “peak in error,” as if it were a mistake for barns to form triangles or to point upward; as if they should know that their role is being, not becoming. The stanza preceding this image offers a kind of koan upon the scene. But what is the status of this adage? The grammatical subjects of the phrase are meticulously evacuated—whose inner resting? a translation of what? how does resting produce something? And the connection between the two stanzas is murky—Does inner resting become very quickly? Does the translation? Or are the two stanzas tangential, touching and then heading in separate directions?

We are used to reading images of nature as encodings of symbolic regimes. In movies, rain at a funeral tells us we should feel sad; when the ground heaves as Eve bites into the forbidden fruit in Paradise Lost, it is because the reader should be mourning. Twenty-One After Days, by contrast, eschews this regime. The fact that nature in the poem produces almost no points of concrete reference transforms those referents into signs unmoored from significations, so that imagery becomes part of an emotional language rather than forming an analogy to it. Weather and landscape constantly interweave with descriptions of writing, reading, and other creative acts: “its lights are brimming—the cursor is dragged—speech is taking” (16); “Hovering there, on the sill,/ as everything/ moves towards revision…” (40); “Then the river recalls itself/ erasing the scheme” (61); “the day is leashed/ to words/ and endings” (68); “So the path of privacy burns out,/ is retraced” (74).

This crossfade of world, writing, and subjecthood reminds one of the great French theorists of writing such as Cixous, Derrida, Ponge, and Edmond Jabès, who writes, in The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, “For place, all you will have had is the hope of a mild place beyond the sands: a mirage of repose.” Place in poetry for Jabès cannot exist beyond the mind of reader and writer; it emanates from and participates in the topography of existence. Lubasch attempts to capture just this aspect of (dis)location. In the book’s first section, “winter enters fretfully” onto a page and immediately “is diverted” into a mental and verbal landscape, or was always in that landscape in the first place:

winter enters fretfully—is diverted—murmuring—almost without frond […] they were compared—to apprehend the difference—as I recall—and the whitening of the book […] the cat embarrassed—or growing violent, even, in a certain climate—where it sleets more often—

Winter in this passage registers somewhere between a season, a character, and an aspect of language. In fact, winter in this passage is a passage, ushering us through a series of changing states, motioning us toward the poetic speaker. “As I recall”… we do not know who this “I” might be, but the act of recollection becomes the central action of this movement, this passage. We move backward in memory while moving forward in writing. The passage ends “in a certain climate” that both is and isn’t part of the winter where it began. Sleet, that border between rain and snow, constitutes a kind of fretful winter; yet the stinging unpleasantless of sleet seems closer to a violent cat than to a murmuring hesitation. In the midst of what might be called this motion without change, we are led to understand that “winter” is entwined with the “whitening” (the wintering, the erasing) of the book. There is no experience of weather, climate, or season without the experience of writing, reading, thinking. These acts do not mirror each other, but rather are always in the process of becoming each other. The experience of the book becomes “some unknown variable,/ of the climate” (72).

A poem constantly in motion is difficult to form words around. As Lubasch reminds us, “identity fastens—loosely” (60). Elements of the work are constantly moving “toward”—towards revision, beauty, completion, conclusion—but never reaching them. The poem is filled with imagery of interruptions, “a failed recourse to gesture” (60), currents that flow only “to reach an ordinary aim” (19). Movements upward are imbued with heaviness, while the interior is “escaping—unhooked as weight” (18). In one of the many moments that sounds like a microcosm of the poem, the speaker tells us in curt, grammatically torqued lines that “melancholy may be guarded—inwardness as shift—so states renew and become dazzling” (15). Indeed, if such grammar seems almost inert in its slow, patient turns (guarded by or from what? what verb governs “inwardness”? if inwardness is a state, how does it shift? if it is not, then what is the referent of “states”?), we are reminded that “the grammar of the action—could be stalled” (25), or that “The room is unmoving,/ but its punctuation/ is stirred” (40).

Perhaps a poem that both elevates and enacts the virtues of patience, interruption, rehearsal, and even “dreariness” (a word that recurs throughout the book) sounds like a frustrating read. But the genius of the work lies in the fact that it is both dreary and “dazzling.” Or rather, its dazzling and dreary moments are the same. Living in this book is like living in the unmoving room of stirred punctuation: it is simultaneously static and turbulent, a moment-by-moment tracking of the process by which “a meaning disentangles/ from its own philosophy” (59). The result is a work of almost unbearable delicacy and beauty, and one that repays multiple readings by continually opening upon new prospects. Each reading will be an erroneous one, in the ancient sense of the word “error”—a wandering, a non-linear path. To embrace error, to raise “care to the level of error,” is to be willing to stop and listen in strange and difficult places, even when the noise is unintelligible, or silence. For as the poem explains quietly, “the quietness is furnished” (26). It is a quietness into which we stumble, or within which we awaken:

the case of the
human
waking to a disinterested art (68)

*****

David B. Goldstein is the author of the chapbook Been Raw Diction (Dusie, 2006), and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel—Second Floor, Jubilat, Typo, Pinstripe Fedora, Epoch, Alice Blue Review, and The Paris Review. He teaches creative writing, Renaissance literature, and food studies at York University.

BOOKS by CHARLES NORTH and HETTIE JONES

2008-03-31T23:08:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Cadenza by Charles North
(Hanging Loose, 2007)

and

Doing 70 by Hettie Jones
(Hanging Loose, 2007)

TWO FROM HANGING LOOSE

Hanging Loose Press has been around since 1966 and is going strong, dedicating time and energy to supporting work by a variety of poets who often go under-recognized in the crowded world of small press poetry publishing. Doing 70 by Hettie Jones and Cadenza by Charles North are recent publications demonstrative of the broadness of poetry the press covers. The poems in both collections are strong although there is much disparity between the respective styles. Regardless of whether the reader favors one poet over the other, it’s to the credit of Hanging Loose for making the new work available. Jones and North are both residents of New York City and Hanging Loose is based out of Brooklyn, both poets amply reference east coast city living, yet neither is easily categorized. Each of the works demonstrates a committed dedication to observation and the poem as documentation.

Charles North began writing poems in the latter half of the 1960s and shortly thereafter enrolled in the last workshop Kenneth Koch taught at the New School. His work bears resemblance to some of what has been termed “New York School,” but stands distinctly on its own merits. Reading the poems there is no doubt that North would be writing them with or without there being any such grouping. He is pursuing his own interests and the result is a unique blend of humor, sharp observation and bare statement.

LOCATION

The pizza crawling with government buildings, three-star hotels,
equestrian statues,
staircases wandering in stone… that’s piazza.
Actually, no, it’s the present sitting casually on its wall of
wet paint,
rush-hour traffic grinding past, people beginning to parachute
out of a murky sky…men in business suits, women in “flame-colored
taffeta”
—one cradling a baby in one arm while gesturing to would-be rescuers
who paddle furiously or hold out a powder blue sheet like a
trampoline…
and the brillig evening, I don’t know what else to call it,
drives a Mercury Cougar past barns and disappearing farms.

The descriptive approach North takes is appealing in a philosophical manner. Awash with action, the lines glide into one another, hesitantly distant but a richly visual appreciation remains. As unusual as it gets there’s a deliberate stillness that holds the attention. It’s not surreal, more of an ultra-real visionary scene of city life at the rush hour escape: the “brillig” hour, a term coined by Lewis Carroll for four o’clock in the afternoon, time for broiling things for dinner. The pizza (most likely a frozen substitute rather than the real thing) that awaits the zooming driver of the Mercury Cougar, on the mind from the first line of the poem, & the farms disappearing while so many continue to go out to live among them, a lament for all that is being lost amid consuming suburban spread. With subtle references to well known recent tragedy and also everyday sort of observations, the poem awaits further readings.

The opening title poem lives up to the improvisation implied in its name, a long piece that explores the attention given to the writing itself. North writes towards writing and even when he appears merely to be going along without any useful agenda, surprising rewards arise.

“Thinking on paper”
is one aspect. Another is
the ghostly traces of mind that hover
over whatever is in the process of being constructed,
whether lyric poem or midtown office building.
“Ghostly” because the connections between
mind and world are invariably impossible to make out,
not to speak of the “rewriting aspect” seemingly built
into the nature of things.

He starts in the middle of a thought and takes it from there. Beginning in medias res (“The longer the life / the roomier the harbor. // Well, not exactly…”) North not only locates an immediate grounding but builds momentum and comes to a conclusion by the end of the writing. The piece doesn’t just trail off. It is a pleasurable a performance, North captures the unusual and surprises, his hold is superb.

In a crowded off-Broadway theater,
a heckler refuses to sit down despite mounting threats
from the relatively large audience. Several of the costumed and in
some cases masked actors
(they are doing Shakepeare’s A Mid Summer Night’s Dream in
traditional dress)
though visibly distracted climb down from the stage
and form a protective ring around him. Bottom
appears to be the ring leader.

North appears to be writing away from any sign of influence of other writers, past and present. His interests are uniquely his own. Repeatedly, there is a heavy emphasis on the visual image.

STUDY

It must be daylight
Your painting of chicory dividing a dark green field
Fills on all sides with light.
It must be daylight.

Some of the portions which are out of sight
Become what the painting yields.
It must be daylight:
Your painting of chicory dividing a dark green field.

The embedded repetition of the patterned lines yields a visualization of the painting, itself a simple enough sounding landscape. What strikes North is the attention the painter has placed upon the light streaming in from beyond “some” of the given field of vision, his poem in turn marks the crispness of a meditated landscape turned mindscape, the visual made mental to give back a further visual.

This well rounded collection closes with a lengthy set of journal notes “SUMMER OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY” a continuous tracking of North’s reflections on day-to-day visuals.

June 25. Rainy and esoteric.
________________________
July 30. A Hunt Cantata of clouds.
________________________
Aug. 2. A water pipe crawled out of the woods.
________________________
Sept. 25. The ghost of a day. Partly rainy. Partly sunny. Partly not there.

North places poetry in the hands of words (where else would it go?) sloughing off his own thoughts and preconceptions as chair and desk give way to visually layered ruminations of language at work within itself.

+++

Hettie Jones is vibrantly alive inside her poems. This is popular poetry. She celebrates life, the joy, along with the sorrow, that accompanies the run of days. Jones isn’t so much concerned with furthering poetry as an art but rather utilizing it as communication of one’s inner beliefs and thoughts to others. She seeks to celebrate community, poems offering up praise and recognition of friends and family, and attend to her daily business.

For Margaret of Sixth Street

who is probably dead, RIP

Whenever I met Margaret
the rest of the day was magic

Margaret might have been ninety-some,
she never would say. One day

after years of meeting her
on the street

I took the plunge
and kissed her cheek

then watched her grin
around her three
remaining teeth.

The language is simple and to the point, sounding out a gritty little bit of song. Jones knows precisely what she wants to get said and does so. She captures quick, accurate transcription of speech.

Jones is aware that one of poetry’s greatest values is of testament. She writes of her own immediate experience and that of others she discovers to declare that it was lived, not forgetting the importance maintaining social and cultural awareness.

Preservation

The author:
known only as Debora
fought and died with the Underground
in Warsaw, 1944

Her diary:
twenty torn, burned, fused-together
pages the size of playing cards
written in secret, stashed, and
as she has instructed

Retrieved:
from behind a radiator
in the ruins of Resistance headquarters
1945

By her friend, Lusia,
who held it sixty years, then
dying instructed:              restore
and share

Some words from a preliminary translation:

bombs       fire       angels       Nazis
mother’s coffin       a pile of corpses
Ghetto is certain death

To not record the words is to forget and to forget is to deny. Jones isn’t about to allow for anything or anyone she cares for to be forgotten. She is adding to the historical record of her generation a voice of celebration, a passionate refusal against silence.

The long title piece of this collection, “Doing 70: A Passion Play,” is a delightful recounting of a flirtatious adventure Jones found herself having after car trouble returning to home from Boston: “On the Mass Pike, at first rest stop past Boston, / the starter breaks.” The dedication is to the recently deceased Helene Dorn, the correspondent whose letters she has driven to Boston to pick up. Dorn and Jones having known each other since the fifties when their husbands at the time, poets Ed Dorn and Le Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka) were close friends and the families often visited together, it’s clear that the relationship between the women ran deep.

The box of letters is heavy every
way. Thirty pounds, four decades,
two women, one dead, the other
stuck. Fuck.

Luckily for Jones when the tow truck arrives the driver is a very capable young man, whose masculine prowess is not lost on her.

a flatbed roars into the sunburnt parking lot.
Waving and pointing, I run the rest of the way,
and soon

an audience has gathered, a three-generation family
with two awed children. Everyone likes a driver,
and here’s a young, good-looking, acrobatic one,
who parks precisely, load-ready, then
in one quick movement swings out,
takes my keys, turns on the lights and radio, and says
it’s probably the starter.

Well I know that.

But Ryan, as I’d know him, notes
at once that I’ve gone past cause to effect.
He tells me the terms, admits he’s been
to New York twice, though not in many years.

In no time Jones is riding home, sitting next to this young driver with her car loaded up on the back of his truck. And it’s clear that she enjoys every minute of being so close to a new strange attractive man. Despite her age Jones expresses her delight and the reader shares in it with her.

But of course we haven’t gone far
before I’m in love. Every time
we hit rough road the glove compartment
falls open into my lap, and my bare foot
closing it seems
provocative
though I know doing seventy means
giving up the pretty boys

The urge is of course to reassure Jones that one never does know.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at the library of USF. Recent reviews have appeared in Artvoice (Buffalo), St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, and Jacket. Poems recently appeared in Cannibal and One Less Magazine.

SKINNY BUDDHA by SHEILA E. MURPHY

2008-03-31T22:58:00.000-07:00

SÉAMAS CAIN Reviews

SKINNY BUDDHA by Sheila E. Murphy
(Dusie, 2007)

1. (The Explorer)

"Give of selves we have not known
Or counted. All the integers
Have been browned beneath
The clouds of sea and broad ideas."

S.E. Murphy's Skinny Buddha, page 22

Sheila Murphy writes, I might describe, as a prism, seen through which drab reality, never apprehended by her under its obvious aspects, is transmuted into the stuff of Sokratic or pre-Sokratic philosophy — or dreams. The crystalline, mineral world of words which is her domain bursts asunder like a lump of flint brought to a white heat. The feeling of vertigo induced by many of her writings is rather like the sensation one has at County Clare in the west of Ireland, at the Cliffs of Moher, haunted by crows & herons, & haunted by the manifestational ghosts of the goddess Badb, to whose slopes cling precariously the low, faintly sinister mists that seep out of disintegrating cairns.

Sheila Murphy is always trying — & how difficult it is! — to grasp that invisible bluewhite filament of marvels which, vibrating in the dialectic of philosophy, or vibrating in the music of the void, emits dreams & objects with the sound of a stream rippling over tiny, living pebbles. Everything Murphy describes or presents is recognizable, even when it relates to composite beings or objects. That strange world known to her alone, whose secrets she elicits & reveals in the course of ardent explorations, belongs to the domain of travelers' tales, those imaginary ocean voyages in which the helmswoman of a ship of dreams watches for the faint faraway signals that will orient her to long-lost lands.

However, the composition of Skinny Buddha itself is extremely daring: the central plane revealed by the cleft in the printed texts & the mostly white of the paper, on which the words are lying, opens out into a great spiral of words culminating in the sphere containing the vision; this is linked with the foreground group of images by a triangle of convergent perspectives. The symbolic & structural complexity of the work is obscured only by the dramatic intensity of the figure of the Skinny Buddha himself, as but an echo of the "vision" theme.

2. (The Trembling Insect)

"... gray feathers tingle in a mittened wind
and sundry long waits
spawn a parakeet-like riffing
joie de vivre projected onto imagery
tucked between pages
sliced by chance ..."

S.E. Murphy's Skinny Buddha, page 18

Sheila Murphy brings to her writing a wholly personal sensibility, the grace of a trembling insect or the grace of a quivering bird, which lends a poignant beauty to her recent works, notably her Incessant Seeds, or the stunningly beautiful Case of the Lost Objective (Case), or the Skinny Buddha. In this latter poem, verbal objects & verbal figures reshape themselves in a welter of flames, & we see their elements hovering in turbid air, as if upheld by unseen magnets. Nevertheless, Murphy leads us into verbal forests of verbal trees that weep or bleed or laugh with joy. These verbal images of everyday objects transform or combine in such a way that their agreement with our preconceived ideas, simple or sophisticated, is obliterated. But it is the unique way in which the verbal parts are assembled that gives these (verbal) images a new identity.

Sheila Murphy takes to burying the eerie figures of her private verbal carnival under verbal cairns of ice-cold stones, or volcanic stones, or the dialectical & musical stones, as in a landscape of harrowing but humorous desolation. Yet nevertheless, it seems clear that precise & charming evocations of the mystery of the Skinny Buddha are furnished best by the verbal images of everyday encounters combined or transformed.

Indeed, the composition of the Skinny Buddha is if anything more lyrical & sublime than Incessant Seeds itself; & it bears the unmistakable imprint of Murphy's imagination. For in a broad landscape, as transparent as the landscape in the Incessant Seeds, the verbal figures are disposed according to a plan which is perfection in itself. The wonderfully straightforward, monumental design flows so smoothly & harmoniously from the figure of the Skinny Buddha, that this is surely a great achievement in Murphy's art, & a milestone in this reader's experience. Thus indeed, this work is based on a perfectly symmetrical design realized with the utmost of sculpted poetry.

3. (Musicality)

"Maligned worth ceases speech
A divination clusters its way safely
Through chance light's
Fidelity as triumph waits
To formulate momentum
Factors seen to magnify
A calculated speech."

S.E. Murphy's Skinny Buddha, page 17

My own poetry is typified by "visionary landscapes." Unfortunately my landscapes have always been bounded by a distant horizon line & located in a space in which all seems strangely remote, petrified in ice-cold light. However, in Sheila Murphy's work both horizon & weight cease to exist; undulations of verbal images, beams of verbal light, & streams of verbal "force" interpenetrate, whirling up & up like spiral nebulae. She is one of those rare poets who, by veiled allusions & in a discreet light, reveal the deadliest, most lawless urges & passions of the mental underworld. Her skies are peopled with winged & beaked clouds, verbal clouds, hovering above archetypal soundscapes or archetypal spacescapes.

Many years ago, Billy Butler Yeats was counted up as one among the Modernists — even though he did not experiment greatly with structure, form, etc. Yeats, however, was reluctant to move too far away from the human voice, or the music of the speaking voice. Thus, even when he struggles with "difficult" or "complex" ideas there is an impression (from the music of the voice alone) that he is accessible in his inaccessibility.

Sheila Murphy does not hesitate to plunge into one wild experiment after another with content & form & structure, etc. However, like Yeats, & almost always, she expresses herself through her writings in the music of the speaking voice, the human voice. Thus, even when she is inaccessible she does not seem to be so.

In the Skinny Buddha, we see vast expanses reaching out into infinity & dappled with bone-like verbal objects, wisps of mist, pebbles or round boulders sometimes standing on end like the cromlechs of old Ireland, & the music of a dialectic of the human voice. Sheila Murphy surrenders wholly to an instinctual drive seconded by technical gifts of the highest order.

Sheila Murphy's work, in which images & ideas are tossed to & fro in terms of a "metalogic" peculiar to herself, appeals to the mind by the witty byplay of her humor & the unfamiliar, fascinating soundscapes it opens up to us. Nevertheless, there is something of Shakespearean comedy in Murphy's handling of the themes of anguish, human solitude, & the elusiveness of human desire, which always slips through the fingers just when we think we grasp it.

It seems to me that the Skinny Buddha is set in a scene of utter tranquillity, beside a lake; from the distance comes a flight of birds, some of them landing on the strand, giving definition to the perspective. Then the strand curves round two circular groups of figures, which are separated by the standing figure of the Skinny Buddha as such. The right hand group of figures is full of dramatic tension, but this is dissipated in the elongated forms of the text itself, stretched in supplication before us. The Skinny Buddha himself, with a gesture, stills the turbulence of the drama & leads our eyes on into the peaceful air over which the herons & crows fly.

4. (The Goethean Perspective)

"One limbered up the body to recast the point of mind space. Buildings full of toys nested alongside square points. Referenced panes lifted from scorch points. There were Everest spiels beside a person's striking hair. The kind of smile one held when blessed or so. With nest egg sizable by craft. Unless the suddenness retracts her best."

S.E. Murphy's Skinny Buddha, page 12

The world of Sheila Murphy is wrought of dreams & light & dark obsessions, teeming with incongruities, at once disquieting & lyrical, joyful & amusing. At times her writing is so greatly simplified as to evoke, through dialectic, some protohistoric chant. Verbal seeds burst into furious life, verbal leaves grow dagger-sharp & malignant & non-malignant orchids blaze forth in magic swamps where the civilized people & the savage people meet on common ground in a quest for truth, multi-dimensional truth. For, in this context to be sure, I greatly admire Murphy's subtle sense of marvels & her transposition of everyday reality into a wonderland built of the golden dreams of childhood. These figurations of the verbal marvels, so strikingly remote from the disincarnate poetry of our time, may console us for the passing of the superb illustration of post-symbolist & post-surrealist literature.

Sheila Murphy's inspiration, like Goethe's, is essentially warm & life-affirming & optimistic if not childlike but it is tinged with melancholy: with constructive or constructivist (not nostalgic) yearnings as well as with the spirit of play. Her poems & texts seem like natural growths, each form giving birth to another, without any logical necessity, but in accordance with the promptings of some wholly personal compulsion.

In the Skinny Buddha, the way the two groups of images revolve is brilliantly original, & so is the contrast between the static hieratic figures in the center of the text & the twisted motion of the Skinny Buddha in the foreground. & thus certainly Sheila Murphy is capable of turning an abstract intellectual proposition into pure poetry (if not pure music & pure geometry). In the Skinny Buddha, she has introduced a more majestic & dramatic use of space, & in effect this will be the occasion of the collapse of the proportional schemes that have seen fashionable use by poets until this time.

5. (The Dialectic)

"I thought participation
once a fair disturbance
then some vatic change
of scope to sequence
images from lurid
to the topic brand of
white blue satchel hope"

S.E. Murphy's Skinny Buddha, page 6

The space of Sheila Murphy's poem becomes a meeting place of lamellated figures, gliding like hieratic robots along sloping planes & caught up in electric storms. Indeed, Sheila Murphy places the whole world under the sway of hieratic & sacred incantation, always, which rules the fashionable districts of the mind & the body, where the old mills of old Ireland grind out pearl necklaces & other philosophical jewellery in a hard metallic light. Murphy, depicting with rare expertness & fine precision the joys & fears of woman & man, blends up meticulous description with verbal figures materializing in a misty, curiously sensuous ambience.

The general effect this Skinny Buddha produces might be described as one of a humorous or desperate & musical dialectic between nearness & remoteness, charged with sculptural overtones rarely found to this extent in poetry. Hmmmm, but this is not the dialectic of the Marxists. No, it is the dialectic (or, the yin vs. yang) of Hegel & Kant & St. Thomas Aquinas & Plato & Sokrates. Yes, & it is the dialectic of John Eriugena, the Irish philosopher of the Ninth Century. Sheila Murphy makes a point as far as possible of presenting only sculptural texts that evoke the mystery & the music & the dialectic of all existence with the precision & charm essential to the life of thought.

But in this rationalized space the story unfolds around verbal architectural protrusions, some of which are in motion, like the high wall on the left, almost hidden by the splendid figure of the young man climbing down from it, & some holding firm, like the colonnade on the right between whose pillars the magnificent procession of women is moving. Verbal architecture plays an unprecedentedly important part in the narrative action of the Skinny Buddha. & indeed, this is a new departure in the work of Sheila Murphy.

6. (The Golden Geometry)

"Temptation's like a latitude remaining on full throttle. Maybe she induces fragile reach. Perhaps not near the tundra. Equally perhaps apart from strings in keepsake midsect springs. For nautical to work, there need be stray mammalian glands. And this was how she tried to work, foregrounding in the midst of improvised quick winter."

S.E. Murphy's Skinny Buddha, page 5

Sheila Murphy, not haunted by nostalgic yearnings for Proustian intoxication, mysterious subterranean halls of long ago, conjures up in her writing verbal wonderlands of voluptuous delight, & her verbal figures, masked & fancifully attired, roam a mesmeric world of magnetized water & gold-veined rocks of words bathed in the light of dreams. She creates a new space filled with a haze of broken lights in which transparent & opaque objects alike are bathed in the prismatic radiance of sunrise, yes the Goethean sunrise. In her art remarkable inventiveness is joined to writerly craft & precision & she has a gift for blending fantasy & humor in compositions where recur, like leitmotivs, objects diverted from their practical uses, & in which asteroids of ice gyrate in frost-bound forests.

Skinny Buddha is a ship in which page by page Murphy sets sail to uncharted lands whose spacescapes & soundscapes, bathed in the light of dreams, she records with meticulous precision. The verbal figures in the Skinny Buddha are constructed according to a golden geometry, yet it has a subtle vigor & urgency, & an airy majesty with the total abstraction of a vision.

The space around the verbal figures is almost non-existent, & the figures themselves are linked together in perfect circular motion. Like a reflection in a convex mirror the sphere seems to protrude towards the reader. Nevertheless, the reader is drawn into the orbit of the sphere in the same way, & led breathlessly through a series of rotations & oblique angles. The light, beating in on the solid figures from behind, shows the careful delineation of the verbal forms, & seems to be the source of visions rising from the darkest depths of the mind & the body.

Indeed, & to be sure, I think that Sheila Murphy succeeds in rescuing poetry from the doldrums of academicism & the sterile disputations of the literary claques, & in restoring it to its place as an active element of life, a burning topic of the day, & a means to probing the utmost possibilities of being.

*****

Information about Séamas Cain are available at HERE and HERE. See also his websites:
http://alazanto.org/seamascain
http://seamascain.writernetwork.com
http://www.mnartists.org/Seamas_Cain

NOVEL PICTORIAL NOISE by NOAH ELI GORDON

2008-03-31T22:48:00.000-07:00

RAYMOND JOHN DE BORJA Reviews

Novel Pictorial Noise by Noah Eli Gordon
(Harper-Collins, New York, 2007)

There are many ways to represent noise. In the Shannon-Weaver communication model(1), noise is an input signal -- isolable from, and transforming the transmitted message:

Or another way, pictorially (2), as Gaussian white noise, in its bell-like distribution across the frequency spectrum:

Then Wittgenstein:
“Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”(3)

If I say that I am quoting this not from Zettel, but from Marjorie Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder(4), what difference does it make that I say so? Just how important is a putting into context?

Comes a night-light’s landing beacon leads me to pick villainy from a bouquet of the places I’d left to yesterday’s map of the future, rubber-necking unintentionally oblique articulation. Loosen a rivet from the lapsed mind and out pours the obvious like thick rain. A sterile neighbourhood, a standing ovation, centuries of labor congealing into the desk lamp that let’s me mold my own two cents from this paper-clip panopticon. I’m not pushing anything here. Power’s got a fulcrum that’s half self-portrait, part handicraft. The lever will pivot regardless of where it’s placed down. It’s the primacy of motion drafts sound. (page 1)

A rain of contexts, a thick rain moving from the L’s of light-landing-lead-villainy-places-unintentionally-oblique-articulation….. Centuries of labor giving us a desk lamp allowing the possibility of a miniaturized version of surveillance from a paper-clip panopticon….

Then Archimedes:
“Give me a place to stand, and with a lever I will move the world.”

Let’s revise the Shannon-Weaver communication model, into a model where noise is both input and message, transformed instead by syntax and a choice of form (transmitter).

The essence of pictorial fact aspires to describe itself as a panorama, an impossible cultivation of pictorial elements. I hold that thinking is an image of art. Therefore, in proposing the helicopter as the only subject retaining any seriousness, one is concurrently giving rise to the fundamental ineptness of abstraction. For example, suppose I see an aesthetic accident rather than the intension expounded in the translator’s preface. Might we then say that the architecture of the gallery space is an analogy for the plasticity of the figurative? The neutrality of such a proof is no more erroneous than the landing pad one might position on one’s roof. (page 15)

“Poetry, an alternate less linear logic” – Rosmarie Waldrop, On Lawn of Excluded Middle(5)

In this less linear logic, therefore, suppose, might, are extracted from their regular logical use and serve to mark the digressions as sharp turns, as unexpected swerves, as “reposition(ings)”:

The first option is to rattle the world in its frame. The second frames the world in its rattle. Between them, an amplifier without its instruments. This is not a metaphor. Each paragraph requires the participants to reposition themselves. From up here, I can make out the action as if it were taking space. Several ants beelining back to headquarters. Reportage lacks ideology as painting lacks performance. Some of these statements are false, including the present example. If one were to take transgression as one’s starting point, then it would be limitation that throws one satisfyingly out of joint. (page 83)

The output is neither message nor noise, but a kind of generative sampling of both. In one instance a flow of conditional clauses lacking their main clauses:

If the function of the camera is to explain itself to the operator. If the page on which the wall appears does not allow for the casting of a shadow. If the shadow is absent from the photograph (…) If this is a picture. (…) If the operation is contorted. (page 55)

*(omissions mine)

There are examples that are closer to the linear than most of the other prose blocks, but these lead only to a recognition of how much “defense” the senses put-up in such linearity:

Already the metaphors seem stale, having stalled in their attempt to carry us over, attention drawn to axle instead of wheel, hinge instead of door, to the slope of an animal’s vertebrae over the phylum under which it’s calcified, cracked into place, in essence, a privileging of anonymity, of unlikeness as a focal point, as though a bridge were to appear suddenly before us, crossing neither treacherous body of water nor maze of roadway, simply offering one another way of going on, an obligatory amazement with the plentitude of defenses guarding all our senses. (page 39)

Such that, when we are given statements of intent (there are quite a handful in Novel Pictorial Noise), there is a sense that these intentions are random rather than intended, generated by sound; by the prose blocks loose logic rather than regular logical sense:

(…)As a mechanical delivery system fails to account for the weight of another clause scratched onto its surface, so I attempt via the unknown to give grammar a purpose (…) (page 45)

(…)Two letters lie on the white table top: one personal, and one impersonal. The desire to create a space in which one might avoid both romantic posturing and ironic detachment(…) (page 43)

Yet to read the prose blocks, is to read only half of Novel Pictorial Noise. The other half (even pages) consists of white spaces punctuated at the beginning by fragments, here are the first three:

composition of noise A thought is music is
concept (page 2)

between What draws
equates of (page 4)

as through
between
definitive (page 6)

If the prose blocks clank with one digressing sentence chinking against the other, these fragments, though set on the small upper portion of the blank page, might seem silent, but are in fact noisier, lacking both regular syntax and an obvious form present in the prose blocks.(6)

One might be a bit clueless until the last fragment is read:

from a bouquet of place – articulation
and labor’s sound of primacy (p.100)

Going back to page 1, one observes that the words constituting the above fragment are extracted from the first prose block. The fragment in page 98 is extracted from page 3, page 96 from page 5, and so on. Reading it this way, I will not readily conclude that the prose blocks came before the fragments, or vice versa; or now, whether the fragments are indeed fragments, or wholes – serving either as germ for the prose blocks, or as extracted from the prose blocks like snatches from a conversation.

light
then
thought’s course again arranged
the same which with it’s surplus

But this was supposed to be a review, so did you like it?

“If you enjoyed it, you understood it, and lots of people have enjoyed it so lots of people have understood it” -- Gertrude Stein (7)

I’m not sure I understand it. How is it to understand.
Is the corollary.

Seeing As or Or from a Rorschach instead of House or Cows.

Perhaps the value is in perhaps.

++++++++++
Notes

1. A brief discussion of the Shannon-Weaver model is at http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/introductory/sw.html.
The picture of the Shannon-Weaver model was also had from this website

2. The string like markings on the title page of Novel Pictorial Noise are most probably graphs of noise in the time spectrum.

3. Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M Anscomber (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1967)

4. Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Marjorie Perloff (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1996)

5. Curves to the Apple, Rosmarie Waldrop (New York: New Directions 2006)

6. “The world is clanking: noun, noun, noun” from Elizabeth Willis’ The Similitude of this Great Flower and “so silence is pictorial/when silence is real” from Barbara Guest's An Emphasis Falls on Reality were used by Noah Eli Gordon as epigraphs for Novel Pictorial Noise. These two suggest/may have informed the structure of the prose block and fragment used in Novel Pictorial Noise

7. Excerpt from Interview 1934, from ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/sound/stein.html

*****

Raymond John A. de Borja works as a technology consultant in an IT consulting company. He graduated with a BS in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the University of the Philippines Diliman. He was a Fellow for Poetry in the 6th UST and the 45TH UP National Writer’s Workshop, and has won in the poetry category of the Amelia Lapena Bonifacio Awards for Literature and the Manining Miclat Poetry Awards. He is a member of Pinoypoets.

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION by CATHY PARK HONG

2008-03-31T22:38:00.000-07:00

SHANNA COMPTON Reviews

Dance Dance Revolution by Cathy Park Hong
(W. W. Norton, New York, 2007)

Dance Dance Revolution is unlike any book of poems you’ve read before, and that alone ought to pique your curiosity enough to pick up a copy. Not quite an epic poem (too short), not quite a novel-in-verse (too fractured), it nevertheless shares with both of those genres certain conventions, while employing them to fresh new ends.

The frame story goes something like this: a 20- or 30-something unnamed Historian of unspecified gender has been frustrated in her[1] attempts to learn of her family’s past by the early death of her mother and the reluctance of her father. In prose excerpts from her memoir, she explains that her father’s former lover is working as a guide at the St. Petersburg Hotel in the Desert, and that she has undertaken a journey to find the Guide in hopes of discovering some backstory.[2] Upon arriving in the Desert, the Historian hires the Guide to show her the sights, chiefly themed hotels based on the great cities of the world. Across the bridge from the dazzling lights of the tourist section lies a guarded ghetto called New Town, home to revolutionary exiles and other political refugees. Desert inhabitants speak “an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported into this city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca,” a creole which though built on the structures of English grammar, is indiscriminately draped with borrowed vocabulary, idiosyncratic spelling, and a mixture of phonetic and archaic pronunciation. The Historian helpfully provides a few translated samples to introduce the reader to the dialect:

Dimfo me am im
Let me tell you about him

[…]

So din he lip dim clout.
So then he punched him in the mouth.

Bar goons hoistim off. Exeunt.
Security escorted him out of the bar.

And so on. The various speeches the Historian tapes and transcribes read somewhat like Oulipian homophonic translations in places, with unusual but recognizable synonyms standing in for more expected terms and a distinct pattern of patois-style clipping and elision. Once you’ve gotten used to it, the dialect is fairly easily understood even if it’s inconsistent on occasion, much in the same way one’s mind auotamticllay copmnestaets wtih jublmed lerttres.

The story within the story consists of the Guide’s speeches, once she and the Historian have put aside the pretext of the tour for the more pressing business at hand: the Guide’s reminiscences of the (historical) Kwangju Uprising and (fictional) Dance Dance Revolution. (The year is either 2016 or sometime thereafter[3], which gives Hong the freedom enjoyed by science fiction writers to blend actual with imagined events to create an alternative reality.) Chun Sujin,[4] as the Guide was known before her self-imposed exile to the Desert, was born near Kwangju, South Korea, the daughter of a famous chanteuse who dies while giving birth. (Motherlessness is a theme in DDR, yes, as are distant fathers.) As a child, she’s diagnosed with alopecia and is shunned and taunted for her “scolded ball head” and begins wearing wigs to fit in. At fourteen, she leaves her father’s house to live with her teacher, by whom she is politically influenced, and eventually joins the activist movement that opposes the dictatorial governments of Chun Du-Hwan and Park Chung-Hee. It is at this point she meets and falls in love with Kim Yoon-Sah, who will later become the Historian’s father. Sujin possesses the gift of gab, a talent that not only befits her future occupation as a Guide, but also serves her well in the revolutionary climate of the late 80s in South Korea. She becomes a popular agitator for the pro-democracy movement, but many of her followers still cannot tolerate her appearance:

…Dim call me voice o Kwangju
uprising’s danseur principal…but samsy, es funny,
I’s voice o Kwangju since dim multitudes who
cryim fo acceptance shun mine presence…

…I’s lose me wig en passion o rally,
mine ball head nekked, mine oysta eyes
filla-up wit wadder, stompim podium,
spout ricanery to rally crowd…

…but crowd dim boo me, t’row rocks a’me
rocks intended fo plis boi patois, balfastards, trown a’ me![5]

Sah convinces Sujin to return to the cause via pirate radio station, as the arrests and spying and suppression ratchet up all around them. On the day Sujin throws a kerosene bomb into a schoolhouse being raided by police, the Kwangju Uprising ensues. Whether or not she is wholly responsible, she blames herself for the massacre that follows. Unable to face her guilt, or the possibility Sah may not have made it out alive, she flees to the Desert to live in the farming enclave known as the Ginseng Colony. There she participates in another uprising a few years later, which also results in many deaths. A disillusioned survivor for the second time, she angrily vows to pursue “only pleasure from n’won.” In 1988, the revolution for which the book is titled takes place.[6]

Ironically, we learn little about Dance Dance Revolution from the Guide, who did not participate. Presumably the Historian is less interested in this part of the story, since her father’s path has also taken a divergent turn. At some point after the Kwangju Uprising, Sah traveled to America, abandoned political science for med school, married the Historian’s American mother, and finally became a doctor in Sierra Leone, etc. This is my chief complaint about what is otherwise a superbly imagined, highly entertaining narrative: What did dancing have to do with the revolution, exactly? Are the swim-caps handed out at the entrance to the New Town dance hall a kind of homage to the bald Guide, who is now celebrated as a hero? We’re left guessing by the gaps in the tale.

During the course of her storytelling, the Guide manages to smuggle the Historian over the bridge into New Town, where the Historian is also able to document speeches by various characters and other noise from the cultural mishmash of the colony’s marketplace: hagglers wheedling, hula hoopers tantalizing, snatches of songs from the dance hall, an auctioneer selling copyrighted phrases. These bits are chances for Hong to play around with variations on the fluid creole of the Desert, and she takes full advantage, to the reader’s delight. One particularly compelling poem emphasizes a key theme in the book, the blending and compressing of a truly global culture, the oscillating experiences of foreignness and familiarity from the perspective of a “double migrant”:

TOASTS IN THE GROVE OF PROPOSALS

Lo, brandied man en rabbinical cape
dab rosy musk en goy’s gossamy nape,
y brassy Brahmin papoosed in sari’s saffron sheet
swoon bine faire Waspian en ‘im wingtip feet,
les’ toast to bountiful gene pool,
to intramarry couple breedim beige population!

Lo, union o husky Ontarian y teacup size Tibetan,
wreath en honeysuckle y dew-studded bracken,
lo, union o Cameroon groom kissim ‘e gallic Gamine’s cheek
en miscengnatin’ amour dim seek to reek
les’ toast to bountiful gene pool,
to intramarry couple breedim beige population!

Clap away, Greek chorus o gay sashayim crowd,
clap away, chatty flackmen y pre-nup hackmen,
bine fort, ruby-lined pachyderms who trundle here proud,
bine fort, madders who nag fo proposal enactment,
les’ toast to bountiful gene pool,
to intramarry couple breedim beige population!

Dance Dance Revolution is a much larger book than the sum of its parts, leading the reader on an ambitious, somehow sweeping tour of pasts and futures both real and imagined, laid out in an intricate plot full of fun science fictionish tweaks, and rich with linguistic invention, ornately textured speeches, and verbal gymnastics, as poetry should be. If in the end I’m left wanting to know more about Dance Dance Revolution, New Town, and the beige population of this fantastical Desert, Hong’s provided enough material for me to imagine a whole second volume. Sequel anyone?
_____________________________________
NOTES

1. Though some reviewers have read the Historian as male, I read the character as female. Go figure.

2. This is not a spoiler, despite Adrienne Rich’s weird assertion in her introduction that this personal connection between the Historian and the Guide “is gradually revealed.” The Historian refers to the relationship as the reason for her trip on the third page of her foreword, the book’s first chapter.

3. It is unclear from the Guide’s chronology or her stories how long she has served as the head guide for the St. Petersburg hotel, but she was appointed to the position in 2016 and has worked for the hotel off and on since 1989.

4. Korean names that have not been Americanized are ordered family name first, given name last. Kwangju is sometimes spelled Gwangju, and hyphenation and capitalization in the other Korean names here follow the book, though they may appear differently elsewhere.

5. These ellipses are not mine. They appear throughout the book to indicated lapses in the Guide’s speeches, because the Historian’s audio recordings have been slightly damaged.

6. Konami’s video game called Dance Dance Revolution was not introduced until 1998. If you were wondering what the revolution and the video game have to do with each other, there is no direct connection, unless Hong means to obliquely suggest that following blinking lights in dance steps bears some relation to living under a dictatorship. But this seems unlikely to me. Perhaps she means to highlight that dancing, i.e. pleasure, is complicated by restrictions upon or responsibilities inherent to free will.

*****

Shanna Compton is the author of For Girls (& Others), Down Spooky, and several chapbooks, as well as the editor of GAMERS: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels. She's also the founding editor of the DIY Publishing Cooperative and Bloof Books. She lives in New Jersey.

MAUVE SEA-ORCHIDS by LILA ZEMBORAIN

2008-03-31T22:18:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Mauve Sea-Orchids by Lila Zemborain, Trans. by Monica de la Torre and Rose Alcala
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2007)

With the caveat that I don't have the knowledge to comment on the Spanish-to-English translation, let me cut to the chase on the English result: Mauve Sea-Orchids is one of the most gorgeous, stunning and impressive feats of a poetry collection I've read in a long while. It’s written by Argentine writer Lila Zemborain (it's her first full-length English poetry collection) and translated from the Spanish by Monica de la Torre and Rose Alcala, as well as published by the ever-innovative Belladonna Books -- kudos to all participants involved in releasing this project!

There's much to adore in Mauve Sea-Orchids. The writing is lush and sensuous, certainly, but these words don't really capture the effect of the poems, which is like the slow, pleasurable, highly-sensitized build up to an orgasm. Not the orgasmic conclusion itself, no. But the process towards it that one wishes never to end and, in this collection, continues on past the last page as a result of resonance. The poetry collection never concludes; its experience just lingers, stays!, for a long time until the reading experience transcends reading to become, in memory, like a bodily act one never forgets.

If I sound delirious, then that attests to the text's ability to have melted distance between my senses and the page -- like:

like the orchid patiently waiting for the bumble-
bee that will pollinate it, an unexpected wind
causes the flower of scents to burst open and
glands begin to secrete their effluvia so the
bumble-bee at celestial distances may perceive,
amid the night's fragrances, the intoxicating
substance; at the call of instinct it will fly
unaware of the destination of its random journey
until arriving at the site of the encounter; there,
beyond essences and circumstances, wrapped
in the scented sphere, they mate unknowingly,
because it is not their bodies that embrace and
touch, but the ethereal substance that overflows
and contains them....

You can open the book at random and every single page contains sinuous, luminous passages, which also often contain deeper meanings. In the above passage, for example, I glean an ars poetica of sorts, that is, just as one may begin a poem without knowing where the poem will go, "at the call of instinct, it will fly / unaware of the destination of its random journey / until arriving at the site of encounter."

Fine, let's open the book at random a few times -- these passages, these poems but also "magnificent creatures" (as blurber Jonathan Skinner so accurately labels them), speak for themselves and their enticing powers:

Page 33:

down, the tide goes down in the irresistible
warmth of a body that escapes language’s effluvia
so as to rid itself, by looking of its gradual
submission to clumsiness; with absent eyes, with
the same reticent happiness of the young who
throw pleasure onto their arched backs, she who
can’t trace the tenderness of past times on her
breasts is able to smile; when the body alters its
coveted geography, unknown parts are coated
by substances that shall confuse it; an area at
the end of the mind designs these figures, a
gesture as elemental as the knife; as if time had
never passed, the landscape superimposes its
figures over the sordid reading of facts; bluntly,
desire slips back to other gestures; another is
the instance that allows for the void to be filled

And

Page 53

cellular foundations, open your eyes, look at
the species, touch the thickness, amplify sense
of touch at the ends of your body; it is not in
the water where sound dissolves; it is in the
thicket, where serpents are growing

And

Page 67

if there is a path, they are shadows avoided like
ferns growing in the forest; a life that has not
been takes refuge in the dampness of termites;
no one talks anymore of the cleared effluvia,
she mourns, mourns the body, mourns while
licking the wound that won’t close; she opens her
mouth, air circulates, and in that gap is proof that
uninhabited shadows are sometimes necessary in
order to dissipate life; although that body threatens
her at night and settles a bubbling cluster in her
chest, she understands that the moon refused to
cohere with her history; bitterness sank to her
elbows and there she decanted her cowardice;
but this language of worry no longer sentences
her, as if the water had released the pressure; it
is now the instance of exact bodies that enlists

And

Page 73

to reach a point or an agreement, or a pact,
or a recent self-questioning as to where or to
what, for what or for when, if desire or nothing,
and once again desire, and to say yes to what
emanates, and to say no to one’s own absurd
cubicle when understanding becomes more
untenable, or when acceptance terrorizes with
its bottomless transparency; to stretch oneself
like a tree towards anxiety’s major route, an arm
punctuating the air, fingers spread in assured
extension, the body like an arrow tensioned in
all directions, arms and legs elongated in water,
altitude and depth on the surface, floating
in the rhythmic inhalation and exhalation of
desire, of the number, of distance, of the head
submerged between the green and celestial, in
the multitude of bubbles and guttural sounds,
that comes no longer from the throat but from
a vague zone; machine, motor, blade, oar, arm
that stretches, leg that sinks, body that slides

The work certainly seems infused with, inspired by, meditations on science and nature and the unknown but tempting depths of seas and oceans, and philosophy -- while all being quite impressively limned with desire. Its sensibility is perfectly captured by a cover image from artist Emilie Clark whose lovely biomorphic images I've long followed and enjoyed. Enervating it all is an eros also seen in the subtitles and their progression: First, “la orquidea y el moscardon” or “orchid and bumble-bee”. Then (my favorite) "los petalos furiosos" or "the furious petals". Lastly, "malvas orqideas del mar" or "mauve sea-orchids".

It's worth noting the form. Without meaning any insult, the poems at first seemed to me to be prose cut-up in lines. This, I think, reflects how these poems are organic bodies whose lines flow together and flow so well together that I initially they should not be be cut up (hence my envisioning of each poem as a body of prose). But there are line-breaks (though no stanza breaks) so that the structure works effectively in high-lighting the beauty of the language and facilitating their impact. Compare, say, this passage as an unbroken prose piece

like the orchid patiently waiting for the bumble-bee that will pollinate it, an unexpected wind causes the flower of scents to burst open and glands begin to secrete their effluvia so the bumble-bee at celestial distances may perceive, amid the night's fragrances, the intoxicating substance; at the call of instinct it will fly

with how it was actually presented as

like the orchid patiently waiting for the bumble-
bee that will pollinate it, an unexpected wind
causes the flower of scents to burst open and
glands begin to secrete their effluvia so the
bumble-bee at celestial distances may perceive,
amid the night's fragrances, the intoxicating
substance; at the call of instinct it will fly

The latter is more effective in focusing further -- and relishing -- the words. I appreciate this reminder of how forms in poetry are not random but deliberate in the hands of the master artist (which, this book persuades me, is Zemborain.) To read this book is to make love, not just with the universe, but one’s self: “nothing prevents the dog from / smelling shoes, or the sun from hiding itself in / the billboard or heating the face with its shadow; / resistance acquires light, the eyelashes hum, / feet of sand kneel before the uncertainty of the / moment, already air and ocean and undulation / and a sky of pearly insistence; to be in that sky / nothing more than a particle in the detached / decipherment of a vanishing afternoon.”

*****

As remuneration for editing Galatea Resurrects, Eileen Tabios doesn't have her books reviewed here ... but she's pleased to point you elsewhere to Thomas Fink's review of her SILENCES: The Autobiography of Loss.

RAPID DEPARTURES by VINCENT KATZ

2008-03-31T22:08:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Rapid Departures / Partidas Rapidás by Vincent Katz, Trans. by Regina Alfarano
(Ateliê Editorial, 2005)

Rapid Departures is a bilingual volume of poems by Vincent Katz (with facing-page Portuguese translations by Regina Alfarano), with art by Mario Cafiero. While it would be wrong to say that the poems are Brazilian-themed, it would not be wrong to say that they are to some degree embodiments of his Brazilian experiences, since they were all written in Brazil. In his endnote, Katz calls this book “an essay in poetry of the city”, and claims in that sense lineage with “Catullus, Propertius, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and O’Hara”. “City” here must be taken in a Platonic-archetype sense, since this in fact a book of poems of several cities, and sometimes of the highways and byways between.

Katz’s inclusion of Propertius is not fortuitous, as Katz is Propertius’ translator. In his introduction to his Propertius translations, Katz writes of the Roman poet’s “highly compressed phraseology”, how “[i]t was in his character to write in a way that was half-challenge, half-insouciance”, how he had “a highly literary and subtle approach to both subject and language”, and how, “with all his literary and verbal sophistication … [he had] the ability to write lines of the most down-to-earth frankness”. He might as well be describing himself.

As Katz mentions in his endnote, when commiserating with his translator, the poems in Rapid Departures “range from the deceptively transparent to the turgidly opaque”. But isn’t that, as they say, life in the big city?

There are echoes of many poets in these poems (which isn’t to say that Katz is derivative; it’s just to say that wherever we go with senses open we can’t help but hear echoes of others who have passed by … and that novelty is an invention of modernity, and if it ain’t got that swing, well …). I hear a bit of Blackburn in the following:

In a couple of years, his girl
will look weathered, maybe bitter. Her breasts
will be sad. But tonight, while the boys play, she is perfect.
-“Rehearsal”

And I hear Apollinaire in

Christ is caught up in antennae
the city is beautiful in the rain
it washes its sins away
-“Validade”

And so on. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hear Katz. It just means that these poems are indeed highly literary.

Of course the literary can be deeply felt (I don’t know why I need to say this, it’s not as if the literary cannot be felt; but there does seem to be some sense still alive in the culture that there is a binary, “real/artifice”, and I feel myself wanting to say no no no … tho I’m guesing I don’t really need to say this to GR’s audience …):

My emotions can’t keep
pace with the beauty,
drops of water on roses
in my wife’s hands
as she stands with me
in front of the world
in a tiny, private, spot,
which passes instantly
and never goes out.
-“Quaresmeira”

So far, I’ve made no mention of what Katz calls his “turgidly opaque.” There are several such poems, though to my ear they seem equally as urban, literary and felt, and in no way more artificial than the “deceptively transparent” poems quoted so far. “Rapid Departures”, the long poem that give the book its title, is one such poem. It begins:

September
SP
Caravaggio
Krates crawl
endemic
underlay
Wander lay
attuned
breaks
in syntax
wavy
articles
sax by
summer
let-in
pistol
shots
at 1:38
a.m.

Later mention is made of “incessant unkempt prattle” and how “here, our manuscript / turns to mush”, but, while normal semantic meaning may not be easy to extract and it very well may not be meant to be, there is nothing unkempt or mushy about this poem (or any of the others in this volume). Katz is in as much control of his materials as he wants to be. This, again from “Rapid Departures”, is for me the funniest moment in the book (and perhaps the most “moving” and “literary”):

to bloom, to be in one’s
prime, to foam, ferment,
be eminent, abound in,
swarm with clutched
story, this’ll be as good
a spot as any to tell
this little tale:

Once, four men entered
a carriage. It headed
over registered half
rising setters rough

And away it goes … expectation set up, expectation denied, only so something better can happen.

It occurs to me that a poem like “Rapid Dapartures” couldn’t have been written before the so-called “linguistic turn” of the latter half of the 20th century. But this is where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve just been reading a creation myth from early First Dynasty Egypt, in which, as in Genesis, logos precedes world. Which makes me wonder: have we always been living under the sign of the linguistic turn? Have we ever set foot outside the “prison-house of language”? I’m not the person to answer this. I still don’t know, and probably never will, how language relates to consciousness, how consciousness relates to body, how body relates to world …

Katz is willing to live with it both, or more than both ways (perhaps this enables his range). Sometimes consciousness (logos?) precedes world:

any view is ultimately
your view, where
you grow up, sun
in the bathroom lands
on your significance
-“Suco Integral”

Sometimes world doesn’t need consciousness/logos for anything:

The shape of a palm tree
A large dead cricket
Scuttling clear crabs
Detritus of tiny shells
The beach paints itself
Before you have seen it
-”Beach”

(I take “paints” here as a poeticism, so to speak, rather than a bit of epistomology.)

As Katz puts it at the end of “Rapid Departures”, “I think I’ve found a way of fitting it all in”, and while no-one fits it all in, what this having it every which way adds up to is a very big book (in only 40-odd English pages) indeed. I take this as a lesson in poetry and in living. As they say, when forced to choose between two good things, choose both of them. (Obviously, this “philosophy” has limited applicability (e.g. certain choices and my wife will literally – literally – kill me), but that’s a different sermon/essay, isn’t it? In any case, it’s often possible to choose and over or, and not a bad poetic strategy.)

Besides Cafiero’s accompanying illustrations (rather gentler than some of the poems yet still pleasing), there are four full-color collaborations between Katz (and Cafiero?) and a number of uncredited LP sleeve artists. Fans of e.g. Raymond Pettibon’s disjunctions between image and text (of which I am one) will get a kick out of them.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman's most recent publications are World Zero and No Sounds Of My Own Making. Work of his will soon appear in The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II. He is one of four collaborators on the recent hay(na)ku sequence "Four Skin Confessions", which has served as a seed project for a number of other collaborations also to be anthologized. His current project is called Autopoiesis, of which he has completed 100+ parts and though he expected it would be time to move on to something else when he put paid to no. 100, surprise! 2008 seems to be the year of the sonnet-shaped thing.

IMAGINING A BABY by BOB MARCACCI

2008-03-31T21:58:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Imagining a Baby by Bob Marcacci
(Dusie, 2007)

The art of drawing has come a long way from the idea of putting pencil or charcoal on paper (or cave wall) to create an image. One artist stretches out thin lines of black ink across a wet white field (or vice versa in terms of color), then picks up the panel and swirls it about to create forms with simultaneously biomorphic and galactic implications (her name is Maureen McQuillan). Another artist takes a wet brush and “throws” the ink at a page tacked up against the wall in a result that could be considered a “watercolor” as well as “drawing” (her name is Pat Steir). Another artist superimposes layers of rice paper against each other so that the “final” image is the sum of images on two fields (her name is Theresa Chong). Another artist uses hair to create line-based forms (her name, uh, will come to me...) Another artist dribbles water across paper and lets the puckering form the marks to create the drawing (her name is Laurie Reid). Another artist placed a small piece of paper across a page in my journal, scribbled furiously across the whole page, then took away the small piece of paper to show "negative space" (his name is Phil Sims). Another artist places wet ink at the edge of a page that’s held up so that gravity does the “drawing” (I might have imagined this artist, but if so the approach is a combination of Theresa Chong’s, Pat Steir’s and Laurie Reid's). These are just a few innovative visual artists addressing drawing...

...who came to mind as I read/perused Bob Marcacci’s single-poem chap, Imagining a Baby. For I consider this project as much as, if not more of, a(n innovative) drawing rather than a poem. Facilitating this conclusion is the Acknowledgements’ note that

The words in this poem are largely comprised of words from the About.com: Pregnancy & Childbirth and Babies Online websites.

Thus, I thought that Marcacci used the borrowed words to place texts on the page -- thus creating a drawing by showing vs. saying something (it can be similar to the way one sculpts rather than writes poems by rearranging text garnered from internet and other third-party sources). Given the e-sources for the words to Imagining A Baby, it’s logical for the poem to contain passages like

this week / beginning \
of the 2nd
trimester
you don’t look like much
while your intestines
migrate / & 20 teeth
wait under gums
you swallow
amniotic fluid \
you can smile /

But note the insertion of the forward and back slashes: / and \. These "marks" (a drawing term, certainly) are critical as they become more prevalent throughout the chap as one goes through its 16 pages. Each subsequent stanza also grows more shaped (through indents and caesuras), in the same way that a fetus develops within the mother’s uterus, for instance

you continue to
put on weight                /\\
as layers\of fat//                \
pile on & help \/ /
               /regulate\body/
           /temperature &/
develop immunity in prepaeration
for life/outside
the womb & the womb
               gets/cramped/\\
your \mother feels
               more your\ knees
               /& elbows &\
it is painful/
               \ sometimes \
as\ you continue
                              to grow &/
               snuggle down
               into the pelvis
               your mother
breathes more easily

Note the slashmarks because the last “stanza” of the poem is comprised of no words but only such slashmarks. And the slashmarks outline a baby dropping out of a womb. Well, it outlines a baby but the image, with the head towards the bottom of the page, denotes said dropping out of the womb. That is, the text finally disappears altogether for a picture which, after all, can be worth a thousand words. The drawing holds sway over the poem.

Imagining a Baby is also a fine conceptual act. For the future parent, can words ever really capture the reality of a baby forming within a belly? I suspect that one can only imagine what it will be like, thus the appropriateness of Marcacci lifting words from other sources if he is not able to articulate the “Imagining (of) a Baby.”

There is also an appreciable warmth in this project -- appreciable if only because of what the poem is about. I don't know if Marcacci lifted some of the lines in this stanza below from the referenced websites but they feel personal, as if they might have been generated from his own life experience; in any event, their narrative is welcome here:

these days it rains often &
we stay inside \ & \ watch TV
you mother \ often takes \
a nap in \ the \ afternoon \
she \ can’t \ sleep \
on her \ right side \
hormones from \
the placenta \
activate \ milk
in your \ mother’s \
breasts she has \ contractions
at the dinner table & winces \
you can \ grasp \ firmly
you open your eyes \
when awake & close them
when sleeping \
your skin continues
to thicken & you \ develop
antibodies you urinate
almost \ 1 pint each day
where does it go \

Ultimately, Imagining a Baby is a lovely feat for capturing in both form and content the theme as defined by its title. What a unique way to approach the topics of pregnancy and birth about which millions of words certainly have been stated all through the centuries. This project is birthed from a beautiful mind.

*****

As remuneration for editing Galatea Resurrects, Eileen Tabios doesn't have her books reviewed here ... but she's pleased to point you elsewhere to Thomas Fink's review of her SILENCES: The Autobiography of Loss.

PRAU by JEAN VENGUA

2008-03-31T21:48:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Prau by Jean Vengua
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2007)

It occurs to me to say: read the book; to direct those of you who want commentary to Tom Beckett’s “Notes on Jean Vengua’s Prau” at Slim Windows, and to his interview with Jean in E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S: The First XI Interviews (Otoliths, 2007) (an indispensable volume, by the way, as is its followup); and to sign off.

That’s tempting. Tom’s commentary is really good. But. Or perhaps I should write: and.

On 8 December 07 I was in Berkeley, and heard Jean read at East Wind Books, and now I can’t read Prau without hearing, no, feeling, her voice, no, her presence. I don’t want to read Prau without that presence. Without that calm. Very steady. Very steady. This is a passionate book written by one who, in her poetry at least, seems equal to what comes.

(Jean, if you’re reading, I’m sure it all feels different in “real life”. But. And.)

I don’t know how important it is to have heard that voice before reading. I liked the book before I heard her read. I thought it was very good. But it’s a different book now. I read it much more slowly, quietly … The main reason I’m writing this is to share what I experienced and how it affects my reading. My advice (Yogi Bhajan once told me: never give advice): take your time with these poems. As Eric Burdon assured everyone in “San Fransiscan Nights”, “It will be worth it.”

Prau is divided into four sections, the titles of which suggest a journey, an odyssey, perhaps without an Ithaca: “Momentum”, “Displacements/In Place”, Ghost Vessels”, “Rowing/Breathing”. Though “life is a journey” is a commonplace, it’s never been truer nor has it ever connoted more intensity of experience than in this, the Age of Dislocation.

Yes, every age is an age of dislocation. And. But.

According to one authoritative source, “Between 2000 and 2005, 13.1 million persons migrated from developing to developed regions.” (Tak Wong, Dept. of Political Science, UC Riverside). How many migrated from one part of the “developed” world to another? How many people migrated from one part of the developing world to another? Is anybody counting? At best, life must have become strange for all of them …

And this doesn’t touch on the number of “internally displaced persons” (IDPs). As defined by the United Nations,

internally displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border.

According to “Internal Displacement: Global Overview of Trends and Developments in 2006” (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), April 2007, as found at Wikipedia), “At the end of 2006 estimates of the world IDP population rose to 24.5 million in some 52 countries.”

We’re talking about a lot of people. So is Jean. (Jerry Jeff Walker: “When I remember your life / I remember mine”). And for all of whom “things” must have become very strange … (I’ve set myself the oulipean constraint of talking about this without using the words pain and suffering …)

Commonplace. Common. Place. Let’s take a closer look at the (rhetorical and actual) notion of place in what I am calling here The Age of Dislocation (I could, as could any of you, adduce any number of reasons why we experience dislocation these days, even if we still live in the home that’s been in the family for x generations). I’m going to quote at some length from Grant Boswell, “Non-Places and the Enfeeblement of Rhetoric in Supermodernity”, Enculturation, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1997 http://enculturation.gmu.edu/1_1/boswell.html (see the original for notes, etc.).

Not only is the concept of place very prominent in rhetoric, it is central to Western discourse generally. … space is the key concept of Western philosophical discourse: “Since the time of its Mediterranean inception, Western philosophy has essentially presented itself as a philosophy of the center. This notion, questioned in various degrees by European thinkers from Hegel to Derrida … concerns itself most profoundly with the concept of spatiality” … In order for something to be recognized as knowable, it has to make its way from periphery to center … and thus what is knowable and therefore meaningful has its place: “meaning is understood in terms of knowing the place of things, of objects and entities, in the given order of the cosmos”.

Think what this must mean for immigrants and IDPs, etc. … and then read Jean’s “This Isn’t Kansas”:

… and the sky is too thin and there
is no tether, no reality. I mean, no flattering munchkin

and, particularly, her “Momentum”, which opens with

Gustav Mahler died in 1911. He saw himself as an outsider.

and which ends (and here I do quote Tom B) with a “skin prickling denouement in which Vengua’s father witnesses, from the rail of a ship, a nuclear explosion on a coral atoll.” Clearly, an event (in Badiou’s sense of the word), which has made us all at least a little bit less at home.

Back to Grant Boswell:

… the relation of place to discourse is one of familiarity and knowledge; one knows and therefore can speak about what is familiar in the place one occupies. This relation is called “rhetorical territory” by Descombes. “Where is the character at home? . . . The character is at home when he is at ease in the rhetoric of the people with whom he shares life.” … Home is the familiar place from which one speaks to one's neighbors about what they share in common because they occupy common places. The question then becomes what happens to discourse when the concept of place as the familiar place one knows and lives in changes?

These poems are one answer. This is the last line of “The Aching Vicinities”:

leuchtendes grun a la pagode lightfast

Is this an example of “supermodernity”? Boswell:

… supermodernity accelerates the transformation of space. Virilio argues that the acceleration of history actually makes possible the transformation of space in what he calls the “shrinking effect” … by making remote distances and places accessible to us by travel or by electronic media, supermodernity compresses space, changing the scale of things such that the world can fit into one's vacation or living room. Thus supermodernity works on the principle of “spatial overabundance” in which the unfamiliarity and expanse of space is compressed into the familiarity and knowability of place. This compression results in excessive possibilities for assimilating spatial overabundance as knowledge within one's home, one's rhetorical territory, because the home becomes the focal point into which knowledge from all over the world is funneled.

Or is this an example of its opposite? Even if we live under conditions of supermodernity that doesn’t mean we’re “supermodern”. If we became postmodern because we never became modern (Bruno Latour) and posthuman because we never became human (Donna Haraway), then perhaps a state of supermodernity and the “shrinking effect” explains why so many of us are on antianxiety meds and antidepressants …

It’s not that every poem is “about” diaspora and dislocation. Not at all. It’s just that life is lived under that sign. Jean does run her own riff on the shrinking effect, I think, by seeing the world in a grain of sand and in the pea under her mattress, and by finding the significance of the world via her senses (which include memory and intellection). Everything counts (Wolfgang Tillmans: “If one thing matters, everything matters”). Here’s all of “This is Not to Explain”:

What did all that traveling mean, and why
can’t I remember? I remember. This is not
nostalgia. There was cool light misting
over the slough near Crescent City; I counted
red barns. There is a prison at Pelican Bay,
a town named Trinidad, a town named Samoa.
What does this have to do with you.
Now the snow crunches under my boots, now
sand and heat scrubs the skin on my heels
dry and bleeding. There were many deserts.
Please explain why. No; I’d forgotten:
there are no more explanations left.

There may be no explanations left. But what are explanations? Do we need them? Perhaps not, when “I am all yours, O”: this is the way “The Paper House” ends. And it must be remembered that “O”, besides being “a natural exclamation, expressive of sudden feeling”, can (and here does, I believe) also “[stand] before the subject in the vocative relation”, as in

O Muse, tell me the story

Of all these things, O Goddess, daughter of Zeus

Beginning wherever you wish

(not Jean’s words; remember, she lives in a world without munchkins). The key word here being “relation”. I DJ a little to show what I mean:

I am all yours, O
cool light misting over the slough

etc. and mix in a sample from “Wednesday, August 25, 2004”:

Once, on some opiate I confused
that street lamp for the full
moon. Tonight, stone sober,
I almost make the same mistake.

O street lamp, o moon …

And to think: I haven’t even begun to talk about the love poems yet …

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman's most recent publications are World Zero and No Sounds Of My Own Making. Work of his will soon appear in The Hay(na)ku Anthology, Vol. II. He is one of four collaborators on the recent hay(na)ku sequence "Four Skin Confessions", which has served as a seed project for a number of other collaborations also to be anthologized. His current project is called Autopoiesis, of which he has completed 100+ parts and though he expected it would be time to move on to something else when he put paid to no. 100, surprise! 2008 seems to be the year of the sonnet-shaped thing.

WHEN A WOMAN LOVES A MAN by DAVID LEHMAN

2008-03-31T21:38:00.000-07:00

THOMAS FINK reviews

When a Woman Loves a Man by David Lehman
(Scribner, 2005)

Nearly three years after it appeared, in late 2007, I came across When a Man Loves a Woman and quickly wondered why I hadn’t encountered it much sooner. David Lehman’s sixth collection is formally daring and full of trenchant social and aesthetic ironies. Lehman has authored an important book on New York School poetry, and this volume of poetry displays a strong inheritance of the pluck, wit, and elegance that the School’s admirers cherish.

At first glance, Lehman gives us six sestinas here. Only one, however, a collaboration with Jim Cummins (89-90), abides by nearly all of the form’s strictures. In “Sestina: When he called the lawyer” (30-31), one of the end-words is used twice, and “The Old Constellation” (38-39) shifts among different grammatical forms of end-words and even uses “anybody” to get away from “body.” “Big Hair” (62-3) goes as far as to include “gin,” “gym,” “Jim,” and “tonic” as a “single” end-word. While every single end-word in “Sestina” is the name of an American poet, and five poets are repeated in every sestet and in the envoi, seven different bards are placed in (what starts as) the third position.

Since the sestina is one of the more challenging traditional forms to pull off, it takes a special audacity to mar it deliberately—to break a rule or two and relinquish bragging rights. Yet the development of slight, subtle variations can be an exciting exercise of imagination; it seems more “nude formalist” (a la Charles Bernstein) than “new formalist.” For me, the result is most intriguing in the very simple end-words (“her,” “said,” “him,” “worst,” “him,” “for”) of “Sestina: When he called the lawyer,” in which Lehman strings together, not Ashberyan clichés, but, more often, fragments of them that register an eerie withdrawal from context-specific dialogue into a sense of ordinary language’s potential for both anxious hollowness and pathos: “But it wasn’t about him./ The money wasn’t meant for./ Their luck went from worse./ Everyone came home when mother” (30). A similar effect occurs in “The Double Agent”; detective fiction’s plot architecture is left out, and what remains is a conventional repertoire of images and abstract phrases that stands and also founders on vague suggestiveness:

The man reading the paper in the hotel lobby
heard every word. There was a short silence.
Suddenly he put the paper down.
“I am the stranger of whom you speak,” he said
in the formal English of a Spaniard
in a Hemingway novel. That was the tip-off. (18)

The reference to Hemingway indicates layers of textual borrowing that result in a signature style—like Raymond Chandler’s. There may be a “tip-off” of some mystery in a text from which Lehman has collaged, but our access to it is permanently deferred.

Aside from the modified sestina, Lehman also makes skilful use of the pantoum, Villanelle, stepped lines that can be found in the work of Mayakovsky and late William Carlos Williams, anaphora reminiscent of Kenneth Koch’s work, stanza patterns ranging from couplets to octaves, stanzaless poems, prose-poetry, and jagged strophic arrangements. One kind of ingenious experiment not involving a fixed structure is “Poem in the Manner of Wallace Stevens as Rewritten by Gertrude Stein,” where the fact that both precursors are mad about repetition creates a dizzying verbal excess: “If night were not night but the absence of night/ an event but not the same event twice then I would be I/ and this would be nice very nice as I write I write” (85).

Repetition in a pantoum should probably haunt a little, and “Space is Limited” (whose repeated lines are not always precisely the same as the first ones) surely does. Here are the first two quatrains and the final one:

You’re both going to die.
Have you remembered to adjust your asset allocation strategy?
You haven’t got any, as Marlene Dietrich told Orson Welles
When she took his palm in her hands and examined it.

Have you remembered to adjust your asset allocation strategy?
You’re supposed to do it once a year, like having a physical.
She took his palm in her hands and examined it, saying,
Are you on track for retirement? Is the window open?. . . .

What do your money and your future have in common?
You haven’t got any, as Marlene Dietrich told Orson Welles.
What do you and your money have in common?
You’re both going to die. (44-45)

In Touch of Evil (1958), Dietrich, playing a fortune-telling madam, informs the detective played by Welles that she won’t read his fortune because he doesn’t have any future. Not only does Lehman link material fortune and lifespan by not rushing to attach the adjective “any” to a specific noun, but there is also an implication of anxiety about sexual status in the pun-friendly terms “die” (coupled with “both”), “asset,” “do it,” and even “any” (as in getting any). The pantoum’s title emphasizes scarcity, as well as the idea that the form’s doubling almost halves the “space” of potential utterance, and reiterations bring home nagging doubts that a security measure like the adjustment of an “asset allocation strategy” will do any good. One cannot outsmart the stock market any more than one can ward off death or ensure one’s sexual potency and appeal. The poet’s final quatrain comprises an inversion of the repetition that occurs in a traditional pantoum, thus allowing the ominous declaration of mortality, with its accompanying connotations, to have the first and last word(s).

Like “Space is Limited,” many successful poems in When A Woman Loves a Man rely a good deal on the force of cultural allusion, along with the problem inhering in the questions that begin “Denmark: A Tragedy”: “Who’s there?/ Who is it that can inform me?” (64). “Poem in the Manner of the 1950s,” a prose-poem, uses a mass of allusive detail that could be said to build a commemorative wall for white, male, middle- or upperclass accounts of this time in the U.S. against revisionist or subaltern counter-histories, except that Lehman, an undergraduate at Columbia University during the anti-Vietnam War protest, is actually parodying the wall and building it with cracks: “There were no homosexuals yet one of them was expelled and no heroin addicts except jazz musicians and no card-carrying Communists except nondescript men in suits carrying briefcases with film canisters in them” (93).

Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC’s attempted purge of supposed Red influences in Hollywood stemmed from the sense that the multitude of Americans’ genuine ideological purity (i.e. faith in unbridled capitalist expansion) must be protected from contamination by a small group of misfits. While Lehman’s speaker, of course, does not mention how the Civil Rights movement took shape in the fifties or how the Southern backlash against it became especially vicious, the stereotyping of “heroin addicts” as “jazz musicians” not only serves as a favorable comparison of the “squeaky clean” fifties to the drug-infested sixties but, since jazz is a major form of black expression, implicitly restricts African-Americans to a pathological margin so that they are not part of a characterization of “healthy” mainstream fifties “America.” As for the assertion of a gay-free America, one irony is that Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s main henchman, was a closet homosexual, and the fiercely anti-communist J. Edgar Hoover is another example. Surely, many found to be homosexuals suffered “expulsion” from good positions in U.S. society. In the fifties, Allen Ginsberg included openly gay references in his anti-establishment poetry, and three of the founding members of the New York School (O’Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler), which started to gain poetic momentum during the decade, were gay. “Poem in the Manner of the 1950s” derives thematic energy from the tension between what it includes as “things that made America great” (94) and how it signals the matter excluded by its limited perspective. This is especially true of the treatment of gender in the text’s opening sentences:

Meet Doak Walker, the last of the all-American glamour boys. Say a
prayer for Gil Hodges, who went 0 for the World Series. There was
one big secret that separated the men from the boys, and that was
what a woman looked like without her clothes on. A naked girl in
1959 was not the same as a naked girl in 1939 or 1919, wasn’t that
true? It was indubitably true, but how would we get the girls to prove
it? (93)

The hyperbolic advertising for fifties NFL football star Doak Walker—as though “all-American glamour boys” would not continued to be manufactured by the mass media!—is comparable to the exaggerated pity accorded to baseball star Gil Hodges, whose slump during a World Series early in the decade prompted a Catholic priest to urge his parishioners to pray for him. If athletes like these men exemplify adult masculinity for the era in question, the “one big secret” (perhaps shared in the locker room) that ridiculously provides a big part of the definition of maleness has a significant crack: is a man defined by his possession of carnal knowledge or by an access to pictorial knowledge conferred either by age or stealth?

Playboy magazine, emblematic of the mainstreaming of pornography, emerged in the fifties; it may be accurate to say that the specifics of the visual presentation of “a naked girl in 1959” in erotica or pornography differed greatly from the one two or four decades earlier. Yet the speaker’s rhetorical question is even relevant to women’s bodies. As Susan Bordo and other scholars have documented, patriarchal culture’s demands on women to develop particular kinds of bodies through diet, exercise, and the use of many consumer products tend to fluctuate, along with fashion, from generation to generation. The cheerful “voice” that Lehman gives to his speaker states norms of gender socialization as though they are “natural” propositions. Such dubious “knowledge” is not only so dated but so inescapably “socially constructed” for most contemporary readers who were not adults during this period that we can wonder what current mainstream commonplaces will seem ridiculous to educated people in another half century. (Note the reference to “the camel route to Iraq,” which must have simply meant romantic wanderlust to Frank Sinatra’s listeners in the fifties but now signifies ominous political adventurism as Bush Junior’s second Gulf War continues disastrously years after he declared victory.) Further, even though the prose-poem’s coda may play on an understandable nostalgia for drive-in movies, “a red Coke machine” that “dispensed green eight-ounce glass bottles, and certain comic books, the idea that a bunch of particular consumer products established the U.S.’s “greatness” is a fatuous hyperbole that serves to point all the more strongly to the anxiety, authoritarianism, and unjust exclusion that the serene “manner” of the historical collage would glide over and thus occlude.

A rawer social parody than “Poem in the Manner of the 1950s,” the sonnet-length “Jew You” is equally effective. The singular or plural or false past tense verb form of “Jew” is used in every line, sometimes twice, and if we also count the name “Judy” (and Judith derives from Judea) which is attached to the ultra-Jewish last name “Levi,” we have 18 instances of the key-word, including six end-words. Such words are repeated often by anti-Semitic characters as curses in plays like Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to reinforce a badge of negative identity. This excess of repetition, though it does not necessarily support the overgeneralization that “Jew” is “the one irreducible word in the language” (112), does emphasize how virulent and irrational the anti-Semitism that, historically, has kept flaring up at certain points has been and continues to be:

Dear Jews: We liked you better as victims.
Jews were chic in 1946 and West 12th Street.
The car was a lemon how come you bought it he jewed me down. . . .
Judy Levi was a vandalism major in college then she went to Jew school
and became a lawyer for the criminally insane. She defended the Jew
who said: the Jews are behind everything and you know who’s
behind the Jews? The Jew fucken mafia in Jew York City.
I am a Jew and my mother was a Jew
and when Lionel Trilling asked Allen Ginsberg why he, a fellow Jew,
had written “fuck the Jews” in his dorm room window,
Ginsberg sighed: “It’s very complicated.” Now there was a Jew. (112)

A full appreciation of the poem’s ending requires background information. Ginsberg was expelled from Columbia University in 1945—a year before “Jews were” allegedly “chic” in the lower west side of Manhattan and the same year that the Shoah ended—for writing the sentence cited above, as well as a slur against the University’s President, and for allowing Jack Kerouac to spend the night in his room. The literary critic Lionel Trilling, twenty years Ginsberg’s senior and probably one of Lehman’s professors as well, was the first Jewish professor tenured at Columbia, yet he identified strongly with the British-American culture of the literature he studied and downplayed his Jewish origins, perhaps because the university tended to marginalize Jews. In other words, when he tried to assist his student in this crisis by speaking to Columbia administrators on his behalf, Trilling would have found Ginsberg’s words disturbing but might have understood both his sigh and the complexity of his motivation. Of Trilling, it could also be said, “Now there was a Jew” (of his time and social context), and thus, the teacher and student are not merely “fellow Jews” but fellow Jews working through somewhat similar issues of assimilation and identity. If the future Beat poet could not precisely be called “a vandalism major” like “Judy Levi,” who went on to defend “the criminally insane,” including anti-Semitic Jews, Trilling counseled Ginsberg to plead insanity during Columbia’s review of his case, and the latter took his favorite instructor’s advice.

Much has been written on this incident, including an account by Trilling’s wife Diana, and there are various interpretations of Ginsberg’s motivation. The most obvious is that Jewish self-hatred involves the internalization of mainstream prejudices and a desire to negate one’s cultural identity to gain the advantages of fitting into society. However, if oppressors (perhaps including many Columbia administrators, faculty, and students) “like” Jews “better as victims,” to use irony to beat them to their denigration, pretending to put oneself down, is to refuse victimhood by taking the authority of interpretation and thus to thwart their perverse desire with one’s own canny perversity. Thirdly, Ginsberg’s cleaning woman, the one who reported Kerouac’s overnight stay, was reputedly anti-Semitic, and some have supposed that Ginsberg wanted her to have to confront her own prejudice and be forced into the position of erasing it by cleaning the window. Finally, especially because it was the goyish Kerouac who was staying in the room and whom Ginsberg evidently desired, it has been advanced that the word “fuck” is intended to mean “make love to” Jews rather than to discriminate against them.

The range of interpretations of Ginsberg’s shocking gesture can be plugged back into Lehman’s poem as a whole. We can say that Lehman is a Jew who is simultaneously giving voice (perhaps with a mixture of fascination and horror) to the virulent tones of hatred against his people and wondering aloud why some Jews are “insane” enough to believe in the omnipotence of some “Jew fucken mafia” and, with various techniques, enclosing this danger within the corrective frame of parody and putting it out there to hold the mirror (window) up to those who “like” Jews “better as victims” and to goad anti-Semites into cleaning the filth from the window and perhaps even calling for Jews and non-Jews to embrace what is “very complicated” in Jewish self-fashioning as it negotiates with others and otherness.

The humorous, deliberately simplistic “A History of Modern Poetry” begins: “The idea was to have a voice of your own,/ distinctive, sounding like nobody else’s/ The result was that everybody sounded alike” (66). A major “idea,” exemplified by “Jew You,” in When a Woman Loves a Man, is to realize—and one could invoke Bakhtin—that what you think is your own voice is inhabited by other voices, and so you should let those voices surface and challenge each other rather than repressing them. It’s not a question of everyone sounding “alike” or different but to allow both similarities and differences in a kind of dialogue to produce effects with multiple consequences for social and cultural interpretation and behavior—and to have fun while doing it.

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of "A Different Sense of Power": Problems of Community in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001) and five books of poetry, including Clarity and Other Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2008). His paintings hang in various collections.

PUBLICATIONS by MAGGIE NELSON and Edited by JULIET COOK

2008-03-31T21:18:00.000-07:00

KRISTI CASTRO Reviews

Something Bright, Then Holes by Maggie Nelson
(Soft Skull Press, Brooklyn, 2007)

and

[Growling Softly], Edited by Juliet Cook and "drilled" by David Foster
(Blood Pudding Press, 2007)

Something Bright, Then Holes. This is the title of a book of poetry by Maggie Nelson, but it also is a description of the world Nelson creates. Something bright. Then holes. Nelson’s book expertly weaves the brightness of life and desire with the holes that come with loss and salvage. It is the feeling of seeing but not being able to see or not seeing and being able to see.

The book divides into three main sections. The first part of the book, “The Canal Diaries,” compares the life and decay around the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York with a decaying relationship. The middle section of the book is called “The Hospital for Special Care”; It was written at the bedside of a hospitalized friend. The last section of the book is made up of shorter poems that return to what happens at the end of a relationship and afterwards.

The most compelling things about Something Bright, Then Holes are the holes in the stories. The actual details of the relationship become less important than the imprint of loss. A reader never really knows the details of her friend’s accident. We are left with the remains, the imprint of loss. This unrevealing makes the story more powerful.

Throughout the book, readers catch glimpses of the story being created in front of them with lines such as “Insert lyricism later” and “when did/ this become a narrative of captivity.” Nelson wants a reader to be aware she is creating a story. Nelson writes, “This story may end/ much sooner than I thought/ It may end today.” There is the feeling of being in the moment with Nelson even though she is writing about something from the past.

Two ideas that run through this book are landscape and water. Nelson writes, “I’m not going to write/ about anyone. Only the canal”(34). Of course, in only writing about the canal, others things come into the story in waves. The canal also becomes a metaphor for what is happening in her own life. Nelson looks at the canal and writes:

I don’t see
why they don’t just fix it
instead of leaving the water
to rot. Yet I know

it’s so much work
to dredge it, to face a century
of muck. (p21)

This image can stand in for the relationship also. The book obsesses about those tiny moments in relationships and in life. Nelson notices those little bits of society that most people might overlook or might have intentionally tossed away: a desk in the weeds, “marigolds glowing in the white, industrial light,” and the barbed wire.

This book draws a reader in not only because of the details Nelson captures but also because it weaves desire and despair reminding a reader these two things re never far apart. This is seen in the salt in the book. Sometimes the salt is from tears. Sometimes it is from cum. In this world, these two things exist together. On one page, Nelson places a towel on her paralyzed friend’s face.

You can’t wipe away your tears because your hands
don’t move, and I can’t wipe them away either
because it’s too abrupt a motion, everything now
needs to happen very slowly. So we place
a wet towel across your eyes and the tears
must soak upwards. (p44)

On the next page, she is reminiscing of seeing “photos of you and your lover/ naked in your kitchen, you both looked/ happy and free" (p45).

Desire and despair are shipmates in life and Nelson’s book. Everything exists in flux. To have light, there must be dark. Nelson writers, “You close your eyes and say waves/ Yes, everything happens now in waves.” (p75) The lapping waves return a reader to the water which has a constant presence in the book, but the waves also mirror the flux of life. The book ebbs and flows between ideas. The waves and lines such as “37 days of feeling lost and found” help show this. (p22)

Fell asleep in the East Broadway subway station last night
until the Mobile Washing Unit spilled water mixed with bleach
on my feet, as if I were just some sludge (p11)

On page 33, Nelson writes, “But I/ should have/ remembered, the rain// always brings in the sewage.” Rain is usually thought of as cleaning, cathartic. Rain equals a good cry. For Nelson, this doesn’t happen without the complications of “sewage.” Nelson is the gold miner dredging through stories, pulling out the shiny bits and the muddy sludge and dumping it all onto the page. Her words are all shining even when she is talking about the dirty water.

This is a book to which readers will want to return. Each reading reveals something new, something bright. Even the cover art (“Heartattack City” by Tara Jane O’Neil) pulls a reader in and makes a reader think of something each time he or she holds the book. A pieced together shell of a partial body with a stitched up heart and emanating lines making a person think of loss, desire, hope, robots, and flux. On page 43, Nelson addresses her hospitalized friend’s reconstructed face, “Now your skull is literally shining.” Something bright. Then holes. Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes shines with each encounter.

+++

Reading the zine [Growling Soflty] from Blood Pudding Press simultaneously with Something Bright, Then Holes enriches both texts. These texts share the same sand box of desire, loss, flux, and salvage. Many of the pieces in [Growling Softly] use color, landscape, and body in the same ways Nelson does.

The most seductive thing about [Growling Softly] is how it is packaged. Mine came with a lavender cover, a metallic inner page peaking out, a long soft ribbon binding, and a textured patterned rectangle on the back cover, but each one is unique. Opening the front cover reveals an admission ticket pasted inside that says, “Rendezvous Admission.” This ticket invites a reader into this zine. The table of contents is called, “*the sticky innards” that hints at what’s to come. The title deceives a reader. Most of these poems growl, but most of them are not soft. These poems confront and kick at a reader; the poems are not shy, slicing into their bellies, pulling out intestines and throwing them down in front of a reader.

Reading the pieces in [Growling Softly] alongside Something Bright, Then Holes makes certain things stand out like these lines from Amber Nelson’s piece “April 28”:

It’s the imprint of a human body
on your body. All skin and kidneys.

Or the lines “The horrible spill of my heart cherries jubilee/all over his dirty white linoleum and him” from “Unrequited Breakfast in Bed” by Misti Rainwater. Lines like, “I must write about sea things:/ dry docks and sludge barges” from John Rocco’s “The Maritime Industry” mean more when put with Nelson’s book. Most of the poems become more special when a reader keeps Nelson’s poems in mind. Almost all of them have at least one image to hold onto like this one from “The Angel of Death” by Juliet Cook

My aborted baby has been salted away
inside an old cigar box
with a handful of blue crayons—

One of the most interesting pieces is “Fleur and the Phantom Limb” by Melissa Culbertson. This poem expertly captures what it means to miss a limb. The ideas of desire, loss, and salvage float through this piece in lines like these below:

Today a man will try to trace his way up my skirt,
but all he’ll find is a smile of skin, more grimace than
scar, tinbent teeth grinning over all that is
missing.
I am the artifact of cartwheel, double-dutch.

The poem captures that feeling of loss, but does not want a reader’s pity. Later in the poem, Culbertson writes, “I’ll make you forget symmetry.” This line is the only line that doesn’t start at the left side of the page. It disrupts the page and makes a reader pay attention to the space where a leg used to be.

Two pieces near the end of the zine “symmetrophobia fear of symmetry” and “ornithophobia fear of birds” both by Kristy Bowen are also gorgeous. The reference to symmetry might hurtle a reader back to “Fleur and the Phantom Limb,” but this poem will take a reader in other places also.

It begins with auguries. Three starlings. Three forks. The faucet
running milk in the mornings and my handwriting hinting at some
independent disaster. I’ll speak in third person when we come to the
part in the pay where the house is on fire. The part in the car where
my ribcage blooms like poppies. Where we die, are revived, then die
again. When the terror is exquisite. A slow, beautiful throttle.

In “ornithophobia,” the speaker actually turns into a bird. For someone who fears birds, that must be the worst thing in the world.

In [Growling Softly], a reader has more of an idea of what happened in most of the pieces. Some of the poems tell a little too much of the story. More gaps and imprints would have been welcomed. Some of the pieces aren’t as successful as others, but the energy and love of the creators come shining through all of them. They are honest and raw. This zine introduced me to Blood Pudding Press, the murmurists, and some writers I want to get to know more about. All in all, this was a rollercoaster of a zine that improved by being read in the shadow of Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes.

*****

Kristi Castro is an archivist, English 101 instructor, and occasional barista. Current projects include a re-mixed deconstruction of The White Album and the small press Fret Punch. Her work can be found in silent actor, not enough night, and Why We Write.

TEXT LOSES TIME by NICO VASSILAKIS

2008-03-31T20:58:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Text Loses Time by Nico Vassilakis
(Many Penny Press, 2007)

It reposes on the rug like a dark weight, spangling its cover’s bright oblongs. Here more than ever, in the objecthood of book as object, is suggestive a first and stone-like materiality, soon itself to be “unearthed” as Nico Vassilakis’s most weighted language:

            magnets
            pictures
            snaps
            what falls
tumble, yellow area

Each of these terms, we feel, develops a dialogic between spatiality and promised, potential mass. There is an equivocal tension here between what holds and what threatens to drop away. Our language, in general, so often seems fixed, “magnetized” -- by the very visuality of its signs, by the histories of its references, by the groundings of our speech -- into some sort of weighted permanence. Yet what to make of such apparent intransience? For how easily our language may “fall”, snapping off into its own weightless nowheres . . . How swiftly our language can abandon its status as reciprocal magnet, becoming a “mere” picture, tumbling, in this instant, through structured voids of sound, sight and sense.

The poem quoted is from the sequence “IN( )BETWEEN: and how powerfully those disturbing central brackets mark the falling space of language I’m attempting to describe. Within the brackets, a space develops. But what is its status? We will see. For the moment we can remark how Vassilakis’s syntactic compression, evidenced strongly here, is what allows this writing’s many tensions to develop. Such contrast of language’s simultaneous weight and weightlessness would not be possible without this careful lexical reserve, which fashions this space into an almost sculptural arrangement.

Sculptural, yes -- for the poem not only visually recreates the “falling” of its words, but makes them culminate, and then accumulate, in an eventual horizontal spread of disorder, colour, “area”. The magnet of language holds, but then, transformed to “pictures”, tumbles. Yet what is this end “area”? It is, as we’ll see, not an entirely negative space, for though simplified, flattened, it is also coloured, and bursting with the potentials of a new spectral light.

We are dealing then with a language which falls, or risks falling, or defies falling, into its weighted middle, its bracketed “between”. Not only a language though – also, a subject:

“your light is…”
never
more of me
in the middle

From light-filled consonants we descend into the heavy material m’s, round and slightly foreboding in our mouths. The initial fragment of speech trails away, and its speechlessness is replaced by a silent centrality, a subject standing in an entre, which the tone of “never” has tinged with regret. This “never” recurs again shortly after in the sequence, and is again spatially determining: “I’m never anywhere.” This language which seemed so heavy, this subject which seemed so established, and this book blissful, in its latent weight: is nothing left of this organization? Is all stripped away now, so that only, as Vassilakis puts it: “chaos works”?

There is of course, we have felt it, an extraordinary benefit to our “tumbling”, a new kunderian lightness of being which accompanies this removal of self and space’s “blocking in”. For holes are also windows, and in “the middle” of the eye, where the hole of the pupil rests, is the possibility of a new perception. Nick Piombino’s lucid Afterword underlines this ambitious perceptive project in Vassilakis’s work: this is, as Piombino says, “image, emotion and meaning, not banished or distorted but reconsidered, reinvented within a visual/verbal nexus of focused perception.” After this reconsideration, there are, as Vassilakis puts it, “Pieces missing” and “Eyelids lowered”: but out of this new darkness and disorder, something else may begin.

It is like a process, then, as Vassilakis says in “Flat Out”, of an “organized dying”, in that such falling may make us feel that we are inexorably led into the absence of textual and referential decomposition. Yet we see, and feel, immediately and intensely, in Vassilakis’s constant and vigilant constructions, that this decomposition of writing can lead, albeit sometimes circuitously, to its subsequent recomposition. It is recomposed via points of new perceptions. These perceptions are formed from out the horizontal debris we initially arrived at after all “tumbled” away. In this new space, language finds itself, perhaps, with difficulties, under the aegis of a freer form: “It reveals itself. It putters along. It thrives too. A wonderment, also torment. Would you lean in and rummage about?” The rummaging is necessary; the torment too is necessary. And in this new state: “The details are obvious again.”

Even more than a phenomenology, this poetics is also, then, an epistemology. It is about the acquisition not only of a new perception, but also of ways of knowing via such new regards. As Vassilakis says in his interview with Piombino:

“As you stare at text you notice the visual aspect of letters. As you stare further meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, space relations, visual associations emerge as you delve further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text you’re reading.

As when you are perched on a mountain’s peak though the panoramic view is fetching you tend to focus on an interesting pebble at your feet. Something quantum about it.”

A perceptive victory arrived at then by an arduous stripping away: “The embedded text is unreadable”, and must thus be “unbedded”. Crucially, Vassilakis’ predominantly visual pieces, such as Negative Alphabet Alphabet, as well as being of a simple and achieved beauty, also importantly carry out this “displacement”. A displacement which is not so much, however, between words this time, or even between letters, as it is truly within the very letters themselves. For here is the arc of an “R” disrupted, here the upper curve of an “O” which does not meet its kin. Of course, we still recognize these new base elements of the language: but how strange they have become, how unlike the forms we traced, made familiar, during childhood. This is indeed the “new pebble at your feet” which Vassilakis has signaled for us. It is an even smaller type of disruption, to show us language’s strangeness; a minuscule act of ostranenie, displacing a supposed “essence” of letters in regard to themselves.

Let us be under no doubt then that this is a total poetics, though this does not imply, importantly, that it is a poetics of totalities. It is rather a wholistic vision in the sense that its diversity of positions and multilayered multiformities serve to reposition those stable linguistic and visual structures which stick, “magnetized”, to the self. This is in some sense, then, Pound’s melopeia, logopeia, phanopeia; but it is not the building of a Poundian ideology on those three pillars of poetic hermeneutics. It is the modification of perception via a wide-ranging poetics of sense and data. It is, in this way, closer to Zukofsky’s sight, sound and intellection, but somehow even more aware than the (ever-adorably) optimistic Louis of the dangers of language’s manipulations. Though the future is thought through here, this is no Marinettian Futurism; and abuse by influence, technology and imposition is never far from Vassilakis’s concerns: “I see you losing focus. It has something to do with the machine you’re using.” With this new space, after our falling, comes thus a new and combative freedom: “The liars are finding themselves wingless in these abundant winds.”

Lost and tumbling, we have not then the old forms to cling to, but rather the newer details made salient by a renewed sight: “The next tether is close at hand. It’s not about being different; it’s about being alone. Forever. A configuration makes sense, but geometries shift.” Thankfully they shift, and they must be made to; for the new configuration makes new sense, in turn. “Nothing remains of our talking” affirms Vassilakis in “The Colander”; but also “In the darkest of times you associate with anything.” This propensity towards association is important, for it is the way to climb, link by link, from out of one of language’s many pits.

A decomposition, then, of writing’s very material sense, sight and sound: but of what order is this “unmaking”? What else, on a grander scale, is it for? It is not quite, to my sense, though this is debatable, the very explicitly social underwriting of language accomplished by a Bernstein, Silliman, Notley, Kinsella. It is perhaps rather more the creation of that “opening” so dear to Hejinian : its political possibilities are palpable, but latent, and appropriately they come into effect later. Even in the impressive “Iraqed”, we are not here abruptly in the realm of the discursive attack. Rather, the act of taking to language spatially, sonorously, referentially, acts in Vassilakis as an initial appropriation, and the subject may then, more than ever, move within a new space of liberties, or even ideally, of acquired perceptive awareness.

All of this repositioning, however -- we have guessed it already -- importantly takes place, fundamentally, in time. For coinciding with the vertical -y axis of space, Vassilakis has set up a contingent x- axis of duration. And yes, text loses time, as the title says: the seconds slip, and the language ekes towards decomposition with the advancement of reading in a temporal march. We may build, however, our language up again, from the chronometric rubble of our readings. This is, then, a veritable Cartesian coordinate system, and the four quadrants thus developed are a map of poetic form .

We can build then, through the poem’s spatial propensities, our own Bergsonian durée réelle: a privileged time in which to read the poem, to make it ours, and to make it at once an integral part, and an agent, of our perceptions. Vassilakis’s vital, intelligent, complex poetics, is nothing less than a chance to unlearn some of our learnt ways of seeing and being, opening our eyes to a spectrum of possibilities which promises, albeit in an often uncomfortable way, to keep opening, and falling, forever:

open your eyes
one time
opens again
another

*****

Nicholas Manning teaches comparative literature at the University of Strasbourg, France. In 2004 he took his MA in twentieth-century poetics from the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and from 2003-2006 held a scholarship at the Ecole normale supérieure of the rue d'Ulm. His poems, articles, translations and reviews have appeared in Verse, The Argotist, Fascicle, Free Verse, Cross Connect, BlazeVox, MiPoesias, Parcel, Cordite, Dusie, Eratio, Otoliths, Shampoo, among others. In 2006 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first chapbook of poems -- Novaless I-XXVI -- is out now from Achiote Press. He is the editor of The Continental Review, and maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals.

WHAT'S IN STORE by TREVOR JOYCE

2008-03-31T20:48:00.000-07:00

STEPHEN VINCENT Reviews

What’s In Store by Trevor Joyce
(New Writers Press / The Gig, Dublin, Ireland / North York, Ontario, 2007)

It’s impossible to read Trevor Joyce’s poems without being intrigued by their combination of formalism and lyric power. Each poem can be seen as a kind of latticework or trellis, in which lines often appear to be constrained by a systematic, yet variegated word and/or syllable count. Whether this is done consciously or not, I am not sure. Each line or group of lines may be a self-contained perception, or, alternatively, a counter-reflection, counter-weight or counter-rhyme to another group of lines on the trellis. This technique allows Joyce to give a seemingly predictable surface a sudden torque:

several channels
tonight aired
footage

streets deserted
shuttered malls

rectangles
of freshly
turned earth
are visible

certain
voices
exist

it could not
be confirmed
whether
an atrocity
had in fact
occurred

an unidentified
vehicle is
approaching

The “unidentified / vehicle” arrives in the poem as a kind of “spook,” a potential saboteur that betrays the apparently authoritative reportage of the news channels. The illusion of being in control as a reader/viewer is disrupted by the sudden appearance of this “unidentified” force.

When I asked Trevor in an email about his formal intentions he moved my sense of intricate forms to a larger, structural level:

My own view of them, both in the initial writing and in the overall organization, was as rhymes of different sorts: phonetic, conceptual, structural, thematic, etc., etc…

Without asking, from reading the book closely, I am sure he means “rhymes” of a variety of sorts – slant, off, or just down right contrary. Whatever the specific process involved in a particular poem or series, his subversion of forms has the effect of an enormously compacted playfulness that functions on several different levels:

Hey, brown-haired girl,
your bed looks wild,
and a brown-haired man
left his hat behind.

Hey, girl, fetch my hat,
fit it firm on my head,
so that bright moonlight
won’t dazzle my eyes.

(Page 193)

The intense, contrasting rhythms, the individual words and lines create a variety of frictions, moving with a skittering quickness as one reads them. Bartok’s transformations of Hungarian folk music come to mind, or Charles Ives’ contrary, yet sympathetic re-interpretations of nineteenth-century American marching-band music. Indeed, many of the sequences in What’s in Store are counter-foils to snatches of folk tradition and anthropological and archeological lore drawn from the Chinese, Hungarian and Irish. Neither sentimental nor mimetic, Joyce’s arsenal of constraints and rhymes becomes a means of penetrating and exploring the suffocating crust of traditional formal devices and cultures. He can be as relentlessly impersonal with work that emerges from his own daily sphere. What is the intention? In my reading, the poems are intent on securing a space that is fresh and contemporary, while still bearing an echo of their original sources.

Throughout the book, these forms & re-workings vary from the hauntingly simple to the extremely complex. In some cases, such as the poem “Stillsman,” Joyce’s pages are thick with language – a relentless masonry wall in which texture is achieved by the correlation of stones of different textures, colors, shapes and implicit histories. At other times, the works fold out into a more relaxed, traditional lyricism. The variety of forms – either stretched or compressed – creates the impression of a poet who is relentless in his drive to explore the ways in which multiple constraints can compel the play of intelligence and imagination:

We, all impassioned
               suffer
                              grief

feel no
               passions, know
                              no grief.

If not already
               snarled
                              why covet
further
               traps
                              and goods?

Minor
               vortices
                              approach
the utter
               limits of
                              the atmosphere;

in light
               the rain
                              -bow
glitters
               and grows
                              parched

Heart
               to ash
                              exhausted

settles
               in a ruined
                              house…

Say, why
               should I
                              experience

nostalgia
               for the forms
                              of men?

How,
               rid now
                              of all familiar

Fixes,
               slough
                              myself?

(Page 170; translation from the Chinese of Ruan Ji)

Despite the formal variety, the book achieves a strong consistency of tone. Why do so many of these poems -- including those contemporary in reference -- have a ‘one step removed’ chill, even a hard-hearted sense of objectivity? Over time, modernism, science, and other utopian practices notwithstanding, the force of the fates appears not to have changed at all. In these poems, phantoms continue to threaten the collective and private psyche; courtships spin out of control, marriages falter, wars spread destruction, children disappear, someone’s death is always nearing, while strange, elusive, possibly threatening messages clamor from the edges of the darkness. Beauty – brief appearances of paradisiacal white birds, peacocks and liquid, transparent stone – is never less than transient:

torrential
penetrates
and rots
the sight

starved
memory
lives off
the store
and wastes

letters? no
correspondence

changes? yes
necessarily
it occurs

subdued
of little
consequence

am
out of
harm’s
way
here

stone
streaming
glass
opaque

(Page 218)

The only order in the universe appears to be the order of song. Without song, one remains as vulnerable as ever. With these songs, however, we are given the rhythmic energy and heightened awareness that allow us to be -- at least, for the length of the song -- liberated from the burdens that inevitably bear down upon us.

The title of the book may be taken on two levels. “What’s in store” is what we each hold in storage in our lives -- our memories and belongings. It’s also what’s to come, in the sense of prophecy or fate. Yes, there is definitely a kind of blues here. No matter the dexterity of the poems’ formal inventiveness, things often turn out badly, or contrary to intentions. Yet, like all good blues, these poems are suffused with the optimism and joy implicit in of the acting of creation or listening (or both). Trevor’s lyricism and variety, his formal invention and sheer velocity, not to mention his sharp sense of humor, are a wake-up call, a joyous alarm to the living, a kick in the butt to the sleepers among us. It’s as if the work is saying the only way we will, at least briefly, get out of here alive is to make poetry, listen and, no doubt, dance to become a member of the race.

A longtime Irish acquaintance says of Trevor, “I love his recent work and think that paradoxically he only found a voice when he lost his own.” I do not know Joyce’s early work, though the comment’s suggestion is that it was, perhaps, overly self-absorbed, autobiographical and/or sentimental. Ironically, through various conceptual systems of constraints -- in the way of Oulipo -- the work has become familiar in the most public sense of that term. The writing’s obligation to arbitrary forms liberates the poem from autobiographical intention, while the poems themselves become a measure of a world ultimately and simultaneously much more personal and universal, tragic or comedic as that may be. That is not to say this book will make Trevor Joyce any more recognizable on the street, or anywhere else. But he has constructed poems that speak much more clearly to a shared condition of human presence.

Yes, I highly recommend What’s In Store. And would suggest that Trevor Joyce is one of most remarkable contemporary poets among us.

*****

Stephen Vincent - a long time resident of San Francisco - is poet, essayist, bloggist, photographer, editor/publisher, teacher, walker, etc! He is the author of over 10 books of poetry, most recently the much praised Walking Theory (Junction Press, 2007). Vincent leads private walking and writing workshops in the Bay Area, as well as classes at the Fromm Institute (University of San Francisco) where he is a member of the writing faculty. His popular blog of commentary, photographs, poems, haptic artwork, and walks may be found at http://stephenvincent.net/blog/

ZAMBOANGUENA by CORRINE FITZPATRICK

2008-03-30T23:48:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Zamboanguena by Corrine Fitzpatrick
(Sona Books, Brooklyn, 2007)

And sometimes the poems so write themselves that their births just seem effortless. Corrine Fitzpatrick’s Zamboanguena belongs in this category, as indicated by this Author’s Note:

In September 2005 I accompanied my grandmother, Mama Lola, on a week-long trip to Munich, Germany for a family wedding. I recorded her telling me stories on two separate evenings. In the fall of 2007 I listened to the tapes for the first time and transcribed the two-plus hours’ worth of narrative. All of the language in the following pages is hers; I did not add any words, nor did I shuffle any segments of her story-telling. While these transcripts are not in total, they are in keeping with the order in which she spoke.

But while Fitzpatrick didn’t “add any words” or “shuffle any segments”, as well as presented the text in the order of her grandmother’s telling, the poet’s effort was obviously required. For an oral transcript wouldn’t have indicated line breaks, stanza breaks, page breaks, caesuras and so on. Nor would the audio tapes have indicated how to space the stanzas in a way where the pages effect a visual sense of space or airiness. Here, for instance, is the first page’s text which is placed nearly two-thirds down the page and along its right edge:

You know how she went to Rome
She went to Rome
And this is the way

Little by little she became pregnant

There is a specific grandmother sharing a particular personal story and yet this excerpt (like much of the poem) invites in the reader for the reader’s own take or inhabitation of these lines.

+++

Still, there is a specific story being shared. While there is sufficient narrative meat to glean that the poem is (partly) about a family in Zamboanga (in southern Philippines) during and shortly after World War II, the poem often unfolds like a dream:

               A pair of slippers.
               A pair of shoes
               I have a dress
               I have chocolates

I have cabbage which is very
Expensive, ocra
Whatever Mrs. Caminas
Mrs. Lopez
Everybody

               The officers are playing poker…

But such are the vagaries of memory, right? Gaps are inherent. Loss is inevitable. Fragments are logical. And this dream-like sequence is enhanced by the chap’s design whereby small stanzas seem cutnpasted across the pages so that the words float above the page -- an effect that enhances the project’s evocativeness.

+++

What Zamboanguena shows is how the poet is effective because she is a good listener -- and what a relief, btw, to experience a poetry of listening! It is through close listening that Fitzpatrick discerned the poem waiting to be discovered from her grandmother’s recollections. Her manner of releasing the poem is as good a method as writing from scratch (so to speak, and to the extent a poem can write from scratch).

Since the poem’s words are not the complete transcript, I did wonder whether Fitzpatrick judiciously deleted words, versus just presented a (discrete) excerpt from the transcript (which is how I’d initially interpreted her Author’s Note). Such deletion, like choice of line break, is a way of sculpting a poem out from prose. Well, that’s ultimately irrelevant perhaps (and just a practitioner’s curiosity on my part). For the result is what makes the opening Author’s Note of interest, not the other way around.

The delicately-rendered cover by Erica Weissman should be noted and applauded. It’s also evocative. Against a pale grey background, an image of a younger person and an older person (the elder manifested through her reliance on the youth’s hand to guide her walk) are depicted strolling along a map of the Philippines. But if you spread out the chap, you will see that the two are walking by what could be a blank wall or blank screen, implying a tale yet to be inscribed, yet to be told. And, perhaps, despite the existence of the poem’s text, the definitive tale can never be identified. For as Fitzpatrick writes -- as her grandmother said -- “In Zamboanga City, there are many stories.”

+++

Zamboanguena is one of four chaps I’ve received so far from the subscription series put out by Sona Books. All chaps are consistent in their thoughtful production. Praise, too, therefore, must be given to publisher/editor Jill Magi. This project, like the others I’ve seen, attest to the necessity of Sona Books’ existence.

*****

As remuneration for editing Galatea Resurrects, Eileen Tabios doesn't have her books reviewed here ... but she's pleased to point you elsewhere to Thomas Fink's review of her SILENCES: The Autobiography of Loss.

EIGHT PUBLICATIONS by BASIL KING

2008-03-30T23:38:00.000-07:00

BURT KIMMELMAN Engages

Several Publications by Basil King:

77 Beasts: Basil King’s Bestiary
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, New York, 2007)

Learning to Draw / A History: Twin Towers
(Skanky Possum, Austin, 2005)

Mirage: A Poem in 22 Sections
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2003)

Warp Spasm
(Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2001)

The Poet
(Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2000)

Identity
(Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2000)

The Complete Minatures
(Stop Press, London, 1997)

Devotions, with Selections from A Painters Bestiary and 14 Drawings from Intentions
(Stop Press, London, 1997)

Learning to Draw, Learning to Paint, Learning to Write: On Basil King

A Basil King Painting

What draws a poet to write about a particular artwork, artist, or artistic milieu? Given that poetry, or at least verse, happens primarily within the dimension of time, and that it gravitates to the sounds of words as an organizing principle (concrete and digital poetry notwithstanding, perhaps), there should be more of an explicitly declaimed affinity between poetry and music, as contrasted to poetry and art, within or beyond the literary canon. And yet, while some marvelous poetry has been written as a result of a poet being moved by, say, one or another symphony, it is the world of painting and sculpture that more often becomes the source of a poet’s muse. Perhaps there is a profound otherness a poet might feel for visual art which beckons (I say this as someone who has written poems on art and who views the human condition as one predicated on uncertainty—it is perhaps the fixed quality of most visual art, situated as it is in space, not time, which attracts me and provides me with some resonance).

Basil King is not an ekphrastic poet. He is a visual artist. He is also a poet. He is not, though, an artist who tries his hand with words, in the sense that Ulysses Grant was a general who was a superb memoirist, or Winston Churchill in much the same way. All the same, King’s work is that of a writer who is really an artist—still, he is not merely an artist who writes. In his poems and prose vignettes King thinks associationally and even downright illogically—or would it be better to say visually? The closest comparison with his writing I might be able to make is the poetry of John Ashbery who began as an art critic, who is completely comfortable in the world of visual art, and who has an instinctive feel for it, and for whom the world of art is a second world as if being an artist were for him a second self; this orientation fundamentally shapes his verse. Ashbery’s is the logic of music although it is inflected by the silence and persistence of art and by art’s capacity to present what might be least plausible. Finally, though, Ashbery is a poet. King, on the other hand, is a visual artist, a sublime draughtsman and painter. He is also on intimate terms with poetry. And his writing is unique. It provides a fortuitous entrance into the world of art, as it exhilarates readers for its literary inventiveness and lyricism (as if it might take an artist to show poets how to be lyrical).

King’s most recent book, 77 Beasts: Basil King’s Bestiary—the latest chapter in his intellectual and personal, spiritual engagement with art, with the particulars of art, and with particular artists—is a testimony in which King the man and King the artist are inseparable though each is distinct and equally compelling. Following upon books like Mirage, Warp Spasm, Devotions, The Complete Miniatures, and Identity, and even a book about his relationship as an artist with various poets, The Poet—we find King in 77 Beasts to be more an artist who writes than a writer who draws and paints, but this book establishes him as a writer who is documenting his life-long encounters with a number of artists or their works, who is probing the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of them in tandem and intertwined with his own life.

Ultimately King is probing the meaning of his vocation. Thus he can speak playfully, and at the same time quite soberly, to the painter Arthur Dove, in a personal voice, as one artist to another as well as one human being to another, of their mutual love of the visual, palpable world:

Brother, we are Doves. Let us not be too complacent. You know, when I sail my boat, straight lines intersect a curve and I deflect from the ordinary course of things and think I can have everything. Every snow flake before it touches the ground will be mine. Every cloud, every grain of sand, every beat of my shoe makes music. It is called music. Music. My romance. (77 Beasts 145)

The world is alive—or better to say King is, and by implication Dove was, alive to the world. Moreover, art makes the world coalesce and makes freedom possible. And if there can be a reality for King or Dove then King has found it in the manifest world.

King does not feel himself to be alone. He enjoys his kinship with Dove. To be sure, he is in touch with artists past and present in this book and in his earlier work as well. In thinking about the painter Gwen John, King writes, in Mirage,

Nobody, nobody paints just for themselves. Nobody. Oh, let there be nobody. Paint nobody, paint language. Nobody, nobody paints just for themselves. Let the shadows unroll. Let the shadow cover the mountain. Let the shadow be. Let the world stop. Let paint be. Nobody, nobody paints just for themselves. Let poetry cease. Let the shadow be. Nobody, nobody paints just for themselves. (Mirage 43).

Reading King one gets the feeling that poetry is everywhere and that it will never “cease.” The reader may sense that King sees himself as alone. Or perhaps King is not alone but he is simply awakened to his own vulnerabilities, and it is being vulnerable that marks all living creatures as in fact being alive and cognizant. But of course he is in communion with other artists. Yet he does not deny his own solitude, in either his art or writing. His book Identity appropriately begins, movingly, viable in memory, as follows.

Primrose. In the Lost and Found there are packages that people want to forget, want to lose. The books that Basil Cohen brought from England have his name covered over with bandaids. He was wounded and I covered young Basil’s wound with bandaids and woodruff. The bandaids and the books are on a shelf. The woodruff is gone. The wound remains. (Identity 7)

Are time and memory ephemeral, while the work of art endures, or does even an aesthetic object have a time frame? “Basil Cohen” in the above passage is Basil King. King’s boyhood was difficult. He was born in England, and brought up there during World War II, after returning from Detroit at the start of the war, with his willful mother, to the London bombings and subsequently to a school in the country—“a Jewish Summerhill,” King has called it, a Dickensian institution in which the children were academically superior but the teachers and administrators, who saw the children as a bother, were vicious toward them. This atmosphere bred loneliness and perhaps shame. What is more, King was born with a physical deficit on one side of his body, due to an incompetent doctor who delivered him at birth. As true of most children, King’s early life was powerfully determined by the adults around him, in King’s case often for the worse.

King eventually made his way back to Detroit. Other members of his family emigrated as well. King’s birth name, Cohen, was changed as a result of happenstance. First his uncle emigrated to America, later followed by King’s immediate family who, having discovered that the uncle had changed his name to the more Christian-sounding King, went along with the masquerade and became Kings too. But this undermining of King’s sense of himself caused an existential crisis for Basil Cohen who really did cover the name written in his books with bandaids.

At sixteen, he was admitted to Black Mountain College, the youngest person there, and without a high school diploma. This beginning overall has, I feel, profoundly affected King’s work. The images in his paintings—sensuous, supple, and slightly abstracted—are haunting, and it takes awhile to realize why. A sadness permeates them, but it is unannounced and subtle, visually realized with exquisite delicacy, a deliberate aesthetic; the sadness wells up inside the viewer slowly. The images are delicate, cerebrally intriguing, and at the same time poignant.

In King’s own early struggle to abandon abstract art (which he finally did by throwing off the heavy influences of the abstract expressionist painters he knew at Black Mountain College and in New York City), he found a freedom in the finitude of narrative (perhaps in part through his friendships with a great many poets and writers such as Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Fielding Dawson, and Hubert Selby, Jr.). His brief poem about Fairfield Porter ends with the declaration, “Dissolve the abstract / and find reason in an unreasonable / world” (77 Beasts 9). King’s prose pensées and lilting verse pieces are, for all their finely honed insights into the works of artists who make up the book’s titles, passionate, deeply personal dialogues with these people, which often imagine the distinctive details that fill in an artist’s life. Hence it can be hard to tell if the opening lines of, for instance, his low-keyed poem to Rembrandt are an act of impersonation or King’s candid, private, uncensored, even as they are gently shaped, thoughts:

I smell rhubarb heading my way and I recall
how much paint it took to paint her legs.
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it.
If I’m to render dogs in men’s clothing
then why should I comb my hair!
(77 Beasts 43)

There is a capricious, non-linear way of thinking that comes through in a lot of King’s verbal pieces, which I am coming to feel belongs more to the realm of art than of literature (as if his poem were in essence a painting), and yet there is also a kinship in these works between King and his fellow artists that does hold a world together, if only momentarily, if only long enough to take in the scene and be changed by it. Of course, this sense of the unexpected makes sense as well if one were to postulate that much of his writing is like found art, is taken from the moments of his actual life, but (to continue the metaphor here) this found art has been delicately altered, mediated.

King’s writing is deeply knowing—both in the sense of art historical knowledge and of the wisdom of a painter who has had a life-long love affair with art—and deeply felt, personal, intelligent, and at times painfully honest. His poem “Esteban Vicente” reads, in part,

Like the armor of a clock
I have found my limits
are emotional As I
describe the language
my lattice my lace
circumscribe an order
of being I am not

We paint from memory
those things that are nearby
Even though
the realism
of your portrait
dissolves

I squeeze your heart
and feel jealousy [….]
(77 Beasts 56)

Vicente, or possibly King, may be jealous; in any case this feeling is part of a larger relationship that transcends any particular moment. One senses this even as it is the moment that is rendered most often in King’s work. The feeling is part of a grand restlessness that comes from living with vulnerability, and living with it for King means comprehending and celebrating it. This comprehension could take the form of somber praise, even in the face of tragedy—for instance when he writes knowingly of Mark Rothko, in Twin Towers (a chapbook portion of a larger, ongoing work titled Learning to Draw / A History):

Rothko was ill when the horizon line refused to yield, divide and guide him as it had always done. He felt betrayed. His surface had become a Trojan horse that released unbearable monsters. No color could appease them and they pecked at him as if he were the lowest barn yard runt. Rothko committed suicide. (Twin Towers 16)

That last, merely factual, statement comes fast upon the uncanny ventriloquism King manages—could anyone but a fellow painter, yet one who is a gifted writer, be able to speak from inside Rothko’s mind?

King’s books are at once the work of an artist and writer, as well as a perspicacious art critic, and in the deepest sense a friend of the artists he engages. There is no body of writing quite like this. Reading his work, I feel jealousy at times for this artist who is also a poet, and always I am in admiration of him.

*****

Burt Kimmelman has published five collections of poetry -- Musaics (1992), First Life (2000), The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), a collaboration with the painter Fred Caruso, Somehow (2005), and There Are Words (2007). For over a decade, he was Senior Editor of Poetry New York: A Journal of Poetry and Translation. He is a professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of two book-length literary studies: The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (1998); and The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He also edited The Facts on File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (2005).

HARLOT by JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM

2008-03-30T23:18:00.000-07:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

HARLOT by Jill Alexander Essbaum
In book and CD forms
(No Tell Books, Reston, VA, 2007)

The CD version of Harlot is a condensed version of the book, it contains about half the pieces. It was extremely helpful to have both formats at hand. I don't think I would have been as appreciative of the work if there hadn't been the opportunity to hear the author speak it.

One upshot of seeing and hearing these texts is that for all their poemynesses (end rhymes, for example) I'm inclined to focus on their performative aspects. Some of these pieces do and some them don't pop on the page, but when Essbaum reads them they come alive in delicious ways.

What I want to say is that these works often read, almost in spite of themselves, like short dramatic monologues. They could and should be staged: these Harlot Monologues. They are all in fact pretty stagey. I mean that in a good way.

What I think unites Harlot is its unrelenting focus on the drama of sexual situations--on the way that they feel from the inside, given just a little distance.

Listen to these lines about a threesome:

She is Aphrodite. You are Priapus.
I am Impropriety in one of her kinky disguises.

This does not surprise us as I fondle the sway of her apple-
round breast, as our limbs take to mingling

like party guests, cock in the one hand, tail in another.
We bleed into each other like watercolors

Writing is a game of appearances, disappearances--it dances among the holograms called Desire. Jill Alexander Essbaum is an able navigator of the terrain.

*****

Tom Beckett is the author of Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006 and Steps: A Notebook (both available from Meritage Press). He also curates the E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interview series (which is available in print from Otoliths).

HOME AMONG THE SWINGING STARS: COLLECTED POEMS OF JAIME DE ANGULO, Ed. by STEFAN HYNER

2008-03-30T23:08:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Home Among the Swinging Stars: Collected Poems of Jaime de Angulo edited by Stefan Hyner with an essay by Andrew Schelling
(La Alameda Press, Albuquerque, 2006)

NEVER A PROFESSION

Jaime de Angulo never settled down to any one specific identity. His writings and life correspond best to the rugged, diverse Northern California landscape itself. A foreigner (born in 1887 France to Spanish expatriates) de Angulo was drawn by the locale and people of the American West. He roamed about scraggly coastal cliffs and followed the wanderings of native tribes across the central valleys, recording their language and music, along with writing narrative prose accounts and tales of their lifestyle and social organization. In addition to working as a vaquero and managing his own ranch property, de Angulo had brief flirtations with the early stages professional anthropology which later placed him in a struggle of contested legitimacy of his own practices against a more traditional academic approach. However, he was fated, it seems, to know no real peace – and desire none – that was not active in nature. His personal tendencies clearly favored the habits of native people, who maintained a life living between the spiritual and the worldly, over the distanced perspective of study balanced by discussion in classroom and university office.

De Angulo often wrote about how the spirit of an individual might become consumed by ‘wandering’ a term of the Pit River Indian Tribe for one who has lost the path to a stable life and is forced by inner turmoil to live apart from others for a time, often demonstrating unstable behavior.

I climb the mountain.
I am looking for a crater lake.
Don’t anybody follow me, I am in trouble.
I must sing my bitterness to the lake,
Alone.

There is no pretension to de Angulo’s poetry. His writing is direct, immediate expression. Poem and life are equalized. The majority of his poems originate from later in his life, after his various stints at professions and attempts at family life, when he was living a solitary existence.

Sun going down thru the Golden Gate
earlier and earlier every day
lighting this room where canaries
live with an old man

Berk MARCH 50

These poems are often fragmentary epistles to the world, drawn from his correspondence with friends and family. It was Ezra Pound who pushed to get de Angulo’s prose into print, some of the only recognition achieved for it in his lifetime. De Angulo also occasionally wrote his verses in French (for which editor Stefan Hyner provides English translations.)

C’est Noel, il pleut sur San Francisco,
sur les trottoirs la foule
s’ amuse
et moi j’m’ennuie à la fenêtre.

It’s Christmas, it’s raining in San Francisco
on the sidewalks the crowd
is amusing itself
and I, I’m at the window, bored.

LETTER to Ezra Pound
Dec 25 48

Though de Angulo’s poems often dwell upon solitary wanderings and broodings they are not necessarily by nature depressive. De Angulo found solace from attentive listening to teachings of ‘Indian doctors’ of the tribes he travelled and spent time with. These teachings were often stories and almost always arose from specific occurrences and feature totem animals and characters (such as Coyote) that may come to guide and guard the spirit of an individual. De Angulo’s poems adopt the stance and speak on behalf of such spiritual companions, often mirroring ritual chants and stories he heard from ‘Indian doctors.’

I never was a man.
I kill men.
In the shadow of the bush I kill men.
I the panther who never was a man.
I the panther will come tonight.

These beliefs are strong among the tribes and de Angulo looked towards them for possible remedies to his own troubles.

i did you wrong
but I paid for it
you of the nilotic profile
beautiful as a serpent
blank panther in the night
with long slanting eyes
you did me wrong
and you paid for it

hell for us both
you died in prison
and i am alone
with my pain

wherever you be
black panther
figure from an archaic tomb
you may now smile

By embracing the totem, de Angulo redirected personal torment. Jungian theory borrows from similar material but de Angulo ultimately rejected such ego-visualization of the intellect and the body. When he lived amongst a tribe he participated as a member of the community, refraining from expressing personal judgment. His poems are the ultimate demonstration of the purity and devotional nature of his study of the people who truly own the West.

Old Kate’s Medicine Song

Without a body I am
i am the song

Without a head I am
i am the head

i am the head without song
i am rolling down the hill

De Angulo loses himself in his poems. They do not point back at him but always away from him. Directing the reader’s eyes out into the world about them, to observe and value what’s going on out there beyond one’s own person. Jaime de Angulo’s poems are floated from the hearth.

to the memory of Bob Callahan

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at the library of USF. Recent reviews have appeared in Artvoice (Buffalo), St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, and Jacket. Poems recently appeared in Cannibal and One Less Magazine.

FEIGN by KRISTY BOWEN

2008-03-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

JULIET COOK Engages

Feign by Kristy Bowen
(New Michigan Press, 2006)

STRANGE BLUE DRESSES

I shall deem this an engagement rather than a review, because it would be difficult for me to articulate the power and sway with which Kristy Bowen’s poems move me in an objective or analytical or critical way. My expressions about her poems emerge sounding rather like poems themselves.

The last few collections by Bowen have made me feel like writing poetry even as I was reading them. Her evocative words and images swell my head with poetry, as if her poems are working upon my very psyche with some kind of subconscious power, causing personal poetic thoughts and ideas to foment and ferment and ripen in my brain. To emerge like lush dreamy wisps and start to spin themselves, weave themselves, practically hurl themselves at the nearest sheet. Her poems evoke such resonant tones for me—tones that are almost akin to visual landscapes. It's difficult to describe, but I suppose I don't have to describe it logically if I don't want to. The kind of poetry that I tend to be drawn to and that tends to draw me in does not function based upon a standard logic. It concocts its own logic that functions on more interior levels. That advances and twists and floats like a strangely possessed blue dress. I think that INDUCIVE OF SUBCONSCIOUS POWER is a wonderful way to describe Kristy Bowen's poetry, at least in terms of its impact upon me.

There are a lot of blue dresses in Bowen's poetry. A lot of blue. A lot of dresses. A lot of birds. A lot of fruit. A lot of household objects and body parts. A lot of buttons and zippers and hooks and other devices for fastening or unfastening. All of these items have unusual power in her poems. Or unusual functions. Or hint at something deeper, moving beyond their ordinary functions into a realm of borderline ominous mystique. Here are a few snippets:

"In one story, she falls open
like a clock, her insides blue
and chaotic, all gears. Wires fashioned
into vowels and finches spilling."

"Harbor something black and lush as licorice
beneath their tongues. Swallow the man
with the hook, the stranger inside the house."

"Some nights even the dolls had teeth"

Most of Bowen's poems are populated by women or by a female presence. Most of these women seem to hold strange feminine powers, dark female knowledge, suspicious and possibly dangerous secrets. Maybe some of these secrets were gleaned in their girlhoods, when the fairy tales of their lives began to deviate from the storybook versions. When they began to realize that perhaps there was quite a fine line between the innocent fairy tale little girl and the cruel fairy tale villainess. Maybe they contained elements of both inside themselves. Maybe it would behoove them to keep their more sinister elements hidden.

And so maybe the houses are not what they seem—maybe the furniture is not what it seems—maybe the blue dresses are not what they seem. Maybe more is hidden in velvet folds and secret compartments and even inside their very bodies. What have they swallowed, but not quite digested? What might they later expel?

The fragrant flowers and pretty fabrics that surround these women seem to be undercut with something sharper. Perhaps this sharpness could be honed into a kind of weapon. Perhaps this sharpness is a kind of sacrifice, like rogue underwire cutting into one's own flesh as she attempts to keep herself neatly contained. Perhaps this sharp sacrifice holds an element of the erotic. Surely you've heard that the masochists are stronger than the sadists.

There are a lot of disjointed female body parts in Bowen's poetry. Mouths and throats and wrists and ribs and spines. I love how the mouths hold such dangerous power. A power that is often contained, but that has the potential to break free and wreak some serious havoc. As in:

"the fire alarm of my mouth"

"In the end, the house burns beneath the
moon opening like a mouth torn out of a book"

The collection as a whole is strong and lovely and I adored many of the poems within, my personal favorites being the title piece, 'Feign', the first poem of the book, 'How to Read This Poem', and 'Trouble'. Thanks to 'Feign', poetry was swimming through my head almost all night long to the point I could hardly sleep. I didn’t need to dream, because Bowen’s poetic imagery was akin to the batting of dark female dreaming.

Like a strange blue dress with dreadful cautionary tales lurking around the seams, which have not yet begun to tatter, but are loosening…

***

Juliet Cook is a poet and the editor of Blood Pudding Press. A few of her newest publication credits are ‘DIAGRAM’, ‘OCTOPUS’, ‘little red leaves’, and ‘Prick of the Spindle’. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and currently has a poem representing in Sundress Publications Best of the Net 2007 Anthology. A selection of new poetry is also available as the first edition of Volume #2 of COMBATIVES, a single author zine series affiliated with H_NGM_N. Her latest chapbook, ‘Planchette’, is available now from Blood Pudding Press at www.BloodPuddingPress.etsy.com.

DAYS POEM, VOLS. I and II by ALLEN BRAMHALL

2008-03-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

ANNY BALLARDINI Reviews

Days Poem, Vols. I and II, by Allen Bramhall
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2007)

Allen Bramhall's deserted plane, his recession from simulacra in Days Poem

Allen Bramhall's Days Poem, almost one thousand pages, is a Gargantuan work, and any attempt to enclose its pataphysical complexity in the narrow confines of a review will be by itself a Pantagruelian effort. As with Eileen Tabios' I Take Thee, English, for My Beloved, Days Poem exceeds possible definitions besides, in Bramhall's case, the limited one granted by a time span (there is an ending date: 'thursday, august 16, 2001, ahb') and the visual consideration that what we are reading is prose poetry, prose, an interrupted and disrupted but somehow connected writing collected into fragmented paragraphs -- one followed by the other. After about a hundred pages, the quiet voice of the Author enters, after several days of reading, this voice accompanies the reader as a presence to a distinct observation of what surrounds us. Like a quiet melody, a tune that becomes familiar with its close humming in the proximity of Walden Pond with Thoreau and Emerson, with a hobo and a bear, a dog -- the only one who knows where he is. The collapsing imprint existentialism gave to our way of thinking, radically executed by postmodernism, finds in Bramhall the underlying layer that supports our contemporary living structure.

We are not dealing with automatic writing, streams of consciousness, confessionalism, a protracted diary, political observations, poetic distillations, metaphysical considerations, philosophical statements, romantic flights, hopes, disappointments, despair, and yet we deal with all of them at the same time. As Tom Beckett writes on his blog, Soluble Census: "Bramhall is working a peculiar discursive space: it is in the present, it is in the past, it is fanciful and philosophical -- often in the space of a single paragraph. A gentle surrealistic attitude floods the tone of these tomes' tune."

His voice settles on an appeasing mode. "Being in the moment" brightens what is by our physical entities. At the same time Bramhall dismantles the Babylonian chaos, the outside structures that asphyxiate individuals. Often his patient deconstruction appeals to common sense, verges on rarefied connections with the musicality of earth, of the air, with the immanence of our stay. It is in this moment that poetry becomes work, like the dreams of children that try to stop our ready-made postures -- even if soon forcefully and inexorably swept away, in the same way a concept tries to become a signifying strength, poetry struggles with words to float to surface, to the attention of lives that keep on postponing their possibility of being lived without realizing it.

Poetry becomes the leading often unmentioned thread of this Gargantuan work. By poetry the Author means a way of living, hence the title, a never ending poem of days. It often refers to a longing for essential values as coined by the hippies in their wish of reaching the state of "beatus", a way of interacting freely one with the other after having torn down useless superstructures, constricting and obliging one-way streets, anguishing and at the same time unreachable targets. His humor -- in the breathless and endless flow mastered by his controlled insights -- has to be mentioned: "tell us of your mystery, Tarzan, the querulous person of civilization asked. mordant necessity. Tarzan love Jane, love Boy. Tarzan sit on rock, watch rhino, the querulous person peers closer. and do you exercise everyday? Tarzan scratches his balls. simplicity is easy to make. the jungle is just about natural. but wait! there's more…"[Volume 1, p. 418]

A certain Rabelaisian mode is to be found by Bramhall, as a matter of fact his outlook reaches the most im/probably visible as well as recondite characters and situations, from the President to the Rangers, to Pound to Robert Bly, to SUV's, from the cosmologic to the microscopic. "brackets enclose supposed necessities, like trees around a clearing. yes, rocks are periods, and periods take time. where the time goes is a question, left behind often. rocks are treated to periods of understanding. moon rocks. within brackets another voice can speak. within brackets a piece of information. one has to expect something. eventually rocks will be less strange. at the end of a period, perhaps."[Volume 1, p. 355]

The reader can delight in Rousseaunian-like stases dictated à rebours[ ] by an objective Marxist filtering of the average ideology perceived as fake fairy tales in a land of fun for all.

"[…] the people have spoken, and having done so, they wish to say more. when more is ready, there will be enough time to reverse decisions, go into hiding, direct the education of the public spirit, and so on, until the ripe moment, quiet as trees, today, wind made those same trees noisy, to the degree that we can understand the essence. lately we have become divided, and started looking at books.

poetry distinguishes the plain from a blind field of force. it doesn't seem obvious but stars. a word breaks into sound, sound into time. the dog is a place, and plans will be made. organized and sailing, anything find, vocabulary. people charge in, falling volcano or just a lame geyser. Inside the latest entropy, the Power Rangers® wait to save the world. the world is a word, generous to our voices. "[Volume 1, p. 368]

Characterized as it is by unstoppable changes, an homogenous quality binds what can be called a work-in-progress, even if Allen Bramhall directs us to different parameters on Antic View, a blog he keeps with poet Jeff Harrison: "I'm thinking of my own work, which I pretty well forget once I've written. For me, a poem (that I've written) is the remnant of an experience. Perhaps it is an imitation of an experience."

A continuation, in terms of a more progressive forging of ideas into a balanced consistency, seems to take place with the turning of pages. What at the beginning were statements ascribable to sensations acquire in Volume 2 the depth of more refined and attentively crafted horti conclusi, the picturing of separate and well-defined worlds, at least for the reader who tries to delineate visible milestones in order to find anchoring points. Otherwise, as previously remarked, his voice carries the reader along, astray, and back to project him again elsewhere. The reader is with the book and with the Author who leads him through an eclectic variety of modulations along various phases of the day, of the year, of objects, sites, points of view, lights and shades, times, and situations.

Allen Bramhall avoids all capital letters. His are usually short sentences that wave and wiggle to unexpected spots. Flashes of poetry meet the reader, as much as random or casual observations, political and social criticism, disappointments, despair, bucolic descriptions, romantic flights. Bramhall's Gargantuan work resides in the depiction of sequences of thoughts which are disconnected from any fixed and/or comfortably recognizable development. Onto the screen the Author brings what crosses his mind in the moment in which he is typing, or what does not want to cross his mind in that moment. Christo's wrapping and mapping[1] could be the antithesis of Bramhall's wording while they meet at the extreme. Their art is there, visible to all to trigger one first question: "Why, what is it?"

-----
[1: Christo and Jean-Claude, their online site: http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/]

*****

Anny Ballardini lives in Bolzano, Italy. She grew up in New York, lived in New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Florence. A poet, translator and interpreter, she teaches high school; edits Poet’s Corner, an online poetry site; and writes a blog: Narcissus Works. She has translated several contemporary poets into Italian and English. Her book of poems, Opening and Closing Numbers, was published by Moria Press in 2005.

THE FINAL NITE & OTHER POEMS: ... by STEVE DALACHINSKY

2008-03-30T22:38:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

The Final Nite & Other Poems: Complete Notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook 1987-2006 by Steve Dalachinsky
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)

SUCCESSFUL OR NOT

Listening to Charles Gayle play is like having someone throw a bucket of water on your face.
-Phil Freeman, New York is Now

it’s like dying & going to heaven even there,
something like a flower with thorns,
is set in front of you – so the pleasure is modified to a walk –
not cautionary but certainly
not applicable to your gorgeous state of mind-body ecstasy –
a torn knee cap & an angelic voice of torture –
-Steve Dalachinsky

With The Final Nite & Other Poems: Complete Notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook 1987-2006, Steve Dalachinsky offers up a scrapbook collection of jottings written while in attendance at live performances and recording sessions of saxophonist Charles Gayle. As Dalachinsky writes in his introduction, “I’ve included every poem written under these circumstances… successful or not… with little or no editing.” Dalachinsky provides notes at the top of every entry usually giving the date and location of the performance along with additional remarks here and there such as Ted Joans being present, or Gayle playing the piano rather than his saxophone. When Dalachinsky hits his mark the precision is right on. While capturing the moment of his listening, Dalachinsky transcends a mundane accounting of his factual whereabouts into a headier contemplative statement of calling.

1-29-94
Charles Gayle Trio (William Parker – bass, Mike Winderly – drums)
@ The Knitting Factory set 1

A secular bewilderness

without a table to rest
my elbows on
without a crowd of
spaces to listen to the birds between
raindrops
there is good cause to say
“ALONE”
in the midst of a few
strangers

i go back to a dream i had
the other night
in which the “OTHERS” were
victorious
& wake with jump into
day light & its
passage thru the blooming
yellow dwarf daffodils
on the sill

it was not as cold as
usual &
i had a sense of
colonization
within my thought &
atrophy within my
fingers

without a starting point
from outside
my inside sees little
to go on
& the beams across the roof
of my eyes
slant thru my drowsiness
small shafts & splinters of a
whyfor –

because whatever lords
left the bills unpaid
in a circle of calling
when Sabbath eve had drawn
to a close
i found myself
disclosing the top of my head
& throwing religious raiment
to the floor
& bending to
the brief light
like a flower &
singing thru the rain
like a bird.

The difficult assertion to make is that Dalachinsky captures the spirit of Gayle’s music. Readers who approach this volume with any expectation of energy transfer from the music into the writing may be disappointed. Dalachinsky does however have moments where he chases after the rhythms of Gale’s performance, combining a traditional sense of conveying ‘meaning’ in the writing with an exploration of pushing the tonal qualities of speech. [Editor's Note: Some of the caesuras and indentations in quoted poem excerpts may not be exactly replicated due to Blogger format.]

1-22-04
Charles Gayle Trio (Tom Abbs – bass, Rashid Baker – drums)
@ Tonic

Gayle plays extended alto sax

to see              with Vision
have a                Vision
envision              A future free to Envision –
minutes & monuments
& election fraud
waiting on the corner can be a dangerous thing
steeping off the corner can be a dangerous thing              (Game: how
many words can YOU
standing on the corner can be a dangerous thing
Make from the word
sitting in the corner can be a dangerous thing
               Intervals)
cornered in the corner
it’s about intervals about changing the squiggly lines into
words~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~INT(E)R(V)(A)(L)S~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
valsevainveinanttailslavelairinvertsternsteinnaivetinvailvi-
talatelateslainstainrainnerve~~~~~~~~~ venttrialtrailsalesailtalev-
eilvinerentternslitlitilestilealereinstrainlainlanevalesentlentnetlet-
setitsitsintinsatvatrailstaleailalenaillanesentsaveinertslantrant….
lying in a corner is unsafe
crouching in a corner is unsafe
hiding in a corner is unsafe
standing in a corner is unsafe
` sleeping in a corner is unsafe
crossing @ the corner                look both ways
loafing lurking hanging……

vealearlrealeartearslatelateeatletratare atalterlatertarleanlearnart.

He sets the mood and direction of the piece, that is, the conception of having a vision and following through with it. Then slams words together, creating a jumble of articulate incoherence moving away from meaning towards sound. Dalachinsky comes closest here to capturing the thrust of the notes Gayle releases. Ending on the demand – when you separate the last eight letters into two words – ‘learn art.’ It’s a directive. A way through the predicament of being alive, feel the thrust of everything rushing through you and release it: bear witness.

This book is Dalachinsky’s (as it should be) far more than Gayle’s. It’s an appreciation of the music, but its focus and preoccupation is primarily with Dalachinsky himself. It’s doubtful that either of them would have it any other way. Dalachinsky matches Gayle in so far that he puts himself on the line as much as Gayle does in his performances. Each of them expresses emotions and feelings without regret or reflection—they’re exploring inner complexions as they go—controversial as the subject matter may be.

4-6-92
Charles Gayle Trio
@ The Knitting Factory

Gayle gives his first anti-abortion speech

Pipe/line

1.
there’s need
there’s greed
               a chair to sit down on
plants i.e. trees                take in carbon dioxide
                              & give off oxygen
                                           people toot their horns

is anything more important than a human life?
           age old question           founded on guilt

embryo in electric chair
black/white cellular                murder
               all part of                same thing
heard all before
               baby         mommy           sapling
               grave disappointments
murder is murder
               gabriel you know where it’s going
no – fact is you don’t

oh so easy if we really knew our right from wrong
               left
so easy to live & not breathe
wind pipe food pipe oil pipe log cabin
                                           i choke on them all

2.
i am against abortion but pro choice
if circumstances are weighed
& decisions are based on belief & will
               desire & need
but murder is murder
                              i am against murder but pro choice

                              go figure that one out

we think left - been left
                              behind

                                          & as dishonest as the rest

               no solo outstrips a long term plan

there’s need &
there’s greed
                                           cymbal & chance

                                             god speed!!!!!

Dalachinsky gives an honest account, supplying at least a partial record of Gayle’s character. He doesn’t judge the matter but allows Gayle’s words to speak as his own. It’s a generous service, catching the humane wishes that drive Gayle’s controversial perspective. After all, there’s no disengaging the artist from his or her perspective. The principles of the artist determine the approach they take to their art and drive the production of further work. There has to be an accompanying belief underlying it all which acts as support propelling the work along. For a man such as Gayle this isn’t a theory of practice but a basic principle of living.

6-1-92
Conversation with Gayle in my apt.

Charles Gayle wisdom

strip away ego – no right no wrong
different perceptions (egos) not about that
knowledge / WISDOM - find the truth of it
both become blank
don’t know anything
one’s own words can strip one’s ego

While there is the thought that if Dalachinsky had tended to his work a bit further, fine tuned it here and there, focusing his interest and talent, that Poetry, as such, would be better served. Of course this is ultimately an unfair judgment as it fails acknowledge the nature of Dalachinsky’s homage. Gayle’s performances can be uneven. They are improvisatory by nature, he may rant, he may not play his best, outside forces beyond his control may disrupt the performance, etc. … the point of Gayle’s playing is to attest to himself and the world as alive. To acknowledge and investigate the occurrence in a fixed event in time, throwing his whole self into it with abandon.

6-7-99
Charles Gayle Trio (Gerald Benson – bass, Gerlad Cleaver – drums)
@ The Knitting Factory

               Body & soul

“……..my life is yours just for the taking.”

               he said – i just don’t feel like playing tonite
i’ve only felt like this once before

               i said – is it musical or personal

               he balled up his hand & pounded his chest lightly

in here – he said

               i said – sometimes when you don’t feel like playing’s
when you play the best

               & patting his forearm added – i’ll be here all nite

when it came time he played & played
                              & played
                                       for love
                                             he said wordlessly
for love

               i just kept thinking over & over again – it’s when you
               don’t want to
                                             that you often do it best

                              &          he         did
                                             he did

Dalachinsky responds and acknowledges the energy of Gayle’s performance. He’s writing towards the nugget of consciousness that brings brief realization to the forefront of experience, the matter at hand lying behind it all—every performance, every act, the impulse driving the living along. In the search for meaning behind living, artists take up the art which calls to them. Not to get beyond or point away from the world about them, but to embody the predicament of living to the fullest extent possible.

I’m not trying to play music –
I’m trying to prove a point.

- Gayle

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at the library of USF. Recent reviews have appeared in Artvoice (Buffalo), St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, and Jacket. Poems recently appeared in Cannibal and One Less Magazine.

THE BEDSIDE GUIDE TO NO TELL MOTEL: SECOND FLOOR Edited by REB LIVINGSTON & MOLLY ARDEN

2008-03-30T22:28:00.000-07:00

KAREN RIGBY Reviews

The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel: Second Floor Edited by Reb Livingston & Molly Arden
(No Tell Books, 2007)

When I first received this anthology the title led me to expect all that one would associate with motels: a multiplicity of voices, the transient, the hipster desire for all things retro and kitschy, the touristic, the voyeuristic, the taboo, the pedestrian décor, and even the lurid. Editors Reb Livingston and Molly Arden wisely anticipated this response, asking the reader to question the difference between the vulgar and the salacious. Livingston adds a disclaimer in bold print: “This is not a collection of dirty ditties.” Instead, the collection is about “What we desire, what we crave, what turns us on…what we find appealing, our own private sexy.” There is no way to put this book down with indifference after reading the introduction. The moment you begin, you’re obligated to consider your ideas about poetry.

The first poem, like a handful of others included here, seem to struggle with the limitations imposed on them by their short forms. They rely on the mantra “brevity is the soul of wit”. Consider Nicole Steinberg’s “Fortune”:

If a girl tells you to eat something
off her tits, you’d better do it.
Even if it’s sardines, you will do it.

Using a cheeky bon mot as the opening for the book is a provocative move. You could be immediately drawn or put off, intrigued, skeptical, or hopeful of the poems to follow. There is always the danger of easy dismissal, just as there are bound to be nods of approval amongst those who appreciate sass.

It’s crucial to remember, however, as with any book, that much of the response, positive or negative, will depend on the reader’s particular biases, definitions and expectations of what a poem should do, should be. Is this poetry? Is it indulgent posturing? Is it a serious commentary on the demands lovers place on one another? Does poetry have to be serious? Can it ever exist purely for the moment? Does poetry need to evoke emotional responses, to take the top of one’s head off, as it were, or is there room, too, for other kinds of poetry? These and other questions are bound to arise.

The editors haven’t chosen an “easy” poem to ease you into the experience of reading this book. Short poems tread a difficult line—in the extreme they can appear cryptic, off-the-cuff, or even unfinished, while at their best, they crystallize some truth in a fresh way, leaving you to dwell on the unspoken as much as on the words themselves.

Regardless of whether you like or dislike the opening, you’ll feel compelled to find out what the other offerings in the anthology will be. Starting with a poem that has every potential to inspire heated discussion about what constitutes poetry, a poem that could polarize an audience, may indeed be the perfect amuse boche for the poems that follow.

No Tell Motel is very much a thematic collection divided in three sections: “Anatomy of Mortals”, “Function of Senses”, and “Core of Affections”. The more expected interpretations appear, including poems using food as metaphors for the sensual, as do more surprising poems, like Robyn Art’s obsessive “Notes About His Hands”, Anne Gorrick’s “The May Garden”, Margot Schilpp’s “Declensions” and Alison Stine’s “Big Fun”. The best poems portray a facet of desire from a distance. Mary Biddinger’s “Copper Harbor” (p. 50) is one particularly noteworthy poem:

Copper Harbor

Freakish, like a tapestry.
The dark smudge of fish
shanties and smokehouses.
An orange nylon jacket

knotted on the breakwater.
We saw the people, made
change for their twenties.

The seagulls were quick
as equinox, Evinrude,
flypaper lit with a zippo.

All cabins have the same
linoleum. It’s universal.
I took prints with knees
and palms. Read your tale

of botanical swerve, flash
and fragment. Artichoke
or parsnip? The ether surge

of a mower on the parkway
slapped us out of reverie.
I asked you the sound

of fishhook through a lip.
You gave me a silver cup
and claw hammer. I woke

all night inspecting corners,
nasturtiums. Your body
an arrow into the lake.

The poem immediately appeals to the eye and ear, echoing Robert Lowell’s “Water”. Instead of Lowell’s “dozens of bleak / white frame houses stuck/ like oyster shells / on a hill of rock,” we’re given a “dark smudge of fish / shanties and smokehouses.” Like Lowell, Biddinger pairs disturbing imagery with unexpected beauty: the abandoned orange jacket, the fishhook through a lip, the claw hammer, nasturtiums, and the botanical swerve. An almost cinematic danger permeates the poem. “Copper Harbor” and other poems included in the anthology succeed when they offer clarity in their images and a degree of ambiguity—enough to invite multiple readings.

No Tell Motel includes a range, from prose poems to Gina Meyer’s eight-page “A Model Year” to lighter poems contemplating the absurd nature of the pick-up line as told through the prism of a glass slipper speaking to a fly. You may find the anthology uneven in this regard—poems using all the music and texture memorable poetry entails appear alongside poems that could seem more prosaic by comparison.

David Lehman’s “Tit Wears a Scarf” (p. 24) is another example of poems that could inspire debate. The first stanza reads “Tit wears a scarf / cock wears a hat, / Belly is flat / Ass curves phat.” The rest of the poem proceeds in a similar manner. If you don’t find the appeal, you may risk being labeled a prude or an elitisit (having already been forewarned by the editors in the introduction that there are no “dirty ditties” here). In the abstract one can appreciate how the nursery-rhyme quality emphasizes what seems to be the point—that the body and sex do not have to be revered all of the time, that the bedroom has room for hijinks—but after that, does it make for good reading?

This comes back to the question of what preconceptions readers bring with them—about the nature of poetry, its purpose, whether it needs to be this or that, according to whom, and why. You may well enjoy the eclectic mix, taking these more of-the-moment poems as a breather between pages, as an enjoyable romp, or simply as being representative of the different voices available in poetry. Whether or not the vast differences between poems detracts from the whole is something you’d have to decide for yourself. No Tell Motel is an anthology to be read for the writers that may be new to you, for the gems included, and for the conversation it inspires—it would make an excellent touchstone for group discussions, and for reflecting on your own views of poetry, whether they are reaffirmed, challenged, or changed.

*****

Karen Rigby received a 2007 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Savage Machinery, a chapbook, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in late 2008. Her poems have been published in Black Warrior Review, FIELD, New England Review and other journals.

THE BEDSIDE GUIDE TO NO TELL MOTEL, Eds. REB LIVINGSTON & MOLLY ARDEN

2008-03-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

NATHAN LOGAN Reviews

The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel Edited by Reb Livingston and Molly Arden
(No Tell Books, 2006)

Sexy is a description that most people would not use in accordance with poetry. In fact, they sound like total opposites, living in different zip codes, occupying different realms of reality. Editors Reb Livingston and Molly Arden would not agree with this sentiment. The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel is an effort to fight back the claim that poetry cannot be sexy or provocative. Livingston and Arden say in their introduction that the poems within “do more than just awaken our eroticized zones…they’ve pricked out minds, twitched our senses, and reminded us why we started reading poetry in the first place.” Those sound like some good qualifications.

Many of the poems in the anthology were taken from the archives of No Tell Motel, the online literary magazine that Livingston and Arden edit. This should be no deterrent though. Many of the poems in the anthology deliver on “bringing sexy back.” Charles Jensen’s poem “Housewives” begins, “Sheer curtains – let’s just say it – drape like labia over the blank eyes of their suburban genitals.” Aaron Belz puts another humorous spin in one of his three “My Factotum” poems. One reads, “My factotum lives in France. / My factotum has no pants.”

There are a variety of poems in this anthology and most of them tingle the senses in some way. Some are funny, some are funny and erotic, some are erotic, and some are heartbreaking. There’s a sense of intimacy in these poems that can not be flushed out entirely. Just when a poem hits home with a feeling, it leads directly into another that may have been hidden under the surface. These poems do bring the sexy back. For anyone interested in the sexy, seedy side of poetry, this is the anthology. Leave the light on for these poems, you will be glad you did.

*****

Nathan Logan was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Crossroads of America. He is a MFA candidate at Minnesota State University Moorhead. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Laundry Room, Lost at Sea, Lovechild, North Central Review, Robot Melon, and The Subterranean Review.