Galatea Resurrects #11 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2008-12-17T18:55:00.000-08:00

December 17, 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
Michael Caylo-Baradi Reviews SHORT MOVIES by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Márton Koppány

Rachel Daley Reviews ZONE : ZERO by Stephanie Strickland

John Olson Reviews SCAFFOLD by Joel Chace

Eric Gelsinger Reviews SO THAT EVEN by Tawrin Baker

Kristina Marie Darling Reviews TORQUES: DRAFTS 58-76 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Denise Dooley Reviews THE SENSORY CABINET by Mark DuCharme

John Herbert Cunningham Reviews CAUGHT BY THE TAIL: FRANCIS PICABIA AND DADA IN PARIS by George Baker and I AM A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER: POETRY, PROSE AND PROVOCATIONS by Francis Picabia, translated by Marc Lowenthal

Eileen Tabios Engages DEMENTIA BLOG by Susan M. Schultz

Pamela Hart Reviews THIS IS WHY I HURT YOU by Kate Greenstreet

Jon Curley Reviews A WOMAN'S GUIDE TO MOUNTAIN CLIMBING by Jane Augustine

Karen An-Hwei Lee Reviews MENTAL COMMITMENT ROBOTS by Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Tom Beckett Reviews SUBSISTENCE EQUIPMENT by Brenda Iijima

Lisa Bower Reviews TRADING IN MERMAIDS by Alfred A. Yuson

Thomas Fink Reviews PARSINGS by Sheila E. Murphy

Michael Caylo-Baradi Reviews PERSUASIONS OF FALL by Ann Lauinger

Tom Beckett Reviews STRING PARADE by Jordan Stempleman

Karen Rigby Reviews THEORIES OF FALLING by Sandra Beasley

Wendy Lynn Cohen Reviews THE GREAT WHIRL OF EXILE by Leroy V. Quintana

James Stotts Reviews ITERATURE by Eugene Ostashevsky

Tom Beckett Reviews YOUR TEN FAVORITE WORDS by Reb Livingston

John Herbert Cunningham Reviews BLANK VERSE: A GUIDE TO ITS HISTORY AND USE by Robert B. Shaw

Elizabeth Kate Switaj Reviews IN NO ONE'S LAND by Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Wendy Lynn Cohen Reviews POLYVERSE by Lee Ann Brown

Eric Gelsinger Reviews OPEN NIGHT by Aaron Lowinger

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIMS by Brenda Iijima

Eileen Tabios Engages HALLUCINATING CALIFORNIA by Richard Lopez and Jonathan Hayes

Emily Schorr Lesnick Reviews ARDOR by Karen An-Hwei Lee

Linda Rodriguez Reviews ROUNDING THE HUMAN by Linda Hogan

Helen Losse Reviews AFTER THE POISON by Collin Kelley (1)

Sam Rasnake Reviews AFTER THE POISON by Collin Kelley (2)

Robert E. Wood Reviews AFTER THE POISON by Collin Kelley (3)

James Stotts Reviews IN COMPANY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW MEXICO POETS AFTER 1960, Edited by Lee Bartlett, V.B. Price and Dianne Edenfield Edwards

Denise Dooley Reviews UNBECOMING BEHAVIOR by Kate Colby

Tom Beckett Reviews WORLD0 and NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING, both by John Bloomberg-Rissman

Michael Caylo-Baradi Reviews THE SINGERS by Logan Ryan Smith

Wendy Lynn Cohen Reviews HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS by Joan Retallack

Lars Palm Reviews PLAYING THE AMPLITUDES by Christopher Rizzo

Karen An-Hwei Lee Reviews BOX OF LIGHT / CAJA DE LUZ by Susan Gardner

Jeff Harrison Reviews WALDEN BOOK by Allen Bramhall

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews BONE PAGODA by Susan Tichy

John Bloomberg-Rissman Reviews ISSUE 1, Edited by Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews WOMEN POETS ON MENTORSHIP: EFFORTS & AFFECTIONS, Edited by Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker

Eileen Tabios Engages TORCHWOOD by Jill Magi

Karen An-Hwei Lee Reviews SHADOW MOUNTAIN by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews GLAD STONE CHILDREN by Edmund Berrigan and DRUNK BY NOON by Jennifer L. Knox

Fiona Sze-Lorrain Reviews SAVAGE MACHINERY by Karen Rigby

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews ALL THAT'S LEFT by Jack Hirschman and ONE OF A KIND by Jack Micheline

Adam Halbur Reviews EYE-SENSING by David Jaffin

Steven Karl Reviews STATE OF THE UNION--50 POLITICAL POEMS, Edited by Joshua Beckman & Matthew Zapruder

Eileen Tabios Engages RED by Marilyn R. Rosenberg

Brett Duchon Reviews PRAU by Jean Vengua

Wendy Lynn Cohen Reviews LOUISE IN LOVE by Mary Jo Bang

Steven Karl Reviews SHY GREEN FIELDS by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Nathan Logan Reviews THE ROMANCE OF HAPPY WORKERS by Anne Boyer

Patria Rivera Reviews FIELD OF MIRRORS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF PHILIPPINE AMERICAN WRITERS, Edited by Edwin Lozada

Brett Duchon Reviews COMPLICATIONS by Garrett Caples

Linda Nguyen Reviews BRIDGEABLE SHORES: SELECTED POEMS (1969-2001) by Luis Cabalquinto

Linda Rodriguez Reviews THE PORTABLE FAMINE by Rane Arroyo

Reed Boskey Reviews WHAT THE FORTUNE TELLER DIDN'T SAY by Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Rebecca Holohan Reviews THE SPLINTERED FACE: TSUNAMI POEMS by Indran Amirthanayagam

Katherine Levy Reviews KALI'S BLADE by Michelle Bautista

Monna Wong Reviews MUSEUM OF ABSENCES by Luis H. Francia

Aileen Ibardaloza Engages PINOY POETICS: A COLLECTION OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL ESSAYS ON FILIPINO AND FILIPINO-AMERICAN POETICS, Edited by Nick Carbo and POEMCRAZY: FREEING YOUR LIFE WITH WORDS by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

Aileen Ibardaloza Reviews PASSAGE: POEMS 1983-2006 by Edgar B. Maranan

Eric Gelsinger Reviews WHEN I COME HERE by Ryan Eckes

Nathan Logan Reviews ON THE FLY by Amy King

Aileen Ibardaloza Engages BARING MORE THAN SOUL by Reme A. Grefalda

THE CRITIC WRITES POEMS
Michael Caylo-Baradi

IN THE PHILIPPINES: “POETRY ALLERGIC TO THE PURELY VERBAL”
A PREFACE: Angelo Suarez engages with the works of Philippines-based poet-artists Bea Camacho, Costantino Zicarelli, Buen Calubayan and Cesare A.X. Syjuco

Angelo Suarez on THE POETICS OF INTERMEDIA: Bea Camacho’s Eulogy to Art

Angelo Suarez on A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS MORON: Constantino Zicarelli and Buen Calubayan

Angelo Suarez on CESARE A.X. SYJUCO AND THE NEW FORMALISM

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Allen Gaborro Reviews DOVEGLION: COLLECTED POEMS by JOSE GARCIA VILLA, Ed. John Edwin Cowen

Patrick James Dunagan Reviews EVANGELINE DOWNS by Micah Ballard

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Tiny Poetry Books Feeding the World…Literally!

BACK COVER
A German Shepherd Most Assuredly Shall Grace the White House Lawn

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2008-12-17T18:50:00.000-08:00

The recession has arrived at Galatea Resurrects (GR). Due to extensive travel in the past six months, I had to collapse two issues into one...and the "recession" in people's time for poetry reviews may be seen in how this two-in-one issue only generated 72 new reviews/engagements. Oh, wait -- 72 new poetry reviews/engagements! Actually, that isn't so bad, is it! Which is also to say, in its two-year existence, GR has presented 610 new reviews, covering 275 publishers in 15 countries!

I still remember starting GR hoping to reach as much as five reviews per issue through the generosities of whoever is out there paying attention in the internet. Well, thank you to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. You make it fun to indulge in statistics -- such as moi running tally up to this current issue:

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

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

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews
Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews

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.

*****

In this issue, I have the pleasure of offering reviews by students whose critical eyes were being trained by two poet-professors: Kristin Naca over at MacAlester College's English Department and Catherine Daly during an open assignment course in 1999 called "English 3xx: Reading Poetry" at Antioch LA. As then-student reviewer Wendy Owen says, "Catherine did something here that I thought was the best way to learn poetry -- reading and critiquing it, not pretending you might know something to impress the teacher but really getting into the head of the poet and finding the key to the poet’s intent yourself. I got to know lesser known poets, not over-exposed and perhaps over-considered ones. And I fell in love with some of them."

I'd like to make this offer to educators out there, to do as Kristin Naca did: have your students use some of Galatea Resurrects' review copies (list available HERE) for assigned poetry reviews. For those you deem worthy, feel free to submit them here for potential publication. (Of course, as with all review copies I send out, please return those review copies if your class ends up not doing a published review, so that I can continue to try placing them with future reviewers). While the review from Catherine Daly's class took place in 1999, the students of Kristin Naca availed themselves of GR's review copies.

*****

One of Galatea Resurrects' special features is its openness to publishing more than one review of the same title -- in this issue, for example, three folks review Collin Kelley's chap AFTER THE POISON. But it's also interesting to see how one reviewer writes two different reviews of the same book, to wit, Patrick James Dunagan generously gives GR a review of Jack Micheline's ONE OF A KIND. But you also can see his different review of the same book, published in the SF Bay Guardian, at http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=6910#cmt. Enjoy!

*****

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).

*****

Last but not least, here are some photos for ye German Shepherd aficionados (but if you really want to understand this breed, you need to read poetry -- Woof!): Achilles and Gabriela wishing you all a Happy Holidays!

With much Love, Fur, Santa Hats, Unfinished Construction by Big Burly Men, and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
December 17, 2008

SHORT MOVIES by JUKKA-PEKKA KERVINEN & MARTON KOPPANY

2008-12-17T18:40:00.000-08:00

MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Engages

Short Movies by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Márton Koppány
(cPress, Finland, 2008. Free .pdf HERE )

Abbreviations in Lucidity
Luminous appropriations in Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Márton Koppány’s Short Movies

1.

The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, community, or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the systematics of the inconceivable; to undo our own “reality” under the effect of the other formulations, other syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject’s topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it, […] (6)
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

In the passage above, Roland Barthes clues us into the nature of human instinct in dream-state, a space where knowledge does not undergo a process of evolution but is already there, given; it is given, in a sense, that it is not produced in the struggle to understand, nor is it an achievement of some sort. Knowledge in that state is the air inhaled and exhaled. The movie The Matrix may come to mind, here, wherein programmed knowledge, from another space, through a few keyboard strokes, can be easily transmitted and lodged in someone’s faculties, in seconds; time in transmitting that knowledge is almost negligible, here, because it doesn’t constitute a process of achievement, or struggle to attain that knowledge; indeed, although the matrix is a state all its own, it’s almost comparable to dream-state; however, readily-transmittable knowledge in the matrix may only be limited to technical knowledge and doesn’t necessarily include downloadable programs on moral and/or philosophical knowledge; unless, of course, if that technical knowledge can be upgraded, to give them metaphysical slants and auras, making them Marxist, Llorcan, Kantian, Tabiosian, Sillimanian, or Sadean. But the difference between knowledge in the matrix and dream-state is that in the matrix knowledge is often transmitted through a request, while in Barthes’ dream-state knowledge is just there, ever present, not subjected to epistemic concepts of time. Certainly, this dream-state doesn’t necessarily mean dream inside closed eyes, while asleep, or in daydream; this dream-state can, indeed, be in quotidian experience itself, experience that is inundated with information through media technologies, such as movies, books, the web, music, or the telephone. Information through these technologies informs us of things beyond our immediate surroundings, that there’s a there, that over there are ‘others.’ Recognition of these others can shake the sensibilities of our reality, morphing and transporting aspects of that reality to a space where distant others and their otherness must irrevocably be considered. This space of alterity and difference takes the characteristics of dream-state, one that lives in one’s consciousness, but alien, foreign. Furthermore, I emphasize this, because the passage above is contextualized, with Japan in the mind of Barthes, the Japan of Barthes, a space that encloses a universe of difference to anything that challenges the Occidental in Barthes. Barthes then encloses Japan in dream-state. Thus, in Empire of Signs Barthes doesn’t seem to struggle to expose knowledge of Japan, but something he already knows, in the fictions of his imagination; the book then is simply the textualization of dream-state, and doesn’t necessarily explain what’s in it. Barthes appropriates a textualization through the language of comparison; his reference point is the Occident. And this appropriation may sound exotic, but it isn’t necessarily new. Travelers or tourists in places foreign to their physical and mental space experience this similar dream-state, a state in which their minds are seduced, unconsciously, to make immediate comparisons between concept of the place in their mind and the materiality of that place, where they are on. One can argue that immigrants and business travelers often experience lapses of this state, in diverse degrees and intensities.

My process of seeing Jukka-Pekka Kervinen and Márton Koppány’s Short Movies may be comparable to the way Barthes sees Japan in Empire of Signs; contextualized in dream-state, I somehow know what’s in it, because, as reader, audience, viewer, or spectator of Short Movies I could devise my own Short Movies, in the fictions of my imagination. Now since this is visual/luminous poetry, my process of engaging in it is witnessing it, giving it the attention one gives an event, be absorbed in the scene. Short Movies is an event I’ve witnessed more than twice. Recalling each piece in it, I’m sometimes tempted to think about them as quick, very subtle commercials, and the product advertised is the title of each piece; sometimes I think they’re preludes to a major television commercial that’s about to be aired, minutes after a popular prime-time mystery feature.

It’s easy to be absorbed by the narratives in Short Movies, because of their visual impact; but it may not be easy to absorb them. That impact can flow in you like a subtle gesture that can almost be easily ignored. But in hindsight, you realize that gesture may have proposed something in you. Being engaged in a work this way can no doubt offer delights to the voyeuristic nature of the digital eye, a promiscuous and ever-hungry eye, one that devours anything that is visually fresh, especially in a whimsical way but with a serious message.

Now in most events, the witness is prone to engage in talking about what they had seen, usually through the narrative of gossip, a bit fraught with a mixture of shock, curiosity, and wonder. This is what I feel like doing, after witnessing Short Movies. However, in textualizing or ‘gossiping’ what I’ve witnessed, I realize I may not be giving the work justice, which must simply be absorbed. But seeing Short Movies is a bit of a shock. Let’s just say, I’m writing what I’ve witnessed to recover from that shock, whatever that recovery portends.

Like Barthes, I use comparison to textualize the dream-state of the work in question. Although my reference points may not be universal, and express strains of myopia, they are still reference points that are recognizable in the realm of human thought. As audience and spectator, I “descend into the untranslatable,” to use Barthes’ phrase; but I’m partial about ‘descend’, here, and prefer to replace ‘descend’ with ‘infiltrate’ or ‘penetrate’; because infiltrations and penetrations suggest more conscious intentions that melts in solipsistic acts of determination in dream-state.

2.

In Cosmology, the cosmos is dominated by the riddle of a hotdog…or, wait, sauerkraut? Could this be the cosmos of a drive-in, or the heart of the cosmos is sauerkraut fever?

Here, the cosmos is horizontal rectangularity; and so it has boundaries. On the other hand, rectangles do not have to suggest they are bounded by boundaries, the edges of the rectangle. Indeed, the cosmos can have any shape we want it to have, circular, ten-dimensional, oblong, like a pimple, or rectangular. All shapes we can think of about the cosmos are valid; it’s like visualizing the image of God: it can be a river, James Dean, death, cinema, or the unconscious.

Now something moves from the left of that rectangularity, a big smudge, a purplish cloud; it’s direction seem to be the right, as though movement in that direction is the only movement it can muster and appropriate. And right in the middle of its journey, it drops something, a curve-like entity, the left half of a parenthesis, its shape a miniature simulacra of a hotdog. The half-punctuation falls, but stops in the middle of the cosmos. But while that curve is moving downwards, it is followed by another punctuation, a period. Or could this period be the top or bottom view of an exclamation mark, dropping sideways, and all we see is its top or bottom? Now the period stops moving downward right in front of the parenthesis, as though to act as substitute for the other half of the parenthesis duality. One wonders after the period falls, if there’ll be a rain or tempest of punctuations. The period is the last dropped, while the smudge continues to move, and soon transforms into a pair of white clouds, soon to move above the signifier of fastfood, before disappearing, moving beyond the realms of the cosmos, eternity, invisibility, spirit.

Now punctuations certainly can suggest many things; but I’d like to think of them as representations of the boundaries of desire. Punctuations enclose desire; they can end it in the period, explode it in the exclamation point, ambiguate it with the quotation mark, give it a character of partiality in the ellipsis, or endow it with a sense of dimension and depth in the parenthesis. The parenthesis is quite special, since to parenthesize something is to give it an appearance of being occluded, be forced to step back from something, a sort of hesitation that invites meditation.

The fall of punctuations, here, can signify the precipitation of the boundaries of desire, in fate. Now, this is serious, because those boundaries can be receptacles of ideology, morality, or politics, elements in our cosmos that guard, dissect, or violate the freedoms of desire. Indeed, only two punctuations are dropped. But they can, indeed, contain a tempest of boundaries that can implode, then seek subjects they can be with to explore and explode. And it’s intriguing that after the punctuations are dropped, the smudge, the purplish cloud turns into two while clouds; a burden has been dropped, to lighten up something in the smudge. God drops his boundaries, and is glad to be had of that burden, on to something lighter, now cruising as white clouds, toward a more appetizing dimension, advancing into the space of reality, the hotdogs. Somewhere further in that cosmos is a hamburger, some burritos, tacos, further hardening the exclamation of hard, tactile materiality.

3.

Prophecy is a diptych: two vertical, adjacent rectangles, as though two pages in a book, but the beginning pages of that book. On the upper left-hand corner of the first rectangle is the number 1 and on the upper right hand corner of the second rectangle is the number 2. On each space, the background color is white, untainted, or unsmudged white. In both spaces is the letter q. The first rectangle only contains the q, but the other space contains other letters besides the letter q: f, m, b. F and m are in bold fonts, situated towards the upper right hand corner of that space. The b, on the other hand, is situated near the bottom right corner of that page, capitalized, but a smaller figure. All the letters have a specific color; all those in the second space are letters with the color black, while the one on the first rectangle, the q has a somewhat caramel color.

In the course of the piece’s narrative, we notice that letter f, m, and b start to disappear, slowly. First, b disappears towards the bottom of its ‘home’ rectangle, m moves toward the top of the rectangle before it vanishes, while f moves eastward before disappearing. After the disappearances, only q is left behind. For a while, both qs are now the only ones left, as though they are the sole and irreplaceable owners of the space they are in. Could there be pride of the qs chanted in silence, here, for being the only ones left in each their spaces? Do their similarities in form, not in color, cause them to somehow move closer to the other, unite? Soon, the q on the right rectangle moves toward the q on the left rectangle, as though the q on the left has magnetic force, the force inherent in similar entities that allows them to seek and bond each other. It’s hard to tell if that movement is reluctant or urgent. The movement ends when that mobile q disappears in the boundary between the first and second rectangle. The aim of reaching out to its probable other is reached in non-unity, eternal invisibility.

The q on the first rectangle never moves, as though movement is not necessary for its being, but is rather nourished in pure non-movement, undisturbed stasis. Since that q is on the first page, we can assume that q is that of innocence, preserved in what it has always been, locked, immobile, not subject to desire, and its convulsions, urges, prognostications. But the rectangle on the left is the rectangle of vibrant activity, movement, travel, voyages, of moving towards boundaries, disappearing there forever, advancing towards death. Perhaps f, m, b are looking for something like themselves, a simpler version, their innocence. On the left rectangle, q is probably lucky enough to see the image of its innocence and moved towards it, only to disappear and reach it somewhere, in a different form, substance. The emptied space on the right rectangle is a premonition, and assumes not peace but emptiness, perhaps burial ground for lost desire, vacancy, stared by q, innocence. And the narrative ends there, q as monument of innocence, before and after anything, outside time.

With regards to the letter q in the English-language alphabet, it’s perhaps one of a few letters of the alphabet that resembles a musical note; the others are lower-cases g, b, p, and d, and the upper-case P. When saying each four letters including q, all four end with the long ē sound, while q’s pronunciation ends with the long ū sound; what’s further different about the q among these note-like alphabets is the formation of one’s lips inwards when pronouncing the q, while one’s lips are spread out while pronouncing the other four. The elongated formation of one’s lips creates an opening, a readiness to ingest, while lips forming inward denotes a unity of the lips, folding, attempting embrace of each other’s skin, becoming intimate, a kiss. There must be something special with the q, or if it’s not that special, something relentlessly queer about it; that’s why this letter is given unconventional attention here.

4.

Voyage is a triptych. Three horizontal rectangles enclose soft colors, as though from a deep, unfocused camera shot trying to capture an image of many colors. This unfocused-ness somehow forces the colors to look like they’re about to overlap, collapsing each other’s substance or identity into each other, blurring boundaries, subverting the meaning of clarity. But these colors are simply the background. At the heart of this piece’s narrative is the figure number 2, the protagonist. That figure moves from the first rectangle to the next, in the center, from left to right, the direction of the Western, reading eye. In the middle rectangle, the figure drops down the bottom of that space; here, the drop, poses as conflict. But the figure makes it up from the bottom, moves up the middle of its journey, and then continues to the end of the last rectangle.

The figure 2 can stand for many things that signify dualities. Simple dualities can be derived from the human body’s specific equipments that come in pairs, and function as congruencies: two eyes, two arms, two ears, two scrotums, or two breasts. But there are more complex dualities that exist not necessarily as similarities, but as oppositions that define a sort of unity: life and death is human existence, a man and woman unite to produce another life, night and day to comprise a twenty-four hour period, or thesis and anti-thesis evolves dialectic. In complex duality, the figure 2 becomes a representation of substance, that one must need another to have something, invite being. But the journey of 2 becomes not merely a representation, but more so, a production of substance in 2, the layering of substance, simplifying it into the heart of 2. The production of that substance is certainly not easy, because it involves tight negotiations, compromises, power struggles, love and hate, subversion and expression, or secrecies and demonstrations.

It’s also significant to emphasize that the figure ‘2’ is not spelled out as ‘two’. The visuality of ‘2’ proposes a unity of two elements into one visual element, while the visuality of ‘t’, ‘w’, and ‘o’, proposes something else, perhaps a visual trilogy that is anachronistic to what two means, the sense of paired-ness in that signification, a collaboration. But there’s a suggestion of cynicism in the collaboration that happens in the journey here. The figure 2 looks the same all the way, from beginning to end. The 2 may have recovered from a fall, but it continues without visual metamorphosis. Perhaps the assumption here is that metamorphosis cannot always be perceived visually, but rather assumed, or proposed as something within. If we can extract an idea of progress proposed in this piece, that progress can be derived in the space or context of time. The voyage of 2 cannot subvert time, because it is within frames, measured frames, bounded. Thus, progress here is perhaps the idea that it can move from one point to another, points that form a space, an idea of itself, a voyage.

5.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled. (7)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972)

Even though “the relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled”, the relationship remains a marriage that cannot contemplate divorce; thus, it’s a marriage that’s settled not merely in negotiations, and/or compromise, but, also, and ineluctably, in both the quiet and bloody power struggle in violence. In that struggle, knowledge, in the end, gives in to new, fresh perceptions availed in seeing; but it gives in reluctantly. But what perhaps binds seeing and knowledge is seeing not necessarily what’s before and after words, but rather the interval before and after words: the word itself, the well in the internal life of text. Seeing in words is knowledge is indelible to poetry; the world’s saturated visuality melts into the visuality of text, words, and punctuations.

Now the visuality of textual poetry can be transformed into something else: the substitution of text with something, say, more visual, and not necessarily looking for something to represent text; this can be a tricky distinction. And I sense this is the proposal of luminous poetry. But in order to create a visual vocabulary, this form borrows images from anywhere, from print text, punctuations, media images, digital visual inventions, or anything from popular culture. In this poetic form, producing something that can have some narrative appeal can, indeed, be an experience, as though in a dream, in an irresistible neon shock. Short Movies gives me that dream-state; it gives me fresh illusory perspectives and correlations when I think of visualizing cosmology, prophesy, and voyage, not to forget q, 2, and an image of a hotdog.

The hotdog is particularly intriguing, because its corresponding existence in real-life can be masticated, then digested through molecular processes, unlike the other non-culinary elements in the frames, the movies. The image of that fastfood can be a hint of ideology and politics; but I’m textualizing dream-state, a space that’s already mired and loaded with multiple combinations of fantastical, phantasmal, or liberal totalitarian ideologies and politics; and discussing politics in that state can certainly be elided, because it’s beyond words, and thus fits the ‘visual discussion’ afforded in the visuality of luminous poetry. I have also avoided thinking what the poets were thinking in terms of words, when they were creating Short Movies. In many ways, I like the idea that as I read or witness the images I become mystified; interestingly, I’m even mystified at the textualization of those mystifying images myself. I am not surprised; I’m textualizing dream-state, although one that would soon diffuse and melt into my everyday reality, demystifying itself there, crawling in my urban reality like rhizomic, digital energies, in the voracious freedoms of the unconscious. But tomorrow I will continue to have my regular fastfood break at the hotdog stand, only adorned with ketchup and relish, habitually relinquishing the palatable but negligible benefits of mustard and onions. I will sit and talk with others around the stand, and for a second there, I may look at the sky, and wonder about things falling; then I’ll just look away, forget that sky, and talk with others around me whose words suggest the inspiring, claustrophobic freedoms in work. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a parenthesis may already be planning a rendezvous with a period or an exclamation mark. Then I’ll remember some movies I’ve seen lately, including some eventful short movies, as I immerse myself in the unfolding, cinematic cosmos around me.

+++++++++++
References
Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs, Hill and Wang, New York, Translated by Richard Howard, 1997.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing, BBC and Penguin Books, 1972.

*****

Michael Caylo-Baradi lives in Southern California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in XCP:Streetnotes, Tertulia Magazine, OurOwnVoice, elimae, and Kartika Review. He occasionally contributes op-ed pieces to the Los Angeles Daily News.

ZONE : ZERO by STEPHANIE STRICKLAND

2008-12-17T18:35:00.000-08:00

RACHEL DALEY Reviews

Zone : Zero by Stephanie Strickland
(Ahsahta Press, 2008)

Pink Acid Cloud and Digital Love:
The Slipstream Worlds of Stephanie Strickland’s Zone : Zero

As a reader/writer with a new baby, my perception being deflected and refracted through the senses of someone just learning to use them, I'm positioned differently in relation to things I read. Previous to parenthood, I consumed reading materials by way of tools honed to maximize an output of applicability to my own writing, which meant marking these materials with reference points by which I could "make sense" or decode these materials. I would understand what I read by way of things I had already read, and so could categorize and interpret according to rules of categories and interpretations generated by reading what I had experienced or read in the past. This is a very commonly-taught way of reading: read for patterns and then apply what you learn about those patterns to the next thing you read which displays those patterns. And in my case, I was particularly interested in how to torque an interpretation, or take advantage, of what I read for the purposes of something I was writing.

But having a baby has changed all of my machinery for categorizing and applying the rules of categories to objects and phenomena. For instance, while at the bagel shop across the street this morning, I walked with my baby toward a door stop that was mounted on the wall adjacent to the women's bathroom. My baby didn't point out this doorstop to me, or make bodily motions indicating he wanted to be nearer to the doorstop. But because I was holding my baby, and trying to do whatever I could to occupy or interest him, as I always do, some part of my mental functioning, of which I was not totally aware, told me to walk the baby over to the doorstop and point out the doorstop to him. The doorstop was mounted at waist-height, and was a rubber-filled metal ring. I thought surely the feel of the rubber and the 3-D aspect of the doorstop would interest him. And it did. The doorstop turned into a baby-point-of-interest for the morning.

So, my goal in reading the doorstop as a new mom was shifted from what it was as a non-mom. Specifically, as a reader going about in the world among things and people, I am now not only reading phenomena in order to understand them and apply that understanding to other tasks (such as writing, or opening doors non-destructively), but am functioning as a facilitator of someone else's reading of these phenomena. I have a role in producing the readerly experience for someone else.

It seems my openness to this new understanding of the shifting function of doorstops required first having a baby. That poetry can make such shifts in its readers' perceptual frameworks is taken for granted by readers and writers alike, including myself. But these shifts in the reading experience don't actually come along all that often, and when they do, they feel as noteworthy as my doorstop experience (which is to say quite noteworthy!).The Wordsworthian free-verse lyric (whose rhetoric uses print-poem techniques which have been around for a long while) is going strong. But when a poem tries out some new technology, lays out new sets of terms and tools for its readers, actually producing new uses and meanings for the act of reading, is when poetry really feels like it's doing its poetry thing. This is how poetry defines itself. And this is how poetry as a practice is renewed as relevant, applicable, accessible, and understandable: when it opens readers' own mechanisms for reading language to a slightly unprecedented but shared capability.

Stephanie Strickland's Zone : Zero enacts and constitutes this shift. The language and structure of the book arches its ingenuous eye toward an interrogation into what poetry does. Initially this happens via the question of how poetry is contained; the book is segmented into five zones ("ZONE ARMORY WAR, "ZONE MOAT ELSE" "ZONE DUNGEON BODY," "ZONE RAMPART LOGIC," "ZONE MOTE ELSE") the language of which (with the exception of "MOTE")* describes these zones as enclosed defensive structures which may or may not act on each other and which may or may not supplement each other's work. These are distinct enclosures/containers, not to be confused with acts of a drama or with personal narrative segments conjoined by a unified lyrical voice. Zone : Zero's structure maps out five parallel disjointed territories. The zones are enclosed places, each zone performing its own work across the fabric of a plane parallel to other planes. What the zones of the book share, in addition to a sense of pre-occupation that results from each section's intense focus, is the fact of their purposeful activity. Each zone performs work that none other could perform.

That said, there are strong threads of linguistic texture crossing through and linking up the ecosystems of each zone, which work together to pull the reading activity into the reader's body: there's sand, dust, colors, crystals, shadows, faiths, lyrics, roots, myths, and histories all skirting each other parabolically. The language bestows real tangibility to the experience of the poems. While the business of the poems and their sections progress, there's also a palpable sense of levity from a lack of the neurotic dialogic double-backing that plagues some lyrical free-verse modes. In a way, Zone : Zero has the best of both poetic-tradition (the one it creates, and the one from which it is born) worlds.

The poems of "ZONE ARMORY WAR,"* the book's first section, are wavelike and rhythmic, patterned after tides and speaking to the constancy and quietness (as in, the poem "Constant Quiet") of the most violently aggressive of human activities. Heroes and heroines, kings and commoners, rubble fields, holy wars, orange trees, pink acid clouds, birdsongs and bond-slaves all populate and penetrate the introductory section of Zone : Zero. These poems inhabit their space on a rise and fall of energy across and/or down the page that seems to have no origin and no endstop. Images of disintegrating lab equipment, trash pits raided by roving eyes, televisions left playing in the middle of the forest, biotic life in the chemical pool – all swimming their cycles in their post-millennial debris, suspended and buoyed by the cosmic rehearsal of ultimate inevitability. Sharp objects and toxic substances, floods and holy wars all come and go with the regularity of leaves on a tree, even if the immediacy of these events feels more or less apocalyptic.

The variable patterning of infinitude in this first section gives way to the book's "moat," the meandering "Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot." The back and forth playfulness of Sand and Soot, zeroes and ones, constitutes the kind of moat which is so loopy, it feels more like a stream. Very much a departure from the checkerboarded tit-for-tat tone of "War Day" in "ZONE ARMORY WAR,"* Sand and Soot's back and forth conversation is a song, a classical narrative of the passionate link between the pursuer (Soot) and the pursued (Sand):

Soot loves Sand. Every tree,
every wall, a target inscription, pierced
by Tell's weapon. Turn me on,
the swooshing sound Soot hears Sand
murmur. (32)

The hypertext version of the poem notes that the ballad's Sand and Soot refer to silicon and carbon. These are organic materials ("Biocompatible glass?" 39) matched in a game of digital-carbonic footsie. Rejecting traditional status as a purely passive love object, Sand's shapeshifting marks her as more of an interactive sort:

Sand's never the sameness fleeter than
anything Soot could get a hand, a handle,
on. Flickery swift. And yet. One finger
brings her crashing down...(42)

As a courtship narrative, "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot" explores how digital and hypertextual technologies can degrade easy demarcations of active subject/passive love object and how the chemical, biological, and cosmological vocabularies which constitute digital creation can also be employed to describe a love relationship. And all the while, the Ballad remains, at essence, playful.

If a silly con were all Sand were.

If an ashy trash were all of Soot.

* * * *

That Zone : Zero can successfully ride these waves of gravity and weightless play is due in large part to a sense that the poems (and their specialized vocabularies) are carefully dipping themselves onto the page from their normal spheres (zones) of activity. I am not at all versed in fractal geometry, Austrian logic systems, or motion capture coding. I am not, as can be expected when reading poetry, reading solely for the consumption of this information, so in reading Zone : Zero, I get to gear up a different kind of cognitive machinery in making an experience for myself with these poems which do feature this type of information. These are poems that blissfully mind and conduct their own business, regardless of whether or not they have my go-ahead. In short, I am never, as a reader of 21st-century American poetry, being sympathized with by the activities of Zone : Zero. What I am given is the opportunity to create my own experience of reading the book, by way of handling various kinds of matter that I would otherwise be shunted from (by myself or by the discreteness of the categories of knowledge to which we all attain). Rather than describe this experience as an amateurish dalliance in things like Greek tragedy, virtual technologies, mysticisms, and math, I would describe the opportunity the poems give as a sort of nano-pricking or nano-threading of these knowledges onto or in and out of the surface of me. These prickings and threadings pick up flashes of memories and associations which then constitute a distinct sensation – one which is particular to me – of the experience of the book.

This pricking-ness, though, is the least of a factor in the third section of the book, "ZONE DUNGEON BODY."* If the poems in this zone are collectively represented by an underground cell or prison which also tangentially relates to the body, it would seem that these left-justified lyrical narrative poems are being described collectively as restricted, restrictive, hemmed-in, constricted, or contained. This is more or less a tautology about formal lyricism. (Which is to say: when your poems only come in a certain kind of package, they only come in a certain kind of package.) But that this tautology also relates to the body, to the limits of the body, creates a relation between this section of the book and the other sections of the book, which display lyrical, visual, and narrative freedoms most obviously in material and nonmaterial substances like silicon, sand, ones, zeroes, fuel rocks, gelatin-silver, and Caves. This section is a sort of departure from previous sections, or a landing back onto home turf:

Just a stone barn
and Rodney's music....

you couldn't even
figure it out, unless you
were told about it.... (53)

Stone barns and stories. In fact, "Stone Barn" includes a sort of commentary on the double-bind of material forms – how materials, being as they are materials, can be so easily hijacked for unintended uses: "...the engineer/mixed it funny, putting down/the piano entirely/when the voice appeared." But this surrender of control is also itself a sort of comfort: "Rodney says,/ that wasn't/ what he meant, but you can't/ be everywhere..." (54). Quite a sigh of relief it is to abandon responsibility for being everywhere.

The comfort of the familiar linearity of these poems is very real. It's also linguistically luscious and even juicy and rich for the knowledge-seeking head. "Absinthe: The Twelve" is in part a survey of oft-overlooked women artists and ascetics from Salt Pillar and Sheba to Patti Smith. The "ZONE DUNGEON BODY"* poems very much reassure that the book as a whole, while engaged in a discussion of late technologies which have redefined what it means to "read," is coming from a place defined by a quote unquote simple love of reading and writing words that make poetry.

The experience of reading this third section leads to the question of what it means to read for pleasure versus what it means to read for something else. Is reading with the goal of learning something definitively not pleasurable? Is it the goal of poetry to create something enjoyable? Is poetry with references to fields of learning outside the realm of poetry less than poetry? Certainly one of poetry's initial conditions, in reading it, is that you come to it with a more or less open mind/eye/ear. You're coming to poetry, to paraphrase Strickland, to be taken through doors – closed doors, secret doors, and doors you don't know are there. Perhaps the answers to some of these questions about the job of poetry can be found by determining whether or not, as a reader of poetry, you want to take yourself through these doors, you want to be taken through these doors by something or someone else, or whether you can envision a system of reading, learning, and interacting with media which doesn't require such a harsh divide between activity and passivity, producer and consumer, writer and viewer.

Perhaps yet another way of looking at these questions is to wonder whether, as a reader (or, "viewer"?), you need to have knowledge to gain knowledge. To read/view about (or, by way of) motion capture coding, for example, do you need to know what motion capture coding is and how it is made? Or, do you actually need to acquire information about motion capture in order to read information using it? What if you didn't want to consume what you read, but would rather simply view? (And indeed, how is this distinction made?)

A rampart is an embankment of earth surmounted by a parapet which is present to defend a fort. Layer upon layer of defense. The "ZONE RAMPART LOGIC"* section of Zone : Zero begins with a prisoner and ends with a prisoner, and what separates one prisoner from another is the surrender of control of the defenses, or of data, for example, to a realization that "to/ assess / motion, one needs rest...one needs that standard..." (80). The mind is distressed in these poems, yet willing to come to grips with the fact of tripping over itself:

slalom total touch re-
currently inclining
crossing to one

voice more than another
like a small creek that stays clear
through numerous findings (75)

Hats are tipped to the work of 20th-century logicians, bridging gaps between Plato's caves and those utilized by 21st-century filmmakers. But the endeavors of logic-seekers and logic-makers, parallel to the work of layers of iron-clad defense, degrade to the touch and give themselves over to the skies:

Never mind that the watch failed to summon,
or did sound, unheard. Dawn,

itself, streak after streak in the big windows, could not
pry open our dreams.

What awaits in the skies, on the other side of the rampart, is the way out or around or beyond the problems of lyrical and experiential limit, beyond the logic of rhetoric and the rhetoric of logic. (And as will be discussed, what follows the release of prisoners from the ramparts of logic is not so much the heart of Zone : Zero as much as it is an accelerator for a way of reading beyond rhetoric.) But on the earthen side of the rampart, experience remains measured in time, space, life, and death: "flowers awaken,/ absorb energy/ to die./ Digits throb/ red alert./ Minutes speed forward only to spread/ apart...." In this dimension, there is one side of the equal sign, and then there is another. Working the sides out in poetry means that truffles and trifles can be equally manhandled in an argument and that as a reader, you are allowed to divest yourself from the outcomes of these arguments and just enjoy the show:

nougats to be made that can't
be toothed – or distoothed – within the Rule

                  but that will be stickily true, nonetheless:
                  a caution...(77)

The words of logicians are equally words and when reappropriated for poetry play, are slanted just enough to reveal their caves and shadows.

*                   *                   *

The final section of Zone : Zero is "ZONE MOTE ELSE."* The "else" in the section's title seems to designate a reaching past what's come before, such as, "I've tried all of these, but what else?" But as opposed to the "else" of "ZONE MOAT ELSE"*, this section's else wants to retain its attachments to what culminated in its fruition. If linear narrative lyric is being stepped away from in Zone : Zero, it certainly is acknowledged as part of the recipe. This is the section, though, in which my doorstop is re-imagined and by the reading of which all other sections become doorstops.

A clue to what else exactly is next comes in the "mote" of the section's title. A mote, as a noun, according to online Merriam-Webster's, is simply a speck, as in a mote of dust or sand. As a verbal auxiliary, mote is an archaic version of may or might, from the Old English "motan" meaning "to be allowed to." Mix all of this together and you get a sense that the poems in this section are infiltrators, interlocutors, getting into secrets areas and coating motionless objects more and more thickly as time accumulates. They have, of course, been given a certain amount of permission. So if the other zones are defensive structures, this zone presents the offender, perhaps invited, who can never be completely contained.

These poems employ a variety of techniques to demonstrate their elseness, including font play, variable (wavelike, really) spacing and enjambment, and the use of programming language to create lyrical "pool.littlegreen willytadpoles" (90). Most prominent in the section, though, is the presence of a 10-part interactive Flash poem, "slippingglimpse," which was made in collaboration with two other artists/writers. The poem is printed in the book (obviously, without the Flash component), is available on-line, and is also one of two poems (the other being "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot') on the CD included with the book.

Without the interactive component, the poem reads like the busted-up record of a conversation between mathematicians, photographers, medieval farmers, and computer programmers. The truncated bits of dialogue, descriptions of artistic process, and loopy lines about how, for example, "the compositor composits it all" lend themselves to a sense you're witnessing clouds of information spinning from their origins around a projection screen in the sky and that the poem is constructed by its composer/compositor having snatched bits of language out of the ether and landing them on the page (94). This type of reading is fun but also limited, and leaves you really with just having glimpsed a part of a part of the larger activity of the poem.

What you're reading when you're reading the print version of "slippingglimpse" is information that has put you on the production side of the poem. The language here presented is comprised, in part, of samples, recombinations, and direct quotes from articles and interviews from many different sources and on many different subject matters. This print version lives in the interactive version as the scrolling text under various video images of waves and oceanic movements. And the print version of the poem is really part of the source material for the interactive version. In the interactive version, the poem-text overlays the images of the ocean's movements, having been assigned locations in the videos by motion-capture coding technology. So the text, the language of the poem, is just one part of the actuality of "slippingglimpse."

As a moving, rhythmic, interactive piece, "slippingglimpse" is about the cycle of things coming about or together and breaking apart, about the violence of this cycle (seen in video and verbal images), and about how despite this violence and the changes that result, systems have a way of reliably returning to patterns. This echoes the first section of the book and clarifies its violence/constancy couple. The poem's notes note the name for this type of pattern ("chreods"), a designation for a concept which allows for a consideration of transition and change in the midst of patterning. The motion capture coding of the poem-text gives the poem's language a sense of this kind of patterning by animating the text with shakes and murmurs, ascents and descents, whirls and wash-outs. The language of the poem as a whole does not represent a particular authorial position or perspective; but it has trajectory as a constantly-producing and -produced piece of interactive material.

What I want to say about "slippingglimpse" is this: the poem puts the reader in the position not so much as a consumer of the poem but as viewer of the poem (for obvious reasons) and as witness to how the components of the poem read each other. As you experience the poem, you see that it is created in the course of its reacting to itself. The text bumps around the waves captured in the video. The images of the ocean impart the understanding that the language comes and goes, and origins and endpoints are kind of irrelevant. All of these different seers or readers or consumers are performing their work which constitutes the poem, and you are witness to it. As opposed to the sort of moral dictum Wordsworth might provide (as he does in, for instance, the craggy rock section in Book I of "The Prelude:" "life and nature, purifying thus/ The elements of feeling and of thought..." 410-11), there is no moral to the story here. The poem is an invitation to observe your own trajectory, as it collides with the poem, and to take the poem with you in whatever manner you wish, wherever it is that you are going. The poem creates that space at the same time that it constructs itself as an example of how to utilize that space.

It seems important to realize that motes of dust are not only constituted in large part by us, especially indoors, but are also understood as constitutive of the universe. Here, the silicon of the digital realm coincides with stardust of the cosmic realm and the dust-to-dustness of the liberal humanist realm. "ZONE MOTE ELSE"* gives you permission to reside in all of these zones. The trick is to do so with an awareness of all of them, lest you privilege one realm over another and end up pigeon-holed up at one point or another. (I mean, to the chagrin of some animators, motion-capture is here to stay.) And the trajectory of this last section of the book lends trajectory to the book as a whole, and answers some of our questions about the job of poetry.

Well actually maybe not any one book will answer definitively any questions about the nature of the job of poetry. But from Zone :Zero, you get the sense that as a reader/viewer/producer, there is an acknowledgment that you bring to the page/screen your own baggage/interests/issues, and despite any one author's determination to take you somewhere specific, you will go where you are going. In other words, you don't need to acquire anything beyond your current and open self in order to read/produce Zone : Zero, although maybe you would need to do some research in order to read/consume/interpret. And if there is any moral to this story, perhaps it would be that you can take this readerly swagger with you.

+++++
[Editor's Note: The middle word in each of the zone titles feature the 2nd word to be typographically smaller than the first and third words -- something I can't replicate viz Blogger.]

*****

Rachel Daley is.

SCAFFOLD by JOEL CHACE

2008-12-17T18:30:00.000-08:00

JOHN OLSON Reviews

Scaffold by Joel Chace
(Country Valley Press, 2008)

The word ‘scaffold’ brings to mind construction, images of buildings under repair, or going up, or coming down. It suggests a state of suspension, a period of incompletion, paint splatters and chains clanking and men shouting and a look of disheveled choreography, rickety planks and rolls of blueprint. The title is perfect for Chace’s chapbook. Open it, and one sees words scattered about the page in a circumstance of weightless apprehension, as if waiting for a reader’s eyes to connect and associate them.

But the words do form images. The last line on the first page reads:

spread among the barn’s own highest beams

The space between the words creates tension. We sense expanse. Weights in confluence. The volume inside a barn and the structure holding it together.

Here is another:

that network of roots tousling

thinning to silky nebulae

The image created by “silky nebulae” is a web, obviously, but ‘nebulae’ also strongly evokes cosmological phenomena, the diffuse patches of glowing material found scattered among the stars. Some nebulae are shells of gas thrown off by old, unstable stars. Others, which can measure hundreds of light-years in diameter, are clouds of gas and dust illuminated by nearby stars. The conflation of the earthly (“network of roots,” the silkiness of a spider web) with the cosmological ruptures the ordinary scale of things and opens a space for vision and the free play of the imagination. Implicit in this is a philosophy of verbal construction: what makes a sentence a sentence? How does the mind assemble meaning? Is meaning always in a mode of construction, or is it innate, a nucleus of assiduous purport packed solidly and indissolubly in the shell of a word?

One is forced while reading this book to pause at each word, each phrase, and absorb it before moving on. The impulse to connect one nebulous of words with another is irresistible, and there is a delicious tension in that, but there is an equal tendency to linger at a phrase and fully absorb it before moving on to the next. This is an issue Stephan Mallarmé maximized to wonderful effect in Un Coup de Dés, in which constellations of word and phrase have multiple meanings and forms and whose semantic and syntactic instabilities express a crisis at the heart of representation: that exquisitely tantalizing, maddeningly indistinguishable line between absence and presence, being and nothingness, which makes poetry the thrilling calamity that it is. This is implicit in nearly all systems of symbolic representation; as an increased attention to the material fact of words makes itself felt, the provisional aspects of thought and perception are heightened. One wonders, in fact, what isn’t continually under construction. What isn’t, ultimately, surrounded by scaffolding? A scaffold is a temporary suspension in space. But where are we, as writer and reader, in relation to one another? These are some of the conundrums to be discovered and enjoyed amid the scaffolding here.

*****

John Olson's last publications include Backscatter: New and Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press (2008), and Souls of Wind, from Quale Press (2008), a novel about the exploits of poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West. His essay, "City of Words," which appeared in Vol. 13, No. 2. of The Raven Chronicles, was recently nominated for a Pushcart prize. He is also the recipient of an annual genius award for literature, in 2004, from Seattle's weekly The Stranger.

SO THAT EVEN by TAWRIN BAKER

2008-12-17T18:25:00.000-08:00

ERIC GELSINGER Reviews

So That Even by Tawrin Baker
(House Press, Bloomington, Buffalo, Philadlephia, and New York City, 2008)

Tawrin Baker has built a book which presents unique problems to the would-be critic or bibliologist. One has to go gently around it with an insinuating eye and practice a rebellious tongue: there are no words known to name it, nor its parts, nor its imagined macrocosm, the library.

In fewer than a thousand words: Tawrin's creation is made of paper, crimson wax, and a clasping metal ring 1" in diameter. Instantly stunningly puzzling, the book is bound by the clasp which pierces and brings together the two far ends of a signature sealed on both ends by crimson wax bent around on itself into a donut-shape. If you pin the thing totally flat it looks more or less like a regular book, bound by a metal ring, but it does not work like a regular book, because it does not open. You can of course manipulate by prying apart the pages imprisoned in the ring's hermetic perimeter to see there is writing, but you can only see it, not read it.

The only script or glyph on the outer-surface is a house on its side, like it got shoved down in a schoolyard fight by some dexterous animosity. If we squeeze the book’s two pleasure points so it blossoms, we see its inner surfaces are tagged. "So That Even" reads one title; "A Lover Exists," the other, in mirror.

Perhaps if one is an engineer and a poet, one can figure out what to do with this unnamable thing which no combination of libro, biblio, sphere, hemi, semi, circa, roto, text, lexi, seems to fit (rotodislexitext? circabilbiosphere?). Naming half of the thing is equally challenging and necessary because the interested student cannot shake the notion each half is one of a pair. Two parts, which perhaps if they can be extricated from one another can be read.

What kind of society can there be for such a book? What kind of library could hold it? This is a lonely book, though it has each other.

I have held the thing up to my eye, articulated and mutilated the pages, and seen inside. Every other page is set to words and every other page offers a geometric figure of circle traversed by four gnomon-like hands, whose angles change page to page. As for the words, though reading is dizzying, I can at least look at them through my squinting hand, as I’d do any other unintelligible shape, and it's clear many if not all the sentences in the one medibook are repeated in the other, though not in the same order. And, on each written sheet I can make out two couplets -- like two lovers in bed.

Unfortunately, most things can’t be said about anything, much less something. Especially here where a riddle craftily mediates what can be known -- you can't say much at all. Yet, it's materially obvious this is a cohesive text. It's a book of interlacing every-other-pages that fits together so well it's an indivisible whole, physically. The writer is obviously a scientist of some kind. The advertised poetry within is most likely metalogical.

*****

Eric Gelsinger is a member of House Press. Originally from Buffalo, he lives in Brooklyn and works near Times Square as an equities trader. More of his writing can be found at www.gelsingers.blogspot.com

TORQUES: DRAFTS 58-76 by RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS

2008-12-17T18:20:00.000-08:00

KRISTINA MARIE DARLING Reviews

TORQUES: DRAFTS 58-76 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, U.K., 2008)

“Suggest Another Mechanism Of Order”:
Rachel Blau Duplessis, Torques, and the Uncertainties of Artistic Practice

In her recent collection of poems, Torques, Rachel Blau DuPlessis reflects on both the limitations and the possibilities of language when faced with loss, a thematic approach that proves striking. Part of an ongoing long poem project in the tradition of Pound and Williams, her work takes the shape of canto-like “drafts,” a form that in itself evokes the opportunities and obstacles inherent in the writing process. Often pairing the incapacities of words with suggestions of activism through artistic practice, DuPlessis raises significant questions about the responsibilities of the poet in the twenty-first century, a role that proves at once meditative and political.

In exploring these themes, the poems in Torques elaborate on two preceding volumes of work, Drafts 1-38, Toll and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, which both establish poetry as a register for the social dynamics of one’s time. Although at times portraying language as insubstantial when faced with overwhelming political grief, DuPlessis suggests that in art, for many marginalized groups, reclaiming agency truly begins. She writes, for example, in Toll:

Thus my voice is empty, but I speak and sing
only of this.
The undersentences
that rise, tides of sediment, the little
stuff agglutinating in time, debris
I sing.
Cano,
Cannot not do it so.

In this passage, DuPlessis creates a speaker who envisioned herself as being vulnerable, an idea conveyed through such phrases as “my voice is empty” and “my shallow heart has flooded.” By juxtaposing this sense of powerlessness with the compulsion to create, or, in other words, to “sing” of the “undersentences/that rise,” the poem establishes the creative process as a means by which to record and assess the currents of history, beginning with “the little/stuff agglutinating” in everyday existence.

DuPlessis explores similar ideas in Pledge, the volume of drafts preceding Torques. Frequently invoking the political through the intensely personal, the speakers found in Pledge also express an interest in the connection between artistic constraints and social inequity. She writes, for example:

Metaphor? A snarl some of whose knots
Have been pulled so close and tight and hard
The rough, the smooth, the sleek, the rotted,
That one is compelled to act.
But how?
Unpick the knot? or cut? or both? and splice?
Perhaps it’s not a knot. No metaphor is right.
And hence this so called poem
suspects them, too much, too many, rough and ready,
uneven, demanding, illogical,
not prettied or curried in the manner of good poems.

Depicting art as being shaped by culturally dominant groups, who determine that “good poems” should be “prettied or curried,” DuPlessis suggests that conventions of art often reinforce the marginalization of groups in society, yet in the end prove subversive. Because she defines metaphor something that “compels” one “to act,” the poem, like others in the collection, implies that awareness and understanding of these social inequities often begins in the creative process. This poem and others like it establish themes that resurface at the start of Torques, which, like DuPlessis’s previous collections, considers the possibilities of a limited lexicon when faced with intense political disappointments.

By beginning Torques with a poem that describes the death of a college student by suicide, DuPlessis dashes the readers’ hopes for a definitive starting point, instead following the “tides of sediment” that she has mapped during her first two books. Using this opening image as a metaphor for subjugation in political life, the poem, “In Situ,” suggests that such iniquities have remained present throughout history. For example, she writes in this piece:

One’s building used as weapon
leaves a mark

one’s stairwell
intimate dull concrete

one’s city
broken apart,

high-pitched twist
of sirens, useless

work of a moment, it leaves a shadow.

In this passage, DuPlessis conflates the student’s death with the aftermath of war, suggesting that an individual’s death proves just as tragic, an idea that is often overshadowed by the “Hollywood militarism” that “makes some dead inconsequent”. Invoking the cultural frustration present in her two previous collections, the beginning of Torques establishes such artistic endeavors as being a means toward recognizing the political dimension often present in personal tragedies, an idea that transcends specific social injustices.

Just as in Pledge and Toll, DuPlessis uses this scene to transition to a reflection on narrative convention and its potential for both activism and subjugation. In a piece entitled “Draft 59: Flash Back,” she juxtaposes linguistic convention with parodies of such traditions, a combination that proves thought-provoking throughout. She writes in “Flash Back,” for instance:

Question:
Why use the alphabet to organize,
                  and why not? Discuss.
                  Suggest another mechanism of order.
                  One form and then another.
Something that sort of ends, but sort of not.
                  The alphabet is existentially funny.
                  Lettristic vaudeville, a blood-orange horizon.

Mimicking the “question and answer” format of a classroom, DuPlessis implies that although such linguistic structures remain inevitable, they often reflect dominant ideas in the given culture. By telling reader to “Suggest another mechanism of order,” the poem highlights the unavoidability of such artistic constraints. Like other works in the book, “Flash Back” pairs hopelessness with continued attempts to subvert these narrative “mechanisms,” proving at once philosophical and grounded in concrete detail.

In doing so, DuPlessis often creates texts that can be read in multiple ways, ultimately subverting this linguistic “mechanism of order” through her use of from, rather than the limited lexicon that she describes throughout Torques. These ideas are exemplified by her poem “Scroll,” in which she juxtaposes two columns of text which may be read separately or concurrently, a form that enables her piece to take on a variety of metaphors as it progresses. She writes, for instance, in “Scroll” AT THIS LINK courtesy of Jacket).

Throughout this piece, DuPlessis mimics the format of a newspaper, a choice suggestive of the culture of spectatorship surrounding tragedy. The two parts of the poem, when read separately, imply that the speaker’s desire for a language conducive to activism, in which the “Snide Rhetorics of ‘scare quotes’” have been replaced, remains unrealistic. When read together, though, the two sections of the poem present a more complex vision of this same message, in which the audience perceives barriers that the speaker does not, suggesting that some artistic endeavors prove both redemptive and illusory.

Often examining the role of gender in shaping her speakers’ experiences of this multifaceted creative process, DuPlessis establishes feminism as being a stigmatized ideology, incorporating dark humor and a quick wit throughout. Often presenting women’s activism as futile, much like conveying political grief with a limited lexicon, DuPlessis suggests that just as with poetic endeavors, recognizing feminism as valuable remains key in reclaiming political agency. She writes, for example:

I zip my body bag, donate myself to science:
                   ‘feminist.’ And secular to boot.
Wall-eyed between suitcase and body bag
I asked ‘are alterations possible?’
                  A poufed-out plastic bag blows by,
                   ‘Pathmark’ is what it says.
                                    This is an ambiguous answer,
                                    whatever the question.

In this passage, DuPlessis creates a speaker who recognizes the limitations of claiming the label of “feminist” in today’s America, yet persists at analyzing social inequities through the lens of gender. Suggesting that feminists remain, quite literally, rare specimens in modern society, the poems in Torques present language as being at once liberating and highly gendered. Just as the speaker receives an “ambiguous answer” when caught between flight and capitulation, DuPlessis presents a complex relationship between activism, language and gender, ideas that recur throughout the collection.

Her focus on feminism and its limitations becomes increasingly prominent as the book progresses, often expounding on ideas from Toll and Pledge while creating a more complex vision of gender politics and their presence in the creative process. In Toll, for example, DuPlessis lists various literary representations of women in previous books, suggesting that even before the creative process begins, the page remains something of a gender loaded space. She writes in a piece entitled “Draft X: Letters,” for example:

Rachel, the pinkish color of a powder.
Silence
Triangle leap. Solomon’s seal…
Woman, as a well-inked
                  Letterpress. Kohl round her eye;
                  She splots on the page as she falls.
X, it marks the spot. It hits the spot.
                  And marks taboo, and intersect.

By invoking biblical characters like Rachel and Solomon, DuPlessis suggests that prominent cultural ideas, in this case Christian ones, often shape representations of women in literature. Implying that such convention can both limit and inspire art, the poem’s transition to the image of a written page evokes the possibilities of both subversion and further subjugation through artistic endeavors. The woman serving as “a well-inked/Letterpress” for established order, she also “marks taboo, and intersect,” a dual role that DuPlessis suggests marginalized individuals must negotiate while creating art.

Likewise, throughout Pledge, DuPlessis depicts the artistic process as being dual natured for marginalized groups, in this case implying that such endeavors remain encased in a biased rhetorical structure. Frequently deconstructing the colloquial, the poems in Pledge suggest that everyday speech remains a subtly politicized space. She writes, for instance, in “Draft 48: Being Astonished”:

Note how odd the story seems from what you now have called the
“other side”
of “the story.”
Try to figure out how many facets something called the other
side might have, if one said “sides.” See whether the two sides are, in
practice, enough. Forget “sides.” Enter.
Identify the qualities and textures of silence, the materials
Involved in silencing, the slight rustles or traces of the silent.

Using a common phrase to illustrate the ways everyday speech reflects undertones within a given culture, DuPlessis presents attempts at diversity and inclusiveness by those in power as reductive. A metaphor that conveys the inextricability of social injustice from language and other social structures, “Being Astonished” presents equality as involving a dramatic change in worldview—one that remains impossible within many linguistic frameworks.

In Torques, DuPlessis further complicates these themes, relating them to both the shortcomings and the possibilities of language. By invoking some of the tropes of literary tradition, such as direct rhyme, quatrains, couplets, Torques demonstrates that the literature of protest can, and often does, operate within such constraints. She writes, for example, in “Draft 64: Forward Slash”:

The poem is the fosse
in which to cower
hunching down
by warehouses of power

a sludge-filled ditch
where futurists once lay;
now backwashed debris,
now box store splay.

Presenting a dissenting message within the guise of literary conventions, DuPlessis uses form to comment on content. The poem being “the fosse/in which to cower” in the face of cultural dominance, the rebellious lines of the piece are literally dominated by the pronounced direct rhyme scheme being used. Implying that such nonconformist writings are often shaped by the tropes that came before them, poems like “Forward slash” demonstrate that tradition’s constraints can be subverted.

Lastly, DuPlessis conveys the resilience of language through a series of poems entitled “The Deletions,” which appear throughout Torques, Pledge, and Toll. By blacking out large portions of the text, the works suggest that dissenting poems like “Forward Slash” remain inevitable no matter what the constraints. She writes, for example, in “Draft 68: Threshold,” which appears in the third volume of the poem project and can be viewed AT THIS LINK (courtesy of Ron Silliman's Blog):

By censoring portions of her own text, DuPlessis suggests that the suppression of questions about powerlessness, loss, and political fulfillment remains inevitable, yet at the same time futile, particularly for the arts. “The Deletions,” like other poems in Torques, presents a complex vision of what poetry is and is not capable of achieving, particularly in the political landscape of the twenty first century, a project that remains thought-provoking throughout.

*****

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. She has written on contemporary literature for The Boston Review, New Letters, The Mid-American Review, Third Coast, The Warwick Review, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies at Rockmirth and Writers and Books.

THE SENSORY CABINET by MARK DUCHARME

2008-12-17T18:15:00.000-08:00

DENISE DOOLEY reviews

The Sensory Cabinet, by Mark DuCharme
(BlazeVOX [Books], Kenmore, NY, 2007)

A cabinet of curiosity displays artifacts as variety, displacing the context of categorical distinctions in favor of a glowing interrogatory light. Fish next to rock next to bug next to man-made tool. In The Sensory Cabinet, Mark DuCharme seems to be doing something similar, hand picking odd turns of phrase and fragments for illumination.

But he is doing something weirder. Consider: ''The output / in the clothes that you aren't wearing,'' (36) “'On a starry night, with so many fat tickets'' (80). We can recognize our own tones of conversation in ''Unspeakable'': ''Serious stuff, I'm like / Whatever, her navigator / A really good / Politically correct/ Villain, we're gonna / Take it so / Hard,...''(57)

All of these scan familiarly but quickly break down into non-sense, albeit a nonsense aligned with familiar syntax. DuCharme melts rhetorical structures, splicing anachronistic word choices into familiar descriptive and argumentative frames.

In FOOTNOTE TO SUDDEN we see:

shards
in bundles, slumping
to sputter, cruelly representative
Driven toward, in various incidents
what used to be viable (-torched-)
Much of what couldn't not be heard
or written in, brand-
New: I know ( 63)

If these poems have a motion it is streaming: water running off interlocking shingles, or rubble falling over armored plates. They resist, with the chilling effect of maintaining a political and argumentative air without-saying-shit. Oh, so relevant. These are the mechanisms of rhetoric itself, the function of argument in an era of surplus opinion, that we are forced to focus on.

Look at this poem that seems to be concerned, sort of, with the noises we make about the war we are in:

                                    an axis of the 'sneak' retaliate
in adversaries to have spawned
                  a 'homeland' & the threat-based
                  potential
they need a smaller version of a
                                    nuke-you-lure

                  friends attack friends sample
deterrent to a scrawl
                  in this wage while clanging
about the potential                   this
                                    cut-out spoils, this reeling

                  my judgment is that we should wander
                                    in torsion to the scrawl
toward minimum zero
                  nuke you leer
posture shifts in plummeting

                  allies with range               or
                  in them slowly
for offense;                   this new
                  -credible                   military                   potency
                  approach of the need
for nude-clear

Look at this poem about the noise we make about the noise the news makes about these things:

I Am Wolf Blitzen & This Is Dinner

It's a little bit weak but it
Levitates. It's not the same tomorrow,
Or next Tuesday. It
Is often the same
Thing as we. How do you
Arrange this. It
Or this. Some real fine trail
Going on here. Singing,
''Often, graceful esplanade''
While flared. It's True
Anachronism by shutting down
The output
...
(Please sign off)
In the future, there will be some trafficking.

Other poems turn away to address the question of reading and attention drift, as when we are told,

''Don't throw away this screwed up batch
Contingent like the subheadings
Under guns which could only be skewed
Conditions for a short hike'' (16)

The book is structured in three parts – Outside Matters, The Betweens, and The Matter Outside – and clustered in theme and sound in a complicated structure. News casters and current-events language buzzes throughout. The focal point rests just-distant – the space directly beyond the lyric subject, the language static surrounding an issue. Disjointed serial lists and obsessive redundancy contribute to a kind of idea-enjambment that distracts and scatters the readers attention. They seem to deploy an obnoxious political vaguery:

Hallmarks to my
Pre-sotted chortle
Fishsick gimmik random
Spooky
Vellum assignment
Nonintentionality voices

The stanza reads like an argument, but what does it argue? Rachel Levitsky's blurb describes this antagonism well: ''DuCharme seems to be about to define his project, but as you eagerly slide into a suggested narrowing, reader beware you are about to widen (yes you yourself) far before you hit the ground . . . ''

It is when the foggy technique addresses personal subject matter that the structures can be seen most clearly, growing within the constraints. In ''CREATURE, SORT OF HUMMING'' and the ''Deviant Winebagos'' poems, life detail made sparse and strange in its transformation to sound byte gives a dimension of panic to gesture within the natural.

Information twirling by
Rote, we can't
inform all the people
all
the time-- just twitter &
Adjust
Your long-
Range plans your escapisms
One other thing becomes transparent

''One other thing becomes transparent'' is a hilarious line that cuts cleanly – anything close to ''apparent'' in this book evaporates away before it hits the page, and these poems have me simultaneously frustrated and elated by their sequences of elision. I am indebted to the strange distance of DuCharme's language casting me out and directing me away. It’s certainly relevant at a time when such huge things are building themselves on similar gestures of avoidance.

*****

Denise Dooley lives in Rogers Park, Chicago. She writes poetry and fiction and works in science education outreach at Northwestern.

TWO BOOKS by FRANCIS PICABIA and GEORGE BAKER

2008-12-17T18:10:00.000-08:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Caught By The Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris by George Baker
(MIT Press, 2007)

and

I Am A Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose and Provocations by Francis Picabia, translated by Marc Lowenthal
(MIT Press, 2007)

“’This portrait is about me,’ he claims, collapsing the genre of the portrait with a ‘mechanical object floating in an empty space without context, a stunning marriage of the impersonality of the drawing’s production to the lack of personality to which the portrait can now attest. But Picabia is not finished. ‘Le Saint des saints,’ he inscribes it: the saint of saints, the holy of holies, ‘this portrait is about me.’”(31)

And so opens chapter 1 of Caught By The Tail, one of two books released by MIT press on Francis Picabia, enfant terrible -- or, at least, one of them -- of the Dadaist movement. The first, Caught By The Tail, and the second, I Am A Beautiful Monster, demand to be read together as each touches on only one aspect of this master; the first on his non-poetic side and the second on the poetic. In addition, Caught By The Tail provides an overview of the Dadaist movement during its Paris years with such chapters bearing such subtitles as Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction and Dada Cinema with an Epilogue bearing the title ‘Long Live Dada: A Dada Montage’ and, as such, should be read/discussed first.

But first, a bit of bio. Francis-Marie Martinez Picabia (January 22, 1879 - November 30, 1953) was born in Paris of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Arts Decoratifs. The year 1911 proved pivotal for him for it was in that year that he became involved with the Puteaux Group which met at Jacques Villon’s studio in the village of Puteaux. There he became acquainted with Marcel Duchamp as well as several prominent Cubist artists and poets including Apollinaire, Albert Gleizes, Roger de La Fresnaye, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger. The introduction to Caught By The Tail concerns this period. In what has come to be characterized as his ‘proto-Dada’ period, from 1913 to 1915, he traveled to New York several times developing his portraits mécaniques. This led, in 1916, while he was in Barcelona, to his starting the Dada periodical 391, in which he published his first mechanical drawings. Around 1919, he became involved with Tristan Tzara at the Café Voltaire in Zurich moving back-and-forth between there and Paris. Shortly thereafter, he came under the sway of Surrealism abandoning Dada for it.

The Le saint des saints drawing referred to in the opening quotation was created in 1915. This formed part of his ‘portraits mécaniques’ and was created while Picabia was in New York. In 1920, Le saint des saints was exhibited in a one-man show in Paris “organized as part of the initial onslaught of Dada in Paris.”(33) As part of this onslaught, Picabia introduced in his publication, 391, another drawing, La Sainte-Vierge or The Blessed Virgin, consisting “of an accumulation of splashes, or better violent drippings of ink on a white sheet of paper…seem[ing] to have very little to do with Picabia’s earlier mechanomorphic images, given over as the latter are to the impersonal artistic language of mechanical drawing, and to the readymade condition of the copy…take[s] its place alongside a host of other Dada experiments with chance procedures, its technique every bit as impersonal -- as violent toward authorship -- as Picabia’s earlier appropriated images.”(33) This quote expresses one of the important ‘technical’ influences of Dada -- chance technique -- which would come to influence the art and writings of John Cage and the poetry of Jackson Mac Low as well as the New York School of John Ashbery and Frank O’hara. After discussing various interpretations of this ink smear by various art historians, Baker makes a very important artistic statement: “Art history seems to have forgotten that Dada was not entirely interested in discovering the meaning of works of art. Meaningless was its goal. Iconography, even ‘hidden’ or secret meanings, were surely invoked by many Dada works. But usually this was done in the spirit of travesty, a devastating annihilation of the apparatus of meaning that had always supported the traditional work of art. Perhaps the time had come for the deployment of another interpretative model. And indeed we could start with the simple suggestion that Picabia’s La Sainte-Vierge is not an image ‘of’ anything at all.”(39) This sentiment seems to have been in the air in other arts as it was around this time that Stravinsky, in a speech at Princeton University, declared music to be devoid of meaning. But Picabia didn’t stop there; from nothing, he created another nothing, as Baker continues, p. 40: “One could never pastiche La Sainte-Vierge, divorced from the hand of the artist and thus purges of any traces of what we might call ‘style,’ one could only follow Picabia’s procedure, producing other Saint-Vierge, itself inimitable in turn. Picabia would do this.” And thus -- La Saint-Vierge II (see p. 41) Thus, Dada came to Paris in 1920 in the form of drawing. Of this period, Baker says “I like to think of several moments of the 1920 Paris Dada season as defining its paradoxical ‘greatness’, as defining, that is, the coiled energies that fuelled Dada’s inevitable failure.”(56) -- one of these moments being the arrival of Tristan Tzara in Paris announced by a ‘reading of his poetry’ “in a popular cinema on the Rue St. Martin”(56) where arrangements had been made that, immediately upon Tzara beginning to read, André Breton and Louis Aragon, who had been waiting in the wings as prearranged, began ringing electric bells preventing anyone from hearing a single word. In concluding this chapter, Baker describes the accomplishments of the Paris Dada period as “meaning would be confronted with nonmeaning, life with death, and discourse with the immense void of silence. Such was the logic of the limit. As a word, as a signifier, ‘silence’ itself could be considered ‘sacrificial’.”(91) We have been shown how this applies to Picabia’s visual art. We will later examine whether this can be applied to his poetic art.

The year 1921 takes us to chapter 2 and to Dada Painting, it takes us to Picabia breaking away from the Paris Dada Group even as he evokes it using a collage technique to gather all the faces of the principals together -- but not their bodies; it’s as if he’s leaving the bodies behind, the faces soon to become the memories of those he once worked with and was inspired by -- and he’s doing this in the collage and photomontage he titled L’oeil cacodylate. Baker says of this:

Instead, L’oeil cacodylate was a collective work, a gesture that insisted on the group; but it was made just as Picabia ceded publicly from the Paris Dada group in the summer of 1921, becoming, in effect, the first and most important ‘dissident Dadaist.’ None of Dada’s central tactics, Picabia’s prior tactics, seems to prevail anymore in 1921: chance, readymade, diagram, mechanical drawing. Stylistic inconsistency rubs hands with medium incoherence, suspending the object between text, photographic and painting,. Seemingly, the work’s inconsistencies know no bounds.(97)

Prior to breaking away, Picabia, thinking that perhaps a live monkey would cause too much controversy, attended at a toy store to purchase a stuffed one and pasted it to a canvas calling it Nature mortes thereby inaugurating what would become know as Dada painting.

In Nature mortes, Picabia presents a readymade but, typically, insists on attaching the object to a canvas surface, forging an indissoluble link between the readymade and painting, a bond that somehow resists easy resolution into the category of collage, just as it does not quite enter the free standing object domain of sculpture (a step definitively taken by Duchamp’s readymades). Duchamp’s insistence that the readymade emerges only as the product of a collision between a chosen commodity object and, just as important, a verbal inscription -- their ‘rendezvous’ as he might have put it -- this was followed by Picabia.(sic) But Picabia’s readymade stubbornly clings to the domain of painting -- a domain whose certainties and conventions, however, now find themselves brutally eviscerated.(101)

After discussing the importance of this, as well as that of Tableau Dada II and Duchamp`s reproduction of the Mona Lisa, replicated this time with a moustache and goatee, Baker looks to the analogy between the visual and the written:

Learning from Natures mortes and L.H.O.O.Q., a Tableau Dada necessarily engaged the question of language -- but language turned against itself, the twisted language of the pun. It reconfigured the status of the mark -- of writing, of drawing -- as a form of the graffito, striking with violence against the proprieties of representation. It enacted a thematics of castration -- suggested, in the closely squeezed legs of Picabia`s monkey; denied, in the presence of Duchamp`s phallic Mother; and redoubled, in Picabia`s erasure of L.H.O.O.Q.`s facial goatee or tail.(109-11)

Baker then takes the reader through a discussion of Jean-Joseph Goux’s concept of general equivalents which Baker defines as “represent[ing] a standard measure – that object against which others are compared, making disparate things commensurable, rendering them in some sense equal, opening up the question of an ordered system of substitutions or exchange, and with that, the correlative question of value.”(111) Baker goes on to examine how this relates to Dada, then introduces the fact that money has been separated from the gold standard resulting in a crisis which “parallels a concurrent series of other representational crises: the contestation of realism in the novel, the relinquishment of figuration in painting, and Saussure’s momentous severing of linguistic signs from their referents in the real world.”(126) The result: “the disentwining of the functions of the general equivalent in modernity”(126) and resulting in the creation of the token. Finally, after a lengthy discussion lasting several pages, he arrives at the applicability of this analysis to Picabia and his work: “These words could have been written directly for Picabia, for the critique of painting that his Natures mortes conveys, or for the vast, repetitive system of parody and pastiche that his work would later enact. In the wake of Dada, Picabia’s lifelong dedication to the copy, his initiation of an aesthetic system of perpetual parodic acts, embraces the mimetic copy only in its absolute bankruptcy a bankruptcy in the face of the unrepresentable nature of the token sign, but also, one realizes, a bankruptcy on which the token sign will be founded.”(129) Later that same year, Picabia signed his name proclaiming that act to be itself a readymade. “Reduced in this way to language, the work of art assimilates itself to a function of the genral (sic) equivalent just as much as those Dada works that embraced the forms of monetary economy -- language being the general equivalent of signs as money is the general equivalent of products.”(139) Feigning an inability to paint due to an eye infection, Picabia refused to participate in the ‘Grande Saison Dada’ of 1921 -- perhaps because of the presence of the Surrealists Breton and Aragon who were just beginning to make their presence felt -- and, instead, invited a select group of friends to his apartment to view his paintings.

Photography has been a part of Dada since its inception. After all, during the period when Dada was in New York, Alfred Stieglitz’s studio was used as a gathering spot. But, in discussing Dada photography in his third chapter, Baker focuses primarily on the Dadaphoto as seen in the April 1921 publication New York Dada. While continuing with his theme of the connection between language and the visual arts, he begins to embellish on his discussion of Lacanian analysis which he had started briefly earlier. Rather than on Picabia, this chapter focuses on the relationship between the American dadaist Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Using the nude photo of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, he attempts to refute the charge that Dada was misogynistic although he is not altogether successful particularly when one of the photographs under discussion is Man Ray’s Portmanteau which features a nude model, masked and with one black stocking on standing behind a coat rack which divides her sex.

‘Prolem Sine Matre Creatam: Dada Abstraction’ returns us to Picabia proper examining various artworks including La Veuve Joyeuse (The Merry Widow) and Chapeau de Paille? (Straw Hat?), both from 1921. Baker describes this period: “And similarly, Picabia’s formerly ‘poetic’ verbal inscriptions become less a series of lines of flight than an assault and a graffiti once more, the open-ended ‘M…..’ calling up inevitably the Dadaists’ favorite exclamation: Merde. Shit for whomever looks at this! Or better: Fuck anyone who looks at this.”(208) Picabia’s move to abstraction signalled, in the eyes of the Picabia scholar Maria Lluisa Borràs, the end of Dada. The eve of this ending was signalled by Picabia travelling with Andre Breton to Barcelona in August 1922 for one of the most important Dada exhibitions, Baker characterizing it as “the Barcelona show was deeply representative of what Dada means…, part and parcel of a movement that was never more powerful than when it was in full flight, or when it was devolving into absolute disintegration. Dada was a complete success in just those moments when it could only be judged a total failure.”(214)

An important development in Picabia’s oeuvre, and for poetry in general, took place during the creation of the last of the mechanomorphs around 1922. “All of the last mechanomorphic titles, in fact, were seized on readymade from captions, taken directly from the explanatory labels affixed to photographs and diagrams in the magazine La Science et la Vie. They were readymade captions. But now, the images that they so clearly identified could not be seen as such. They were captions pinned hopelessly to abstractions, disassociated phrases attached to still potent enigmas whose source had now been flipped away from the verbal and into the operations of visual form itself.”(230)

Baker concludes this chapter with an examination of the drawings from late 1922 through 1924 where “the last mechanomorphs marry abstract form to the part object”(268) -- Optophone, Lampe which are “an embrace of the figurative-as-pastiche that soon left any concern with abstraction far behind.”(271) These incredible pieces “at their most bold…violated the neo-classical body of post-war French art with the hallucinogenic, pornographic intensity of a 1924 drawing such as Érotique, a vision worthy of Bosch, with the stark bodily contour of a renewed figurative line doing nothing to stem the tide of transformations initiated by the part object to which this line nevertheless attempts to give form, and from which it takes the modality of its form.”(271)

A short way into the chapter ‘Intermission: Dada Cinema’, the ‘intermission part assumed from the film made by Picabia, Eric Satie and René Clair in 1924 titled Entr’acte, Baker states that “Dada’s origins lie in an engagement with performance and theatre, from the moment that the first Dadaists coalesced in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland. Paris Dada, in its own way, intensified this theatrical origin.”(292) Baker, in this chapter, concentrates on descriptions of the film which he does exceedingly well including various stills to emphasize his points. The film has numerous reversals with “shots that are simply ordered backward in relation to a standard pattern of narrative ending.”(315) The “crucial lesson to be learned”, he says, is that by “simply reversing standard shot order, meaning is not merely sapped or voided. A whole new series of connections comes into play, connections usually repressed by narrative causality.” He elaborates on these connections on p. 318: “Yes, an order of representation here is targeted; and yes, its annihilation proceeds as if from within, via the upending and sheer reversal of that order’s conventional symbolic structures. However, in this upending, the cuts between scenes in Entr’acte may at first not appear ’logical’ or motivated by the conventions of storytelling, but they weave a vast tapestry of interconnections nonetheless, a series of exchanges and comparisons whose overall effect is one of a general symbolic contagion.” Baker cites Walter Benjamin’s response to Dada cinema as well as to Picabia’s poetry, Benjamin calling Picabia an “artist of correspondences” and, as a result thereof, Baker states, at p. 320-21, that:

The Symbolist heritage of the ‘correspondences’ survives in Picabia’s work, no matter art history’s long insistence that Symbolist aesthetics were precisely targeted by Dada as an avant-garde, like the perfume of so many vibrant flowers falling before the aggressive petrol stench of the machine. But instead of seeing this heritage liquidated in the moment of Dada as an avant-garde, one might suggest that ideas such as ‘correspondence’ were only radicalized by artists like Picabia – transformed beyond recognition, but not relinquished.

And so Baker, following Dada Cinema, prepares to silence himself. But in the process of speaking, he has said a great deal leaving us with a much better understanding of Dada and Francis Picabia. The discussions he has had throughout regarding the connections between Picabia’s language and his art have prepared us for Lowenthal’s translation. And so he passes on the torch so Lowenthal can speak.

And speak Lowenthal does. He begins his ‘Translator’s Introduction’ with the following:

The Dada movement has been framed and assessed in numerous ways: as the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s, as well as -- perhaps its most common summation -- the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism. However one wishes to use Dada, though, its one overriding significance for the twentieth century, and its one attribute that continues to cast a formidable shadow into the twenty-first, is the way it managed to, however briefly, embody an attitude…What the unconscious was to Surrealism, refusal was to Dada; and that this nihilistic spirit remains potent (and emulated) to this day is in no small part due to the contribution of Francis Picabia. A self-declared funny guy, failure, alcoholic imbecile, and pickpocket (not to mention painter and poet), Picabia was above all a most ‘beautiful monster’, who for a significant period of time during the heady years of early modernism was able to rightly claim the distinction of being the anti-artist par excellence.(1)

This introduction is excellent providing one with a vivid, although succinct, portrayal of Picabia and the world of Dada. For example, he describes, at p. 10, the connection between Picabia’s painting [as an aside, Lowenthal informs us that Picabia began as a post-impressionist landscape painter who eschewed modernity] and his poetry: “Whether because of his frequent and doubtless wearisome journeys by boat, his troubled first marriage and reluctant solitude in New York, or his nervous depression and recuperation from opium addiction in Switzerland (where a doctor actually forbade his to paint), Picabia’s early poetry arose from an absence of painting, which, despite his frequent antagonism toward the art world, was ultimately his real refuge and for him a truer source of pleasure.” What sets Picabia apart from such other Dada poets as Kurt Schwitters or Hugo Ball is that “Picabia’s literary abstraction operates on the level of syntax and sense, bur rarely on the level of the word and sound itself, and the few exceptions were more for the sake of satire than experimentation.”(13)

Upon arriving at the poetry, there are two things one immediately notices. The first is that Lowenthal provides excellent introductions to the poems. For example, in setting out ‘Delightful’, he precedes it with an intro which provides a picture of Picabia’s life in New York: “Gabrielle Buffet [Picabia’s first wife] was in Switzerland with their children. Picabia was sharing a New York apartment with Edgard Varèse [the composer of Amériques in which he used one of the first electronic instruments, the ondes Martenot, and Ecuatorial in which he used the Theremin], and having an affair with Isadora Duncan [the originator of Contemporary Dance].”(28) We see the influence of Mallarmé in the way the poem is set out on the page:

                  Being both
                                    disconnected
from day                   to day
              more alone than anywhere
                  to sometimes bring to an end
                                    the tip of my nose

in my authentic
                                    life
if it’s possible
                  I am sure
                                material necessity
                                    brings good luck

We can see Picabia’s anti-art perspective in the last line of the first stanza ‘the tip of my nose’ throwing in the unexpected and unusual which wrenches the lyricism that preceded it to a grinding halt -- something fitting for his mechanomorphic attitude. The poem combines both the aural and the visual which is fitting for an artist both visual and poetic. Note how ‘life’ hangs as if that aspect, perhaps his life as a post-impressionist landscape painter, has been ejected or, perhaps, has committed suicide so that the ‘real’ life of Picabia can emerge. The second thing to be noticed is that there is no French counterpart which is something every translation should have. However, considering that this book is already over 400 pages in length, this is, perhaps, understandable.

Picabia’s first book, ‘Fifty-Two Mirrors’, was published in Barcelona in 1917. There are a few poems which combine the aural and the visual but, for the most part, a straight lyric structure is present. Take ‘Basin’: “Crossed out in a little courtyard/of twisted cable./Wisteria in the pansy joy./The pattern and its dance/marks the duration between the curtains.” Present is the convoluted syntax ‘Wisteria in the pansy joy’, the displaced word ‘duration between the curtains’, the shock and awe of unrelated images piled one atop the other creating a disorientation all aligned at the left hand margin. We miss the joyful exuberance of space, the dance of words across, along and down the page.

This, as well as several other, poems reflect an interesting aspect of Dadaist poetry -- an aspect which Lowenthal never mentions. To understand this, we must go back to Charles Baudelaire, the father of French modernism, and, more particularly, to his poem ‘Correspondances’ (Correspondences) with its line “Les parfums, les coloeurs et les sons se répondent.” which C.F. McIntyre, at p. 13 of his French Symbolist Poetry, translated as “perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.” This is the essence of what came to be known as Symbolism. Poetry Portal (http://www.poetry-portal.com/poets39.html) says of this that “Baudelaire's poetry explored symbols selected for their tendency to evoke one sensory experience through another, so elevating experience to the level of intellect.” It says of another Symbolist poet, Mallarmé, that he “populated a universe with symbols lacking obvious referents.” We can see the transition of this symbolic correspondence from Baudelaire through Mallarmé to Picabia; from symbols that have reference to symbols that lack the obvious to symbols that themselves are corrupted but have reference although to things which lack any conceivable correspondence other than that they have been juxtaposed together merely as a result of language -- correspondence of the ludicrous. And it is this which gives Dadaist poetry its disorienting effect. How else do we explain this line in ‘Basin’: “Animals encounter the solitude of screws/at the arabesque hour in the keys.”(35) Or the example of ‘Somersaults’:

            Dislocation of the still water
                  Beans
                  Opium
                  Explosion
            The signal of flutes comes
                  At my feet.
Crooked in the fold of its hieroglyph
                  Pregnant
                  Damaged
                  House(46)

We can see where John Ashbery in part derived from.

Further development is readily seen in Picabia’s next book Poems and Drawings of the Daughter Born Without A Mother (Prolem sine matrem creatam), published in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1918, whose title was apparently derived from Ovid’s second Metamorphosis via the Petit Larousse dictionary which Picabia tended to have with him at all times. Some of his poems, such as the second stanza of ‘Belladonna’, give the appearance that he would randomly select words from that source: “Gladiator pickpockets/tedded by the dancers of a terrifying dream/nightmares in the red ring naturally/we chose the simple sensualities/of flabby clowns flagellated in the sky/where iron soothes the dangerous place/I myself tremble from the sparkling reflections”(71). Or this from ‘The Maid’: “If only the arrogant shoes/understood the amethysts/with the feathers of living rabbits.”(81) Included amongst the poems are eighteen of Picabia’s mechanomorphs. Also included is the poem ‘Cacodylat’ whose opening stanza reads: “Her parade whose turmoil has ruthless milestones/led a procession of a bright pink cacodylate eye/through my life of Swiss overeating./The reclining chairs were to be found after death/which they clearly though covers abandonment/all that in a bit of crystal doctor –“(79).

In late 1918, Picabia published two chapbooks -- The Mortician’s Athlete, subtitled Poem in five cantos, and Platonic False Teeth, subtitled Poem in two chapters: Pharmacist of chance. Both were published in Switzerland. In the first, his longest poem to date, he titles each canto: Canto I: salt water, Canto II: forkscrews, Canto III: coconut, Canto IV: gingerbread, and Canto V: houses of cards. Lowenthal cites P.A. Benoit’s statement that “Picabia had taken a mass of the poems he had been writing since The Daughter Born without a Mother…removed their titles, and joined them together to compose this poem.”(98) Canto I opens with “The palm tree of flooded wives/turns towards me the prodigy road/of coffeeless thorn bushes, which sing/of liquid bracelets.”(99) This is again an enhancement of what has gone before. While he had used the prose poem format in an earlier poem ‘Ideal Gilded By Gold’, found in his first book, Platonic False Teeth is written entirely in that style. The ‘First Chapter’, subtitled ‘Foulbrood’, begins:

The regime of the photographic radium screen’s wind rests every day in the effluvia of the sublime family of great vices when the pyre laughs at the pirate world. Blushing gets pretty dangerous if paralyzed King lacks a Queen, and Jesus Christ, crazed with the sorrows of a society violated in public hereditary silence, operates early in the intrigues of the seraglio, vizier of heaven’s administration.”(112)

During the course of the poem, Picabia takes liberties with himself: “Francis Picabia, I’m understanding you less and less.”(115) Then, after an intervening paragraph: “I’m beginning to understand you, dear friend!” -- this hucksterism becoming an enduring -- and endearing -- aspect of his poetry from this point on. I cannot help but hear the echo of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony in the opening line of Chapter II: The Towel Rail Amazon: “The crime that a man commits becomes a pleasure in his ears”(116).

The rest of the Pre-Dada poetic period, 1917-19, is completed with a few loose published poems plus Purring Poetry, consisting of one long poem published in Lausanne in 1919 which contains the first instance of the word ‘Dada’ appearing in one of Picabia’s poems.

The Dada period proper begins with what appears to be one long poem, Thoughts Without Language, published in Paris in 1919 -- the first Dadaist poem to be published there. The poems which appear to make up this one long poem lack titles leading to confusion as to where one ends and the next begins although, in the original edition, each poem appeared on a separate page. Lowenthal comments that “Obviously, Picabia is using language (and his concluding note should dissuade the reader from concluding that these points are language without thought); but rather than reproducing through and within the framework of language, the title points to an effort at reversing this conventional process by reproducing language through the framework of thought; an inversion not unlike Picabia’s later allusions to a ‘frame without a picture.’ It is striking, then, to see how Picabia has arrived at an idea of automatic writing and unconscious language similar to that of Breton’s, but through his own approach: one derived from Nietzsche rather than psychoanalysis and Freud.”(150) This is the last half of the first stanza:

love talk
which is not a military service
I already see the little cross
fitted out with a ribbon smoking a cigarette
over the ruins(153)

The note referred to appears as a P.S. at the end and reads: “To all those itching to say that this language is without thought, I recommend a dangerous visit to the zoological gardens.”(177) Enigmatic, non! Enigmatic, yes!

We come now to one of Picabia’s most famous works -- the Unique Eunuch, published in Paris in 1920. As Lowenthal states, at p. 182: “This book is considered by many to be the summation of Picabia’s early poetry, and one of the more emblematic productions of Paris Dada. Its most immediately noticeable feature is the fact that a good number of verses run backward, evidence of the poet’s continued interest in the idea of isotropic poetry, but also a liberalization of the wordplay between vers and envers (‘reversed verse’, so to speak).” as can be seen here: “Ancient lit trimming black/Bicycle horizon the toward/Etiquette breast the in/Raven a with pregnant is/The League of Nations/Camel a or/With D’Annunzio’s nightmarish spices”(184)

Lowenthal describes Picabia’s next poetry book, Jesus Christ Rastaquouère, published in Paris in 1920, as “Picabia’s most accomplished literary work…Although this book has come to be considered one of the credos of the Parisian Dada movement, its opening ‘interlude’ already demonstrates a distancing between Picabia and the Dadaists.”(223) The interlude describes a trip on a ship where all the passengers are on horseback except for Picabia who is on a wooden horse: “We disembarked at a new land where horses were unknown; the natives took our ship’s mounted passengers for two-headed animals and didn’t dare approach, consumed with terror; only I, recognized as a fellow human being by these primitive people, was taken prisoner.”(225) Here, prose and verse are intermingled, each being given equal billing:

Lyrical poets, dramatic poets, you worship art to escape from literature, and you are nothing but literary hacks. Struggling painters, the regions you explore are old anecdotes. Musicians, you are pebbles skipping on water…

            A man these days
            Is a kind of mirror
            When the curtain rises,
            The audience member’s seat
            Is completely free,
            He has no faith
            And you impose prejudices on him,
            How canon have hope?(226)

Divided into seven chapters, each heavily subdivided by subtitles, this is a Dadaist version of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons which was published some seven years previous. Interesting -- one of the most profound Cubist literary works has found itself transformed into one of Dada’s most profound, the two antagonistic to each other -- or, so Picabia has led us to believe. There is a passage in chapter V that is a new direction in Picabia’s poetry but reminds one of the sound poetry of two other Dadaists -- Kurt Schwitters or Hugo Ball:

‘i
‘Ka tangi té Kivi
‘Ki vi
‘Ka Tangi té moho
‘hi hi e
‘pi pi e
‘ta ta e
‘ta kou ta ka jou (245)

Which Lowenthal, in his extensive notes to the poems, quotes Tristan Tzara as saying that this “is an abstract poem, ‘composed of pure sounds invented by myself and containing no allusion to reality’”(460) although it appears that “in a different form and in its original context, it is from a Maori work song for hauling trees.”

The end of Dada, at least for Picabia, was announced in 1921 with a flurry of aphorisms, prose and manifestoes.

The period following Picabia’s renunciation of Dada was marked by individual prose and poetry published in small presses approaching the vitriolic. It was not until 1939 (published some sixteen years later in 1955) that he wrote another book of poems, Poems of Dingalari. Of this, Lowenthal says: “Picabia began to write poetry again, but in a very different manner from his earlier years: sarcasm had given way to melancholy lyricism.”(346): “I need air to breathe/before me Switzerland with its sunken eye sockets/looks at me/I hear the word war uttered/the ground is soft/I feel like I’ve fallen/and it won’t be possible to stand back up”(347). Granted there is a war on, but this is a poetry of regret. Picabia’s moment has passed and he is aware of it. “I am rid of my youth/rid of its unbearable oppression/all that remains to me/is hashish/women now/are delightful pianos”(353). As is evidenced here, he is still capable of coining an intriguing metaphor. But this is not the Picabia that brought us Dada, which violated all of the strictures and, in doing so, challenged those that followed to see things in a new way, to write in a new way.

This is not to say that there are not some interesting moments nor that Picabia ceased being creative. In some of his later work, he quotes, without stating the source, from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. This is spoken of derisively by Lowenthal. And it would probably be so by any writer. Except -- and this is a very important exception -- Picabia’s poetry oftentimes mirrored developments in his painting. Is it not possible, then, that he considers the words of Nietzsche splayed out in a book as found objects, as readymades to be used as he desires without the need for attribution? After all, did Duchamp attribute the urinal he turned without modification into art to the manufacturer? Then why should it be done for words other than that there is an antique convention respecting that? Conventions of any sort were not respected by the Dadaists.

MIT Press, George Baker and Marc Lowenthal must be showered with accolades for bringing out these two excellent books that, together, reveal one of the most interesting of poets/painters/writers/funny guys of the twentieth century -- one that has had a profound influence on what came after. Literature would be profoundly different today were it not for Picabia and Dada.

*****

John Cunningham is a poet and writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Every once in a while he emerges from his igloo, hitches up his dog sled team, and sets off across the white expanse of emptiness known as Canada in order to write poetry reviews. He does o in Canada for Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Arc, Antigonish Review and Fiddlehead, in the U.S. for Big Bridge, Galatea Resurrects, Rain Taxi, Rattle and Quarterly Conversations, and in Australia for Jacket.

DEMENTIA BLOG by SUSAN M. SCHULTZ

2008-12-17T18:05:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

DEMENTIA BLOG by Susan M. Schultz
(Singing Horse Press, San Diego, CA, 2008)

Susan M. Schultz’s Dementia Blog is uncomfortably moving, and successful on its own terms and ultimately on mine as a poetry reader. Among such terms is how the project’s book form illustrates how blogging can be generative for creative writing, as well as how the subsequent book form becomes more than just a hard copy print-out of a blog. But, first, Schultz’s “A Fore and After Word” offers a convenient description of the project so let me post (pun intended of course) it here:

I kept a travel blog over the summer of 2006 for family and friends. We did this and we did that filled up the month of July, when we were (as they say) “abroad.” As August began, we arrived in Northern Virginia, where my mother lives. She was still at home then, but lived there with difficulty, as her dementia had progressed (if progress it was) until she could not care for herself, but refused to (could not) admit that fact. The blog turned serious and became a prose poetic project. Dementia destroys the self, but that destruction is oddly, horribly, poetic. My mother was crossing paths with my children (5 and 7), who were developing maturity and independence even as she was losing it. But the processes were not utterly dissimilar, those of loss and gain. So I began to record what I saw. What had seemed awkward about the blog, the way in which it’s written forward but read backwards, suddenly made sense as a form in which to work on the process of memory and forgetting. Whatever is confusing about reading the story backwards is intended by the form. The confusions offered by the form are similar (or at least apt metaphors) to the confusions of dementia.

There is also a political content to this blog. During the time it was written, the Bush administration was pushing us closer to the abyss. The administration’s uses of the language seemed, to this reader, demented. The split between reader and author, between the person who suffers (or causes to suffer) and the person who reads about it, forms a significant part of my “plot.”

I dedicate this blog to my mother’s many friends, to my family and to everyone for whom dementia is a family and/or national event. Their losses of memory cause us to lose our loved ones; our loss of memory may cause us to lose our nation.

The project may have begun as a journal but poetry clearly took over the words—it’s easy to see that Schultz didn’t need to embellish observations to nonetheless come up with resonant results like this below, where the first “She” refers to Schultz’s mother and “Sangha” to her son:

She was as surprised to see us on the second day as on the first. Knowledge is the memory you’ve done this at least once before. Sangha sings: Har-ry Pot-ter’s com-ing to town!

Not mentioned—that is, cited as part of the author’s intention—in the Fore/After Word is an ars poetica layer that deepens the meanings in—possibilities of—language:

Poetry is the language that calls attention to itself. Our sight words for today are

            Home

            broken

            meaning

            Box

            making

            checks

Of course, Dementia Blog inevitably includes memories since living inevitably evokes the past. But the almost matter-of-fact telling suffices for lingering effect:

The boy (was he 10, 12?) attached himself to me at Bal Mandir. He smiled, he followed. He was like a cat that rubs you as if to say “I’m not feral.” We toured the orphanage, met the women who cared for the children, gave them combs and lotions. They smiled, and we. The boy held to me, without touching, walked the corridors with me. Then he was gone. I turned toward a room packed with babies, and we were gone, out the front door of a cold former palace. In the car I wept. What’s the matter? Ramesh asked Bryant. By the waters of.

The juxtaposition of the political with the personal is uniquely effective—using dementia as a doorway into addressing the dysfunctional politics of the several years pre-Obama is one of those ideas that makes you (or me) think, “I wish I thought of that!” Except that here—and it’s one of the reasons Dementia Blog is so powerful—the concept isn’t an imagined idea, but one that arose organically from actual experience. (Not to say that imagination can't be powerfully generative, although when it is I think it's when what started out as imagined may become felt as lived.) This post fully replicated below is one of the most powerful in presenting dissonances and dissolutions as one loses one’s mind, as one witnesses a beloved mother lose her mind, as a country reels from war, and as one remembers, too, the illogical world often inhabited by orphans (Schultz’s children are adopted):

Thursday, December 07, 2006

--She says my life sounds fragmentary. I say fragments must be set down to see where their edges meet. He says he “throws his eye” at the books I sent. I say in English we do not throw our eyes, we cast them. Whiz of the line, kerplunk. Your glance is a hooked fish; you will draw him back in. He and you will drown in fullest air.

--They wrote of seams, of writing as a rough sewing. Canvas or skin, brush stroke scar.

--Sangha asks how to spell “broomstick.” He speaks of walking through magic walls, writes that Harry loves “Hermione,” that he wants to walk to the “castle,” that he feels how little boys feel who have “magic” powers. The “cupboard” was his orphanage.

--Use the word “and” to mean as many things as it can, then move on to “or.”

--Operation Forward Together. Operation Desert Storm. Operation Just Cause. Operation Enduring Freedom. And in my theater: Operation (Cult of) Overwork, Operation Disseminated Gossip, Operation Betrayal Guesswork, Operation Control Freak, Operation Drama Queen/King.

--Emma calls to say mom has pneumonia in her lower left lung.

--Radhika makes her own connect-the-dots pictures. Which come first, lines or dots? In a desert country, there are dots for cities, very few river lines. Anbar Province: 11 Americans killed yesterday by IEDs that can pierce a tank’s skin. This is an elephant! And this discarded metal. Open it up and see all the people.

II.

--To avoid fragments, join together mother’s pneumonia with the IEDs in Anbar with the operations that leave orphans in cupboards with the boy who would fly from them on his broomstick with the fish who makes his progress back to sea, away from the rod and line, line that leads us to the page-end, ragged edge where we find (this other morning exercise) haole privilege on-line with the metaphor of the back-of-the-bus turned on its head, where the haole sits at the back and forward together those who are not haole assume the front seat position in this geometry. I have heard those words in those subject/object positions, yes, but what of other sentences, those that refuse closure, open to offer me a middle seat? I will not let go this contested beauty. For each sentence admit the possibility of another, and another. If you are the guilty settler of one sentence, change your noun and verb. The adjectives will follow.

Posted by Susan at 11:37 AM 0 comments

I was also taken by the above post because I thought that the entirety of Part II, while a good rounding up of the fragments in Part I, also can work on its own. And that Part I’s fragments are also raw material for what became Part II is actually a good poem-in-progress exercise. That is, if Part II is to be taken as effective on its own, then the parts of Part I can be viewed as source-material. Perhaps I belabor this point admiringly because my very first published book, Black Lightning, was a compilation of poem-in-progress pieces on the poems of 14 poets. But anyway, let this paragraph attest to the multiplicities of readings possible for various parts of Dementia Blog.

As well, at the end of each blog post is a typical line replicated from the blog format, i.e.

“posted by Susan at 7:58 PM 0 comments”

I found myself quite moved here by the reference to “0 comments”. In a 134-page book of blog posts (mostly 1- to 2-page long), most of the posts end with “0 comments.” This is a project where one learns and feels, even empathizes. But often, one doesn’t “comment.” It’s not, or not just, because words sometimes fail. It’s that when it comes to the senseless, politically or personally, it’s insane to engage through conversation—there may be no one listening on the other side, or whoever might be listening may be a dubious presence.

Also effective is the occasional insertion of the blog format’s presenting of a listing of most recent posts. For example, below also works a poem: it could be entitled “Dementia”

November 19, 2006 Nothing left except loss of ...
November 12, 2006 -- What I do not say to her: th...
November 11, 2006 -- Houses are square, with pitc...
October 15, 2006 -- No Imperial Mints in Chiswic...
September 30, 2006 -- The lyric in wartime. If...
September 25, 2006 -- The former President lost h...
September 22, 2006 -- The words bear weight, bu...

Let me end with another excerpt—the ending to a post dated Aug. 14, 2006—which may also capture the sense of a closed world that dementia creates:

No leader of the Khmer Rouge has faced a court of law.

--Email from Karen: Mom slept.

posted by Susan at 12:09 PM 0 comments

The front cover of the book presents a photo of Schultz’s parents. The back cover features that same photograph amidst a larger collage of family photos. The text between the covers fully justify why, on the back cover, the photograph is upside-down. Which is to say, in this book, Susan M. Schultz the poet is writing at the top of her game.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Fred Muratori's review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW. She feels lucky to have received reviews of her books and, one day, while wondering what to do with all these reviews, answered her own question with her newest book THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS: HER BIOGRAPHY THROUGH YOUR POETICS which recycles reviews and engagements of her poems into a biography--a biography because, as Ted Berrigan once noted, "there is a self inside almost all of the poems”.

THIS IS WHY I HURT YOU by KATE GREENSTREET

2008-12-17T18:00:00.000-08:00

PAMELA HART Reviews

This is Why I Hurt You by Kate Greenstreet
(Lamehouse Press, Saginaw & Brooklyn, 2008)

The spaces between dreamtime and waking, between associative thought and logic are enigmatic and numinous. Questions reside there. And these questions may not often lurch towards answers. Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook, This is Why I Hurt You, roams in this territory.

It’s a spare book, with small poems that work like messages from some unknown place. As they move into the reader’s imagination, these epigrammatic pieces create puzzles to muse on. Like Zen koans, these are meant to be pondered by the reader, not necessarily solved. Photographer and writer Walker Evans’ words serve as a kind of guiding principle: “It’s logical to say that what I do is an act of faith. It came to me. And I worked it out.” Greenstreet’s poems ask us to “work it out,” make your own story or meaning. Or not.

The book ruminates on the purpose of art, particularly poetry. It opens with a short dialogue on the uses of poetry. You can’t stop a tank with a poem, someone once said. Still, Williams’ admonition about what could happen from a lack of poetry isn’t the point either. Poetry is about connectivity, according to Greenstreet. It helps us “to feel human. And to feel that being human is…an okay thing.” Perhaps in complicated times, this is more than enough.

As they move into dream territory, the poems become less tangible. Some wind through a strange narrative about an encounter with a wounded deer. These dream poems are occasionally interspersed with short, disjunctive sentences, some of which originated at Greenstreet’s blog. Somehow this all works—the way dreams make sense and you accept them. Here’s an example:

The picture should be looked at.

In the dream it’s you and me and a lot of other
people. We’re performing a long and complicated
vocal piece and I love you in the dream.

I think it lasts about…twenty minutes, then they
have to use the hack saws. To get it off. Can we
recognize a pattern?

I love the turn in the third stanza, especially the image of the hacksaw in the middle of a choral performance. There’s a wonderful, dark quirkiness to these poems and this book. And somehow I doubt Greenstreet’s last line, “These are all the questions I have.” I think she’s imagining more questions even now.

*****

Pamela Hart, a former journalist, is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art. Her chapbook, The End of the Body, was published in 2006 by toadlily press. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in journals like Kalliope, Rattappalax, and Lumina, and online at The Cortland Review, qarrtsiluni and postalpoetry.

A WOMAN'S GUIDE TO MOUNTAIN CLIMBING by JANE AUGUSTINE

2008-12-17T17:55:00.000-08:00

JON CURLEY Reviews

A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing by Jane Augustine
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2008)

In poetry as well as other writing forms advancing autobiographical and memoir-oriented approaches, the tendency, the temptation, of falsifying self-analysis prevails. Absorption in life experience can lead to representations of posturing, a forensics of the self too aggrandizing or abasing to be taken seriously. This kind of practiced or inadvertent confessionalism is the mortal sin of an ego too convinced of its worth, a naked or well-clothed exposure meant to titillate with its variety of recollections and re-visitations of fatuous “life journeys” embroidered with the none-too-cautious didacticism of one who has really lived. For the most part, poetry of this ilk makes the transparent eyeball of the “I” in dire need of corrective lenses and so too leaves the careful reader wishing that Eliot’s dictum to run away from the personal be a mantra and a marathon—run, do not walk, from one’s hyperbolic sense of self importance, cover the veneer of your identity politics with a plastic covering to rescue you from an imbalanced consideration of your experiential worth. In other words, put that lustrous self of yours on the shelf with the other exemplars of self and see how the entire aggregate leaves nothing but voices arranged in a symphony of banal attitudes, conventional wisdoms, and witlessness.

The ability to truly write about oneself is difficult, as hard and implacable as the mountains Jane Augustine climbs and contends with through this magnificent volume, A Woman’s Guide to Mountain Climbing. With the precision of an eye glancing over a precipice and the honest, rigorous examination that comes with not only experience but poetic prowess, Augustine has chiseled a book that is a celebration of being in all of its conflicts, contradictions, joys, and losses. This kind of poetry is fully formed and like a rock. Instead of the sedimentary rock of superficial or residual recognitions, we have the igneous depths of revelation and befuddlement. What comes forth is a conscience laying down the weight of its memory and meaning while lashing it to the self-questioning that affirms both the understanding of a moment’s experience and the dire difficulties of comprehending the range—mountain metaphor is impossible to get away from—of emotions one should feel or face in the trajectory of living and moving across the face of one’s life.

I assume that some readers and critics would deem Augustine’s brand of poetry in service to some notion of a feminist poetics. Perhaps. But the gestation of these poems collectively force one to see their energies amassed from a feminizing poetic, taking the realm of the real into a becoming, affirming the feminine while kinetically discovering what this can and cannot be. The clarity and hard earned gestures performed here leave one with the idea that the process, not the result, characterizes the truly authentic endeavor to uncover one’s relation to the self and one’s surroundings, whether the natural world or the congested, often incommunicative world of social beings and their armament of agencies, desires, evasions, and deliberations.

In the title poem, “A Women’s Guide to Mountain Climbing,” the prescriptions start straightforwardly enough:

A woman can carry
on her back
everything needed to survive—

                  tent, sweater, sleeping bag
                  canteen, flyrod, cheese
                  cookpot, poncho, map
                  tampons, bowie knife
                  and book of stars

can’t climb
without these essentials

almost can’t climb
with them

But soon, with a careful and constant mindfulness that bespeak a sensitivity so lacking in most types of modern poetry, Augustine articulates a woman’s role and rhythm and then assays a reconciliation of materiality and myth, collapsing the ardent desire for fostering difference and unlikeness into the fusion of the human, the worldly and the unworldly. So the poem asserts:

A woman often carries more
than her own weight—
the child’s too

in the pit of her stomach
and balanced heavily upon
her watchful head: a long safari—

and think of those men who carry none
of their own weight,
who float asleep on the inner springs

of their mothers’ curls,
whose bathtubs’ crows-feet
are their secretaries’ hands and knees

—and likewise asserted is the quickening pulse of what it is, how it feels, to be a woman, a mother, a person witnessing the abjection forced by the unequal, unfair condition of women in the shadow of, no, not patriarchy—the sentiment is not writ so large—but the insensitive, casual deportment of male counterparts. Later on in the poem, the merging of the individual voice and a world made less obstructed by categorical separation of spirit and substance, myth and material, emotion and instinct comes to light:

I walk into the moon’s country.
Her fullness rises,
a cooled and softened sun.

Both eyes of the sky
have cleared, strip
down to essential body,

lose the flesh of thought.
My white bones float
out to meet that naked source

by which I see both dark and light,
wildflower both beautiful
and lethal—

no illusion

therefore no consolation

Notice how this passage refuses a period, as if to indicate that the lines run to no assertion, only a concentrated attunement to the magic and menace of experience imaginatively and personally processed. The “flesh of thought”—a phrasing so penetrating in its syncretic oversight of the collision of the material and abstract leads to the clear-headed conception of the available currents of perception allowed to the poet on a “safari” in the world—validation and a stark and troubled resignation. These lines run with the integrity of a mountain river and refuse the easy tributary into the human-made reservoir of easy closure.

These personal poems personalize themselves without exhibitionism, with a steady, surmounting projection of a self steeled in skeptical inquiry and roving jouissance with all that is on—and perhaps off, at least empirically—offer. Images and indications of familial and romantic loss and recuperation, the anxiety of being ensconsed and constrained by the limits of society and self-knowledge, the enumeration of the dependencies on family, social or poetic traditions, and cultivated sensibility of one’s notions of how to navigate the mountainous terrain of life’s fertile and sometimes frustratingly fallow or faltering portions: these qualities are, at times, countered, and held accountable, by the willful exemptions of a poet who refuses the tyranny of the real, the received, and the fateful. Few poets can bequeath a book that operates, on its own terms, as a guide, a user’s manual, that so poignantly instructs and points to paths of inquiry too often obscured by the brambles and brush of our noisy world, our lackluster selves. Jane Augustine is that kind of masterful poet that trailblazes and yet carries a torch to show the necessary trails to poets, readers, all of us in the dark and wishing for some illuminating filaments of grace to banish the encroaching darkness.

*****

Jon Curley is a poet living in Newark, New Jersey.

MENTAL COMMITMENT ROBOTS by SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE

2008-12-17T17:50:00.000-08:00

KAREN AN-HWEI LEE Reviews

Mental Commitment Robots by Sueyeun Juliette Lee and collages by Brenda Iijima
(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Brooklyn, 2007)

With a startling ivory and fuchsia cardstock cover, this new chapbook by Sueyeun Juliette Lee is a cerebral medley of prose poems and images. Fresh from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs in Brooklyn, New York, Mental Commitment Robots includes collages by publisher Brenda Iijima, whose editorial vision for “diversity and interconnection—social, cultural, environmental and aesthetic” characterize her fine saddle-stitched series. Iijima’s cover is a collage of light microscopy images (protozoa and neurons), a nomenclature index, graph paper, and ink-on-text designs reminiscent of British artist Tom Phillips’s The Humument. The back cover is a pastiche of oil rigs, algae, a dog, a fish, furniture, a plant, and a little robot drawn on a cut-out index. The overall effect is eclectic, brainy, and stylish: The last page reveals a hammerhead shark, a hand-drawn eye, and another little text robot.

Lee (no relation to me, by the way, except in poetic sisterhood) sings rhapsodic, fractured inscapes across a scientific spectrum of musical rhythms, subterranean noise, and marine transparencies. The first prose poem sequence, “Once more,” is innocently surreal and capricious: “. . . The bus is an aqueduct, a portal for song. I can cry no more sorry anemones when I hear a violin . . . .” The lyric moment is continually deferred -- in playful humoresques -- by the pragmatic or empirical. Although the poems occasionally sing of dramas, sentimentalism never takes root. In fact, the tension between our material world and a rich inner life -- albeit one that questions authentic presences -- results in a phenomenology of emotion pixilated by the technology of simulation, the ceaseless production of data, and the estranging perceptions of affective neuroscience. Indeed, as an aggregate of cells functions like a machine or organism, Lee’s fascinating prose poems engage a cognitive science of emotion.

In the second prose poem sequence entitled, “I am a hammerhead shark. I make no sound,” the reader encounters “cartilaginoid joints that give under semantic duress,” “a pair of milky eyes that refuse to triangulate,” “a stereoscopic ocean floor,” and an imperative: “Pursue me across numerous divides, over chasms of understatement now clothed in a subtextual, ‘common sense’ racination.” Lee deftly weaves the linguistic, the affective, and the scientific into multifaceted readings. Two-column tables appear at intervals with a photograph, video, or ambient noise: “sounds of water | image of shark in sea.” Like labels with transparent images, or words with unheard sounds -- the word detached from its signified, in turn disconnected from its referent -- Lee’s poems engage simulation and surface. Perhaps “sharkness” is a form of literary experiment where the sign points to a semantic rift rather than a referent: “Sharkness describes a silent skepticism, a roving appetite that sniffs out alterations in the temperature depth beneath a variable surface.” In this mysterious chasm, newness enters the world through the crevices of language: “Sharkness is destiny, is a perfect repetition, the imitation that broke though.”

The following excerpt illustrates Lee’s signature move from the conventional or “textbook” -- instructions on how to resuscitate a shark, for instance -- to metapoetical play:

To resuscitate a shark, to slide two fingers across a serrated organ for “breath,” is to wake up inside a starkly blue-lit room where the text written across torn cotton pages wafts in a circular fan’s efforts. “This is not a page.” “Only you are here.” “You are only here.”

Lee’s poems recall Leslie Scalapino’s aeolotropic series, that they were at the beach, where crystalline poems fracture perception and experience while reflecting one another’s tones, rhythms, and observations. In Lee’s sequence, “The big deal with shopping is composed for the heart,” consumerism and its hypnotic influence upon individual affects -- our emotions -- question what is authentic or genuine in our relationships: “The economy is a robotic circulation of love . . . .” Permutations of data and the robotics of human interactions in an anonymous global populace resonate with the Althusserian notion of interpellation, where subjects internalize hegemonic values through the commerce of art and technology. Human emotions, then, are an outcome of cultural production. With the glow of circuitry in a socio-economic machine, the following prose poem flows between the interpellated subliminal (You will buy that which you did not have), the capricious Romantic (That love can be a many tentacled thing), and metapoetical self-awareness:

You will buy that which you did not have. That love can be a many tentacled thing, but maintains a relational resonance suggests a tectonic circuitry. The shadow of two figures holds hands in a terraced mall. The imaginary in this instance is a ray of (artificial) light. Our unconsciousness has built it, a shibboleth cut from snow.

In Lee’s last sequence, “A dog is only angry because it is angry or afraid,” the reader encounters a series of prescient images in the aesthetic strain of “mental commitment robots” titling the collection:

I can tell the future in the sunrise and the colors of this stream. West emerged as a colorless conclusion, then, an event horizon after which the highway takes over, hair-like data-strips that dissolve across the tongue. The prints in the ground I track for hours lead me to the place I was taught to call home.

A sense of double-consciousness arises with the awareness of poetic constructs internalized as one’s own, or the fact that they are “taught.” How, then, does a poet actually sing? How does newness enter the world, and what is authentically new? Lee responds with questions pointing to language and violence as a site for the poetic body, or vice versa: “When you cut into the blood, when the chain breaks across the muffled throat, isn’t that a new song? Isn’t that something to sing?” Similarly, in her anecdotal prose fragment where “the young daughter struggles to assert her sense of her unique destiny,” the speaker’s “break with her family is simultaneous with an off-shore explosion that jettisons hundreds of millions of dollars worth of robotics into the sea.” So a revolution in poetic language, to borrow from Julia Kristeva’s concept, starts with the rupture at birth: “Submarine dogs converge in a hungry swarm. A baby is born in a dark, damp room meant to simulate a forest.” The search for an authentic voice -- rather than robotic ventriloquism -- commences with the establishment of the speaker’s autonomy. A poet finds her footholds in innovative language, experiments with a montage of discourses, and ultimately, bleeds poetry itself as song.

*****

Karen An-Hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004). She lives and teaches on the West Coast, where she is a novice harpist.

SUBSISTENCE EQUIPMENT by BRENDA IIJIMA

2008-12-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

Subsistence Equipment by Brenda Iijima
(Faux Press, 2008)

Brenda Iijima's poetry is full of the kinds of accidents and incidents, framings and skewings of same that give me hope for the future of the art, that give me hope for the future period. This is brilliant, difficult work. Subsistence equipment, for sure.

Subsistence Equipment is a chapbook-length poem that is delivered in stanzas of three lines until the last page where one finds a stanza of 2 lines, a stanza of 7 lines, a stanza of 9 lines, and a one-line stanza. Those variant stanzas follow this one:

Space has

No

Patience

Iijima is nothing if not a navigator of the present multi-dementia-zonal moment. Well, that's not very precise and is only partly correct; but it is true to the delirium I feel when I read this decentered, all-over work. It's an environment in which the "city skeletal," the outer urban environment, is one with the "Inner in house enthralled blouses bodice" which "Envelopes physical body." Not to mention mind.

The stanzas are variously notational, instructional, aphoristic, or function as commentary/ segments in fractured narrative(s). This is by no means an exhaustive list of their wily way, those stanzas.

It's a crazy quilt, this poem, of voice and painterly images carried through something like 180 stanzas. I tried counting a couple of times and never came up with the same total. I'm not much of a counter. It doesn't feel counter-intuitive to attempt such measures here though. 180 feels right. A half-circle or possibility of reversal in brackets? Vortices?

I would love to interview Iijima. She seems like a pretty pure synethesiast to me. Her stanzas roil through all of the senses and many of the follies of our late capitalist malaise:

Stereoscopic project facility

Hollyhock bolt the sky still holds vituperators

Martin Luther King Junior, the polis, haven or lawn

This is a poet who never lets up, whose work's value I can only hint at, who is relentless in her laying bare of our psycho-cultural home turf. I want to read all of her work. Maybe then I can myself begin to write.

Who'd be foolish enough to give up

Loving women as a storm impales a gaze

Th is form will become norm predation ease

Relapse irk ooze substantiate

Delicate tower of flesh

Harvest diskette docket wild unsubstantiated desire

To be

Shall we want to fuck

Kindly move these Christmas cacti

The gesture of separating "Th is" so, phonemically, is characteristic and recurs. It's an example of how attuned BI is to the sonic/conceptual landscape of this -scape obsessed poem:

Crocheted

In camouflage

Colors

Someone says

In the

Background

Faces

Wear out

Fastest

If I were a real, tenured, certified and celebrated poet-critic I'd have some way of locking this all down, some way to make it all more digestible and understandable. But this is a gloriously unassimilable text which I will return to for a long time to come.

Subsistence Equipment is a very good chapbook, resistant writing of the best kind. Please consider reading it. It just might make you reconsider what a poem can be. It just might make you wonder where you are. And maybe--I don't know--despite our best efforts, that is the most a poem can do.

*****

Tom Beckett is the author of This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day (Otoliths), Unprotected Texts (Meritage Press), and the curator of the E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interview series (Otoliths). He is currently working on a year long conversation-in-writing with Geof Huth.

TRADING IN MERMAIDS by ALFRED A. YUSON

2008-12-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

LISA BOWER Reviews

Trading in Mermaids by Alfred A. Yuson
(Anvil Publishing, Manila, 1993)

Alfred A. Yuson’s poetry collection, Trading in Mermaids, is a cacophony of sound and images: each line builds to form the visceral and sometimes all-encompassing aura of a moment important enough to remember. The poems take the reader through different countries and cultures and zero in on images both specific and surreal. Where Yuson is speaking of the “inaudible obscenities” in a foreign land, the graves of Chopin and Jim Morrison or Larry Bird’s trip to Spain, the world becomes something of a playground. The speakers in these poems are not lost nor are they found: They are living, living, living.

Yuson’s work is quiet and will sneak up on you. The lines are controlled, and the music is tuned to a precise pitch, one that is low and quiet. Yuson’s poetry is clever and as swift as the blink of the eye. These quiet poems will sneak up on you so that they are over as quickly as they begin. Nothing’s better than leaving the reader both satisfied and wanting more, and this is the calling of the mermaids in this collection.

These poems travel the world and bring along a rare universality. Yuson writes in “Knife in the Adriatic”:

Slept part of the night in Yugoslavia.
Rose at dead of four a.m. local time
to rousing breeze from black Adriatic.

Swig of Paddy’s Irish bought in a quick
stopover at Dubai –distance repeating
snapshots of passage in the dream.

Rested now, homing in to welcome
of a foreign dawn. Another swig. Gut
adapts sooner than the flick of fool

and ancient rendezvous. Hotel room’s lamp’s
a ghost driven back by moves in time,
old loves padding out into the balcony.

There it is cold in a version of February
looking blindly down upon the conifers
and hearing the hiss of sea beyond.

Pushed back by Italy’s winds. Pee and pull
the metal chain, drown the quiet with shock
of toilet roar. More and more it’s alien

and familiar. Now seek intimacy out the door
past the hall down the flights across empty
lobby and sliding glass into vast dark world

of different air. New and renewed, lost
in shadowy stumble to heedless water.
It is there. Faint light approaches the surf.

Knife weighed in the palm of distant arrival.
Blade opened and thrust into amity of spirits.
In an hour, gulls and the kindness of sunrise.

Here, the speaker could be anyone, of any nationality, and of any gender or socioeconomic class. Movement is key to this poem: the verbs are imperative and push the reader from tightly controlled line to tightly controlled line. The word play of “home in to welcome / of a foreign dawn” plays with the idea of home and expands it beyond the nest of one place. Here, Yuson welcomes “ancient rendezvous,” and his poems become the “faint light” that “approaches the surf.”

The language in this book of poems is the real gold star: this a place where even “the curses are musical.” The people in these poems are seemingly always on the move, between continents and countries, and yet there is not the usual yearning or nostalgia for home. Instead, the poems show a cultural exchange that is as subtle as it is beautiful articulated throughout the course of the poems. It is both brave and rare for a poet to proclaim that the speakers in their poems “feel so much / safer as an alien, dumb to the invocation / of intimacy,” and yet, the effect is one that asks the reader and the world to step outside of their comfort zones and explore. No matter where the speakers are or the country these poems are set in, there is magic happening. In Yuson’s poems, “the bootleg album of memory” is playing sweetly as Yuson takes us around the world.

*****

Lisa Bower is originally from Kingston, NY, spent six years falling in love with the South in Roanoke, Virginia, and recently moved to New Orleans (it's everything you've heard and more). She can't get enough of Patricia Smith's poetry collection, Blood Dazzler and Lupe Fiasco's take on hip hop. She works from home as a freelance writer and tutor and is cultivating a caffeine addiction.

PARSINGS by SHEILA E. MURPHY

2008-12-17T17:40:00.000-08:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Parsings by Sheila E. Murphy
(Arrum Press, Finland, 2008)

Parsings, at 157 pages, may be the longest poem that Sheila E. Murphy, a prolific poet since the late seventies, has ever published. There are six lines (a sestet) per stanza, with the first three in large type and boldface and the last three in smaller type and italics. At the same time, colons—which had previously been used in innovative ways by A.R. Ammons and Eileen R. Tabios—break the flow of syntax and allow the reader to jump over them to make sense of a particular unit of language: “: colon leads to what I say :/ casts long-spooled shadow onto/ : pathway” (114). For Murphy’s readers, this supple, eccentric form slows down and complicates the reception of already challenging and challenged meaning, in which, as she puts it, “stochast/ push discourse” (26). Stochastics, of course, involves a mathematical process including particular procedures that produce both random and, to some extent, predictable results.

Early in the poem, an abstract critique of a particular form of business management exemplifies Murphy’s (often implicit) challenge to binding structures:

get-to-know-me : broadside
cubicles : called “cubes”
a sacramental way of :
separation rationed : the irrational quest for
over prepped ; delivery
embraces : foster cadre (8)

The probable attachment of the violent or comical adjective “broadside” to the noun “cubicles” indicates how good relationships based on some degree of knowledge in a work environment are not a primary corporate goal. Such a mode of interior architecture is “sacramental” only because some “cadre” of management gurus have perceived the arrangement as a key to fulfilling the “sacred” task of maximizing workers’ productivity and efficiency. The division of “of” and “separation” is a wonderful anti- or a-grammatical enactment of “separation rationed,” and the fact that most of the second word in that fourth line is contained in the first word and reprised in the fourth one enhances the tour de force. If the rationing of separation is intended as an instrumentally rational mode of discouraging intimacy that could distract the rank and file from business, “’cubes’” might also be deemed evidence of an irrational obsession with trying to manipulate every variable of production in advance.

To be “over prepped” is to miss how “delivery” of goods and services can involve a kind of “embrace.” Those placed in cubicles could lack the human contact that affords chances for synergistic cooperation rather than egotistical competition that might derail a company’s long-term development. Though trying to “foster [develop] cadre,” a group focused on problem-solving and opportunity-creating, one might merely bring about a “foster” (substitutive with the connotation of ersatz, pseudo) “cadre” of clashing individualists. Later, as if in response to this passage, Murphy writes: “divide time/ between : spaced selves// finessive” (24-5). One can “finesse” artificial constraints, after all, and “always” be “making for ex-/ tended selves” (33).

At times, when the poet seems to be aiming for such an extension, she enters into a spiritually inflected discourse with a high degree of abstraction that still manages to maintain its arresting elusiveness:

real prayer
is one deed at a time : repeated in a
sequence sequeling parade’s : invisible
devotion you can spot : wholeness

of real living prayer :
accompanied by silence in and
about : the confluence of
: it and everything revoking non-sense and
: non-feeling
reeling in the real : allowing that to

pressure being : is not how we
shore up what : we care about is
not the same as : “keep
simplicity as brave as clarity”
: a charitable opus is the breath : right
here (the through way : dims its left

hook : probably quite wheeled-
into) therapeutic : live white
simulacrum : filled by farmer
of the glistening : blond wheat-
field : name also of the
resistance : fettering absconds

with acumen reduction : (98-99)

Murphy uses the term “real” three times, and before problematizing “the real” as her readers would expect her to do, she chooses to meditate about different kinds of prayer to distinguish between ostentatious, manipulative behavior and sequential action that partakes of a sense of “wholeness,” lack of ostentation (“invisible devotion”) in an ambience of “silence.” Although she is a connoisseur of “nonsense,” communication which defies ordinary ways of making meaning, she appreciates prayer that “revokes” “non-sense,” the lamentable absence of sensory actuality or a bloodless, bodiless aim, as well as lack of emotion. Prayer is an attempt to capture, to hook “the real”; the homonym “reel” in “reeling” reminds us that the presumption of cinematic capture, too, is a fiction that puts “pressure” on the individual’s reception of “being,” if not being itself. In other words, whatever version of “the real” is reeled in does not constitute “being,” but it vies affectively for the latter’s authority.

Then, the syntax, studded with colon-obstacles, gets more challenging. Does Murphy criticize prayer as the act of “shoring up” one’s investments in security-producing beliefs? Considering the questionable aphorism in quotes, I ask: Is “clarity” always “brave,” or could it be cowardly when premature clarity falsifies a complex situation? And why should one maintain a link between “clarity” and “simplicity” when what is grasped as accurately clear may resist translation into a simple representation? Those “fettered” to a false understanding are victimized by “acumen reduction.” I find the eight lines of the passage after the quotation and before the concluding clause extremely opaque, juxtaposing tropes of “charity” as “breath,” highway driving, boxing, a (possibly Baudrillardian) “simulacrum,” and agriculture in an unsure syntactical space. It is as though Murphy’s bit of violence with divergent contexts is “therapeutic” in the sense that it obliquely “names” “resistance” to a fixed conception of prayer.

Surely, Murphy “parses” her social landscape in part to practice “resistance” to those like “the greedy” who find it “easier. . ./ : to keep// a public stupid lazy : groveling/ for worthless items” (130), and when she tells us, “hear me/ sustain commitment : to discomfort” 141), she refers to confronting both uncertainty and stress-inducing aspects of her social environment. However, the poet also wishes to make her text a space of celebration: “wind farms/ (overtones of how we worth our way : through each impediment) : I live here/ each day’s celebrarium” (119). For one thing, the transformation of the noun “worth” into a verb, not uncommon in the Murphy canon, like such sprightly coinages as “celebrarium,” “acronymph” (21), “proc(lividity)” (37), and “altercade” (90) and the wild double pun, “drop in the bucket/ et : tu (brutality)”(28), suggests that, for her, the exuberant display of language as “party animal” is just about always in season. Such a “celebrarium” may be just as useful as an aquarium or planetarium, since, in day-to-day uses of language primarily as instruments of transactions, persuasion, and “altercades,” some “areas” should be constructed where the joyful, recreational study of words can occur. Experimental poets in each generation—ranging from Stein and Stevens, Zukofsky, Ashbery and the New York School to the Language Poets—have recognized this.

However, aside from that understanding, some experimentalists’ major tones tend to be somber, perhaps even dour, whereas Murphy, here and elsewhere, often features the affirmation of “joie de vivre,” including “my wish for you/ that you not feel : contempt” (145). Murphy’s gestures of critique and resistance never seem like “contempt,” because her work evinces a general respect for a “you” that embodies many divergent possibilities, regardless of current tendencies, and continual hope for common ground. Here, for example, is what might be termed an eccentric but remarkable eloquent and intense rewriting of Walt Whitman’s acts of democratic stretching:

: I gradually become
a glistening choice : lullaby connect
point for the others : who are all with

and of me : links so pure they
know themselves as lowest :
sum of squares (the shapes
are integral : now moving
befalls us (opening) : wings central,
where are we if not : together (all

in common “blessings” : (111)

While Whitman might figure himself as a “glistening” irresistible force, Murphy’s moderate adverb “gradually” and the openness of “choice” separate her from the nineteenth century bard’s pushiness: “yes/ adaged pretty softly” (156). As a relativist, she will make no claims for “the imperial self,” and the noun “’blessings’” is placed in quotes, not because the poet is mocking it, but because, given historical accretions of meaning tied to theological institutions, the word is not quite right for what she is trying to characterize, and no other word fits, either.

The tempo in this colon-driven poem is varied, as it needs to be to sustain 157 pages, but, compared to the frequent sounding of a “barbaric yawp” in Song of Myself, parsings can be said to provide the relatively quiet encouragement of a “lullaby” in this and many other passages. Both Murphy and Whitman’s “songs” aim to offer points of connection “for the others” while stressing the writers’ sharing of community (“who are all with”) and kinship (“of me”). In parsings, the negative-sounding lowest common denominator is replaced by the unexpected “lowest :/ sum of squares.” “Moving” has been what “befalls” (as both challenge and advantage) the community of readers throughout the poem, and the phrase “where are we if not : together” is forceful yet avoids sentimental didacticism through its placement within the “relay of a long string” (99) replete with “procedural loofas” (25) and “plump with stories” (129).

*****

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, and in 2007, he and Joseph Lease co-edited “Burning Interiors”: David Shapiro’s Poetry and Poetics. His work appears in The Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). Fink's paintings hang in various collections.

PERSUASIONS OF FALL by ANN LAUINGER

2008-12-17T17:35:00.000-08:00

MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Reviews

Persuasions of Fall by Ann Lauinger
(The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 2004)

1.

A black and white photo of squash leaves, appropriately titled “Squash,” dominates the cover of Ann Lauinger’s Persuasions of Fall, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry in 2003, the year the prize was first given; [Footnote 1] Keith Bartholomew is its photographer, currently a professor in the College of Architecture + Planning Urban Planning Program, at the University of Utah, also the collection’s publisher. Squash leaves are wide leaves, their shapes almost attempting to form a more circular appearance. But this attempt is simply an attempt and only culminates in approximate circularity. Certainly, convincing circularity, here, isn’t an indication of failure but rather the success of its obligation to evolution, to simply have a geometrical appearance of near-circularity. Visually, the edges of squash leaves have a soft roughness its own evolutionary identity has imposed, as though to defy the idea of visually perfect circularity, in order to design an imperfect but appealing squash leaf-form.

One might assume this evolutionary defiance is also true in other aspects of squash. The squash plant is one of those that somehow resist the idea of vertical, ascending growth, the kind of growth that struggles against gravity to achieve a certain height above ground; instead, squash plants prefer a more horizontal growth and fruit production, moving almost semi-rhizomatically, spreading its leaves and body outwards, as though extending its presence to the roots of other plants, in the name of plant solidarity. There is something about squash, then, that prefers the comfort of earth elements, the more subdued aspects of those elements, the creatures on ground, the little, wormy, crawling critters, not to mention the color of soil, diverse combinations of dark, grey, brown, and any permutations of darker colors usually amenable for plant growth. That’s why the idea of using squash leaves here, as the book’s cover achieves an accidental, if not conscious, congruence about the idea of fall in the book’s title, the season when things are stereotypically perceived to slow or quiet down, lay low, the way brown leaves are when they start to fall, obeying the laws of gravity, reaching for the ground, a space for rest, temporal or final.

Certainly, one’s immediate association of the term ‘fall,’ in the title, is fall as specific season of the year; but, too, the term can be applied to other things, entities, ideas, or values about falling. The extended meanings of the term can, indeed, expand into states of moving or progressing towards conditions of eventual relaxation. However, when the idea of ‘persuasion’ is attached to ‘fall’, ‘fall’ acquires added layers of signification.

Thus, the notion of ‘persuasions’ of fall can also alert readers that there are gravities and determinations to pay attention to, for instance the gravity of melancholy that perhaps pervades in the fall season, the gravitation towards details in a condition of melancholy or otherwise, physical details that could be magnified in the process of slowing down, or the details that are more fantastical, abstract, those that are nourished in the forces of consciousness and, too, unconsciousness. Here, I’m suggesting that ‘persuasions of fall’ can be about evolutions into another state or other states of being, such as those progressions in human intimacies that can be approximately characterized as progressive states of falling in love.

2.

The collection is divided in two parts. In the first part, the reader is ushered into a somewhat gray world, tricky prisms of grayness, flickering illuminations in grayness. The second part hints us into sensibilities of lightness that light deflects and reflects in the hard ice of winter, a calcification of intimate things, of preservations that’d soon melt into spring, the new in the new year.

“The Company of Fools” welcomes the reader in Part I, with the sound of frogs: “the small boom of frogs / in spring woods” (3). The noise isn’t necessarily deafening, but the cacophony can be annoying, especially if we feel “amphibious slime” (3) around our ankles, as we wade through a “glassy pond” (3) in these woods. A reader whose hobby or vocation involves sound collection and engineering – for a sound library/archive – may find this amphibian boom appealing for his/her next music record. Although considered noise by human standards, this boom is the reader’s initial instrument of displacement, of falling away from the frenzy of civilization, away from schedules, into a state of meditation, to be part of a ritual, and not to undermine the quiet simplicities of the season. And this first poem is, of course, not about frogs, and the springy woods, but rather about reconsidering tightness, loosening it a bit. Lauinger asks us to applaud this “small boom of frogs” (3) for “complicating green” (3); she’s suggesting a critical dialectic in the experience of taking some time to listen to this small boom and the green, the grasses, or trees around this sound. In some ways, she’s assuming that the reader inhabits a world where nature has been marginalized, where nature has been replaced by the mind-space of culture, especially the materiality of culture expressed in architecture, literature, sports, technology, or even religion. But she ups the ante a bit and suggests that we

Praise the broken eggs and praise
whoever dropped them.
Smooth virtue deserves a smash-
and what pleasure’s more reliable
than a decent omelet? (3)

Virtues are, indeed, fragile, easily broken like eggs. But Lauinger’s humor leaks here, because she’s not necessarily advocating that we become virtue’s hard-core villains, but that we smash virtues now and then, and enjoy them as “decent omelet” (3). Is she advocating that we tell a lie now and then, elide the idea of telling the truth a bit, and enjoy the short rebellion from being staunchly virtuous? In a way, yes, perhaps because our humanity needs it now and then. But she’s giving this suggestion to people who have a sense of balance and equilibrium, those who understands the decent in “decent omelet” (3).

“Fallingwater,” the second poem, also takes us into nature, into elements and forms in geography, that’d soon find harmony in the mind of culture re-shaping nature to become harmonious with culture, thus exploring a sense of balance and equilibrium in this relationship. The title refers to a particular structure designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in 1936, in Pennsylvania, for Edgar J. Kaufmann. Epistolary in form, the piece dramatizes the architect’s appeal to his client about, injecting courage in the client to trust the architect who’d construct a structure on an unconventional location, and, too, to help the client envision the unique experience of living in a house on “the waterfall in the woods” (4):

The house I want to build asks daring –
not of me, Kaufmann, but of you.
I shall cantilever concrete slabs
over falls and stream, layered like birthday cake.
My job’s a conjuror’s trick, mere cunning.
The question, Kaufmann, is: have you the courage
not simply to look at the waterfalls, but to live with them? (4)

The last line is one of two excerpts Lauinger has borrowed from Wright’s actual correspondence to Kaufmann. And the last line can be the highest note in this letter of persuasion. The designer is trying to persuade his client to fall into ‘Fallingwater,’ be in it, assimilate in the experience it can offer, marry it. Without checking any archive or historical documents on this project, the tone in this passage – and the poem itself – suggests the client’s critical doubts about funding to build this structure, but that Wright was successful in convincing his client to pursue the project, because of the architect’s persuasiveness, which Lauinger also suggests in this poem’s tone. Thus, the poem, too, can be about Wright himself, about the persuasions of ambition, a critical instrument in transforming nature into a dimension of culture.

In “Ashes” – Part I’s last poem – we are ushered into the more intimate aspects of falling, taking us into a chamber of mourning: a personal box. The ashes here are what is left behind by a loved one who just died, specifically things in that person’s personal box: “binoculars, bridge deck and scorepads, scented soap” (34); the poem’s voice enumerates them like holding the ashes of that loved one and letting them fall for the wind to catch. But then the voice asks and confirms: “Where will you turn / up next? Always, there’s something left to burn” (34). The question is heavy; but it cannot burn itself, because it cannot die, the fire of love has always “something left to burn,” any remembrance, but not the condition of still being in love, even after that loved one’s final, physical departure.

As Part I ends with somber, funeral air with subtle affirmations of love, Part II opens with a more springy note, almost the way Part I started, filled with amphibian sonic boom; Part II starts with “Birdsong.” Again, there’s the equation here between the visuality of green in nature and the sounds of nature: “BIRDSONG, / glaze-smooth / reasonless / green on the skin, / held us-“(37). Here, Lauinger installs polished texture and specific color to a birdsong. The avian melody captivates the listeners (“held us”), a “glaze-smooth” composition that hasn’t been through the grind of reason, or couldn’t have been produced by reason, avian reason, that is. The absence of reason in the production of this composition is justified, from the element that produced the song, the bird; but reason still occupies a role in the production of the birdsong, from the context of the listener. The notion of ‘birdsongs’, here, is an auditory production of a poet’s observations and sense of music, a poet humanizing, or even poeticizing that which is part of nature’s primeval and basic elements, the act of breathing, the very process of exhaling and inhaling. The sensitive ears of humans hear song in varieties of bird sounds, but birds are just living their lives, and, I believe, do not have intentions of serenading the human soul, because the sounds they’re making is the effect of vibration in the process of breathing.

Now Lauinger further elevates birdsong: “in a state of / suspended / interpretation / until abruptly / like all oracles / it ceased” (37). Indeed, the poet hungers for interpretation. Entranced by the song, the poet seems caught in a brief state of suspended delight and invests insight in the beautiful sound. In many ways, we can assume the birdsong transported the listener to a state that resembles something spiritually enlightening, even oracular. But the song stopped, and appears to banish, abruptly, without any hint of being in the poet’s immediate auditory premises again. The listener’s temporal relationship with this ‘composition’ is, therefore, severed, as though it fell persuasively into a crevice, that of silence, the kind of silence that denies spiritual advancement, not the silence in meditation but that of undesirable, empty silence

Also in Part II, “Fireworks Over Sing Sing” has a subtle similarity with “Fallingwater” perhaps primarily because of the – conscious or unconscious – involvement of a building structure to explore a specific intersection in nature and culture. While in “Fallingwater” we experience this nexus through the cunning of clever, calculated design solutions, in “Fireworks…” we sense this in the inner world of someone incarcerated in the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, looking outside from his cell (“C-15-94”) “despi[sing] freedom’s shameless appetite for easy rapture and release” (44). It’s safe to imagine or assume that fireworks flares could’ve alerted this particular inmate with temporal fantasies of freedom, or childhood memories from family and friends, especially, because the display seem to happen on the 4th of July, Independence Day. Instead, fireworks, to him, appear to represent “freedom’s shameless appetite for easy rapture”(44). Certainly, those who’re not incarcerated do not necessarily share this view of freedom’s “easy rapture[s]”, because those who belong to the large majority – who are also and mostly tax-payers – have an approximate understanding that freedom is not at all easy raptures, but rather a conglomeration or collage of overlapping processes, methods, and mechanisms that guards and inspires social and personal responsibilities, to preserve not necessarily legal order but fundamental desire and instinct for a sense of general social order and harmony. One can argue that Lauinger gives this particular inmate this perception of freedom, because he has been through the grind of prison-life, has experienced the darknesses in his cell, and may have advanced a critical inner evolution, after periods of remorse. But then Lauinger gives a glimpse of this inmate’s knowledge that perhaps only an inmate’s imagination understands:

[…] He’s not fooled:

adults or kids, they’re primed down there for havoc.
He’s known the bullet’s sweet exploding shock
but lost his taste for mayhem, as for magic. (44)

The passage suggests this inmate is incarcerated for taking another life, say, in the context of self-defense, for trying to preserve his own life, through a “bullet’s sweet exploding shock.” On the other hand, the poet argues his case could happen to anybody, because “adults or kids” are “primed […] for havoc,” and have the basic, inherent instincts for brutality that can find expression in situations that demands them; thus synonymously, they fall for the logic of nature, abandon their sense of civility, or whatever equipment they have that controls their capacity for violence and savagery, specific to their personalities. And so, these ‘fireworks of independence,’ in the end, are hollow, because they could not properly not stand for freedom in independence, because they cannot “bring down […] walls,” walls thicker than Sing Sing’s, those prisons inside us: the forces in us hard to control. Now the notion of “primed down there for havoc” certainly suggests an incarcerated drawing a link between the world outside and inside prison; but the prisoner underlines the gulf in these two worlds with a tone of distance in “down there.” But I speculate that “down there” may not really be that far, in the context of our media saturated environment. Certainly, the economy of civil social relations and negotiations imposes systems and forms of surveillance that attempts to secure civil human behavior, and prevent people from going to jail. But there are elements in that economy that display tendencies of glamorizing the incarcerated, quietly exoticizing the culture of danger and violence in the prison system itself, tendencies that may influence adults and kids – especially impressionable kids and teens – be ‘primed for havoc’; these tendencies appear to pervade in the diverse tributaries of popular culture, especially nourished by the music, film, and television industries. Often, the main avenues of this process of glamorization are the realm of arguments that protects entertainment within the confines of art; thus, in our media saturated imagination we’ve heard or seen in film and television stories about life imitating art, or rather life falling for the persuasions of art.

The collection’s last poem “New Year’s Day” takes us not into the crowded and noisy celebration of that day, but rather something quieter, into a drive “to beat the first snow” (68). There’s no suggestion here that the couple in the car are about to join their friends or family later, after the drive, but just them both celebrating the new year:

[…] We passed

speeding under the low, quilted sky
like bride and groom escaping the wedding guests,
ducking heads and holding collars close,
impatient for the embrace of ordinariness (68)

The car’s speedometer appears to be as revved up as the rush and throbbings in the couple’s hearts, for being together in this time of the year, isolated from everybody, into a space of ‘ordinariness.’ Here, to be in a state of ‘embracing ordinariness,’ in many ways, elevates ordinariness into something not quite ordinary, a space that perhaps is more conducive to acts of renewal, acts such as those intimated in the company of someone dear to one’s heart and soul.

3.

There’s something incisively tender about the pieces in this collection, like the tenderness in the middle of the human eye, quiet, peaceful, the visual foundation of being, but sucking with violence information from the world. Look away from that center, and you witness the emphasis of chaos and disruptions stringing themselves together, like polished cultured pearls.

(Footnote 1: http://faculty.arch.utah.edu/bartholomew/CV_Main_Nov2008.pdf. This is Bartholomew’s CV -- 9th page mentions the photograph included in this book.)

*****

Michael Caylo-Baradi lives in Southern California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in XCP:Streetnotes, Tertulia Magazine, OurOwnVoice, and PopMatters.com. He occasionally contributes op-ed pieces to The Daily Californian and the Los Angeles Daily News.

STRING PARADE by JORDAN STEMPLEMAN

2008-12-17T17:30:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

String Parade by Jordan Stempleman
(BlazeVOX , Kenmore, N.Y., 2008)

I admire no younger poet more than I admire Jordan Stempleman. He seems wise beyond his years. Let's look at the poem which opens this beautiful collection:

Double as Bed
for Mark

I am not featuring pessimism
as a function. I am not a member of a trade
union, although I was invited to a lunch
or two I meant to attend, but didn't.
The heroic, are the overlapping
voices found wandering the streets,
since they all came to the neighborhood too early
and the restaurant doesn't open
until noon. The city-life is back to
evolving. I know it's a central force to my reasoning
and order. There are times to go in.
This is one of those times. I am not
imagining we'll ever be together, although we
could, and so I may now begin thinking
in this sense, since taught early enough: never waste a being-
based aesthetic. That's me--
reminding myself to work, live, and then
speak, in that order. They are closest to my biological
likeness, they too have accidents as well.

"Double as Bed" contains the most explicit statement of Stempleman's existential groundedness I've seen to this point: that "never waste a being-/based aesthetic," and the gentle self-admonition "to work, live, and then/speak, in that order" would serve anyone well.

I'm drawn to poets whose work seems coextensive with their lives; not, I mean, poets writing about their lives per se, mind you, but poets creating work which arises from recognitions achieved within a lived live in relation to others. One cannot live except in relation to others. Let's acknowledge that "being-based aesthetic" again. And it's present everywhere in String Parade, if for no other reason than that each poem is dedicated to an individual; each poem is, apparently, a response or address. This is a book that depends for its existence, in almost every sense, on an idea of family, community, response-ability, and love. I would maintain that that is rarely a bad grounding for a work of art.

This. Is. An. Essential. Work. Of. Art. I want to read everything Jordan Stempleman writes. I hope, dear reader, you will come to feel this way too.

*****

Tom Beckett is the author of This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day (Otoliths), Unprotected Texts (Meritage Press), and the curator of the E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interview series (Otoliths). He is currently working on a year long conversation-in-writing with Geof Huth.

THEORIES OF FALLING by SANDRA BEASLEY

2008-12-17T17:25:00.000-08:00

KAREN RIGBY Reviews

Theories of Falling by Sandra Beasley
(New Issues Press, 2008)

In a recent Hayden’s Ferry Review spotlight, Sandra Beasley writes, “poets struggle with wanting the authenticity of the first person while also wanting the freedom of hyperbole and narrative construction”, and that her first book “assembled an identity through the prism of experience”. She accomplishes these goals, creating a multi-faceted persona that appears in poems on family and romantic relationships in the first half of the book and in broader poems in the second half. Theories of Falling can almost be read as a loose bildungsroman in verse.

In the opening poem, “Cherry Tomatoes”, the speaker notes “the way, when I finally // went sailing, my stomach // was rocked from the inside out.” If sailing can be extended as a metaphor for growing up and leaving home, the line is fitting for much of the book. Turbulence and discomforting images reappear throughout. In “Holiday”, we find “my sister stringing up angels, in one hand // their tiny napes of neck and in the other hand, a hook.” In other poems fire, fists, methadone, floods, and a general sense of standing on the brink emerge to create a sensibility marked by vulnerability and bravado—a familiar stance, effective in its promise of the autobiographical, echoing aspects of Anne Sexton’s voice in its physicality, yet still maintaining a certain distance.

As much as we come to “know” the persona here, there’s a sense that language is sometimes used as a mask. This may be akin to the “adolescent persona” mentioned by Stephen Burt (as quoted in Ron Slate’s review) but it is nevertheless compelling in poems like “The Parade”:

I throw a parade of thirty reasons you shouldn’t love me.
Shut up, you say, I know what I love.
What can you know? I know

only that there is no constancy to this body—
I am gaseous, vapor, water and solid. I swell. I shrink.
I bloat. My heels are hardening as we speak.

I run off an ounce of sweat, then gorge on bread and oil.
I claim my nails are short yet manage to claw you.
I call my hair long, but geometry dictates that strands must be

growing every possible length in between.
Shut up, you say. Come to bed.
Do you know that when I lay down, the loosening muscles

cause me to grow an inch taller?
Love, please listen to me, I am trying to help you.
Love, you are wasting these elephants and this ticker tape.

“The Parade” is built on contradictions. The speaker, like Whitman, contains multitudes but the lover refuses to accept her insecurities / excuses for why she should not be loved. It would have been intriguing to read all thirty of the reasons, but enough is given here to illustrate the tension between the desire for intimacy and the desire to be left alone, a thoroughly human plight, and not solely the providence of adolescence.

One of the markers of Beasley’s many talents is her ability to achieve a genuine pathos through the careful sequencing of poems. Taken individually, the poems may at first seem like consistently hip, edgy missives, but together they transcend that and accumulate to the closing lines of the book in “The Door”:

Here is the church, here

is the steeple: a child
opens the door of her hands.

Inside, those people
never let her down.

“Those people” can be read as a wish—an ideal different from the reality of the speaker’s parents in the opening poem, “Cherry Tomatoes”, who in another poem, “Allergy Girl”, might have taken “the wrecking ball to each other” were it not for the speaker’s presence. The suggestion that the child has been let down is strikingly honest. There is no sense of blame. The speaker here is not an adult reflecting on the past hoping to find explanations for the present. The choice to use a child and not an “I” is a very apt one, offering, as it does, a simplicity in sharp contrast with the energetic hyperbole in other poems, as though here, at last, the mask is removed and the ticker tape parade ends. The result is a memorable debut, thoughtful in its structure and haunting in its claims.

*****

Karen Rigby is the author of the chapbooks Savage Machinery (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Festival Bone (Adastra Press, 2004).

THE GREAT WHIRL OF EXILE by LEROY V. QUINTANA

2008-12-17T17:20:00.000-08:00

WENDY LYNN COHEN Reviews

The Great Whirl of Exile by Leroy V. Quintana
(Curbstone Press, 1999)

Poet Leroy V. Quintana is a revelation. His 1999 book, The Great Whirl of Exile, published by Curbstone Press, is my first Quintana book, but it will certainly not be my last. Published several times, Quintana is a storyteller of considerable skill, a poet of some renown for work articulating his experiences in Vietnam, and a voice of the Southwest. Quintana is particularly known as one of the best of the Chicano Poets, a group organically formed -- from a large migration of people, mostly to the Southwestern U.S., from Mexico, Central and South America -- that presently write about a singular culture. The commingling of language and cultures created a Latino subculture concretized by racism in the areas in which they settled. These poets have politicized their experiences, communities and personal reality[s] through their best weapon -- in their words; poems and prose. They speak out against negative attitudes of Federal and local governments, and the primarily racist white populace, while interacting closely with the people in their own communities.

Quintana’s irony, political and literary savvy, prove why he is considered one of the top of this specific literary community via his unique ability to paint powerful images of his people, his culture and his life in words. Clearly a political being, the poet’s stories are simple, direct and dramatic. Quintana employs humor and irony, while telling us of his hometown, his family, his childhood, his friends, and his army comrades. These are not political sounding poems but they are political nonetheless. He savagely addresses issues of youth, war, poverty, sadness, and fear. The repeating character Filemón, for example, says in the poem “Etymology: Chicano” that “when the movimiento (movement) began, a talkshow host attempted to clarify how the word ‘Chicano’ originated. A woman called in, assuredly said it had its roots in ‘chicanery,’ those people being such liars and thieves, so dishonest and deceitful.”

This book is segmented into three sections that separate the purpose and tone of specific groups pf poems. Legends of Home is the first segment, comprised mostly of stories reflecting Quintana‘s New Mexico boyhood/teenage life. Some pieces are blunt, forceful; others have recurrent characters, i.e., Filemón, that are comforting in their keen everyday observations, relayed in a voice specific to New Mexico. John Nichols‘ New Mexico trilogy, encompassing The Milagro Beanfield War, and Tony Hillerman’s mystery novels set in this Southwest area are best known works in this voice. Quintana adopts this unique, real voice: a self-mocking yet non-debasing, no-nonsense, unpretentious, what-you-see-is-what–you-get (computer WYSIWIG) style that allows us to be in the neighborhood. In the corner market, Lalo, in the middle of a sentence forgot the name of those “people who drank a lot of wine…wasn’t the Italianos…los Franceses…the name of those people who drink a lot of wine! No goddamnit, it wasn’t the Greeks!…¡Winos! ¡Winos! he exclaimed suddenly…” “Drunk in English” and “With the Lights on All Night” are light, clever poems with delightful concurrent plays on words in English and Spanish. Dedications, the second section, is a series of poems driven by the writer’s memories, not of the person the work is dedicated to, but rather the time, place, or people they evoke for Quintana. Omen, the final segment, contains far darker work, poems that clearly cut so deep one can almost see blood running down the pages.

A spare, sparse use of language is one of the most interesting aspects of Quintana’s work. Brevity permits easy access to the real work, the core and energy, yet Quintana’s pieces lack none of the richness other poets require in so much more language, filling up pages with aimless phrases. “Legends of Home” sadly speaks of lost youth via “the only way[s] youth knows.” Car accidents are the “Saturday night turned into Sunday morning that turn” into stories, “flying off the road …flames thirst for…spilled gasoline” (pg. 3).

Though Quintana’s writing is seemingly simple, simple is not what his work is. It is very deceptive, with varied techniques that engage the reader, like biting wit couched in simplistic language in the mouths of people from whom we least expect it. He draws the reader as a spider to a web, and once there, his view of the universe -- his regret, his outrage, his isolation and his anger is shocking. Even when only meant to be funny and quirky, his work makes the reader wait for the single line that will take the breath away, especially after seeing so much pathos and depth in other poems. But humor is so much a part of this culture, too; to fend off the collective and personal grief and pain.

The writer’s deep loss is clearly his sense of exile -- from growing up in a racist environment, and going off to a horrific, unpopular war, to coming home to a world that hated him simply for doing his job. Soldiering ultimately made him live a life “so afraid, on a rain-soaked day such as this, On a rain-soaked day…in Vietnam I prayed fervently. In Vietnam, I prayed fervently shivering uncontrollably in the mud…” (from “Poem for Our Dog Afraid of Thunder on a Rainy Day”, pg. 58); and aware in “Sharks” (pg. 56) of the onus of his birth -- “lettuce pickers and dishwashers, all we are good for…We carry fearsome switchblades…born knowing how to use them.”

Quintana’s technique repertoire includes echoing of character, forms of anaphora and other repetition for immediate attention and emphasis. The thrust and prominence of phrases change subtly, and though in short pieces we are as shivering and cold, and as devastated and fearful on a rainy and thunderous day as either man or his dog.

Poet Quintana’s ably created quiet, rational and boldly meaningful indictments against the systems and environments that exile him -- that, in truth, separate all of us -- are essential to hear, particularly in a country hell-bent on freedom that cannot cure its own racism in a world on a path to yet another war.

*****

Wendy Lynn Cohen is a writer and editor currently living in Los Angeles, California. Cohen is a graduate of Antioch University Los Angeles baccalaureate Creative Writing program in 2002. She continues to freelance for multi-disciplined commercial writing/editing/design projects, while executing varied creative fiction and non-fiction projects. In 2007, Cohen edited, The Devil Made Me Do it, a memoir of a renowned 1970’s film actress. She aided the self-published author in designing the book, its cover, and marketing its initial launch in mid-2008, garnering a coveted NPR interview and book signing at Book Soup, one of LA’s foremost independent book stores. Though not specifically a poet, her love of poetry was greatly heightened in an all-involving “…reading-poetry-is-reviewing course…[whose] syllabi were recognized by [the] National Book Critics Circle as innovative courses.”

ITERATURE by EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY

2008-12-17T17:15:00.000-08:00

JAMES STOTTS Reviews

Iterature by Eugene Ostashevsky
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2005)

Reading through Eugene Ostashevsky’s Iterature I had to fight the sense that the poems were all diarrhoetic (словесный понос), or (to make an adjustment Ostashevsky would probably appreciate) diary-tics. There is a strong sense that this is all a testing out of his powers, ludic experiments with verse and language that don’t necessarily get very far or say very much. But in stray moments, and in cumulative effect, there is much to praise. There also seems to be a guiding principle, inspired and borrowed from the poets he claims as predecessors—Daniil Kharms, Aleksandr Vvedensky, Osip Mandelstam—Russian poets from the first half of the twentieth century who learned to exploit formal devices and arbitrary poetic standards to reshape their language and to generate new meaning out of a violently deflated Soviet culture. Old cloth techniques like rhyme and meter were used to create random associations and juxtapositions, and it was out of these new constellations that poetry could be revitalized. Kharms and Vvedensky especially were outrageous and humorous language poets, experimenting with orthography, a-logic, and pure flights of nonsense fancy. Ostashevsky has spent a great deal of time learning from them, translating their poems, reading and collecting their notebooks and marginalia. He edited an anthology of poetry by the circle of writers associated with Vvedensky and Kharms called OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism. He clearly sees his own poetry as a continuation in that vein, excepting that he wears his effuse multi-lingual influences on his sleeve, from his academic interests in philosophy, literature and mathematics, American pop and underground cultures, his (I assume) Jewish and (obviously) Russian heritage, with snippets of French and German, and an abiding concern for repairing his split spiritual identity.

When Ostashevsky says in his autobiography poems “I have no native language/I can’t judge, I suspect I write garbage” and “I found myself with no native tongue,/only two prosthetics to flap among/teeth and gums” I like to think that he’s taking veiled shots at some of the other Russian-émigrés of his generation who like to pretend that they’re American poets—such as Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich, Ilya Kaminsky—or at least putting words in their mouths that they are too self-[un]aware to say themselves. Though they might all be to varying degrees capable of a clever or interesting phrase in English, and have certain strengths as poets, and may be functionally fluent, excepting Ostashevsky they don’t seem to me fluent on the poetic (that is, the highest) level. Their poems have a tendency to be carried on mangled or else tired English, but Ostashevsky, for all his humility, has a sure ear, writes laconic enough for his two-liners to sometimes feel like the blues, and is ludic in the sense that he really does play with language instead of trying to bypass it. Just to emphasize how this is meant as a compliment, I’d add to the list of poets that Ostashevsky overshadows Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. And of those six, he’s the only one who seems to have understated, rather than overstated his proficiency as a poet in English. Nabokov, despite being a great writer in many respects, never seemed to understand that fluency had any measure other than the length of his personal lexicon.

Ostashevsky, in modeling himself after OBERIU’s poets, is a much more committed formalist and humorist than, say, Mayakovsky. And people who think of Mayakovsky in Russia and Frank O’Hara here when I say absurd will be surprised by how strange and cerebral and talented Ostashevsky is compared to them.

Situating him in the American scene, though, is not so easy. The first person that came to my mind reading Iterature was—surprisingly—his fellow New Yorker, Paul Simon:

I was walking down the street when I thought I heard this voice say
Say! Ain’t we walking down the same street together on the very same day?

And I said, Hey, señorita, that’s astute.
Why don’t we get together and call ourselves an institute

We had a lot of fun, we had a lot of money.
We had a little son, we thought we’d call him Sonny…

…Sonny gets sunnier day by day by day

Rhyme is used as a disinhibiting device as well, allowing him to talk about sex and the body, much like the dirty joking of teenage boys. For example:

So stay in bed & hold in that pee
for that way at least something inside you be

plus a laboratory technician may not
decipher your character in a chamber pot

Your body flopped around like a sturgeon,
though five minutes before that you were a virgin.

It makes sense, then, that some of Iterature is immature, uneven, and embarrassingly bad. And that’s when it feels as if you are going through a young writer’s journals, where there is no self-censorship. There is another, related, sense one gets from Iterature: that these are apprentice works. Especially in the section called “Smotherland,” which is a punning nod to Vvedensky’s long poema, “Frother” (frother is Ostashevsky’s translation of the Russian потец (potets) which splices together the words for father and sweat). "Smotherland" contains his allusions and dedications to Mandelstam, Kharms, Vvedensky, and Pushkin, and explicitly continues the themes of their poems and biographies.

The desperate stories of the poet-heroes who were destroyed by Stalin and the Communist experiments have the effect of significantly sobering Ostashevsky’s tone throughout this section and of numbing/humbling us all:

You are excused from seeing
the bloody bones on the wheel

the soggy bones in the ground
the grey bones in the air

You will never taste
cat, human meat

wallpaper glue
boiled leather, sawdust

Ostashevsky, poet-as-embarrassed-witness, takes on a whole new gravity after these poems. Poetry is a container for his outrage, psychosis, frustrated love and philosophy. Iterature also plays the vital function of poetry as testimony and heritage, constellating Ostashevsky’s American verse among the Russian language-monger/martyrs.

It is an essential document of Eugene Ostashevsky’s development.

*****

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. He's exhibited his photography and paintings in Boston, Russia, and Mexico. What he can't publish elsewhere he posts on his blog, The Fugue Aesthetics of J.H. Stotts. He finished an 'inauspicious' shotgun anthology of Russian poetry, from Fet to Esenin to Ryzhii, in formal and experimental translations and is currently at work on a selected poems of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, to come out in '09 from Whale and Star Press.

YOUR TEN FAVORITE WORDS by REB LIVINGSTON

2008-12-17T17:10:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

Your Ten Favorite Words by Reb Livingston
(Coconut Books, 2007)

When my oldest daughter was a child, I asked her what she liked best about a ballet performance. She was perturbed about being prodded to choose. "Everything," she replied. That's actually how I feel about Your Ten Favorite Words. I love every word of it.

Nonetheless, one of my favorite sets of ten words in Your Ten Favorite Words is: camisole, bra, spectral, polygamy, smitten, quantity, quality, lover, fissured, and pretendography. I also liked these hyphenated words: candle-waxed, coal-sucking, cartwheel-thrusting, coupon-clipping, home-wrecking, off-key, stick-up, one-time, blow-hole, and sink-hole.

As you can see, I've italicized the first set of words and haven't done so in the second set. That might or might not be important. You should read this book and find out (he says suggestively).

Your Ten Favorite Words is a smart, funny, angry and very adult book of poems about the power and pitfalls of eros, about the ways in which men and women stumble into one another, and about the fall-out from those collisions.

I'm aching to quote one of these wonderful poems in full:

My Lover Never

Matrimony had a lover;
they took bike rides together,

shared an angel sex partner,
tied her to a cement block and utterly rejected her.

My lover never gave a handjob
in the muck, hardly.

My lover is a sex lamb, incensed
and salmon-colored

like that man over there,
pruning his foreign foliage, ignoring me.

Awfully American, pretending not.
A fancy American wearing stripes.

I'm wearing a skirt.
I tried to call, a little hurt.

Attending yet another wedding.
My lover pumps a bright bicycle,

hoards wire hangers, licks moths,
finds pleasures inside his mouth.

Love, we must atone some.
Something inside must climb and crinkle.

You were never supposed to be my friend.
That's passion's funny lie.

An emotional universe is being sketched in the ravishing languagescape of "My Lover Never," and in each of the poems in this volume. Read these poems to yourself aloud, slowly and with deliberation.

*

I've been working, for the last few months, on a year-long exchange of views with Geof Huth. We're at a point in our conversation, coming off a discussion of Leslie Scalapino's work, where Geof has essentially asked (I'm paring things down for the purpose of this brief review) what--if any--differences I see between male and female writers--can I, for example, tell if an unattributed text was written by a male or a female. That is the sort of question that a male writer of a certain age, such as myself, needs to take a deep breath before approaching. It's also the sort of question that I love.

I'm not an essentialist. I don't believe men are this and women are that. I do believe though that men and women live in more or less different social contexts and that meaning itself is contextual. These kinds of things can be difficult to parse.(Such parsing is some part of what I believe Reb Livingston is attempting in Your Ten Favorite Words.)

This is to say that one of the many ways where things get complicated between men and women is when social and linguistic contexts that seemed woven together begin to visibly and audibly fray. Your Ten Favorite Words works that seam.

Your Ten Favorite Words is a delicious, thought provoking stroll among the landmines strewn across the battlefields of love. It is wonderful.

Here's ten more words from Your Ten Favorite Words to close things out: entwine, lament, clasping, conjure, wanton, unfocused, torso, frosty, dismal, thrum.

*****

Tom Beckett is the author of This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day (Otoliths), Unprotected Texts (Meritage Press), and the curator of the E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interview series (Otoliths). He is currently working on a year long conversation-in-writing with Geof Huth.

BLANK VERSE: A GUIDE TO ITS HISTORY AND USE by ROBERT B. SHAW

2008-12-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Blank Verse: A Guide to its History and Use by Robert B. Shaw
(Ohio University Press, 2007)

In this age of free verse and language writing, why a book on blank verse -- isn’t that sort of a bit antiquated. Shaw says no! and in his preface states: “The twentieth century and later receives more expansive treatment than earlier periods because this part of the story has been overlooked by scholarship.”(ix)

So what is this book all about? There is no better way of responding to that question than by quoting the words of the writer: “this book undertakes two tasks: to study the characteristics of the poetic form we call blank verse, and to study the achievements of poets who have used it from its first emergence up to our own day…While the first and last chapters concentrate on practical considerations for writers and readers of blank verse, the middle chapters, which are arranged as a historical survey, in fact carry on the discussion of technique…”(ix)

Early into the first chapter ‘The Sound of Blank Verse’, Shaw has this to say: “The lazy way to think about blank verse is to view it as a compromise between rhyming metrical verse on the one hand and free verse on the other. A poet who devotes serious attention to these three forms will quickly realize that blank verse is something more than a halfway house between rhyme and open form. It has characteristics that give it a unique set of capabilities, setting it distinctly apart from either of these alternatives.”(3) On the next page, he qualifies those characteristics: “Freedom and fixity are both at play in the form. Unchecked and unsegmented by patterns of rhyme, it can accommodate prodigious flows of utterances; in that sense it is freer. At the same time, unlike free verse, it has a set length of line and recurring number of beats, and while poets in practice may allow themselves flexible rhythms and even occasional metrical substitutions, these attain expressive power precisely because the standard iambic pentameter is there as a basis, a point to vary from.”(4)

As Wallace Stevens and James Merrill, et al, have shown, there is no restriction as to subject matter applicable to the use of blank verse: “Just as this form diversified in terms of mode -- moving successively from drama through epic to other narrative, meditative, descriptive, and lyric types -- so is has proven able to deal with subjects decorous or rough, exalted or mundane.”(5) Shaw does cite certain restrictions on the use of blank verse, such as “Any kind of free verse that depends on visual effects is, of course, one of these untransposable forms. This would include not only the freewheeling typewriter art of E.E. Cummings but many short-lined poems by William Carlos Williams and others, in which line groupings, enjambments, and deliberate fragmentation contribute importantly to the ultimate meaning.”(7-8) He does indicate that, in certain circumstances, blank verse can be substituted for metrical verse acknowledging that “good blank-verse sonnets exist”(8) [for an entire book see Karen Volkman’s Nomina] although he seems doubtful as to its effectiveness in very short poems: “Without room to display many of the devices that, for it, supply distinctive auditory and structural functions, the few lines may seem fragmentary or tentative jottings rather than finished works of art.”(9)

Following discussion of the relationship between prose and the iambic pentameter of blank verse, and of the rudiments of scanning such lines, Shaw enters the important discussion of the distinction between meter and rhythm, stating “Rather than adhering in lockstep fashion to the paradigm, well-written lines of iambic pentameter will correspond to it in more relative ways, generally following the fluctuations between weaker and stronger syllables, but doing so with ever-shifting modulations. The difference between weak and strong will be at some points emphatic, while at other points it will be less pronounced.”(16) Extending this discussion to metrical substitution, he says “Iambic pentameter, as used by the masters of blank verse, is not skeleton alone but muscle and tendon, capable of bending and stretching to give adequate mobility to language and to the thoughts language embodies.”(18) Shaw completes the chapter with a flurry of poems demonstrating the versatility of blank verse.

The next chapter provided the historical context for the invention and use of blank verse ‘Before The Twentieth Century’. It opens with a lament regarding the state of poetry at the time of Chaucer and the inability of poets of that time to handle the decasyllabic line which Chaucer used so adeptly:

The invention of blank verse in England is part of a larger story of the rescue of poetry from this state of prosodic anarchy. Here, too, some parts of the story remain mysterious. The poets who smoothed out the crimps in the decasyllabic line may not have been aiming at the accentual-syllabic line that we would call iambic pentameter. It is possible that they were trying simply to emulate the regular syllable count of verse written in Romance languages such as French and Italian -- verse that is scanned without regard to accent. (23)

The first use of English blank verse took place around 1540 when Henry Howard translated books 2 and 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid into English. These translations eventually found themselves published in Tottel’s justly famed book of 1557 which has come to be known as Tottel’s Miscellany. The Aeneid itself was written in unrhymed hexameter and a precursor to Henry’s translation took place in Italy where it had been translated into ten or eleven syllable unrhymed lines. The next major development took place in drama when Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, in writing the play Gorbuduc, attempted to imitate the Latin unrhymed classical meter of Seneca. Shaw justly criticizes these early users of blank verse for their stiffness and didacticism heralding Christopher Marlow as the saviour of English drama: “Marlowe was the first playwright able to make blank verse an effective medium for drama.” (37).

Then along came Shakespeare whose “ability to overcome the naggingly evident pause at the line break that proved so persistent for his precursors is a point of major importance.”(41) After discussing Symonds’ and Saintsbury’s response to him, Shaw explains the importance of Shakespeare as follows:

Shakespeare indeed ‘thawed the ice’ in fashioning his lines. In his work we find ourselves reading for the first time iambic pentameter not by increments of a line or two at a time but by verse paragraphs that sustain themselves over unpredictable spans, paradoxically challenging as well as satisfying the demands of the meter. Shakespeare does this through technical dexterity applied in a number of ways.(41)

Shakespeare revelled in such devices as enjambment and feminine endings which “blurs the boundary of the line and, interestingly, it [i.e. feminine ending] seems to supply a carryover effect whether or not lines are endstopped”(42). But, as Shaw points out, these two techniques are not enough: “What is crucial, though, is not a particular technical device, however deftly used, but an ear for extended, often asymmetrical patterns of sound, and a rhetorical control that can negotiate complex alliances between meter and grammar.”(43) As much as these effects at the ends of lines vastly improved the reading of iambic pentameter, Shakespeare’s greatest gift, as Shaw points out through an extremely effective analysis of several examples, is the way he manipulates internal meter helping to explain why “Shakespeare’s plays continue to be staged...even with the difficulties presented by a sometimes obscure diction and numerous obsolete usages [because] an audience is still able to hear the dialogue as actual speech supported by recognizable feelings.”(47) The place where Shaw’s analysis falters is in his discussion of stichomythia “inherited from Seneca…is a dialogue in which a single line plays off the language of the first in some way.”(48) The problem is that the examples he cites to reflect this are all in rhyme or repeat the last word of the preceding line. The interesting aspect of the examples cited is the use of parallel construction. But can it truly be said that lines repeating the same last word are truly blank verse or just a modification of rhyme. Shaw ends this discussion of the medieval use of blank verse by citing examples of Shakespeare’s compatriots Ben Johnson and John Webster before moving on to Milton.

Shaw says of Milton’s Paradise Lost that it “was so successful in making blank verse an institution that it is with some effort that we remind ourselves that Milton’s choice of the meter for a long epic poem was regarded by himself and by others as revolutionary. Verse narratives in English had typically been written in rhymed couplets or in various kinds of stanzas.”(51) The revolutionary nature of this was doubly so. At the time Milton was writing, at the time that the Restoration was in full flower, blank verse had fallen out of favour even in the theatre as a result of the proselytizing of John Dryden who championed the use of heroic couplets or, something new on the scene, prose. To show how revolutionary it was, at the time of the second edition in 1674, Milton included a preface explaining the lack of rhyme and extolling the superior virtues of blank verse by referring back to the classical texts of Homer and Virgil.

Describing Milton’s blank verse, Shaw says it, “is challenging to describe (and even more, to imitate) because it exhibits so much painstaking control of minute detail while achieving an effect of vastness and profundity -- something far different from lapidary refinements.”(53) He goes on to describe Milton’s line as “likely to seem metrically austere. Feminine endings are much less frequent than in dramatic verse;”(53) indicating that they are left primarily to the latter books of Paradise Lost. He goes on to demonstrate the various and varied metrical substitutions used by Milton. In places, Milton uses internal rhyme to create meter where none would otherwise exist. Shaw also points out Milton’s use of elision: “Any page of Paradise Lost, except in a drastically (and unwisely) modernized edition, will display its share of apostrophes; some pages are peppered with them.”(55-6) Again, Shaw concludes this section with excellent examples and discussion of Milton’s prosody.

In the next section, Shaw laments the decrepit state blank verse falls into in the eighteenth-century. He cites examples of James Thompson and Edward Young to make his point. Then, salvation! -- or some semblance of it. The arrival of William Cowper provides some relief: “There are numerous Miltonic turns of phrase in The Task (1785), and yet in reading it we are more likely to notice anticipations of Wordsworth than reverberations of Milton.”(63) Shaw congratulates Cowper on discovering new directions for blank verse: “He managed much more smoothly than his immediate precursors to integrate precise description with generalizing discussion. One thing he should have noted, but doesn’t, regarding Cowper’s style is the meandering caesura which adds considerable interest to the verse. He ends his expurgation of Cowper and The Task by concluding that it “has undoubted importance in having shown how the volume of Milton’s verse could be turned down to make it suitable for less-than-epic occasions.”(64)

He concludes his examination of the events leading up to the twentieth-century with examinations of the nineteenth referring to Coleridge and Wordsworth (Romantic blank verse) and Browning and Tennyson (Victorian blank verse). Of Coleridge, he refers to the ‘Conversational Poems’ as “demonstrat[ing] that blank verse allows for naturalistic gestures that mimic the spontaneity of speech.”(65) And of Wordsworth, “The conversational note is even more pronounced”(65) and quotes from Wordsworth that “a poet ‘is a man speaking to men’ and, further and much more controversially to his time, “that there neither is, nor can be, an essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” Shaw later states that “Not to be noticed as meter, in fact, seems to be a primary aim of Wordsworth’s blank verse.”(65) While commenting on Wordsworth’s occasional “use of prepositions…in stress positions”(66), he seems to overlook the effect of this secondary stress which is to create secondary caesuras making the lines in which they are found novel and interesting. It should also be commented on that, at least in the example he cites, those secondary stresses fall in a place where one could expect the caesura to fall were it not for the earlier incident of them near the beginning of the line.

Shaw briefly examines the work of Bryon, Shelley and Keats from the perspective of a step back from Coleridge and Wordsworth to Milton. He then moves onto the Victorians with the sentence “The early deaths of Byron, Shelley, and Keats left their successors, the Victorian poets of mid-century an open field”(73) saying the “poets found the meter protean in its ability to carry descriptive, meditative, narrative, or dramatic burdens in lengths of all sorts.”(73) Shaw contrasts Tennyson to Browning as follows: “While he, also, aims to define his characters and their situation through individualized voices, his style tends to be loftier. If Browning’s Renaissance painters and assorted scoundrels sometimes have the broad grotesquerie of cartoons, Tennyson’s sometimes seem to have stepped out of a Greek frieze.”(75-6) Shaw concludes this section and his study of pre-twentieth-century blank verse with an examination of some American poets -- Thoreau and Emerson to name two -- who occasionally resorted to this form.

Shaw begins his discussion of ‘Blank Verse and Modernism’ with an examination of some New England poets at the turn of the century including Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost. Of Arlington’s contribution to blank verse, Shaw says that it “was not one of technique but of topical diversity.”(86) Of Frost, he says: “The distinction he makes between strict iambic and loose iambic meter…is useful to keep in mind in regard to his blank verse. Frost certainly wrote rhyming poems that are strict (or strict enough) in their use of iambics, but it is hard to find anything consistently strict in his blank verse: “the meter is loose simply in its varying counts of syllables from line to line even apart from the expressive emphases imposed by speech rhythms on the metrical frame.”(89-90) After analyzing Frost’s ‘The Wood Pile’ and noting the numerous variations within the first several lines including the first, Shaw says that “it does make the poem, like many more of Frost’s, a problematic model of blank verse.”(92). Perhaps this is because this is not blank verse but, rather, free verse – or at least blank verse on the verge of becoming free. Just because a line has ten syllables doesn’t mean that it’s blank verse. Still, Shaw argues that “in reading the poem [in this case, ‘The Fear’] it is likely that we will hear what Frost wants us to hear, the pattern of speech rhythms and those of meter contrasting in ‘strained relation.’”(95) There are many ways to counterpoint a line with this contrast being one. But is Shaw going too far in attempting to join the three lines forming a diagonal in the middle of the poem into one so that he can attempt to find iambic pentameter. If not, then how does he reconcile the broken line before which has eleven syllables but cannot be ended on an unaccented beat. In fact, it is more probable that the line before ends with a spondee – or close to one depending on whether you assign an intermediate stress level to one of the last two words. Shaw never discusses this. Shaw does say, at p. 96, that “less-than-studious readers were sometimes under the impression that Frost was writing free verse, which he abhorred. In a comment for an anthology that in 1942 reprinted “The Death of the Hired Man,” he felt obliged to conclude with this plaintive sentence: “By the way, it’s in blank verse, not free verse.” We are not presented with an analysis of this poem so it is difficult to comment. But poets do not always know what lurks in their subconscious. And this statement of Frost’s certainly doesn’t exhibit an abhorrence towards free verse. The reader needs more convincing in order to be satisfied.

In a fabulous transition where Shaw speaks of Frost having to go over to England in order to get his poetry published and of Frost being introduced to Yeats through the agency of Ezra Pound, Shaw segues into a discussion of Yeats’s blank verse. He compares Yeats to Frost in terms of their temperaments and egos, but then says “our comparison of Yeats with Frost goes only so far. While Yeats worked hard and successfully to make his language less ornate, it rarely approaches the level of colloquialism that is the norm in Frost. It creates an effect of conversation when Yeats so intends, but it is typically what he called in a late poem ‘high talk’.”(103) Not spending much time on Yeats -- or on the Georgians, or Sassoon, or Graves, for that matter -- Shaw concludes this section strongly:

Different as they are in extent and aural quality, the deliberate roughening of the iambic pentameter line that we see in Frost, Yeats, Thomas, and Graves are related in aim. The common aid was to move away from the elaborately musical effects of Tennyson and Swinburne to something convincingly like speech. For conservative modernists such as these, meter was something to be stretched -- sometimes to the breaking point -- but it was not something to be discarded. It remained the recognizable foundation of highly disparate voice exercises.(113)

Through this statement, Shaw salvages his thesis. He appears to be saying that blank verse acts almost like the figured bass in baroque music in that it is the framework upon which the piece rests and from which the elaboration of harmony and dissonance arises. It is in the interplay between the implication of blank verse and the actual figuration that this occurs. And it is this tension that creates interest in these poems. That is something the reader can buy.

There would seem to be some credence and support for this as Shaw quotes favourably from Eliot’s article ‘Reflections on Vers Libre’ (1917): “the most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one.”(124) If we read ‘no form at all’ as ‘free verse’, then the simple one to which it approximates has already been stated: iambic pentameter. Shaw uses lines from Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ to exemplify this point.

Shaw next turns to Eliot and Pound’s progeny. After examining such as Hart Crane and Allen Tate, he makes the comment that “Breaking the pentameter became more and more an accepted practice in the 1920s and 1930s. Readers in later decades, accustomed to a broad range of techniques in modern verse, could easily fail to notice the deliberate subversion of meter in the sorts of poems here called Websterian because the meter was no longer ‘inevitable’ in unrhymed verse. The boundary between blank and free verse, for many readers and even for some poets, became blurred.”(134)

For the next numerous pages, Shaw proclaims a litany of names of poets of the early to mid-twentieth century, including the requisite share of women poets, none of whom used blank verse frequently but would defer to it once in a while. He does recognize the direction in which he has been going when he states, on p. 152: “Here must end what threatens to become an endless catalogue.” Thank you, brother, for recognizing the error of your ways. The most interesting thing he has to say in these 20 or 30 pages is that the influence which these poets subscribed to oscillated between Frost and Eliot. Unlike the poets, other than Frost and Eliot, he had discussed in the chapter leading up to the twentieth-century, none of these poets had done anything significant or new with blank verse.

Shaw concludes his discussion of modernism and the use of blank verse with a discussion of Wallace Stevens -- and here we see Shaw’s conservatism. Acknowledging that Stevens, in his early poetry such as ‘Sunday Morning’, was a master of this form and “one of the most prolific writers of blank verse among the modernists”(152), he concludes that Stevens’ approach to blank verse has been “first as something to be mastered, then, more dubiously, as something to be modified…Stevens undoubtedly was a master of blank verse when he chose to be; frequently, though, he indulged in metrical manipulations that severely distorted the character of the line.”(160) Earlier, at p. 159, he had stated, “It may seem surprising that such leaps in and out of regular meter do not disrupt the reader’s attention more than they do. Probably much of the credit for this is owing to Steven’s imposingly extended sentences, often overriding the bounds not merely of a few lines but of several tercets.” This is a backhanded compliment for he goes on: “A nagging feeling may eventually accost some readers, a suspicion that the later Stevens is more interested in writing sentences than is shaping lines of verse.” Consider this. Isn’t this pitting the structure of the sentence against the structure of the line? And isn’t this merely an extension, a fantastic extension, of the dissonance that was created by Frost and Eliot in their riding of free verse above the figured bass of the blank? And won’t this playing off of the sentence against the line be that which gives birth to such as Lyn Hejinian much later in the century?

In beginning his chapter ‘After Modernism’, Shaw posts a warning: “In the period we are about to explore (roughly, the late 1930s to the present), many poets have treated iambic pentameter more as a point of departure than as a form consistently sustained.”(161) While examining Randall Jarrell’s ‘Second Air Force’, Shaw comments that Jarrell “juxtaposes perfectly regular lines with wrenched ones…the prosodic disturbances [being] linked to moments of emotional intensity or emphasiz[ing] elements of description. As stresses are shifted and syllables added or subtracted, one senses improvisation more than technical assurance…What we perceive ...is not the continued presence of the ghost of meter, but an almost mechanical pattern of lurches back and forth between a workaday sort of pentameter and whatever weird assault on its contour strikes the poet’s fancy.”(164) Of Delmore Schwartz, he comments “the shifting of stresses and the chopping by commas…completes a subordination of prosody to metaphor…”(165) Here he has brought up an important point and a charge similar to that raised against Donne, Marvell and the other Metaphysical poets of the sixteenth century -- the subordination of sound to sense. But he fails to elaborate on this even though it demands it. This charge is interesting because it was during this period that the Metaphysicals were rediscovered and proved to be a significant influence from Eliot onward. After savaging the poetry of John Berryman and Robert Lowell, he heaps praise on Karl Shapiro for his conservative verse: “When he wants an extreme emphasis he is more likely to cut a line short than to disrupt iambic movement markedly. There is not much of the free use of anapests that we saw in Stevens and others. More of Shapiro’s notable metrical or rhythmic variations are governed by his personal sense of decorum, or appropriateness to the matters at hand.”(174)

There is a point which must be commented on for censure. On p. 179, he states: “Both Hayden and Randall, in their sparse use of the meter, stand in stark contrast with African American formalist poets who preceded them; throughout the nineteenth century blank verse was a widely used form for such poets.” But then, on the next page, he goes on: But we must move on…” This raises the question: Why were African American poets not mentioned in that long litany of names, most being relatively unknown Female American poets, which closed off the previous chapter?

Next for discussion are four poets -- Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and James Merrill. He does an adequate job of discussing the first three. But were they really worth discussing as it is only with Merrill that we enter some truly new territory. As Shaw says, at p. 197: “Merrell alternates blank verse with stanzaic passages…This implies that Merrill is interested not only in expressive modifications of the pentameter line by line, but in balancing off masses of blank verse against other forms within the structure of a single poem.”

Following this, he creates another catalogue. But this time, he unearths some gems hidden within the compost. Not only that, but he reminds us of the blank verse used by Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Adrienne Rich.

The conclusion to the chapter ‘After Modernism’ is one of the best parts of the book. Exploring the New Formalists and the New Narrativists, he comments: “There is much of this problematic type of verse to be found in contemporary poetry; some poets who occasionally write in regular meter at other times venture into this rougher terrain, and for some the aim seems to be to treat blank verse not as a form to be embraced but as a point of departure, a theme barely to be discerned through layers of superimposed variations.”(238) Not only do they venture into rougher terrain but, also, into strange ones such as crack houses and James Bond movies.

In his closing chapter, ‘Writing Blank Verse Today’, Shaw launches an appeal for the return to a more regular blank verse. He does have some important things to say, sayings that could be turned into aphorisms as he plays variations on the theme of rhythm and sound “Poetic rhythm can suggest qualities of feeling or imitate movement, but they do so this only in conjunction with the words they animate. In themselves, rhythms and meters are abstract patterns, which is what makes them available for any content the poet desires.”(257) Even those of us who are die-hard free-versers find intrigue in his admonitions and appeal and may consider trying our hand at blank verse even if just for an exercise in discipline. But, then, he loses us by going on ad nauseam regarding enjambment and caesuras. He does raise some interesting points but it is just the wrong time to do so. This should be a chapter of summation, not of novelty. If left at summation, he would have had an effective explication of his thesis. Now it becomes a Romantic era symphony with all its bombast and bravado, one climax endlessly following another diminuendoing and crescendoing us to deafness. Its like that famous line of Renée Zellweger’s in the movie Jerry Maguire “You had me at hello!” -- know where to end. Even if he had placed this material at the beginning of the chapter would have been much better.

As has already been noted, in many places Shaw does an excellent job. There are also several points of weakness. Still, to draw our attention to what he considers an underused and abused form of poetry makes this a good book to have on our bookshelves until a better one comes along.

*****

John Cunningham is a poet and writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Every once in a while he emerges from his igloo, hitches up his dog sled team, and sets off across the white expanse of emptiness known as Canada in order to write poetry reviews. He does o in Canada for Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, Arc, Antigonish Review and Fiddlehead, in the U.S. for Big Bridge, Galatea Resurrects, Rain Taxi, Rattle and Quarterly Conversations, and in Australia for Jacket. TTFN.

IN NO ONE'S LAND by PAIGE ACKERSON-KIELY

2008-12-17T17:00:00.000-08:00

ELIZABETH KATE SWITAJ Reviews

In No One's Land by Paige Ackerson-Kiely
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2007)

What is the difference between no man's land and no one's land? In her 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize winning collection, In No One's Land, Paige Ackerson-Kiely reveals that it isn't just a question of gender neutral language. She illustrates no one's as a populated desolation, a sense of isolation that the presence of people cannot dispel, yet this land is not altogether bleak.

As the necessary result of life in such a world, the individuals who appear in her poems express a sense of loneliness. The speaker of "Nocturne IV" notes "[y]ou weren't anywhere I was planning to go" and refers to night as an "excuse to get somewhere / not directly" hinting at a deviation to seek company. The woman in the bar in "Illness" says "yeah, I've got abandonment issues." In “Interrogation", love can only be admitted under world-changing circumstances.

This sense of seclusion remains, is perhaps heightened, when an individual is surrounded by other people. No matter how many people occupy their world, they remain, to translate part of the collection's epigraph, "with no one". The general namelessness of people serves to prevent them from appearing as full, real people capable of assuaging isolation; this is emphasized in "Love Letter" with the claim of an impossible name: "twenty-four letters long plus seventy-two words for snow."

Indeed, those names that do appear seem distanced or unimportant. Roscoe Holcomb is only claimed as an identity for a moment and Cy Twombly is only an epistle's addressee. Helen Keller, mentioned in that letter, is described not as a person known in the flesh but as one read about in a book. Ataturk is apostrophised sardonically. Peter Freuchen only nods and takes notes. Ada Blackjack is a daughter's name, and that is all we know. Jesus, not exactly human, distant as all mythic figures, does things no historical Jesus could have. "Svalbard is my tiny gun." Still, I might have reduced the number of names mentioned to increase the impression of being surrounded by strangers.

Disposing thus of the named, we are left with, at best, incompletely known and identified figures and, as in the "The Potential of Rapture", a stranger's "face is no curling-up in bed", no matter how s/he smiles. Everyone must remain strangers if the speaker of "Different Kinds of Clean" speaks true in saying, "Most stuff you should hide. Kids know this, / babies . . ."

Flat or otherwise unknown or not fully identified people cannot ease the sense of desolation. Both speaker and addressee of "Foreplay" seem unmoved after the recounting of so many people in schoolyard-rhyme style:

Here is a man darning his sock. Here is a woman spitting into a sink. Here is all of
Berlin in the creosote of coughing, sitting primly at the windowsill, looking out.

The presence of the idiosyncratic phrase "creosote of coughing" underscores these characters' lack of identity and concomitant inability to provide the comfort of close, three-dimensional people. At the end of the the same prose poem, three cliché lines appear as a possible announcement from "someone [who] will push his way through the door". One at least seems intended to comfort, but absent of context and thus meaning, neither the lines nor whoever speaks them can provide solace. In the next poem, the liquor store clerk is given instructions not to connect with the trembling customers but simply to "relax them". In "Dear Guest", there appears once again a catalog of people who cannot provide comfort; these, however, are more explicitly unknown and unknowable:

Whoever you are (winnowing in North Dakota)
whoever you are (ciphering in Denmark)
your hand will not stay with me . . .

Later, "Privacy" claims there is "[n]obody here" just a few lines before referring to "the blonde children / sleeping in the grass". Little is known about these children: what is said, beyond their physical appearance seems likely to be a projection or faded memory on the part of the speaker: they "know when to shut-up / you better."

At other times, even were they not flat, the characters in In No One's Land would not be able to provide comfort simply because of their own insensitivity. Take these figures from "Illness":

People who say, at least
I have my health.

Other people nodding.

Whatever they have dealt with, it has made them unable to consider other people's pain, a pain outside what they have known. They do not consider how that act of self-reassurance might make someone who doesn't have their health feel. The titular "Understudy" of the prose poem that follows would, perhaps, take pleasure in the illness if it struck the lead actor: it would be their chance to be looked at, to "show you something".

More generally, belonging to a crowd in and of itself cannot undo loneliness. The speaker of "Shepherding" after changing from shepherd to sheep laments that

They will call all of us in
on cold nights,
though no one calls
to me specifically.

The figures of the shepherd and flock reappear in "On the Gentle Nature of Swales". "Say lie down sweetheart. Some animals will." But not your sweetheart, not anyone whose lying down could bring a sense of connection, unless of course they lie down forever as the speaker admits to once wishing to do despite or because of the addressee's presence. Later, surrounded by men in "Cavalry Men", the speaker concludes, "I will never marry. / This gets me." Unless the woman can be intimate with one, the presence of a crowd of men only heightens her awareness of her isolation, even if this isolation may be in some degree of her own making, as the next poem, "Onenightstand" includes the statement, "I want no intimate thing; I am frightened of the intimate thing" and the piece after that, "On the Austerity of Autumn" carries the claim "I am quitting Romance".

No one's land belongs to no one: no one is there at home. "Foreplay" begins the collection in a motel room; "Afterhours" ends it with a waitress in a diner. In between, the owner of the liquor store in the second poem never appears. The title of "Dear Guest" suggests a letter, but then the writer states "I am a guest"; everyone is a guest. In "Illness', everyone but

. . . the last woman
left
in the bar

goes home (or perhaps to another bar).

The world they leave, however, has its charms. The very transience enforced by lack of ownership can nourish. The motel room in "Foreplay" "is the color of breastmilk, nutritive water, rinsing the palate of you". Moreover, this world of seclusion is not without its beauty. The speaker of "Nocturne IV" lines up mayonnaise jars for fireflies. These are recalled by the mason jars of "A Moment as Roscoe Holcomb", bringing an echo of their transient light and beauty into a less apparently beautiful context.

Overall, then, In No One's Land creates an effect of melancholy beauty, even if not every instance of beauty is melancholy nor every moment of melancholy beautiful. The gray blank pages that divide the collection into sections, though not following any apparent logic, slow the reader down, creating a pace that emphasizes this, and it is this that stands behind the prayer in "Application for Asylum": "I am saying God, if you are anywhere, let you be an arctic night." For this beauty, born of isolation without sequestration, one must give up "the beautiful things / that might move me", which the speaker of "The Potential of Rapture" locks up. One must go down into the dirt, up among the addicts, and find something more among them, as Ackerson-Kiely so powerfully does.

*****

Elizabeth Kate Switaj (www.elizabethkateswitaj.net) has two full-length collections of poetry forthcoming: Magdalene & the Mermaids from Paper Kite Press and How to Drink a Floral Moon from Blue Lion Books. Her chapbook, The Broken Sanctuary: Nature Poems, is currently available from Ypolita Press and her echap, Shanghai (has more capital), from Gold Wake Press. She edits Crossing Rivers Into Twilight (www.critjournal.com) and serves as assistant editor for Inertia Magazine. Her professional experience includes teaching in cities throughout Japan, China, and the US as well as writing online copy for a kimono import company and conducting media research.

POLYVERSE by LEE ANN BROWN

2008-12-17T16:45:00.000-08:00

WENDY LYNN COHEN Reviews

Polyverse by Lee Ann Brown
(Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1999)

The title Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999) is itself a direct clue to Lee Ann Brown’s schema: Poly, the prefix from the Greek, is a modifier to Verse here, indicating many kinds of verse. There are highly structured poems “in the style of…” and a great diversity of freeform pieces. The work comes from many sources, to honor historical writers she loves as well as to work with as many of her contemporaries as she can fit. The question might be posed: is the meaning of Poly ‘”Play” in drag? Her sense of play is manifest throughout the book, and her taste is broad, knowing nearly no boundary.

She starts her book of poems with a quote from Sappho -- “People do gossip” -- on a page heralding the first of three major sections, the first deceptively called “Her Hearsay Hymnbook” as if in homage to poets of yore. Smaller sections heads are for select groups of poems -- called Comfit, Witch Alphabet Occasionally Named, a museme, Co-labs (collaborative efforts which are fully diverse). The second major section called “Velocity City” -- brings modernity to Lee Ann Brown, where she talks of Transistors, then in “A little Resistance” come Cultivate, then Daybook.

Brown is imaged as a medieval roving poet from certain poetic styles, and as the apron-clad lady from Victorian years from others. She later propels herself into all types of modern form and experimental image. The writer launches us into an untitled highly stylized poem that is a choreographed echo of Emily Dickinson --

Come go with me out to the Field –
To look upon the Rose
Whose glow – remembers once the Sun
Gave Garments for her Clothes…”

Next is a nonsense piece in a similarly old-fashioned structure, complete with key-placed capital letters, in which we see the beginning of at least one game and the beginning of Brown’s focus: poetry driven by words, sounds and lots of jokes. The titles and bodies of many of Brown’s poems are a dead giveaway of homage paid to both writers of days past and her contemporaries -- in alphabet, words and sounds. In the final couplet, “This comes of whose period Can make the sentences soon” (pg. 19), of “The of a The” she is joyfully consumed in telling us about sentence structure without taking a pedantic stance.

Brown makes it clear that she loves language throughout Polyverse -- she loves language in any form in any way she can get it -- she’s addicted, and she makes no bones about it. A pure energy bursts from this book at any given moment -- some of it unabashedly playful. It is often sexual and completely without guile; she likes sex and makes no bones about that either:

“Words…weren’t enough for her.”
She often made high cat cries
And danced hard
On the blue carpet (pg 23).

Museme is a definition of a musical term, “A museme” is clearly a pun on that word, as well as her love of the poetic muse, any person or thing that can function as amusement, or as muse, and surely, a way in which she amuses herself in the process (pg. 78). “Yoo-Hoo, Polyhymnia” as in several other poems, permits Brown to play with sound by constraining herself to the use of specific letters:

“A po’ hymn hoopla
                  in a Lollapaloola Hall
I am Polly
Him: Nia
                  A Nippon Mina Loy.
An alloy pony hoola-a-hoop
Amy lay in Hilton limp and ‘nilla
Pomp Mon
Nepal
Hominy poi
Imp yo-yo all lampy
                  in open hill lay
A Loopy Lap
An Oil Mop
A pool Nope
A Pall in May
             Nay Pal,
             Pin yon piñon on yo’ polo yoni
Holy Moly!
Monopoly Mania” (pg 86)

Brown likes using this type of found poetry -- a single line she can define and redefine several times in as many ways as she can -- puzzles with a focus on sound and unusual, unlikely combinations of words. Her love of nonsense and silliness becomes abundantly plain in the first section. “Meow Memo” is a poem with a structure created strictly to allow the letters M-E-O-W to be read vertically.

“Moon
Eggs sol much
On
World market

Maya yams say “ma”
Eons-
O
Wow” (pg 118)

The reader is given a lesson on historical poetry at the book’s start -- then the writer jumps into experimentation, providing a multitude of tiny, seemingly insignificant “poemettes”; lists of things to do; things found in everyday life -- “Cafeteria“ reads “Ice Tea, Cream corn, Fried okra, plus one meat.” Are these her choices for lunch or dinner, are these things Brown discovered at a Cafeteria, or just words bandied about for a precious sound, a look? She plays lots of jokes on us, often joking about her own image, about who she is -- absentminded and/or blinded by love? “White Slippers” says

“When I reach for the lamp,
my thumb goes into
the bowl of water by my bed.
Even the book just bought
is missing, as my shoes
are heading for the door.”(pg 24) --

I love her sense of humor but I like best the smile behind the words. Not disingenuous -- it may be a little devious but the poet never laughs at or stands apart from the reader -- she has as grand a time without leaving you in the dust.

Brown’s generosity is shown in her sense of humor. She is open, lusty, caring, and devotes an entire section to collaborating with or writing poems to fellow poets friends and family. The people she loves are evidently in her writing life as much as they are in her personal life, coupled with her strong sense of connection, to men and women. She is open about her sexual relationships with women but is no male basher -- her lustfulness is evident in poems of love and sex; aggressive about who she is/ what she likes, though the narrator, to be certain, has experimented with both men and women. She says being “crushed between him and her is nice” (pg 176). This is not confessional work, per se, but it does inform us about a life; as in many books, we are just not certain that the narrator is the poet. That in itself could be a big part of her joke -- is she behind door number one, two or three? Is she straight, lesbian or dare I say poly-sexual? It does not matter, but it piques the reader’s interest to know if she really loves everybody, as implied.

Let’s take off all our clothes,
Honey, and lie down
With our skins touching in every place possible. (pg 154)

The above lusty stanza from “Let’s take off all our clothes” is her healthy almost aggressive sexuality coming to the fore -- a “Let’s just do it in the road” approach. Immediately following is “A Critical Approach to Love”, in which she dreamily talks of love, proving that she loves being in love -- and concurrently shows us her visual and aural prowess in the use of all the o’s in the following:

“A random kiss to concentrate on
Does it bloom anymore than if left alone?”
I need to do laundry
I need to be alone to write and think I think
Then spend all my nickels calling you. (pg 155)

Brown’s concurrent naïveté and sophistication are quite charming; this woman likes to have fun in everything she does. Her poetry is no exception- -- and might be the thing that gives her the greatest pleasure, because it evidently permits her to play well with others. In “Summery”, slyer fun --

An undone tropic fell too lush
A canyon climb a bird a thrush
A tea before the ending hitch
The sprite from hell said smoke the bitch. (pg 171)

Sad issues lurk behind some poems. They are not hidden; issues are discussed, not merely alluded to but treated as a matter of fact Some might think pain is treated cavalierly, or with little seriousness -- she simply pays little attention to it here -- it is not denial; just a part of a life. “A Long Distance Sentence” is a piece that attempts to rival the great Joyce’s Ulysses; a six-page sentence with no punctuation in a stream of consciousness that gives the reader many choices of interpretation. This writing feels like a decagon might look in architecture -- with many characters concurrently calling different phrases from a multi-sided building -- picture “Laugh-In” from a Bucky Fuller building. Brown talks about how her mother has made her crazy on more than one occasion -- just her mother’s voice can make her neurotic. You can almost hear the narrator hyperventilating and getting faster and more manic throughout the piece; and yes, inherent in this neurotic behavior is a fear of really going crazy -- as her two siblings rest in mental institutions:

“…forgiven me for both my brother and sister are in insane asylums am I three a success probably sometimes more than others playing word games with others …” Her fear of death is evident in other pieces, but here Brown writes: “am I going to be a good ‘dier’ already in the hospital young my parents I’m a real poet…” (pg 132, no page breaks). But again her healthy lust for life, shown in lacing both innuendo and not so subtle sexual references “…body is what I am hoping for some trim rub our starter sets together cat and mouse or even joke with ugly names like chore girl weezer willie or lily muff muffin peach or even peachfish…” (pg 127) grounds her. You realize this is just an everyday human being, with all her unique and interesting foibles. No great mystery.

I like Lee Ann Brown’s work. It is refreshing, pleasant and totally unpretentious, but it is concurrently complex, requiring willingness to go beyond what is simply offered or basic nuance. The interactive collaborative work, and the poetry in which she mimics (and therefore shows great esteem for) her fellows, is exceptional -- the form, structure, and sound are joyful and you get the same vicarious thrill she had writing it. She uses many poetic forms throughout, and revels in doing so -- while putting her own stamp upon the form. If you are quiet, you can hear a raucous, thoroughly blissful laughter behind each line. Lee Ann Brown clearly loves poetry, she loves to write it, study it, consume, even absorb it -- and this book proves that she wants to share it in as many ways possible with everyone, providing “a jewel of etymology hair” (pg 149).

*****

Wendy Lynn Cohen is a writer and editor currently living in Los Angeles, California. Cohen is a graduate of Antioch University Los Angeles baccalaureate Creative Writing program in 2002. She continues to freelance for multi-disciplined commercial writing/editing/design projects, while executing varied creative fiction and non-fiction projects. In 2007, Cohen edited, The Devil Made Me Do it, a memoir of a renowned 1970’s film actress. She aided the self-published author in designing the book, its cover, and marketing its initial launch in mid-2008, garnering a coveted NPR interview and book signing at Book Soup, one of LA’s foremost independent book stores. Though not specifically a poet, her love of poetry was greatly heightened in an all-involving “…reading-poetry-is-reviewing course…[whose] syllabi were recognized by [the] National Book Critics Circle as innovative courses.”

OPEN NIGHT by AARON LOWINGER

2008-12-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

ERIC GELSINGER Reviews

Open Night by Aaron Lowinger
(Transmission Press, San Francisco, 2008)

Not eating sunflower seeds
living the dream goofing off at work
got headphones on like I’m in on some secret
a secret I only really know about and they don’t
they don’t even know it’s a secret
is day day today?
the sun looks tough enough
the churches still standing
but what happened to the dinosaurs
oh God Bless America
third planet from the sun

In Open Night, by Aaron Lowinger, every poem is titled “open night.” There are 52 of them.

Fifty two weeks, fifty two stars: the book’s a flag for a year: folksy, forever-fashionable, symbolic standard of life fully felt.

In life’s big hotel
with white towels
a leather jacket
and a pair of sunglasses
making love
every morning
and drawing
American flags
on the beach colored wallpaper
with the TV on

If that doesn’t strike you as more American than Nabakov’s motel odyssey in Lolita, then try the following:

Rain basil coins puke glasses
it’s a beautiful night
just sitting out here
drinking away the summer with you
eating onion rings
applying for jobs every day
on the phone every day
I might get one of the phones
that you wear right on your ear
and then ideas will be free
this street is long like the sea
I can’t see where it ends only trees

There just might, in fact, be something more American, but if so then it’s in this book of poems.

II

As for the poems: Lowinger’s language’s syntax & sentiment are common but not vulgar: it’s the good stuff of the speech we all share. As in the “secret they don’t even know it’s a secret,” there’s no artificial, affected, or poetically inflated speech here.

Simplicity is not interchangable with authenticity, or with clarity for that matter, but here all three obtain. And simplicity not only characterizes the line, it also determines within the composition: one line/one thought, on top of another: stacking sticks, like an Andy Goldsworthy work. One advantage of simplicity is that the poems rest on the most common, communing tradition: nature--be it sticks or speech or feeling. It’s an Open Night after all: it’s there for the taking.

Lowinger’s lines are robust and independent, like stripes on our flag heralding independent agencies of a single federation. You could substitute for the “title” of a given poem any one of its constituent lines, and fail less egregiously than you do at most things, to be sure. The way the line demarcates both thought and breath, there’s no need for punctuation, any more than there’s need to interpolate the words “comma” and “semi-colon” into your own speech. Any more than there need be customs agents or money changings between the states.

With very few exceptions (why impose a rule of prosody if not to strategically exempt certain speech?) each line is a self-contained unit of meaning and breath. Each line consists of what, in a sentence, would be a clause, so can be grasped by itself, often instantly. And, each line laid down in 2-4 feet without caesura: one short breath, which means it can be breathed HARD. Each next line lets you come back full-strength, full breath. There’s the insistence of strong emotion in the constantly renewed line. Nor do the longer, the four-foot lines, compromise the intensity; they force breath to trail off at the end, adding a different, sadder or more wistful emotion (see the last line in the 3rd poem above--or the “secret” lines in the 1st poem, which achieve a kind of comical self-deprecation by the extra feet). Intensity can only be sustained by its respites. Those who go at life hard need their rest, and those rests are sweetly melancholy, reflective--sometimes humorous things.

Taking Pound’s own insistence Only emotion endures, these poems might last like rockwork: a mountain-range in the mind, optically diminished by distance. They’re also rock-like in that layer atop layer, line atop line structure, achieving sedimentary mass by a temporal process--accumulation. Including time in the prosody gives the poems a feeling of time experienced, a documentary rendering of a moment through the human tools of the poet.

A tree collects mass largely by putting down roots and becoming heavier by virtue of invisible manipulations--toward conspiracy with other forces. Pieces which collect meaning or literary effect in a tantamount process are often described as organic: an apperception of going from tail to head manifests a kind of epiphenomenon of reading: a living thing. The open nights aren’t like that. They are aggregate masses few would call “organic” or “elegant”, despite the fact the lineated strata often interlock with rhyme and rhythm. They rather invite that other favorite appelation: “raw”; though I prefer “rough and rugged” because they are manly poems, suggestive of large forearms wielding heavy stuff. Herculean perception!

Finally, the open night technique of accumulation inspires reconsideration of the precept: poems ought not include anything unncessary . Taking the 3rd poem above: to omit“eating onion rings”, or “applying for jobs every day”, or “on the phone very day” jeopardizes the intelligiblity of the poem not at all--and does de minimis damage to the prosody. Just so, striking an item from a list does nothing to distort the identity of a list as such, yet the absence may be fatal to the roast-- or here, the feeling. So, this technique of stacking thoughts/observations/facts drives home the invaluable nature of every such thought and observation and fact, which is a life lesson of a life loved. Prosody indistinguishable from philosophy, morality, and living is prosody de veras. That’s not to say the poet isn’t being selective. Of course he is, but behind closed doors so that we feel the picture of the poem is complete, and all-inclusive. It’s an “effect” cynics would say.

III

The earth’s said to be a big rock, but life does grow atop it. Life grows upon these poems too. Half of them have been with me since 2006, when they were published as a collection by House Press. Now they’ve been married to newer pieces in this Transmission Press publication. Back in ’06 when the Miami Heat were champs and the stock market couldn’t open lower, the Open Night series wasn’t necessarily my favorite. But, the poems’ combination of particulars let meanings grow on them, when they’ve been long enough in the atmosphere of a mind. One would think such cultivation would take place in the more abstract fields, and so it does, but the particulars herein are chosen with a magic so they quickly become nostalgic--fuzzy with personal meanings.

summer 2006 electric fan
plugged into the wall
and that’s where God moves

. . . .

PBS tower crowded out by leaves
mother of wonder night calls

An elegance does show through. What will become nostalgic is of course unpredictable; nostalgia is being taken back to the commonplaces that were taken for granted: a dumb gift from a relative, a garbage-picked chair, the tomatoes that year. When you try to hold on to something in the present in order to remember it for the future, it’s like in the future looking back and:

trying without feeling
to remember or recreate any feeling

. . .

I go to the store
but there’s nothing to buy
go home again
put my head sideways
fill the hall with windows
listen to the water
moving around me

Open Night is the heart flag of one man. It seems meant to die with the poet. It’s got its place, its time. It’s not supposed to be mended and amended, not meant to be everlasting--which is why it will last, for a while. It’s precisely the country walked, and the mystical interaction of that earth with its sky and the person walking it. The result of that mystical interaction is feeling, personal and universal both. And he speaks it out, he raises the feeling for all ears in the open night. He knows life will end. But speaking to or into that night, loudly, or to “you” more quietly, but still with lots of stressed syllables and halted and renewed phrasing to fit the phase of energy, he ends up creating a little book of poems which may betray his pretensions toward the topical.

Lowinger ‘wholly dedicates the poems to night and the magic in connecting Earth to the infinite ocean of darkness around us.’ Night intervenes between earth and the cosmos, or separates them--most would say. Herr Lowinger says it otherwise. His poems testify he believes that whatever air earth light comes between one person and another does not separate but connects us in a body we all share. The Open Night poems are shouted secret messages, electrical activity in the emotional system of this larger body (the electric city?).

right now it is only November 30
wind rain dead leaves
and you don’t love me
this is going to be
a long winter
when it rains
I see money

And a good many of them are funny. Open Night!

*****

Eric Gelsinger is a member of House Press. Originally from Buffalo, he lives in Brooklyn and works near Times Square as an equities trader. More of his writing can be found at www.gelsingers.blogspot.com

ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIMS by BRENDA IIJIMA

2008-12-17T16:35:00.000-08:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews:

Animate, Inanimate Aims by Brenda Iijima
(Litmus Press, 2007)

“If the creative writer pushes far enough into language, he finds himself in the embrace of thought.” That’s Lorine Niedecker, as quoted by Meredith Quartermain, in her review of Iijima’s Around Sea (Jacket 25). I understand this to mean something like if you get all the way down to most granular (the Planck length of language, so to speak), you’ll somehow magically arrive at the point of “as above, so below”, and thinking will occur. Another way to put this might be anecdotal. One of the best pieces of advice my son, who is a photographer, ever got were these words from an old pro: “Every square millimeter is on you.” Since then, Sam’s photos have never been the same. Or, to put it as Jules Verne did, in the epigraph to Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, “Look, with all your eyes, look” (Bellos translation). But are eyes enough? Let me answer myself with Zukofsky’s “If you once desired to be all eyes, you do not feel compelled any more unless it be to look at Shakespeare’s words as if they were tuned objects that strike off tones.” (Bottom: On Shakespeare, p.333, as quoted by Bob Perelman in his Foreword). How, and why, separate/distinguish-between the eye and the ear, then? When the senses work as one, all 999 of them, “the creative writer” has a chance to reach that Planck length, and the magical embrace of thought. I take thought here to mean the something big happening with/in every syllable. Which brings me, by a commodius vicus, to Brenda Iijima. Or at least to an aspect of her work, the aspect of Animate, Inanimate Aims (which I will call A,IA) that impresses me most: every grapheme, every phoneme, counts.

I need to mention two things before I get into her work. First, To quote the letter that accompanies my review copy: “the poems are bookended by a series of [Iijima’s ] own drawings and collages that illuminate a sensorium of “Spectral graffiti” where “Ostensibly / The world / Gestured the matador.” . I won’t be addressing those drawings and collages here. Second, there’s a puzzle vis-à-vis the text (fittingly enough, the first poem is titled “Puzzle”). I take the bold uppercase bits at the top of certain pages to be titles. What I don’t know is this: are the texts on the pages with no bold uppercase at the top separate, or are they parts of longer, titled, texts? Since half the time texts stop halfway down the page, format is no help. And since in many cases there are no obvious continuities between the text on one page and the text on the next, again, I don’t know whether I’m reading sequences or … I choose to bracket this just don’t know and to accept a degree of and and as well as either or.

Nevertheless. Because of. And and. This is a wonderful book. As I read I thought: Wow, this is huge. There’s tenderness:

Neighbor
Some green tea?
So you might live
To be 110
(p.40)

Right next door (3 lines away) there’s close observation of nature (and yes she knows that nature’s constructed blah blah blah -- and yet … and yet … sometimes: so what?):

Out to trowel soil
For this yearling
Azalea timed
To explode into bloom
Any day now
(p.40)

Is that just a bit more tenderness? No. Those lines are followed directly by that which contextualizes our tenderness and awareness of the beauty (and wonder and and …) around us (the somewhat unnameable that plays havoc with our hearts):

Spectral graffiti is our
Unique labor. I imagine
By an ineradicable code
(A contrary) A difference (French)
An abyss prevails over rapture
Vertigo escorts daily over
That bridge.
(p.40)

There’s anger (righteous wrath) here too. At environmental degradation:

Pitted earth where the mines were
Turn over soil
Time and again
Mine and again

Hath utterly m. void Num 30:12
Thou hast m. void covenant Ps 89:39
They have m. void thy law 119:126
Be heirs, faith is m. void Rom 4:14

Save me
From the lion’s
Lust for revenge …

(“MADE:”)

At war. The war. All the wars. (I transcribe a page in full):

In the case
Of the declarative sentence that goes
As follows:
“War won’t go
Away:
A glazing on vocabulary
Indelible residual
How we employ our words. In this case
For war
And more war
Raw
Have it your way

This is the section
Of rocky human
Feelings

Aims to be
Water tight
But is porous

The machines
Fought for their
Lives

War
Being
At the door
All of the time
(p.71)

“Have it your way”: the Burger King slogan. “The machines / fought for their / Lives”: do we even know what war is? These poems are never simple, never. Because, ahem, life or wherever it is we find ourselves (“the section / Of rocky human / Feelings”???) , which is right where these poems are, isn’t either.

And do they sing. To continue Niedecker’s gendered language, with which I began, boy, do they sing. I keep thinking of Zukofsky’s “upper limit music, lower limit speech”. And how, “[i]f the creative writer pushes far enough into language, he finds himself in the embrace of …” each. And and.

I await her next book eagerly. It’s called Rabbit Lesson, and is available from Fewer & Further Press. My copy’s on its way.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman's most recent publications are No Sounds Of My Own Making, World0, and (forthcoming) A Spectrum of Other Instances. His work is anthologized in The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II. His current projects are editing the anthology 1000 Views Of "Girl Singing" and constructing the interminable Autopoiesis. He has just been named co-editor of Leafe Press. You can catch him in action at Zeitgeist Spam.

HALLUCINATING CALIFORNIA by RICHARD LOPEZ and JONATHAN HAYES

2008-12-17T16:30:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

HALLUCINATING CALIFORNIA by Richard Lopez and Jonathan Hayes
(Windowpane Press, Sacramento/San Francisco, 2008; for Windowpane Press info, contact Jonathan Hayes at jsh619@earthlink.net)

I love everything about HALLUCINATING CALIFORNIA—the structure, the poems, the simple but elegant design, and especially the life-force underlying the whole project.

The chap contains two sections enchantingly titled with the area codes of “916” (the Sacramento section by Richard Lopez) and “415” (the San Francisco section by Jonathan Hayes). Sure, it more accurately might be entitled HALLUCINATING NORTHERN CALIFORNIA but that’s a petty objection for poems that raise and maintain interest for readers whose interests lie beyond California. I raise it here only because the project’s delights made me wish there was a larger book entitled HALLUCINATING CALIFORNIA with many more writers living in all sorts of area codes within the state and writing poems as effectively as Lopez and Hayes.

I received my copy from Lopez and so also received his inscription as part of my chap: “Poetry is life.” And if such was the intention of both writers, then they were successful in manifesting their intent. The poems are basically slices of life in Sacramento and San Francisco, but wisely and wittily distilled into quite enjoyable gems. Here’s one by Lopez:

tripping out

k st mall at 6:00 pm in sac
winter night after work
walking thru and around
the wannabes gangsters
workers waiting for the train
home i’m in deep
neon and shadows shape
thoughts but whose
i’m wandering
have my toes pointed in every direction
which means desire
confused with coordination
tripping out
the best way is to
walk thru

The consistent use of lower-case capitals remind me of a conversation I once had with another poet, Arthur Sze, who shared that he usually writes his first drafts all in lower case because he didn’t want the pauses required for capitalizing letters to interrupt the initial flow. Not to say that I think these poems are just “first drafts” but I recall this conversation because one of HALLUCINATING CALIFORNIA’s assets is the energy that, in “tripping out” does seem uninterrupted as it flows.

Interestingly, I have had various correspondences from Lopez and I can’t recall him ever capitalizing letters. Even when he sends a snailmail address, the first letters of streets, city and state are lower-case. I believe this to be one example of, for Lopez, the lack of separation between life and poetry—even when he might make up something for purpose of a poem, he is always writing the truth.

I sense a similar life/poetic force in the poems I see here by Hayes. Here’s a sample poem:

san francisco, california

still in her Safeway uniform
but now with a cigarette & drink

she fries tortilla chips in the skillet
holds up a bloody red steak to the kitchen air

with our tarnished metal forks
we smash avocados in a ceramic bowl

salt
lemon more salt

by the time the guacamole is made
chips are laid on a green Guatemalan cloth

to dry
& cool

she tells us
“como extrano a mi tierra”

This poem is also the first poem in Hayes’ section, and is an effective invitation to the rest of the poems, of which my favorite is

chicken poem

embarcadero center
waiting on the 1 california street bus
she told me
“last week i boarded the bus and a couple blocks up
an old chinese lady came on with a chicken
pecking and heckling
the bus driver told her
‘no animals on the bus’
she snapped the neck of the chicken
and walked to the back of the bus”

As Lopez and Hayes finely illustrate, poetry is all around us and we just need to be observant. Wonderfully effortless poems—no strain, just “walk[in’] thru”

*****

Eileen Tabios does not allow her books to be reviewed in Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to Fred Muratori's review of her I Take Thee, English, For My Beloved in AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW. She feels lucky to have received reviews of her books and, one day, while wondering what to do with all these reviews, answered her own question with her newest book THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS: HER BIOGRAPHY THROUGH YOUR POETICS which recycles reviews and engagements of her poems into a biography--a biography because, as Ted Berrigan once noted, "there is a self inside almost all of the poems”.

ARDOR by KAREN AN-HWEI LEE

2008-12-17T16:25:00.000-08:00

EMILY SCHORR LESNICK Reviews

Ardor by Karen An-Hwei Lee
(Tupelo Press, Dorset, VT, 2008)

Everything about Karen An-Hwei Lee’s Ardor is alluring: the shiny red cover, pomegranate, the cartoid, heart-shaped, graph and mathematical equations. The language seduces, too:

They took the pomegranate and burned it.
You mean they burst it open. Ripe
Tore it apart leaf by leaf and burned the seeds.
Every single word in there said love and love. (11)

It’s easy to get lost in this book, a 70-page poem, structured like a play, with characters named, dreams, letter, and prayers, on the left-hand margin. The body of the text—the lines these characters speak—is made up of multi-page poems, prose poems, one-line sentences and fragments. These structural centerpieces do not inhibit the piece; rather, they facilitate a flow of Lee’s sensual writing. To estimate what Ardor is about or what it does is difficult. I might say, it’s Lee’s dream self addressing her ideal self, telling her she’s entitled to passion and pain.

I grasped the rich red cover. I devoured Ardor in one intense sitting. Lee writes about personal identity and interactive passion, her dreams, ruminations, and wishes, each uniquely personal. She writes about herself intimately. She also includes nameless characters in the text, designated by He and She pronouns, implicating the readers in her dreams, letters and prayers. Lee is clearly unafraid to go deep inside herself, and she asks the same courage of her reader.

Particularly appealing is Lee’s imagery. Often by conflating the fruit and the human spirit, Lee insists the word itself is flesh. Lee recognizes the burning passion that exists both within the body and between bodies:

Flesh burning flesh
Vision joined to
Love’s apostrophe
Of possession (22)

Lee’s writing brims with love and anger, and of an open heart. As vulnerable readers, we cannot distance ourselves from the intimacy of this writing.

Lee’s writing employs not only a feminine and feminist consciousness, but also a racialized consciousness. She explores how bodies are both sexualized and racialized. Ardor tears apart human emotion, as well as the construction of race, and Whiteness in particular:

Never understood why
White women
So often photographed
Used bleaching cream
Hydroquinone
Isn’t white
White enough (34-35)

Ardor, however, does not render Lee a voiceless woman, subject to the (mis)readings and otherings of dominant culture. Lee maintains agentic power in both her racial consciousness and her deliberate writing. Her writing reflects her unique experience and position, as well as incorporating the sensuality that is present throughout the book. She insists on the intentionality on every word, every bit of punctuation, and every absence:

Don’t standardize my phrasing
My seasoned grammar
Of double roses
Dashed rhododendrons (19)

As an Asian-American woman poet, Lee is adamant in using her own voice and her own body as subject, while also criticizing systems of power that might place her there against her will. Throughout Ardor, Karen An-Hwei Lee is looking in a mirror, speaking directly to her body. The only way to enter the dialogue is to begin reading.

*****

Emily Schorr Lesnick is a student at Macalester College.

ROUNDING THE HUMAN by LINDA HOGAN

2008-12-17T16:15:00.000-08:00

LINDA RODRIGUEZ Reviews

Rounding the Human by Linda Hogan
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2008)

Rounding the Human demonstrates just why Linda Hogan is considered a major American writer. Its visionary imagery and lyrical language are only part of the reason Jim Harrison calls her “a significant figure in our literature,” and William Kittredge in his introduction calls her “one of those singular poets,” saying she offers us “Solace come through apprehending the material and holy world precisely as it is.”

Past winner of the American Book Award, Colorado Book Award, and Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, as well as a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, novelist and essayist, but she is also a dedicated volunteer and consultant for wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs. As such she writes often with the naturalist’s eye, the way she does in “The Heron” about her efforts to rescue an injured heron, which ends with:

“You could kill me or help me.
I know you and I have no choice
but to give myself up
and in whatever supremacy of this moment,
hold your human hand
with my bent claws.

In “Moving the Woodpile,” which could be her manifesto, she begins with “Never am I careless,/ yet when I lift the wood/ …the bark falls from the log…” as she tells of dislodging a wasps’ nest full of pupas and being unable to restore it to the disturbed wasp parents circling just out of reach, no matter how she tries.

“Maybe our sin is not enough
of us get on our knees and ever see
how everything small and nearly gone
is precious, the paper wasp nest,
made by the moment-by-moment creation of care.
… I’ve always wished
to hold the truly stolen, broken world together
but my every move is to break
by degrees, acres, even the smallest atom.”

That sensibility of the naturalist and consultant on endangered species is also apparent in “The Night Constant,” where she writes of the lion that circles around and walks near her house at night.

...and we don’t even know
the animals that walk outside our sleep
yet we have traveled there so often
there are not so many of them now
where light falls across the hunting ground
we call a world that’s small
because we’ve matched it to ourselves.”

Though Rounding the Human is suffused with this love and concern for the natural wild world and breathtakingly precise descriptions of it, the book lives up to its title in its constant concern with what it is to be truly human, what humans have given up of themselves in the process of damaging the world as they have, and how we can learn to be truly human, yet truly at home in and at one with the natural world around us. The second poem in the book and first in the section titled “Unlayering the Human,” “The Way In” is a small jewel of a poem that will, I think, be one of those rare poems that live on through the generations, the kind that takes your breath away with its music and its truth. “Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body,” it begins, before listing other ways and continuing with “…there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,/ and beauty…” Then she speaks of transformation: stone by water, hard earth by unfolding plant, dry fuel by fire. When she ends with “To enter life, be food,” the truth and pain of those words that humans have fought against and been a part of since their first appearance on this planet reverberates deep within the reader.

Yet Hogan always offers hope. “I know fear has come down to us/ from the first universe/ where the beginnings of stars are never tame,” she tells her granddaughter when asked if she is afraid, but she reminds the reader, “Paradise has always been just out of sight,” and “It may be, it may one day be/ this is a world haunted by happiness…/ …remember there is always something/ besides our own misery.” She urges us again and again to learn from and make our peace with the mysteries of the body, because “…the body remembers the fine animal/ that was lost/ some place in time.”

Sexuality is one of the key ways she highlights our pathway to this wholeness through the body. In “Mysteries of the Bed,” she points out that “Even in the coldest heart,/ we are mostly tender here…” The holy places of the body, she says, “…are the ones with the power/ of gentling the human.” Drawing on her Native American heritage, she encourages us to “…remember the forgotten language wild,/can you still call it?” Hogan can, and she is generous enough to share it with the rest of us, calling to us to join her in her intoxication with the beauty and power of the natural world. Still, she never makes this offer from some superior position, but from the humble place of one who has had to learn these truths in painful ways but counts them worth the cost. Instead she tells us, “I am still a beginner in this world/ without a hold, without money or love or tools./ I am down on my knees./ Maybe now I can begin to learn something.”

Totally accessible as these poems are, this is a book that repays repeated rereading, in fact, almost demands it, because there are new treasures to be found in each poem every time you come to them. It is a major work by a major American writer.

*****

Vice-president of the Latino Writers Collective, Linda Rodriguez has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals and anthologies. She has also published a chapbook, Skin Hunger, and numerous articles for general and scholarly publications, most recently three articles in the Encyclopedia of Hispanic Literature. Her cookbook, The “I Don’t Know How to Cook” Book: Mexican (Adams Media) was just published. Her book of poetry, Heart’s Migration, will be published by Tia Chucha Press in April 2009.

AFTER THE POISON by COLLIN KELLEY (1)

2008-12-17T16:10:00.000-08:00

HELEN LOSSE Reviews

After the Poison by Collin Kelley
(Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky, 2008)

The theme is clear enough in Collin Kelley’s After the Poison: We do not care about people who are peripheral to mainstream society—the poor, the blacks, the gays, the Muslims, the dwellers in the Third World. We do not care about them here or abroad. And to illustrate this, Kelley creates vivid images.

. . . this place
barely exists offers no kickbacks
to presidents, their kin or commanders. . . .
No liberation force is coming [to Darfur]. . . .
Here is famine, genocide,
dark skin pouring black oil
that holds no currency.
(from “War For Oil,” page 5)

No. And we do not care.

. . . the loss of life, while painful,
is a mere drop in the Indian Ocean. . . .
In Banda Aceh, the pool outside the Grand Mosque
is full of debris and bodies, bloated by sea and heat.
Men and women cry, hands to Heaven, . . .
(from “Banda Aceh,” pages 6-7)

But do not compare this to “airplanes flying into buildings.” No, it’s Christmas, when the tsunami hits. so “[Heaven is] not taking calls this week.” “America cleans up its dead so easily,” unlike “the UNCHRISTIAN Third World.” (from “Banda Aceh,” page 6-7)

And in London, the torso of a black boy floats in the Thames. He has been beheaded. His head was probably sacrificed “to drive the evil back to Africa” or maybe eaten by a white man.

. . . police determine this one
came from Nigeria
by the density of his bones. . . .
One small boy, his homeland
a gene, his identity a mystery. . . .
One small boy. 299 still missing.
They call this one Adam.
(from “Human Trafficking,” pages 12-13)

Not all of Kelley’s poems are set in foreign lands. Some deal with events in California, where Ronald Reagan is being buried, “Ronnie’s head to the west/ finally out of his ass.” (from “Siege,” page 3) In our nation’s capital, “there is hope yet,” as speaking to Condoleezza Rice, the poet says, “. . . there is still time to come to the nation’s aid./ I dream of you sitting in front of Congress, nailing it/ with two simple words: ‘Bush lied.’” (from “Confidentiality,” page 8) In New Orleans, some things haven’t changed much from 1905 to 2005. “Katherine, black woman,/ hung from a poplar tree.” (from “Katrina Origins,” page 15) In San Francisco, “In the library, all slick stone,/ more gray, the homeless line up/ for 15 minutes at a free computer.” (from “Hurt,” page 18) And in Harlem, “The man in a hoopty Seville, blue/ and dented, turns a corner /. . . screaming fire, fire, fire.,” while “the two big booty black girls”—described in the first lines of the poem: “the right hair, nails did, jeans that will hug curves”—“yell [back] where’s it at, motherfucker?” (from “In Harlem,” pages 26-27)

Kelley, who is always open and honest about his own homosexuality (and, it seems, everything else), deals directly with this subject in two poems, “Fatwa” and “Siege.” Ronald Reagan, he says,

. . . knew
their kind from his Hollywood days, grab-assing
in the Warner Brothers’ dressing rooms. Faggots.
Bad enough he had to dirty his mouth with the word
AIDS, but gay would never pass his lips,
as if his withholding the word banished them,
made their cries of shame, shame, shame outside
the White House nothing more than a collective
bad dream. . . .
(from “Siege,” page 3)

Then in “Fatwa,” Kelley speaks of an encounter with a Muslim man, whom the speaker in the poem “picked up at the station.” And at this point, it behooves us to remember that the “I” in the poem may or may not be Kelley himself. Although Kelley is gay, he is no more required, or perhaps even inclined, to write autobiographically than any other poet. Kelley is writing about social outcasts and our lack of concern for their well-being, not telling the story of his life. The images concerning what happens and Kelley’s smart play on words are powerful.

I’m here to be your persecution cum dump,
take it out on me, take it out on me. . . .
Let’s come together,
fucking in rhythm and sorrow.
(from “Fatwa,” page 24)

Come together, indeed.

It’s often the last lines of Kelley’s poems—like the final three quoted above—that he earns and uses so well. Lines like these drive home Kelley’s point: our indifference to the pain of others: “I can feel my shoe filling with blood.” (from “Hurt,” 19), “One lost kingdom is enough.” (from “Siege,” page 4), and : “. . . fight the powers, fight the powers that be.” (from “Drowned World,” page 17). These final lines are especially strong:

. . . countries will be occupied, the rich
will drink oil, racism will rise in floodwaters,
and I’ll be free, pardoned, back in the familial fold.
But every time you see me, you’ll remember
the gun in my hand, the street-fighting years,
that we are still prisoners of war,
and you’ll wonder just who has been brainwashed.
(from “Patty Hurst On The Occasion Of Presidential Pardon,” page 21)

And the final lines of the chapbook’s final poem:

Somewhere in the static, a face is trying to come through,
a movie I saw long ago or some other song, Zevon maybe.
And in the rolling vertical hold the words come clearly:
send lawyers, guns and money.”
(from “Los Angeles,” page 23)

Throughout After the Poison, Kelley’s language is uncluttered, his images clear. The reader is never left to solve a word puzzle, but neither language nor image is simplistic. Kelley gives voices and faces to the marginalized and unheard, so that the chapbook seems, somehow, longer than it is, as he continues—poem after poignant poem—to strike chords of true compassion, challenging his reader to care. Collin Kelley calls us out, makes us aware of the poison: the racism, the nationalism, the homophobia. We are now without excuse. What will we do?

*****

Helen Losse is a poet, free lance writer, and Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her recent poetry publications include Lily, Ghoti, The Wild Goose Review, Right Hand Pointing, and Blue Fifth Review. She has two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces, available from FootHills Publishing and Paper Snowflakes, available from Southern Hum Press. Educated at Missouri Southern State and Wake Forest Universities, she lives in Winston-Salem, NC where she occasionally writes book reviews for the Winston-Salem Journal, CutBank Reviews, and other literary magazines.

AFTER THE POISON by COLLIN KELLEY (2)

2008-12-17T16:05:00.000-08:00

SAM RASNAKE Reviews

After the Poison by Collin Kelley
(Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky, 2008)

Lost Kingdoms: Discarded, Occupied, Brainwashed

The poems in After the Poison, Collin Kelley’s most recent collection, disturb, rattle all the safe senses and—for me, the satisfying part—pose, without solution, many of today’s definitive quandaries: the bombed, the lied to, the lost, the dead … no home, no name, no fairy tale. In these poems the modern world declares itself—an heiress turned urban guerilla turned seer, a president’s corpse, Little Red, the classified fantasy come to life. The landscape shifts—West Coast to New Orleans to Darfur to Banda Aceh. The constant presence is human tragedy.

Kelley’s writing is immediate, even fierce, creating an urgency in the works. This urgency is made all the more forceful because of the poems’ contemporary settings. It is the reader’s world, and it’s a familiar one. Note the bleakness in these lines:

Look in the mirror,
we are the new public enemy,
and we will be left to drown and starve
if the power has anything to do with it
(“Drowned World”)

The use of the mirror, which is such an individual connection, is what makes the lines so direct and impacting. Everyone is vulnerable; everyone is culpable. To overcome the dangers of familiarity, the poem jolts the reader from the comforts of apathy. The writer’s intent is survival. “Drowned World” ends with a plea for action: “fight the powers, fight the powers that be”.

Elsewhere in the chapbook reflection as a trope illustrates a world that is horribly out of balance. In one poem Kelley recasts characters from fairy tales, updating their lives and problems with an echo of Anne Sexton’s Transformations. Of Snow White, he writes that she will

…never eat fresh fruit again,
or comb her hair for that matter,
because the mirror is back talking,
making her paranoid about the Prince,
says he’s got eyes for a skinny maid,
so she’ll hide her dinner in napkins,
or discreetly vomit in a chamber pot,
the comfort she once took in apples
now gone to rot.
(“Fairy Tale Eating Disorders”)

Trust and certainty are no longer possible. Later in the poem, a mirror, used to undermine and destroy any notion of self-worth, “whispers” cruel words to Cinderella, warning that if she does not conform to the accepted ideal of beauty, she’ll break the “dainty glass slipper.” The poem ends with an alarming but exact take on one of the American myths, a founding pillar of commerce: “no one likes / a fat princess”. The world of the do-over. And no one escapes. In the Hansel and Gretel section of the piece, Kelley writes that “even a crone / isn’t safe these days”. Lending a wholeness to the collection, images of reflection or electronic visuals appear in other poems including “Hurt (San Francisco)” [music video on computer], “Patty Hearst On the Occasion of Her Presidential Pardon” [a pose for security cameras], “Banda Aceh” [a pool full of debris and bodies], and “Los Angeles” [a city compared to static and lost signals from a television station off the air].

The poetic voice in After the Poison doubts—and for good reason—governmental authorities and the world’s social conscience. Death—Kelley writes in “D.”—“must have been cloned / into an army working overtime.” The media, religion, family—all fall victim to the turbulent times. One poignant moment deftly shows the unthinkable of which we are all capable:

One small boy, his homeland
a gene, his identity a mystery.
His missing face frozen
in someone’s mind,
maybe a mother who sold him
for a few day’s food,
or the white man who consumed him,
or the voodoo priest who beheaded him
(“Human Trafficking”)

We set upon ourselves. Kelley impresses this theme in several poems: “Siege” [the US government’s response to the AIDS crisis], “War For Oil (Darfur, Africa)” [“dark skin pouring black oil / that holds no currency”], “Katrina Origins” [the vicious history that is the DNA of our language], and “Drowned World” [“the spawn / who claims to hold the power”]. In “Fatwa” two men, two cultures come together in a pick-up—lovemaking that bodies itself “in rhythm and sorrow” under the weight of a “fed up / America” and world, the boil of blood “in veins / here and in Africa.” Fed up because of religious and political fanaticism, of bombing “in the name of freedom,” of the world’s declarations of what is and is not forbidden.

Although I cannot offer enough high praise for this collection, it comes with a warning. The book will make readers squirm in their seats, will force a new, unsettling panorama of the self. After the Poison is a sad book. Sad because it carries truths we would rather not know. Sad because of the overt display of the real terror in our living. It’s a world burning down – as in “Martyr” [in the “market place … setting your hair aflame”], “Across Sampson Street” [fireworks of play and war], and “In Harlem” [prayers that sound “like someone whispering fire, fire, fire]. Or, it’s a drowning world – “Banda Aceh” [“death in leviathan waters”], “Drowned World” [“the sound of tears and blood”], and “Katrina Origins” [“rain gathers, wind sucks”]. Kelley never turns away from the ugliness, from the void of compassion, from the politics that destroy.

There’s also a beauty in these poems—in the relentless language that unmasks, that disrobes the beast that is the new millennium. It’s a work that challenges us to understand, to dare to change. The change must happen, because, as the poet writes, “One lost kingdom is enough.” Read this book. Be amazed by a slender collection that wields such an enormous club.

*****

Sam Rasnake’s poetry has appeared recently in journals such as MiPOesias, Pebble Lake Review, Snow Monkey, Siren, and Boxcar Poetry Review. The author of one chapbook, Religions of the Blood (Pudding House), and one collection, Necessary Motions (Sow’s Ear Press), he edits Blue Fifth Review, an online poetry journal.

AFTER THE POISON by COLLIN KELLEY (3)

2008-12-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

ROBERT E. WOOD Reviews

After the Poison by Collin Kelley
(Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, KY 2008)

Collin Kelley is a poet of considerable stylistic power and range. Some of his poems vent an anger gratifying to anyone who shares his outrage (probably anyone to the left of Generalissimo Franco), but others move beyond this into the realm of heartbreak. After the Poison is a breviary of laments on the horrors and hypocrisies of our time.

“Patty Hearst on the Occasion of Her Presidential Pardon” reaches into the past in a mock manifesto. For the moment the sardonic wit of the piece is a consolation.

Only in California will they let you keep
your rock star shades on for the mug shot.
I looked like a starlet.

But Kelley is not merely a satirist. He knows when the simple statement of fact is more chilling than any device. “Human Trafficking” describes an attempt to identify the body of a child of seven. These lines will haunt me forever.

Three hundred black boys
have disappeared in London
as police determine this one
came from Nigeria
by the density of his bones.

At times Kelley confronts human tragedy with lines that beat with the drive of a Greek chorus. “In Harlem” examines the tensions of the street.

Someone’s got a bomb, someone’s got a gun,
and the prayers that come and go, bouncing off
brick walls, between the muddled hallelujahs,
sounds like someone whispering fire, fire, fire.

It is a cliche to say of a poet that he writes as if his hair is on fire. Collin Kelley writes as if the world is on fire. And it is.

*****

Robert E. Wood is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. His film studies include essays on Fosse, DePalma, and Verhoeven, as well as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He is the author of Some Necessary Questions of the Play, a study of Hamlet. His poetry has appeared recently in flashquake, Poetry Midwest, Quiddity, Quercus Review, Hamilton Stone Review, The Sylvan Echo and Umbrella. Poems are forthcoming in Blue Fifth Review, Motel 58 and War, Literature, and the Arts. Previous poetry publications include Chattahoochee Review, Wind, Southern Humanities Review, and South Carolina Review.

IN COMPANY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW MEXICO POETS AFTER 1960, Eds. LEE BARTLETT, V.B. PRICE & DIANNE EDENFIELD EDWARDS

2008-12-17T15:55:00.000-08:00

JAMES STOTTS Reviews

IN COMPANY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW MEXICO POETS AFTER 1960, Edited by Lee Bartlett, V.B. Price and Dianne Edenfield Edwards
(University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 2004)

It seems intellectually dishonest to mention, as the editors do in the preface, that New Mexico is mired in poverty and sparsely populated, without mentioning too the clusters of well-to-do communities there where many of this book’s writers thrived without ever getting any more than a journalist’s glimpse into the third-world conditions of the state. Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey, Val Kilmer, Donald Rumsfeld—all have vacation homes here. It would seem to me that explaining the geographical, socio-political, historical and cultural shape of New Mexico would be the paramount concern of any introduction to an anthology of New Mexico poets (the need for such an anthology is an implicit acknowledgment of the underrepresentation and lack of understanding about the literary history of New Mexico). Instead, the nuances and complexities of our state are glossed over; no attempt is made to provide a context for the poetry, to say what it is that is so special about New Mexico. A reader unacquainted with the state would find no indication of even the most basic facts: that Santa Fe is the capital, and Albuquerque the largest city. And it’s not that these fundamentals are assumed, it’s that the editors don’t ever get that far. The geography is described as desert with mountains. The economic conditions are merely very poor. The population: sparse. Anyone familiar with New Mexico knows how inadequate these descriptors are. And someone vaguely familiar with the region could easily confuse the New Mexico described with any of a number of other states. How, then, do they justify the choice to focus on New Mexico, as opposed to merely the southwest? This lack of vision is a real problem, because it doesn’t offer what is required to correct the blind spot that has left New Mexican poets undeservedly ignored. Also, is there no distinguishing between a New Mexican poet, and a poet who visited New Mexico for any length of time? This anthology is full of both, but labels them all the former.

The prefatory remarks were startlingly bad, and yet strangely reminiscent of my own time at the University of New Mexico because of that. The preface was misleading. The foreword was a long and boorish dedication to the late Mary Burritt Christiansen, whose gift to the university in the form of an endowment indirectly paid for In Company to be published—more lip service than any real gratitude. The introduction was jumbled, hackneyed, off point, and wholly unedifying. There were as many typos as pages. As a freshman in English 101 at UNM seven years ago, I was required to read an anthology of essays culled entirely from the faculty’s publications, as was every other incoming student at the school. They were among the worst professional essays I have ever had the displeasure of reading. It seems time has done woefully little to improve the editorial shortcomings of the University of New Mexico Press, sadly; the poets here (and there are only a few real poets) deserve better. This book’s editing reminded me why I indignantly refused to take the English degree I had rightfully earned back then (full disclosure: I never completed my final required course for a double major—Chaucer—when I came to class the first day and the professor had been changed and there was still no Chaucer at the bookstore—part of a pattern of unpreparedness I’d met a hundred times already).

If this project was a labor of love, like the editors claim, then something is wrong. The University of New Mexico Press, with the sizable Christiansen endowment and the resources of the university at their disposal, are ideally positioned to do meaningful research into the landscape of poetry in New Mexico, to create a touchstone document that would be an invaluable resource to future scholars, to do what is necessary to communicate and trace the lives of these poets (some of whom may not be available much longer for living inquests), to distill the careers of New Mexico’s living treasures like Rudolfo Anaya to their essentials. This anthology misses every mark, and gives lie to the claim that this was a labor of love. Instead it seems that the poems compiled come not from a deep examination of the poets’ works that might be forever overlooked or hard to come by otherwise, but rather from a cursory reading of the most readily available collections. Where are the interviews? The biographies? An opportunity is being lost if this anthology, by its publication, discourages any other real surveys from being attempted in the near future.

I would recommend skipping the introductions altogether.

This, then, is in place of an introduction.

Some accounting: out of the 81 poets anthologized, I had in my library books by 3, and had heard of 11. I came to New Mexico when I was 5, and left when I was 24 (which was last year). I lived in 11 different homes in Albuquerque and in the Sandia mountains nearby. Out of 5 siblings, I was 1 of the 3 that graduated high school, which is roughly in keeping with statistics for the state at large.

New Mexico has been the home to several alien confluences in its history, from the forced migrations of Native Americans victim to ‘manifest destiny,’ to the top-secret gathering of nuclear scientists from around the world in Los Alamos to help create and test the atomic bomb, to the explosion in ranch-house suburban-style settlement by America’s white middle class in the last 50 years, to the packed parking lots of tourists on pilgrimage to reservation casinos. The southwest territory, stolen from Mexico through cynical political maneuvering and a preemptive war in the middle of the 19th century, has had an especially turbulent, if peripheral, history. This land was the outskirts of the Civil War, the earth where Billy the Kid was laid down. Nowhere, outside of New York and Los Angeles, were 2006’s summer protests against crackdowns on illegal immigrants more heavily or wildly attended than in New Mexico, as they shut cities down across the state.

Current demographics from the last census show a Hispanic plurality in the population (the highest percentage of Hispanics in the U.S.), followed by Native Americans (the second largest Native American community in any state, after Oklahoma) then German-Americans.

Tourist campaigns, which have given us a state cookie (the biscochito), a state question (Red or green?), a state attire (the bolo tie), make me cringe; they overlook the real gifts of our Tierra Encantada (the Carlsbad Caverns in the south, the Lawrence Ranch nestled in the Sangro de Cristos to the north and the Ghost Ranch above Santa Fe where Georgia O’Keefe stayed, a hundred different eternal creation myths passed down from pre-history, some of the earliest and most beautiful Catholic churches in the country), and ignore the dire conditions of the state: dying rivers, isolated villages decimated by drug traffic, desperately contrived gang violence, the ambivalent inheritance of heroes (like Kit Carson and the conquistadores, who made their reputations by murdering native populations, from the time of Spain’s slave-labor haciendas to the brutal ‘Long Walk,’ and whose public monuments are forever being vandalized). All these real concerns, and more, are answered by the poets in the anthology.

The most famous poets in this anthology are not represented with their best work. Winfield Townley Scott, Witter Bynner, Robert Creely, Charles Tomlinson, Arthur Sze, Gene Frumkin, Nathaniel Tarn, N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo—though their selections are easily the strongest in the collection, are hardly memorable when they have work that is much better. After them, things go down hill. Among the hundred anonymous names, there was nothing impressive, and by the time I was almost halfway through I had lost patience and degenerated into a haphazard survey of the poems of the second half. The editors, with their connections to the University of New Mexico and New Mexico State University seem to have largely just raked through the dregs of the college M.F.A programs in the state to fill out the end of the anthology. At this point, I had already given up hope—so I will say in the anthology’s defense that a good poem or two might have been swept up with all the garbage, by accident.

A few redeeming notes:

Rudolfo Anaya’s long narrative poem “Isis in the Heart” reveals his cultural agenda as he transplants ancient Egyptian myth in the New Mexican desert. We get local and exotic color done subtly and with a sure hand. Anubis is juxtaposed to La Llorana. Osiris is made into an alien Kokopelli as he carries his dis-membered phallus on his back. Anaya, a visionary writer of the traditions surviving in communities along U.S.-Mexican borderlands, shows off what he’s learned from his long tenure at the University of New Mexico. He demonstrates (maybe too explicitly) his comfortable grasp of the history of western culture, and how he’s been influenced by the modern American poets like Ginsberg and Bynner. Anaya makes himself a textbook example of how New Mexico’s writers have been affected by outsiders from the east. He relishes beatnik-like bi-lingual obscenities, exposing Osiris and Isis as incestuous lovers, and describing their cosmic fellatio. But he also has a deep respect for place and for the local legends he was raised on. His mission is conservative, aimed at the preservation of old customs. The poem moves among the old villages of Española and Los Altos, Puyé, Las Cruces. The effect of this confluence is sincere and meaningful:

History repeats itself.
Keep well in mind the law of repetition.
We live in the ancient Egyptian time.
Their myths are ours.
The Rio Grande is the Blue Nile.
They sought to prolong life. The soul
returned to seek the flesh, they thought.
Mummified flesh.
We seek to prolong life,
We have fallen in love with the flesh
and believe it will last forever.

In Albuquerque, we all read Anaya’s fantastic bildungsroman Bless Me, Ultima in high school. He’s our unofficial laureate, and “Isis in the Heart,” though uneven, is a worthy testament to the spirit of New Mexican poetry.

At least, until it is compared to Nathaniel Tarn’s “The Great Odor of Summer” which attempts to explain its own revisionary mythopoetics as a natural process:

I am interested in those who begin at the beginning
philosophers in caves             playing with light and shadow
[…]
                  while we select the America we are dreaming
and the great elegy that the world is writing for itself
                              in silence somewhere

Tarn’s imagination for remaking America gives us something infinitely richer than Anaya’s, and is the closest this anthology comes to great poetry.

*****

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. He's exhibited his photography and paintings in Boston, Russia, and Mexico. What he can't publish elsewhere he posts on his blog, The Fugue Aesthetics of J.H. Stotts. He finished an 'inauspicious' shotgun anthology of Russian poetry, from Fet to Esenin to Ryzhii, in formal and experimental translations and is currently at work on a selected poems of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, to come out in '09 from Whale and Star Press.

UNBECOMING BEHAVIOR by KATE COLBY

2008-12-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

DENISE DOOLEY Reviews

Unbecoming Behavior by Kate Colby
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2008)


                                           Triangulate from every point

                                     to divine the solar plexus

Kate Colby's Unbecoming Behavior examines Jane Bowles’ biography through an imaginative parsing of sensory detail, autobiographical detail and critique of creative process. The long poem is as engaging and resonant as the subject matter is rich.

Bowles’ standard story is all ex-pat american trainwreck Woman Writer, and the familiarity of the narrative arc is eerie and irritating. Colby splices Bowles’ life together with her own and capitalizes on the scattered energies of life-retold-as-cliché -- successful writer husband, writers block, and creative depression. The biography is a fulcrum rather than a focus, centering the reflective charge of Colby's drive to reimagine. We follow the poet ''I'':

The summer I was seven, the gypsy
moths infested, caterpillars wriggled
from the sky, tangled in my ratty
hair, formed knots, crawling skin,
shivers, peristaltic on the sidewalk.

Then follow a shift to third person with Jane Bowles:

[I am]
negatively geotropic

                  Caterpillars gather periodically,

                  climb to the tips of branches

                  and dangle from silk threads,

                  catch the wind to a new location

                  in a practice called ''ballooning.''

Jane refuses majoun
lest things begin to flicker
in the corner of her eye,

And so on, back and forth, in a tensile and expanding structure compounded by transchronologic confusions. Transitions are high points throughout the poem, with moth larvae swinging toward Jane's surrender to transience. The passage of time poses questions of influence: can the imagined future ''poet I'' critic enter the scene at the edge of the poet’s own sight, a hovering audience? And when does considering predecessors shade into weird narcissism? It’s a vein of nervous energy that Colby mines to great effect. Why are you interested in crazy Jane Bowles, with her awful personal narratives a bigger story than her stories?

in dreams
i understudy
others' eyes.

There are many reasons, and Colby takes them on in a high risk interrogation: how embarrassing-cliche to work on an acknowledged and berated cliche, embarrassing-juvenile to mobilize the fascination with lineage and lady-author role models, embarrassing-pompous to set one’s creative autobiography against acclaimed and mythologized biography. Unbecoming Behavior confronts these fills the reductive frame with strange and strong language.

Colby's interrogation of her own methods proves the core of the book: ''Consider yourself / at home in this poem...''. but shortly thereafter we are asked: '' Are you lost / yet / in syntactic gymnastics. ''
cannibalizing my own
cast-off poems, I am
the mother of necessity

She clears a space for bare, resonant phrasing:

netted: future
husband

fetid
honey bucket
           crackling

                                                 palmettos

How to out-do what happens
to be true. To be cancelled.

                  Crest, meet trough,

                  I am nothing if not

                  oyster crackers.

The parallels develop toward criticism and the rigor gives the reveries spine. Colby interrupts a series of east coast family memories (“... lures of lobster buoys”. . . “tiny wicket / ring around / the Cape shaped house”) to discount them:
-- over here futzing
...
Must keep moving
always letting
left hand know what right's doing.
...
-- cut, cue curtain

                  and back

                                                 to whats after

                                                 these messages

                                                  (building my brand

                                                 of historic invention.)

The cuts and cues are graceful, as is Colby’s entire project of spliced sound, color, and ventriloquized experience. Unbecoming Behavior seeks a new motion within the reductive biography narrative-arc. Rejecting analogy (“things that ring /false, like similies”) in favor of assonance and repetition, the poem layers reflective description and sound to craft multiple images with thoughts rolling from source to source.

Thematic repetition is more open than symmetrical pairings. When the pairings outgrow their constraints they develop instead to a multiplicity of echoes, like splitting branches. Instead of Bowles is to Colby, it becomes Colby is to Bowles is to Cherifa is to Jim Thompson, etc. In forging this model based in repetition, and in making beautiful work of faulty legacy, Unbecoming Behavior puts a confrontation with literary legacy to work. What emerges is a startling and energetic new form, built of language that is both perceptive and as foreign as a story you invent yourself.

[* I thought knowledge of Bowles biography and Colby's other works opened the poem up and made the reading more rewarding, but be warned that Colby advises it’s not necessary. Interview at http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008_03_012506.php .]

*****

Denise Dooley lives in Rogers Park, Chicago. She writes poetry and fiction and works in science education outreach at Northwestern.

WORLD0 and NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING by JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN

2008-12-17T15:45:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT Engages

WORLD0 by John Bloomberg-Rissman
(Leafe Press & Bamboo Books, Nottingham, U.K. & Culver City, CA, 2007)

and

NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING by John Bloomberg-Rissman
(Leafe Press, Nottingham, U.K., 2007)

Giving It Up To JB-R: An Engagement

Ecstasies (whether religious, political, artistic or sexual) often have the common denominator of self-surrender. Self-surrender, William James famously pointed out in The Varieties of Religious Experience, is a requirement of any conversion experience: the so-called giving up of oneself to a higher power.

Ideas of self-surrender are at the heart of my thinking about my relationship to John Bloomberg-Rissman’s poetry-writing, and at the heart of what I have come to believe about his method.

JB-R is the proprietor of the blog Zeitgeist Spam , a website where he mainly publishes work of his own which is derived from the work of others. Yes, Mr. Bloomberg-Rissman is an appropriation-artist, a writer who harvests notes from others to turn into music of his own.

He’s borrowed from my own work on occasion, perhaps most notably in the sequence which opens World0. All of the zombie references in that piece have in some way been culled from my “Little Book of Zombie Poems.” Which JB-R freely acknowledges. He cites that from which he has taken—both at his website (where much of the work first appeared)—and in the books.

I have to confess that when I first noticed JB-R was making use of my work I had qualms. Here’s the thing though: there was no disrespect in what he was producing. The poems he was writing were as good or better than what he was clipping from. That recognition gave me pause. It shook me a little that he’s so good at what he does.

John Bloomberg-Rissman is a remarkable poet who makes work anew from the work of others. Drawing from already existing writing to make one’s own poetry must function as both a constraint and as a liberating experience for him. In surrendering an idea of the self as author who creates ex nihilo, JB-R is freed up to participate in the potential communality of all thought and culture. And I, as one whose work has been dipped into, can learn a lot from him. For all my labors in the vineyard of poetry, it is not as if any of the words I’ve employed have ever belonged to me in the first place.

*****

Tom Beckett is the author of This Poem/What Speaks?/A Day (Otoliths), Unprotected Texts (Meritage Press), and the curator of the E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S interview series (Otoliths). He is currently working on a year long conversation-in-writing with Geof Huth.

THE SINGERS by LOGAN RYAN SMITH

2008-12-16T23:55:00.000-08:00

MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Reviews

The Singers by Logan Ryan Smith
(Dusie, Switzerland, 2007)

Body of Whirl: In the sonic vertigoes of Logan Ryan Smith’s The Singers

“Your life as uncoordinated bridge-worker” (9) is the first line of Logan Smith Ryan’s The Singers; it sucked me in, daring me into that particular employee’s uncoordinated reflexes. This notion of being uncoordinated brings to mind synapses and neurons that have failed to transmit critical information to the brain. What’s wrong with this bridge-worker? Is he or she on crack? An alcoholic? Surely, one must take any available employment one is qualified, in order to survive, however uncoordinated one feels about one’s reflexes. But despite this handicap, the view down there must be exhilarating from that bridge-worker’s point of reference up that bridge, closer to the sky, above the landscape and its sea, movements down there of frenetic humanity, civilization’s desires, hectic on cars, buses, trains, and this, this bridge that would extend that frenzy, into other exhaustions. The imagination sees many things here, stimulating entities beneath, especially the unconscious, waking up sensations that only surface during moments of profound imbalance, equilibrium loss, and other gravity-defying postures. But when Smith puts our world today in that mental space, one is ushered not into a body that has the comparable nature of whirlwind or whirlpool, but something else, a body of whirl into internal rhythms dancing in music of fragmentations, inaudible repetitions, but clearly sonic, like songs one chants in meditation, intense awake consciousness, away from dreams.

This body of whirl is in the everyday, the materiality of our quotidian, especially the density of its memory. That’s why legends and icons in history walk in the streets of that everyday and is interrogated, especially “ghosts trying to sell you something” (23): “Elvis, what happened? Did the voices hurt your head?/Where you strung out strung to the bow?” (23). What Elvis has been trying to sell is his legend, and the everyday eats it like convenient fast food on a corner mall. But these icons in culture are relevant, because they seize something in time, record sensibilities, document intensities. Now remember that tax man, of short stature, trying to inch through a crowd to see Jesus, could not move through that crowd, and eventually climbed up a sycamore tree, where Jesus would see him, and the Messiah ended up being at the tax collector’s house? Yes, Smith remembers his Bible stories, and gives us Zacchaeus as signifier of a nagging bureau in our daily taxed purchases: “We count on him calling in every day” (82). But the tax collector is, indeed, just a pretext, before we stumble into Jesus. But it’s not Christ’s face we see and feel, but his left wrist: “To be the pulse in the left wrist of the crucified Christ!” (87). Indeed, Jesus Christ was the pulse of the left in his time; his crucifixion was the right’s manifestation of his extreme leftist-ness. Pontius Pilate, the sometime centrist, saw something in Christ; but his power is the people, he couldn’t stand the idea he’s the only powerful figure who saw the innocence in Christ. And so Pilate washed his hands of that whole affair, because, clearly, as Logan echoes: “No one wants to be Jesus” (87). But everybody wants the Messiah’s story, both the reason of, and resistance of conquests, and becomes synonymous with time, bookmarking civilization as B.C. or A.D.

The Singers has four parts. But the absence of title for each part becomes, for me, a pretext to view the text as one continuous song, from first to last page, especially that there are no individual titles that clearly indicate individual poems, in each part. However, these four divisions do alert the reader that there is a movement or are movements in the narrative, although these movements do not necessarily have to be viewed as progression, perhaps one determined by a structured system. For now though, I could not fairly determine what that system is; maybe I’d detect that in my nth reading in the future, months, or years ahead. But in terms of movement not as progression but simply movement, what I did notice is that the parts somehow move and float towards each other, not like clashing tectonic plates expecting explosive friction, but rather as individual masses moving into each other without one dissolving and disappearing in the world and power of the other. I think this is what sonic experience is about, in poetry and music, at least; there’s a sort of culmination of movements in the listener’s imagination, a sorting out that can evolve into a unique harmony for that listener’s experience, harmony that can then bleed into insight, force, education, prognostications, or, of course, inspiration; and if there is dissonance in the level of cognition, that cannot necessarily be a negative element but rather an indelible element towards a perception of equilibrium in the listener’s imagination.

Now while there are no indications of poem-titles in the book, one notices that at the bottom of certain pages are dedications: for Armand F. Capanna II (79), for Helen Lhim (59), for Jared Hayes (77), for Jen Rogers (76), for Lauren Shufran (61), just to name a few, including the legendary Ben Fong-Torres (71) who used to write for the Rolling Stone since the magazine’s inception. One simply assumes these names are signifiers of friendship in Smith’s life. But the names can appear to become titles themselves, not of a particular part of The Singers as continuous song per se, but rather of unique rhythms in that song, indications that one is perhaps in ‘andante’ mode or that the next is ‘allegro.’ I would like to assume these indications can characterize Logan’s bond with these persons, or the other singers within The Singers, who were Smith’s muses for his song.

In one of the book’s blurbs, Kevin Killian writes that “Music and its family of allied arts reigns high in the world Logan Ryan Smith has carved for his Singers. Dance and ritual act as counterforces to the martial law the poem has been written under, in this time of Iraq incursion that touches every aspect of our lives.” The term ‘Iraq’ continues to be a loaded term in the vocabulary of any language, in our world today. In a way, the term ‘Iraq’ seems to dominate the other loaded terms in his blurb, especially competing and overwhelming the seriousness in ‘counterforces,’ and even making the phrase ‘martial law’ a somewhat innocent, abstract idea, because its essence is still waiting to be attached to a particular proper noun. But there’s power in the tactility of the proper noun ‘Iraq,’ in our imagination, even if we haven’t been there, because what has been going on there today trickles down to us through the intricate tributaries of politics, bureaucracy, journalism, or the internet, and, therefore, pervasively penetrates our daily livelihood. Thus, in Killian’s blurb, the idea and reality that is Iraq becomes a critical point of reference, in assessing perceptions of Smith’s The Singers; in this regard, this piece can be viewed as ritual to the gods of war, peace, and resistance. It’s not a singular ritual, but rather a collection of rituals [“Gather together. Count and call” (9).], an assemblage that evolves into and revolves in calculated schizophrenia, ecstasy in frenzy, an unstoppable whirl, a vertigo that has serious propositions with infinity. Thus, when we hear in the last pages a voice that wants to let go [“Give me another turn. From here. Let me pass” (99).], we hear the tone of a plea, one that is begging for emancipation. On the other hand, one does wonder why this feeling of being trapped, enclosed, filled and inundated with forces that can only be exorcised in dense memories, where one’s sense of direction has been abolished: “I’ve got no compass and no sense of direction and so I’m already lost;/You can trust me. To begin again. Somewhere else” (99).

There were times I felt like being in different hang-outs on a weekend, club-hopping to this club and that bar, while reading The Singers; there are no puking episodes here, because of too much alcohol and such, but just the energy from one night to the other determining the narrative, especially on a Friday night dance and orgy when I feel like an uncoordinated bridge-worker, conscious I might fall somewhere beyond the dance-floor. And yes, there is a fall, a fall into the black-hole of a mouth, of fierce-lion neons, into their sonic resplendence, mixed hip-hop techno, remixed rap concertos, muted, blasted, vertiginous like an eternal mantra; the weekend days move, are lost, with no sense of direction, or rather the convention that is direction, that which characterizes the materiality of civilizations, but perhaps not the empires in the soul that do not have twilights, the immanent spirit we fall into in song.

*****

Michael Caylo-Baradi lives in Southern California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in XCP:Streetnotes, Tertulia Magazine, OurOwnVoice, and PopMatters.com. He occasionally contributes op-ed pieces to The Daily Californian and the Los Angeles Daily News.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS by JOAN RETALLACK

2008-12-16T23:50:00.000-08:00

WENDY LYNN COHEN Reviews

How To Do Things With Words by Joan Retallack
(Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1998)

“How to Do Things with Words”

How To Do Things With Words (Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1998), evokes an anticipation of something fresh, innovative, and unique on the landscape of modern writing. The title of Joan Retallack’s book denotes things visual, providing the key clue that this is not conventional poetry. Indeed, throughout my first reading of the book, I thought, “this woman must love mistakes, and little oddities,” only to find shortly after that Retallack is “a maker of novel devices… accused of loving too much the pathos of the typo…” (http://www.washingtonreview.online.com/retallack_words_review.htm, Jordan Davis, October 2, 2001).

Joan Retallack is a pioneer, a rebel, like the Fauvist painters at the turn of the 1900’s, who broke away from the conservatives of the French Academe. Called the Wild Beasts, they used intense, brilliant color in matchless applications to everyday objects, shaking things up. The Fauve movement comprised the best-loved painters of the 20th century, and was precursor to the Cubists, who gave depth and dimension to a traditionally flat, two-dimensional art. It might be construed to have been the parent to all the rebel arts in the last century -- giving artists the models with which to move out to the farthest wall in order to break through. The verbal and visual artists mentioned in this book were well known for pushing the envelope a great deal in their time, and in their individual “movement” -- and we hear their voices underneath echoing in these poems.

Retallack is clearly a visual poet, driven by the look of a page and the physical configuration of a written work -- her witty and playful experimentation prove a dedication to this seemingly formless structure. However, while looking for visual images -- the way words play across the page, whole and part words, broken in odd places -- Retallack the writer is also focusing on the words, presenting them tangibly in new ways precisely to be heard. She invents new forms, but rather than strictly for a specific visual or aural purpose she creates combinations of spaces and sounds. Thus, she is also a language poet.

The pages that comprise “Shakespeare was a Woman” most evidence the poet’s visual interest and skill. They also reflect the quote from a May, 1999, interview stating “the notion of genius is a masculine construction…one of large-scale power and authority…a particular kind of charisma -- a visceral connection between you and…smaller scale beings drawn to find meaning and direction…it’s an eruptive notion…I experience my energy as exchange…”

then            appointed            no hope
then            no hope            of
barren place & fertile            the ditty does            virtue
barren place            the dog            the ditty
no hope            -ey’d            appointed

[Editor's Note: In the above poem-excerpt, the words are presented in straighter columns than I can do with the Blogger format.]

These are words and phrases that as easily stand by themselves as connect to the others, on the page they share and pages that follow. They can be read across, down, up and seen as whole complete pieces within a larger-framework or as a continuum. At best, there are 10 phrases in total that repeat, are redrawn, and break down.

This search for language and experimentation is most evident in poems like “ditto Marcel Duchamps? ditto ditto Gertrude Stein?”, where the poet creates different forms (interview/prose/more than one story concept within the confines of an eight-page poem), presents varied concepts/viewpoints, uses unusual fonts to create and cross boundaries; and intersperses Arabic numbers, mathematical formulas, and other languages (including Astrological and alchemical symbols), with diverse factoids. She plainly offers stylistic homage, in several poems, to some of our best-known bohemian artists and writers -- Duchamps and Stein, as well as William Burroughs, and modern painter, Francis Bacon.

In “Here’s Looking At You Francis Bacon”, she creates an image that reminds you of Russian puzzle dolls -- an image inside an image inside an image, ad infinitum. The visuals are further compacted by literal hairline borders around the text. Some boxes have longer text than others, lopping off segments with different meanings -- but it all comes down to Descartes’ famous line -- “therefore I am.” Such poems required enormous amounts of strategy, development, and thoughtfulness.

"On the metro the man across the
aisle began all his sen
tences with "I prophecy" (p. 135)

[Editor's Note: the above poem-excerpt is featured within a box not replicable within Blogger format.]

…Missouri Fox Trotter is a three gaited horse Mars was 36.5 million miles from earth on
September 21, 1988 inside the house is a man inside the man is a brain inside the brain a box a woman inside the woman a brain inside the brain a house inside the house a man inside the man a brain inside the brain a bet on a Missouri Fox Trotter names Mars Prophesy…(pg 136)

. . . . . . . fox-trotting across the page
into the experiment in the woods the
house the woman the man the box
the brain the joke with therefore I am

[Editor's Note: the above stanzas are each featured within a box not replicable within Blogger format. The first box is also placed against the page closer to the page's right edge, rather than as shown above one directly atop the other.]

Moving inward one step at a time like those dolls (though size here is not an issue) to uncover each thought….

The London interview with Retellack informs us how real life chance drives her work, how she incorporates all of the arts to it. Strong knowledge of painting, music and other genres in writing, and a “guerilla theatre” background, provide us with a broader awareness of the writer’s politics and poetry. This might mirror the densely layered work of Bacon.

Her title suggests that she plays with words, building non-sense. It is not nonsensical, or lacking structure; this work is a definite and concerted desire to see what forms develop from chance, while making sense out what appears to be its opposite. Though some of this work is clearly ear candy, not all of the poems in this book are easily understood read aloud. Some pieces cannot possibly be spoken -- these works lose whatever inherent impact they offer because they are clearly meant for the eye alone to grasp meaning.

Joan Retallack is very skilled at doing things with words; her mind is playful as is her use of image -- these are neither mere pictographs nor do these poems turn to simple icon. Clever plays on words and puns -- “notes from the specific rim” (subtitle of “BE ING & NO TH’ ING NESS”) -- and constructed words like “mythunderstanding” make you chuckle aloud (especially if you lisp as I do), while pondering, in the poem “AID/I/SAPPEARANCE”, the slow and torturous death of a close friend, to a final wasting away. Retallack’s question is a lone consonant, a ‘Y’, followed by a list of numbers with no words attached, and no answers offered.

Retallack is quoted in the Olsen interview in discussing the focus of so much of her work “…it’s not that information or the use of language to give information are excluded from my poetics, it’s that …we have to bring language into the dynamic exchange…doing things other than giving information in addition to giving information, in complex multiplication of information.”

The writer has strong modernist sensibilities that cannot be ignored. Her awareness of vital present-day issues pervades to show that not all the work is diversion. This book is all about meaning -- “every code both rational and arbitrary” -- yet no two people will see the same things in this book.

*****

Wendy Lynn Cohen is a writer and editor currently living in Los Angeles, California. Cohen is a graduate of Antioch University Los Angeles baccalaureate Creative Writing program in 2002. She continues to freelance for multi-disciplined commercial writing/editing/design projects, while executing varied creative fiction and non-fiction projects. In 2007, Cohen edited, The Devil Made Me Do it, a memoir of a renowned 1970’s film actress. She aided the self-published author in designing the book, its cover, and marketing its initial launch in mid-2008, garnering a coveted NPR interview and book signing at Book Soup, one of LA’s foremost independent book stores. Though not specifically a poet, her love of poetry was greatly heightened in an all-involving “…reading-poetry-is-reviewing course…[whose] syllabi were recognized by [the] National Book Critics Circle as innovative courses.”

PLAYING THE AMPLITUDES by CHRISTOPHER RIZZO

2008-12-16T23:45:00.000-08:00

LARS PALM Reviews

Playing the Amplitudes by Christopher Rizzo
(BlazeVOX e-book, 2008)

When I started sketching this text I sat with my morning coffee listening to a radio program/essay on (Max) Ernst. This is probably not a coincidence. Rizzo's first long book is brimming with extraliterary references, all given by last name only; Duchamp, Mingus, Coltrane, Mozart, Davis. It's no coincidence that these are some (or most) of the people referenced in the poems of Playing the Amplitudes. I am surprised not to have found Braxton among them. But as this is just the beginning stages of a great career he may well be around later.

So what may you, dear reader, expect when you open the pdf recently published by Gatza's BlazeVOX? If you're not already familiar with the poems of Rizzo, the first thing may well be confusion. That's quite normal & nothing to be afraid of. & it will mostly pass. Then you will probably want to read the poems aloud to yourself &/ or your significant other, should one be around. & that's when they might start opening up to you

Here we go and there you go, as in again,
say somebody took out the wager and never
came back.

Thus opens the first poem, by the way titled I Can't Get Started. It reminds me of when NoMeansNo played in a small venue in Malmö a few years ago & they were milling about on stage for a while until one of them said ”Well, we might as well begin then.”

& then they made wonderful noise for something like three very short hours. Rizzo does something like that, using logical leaps & lacunas, word-play, rhythmical shifts. As in Rifftide

Took scoops in blahs, ratcheted down
rhizomes, skimped on cumin to zero and steeled.
Such or else the intensity out of work
and order rebellion with strapped signage
the artifice of dying with your pants on
in the park, the hammer blights
for arson, lit up and downed
marionette minions, all the cool you could chow.
Nibble gable picks and find yourself
shunting in July, pitch clung poppers
star humming a bored infinity, nil the real
so anybody to turn out
the lights on the blot of polis, the scat
blat of city, a country called my, innuendoes
for extinguishers and the sigh
of unsightly, not human but humane
the hump day our communal
plight, bombs bursting in riffles.

Me thinking about NoMeansNo when engaging with this book is no coincidence. The Vancouver-based trio works on the fringes of the HC-scene mostly playing quirky expansive, apparently improvisational & deeply political punk & have been doing so for something like 25 years, on one occasion closing an album with two interesting covers; first Davis's Bitch's Brew & then the Ramones' Beat on the Brat. Rizzo works on the fringes of what? Himself? His senses? Maybe. In a literary context maybe the surrealists, dada, Black Mountain, the beats, langpo? Most certainly. But also, & more about that later, all the commercial & political nonlanguage that surrounds us. Which brings us to what I see as a political dimension in Rizzo's writing. Apart, of course, from my favourite notion that the writing of poetry in & of itself is a political activity, in that there is so little money in it that it could be seen as an actively non-capitalist act. In all this dazzling fireworks there is manifest a will & an attempt to reclaim language, to infuse it with (non)sense, meaning &, may i venture, life. & at times we reach a clearing, where the poem opens in, often, two-word sentences. As about half-way into So What

Nice asinine. At nine. Hip crush.
Flick look. Back in. Have gun.
Will go. Read smear. Say what.

& with this we exit the Breaks which is the first part of the book. & a strong opening indeed. & with an interesting epigraph by Ralph Ellison

“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.”

The last sentence could be said to be valid for the whole book, not just the first part. The third part, Zone, is fascinating. 10 loose sonnets of observed language, ”billboard taglines, road signs, bumper stickers, etc” (as he writes in a note to the sequence), written on an approximately four hours long bus trip. Nothing added. & yet the language is very Rizzo. I call on the second one to serve as example

Apportioned diamond – proud to be an American –
Motors project – mile police – only you know
long view pioneer – south speed music
wanted and available – wines and lodging – tiger
next press show turns – Tom Western –
open shell – attractions one way north –
maintenance designs – home office
exit – charburger yes we’re open liquors –
office dialysis – WWII banquet – Angelo’s
Old South Street lot – long term other –
stop stop in – pan staff – hours wanted the people –
sub pots – anytime SooRa – Lucky Nails –
market limit – parking for gas – center time deliveries–
laser grandstands entering and left –

Here we are in the midst of the commercial & political nonlanguage. Displayed on its own terms, arranged into this poetic structure. & stripped of its original contexts. In this new context some strange things happen to the phrases. They turn into poetry. They take on meaning(s) heretofore unknown to them. They remain political but they lose what little commercial value they had. Instead they may be seen as a scathing critique of a completely commercialized landscape. For example. Or as showing a fascination with this (to a european quite surreal) landscape of billboards, road signs & bumper stickers. Anyway it's clear that the political content of the phrases changes dramatically. This becomes even clearer when reading the whole sequence quickly. The cumulative effect is really strong. & it's an exciting contemporary take on the sonnet

With this I ruthlessly leap to Muthos Lingos, the sixth & last part of the book. In doing so I skip past the fifth part, Of Sound Mind, a wonderful & rich four-page prose poem which would warrant its own engagement. But onward now & into I'm Feeling a Little Irony which ends

All this information, and I still know
nothing for noting for knotting up such messes.
Show me the money, Dr. Quietude,
I’m feeling frisked yet quite alone.
War? What fucking war? History’s done
like lunch by a swami. Before you know it, finis
and oracles come cheap, armies
of exegetes with ink on their paws or–
did someone say Schnapps?

What to say about all this information, other than Schnapps? Here Rizzo covers quite a lot of ground, as he often does in the poems in this book. From information through confusion to the Silliman division of (mostly) north american poetry, back to politics (yes, it may be hard to keep track of all the wars) to Fukuyama's end-of-history nonsense & on. & can swamis cook? Aren't they supposedly too lofty for such worldly endeavours? About half-way into No-No we are asked

Language, how language?

& I have no idea how to answer that, except maybe “green”, or “jumping”, or with the phrase ending Dear Marks, the last poem of the book & thus ending the whole of Playing the Amplitudes as well as this text

Hey Capital, sell this.

*****

Lars Palm likes to run off to subtropical islands when winter sets in. he has written some poems & will write some more & he runs ungovernable press.

BOX OF LIGHT / CAJA DE LUZ by SUSAN GARDNER

2008-12-16T23:40:00.000-08:00

KAREN AN-HWEI LEE Reviews

Box of Light/Caja de Luz by Susan Gardner
(Red Mountain Press, Santa Fe, NM, 2008)

Susan Gardner’s Box of Light/Caja de Luz, graced by the author’s own photograph of a stained glass detail from Nantes Cathedral in France, is a colorful volume of eloquent Spanish and English poems. Spanish versions appear on the left-hand pages and English on the right. The “Author’s Note” is shy of denoting, however, whether the Spanish or English versions are originals: “Some of these poems were first composed in English; the rest were originally written in Spanish. It has been interesting to try to capture the sense and sound of the original language in the second. Moving between languages is moving between cultures; the poems are cousins rather than twins.” With points of origin and translation therefore elusive, I read each poem as an original, and each pair as a doubled origin—a binary star of sorts—with parallel trajectories into Gardner’s imagination.

The volume includes Gardner’s own ink drawings, calligraphic strokes of brush and pen depicting hands at rest, dancers, string instruments, or pure rhythm. Roaming through the flora and fauna of the American southwest, or the mesmerizing valences of desert life, Gardener is an artist of atmosphere. Her style is unpretentious, austere, yet various. The subject matter ranges from “Shakuhachi” or a Japanese bamboo flute to “El Nivel de Polen/Pollen Count” and the ethereal “Virga:”

En Nuevo México virga es la lluvia
que no llega nunca a la tierra.

In New Mexico virga is rain
that never reaches the ground.

The geometry of her transparencies bring to mind lex parsimoniae, or the law of parsimony, as in lines from “Deseos Nocturnos/Desires in the Night:” “La noche es bella / fresca, oscura, limpia . . . The night is beautiful / cool, dark, clear,” or the azure dragonfly in “Al Pie de Black Mesa/Below Black Mesa” who is “azul y valiente/blue and brave.” Consider the sparse rhythms of “Reunion/Homecoming:”

Lluvia nocturna en las ventanas

Té de salvia
                  -- el vapor a la deriva --
                  -- transparente --

lentamente
suelta su fragancia.

Night rain on the windows

                  Sage tea --
                                    steam drifting transparently --

slowly slowly
releases its fragrance.

With Gardner’s ink illustrations at silent intervals, the poems recall the dark ferramenta or heavy metal frames dividing each section of stained glass where every opening in the traceried window is called light. Gardner’s style, tone, and subject matter, however, are not limited to any particular realm of illumination. She variously focuses upon an “Apron Story,” “Multimedia,” and “Acrobatics.” Here, for instance, is a whimsical list of flavor-words for chocolate, in two tongues:

Chocolate con
almendras, avellanas, pasas, ciruelas,
frambuesas, naranjas, mandarinas,
vino, café, té, chile

Chocolate with
almonds, filberts, raisins, prunes,
raspberries, oranges, tangerines,
wine, coffee, tea, chile

Gardner’s syllables, round as stream pebbles, are reminiscent of Albert Einstein’s paraphrase of Occum’s razor: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” Although the English-language poems are slightly familiar in phrasing at times, the lovely cousinship of two languages -- Spanish and English -- may be compared to the song of a musical instrument whose two strings, bowed or plucked, resonate with others in rich harmonic overtones (“Tocando la viola/Playing the Viola”):

Un cuerpo envuelto aldrededor del sinuoso espacio
tenso, brillante

A body wrapped around the sinuous space
taut, shining

The musical vowels of her poetry give us a quiet assurance centered upon domestic spaces and natural settings, each word hovering in its own luminous space, although some poems hint occasionally at unrest, violence, and global conflict (“Condiciones Desestabilizadas/Unsettled Conditions”):

avisos en los lagos grandes
turbulencia en la atmosfera alta

Cualquier tiempo es el tiempo
de hacer la guerra.

large lakes advisory
turbulence in the upper atmosphere

Any time is the time
to go to war.

As a silver stain painted on a piece of glass is fired to permanence—yellow to orange, amber or brown—each poem bleeds moods, tones, and hues in subtle ripples and depths. The title poem, “Caja de Luz/Box of Light,” opens the volume with this locus of quiet prescience: “I put my memories of the future in this box of light.” To a certain extent, the wit and wisdom of Gwendolyn Brooks arise in my mind, and her unadorned truth that “poetry is life distilled.”

*****

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004). She lives and teaches on the West Coast, where she is a novice harpist.

WALDEN BOOK by ALLEN BRAMHALL

2008-12-16T23:35:00.000-08:00

JEFF HARRISON Reviews

Walden Book by Allen Bramhall
(The Greying Ghost, Mass., 2008)

Although the prose poems of Allen Bramhall's Walden Book require, by virtue of sentences like verse lines amid sentences like journal entries or speech, replication, not excerption, commentary has its own requirement: the interspersion of selections from one author's writing with transcribed selections of another author's reading. Bramhall's marvelous use of stops for pacing is but adumbrated in a review (all quotation marks in this review are mine):

"taxonomy relaxes the boundaries, and everyone dies to learn more. these racing cars (Route 2) enforce the latest. mind where you roam, percipient one. endless delivery is a love of place." (from "Map This")

I report there are recurring characters in Walden Book, among them Thoreau, Walden Pond, Walden's visitors, and, Walden's other, perhaps initial, genius loci, the pond monster.

"when the monstrous benthic beast resumes its search, climbing from the water with dripping approach, the crowds will yawn thru all the hot weekend. the monstrosity will invent Henry again and the world will spin thru new acres of space. every dimension has a confusing edge that needs to be viewed from the side. when time bends and space circles on itself, we become enthralled in matters of vocabulary." (from "Monstrous Walden")

Circling is another recurrence in this book.

"Thoreau's ghost makes a rare appearance everyday. smile when you see that he has been laughing inwardly. you can throw a rock on his memorial cairn, or screw it, invent a new tree. oh the passing train feels a sadness, but heads on down the line." (from "Walden Pond In Rain")

"Thoreau moved on, circling. doesn't that sound familiar?" (from "Lone Piper At Dawn (Thursday Morn)")

Bramhall writes of the community landscape sometimes calls for and sometimes provides:

"we want to look at the sequestered water, and fit it into our plans. blithe citizens, we are free to fall out of trees, free to stare at stones. the dialogue between tree leaf and sunlight broadens our universe one molecule at a time. this dynamic fit shakes us to our very soul, tho no soul could contend with the definitions we have depended on to outlast the coming sunset." (from "Walden Will Remain")

One must note Nature, and one may, with Allen Bramhall, give at least as much attention to the Nature poetry depicts itself as sharing with the world:

"the pond pours out a siren of wet nature, and seems so reckless. from the hill across the street, the sight of the damp instigation is a ritual among trees." (from "When Beth Sees Walden")

"the sparkling sunset last summer held on and now, listen, the rainfall agrees. oh such public poetry, placed just so. I love that very act." (from "Rational Pond In Concord")

As do I! This is another necessary and desired book by Allen Bramhall.

"going and coming are just two ways of saying the world is green and green and greener still." (from "Walden Will Remain")

*****

Jeff Harrison reviewed books in GR #8, GR #9, and GR #10. Some of his poems can be read here. You are welcome to visit Antic View.

BONE PAGODA by SUSAN TICHY

2008-12-16T23:32:00.000-08:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

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

Revisiting both collective and personal memories of the Vietnam War, Susan Tichy’s Bone Pagoda opens immediately with a very strong and evocative statement, delivered in a rather arresting epistolary style:

Mang Thit River, February 2000

I would call the poem What I Did Not See. It would begin in the multiplied shade of the outdoor restaurant, the one we came to lost, and accidental, ten hours on the water, our interpreter already tired of the whole thing. The edge of the poem would be its bamboo fence, that and a hand-made roof, patched with plastic where it had to be, enlisted in the cause of something real: a sense of place, a sense of time, the body sweating in its plastic chair, holding out for a cold beer, or a slight rhyme. To write this I would need a photograph, to know the man wore a loose clean shirt, with a neat hem, and would, in the ordinary course of things, stand not quite to your shoulder.
(From ‘‘Couplet’’, p. 1)

Subtly, the poet sets an elegiac tone for a difficult subject that means to her more than personal importance: Vietnam War. Her elegiac voice is not simply elegiac, however, since what that she writes about are true emotions, honest observations, as well as profound interrogations arising from losses. Losses that are painful and for quite a long time, repressed.

Bone Pagoda is essentially a book of poems that resounds with catastrophic losses of bodies, spaces, and ideals related to the Vietnam War. ‘‘If you are not war what are you? say’’ is a line that appears both at the beginning and the end; it defines most of the work’s spirits and theme. What strikes most is the poet’s choice of aesthetics in rendering the verb ‘‘say’’ towards more dramatic nuances : tell, dictate, state, specify, cry, scream, moan, order… The unexpected swings in tempo and rhythm adds to the drama beneath the words. Short and long verses are syncopated with one-word utterances, or interrupted by collages of registered quotations from various individuals evoking their war memories. Such an arrangment has a felt effect on language and energy: the poems can read by themselves, and do not need to be read in order to read, for they have a real voice that speaks.

‘‘To articulate the past historically,’’ Walter Benjamin emphasizes, ‘‘means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger… to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.’’ (Theses on the Philosophy of History, p. 255) That Susan Tichy has decided upon a collage form to present the different voices speaking about the Vietnam War seems to be an effort that advocates Benjamin’s belief. The collage that Tichy has created in ‘‘Street’’, for example, flashes up different moments of danger, in which different voices counterpoint on the same page. A precise fragment of memory is preserved in each voice, although all voices do not originate from a common chronology:

‘Develop discord,’ Hoover said
And I distort, disjunct, obey

‘In this stage of structured confrontation’
Speech comprised of equal parts
…

‘Maintain a level of violence in the language’
The bombing, I mean, etcetera

‘So you can’t ever exactly lose’
…

‘For peace for human love’
Burned himself

To death on the steps
Of the Pentagon

O Plain imperfect small machine

‘Men do not sham’
‘Bombing that little pissant country up there’

‘As long as art is mimetic
It is loss’
(From ‘‘Street’’, p.38-39)

The last borrowed voice from the above-mentioned extract is particularly poignant: it suggests that articulating a memory or an emotion related to the war can never possibly be as oblique as one thinks. ‘‘Words carved are a metaphor/ I can’t read can touch’’ (‘‘Swerve’’, p. 50). Should this be true, Tichy’s endeavor in piecing together voices — both haunting and alive —‘‘assorted pieces of trash/ And scrap metal picked from their bodies’’ (‘‘River’’, p. 63) is therefore a considerable act of courage.

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain publishes poetry and non-fiction under the nom-de-plume, Greta Aart. Some of her poetry are forthcoming in New Politics, Santa Clara Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, etc. Also a musician and theatre artist, she is currently an editor (Poetry/Non-fiction) of Emprise Review. She lives in Paris, France. (fionasze.com)