Galatea Resurrects #10 (A Poetry Engagement)

2008-07-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

ISSUE NO. 10 TABLE OF CONTENTS

July 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
Jeffrey Side reviews WHERE THE THREE RIVERS MEET by Aine MacAodha

Nicholas Manning reviews BEAUTIFUL, UNFINISHED: PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM by M.T.C. Cronin

Eileen Tabios engages ENDGAMES by Márton Koppány

Patrick James Dunagan reviews DERIVATIVE OF THE MOVING IMAGE by Jennifer Bartlett, BEAUTY [IS THE NEW ABSURDITY] by Jennifer Scappettone, DOG GIRL by Heidi Lynn Staples and THE MARVELOUS BONES OF TIME by Brenda Coultas

Eric Hoffman reviews PASSING OVER by Norman Finkelstein

Pamela Hart reviews BONE PAGODA by Susan Tichy

Tim Wright reviews GOING GOING by Jen Hofer

Nicholas Manning reviews PPL IN A DEPOT by Gary Sullivan

Tyrone Williams reviews THE ANATOMY OF OIL by Marcella Durand

Nicholas Manning reviews CORNSTARCH FIGURINE by Elizabeth Treadwell

Eileen Tabios engages & PERSONA, poems by Mackenzie Carignan and photographs by Felicia Ohnmacht

Francie Noyes reviews MIDNIGHTS, poetry by Jane Miller & artwork by Beverly Pepper

H. Francisco V. Penones, Jr. reviews AMIGO WARFARE by Eric Gamalinda

Francie Noyes reviews BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY by Steve Fellner

Tyrone Williams reviews THE STRAITS by Kristin Palm

Eileen Tabios engages BE THAT EMPTY: APOLOGIA FOR AIR by Alice B. Fogel

Richard Lopez reviews BREAK ME OUCH by Michael Farrell

Tyrone Williams reviews OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS) by Carla Harryman

James Stotts reviews ENTER MORRIS IMPOSTERNAK, PURSUED BY IRONIES by Eugene Ostashevsky

Thomas Fink reviews TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD by Carole Stone

Laurel Johnson reviews THE BLUE MOON SERIES by Rodger Martin

Ryan Daley reviews ... AND THEN engages FLOWERS OF BAD: A FALSE TRANSLATION OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S LES FLEURS DU MAL by David Cameron

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews HORACE: POEMS by Tim Atkins; COVERS by Susan Landers; and FLOWERS OF BAD: A FALSE TRANSLATION OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S LES FLEURS DU MAL by David Cameron

Karen Rigby reviews ISLE OF THE SIGNATORIES by Marjorie Welish

Eileen Tabios engages THEORY OF COLORS by Mercedes Roffe

Pamela Hart reviews THE ORCHARD by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

Kristina Marie Darling reviews CHANTEUSE/CANTATRICE by Catherine Daly

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

Andy Frazee reviews THE CITY VISIBLE: CHICAGO POETRY FOR THE NEW CENTURY edited by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi

Jim McCrary reviews SPADE by David Bromige & Rychard Denner; ART IS WAR by Anne Boyer; THE ROMANCE OF HAPPY WORKERS by Anne Boyer; from THE TRADITIONS by Juliana Spahr; NO FACE by Judith Roitman

Evelyn Hampton engages THE SMALL ANYTHING CITY by Cynthia Arrieu-King

Christopher Mulrooney engages THE DEVELOPMENT OF AERIAL MILITARISM AND THE DEMOBILIZATION OF EUROPEAN GROUND FORCES, FORTRESSES, AND NAVAL FLEETS by Paul Scheerbart, trans. by M. Kasper

Eileen Tabios engages FORGET READING by Anthony Hawley

Denise Dooley reviews THE RIVER IS WIDE / EL RIO ES ANCHO: TWENTY MEXICAN POETS Edited and Translated by Marlon L. Fick

Pamela Hart reviews CHILD IN THE ROAD by Cindy Savett

Nicholas Manning reviews THIS POEM/WHAT SPEAKS?/A DAY by Tom Beckett

Eileen Tabios engages ORANGES & SARDINES, Summer 2008, Vol. 1 Issue, Edited by David Krump, Andy Nicholson, Meghan Punschke and Didi Menendez

Karen Rigby reviews THE BOYS I BORROW by Heather Sellers

Eileen Tabios engages RAFETOWN GEORGICS by Garin Cycholl

Laurel Johnson reviews DEFIANCE by Hugh Fox

Jeff Harrison reviews SKINNY BUDDHA by Sheila E. Murphy

Pamela Hart reviews THE MARVELOUS BONES OF TIME by Brenda Coultas

Leny M. Strobel engages PRAU by Jean Vengua

Francie Noyes reviews CLOUD VIEW POETS: MASTER CLASSES WITH DAVID ST. JOHN, edited by Morley Clark, Jane Downs, CB Follett, and Susan Terris

Patrick James Dunagan reviews SHINY, No. 14, 2008, edited by Michael Friedman

Bob Marcacci reviews TWO HATS APPEAR WHEN APPLAUDED by Raymond Farr, OCCASION IN THE MOSAIC DISTANCE by Paul Klinger, [from SLOT (TO PULL AN HISTORICAL SITE FORM YOU)] by Jill Magi, SPECIMEN by Marci Nelligan, INSECT COUNTRY (B) by Sawako Nakayasu, and SOUVENIRS by Bronwen Tate

Derek Motion reviews ORIGAMI SHIPWRECK by Craig Perez and Katy Acheson

William Allegrezza reviews IT’S ALL A MOVIE by Alex Gildzen

Nathan Logan reviews NEVER CRY WOOF by Shafer Hall

Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz reviews AN MAUPAY HA MGA WARAY UF IBA PA NGA MGA SIDAY (Waray poems with English translations) by Voltaire Oyzon

Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor reviews BEIJING BACKGROUND by Bob Marcacci

Eileen Tabios engages ORGY IN THE BEEF CLOSET by Michael Koshkin

Laurel Johnson reviews SUDDENLY, FRUIT by Linda Tomol Pennisi

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
"{ . . . from HOMO SENTIMENTALIS : A GUIDE IN VERSE TO MODERN EMOTIONAL INTIMACY}" By Nicholas Manning

FEATURE ARTICLES
FEATURED POET: Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow

Thomas Fink interviews Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Francie Noyes reviews AVERNO by Louise Gluck

Allen Gaborro reviews STAGE PRESENCE: CONVERSATIONS WITH FILIPINO AMERICAN PERFORMING ARTISTS, edited by Theodore S. Gonzalves

Allen Gaborro reviews PRAU bv Jean Vengua

Juaniyo Arcellana reviews PINOY POETICS: A COLLECTION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS ON FILIPINO AND FILIPINO-AMERICAN POETICS, edited by Nick Carbo

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BACK COVER
Dawg Days of Summer!

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2008-07-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

This issue is dedicated to Rochelle Ratner, poet, editor, novelist, critic, and GR poetry engager...R.I.P. dear Poetry Angel...

I continue to be grateful that reviewers -- all volunteers -- continue to send GR their reviews or engagements. And I am delighted to share that this issue of GR is posting a record number of reviews: 68! Woot and YaY! With Issue No. 10, GR brings total new reviews to date to 538 (a summary can be seen at GR's List Of Reviewed Publishers). Here are the latest stats showing how Poetry continues to burn as hot as California's wildfires did this summer:

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

The project reviewed thrice was FLOWERS OF BAD: A FALSE TRANSLATION OF CHARLES BAUDELAIRE’S LES FLEURS DU MAL by David Cameron, which was actually reviewed twice by Ryan Daley (the other review is by John Bloomberg-Rissman). I mention Ryan Daley because one review is a "review" while the other is an "engagement"; some of you have asked about the difference and now you can see how one critic differentiates between these two terms/acts.

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

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews

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).

*****

Here I am unshowered, unshaven and bleary-eyed over my first cup of coffee from having to stay up late to put out this issue. But of course this photo is not about me; it's about the reason some of you check in -- to see more photos of moi dawgs (but read some poetry, wontcha!), in this case Achilles and Gabriela are wrestling on their new lawn.

With much Love, Fur and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
July 31, 2008

WHERE THE THREE RIVERS MEET by AINE MACAODHA

2008-07-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

JEFFREY SIDE Reviews

Where the Three Rivers Meet by Aine MacAodha
(Lulu Press, 2008. Free download available.)

Where the Three Rivers Meet by Aine MacAodha is a collection of poems linguistically evocative of 17th century Irish Gaelic poetry, although written in English. This is not surprising as MacAodha is an Irish poet intuitively connected to that rich poetic tradition. Her poems are rich with references and imagery that evoke the mythos of Ireland’s ancient history and Celtic traditions. She also writes about the landscape with a sincere affection and respect not only for its actuality, but for its vitality and mystery. In some respects, some of her poetry has a connectedness to the ancient traditions and concerns figuratively expressed in various earth religions, as well as in Celtic Christianity.

The vocabulary of the poems is interesting. MacAodha uses words that are largely unfamiliar to most readers, such as “dander”, “beagmore”, “alder”, “lough”, “gaels” and “firbolgs”. She also makes copious references to Irish mythic figures and places, such Cú Chulainn, a legendary Irish hero and demi-god, and “Tara”, which was the ancient seat of the high kings of Ireland. The obscurity of these words and references should not impede the reader of these poems. Far from it, they function as intertextual metonymic ciphers to be appropriated by the reader for his or her own personal exegesis.

The supernatural is never far removed from the poetry, and is largely expressed in refreshingly rhetorical terms:

I feel its supernatural pull
working its way up from the earth
and out to the universe.

(‘Aghascrebah Ogham Stone, Ireland’)

Into this November air
a supernatural force
draws me to it like a magnet

(‘Aghascrebah Ogham Stone, Ireland’)

She is the blueprints
of the past,
the wishes of the unborn,
the spirit of the crops

(‘Fire of the Gaels’)

Here, the physicality of the natural environment is “spiritualised” and enlivened by the poet’s consciousness, and words like ‘pull’ and ‘draws’ signify a forward (and perhaps upward) movement suggestive of a monistic narrowing of the “gap” between “heaven” and earth; spirit and matter.

Additionally, the landscape is made to resonate with human and non-human “energies” implanted long ago. For instance, the Sperrin countryside (a region in Northern Ireland) is described as if it can “record” past history, as is seen in the following stanza from ‘The Sperrin Mountains’, where dander (a material shed from the bodies of animals) is imbued with consciousness in order to recognise the latent “recorded” historical energies present in the landscape:

Dander over the peat clad slopes
find the ancient past alive
in the bones of the Sperrins.

This is again seen in ‘Banda’:

In myths we recall our living past,
woven as carpet on the landscape.
In stones, trees and bog;
in birds, horse and dog.

Here, sentient and non-sentient matter become amalgamated and seen as (to a degree) functioning as geological recording devices. Yet, in this poem, the recorded energies develop into personalised “ghostly” manifestations, and accordingly the poetic register is made to complement this transformation by taking on a more archaic and almost biblical tone:

Oh sacred bile, Oh graveyard Yew,
the Hawthorn and the Oak;
the Hazel, Alder and the Rowan,
the Willow and the faery folk.

Pay homage to the spirits of Tara,
the ones who went before
the Warriors, Bards and Kings,
the Queens and many more.

MacAodha’s use of poetic language is interesting in that it exists within its own self-demarcated boundaries, not reliant on mere description for its affects. For instance, in ‘Fire of the Gaels’ we see the lines:

Her stories, etched on the
landscapes of the universe.

It matters not that the universe has no landscapes (it being the sum of space and time); the lines convey the intransience of the “stories” through imagery that signifies solidity and durability. A slighter poet would have taken greater pains to minutely describe what MacAodha, here, has achieved in just two lines. One of the distinctive aspects of her poetry is that it uses Gaelic words and imagery that, as mentioned earlier, most readers would find unfamiliar. The poem ‘Mise Eire’ is an appropriate example, with such phrases as: ‘Tell me of Cu Chulainn’, ‘the battles of the Tain Bo’ and ‘the progress of the firbolgs. / The De danaans on the hill’. It is of little import that a reader may not know what these lines signify. It is, of course, easily possible for such a reader to find out what they mean, but to do so, in my view, would not significantly add to an appreciation of the poem’s use of such language. Poetry is, after all, not prose and to expect it to operate similarly is to misunderstand the nature of poetic language. The lines are best approached in such a manner as to allow readers to decide for themselves what words like, ‘Cu Chulainn’, ‘Tain Bo’, ‘firbolgs and ‘De danaans’ suggest to them, rather than turning to a dictionary or an encyclopaedia with each line.

In ‘Oak Lake, County Tyrone’, MacAodha displays a more conventional lyricism:

The lake waltzes to and fro
like a child mesmerized
by magical stories voiced
by an old teller of tales.

Its edges flanked with an audience of
purple moss, pink cranberry flower
and the burnt orange of summer gorse,
all paying homage by showiness.

A clump of rushes moves slightly.
I think of childhood tales of
the watershee luring one off
to the silver world of faeries.

Yet, even here we notice a transcendence and mysteriousness, as the poem concludes with the “disappearance” of its speaker; a disappearance which parallels that of the daylight:

The light of the day now slipping
ever so peacefully behind the
peaks of the Sperrins. I shall go now
and take its essence with me,
to sooth my night quests ahead.

We are placed in doubt as to who, or what, this speaker is. Is it a sentient being within nature or is it an aspect of nature itself? Like all good poetry, we are left with more questions than answers. As a first collection of poetry, Where the Three Rivers Meet is noteworthy and I highly recommend it.

*****

Jeffrey Side studied English at Liverpool University and Leeds University, and has had poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg Review, and on poetry web sites such as Underground Window, A Little Poetry, Poethia, nthposition, eratio, Ancient Heart, Blazevox, Lily, Big Bridge, Jacket, Textimagepoem, Apochryphaltext, 9th St. Laboratories, P.F.S. Post, Great Works, hutt, ken*again, Poets' Corner, The Dande Review, Poetry Bay, Dusie and CybpherAnthology. He has reviewed poetry for New Hope International, Stride, Acumen, and Shearsman. From 1996 to 2000 he was the assistant editor of The Argotist magazine. He now edits The Argotist Online. He has two poetry collections out, Carrier of the Seed (Blazevox) and Slimvol (cPress).

BEAUTIFUL, UNFINISHED: PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM by M.T.C. CRONIN

2008-07-20T23:25:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

BEAUTIFUL, UNFINISHED: PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM by M.T.C. Cronin
(Salt, 2003)

It is possible that each critic, over time, comes to identify a number of poets or writers whose general laudation—the mellow radiance of expanding peer esteem—remains to him or her rather mysterious. This would be, perhaps, Cole Swensen for Simon Dedeo, or post-Gunslinger Ed Dorn for Ron Silliman. These poets—or in the case of Dorn, a specific period within a given poet’s aesthetic evolution—can represent for the critic cases of profound cultural disconnect. They are like the points in a glittering receptive network where one critic’s wires have, at a crucial juncture, been cut. Beyond this point of “no transmission”, we can imagine the critic standing—with opaque eyes fixed on poems so highly praised by one’s contemporaries—with a look of smiling perplexity or irritated bewilderment.

This is of course, within poetics, the humanist or liberal-democratic moment par excellence: it is the instant you realize, not only that others do not agree with you, but that you are entirely incapable of even beginning to understand their disagreement. M.T.C. Cronin is, for me, just such a poet. Her work is sometimes strong; but for me it is also, and much too often, wildly uneven. This collection—entitled beautiful, unfinished—was Cronin’s ninth book of poems, and upon its release in 2003 met with general critical approbation, coupled with a number of eloquent panegyrics. Peter Porter, for instance, writing in Melbourne’s The Age, remarked:

“I can stick to straightforward words of praise, such as brilliance of technical address and originality of utterance, when describing her verse.”

I remember reading this appreciation at the time, and was not surprised to see its recurrence on the book’s back cover. I feel less trepidation, then, in writing a generally negative review of Cronin’s work, given the fact that others appreciate her poems so integrally. Though this may seem hypocritical, I simply want to imply that it is important to note that it is very possible, in the criticisms I will here attempt to outline, that I have simply missed a 1 or a 0 in the fibred interactions of the informational system which is contemporary Australian poetics. Luckily, however, this is the flipside of the dreaded humanist paradigm: the reader may judge for herself . . .

I will begin with the good. The first sequence in the book, “Parable On the Erotic Struggle with True Muteness (How We Speak)” contains 77 solid, short poems, admirable for their tense torque, their contained energies, their play with ambiguous registers, parsings and forms of address:

Why can we not find out
                  more than television?
Sitting side-by-side
                  like two identical buildings
                  we cannot feel god
Cannot feel the pitch-black pain
                  of the joined

There is something of a Noelle Kocot to such lines: to these visionary Lettres d’un voyant mixed with the ephemera of urban and domestic ennui. As the title of the poem itself indicates, then, this is all overtly—and perhaps overly—earnest stuff; but, in this sequence, such inquiring solemnity functions rather interestingly. It is perhaps a result of the fact that Cronin’s play on a prophetic, ecstatic tonality, is here reigned in by the formal and imagistic compression of these tightly strung stanze. That initial statement on the epistemological limitations of TV, for instance, agilely, if only barely, avoids the status of observational common-place, via the hand-break torque instigated in that well-placed line-break. In this way, “out/ more” kicks the line into a state of semantic resonance it perhaps did not, in itself, contain.

But even from the very beginning of “Parable On the Erotic Struggle with True Muteness”, we begin to glimpse some of the less positive aspects of Cronin’s poetic, which I would like now to put into question. To take another poem from the series:

My daughter was five years old
                  before I told her
                  not to look at the sun
This astounds me
Does she believe
                  she can only grow old
                  on the day she was born

This is as good an example as any, for it is here that Cronin’s earnestness starts to sound rather more proselytizing, normative, almost pedagogical. The faux-mystical tournures of these pieces have, for me, something irritating about them, at once in their intentional as their contentional impulses. It is rather like listening to someone who, though they may very well be a prophet, adopts the tone of a prophet in order to convince others of their own prophetic capacities.

This is also, for me, the type of poetic ambiguity which William Empson rightly rejected from his pantheon of seven avatars. Of course, it is not primarily important whether or not poetry “signifies”—whether it has a direct semantic thrust, a denotational over a connotational imperative—but perhaps it is important if poetry pretends to signify: that is, if it presents its data in the form of sagacious tidbits, which in the end turn out to be rather specious. If it dresses itself up, then, in the clothes of ecstatic profundity, it perhaps needs to assume the full gamut of readerly assumptions that go along with this (fundamentally synthetic) pose.

It is not unsurprising then—given this semi-instructional tone—that Cronin regularly quotes the likes of Wallace Stevens and Pablo Neruda. The ideational vein of ecstatic wisdom seems to be the effect she is gunning for here. The problem though is not that these shoes—those of the Whitmanian parabolic teacher of the reader (and equal, of course!)—are too big for Cronin to fill, but that these shoes are, today, almost completely rotten through. Their laces have fallen out. Their leather has been walked away. Let’s see how Cronin, however, assumes the ideational scepter, and to what effect :

I have grown my wisdom
on summer days

and watered it with both rain
and melting snow

I have helped it
up ladders

and sat with it
still upon a tired step

I have tasted [. . .]

Etcetera . . . I will quote more soon, but suffice to say, it turns out there are a lot of things one can do with one’s wisdom. On a more simple level: “my wisdom”? This particular “poet-as-cultural-seer”, this transcendental Avatar, might have passed Dijon mustard in the beard of Victor Hugo: but those were different times, and the mec was, frankly, the most famous megalomaniac in France. Moreover, the entirely untextured distiches plod bravely on here through their slough of rhythmic despond, tirelessly erecting their muddy metaphorical contraptions. “I have helped it/ up ladders”? Is this the “originality of utterance” Peter Porter is talking about in his blurb? I have “sat with it/ still upon a tired step”? The personification of “wisdom”, in contemporary poetics, must either be seen as complete Blakean parody, or as something so charged with negative cliché as to be rendered ineffective. In any case, this critic stands beyond the receptive void, mouthing unhappily: Non intellego.

There is a narrative thrust, however, to this poem, and we soon learn that the speaker’s initial “wisdom” is, unsurprisingly, advanced only to lead to its eventual rejection. We expected nothing less . . . For, of course, the truly wise poet must be even more “wise” to realize that his or her initial “wisdom” was not wisdom, but ignorance, which would lead to later wisdom in the realization that prior “wisdom” was, in fact, ignorance:

I was shocked but don’t know why
I should have been

when I looked in a mirror
painted over

and I let my wisdom die
with the relaxing cells

that slow upon my body
and quickly fall aside

I use it to discard myself well
in the world

and when the world
is not mine

I will have no need
of the glorious shelter it will erect

“Contraposition” makes up part of a section of the book entitled “Seven Mysterious Songs”. I’m not sure where the mystery of them lies: they seem to me rather clear instances of contemporary moralism veiled in a linear narrative device. Genette, in brief, would be bored. Poet feels wise. Poet realizes poet is not wise. Poet realizes subsequent ignorance is in fact different type of wisdom. Blake did it better.

But for these criticisms to have value, we must take account of the fact that Cronin gives a very specific framing for her writing in this work: it is not to have the status of other poems, she suggests, but rather the status of the “parable”. As she says at the very start of the book:

There is not one thing I will say
outside of parable

Does the status of the parable excuse some, even all, of the elements I’m outlining? The pedagogical tonalities? The predictable narrative progressions? I personally do not think so. Why? Not only because this type of tonality is also present in Cronin’s other, less “parabolic”, work—which I do generally like a lot more—but also because the poems of this collection do not, for me, resemble anything truly parabolic. For, as the adjectival form of the word suggests, the parable incarnates a dynamic curve, an arc which does not progress linearly from one affirmation to an evident next, but rather, as in the circular paradoxes of Epimenides or Zeno, is valuable less for what it says, than for its oblique ways of saying.

Whether, then, one likes Stevens or not—I personally really have to be in the mood—at least his best work attains these contorted parabolic heights. But to try another Cronin extract, this time from a piece adopting rather the mode of the “song” than the “parable”, entitled “Canto of an Ant”:

did you know that there is an ant
that follows all the people
it is called the following ant

this ant knows that sand
is not less time than time
that water is not less time
than time
that wood is poor flesh
and that the moon
needs more air to be full—

Often, in Cronin, I have the impression that materiam superabat opus (the workmanship’s better than the subject). But not here. The lines are flat and untextured. As for the content: “This ant knows that sand/ is not less time than time”. I must honestly say that I am not interested in what the ant knows, and that these pedestrian verses would have to hold some truly interesting contential impulse to justify their extreme prosodic monotonies.

But let’s do them their justice, and try to get at them in more detail. Sand and time, as poles of this metaphorical hinge, are perhaps linked by the notion of the hourglass. But beyond this . . . What becomes evident here is that we are not, as readers, supposed to ask such questions. We are expected rather to take the status of the text as astute fable, read it, and move on.

More than anything else, then, this all seems to me like a type of ineffective tonal posturing. So much for the status of the contemporary poetic parable . . . Then there is the material here which—I do not know how else to put it—simply makes me cringe. From “Canto of Faces”:

There is no need to explain
our friendship

Life is about its preciousness
each person

I cannot really contend with these moments. Honestly, I just wish that, in the midst of the treacle of this 100-Cars-Oprah-Special, Alice Notley would stride in to discourse eloquently about art, politics and fucking . . . “Life is about its preciousness”? I cannot see how this is not rather gratuitous: the sort of rhetorically vacant phrasing we’ve come to expect more from our contemporary politicians. “Life is about its preciousness” is, in this way, almost akin to “Democracy is about its freedom”. It’s the type of axiom that almost entirely empties out each of its semantemes, until the complex word “life” —cf. Louis Zukofsky—comes to resemble nothing so much as a pink Tiffany ring.

To close such examples, I will take a poem from later in the book, entitled “all babies are buddhas”:

all babies are buddhas

we tend to grow out of our knowledge,
rather than into it.
and then remember one day,
it was truth we wanted,
smiling,
for no good reason.

This is indisputably Hallmark territory. It has babies. Smiling babies. It has a cute message. It has a feel-good ending. Exeunt.

I have, perhaps mean-spiritedly, mentioned the word “moralism” when speaking of Cronin’s work. The poem-as-lesson is a rather disturbing sub-genre, and though Cronin plays with it in more interesting ways than the oppressive, disguised didacticism of a Ted Kooser or Galway Kinnel, it seems to remain there, in Cronin, beneath the surface, a Victorian vision of poetry as principled soothsayer:

It is important
not to be obsessed
The destination of your voice
should be what you can move
How not to covet even
what makes your vision clear

Please, poet, don’t tell me what to do . . . And if the “you” is in fact—in a gesture invented by Apollinaire—used to refer to the poet herself, this demarcation perhaps needs be rendered clearer. As who erected the rhapsode to such a normalizing apogee? In what city?

Specifically, also: “how not to covet”. The word-choice is revealing. But striving after explicitly biblical effects is notoriously precarious. Paul Claudel, Fanny Howe and Henri Meschonnic do it, and scintillatingly, but they do not throw out the odd Hebraic verb: it is at the base and foundation of every aspect of their poetics.

In closing, I wanted to remark that I do know I sound exceptionally harsh in this review. I hope readers, and Cronin herself, will not feel that I am being entirely unfair. Though I was born in Australia, I’ve been absent nearly six years, and perhaps I am disconnected with particular veins of contemporary Australian poetics. This is, I sincerely assure you, entirely possible.

Forgive me, then, M.T.C. Cronin, Peter Porter, Barry Hill. My incomprehension is perhaps entirely my fault. But, in any case, it is there, and it seems fruitless to deny it. The critic waits to be set straight.

Only, please: not with parables.

*****

Nicholas Manning teaches comparative poetics at the University of Strasbourg, where he is currently completing his PhD. His first full collection, entitled *Novaless*, will be released in August 2008 from Otoliths. A chapbook of new poems is also forthcoming from Ypolita Press. Editor of The Continental Review, his poetry and criticism may be found in such places as Jacket, Verse, Fascicle, The Argotist, Free Verse, among others. He maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals.

ENDGAMES by MÁRTON KOPPÁNY

2008-07-20T23:20:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

ENDGAMES by Márton Koppány
(Otoliths, 2008)

ENDGAMES is the purr-fect title for Márton Koppány’s collection that delivers an ACE of a serve to poetry’s attempts to write itself. I call the works (tennis-related) Aces since each delivers a sense of completely having said it all (whatever that it is) on the page. There’s no need here for the reader to mentally dither as to what the work means or where it’s going (much as one goes back and forth in tennis). Each work delivers its world complete, and one’s job as a reader/viewer is not to “complete” it with one’s subjective response (as is encouraged by some deliberately open-ended poem) but just to witness it … and marvel. Here’s one example, the poem “The Secret” in its entirety:

{([ )}]

The concept seems simple enough until I realized there’s no synchronicity in the order of the marks. That is, my eye first saw (my assumption of the poem to be):

{([ ])}

as such would manifest the parenthetical nature of the marks. But, out of order, they suddenly denote something else. And that something else is unknowable like a secret. Like, perhaps, Poetry.

Form manifests Content.

Inevitably, in my experience of attempting or witnessing others’ attempts to expand the possibilities—or explore the barriers—of text, the visual becomes more of a presence than in verse. For example, Pages 18 and 19 of “Graffiti 1-12”, which face each other, serve as a diptych. Page 18 is a page that is blank except for a black, rectangular border with nothing within the border. Page 19 is the same thing, except that there’s a handwritten “and” off-center and in the bottom half of the page. That’s another “Ace”! When one faces a blank page, or blank wall, one is often tempted to fill it in—e.g., viz graffiti. But to say “and” is to mark it by simply capturing the sense of something else without defining it. So that “and” also simply manifests the blank page/wall by inscribing the purity of blankness as possibility.

Elsewhere, Koppány uses collage and photographs to deliver more Aces. For example, “Ellipsis No. 5” features a chair standing on one leg, or with the number of missing legs the same as the periods that punctuation-ally manifests the ellipsis. “Ancient Ellipsis (Fragment)”, meanwhile, is the photograph of a boulder, presumably old and hearkening itself as a left-over from a once-larger mountain of stone. Thus, one sees not just the left-over boulder but the missing element of which it once was part, an element now able to be evoked only through the conceptual ellipsis.

I could highlight so many more examples of how each work is dead-on, with every single letter and image absolutely essential to the work. Instead, I want to share an excerpt from Karl Young’s essay (I call it “essay” since I think it’s more respectable than a “blurb”) on the book’s back cover:

Earlier works such as these depend on Koppány’s background in the dangers of language and existence: When a Hungarian Jew who lost most of his family to the Holocaust; lived much of his life under Soviet domination; now lives in an environment of Neo-Nazi resurgence, is extremely careful with his use of language, it should not be seen as simply a style or affectation. At the same time, attributing political motives to his economy of language reduces it and him to propaganda, the genre farthest away from his poetry.

Becoming aware of that background makes me look at these works in a new light, for example “Endgame No. 2” which, in its entirety, is the line

it is too late

The line is first typed out, then the second word “is” has a line striking it out in favor of a new handwritten word above it. But that new, handwritten word is, again, “is”.

So what makes this work poetry and not merely politics? Young says it as well as I can:

An exploration of the danger of existence without complaint reveals a larger personality. A completely infectious sense of humor which ridicules no one and degrades nothing makes sense of the inescapable circuits in which his work moves.

(Such also reminds me of one of the most inspiring books I’ve read, Victor E. Frankl's MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. In fact, in a recent (synchronistic) conversation with the excellent poet Sharon Mesmer, I was reminded that Frankl, writing about his experience in a concentration camp, once said, "As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.")

Certainly, I appreciated “Endgame No. 2” even before reading the back cover information which presented it in a different light. For it is Koppány’s witty playfulness (not decimated by his personal history) that makes his poems so effective. For me, fully transparent here in noting my relationship to the hay(na)ku, that play is most generous in his “Singing Iceberg” which presents a musical score for the letters “n-o-F or-m se-a-a-a-a-A rch? C h-e-c-k-k-k”. I read music a little and so was able to sing this work out loud. In fact, the ending “k-k-k” is featured by Koppány to show the “k”s in descending size order, with the first “k” the largest, the second “k” smaller, and the third “k” smallest of the three; this implies that whilst singing the letters one’s tone should lower in volume, too. This would be a great poem to deliver at a poetry reading! And this sound-poem was inspired, according to the “Author’s Notes” by one of Crag Hill’s hay(na)ku:

Scientists Discover Singing Iceberg

Scientists
monitoring earth
movements in Antarctica

say
they’ve found
a singing iceberg.

The
sound waves
cannot be heard

by
humans, a
frequency of 0.5 hertz

but
they resemble
a swarm of

bees
or an
orchestra warming up.

“Once
the iceberg
stuck fast, it

was
like a
rock in a

river,”
she said.
“The water pushes

through
its crevasses
and tunnels at

high
pressure and
the iceberg starts

singing.
The tune
even goes up

and
down, just
like a real song.”

I share Hill’s hay(na)ku in its entirety because it also describes what been going on through Koppány’s ENDGAMES— Koppány looks at words, letters and punctuation marks and deconstructs them into poems by dancing through their “crevasses/ and tunnels at // high / pressure” (I first typed “pleasure” for “pressure”).

With my eyes, ears and mouth fully satisfied with the experience of Koppány’s ENDGAMES, I closed the book absolutely in love with his Devotion.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Anny Ballardini’s review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in JACKET, as well as Allen Gaborro’s review of her The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the Philippine News.

BOOKS by JENNIFER BARTLETT, BRENDA COULTAS, JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE & HEIDI LYNN STAPLES

2008-07-20T23:15:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Derivative of the Moving Image by Jennifer Bartlett
(University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2007)

and

The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations by Brenda Coultas
(Coffeehouse, Minneapolis, 2007)

and

BEAUTY [IS THE NEW ABSURDITY] by Jennifer Scappettone
(Dusie, 2007)

and

Dog Girl by Heidi Lynn Staples
(Ahsahta, Boise, 2007)

“LIVELY THOUGHT”: FOUR TAKES

What 20th century innovative artists came to see is that the form that the experiment takes is not preliminary to the answer, not preliminary to the creation of the art object. It is the answer. It is the art. Just as the essay is not the result of the investigation, it is the investigation going on in writing that, in the radical mode of any lively thought, does not, at any given point, know entirely where it’s going. This means that its openness to its inability to conclude, its refusal to know, rather than to sense, suspect, consider, theorize, contemplate, hypothesize, conjecture, wager… forms it as an experience of being in the world where uncertain and unpredictable life principles (in contrast to prescriptive rules) always exceed the scope of logical inference or imagination.

--Joan Retallack
“The Experimental Feminine”

Jennifer Bartlett’s first full collection, Derivative of the Moving Image, bears the weight of its presentation of nostalgia and sentiment well. That is to say, although this is an often personal poetry, so full of psychological dimensions rarely does it escape from out the subjectivity of the poet, it does at times, however, escape and the results are quite fine.

From a Paris Hotel Room

It was the spring after my sister died that I begin to notice
the moths. They would follow me from room to room beating
against the window shades or showing themselves in the one
tiny patch of light as I dressed for the day. Some days, some
hours, I would count as many as twenty and still they held no
significance for me. I saw them as many see the trees that line
the highway, just passing objects.

One afternoon when the rains came I let the girls take off all
their clothes and run naked in the yard while I danced around
them in my blue nanny dress. I don’t know why I did that. That
night the moths were so large that they woke me like a burglar
might. I put bowls of sugar around the house to keep them
from the books.

Occasionally, the elder of the two girls will touch my arm and
speak of my sister as if she remembers her. She tells me that
my sister is dead.

Then the moths. They like to linger in hot places like the roof
of the car. The smaller ones cling to my hands as I water the
garden in the morning. When I ask others if they notice the
creatures with the same consistency most deny it or act as
though it is ordinary. The few that show an interest describe
them as hideous monsters. I argue them to be more beautiful
than butterflies.

Is this the New Confessionalism? No, it isn’t, at least not precisely so. There is far too much of Bartlett present here yet she manages not to overdo her self-importance. It isn’t gushy or indulgent. There is just the right amount of restraint and the prose-like line she employs stays the hand of sing-song woe. These are some heavily seeming symbolic moths but Bartlett isn’t over-stressing that symbolism. In fact, she’s more likely sharing in Bernadette Mayer’s assertion of what confronts you being a woman and a poet:

Remember that woman I told you about who came to take a picture of Lewis and he said I was a poet too, and she looked at me and Sophia and Marie carefully crawling on me and she said, oh really and when do you get time to write? There's no use ever actually saying you're a poet, it's a disservice to yourself except for the wonder you can sustain among the moths, but you'd better say it anyway.
(The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, 59-60)

Bartlett may or may not have knowledge of this passage, but she does nonetheless convey a sense of “the wonder you can sustain among the moths.” Bartlett embraces the desire to tell the reader where she’s been, where she is, what is happening, what she remembers, to set her story down propels the book along. The strength required to keep that energy going, to not get bogged down by all the shit the world is ever tossing before the poet, is her greatest achievement here. The poems keep going, keep her going, and keep the reader going as well.

Death appears a frequent trope yet isn’t mere literary decoration. As V.B. Price acknowledges in his Foreword, “[Bartlett’s] poems deal, in part, with the crushing circumstances of untimely and unexpected deaths in her family and of the emotional traumas…that afflict us all time to time.” She draws heavily upon biographical occasions in what amounts to a spiritual search for ordering principles to be found in the practice of poetry. In acts of faith committed by herself, or those around her, Bartlett locates within the poem an understanding of life’s rather particular and at times peculiarly conscious circumstance.

Ghost Boy

I think about death all the time now. She slides her body
between us, even on the most vivid days. We are as simple as
this, moving through rain, your thin hands reaching for fireflies
to save them from the heat. Why do you desert me? You know
my limbs are fragile; like paper dolls I could tear at any second.
I cannot bear one moment without your eyes in my direction,
your breath writing notes across my skin. Or: lying across water
we face opposite directions. I am the drop of a hat on your bed.
Blue, I think it was.

From her memories, as in these lines from “The Yellow One,” emerge such instances which reinforce the balanced desire between the world that is and a possible other,

the getting there a pilgrimage in itself
much like the one taken each year in New Mexico
seventeen miles from desert
                  to piñon grove into the village
with twin churches. This procession led into
the larger church with its collage of abandoned crutches
suspended over a hole of healing dirt that
                                     (a miracle in itself)
                                                 replenished each day.
When William Everson came here he ate the dirt,
                  this obscure, drastic gesture
leading him closer to God in that instant
                                    than all poems.

Bartlett aligns herself with the gravity of Everson’s person and his poetry (finally a lay Catholic mysticism mixture of bear, Pacific coast, and Jung.) It matters. Who one is and what one does is deserving of representation within the poem. This is not a current trend of many poets working today. Too many shy away from placing, as Keats would have it, a “living hand” in their poems. Bartlett, however, would appear have none of that and has no truck with drawing parallels between a centuries dead poet like Li Po and her own lover.

I am in love with him
only because he is so much like you,
a man likely to fall into a river
trying to embrace the moon.
(“Li Po’s”)

That “only” reveals her hand in the romance. She’s chasing down poetry via the myth of a dead poet in the dalliance at hand. And why not, Li Po is a marvelous figure to embrace and make use of in just such manner. Bartlett’s strength comes of her unabashed openness towards writing out her thoughts and actions. She isn’t one to shy away from laying explicit autobiographical tracings throughout the poem.

Whose Music Excels the Music of Birds

The news of her death came to me late
as if from a messenger who, lost in his wandering,
                                    forgets all text.
You broke it to me over the phone at work
during one of our fights,
                                    our shameless meanderings
as to whether we did or did not love each other,
                  the fact of a lingering ammunition,
a second kind of ending that day.
          I was trapped in the moment—
a toss-up between the brutality of movement
                  and the impossibility of stillness—
the suddenly malevolent Christmas shoppers
                                a swarm of glowing distractions,
the noise of their footsteps and chatter
a seemingly violent music. It disturbed them,
                  this dangerous experiment against composure,
                                    a girl running past
in the too obvious display of grief.

Complete in my autobiography of dirty feathers
                  I fled to exit,
                                    beating wings inside out,
toward the snow I somehow knew
was beginning for the first time that winter
                  to collect on the statues,
the art trying to fend off its white heaviness.

I sat down in it as if attempting
                  through my own body
                                    to imprint the cold record of hers.
I remembered the footage of a young poet
in cat-eye glasses describing her Peggy Guggenheim Foundation
                                    washer and dryer,
hands twisted downward full of smoke
                                    with a room of casual onlookers
watching as she sat at her typewriter composing a music that
                                                   excels the music of birds;
                                    a language not able to make
the usual distinction
                  between the words and the singing.

To hazard a guess at the identity of the “young poet / in cat-eye glasses,” both Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton seem obvious contenders, although a Google search for images of them doesn’t turn up a shot of either wearing eyeglasses. Of course, a woman of their day wouldn’t wish to be photographed wearing eyeglasses. So it goes unanswered, yet again raises the question of whether or not Bartlett is writing the New Confessionalism. There is no need to bother with labeling it, but surely the single significant criticism of her poetry is the over-reliance given to falling back upon narrative, and the narrative is personal to the core.

Jennifer Scappettone writes from the far opposite corner of the spectrum from Bartlett. Her chapbook BEAUTY [IS THE NEW ABSURDITY] is decidedly experimental, seeking to compress, and at moments indeed crush out, the personal, in so far that it is to be seen as implicit statement of poetry. As she asks, “Can one in honesty hearken to some bed that held the old scene in dewy harmony, or has it all been ocean.” (“Note”) There is irony here. These pages of heavily inked lines between which lines of poetry float, as if seen through open venetian blinds make evident by physical presentation alone the “Beauty” addressed. She’s asking for repulsion.

Scappettone wants to tear back the veil of paradise, painted castles afloat in pinkish air, epic fields of harmonious ocean swells to be swept asunder, or rather simply ignored. The facade that any life is drives her to declare [Editor's Note: The excerpt below is featured within a block of underlined lines, something not replicable in Blogger format]:

                                                      omnicorporal beauty you must

                  swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber,                   at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week

                  whose frequency makes of ugliness a duty til Daybreak

we will be capsule sleepers fleeing prison buzz amidst maws of glass sung after all

                                    hims, & our etceteras own                   allowed

There is beauty here, isn’t there? “Our etceteras” do indeed “own.” After all, isn’t the absurdity located precisely within our various approach. Willing future cadavers that we are, tossing off poems, getting each time no closer to what fatefully (or perhaps just finally) is just what it is: ourselves, merrily at it, that thing we are.

Jennifer, please write more poetry and love it for the thing it is—Beauty.

Heidi Lynn Staples’ Dog Girl treads ground between Bartlett and Scappettone.

POND

alone is the woman on the surface and alone is the woman on the edge alone the profound water; but most alone when one body knocks together two persons,
and the tale of death is told.

She isn’t against tackling the abstract and nailing it down with emotion, pinning “beauty” up and pointing out the silliness of it, yet all the while backing an eternal desire for the nature these notions are built to entertain. She runs her own show and delights in doing so.

THERE THERE

What makes a man, makes amends,
She said, as she pooled the deep’s up higher.
What makes a woman, wakes the ends
Of the birth, he said, as he pooled balm.

She said, as she pooled the deep’s up higher,
I don’t corpulent your spray, you’re a purse
Of mirth, he interrupted, as he pooled balm.
Of nit! I was engorging Thursday, she said.

I don’t corpulent your spray, you’re a parse
Of good nude, he interrupted again, of lark!
Of nuke! I was engorging Thursday, she said.
He jumbled stout of dread, pooling the deep’s fifth hum,

Of good jukes, he repeated, of lark!
She didn’t have dawn dawning close. Sheep bees and a fly.
He galumphed brackish in head, pooling the deep’s lover her,
Speak seems, he said. Uvula va-va-voom, she said.

Sound is her forte. Some readers may think of Stein or find it overly cutesy. These anonymous are encouraged to read the book twice through at least, and then some…Staples piles weight into her measure. Listen for awhile and get yourself some.

FEBRUALLAD

o yes, i have strummed love
flung lit spin and shout, bright clasped rain
yes, my favor friend a true-love
and none day we’ll be fright as lain.

o once up in a spree, eyes met a true-love
i gasped him if i may
behold beheld become opposite of grave
o met was a whole nude day.

he spelt with me attention, fold me up
and dawn, he’s how i burnt thru speak
my fond, o before wife looked so grave
now he of he’ll not let life sleep.

he as rave of grave,
he as a lep of sleep,
and of lep of his lips,
of lips kiss of kissing seek.

not of seek sick, of lips
slip up. yes, it’s us strong
has an always, o lisp of lips,
i of you as the dock is longing.

yes, once up in a spree, we of green
a bout, hour’s reelings, wind and a walk
we risked, lit as quiet a seen.
he said, let’s grow flower a little stalk,

lover this way, he all lit me love,
and i remember it too with this very decay;
he said, let’s grow flowers here, love
together till our days away.

Staples lives in Ireland. Her work busies the ear in picking up haunting vibrations of pure joy and it is impossible not to suspect much of this she owes to the hum of eternity alive in the romanticized voice of the Irish. As Robert Creeley puts it, upon discovering his name is Irish,

and the heavens opened, birds sang,
and the trees and the ladies spoke
with wondrous voices. The power of the glory
of poetry—was at last mine.
(“Theresa’s Friends”)

These poems are at play with, and in, the language itself. They hum, burp, bump, bop, strum, fly along; and what else would any one have them do. Poetry is for pleasure, wherever it is to be found, it’s the very thing necessitates the reader onwards.

AUGLIST

1. You play your mean bicker too proud. It really runs on my verve.

2. When you sleep, I watch you and think about ruining a wife as cross as your juggler.

3. To fold neatly and put your dirty socks back in your stock war.

4. To halve and to hound; there’s a big difference between.

5. That sounds too carps.

6. You’re not wall as dad.

7. Did I ever tell you that I/new when we wed weed weave flowers gather flowers ever?

8. If you had a sun, would heat be the center of your epic thirst?

9. Or the sinner of your shun as perverse?

10. Or the son your always haunted.

There’s aplenty in DOG GIRL to return to. Staples brings out a collection that tackles head on what it is a book of poems should be and do, insisting that each page be ready to stand up and be reckoned with. The only slight bits here (often colored so by title choice) are but seemingly so.

JANIMERICK

There once was a white with a mouth
And a caul with a north for a south
The cold snapped err its ice
White as laboratory mice—
A quiet thrall bid a sprout broken

This is a calendar of talent. There’s little leftover to be asked of it.

It’s not too much to assert that Brenda Coultas’ new collection The Marvelous Bones of Time easily assumes position as a new classic of American Literature. Comprised of, as Coultas herself frames it, excavations and explanations, this new work is concerned with people and place. The first half, The Abolition Journal, looks back at the historical record concerning abolition in the 19th century in and around where she grew up in southern Indiana along the Kentucky border while also weaving in contemporary commentary, gossip, and jokes. Coultas writes by assemblage, situating the reader by offering up her own perspective of the area (both historical and current) drawn from numerous sources, personal and public.

Looking from the free state
there is a river then a slave state
Turn around and there is a slave state,
a river
then a free state

I was born between the free side and the slave side, my head
crowning on the bridge. I fully emerged in an elevator traveling
upward in a slave state. I have shopped in the slave state and eaten
barbecue there. I have walked along the riverbank in the slave
state and looked out at the free state.

Lincoln looked out over the river and saw a slave state and he was
Born in one (Kentucky), like me, but was raised in a free state
(Indiana), like me. We were white and so could cross the river.

Question: are there any abolitionists hanging from my family tree?

This is writing that seeks to discover in the words asked a further questioning which points ever outward. Coultas is mapping out a story but isn’t sealing it off with closure. The poetic identity laid out is one that invites the reader to be active participant and take up where Coultas leaves off. The “I” here is amply spread around.

The palmist heard many voices, a mournful ocean coming from
                                                      my right hand
                                    And felt a deep sadness.

She heard,
“I went to the underworld and this is what I found”
She heard,
“I have her body.”

                  Then I heard the word and the word was “Autonomy.”

The autonomy is to be shared. Coultas is seeking the personal in order to charge it with universal appeal. By sorting out her own understanding of the historical record via her experience with it, as both text and lived fact, she opens the larger opportunity for a cultural sorting. At times she punctuates the exchange of perspectives with cutting humor.

WAR OF WORDS

There was a war between the Kentuckians and the Hoosiers. The
Kentuckians were throwing firecrackers and the Hoosiers were
lighting them and throwing them back.

There was a Hoosier fishing on one bank and a Kentuckian fish-
ing on the other. The Hoosier was catching lots of fish while the
Kentuckian had none. The Kentuckian said “I’m not getting any
bites over here.” The Hoosier said “Come over and try this side,
I’ll shine my flashlight beam and you can walk over on it.” The
Kentuckian said, “No way, I’ll get halfway there and you’ll turn
it off.”

Have you heard about the new state farm?
They put a fence around Kentucky.

Why do ducks fly upside down over Kentucky?
There’s nothing worth shitting on.

Do you know why they built a bridge across the Ohio River?
So Kentuckians can swim across in the shade.

The unsettling history of the battle over abolition may appear to remain inescapable for people caught up in the past as much as in the present, but appearance shouldn’t completely decide the matter. Although old resentments die hard they do undergo alteration, Coultas looks at the idea of boundaries, revealing how superficial they are and meaningless given time.

As we land, the only African American passenger on board tells
us he was born and raised in Los Angeles and brought his family
to Kentucky to visit friends, and they refused to leave. He plans
on commuting to see his family every vacation until his retirement
from the post office in a few years. “Owensboro,” he said.
“Heaven,” he said.

Owensboro is right at the border along the river separating Kentucky and Indiana. The ravages of the past may remain for those with direct ties to the land, but for the outsider coming in with fresh ideas all that is seen are the upside qualities to benefit from.

In the second half of the book, A LONELY CEMETARY, Coultas explores the always burgeoning Americana territory of ghost stories. She’s diving deep into familiar territory culturally but a somewhat unusual realm for poetry. These are not Jack Spicer’s poem-producing ghosts but rather ones from off television shows about ghost chasers and true-life encounters with the supernatural. These spooks fly about the pages, at times deserving of a scene of camp-fire telling.

A KNIFE STORY

Robert told me this story, but he can’t remember if he overheard
or dreamed it. Every day for a month a butcher knife, the old-
fashioned kind, appeared stuck into a tree in the same position. At
first, the neighbors removed the knife so that neighborhood kids
wouldn’t play with it, but in the morning another knife would
appear. There was an oily substance on the blades and there were
random letters carved into the handles. At the end of the month,
the knives stopped appearing. That weekend four neighbors were
stabbed to death. A homicide detective working the case heard
the story. He thought there might be a clue in the weird letters on
the handles, so he collected the knives and found that the letters
made up the names of the four victims.

Coultas delves into the everydayness of the supernatural. Her presentation is exceedingly fine in removal of the superficial and its refusal to allow the poet’s own commentary any excessive intrusion. Coultas undertakes an investigation that is of interest to her, uncovering all she is able to come across and reporting back her finds in the form of poetry. With subtlety and great care that the language be precise, she offers the stories she has collected with the supposition that perhaps they be heard and entertained for the evidence they are: pointers toward a fleeting world hovering just about our own.

THE SECOND FOURTH OF JULY

The following fourth of July, Dave told me this. Because of
Hurricane Katrina, he, his pregnant wife, and his young daughter
moved to Natchez to stay with relatives. Unsure how long they
would have to stay after the storm, they rented a house about a
mile from his wife’s aunt and uncle. Dave and his family, plus his
mother-in-law, moved in. On the first night, Dave fell asleep
holding hands with his wife and daughter, grateful that he had his
family with him, safe for the moment. In the middle of the night
he awoke and saw a ghost of a man dressed in pants, shirt and tie,
sixties or seventies style, walking up the stairs to their bedroom.
                  Even though the ghost was fully materialized, Dave knew
that this was not a living person, and suspects that the ghost
enacted this ritual every night because it recalled his daily return
home during his mortal life. When the ghost realized that Dave
could see him, he was shocked. In his mind, Dave told the ghost
that he must leave, that he (Dave) had his own problems, serious
ones. The ghost became very sad; the intensity of the sadness akin
to Dave’s despair.
                  As the ghost left, Dave pleaded with him to come back, say-
ing that they could work something out. Dave followed him out
the door to a grassy patch across the driveway. There was a shim-
mering oval in the grass; floating within the oval was a knife. The
ghost walked into the oval and was slowly absorbed.
                  The next day, Dave was in his car drinking coffee, listening
to the radio for news from New Orleans. He met his new neigh-
bor, an older lady, who told him that the house he was renting had
been empty for years. She recalled the former occupants as the
perfect family: a doctor, his wife and daughter, nothing unusual
about them except for the doctor, whom she described as having
an aura of sadness surrounding him.
                  Later, Dave found out there had been a shooting in the
house and the doctor had been badly hurt. He did, however, sur-
vive. The shooting was ruled a self-inflected accident. There were
rumors that his daughter had had a drug problem and that she or
her mother had shot him. But what role did the shining weapon
play? What message did the doctor wish to communicate?

As with any good ghost story, there are more questions than answers. Coultas leaves the reader delightfully scared and bemused, startling expectations and never imposing anything in excess. Her humor suffuses the book in a glow of warm bits, “I asked the cards if my poem would be successful. The reader said, ‘who is that man with the dark glasses and pot belly? Is there any reason why I should be seeing Allen Ginsberg over your shoulder?’” She brings poetry into the world and the world into poetry.

Coultas saves American poetry from itself by embodying America itself. She is an answer to this country’s 19th century masters: Dickinson, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville. If you don’t adore the work you are not only wrong but are on the major shit list of all non-Bush Americans. This is our poet. Wake the fuck up.

I have only
the poet’s arsenal
words
with which to build this
hope chest.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at the library of USF. Poems recently appeared in Cannibal, Morning Train, and One Less Magazine. At present, working on a collaborative collection of re-writing each other's re-writes of other people's poems with Micah Ballard. Lots of walking and talking.

PASSING OVER by NORMAN FINKELSTEIN

2008-07-20T23:10:00.000-07:00

ERIC HOFFMAN Reviews

Passing Over by Norman Finkelstein
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2007)

Norman Finkelstein's magnum opus Track, one of the finest long poems of the past fifty years (and sadly in need of a single-volume collected edition), is the culmination of years of thematic development, a rigorous honing of poetic voice and tone; all in all, a remarkable achievement. In the recent publication from Marsh Hawk Press, Passing Over, we are made witness to this process of poetic refinement in works that increasingly point the way toward the masterwork that is Track: from the formal lyricism of “October” and “A Tomb for Ernest Bloch” to the increasingly terse and calibrated serial poems “Mara: The Shape of Absence” and “Passing Over.” Yet the overall concern of Finkelstein's poetry, composed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is that of Judaism; in particular, Jewish-American identity and the Jewish artist in the modern world.

Finkelstein's poems, then, both enact at the same time they describe the idea of the Jew as possessor of the word and the Word, for the Jews, historically, are known as the people of the Book. It is the Torah that has helped preserve Jewish identity in the face of the diaspora, the scattering of Judaica from the Holy Land and the oppression, persecution and rampant anti-Semitism Jews have faced in seemingly every society in which they have sought refuge. Finkelstein's poem “October” portrays this identity of the Jewish intellectual poet in modern America, struggling to create, as spiritually akin to the Rabbinical scholar, pouring over the Torah:

Surely he gave his consent,
but he has no memory of the books arriving,
of years sheltered from the weather,
of studying all the codes (3).

In “Aliyah,” Finkelstein writes of the “corrosive Word” which “calls to the soul” and urges on to “Go up to the Book,” which contains “the world of the strong fragments” where “love curls around the tongue / until it gives birth to truth.” The Book provides a “promised place,” the place where the diaspora is reconciled form the “wreckage of history” and where one finds him or herself “speaking that ancient language / that somehow is always new” (7).

The trio of elegiac poems, or “tombs,” written in memory the composer Ernst Bloch, literary critic Northrop Frye and philosopher Gershom Scholem, are among the more powerful of these early works, addressing Finkelstein's theme of Judaism most directly. “I was waiting for the words to open a space,” Finkelstein writes in “A Tomb for Ernst Bloch,” signaling the incantatory power of the word, or World. Bloch, a German-Jewish Marxist philosopher, was “married / to the old narratives” and was “betrayed” by the “future” which he “must have loved . . . like a mistress.” The Word, while it possesses an “old power,” is futile, subject to the disappointments of time and “doomed to hopeless repetition.” The present, Finkelstein argues, is “dark with promise, dense with the past”; because of this, “we're always eager / to imagine easy prophetic responses.” The promise of the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, “a day of absolute stillness” where “everything is returned” (9-10), seems ever more impossible. Thus, Bloch's betrayal is our betrayal, our urge to disguise the future in the expectations of the past, to expect God's revelation to fulfill a longing for the imagined simplicity of a bygone era, to expect of the future a spousal devotion when in fact it is full of passion and betrayal.

Northrop Frye, that great explicator of William Blake, failed to respond to Finkelstein's poems, as Finkelstein observes in his “A Tomb for Northrop Frye.” He must have been “busy deciphering that great code,” Finkelstein writes, referring to the system of metaphor Blake derived from Milton and the Bible. Finkelstein imagines Frye, after his death, of having gone to that

Great Assembly where the critics sing in chorus,
changing the poems they still hope to write,
where a thousand briefcases bulge contentedly
with moldering off-prints, dog-eared copies

The heaven of poets, in other words, in the “Universal Library / that Milky Way of Books” (11-12). If, in the beginning was the Word, as the Greek Johannine gospel declares, then in the end is the Word. From language comes consciousness and from consciousness the world. Thus the Word is the world and the world is the Word.

This theme continues in “A Tomb for Gershom Scholem,” a poem written in response to the death of philosopher Scholem, widely considered the founder of modern Kabbalah studies, and an authority on Jewish mysticism, an influence on thinkers as diverse as Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida Giorgio Agamben and George Steiner. Finkelstein writes that “we cannot speak of it without speaking of you, / and the books and papers reach back toward that Infinity / from which the books and papers are said to come.” In Finkelstein's words, the word has become that tangible event that makes sense of the insensible, that gives meaning to the meaningless and structure to the structureless. The modern writer, the user of words, and especially the poet, who uses words in an incantatory and creational sense, thus imparting to them that air of mystery from which they were born, is the true judge of history, the only credible diagnostician of its illnesses, the mastery of ceremonies at the celebration of text as world, world as text. And therefore body as text. A theme taken up in the poem that (quite appropriately – the book is masterfully arranged) follows “A Tomb for Gershom Scholem (“who was a kingdom unto himself” (14)), “Inscriptions of the Body on the Text,” describes bodies and texts as “inscribed.” They “curve” and “mingle freely” and are “forbidden.” The poem as body acts as “an embrace,” a “secret kiss” (15).

With “Terminable and Interminable” and “Imaginary Photographs,” Finkelstein's style shifts to the serial form, which makes up the majority of the remaining poems in the book. The serial form, practiced by poets as diverse as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and George Oppen, is used to profitable effect by Finkelstein, who appears in these poems (and in Track against which they are helpfully contrasted) to be primarily influenced by the serial form as practiced by Oppen. (“Terminable and Interminable,” for instance, adopts Oppen's mid-1960s tendency to include individually titled sections to each individual poem of the series). “Imaginary Photographs” utilizes the serial form to great affect: the poems register like a series of photographs in an album; much like Oppen's Discrete Series each poem has it sown page, providing its own image-event. It is the natural culmination of Pound's “In a Station at the Metro”; the photograph as captured image, conveying emotion:

The moment is registered
by the camera
stored in the file
awaiting the emotion
changing an event
to which it corresponds (33)

Yet at the same time the poem laments, it celebrates: for each captured image conveys its emotion as much by what is says as what it cannot say:

Writing against life
experienced as a scrapbook

he takes a photograph of himself
and puts it in the album

wishing the dark pages
could dwindle into wings (35).

The people in photographs, as in poems, “find themselves . . . clinging to an instant / of supposed significance // when they would as soon pass away / into the oblivion of objects.” So the poem, Finkelstein argues, like the “backgrounds of snapshots,” become a part of the “detritus of our lives.” “Have mercy on the photographs / holding fast to the objects,” the poem implores, for, despite their seeming insignificance, the photographs reflect so powerfully upon our lives they perhaps tell us more about ourselves than we are prepared to know. “Buy them in the albums / put away in the attics,” the poem instructs. “Do not / look at them” (39).

If, as the saying goes, each man destroys the thing he loves, then, so, too, is each man destroyed by the thing he loves, a theme addressed in the serial poem “Mara: The Shape of Absence.” A meditation on love's destructiveness, the poem contains some of Finkelstein's finest lyric moments; indeed, it contains some of the finest lyric moments in poetry.

First, there is repetition, then there is love.
Or repetition is love: the circumscribed life.
Circle-written, I name you bitterness,
Joy beyond any legitimate limits (49).

How much there is to be savored here, in both content and form! The alliteration is magnificent: the long, airy “i” sound in “circumscribed life” followed immediately by the hard, consonant pounding of the four syllable punch “Circle written,” itself a kind of repetition, introducing the “bitterness” of these lines. If love is repetition it is both in the airy freedom of the “circumscribed life,” and the “t” laden masculine “repetition” that is “Circle-written,” and within “legitimate limits.” The love that, circular, knows no beginning or end and is therefore beyond limit is both “Joy” and “bitterness.” And how is love both? According to Finkelstein, Mara, meaning “bitter” in Hebrew, is derived from The Book of Ruth 1: 19-22, where Naomi asks that she be referred to as Mara, “for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.” But this Mara might also be the Mara of the Buddhist tradition, whose punishments are unceasing and thus, their eternal repetition, however painful, is still the promise of love which, ever continuing, cannot be contained and is without limits. The poem's speaker is intentionally ambiguous: it alternates between the speaker, Mara, and Mara's lover. What is more, all three might be the same.

Note the care with which Finkelstein utilizes the lyric tradition, the attention he draws to the act of composition, which contains its own form of endlessness, its own promise of joyful repetition:

When I still composed in the old way,
I would wait endlessly for the succeeding line
and still it would never arrive.

Now, as then, I go on without it.
Mara: the shape of an absence,
endlessness as a kind of bouquet
given to no one on a day like any other (49).

There is “No temple but the poem” and “No resting place but the word” (58). The Jew as poet, the poet as Jew, is reconciled by the possibility of the word, which presents them with sanctuary from the world. In a chilling passage, Finkelstein invokes the Ha-Shoah, a moment when it seemed that the endlessness of painful repetition might cease, the word (and World) might forever be silenced:

They shaved our heads
and made us run
but I won't
come to you like that.

I won't come to you
out of ash and horror
and when I speak
I want to speak with you.

My pleasure, my regret,
I have no song for your
and when I speak
you speak to yourself (59).

The book concludes with the long title poem, which begins with both an incantation and a recitation: “The poem as servant of memory / is notoriously unreliable” The poem “is a prelude / to a ritual of remembrance / performed around the spaces / which oblivion has seized” (67-68). As poet and Jew, Finkelstein, aware of the near-oblivion which has seized his people throughout history, finds the poet the protector of language (both preserving and infusing language with both meaning and life) and the role language plays in the preservation of Jewish memory, “as if the survival of symbols / meant the survival of a people.” The rituals of the Jewish passover, recounted here in loving detail, are a “play of death and rebirth,” “somehow set forth / like food on a plate.” The ritual is meant for the present, for “one who stands apart / forever in transition // between the darkness of the past / and the promises of fulfillment / that would reside in the future” (78). The Passover ritual bodies forth those from the past, “welcome in wandering / sustained by fragments” (73), both the fragments of the matzah bread and the fragments of the Torah which preserved Jewish culture in the face of diaspora and slavery, “which is why the old men stay up all night / heading from Egypt to morning / -- as if to learn how the tale will end” (5).

Yet the tale has no end, as wickedness has no end. Suffering, as the Buddhists insist, is a fundamental aspect of existence.

Rabbi I ask you
when can I stop remembering

When can I acknowledge
it was me it was not me

it is mine it is not mine

When have I filled
my Passover duty” (82)?

The “Words / remain / after all is consumed,” the poem concludes. So, too, will Finkelstein's words, which comprise some of the finest, most insightful, tender and unflinchingly honest poetry written in recent years. The joy of one is the joy of many, the suffering of the one is the suffering of many. These poems account for some of that suffering, some of that joy, and speak equally well for both.

*****

Eric Hoffman lives and writes in Manchester, Connecticut. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry, Things Like This Happen All the Time (2000), Threnody (2006) and Of Love and Water (2008). His article on George Oppen, "A Poetry of Action: George Oppen and Communism" appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of American Communist History. Currently, he is editing a special feature on Oppen for Big Bridge. His poetry has appeared in The Argotist and is forthcoming from Cultural Society.

BONE PAGODA by SUSAN TICHY

2008-07-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

PAMELA HART Reviews

Bone Pagoda by Susan Tichy
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2007)

The first thing you notice are the couplets that plow through Susan Tichy’s third collection, Bone Pagoda. Couplets seem to be in vogue these days, but there’s something about the couplets in these poems, perhaps their ballad echoes, their twinning and mirroring of language and imagery, their insistent repetitions. They serve the poet’s project, which is to piece together a fractured narrative from bits of culture, history as well as personal experience and recollection to re-envision the American experience of war, particularly the Vietnam War.

The book, which takes its title from an ossuary at the Vietnamese-Cambodian border containing the remains of 3,000 people massacred by the Khmer Rouge in 1978, is also an elegy to Tichy’s late husband, a Vietnam vet who served in the Mekong Delta. Tichy has written that a reader should be able to feel the bumps and rough places in a poem, where “one piece of language meets another, where texture and temperature change.” She succeeds in this pursuit by “mutter mutter toil and stutter,” as she writes in one poem.

This stuttering and muttering, the associative bumps from voice to voice, the unexpected rhymes and off rhymes imbue the poems with a tone that is archaically contemporary, if that makes sense. You hear and see echoes of the Scottish ballads that informed her childhood ear. But the images and associations are contemporary. Here’s an excerpt from the poem, Desk and Chair.

O the cover of night is a wonderful thing
Jiggery-pokery preterit shebeen

My precious collection of English words
‘Till the bridge brak and we fell in the mire’

Cryptograms and all known plants
What happened that day and to whom it happened

What happened that day and to whom it happened
A rocket went through his neck

Handbook of omens, melos, love
Sliced in half like a flatfish

Sliced in half consummated
But not on the last page

There’s slant music in the lines, cadences that compel your foot to tap even as you collide into the brutal depiction of war’s horror. As I read lines like these, I found myself recalling the Child ballads, popularized by Joan Baez in the 1960s. So I dug out my Joan Baez songbook and, sure enough, songs like Henry Martin and Mary Hamilton reverberate with Tichy’s meters. That’s no accident. The poet acknowledges and includes a range of voices -- from her husband and Baez to Daniel Berrigan, Emily Dickinson, Robert Browning, George Oppen and more. The book is a conversation, she notes. Sometimes these voices talk at once, sometimes to each other, and always in communication with the poet, as she sifts through language to find her way through war and loss.

*****

Pamela Hart, a former journalist, is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she works as a teaching artist. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published in 2006. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has been published in qarrtsiluni, BigCityLit.com, Rattapallax and Kalliope and is forthcoming in The Cortland Review. Read her blog, A Walk Around the Lake, at pamelahart.blogspot.com

GOING GOING by JEN HOFER

2008-07-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

TIM WRIGHT Reviews

going going by Jen Hofer
(Dusie 'e/chap, 2007; available free as a .pdf -- just click on link)

Poetry chapbooks and zines are similar in a few ways: they are often assembled by hand and posted through the mail as gifts, they both exist outside the larger economy of publishing. But culturally they come from different places. I want to look briefly at these categories, chapbook and zine, as a way into thinking about Jen Hofer's going going, and how it came to fall out of an envelope onto my desk.

Most histories of zines see them as a patchwork of political samizdat, mail art, and the networks created through punk and science fiction fan publications. In many of the zines I remember reading in the 1990s the paper itself was like a hold-all container, a desperate missive to the outside world. Photocopying was relatively expensive (20 cents a page at the local 24hr store, as I remember) and the aesthetic that developed from this was of denseness: tiny web-like type, often handwritten, intricate arrangements of word and image. As much as possible was crammed in. There was, in the best zines, a kind of devotion to the page. When the cheap photocopy barns like Officeworks and Kinko's opened, more white space was suddenly available. Literally, you didn't have to write to the end of the line anymore. This change had as significant an effect on those self-publishing as the change from dial-up to broadband had for those working with online media. People could explore the aesthetics of the photocopier itself. Hybrid, experimental forms of writing and art were tried out, and became native to the form. Zines stopped looking like small versions of magazines and became their own form.

The term chapbook, at least according its Wikipedia entry, originally referred to the cheaply printed books of stories or lyrics that were hawked around English towns from the sixteenth century to working class and trades people -- those who couldn't afford proper books. The traces aren't hard to spot in contemporary uses. Chapbooks are the publications that poets release before or between their real books, hawked, perhaps, to bookshops and punters. But it seems there is a hesitation to experiment with form and shape in the way that zines do naturally. Generally I like art that has an awareness of the media it uses. At the same time I believe it is the words that matter. What I'm getting at is that poiesis does not end with a finished manuscript. I'm interested in what is happening between the two modes of zine and chapbook.

The idea that Poetry (as rarefied, dusty) is on one side, and zines (as hip, media-literate) on the other-always way off mark, in any case-is harder now to maintain. Too many things fall between: instances of an emergent poetic practice that is more in key with ephemerality and objecthood; something between a chapbook and a zine. Dusie's series of e/chaps gives us plenty examples of this. Their idea to gather limited edition poetry chaps together online isn't unlike the way that independent record companies will now give a key to download the same album when a vinyl LP is purchased. The domestic work of self-publishing is patched into the speedy possibilities of the internet; analog and digital are integrated.

Jen Hofer's going going is one part of this. It is a chapbook of poems, a durational project, and has a strong sense of handmadeness and idiosyncracy often associated with zines. Hofer wrote one poem a day for thirty-five days in Buenos Aires and Puerto Iguazú. The poems are, in a sense, one long poem which passes itself forward like a baton by way of repeated, remixed, phrases from the previous poem. The formal exercise seems to be to construct the first line of each poem by taking one word from each line of the previous poem. Over time this gives a sense of branching out like a tree and becoming more complex. The writing is impressionistic rather than rhetorical -- 'things singe calmly'. The poems see city life at street level, recording sense data or field notes in swarms of phrases. The have a 'Dali Atomicus' sense of different elements photographically frozen by the poem's presence on the page. One poem reads:

A quick googling locates some examples of Jen Hofer's writing and shards of a biography. Hofer works makes a living as a Spanish-English translator, and her article 'Suspension of Belief: Some Thoughts on Translation as Subversive Speech' gives one insight into her approach. She writes:

Literally, English needs to hear differently. And thus to speak differently, to think differently, to act differently. English as it functions in the normative political and social spheres is a language out of which we must translate all the time, refusing vigilantly, energetically, to be seduced or coddled or dulled or defeated by the willfully deceptive misnomers of an Orwellian system that frames not just our actions but our frames (language, thought, relation) themselves.

The kind of hearing Hofer calls for isn't necessarily achieved by the kind of efficient bilingualism proposed by language colleges ('English is Sexy!' read an advertisement for one I saw at Florenc bus station in Prague last year). The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is fluent in Mandarin yet handles language as if it is a virus he needs to contain. We learn to hear, as Hofer tells us, by constantly translating ourselves out of English so as to tune ourselves more finely to its strangenesses. Others have located the beginnings of American Language poetry in the context of the absurdisms that were being used to justify the Vietnam War. There is a strong strain of anti-militarism in the street scenes of these poems, but the attack lies more in the refusal to resolve the poems into individual aesthetic objects than the refusal to refer.

A sheaf of thin pages is bolted to a postcard cover: a 1960s desert, warm blunted rocks pointing off in different directions. The poems as they appear were typed on Hofer's grandmother's Olivetti Lettera 22. The work as a whole was composed 'as a gift, incantation and promise for jp', as a note at the back indicates. These notes activate the work's aura: as both as poetry and object, going going is analogous to places it was made. It is like something a child might find in a box, years from now, and wonder about.

*****

Tim Wright lives in Sydney, Australia. He is one of three behind the journal When Pressed and blogs occasionally at
swimswam.wordpress.net.

PPL IN A DEPOT by GARY SULLIVAN

2008-07-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

PPL In A Depot by Gary Sullivan
(Roof, New York, 2007)

There is an unusual receptive anomaly often associated with the emergence of “new” ways of writing. Firstly, we can sometimes see, on the part of critics, an initial historicizing tendency: an attempt to posit the relationship of a new type of writing to its literary-historical precedents. Secondly -- and existing entirely simultaneously to this effort for chronological placement -- we can also note a sort of ideational hyperbole, which posits that this new style is “like nothing else”, that it surpasses “prior notions”, “old concepts”, exploding aesthetic boundaries into territories for which we have no current critical nomenclature.

The pertinence of these preliminary remarks will, I hope, soon become clear; but before speaking specifically of Gary Sullivan’s PPL In A Depot, I’ll attempt to explain what I’m getting at in my identification of this receptive paradox.

First, let’s first take the blurbs which here encase Gary Sullivan’s faux-dramatic dialogues. What is interesting is that each blurbist not only feels the need to posit a precedent and history to Sullivan’s writing, but that such precedents, though in themselves appropriate, form together a surprisingly eclectic lineage.

Stacy Doris, for instance, situates this writing “in the Yeatsian lineage of Flarf Noh, received via Spicer and Oulipo”. Kasey Mohammad has recourse to Artaud’s “‘Theatry of Cruelty’, an ‘impossible theatre’ that would confront spectators with the violent truth of their lives in ways that exploded traditional notions of dramatic form and propriety.”

Of course, what is so curious here is that it hardly needs be said that Antonin Artaud is perhaps as diametrically opposed to Oulipo as one could get. If the former represents the violent, spiritual, personal digging into the depths of an existential ennui, the latter incarnates more closely an attempt to overcome expressive effusion via procedural concentration, mixed with the development of complex praxe.

And the interesting thing here is that both heritages are, of course, correct. They are perspicaciously identified, regarding PPL In A Depot, by both Doris and Mohammad, because they do indeed exist, in varying degrees and at variant moments, within this writing’s breadth of performance and performativity.

But then something strange occurs: something which seems to me nevertheless rather common to the reception of Flarf specifically in the contemporary critical climate. For Doris then advances, in her otherwise stimulating appreciation, that: “These snappy, to the point acts of writing bounce genre, authorship, taste, and all the other no longer interesting issues out of the house.”

Oh really? It’s a recurrent gesture, not only to Flarf, but to a variety of new or variant movements across the history of literary modernity. First, Sullivan -- and perhaps Flarf generally as both collective and mode of writing -- is given a variety of coherent possible forbears: Dada, Oulipo, Situationism, Surrealism ; Tristan Tzara, Raymond Queneau, Jack Spicer, Guy Debord. Then it is posited, in almost the same breath, that Sullivan “dismisses”, “ignores” or “explodes” known notions of “genre, authorship, taste”: those precise notions, then, which were the central speculative inquiries -- the formal and contential nodes or axes -- of the precise movements and histories previously convened.

It’s perhaps a critical ambivalence common to the reception of new forms of art generally: a mixture of evolution and intelligent design, a desire to say at once that this new form has historically evolved out of mutations of its former avatars, coupled with a concurrent desire to claim for this new form the status of anhistorical ex nihilo.

It’s a known paradox, then, of almost every avant-garde; but it is still, in my sense, a slightly disturbing tendency, for the reason that what comes to be hidden from us in this emphasis on Gary Sullivan’s “dismissal” of “all the old questions”, is the truly complex, multivalent engagement with such problematic notions that a work such as PPL, albeit obliquely, implies.

Of course, I feel that it is hardly necessary to say that Gary Sullivan, and Flarf writing in general, in no way bounces “genre, authorship, taste, and all the other no longer interesting issues out of the house.” It is difficult to see how any form of contemporary writing -- even that of the most hardcore transceptual -- could claim such wide-reaching manumission. Genre is not important in PPL? Isn’t the question of genre the central grounding feature at the base of Mohammad and Doris’s articulate desire to identify for Sullivan’s writing a specific literary grounding? Taste is not an issue? Isn’t the notion of taste -- as I’ll attempt to suggest later -- one of the primary preoccupations of these intricate, ambiguous dialogues?

Perhaps I am being humorless here -- a humorless critic? -- and that Stacy Doris’s statement is much more jocular and elliptical than I am giving it credit for. Though that might be the case, I concentrate on it here simply because this type of statement seems to me a recurrent common-place, appearing at so many different points in so many discussions, that it seems important now to talk of it. In line with this hypothesis that Sullivan, and Flarf generally, is uninterested in such “traditional” questions, is a linked critical tendency, for instance, to suggest that certain poets -- and Gary Sullivan in particular -- seek to “destroy” the poetic. Mac Wellman, for example, says of the plays in PPL that: “They could be called poetic, but the author would probably prefer to be shot than thought poetic.”

Of course, the term “poetic” here refers not to all poetry -- we have already said that there are echoes ranging here from Spicer to Artaud -- but rather a very specific heritage: that of a hard-line lyrical, ideational, utopian, transcendental or ecstatic tradition, coming direct from Schelling’s slightly toxic universal Esemplasie and coursing in a green run-off throughout the entire creek of Anglo-American Modernism.

But, to be honest, if “destroying the poetic” was truly Gary Sullivan’s project, I wouldn’t be so interested as I am. I honestly do not think this is the primary project here at all, (even if Gary were to inform me of the contrary!) For, of course, almost all modern poets have wanted to destroy “the poetic”: as everyone from Jean Paulhan to Rosalind Kraus to Louis Menand have pointed out, destroying the poetic was perhaps the central tenet of almost all 20th century engagement, whether reactionary or avant-garde. (The reactionaries often seeking to destroy “the poetic” through a return to the self and its expressions; the avants often through recourse to various forms of play, disjunction, and procedural praxis. This is the history -- the cliché -- of poetic Modernism, let alone of the Post- in its prefix).

Even the most hardcore literary Terrorist, then -- to use Jean Paulhan’s evocative term -- engages with these “outdated” notions, albeit in a negative or contrastive way. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that Gary Sullivan’s writing is as much about taste, genre, and authorship as it is “about” anything else, (and that, moreover, it is the complex way such notions are here engaged that constitutes one of the most intricate aspects of this most vital book).

Perhaps, though, these statements will be controversial. Perhaps Gary Sullivan, even, will not appreciate such a hypothesis! I will no doubt have to argue my case. Let’s take this passage, then, from the remarkable “Written in Styrofoam”:

BARISTA [Bringing their order to the table]: When Foucault wrote that the “author” is a product of the discourse of her times, he could as well have included the reader. “Who reads?”

SHIRLEY WOOD: It’s easy enough to figure out “who is reading” in most cases, by the reader’s response.

DAVID MOORHEAD [Standing, walking slowly toward edge of stage]: Oh, I get it, Brooke. You want to play “Phantom of the Opera”? Okay. We’re all alone, and I’m in the mood for a singing lesson. I’m going to sing now. I hope no one comes up behind me to ravage me. I feel a mysterious presence. Who is it? ( p. 77)

Now, Stacy Doris’s position may be -- and it would be an interesting one, with its own supporting evidence -- that such a passage merely serves to highlight how meaningless and unimportant such discussions regarding authorship appear now to a writer such as Sullivan. For there is here -- in a gesture common to Gary Sullivan’s writing in particular, even more so than other members of the Flarf Collective -- an intriguing magnanimity to this anti-didactic satire. It is, it seems to me, almost like a making-fun of all apparent “convictions” or “positions” one may have regarding, in this case, the question of an author’s ontology. Strangely, all positions here -- such is the dialectical density of the derision -- appear almost equally absurd. It is this type of wide-ranging, non-didactic, non-Horatian satire, which threatens to throw the question itself -- rather than any particular response to it -- into a pit of not-quite-nihilistic nonsense.

The “not-quite” aspect of my maladroit neologism is, I feel, crucial here, for we must then ask: is the initial question truly “dismissed” as just one more wave-length of nebulous cultural noise? Does such simultaneously light yet acrid satire as Sullivan’s create a pure dialectic snow -- a sort of dark cultural relativism, if not nihilism -- wherein no position can seem more valuable than the next?

Of course, we cannot think so, though perhaps, regarding Flarf generally, such a hypothesis has often been evoked. But what is going on here is, I feel, much more complex. To see what is indeed happening, let’s take another so-called “traditional” question, this time that of “writing and ethics”. Here is a passage from “Written in Styrofoam” relating to the poems from Guantànomo :

DAVID MOORHEAD: There are times I would really love to hear these poems explode into a different kind of jam, looser and free of the constant drama. [Going back to the table]. I’m not tanking the book over this, I’d just love to hear these poets go NUTS with less of the lamenting.

SHIRLEY WOOD: It’s one thing to drop a word like “Diet Coke” or something into a poem, but to repeatedly use language that a normal person would never use?

BARISTA: [Heading back to the counter] This book has so many OMFG moments it’s hard to assemble highlights.

SHIRLEY WOOD: The big realization that I had is how much this book totally relates to blogging. You are more attractive when you share, share, share yourself.

Of course, all of this is at once hilarious, while sufficiently analogous to heard exchanges that the reader occasionally feels like huddling in a corner to cry. The strange thing is that, given the fact that the satire of these ideological “positions” is so acutely obvious -- the hypocrisy, absurdity and near-depravity of comparisons between Gunatànamo poets’ self-expression and the “self-expression” of free and prosperous “sharing” -- such positions themselves become something one cannot readily adhere to.

What does this mean? Well, perhaps we could posit that this is a type of theater which Brecht would have deplored. For we are presented here with various socio-cultural and linguistic situations where we are each accustomed to having an “argument”, a democratic “choice”, based on our “convictions”, which must be made between variant positions. And rather than being forced, as Brecht would want, to actively and dialectically implicate our moral or social selves in this debate, we almost have the impression that all such dialectical implication -- on the part of the speakers as much as the reader -- would be rendered here immediately absurd.

We remember, then, that Brecht’s ideal theatrical interaction consisted in audience members screaming out advice and abuse to the characters they were meant to be simply “observing”. And in this way, observation ceased to be simple observation, becoming instead a sort of dialectical -- thus social, thus political -- engagement.

I feel then that it is difficult to imagine such a readerly, Brechtian relationship to Gary Sullivan’s “plays”. This is not necessarily, of course, a criticism. It is perhaps simply a different type of engagement which is manifested here. As, faced with Sullivan’s writing, it is difficult for us to voice our “approval” or “disapproval” -- our affirmation or our negation -- regarding the heterogonous cultural and aesthetic episteme presented to us on this strangely-lit stage. It seems almost then -- in this choice between outrage at such visions of Guantanamo “expression” or their facile acceptance -- that we do not have the ability “to choose”, in a Brechtian sense, as our choice of one or the other option leads us into the midst of the selfsame cultural noise. But this noise is itself, of course, revelatory. It is a noise which profoundly digs into the heart of our current cultural discourse -- into its densely woven, if often strangely vacant, fibres -- where the problem is often not so much which option do we choose, as the dilemma that the very discourse itself -- its rhetorical and ethical ways of functioning -- seem to render contrasting opinions all equally null.

This said, such fascinating exposition does not, I insist, equate to a new incarnation of fin-de-siècle nihilism. It is not that all discourses here are equally valuable, or even that all discourses are here without value, or “beyond” value: that this writing has progressed into a state beyond “traditional” axiologies -- “genre, authorship, taste” -- into a realm which, while negating them, does not necessarily provide us with a variety of cogent alternatives.

To my sense, it is more suggestive of the fact that to truly and appropriately account for language’s current formations and deformations, we need to examine not the apparent “arguments” or positions of certain speakers, but something deeper in the discourse itself. The personages of PPL In A Depot, who are able to spend their time arguing over the respective merits of art and money, church and state, decaf and latte, as if such discussions were in some way meaningful or comparable, seem to reveal to us then the inane, almost invisible flattening-effect, of our cultural discursivity itself.

This is no doubt what Stacy Doris means, in part, when she speaks of Gary Sullivan’s writing as that which “surpasses” older critical fetishes. But Mozart and Salieri -- in their incongruous discussions here on the ethical and aesthetic merits of art and artists – in showing the arbitrariness of contrasting positions, allow us to penetrate into an inner working beneath such cultural constructs. Though we may at first see such writing, then, as satire which reduces all to the level of the ideologically equal playing-field, this reduction seems to exist only as an initial means, whereby we come to better understand the more primary motivations of this language.

It is an observation equally applicable to the less theatrical, but still often profoundly dialogic poetry, of a K. Silem Mohammad or a Sharon Mesmer. What is fascinating for me however, in Sullivan’s work, is the degree to which he is often preoccupied with the relation of these cultural discourses to the question of poetry itself. Art. Aesthetics. Ethics. These are key fixations of these pieces, to such an extent that large portions of the brilliant “Mozart & Salieri” bizarrely resemble nothing so much as Milan Kundera’s heavier reveries in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There are other unusual parallels here – which Gary Sullivan may or may not appreciate -- with a poet such as Kent Johnson: the same questioning of the contemporary poetical imperative, the same cultural darkness which swims beneath a more glittering surface.

Such “darkness”, however, seems to take on here an entirely different form. As Kent Johnson, in his surely vindicated, if sometimes slightly righteous, anger, is perhaps situated in a much more clearly Brechtian tradition. (We usually know who Johnson thinks is in the wrong, for instance, who is being hypocritical or fucked-up, and we are left then to taste of the clever praxis of his dark analysis). Sullivan’s writing is, however, at least for me, less open to such dialectical positioning. In the following excerpt, for example, Salieri has just handed to Mozart a new fragment of “art”:

MOZART: You like?

SALIERI: What profundity! What boldness!
What perfect foam!

MOZART: Oh, come now, Salieri,
What’s foam to the starving man?

SALIERI: Dinner is on me: Red Lobster!

MOZART: Gladly,
But let me first address
Why we exist.

The “point” of the exchange is here rather too obvious to be its true point. We understand immediately that Sullivan is not trying anything so simple as to instruct us how decadent, dissolute and disconnected artists can be in the face of social realities. For, making this point with the absurd, unworldly comparison of eating lobster before an imagined starving mass, is to put upon the stage two equally inconceivable limits. The comic effect of their collision here is not based upon our immediate decision as to the hypocrisy of one or the other -- a parataxis of the type: “isn’t it terrible that famous artists eat lobster while there are thousands of other people who are starving?” -- as this position, presented thus, would itself be rendered absurd, and based on an entirely imaginary limit.

Famous artists eating lobster while having existential discussions then, though perhaps a vision dear to some, is here reduced almost to the status of meaningless cliché. Importantly, however, the opposing “starving man” is also reduced to the status of comparable common-place: the term “starving man”, we see -- at least in the way this term is used as a rhetorical device in arguments and contemporary conversations -- is a notion as divorced here from its true referent as its apparently less positive pole.

All of this is to say, then, that we should not be surprised that if it is (in)famously impossible to guess Gary Sullivan’s “tone”. In a related question: I’ve often felt that some of the most fruitless discussions surrounding specific instances of Flarf have been oriented around an attempt to determine the degree of “irony” in a given text. Not the poet’s irony, of course -- we are all still good little New Critics -- but the irony “of the poem”. Though it has been a question dragged out at different points -- notably in relation to discussions of such poets as Michael Magee and Drew Gardner -- it seems to me not only a generally useless endeavor, but entirely misses the reason-for-being of such writings.

To see how this may be case, I’ll take the final notion that Gary Sullivan apparently renders démodée: taste. In “The Separation of Church and State”, we read:

COUNSELOR: Now see here! [“Wild West” music stops abruptly.] I will respect your point of view ma’am, but I don’t appreciate your tone!

BONUS MILLER: I don’t care what you appreciate! People who chew with their mouths open should be shot. People who lick the ends of their fingers should be forced to lick the ends of OTHER people’s fingers, the very fingers they used to squeeze --

COUNSELOR: Ma’am you are way over the line! You should be preparing to face problems on Earth, not in some fairyland called Your Opinion!

All of which leads to me to a general hypothesis. This may appear reductive, but it’s a thought I kept returning to throughout each of these most dexterous and circuitous dialogues: if PPL In A Depot is “about” something, it is less “about” such notions as “inappropriate language”, “bad writing” or the “un-PC”, as it is the broad inquiry into the question of language in communities. The freedom and constraints of such communal language. Their meaninglessness or pertinence. In attempting to outline what Sullivan’s specific type of non-Brechtian engagement might resemble, I kept mentally returning then to a quote from Jean-Luc Nancy regarding the communitarian, and communicative, status of writing as engaged act:

To write for others means in reality to write because of others. The writer gives nothing to others: he does not envisage, as his project, to communicate to them anything whatsoever, neither a message, nor himself. Of course, there are always messages, and there are always people, and it is important that both -- if I can for a moment treat them as though they were identical -- be communicated. But writing is an act governed only by the necessity of exposing a limit: not the limit of communication, but the limit at which communication takes places”.

It is a similar idea as that presented by René Wellek and Austin Warren in their Theory of Literature, though Nancy here adds an important element: namely, that the point at which writing, and art in general, becomes of most pressing value, is that point where it has forged not only a new limit for itself, but a new limit at which other forms of intellectual, emotional and social engagement -- communication -- may become possible.

Gary Sullivan’s writing, for me, reads like the extreme creation of just such a limit. Against the idea, then, that this writing goes “beyond” genre, authorship and taste, I would conjecture that this writing situates itself at the very limits of genre, authorship and taste. “Situates itself” meaning here, of course, that it creates a new limit, necessary for its own existence, which simultaneously expands our own understanding of these antediluvian categories and terms.

That this is exhilarating writing should not, in the end, surprise us: what creates new limits, while not abolishing its precedents, will always create a vibrant perspective. In criticizing our current communities and communal languages then, perhaps PPL, for me, beyond any nihilistic tendency, shyly and subtly gestures towards a new, possible communal language. If it is in some ways, then, a criticism of the value of certain ways of saying, it also manifests a deeper desire, as in much Flarf, evident beneath the leveling satire, for the invention of different ways of being in the language of a time.

At one point in “Gray Matter”, the character Jenny remarks: “If you think America is so bad, why not leave and go to another place?” There is, of course -- as she is immediately reminded -- no “other place”: if it is not in the possible creation of a different language which we hope, some day, to use.

*****

Nicholas Manning teaches comparative poetics at the University of Strasbourg, where he is currently completing his PhD. His first full collection, entitled Novaless, will be released in August 2008 from Otoliths. A chapbook of new poems is also forthcoming from Ypolita Press. Editor of The Continental Review, his poetry and criticism may be found in such places as Jacket, Verse, Fascicle, The Argotist, Free Verse, among others. He maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals, where readers are invited to rebuke him for his negative reviews.

THE ANATOMY OF OIL by MARCELLA DURAND

2008-07-20T22:53:00.000-07:00

TYRONE WILLIAMS Reviews

The Anatomy of Oil by Marcella Durand
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2006)

Falling heads and shoulders into the histories of the earth (and “üs”) as indexed in literal and figurative sedimentations as well as the movement of tectonic plates, Marcella Durand uncovers the future of Homo sapiens in the mineral records (we would be lucky to remain fossils) of the past. A trip through a desert (by foot, boat and automobile) functions as a sign of our alienation from the “natural” world and an allegory of human history in general, to say nothing of a future where we will “exist” only to the extent post-human entities remain as “hungry” for knowledge and exploitation/exploration as we are.

The wars over shrinking oil, water and food resources—wars present and future—also serve as signs of our more general “thirst” for energy, for power, for control, first and foremost, over “nature.” Without digressing into a discussion of the various concepts of the term “nature” in anthropology, philosophy, and psychology (cultural construct? radical Other? exteriorized daimon?), we can say with Durand that human encounter with nature defines a history full of violence, death and destruction on both sides, as it were, of the ledger. Thus one achievement of this book-long poem is its refusal to sentimentalize, even as it strategically anthropomorphizes, nature.

Composed of some forty or so interlocked or stand-alone stanzas, culminating in an eighteen-quatrain coda, The Anatomy of Oil beckons, even as it refuses, epical stature. Conscious that “the floating plates under us” were “(…not written to us)/us with notebooks in hand,” Durand underscores mono-directional knowledge not as a sign of our superiority as sentient beings but as a sign of our historical immaturity; the earth is older and “wiser” than we are: “What we think is oxidation the sky here/feels at one with benzene and flammable/clouds noxious vapor at lunch/break clouds ignite and spread flaming drops/over school travels insatiable brilliant appetite radioactive denizens even, as with/us, on this boat, felling or going toward,/there is a place we have been before.”(11) The irony of that last line—from dust we came, to dust we return—emphasizes the priority of the mineral vis-à-vis the animal kingdom. Thus the history of the planet is not only the history of parallel clashes above (flora, fauna and human encounters) and below (those plates grinding into one another) but also perpendicular clashes between the below (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, etc.) and the above (mining, drilling, etc.). At least three times Durand even animates color with spirit: “colors will not be denied/as they reach through glass and cool air.” The anthropomorphism deployed by Durand puts into abeyance the sentient/non-sentient divide that “allows” us to objectify, and thus exploit, “our” natural resources.

Durand’s figure of choice for our desire or need to use the world about us is “hunger.” Hunger is general, universal and ahistorical. It is also, ironically, self-destructive: “Shoulder to shoulder we stand in our way/united and hungry our stomachs are full.” (16) The paradox of the last phrase—“hungry our stomachs are full”—echoes precisely the state of psychosis as depicted in The Stone Virgins by the late novelist Yvonne Vera. In this brutal, terse rendering of war-ravaged postcolonial Zimbabwe, Sibaso, a teenaged boy-soldier, lost but still in “service”(he has no other life), rapes one twin sister after beheading the other. We are told by Vera that he hunts—and rape is part of the destruction of the prey—because his stomach is full. Moreover, the invocation of martial rites in the phrase “shoulder to shoulder” alludes not only to the perpendicular soldiers ready to wage war but also to the dead soldiers and citizens whose bodies serve to oil the machinery of combat: “are not we us no we/but then what/is oil? but millions/of creatures crushed/one into another/shoulder/to shoulder.”(14) The enjambment of “shoulder” draws a line between, even as it links, the living and the dead: the first are vertical—“shoulder to shoulder”—while the second are horizontal, piled atop one another “shoulder/to shoulder.”

The enforced collectivism and spectacle of war and its martial cognates (e.g., the parade) is opposed by Durand to the invisibility of other modes of communication. Ecology in general has been concerned with bracketing the privilege accorded to the visual insofar as the significant networks of ecological systems operate at molecular scales. These too are, for Durand, forms of speech: Öur deserts calls to your desert./Across the earth, one desert speaks/to another, just as water wicks away/into sky.”(18) Perspective, as they say, is everything. What if we were to imagine being seen by the allegedly non-sentient as we see “them”? “These are just rocks falling down one/upon the other there/is no ‘we’ us here/on this boat and we/what are we but/separate me I you/another over there/no stone fits each.” (14)

*****

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of two books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002) and On Spec(Omnidawn Publishing, 2008). He also has several chapbooks out, including AAB (Slack Buddha Press, 2004), Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004)and Musique Noir (Overhere Press, 2006). Recent poems are in or forthcoming from Critiphoria, Laurel Review and The Nation. He is currently writing a book of poems for the innovative writing press, Atelos Books.

CORNSTARCH FIGURINE by ELIZABETH TREADWELL

2008-07-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Cornstarch Figurine by Elizabeth Treadwell
(Dusie, 2007)

“For which the speech of England has no name . . .” This quote by William Cullen Bryant, which sits in incipit to Elizabeth Treadwell’s poem “the snow-white host of new haven”, suggests to us some of the initial concerns of this poetic. For what precisely is this object which “speech”, specifically, cannot name? It is perhaps something outside of our known taxonomic boundaries; a manifestation of language surpassing familiar forms; a linguistic entity which, though possessing its own unique shape, has contorted itself into an, as yet unnameable, amalgam.

It is this amalgam which, when initially faced with Treadwell’s complex, achieved poems—with these incarnations of language-as-evolving-object—we are at a loss to adequately describe. It is perhaps, in short, the acquiescent “figurine” representative of all possible poems: malleable, yes, as all the good ones are, into shapes we find nowhere in the tiny dictionary of our current nomenclatures. It is perhaps, then, a language able to forge a space for itself in which it has itself lost the means to describe its own precise qualities! It is the fact that a new form never implies formlessness. It is the strange, simultaneous variety and unity of this poetic.

“For which the speech of England has no name”, becomes, then, as well as a possible definition of poetry in general, a particularly salient description of Treadwell’s poetry in particular. For the relationship which this poetic maintains between the two notions referred to here—writing and speech, “form” and “formlessness” —gives the lie to this alluring binary. As Treadwell’s poems, in veering between their states of shapes and shapelessness, in seeming to begin always in media res and in concluding when we expect it least, in spreading tendrils of visual stanze to the edges of a page before contracting into tight amoebic unity, give us the impression not only of an intricate malleability to so much textured “stuff”, but convince us also of our own freedom to take such lived or poetic “material” as we will, and to make out of it a new structure, firmament or environment.

William Cullen’s quote thus seems, in the context of Treadwell’s poetic, to take on a certain significance. But why speech? Is “speech” used metonymically here to mean the same as “language”? Treadwell’s poetic, it seems to me, leads us to a different conclusion: namely, that correspondence, conversations, calling, in short all this “lower-limit speech”, has value not in itself necessarily, but in its widening of the possible fray and foray of a poetic.

The incorporation of such speech into an ever-widening formality implies then that each discourse, in spite its own “given” form, may be remoulded to make a veritable Animalia out of its originally inert cells. The heritage for this incorporation of speech is long, but Treadwell seems as far from New York talkiness as could be imagined. This is perhaps because we may have the impression that speech, in Treadwell, like the other preoccupations of her poetic, is less a value around which one can create the axiology of a poetic, as simply another form, another possibility in these poems’ constantly moving metamorphoses.

Of course, the poetry is speckled with conversations. Not any conversations. These are brilliant conversations.

Men always say women have intuition, but really it’s just that we pay attention
--Yedda Morrison, conversation

The comma, followed by that last categorizing word, establishes a rich antinomy. This is speech. It is “from” a conversation. It has been put into writing, and made poem. Of course, it remains conversation both in origin and possibility; but it is sufficiently rich and sufficiently beautiful that it has broken its taxonomical bounds in order to become something else.

For this is, it seems, not the valuing of speech for speech’s sake: not the status of mentally recorded verbal tournures as in O’Hara-n acrobatics. What is it then? Rather, this:

chatter pages hair dryers makeup a plain leather black smoky don’t
smoke mustn’t kitchen mother tea please drawing pin up please i am
leaving my dress it is my dress I’m not lying to burnt hair tart angle
tired big leaving i am windy promenade goodbye for ever lemonade
is it good the man asks seagulls once a gravesite said mate for life

What precisely is this sticky sonic and semantic web? Revealingly, “chatter” and “pages” find themselves here touching in a most unusual of initial unities. For such a passage seems made up precisely of both “chatter” and “pages”, which form together here an unusually equity. Here, “don’t smoke” and “goodbye” cuddles then with “windy promenade”. I would rarely use the latter phrase when speaking; when writing, however . . .

This is, then, like the expanding breadth of language’s usage. And importantly, there is a surprising unity to these particulars, in spite of their diverse origins. This is not facile assemblage, and it is this, I feel, which makes Treadwell’s poems function so often, and so well.

It’s not always fashionable today to speak of formal unity: the term itself seems to reek of certain structuralist hegemonies. And yet how entirely such successful poems convince us of the lasting necessity of these cohesions! I said before though that these poems begin in media res, that they end before we even expect it. Does this not break their unity, leading them into a sort of formal dissipation? Strangely, no. Some examples will be enlightening. To take, almost at random, the marvellous little poem “Pocahontas Riding Her Victoria Hospital Pillows Home”:

still she lies
alone in wake
amongst this gathered
blue
pistachio passionate
Jesus fish swim
round her hand-held
water

also these false gold
mid-twentieth
century ones
these other quiet fish

There are many delicate touches here: “Alone in wake” is not quite what we would expect, though we may initially scan it without out blinking. “Awake?” No. Read again.

A word too about sound: the assonantal and alliterative touches here, revolving largely around a’s and s’s, seem to create an elliptical effect mimetically mirroring the represented circling of such fish.

As for the notion of formal closure or coherency: not only are we unsure where specific phrases and sentences begin and end here—making possible parsings—but the poem may also seem to have ended before it “should”. In some contiguous cases, the poems even seem to continue on after several possible points of their finition. This, for instance, is the rather unpoundian close of “Impersona”:

he said that, pope’s long chain
armful of field poisoned

till he was dead
till he was dead

only would immediate cousin,
thought litter envisage kingdom

description of the palace,
the dress worn to the sea

This ending lends itself for me to an effect of nearly pure bathos, (or a known error in the Horatian handbook). But it’s almost impossible to say that it doesn’t function brilliantly. “Till he was dead” or “thought litter envisage kingdom” would both have been easy exits. But Treadwell doesn’t take them. She lingers on in a final distich which leaves us wondering, at the end of it all, where we are and what we feel.

Now, I am aware that this positing of ineffective closure or origin in these poems sounds like a criticism; yet here, for me, it is in fact the highest of praise. For, just as with the arrival of such “quiet fish” in the previous example, we too descend here into a rather sudden silence which, given the line-breaks and the rhythms of the preceding stanze, leaves us expecting more. What else? What is this poetic announcing? It is announcing, first of all, some effects we have rarely seen, along with others which, though they look suspiciously like poetries we may feel we “know”, show themselves in the end to be rather different.

An example: I am often personally dissatisfied by what is sometimes called—to use a term dear to both Ron Silliman and Jordan Davis—“soft surrealism”. So envisage my surprise to see that, in Treadwell’s poems, these moments of littérature fantastique sometimes seem among the most astoundingly effective. Take, for instance, the poem “Concern”, which needs to be quoted in its entirety:

little people-shaped creatures
sit in the many many crevices
of my tiery ballgown listening
to everything that i say

to be bodice specific:
in my manifold cleavage,
for i have twelve breasts,
looping round, which makes
it hard to deal with one’s
arms, they sit, hairless tiny
monsters folded up like
the thinker, one in each shallow

to be specific as to length:
near where my knees would
be, if you could see them,
there is a fragile ribbon
arcing round, and still others
hang there, like miniature
crucified men

One of the things which I find so strange about this piece is the precision of its observation—its playing with an almost positivistic descriptive register—which contrasts so unusually with its more imagistic reverie. There is much concern here regarding specificity: “to be specific as to length”. And yet, that which we are being “specific” about seems entirely beyond any such “rational” gaze: it is an image of another world, one charged with mythopoeic, perhaps even psychoanalytic, possibility. How can one “measure” one’s dreams, nightmares, fantasies, desires? This seems one of the most pertinent questions of “Concern” and perhaps it is also this dualism which is even more of a “concern” than the bold images with which we and the speaker are confronted. These are complex, gendered, political, real questions, given the status of dream.

That is, there is a distance constructed here between two different ways of seeing: first a more intentionally, if playfully, “visionary” mode, in which we may perceive crucified men in our breasts; followed by another in which we attempt to measure, analyze and equate these postulates, even up until the very content of our most secret projections, dreams, desires, memories.

In the same way, the very careful and studied line-breaks help contribute, I suspect, to the prevention of this imagery falling into pure reverie or surrealistic automatism. This is, in part Neruda, but it is also the inversion, even more so than the subversion, of Neruda, (especially his most machismo-esque elements). Though their gestures of incongruous association have some roots, then, in a defined tradition, the poems themselves go elsewhere, and in doing so, re-define—reshape—themselves:

when the point was to frame
horror in tactics of artistic
wax, merely imagining or trying

just as the birth was his
church when white cowards
down at the rock real estate

We shouldn’t be surprised that, in contemporary poetics, our taxonomies are exploding. Don’t worry though, friends, because they have been exploding outwards since Horace, and Elizabeth Treadwell simply contributes to this other tradition: a definition of our new parameters and needs. Moreover, in spite of such invention, we aren’t to fear much chaos here. Not with this unity. Not with this adhesive, binding, textured formality. Not with poems which begin: “pinprick the lighthole situationist”.

Not, in short, with this intelligence.

*****

Nicholas Manning teaches comparative poetics at the University of Strasbourg, where he is currently completing his PhD. His first full collection, entitled *Novaless*, will be released in August 2008 from Otoliths. A chapbook of new poems is also forthcoming from Ypolita Press. Editor of The Continental Review, his poetry and criticism may be found in such places as Jacket, Verse, Fascicle, The Argotist, Free Verse, among others. He maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals.

& PERSONA by MACKENZIE CARIGNAN and FELICIA OHNMACHT

2008-07-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

& persona with poems by Mackenzie Carignan and photographs by Felicia Ohnmacht
(Dusie, 2007)

Even before reading the “Artists’ Statements” at the back of this collaborative chap, I felt that the title “& persona” is quite fitting. & persona contains combinations of one photographed image with one poem to create a new work. The results are open-ended even as they depict (pleasing) juxtapositions that offer specific narratives. A favorite is “& fingers” which presents an image of a landscape containing a log fence; the eye is immediately drawn to the center which presents a fence corner showing logs placed atop each other—indeed, the effect is similar to the image of intertwined fingers. Yet one—or, I—wouldn’t have thought of fingers were it not for the work’s title. And when I finally read the text, I’m impressed further by the poet’s and artist’s imaginative breadth:

There’s something about the lacing. Touch and twine. The mixture of slice and rub. Muddled spark, all downhill. As if we are rolling, we follow the lines. Closeness, more of a blur than miles away. He is here, in this moment, overlapping each segment of digression. How many do you have? How many more can you touch me with? Hundreds? Thousands? Snakes in the rocks? Your thumbs again, holding every thing in place.

Here is a collaboration where both poems and images are fabulous—that is, lovely, resonant, punchy, intriguing—enough on their own. But their combinations give rise to delightfully effective results of ekphrasis—where 1 + 1 is more than 2. (The work doesn't lapse into the more limited ekphrasis approach where the text seems like mere caption to the image—clearly not the case in this project.) The poems and images flow into each other effortlessly despite their often unusual juxtapositions. (This is one of the most pleasing example of ekphrasis collaboration I’ve witnessed since John Yau’s and Archie Rand’s 100 More Jokes From the Book of the Dead which I was moved to publish in 2001 through Meritage Press.)

In addition, the inclusion of Carignan’s and Ohnmacht’s Artist Statements happens not also to present interesting reading but, among other things, allows for the collection to be judged based on the artists’ intentions:

I approach poetry by asking questions and challenging the language to find an answer, which rarely happens. It’s the asking that makes the poem. In this collection, I am trying to reconcile the many faces/personas I project as a woman: mother, wife, poet, professional, critic, teacher, sister, friend. The poems offer, at best, shadows of answers, and often result in more questions. The poems are also evidence that the desire to define a single self is a lost battle….
--Mackenzie Carignan

After many years of my camera gathering dust, I rediscovered the reason why I shoot photography: the pleasure of finding an unusual detail and seeing it pop off paper. In taking pride in the analyzation of an object’s detail, I in turn find the complex personas that it holds, which is also how I feel about every human. The more we learn and the closer we look at each individual, the more intriguing and detailed are the facades that are presented. I feel that sometimes all it takes is a change of angle, focus or light on any situation to see a more true perspective. & Persona was the perfect way for me to express these details by being inspired by the complexities of the poetry and to document the absorbing mix of human versus object.
--Felicia Ohnamacht

Carignan and Ohnmacht achieved their goals with fresh results (the issue isn’t making it new but making it fresh, di ba?). Another marvelous example is “& needle” where the image is of a flower I can’t identify by name, except that its “petals” are thin stalks looking more like stems than leaves (that I can’t identify the flower is not a flaw of the photo but a reflection of my urbanized upbringing, even as my ignorance might make for a more non-mediated response to the image). This piece bears the text

Cleft. Mitosis. Multiple tongues. I speak to you throughout. He put his hand on my vertebrae. Fingers between them like spongy disks. Then squeezed. See, resting spider. You are a succulent breed. I stroke you as you jostle me around. The beasts, alive with their juicy jowls. Foreign self, against my knowing. She is desperate to hold on. Your sweet wisps of hair, brushed away from your face. I…it was me who did the suckling. Who are you, then, with a fist around my spine?

A particular image, but as the “&”—which significantly begins all titles—proposes, these works seed something else: deliberately unpredictable responses. For while the text, when the image is the starting point for a reader/viewer’s entry—or vice versa—are examples of how the “&” component may be fleshed out, that each work carries an embedded response doesn’t preclude someone else’s imaginative extension on the work. In that unpredictability, “persona” is a logical description of the project even as the persona will never be fixed by any singular reading/perusal.

In the chap’s last page, the artists express their hope that the project is enjoyed by others as much as by they enjoyed making it. I mention this statement not cursorily. This project is, in fact, one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve experienced in poetry and its collaborative relationships. And that’s just great since I enjoyed meeting “& persona” without knowing what/who exactly it is I met—it’s like some really deep conversations I’ve had with total strangers whom I never saw again (serendipitous meetings through prolonged waits at airports or at large parties). The pleasure existed in that conversation; I didn’t have to know anything else about the people and their lives for the conversation itself to have sufficed for offering a lovely engagement. I suppose that’s what some critics (and some artists and poets themselves) mean, too, when they insist, ‘It’s the work that counts.”

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Anny Ballardini’s review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in JACKET, as well as Allen Gaborro’s review of her The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the Philippine News.

MIDNIGHTS by JANE MILLER & BEVERLY PEPPER

2008-07-20T22:45:00.000-07:00

FRANCIE NOYES Reviews

Midnights, Poetry by Jane Miller & Artwork by Beverly Pepper
(With Introduction by C.D. Wright)
(Saturnalia Books, 2007)

‘Midnight’ is a loaded word, almost a cliché. It is shorthand for all sorts of dark and gloomy, moment-of-truth type of statements. A major accomplishment of Jane Miller’s Midnights is that she rescues middle-of-the-night ideas from worn-out truisms and offers them as the torturous realities they can be in experience.

Despite the dark subjects, Miller’s approach is open and flexible. She tells numerous stories, using a variety of formats. The stories are universal—her lover is leaving, her mother is dying. She describes touchy relationships and affection for friends, and through it all, she writes about the challenge of writing. The individual facts of one’s life are achingly personal, the challenge of finding meaning in them is the gift—and curse—of the artist.

Midnights meets that challenge partly through its form. The book has a tight structure of four parts. Each section is introduced with a traditionally-formatted poem, the only poems in the book with titles. Each introductory poem is followed by a series of prose poems that carry forward most of the narrative. Miller uses the varied formats to weave together her observations on life, literature, art and politics, from the mundane to the flash of brilliance.

The first lines of the first poem set the stage:

It is mostly midnight
inhabiting a strange space.
It makes no difference to me

“(M)ostly midnight:” whether it is literally midnight or three in the afternoon, it is midnight in the heart and mind. The poems look unblinkingly into loss. Some is unavoidable, some the result of choices turning sour. Her mother’s illness carries the endlessly repeated lessons of the passage of time and its inevitable thievery. But the pain of betrayal is something else.

Unhappily, if that is the right word, I have cracked the bowl of the one slave I am permitted to touch on this earth with a scream so high-pitched as to be inaudible, except that, unfortunately, she heard it, and lies in bed now with a new lover’s hands over her ears.

If the time is midnight, the mode is movement. The poet moves, both physically and mentally. She writes in Arizona, in California, in Italy. She travels by airplane and captures the fatigue and unworldly stress of airports, she visits hospitals and captures the technological prison-like atmosphere of bright lights and bodies going bad. She writes in sterile hotel rooms and in a much-loved garden. The mind is never still, the body is in constant motion.

An example of the way the poet’s mind travels is found in section xxii. The oppressive heat of southern California brings to mind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “perfect description of wind through a summerhouse making things worse.” This idea of summer leads to the image of pink roses, with petals that suggest “the faces of boys who stop by Caravaggio’s studio, looking for him and looking for work. . .” The roses also suggest babies and the refusal of the poet’s lover to consider a child, a thought “buried” like a garment is buried as part of a Jewish funeral.

That thought leads to Osip Mandelstam—“excuse me for intruding on your afterlife,” Miller says politely, quoting his famous statement about the vitality of poetry: “Only in Russia, poetry is respected—it gets people killed.” Finally, the roses become the lovers, “so light a pink that we are nearly white, invisible. (I am braced to you.)”

Art, literature, history and politics are all part of the multiple realities explored in Midnights. For example, what politicians call ‘illegal immigration,” Miller names “power and slavery.” She describes the murderous trek through the desert, where both the land and border agents threaten those seeking work and a better life.

It takes more than a broken poet,

More than the most sacred heart, more than a cathedral to hold them in its embrace, these women and girls and boys and men being fired upon. Those of us who are writers write about the forlorn.

Those “forlorn” in the desert lead to thoughts of the Jews in Nazi Germany, which then leads to the poet Paul Celan, one of the poetic presences that permeate Midnights. Grappling with the incomprehensible, Miller writes of “the giants I admire, who could not live—Paul Celan, Virginia Woolf—but who lived anyway, suffering mind bends.”

Celan and Woolf are models for Miller here, brilliant thinkers but also suicides. They died by drowning, another truth that haunts this book. Sometimes life is too much, sometimes pain and terror win. Sometimes even geniuses can’t take it. Death by drowning is both a literal fact and a metaphor for despair.

The vision in Midnights is expanded as well with pictures. The book is part of a series from Saturnalia Books that pairs writers and artists. The stark black and white drawings by Beverly Pepper don’t illustrate Miller’s stories as much at they suggest other ways of seeing her ideas.

The visual images are stark and suggestive. The first, used on the cover, is a triangle, suggesting both precarious balance and sheer femininity. Another looming dark shape—to me—seems like the fear of midnight itself, dangerous, threatening. Yet another image suggests a group of black shapes—the figures of the past, perhaps, or the chorus in a Greek tragedy. All lives are haunted by those voices.

In the last section, Miller appears to achieve a sort of reconciliation as the poems seek to balance emotion and artistic expression. The poet visits the Rothko Chapel, where “a violet middle panel weeps; on each side, night falls on a darker, midnight blue panel of the watery beginning of time.” The poem quotes Rothko: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them.” Modern artists may not paint Madonnas or crucifixions, Miller seems to say, but they still capture the spirituality of their times.

As the book ends, Miller cleans out her apartment, with a little help from her friends, and balances her thoughts, emotions, reactions and observations into threads of poetry. She works, she tries to heal but most of all, she remembers and puts it all into language.

*****

Francie Noyes is a poet and writer living in Phoenix, Arizona. Formerly a political reporter, gubernatorial press secretary and movie critic, she now focuses on poetry and film writing. Her work has appeared in Panamowa, Key West: a collection and The Anthology of New England Writers 2002.

AMIGO WARFARE by ERIC GAMALINDA

2008-07-20T22:40:00.000-07:00

H. FRANCISCO V. PENONES, JR. Reviews

Amigo Warfare by Eric Gamalinda
(Cherry Grove Collections, 2007)

Poetry as the Canary at the End of a Mine Shaft

Eric Gamalinda's recent poetry collection, Amigo Warfare, is an act of faith on the survival of the poet's voice amidst the mad march of humanity towards annihilation. The book's title, culled from guerilla-tactics employed by Filipinos who appear as friendly farmers at daylight but carry their guns at night in their resistance against American occupation of their country, also carries this duality in the 39 poems which teeter on the poles of war and healing, memory and forgiveness, apocalyptic metaphysics and Christian hope.

In this collection, Gamalinda, a recipient of an American Literary Award for a previous poetry book, Zero Gravity, and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant for fiction, continues the re-examination of a post-911 world. Only here he poses the question, if not the blame, on America itself. "Because you send a shining fleet/of your youngest men,/lust still forming in their bones," the persona in the title poem tells a personified America. This doesn't make the poems, however, less American-friendly. It is more echoing the call not to let go of the light amidst the dark reality that "...war is inescapable. You must bomb/ a few towns if you want peace. If we have children,/ they will be among the nine out of ten/ who will never speak in the future tense."(“Two Nudes”); and where, "The world's great wars/ are fought on prime time TV." (“Ego>Lust>Guilt”); and therefore, " ..the nights we dreaded/ surfing the channels for comfort are here/ at last, all that cinema dreamed for us/ has come to pass," (“9/12”).

It is clearly a vision of the apocalypse, now, where the end of the world is seen as coming, "...slowly, like madness, like a boat/ cruising the Seine."(“Melting City”)

Amidst and despite this pessimism, however, is a voice that refuses the dying of the human light and existence, clutching on the last straws of hope. "...but there must be a season/ no one has weapons or currency for,/ in which smallest voices/still give praise to rain." (“The Remembered World”); and, "Through all the wars of our two centuries/ there must have been at least one soul/ that remained unbroken." (“Tektite”).

It is the poet's voice: "And I became a poet/ so I would have nothing to do/ with the government of humans,/ only to carry like river water/ in pails on two ends of a stick/ the weight of remembering/ and the weight of forgiving." (“My Generation”); for "Grief is a nation of everyone/ a country without borders," and; "We are so many bodies, my friends/ We all move in the same direction.(“DMZ”).

Amigo Warfare then plays the role that Galway Kinnell sees of poetry in our age, that is, as a canary at the end of a mine shaft. It makes us see our salvation and common route. Such affirmation makes Amigo Warfare really, a friendly reminder in an age of warfare.

*****

H. Francisco V. Penones Jr.'s recent works have been included in Field of Mirrors: An Anthology of Philippine American Writers; and Reed Magazine of San Jose State University where he is an MFA Creative Writing student on a fellowship grant from the International Ford Foundation.

BLIND DATE WITH CAVAFY by STEVE FELLNER

2008-07-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

FRANCIE NOYES Reviews

Blind Date with Cavafy by Steve Fellner
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2007)

I know, I know. Don’t judge a book by its cover. But I read Blind Date with Cavafy totally because of its cover, which was designed by Claudia Carlson. A terrific title, combining trendy pop culture sensibility with the name of one of the most touching poets of exile in the twentieth century. And add to that, a bright close-up photo of a cup of coffee and I was hooked.

Fortunately, many of the poems inside Steve Fellner’s award-winning debut volume fulfill those expectations. The poems are funny, topical, insightful and accessible. The collection starts strong with “Epiphanies.”

Everyone was having them. You couldn’t walk
through the neighborhood streets without seeing people
smacking their foreheads with the palms of their hands,
bragging about another bright idea.

These lines show much of Fellner’s approach. An epiphany is one of those concepts much abused and over-used in contemporary writing. Fellner undercuts over-familiar pomposity with humor and unexpected visual detail.

Down-to-earth detail triumphs in the oddly funny poem “Judgment Day.” Whether we believe it literally or not, most of us have the same image of Judgment Day: the patriarchal figure sternly evaluating each human who comes before him. Imagine the length of the line, Fellner suggests. Imagine how intimidating that wait would be.

The line stretches across several
continents. Angels hover above you,
offering crossword puzzle books, cigarettes,
Dixie cups of red wine, fraudulent smiles.
You make small talk with the man behind you.
. . . .

You wonder how God can listen to everyone’s litany
of sins without yawning.

Certain ideas and themes crop up repeatedly in the book, which won the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize in 2006. The poet shares his love of literature--Shakespeare and Catullus warrant numerous references--and he revels in pop culture, particularly trashy movies. He also likes to think about the reality of famous folks. For example, “Breakfast with Socrates” sees the real man constantly pondering big, unanswerable questions.

I bet Socrates hated waking up in the morning.
With every sip of coffee, he thought about the possibility
of choking, which led him to ponder the afterlife,
the meaning of his life, our lives.

If being Socrates is tough, imagine his wife’s situation.

I bet she craved the art of small talk. How horrible
to threaten divorce and receive a litany
of reasons as to how betrayal is an essential
and necessary component in any relationship.

For all its humor and honesty, the book occasionally lapses into a judgmental, disparaging tone. I was looking forward to the title poem, to see what a talented, contemporary poet had to say about Cavafy. Cavafy was a Greek writer and government clerk in Alexandria, Egypt whose work was mostly unknown until after his death in 1933.

“Blind Date with Cavafy” describes the awkward meeting with an ordinary man in a nameless café. The description is certainly plausible as most biographies depict Cavafy as a quietly gay man in a severely traditional and repressive society. In Fellner’s poem, the meeting is weighed with sadness and missed opportunity.

This much I remember:
he overtipped the waiter.
. . . .

Halfway to my house,
he said he forgot his wallet
on our table. “I should go back
and get it,” he said. “Next week
I’ll come over.” I don’t remember what happened
the next week. Or the week
after that.

Although the poem aptly describes the sadness of these brief encounters, it ends with an abrupt dismissal of Cavafy’s poems.

I never read
a poem of his through to the end. I want
to believe he left something, someone out.

I’m not sure what is gained by ending the poem this way. To evoke a wonderful poet as Cavafy and then reject his work as lacking struck me as off-putting.

A similar unpleasant tone also surfaces in “Self-Portrait,” the long, serious poem that serves as the centerpiece of the book. It isn’t the actual events but the attitude toward them that seems self-indulgent. Written in the first person, “Self-Portrait” describes a difficult childhood as the adopted child of an eccentric woman. His mother is the kind of woman who entertains other parents at a school dinner with tales of her operations. (Then again, all mothers do things that embarrass their children.) He also describes two meetings with his birth mother, who is, if anything, more eccentric than his adopted mother.

She sounded like a laugh track
gone berserk. “I put
eight kids up
for adoption
during my life. Each
from a different guy.

Other incidents include his one sexual encounter with a woman, interrupted by a two-hour phone call she spent yelling at another man. The poet also talks of leaving an older lover because the man had children. The young man puts a note on the refrigerator:

. . . “There’s not enough room
in anybody’s life for two babies. Never
contact me again.” He called.
Which was more
than my father ever did

after he deserted us . . .

The voice in this poem has the unattractive quality of blaming everyone else for its unhappiness. While the events and details in “Self-Portrait” are vivid and quirky, thirteen pages of self-pity are too much for me. For a writer so capable of humor and quirky insight, melodrama is probably a bad idea.

*****

Francie Noyes is a poet and writer living in Phoenix, Arizona. Formerly a political reporter, gubernatorial press secretary and movie critic, she now focuses on poetry and film writing. Her work has appeared in Panamowa, Key West: a collection and The Anthology of New England Writers 2002.

THE STRAITS by KRISTIN PALM

2008-07-20T22:37:00.000-07:00

TYRONE WILLIAMS Reviews

The Straits by Kristin Palm
(Palm Press, Long Beach, CA, 2008)

Full disclosure: in many ways I am the worst possible person to review this book. Like Kristin Palm, I, too, am a former Detroiter with fierce loyalties to the city. Unlike Palm, I grew up in the city (she was born in Mt. Pleasant, a northern suburb), and I retain, to my surprise, much of the antipathy we in the “inner city” learned to feel toward the suburbs and suburbanites. That I currently live outside the legal boundary of Cincinnati, Ohio (as much of my family in Detroit lives outside the city) in no way diminishes this almost instinctual hostility.

That said, this is a fine, if somewhat thin, narrative documentary of the history of the city, from its founding as a French settlement in 1701 to the narrator’s departure in the early 21st century. Divided into two long poems, “The Straits” and “City of Conscience,” The Straits offers a history of the city that only slightly departs from its official histories, many of which are cited as source-texts at the end of the book. The first poem offers a mixture of Susan Howe textual appropriation and quotation and Muriel Rukeyser narrative documentation without the latter’s moralizing. At the same time the contrast between the city’s promise of economic vitality and the social costs of those aspirations (from the first wars with Pontiac to the forced relocation of entire sections of the population to pave the way for industrial “progress”) suggests that the Catch-22 of capitalist prosperity demands a rethinking of “progress” and economic “viability,” to say nothing of social and cultural welfare. Aside from suggesting that one reading of the 1967 riot pits blacks “(and some whites)” against “the state” provides some interesting—and perhaps necessary—frisson against the city’s well-documented racial problems, Palm is largely content, in “The Straits,” to show.

This strategy is telling, as “City of Conscience” makes clear. Unlike “The Straits” which moves back and forth between the tradition of apostrophe (e.g., “City, your hands are candles”—19) and Howe/Rukeyser experimental documentation and narrative, “City of Conscience” incorporates a first-person singular “I” (as opposed to the “we” that makes a few brief appearances in “The Straits”). Thus, this second poem sounds much more personal, a felt mourning for a city drained of economic, and thus, political power. To her credit, Palm does not excuse her own decision to leave: “I know it’s been said it’s time to decide whether you are going to be the problem or you are going to be the solution, and my first thought is that I don’t know which I am though I suspect that the answer is both.” (90) Of course, the reduction of the complexity of industrialized sites to matters of individual choice is itself part of the apparatus of late capitalism. I am not blaming Palm for feeling this way; I recall feeling precisely the same way when I left for good in 1987. Still, such feelings, however genuine, play into the hands of the very forces marshaled against individual agency. Palm, in the same paragraph cited above, recognizes this dilemma even as she turns away from its darker implications: “I could write a letter here, a litany of my city’s history so that it collides, runs up against itself, and I could say that this shows all the forces that have run up against each other and themselves over all these years to make this city what it is today with all its attendant problems…What takes precedence? What do we view together and in isolation? City, I could write about you until the end of time and it would not make me able to return to you.” (90)

The Straits is an important document, and its sheer breadth and range makes it worth reading. I only wish it had a bit more kick to it.

*****

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of two books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002) and On Spec(Omnidawn Publishing, 2008). He also has several chapbooks out, including AAB (Slack Buddha Press, 2004), Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004)and Musique Noir (Overhere Press, 2006). Recent poems are in or forthcoming from Critiphoria, Laurel Review and The Nation. He is currently writing a book of poems for the innovative writing press, Atelos Books.

BE THAT EMPTY: APOLOGIA FOR AIR by ALICE B. FOGEL

2008-07-20T22:35:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Be That Empty: Apologia for Air by Alice B. Fogel
(Harbor Mountain Press, Brownsville, Vermont, 2007)

I live on a mountain. So I’ve often witnessed two landscapes from the same window—where the top half may be sunlit blue sky while the bottom half is terrain shrouded in mist. On those days, I know that those in the valley would look up to see gray—while I would see gray topped by a lovely sapphire. I would see what others would have to imagine: fog and sunlight co-existing in harmony. Which is all to say, my empathy for this poem is logical:

MAP OF A DISTANT LAND

I woke up most mornings above the clouds.

There, I waited for that white sky
to lift off from the river below me
and catch up to the air before my eyes.

Half the mountains were mountains
and half the mountains were clouds.

On warm wet summer mornings like this one

I looked across the two rivers, afterthought
of green between them, and the white
mountains that were clouds

rose from the darker, grounded mounds

then passed on through me, and passed
on upward like old souls heading home
at last, turning invisible, slowly, as they flew.

That Blake-an reference as to the significance of image attests to the strength of Alice Fogel’s Be That Empty: Apologia For Air. Fogel’s collection contains poems that begin in nature but move on deftly to reveal an element alchemized from what simmers within the human unconscious:

Be there at dusk when hawks
cross the clearing.
                                    In the smallest thing
                                    live smaller things
                  unbreakable
as atoms used to be:
                                    things unknown
even in the intimacy
                  of what is
                                    at home.
(--from “HOMING”)

Indeed, the poem that most moved me is “FRACTURED LULLABYE” which unfolds to show the evaporation of the seam between planet and human body. This magnificent poem concludes

You whisper, Listen—do you hear the sky?
I answer yes, but it’s the sound
of your effort to take it all in.

One responds in varied ways to settings where one seems alone, where one seems to be the only one standing within a particular landscape. One can feel small standing atop a mountain and witnessing seemingly infinite vistas, below the canvas of the Milky Way or before a clump of huge, ancient redwood trees. One can be humbled. But nature teaches that one is never alone -- that there are always other creatures about even when they are invisible to human eyes.

These poems by Fogel, a poet described as living “off the grid” in New Hampshire, do not use nature to humble the human. Rather, they uplift in the way heightened consciousness makes one more aware. In that awareness, one feels ever more interconnected with the rest of creation. Through interconnectedness, there are no “others.” There’s no need to compare and be humbled (or feel grander): We are all One—as in from "ECLIPSE":

Once upon the day the moon
           overtook the sun
                  and life on earth
included everything ever
           made of atoms
                  and everything else
at all that mattered
[…]
           and all
manner of other thimgs
           changed
                  and charged
with the light of insight
           until light’s
                  own language
spoke in tongues
           of leaves
                  to the land
illuminating
           shadows where
                  there were none
and always
           in the shapes
                  of crescent moons
because the moon
           made moonlight
                  of the sun
that nightly gives moon
           its own light
                  until the sun
[…]
drew such a chiaroscuro
           such a brilliant
                  shade
of light oh
           there was a light
                  that blinded
us to rounder
           suns of brighter
                  days!

“…brighter days!” Well, oops—I should have mentioned first rather than last, that in this poetry collection, there admirably is that element I don’t notice enough in contemporary poetry: Joy. I am grateful Alice Fogel wrote these poems to connect by sharing radiance and rapture.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Anny Ballardini’s review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in JACKET, as well as Allen Gaborro’s review of her The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the Philippine News.

BREAK ME OUCH by MICHAEL FARRELL

2008-07-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

RICHARD LOPEZ Reviews

Break Me Ouch by Michael Farrell
(3 Deep Publishing, St. Kilda, Australia, 2006)

I have long admired the poetry of Aussie poet Michael Farrell. Even at his most experimental his texts explore not only the sensuality of words but the sexuality of the language and of the human body. Of course how one reads texts in general and perhaps poems in particular says more about the reader, I think, then it does about the author’s intent. Or perhaps both since a text is created simultaneously by both writer and reader. I is an Other, as Rimbaud wrote not so long ago, and texts are just that, especially so in farrell’s fine collection Break Me Ouch.

As the title declares, this is Farrell at his most daring. I’m not sure how to write about the poems since these pieces are handwritten cartoon panels. Sometimes the poems are drawn with no words at all. This collection is a new creature, at least to this reader, something that I think can be called ‘graphic poetry’ used in connection to the term ‘graphic novel’. The ‘I’, or sole protagonist, is an unnamed character drawn as a solid triangle for a body and with a circle for a head. The texts tend to be brief expressions drawn and written in a few panels. But it is not just only these features that make Farrell’s work most daring, but the poet in these pages is unafraid of direct erotic writing. So these pieces are simultaneously willfully obscure and directly written meanings.

Can such a thing exist? Each time I open Farrell’s book I see that the eroticism of Farrell is tempered only by his joy in the processes of making poems. Thus the text ‘chocolade’ is written in six panels sans words while the unnamed ‘I’ begins in the first panel in his [I use the masculine pronoun even though the ‘I’ could be feminine, or perhaps even both] usual body display of a solid triangle and round head. The next four panels each focus on the ‘I’ as the body changes from triangle to rectangle and dissolves to three black slashes at the top of the body and two drip marks at the bottom. Then the sixth panel drops below the line of the five previous panels, much like the figure of a line of written poetry indented and beginning below the previous line, as the ‘I’‘s head turns into what appears to be something similar to a half-eaten cookie and the body as slashes begin to collapse on each other. I read this piece as an expression of pleasure as one consumes and is consumed by a favorite treat.

There’s the erotics of eating and there’s the erotics of sexuality and Farrell is declaring both in this collection. Take the piece ‘cup’ for example where the couplets of the poem are written within the space of eight panels, each couplet in a single panel with ‘I’ virtually unchanged except in stanza six when ‘I’‘s body takes root like the roots of a tree. Here is the text in its entirety.

BACKED
AGAINST

THE
BARRACKS

I
WATCH
YOU
BECKON

BETWEEN
A

TREE
&

HIM
ON

HIS
KNEES

There is a sweetness to the clarity of this piece that I find thrilling. What is freedom of expression at all if not for the express of human sexuality in its manifold forms. It is a powerful piece of writing and I’m glad Farrell wrote it.

But this is a collection of poems and as that there are many pieces that are not so directly sexual. There’s also criticism of poets and poetry and the war in Iraq as well as paeans to pop music and texts that are, I think, about the catholic faith. I’ve read somewhere that Farrell wrote this collection after discovering the neo-garage rock of The White Stripes. The minimalist style of these graphic poems do seem to be a brother/sister to the Detroit band’s stripped-down rock of vocals, guitar and drums. For example, the poem ‘no two’ is written in four panels with a musical staff drawn above the panels which uses the ‘I’‘s head as notes. Only in the final panel does Farrell draw eyes for the ‘I’ and the text reads with the simplicity of a song lyric.

LIKE
MUSICS
IN A
BOWL

IT
GIVES
FOOD
ITS
SOUL

I
DANCE
WITH
MY
MOTHER

FOR
THE
RAISINS
THEY
THROW

Again Farrell is writing the erotics of the body detailed in the figures of the pleasures of dancing, eating and music. Or that is how I read this collection for farrell is, even at his most difficult, a pleasure-seeking and pleasure-giving poet. It is a wonder of this collection that the panels continue to engage upon repeated readings. None of the novelty of graphic poetry has worn off, and yet there’s more to these pieces than the novelty of creating graphic poetry. These are powerful, beguiling and entrancing pieces written and drawn by a poet at the height of his creative powers.

I’ll leave it at that.

*****

richard lopez lives in sac. poems recently published in listenlight and concelebratory shoehorn review. a split-chap with jonathan hayes, hallucinating california, from windowpane press was recently published as an e-book and is soon to be fetishized in paper form.

OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS) by CARLA HARRYMAN

2008-07-20T22:20:00.000-07:00

TYRONE WILLIAMS Reviews

Open Box (Improvisations) by Carla Harryman
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2007)

Carla Harryman’s Open Box is a meditation-in-process on the possibility of a poetry available to cultural, social and political critique that does not unwittingly reinscribe the political, social and cultural formations (textual and otherwise) against which it is posed. Because Harryman wants to preserve a “place,” if not “places,” for an aesthetic and procedure resistant to reification, she deploys improvisation as writing, as textual practices open to the future and, more ambitiously, to the past, to the written. Since this must include Harryman’s own written, even in this very book, the provisional is privileged over and against the dogmatic. Therefore the poetics enacted here are “Neither efficacious nor harmful/ Something wanted here/ A decision/ With the option of turning back or resting between.” (10) This apparent anti-narrative stance is, must be, just that: apparent. Though the forward-pull of normative reading habits narrativize even that which resists it, Harryman too, as reader and writer, narrates at certain moments:

The psyche of the poet
Exceeds the poem
Without the poem
Disappearing

Into an exterior world
In which it cannot survive
The poem is therefore
A representation of an edge

Performed
In other world
Not this
Once
(60-61)

The forward-pull of narrative is elsewhere resisted by the self-reflexive play of language at the lexical and stanza levels. Here, however, narrativity dominates precisely as meaning, as an unavoidable metaphysical gesture signaled by the presence of the soul (psyche). For Harryman, each word, each line, each stanza (each “room”), is both node and network, closed and opened box. This box, a kitchen in motion (“Kitchen/ Is a fluid, then later”), processes language (a poem then is always already “cooked,” avatars of the “raw” notwithstanding), makes, forges, an artifice. Its resemblance to the language of ordinary life tempts absolute conflation (a poetics which reifies the quotidian as an intrinsic good) or absolute separation (e.g., New Formalism). Harryman emphasizes that “between,” the poem as not an edge per se (and hence not the box—the poem is generated by performance; it must be spoken or read), not language per se. It is a “representation of an edge,” of a language. Boxed in by author and reader, printed text and performed text, the poem exists “between.”

The political and cultural consequences of these distinctions and open-at-both-ends writing are significant. Avoiding metaphor, symbol and allegory (though my reading, as a critical practice, does not), Harryman draws analogies, analogies which are necessary but insufficient in themselves for metaphoric-symbolic moments of transcendence. Thus crowds, poetic movements (like Language Poetry), psyches, coalesce and disperse, come together and drift apart. Like the box that opens and closes (one needs to “read” these poems as flash texts at the online journal mark(s) to get a sense of the multi-dimensional movements Harryman sets into motion), Harryman’s poetry is an analogue to its very “subject matter”; the in-and-out movement enacted at every level here might lead us to the temptation of organicism, but “the poem does not inflate/ Lungs do.” (7) This respect for an alterity irreducible except by violent yanking (write this Yankee) not only has biological, cultural and political consequences but, as noted at the outset, must turn back upon itself, must respect its own difference from itself. Whatever or whose ever side one takes, “Sides turned over/Sun.”

*****

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of two books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002) and On Spec(Omnidawn Publishing, 2008). He also has several chapbooks out, including AAB (Slack Buddha Press, 2004), Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004)and Musique Noir (Overhere Press, 2006). Recent poems are in or forthcoming from Critiphoria, Laurel Review and The Nation. He is currently writing a book of poems for the innovative writing press, Atelos Books.

TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD by CAROLE STONE

2008-07-20T22:19:00.001-07:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Traveling with the Dead by Carole Stone
(Backwaters Press, 2007)

Traveling with the Dead. How can it be done? Through the imagination? Will it work? Hmm. In the book’s opening poem, “Dream of Mrs. Roosevelt,” no less than Eleanor herself advises Carole Stone, who lost both of her parents at age four and imagines them “at FDR’s inauguration,/ standing in the D.C. cold, drinking in/ FDR’s words like bathtub gin,” in an “anthracite mine”:

The President rolls out
of the black in his wheelchair.
Why couldn’t you save them?
I ask. Why did they die?
He rolls on into the darkness.
Mrs. Roosevelt hands me a pickaxe.
Dig, she says. (13)

The italicized questions are unanswerable, and nearly unbearable, but Stone takes the First Lady’s advice as she quests for imaginative compensation for her parents’ absence.

Although, in “Unlikely Pair,” she declares, “I have no stories about my parents,/ silent in their filled holes of earth” (38), Stone presents plausible specifics about their lives and deaths in a handful of poems. “Inheritance” identifies her father as a self-made man: “His fists raised him from nothing to something,/ boss of the New Jersey mob” (14). This ended, of course, when he was “speeding/ home from his gambling casino” and he lost control of his “yellow roadster.” “Goulash” tells us that he was “a chief petty officer, Third Fleet/ welter-weight champion” and later, “a bootlegger” and “shadow/ gunman who slept with his revolver” (28). “As a girl,” Stone’s “mother. . . lived on a mud street/ in a provincial town near Budapest.” Regarding her death, which closely followed her husband’s, and creating interesting parallels with the suicide of poet Maria Tsvetayeva, “Lantern” suggests the unconscious commission of a slow suicide: “She shivered as a girl in Hungary,/ became a woman who walked out her despair/ for hours in the freezing rain./ All my life I have tried to forgive her for dying” (15). Often, a statement like Stone’s would be deemed irrational and embarrassingly regressive; in this instance, both parents acted recklessly, courting death. In “Mother’s Gown,” Stone rightly asks: “On your death bed what did you think,/ knowing you would leave me/ only the gift of your likeness?” (32). She probably wasn’t thinking of her daughter and son at all, but about her grief for her husband. In several poems, Stone describes how her orphanhood has tarnished important aspects of her adult life:

The day my daughter was born, I called and called

to a place beyond calling from my mother and father
who never grow old. They weren’t there,
not cooing through the hospital nursery window,

not first day of kindergarten, not at my wedding
to arrange my satin train and give me away. (“Generations,” 77)

Even Stone’s experience of being a grandmother reminds her of the primal loss; in “A Word,” happy that she can “listen to Emma’s four-year-old serious talk,” she adds, “I love to hear her call/ ‘Mama,’ a word I never said./ But this poem isn’t about the dead.” Since intergenerational comparisons and contrasts are inevitable, the poem’s final sentence also means the opposite of what it is trying to assert.

Faced with the relative paucity of historical details, Stone often follows Eleanor Roosevelt’s injunction to “dig,” with the aid of traces, material, verbal, and cultural, into her own imaginative power to reanimate her parents’ history, to extend their stories and, in that sense, their lives. The book’s front cover has a clear photo of Stone’s parents, while the back cover has a bleached version of the same, with the poet herself perched over her mother’s hat, looking eerily like both. Two poems, “Petit Elegy” and “Souvenir,” use the photo as a point of departure. While in the former, Stone mourns the fact that her “father is empty clothing, a navy blue double-breasted/ blazer and white flannel pants in the photo// that has stood on the old Chickering piano for years,” that he “is a lost listing in the telephone book” (46), she fleshes out details in the latter poem and struggles to make them “here” so she can travel with “them,” even if they are unaware of it. The fine description of the festive event in “Souvenir” almost carries Stone into her parents’ experience:

Forever frozen
in Sloppy Joe’s, Havana,
my parents sip Cuba Libres.
Black hair pomaded and parted
In the middle, my father in white slacks,
navy-blue double breasted blazer
blows smoke clouds with his cigar.
Beside him, my mother,
mink wrap around her shoulders,
a velvet cloche hiding
her profile,
stares into the future
that never comes. (37)

The first jarring note, “forever frozen,” can be set aside, yet the twelfth and thirteen lines remind us of the subjects’ loss of an anticipated future. The poet aims for recovery by focusing on who the fellow “in the background” might be in relation to her foregrounded parents. Almost immediately, though, she lays bare her own device, and this honesty undermines the potential force of “presence”: “I invent him/ as go-between/ for the gambling syndicate/ and the Bureau of Internal Revenue. . . .” (37). It would be exciting to learn what such a “go-between” actually accomplished and how he did it, but the narrative—its fictive status exposed—is shut down before it can gather steam: “. . . my father as el jefe,/ while my mother spills/ her velvet words/ from the frame.” “As” calls attention to the father’s posing and/or being posed, the staging of his figure to assume a (foreign) likeness that is not an identity. The fact that the mother’s words—not only soft, smooth, elegant, and perhaps exotic but precious to the daughter—“spilled” from the photo’s historical container suggests that they are not delivered to the poet, prime representative of the next generation. They are wasted.

This disruption of “presenc-ing” by a narratized consciousness of absence also characterizes poems in the book that attempt to revive Stone’s parents by putting them in leading movie roles: “In the movie house I watched/ her half-parted lips, her thin eyebrows/ like my mother’s, lighting up the screen” (31). In the case of this Berlin-based “chanteuse in the strapless,” Stone breaks off the narrative to concentrate on her desire for the actress to stay in character and thus preserve her mother’s celluloid “life”:

I didn’t want her to falter before the camera
forget her lines, jumble her speech,
thinking strangers were old friends, her days broken dreams.

If she couldn’t call her daughter by name,
rinse her hennaed hair, if she shuffled
in padded slippers and frayed chenille robe,

bowing before the absent camera like a lily,
doing what she always did for love,
how could I keep my mother alive? (31)

Because there are multiple takes, the actress will never “falter,” but the viewer projects her own angst onto the women on screen. Expression of anxiety not only shows the precariousness of Stone’s attempt at imaginative displacement, but the exposure of its illusory qualities drains its possibilities of even a temporary impact, a respite from mourning.

When Stone titles a poem, “It’s Easy to Imagine You Here,” the ease of imagining is undone by the impossibility of keeping what is imagined. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud examines how his grandson plays the game of fort/da to “control” the pain of his mother’s recurrent disappearance, while Stone apostrophizes her mother—if she is addressed, she “must” exist—to tell of her sudden reappearance and re-disappearance:

Amid the Spanish tile, by the oversized pool where
Esther Williams once swam laps you come back, Mother,
my movie star, sipping a frozen daiquiri,
your long pearls translucent in your pink silk lap.

Now I see you poised at the pool’s edge
in your one-piece bathing suit.
Legs slick with coconut oil you dive
and disappear as you did when I was four. (45)

Even if Stone’s mother never set foot in a pool, the association with an actual movie star and champion swimmer sets a tone of glamorous fantasy comparable to those in “Before the Camera” and “Legacy.” As the last two quatrains reveal, the fantasy is vulnerable to dissolution. The “here” that Stone has imagined is exposed as existing at one remove:

I hold my breath afraid this will be the end
of my imagining, until you surface, wave to me.
Now you hold me in your underwater world.
Longer and longer I stay with you before you vanish

again, Mother, my mermaid, and lungs bursting
I must kick to the pool’s top where
on a billboard the peeling figures
of movie actresses hold foaming daiquiris. (45)

Stone is not in the “underwater world” at all, not next to her mother; she is “held” (captivated—in a sense, haunted) by an image, product of her imagining, that she cannot touch. Holding her breath to ward off bad luck and as though underwater, she is forced to understand the temporal and practical limits of this willed in-spiration: if she tries to live in her imagination to gain what cannot return in reality, she will cease to live (“drown”) psychologically. The one observed reality that greets her when she returns from the subterranean image-world turns out to be a mass-produced image, an advertisement promoting intoxication, and obvious physical decay undermines the ad’s rhetorical effect and ironically indicates the transience of images and human beings.

Stone’s book vigorously supports the thesis that (tragically premature) absence makes the heart obsess—without hope of enduring relief. Of course, fully articulated, aesthetically satisfying testimony may prove a small measure of compensation. The volume’s epigraph is “I told myself ‘pity should begin at home.’ So the more pity I felt, the more I felt at home” (11). Although obsession and self-pity are often tedious for those who hear or read about it, Traveling with the Dead kept me eager for more revelations. Not only would a purveyor of self-pity not include the ironizing epigraph, but Stone does not waste words or write imprecisely, she avoids saturated emotional language, and she displays a quiet wit. Respecting her pain and its persistence, we need not label her a whiner. Also, as my analysis should suggest, many of the poems illuminate, supplement, quirkily echo, or round out one or more others, so insights about the situation as a whole gradually accumulate, until, in the last poems, the orphan as grandmother reports that much is right with her, that the obsession has been somewhat muted.

*****

Thomas Fink’s fifth book of poetry, Clarity and Other Poems, was published by Marsh Hawk Press in Spring, 2008. A Different Sense of Power (Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2001) is his most recent book of criticism. In 2007, he and Joseph Lease co-edited “Burning Interiors”: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics. Heather McHugh and David Lehman selected his poem, “Yinglish Strophes IX,” for The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). His paintings hang in various collections.

ENTER MORRIS IMPOSTERNAK, PURSUED BY IRONIES by EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY

2008-07-20T22:19:00.000-07:00

JAMES STOTTS Reviews

Enter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies by Eugene Ostashevsky
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2008)

The easiest commentary first—Enter Morris Imposternak, Pursued by Ironies is Eugene Ostashevsky’s 12-part suite of frustrated love poems. I think it is a sign of growth, with more of his true strengths evident, and less of the image-making quirks of a writer looking to brand himself. That is, Ostashevsky’s true colors are on display.

The real Boris Pasternak was a poet whose signature fortes en correspondances were whining—but it was a whine of profoundly high order—and bragging. And he was also a poet who believed in recurrence, of a kind—the poetic spirit as orphic reincarnation—which was in vogue during his time and which he shared with fellow traveler, Marina Tsvetaeva, and German High-Romantic Rainer Maria Rilke, among others. As far as biography goes, he was the Jewish-Russian son of a musician and painter, studied music and philosophy formally throughout Europe before turning to poetry, was one of the few great poets to stay and survive Russia’s civil war and WWII and lived long enough to be a Nobel laureate in absentia. To puzzle out a comparison to Russian émigré poet, Eugene Ostashevsky, reveals a troubled inheritance full of its own implicit poetry. It would be misguided, however, to assume that Ostashevsky writes like Pasternak here; he does not.

Neither Ostashevsky or Pasternak is a stranger to annoying plaints and megalomaniacal contests with gods. Pasternak said he was a genius, the same as Shakespeare, to justify his abusive Shakespeare translations, and in Ostashevsky’s earlier poems, his DJ Spinoza was particularly fond of whining/arguing with god in proud frustration. Here we see Ostashevsky further exploring the formal tendencies of whining, extending it as an art form, and examining its structure for weaknesses and special properties, much as a philosopher would. If Ostashevsky’s poetry has sometimes been described as insouciant (and it has, even by Ugly Duckling Presse, the bookmaker he’s most closely associated with and who published the Imposternak chapbook), it is certainly not sans souci here, but might better be called childish, in the best sense. Sorrow is the operative issue in Imposternak’s world, and it is considered from the ground up. It is an intellectual response to the poet’s inability to find or make meaning with his art, as in the lines

It is possible that ideas don't suffer--
Such as the idea of suffering, for instance,--

But we are not ideas, are we?
Morris Imposternak, at least, is not an idea.

or the impossibility of meaning’s having any beauty, because of the indignity of the body. Ironically, Ostashevky’s talent for the ugly beauty of the body is on full display here, and forms the basis for his strongest metaphors. For example:

Look at the sea! Don't you think that the sea too suffers
When it pulls up its skirt at low tide

And shows the varicose veins, the ingrown hairs, the splotches
Along its cold, pale, swollen, hypertensive leg?

Do not love
For when you pop open a human being

All you find is forty feet of intestine
And how lovable is that?

Ultimately, the pleasure and pain of Ostashevsky’s poetry seems a confluence of distinct formulae: the antipodal or apophatic logical construction (a world composed of P and -P), the surrender to nonsense, or a-sense, or tran-sense (“And anything can be just so anything”), the errant allusion to Rome (Philippi) or philosophy (Bertrand Russell’s paradox for starters, and (maybe) Zarathustra and Lacan, and otherwise full of the influence of Pasternak’s favorite Germans as well), a fantasy world made of monsters and puns (DJ Spinoza and MC Squared, Morris Imposternak, the Begriffon, the toothy Knight of the Swan, and cetera), nihilism (“We can’t change the world we can only make noise”), scientific and mathematic inquiry (Ostashevsky’s PhD dissertation was on the history of zero, as he likes to remind us), and the tender touch. Not condescending, the stray allusions seem to float over the readers’ heads like chaff in the wind. These are loaded poems; the chemical signature of a complete poem, then, is a compressed analysis, and makes the critic’s job redundant to a certain extent…

At the risk of sounding ironical, these poems seem, compared to Ostashevsky’s other work, more sincere, less flip. The problem is, that he isn’t actually flip, and these poems aren’t exactly sincere, but as a matter of tone...the outrageous rhymes are less in evidence, the earnest doubts and inquiries are.

Of course, I recommend the book. I think Eugene Ostashesvky is a master in his stride (maybe a master of the minor type, like Pollack was with paint, but nevertheless (and with Imposternak we do find him stretching further)). The biggest risk he takes is in begging the comparison with Pasternak, who, unlike Spinoza, was a poet. Is he panning Pasternak? If, in response, we readers go back to Pasternak, we find gifts beyond/different from Ostashevsky’s; Pasternak was perhaps less humorous or outrageous, but just as inventive and intellectually dynamic. There’s little evidence Ostashevsky has Pasternak’s typical poetic genius for recreating the beauty of nature. The advantage to Ostashevsky is in his special mode, which Pasternak’s temper was ill-suited to: inquiry.

What are we to do with our banality?

And with Enter Morris Imposternak, Ostashevsky offers a small, but compelling answer.

****

J.H. Stotts is a writer and photographer living in Boston and starting a family. His essays, poems, and translations have been published in Circumference, Hanging Loose, The Atlantic, and numerous e-zines. What he can't publish elsewhere he posts on his blog, The Fugue Aesthetics of J.H. Stotts. He has just finished a shotgun anthology of Russian poetry, from Fet to Esenin to Ryzhii, in formal and experimental translations.

THE BLUE MOON SERIES by RODGER MARTIN

2008-07-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

The Blue Moon Series by Rodger Martin, with Illustrations by Chad Gowey
(Hobblebush Books, Brookline, N.H., 2007)

Everyone involved with creating this beautiful little book should be proud. From the surreal illustrations to the subtly intense poetry, this work by the award winning poet and artist is first rate. Together, they set a somewhat haunting tone as each month of the year presents its own unique ambience.

For example, in “March: The Chaste Moon” readers will walk the foggy streets of London by night. Martin’s words will take you there:

London drizzled this early November evening,
but now the overcast dissipates and the foggy drift
of coal smoke settles like gunpowder’s acrid
afterspice once the fireworks have silenced.
A lunar glow trims the glistening spires.

Human imagination can run wild at night, when the moon is full and shadows prowl and the screech of an owl penetrates our marrow. This excerpt from “May: The Panther Moon” gave me shivers:

When the moon has depth and Minerva’s bird
calls clear and cold as death,
sleep eludes the living.

“June: The Dyad Moon (Along the Monadnock Watch)" is a powerful poem, gut wrenching in its pristine beauty. Martin’s poetic skill and Gowey’s illustration commemorate a tragedy amidst Nature’s elegance. The first verse provides a nocturnal backdrop:

Moonglow casts deep to the dark spine
and flank of this ancient whale of a rock.
And here beached by the edge of a marsh
stream, like a salt, like an almost Roman
outpost, stands a well, guarding hemlock
and brush while mist unveils its tapestry.

In “October: The Hunter’s Moon (Wolf)” the poet dreams and becomes the wolf in spirit:

In the 3 a.m. dark,
I nuzzle you well, own my dream
And the leafless stem of time.

In the soft breathing
your pads become my tread.
Your smooth, worn claws
glisten in the starlight.

The Blue Moon Series is exceptional in every way and highly recommended.

*****

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

FLOWERS OF BAD by DAVID CAMERON

2008-07-20T22:10:00.000-07:00

RYAN DALEY Reviews ... AND THEN Engages

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

[First, the review. Second, the engagement.]

David Cameron has flown low before, I’m sure of it. At dusk when you confuse the bleachers with the field those bats are his. His hang glider is operable. Somewhere big, potato and fake Viking hat-wearing songbirds are roused to concerto by these Flowers of Bad: Mistranslations, or perhaps Babel, of Baudelaire.

You’re the one singing on construction duty. A few girders up the sparks are flying. Men partaking in men’s diets. Women taking on the scaffold. This is Whistler, 2008. And what you hear isn’t the foreman, nor their orders, but Cameron’s garbled song stretched so that its metal now reflects.

Take the first quatrain of “Man & The Sea (XIV),”

In books you’re always looking at the sea!
The sea is your mirror, you look like an ass
In the infinite derailments on your street
And your spirit is less patriotic than a golf ball

When, in the Argentine dialect, a person is an idiot or imbecile, they are referred to as a pelotudo. It’s no coincidence then that pelota, ball, is the root. Ball head. For Maradona, the ball was something to kick. And the head of stupid person should be used for golfing.

In books, both as a character and the more obvious function of literature as mirror, this “you” looks out, taking in the sea during a visit to the beach on a ratty towel. Maybe this “you” smokes, maybe not. Maybe this “you” is thinking that looking like an ass is what most pelotudos dream of: donkeys. The infinite doorways, or derailments, derailleur (options in gearing) or other streets leading off into nothing, or chain guards, as the scoundrel is indeed found selling patriotism. Hidden pelotudos.

**********

[An Engagement]

David Cameron flew low front. In the twilight when you confuse the field this beater operational with him.

His sailplane of the breath is functional.

Some divide large, potato and the songbirds of Viking are caused with concert by these Flowers of Bad: Mistranslations, or perhaps Babel, of Baudelaire.

While singing in the duty of construction.

Some beams at the top of the sparks steal the men who make examination of the part in the methods of the men.

Women who make examination scaffolding.

It is Whistler, 2008. And what you hear is not him supervising, nor their orders, but deformed song of tended Cameron so that its metal is reflected now.

It makes examination of first quatrain of "man and sea (XIV),"

In books you’re always looking at the sea!
The sea is your mirror, you look like an ass
In the infinite derailments on your street
And your spirit is less patriotic than a golf ball

when, in dialect of Argentina, you wish to call somebody an idiot or imbecile, it is not any coincidence whereas in a Basque sphere, or in the puffiness, it is with the root of a head of the sphere.

For Maradona, the sphere is something to give a rejection. And the head of the person stupid must be used to play golf.

In the books, like the character and a more obvious function of literature likes the mirror, this one "that one you" looks at outside, attractive in the sea during a visit with the beach in a ratty outfit. Perhaps this "that one you" smoke, perhaps not. Perhaps this "which you" think that must resemble an ass of which majority of the dream of the pelotudos: asses.

Infinite doors, or of the derailments, the derailleur (options in the clutch) or other streets which are carried out distant of anything, as a rabble proves certainly to sell the patriotism. Hidden Pelotudos are found in the sphere.

*****

Ryan Daley blogs at Giver (http://charitablegiving.blogspot.com/) and teaches in New York City. Previous work appears in GlitterPony, Scantily Clad Press, BlazeVOX, JACKET. His chapbook, A BORDER LOOKS LIKE MAKING LOVE, is forthcoming from Airforce Joyride (The Greying Ghost Press).

BOOKS by TIM ATKINS, SUSAN LANDERS and DAVID CAMERON

2008-07-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews:

Horace: Poems by Tim Atkins
(O Books, 2007)

and

Covers by Susan Landers
(O Books, 2007)

and

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

1.

When Rome fell, its survivors and inheritors incorporated as many bits of the ruins as they could carry into their own cultures. I’m thinking of the stones of the monuments that became parts of their houses as well as the bits they had no choice but to live with, such as the Latin that became the romance vernaculars … and a countless number of what for simplicity’s sake I’ll call concepts … or culture.

While the stones were used locally, the languages and concepts spread across the entire planet.

When later empires fell, e.g. the British, the same thing happened.

Now, as “globalization” follows* its own rise and fall, we are trapped yet again in the same cycle, but this time with a twist. Because this time there may very well be NO “those who follow”. Or very few of us/them (us or them depends on when): the fall of this “empire” may very well synch up with mass diminution if not total extinction in the number of humans who survive.

*”follows”, perhaps, as in Derrida’s “But as for me, who am I (following)?” (cf. Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, tr. David Wills)

This possibility has led to a bone-deep understanding of “first time tragedy, second time farce, nth time what??” It must be noted, immeasurably sadly, nth time may not be tragic, technically speaking, but it’s certainly, well, certainly …

This understanding places many of us in a very peculiar relationship with the “two gross of broken statues, … the few thousand battered books” that form our artistic inheritance. This is the stuff of which everyone who reads these words is at least partially made. Now that we know what we know, now that we know we can’t escape what we know, what do we DO with this shit? Especially now that a slowly/ridiculously quick modernity has us so locked in, now that modernism’s utopianism has turned out to be a badly cut speedball with some dirty E tossed in for kicks?

That’s the question I’m interested in here. Properly speaking, what follows will not be a review. Here’s my review:

I’ve read these books. I will read them again. You might want to consider reading them.

What I’m going to do here is chew on how each of these books addresses my questions, or at least my questioning (I’m not sure whether these questions are questions or confusions). To repeat, as if this were short-attention-span television: What do we DO with this shit? In some ways, what follows are three separate but related mini-essays. They are ordered in terms of source-poet chronology.

2.

Horace is as much an icon of empire, high culture and classicism as they come. Suggestive anecdote:

I was once privileged to know an Englishman who had been a judge in Malay. During World War II he was captured at Singapore by the Japanese and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. He told me once that when finally he had been liberated and had returned to what seemed to him for some time the strange world of England and freedom, one of his first actions was to hire a horse and ride out on to the open spaces of the South Downs. Here, with no one within sight or sound, he would put his horse to a gallop and at the top of his voice shout out to the clouds and sky the words of Horace’s Fifth Ode in the First Book:

Quis multis gracilis te puer in rosa
perfusus liquidis urget odoribus
                   grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
                                     cui flavam, religas comam,
simplex munditiis? …

Famous lines, translated by Milton among so many other translations, and rendered by James Michie as follows:

What slim youngster, his hair dripping with fragrant oil,
Makes hot love to you now, Pyrrha, ensconsed in a
                   Snug cave curtained with roses?
                                     Who lays claim to that casually
Chic blond hair in a braid? …

My friend, if his voice held out, would continue the Ode from the beginning to its beautiful end while the horse galloped on and the clouds floated by. Even the few lines which I have quoted will indicate that the poem could have no very obvious reference to his predicament. Yet my friend’s action seems to me absolutely natural, indeed almost inevitable. I should certainly do the same myself, had I ever acquired any dexterity as a horseman. As it is, on foot and less gloriously, I still murmur to the woods and streams.

(Rex Warner, intro. to James Michie’s translation of The Odes of Horace)

There is NOTHING in this passage that DOES NOT suggest to me that these people were NOT living on another planet.

So, those days are done. At least for this reader.

More on Horace, from another angle: though he doesn’t believe in a psycho God the way Dante does (see below for more on that), he does suck up big time to totalitarian/totalizing power: Octavian, soon to be Augustus, and Maecenas; it was the latter who gave Horace his farm and his peace and quiet. Why am I not surprised, then, that Horace would be the one to write dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, “it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”, which we all should know by now to be one of the sickest lines in all poetry (and not sick in the good sense). Way back when, Wilfred Owen famously called this “the old lie.” As anyone who listens to the radio, reads the newspaper, or turns on the TV knows, they’re still telling it. And telling it. And telling it. And the poor saps are still buying …

But Horace … Horace is … what was it Bunting wrote about Pound’s cantos?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

An alp is an alp, so: what to do, what to do? Well, here’s Tim Atkins’ version of the Fifth Ode excerpted above:

O long lost
Mail slags
In yonder fane
Will I refer to Garland’s
Hoe

in dripping garments
it is the water

which is made black
who curbs the main
in yonder fane

in spirit world geysers

Hair long, will come
& mar the song

Say what? To be honest, I don’t know what this has to do with Horace. Though Michael Gizzi’s back cover blurb suggests that what Atkins provides is “a Horace very much in the vernacular and homophonic tradition of Rodefer’s Villon and Mayer’s (not to mention Zukofsky’s) Catullus”, I must confess: I don’t hear the homophony. I’ve gone through a number of these poems side-by-side with the Latin, and: I don’t hear it.

Though I do love “in dripping garments / it is the water / / which is made black”.

Sometimes the relationship between Atkins’ poem and Horace’s is more discernible, e.g., Atkins’ Odes II/1 is an unsympathetic reading of Horace’s II/1. Unsympathetic is putting it mildly. III/1 incorporates a name from Horace, though in distorted form. Etc.

Something else, or a number of something elses, besides homophony and/or reasonably direct translation, is going on here. I’m not sure what.

Second admission: I just wrote “I’m not sure what.” To read this book, I don’t need to be sure what. In fact, I don’t really care whether I always get what Atkins is doing with/to Horace. However these poems were constructed, whatever their relationship to Horace, I dig ‘em. They are much more from my world than Horace is. From my planet. They feel right. And who feels it knows it, yeah.

3.

Let’s turn to Landers’ Dante.

Here I am, the not yet post romantic, in spite of the above and all our/my theorizing, heir of Ivan Karamazov, in absolute sympathy with Ivan’s question to Alyosha:

“… Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature … and to found that edifice on its … tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

And in absolute agreement with Alyosha’s response:

“No, I wouldn’t …”

Here I am; how am I supposed to read Dante (whom, oddly enough, I’ve read many times, in many translations, though perhaps somewhat stupidly), the poet for whom, to quote Robert Hollander, in his intro to The Inferno (trs. Robert and Jean Hollander), “If God is just, it follows logically that there can be no question concerning the justness of His judgments”, without being repelled by the unquestioning and eventually joyous acceptance of “the torture and death” of countless “tiny creature[s]”? According to Hollander, any sympathy on Dante-the-character’s or the reader’s part (or, let me add, on the translator’s) for the sufferings of those in hell (and by logical extension those still living) is a revelation of a serious failure of understanding by the character or the reader, pace Dante-the-writer’s difficulty living up to that standard; the less stupidly I read, the more I tend to agree with Hollander. Human concerns are out of place here. This is God’s world, dog, GOD, the o-riginal OG; don’t ever forget it.

It’s partly a theological problem; it’s partly a culturo-historical one, i.e., in this time of terrifying and despicable and powerful fundamentalist certainties, which have led to the deaths of countless creatures (and, yes, I include the atheist/technological/scientistic/political/economic certainties among the usual-suspect religious ones), I side with Ivan, and “rebel”, to use Dostoevsky’s word, against anyone who would found anything on another’s tears (or even on their own) (fundies, to use an Anselm Hollo word, freak me out …)

Anyway, how do I read Dante now? Through Susan Landers, that’s how. She doesn’t bow to his theology. She enters into an agon with him and lets that agon show.*

*I borrow the word agon from Carla Harryman’s back-cover blurb.

The agon takes many forms. I’m going to start at the very beginning , as how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-Maria’s “Do-Re-Mi” suggests. Here are the first few lines of Canto 1 of The Inferno in the Hollanders’ version:

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.

Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense, and harsh –
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw.

Here are those same lines, by Landers:

/ in the middle of a lost road / forest gloomy / straight craft mislaid /

/ fuck /

/ how many wars /

/ sour wild /

/ thinking a-news fear / let me speak of loving / more than death / of finding /

(She goes on to add in the next line: “/ nothing about this is funny”)

While there are MANY ways I could enter into a discussion of her agon, I just want to note a few:

Her “straight craft” parallels “straight way” but with a difference. The “way” (Dante’s via) is now a craft, suggesting that it is not something laid out in advance, like a road one must follow, but rather something that is made step by step. Etymologically, craft relates to strength, the notion of skill only arising later. Strength or skill, the via is self-constructed. This is post-theology-ology. As writ in the post-theological-gospel of the Dead’s “New Speedway Boogie”:

You can't overlook the lack, jack, of any other highway to ride.
It's got no signs or dividing lines and very few rule to guide.

Her making specific “the nature of that wood” with “/ how many wars /” is of course a reference to the totally fucked up policies of the US over the last (hell, who can count ‘em?) years, among the totally fucked up policies of ever entity with the strength to HAV an actionable policy, but it’s also a refusal to see the dark wood as a place of individual torment; the torment affects individuals, of course, but it’s certainly collective.

“/ Thinking a-news fear /” is not quite an agonistic dance with Dante’s original, though I might mention that there is a bit of word-play between the Hollanders’ “renews” and Landers’ “a-news”, which is justified by the Italian rinova, which is, I think, the source for “news” for Landers. It’s rather an agon with (to repeat myself) the sick policies of contemporary mainstream world information “news” sources, 99% of which are so deep in the pocket of our Owners (as if major media can be considered separately from our Owners) that uh uh uh, I begin to splutter here … I hope no-one needs elaboration.

Finally, I would like to note that while we will learn that “the good” that Dante discovers is God’s justice being played out and bowed down to as divine love, the good that Landers discovers in the same place is a product of human, rather than divine agency: loving … finding. What WE do, not what God does.

By focusing on these few lines, I’ve somewhat overstated the case. Landers doesn’t only struggle with Dante in this book (I wish I had room to describe all the ways she struggles); she also honors him. A number of the “covers” are much more “faithful in their way” to the originals. But even they are read through a post-theological post 9/11 lens. I don’t have space here – I don’t want to take the space, I want to say a few words about Cameron’s Baudelaire, too – to go into a thorough analysis of everything she does. You’ll have to take my word for it that it’s worth the ride.

But I must also mention that not everything in this book is out of Dante. There are also the “B Sides”. The B Sides are more-or-less generated by current events. I’d like to end with two lines from one of the B-Sides, “Almost Certainly, It’s Agita (November 1, 2004)”:

(THINGS DON’T GO MIRACULOUSLY RIGHT.
YOU MUST FIGHT FOR THEM TOOTH AND NAIL.)

[Note: the presidential “election” was held on 2 November … was she prescient, or just awake? As she notes in another poem,

We are all Floridians.

In Ohio.

…

Scattered problems were reported –

Powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon –

The stuff you don’t smoke want to around.”

(“Like the looting of explosives –“)

[Note: as I write this, as the nominating campaigns for the presidential “election” 2008 wind down, it is becoming clear that Democrats from Florida and Michigan won’t really get a say in who their party nominates [Later addendum: they didn’t] … dark woods indeed … for a country pretending to be a democracy …]

3.

Baudelaire is a if not the first poet of modernity (cf. Walter Benjamin). But he’s also a modernist, and David Cameron is not. Some might say that modernism is so over, though of course modernity is not. This is not the place for an essay on modernism’s utopian tendencies, which are undoubtedly familiar to y’all, not on the way some of those tendencies actually fuel certain postmodernist poetics; in any case Cameron’s doesn’t seem utopian to me. Cameron simply treats Les Fleurs du Mal as source text and works magic algorithms on it.

This may align this work with Atkins’; it’s hard to tell, because I don’t have any clues to Atkins’ methodologies. Luckily for me, Cameron is explicit about his. His notes are my favorite part of the book, which is not the slightest knock on the poems.

He uses a million methods (well, he lists thirteen), such as “Mword”, which uses Microsoft Word 3.0’s spellchecker, “Phonetic”, which is homophonic, “Annagrammatic”, and others which it would take too long to describe here, such as “Collision & Directed” and “The Two Good Sisters”, in order to fashion some mighty fine contemporary poems which are themselves at least as much as they are “Baudelaire.”

This might bother some sensibilities (I feel for poor Clayton Eshleman, who can’t recognize the utter greatness of, e.g. Ted Berrigan’s version of Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau Ivre” …). It doesn’t bother mine. Since the methods uses are so varied, and the results so unpredictable, I’d either have to quote a dozen poems or … So, I’m only going to give one example, the closing lines of the book, the last two stanzas of Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage”. In order to fully enable appreciation of what Cameron has done, I will quote these lines in the original and in some other well-known translations:

Ô Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l’ancre!
Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons!
Si le ciel et la mer sont noirs comme de l’encre,
Nos coeurs que tu connais sont remplis de rayons!

Verse-nous ton poison pour qu’il nous réconforte!
Nous voulons, tant ce feu nous brûle le cerveau,
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?
Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!

…

Oh, Death, old captain, hoist the anchor! Come, cast off!
We’ve seen this country, Death! We’re sick of it! Let's go!
The sky is black; black is the curling crest, the trough
Of the deep wave; yet crowd the sail on, even so!

Pour us your poison wine that makes us feel like gods!
Our brains are burning up! — there’s nothing left to do
But plunge into the void! — hell? heaven? — what’s the odds?
We're bound for the Unknown, in search of something new!
                   (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

O Death, old Captain, it is time. Weigh anchor!
To sail beyond the doldrums of our days.
Though black as pitch the sea and sky, we hanker
For space; you know our hearts are full of rays.

Pour us your poison to revive our soul!
It cheers the burning quest that we pursue,
Careless if Hell or Heaven be our goal,
Beyond the known world to seek out the New!
                   (Roy Campbell)

It’s time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!
The land rots; we shall sail into the night;
if now the sky and sea are black as ink
our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.

Only when we drink poison are we well —
we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,
to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,
who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.
                   (Robert Lowell)

Death, old admiral, up anchor now,
this country wearies us. Put out to sea!
What if the waves and winds are black as ink,
our hearts are filled with light. You know our hearts!

Pour out your poison, let us be comforted!
Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge
to Hell or heaven – any abyss will do –
deep in the unknown to find the new!
                   (Richard Howard)

Death, my old captain, it is time! Let us weigh anchor! O Death, this country is boring. Under way! If sky and seas are inky black, you know our hearts are filled with light!

                   Pour us your poison for our comfort! We want, this fire so blazing in our brains, to plunge to the depth of the abyss–Hell or Heaven, who cares?–to the heart of the Unknown to find the new!
                   (Keith Waldrop)

And here’s Cameron:

O Mort, old and vying captain, it’s time, lift up the anchor!
This country is irritating Mort! Let’s dress one another in our mother’s curtains!
If the sky tries to sell us or eat the sea aren’t we night or black like a crusty
Northern Sea dog you met on the gangway stuffing his pockets with silk flowers?

Each line knots itself around my neck your fish write mercury in my brain Piano-
forte
Hangs me from the clotheslines we want, my dead aunt and I a few fires to broil
the cervix
To drown in the fountain drunk Heaven or Hell, who gives a fuck?
We’re fond of not knowing and keep digging in our empty pockets for the desert
or the flood.

As Randy Newman sang about my hometown, that great dystopic new, blooming like a fleur du cheesy mal between the desert of the real and the crusty sea too sick to swim in, I love it!

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman's most recent publications are No Sounds Of My Own Making, World Zero, and (forthcoming) A Spectrum of Other Instances. His work is anthologized in The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. His current project is tentatively titled *1000 Views Of "Girl Singing"*. He has just been named co-editor of Leafe Press. You can catch him in action at Zeitgeist Spam.

ISLE OF SIGNATORIES by MARJORIE WELISH

2008-07-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

KAREN RIGBY Reviews

Isle of Signatories by Marjorie Welish
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2008)

Challenging. Avant-garde. Enigmatic. The way to describe Isle of Signatories depends on whether you’re a fellow poet, a scholar familiar with the movements preceding Welish, an avid reader able to contextualize her work, or that fabled “average reader” that has come to the page expecting to understand and be moved, to hear the language sing.

If you were that average reader, and new to poetry, this would not be the collection to begin. The varying fonts and fragments of language might confirm any preconceptions you might have about poetry being showy or puzzling:

INVECTIVE
                  IN PERPETUITY

CLEAR GLASS SQUARE LEANING

LET’S WRITE ALL OVER THE PLACE

IF, THEN; IF NOT, THEN WHAT?

COUNTERCLOCKWISE
                                    PLACATED
                                                      LOW PRESSURE

TINTED LINEN OBLONG FOLDED

LET’S WRITE HERE

SO WHAT?

(“Art & Language Writes an Epitaph”, p. 35)

This particular poem is appealing in its jubilance (there’s almost an impulse to think about inscriptions like “Kilroy was here!”) as it lists the varying surfaces that can be written on—the glass, the envelope, “STREAKED VEGETAL WHITE BINDING,” “GREEN WOOD STACKED WET” and so forth. The danger in posing the provocative question is that you might be tempted to wonder, indeed, so what? What does the poem amount to in the end, what are the aims of the book?

The description on the back cover is as follows:

In her latest collection, Marjorie Welish invents a world of public inscriptions. From graffiti to scholarly dedication and from historical placards to words etched in granite, she employs graphical display to mark the prompts and admonitions of rhetoric, the mysteries of coded language, the intellectual registers of form, the powerful gift of dedication, and the strange sense and substance of both new and dying literary conventions.

Knowing this won’t help, however, if it leaves you at a loss. Had the poems employed “found” text (there are no notes indicating that this is the case), it might have resulted in a curious exhibit akin to something like writtenonthecity.com, a site featuring user-contributed photos of graffiti and signs around the world. The poet would serve as a curator, offering back insights with the added layers of craft and juxtaposition. But we’re not witnessing an easily recognizable world. We’re not receiving missives from voices like our own, in the form of real language garnered from public places. It’s less about finding connection than it is about distance.

We’re offered a writer’s idea of public inscriptions. We’re introduced to a writer’s concerns with text as a protest against conventional poetry, if by conventional one means the lyric / narrative built on patterns of sound and imagery leading to some truth, observation, commentary or discovery.

Isle of Signatories is a cerebral project. The result is both riskier and more original than a pastiche of found poems would be. The drawback is that the poems don’t correspond to the familiar readily, and by extension, are more likely to appeal to those who already enjoy this type of poetry than to casual readers.

The poet is aware of the limitations writing in the margins can bring, even seems to be winking—“the poet is preparing to detonate / meaninglessness” (p. 83), and “What is poetry?” (p. 7). In the title poem, “Isle of the Signatories”, Welish writes:

                  She sang

Through other texts
                  A palette

                  Of irritability
                  Constitutive of

                  A signature—
Her singular voiceprint

Which is to say “I am here”
              The competent reader

This can be interpreted as longing—to be understood, to find the like-minded—or as an amusing, self-referential commentary on the process of writing itself, using “other texts” as the source. The more lucid moments in Welish’s poems are attractive for the glimpses they offer at the mind behind the work. The line of inquiry between writing and reading forms an organizing structure in the book. (Other poems mention authors and writing as well.) In “Fibulae Iterated”, the reader appears again:

The reader will be well advised to fathom the obscurity by
asking: in what sense does the editor pre-suppose self-
evidence by remarking “Unclear”.

The subsequent poem, “Unfolding Yes”, picks up the thread:

UNCLEAR. Normative editorial comment.
Itself unclear.

Later in the poem:

Remark “unclear” calls for change without
articulating the sense that obtains.

Still later:

Unclear—see me.

“Make clear”, a normative
Editorial remark that assumes its own
convention.

And later:

See subject-verb-object
Clarify: to which
community, by whose
authority, for what purpose, why?

The poem proceeds, each repetition providing a scaffolding. The speaker’s mounting
impatience with this editor, this thorn-in-the-side demanding clarity, makes us wonder.

It’s a valid point. Why do many of us expect a poem to unfold in a certain fashion?

Welish anticipated the very thing most likely to alienate a reader. Her intelligence and self-awareness allow you to feel reassured that she knows what she’s doing, but the question isn’t fully answered—you could ask the same series of questions in return—why condone anti-clarity, unless as a form of subversion?

If you can move beyond the suspicion that the poems were generated through a series of associative leaps only the initiated could decipher, you can start warming up to the book and appreciating the subtle humor embedded in the work.

The best poem is “Fibulae Iterated”, the one prose poem included here. It may not be representative of the whole, but it is the clearest poem. The first page is reproduced:

Fibulae Iterated

1
Lost tabby, prowling the fire escape and tagged “Minou”,
may be yours. Please claim.

Setting forth. If, in relation to genesis, we shall have
inaugurated advantage, we call the adventure good, a
good thing. If illustrious, setting forth shall have
inaugurated us to our advantage. And why not?

Yet another possibility exists: let cloth drop so that it
drapes across the string now oscillating, pinned to the
wall; take up the cloth. Repeat.

The reader will be well advised to fathom the obscurity by
asking: in what sense does the editor presuppose self-
evidence in remarking “Unclear”.

Yet another possibility exists: pin a length of string at
either end across the wall such that it supports a cloth
when dropped; take up the dropped cloth from the low
string now. Repeat.

Once upon a time, the outcome of our adventures,
seeming advantageous, was called “The End”; so began a
time after time. And later: of our seemingly indefatigable
adventures in large dimensions once upon a time.

Roaming and meowing cats—is it yours?

Roaming tabby tagged “Minou” is meowing; is it yours?
Please claim.

The poem continues for another three pages, weaving back and forth between the adventurers, the tabby, and the cloth. By the end, a whimsical, urgent voice emerges. This voice has every potential to delight. It’s quirky, sophisticated, and downright strange. Unfortunately, other passages in the book are closer to this excerpt [due to Blogger format, this excerpt is not shown as correctly formatted; you can assume a quad-center structure to all lines]:

To the debris for all hints of symptomatic
Intelligibility, the breadth of differentiation
relating A to insentient B. A fairly long breath
and a great deal else besides.
They boast chronologically.

Insofar as naming A
legible elements in lieu of intelligible length,
of uselessness—deeply humiliated but cannot articulate it—
insofar as impotent neo-slumber rendering effect
unapologetic society having put on
moonlight prophylactic
fitted
a collective plot whereby varying margins of wishful thinking.

(p. 53, “From Dedicated To”)

The most arresting lines, such as “deeply humiliated but can’t articulate it”, convey a distanced, self-reflective feeling. There’s a little bit of Bridget Jones sass in that clipped, telegram tone, in the things left unsaid, an echo also heard in the repeated “Please claim” in “Fibulae Iterated”, but these glimmers are often overwhelmed by the rest of the language.

The poems in Isle of Signatories seem to be about making a statement, about creating tension between the spare, spatial arrangement in some poems and the excess in others, about re-inventing poetics. If that was their purpose, they succeed, but I would recommend them with reservations, if only for the moments that intrigue.

*****

Karen Rigby’s second chapbook, Savage Machinery, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in September.

THEORY OF COLORS by MERCEDES ROFFE

2008-07-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Theory of Colors by Mercedes Roffe, Trans. from the Spanish by Margaret Carson
(Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, 2005)

Color, when articulated, is subjective. It’s based on preconceptions and biases as much as its pure nature.

Or, the point simply is color is not pure. Color is colored, as it were, by the viewer.

In that sense, this project is an ars poetica project, highlighting the integral role of reader-response as part of identifying a poem’s significance. Such is hinted by the poem “Encounter,” even as its effectiveness stems from how it clearly relates to other matters than color theory:

Encounter
                   (R. Varo)

If you wait
                                                      I’ll tell you
who you are

                                                      Let me in

I am not completely

                                                      dead

I am you

Even the chap’s epigraph by Marcel Duchamp—“The title is one more color”—affirms the role of subjectivity, how “red” could be “blood,” “rose,” “passion,” “anger,” et al to different people, or just variations of the color red—from fuschia to magenta to burgundy (or cabernet) and so on.

Anyway, a meditation on color theory is okay. But this would be a one-note project if that were all that Theory of Color is. What uplifts this collection beyond the world of the color wheel is how its evocative language—including spaces between words—invites “encounters.” There are gems sprinkled throughout the chap’s pages, such as this couplet from “Breaking the Vicious Cycle” that gives a new perspective on such notions as “first draft, last draft” to the Greek myth of Venus springing forth from Zeus’ forehead (or to a related Filipino creation myth of the first man and woman, Malakas and Maganda, stepping out fully formed from split bamboo):

a nest on my head forces
my birth

And lovely imagery, such as the scene that closes this excerpt from “Allegorie”:

eyes

children

ivy (or laurel)

an arc and a

                                    bas relief

on one side, in the corner

an angel                  astonished

                                    looking at

a crystal ball                    (as in disbelief)

And later in that same poem, an example of a witty leap:

reading a gate
as if reading an altar

These are deft poems entrancingly manifesting “a play / of light” (poem title).

How apt. A play of light—such, too, is as perfect an articulation of a theory of colors as it is about a revealed poetics clearly concerned about lucidity.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Anny Ballardini’s review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in JACKET, as well as Allen Gaborro’s review of her The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the Philippine News.

THE ORCHARD by BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY

2008-07-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

PAMELA HART Reviews

The Orchard By Brigit Pegeen Kelly
(BOA Editions, Rochester, N.Y. 2004)

Perhaps our ongoing fascination with fiction vs. memoir, the blather about spin and “truthiness” are what finally drove me out of the garden of reality and into the mythic orchard where what’s real is less important than what’s imagined and made. I weary of the noise of the culture straining to squeeze beauty out of the immediate. I want to be lost for awhile. As a youngster, several books offered this refuge -- The Secret Garden and A Girl of the Limber Lost -- and I often returned to them. Exploring those texts meant encountering images at the intersection of dreamscape and psychology -- where danger and eros, loss and discovery reside in the strange flora and fauna. In her book, The Orchard, Brigit Pegeen Kelly roams around this essential, ruined space, “a place/So old it seemed to exist outside of time.”

This is, however, no orderly, comforting garden. But then what garden really is: Who knows what or who lurks beyond the sugar snaps or zinnias -- ask Peter Rabbit and Eve. The poems in this collection are full of disquieting images: broken statues, rotting vegetation, overgrown and untended fruit trees, animal children, ancient gigantic carp and other weird beasts. It’s the landscape of fable and myth. Thus, Kelly’s project isn’t about telling it like it is. Nor is it about telling all. Her poems don’t sing of references to popular icons. Nor is she participating in the current narrative craze for stories of triumph over pain. The work of this collection is to lead the reader deep into the region of archetype, of dreams, to spend time in “the oldest part of the woods. / It is a dark unsettling place and I am drawn to it,” as the speaker describes her own underworld journey in the poem “Pale Rider.”

It’s a difficult undertaking. These poems demand the reader move slowly and return again. We’re asked to relinquish our need for short breathy meters. Kelly’s lines are as long and overgrown with sound as the orchard and fields depicted in the poems. There are archaic constructions that highlight the sense of myth and scripture even. Listen from the opening lines of the poem “Brightness from the North”:

Bright shapes in the dark garden, the gardenless stretch
Of old yard, sweetened now by the half-light
As if by burning flowers. Overture. First gesture,
But not even that, the pause before the gesture,
The window frame composing the space, so it
Seems as if time has stopped, as if this half-dark,
This winter grass, plaited with frost, these unseen
Silent birds might stay forever…

At the heart of the collection is loss, though there’s no one named -- a parent, a lover perhaps? The missing you is addressed directly in the poem “Elegy,” “I find you here, in the shifting grass, / In the late light, as if you had always been here. / Behind you two torn black cedars flame white/ Against the darkening fields…” Indeed the force of this absence has overturned statues, given stone lions mystical powers of birth and caused a swarm of bees to do “something beyond the report of beauty” -- carry a snake through a garden. Counterbalancing loss is presence, a boy child who opens the collection. In the prose poem “The Foreskin,” the boy’s foreskin is buried beneath a magnolia tree, thus blessing both flesh and fruit. The child figure appears through the course of this poetic wandering as a Virgil-like guide offering prophetic utterances.

What to make of this orchard, its old garden, dark pond, weird statues and shifting imagery of benevolent and malicious characters? That suffering and beauty go hand in hand, the foul and the fragrant, all the imaginings, the many arms of the mind, as Kelly writes of her orchard inhabitants -- this is dangerous beauty. It’s familiar territory for Kelly. She’s excavated around this place before, notably her previous collection, Song, which was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection from the American Academy of Poets. But a decade later, the sense of allegory is stronger and darker. The poet has retreated from the concluding stance of Song, which depicts the speaker and children looking at the moon,

“Perfect like a flower. Or an oracle. Something/Completely understood. But unspeakable.”

Now, comprehension is less important. Confusion -- and its images that “cannot be deciphered” but still delight -- abounds. Ultimately, Kelly proposes that the numinous is good. In the final poem, “The Sparrow’s Gate,” Kelly reminds us that:

…the fabric of the world—the sky itself, the trees, the garden
and its terrifying colors, the dusky texture of the boy’s hair—is
woven from rebuttals and embraces, takes on its hue, retains its
shape as surely as the patterns on the loom, to which the
woman had given too much importance, mistaking cloth for
flesh…

It’s in this last poem, with its loose, rambling irregular lines and cadences, and informal structures, that the reader is finally led out of the dark orchard. But unlike Dante who was greeted by stars after his long journey, we’re offered distant figures coming through a gate, women “laughing and laughing and carrying on” -- such a long strange trip but the mind is clear, “the air itself made visible.” And I am pleased to have lost bits of myself along the way, even as Kelly has re-fashioned remnants of myth and fable that this reader at least will bring back as boons.

*****

Pamela Hart, a former journalist, is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she works as a teaching artist. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published in 2006. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has been published in qarrtsiluni, BigCityLit.com, Rattapallax and Kalliope and is forthcoming in The Cortland Review. Read her blog, A Walk Around the Lake, at pamelahart.blogspot.com

CHANTEUSE/CANTATRICE by CATHERINE DALY

2008-07-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

KRISTINA MARIE DARLING Reviews

Chanteuse/Cantatrice by Catherine Daly
(Factory School, 2007)

In her collection of poems, Chanteuse/Cantatrice, Catherine Daly examines such diverse subjects as gender roles, politics, and the role of the poet in twenty-first century society. While her book treats a wide range of ideas, Daly’s distinctive use of form unifies the collection as she explores the fine line between reputability and disreputability in artistic life. By including titles at both the beginning and end of the each work, Daly often suggests that the questionable “chanteuse,” or cabaret performer, can quite seamlessly transition into a respectable artist—“une cantatrice”—and vice versa. A thoughtful meditation on the ways self-expression is categorized in American society, Chanteuse/Cantatrice raises significant questions about the binary distinctions to which many adhere, scrutinizing while “singing” throughout.

Daly’s use of fragmentation in conveying these themes is especially impressive. Often using “romantic debris” to create a text that can be read in multiple ways, Daly suggests through her distinctive use of form that the binaries that she delineates—of which Nurse/Assassin, Virgin/Whore, and Home/Front are merely a few examples—often prove more fluid than most would think. These ideas are exemplified by her poem “Assimilate/Appropriate,” in which she writes:

she—piaf—photographed with a copy of “L’Anglais sans Peine” in her hand
                                                      assimil method
assimilate (acculturate)
learn culture
                  information

to research these poems

what is culture
to consume and incorporate—acquire
                  one’s mind similar?

By juxtaposing the image of a poet with ideas about conforming to a dominant culture, Daly suggests that “assimilation” and “acculturation” often have repercussions for artistic freedom. Through phrases like rendering “one’s mind similar” and “what is culture/to consume and incorporate,” Chanteuse/Cantatrice suggests that cultural dominance often stifles artists’ attempts to create, rendering the thought-provoking disreputable. Implying through her use of fragmented forms that assimilation can easily metamorphose appropriation, Daly’s poem, like many of the works in this collection, proves at once challenging and lyrical throughout.

This stylistic approach works well with the repeated themes and motifs in the texts, which are often conducive to multiple, even contradictory, readings. In using these fragmented forms to explore the role of the artist in the political arena, for example, Daly presents coercion and rebellion alongside cooperation, suggesting through stylistic elements that these ideas often overlap and intersect. Her poem “Resistance/Collaboration//Collaboration/Resistance” exemplifies these trends. She writes, for example:

She was the only wireless operator left in the network.
She attempted to rebuild the network.
They knew of her and followed her,
Interrogated her. Although she remained silent, they discovered a book, an ordinary school copy book containing the messages she sent and received in code and in plain text…

We talked about when we were captured, and what this one thought, what that other had left to say. I remember what one of them said. She and I felt something had been wrong. She had the feeling—she was arrested as she arrived—there was an informant.

In this passage, Daly suggests through both her titles and her narrative that collaboration and resistance are not so easily delineated. In doing so, Daly suggests that the role of the poet, like the categories that she establishes, remains adaptable, yet firmly grounded in maintaining artistic freedoms, an idea that she conveys with grace and dignity throughout.

Chanteuse/Cantatrice is a provocative, enigmatic read. Ideal for readers of experimental and political poetry alike, Catherine Daly’s new book raises significant questions about the role of the poet in the twenty-first century. Five stars.

*****

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of five chapbooks, which include Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2006, her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, which include Janus Head, Rattle, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Rain Taxi, The Adirondack Review, The Main Street Rag, Big City Lit, CutBank, The Mid-American Review, Jacket, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, and others. Recent awards include residencies from the Centrum Foundation and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

WORDS IN YOUR FACE by CRISTIN O'KEEFE APTOWICZ

2008-07-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

MICHAEL LAYNE HEATH Reviews

WORDS IN YOUR FACE: A Guided Tour Through 20 Years of The New York City Poetry Slam by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz
(Soft Skull Press, 2008)

When it comes to the extreme delivery system of poetry called Slam, you find extreme opinions to match. On one side, you have those who consider slamming a necessary, overdue democratization of the form; yanking it out of Academia and positively transforming it like none since the Beats. Then there’s those whose mental picture of a slam consists of caffeinated gatherings of mad, shouty people whose offerings would be better served by a hiphop instrumental backing. Or not.

It is to the enormous credit of Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, then, that her new history of New York City’s slam scene WORDS IN YOUR FACE gives equal time to both sides; all the more surprising are the critical appraisals of the present state of Slam by some of its most recognizable practitioners.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. A longtime mainstay of NYC’s slam community, Aptowicz has constructed an objective yet passionate account of Slam's impact on New York’s long reknown status as a prime energy center for poets. The immediate effects of importing the Slam concept from its Chicago birthplace in the mid-80’s (legendarily midwived by working class poet advocate Marc Smith). The first blush and subsequent bluetouch-paper-lit media explosion Slam enjoyed in the mid-90’s, followed by the post-millennial, post-9/11 period of retrenching and restatement, which at this end finds Slam continuing to flourish in longstanding venues like the Urbana Slam (at the Bowery Poetry Club) and louderARTS.

And as this is, after all, spoken word-borne poetry we’re talking about, WORDS IN YOUR FACE is as much comprised of oral history as strict chronology. Aptowicz has done a most admirable job of getting NY Slam pathfinders, cheerleaders and exponents alike to talk candidly and honestly about about their experiences, and where they see it all headed in future.

WORDS IN YOUR FACE may not inspire the detractors to check out their local Slam night, but for its equally legion fans, it is a vital window into that world, and as such, a perfect update and companion to 1996’s masterful documentary SLAM NATION.

*****

Michael Layne Heath is a veteran inspired-amateur journalist, poet and musician living in San Francisco. His most recent chapbook SACRED GROUNDS was published by Kendra Steiner Editions, San Antonio.

THE CITY VISIBLE: CHICAGO POETRY FOR THE NEW CENTURY, Edited by WILLLIAM ALLEGREZZA & RAYMOND BIANCHI

2008-07-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

ANDY FRAZEE Reviews

The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, edited by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi
(Cracked Slab Books, Chicago, 2007)

“For years,” Paul Hoover writes in the Autumn 2005 issue of the Chicago Review, “Chicago was a fly-over city,” while “the real world of literature existed on the coasts.” Although “San Francisco comes ready-made,” he continues, “Chicago remained to be built.” But, as the former Chicagoan records in both that essay and in the foreword to The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, Chicago’s status as a home for innovative poetry changed significantly in the 1990s and early 2000s, with the establishment and growth of graduate creative writing programs, a flourishing of homegrown magazines, small presses, and reading series, and, not least, an influx of poets devoted to, as he says in the foreword, “alternative formal strategies.” The result is a burgeoning experimental poetry scene in the Second City, leading to contemplation of a “New Prairie Renaissance,” perhaps even of a “New Prairie School.” Into, and out of, this ferment of poetic activity comes The City Visible, an anthology part-historical snapshot and part-declaration of independence—“a portal,” co-editor William Allegrezza writes, “through which you might begin to see the poetry scene in a high moment.”

The City Visible gathers work from fifty-two poets, some better known (Hoover, Maxine Chernoff, Ed Roberson, Arielle Greenberg, and Peter O’Leary among others), some lesser known, with many at the relative beginnings of their literary careers, and living in Chicago area (with interesting exceptions, including current San Franciscans Hoover and Chernoff). Throughout the anthology, we’re treated to many instances of the challenging forms and charged language of the best of contemporary innovative practice, as in Jennifer Scappettone’s punning update on the long Whitmanic line:

I was pre-Pandoran once, clear & amok, scarlet free where scarcely orange or purple
romed: all
font, Greek, drunk, then, then Tyred, vinegar aspect for breakfast. How I seam now in
video
footage of national folding where only arson lives lives.

Or in the haunting final sentences of Suzanne Buffam’s prose poetic dramatic monologue, “Mariner”—

My voice has been described as nondescript, yet I continue to use it. I call to the hills and to the good people in them. I call to hear the sound of my own voice. The truth is, I seldom think about home at all. To grow up at sea is a mixed blessing, granted, but show me a blessing that isn’t.

As well as in the jagged, torqued lines of Michael Antonucci’s “Bicentennial Minutes from the Vet,” a poem (ironically) about Philadelphia:

Dawning(s)
                  liberty crucible
                                    crack/ed
belling(s)
              cook/ed                   Astroturf ring/ed
                  shouting(s),
thermometer                   soar
candy kitchen                   heat

While the book does provide a snapshot of the contemporary Chicago poetry scene, the collection of individual poetics involved seem to point less to the development of a particular school or movement than to a melting pot of various avant-garde approaches at work throughout contemporary American poetry. Take, as another example, the minimalist work of Bill Marsh, who posits that the correct reading of his texts demands—through tearing out the pages—the destruction of the book itself: “The trick to reading [the poems] is to place them one over the other, with the ‘template’ on the bottom, and then to hold them up to a bright artificial light, such as a CRT computer screen or a TV tuned to Channel One”:

N. RIMES [template excerpt]

                                                      a e i o (you)
evo cat

eva sum                                     evo sum

eva cat                                     service novice rain

2 0_ 0 2
N. 3 [poem]                                     covet air

covet tao                                     costume tao

costume air                                     cantor never vain

Toward the goal of exhibiting each poet’s use of postmodern formal strategies, each selection of work comes prefaced with a poetic statement, which often provides interesting insights—at least into the poet’s consideration of his or her own work, if not to the work itself. The statements, as with the poetry, range widely in form and intent, from one-sentence axioms (John Tipton’s “I always try to make something beautiful”) to extended discussions of process and context that may be longer than the selection of poetry itself. In the statements, as with the poems, there are gems, from the memorable nugget—

A poetic that precedes a poem privileges certainty of form over discovery in form. I feel myself devoted to the latter difficulty. (Dan Beachy-Quick)

—to the lyrical, personal account—

My hope is that there are always friends and neighbors around who are interested. I count on them being there to heckle when a poem isn’t up to the task of cultivating an eloquent silence. (Chuck Stebelton)

—to the tongue-in-cheek list of “what the poems are about”—

The poems are about: work, money, water, loss, cars, isolation, love, nature v. man, insanity, death, survivor’s guilt, war, time, desperation, bodies, beauty, sickness, ironic occurrences, torture, disappointment, housework, joy, murder, motherhood, branding, imperialism, inexplicable violence, Spaniards, sex, old age, disappearance, abandonment, mysticism, tidal waves, longing, spiritual connection, institutionalization, and MRIs. (Laura Sims)

As with any inclusion of statements considering the intent of the work presented, the results are often-interesting tensions between theory and practice, purpose and effect—and in this case only add to the appeal of the anthology.

Interestingly, for an anthology based on a notion of locality, place in general doesn’t seem particularly important in these poems. Granted, there are several references to Chicago, with co-editor Raymond Bianchi’s work perhaps coming closest to the kind of tough talk one might associate with the popular image of the city:

Chicago unlike New York is a city where the basic and the hard won is prized and quick millions are envied but never respected. Donald Trump must be building that big building on the river because no one here thinks that his gold lame life is worth thinking about. (“American Master”)

But, as Hoover asks in the Chicago Review essay, “How exactly does a Chicagoan write? Is it different from the Pittsburgh style? The Trobriand Islands?” While Hoover’s point is well taken, The City Visible provides a convenient occasion to ask such questions about the relation between location and locution. How may locality influence poetic practice—consciously or subconsciously—and may it do so to such a degree that place can be detected in poetic form? Does the Chicago air pervade these poems as materially as it pervades the blood and lungs as those that live there? What relation would “Chicago” the city have to “Chicago” the school of poetry?

The City Visible contributor Tim Yu, in a paper presented at the Midwest MLA conference in 2006, suggests that co-contributor Chuck Stebelton’s work may best model the possibility of an aesthetic tied directly to Chicago: “Stebelton’s mix of density, seriousness, openness, and sense of place may best embody Chicago avant-garde writing,” he writes. “Stebelton’s ‘new prairie’ may be a highly built environment, but it retains an awareness of the wider and perhaps more open spaces that structure it.” Yu posits that “the distinctive textures of Stebelton’s work, and its structural analogies to wide-open Midwestern space, suggests that the idea of a new Prairie School of poetry is not so fanciful after all.”

While these questions remain open, what seems most important in considering The City Visible is to recognize that this particular network of poets, each with their own backgrounds and notions of poetic practice, are beginning to cohere in such a way as to produce an atmosphere of excitement conducive to poetic innovation in the city. While it would be hard to recommend The City Visible as anything more than a contemporary portrait of the state of Chicago’s experimental scene, the anthology as a historical and persuasive document does convince one that the flowering of that scene is both real and important. Is it a “school”? Probably not—at least not right now: Yu’s consideration of Stebelton’s work aside, it is hard to see how the individual poetics involved might coalesce into something peculiar enough to Chicago to warrant the name “Chicago School.” But is it a renaissance akin to the modernist Chicago Renaissance of Sandburg, Masters, and Lindsay? The City Visible certainly makes a persuasive claim that if it isn’t already, it may be soon.

****

Andy Frazee is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. His reviews have appeared in Verse and Cutbank Reviews, with another forthcoming in Boston Review. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Eleven Eleven, 1913, Bath House, Faultline, Rhino, and The Sycamore Review, and has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

PUBLICATIONS by DAVID BROMIGE & RYCHARD DENNER; ANNE BOYER; JULIANA SPAHR; & JUDITH ROITMAN

2008-07-20T21:30:00.000-07:00

JIM MCCRARY Reviews

Spade by David Bromige & Rychard Denner
(Dpress, Sebastopol, Ca., 2006)

art is war by Anne Boyer
(mitzvah chaps, Lawrence, Ks., 2008)

The Romance of Happy Workers by Anne Boyer
(Coffeehouse Press, Minneapolis, Mn., 2008)

from The Tradition by Juliana Spahr
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, Ca., 2008)

no face by Judith Roitman
(First Intensity Books, Lawrence, Ks., 2008)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I want to recognize those who publish these books…mitzvah chaps, Dpress, First Intensity and Coffeehouse. They are the ones who print, pay, sew, color, write, mail work very hard, spend a lot and then give the books away again and again and again. Then they save more dollars and do it again. Ompah!!!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Spade. Here the first selection of a collaboration between Bromige and Denner and contains Cantos 1-33 of what became 100 Cantos. This book gives me great pleasure foremost because it was signed and handed to me by David Bromige during a recent visit in June. These two, Bromige and Denner spent great time together on a regular basis and this is the result. It is, as is said in the intro, a great conversation…a record of “…what was said between them…”. Now…not that we overhear what they said but that they choose and collected what was said. It is valuable in that sense to me to have the privilege to read and react. What is it about? Oh come on you know how it is to listen in to others…you know the airport full of cell phone conversations…nothing to recall. That here too. Sure but don’t ask me to tell you. I, personally, find it hysterical and sarcastic and fretful and unknown. It is, well, entertaining and newsworthy… ack! And it is timely, torn from the nightly news…back to you Katie. All that and more. Sure the bits about the Berkeley Poetry Conference are as if live from Comedy Central. And the Plato dialogs between DB and RD…and Iraq and cannibalism. It is talk, to say the least.

If nothing else…look for this…to see and read the possibilities. You know you have thought about collaborating with someone. Well, here it is. Find this book ( there is some on the web) and do not let it discourage your own attempt. Even if these guys nailed it, don’t let that get you down.

art is war. Has Ms. Boyer simply swept her desk clear of recentness and hereby collected into one slight albeit powerful chap? Fuck that could happen. Oh no not at all. Oh no. Not that. Here is some detail that is shared from the midland of Overland Park…overheard in Overland. In the pool. The pool of jean and daisy dukes. Of Sarge and Billy. Oh yeah. This is plan 54 from Boyer to upset the cart of known poetics with thoughts to recreate how we read…as example. She says:

“I have not included my many ideas about Stallions.
Sometimes I have edited my original ideas so as not to seem cruel.”

Get it? Go ahead and shave a cat, inject a pore, plant fur or dead people. Get it done however possible it can be. Publish and perish. The deal is you have to have a sense of humor. Is that a whale on the cover? Ms. Boyer does indeed have a way. You should discover that at first. It don’t cost a whole lot. You can do it if you try. And don’t, no don’t ever, ask me to explain any……….

The Romance of Happy Workers. Oh wait. Here is another Anne Boyer collection with the pig and snake on cover. What can that be? Diane Wakoski says it's "Post-Newtonian physics and Hermes Trismegistus.”

But that’s in a back cover blurb and surely doesn’t count, does it? Fuck me. Look, I just read the stuff. Half the time I don’t get it, you know. Like I have any idea what is referenced? You do? Bull. “raise high the roof beams” Do you really know why that is in quotes? So what…it looks cool to me and important and it sounds different in my head. So that’s it. Thanks Anne. No really. That is what does it for me , here. All of it that comes before and after. This is a poet here, boys and girls. We know that now. And who, yes who else might say, in opening stanza: “Nothing, too, is a subject:/dusk regulating the blankery./Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,/fill in the metaphorical smell.” Who.

The thing is this you can read and hear and recollect and that is what it does. You don’t need me to tell you “what it all means” or why it is “this or that” or “not flarfh”. Blah blah.

I don’t do this much because I value what I do when I do do this. Anne Boyer you should read. A lot.

from The Tradition. This is a tiny book, one inch square, covered in Guatemalan material. A blank book filled in by hand as a medieval might have done, but in this case the Saint in St. Helena has handwritten a poem by Juliana Spahr. But first, it is always for me a thrill to receive a book in the mail. To open the envelope and in this case the little book falls out and I seem to smell wood smoke. That probably picked up from the cover, my memories of Guatemala. Maybe and maybe not. Still the have a book in the palm of your hand has to be a rush…and is. The work is amazing…the words or sometimes a word to a page…colored…drawn in some font known only to the drawer the writer…placed on the page in a way that draws a reader to stop and recognize what is written.

“I want to begin this by telling you who I am.”

Now that is an opening to any poem. Enough to keep you turned to see what comes and who it is, perhaps. Or not. Perhaps enough to find what follows if anything. There is much in little here…the little pages in a little book. I have absolutely nothing to compare with this book…having not read Ms. Spahr only seen the name. Without that prior knowledge…I have only what is in this tiny book. Strong stuff for sure and pleasure in reading what Ms. Spahr is thinking and how that comes through to the books end. There is no way to tell you except point you to it.

no face by Judith Roitman has arrived from around the corner and across town. A local book for sure. And a cover that is so full of puns that I can hardly find time to turn the page and then to find this in opening line of opening text:

“What is the unit here and how can we find it? People who can’t
decode reading but can talk, and others who can’t talk but
make sounds anyway…”

Count me in the latter.

“She begins with lotus seeds.
She ended with wireless.
That’s how she got rid of everything.”

Could be the future for all of us should we pay attention to Ms. Roitman.

Here is the poet who moves through style and substance with ease and who knows what else come from staring at walls and chalkboards.

“He likes my mind I do not like my mind
constrained and trailing flowers the
luminous archetype like skin separating
and coming together.”

You may find this the first sign of Ms. Reitman’s poetics…she pays the price of living, poetically, a long ways from view. Her choice and a good one given the results. One hopes this publication gives her a wider audience.

Ms. Roitman deserves all the collection she has had made here..it is much and can be sampled for a very long time…believe me….and to have it is great. To have heard it over a long period is priceless.

*****

Jim McCrary's Bio: Living in Lawrence, Ks...where the air is heavy with summer heat. In process of editing a "collected" poems which should see print in early fall. Working on long, epic Kansas poem featuring illigial asian immagrant transvestite working at Tyson chicken "rendering" plant in Salina. Ho hum. Most recent publications include Being Frida Kahlo, a chapbook from Really Old Gringo Press (also available as video on Contential Review website).

THE SMALL ANYTHING CITY by CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING

2008-07-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

EVELYN HAMPTON Engages

The Small Anything City by Cynthia Arrieu-King
(Winner of the 2006 National Poetry Chapbook Prize from Dream Horse Press, Aptos, CA, 2007)

In the title poem in Cynthia Arrieu-King's The Small Anything City, the speaker tells us that the "small anything city" is "anything you / ever lost." In this chapbook, which is Arrieu-King's first published collection, we find lost people and lost objects as they briefly surface in the speaker's memory. Often, what’s recalled of losses and failures are a few crystalline images in which the speaker locates associated emotions. The language used to convey these images and associations is precise, restrained, and instructed by silence.

The poems are often quite personal in their associations; in "Target Pistol and Man," for instance, the speaker is reminded of her dead father while looking at a self-portrait (titled “Target Pistol and Man”) by Alex Colville. There is a shift mid-way through the poem, where, following the only stanza break, the speaker connects elements of the painting to her own life:

The expression of Scotch Alex’s waist, wrists, and head poised

like my Chinese father’s.

Such associations blur the boundary between representation and “real,” as in "People are Tiny in Paintings of China." In this poem, the speaker observes that in a painting of a mountain, "It is hard to tell water and pigment from air and flesh." The mountain becomes real as the speaker considers the dangers posed to people on a real mountain: "Riding too fast down a real mountain, / a truck of shale risks a spill / next to a crowd of lean people..." In this poem and elsewhere, the omission of narrative details creates the spooky silence that often follows catastrophe. "They say the mountain is slow and full of snow. / And can hide almost anything," the speaker concludes in "People are Tiny." What has the mountain hidden? What has the speaker hidden from herself? The poems in The Small Anything City are oblique and suggestive in order to deal with the emotional complexities of events.

One of the book's motifs that I find interesting is the tension between the objective and subjective (or another way of saying this, between the “real” and the representation, as in "Target Pistol and Man" and "People are Tiny"). We see this tension in the book's first poem, "Albino Aubade," where subjects' attempts to express emotions are obfuscated by impersonal forces--

We're like
love doves, my mother begged. Father nodded,
a bizarre Morse code
of dots on his tie. The facts of the wind
rewrote the notes they slipped each other.

--before the subjects themselves are obliterated by the death of the speaker's father: "The bleach of him spilled on grief / and aftermath: She forgot the lines of her dresses. I fell / formless into taxes."

The poem closes with the kind of image that appears elsewhere in the book, crystalline even while dissolving:

A strawberry inlaid with tiny diamonds went pink,
then into mist.

There was less. The sky rose up again,
though nothing instructed it to.

Throughout "Albino Aubade," human lives are dissolving into objects, which finally also dissolve: nods become a code of dots become the seeds of a strawberry that goes "into mist." We see such dissolution throughout the book. As the boundary between subject and object breaks down, the structures of several of the poems ("Albino Aubade" being one) also dissolve by becoming more fragmentary, so that the reader observes an initially prose-like structure with a speaker whose identity is not in question break into more fragmented verse wherein it seems even the speaker’s identity is effaced.

Something Arrieu-King does well is to imbue objects and the landscape with an emotional resonance without symbolism, anthropomorphism, or didactic description. She is an adept writer of interior landscapes, of the subtle processes of their construction and of the difficulty of their inhabitation. In the title poem, Arrieu-King juxtaposes the exterior neatness achieved by rational thought with the wildness of the subconscious, the following lines bringing to mind Plato via Clark Coolidge:

The brain trimming it back letting it all grow wild rooted
as in the ideal cave, the back of a long dank cave.

Once in a while I'll go to another city and reach for the phone
trying to call my father--

Many of Arrieu-King’s poems go to bleak places, but they often get there by way of humor. For instance, "Welcome to Your Wish List, Tomohiko Nakao" is quick and funny in its speculative leaps, beginning:

I grip the helm of my imaginary speedboat cutting the clean Pacific
thinking of you behind me in Japan, Tomohiko Nakao,
ass being packed into a Kyoto subway car, late as hell,
my crucial and unmet friend
choking down pristine rice

where you could not possibly be, since
you were just here in my damned library seat
trying to buy a book on-line.

The poem ends more sedately, and, disappointingly, becomes a bit preachy:

Whatever you added to your wish-list
cannot possibly eclipse
what you really need,

what you actually longed for
on your grey ride home from this cement building.

This distinctly pessimistic voice is perhaps the only departure from the epigraph from Unsuii, Rule of St. Benedict, which begins The Small Anything City and describes many of its poems: "They have come through the test of the desert. They have passed beyond optimism, pessimism, and mysticism. Being so, they are like clouds and water."

Generally, the speaker's tone is not preachy but wry, humorous, even guarded, often leaving the reader to figure out what has happened. We see this in the book's final poem, "April 17, 1998; Or, The News," which begins,

My sweetheart has a way of telling a joke,
a story, springs it on me,
in his letters. He writes HAHAHA
and the HAHAHA ends up funnier
than the joke it modifies.

Quietly, four stanzas later the "sweetheart" of the first stanza becomes "my friend / who writes me HAHAHA in letters of what has happened to him..." It is left to the reader to decide why this change from “sweetheart” to “friend.”

Before reading The Small Anything City, I had been reading recent poetry by Arrieu-King in poetry journals. The Small Anything City is a strong first book, and Arrieu-King only builds on its strengths in her more recent poems. I am excited to read a full-length collection by this poet.

*****

Evelyn has published fiction and poetry here and there online and in print. Evelyn can be contacted at evelynh@gmail.com, or on her blog.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AERIAL MILITARISM AND THE DEMOBILIZATION OF EUROPEAN GROUND FORCES, FORTRESSES AND NAVAL FLEETS by PAUL SCHEERBART

2008-07-19T21:25:00.000-07:00

CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY Engages

The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets by Paul Scheerbart, trans. by M. Kasper
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2007)

Like Rilke’s mirrored stag, Scheerbart offers sixteen points in this “flyer”, newly translated a hundred years after it was written.

I. “A land battle however is completely impossible—the dynamite dropping from above works so fast that ground forces don’t arrive until long after events develop.”

II. “Naturally—many soldiers can hide in forts. But if they come out, they’re exposed to air torpedoes. They might as well not come out.”

III. “Naval fleets count for nothing in future dynamite wars... in particular, the English are to be pitied.”

IV. “Infantry is of no use whatsoever.”

V. “Artillery, all the same, would have a limited ‘right to existence.’”

VI. “Horse soldiers nowadays haven’t the slightest value.”

VII. “One could stop building submarines.”

VIII. “I’m against demolishing fortifications—they’re excellent examples of architectural landscapes... even torpedo boats would be well received as passenger steamers.”

IX. “Superfluous cannons... horses... most sabers and most uniforms will probably wind up in the war museums of the future.”

X. “A European or international congress of militarists should be organized in the very near future. Whether it meets in Berlin, Paris, or Switzerland is neither here nor there... redeployment of armaments is what needs discussing, not disarmament.”

XI. “Anti-militarism hasn’t the slightest right to exist anymore; it’s over, and the friends of peace should realize that very soon.”

XII. “Naturally, the smallest state can be very dangerous to the biggest.”

XIII. “’This image also suggests notions of just what an air apparatus might mean to anarchists, nihilists, and others of that ilk. The eagle eye of the police may constantly monitor the doings of these groups, but who’ll watch over them if they hurl their murderous weapons from on high, which, with flying machines, will soon be within reach?’”

XIV. “Festivals! After what’s just been said, I need hardly add that we have little reason to celebrate dirigibles with festive enthusiasm.”

XV. “Over the centuries, the United States of Europe have constituted a much-ridiculed utopia. Faced with a dynamite war, this utopia becomes a much more realizable thing—soon losing its comical side.”

XVI. “Private aircraft, therefore, are easily utilized in air warfare.”

*****

Christopher Mulrooney has written criticism in Small Press Review, Elimae, The Film Journal, Deep South and Parameter, poems and translations in Beeswax, Vanitas, Guernica and New Translations.

FORGET READING by ANTHONY HAWLEY

2008-07-19T20:22:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Forget Reading by Anthony Hawley
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, U.K., 2008)

Forget Reading's title intrigues me partly because I can’t recall ever responding to a poetry book the way I did to Anthony Hawley’s newest collection—that is, I thought all of the poems could be read as “list poems”, specifically where each line is a title

verbatim garden
hillock aspect
one who is dividing
dear lapsang souchong
lead us not into the forest
impossible sections
the living verb
of cinema binds us
a little more mechanical
watch and we’ll engine
off so many ports
the world has to smile at
fading into a measure
of water unplug views of hills

I realize, of course, that these are not list poems, but that they effect that impression is facilitated by the line-break working consistently (in my read anyway) as a pause. More admirably, the list-making impression attests to the power of each line to make one linger rather than right away continue into reading the next line, often due to intriguing juxtapositions of words: “violins shudder” (P. 14); “transformative batter” (P. 38); “past parallel” (P. 83); “fired marshmallow” (P. 78)…and so on.

Even when there could be that ye olde narrative arc that goes beyond one line into the next, each line still causes a pause due to the lines’ definitional mysteries, as in this example—from the third “P(r)etty Sonnets”:

counting zero
to negative ten

Or this longer example that one certainly can argue sets up a scene but again the scene seems of secondary import to me and I feel instead that something else is going on beyond its surface references:

enter flax seed oil
enter pignoli nut and almond
enter the six lemon trees
on top of which perched a pair of swallows
enter rinds and zest of
enter yolk
enter tablecloth and the six guests
enter chewing happily
the wine for washing down
the sweet sweet tea
for warming
enter deck of cards and royal flush
enter losing face
disguised, enter chatter to end
the evening always

The pauses effected at the end of each line give an impression these could be collated lines rather than the descriptive reference to some social gathering. This is an effect that can look easy but requires care and patience to pull off; when I wrote my first and so far only list-poem based on titles, I had to pay attention to how the length and sound of each title might rhythmically cohere into a body that works as a poem and not just a list (if curious about moi poem, go HERE for “Untitled Bookstore” which is the 2nd of three poems on my 2001 Moria Poetry page). Hawley succeeds in part due to an attention to music, e.g. from the third “P(r)etty Sonnets”:

they come swaggering not knowing just how fast
i wish i could write what is said
caterpillar, june bug towards the graveled surface
of every article in the closet
are there any coats like a dalmatian’s
bandonian is the desert we lost each other in
oh caballeros
when will be it be done

The lyricism, indeed, is pleasure-heightening in this collection. Here’s an excerpt from “Productive Suffix” where the line-break-induced pauses occur even in couplets (a title can be two lines, why not?); I often read the couplets as blocks (that is, glossing over the internal line-break in each couplet) given these stanzas' brevity, but didn't do so in Hawley's poems. This excerpt also displays lovely music:

at night
convergence

                  what doesn’t
                  continue to drain

tirade
of water

                  is anywhere a sense of
                  more than right here

Now, I've conceded that I am reading something into this work not intended by its author. But s/he who forgets reading is usually dead anyway, right?, as in a dead author? (And by “author” here, I don’t mean necessarily the professional writer but anyone who has ever written anything—a letter, an email, a song—has authored something.) Moreover, synchronistically, if each line is a title and yet the work for which the title exists is non-existent (in the book anyway), isn’t that consistent with the title’s suggestion to “forget reading”?

Or as the author explicitly says, with a welcome, gentle sense of humor, in the book’s fourth and last “P(r)etty Sonnets”:

cliffs across the river a set of teeth
all the toy boats wedged between the teeth
you could not you could not arrange the lilacs neatly why not
the photograph of the dock is the picture of desire flooding it
have you a green thumb
the caretaker of the garden asked, held a gecko in his palm
does a line connect by definition
anyway, forget reading

Which is all to say, for its conceptual underpinning and wonderful verbal pitch, Forget Reading is most definitely… not forgettable.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Anny Ballardini’s review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in JACKET, as well as Allen Gaborro’s review of her The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the Philippine News.

THE RIVER IS WIDE / EL RIO ES ANCHO; TWENTY MEXICAN POETS, Edited & Translated by MARLON L. FICK

2008-07-19T20:20:00.000-07:00

DENISE DOOLEY Reviews

The River is Wide / El río es ancho: Twenty Mexican Poets -- A Bilingual Anthology Edited and Translated by Marlon L. Fick
(University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2007)
[Poems by: Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Coral Bracho, Héctor Carreto, Alí Chumacero, Elsa Cross, Juan Cú, Jorge Ruiz Esparza, Jorg Esquinca, Gloria Gervitz, Francisco Hernández, Elva Macías, Myriam Moscona, Óscar Oliva, Jaime Sabines, Tomás Segovia, Lillian Van Den Broeck, Verónica Volkow, Francisco Ávila Fuentes, Hernán Bravo Varela, Bernardo Emilio Pérez]

                   What sleeping snake do you want to wake in me?
                   -- Tomás Segovia

This is the place for your mirror,
your desire to run that is mine to rain.

Look at our side. How many names does it take to close a door?
I pick up a pen to tell you something. (. . .)

                   -- From ''Yoviendo / I See I Rain '', Francisco Ávila Fuentes

Editor and translator Marlon L. Fick generously hands these poems to us and steps aside. The 452-page volume presents deep selections by contemporary Mexican poets, presented first in original Spanish and followed by what Fick refers to as an “offering” of English translations. The anthology does not aim to explain or account for the landscape of contemporary poetry in Mexico and distinctly avoids the defining a canon or chronology. Rather, we are encouraged to read these selections and excerpts as discoveries, and to find ourselves wholly absorbed in the direct encounter with the poems. The River is Wide is a joy -- the poems included are diverse in form and voice and uniformly excellent. Long established poets Ali Chumacarro, Jamie Sabines and Rubén Bonifaz Nuño are represented and well balanced by selections from ''three young poets'' Francisco Ávila Fuentes, Bernardo Emilio Pérez and Hernán Bravo Varela. It could be said of any work in this volume that, as Rubén Bonifaz Nuño writes, ''it chatters and whines and twists me / down to the tongue of the shoe.''

+ + +

Does it bother you, Vargas,
that I'm sleeping with your wife?
Be reasonable, my friend,
I'm more handsome – what can you do?
and let me remind you,
I'm your boss.

-- To an Employee, Hector Carréto

Poems build like punchlines in the selection from Hector Carréto, with metaphors piled sky-high only to be realized in moments outside metaphor, as in "The Doe" where ''my word was not able to achieve Poetry . Other poems unravel as material asserts itself, as in ''Poem from the Interrupted Dream'' or ''Within Reach of Her Mouth'', where to kiss the ''goddess of golden nipples and perpetual smiles'' one may ''kiss gently the pages, / but please don't slobber on them, you might / mess up my magazine.'' Carreto is charming and slight. The clown of a poet-figure in these poems offers brief, complex structures rich with linguistic tensions and a fast hilarious release.

+ + +

The selection of Elsa Cross's poems features twenty pages of short lyrics. Their airy meditations on nature hinge on the strange disconnect of perception in relation to passing time and distance. In Whispers, 'The water drinks itself against the wet earth. / The geese eat from my hand. / Wild geese / that pull away like boats in the air.'' Cross opens the sorrows of perception and finds that slippage is easy. In "Silence", she writes;

. . . leaves
amass over the earth
like plaques of bronze.

Your silence invades me,
it takes me from myself completely.
And in the root of that moment
word and thought
thought and desire become one,
and they sink into your silence.

The subject matter here is less about the natural objects described than the play (and strangeness) of visual sense, and these poems are stunning in their effort to continually relate subject through distancing motions and misapprehensions.

+ + +

Other selections simply urged me on in further readings of authors' work. Juan Cú's ''Additions to the Book of Whores (fragments)" are block pages of aphorisms that in a clever, gathering chorus. All focus on whores: ''The whore with free will scopes out the man. / The audacious whore is surely a widow. / The quiet whore looks for a loudmouth... / '' Similarly, Coral Bracho's selection here merely points to a greater philosophical project – in the poem Stone in the Sand, as in others ''The two play with a stone / emanating light ... observe it, / cover it. They spin it softly.'' and I am left with a desire to better acquaint myself with her greater project and its aims. I was likewise curious about the dizzying excerpt from Lillian Van Den Broecks' The State of Anonymity. The selection included consists of short titled poems, repeatedly cycling between topics that include an elm tree that bears pears, a magician's violent act, and the interactions of 'Maria" and "the Outside.'' These selections from broader projects suggest the long poem is alive and well in Mexican contemporary work, but it is a struggle to read such work without context or a sense of the greater project.

+ + +

Strip away all the flesh
until the verse remains
in the sonorous dark of the bone.
And the bone is smoothed, polished and sharpened
till it becomes a needle so fine
it passes through the tongue without pain,
though blood stops up the throat.

-- Until the Verse Remains, Francisco Hernandez

The title of the volume refers to the distance between Mexico and the U.S., and addressing the literary distance in particular seems to be a major goal of this volume. It's a crucial task: so many U.S. Spanish-language students have a functional knowledge of the language, yet little knowledge of Mexican literature, myself included. Fick has opted for a minimalist anthology and wants to avoid ranking and canon-making, but the trade-off here is a disorienting lack of context. Original dates and volume titles are missing, author bios are very brief, and the preface does little to explain the translator's method. Fick reportedly worked with each poet, but he says little about collaborations or his methods for selecting work. An essay and bibliography would be helpful here--after awakening readers' interests you can give them access to further reading by providing historical/chronological context and guiding them to poets' other works.

Still, The River is Wide is an excellent collection, much needed and well executed. The poems are delivered to us in the care of a wonderful and deft translator, who maintains the singularity of voice within each authors work with a grace that seems to fade the interference to a minimum. The clear, loyal line-by-line interpretations are ideal for the Spanish language student, adding another dimension of usefulness to a beautiful book. Fick provides a primary contact, rather than a reading or a version, and opens the door to new encounters.

*****

Denise Dooley lives in Rogers Park, Chicago. She writes poetry and fiction and works in science education outreach at Northwestern.

THIS POEM/WHAT SPEAKS?/A DAY by TOM BECKETT

2008-07-19T20:15:00.001-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day by Tom Beckett
(Otoliths, 2008)

An Appreciation

It is possible to read the triptych of poems contained in Tom Beckett’s new collection as a complex triangulation of several of the possibilities of poetics. Poem, poet, world. Discourse, locution, reference. “This Poem”, which wonders about its own ontology. “What Speaks?”, whose divided speakers interrogate their own being and speech, (their being in speech). “A Day”, where the world wakes and washes itself among the wild quotidiana of its repeated experience.

“This poem/ Is parenthetical”, announces the first axis of our hypothetical trigonometry. Parenthetical in that it is inside of itself. This poem makes itself—doubled, doubling poêsis—by making experimental statements about what it is. Of course, this is also in part the act we too perform, every moment of our lives, in the social—and spiritual? —formation of our selves. We stand, equally doubled, before our own minds as mirrors, affirming “I am Pascal” or “I do not believe in God” or “I live in the 17th century after Christ”. It is interrogation in the form of affirmation. It is the question: how much do we control what we are? It is a question, in short, which we ask ourselves, but which we are surprised to discover, in the presence of Tom Beckett, that poems do the same.

Poems too are unsure of themselves. Poems too desire a new type of autonomous definition and assertion. They too want to discover a way to live which allows them to live. There is a difference though: for “this” poem does not say “I”. It is seemingly not capable, or desirous, of this particular assumption of identity. It remains then, with regard to itself—and much like Tom Beckett’s own poetic—in a dialectical interplay between always adorable intimacy and analytic remoteness.

We are close to ourselves, and also very far. Distance is deceptive. “This Poem” does not say “I”, but also, it does not say “That”. “I, Poem” and “That Poem” seem the poles of identarian difference between which “This Poem” situates itself. Appropriately, its knowledge of its own workings thus seems, at different times, lucid and obscure. “This poem/ Is embedded/ Within ” And so ends our hypothesis. Within what? The poem does not know, any more than us. Yet how revealing is this horizontal event-horizon of its own experience!

The result of this is that, at the level of the self, apparent errors or contre-sens come to seem as revealing as evident “truths”. “This poem/ is blue” —a statement we cannot quite agree with—appears to be then just as much an element of subjective definition as the acuity of: “This poem/ Pretends not/ To know me.” In short, “This poem/ Stares into/ A mirror” But this is not dry reflexivity; for this poem, in mirroring its own questions of itself, is a body. It is a being. Its doubled existence is not a speculation. It is, as for us, a basic and daily question of identity. Of self. Of embodiment. “This Poem/ Is the body / In question.” How comforting it is then for us to read that poems themselves are equally preoccupied with the state of their divided being! They are not “mind” merely, or “emotion”, or “spirit”, as the centuries have often divergently told us, but also biological and material life—though, like us, they too reject such categories!

And they are right to do so. For as we read in the complex tour de force of this collection, “What Speaks?”: “Meat. Muttering/ Utterances, iterations./ Ejaculations. Shouting./ Interrogations.” Here, it is as though the mortal coil of “our” very fibre talks. It is as though, even in the space of the most intratextual utterance, our “meat” remains (Linh Dinh and Juliana Spahr spring to mind as other apt adherents of this realism). It is woven, for Beckett, among all our lived and verbal weavings: “Forethoughtskin”. Sex thus becomes “conceptual”. “Consexual.” Not a poetry “of” ideas, but a poetry containing ideas? If you must. But only in the sense that this is all important for us to know:

Words are mouthed
But the membrane
Between thought
And act
Is what’s
Called experience.

A refraction and a mirroring, of writing as of being. There are some experiences, and their interpretations, which return back to us, and others which dart away. Within “What Speaks?”, the characters of the Ventriloquist and Hypnotist emerge here as the competing interlocutors in a complex internal dialogue. Think of the exploratory interchanges of Donne or Marvell, where Self and Soul debate their relevant physical and metaphysical claims. The Ventriloquist and the Hypnotist is an updating of the paradigm, framed within a moving portrait of our modern visions of language and speech.

Ventriloquism and Hypnotism: the two dangers of our poetics? The two goals? Aspiration or jeopardy? It is the one who speaks through us and the one who silences us in sleep. “Trying/ To coincide/ With one’s selves.” We will keep trying. Speaking through and being silenced. Arguing endlessly with our smiling dummies, unil two fingers click, and we wake.

“I am a fiction.” The fiction is our person: what we call the face in the mirror in the morning. But as “fiction”, it is imbued with interrogation. Possibilities. Growth? Formation takes place here, then, alongside dissolution: “Figures./ Erasures.” There is, however, always, something initial to erase.

And it is here, in “A Day”, that the world itself more clearly emerges: not in an absolute sense—this is no Weltseele—but in the sense of its contiguous monotonies and discoveries, its base states of perceptive “sleeping”, and being “awake”:

                  Reaching
                  after
accident, incident
            on a stationary
                  bike.

We stand still. We feel we repeat the same gestures. Each. Hour? Day. Every day resembles every . . . Yet they may be filled with value. “Minor” experience is still experience. Particulars are important, (like our particular bodies). Thus, the “Irritation of/ having to dress” is of the same importance as the experiences we remember, with which we make up the composite narrative of our selves:

           The work
         of existence
        resolves into
routines which
                  can be
           lived but
not spoken
           in readily
           meaningful
                  ways

Experience is nothing, and finite. Everything and infinite? Of course. For we travel here across a triangulation. Its intersections overlap. Yet if this schema is functional, a question remains: where is the final element? Where is the reader? Upon reading these important poems, our response becomes evident: the reader is situated, precisely, across these surfaces. The reader is everywhere. “It” is an imagined interrogation. For Tom Beckett’s poems, one feels, are not precisely made for either poem, poet, or world.

No. These poems, Tom Beckett’s poems, they are for you.

*****

Nicholas Manning teaches comparative poetics at the University of Strasbourg, where he is currently completing his PhD. His first full collection, entitled *Novaless*, will be released in August 2008 from Otoliths. A chapbook of new poems is also forthcoming from Ypolita Press. Editor of The Continental Review, his poetry and criticism may be found in such places as Jacket, Verse, Fascicle, The Argotist, Free Verse, among others. He maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals.

CHILD IN THE ROAD by CINDY SAVETT

2008-07-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

PAMELA HART Reviews

Child in the Road by Cindy Savett
(Parlor Press, Indiana, 2007)

“The form-giving work of poetry,” writes Susan Stewart in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, “is to counter the oblivion of darkness.” That poetry can somehow bring both reader and poet up from the depths underlies the poems in Cindy Savett’s first book, Child in the Road. The collection of poems can be read as one extended work in which the author at turns mourns, prays, and rages in response to the sudden death of her eight-year-old daughter.

Savett has not couched her emotions, however, as she moves through the landscape of death. The reader is not sheltered from the darkness via poetic markers such as meter, sound, lyric form or even punctuation. These poems drag you into the writer’s dark places. You’re pulled on the journey as the poet scours the world trying to make sense of what cannot ultimately be understood. Like Demeter, who wandered and searched, who shape shifted and wrecked havoc as she tried to find her lost daughter Persephone, the mother in these poems is unflinching in her seeking. Listen to her plea and see if you have the courage to accompany her.

Freedom Mother
smash faith against the wind

and crawl deep into corners
of carcass craving
mess of wings
in the pit

steaming bowls
stuffed with dark
odor
rotted leaves
descending

shattered
blood tubes
cluttering the lab

The book is divided into 10 sections, but comforting way stations like titles for the poems don’t exist. It’s hard to distinguish between individual poems, except for the insertion of graphic lines. This is part of the author’s determination, I think, to render grief from its molten center. But titles of the section do indicate the route the poet’s journey will take—from the first (alibis) to the center (you and the blue name Rachel) to the final sections (in the temporary mist of prayer and is your question.) There is an I but no other sense of family or friend offering solace. The primary figure is this I, moving through ruin and debilitation, chanting, speaking, calling, trying to use language to bring back the dead, as Savett writes at the end of a beautiful brief section, you, “come darling/spread your vowels against the wind/ a restored feast.”

So how does Child in the Road counter the oblivion of the darkness of a daughter’s death? There is no solace in this book. It is not filled with poems containing wise words on the stages of grief or well-crafted lines about closure. These are rough, scarred poems that carry you into the nightmare on the poet’s back. Pick up this book and you’ll breathe in the primal dread of oblivion. But Savett’s work to counter the darkness is as mapmaker. She will guide you through a time when “light is just despair” to a potentially safer place where “whitewashed bones forgiven in this light.” And this is a kind of absolution, which is testimony to the incantatory power of poetry.

*****

Pamela Hart, a former journalist, is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she works as a teaching artist. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published in 2006. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has been published in qarrtsiluni, BigCityLit.com, Rattapallax and Kalliope and is forthcoming in The Cortland Review. Read her blog, A Walk Around the Lake, at pamelahart.blogspot.com

ORANGES & SARDINES, Ed. by DAVID KRUMP, ANDY NICHOLSON, MEGHAN PUNSCHKE & DIDI MENENDEZ

2008-07-19T20:10:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Oranges & Sardines, Summer 2008, Vol. 1 Issue Edited by David Krump, Andy Nicholson, Meghan Punschke and Didi Menendez
(Didi Menendez, Summer 2008)

Oranges & Sardines is a new literary/arts journal containing poems, visual art folios, reviews, interviews, and columns. Published by Didi Menendez, the journal takes its title from Frank O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not A Painter”.

O’Hara is an appropriate inspiration since the journal, as with “O’Hara’s poem[,] joins poetry and visual art”, according to the Letter From The Editors by Andy Nicholson and David Krump. Right away, the concept interested me, especially when Nicholson and Krump quotes O’Hara’s

“Insofar as we are thinking of painting, its interpretation depends on use…Techniques of painting have been explored so thoroughly in recent years that their usages now seem to have evolved almost symbolic weights and meanings, not as absolutes, but as stances.”

before continuing on to say

“Artistic techniques are not absolutes but stances… // Any theme, any style, any mode of exploration should ot be seen as an absolute but as a use, and when techniques become usable outside of affiliation and identity, it becomes all the more imperative to read each poem from its unique perspective, to give each poem a chance to build its rhetoric, its interests, its way of moving through the world.”

My empathy for the journal's vision comes from how visual art techniques have been a primary influence on my poems. In part, this reflects my opinion (only an opinion!) that, in the latter part of the 20th century, visual art explorations have been more interesting than developments in contemporary poetry approaches. Nicholson and Krump also allude to visual arts’ history:

“As painting then had passed through the maturity of various styles—German Expressionism, Surrealism, American Expressionism—and was on the cusp of a new synthesis of these techniques in the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, so too has contemporary poetry passed through the maturity of various literary styles—from Confessional to Language poetry—and currently has the opportunity to reenvision American poetics.”

And Nicholson and Krump conclude—and it’s a wonderful point so I want to repeat it: “Any theme, any style, any mode of exploration should not be seen as an absolute but as a use, and when techniques become usable outside of affiliation and identity, it becomes all the more imperative to read each poem from its unique perspective, to give each poem a chance to build its rhetoric, its interests, its way of moving through the world.”

Of course I think their conclusion is laudable—it should be obvious to any follower of Galatea Resurrects that we here are open to many readings of a poem, including a reading that does not situate any individual poem within its “theme,…style…[or] mode of exploration.” For instance, I forget the first poem(s) I read by Charles Bernstein but I remember enjoying its/their lyrical qualities, versus as a representative of Bernstein’s poetic approaches, e.g. LANGUAGE POETRY (it’s how I came to cite Bernstein’s “Log Rhythms” in an art review I did on Susan Bee HERE).

And so, with Nicholson and Krump’s very inviting Letter From The Editors, I eagerly pressed onward through the pages of Oranges & Sardines. Fortunately, the experience doesn’t disappoint. Specifically:

I like how Jim Knowles reviewed The Headless Saints by Myronn Hardy in that he starts by noting how he defines what he likes or dislikes: “Poems that really grab my attention are usually sharp and sparse, but combine all kinds of ingredients and make it look easy.” In something subjective like criticism, laying out the basis for judgement before sharing said judgement is a good idea. And, by the way, Knowles recommends Hardy’s book: “There is image, story, reality, the eery, the surreal, and the unexpected takes in this work. It has the magic and travel, but the lines are still sparse and surprising. Very nice.”

A favorite among the poems is, not surprisingly, J.P. Dancing Bear’s three poems. I say “not surprisingly” because the poems begin—were begun—with a first line sourced from another poet’s work. While perhaps not a new approach (and I recall Alice Friman doing something similar by beginning poems from a standpoint of doing the opposite of a quoted line), the transparent conceptual underpinning allows homage to another poet’s inspirational line, while moving Dancing Bear to craft anew a different poem that expands the quoted line’s (and the source poem’s) life. Here’s the beginning of “Lines Cast” whose first line is by Diane Ackerman

where you work the oracle of my thoughts
and thumb the stopwatch of my blood
in my red wheelhouse, my pink kitchen.
Neurons fire to beacon
with your touch.

Highlights for me are the presentations of the visual arts that give each artist a satisfying representative of images, combined with interviews or autobiographical statements. It’s fascinating to see how artists’ thoughts, including intentions, are manifested visually in their works. The interviews on their own offer good reading; here are excerpts from two artists responding to the same questions:

JEFF FILIPSKI
How does a concept for a painting come to you?
I get thought dysentery and I need to purge. I conceive of an idea. Sometimes I thumbnail it in my notebooks. Sometimes it is simply action streaming depending on what type of music I’m listening to, maybe some manic foible of day to day life. I agonize over which part of the vortext I most currently occupy…

Would you make love on a freshly painted canvas?
This is contingent on whether I’m alone or with somebody, though in the past it has never really mattered.

MARCIA MOLNAR
How does a concept for a painting come to you?
I never know what will hit me or when, but when it does, it burns a hole in my brain until I get it on canvas. I spend a lot of time in the great outrdoors getting off the beaten path. At times, my world seems a abstact arrangement of colors, texture, line and movement as I hold a rose to the light, stalk the moon or wait for sundown with a storm rolling in.

Would you make love on a freshly painted canvas?
No. Oil paints are too toxic and hard to get off!

In short, the journal is full of lovely, fascinating, humourous, witty moments. The first couplet in Steffi Drewes’ poem “Meet me in Marin” made me laugh:

Dear, what have the bridges
done to your eyes? Let me drive.

Oranges & Sardines is quite clearly successful by its own terms. In Talia Reed’s column entitled “The Real Estate Value of a Room of One’s Own,” Jennifer Hill-Kaucher is quoted as saying, “I don’t think Americans know what to do with poetry—for them, poetry is the middle child of the arts. Most people can relate to a painting, they enjoy theatre, love music and dance. Suggest an evening of poetry to anyone on the street and you’re likely to get a funny look and an excuse about them having to floss the cat.”

But Oranges & Sardines is such an enjoyable read that there’s no sense of laboring as one goes through reading the poems. Sure, that’s because the poems are wonderful, but their inclusion in such a beautifully-produced context replete with visually attractive images could make (one hopes) a non-poetry aficionado return to more poems in the future.

Which is all to say, Oranges & Sardines as a whole is much greater than as the sum of its individual parts—isn’t that what editors/publishers strive to achieve in creating groupings of individual, previously-unrelated works? Groupings like a literary journal? I am delighted to welcome Oranges & Sardines to the world.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Anny Ballardini’s review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in JACKET, as well as Allen Gaborro’s review of her The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the Philippine News.

THE BOYS I BORROW by HEATHER SELLERS

2008-07-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

KAREN RIGBY Reviews

The Boys I Borrow by Heather Sellers
(New Issues Press, 2007)

In Heather Sellers’ new book a woman (also named Heather) narrates her experience of dating and marrying David, a roofer with two sons, David Jr. and Jake. Timeless themes of marriage and family are written in contemporary terms: Nintendo, fertility clinics, and global positioning all make appearances in poems that are immediately likeable.

Although some readers may find it hard to look past the domestic subject, the arrangement of the poems is skillful enough to avoid repetition. Poems introducing the family are spliced with more experimental poems like “Found Poem: Jacob’s Homework Handout: “Your Teen Pregnancy Statistics” (p. 22), a list poem on the construction of a house, a poem on old credit card debt and other topics.

Being a fiction writer as well as a poet, Sellers has immense ability to make you feel you’ve come to know her alter-ego, the “Heather” of these poems. She creates a carefully balanced portrait of a multi-dimensional character.

The second chapter is particularly strong, both for its glimpse at Heather’s past life in Florida and for the poems themselves. They add dimension by exploring one of the essential messages of this book—time. “Listening to the New Tom Petty” (p. 44) is quoted in full here:

I’m back in the sinkholes with the boy I loved
Most, left early. Florida bars in the scrub, raccoon shows

And oysters, frog legs, mullet, conch. Possum shacks on the river.
Seersucker. And his mouth: tan inside, salty, cold as a spoon.

I’ve heard he never married. I heard he drinks
Too much. I heard he whispers his own name. Buzzards.

He knew me when I knew me. I keep up.
I know all the words after one close listen. Everyone knows

The words to some songs in little bits and strands.
But I know these words are stray pieces too, even unsung.

I don’t need a crowd, a verse, the bridge.
I don’t miss him. I miss her. And how we laid on time.

The past, as we come to find out, is filled with could-haves and might-have-beens, and a history the speaker wasn’t part of (the boys are already beyond early cildhood by the time Heather enters their lives). The present unfolds one gift at a time. Sellers is surveying a life as it’s been lived, thereby honoring those that have made it what it is.

In a poem on dancing Sellers writes, “We know how to stage the moonlight, and move / Like any small dancing vague family” (p. 55). If there is any criticism, it may be exactly this: that it is a personal series about a small, vague family. We come to know Heather more than any of the other characters—the sons in particular, with their teenage embarrassments, soccer practice, and SAT word lists could almost be any sons, but if the poems are indeed based on the writer’s experiences, this may simply be akin to the memoirist’s understatement, that decision to maintain privacy by simply adding a brush stroke here and there and moving on.

While the poems never veer into the one-dimensional caricature of the step-mom so often found in sitcoms and avoid sentimentality, neither do they challenge the reader with distinctive turns of phrase or startling revelations. These are not the pyrotechnic poems of a debut, nor the seasoned poems of a writer at the pinnacle of their career. Instead, they are the assured, generous, reflective poems of a poet’s second full-length collection.

Readers that enjoy accessible poetry—poetry for a larger audience than other poets, poetry about real things (real being debatable), work akin to that of Ted Kooser, Jim Daniels, Dorianne Laux and others—will find many delights here, just as readers who are determined to interpret “accessible” as meaning too-transparent-writing may find the poems aren’t to their tastes.

Quieter poems don’t seem to garner as much attention as award-winning work by new writers or that of “name” poets, but they should: The Boys I Borrow, if narrow in its scope, is refreshing in its willingness to pay homage to the relationships that define us.

It is unabashedly poetry about something, about the accumulation of memories and belongings, of letting go and embracing love.

*****

Karen Rigby’s second chapbook, Savage Machinery, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in September.

RAFETOWN GEORGICS by GARIN CYCHOLL

2008-07-19T20:00:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Rafetown Georgics by Garin Cycholl
(Cracked Slab Books, Chicago, 2008)

Garin Cycholl’s Rafetown Georgics is a luminous journey with some of the most elegant diction I’ve noticed from reading through various contemporary poetry collections. This book wouldn’t be so successful, first, without the author’s capacity for deep observance—a strength that roots this collection into the illuminating flowers of individual poems. The observations proceed through some wondrous alchemy so that when poems result from the standpoint of memory, text sings:

The land, a haggard trophy
(from “Antebellum Christi”)

No stern slap of language, but a field
planted with stones, even the words broken, me
a lingering god.
(from “Dundas and Rafetown, 1997”)

“Daddy,” she says, “the sun hands the bird from my eyes to yours”
(from “Topics in Experimental Photography”)

among the fencerows,
the man’s voice crying,
“cut the bacteria out of
my foot; cut the moon-
light out of my eye”
(from “Fld.wrk”)

Something happens when one recalls versus observes: here, it’s absence as presence. There’s a current of sadness combined with longing through these poems, and it’s this combination that unmoors the poems from observations into something more moving, something where one sees the wrestling for significance, something that opens a door for reader empathy:

these aren’t experiments
or landscapes or a matter of
words (the light never “lands”
or “uncovers” or “washes”) the
light’s a tattoo—shadow, sub-
stance—the city, a geometry
without an eye to thought
(from “’Eleanor’”)

It’s mentioned in the author’s bio that the “Rafetown Georgics spring from an area along the Embarras River in southern Illinois.” Yet these poems, while rooted in place, expand place:

the mind into torn paper;
the sound stranded there—
take your guitar to the West
Side, tune it under the neon
canopy the wires
stretched tight where the
first shots were fired

“there
is only the drama of objects
and you, watching”
(from “Chicago 53”)

There is a drama, indeed, that unfolds in the book and which exists as much in the mind as in the physical terroir identified as its spring-source. What is marvelous is how the reader(s) is allowed to take part through stellar poetic techniques—lyricism, imagery, evocative diction…

And then, jazz. And the blues.

Ultimately, I’m left grasping unsuccessfully (though in a good way). I finish the last page of the book and feel the urgent need to re-read. While this effect is not unusual in reading poetry collections, the urgency of its call is, for me, rare. I end the book, at the first read, knowing I’ve missed much. Or, that there was too much to grasp at one sitting (reading).

Fortunately, the compelling—beautiful!—language makes this invitation to return to the book a welcome one: from “flames flames flames”:

she plants red blooms in sky
sky waiting to cohere

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Anny Ballardini’s review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in JACKET, as well as Allen Gaborro’s review of her The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes in the Philippine News.

DEFIANCE by HUGH FOX

2008-07-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

Defiance by Hugh Fox
(Higganum Hill Books, Higganum, CT, 2007)

Hugh Fox is well known in the literary world for his poems and commentaries. I was fascinated to learn that he also has four books published on the archeological work he’s done in the Andes and Latin America. Fox has discovered Phoenician writing on pottery and in the ruins of the Mochica Indians of Peru and the Yopi Indians in Mexico; he’s discovered Sumerian writing on pots in ancient Bolivia. Is it any wonder, then, that his poetry resounds with a wisdom both primal and spiritual? His mind and spirit wander the world, hopeful and despairing, looking back on ghosts of the past and forward in search of proof that our existence will not end. Many of the poems here include French or German translations.

One critic described Hugh Fox as “a shaman who walks through walls…a poet who paints without inhibitions or games.” This excerpt from “Magna Mater” typifies Fox’s vision:

….I wait for the magic runes and
prehistoric musics when everyone,
like me today, believes that the earth was
The Magic Mother,
Nothing else.

And, again, in this excerpt from “The Wonderful, Beautiful Month of May” he looks to the past in search of a hopeful vision for the future:

I bear no grudge against war
everyday in the air like exhaust from a truck that
needs fixing, but the Rose, the Lily, the Dove, the Sun
vibrate so much fuller when you think there’ll be a
tomorrow.

Fox contemplates prehistoric gods who bless and curse, protect and punish. He views the world with the vision of both primitive spirit and modern man, plumbs the depths of time to recollect his youth, dead friends and family. His visions are breathtaking, ripe with simple truths. This is a work to be read and reread, to be savored and celebrated. He gives us human impermanence and hopeful lessons from the blessings of an ancient Earth. As an example, consider this one last poem in its entirety, “Mother of Us All:”

Mother of grottos, rabbits and peacocks,
hills-sister,
leaves-daughter,
I have to invent a new language for you,
made out of cicada songs,
the sighs and whispers of the winds,
the flapping of wings,
the rain against the rich summer leaves,
the frail, fragile leaves of
Fall.

*****

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

SKINNY BUDDHA by SHEILA E. MURPHY

2008-07-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

JEFF HARRISON Reviews

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

"As with many forms of Damocles, she limbered her neglect in time to meet the vitriol with young, spent sugar. She was dimed, foretested, and rescheduled in her palm capital “p” as if and only avenues would creed her where she wept. If only pacemade lint were batched for sea sail, she might adumbrate, she might defray the cost of lazy made infractive silt. But no. She wandered once again from gender as she had been properly adduced. If not now, why? If not then, practice!"
(from "Skinny Buddha and the Timely Rinse of Lamplight", page 4)

Poetry's declaration is addition and not observation (observation lying dormant in a subject for any observer to rouse), and although written, is of a perishability equal to speech.

"maybe what is beautiful is
repeated fare amid fanned heat
back and forth"
(from "The Verb To Be", page 6)

The poems in Skinny Buddha offer such words as relapse, returns, remands, repeated, resurgences, and Ref rains. There are references to seasons, to warmth and cold. And there's this:

"To try for size one loses peaceable perspective. Several courses taken with sundowners easily persuade the visitation team to reconsider digging in. Something in the realm of hurt precludes a smooth transitioning to possibly an easy move, one consciously owning resilience."
(from the prose poem beginning "Posture remands itself to folds...", page 8)

This is return to language, recovery as abandonment. The solidity of each line (or sentence) of verse eyes surrounding lines and, though in other poems, other books, though by other poets, distant lines (I am not writing of direct quotation).

"Color of inner radish, prior to talk
Versed in vernacular twice
Fargo the limestone below
Bloomington or some such loosely
Knit cadenza of the cable car or
Stitching born to seem immaculate"
(from "Chalk", page 16)

The presence of recurrence (starting with the book's title, being two six-letter words, each with twin consonants following the first of two vowels, the second vowel ending the word) underscores alliteration, assonance, and consonance.

"Passed out lifted home a problem vaulted onto silken limber proof of
purchase the vocabulary a choirmaster’s chit whittled to sound one
chants do you resist temptation to have rendered wrinkled prose
whose tower is not mint enough to father splits the sumptuous long
tone first elected then derailed from vastness and these height
assumptions battle-weary though preceding morning"
(the third of five "Site-Specific Rations", page 20)

A "sumptuous long tone first elected then derailed from vastness" doubles as a definition of the word 'poem'.

"Slapstick doves are bones of stressed errata tossed into communiqués. With cloves so near the heart, a darker sweetness trailing paths."
(from "As Such", page 21)

The "cl" of "cloves" makes a graphic writing, in type, of "doves".

"During prayer a soft p lace
Came a
Cross my sense of
H earing s he
Sounded pro-
Fessed
I did not win
ce

The first movement
Of giving up
The instrument p
Lucked
Parallel to
Re
Collection"
(from "F Lute", page 13)

A word, such as "place" or "plucked" is repeated via separation. See also the poem "recreation" (page 9) and the poem beginning "Sc old" (page 10).

"It is a soon spun world open
To patterning."
(from "Tenacity", page 22)

Many wonders await, in this book or any book, poem, or artwork by Sheila E. Murphy.

*****

Jeff Harrison reviewed books in GR #8 and GR #9. His poetry has appeared in several journals, including Otoliths and Dusie. You are welcome to visit Antic View.

THE MARVELOUS BONES OF TIME by BRENDA COULTAS

2008-07-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

PAMELA HART Reviews

The Marvelous Bones of Time: Excavations and Explanations by Brenda Coultas
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2007)

As the title suggests, this collection is two books that take up history, memory and ghosts as they exist in “objects of the earth,” as Coultas writes. Both books seek to excavate and explain. The first book, which looks like poetry and sounds sometimes like reportage, looks at the poet’s ancestry by traveling the back roads, digging through the dumpster to understand who she is and where she came from. Interestingly, the second book, a more traditionally organized series of stories about ghosts, monsters and UFOs, ruminates around the idea that history can be known through mythology and folk tales.

So the spine of the book is story, narrative -- first via poetry in the section titled The Abolition Journal (or, Tracing the Earthworks of My County) and the second, titled A Lonely Cemetery, via myth. Poetry serves the first section because it allows Coultas to muse and wander off the beaten path as she pieces together her family and looks for the answer to the question she poses early on, “are there any abolitionists hanging from my family tree?” Coultas, who received the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award for her book A Handmade Museum, was born in Kentucky, “between the free side and the slave side,” thus the specter of slavery hovers like another kind of ghost in Coultas’ investigation. The second book explores how history can be revealed through the myth-making genre of the ghost story. This collection of tales gathered by Coultas is another kind of excavation. And here Coultas introduces us to stuff of myth -- characters and places that are quirky and vivid. One of my favorites is the Librarium, “a columbarium where book-shaped urns sat on enormous bookshelves…This is a very good resting place for a poet,” writes Coultas. These paranormal narratives serve several purposes. They’re quite different from the poems, and yet they illustrate what Coultas has been up to throughout the book. As she writes of her “rough, crazy quilt,” book, “I thought to loosen it all, to pull the thread/let the rags fall.” That is indeed Coultas’s impulse -- to dig , to loosen and to expose, not in grand places but at the edges of the ordinary. “The city dump is my memoir,” she observes. As good a place as any to uncover the bones of family and community narrative.

*****

Pamela Hart, a former journalist, is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art where she works as a teaching artist. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published in 2006. Her work, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has been published in qarrtsiluni, BigCityLit.com, Rattapallax and Kalliope and is forthcoming in The Cortland Review. Read her blog, A Walk Around the Lake, at pamelahart.blogspot.com

PRAU by JEAN VENGUA

2008-07-19T17:12:00.000-07:00

LENY M. STROBEL Engages

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

Narratives are slippery. Inside the slippage, there’s poetry.

I sat through the movie Moby Dick while crocheting scarves for holiday give-aways before I realized that I had made an earlier mental note to read Prau at bedtime.

Serendipity?

There is a Prau on my bedside and it shares a resonance with C.L.R. James’ reading Melville’s Moby Dick in his book, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.
To this day people read these chapters and will not understand them. But if these chapters are read and accepted, then right early the book itself can be seen for what it is, the grandest conception that has ever been made to see the modern world, our world, as it was, and the future that lay before it. The voyage of the Pequod is the voyage of modern civilization seeking its destiny.

Ahab, we know, is consumed with anger at that civilization. (25)

This civilization that launched not only whaling ships but ships of “discovery” to the “new” world -- is what I’m thinking of. In Melville’s novel, the white whale haunts Captain Ahab and consumes his passion for revenge; in Queequeg, Ishmael projects his longing for what he himself has lost for having become a modern man in search of identity.

What does this have to do with Prau?

***

I recall a professor who used to chastise me for using words and concepts out of context. Right now the word ‘bricolage’ comes to mind. Is Prau a bricolage? Jean -- a bricoleur? I’ve since learned what this word means and it belongs to Jean.

I, on the other hand, think of myself as a fishing woman and so I think of Prau as an ocean to fish from. This is what her abstract poetry offers to me -- a water-world full of mystery, stories, and images that gives birth to other creatures and creations.

Question inside the Dream: why don’t you write poetry? Answer: I am afraid of words falling and hurting people.

But this I can do…do a collage on Prau.

1.
There’s always mingling past present tenses. The drowned fluffing and flailing because the sky is too thin, no tether. Pigafetta’s voyeurism and hunger making history in momentum. Poetics of geodetic control. Migration busting sacredness of the journey. The body’s tik-tok doesn’t fit. Shifting and aching vicinities -- what did all this traveling mean? Night stammers. Manong photographers outside the frame. What matters?

2.
On the crossroads I don’t know how to run in place. Catatonia: in this state progress doesn’t exist. California as conveyor of forgetfulness. Crows run flagpoles to the ground. Home is what you choose to forget. This paper house I furnished with loneliness -- it became beautiful, a pilgrimage to kool house. A glorious machinery of internal stimuli. In the city and garden, we are angry, indifferent and in love. Like this. Trade.

3.
I’ve lost the connection to holy things. Space once longed for is now repellent. A demon can be your amanuensis. Before going to bed, separate. The great chain of being is a zombie calculus and erotics. I have a crushed heart. I am a story going down, falling forever into universe, eroding my lover down vortics of narrows on Wednesday, August 25, 2004. Dear so and so, why? Frequenting crosswalks, awkwardly we go, but do not linger.

4.
Subject to sentience, the mountains across the bay disappear, framing desire from a distance. I outstrip you through the cracks of fearful foundations revealing the moment. Identities pass by aching for some taste of something to hang along the trembling seams as if it could delete or change the meaning slightly. Promises, promises, promises. Koan – the rest has been disremembered. Empty this boat.

Dear Jean,

I don’t know what I just did above. But your words that I’ve chosen from Prau came to me… beckoned by what? I do not know. As I read what I culled afterwards, I felt an affirmation, a gentleness that soothed a sad little corner of my heart that has felt abandoned by a Beloved Stranger. Having said that, however, what slips through that narrative is the other feeling: a wholeness unto itself.

Who is this Beloved Stranger? Is it Language? That which refuses articulation in English? How do we begin to articulate the depths of all things mysterious if those things were born in another tongue? Before the praus got there.

In Prau (I don’t know why I keep typing ‘pray’) I see glimpses of stories about our received History: of colonialism crossing the waters; of Manongs on board praus, who sold pieces of land to come to America; of their descendants learning to make peace with this crossing through music, art, poetry. And through revolutionary struggles for dignity and justice.

And then there is that which remains unsaid. Perhaps it cannot be said. Fragments can be told only in poetry. Are some truths about this History too horrible for recall? As we have yet to discover what would assuage the safety of recall, those memories will remain at the bottom of the ocean. I pray for the day when our bodies will be strong enough to excavate the depths and bring to the surface the stories waiting to be told. And then perhaps, we can empty the boat of Memory and row it to destinies beyond.

While CLR James offered me an intellectual critique of modern civilization via Moby Dick, Prau offered me beauty beyond measure. What a pleasure and a treasure to know that poets like you can offer this to me, to us.

Salamat.

*****

Leny M. Strobel lately has been stalked by a group of young women calling her a "babaylan-trainee magnet" and the women calling themselves "babaylan-stalkers"!

CLOUD VIEW POETS: MASTER CLASSES WITH DAVID ST. JOHN, Edited by MORLEY CLARK, JANE DOWNS, CB FOLLETT & SUSAN TERRIS

2008-07-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

FRANCIE NOYES Reviews

Cloud View Poets: Master Classes with David St. John, Edited by Morley Clark, Jane Downs, CB Follett, and Susan Terris
(Arctos Press, 2005)

The claim made for Cloud View Poets is high: in his introduction David St. John says these writers show “extraordinary accomplishment and universal excellence.” Personally, I found most of them ordinary and conventional. Some good lines, some fresh language, but as a whole, the collection is mundane, with poems of nostalgia, death and worn-out nature imagery.

The impulse behind the book is promising. Bring together work from writers who have participated in master classes with David St. John. Be democratic and include one poem each from every participant, for a total of 81 writers. Loosely organize the book thematically, with four sections looking at art, coming of age, love and nature (the sections are not labeled, so those descriptions are mine, not the editors). Then, let the readers have a go.

For me, the result is uneven. For every surprise or insight, there are many boring approaches to obvious topics. Most of the poems fit into the familiar pattern of contemporary narrative poetry: an incident or event, described, analyzed and presented as deep insight. While this type of poem certainly can work—and the book includes some successful examples—this method unfortunately can look trite if not handled well.

For example, in “Walking with the Poor-will” poet Robert Aquinas McNally sees a bird in the woods. He follows it, thinking about “the sweet grief dividing / where man ends and bird begins.” If that thought is not exactly new, neither is the conclusion:

It ascended then in a final turn, trilled
a single note, cast silence over me
like a dark falling net.

Unfortunately, some of these poems look like weak imitations of classic, familiar works. “September” by Lynn Lyman Trombetta offers thoughts while picking apples. Anything this close to Robert Frost needs to find fresh language or insight, but this doesn’t. Instead, it gives us the rhetorical question: “Shouldn’t I, too, be content with this sweetness?” Getting nostalgic about an apple tree is a tough assignment these days.

The presence of earlier poems also haunts “Out of Place” by Dan Harder. Although Harder does use a risky, fragmented line, his description of a leopard pacing in a cage is overwhelmed by the famous poems by Blake and Rilke. Harder’s language is simply too pallid to overcome the presence of those other big cats.

Some readers these days object to mythic references as obscure or elitist. I don’t share that view and think myth can add depth and resonance to a poem. So my problem with “Arrival of Aphrodite” is not the traditional subject, it is the out-dated, over-used language.

Hora holds the cape ready, vermilion,
Embroidered with purity, for this moment’s end.
But this emergence will never be over.

The poem ends with a pure 19th century exhortation:

Beauty! Beauty! Beauty!

This is so worn out, I wondered it the author was being ironic. I reread the poem a number of times and, if it was ironic, I couldn’t see it.

Some of the Cloud View Poets handled the conventional formats wonderfully well. I was quite moved by “Sha’arei Shalom” by Stephanie Mendel. Here, a woman visits the cemetery where her husband is buried. She imagines him talking with the other people buried there— “Who knows what dead people talk about” and tells him about her life:

No need to tell him Arnold Schwarzenegger
is now our governor. It’s not his concern.
I tell him I saw twelve deer near the mausoleum . . . .

“God of the Jellyfish” by Lucille Lang Day is a descriptive delight:

The god of the jellyfish
Must be a luminous, translucent bowl
The size of a big top,
. . .
ruffled and lacy
as thousands of wedding gowns
and Victorian bodices

“Monday is an Abstract Concept” by Susan Terris is another favorite as it stretches the imagination with its description of an aging mind. The woman in the poem has lost the ability to compute numbers and sees the world in a new way.

August, no longer the eighth month, has become
an old college friend. She and August speak of
God and evolution. They read in the Times
how the chirp of crickets has been unchanged for
fifty-five million years. Such fidelity amuses her . . . .

An extra attraction here is the background material on the authors. Although some critics spent too much time using biography to explain poetry—the poet hated her father and so on—it is interesting to see the professions of these poets. It is probably not surprising that most are teachers. Of 43 different professions, 36 of the participants are teachers, including ten at the university and college level.

Also not surprising for master classes taught on weekends, the large majority of the participants—more than 60 of them—gave their age as over 45. I had to wonder whether younger poets would have shaken things up a bit, but that may be unfounded. Certainly, these poets have had appreciable success. The 81 poets have published a total of 119 books and given more than 280 readings.

One strong advantage of an anthology is diversity and Cloud View Poets does offer an introduction to more than 80 hardworking poets. It’s very possible that other readers will find favorites among the poems that left me unimpressed and, if so, that’s all to the good.

*****

Francie Noyes is a poet and writer living in Phoenix, Arizona. Formerly a political reporter, gubernatorial press secretary and movie critic, she now focuses on poetry and film writing. Her work has appeared in Panamowa, Key West: a collection and The Anthology of New England Writers 2002.

SHINY 14 Edited by MICHAEL FRIEDMAN

2008-07-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

SHINY 14, 2008, edited by Michael Friedman

SHINY continues to delight. A well edited journal adds a mixture of new names and new content with a constant addition of familiar characters who continue growing and expanding upon previously covered ground. The idea being to bring together an eclectic company engaged in constantly renewable dialogue and Michael Friedman delivers again and again.

Not necessarily every poem or line may ring true, but the metal of inspiration is consistently tested throughout a significant portion. Tested and celebrated. The delight outshines any disappointment.

Among the strongest of the (apparently) new eclectics being touted here is Aaron Simon.

INDIAN GIRL

The sky already filled with light
That’s all for today
Blood pounding the temples

A wilderness of mirrors
Washed up on the shore
Like a history prior to nervous shock

Don’t get up
They’re going to seal off the scene
Be prepared for endless paperwork

Discharged without a sound
Around the night-watch with its tattered nocturne
Leaving little to be desired of sleep

We’ll pitch camp here
Over partial remains
A city-state of perennial sweets

To introduce the moon at a glance
To circumscribe fear
Within a headdress

This is a case where the absence of author bios in Shiny stands out. Simon looks promising as a substantial handle and it would be beneficial to have some info on where to locate further work by him. His poems resoundingly stand out in this issue of SHINY.

John Godfrey opens the issue and it serves as a healthy reminder that a new collection of poems, City of Corners, is due out this August from Wave Books and will no doubt be making an impression.

THROUGH THE WALL

I forsake your lips
to get in on the action
Then you are gone
and I get along

Direction all I need
I catch myself in time
Angles all discordant
No way through the wall

I take what I need
Between me and nothing
stands what I want
When that’s enough I know

Will you know me
First at twenty feet
You pass like water
I can always call your star

Remove the entire last stanza and this is a perfect poem. Every note is paced to hit. It’s natural speech at its best. Taking you to that comfortable realm of between knowing what’s being said and not quite recognizing what’s happening and then just leaving you there, marvelous but for those final four lines. Every poet sometimes gets sentimental in the work and leaves in what should be discarded, Godfrey is to be faulted but he’s still pure gold, a worker under typical radar.

Forward looking beyond belief, the collaborations of Ted Greenwald and Kit Robinson jump alive on the page as the tingling starts.

Down Own

In the English manner
Is there a lesson, any, in North America
Classic lines regular meter
Never mind them, don’t I never
But then again, again, I don’t ever
It’s a dream Dream of interpretation
Dinner in, poetry out
Two-tone towns ago
Like (like) a picture tube
Been asking for
What you forget
Ask the night before
The way a watch is set oh, night before
A variety of other mohairs

Now, don’t go seeing this as just another couple of poets writing again about the habit of writing through the poem-habit. Sure, there’s some fun being had and possibly it’s at the reader’s expense but that certainly doesn’t put it out of reach or turn away further possibilities.

Toy Sart

Taken for a right
Okay, nice pix, talk tonight
When you let it ride
So-so see you, quoted in a history of today
Another grapefruit day
Run out of difference e’re last night
Twilight baffled investigators
Hope all’s well with you in
The Americano raises
Another phone call Another raises
Fold in a crowd
Your eggs, how you like ‘em, now?
Adult audience neglects a duple bind
Who wants to no-no?

These collabs are knock-out sound spectacles and Friedman serves up a full fourteen count. Well deserving of chapbook publication, here’s to hoping there are more yet-to-be-published. This presentation of them is a terrific follow up to Greenwald’s recent interview in the Poetry Project Newsletter (Dec ‘07/Jan ’08: http://www.poetryproject.com/PDF/N213.pdf)

Brotherly in spirit to Greenwald and Robinson’s collabs, Clark Coolidge throws down a further few new ones here as well, continuing to demonstrate that if you give him a place to write and an active cable subscription he’ll astound you time and again. Who cares if the references are often to whatever film might be playing on the television. He’s telling a larger tale, drawing in a world and not merely amusing himself with cultural riffs.

THE PREFECT FILMIC APPOSITENESS OF KAREN BLACK

Now what’s crawling up Bette Davis’s torso
those people down there             sit down to the bleeder
rust colored vane kind of thing             an ancient coughing
throttling lessons in the kitchen one day
one night a topspin applied to anything loose
someone physical as Harpo             a mad blond trigger
then these masses as described on the phone
a latch to any future             pathetic voice trap
pluck and hedge from the waist             oh hell
a lumbertruck             boundary threat in jet
a pall over the wallpaper road post dispatch
a morning put to shame             in sure and certain hope
glistens in the sun spot             call the poet and
get your bottle back             I have told you
and told you and even that is part
of the carbon wing of this tale

25IV06

Coolidge is expanding the case to be made for the future of the narrative. Bring it all in and manage it by sound. Punctuate the tale with the pings of the passing truck outside the window.

Elizabeth Robinson’s presence in a journal is always a welcome sight. Her poems often have a stand alone quality that holds up well. It’s a unique lyric gift. Assumptive with an inviting delicacy that doesn’t overwhelm, there’s a hint of daring the reader to not find value, as if the reader mattered at all. [Editor's Note: the poem below would be presented as quad-centered on the page.]

EXTINCTION

Cheat
on this
examination

so as to amuse
the truth

while it peruses
the leash
that procures

or arouses it.
Presto,

the liar says,
I exscind,
I test my disappearance

on this perfect score.

Robinson closes the poem, there is not a testing of possibility or that anything left lingering goes unsaid. There is no doing without her.

SHINY is terrific at bringing out the unexpected bits of writing from its contributors. This issue includes Eileen Myles’ “Rene” a memoir piece composed of diverse encounters with poet Rene Ricard. What’s delightful about such an accounting is how likely it is (hopefully!) to leave the reader wanting to read more Eileen Myles and also more Rene Ricard, who usually is less well known. (A great companion piece to this is Geoffrey Young’s short account of bumping into Ricard at a poetry reading in Young’s new collection The Riot Act, Bootstrap 2008.) Myles certainly knows how to grab attention, admire the subject a bit, then present a surprising twist that dangles a bit of carrot. Consider her opening,

Rene Ricard walked up to me one night at a reading. He wore a baseball jacket and jeans with the cuffs rolled and white crew socks gleaming over his penny loafers. He was kind of a pretty fag, but tough. Later I heard he broke a glass in someone’s face at One U.

This may sound like a bad scene from an eighties film, but there’s something to Myles’ style that gives the reader reason to trust that anything she’s interested enough to be writing about is worth reading. She goes on to drop glimmering hints for the uninitiated: “Rene was famous.” “When Rene got up [to read] he commanded the doors be closed and no one was to enter now. We were trapped.” “Robert Creeley remarked at a reading at St. Mark’s that he could recall a time when Rene was one half of the demi-monde of Newport, Rhode Island. Everyone laughed. My head was spinning.” Not that this really clears anything up. The confused reader is likely still confused, probably more so. The advance of Myles’ prose is often anything but linear. There is an ordering but it is based upon Eileen’s order. It reads much like her poems, with stops and jumps and returns. When read closely you get a bit of everything.

He lived in this apartment until much later, till the late eighties the dawn of crack. I just never thought of him as a drunk or an addict. He just seemed from another moment. Holding a glass. I didn’t understand his poetry as good. He had a Tiffany blue book that Dia published. Look at my book he said. I was jealous. They supported him for god’s sake. He wrote about boys and in one poem they were all in a painting of Caravaggio’s and the last line was “they pile.” Like experiences don’t end. They pile up. I didn’t understand why that was so important.

With Myles, you learn about her alongside learning about the subject at hand, after all what is being seen is being seen through her experience. It’s quite fair and an open reader becomes aware how what they’re reading filtered through Myles is in turn being filtered through them. This may be made into a game where the reader can see just how much they’re able to filter to keep up with her. Just how much of the world as she has known it is possibly digestible by them. And she is excellent, adding a bit about secondary characters around her main subject and letting that assist in developing the portrait, while also providing commentary on them as well.

I remember when Rene would ring the bell and come up to Ted and Alice’s house—that was my favorite feeling in the world. To be already inside and see who came in. Rene was one of my favorite people and they liked him too. If you saw him in the street you would stop for an hour. You’d go get a coffee. He would decide you should go to this opening or bar with him. He was in my house and their house, Berrigan, Schnabel, Myles. He was a carrier. I’d see Ted standing in the street talking to Kathy Acker. Ted was a carrier too. He could be carrying drugs, or a bit of gossip. He could be walking down the street with books to sell. Kathy would get all bright and look like a little girl. Ted was carrying her childhood; the story of Kathy when she first came to town or the time she came to Iowa with some man she was dating and Ted was nice which he always was. You would see each person through the other person’s eyes. She just needed to be seen as young, or nice or new. He needed to be a member of somebody, everybody’s families.

Myles’ writing shows these poets seeing each other. She provides the opportunity to gain a sense of how the world was for them during a certain period in their lives together. As Myles says, “We were carrying the message, day and night for about ten years. That’s about as long as you get.”

Another excellent inclusion in this issue is Lisa Jarnot.

MARCUS AURELIUS ROSE

For Thomas

From the five good emperors
I have learned that there were five good emperors,

From the lemon tree I’ve planted now I know that leaves unpummeled
yet will drop,

From the clock, the time, it’s five P.M.,
from the sun the length of the day,

From quercus borealis, the queer names of the leaves
of all the trees,

From burning I’ve learned burning,
from the aster family chickory abounds,

From hawkweed of the colors bright,
from sleeping, of my dreams,

From mosquitoes, scratching, from fishes, fishing,
from turkeys how to run and how to hop,

From erect perennials I’ve learned how to reach the shelf,
from my cats to lick the dark part of the tin,

From the sparrow I’ve learned this and that,
from Germanic tribes, to gather thoughts in herds,

From the window blinds, yet nothing learned,
from the heart a brimming record braised and turned.

Jarnot is musing upon such Meditations of Roman Aurelius as, “Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.” As Aurelius would surely agree, to “adapt” to the things around you must surely include that you “learn” from them. Jarnot brings just the right amount of mellow twinge to humorously lighten the load.

For the best of the rest (including: Stephen Rodefer, Jennifer Moxley, Laird Hunt, and many others) go and buy yourself a copy of SHINY 14. You’ll find yourself picking it up again and again.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at the library of USF. Poems recently appeared in Cannibal, Morning Train, and One Less Magazine. At present, working on a collaborative collection of re-writing each other's re-writes of other people's poems with Micah Ballard. Lots of walking and talking.