Saturday, July 19, 2008

ORGY IN THE BEEF CLOSET by MICHAEL KOSHKIN

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Orgy in the Beef Closet by Michael Koshkin
(Transmission Press, San Francisco, 2007)

In the past, I've observed some poets raise the binary of sonics vs meaning in poems. It's an unnecessary binary, as exemplified by Michael Koshkin's Orgy in the Beef Closet.

Orgy in the Beef Closet is a single-poem chap that offers the type of disjunctive juxtapositions (and perhaps facilitated by a collage-technique as implied by an epigraph "in your words") that, poetically, has been rationalized by some primarily for its music, e.g.
It is not a dream

I'm sticking my tongue between

but hope

and emptiness

                  listening,

her pale skin

                  like a radio

imploding gas fruit

                  I fill up

and again,

am caught masticating


                  Half-eaten hotdogs

appear & re-appear
                              via Greyhound

on pre-Cambrian shores of Ladoga

Yes, they're feeding, too--the air,
integrated

                  sheep
graze the warehouses

of her generic implications

like shadows of something

pituitary glands, half molested

on pre-Cambrian shores of Ladoga


Congratulations, Kangaroo

                  it is to sing

                  to hold

                  to go back home to the uneaten half

                  and chew

Sure: one can enjoy this poem, just rollicking along with its wonderful energy ... but then you come to something like
rarely, reality

finds the word

and you realize--or I realize--this poet isn't just having a good time. He's philosophizing. (Not that philosophy can't be fun, of course....). It’s a philosophy borne of some deep observation of the world, and perhaps (perhaps) the inability to articulate certain of those realities. From the above couplet, the poem continues
There are barnacles

on some good things,

that is,

some barnacles grow on some good things


in the pockets

of chickens


in the tongues

of gulls


so many

to feed


so little

feeling


He could find nothing but distance

whistling in the dumpsters,

in all the glum alleys

yes, a feeding--the air,
integrated

enslaving the wind

in your absence

The ending may have an elegiac tone more typical of referencing a Beloved ("in your absence")....but I thought instead of “dumpster-diving”, or delving into dumpsters for food, clothes and whatever else a “diver” might salvage. Lars Eighner wrote such an account in his TRAVELS WITH LIZABETH: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets. During the period of the book when he was homeless and traveling with a pet dog, Eighner often dived into dumpsters to help support himself:
“The area I frequent is inhabited by many affluent college students. I am not here by chance; the Dumpsters in this area are very rich. Students throw out many good things, including food. In particular they tend to throw everything out when they move at the end of a semester, before and after breaks, and around midterm, when many of them despair of college. So I find it advantageous to keep an eye on the academic calendar.”

My correlation of Koshkin’s poem to dumpster-diving may be subjective, but the chap's title, after all, is "Orgy in the Beef Closet".... the times being what they are, I think of poverty and hunger increasing as the already-wealthy compete with the poor for food; as I write this, the media is full of coverage over decreasing harvests, increased hunger among the poor, and intense competition among biofuels versus food producers. As example, here’s an excerpt from a May 30, 2008 New York Times article, “Food Report Criticizes Biofuel Policiess” by Andrew Martin:
The energy security, environmental and economic benefits of biofuels production based on agricultural commodity feed stocks are at best modest, and sometimes even negative,” says the report, prepared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. “Alternative approaches may be considered that offer potentially greater benefits with less of the unintended market impact.”

The Agriculture Department’s own longtime chief economist, Keith Collins, who retired in January, said that ethanol was the “foot on the accelerator” of corn demand--an essential feed for animals, as well as a part of many diets--and merited renewed debate. He said Congressional mandates for ethanol would require farmers to grow more corn for conversion to biofuel, at the expense of feed corn and other food crops.

“You’re building in tremendous increase in demand,” said Mr. Collins, who emphasized that he was not necessarily against ethanol. “It’s an increase that is going to feed into food prices.”

The United Nations report, the global agriculture outlook through 2017, said prices for farm crops will remain substantially higher over the next decade because of fundamental changes in demand, though they will gradually decline from current highs.

Biofuels versus food might actually be another false binary, or at least not quite on point. According to Frances Moore Lappe, author of DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET and more recently with her daughter Anne Lappe HOPE'S EDGE: THE NEXT DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET, it's a myth that there's a scarcity of food in the world. The problem is more of allocation, myopia and entrenched interests. Here's an excerpt from HOPE'S EDGE:
In the original DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET, I set out to explode the scarcity myth with mountains of evidence showing the abundance--and the waste--in our food systems.

For me, discovering that here in the U.S. we feed sixteen pounds of grain and soy to cattle to get one pound back in meat was the first real wake-up call. Because so much of our harvested acreage goes to feed livestock, the waste is staggering. I calculated that the grain we annually feed to livestock could provide the equivalent of a bowl of food for every person on earth every day of the year! So, I thought, anyone who simply looked at the facts would be spurred to make big changes.

But I guess I didn't appreciate the strength of this thought trap's grip. Even now, thirty years later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sees no problem at all. Its economists maintain that the grain-to-beef ratio is "only" seven to one--as if seven pounds fed to get only one pound back is some mark of efficiency. (To get their seven-to-one ratio, government analysts must credit grain and soy feeding with all the meat produced, although they know that more than half comes from grass, hay, and other things cattle eat.)

So we've turned cattle into virtual protein disposals, and now we're doing the same with fish. During World War II, a government-issued poster read EAT FISH, THEY FEED THEMSELVES. But this is less and less true; we're now feeding fish to fish, shrinking overall supply. To get one pound of salmon, we use four pounds of what are deemd "junk" fish, including sardines, that are a vital protein source for a billion poor people -- exactly those who could never afford the higher-priced salmon."


Koshkin, of course, and appropriately, may have had a different intention with his work than with my interpretation. Hmm--or does he? To wit:
A cow is standing in the pit

he likes the cow meat most of all

If cannibalization is relevant, it seems to me there’s more than one way for a human to eat another human to death.

Nonetheless, to go back to the point with which I began this engagement, if I'm able to identify some sort of narrative being fleshed out, it only affirms the point of the artificiality of the battle, in poetry, between musicality vs meaning. This is a poem that disrupts its own song in order to encourage the reader to think. That's not a result easy to pull off with zero didacticism. Good for Michael Koshkin--singing, he showed us where the beef awaits in all of its dubious glory. Singing, he makes us think.

*****

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.

No comments: