GALATEA RESURRECTS, #7 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2007-08-31T23:55:00.000-07:00

August 31, 2007

[N.B. You can scroll down for all articles or click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to 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
Jessica Bozek reviews AFTER YOU, DEAREST LANGUAGE by Marisol Limon Martinez

Nicholas Manning reviews POEM FOR THE END OF TIME AND OTHER POEMS by Noelle Kocot

Eileen Tabios engages THE STEAM SEQUENCE by Carly Sachs

Brian Strang reviews BROKEN WORLD by Joseph Lease

Brenda Iijima reviews A HALF-RED SEA by Evie Shockley

Patrick James Dunagan reviews A FIDDLE PULLED FROM THE THROAT OF A SPARROW by Noah Eli Gordon

Nicholas Grider reviews INSECT COUNTRY (A), INSECT COUNTRY (B), and the INSECT TUTELAGE BLOG by Sawako Nakayasu

Patrick James Dunagan reviews TRAFFIC: A PUBLICATION OF SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC, ISSUES 1 AND 2, (2005-2007) edited by Elizabeth Treadwell

Teresa Carmody reviews [one love affair]* by Jenny Boully

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews THE BODY ACHES and NOT EVEN DOGS by Ernesto Priego

Nicholas Grider reviews NETS by Jen Bervin

Patrick James Dunagan reviews HOUSE ORGAN #58 Win/Spr ’07 edited by Kenneth Warren

Nicholas Manning reviews GUESTS OF SPACE by Anselm Hollo

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz reviews THE GODS WE WORSHIP LIVE NEXT DOOR by Bino A. Realuyo

Jennifer Bartlett reviews THE SECOND CHILD by Deborah Garrison

Eileen Tabios engages BROKEN/OPEN by Jill Jones

Laurel Johnson reviews THE ELEPHANT HOUSE by Claudia Carlson

Alysha Wood reviews a(A)ugust by Akilah Oliver, with collages by Brenda Iijima

Eileen Tabios engages BELLUM LETTERS by Michelle Detorie

Steve Halle reviews POSIT by Adam Fieled

Paul Klinger reviews THE BOOK OF OCEAN BY Maryrose Larkin

Michelle Detorie reviews BIRDS AND FANCIES by Elizabeth Treadwell

Eileen Tabios engages ERRATUM to and including A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS (LEVIATHAN PRESS, 2001) by Giles Goodland

Craig Santos Perez reviews NAMES ABOVE HOUSES by Oliver de la Paz

Christopher Mulrooney reviews OSIP MANDELSTAM: NEW TRANSLATIONS edited by Ilya Bernstein

Craig Santos Perez reviews ANYWHERE AVENUE by Oscar Bermeo

Christopher Mulrooney reviews STIGMATA ERRATA ETCETERA by Bill Knott, with collages by Star Black

Nicholas Grider reviews THE STATES, Vols. 1 and 2 by Craig Foltz, designed and edited by designed and edited by Ellie Ga, and with photographs by William Gillespie, Justin Ulmer, Martin Bland, Sabra Cox, Kristina Del Pino, Simona Schneider, Florence Neal, Jon Ciliberto, Stephen Mead, Christa HOlka, Don Goede, Lyn Lifshin, Shelton Walsmith, Marie Kazalia, Rebekah Travis, Lara Khalil, Tracy Lee Carroll, Jennifer Stahl, Barbara Henning, Jade Doskow, David McConeghy, Jared Zimmerman, Alice Arnold, Robert Matson, Mary Wrenn, Julia Marta Clapp, Tina Burton, Jim Simandl, Philip Metres, Chris Hampton, Hayley Barker, Thomas Ciufo, Meredyth Sparks, Shannon Shaper, Renae Morehead, Ryn Gargulinski, Robert S. Dunn, Jen Hofer, David Gatten, Jerilyn Myran, Shara Shisheboran, Courtney Fischer, ARiana Smart Truman, Tod Seelie, David W. Lee, Katherine McDowell, Mike Mahaffie, Willile Baronet, Karen Lillis, Paul Yoo, Justin Simonsen and Elizabeth Willis.

Beatriz Tabios engages BRIDGEABLE SHORES: SELECTED POEMS (1969-2001) by Luis Cabalquinto

Carlos Hiraldo reviews THE SALESMAN'S SHOES by James Roderick Burns

Nicholas Manning reviews FOLLY by Nada Gordon

Alysha Wood reviews trespasses by Padcha Tuntha-obas

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews THE MCSWEENEY BOOK OF POETS PICKING POETS edited by Dominic Lumford

Joe LeClerc reviews THE ENEMY SELF: POETRY & CRITICISM OF LAURA RIDING edited by Barbara Adams

Hugh Fox reviews LIBIDO DREAMS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Glenna Luschei

Laurel Johnson reviews THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA by Victor Hernandez Cruz

Craig Santos Perez reviews THE WIND SHIFTS: NEW LATINO POETRY edited by Francisco Aragon

Kristin Berkey-Abbott reviews PUNK POEMS by John Burgess

Julie R. Enszer Reviews SUGARING by Ann Cefola

Julie R. Enszer Reviews TEAHOUSE OF THE ALMIGHTY by Patricia Smith

Julie R. Enszer Reviews CINEPHRASTICS by Kathleen Ossip

Julie R. Enszer Reviews THE PARAGON by Kathrine Varnes

Julie R. Enszer Reviews KALI’S BLADE by Michelle Bautista

Julie R. Enszer Reviews three books by Rochelle Ratner: QUARRY, COMBING THE WAVES, and PRACTICING TO BE A WOMAN

FEATURE ARTICLES
"Objections to the Beauty-Object: A Reading of Two Poems by Barbara Guest" by Catherine Wagner

"The Ocean At Night: An Inside Look at the Poetry Process" by Aimee Celino Nezhukumatathil

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Catherine Wagner reviews 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE: POEMS OF THE MIDDLE EAST by Naomi Shihab Nye and EMAILS FROM SCHEHEREZAD by Mohja Kahf

Catherine Wagner reviews CATALOGUE OF COMEDIC NOVELTIES: SELECTED POEMS by Lev Rubinstein, Translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky

Catherine Wagner engages four books by Alice Notley: DISOBEDIENCE, MARGARET AND DUSTY, MYSTERIES OF SMALL HOUSES and SELECTED POEMS

"ADVERTISEMENT"
Poetry Feeds The World!

BACK COVER
Winepoetics!

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2007-08-31T23:52:00.000-07:00

It's purr-inducing to announce Galatea Resurrects' (GR) seventh issue. Among our special features is GR's first review of a poetry blog -- an honor that goes to Sawako Nakayasu's Insect Tutelage Blog. This is also a reminder that GR is open to engaging with all sorts of poetry projects, not just poetry books and chaps.

GR is an all-volunteer operation--and I'm grateful to the reviewers who are allowing GR to continue with the following stats:

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

While no poetry project received more than one review in this issue, this issue does present reviews of some titles already reviewed in prior issues -- something GR encourages as we believe the same poem(s) can elicit different (and, as the saying goes, equally valid) responses from different readers. Thus, with this issue, we note that Ernesto Priego's hay(na)ku poetry collection Not Even Dogs now has the honor of being most reviewed to date by different GR reviewers.

Of this issue's reviews/engagements, the following were generated from review copies sent to Galatea Resurrects:

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

So I continue to encourage publishers and authors to send in review copies. Reflecting the logistical support of the internet, reviewers from around the world are paying attention. For information on submission and review copies, go check out Galatea's Purse.

*****

Your editor is "blind" and, at the time of putting this issue to bed, jet-lagging. So there can be typos or other errors in the presentation of the articles. Please feel free to let me know. Given Blogger's format, I can make corrections easily to the engagements.

*****

Let me briefly discuss Mom who contributes a review in this issue. Following my father's death just over a year ago, my mother came to live with me here in St. Helena. One of the challenges I've dealt with since her arrival is trying to ensure she feels at home here in a new house in a new city, and that she thrives in a new place far from long-time friends and acquaintances.

Frankly, my suggestion that she do a review of some poetry books was just one of many attempts on my part to interest her in a new activity as she becomes accustomed to her new residence. I never expected the outcome that you can read in her review of Luis Cabalquinto's poetry collection, Bridgeable Shores. Obviously, it goes to the power of poetry. And so, to Mr. Luis Cabalquinto -- a heartfelt thanks to you for writing poems that had such a positive impact on my mother and her world-view for the rest of her life.

*****

And for the special component of GR's audience who appreciates that I undertook this project in part to create an e-photo album for my dogs, I give you Achilles and Gabriela giving a Howl Out with:

With much Love, Fur and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
August 31, 2007

AFTER YOU, DEAREST LANGUAGE by MARISOL LIMON MARTINEZ

2007-08-31T23:51:00.001-07:00

JESSICA BOZEK Reviews

After you, dearest language by Marisol Limon Martinez
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005)

Marisol Limon Martinez’s new book, After you, dearest language, is a revolving theater of artists, animals, musical instruments, events, body parts, objects, cities, streets, family, and friends, arranged alphabetically in entries as minimally named as “LUNG,” “SONATA,” and “CHANDELIER.” In a sort of print actualization of online hypertext, each entry links to another, as “BOOK” suggests: “Each page leads us to another landscape, another place.”

The primary effect of such a form foregrounds the issue of how to read. In fact, I wonder how Limon Martinez herself reads these pieces aloud. After you, dearest language is physically spare, with a letterpressed, matte-grey cover. The author’s name appears only twice, on the spine and in the copyright at the back of the book. There are no blurbs, no images, no summaries or reductions of what’s inside; thus, the book presents itself as an unmediated document, one whose chosen structure seems just one of many possible structures. The alphabet is as arbitrary a system as any for ordering the real/surreal/dream experiences contained within, which suggests that order is not what we’re meant to pay attention to. After all, reading After you, dearest language from front to back doesn’t feel right. To ignore its cross-referencing is to reduce the entries to rule, to privilege product over process.

One of the collection’s central ideas seems to be that we are seldom the authors of our own dreams. Here, readers have some authority in that they can choose whether or not to follow a particular reference, though they are subject to Limon Martinez’s authority in that individual entries are immutable. Only our path through these entries is variable. When I first read After you, dearest language, I was content with that variability, with the idea of the collection as a limited reference book to its speaker’s dreams and friends and anxieties. But as soon as I decided to review the book, I grew restless. If I only read around, following discrete reference-complexes, I felt as if I were shortchanging the collection. I might miss something. But reading straight through, the imperatives of cross-referencing had to be ignored. And I started to think of the book as a curio, as something I could never really know if I read it the way it asks to be read. I am still troubling over what moves this book beyond the personal and find it odd that, of the real-life characters mentioned in the book, only family members and famous artists (e.g., Louise Brooks, Jackson Pollock, Judy Garland) are “defined” or “qualified,” when giving friends their own reference-complexes wouldn’t have made the book any less universal or more personal than it already is. But After you, dearest language shuts down such criticisms by virtue of its diaristic prose:

A WOMAN in a RIVER is rowing a BOAT. Her CHILDREN are in a CAGE. She rows the boat to keep her children on the boat. If she STOPS rowing the boat, the children will drown. (“FILM”)

In other words, if the book’s speaker mentions Bande à Part but not another, more temperamentally relevant Godard film (say, Pierrot Le Fou or Weekend), because Bande à Part is what she saw, isn’t that more appropriate in this world, more to the point of the dream experience’s primacy than a grafting of associations onto the text after the fact?

While I don’t believe that it’s uncouth to share dreams, I do know that if my dream-factory can never be your dream-factory, then when I tell you my dreams, it’s because I think you might have a stake in them, in me. Similarly, After you, dearest language is a reference book with a single center, its speaker. I don’t mean to suggest that the subconscious is ever irrelevant, but that dreams, in Limon Martinez, are never not personal (whether they are the poet’s or her speaker’s). This is very different from Alice Notley’s use of dreams in Disobedience, where dream-narratives and the very act of dreaming are posited as political, as a way of shaping and maintaining an identity apart from “the American poetry masons in their burntdown hall”: “Did dreams begin when women were first / excluded from public life?” If the dreams in After you, dearest language aren’t going to invade my dreams, then I want to have o think about them more than the book impels me too.

I’m most content reading After you, dearest language on those occasions when Limon Martinez drops me into the messiness of the subconscious by way of tantalizing compression, as when there is no entry for a term save another term: “DILDO REHEARSAL,” “PECTORAL TOTEM,” “WIFE BRETON.” Do all wives lead back to Breton? Or is Breton defined solely by his “wife”? Who is Breton’s wife? According to the entry for “BRETON” “NADJA” is “Breton’s WIFE.” But “NADJA” is defined solely as “BRETON.” The circularity, the evasion, is both playful and frustrating. Of course, “NADJA” is a function of “BRETON,” but how is “BRETON” a function of “WIFE”? In the same entry Limon Martinez writes, “Someone is making THEATRE out of my life. I watch the REHEARSALS take place in a BOX PUPPET theatre.” The entry for “GOOSE,” which tells us that “Catherine… feeds a goose its own FEATHERS. She forces them into its MOUTH” suggests that After you, dearest language is an elaborate, tongue-in-cheek foie gras. This could explain Breton’s prominence and the questions of identity his presence conjures. Nadja (1928), after all, blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction, and begins with the question “Who am I?” and ends, inconclusively, “Who goes here? Is it you, Nadja?… Is it only me? Is it myself?”

In her note on the book’s title Limon Martinez writes:

“AFTER YOU, DEAREST LANGUAGE” is taken from the line in André Breton’s Introduction au discours sur le peu de realité as quoted in Walter Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism as referenced in David Levi Strauss’ “After You, Dearest Photography: Reflections on the Work of Francesca Woodman.”

She implies that language is always received at a distance, via a network of references which a reader/listener and—to a certain extent—a writer/speaker cannot know. After you, dearest language might then be regarded as an attempt to map some of these networks. For example, not every “hill” references the same “HILL”: In the entry for “ACROBAT,” “The stage is a HILL in the distance” but “The hill in the distance gets closer… The hill is closer still.” The entry for “HILL” is similar regarding “white”:

I drive through the hills in search of a HOUSE. I find a WHITE HEXAGON shaped BUILDING surrounded by TREES. I walk in. There is barely any FURNITURE. I look under and around BEDS, DESKS, TABLES. Everything is white.

Only the first “WHITE” then belongs to the reference-complex that includes

ALTAR, APARTMENT, AQUARIUM, BLOOD, BUS, CANDLE, CHANDELIER, CLASSROOM, CONCERT, CREATURE, DRAGON, DRUGS, GLASS, HEXAGON, HILL, HOSPITAL, HOUSE, LAREDO, LEG, METRO, MIRROR, MOTORCYCLE, PORNOGRAPHY, REHEARSAL, STATUE, STREET, TOTEM, TRAIN, UNDERWEAR, VIDEO, WALL

We are left to wonder how the second “white” is different from the first “WHITE.”

If After you, dearest language is an attempt to create paths through such reference-complexes, I can’t help thinking that the project would be more appropriate, and perhaps more effective in simulating dream spaces and (il)logic, online with hypertext. In such a space, readers wouldn’t have a gauge for their location or be able to fall back on the conventional ways we have for measuring progress through a text. While there are no page numbers in this print edition, the alphabet serves as a rough-enough guide, and, of course, we always know whether we’re hardly, halfway, or mostly finished by the thickness of pages on either side of pencil or bookmark. It may be more promising to consider this project a blueprint for another, one that (at the risk of seeming gimmicky) not only suggests paths but actually generates maps of those varied paths, their expanses and their returns.

*****

Jessica Bozek wears sweaters in August & teaches at Boston University. Her new chapbook is cor•re•spond•ence (Dusie), a collaboration with Eli Queen.

POEM FOR THE END OF TIME AND OTHER POEMS by NOELLE KOCOT

2007-08-31T23:50:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems by Noelle Kocot
(Wave Books, 2006)

This has been a difficult review to write, as I have been a fan for some time of Noelle Kocot: her poetry was, is, different. Strange and fiercely imaginative, it marries diverse and unusual influences, from the cadences of scripture to French Surrealism, from South-American Magic Realism to riffs on New York School cool. And for a good half of Poem For the End of Time and Other Poems, Kocot delivers handsomely. But then, at least to this reviewer, things go somewhat off the rails.

Firstly, it was obvious to me that the first sequence of ungrouped poems in this collection--precisely the Other Poems of its title--are by far the finest and most mature work that Kocot has produced. These poems, which make up the first 25 pages of the book, simply bridle with poetic energy and invention, and one can almost pick passages at random to show why:

Your loops swallow themselves
Until they are younger loops
While your dark night bridges you fluently.

The analogic movement here is both compact and complex. We may first read “bridges” as a noun, then, realizing it is in fact a verb, discover the coherence of this imagery: the loops and bridges doubling, repeating themselves, thus becoming “younger”. Now, Kocot has always been a little over-the-top, at once boisterous and expressive, but always in a Frank O’Hara way, so intense as to be funny, so aware of her excess as to relish it:

The bright waterlights blinking
And grieving over a mash of ice.
Like them, I wanted only to die, moon-dark, blessed,

Poised beneath the driest arrows of my suffering,
Far from the flocks of burning, singing gulls,
Face to face with the God of my childhood

There is, in such writing, an extravagance and profligacy balancing itself delicately on a tightrope between Rimbaldian prophetic ecstasy and amusing surrealist kitsch.

Another striking effect is the way in which Kocot’s out-there, disjointed spiritual fervor garners its effects from simple comparison with the quotidian:

Penumbra of ancestries properly wired,
While someone sings on a lawn chair

We detect everywhere too the lovely tension between an unashamed lyricism and the simultaneous parody, or rather “playing-up”, of this lyricism as effect and affect:

You wanted to concoct a monody
On a dead-end highway
In an impossible springtime.

A dead-end highway in spring is, to say the least, a bit too much: but how evocatively it functions! Like the flock of burning, singing gulls, this is an image which many lesser poets may have been too afraid to use, recognizing that it must be carefully framed in order not to be considered simply “bad”. For in fact, Kocot does indeed play with our expectations of what exactly “bad” poetry may be, showing us the true width of this delicately fine line. Much of this verse echoes, for example, the late great Ern Malley: “A fuschia archaeopteryx would eat my bones” in The Nowhere Parade being but one vivid instance.

These first poems in the volume are thus plain old effective: assured, inventive, unsettling in their imagery, and always preferring the road less traveled.

And your thirsty mirrors
Lynched the shadow of a bridesmaid.
I’ve told this to no one else,

How the traces of your blond
Preside over a thimble full of light,
How a crack in the fetid sky veers

Into the molting radiance of a gun

This is Lautréament, or maybe Georg Trakl, somehow weirdly ciphered through Confessionalism or Elizabeth Bishop. And yet, at the same time, such very capable passages as these are uniquely and undeniably Noelle Kocot. This is Kocot at her best: traveling at breakneck speed, led by her own inventiveness, while maintaining an often extraordinary degree of metaphorical control:

We have reached a place where everything
Can be signed away while the hours
Sprint by on the glinting legs of cranes.

Of course, this sometimes gives the impression that when Kocot finally slows down from this rapid-fire shutter-speed, she’s no longer quite sure where to point her lens; but these moments are rare.

As for the slight superiority of these pieces over those of Kocot’s earlier collections, it seems to me that she is now ever more capable of anchoring her wildly generative imagery to a grounding preoccupation, a central nexus, a dropped stone around which her ideas may spread in concentric ripples. The return of “beauty” as a primary node in Oasis, for example, provides the inventiveness of the piece with a tangible limit; it concentrates it within an enclosed space :

When a beautiful woman cuts herself
In a movie, tinsel falls from the universe.
And when you ask someone if I am beautiful,
You don’t ask to affirm me, but to affirm
Your own conjecture that I might be
As beautiful as you once thought.

The imagistic intensity of the first couplet is not allowed to waver or dissipate in related reflections or half-baked surrealism. Beauty is an affirmation for its subject, but not for its object: Kocot picks up on this interesting idea, and unpacks its initial image. Not “cutting”, not “tinsel” then, but what these devices allow us to see.

Well . . . So much for the triumphantly successful first part of the collection. Now we must come to consider it’s center-piece, the rambling, elegiacal tirade of personal pain and political gall which is the Poem For the End of Time. It must be said simply: for this reviewer at least, there is not much forgivable in the poem. After the twentieth page or so, I was praying, albeit in an incantatory voice, for its end. From page one:

My neighborhood my neighborhood my neighborhood
Up in flames my neighborhood
There were jars turning black in my neighborhood
I saw smoke rising from them in my neighborhood

Now let’s skip ahead to page twenty-one to see what’s changed:

In my neighborhood I knocked at the gate
In my neighborhood the answer was yes
In my neighborhood I am no longer an Innocent
In my neighborhood I became one of them one of them

You leave me no choice my neighborhood
You leave me no choice my neighborhood

And so it goes on . . . For thirty-four pages . . . Ever more tedious, ever less variable. The striving for Ginsbergian effect is evident, but as reader we have no choice but to buckle under this discursive torrent. It is not only the repetition– see Celan do it right –but the choice of repeated phrases, many of them inexcusable clichés: “skull-shattered martyrs”, “dark salvation”, “I am no longer an Innocent”. Is this Kocot, as she does so effectively elsewhere, playing with cliché, truism, affectation? . . . Perhaps. But there is no trace of self-reflection here, no higher irony: the tone is overtly earnest, dogmatic and declarative rather than indefinite or reflective. And, importantly, these clichés do not appear once, but perhaps thirty times . . .

Then we have the reappearance, entirely absent from the other successful poems in this volume, of several of Kocot’s more formative ticks, which we might have thought discarded: her mystic number symbolism, for example, which, equally arbitrary in Yeats– why are there 59 wild swans? –does not instantly a great poet make:

But not the Holy Spirit Number 4
Not the Word made flesh Number 4
4 4 4 4 You are so good to me number 4
You are beautiful and radiant with great splendor number 4

We have understood by now, after her first volume (entitled 4), that the number 4 is very important to Kocot, and this is no doubt due to a specific lay or ecclesiastical tradition. But does it make for good poems?

To answer this question, we must first recognize that Kocot aims everywhere in Poem for The End of Time, and to a much greater degree than ever before, for the spiritual incantatory effect of a poet like Paul Claudel. But Claudel knew the value of variation, and dressed his biblical cadences– which in Kocot, moreover, seem often to surge less from Scripture than from the pulpit –in the balanced perfection of his lines. In comparison to this Claudelian tradition, Kocot’s incantation is largely uncontrolled, and, perhaps its greatest fault of all (for Frank O’Hara fans), is continually uninteresting. The textual surface is monotone, and the surprises usually so frequent in Kocot’s lively imaginative arsenal are absent.

For, though Kocot’s anger develops from a personal to a political one in the course of the poem, until these two finally merge or at least overlap, it often seems that she has simply put the Dissent-Machine on autopilot, stripping her verse of its usual associative brilliance. “America your manifest destiny is Starbucks” is a line severely lacking in imagination, missing moreover any true sense of injustice; or worse: “They take jobs cleaning the apartments of drug dealers / They take jobs that come with cellular phones.”

In fact, this reviewer cannot but conclude that in Poem For the End of Time, Kocot loses her way. Now, what does this mean? We might propose the old-fashioned idea that this sometimes painful self-indulgence is only to be excused– whether it finally is or not is conjecturable –by this elegy’s very specific context. For, The Poem For the End of Time is for Kocot an extremely personal piece: rooted in biography, it is an extended elegy for the death of her husband, the composer Damon Tomblin. This fact is nowhere hidden: the poem is dedicated to Tomblin, and he appears everywhere in it (“Damon Daemon Damiano / O God rebuild my Church”). Tomblin is the poem’s context.

But biography, it is hardly necessary to say, is itself a construct: it does not justify a poem, but it does help us to understand its condition. Of course, the ensuing discussion is similar to that surrounding moments of “excusably” excessive pathos in Hughes’ Birthday Letters: for Poem For the End of Time may indeed be deeply touching– it sometimes, though rarely, is –if it did not encounter some serious aesthetic hurdles. For this reason, the elegy should perhaps be considered less a “usual” work of poetry than a loud, heartfelt cry, which, charged as it is with explicit personal resonance, does not always lend itself to an achieved aesthetic effect.

This is not entirely, of course, an excuse: it is simply a context. However, I imagine that, if Noelle Kocot herself reads this review, she may care little for the critical opinion brought to bear upon her poem, and she would be, I think, to a very large extent justified. For perhaps this goal– namely, to be an “achieved” work of art –is not this particular elegy’s final justification. In the end, though we may think it not her best work, if this poem has specific and very personal meaning for Kocot, we may not at all mind, being the fine poet that she is, that she has published it, less still that she took the time to write it. We may just not want, necessarily, to re-read it.

*****

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

THE STEAM SEQUENCE by CARLY SACHS

2007-08-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

the steam sequence by Carly Sachs
(Washington Writers Publishing House, Washington D.C., 2006)

For Galatea Resurrects, I don’t have particular books in mind to review. I just read poetry as widely as I can and then review whatever moves me to engage with them in that manner. With Carly Sachs’ the steam sequence, I felt compelled to write about it, even as I suspected that I probably will fail at fully articulating why I am so glad to see this collection in print.

the steam sequence is not just about, to quote from Henry Israeli's blurb, "an unnamed Jewish woman, a Nazi soldier, a dead child". It's not just about their experience. It's about remembering that experience. And reminding people that people underwent their experience. But also about the inevitable failure of remembering accurately -- that what will become memory is full of holes, and perhaps deliberately so.

It's about reminding people of something so brutal that many people would just as soon have their memories evaporate: the kettle screams forth its steam but, afterwards, the steam disappears.

+++

So I can talk about the deftness of the poetic craft and book design. And I will because I want to respect the poet's and designer’s skill.

Book design and composition are attributed to Patrick Pepper; cover design to Moira Egan, Patrick Pepper, and Graham Wimbrow; and cover art to Graham Wimbrow. We see the effectiveness of their thought process: the grey of the front and back covers as grey as steam that arose from one of humanity’s worst histories, as trains arrived, or as chimneys belched out a certain smoke…. We see the cover image to be an undefinable image except that it’s grey; it could be a night sky, a sky blackened by smoke, a crater, or a moon suddenly blackened by ash. The all of it -- and what it is not -- befits what lies within the book.

Within the book, we have the effective use of caesuras and spare language to capture what cannot be captured, for instance, horror:

in the room

the radiator the beating

heart

Design. Yes, we see how the placement of a few lines on a page, leaving the page mostly blank, enhances the silences -- and erasures. For example, the above three lines are atop the page and the rest of the page is blank. The blank evokes a scream. The blank encourages the reader/viewer to fill in the rest of the page with response. The blank page reminds: the blank page is not horrible because it’s silent but because a voice was -- voices were -- silenced.

[t]he[y] cut
                              out
               her tongue

                                             and told her

                              no one          would be           [left a]
                                                      li[e]ve

                                                            if she
                              spoke

And why not rely on fragments? Even the full-frontal narrative of the following seems somehow to understate the experience of … Auschwitz:

They let certain women keep their hair,
those were the soldiers’ women,
always the ones most recently off the train
who were given soap and water
then taken naked to a concrete room
where the soldiers would shove the heads
of their rifles inside them.

Sent back to the women’s barracks
beauty gone, the other women
picked on the bones,
scavenged these broken bodies
for jewelry, a hidden tube of lipstick,
the mirror, though no one
wanted to see what they had become.

And yet the specificity of the above is critical. It provides a backbone, though broken, to excerpts like this:

                              some days                she
sits in the kitchen
                                          and boils
                              water all day
               the tea kettle                screaming
she
               remembers                it
                              this                way

or this excerpt

in a jam jar
how many hands and bodies

Each page offers one broken piece after another. That the texts manage to be organized into a poetry book does not preclude the experience from being one of “music", albeit of a "music / thinning / to air.”

+++

Reading this book also reminded me of an art exhibition I witnessed in 2001: installation and mixed-media art by Ruth Liberman at Messineo Wyman Projects in New York City. I reviewed it for the now-defunct ReviewNY. Here’s an excerpt:

Poetry is what cannot be articulated. Ruth Liberman’s works address what should not be articulated: horror and evil. Consequently, Liberman uses text as visual material. In doing so, she creates visual poetry and subverts meaning.

Liberman is concerned about what she describes in an Artist’s Statement to be “people in extreme situations.” In this exhibition, she ask what meaning can be found in such horrors as Nazi-perpetrated genocide….

“Petrikau 26.7.43 (1990-94)” is a set of four vinyl panels covered with the carbon traces of used typewriter ribbon. Through the ribbons, Liberman marks the vinyl with words from an unpublished 1943 diary of a German army officer on duty in the SS-occupied Jewish ghetto in Piotrkov (Poland). The officer writes descriptively—hence, brutally—of what he witnessed as the ghetto was shut down and people deported or killed. Stretches of black tape cover portions of the text that Liberman perhaps deems too brutal to expose. The hidden sections only make more horrendous the feelings generated from such fragmented texts as:

--“a little white coat and white tiny cap”
--“It all takes its course. The air feels leaden”
-- “I see how the fat bleached blond, having already returned, presses the face of the twelve-year-old against her body”

+++

As with Liberman’s installation art, the steam sequence fragments the shield of forgetfulness. These works record. Sach’s poems are about something. That their subjects are ghosts does not make them any less real. Indeed, whether from memory or horror or some combination thereof, both the steam sequence and Liberman’s exhibit embody -- or rather, as Lyn Hejinian puts it in her blurb, “re-embody” -- something that, as Hejinian also puts it, “by its very nature can’t be remembered, is about the very limits of experience.”

Yes, poetry can be written afterwards.

*****

Eileen Tabios recently released THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007).

BROKEN WORLD by JOSEPH LEASE

2007-08-31T23:35:00.000-07:00

BRIAN STRANG Reviews

Broken World by Joseph Lease
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2007)

In June 2007, Harper’s ran a series of articles on how to repair what has been done to “the constitution,” “the courts,” “civil service,” “the environment,” “science,” “the economy,” “the marketplace of ideas,” “intelligence,” “the military,” “diplomacy” and “the national character.” In virtually every sphere, it seems, Americans live with the idea that great damage has been done, that things are broken, but certainly more that the political elements of the nation is broken. The social is made up of spheres within spheres—the personal, the local, the civic and so forth—each an imperfect fit, broken worlds that intersect, collapse, unite and divide—composing the multiplicity of community and individuals within it.

Joseph Lease's new book, Broken World, takes its title from Robert Creeley quoting Hart Crane: “And so it was I entered the broken world.” The term is also part of the visionary Jewish tradition. Lease is working within (while “making new”) and applying these traditions to the contemporary world of the individual, of the human community and, yes, of America, a world of contradictions too diverse and complex to be contained. And the poems of this broken world do not contain but oscillate between the tensions of the many worlds we inhabit. This is no easy task and Lease has, more successfully than any of his peers, written directly, authentically and affirmatively through these contradictions.

The first poem, “Ghost,” announces a language of lament, an implicit but present voice both close at hand and intangible, creating paradox through repetition.

the word for dawn
               is others

the word for light
               is freefall

the word for hand
               is others

The poem moves through, but never quite inhabits, the lyrical “I,” veering into the pronoun “her” instead with the closest possible referent being “sister,” though “sister,” is “the word for dawn” and, this too, is “the word for others.” The resulting sphere is one of connection, an ephemeral lyric that, rather than exulting in the individual, steps through the connections of commonality into a liminal zone where the dichotomy of self and other is reduced. Here, in this zone, where an incantation of lament unites, where the self is in union with others, the broken world can begin to be healed.

In the title poem “Broken World,” an elegy for James Assalty, a friend who died at 31 of AIDS in 1993, what “won’t be” is recorded and lamented. And Lease uses repetition again to echo through what is broken:

Won’t be stronger. Won’t be water.
Won’t be dancing on floating berries.
Won’t be a year. Won’t be a song.
Won’t be taller. Won’t be accounted
a flame. Won’t be a boy. Won’t be
any relation to the famous rebel.

“Broken” is a term of function. And the rhythms established form a kind of healing incantation, lamenting what no longer works. The loss of a friend, of an individual person, breaks the world.

At times the poem takes on the tone of anger in sadness:

You are with me
               and I shatter

everyone who
               hates you.

Arrows on water;
               you are with me—

rain on snow—
               and I shatter

everyone who
               hates you.

Engaging with both the internal peril and outwardly turned vengeance of loss gives the poem an accurate claim to the multiplicity of experience. Rather than encapsulate, the poem is open to contradiction, and for this it rings true with the reader.

“History of Our Death” deals with another broken world, seen through a historical lens. Although the poem is less intimate in its relationship to the subject, it is no less personal in its relationship to the reader. This poem explores what can and cannot be known about horror, and, for me, it is the most compelling of the book (though many readers will probably feel that “Free Again” is the most important) because it asks the most difficult questions, about complicity, about empathy, about what it means to be part of humanity.

Beginning with a found text written by a victim of the Holocaust, the language of the first section both engages and distances. It is the language of a victim who is torn by complicated feelings of guilt after eating more than his allotment of bread. Few of us can imagine what it feels like to be bored, guilty and waiting for certain annihilation, to be so utterly dehumanized and, at the same time, be wracked with such human emotions. The inclusion of this text announces Lease’s sincerity; a detached ironic stance will be useless in the rest of the poem. Instead, the rest of the poem becomes, according to Lease, an attempt to “create life that we need—life that we don’t recognize until we are in the poem.”

The second section, returning to a present-day first-person address, begin with description of “The top half//of a crab shell” and ends with “they call me/human garbage— // I was garbage / so I still am—“ in an echo of T.S. Eliot’s dehumanized and utterly reduced “pair of ragged claws.” Oppression is the subject of Lease’s poem, and the reader must ask, as the poet does, whether it is possible to truly empathize with the victims of such vast and senseless destruction and we must go on to ask whether this gesture, doomed to failure from the beginning, serves any purpose. Can one do no more (as Lease says in the third section) than “burn for no / reason”? Don’t attempts to “feel” for the victims trivialize the horror, making one complicit in some way?

Lease deals with these questions of how to think about horror in history and concludes that “the living know nothing / I can’t know.” Yet despite the bleakness of these conclusions, remarkably, the poem ends on a note of hope:

God breathing—
in daughters and sons—

God dancing—

Perhaps answers to some of the questions this poem raises can be found in a previous poem, “Soul-Making.” If it is impossible and perhaps even undesirable to attempt to inhabit the experience of the victims of oppression, the attempt to bring ourselves closer in some ways is, nevertheless, necessary for the creation and re-creation of our own internal life, for the sustenance of our own humanity and, perhaps most importantly, to keep indifference, that dangerous anesthetic, at bay. After all, it is a history of our death and this is our soul being made.

In the final and longest poem of the collection, “Free Again,” Lease turns his attention to contemporary America. Here, Lease establishes a Shelleyean place for poetry in the political sphere, as a legitimate means of engagement in a culture that values passive pleasures above all else. Freedom—artistic, social, personal and otherwise—must be actively recreated, and so the series consists of 26 poems of the same name. The number 26, too, might be seen as a marker of the English language, indicating the necessity to recreate freedom linguistically as well.

In the realm of this poem, the contradictions are thick and it is easy for poets to veer into a stance of sarcastic irony, of inertia. Lease’s attempt to find a valid place for poetry in the political realm, prohibits the use of irony as a distanced passivity. Instead, this poem alternates between the lyric and ironic, as in these two consecutive poems of the series (in their entirety):

“Free Again”

                              Stillness in red, stillness in green—I
have no words, light hangs like rope—

                              We breathe our eyes, promise the
wind, boxes of shit, pieces of glass—

                              Color the wind, we breathe our yes,
open the doors, one vote one corpse—

                              One seed of light—

“Free Again”

The I feels grateful for its bagel, grateful for its espresso—
now try it this way: the I lives in an empire—community
of headlines, community of video loops—all its friends
feel terrible—“guilt is the new terrorism—“

                              the Dostoevsky Network: all writhing,
                              all the time—

Here irony is a useful tool, as a means for critical engagement, but Lease never relinquishes his firm grounding in a more complete and authentic stance. Moving between a yearning, breathed “yes” and a commentary on the lack of community, both poems feel accurate as reflections on the contemporary American empire. Lease’s “I” is both victim and perpetrator, ensnared in the contradictions. But if he is to accurately address this society in the larger way that he does, he must avoid being reductive. And his poem does successfully capture and comment upon an America of the early 21st Century.

Ultimately, Broken World is an affirmative and visionary work, one that attempts to nurture the “seed of light.” “Broken” has an implicit and awesome moral imperative, mandating that we mend what is no longer functional. And through Lease’s own attempts at accurately understanding the world, the responsibility extends to the reader as well:

I was a ghost, you were the only one

who could hear me—

*****

Brian Strang, co-editor of 26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics, lives in Oakland and teaches English composition at San Francisco State University and Merritt College. He is the author of Incretion (Sputyen Duyvil) and machinations (a free Duration ebook) among others. i n v i s i b i l i t y, a special edition with drawings by Basil King, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. Recent poem/paintings can be seen at his site, Sorry Nature. His poem/paintings opened at Canessa Park Gallery in San Francisco on June 3rd.

A HALF-RED SEA by EVIE SHOCKLEY

2007-08-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

BRENDA IIJIMA Reviews

a half-red sea by Evie Shockley
(Carolina Wren Press, Durham, NC, 2006)

A book pops open and creates access to numerous registers. I found myself reading Evie Shockley’s dynamic book, a half-red sea, in a cluster of relational titles (as is always the case). Encircling and informing my reading experience were Octavia Butler’s Kindred and also Wild Seed (once I found out that Evie lists it as one of her favorite titles), Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' The Pink Guitar, to name a few. In this review I hope to give space for the ricocheting of intertextual meanings that sprang forth.

In Butler’s Wild Seed, Anyanwu, a spirited 300 year old gorgeous African female shape shifter who is impervious of time gets coerced into going to the colonies in “The New World” with Doro, a menacing spirit who takes captives from Africa and elsewhere to set up his seed villages—communities of people bred for their superior human qualities. It is a tumultuous science fiction tale that allegorically echoes layers of actual histories. Anyanwu’s strength of spirit is challenged throughout the book. Her independence, intelligence and dignity are continually frustrated by what is asked of her but more readily forced upon her. She is able to look into each relation and reshape her being to best overcome what she confronts. a half-red sea accomplishes something similar lingually and philosophically. The stretch and bend of form and content within a half-red sea is open, changeable and free—procedurally constantly regenerating from spaces within being and through charged energies of interrelation all rendered in slippery, succulently descriptive language. And, like Anyanwu’s struggle, the work is immersive—these verses course through hundreds of years of ancestral history lived, remembered and felt. Strength comes from this continuum. Strength to acknowledge and confront contemporary injustice that destabilizes, clashes, threatens—composes the daily. waiting on the mayflower opens with an epigram by Frederick Douglas: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” As the poem moves through an in-tense chronology pressure builds up to present tense.

blood. africa’s descendents,
planting here year after year

the seeds of labor, sweating
bullets in this nation’s wars,

have harvested the rope,
the rape, the ghetto, the cell,

the fire, the flood, and the
blame for you-name-it. so

today black folks barbeque
ribs and smother the echoes

of billie’s strange song in
sauces. drink gin. gladly

holiday to heckle speeches
on tv. pretend to parade.

turn out in droves for distant
detonations, chaos, controlled

I’ve clipped and cropped this poem at a difficult spot—because “controlled” sits on the page, glaring. It is unfair to these poems to fragment them—there is so much momentum and velocity within each poem that excerpting from Shockley’s poems messes with the fury played out in a tempo of suggestion, indictment and impassioned song.

“Language in its thickness, layered, can also peel back and become a map of levels, with space behind space.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar, p. 86. The richness of this statement is realized in Shockley’s poetry: “the city is american, so she/can map it. train tracks, highways slice through, bleed/ only to one side, like a half-red sea/permanently parted, the middle she’d…” Mapping, the segregation of bodies and spaces, the commoditization of bodies and spaces—this fraught reality rears, meaning it comes forth with depth and amplitude—there is rarely any whimsy implied in maps and map making. Racism has been codified and the ideology that buttresses it is mapped into consciousness. De-mapping and reuniting—perhaps this is what is needed, desperately—as it stands, only capitol (speaking here of humanly created entities, substance) has ready access across political, sociological and emotional grids (human bodies don’t) yet human endeavor is much more slippery than what can be accommodated by maps. Maps are instantly obsolete as we live in a changeable, animate universe. Here I am thinking of the burgeoning refugee population—Doctors Without Borders estimates that 33 million people live in a condition of being a refuge. These root concepts are glowingly reconsidered for what they continue to yield in Shockley’s poems. In another poem a Shockley line reads, “a map of where”—such a stance opens ground for the myriad exchanges that take place at any given site through time. The penultimate stanza in elocation (or, exit us) reads, “the city’s infra (red) structure sweats her,/a land(e)scape she can’t make, though she knows/the way. she’s got great heart, but that gets her/where? egypt’s always on her right (it goes/where she goes), canaan’s always just a-head,/and to her left, land of the bloodless dead.” And, to interject a quotation from Samuel R. Delany’s fabulous essay, …Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red, 1998, “…as much the same way as contact and networking, infrastructure and superstructure are ultimately relative terms. They are vectors rather than fixed positions, so that there are some locations where, depending on the vectors around them, for brief periods it may be indeterminate whether something will operate with superstructural or infrastructural force.” (Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity edited by Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin, p. 57). Delany is referring to the vectors that shape a neighborhood—what forces help deteriorate and or invigorate a social space. Vectors, superstructures, infrastructures—a half-red sea traces the echoes, reverberations, thunder, cries and protests not without cacophonous joy, glittering revelation, sensual sighs (the syntax sashays, saunters) and smart rebuttal:

“i am southern hear me roar i am burning flags bearing crosses i am scarlet and prissy like a piece of carmine velvet at christmas don’t know nothing bout birthin no rabies so don’t come foamin at my mouth I am miss dixie and a miss is as good as a guile i am a daughter of the con-federacy…” (from cause i’m from dixie too)

and from time is of the essence:

               “…like the idea of waking. watching
the sun crash into a skyline cut flat
               where interstate 40 sweeps along

on stilts, she thinks about her honda’s
               drink: what the paleozoic period
boiled down to. miles away, on

               the same planet, creatures of a new
era thunder around, care-less and
               cannibal in our desperate search

for fuel. she recaps her tank, fingers
               reeking. across the corner, the lot
at 1st street bar and grill is full. she

               knows the holocene will boil down, too,
someday: wonders how this crude age
               will have deposited anything of use.

Shockley’s articulate awareness and sensitivity of the porous dimensions of time is a rich political statement I think. The diachronic and synchronic play off of each other and form a third space—something like possibility. A further aspect of this quality of Shockley’s poetry is that she doesn’t subordinate forms of time or what occurs in time. In this way content (which is experiential and takes place in time—her lyrical accounts and other’s account) account for a the space of the poem—without exclusion; it is a diverse open autobiography infused with the vitality of the lives of those she acknowledges: Ntozake Shange, Henry Bibb, Billie Holiday, Crispus Attucks, Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemmings, Anita Hill and others. Here’s one example of Shockley’s poetic regard for the modality that is time (from her poem clutter):

“the wedding party occupied a bed & breakfast
                              near the lake,
in a neighborhood that had turned black
               around its edges,
          as if the property were a cookie baked too fast,
                              at too high a temperature…”

We are at this juncture here in the United States—Brown vs. The Board of Education was overturned while I was writing this review representing a reverse of a major accomplishment in the civil rights struggle. Remembering James Baldwin’s words, “I’m only black ‘cos you think you’re white.” Should issues of race be fore grounded—where? (I think yes—in the sense of not separated out (or avoided) from everything that coexists—sensitively addressed so that there can be an opening up of common ground).Within poetry or is this a domain exempt from tangible social concern? How do we speak to/of these realities? How is identity shaped through our differences and interdependences? One disturbing feature of racism is the distinct dismissal of any sort of critique coming from people of color—absorbed or reflected into the generalized impertinence that feels like social fabric. If critiques are ignored by white people of privilege I don’t know how desired change can happen without out serious blind spots, misunderstandings and misperceptions. Derrick Bell’s second rule of racial standing that reads as follows:

“Not only are black’s complaints discounted, but black victims of racism are less effective witnesses than are whites, who are members of the oppressor class. This phenomenon reflects a widespread assumption that blacks, unlike whites, cannot be objective on racial issues and will favor their own no matter what. This deep-seated belief fuels a continuing effort—despite all manner of Supreme Court decisions intended to curb the practice—to keep black people off juries in cases involving race. Black judges hearing racial cases are eyed suspiciously and sometimes asked to recuse themselves in favor of a white judge—without those making the request even being aware of the paradox in their motions. (Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, p. 113)

How does this play out in poetry…? Evie Shockley has the courage and dignity to address ourselves, our interrelations—our words and selves.

Joan Retallack talks about the contemporary challenge as follows, “At some point I realized that the lurking question in everything I’ve written about literature is this: how can imaginative, responsible, meaningful agency thrive in such a complex and perilous world, fallen many times over, hardly off its knees when it comes to matters of hope? In an earlier paragraph she highlights complex realism, reciprocal alterity, polyculturalism, polylingualism and contemporaneity. (Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wage, p. 13) These regenerative meditations by Evie Shockley offer up a positive socio-lingual paradigm.

*****

Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press) and Around Sea (O Books). If Not Metamorphic was runner up for the Sawtooth Prize and will be published by Ahsahta Press. Also forthcoming is Remembering Animals which will be published by Displace Press. She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (yoyolabs.com/). Together with Evelyn Reilly she is editing a collection of essays by poets concerning poetry and ecological ethics titled, )((eco (lang)(uage(reader). She is the art editor for Boog City as well as a visual artist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she designs and constructs homeopathic gardens.

A FIDDLE PULLED FROM THE THROAT OF A SPARROW by NOAH ELI GORDON

2007-08-31T23:25:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow by Noah Eli Gordon
(New Issues in Prose & Poetry Western Michigan University, 2007)

THE STRUGGLE TO LET THE POEM ‘BE’

Noah Eli Gordon states, “I’ve tried everything I can think of to bring a poem into the world.”* The list of examples he then provides is indeed fairly exhaustive in scope of possible exercises: “automatic writing; timed writing; making word lists; sketching out detailed charts of specific syntax and filling in the words later on; writing only in public; writing at specific times of the day.” He also confesses, “I write a lot.” The poems collected in A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow demonstrate the merit along with the frailty of Gordon’s self-reflections upon his writing process. There is beauty beside absurdity. Technical skill demonstrated but not always sustained. A mixture of styles and an assortment of possible influences embedded throughout. Notes in the back notify the reader that the poems were “composed between 1999 & 2005” and were published “often in radically different versions and under different titles” in numerous journals and chapbooks. It is as if instead of a ‘selected early poems,’ (which would admittedly be an odd exhibit for a poet who is still relatively young and at the beginning of his career) Gordon took his earlier, uncollected work and re-drafted much of it with the intention to form a fresh, cohesive collection. Unfortunately, although there are shining moments, any intended cohesion doesn’t hold.

The title poem starts it off well enough. The lines are clean and delicate by way of sound and texture, a sweetly inviting embrace of lyrical imagery.

A fiddle pulled from the throat of a sparrow

little piece of silence
astray in the circumstantial music of a crowd
part myth, part massacre
have you put away your toy internment
turned to the first movement
where the house was empty
& the dead hair of the harpist spread on the lawn
its arrayed core drawing a grace note
from the muttering of those exhausted by wild dance
showing an oar for a lyre
a turtle shell a tear
cleaving a bird call on the kettle drum
to unsettle a dust of harmonics
expelling an itinerant elsewhere
an epistolary scratching-post
a winged thing for the gypsy’s chime
the timbrel’s return to nowhere

Lines such as “showing an oar for a lyre / a turtle shell a tear” serve up Gordon’s nimble delight in play with sound, mixing in classical references to music and poetry of ancient days with a quickness of line shared by many in the current moment. There’s deliberate care given to every word which the double spacing of the lines adds an elegance of attention to without overdoing it. After all, the title of this opening section is “A Dictionary of Music,” Gordon lays down a solid entrance into his work.

Following “A Dictionary of Music” is a section titled “The Right of Return.” Each of the eight poems contained within are a “book of.” For instance, there’s “The Book of Forgetting” along with “The Book of Rebuilding” and

The Book of Definitions

The vestigial mark was the wound
shadow in the preface
though they circled around the flame,
thought of this night
took the form first as bone,
first a cliff overlooking the sea
called “longing for arrival”

When the youngest asked
why this hand was different from others,
another drew in his fingers & said
“This hand is called a fist.”
Not to take note but to transcribe
Bells were rung & special knots devised

At a glance this poem is similar in looks and style to “A Fiddle” but the sensibility behind the lines is of a different nature. Where “A Fiddle” leans on its ambiguous meaning, and thereby gains a sympathetic ear from the reader, “The Book of Definitions” seeks clarity in elusive hinting towards a possible description of rites of violent passage. The poem is neither lesson nor celebration. It does not seek to critique the nature of the young teaching each other how and what it means to say, “This hand is called a fist.” Many of the lines have an overheard quality to them, what might be happening in the reader’s thoughts sitting outside a schoolyard and reflecting without judgment on what is heard. It’s something worth the thought.

The next section’s title, “How Human Nouns,” rivals the metaphoric imagery of the collection’s title (as far as clever titles go) with its witty play-off of traditional rules of grammar. Each of these opening sections is comprised of individually titled poems forming mini-chapbooks of a sort, and work rather nicely when taken individually. It would seem that terms are being set for the collection as a whole. Sometimes this bodes well for the reader and Gordon is headed in a good direction, at other times there’s only disappointment.

To map the wearing away of things

What endows an anecdote with so much tinder
a particular tree in how light fell
how human nouns what the nucleus of commerce won’t replicate
the world in a real enough window
money made of money a bare ankle
pacing from the vault to the podium
to fasten the world a believable cape

Gordon’s ease in falling back on slick trade-ups of common phrase to gain the poetic is not to the poem’s benefit. Not “to fashion” but rather “fasten.” It’s more than a bit trite. Triteness isn’t much better than the clichéd sense Gordon no doubt wishes to duck. The at-first-seeming inspired wit of the section’s title loses almost all of its unique sparkle when the line it is raised out from, “how human nouns what the nucleus of commerce won’t replicate,” is revealed.

Following these three opening sections is “Untragic Hero of Epic Theater,” “Four Allusive Fields,” and “A Book of Names.” These too are mini-chaps of a kind, differing from the opening three in that they’re composed of untitled poems and have a more serial-poem sensibility to them. “Four Allusive Fields” with its first line refrain beginning each poem, “Cy listens absently to absent Homer,” being the most successful. “Cy” is American painter Cy Twombly and Gordon’s poems evoke abstract wanderings serving as both response and commentary upon Twombly’s series of adventurous canvases engaging with the Iliad; in Gordon’s words, “a system of charged, yet ambiguous signifiers, but also wholly narrative.”

Cy listens absently to absent Homer
taking notes that amount to nothing, & nothing
erases as well as a name. Can one draw a careless world
out of its engorged abdomen? Ask that moth
eating through a painted magpie what grinding
against a shard of twilight gave it. Flowers
chalked over aluminum & the elegance
of taped-on wings. Ladders reaching the roof
behind rain clouds brushed on to cover a mistake
Who wouldn’t mistake the surface for vapid paint
a cloud for a sarcophagus a bed for a life your white shirt
for mine, blue for blue. Depending on the vantage point
proves you hang from it in pieces, & though we hadn’t
arrived on the same boat, we’re surely on the same boat now

There’s a pleasant bit of music to these lines, in contrast to “Untragic Hero of Epic Theater” which from its clunky opening line, “Did blanched afternoon unfastening its oiled feathers” on through, never gets around to amounting to anything much or maintaining the reader’s attention. At its best moments a mildly bored sensibility reminiscent of Ashbery is achieved:

What’s the difference hedges toward a structure
I don’t want the locution of some scuffed surface
just your lips moving like birds
where birds are not the story
second to its telling but the inky shape
of astonishment arresting our attention

Often it feels as if Gordon is offering up poetic exercises, attempts to “sound like” or utilize the technique of so and so, the result isn’t much of a thrill. At the end of “Book of Names” references to previous poems appear

Why George? Why Cy?
Why do nudes fall from newspapers?
Why a fire that consumes all before it?
Why yes? & why no?
Why the world’s most believable cape?

Gordon may be holding his own book to question.

Closing out the collection comes “A New Hymn to the Old Night” (if you’re thinking Novalis, so is Gordon, this longish poem intends at being a nod towards his Hymnen an die Nacht), along with “A Little Book of Prayers” which is a mini-mini-chap of three poems and provides an attempt at closure. It is with “A New Hymn to the Old Night” that the design of the book irrevocably intrudes and interrupts the readability of the text. On every page with text a solid line runs from the outside edge of the page about a space and a half above the first line of the poem for about fifteen spaces. The line on the opposing page is slightly lower, so that when the looking at text on opposing pages the text on the left begins ever so slightly higher up on the page than that opposing it on the right. It makes for a rather uneven symmetry and serves no visible purpose other than annoyance. With “A New Hymn to the Old Night” it is especially irksome as it interrupts the visual flow of sections that happen to run further than one page. The assumption is that Gordon intends the poem to be composed of stanzas without separation into individual poems or parts, but these lines lend a sense of rupture, both between as well as at times within, to the would-be stanzas. It’s clear that the lay out was decided upon without a reader-friendly understanding of the manuscript to be associated with it.

Gordon ends the collection with a poem that has a quote from Myung Mi Kim as an epigraph which challenges the thrust of this review.

Urge to call

Cohere who can say
- Myung Mi Kim

Begin with the phrase: it’s light outside
with a window, the reshaping of water
to map the shoreline between finger & figure
to say there is so much loss in the current
anchor-ripped coral or coral-ripped hull
adjacent, resolute, an idea preceding vocabulary
the inclination of a knee to bend or body to decay
one would question sleep as one would step
an image, angled—inverted in a spoon
the subject, suspect of syntax
one tests the wind with a finger as a ship settles
between shoreline & the lines on a map
the terms, twinned to coax out meaning
the leakage of water through slats of wood
one must begin with the current, the word cohere
a child who says: the window shows it’s time to get up

Gordon succeeds in searching for the needs of the poem, but when the needs are met the searching continues, Gordon is always casting in every line for a further lure. As the poem indicates, there comes a time when “it’s time to get up.” The poem is forever an indicator in Gordon’s hands, veering away from becoming, pointing towards a furtherance of the act of its own composition rather than existing as a thing itself to be confronted. Whether the book must cohere isn’t what’s at question so much as whether the poems work well on the page and achieve a state of becoming which travels beyond it.

Necessity alone dictates that readers should expect a poet always be on the go, trying on different hats as it were. As Gordon himself says, “being a poet is something that needs to be continually relearned.” This collection publicly bares the early lessons of Gordon teaching himself this rule. It may be that it’s too soon to be unveiling some of these sequences. The best being better suited to appear at a later date with the lesser attempts included here replaced by material yet to come. Perhaps Gordon doesn’t believe in just letting poems get lost and not pushing them into publication. He admits, “I worked for six years on A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow; some of those poems went through hundreds of drafts.” Whatever the reasons, the volume has a rushed, or perhaps ‘pushed’ is the more proper term, bearing to it. Presented as they are, the poems have a leaned-on atmosphere, as though Gordon has sharpened them to the point where their utility is hampered, and at points, extinguished.

+++
[* All quotations of Gordon’s comments are taken from his interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson published on-line in the Spring ‘07 issue of Rain Taxi.]

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in the library at USF. Poems and chapbooks have been published by Auguste Press, Blue Book, Chain, Pompom, and Red Ant Press among others.

A POETRY BLOG AND TWO CHAPS by SAWAKO NAKAYASU

2007-08-31T23:20:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS GRIDER Reviews

Insect Country (A) by Sawako Nakayasu
(Dusie Press, 2006)

Insect Country (B) by Sawako Nakayasu
(Dusie Press, 2007)

Insect Tutelage Blog by Sawako Nakayasu

Though sometimes the miniature narratives that make up Sawako Nakayasu’s ongoing “insect” project (which includes both the two chapbooks reviewed here and on her Insect Tutelage blog) are compelling and interesting in themselves, what’s most interesting about the project as a whole is Nakayasu’s use of space, time and rhythm between and around the individual poems. There’s no grand narrative or consistent set of characters (except that the pieces mostly have ants or other insects as protagonists) or even a consistent point of view presented by the poems, which forces the reader to either slow down and consider each poem on its own (which is generally worth it) or attempt to find/build an architecture for how these poems fit together other than surface similarity.

There are two points of entry if you’re looking for architecture. The first is the first half of Insect Country (A), which almost functions as a brief, taut apostrophe to the rest of the poems, and has a distinctly different relationship to rhythm than the other poems, presented as small, justified-margins blocks of prose both in the book and on the blog. Recalling her previous work nothing fictional but the accuracy and arrangement (she, the run-on sentence that leads off Insect Country (A) is rendered highly rhythmic by its visual arrangement: at one line per small page, the poem rushes across the page, and while there aren’t any line breaks as such, new pages seem like hard enjambments:

A trail of anything – insects, hamburgers, bicycles /// popsicles, miniature lightning bolts, road maps – anything, all of it /// lined up assiduously, all imagining the small of my back, envisioning it, /// bare, exposed to the light, sunlight, moonlight, halogen, florescent, /// all of it –

where something like “lined up” gets special emphasis because of poem/book design and where “all of it” rushes headlong into a blank page, followed in the rest of Insect Country (A) and all of Insect Country (B) by recalcitrant and meditative (by comparison) vignettes involving insects that approach but stay a good distance away from the surreal, as in “Parade”:

Today is a unique holiday, commemorated by a parade of black, four-legged stools going down the closed-off street. All the neighborhood ants come out to take a look, most of whom take a very critical stance.

There’s a lot of ambiguity to explore here, not the least of which is the question of whether the stools are anthropomorphized (and if they are, how that frames the anthropomorphosis of the ants and their “critical stance”) and that’s both the charm and the frustration of the remaining poems in both chapbooks: the rush of the opening line/poem creates a kind of vacuum for the other work that can make the poems sometimes seem slight when considered alone but that also prevent the poems from adding up to anything more.

Given the ample demonstration in Nakayasu’s other work that she’s completely masterful at what she’s doing, though, that leads me to Architectural Entry Point #2 – the blog that predates the chapbooks. The easy production of and lack of external editorial control that is part and parcel of the idea of the blog gives the form a bad reputation it doesn’t really deserve. Make what you want of blogs, but the interface architecture of the blog distinguishes it as a form with two primary characteristics: inexorable accumulation and a window/monitor that only permits seeing a small part of the whole at one time. (You could easily argue that a commonplace book or diary—or any book—functions in the same way, but bear with me for a moment.) Nakayasu’s insect work is, in a sense, the perfect “blog” poetry project, and I mean that as a compliment: taken together, the individual pieces add up to a whole in which the quality of addition is important—not just that other poems remain on your mind when you read any given poem, but that each new poem is at once a reworking of and addition to a whole history (or, in this case, country) of insect poems. I’ve been trying to avoid the corny metaphor, here, but when looking at the chapbooks the obvious is, well, obvious: the individual poems, too carefully laid out and thoughtful to be rough fragments, are like so many ants themselves slowly and constantly at work on an anthill constantly in the process of being rebuilt.

*****

Nicholas Grider currently lives in southern California.

TRAFFIC, ISSUES 1 AND 2, Edited by ELIZABETH TREADWELL

2007-08-31T23:15:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

Traffic: A Publication of Small Press Traffic, Issues 1 and 2, 2005-07, Edited by Elizabeth Treadwell
(Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, 2005-07)

IT ALL STARTED WAY BACK IN 1974

Theories and opinions about editing a literary journal are diverse, and an ever on-going public discussion continues whenever a new journal starts up. Willingly or not, Traffic (issues 1 and 2) edited by Elizabeth Treadwell, from out of the Executive Director’s office at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, has entered into the conversation. And it’s about time, as it is always a pleasure to see signs that a journal is willing to go in more than one direction and not stick to a single content or format from issue to issue. This allows for improvement and surprise, and indeed, the second issue of Traffic improves upon the first. Treadwell removes a lot of unnecessary front matter and allows the work, itself, to be immediately presented. The first issue reads almost like a high school yearbook when opened, it’s a bit too sweet and friendly in its welcoming the reader in, as well as overgenerous to its cover artist with an extended “Artist’s Statement,” while the second is more professional and serious-looking.

The poems in Issue 1 are, without doubt, its highlights. Stephanie Young’s celebratory “Poem for Small Press Traffic’s 30th Anniversary” opens the “Poetry and Prose” section. Her fast moving inventory of historical reference points from the year of birth she shares with the institution reads like a groovy chuck and jive update of Frank O’Hara. She opens with a list of whom and what else is also born that year:

It’s 1974, quick, you are
getting born, also Leonardo di Caprio
and Jewel. Floppy disk drives, People Magazine,
Dungeons & Dragons, Happy Days, internet,
Institute of Physics Library, Super Pong, Chinatown, Sterling Bank,
Kate Moss, Supermodel! Nobody gets the Pulitzer for fiction or drama but Robert Lowell does.

“Robert Lowell” stands in for “poetry,” as much as he represents what in 1974 was deemed Pulitzer material, things haven’t changed much in 30 years as Young’s poem remind us.

Anne Sexton dies on October 4.
Karen Silkwood dies on November 12.
Nixon resigns.
George W. Bush is discharged from
the U.S. Air Force Reserve. They’re putting
carnations in their guns in Portugal and bombs
go off in pubs, Dublin, the Tower of London, 107 meters
underground, India’s testing a Peaceful Nuclear Explosive.

The beautiful-the famous-the tragic-the corrupt, death and bombs going off, bombs being tested: a dangerous world.

It’s all happening now
Patty Hearst with a rifle in her hands
John Lennon is still alive
the oil embargo is over
Sonny and Cher are over
but the Talking Heads are getting together.
The Ramones are getting together.
Japan is getting together.

Stephanie Young is definitely getting it together. It’s difficult to think of another poem better suited to open what will hopefully be an ongoing enterprise for the organization, “started way back in 1974,” which continues to be an integral force of the experimental poetics community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Young, stepping to as a fresh member, keeps the rhythm of her lines going, the listing of historical births a surprising delight, right up to the end.

Grateful Dead unleashes the wall of sound
the UN grants observer status to the PLO
Rover Thomas and the Krill Kill songs
UPC codes
it all started way back in 1974:
walking for exercise
pipeline construction
over 12 million donuts
the barrier
the project
King Crimson
Sears Tower
the Australian Forum for Textile Arts
my Queen collection
the International WONCA news
grass Oil for Men By Javan
the NewMath, where one must be
wary of empty formalism,
by, being, multiplactors.

Following Young, Will Alexander’s dark, surreal testimonial, “The Blood Penguin,” engages in an entirely different manner. “I am the carnivore / the hounded night walker / searching for my wings under scattered glass,” it’s not easy to understand who the person, or thing, Alexander describes is, it’s also not necessary. Alexander is tapping into a powerful, mytho-spiritual force that language yields up from deep within. A global, even inter-stellar, consciousness, “it says / I am of Africa & the sea coast / of Ghana & the Seychelles / of insular breakage near the Azores // yet it states my non-placement / my cavern / my debilitating refuge // not even a dwelling beneath the stars / as etheric camp base on Saturn.” As always with Alexander’s poems, the reader is taken on a thrilling ride of auditory splendor, of which the meaning, perhaps, is not obvious yet the feeling that language is being presented in fresh, world-thought provoking ways refuses denial.

Margaret Christakos’ work displays a playful ease with bringing words together and delighting in the lushness of the evocative phrase, “Tender repartee taunts / if in a cockle is your conch / gush up mister” (“The Groin Area (Wet Version)”). An opening that catches the reader’s attention, if the title didn’t, and her interrogation of the possible acts these phrases capture carries through to the end of the poem,

The groin area wetter to roam
repartee still and tender
such minstrel speech—
shush shush hush
about get else gush on lever us
with several words of advice
Gender us
gentle shelter overhead:
pear-shaped bulb a pulse
or else no lesser.

It is clear that the intent is not mere titillation.

Small Press Traffic is also supportive of experimental prose writing, the writers involved in events held there, being just that, “writers,” the line between prose and poetry continually blurred. On many occasions this produces a difficult reading to sit through, but when the writing holds the listener’s interest, the evening’s enjoyable. Thankfully, Lise Erdrich’s prose is capable at times of being a good example of the latter. There is the resistance to being classifiable, is this memoir-mini-story-or what?

When my cousins came back once I told them it was easy to see
they were hard-core regulars in here, they were going to be losers
and throw away their opportunity to get an education. They just
laughed and started singing, “Go My Son” but the words were
all changed like, Go my son, leave the reservation, go my son, you’re on
Relocation, go my son, take your medication. Finally we left and started
walking down the street to somebody’s house nearby where there
was a party, like they promised in the first place. This car full of
white people came speeding down the street and they swerved up
alongside us and stuck their heads out the windows and hollered
all at once “HAIRY BUFFALO!” and I thought I was going to be
a hate crime but they kept on going. My cousins explained that we
were being invited to a party.
(“Hairy Buffalo”)

Erdrich combines a delicate flirtation with amusing aspects of the scene alongside forthright honesty of lines that catch the reader up, “I thought I was going to be a hate crime.” Erdrich keeps her lines clean and crisp, leaving the impression she knows all too well the dangers she addresses and grounds her text in the occasions which inspired the writing of it.

The selection of poems from Mark McMorris’ “Letter for K & Poems for Someone Else,” demonstrate a lyrical drive bent on beauty, caught in the in-between luster of the desire towards the beloved “Other.”

(a poem)
               dis poem shall say nothing new
               dis poem shall speak of time
               --Mutaburaka

The larks animate the morning with their signals
to each other that I overhear and cannot decode
draw me from the doorway to the street, to be one
among several musics that score the city I love.
Today the Lord dies again; a scholar writes in Greek
his story of mystery; the translator comes to Antioch
to start on the final book, the one that was lost for good.
I breathe the same air and sound of voices falling
onto a page that cannot record the thing itself
how your face is close to my thought, as close as a breath
that I still listen to, a translator who keeps very still.
In one or another folio on the shelf, it says that I look
at train schedules and take steps to book your flight
dressed up for a meeting at a café. It is a volume
I want to read at once, to conclude, and start over,
a book that meets a scholar, a scholar that meets a train,
a train that meets a woman, a woman that meets me.
But this poem is like a war that never ends, this poem
has no closure, it unravels as I write, it starts again
on the Pontus Euxine, on an island, and then it says:

An epistolary sequence, as the title indicates, these poems are held in the eternal stasis of lyrical containment. “And then it says:” which is to say, it keeps on going, “this poem has / no closure,” caught up in the swirl of the world “the larks animate.” McMorris, free or not, as any other, acknowledges the poem and moves forward in it. This is the lyric of nostalgia.

Charles Alexander’s “Pushing Water 23 for Jackson Maclow” is a moving tribute to the recently deceased older poet, structured similar to Maclow’s “Light Poems,” of which, it is reminiscent. The line “the movement of light through a prism” plays as a refrain throughout, gathering lines to it, almost ceremonially reminding, “it’s all part of the same light / it’s all part of the same light,” becoming a prayer, of sorts, for The Poem continuing past the page becoming The Life, “bloomsday light // French sonnet light // missing the light // beyond the light.”

Robert Fitterman (with David Buuck)’s essay, “Identity Theft: My subjectivity” succeeds in asking lots of good questions, as he states, it is more of “a Q and Q than a Q and A,” and troubles only when he attempts to somewhat provide answers. His acute comments on the fluid sense of identity brought about by aggressive marketing in our ever-increasingly consumer culture of the last three decades is appetizing: “This 70s splintered youth, especially in the suburbs, struggled against and identified with a new consumer culture that was both mercurial and superficial. It was an identity that was carefully engineered by marketing strategist[s] who foresaw the benefits of emptying one identity and refilling it with multiple identities.” Fitterman is accurate in pointing out the potential for a poetics of adaptation based upon a borrowing and blending of subjectivity,

a new prosody in this sense would necessarily mean not only a
rigorous rethinking of formal approaches to the commodity
aesthetics of consumer culture, but also would require a critical
engagement with the actual processes of content-gathering, textual
retrieval, research, culling, etc. What is the relationship between
sources and fragments, and the new forms that (re)articulate them?
How is context established, framed, or ‘staged’? Following Olson,
does our cultural weeding carry with it the soil and roots of historical
sedimentation? (in an active, and not nostalgic or fetishistic way?)

These are great questions, and the potential excitement of a rising generation of young poets already at work with the issues Fitterman raises is strongly apparent. The trouble arises in so far that there is the possible loss of this potential if one loses belief in the actual. Fitterman claims he likes “the personal,” he just doesn’t want it to be his “own,” which is fine, but don’t give up your stake in it. If, truly, “we have experienced the same with the same,” it’s hard to see any reason to bother defending the experience, or sharing it for that matter. Fitterman would do well to find himself an adage, such as, “all pop songs are lies, but the good ones you believe in,” and to trust in feeling, even if it isn’t his own.

Carol Mirakove’s, “Anxieties of Information,” suffers from poor textual formatting. She cites the work of numerous poets, with extended quotations, none of which are indented, making it a challenge in areas to decipher where her commentary picks back up and the work she’s quoting ends. Perhaps this is purposeful, to merge commentary and text, unfortunately it doesn’t work out very well. There is also the distracting nuisance of having the names of the writers she cites printed in bold. It is assumed that this is according to her wishes. If there is a good reason for it, the essay does not reveal it. By the end of reading through this piece, the reader is rather glad to be finished with all the confusion and is slightly annoyed that Mirakove’s “anxieties” have, however briefly, become her own.

There’s very little to be said for “The 10 Minute Hollywood.” This collaborative “play” written by Tanya Brolaski, Brent Cunningham, Dan Fisher, Kelly Holt & Cynthia Sailers, cruises in on the skirts of the now annual Small Press Traffic Poets Theatre and takes advantage of the snide humor towards Hollywood and popular culture that has become de rigeur in the works performed. Kevin Killian’s plays are the best of this style. What you get without his involvement tends towards the juvenile; while amusing in parts, there’s nothing original or worthwhile. This is the kind of writing best kept between friends having some fun, possibly distributed cheaply and on-the-go for distribution among each other and other small communities. It’s strikingly out of place with the best of the work in Traffic and demonstrative of just how bad the magazine might be without proper editing.

Each issue of Traffic contains an interview. The first is with poet and editor, Allison Cobb, the second with poet, artist and editor, Yedda Morrison (whose original art, “Bioposy #12,” adorns the cover). Interviews are absolutely necessary documents allowing for discoveries about an artist’s processes and life circumstances which the work does not convey, but relies upon and, often enough, is derived from. In the last decade’s boom of email barrage, an ever greater number of interviews have been published which are, in actuality, email exchange. An email exchange is not an interview, it is a correspondence. Elizabeth Treadwell acknowledges that her “interview” with Morrison occurred via email. Jane Sprague does not state whether or not her “interview” with Allison Cobb took place via email, but it suffers from too few questions and rather long, extended responses which tend to characterize such interactions. Call it old fashioned, but there’s something to sitting down in person with somebody and having a chat which email fails to live up to. Both Morrison and Cobb are doing fairly interesting work, these “interviews” do offer insight into them as individuals, but it would be pleasant to have the opportunity to see the results of a more thorough exchange. Nevertheless, if Cobb and Morrison continue on the paths they’re currently on, producing work that motivates and encourages others, there’s sure to be desire for the information these exchanges contain. Each brings additional value and depth to the individual issue in which it appears.

Issue 2 is chock full of engaging material. One improvement Treadwell has made is the addition of 100 pages over the 124 pages of issue 1, printed in a smaller, more scholarly font, which she then packs with worthwhile poems, essays, and an “Editor’s Forum: On poetry & women’s embodiment.” It’s fair to say that the title of the forum itself is the theme of the issue. All of the work is by women and provides, by example, a counterbalance, as well as response to, many of the statements made in the forum, which focus primarily on the SuicideGirls cover of a recent issue of Fence and the inclusion of some sexually charged photographs of women in a recent issue of Shiny. The debate in the forum is both appropriate and necessary. The work in the rest of the issue, when at its best, is inspiring and, at times, daring.

Alice Notley starts the issue off with a generous new selection from “Songs and Stories of the Ghouls: extract from The Book of Dead.” This is Notley writing in top form. None of this selection appears in her recent new and selected poems, Grave of Light, which also contains a portion from the same manuscript. The ancient Greek figure, Medea, makes numerous appearances, her story—of murdering her brother for the love of Jason only to later be spurned and murder her own children—gets reworked and inextricably interwoven with that of the narrator:

Medea ran with her children
She fled with them leaving the house where one must
accept the elaborate head in a box with its
silver and turquoise ornamentation as one’s own
civilization. This severed thought will do you good
No we are leaving you. Though it was reported
she killed her children and left alone since that story
took care of all of them. Medea entrusted herself with
the remnants of her culture, in an old box. What was her
culture? You say it was a dream, leading you on
I am the most destructive person alive because I
can’t bear the lies in your heart. Every murder attributed to her
had no victim but feelings, was an assault on the sanctity of your
language covering one with the white shit of pigeons in an airshaft.

Along with Medea, Notley reminds the reader she has “to tell you about ghouls, too.” The ghouls appear frequently and are appropriately, well, “ghoulish.” “In Dead,” which is the state the narrator writes from, everybody’s a ghoul. Turns out ghouls still pay attention to poetic form, all the while retelling Medea’s story, as well as calling their own into being, and the matters of the living don’t drop away.

Why kill anyone? There are much more radical things to do.

I need to write in verse for a moment
effecting a temporary change. Can you
feel it? I’d always rather write a poem.
But I’m shaky, lacking in control. The murder
makes me nervous, this talk of my own death. No,
it’s more that I’m afraid prose won’t go deep enough.
It can’t solve the murder this time; because it didn’t pose
it, the deathly situation, in the first place
Poetry tells me I’m dead; prose pretends I’m not.

And yet I go on in prose.

In Dead, voices have begun to speak to me in old languages: it
sounded like Latin last time. In English a man’s voice said, “The prisons
are fragile.” All the prisons at this time are fragile, that is, the prisons of
form. He said as well, “Move on,” but I translate that as Use the fragility
for change.

Though “ghouls are amassing everywhere,” Notley continues to excite with her shifts of imaginary forms. What happens in an Alice Notley line drifts in the reader’s thoughts for days afterwards, there’s no shaking it. As Catherine Wagner notices in her perspective essay, “Leslie Scalapino, Alice Notley, and the Better-World Thought Experiment,” which directly follows the Notley selection, “Both Scalapino and Notley are conscious of the role of language in creating and reinforcing hierarchies and oppressions.” With her “ghouls” Notley continues to wage the good fight in her oh so lovely dark manner.

Joining Notley, Tonya Foster reacts against reinforcements of “hierarchies and oppressions” in the “role of language,” in her own way, posing an explorative experiment with memoir in the section presented here from her “A Mathematics of Chaos: Pay Attention to Where You At.” Several sections of which demonstrate her to be directly in the line of Gertrude Stein. By use of repetitive phrases and words, she opens her text to the free play of sound, making new meaning.

Waterlikelanguagelikewaterlikelanguagelikewaterlikelangauge
Likeotterslikelanguagelikedaughterslikeotterslikelickinglike
lappinglike

languagewaters

Foster also shares anecdotes from her childhood which demonstrate an early interest and awareness in the flexibility of possible meanings of language. An attention to the fact that it is how words are heard, determines meaning.

Once, my little cousin Amber asked my sister Briana where my sister
Chonda had moved to. “Indiana,” Briana explained. “Indiana?” Amber
responded bewildered. Thinking Briana hadn’t understood her, she
repeated her question. “In di ana,” Briana responded more slowly, in
her careful schoolteacher diction. Amber looked back and forth from
Briana to my sister Deanna. “How can Chonda be in Deanna?” Amber
asked.

The pleasure of being playful, yet direct, aware of the various dead end paths which proliferate the further the writing heads into unmapped territory; is the thrill these poets are sharing in. In her own poem, “There’s No Kindness,” Joanna Fuhrman shares her sense of her identity as poet:

in water vapor doing
what I am afraid to be

sure I could write
a love poem and appear

triumphantly dumb
or a business letter,

perfectly adroit, confident
a wingless fly scurrying

over an air conditioner
makes the afternoon

less than praise-worthy
to the fanatically clean,

but not, to me,
a veritable believer

in the inherent
glamour of error

In this “glamour of error” the poet achieves a role distinctly suited to her purposes. Many, if not all, the poets presented, share in a similar sense of purpose when it comes to the activity of writing. Fuhrman’s work totters on the edge of sliding too far over that edge of error, but manages to maintain a somewhat usefulness. Not every poet practicing in this same manner achieves the ability to stay away from the temptation of allowing the lines to wander off into self-indulgent nonsense. Fuhrman shows she has the good sense not to over-reach her abilities.

As Yedda Morrison tells Treadwell, “My poems come mostly from preoccupations with structures of power, from personal weaknesses, mass media addictions, points of desire and confusion.” It does not belittle the work to admit things which are true. Nada Gordon’s ecstatic “I LOVE MEN,” teases the tension of being radical, experimental, and feminist, with a boisterous ironic shout, “I wrote the meanest, silliest thing below about men. I’m so sorry. Please ignore. / Anyway, here’s why I love men. They are brave. I love men’s thighs, their hands; the small of their necks; I love men.” What makes Gordon’s poem work is that she truly does know what men love. She compiles a list that seduces as much as it scathes, “I love men for their strength. Sometimes it is that vein that bulges on the upper part… I love men for the way they give up everything but themselves for love. / I love men with big penis… and I love men’s hair.” She’s playful and jabbing,

Urgh, I love men with top hats and beautifully tailored tuxedos and immaculately polished shoes. I Love Men In Uniform I Love Men In Uniform Charm. I Love Firemen I Love Firemen Charm.
I love men in turbans.
I love men who wear fishnet and skirts. It’s just downright sexy,
I love men staring from buses in the next lane. Sometimes, my boyfriend will make me go out in a miniskirt without panties to go on an escalator.
I Love Men in Boots! That’s a whole lotta boots!

I love men, but they wear me out with all their confusing issues. One day
they say they love you and the next they see someone with a bigger ass.

I love men, muscles, sex, porn, and chocolate.

I love Men on Prozac. I love men on Prozac with their calm, James Dean
smiles and dreamy novelist eyes.

Of course I love men of all races…but, I have to admit I am completely
fascinated by Asian men. Japanese, Chinese, Korean…I love it all.

I love men. They are energetic, great at fetching and I love them. Darlings,
I love men, especially when they are silent, beautiful and have no panties.

I LOVE WIENERS And Jewels I love men Money Power And I love my sex Me and My sex And I love my sex Only Me and My sex La la la la la
la la la la..

Gordon acknowledges and confronts the ludicrousness of the Male gender at large. And she does so with glee: “I LOVE MEN!!! I LOVE MEN!!! I LOVE MEN!!!” There’s no blaming her.

At the heart of Issue 2, and a gem of an example of possible promise in the future for any “new poetics,” is Alicia Cohen’s “Lyric Creatures: New poetics and the Animal,” her exploration of various avenues available to poets via closer examination of the manner of communication between animals is precise and, on the whole, entirely heart-warming. Cohen grounds her argument in the philosopher Levinas:

According to Levinas, western metaphysics commits an ethical violence
against “being” because it approaches the world like a hunter who
demands of all things Reveal yourself to me. I will understand you, grasp
you. The violence of metaphysics is hidden beneath a cloak of scholarly
quiet and a kind of worldly remove but knowing the world, according to
Levinas, is always a predatory mode in which revelation is ultimately a
means to seize, control, and subjugate what is known. An ethical
philosophy, for Levinas, cannot involve a demand like: reveal yourself. An
ethical approach to being involves instead the offer of a greeting as a means
of opening a conversation. In this approach to knowing “what is” one
recognizes and respects the autonomy, the radical alterity, which is the face
of the Other. The philosopher in this approach does not expect (ever) to
penetrate, reveal, and grasp “what is” or the Other’s otherness. What is left
is the possibility of conversation. A conversation in which one is beholden
to the Other.

Cohen continues, describing how, for herself, “Poetry doesn’t serve to penetrate, reveal, or grasp otherness. Rather, it creates a space in which otherness can move— a place in which one can greet and open to and share a space with otherness.” Cohen is arguing for poets to find it worthwhile to look towards animal communication as a means of liberating the imagination.

William Carlos Williams, in his original preface to Kora in Hell, posed a similar possibility, citing St. Francis of Assisi,

I should like to make St. Francis of Assisi the patron saint of the United
States, because he loved the animals. The birds came to him not for
wheat but to hear him preach. Even the fish heard him.

The columns of the trees in his forests were a lesson to him; he looked
up between them and mingled with the animals as an equal.

Williams adds, “Nor do I think it is especially recorded that St. Francis tried to make the sparrows Christians. When the service was over each beast returned to his former habits.” Assisi did not convert animals to his own means. He did not attempt to exert control over them, so they were relaxed and comfortable in his presence. Assisi’s removal of his own interests aligns with Cohen’s own writing habits. As she states, “When I go to write I sit and just open to whatever moves through me to write. I try to follow what the writing has to tell me rather than use the writing as a mode of willed articulation.” Cohen is chasing down a means to imbibe the writing of poetry with a fresh perspective that challenges, and adds to, the preconceptions which grounded past poetics. Her pursuit contributes an approach that is both a wonder and a necessity as it rises above the squabbling connected with the numerous poetry scenes and settings of today’s world, not to mention the ludicrous violence of mistaken governments.

It is to be hoped that there will be many future issues of Traffic, the material getting better and better, as each issue continues to allow for change of direction and consistent striving after the best work happening in the contemporary moment. If Treadwell sets her sights right, she’ll broaden the net of potential contributors and keep up with a wide range of substance and format of the work presented. Transcription of panel discussions, for instance, whether they occur on the premises of SPT or not, would be terrific to see appear. Perhaps most promising about her editorial work so far is her ability not to lapse into merely publishing the work of readers from the SPT reading series, but continually reaching for examples from beyond immediate quarters. Subscriptions (faculty and librarians of Poetry Special Collections, take note—your library is lacking without Traffic) and/or memberships to Small Press Traffic (which include a copy of Traffic) are recommended as means to ensure the venture stays afloat.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in the library at USF. Poems and chapbooks have been published by Auguste Press, Blue Book, Chain, Pompom, and Red Ant Press among others.

[one love affair]* by JENNY BOULLY

2007-08-31T23:10:00.000-07:00

Teresa Carmody reviews

[one love affair]* by Jenny Boully
(Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006)

To Love: a feeling, a sense, a knowing which grows through an engagement with another who cannot be fully recognized or apprehended, for the lover and the beloved do not, à la happily-ever-after and despite Biblical injunctions, ever really become one.

To Read: a feeling, a sense, a knowing, which grows through an engagement with a text which cannot be fully recognized or apprehended, for the reader and the writer are forever, à la Wittgenstein, peering through their own self-set of eyes, and, as Jenny Boully writes, “the promise told [will] never be the promise given.”

Boully is writing about love.

Boully is writing about reading.

Boully is writing a renga of love and reading, a collaboration with the writers she is reading, incorporating their lines into this new love object, [one love affair]*, three long poems made from “the narrative that snuck in when reading various books, which are documented in subsequent footnotes.” (Boully, 17) And it’s a non-monogamous list, including: Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Duras, Carol Maso, Gertruide Stein, and Robert Walser.

Boully’s language is accretive and lyrical. It is clear, feels clean in the mouth and sweet in the ear--the sweetness of alliteration and repetition. Yes, it is repeating, so one begins to feel there another form embedded within the prose, though not a poetic form as much as the formed outline of a lover’s body, a book one has loved, one lover in a line of lovers, lying in the same bed as the former others.

“She takes for a moment certain words and tries to decide whether or not they belong.” (Boully, 11)

Boully writes that which Vanessa Place describes as the “lyric as-is,” a lyricism of the traditionally beautiful (a moon, dogwood, violets) alongside the ordinary (soup, Sprites, tree snails), a lyricism of the ironic, yet earnest, a gesture toward transcendence, already understood to not really exist.

In my position, alone, in relation to someone who comes and goes, an action without end, I too drift among hermits, show crabs, pedestrians, tellers of misfortunes. I know the omen, the omen across the table who glances up occasionally to remind you that this too you will not have. He is eating his soup; he is living with you; he had not asked you to spend your life with him.

From “It’s the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative I exist” (title from Beckett)

So Boully leaves us, in the end, alone and separated, meaning eclipsed by the impossibility of saying, with a spectral of sense of something though perhaps not enough feeling, except for the faithful fact of feeling.

*****

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem, a collection of short stories. Other work has appeared in Fold Appropriate Text, PoetsWest, Stolen Purse, Roar, For Here or To Go, 4th Street and TrenchArt Material, and is forthcoming in Slope. She is cofounder and director of Les Figues Press, and co-curator of The Last Sunday of the Month Reading Series at the Smell in downtown Los Angeles.

TWO PUBLICATIONS by ERNESTO PRIEGO

2007-08-31T23:05:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

The Body Aches by Ernesto Priego
(ExPressoDoble, Mexico City, 2005)

and

Not Even Dogs by Ernesto Priego
(Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, 2006)

Ernesto Priego is theoretically and historically informed. He’s written and published essays in at least two languages, on topics ranging from Don Quixote to Mexican Indie Comics to postmodern culture. His work is contemporary. He knows what he’s doing. And -- his poems are as naked as language will allow. That’s not easy. It requires a tremendous amount of focus to keep from being overwhelmed by intellection when one is an intellectual. Not that poetry and intellection are opposed, of course. To quote Creeley:

In his preface to A Test of Poetry (1948) Louis Zukofsky notes at the outset, “The test of poetry is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art.” In his long poem “A” he qualifies its occasion as “Out of deep need . . .” … It is a sense that proposes poetry to be evidence as to its own activity, apart from any other sense of description or of a convenience to some elsewise considered reality of things.

Nothing in what Creeley calls Zukofsky’s proposal specifies just how poetry is to “be evidence as to its own activity”, nor how necessary it is that that evidence be foregrounded. In Priego’s work, line break, form (e.g. hay(na)ku) and concision and precision of language , as well as music, serve as evidence. But these elements are not foregrounded. Rather, his “considered reality of things” is. (If one prefers to think in terms of persona rather than person, I believe that Priego and his persona are pretty much the same.) And it’s our shared reality that forms his “subject.”

There’s a drawing of a person in t-shirt and jeans, a torso, rather, on the cover of A Body Aches (a portrait of the author?). At first glance, one might think the head is missing. But I don’t think so. It’s either buried within a wall, or it’s poking through that wall to see what’s on the other side. In any case, the body is the focus. From the title poem:

How difficult it is, the body tells you, to keep a promise:
To say, painlessly, j’accepte, and keep your word.

The word becomes embedded in a book, “The first page” of which “quickly became the last”, a book that can’t be read -- yet:

How come the book is still here, unread,
Waiting patiently for the ache to go away.

(“A body aches”)

This is a love poem, and what the body tells is that when love doesn’t last, when it passes too quickly, well … is there one among us who doesn’t know the rest? Sometimes poems tell us what we don’t know, sometimes they tell us what we do, and can’t and shouldn’t forget. I have no preference, as long as the ride is good.

Most of the poems in The Body Aches are written in relation to the absence of the beloved, and the same ache. In a sense, then, this book is a sequence. I don’t think it’s a narrative. At least I don’t sense a resolution, an end to the aching.

About half the poems here are hay(na)ku. This form offers room enough and formal tension enough to both allow and force a writer to get what needs to be in in and to leave what needs to be out out. Of course, as with any other form, a lot depends on the compatibility of sensibility and constraint. There’s no question that Priego and hay(na)ku were meant for each other.

Not Even Dogs, the other title under review, is entirely hay(na)ku. This lends a formal coherence that unifies the book somewhat the way the feeling-tone of lost love unifies The Body Aches. This coherence allows the poems to encompass a bigger world. But not an entirely different world.

Some of Priego’s more theoretical concerns appear in Not Even Dogs, without his abandoning the body:

This
begins with
a simple premise:

I don’t know
who this
is.

Or,
should I
say, who I

is, in writing
it’s the
body

written
superficially, here,
yet absent, nowhere,

found only precisely
here …

(“[This / begins with / a simple premise]”)

Note how the hay(na)ku tercet and the thought-unit are one and the same at the beginning, and how the thought-unit expands as the poem goes on, and how even as the tercet and the thought-unit cease to correspond the breaks between them continue to serve a dramatic purpose. That’s craft.

Though some of his concerns are expressed theoretically, or what looks like theoretically, I’d say that at heart Priego is a love poet:

One
word leads
to an Other:

(“[One / word leads / to an Other:]”)

And when an Other is present … look out. And when the Other is not:

How
I wish
I could write

about
something other
than my ghosts

(“[How / I wish / I could write]”)

But we can only write what we can write. That’s not romanticism speaking through me, that’s just fact. For unfathomable reasons, and no matter how much they might try not to, every poet sounds/reads/whatever just like her or himself.

Sometimes the Other isn’t a person. Take the 10-part sequence “Cities”, in which “you” is a city. I don’t think it matters much if the beloved is a person or a city:

Your
Beauty, wounded, …

still
prevails, even
if in dreams.

For
you, I
sing these blues.

(“Ninth City”)

I like these poems, am moved by them, am enabled by them, encouraged to feel my own life more deeply. To not shy away from pain. To not shy away from ecstasy. To live in love, obviously.

…
it’s a joy

bearing
witness …

(“[In / this case / it’s a joy]”)

Witness is withness, if you know what I mean.

In closing, perhaps it should be noted that some of the poems in The Body Aches reappear in Not Even Dogs. That doesn’t mean both books aren’t worth having.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman’s most recent publications are World Zero and No Sounds Of My Own Making. He is one of four collaborators on the recent “Four Skin Confessions”, which can be found at http://chainedhaynaku.wordpress.com/. His current project is called Autopoiesis. He’s completed 35 parts and has no idea how many there will be when it’s done. Perhaps 35. Perhaps 1,000,000.

NETS by JEN BERVIN

2007-08-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS GRIDER Reviews

Nets by Jen Bervin
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004)

Jen Bervin’s Nets uses a very simple and compelling strategy to explore a number of “big questions” about poetry, from the authority of the reader and the historicity of a given poem to questions of how poetry is made (rather than expressed). The simple strategy Bervin uses is to pick certain words from all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and present those arrangements of words and phrases as a poem “written over” the original text.

Because of the visual nature of the poems, this process is easier to just demonstrate than to try to describe, so here is the Bervin/Shakespeare version of Sonnet 20 [Editor's Note: Due to Blogger constraints, what's not featured in the poem below is how the non-bold words are supposed to be in text colored light gray]:

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be they love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

Rather than discarding the unused portions of the text she’s over-writing and to which she’s responding (as in other similar projects like Ronald Johnson’s Paradise Lost elision, RADI OS), Bervin leaves the original sonnet in place beneath and between her chosen words. And this, which seems at first like a minor but clever editorial decision, becomes the hinge of the entire project. If she would have left the light-gray text out completely, she would have one short, spare and ambiguous poem, but the authorial gesture of keeping the unused text actually produces a multiplicity of poems by emphasizing what Bervin left out as much as what she kept.

This tension between the original text and the partially redacted is (for me, at least) incredibly exciting and great because it thoroughly disrupts a “clean” reading of either Shakespeare’s original or Bervin’s edit and instead produces the generative energy of a possibility of endless poems being produced between writing and reading—a kind of Pandora’s box of language that resists finality and endlessly shifts between readings.

Or maybe a better way of addressing this openness would be to list a few things that come out of reading between the above double-poem:

1) Bervin mostly avoids using any of the gendered phrases in the poem except “master-mistress,” highlighting the emphasis on gender in the original and the apparent absence of it in Bervin’s own version.

2) “master-mistress” gets foregrounded as the tension going on in both poems; in the original, it’s a question of the tension between the narrator’s authorial power, Nature’s agency, and the agency of the addressed woman’s Natural beauty. In Bervin’s gender-avoidant use of the phrase, though, the relational status of both master and mistress are redefined because, rather than being attached to the engine that drives the original’s writing (i.e. “my passion”), master and mistress are attached to “my / shifting” and the purposeful space and silence between “my” and “shifting.”

3) Bervin’s choices represent both her and Shakespeare’s poems as fields/clusters of words instead of one long broken line. An example of this is in the lower left-hand corner of Bervin’s poem: instead of choosing the “by” next to “adding” she chooses the “by” that hovers above it, calling attention to both the repetition of the word and raising questions over the choice of the present-tense and active “adding” over the nearby “addition.” Additionally, because of the low number of words Bervin selects in each sonnet, the reader’s eye skips in unexpected and nonlinear ways: looking at the above poem, for example, I’m able to read “shifting / nothing,” “master-mistress of my / nothing,” and “nothing / prick’d thee out for…pleasure” as lines contained within Bervin’s otherwise linear revision of the poem.

4) Bervin mostly avoids the shiny $10 words in the poem (like “gazeth” or “a-doting”) in favor of making connections between Shakespeare and her careful choice of more ordinary words—the superficially similar “shifting” “adding” and “nothing” are linked in a way that invites the reader to consider the relationship between those words and how they’re used in Bervin’s version as well as the original.

5) Finally, all of what I mentioned above about Bervin’s edit reflects back on the original, calling forth phrases from the original that lead in interesting directions away from the poem itself—instead of just thinking of this as the demonstration of “passion,” for example, with the “Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting” serving as a kind of buried footnote reminding the reader of the Renaissance’s wholesale appropriation of the more family-friendly parts of ancient Greek and Roman culture and how that was formalized into an idea of Romance as odd, stiff and flashy as the ruffs worn by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

So it should be clear, here, that this is a pretty strong endorsement of going out and buying this book ASAP especially if you’re interested in Shakespeare or contemporary US versions of the sonnet by Bernadette Mayer or Ted Berrigan. The book is not without its flaws—dealing with 150 sonnets on a small group of themes, it’s sometimes difficult for Bervin to present a reading./writing that doesn’t end up hugging the curve of the original, and her valiant attempt to deal with the tacky Sonnet 135 never quite gets off the ground—but ultimately the project as a whole, in calling forth a multiplicity of readings between old and new versions, becomes more rewarding the more you reread it and get explicitly drawn into an authorial position yourself.

*****

Nicholas Grider currently lives in southern California.

HOUSE ORGAN Edited by KENNETH WARREN

2007-08-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

HOUSE ORGAN #58 Win/Spr ’07, Edited by Kenneth Warren
(Lakewood, Ohio, 2007)

FUN IN THE ETERNAL CITY

House Organ is a personal endeavor that escapes the crippling baggage that generally accompanies such affairs. Kenneth Warren edits and publishes each issue, sending them out from his residence in Lakewood, Ohio. Unassuming in appearance, House Organ consists of several sheets of 8 ½ by 11 paper folded vertically in half with a single staple affixing the spine; addresses are written on the back and postage attached—no need for envelopes—each issue contains poems, ongoing critical engagements, reviews, and memoirs. As Warren has termed the publication, it is a donor organ. This appears to be meant literally, those who receive it in the mail along with those who it publishes, donate their time and person to an ongoing, active engagement with poetry. Warren is paying attention below the usual radar. It would be of no surprise to one day run into him without ever knowing it and for him to have all the words needed for conversation at hand without any concern for hobnobbing or any “who’s who” nonsense. This is the sense of mind evidenced by his editorial judgment along with the continuing productivity and longevity of the Organ.

Stephen Ellis is among the core group of poets Warren draws upon for repeat appearances in the issues and he is pleasantly included in issue #58. Ellis marks his poetic engagement with striking word choice and rapid springs of rushed motivation, getting the physical down into fluid fourteen line structures of dazzling arrangement.

Returning Libido To Its Source

Lust perhaps turns into devotion
to object not inverted to subject,
beginning each phase of life as amateur
all over again, obligatory ritual
Ginger Rogers singing We’re In
The Money in pig-latin, as nothing
previously understood, except as the pre-
history each passing moment passes into,
pulled always back into the present as we are,
caught before nature’s hieroglyphs, garbled
as devotion’s objects often are, by one’s own
intercession to love itself, to release
the self from each subject’s hold, and hold
equally to each and every object’s activation

The poem is engagement with living. Ellis is working out his own psychological battles within the formal grace of language bent to his means. As an editor, Warren appears drawn to writers who are interested in writing with direct treatment of the text as an extension of their person over any particular branch of poetics or level of discipline achieved. As a result, the sensibilities displayed by the work in each issue vary wildly. Margueritte (a pen name? No last name is ever given), whose work I have not seen elsewhere, provides juxtaposition to Ellis.

broken piece

eye round fastened to grass
tall waving eye follows
grass cooled by wind eye
why you say it is heaven
I say watch out someone
will take it away
when you are not looking

Where Ellis is challenging, engaging the reader’s intellect, Margueritte is coy and playful, simple in word choice and delivered in a relaxed mood of warning. Each poet is careful in craft and is intent on getting a message across to the reader, yet the ultimate atmospheres created by each are separated by distinctly distant relationships to the language.

Warren’s address book would be a pleasure to behold. The surprises contained inside must be like discovering a terrific used book store stocked full of small press ephemera that only those readers who have really put in the time are aware of. Reading House Organ returns the physical pleasure of the text to the reader in contrast to the screen culture so prevalent to many relations these days. The sense of community is strong and grounded by deeply extended roots reaching far back. Janine Pommy Vega, a poet found most usually in secondary sources on women of the Beat Generation, makes regular appearances in House Organ. Her poems continually pull at the reader’s sensibilities and focus the imagination upon the revelation the world about is.

Eternal City
(for Corine Young)

On the banks of the Tevere
eternity casts its light
on the trees at 7pm

traffic roaring
Caravaggio saw this light
Botticelli

last gulls patrol the surface
for dinner, hold caucuses
on the muddy bank

Roma antica
harboring a populace spread
over seven hills for 2500 years

blackberry canes
cut back on the bank
a flock of tiny birds swoops and dives

grey brown with white belly bands
like little ladies in aprons
they serenade the bridge Risorgimento

little neighbors of the Tiber
huing and crying in wide concentric
arcs from the water as high as the bridge

gold fades to rose on the ancient buildings
Michaelangelo painted this light
Leonardo de Vinci

having flung themselves in controlled abandon
the birds carve out figure eights
on the water, last hosannahs

Fra Angelico would have recognized
fun in the Eternal City
twenty of them circling in the light.

Warren is more than willing to provide a space of publication for those who often aren’t involved with any particular scene in the current poetry world. Reading through House Organ is a true fringe experience in the best sense, for found inside are folks who write for no other reason than testimonial to a life that has been given over to poetry. It’s a challenge to realize that the reason one or another poem come across might not be particularly appealing is due to inadequacies within one’s own reading and life experience. There’s little doubt that anything Warren publishes does not deserve an attentive eye and ear.

There’s a bevy of men living various lifestyles, what might once have been considered as blue collar, scattered throughout the upper Midwest who are all practicing writers often overlooked by a larger audience but quite familiar to each other. Brian Richards, along with the aforementioned Stephen Ellis, is one of these men. Here and there, a publication of theirs surfaces or the occasional piece appears in House Organ or another rogue journal. Much of this Win/Spr ‘07 issue is taken up by a long section from what appears to be a semi-fictionalized memoir of sorts by Richards, In Rain. Richards’ prose is of an uneven rambling sort but provides its own rewards to attentive readers. There are many characters and lots of starts and stops to any potential plot development, but a vigorous thrust is strongly held to throughout which propels the piece along on self-generated inertia alone. At his best, Richards is a reflective writer and when he comes upon the opportunity not to be mentioning this-or-that trouble this particular group of friends is having he revels in it, to the delight of the reader.

Or, once, he wandered up the hillside, close enough to keep the party in view, but far enough that the conversation went symphonic: a hum of strings, a murmur of winds punctuated by brassy laughter. As the night wore on and the drugs off, the quiet grew until he could hear the occasional fog horn on the straits. But the sky had cleared so he could see lights miles away on the water, and he realized that what he was hearing through his distorted perception were nighthawk wings cutting the air around him in pursuit of gnats. The sky swelled with light in the east, the remaining cloud above the mountains stretched like a dragon flying slowly north, its belly pulsing with the sun that seemed to take forever before it finally breasted the peaks and he walked down to find their bed.

Once again, the treatment is direct, the resulting sense of location vivid and lively. Richards breaks through any sentimentalism for the setting and writes just what is occurring, a reminder that writing is an act of communication, binding reader and writer together, to take share in a greater whole.

What Warren offers of his own writing is a section from an ongoing critical study of the relationship of Gloucester poets Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini, The Emperor’s New Code. Warren is co-editor of Ferrini’s recent The Whole Song: Selected Poems and it is evident that he’s a familiar reader of this prolific poet. Ultimately, no matter how Jungian and mytho-exploratory in moments it may be, this excerpt of Warren’s interpretive critique of the personal/psychological dimensions shared between Olson and Ferrini is a constant wonder of fascination and sparkles with bursts of argument. Warren dives right in and goes deep, his attentive critique of the relationship testifies to its central place in current and future studies of Olson. Ferrini’s own work encourages the level of discussion at which Warren negotiates.

THE DIVINE INTELLIGIENCE

DEATH is asleep
for the EMBODIMENT of the WHOLE
THE GRAIL of my Mother & Father
the Carriers of the SPIRIT
of them both
& the Mystique of my Muse
in the ONE
by the Actions of the Creating Energies
where Time is a fiction
Humanity is constantly
Recycled through
all the Forms of Nature
& the ever-elucidating Cosmos
the Revolution & the Resurrection
together
lost & found in the ONE

Ferrini is the closest America has come so far in producing its own William Blake. His poems announce a personal cosmology which he has defined to suit his own purposes where the available materials were lacking. Warren’s commentary further explores the facts of Olson’s recognition of the powers Ferrini’s work possesses and elucidates the according respect Olson offered, along with his acting in the appropriately aggrandizing manner towards his contemporary rival.

Poet Simon Perchik closes his review of Bangalore Blue by Terry Kennedy with a note on the physical nature of the book:

One last word on the book itself. It is a joy to hold. Much thought went into putting it together and in the sequence. It’s a book, not just a collection of poems. Each poem leads into the next and the reader is comforted by the obvious care taken in presenting Kennedy’s work. Here is a case where all involved have taken duty to heart.

House Organ may not cater towards elegance in terms of materials used in its construction, but let it be assured that the endeavor has indeed “taken duty to heart.” Duty to the life of writing, living among the texts that they might breathe a little easier in turn as the humble reader turns from them to create her own.

*****

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works in the library at USF. Poems and chapbooks have been published by Auguste Press, Blue Book, Chain, Pompom, and Red Ant Press among others.

GUESTS OF SPACE by ANSELM HOLLO

2007-08-31T22:50:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Guests of Space by Anselm Hollo
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, 2007)

Let’s begin at a strange beginning. My copy of Guests of Space came wrapped in a Coffee House Press press-sheet, evidently designed to seduce reviewers into asking this most recent book up for a night-cap. These three A4 pages, crammed with a cocktail party of positive opinions on Hollo, were disturbing. The reason is that, regarding the merits of Guests of Space, I found myself agreeing less with two extraordinary poets– Lisa Jarnot (“who better to write an elegy for the West than Anselm Hollo?”) and Alice Notley (“you must read [this book] or you won’t know enough”) –than with Publishers Weekly: “An entertaining, chatty, omnivorous affair.”

I can’t help thinking that Publishers Weekly, in its own chatty way, is the more just here as to the merits of Hollo’s most recent book. Guests of Space is for me a vigorous, formally proficient book. It’s a book which obviously likes language. It is often enjoyable. It makes jokes. It’s not afraid of being political, cosmopolitan, and engaging. But it is hardly a poetry which, as the usually extraordinary Tomaž Šalumun writes, renders one “changed as never before.” Worryingly, Hollo’s book seems to be of the type which makes intelligent people say impenetrable things. Andrei Codrescu: “If you can’t remember the way to your heart, Hollo’s poem will show you.” Or The Albuquerque Journal, (my favourite), which confers upon Hollo veritable First Testament powers: “He tells us how it is and how it always has been in our own words, only better.”

It’s this sort of press-release which makes me shudder in antipathy and near horror at the critic’s (thus, my) hypocritic oath. Of course, none of this is Hollo’s fault; but the reason I’m talking about it at the beginning of this review is because, as we’ll see, Hollo too is a lover of notes, and has accordingly freckled them across almost every page of his book. My hypothesis– and my reason for talking about a press-sheet at the beginning of a book review –is that Hollo’s notes are in no way gratuitous: rather, they allow us a disquieting and unfamiliar glimpse into a perhaps worrying aspect of his aesthetic.

* * ***

First, some general remarks. Though we may wince at the knee-jerk taxonomy, Guests of Space, though not derivative, proudly situates itself in a Berriganesque tradition. In spite of this, the sonnet forms in play in the book are distinctly and remarkably Hollo’s. (As Notley rightly notes in her blurb– and she is someone who would know –“The personal sonnet, that is, made Hollo’s–can you imagine how tricky that might be?”) More than this: the form is here manifestly impressive. It is at once taut and giving, and Hollo, through the use of diverse stanzaic forms variegated only by the white of the page, allows it to stretch and then recontract, conferring upon these fourteen-liners a brilliant reciprocal consistency and variety, energy and restraint.

Sadly for me, however, this formal proficiency is the most impressive thing in Guests of Space. As apart from this, the collection, though energetic and competent, is prone to lackluster stretches: lines like “the festival of Saint Retail/ that ends every good U.S. American’s year” seem, to say the least, unimaginative. But when Hollo riffs, when he, as the Boston Chronicle tells us, “snips and snaps”, we are in familiar territory, but we usually want more:

So the old guy grits his teeth
and wishes for that song “She Is a Country Woman”
to call him back to the bars of? Late Modernism?

Too often though, for me, it all looks and sounds just that touch too premeditated: a playing-out of oblique cuts and known surrealist gestures: “What’s current? I mean misheard? / Currently misheard? Shelf dancing? Alpine badminton?” The line saunters off into dispassionate incongruity; but what is there beyond this? This isn’t as angry as Notley, nor as strangely sad as Berrigan is under all those droopy shrugs:

Everything goes on as before
But never does any single experience make total use
Of you. You are always slightly ahead,
Slightly behind. It merely baffles, it doesn't hurt.
It's total pain & it breaks your heart (Ted Berrigan, from “Wrong Train”)

The one part of Guests of Space that, against expectations, surprised and moved me, was the explicitly political conclusion which is “Such an Expensive Dream”. It was almost as though Hollo, shaking off the Cool and hanging up the coterie of Jack K. and Allen G. and, a bit later, Anselm B., had woken up:

first they asked for your Ausweis
then they took you to Auschwitz Kosovo! Kosovo!
the way the species now does what it does
is the way it has always done it

* * ***

So much for a general take. To introduce my following remarks, I think it’s important to recognize that critics, when reviewing a new collection of poems, are usually supposed to address “simply” the “poems themselves.” Above all, the critic is not entitled to be interested in such secondary, unimportant things as, say, footnotes.

What is, however, “a poem itself”? This seems to me one of the questions which Hollo’s book unintentionally asks. Because, naively against protocol, this review is really a review about notes: footnotes, blurbs, annotations, explanations, observations, clarifications, elucidations. Details. Notes under notes. Notes inside notes. “A critic should allow us to see the global, sum value of a work.” I’m skeptical of this formulation of the analytic imperative. For if this “value” is itself swamped in detail? If this value is made of detail? An encompassing vision is of course preferable; but detail, though it is never definitive, is at least indicative, and I suspect that these “secondary” elements in Guests of Space may in turn be telling of a certain way of conceiving of poetry, which has, I will argue, some negative aspects.

To return to the allegory of the press-sheet mentioned at the beginning of this review: why is it important? Simply because, the notes present everywhere in Hollo have for me a fairly patent uselessness. In spite of this, it is difficult to detect any trace of irony directed towards either scholastic conventions or philological bookishness. In fact, such travestied playfulness, apparently absent here, is curiously more evident in Eliot’s infamous post-factum remarks, (and that’s saying something).

For these notes are, strangely, at once useless and yet presented with a popularizing wink: “Hi. I’m your author. I’m here to help you.” I have some favourites. In one poem, Hollo notes that a particular collaged fragment is from a play by Carla Harryman, but then feels obliged to inform us: “I was assigned that part in a reading of the play one summer at Naropa in the nineties.” Or, we come across the phrase “Red Bug Dermititis” in a poem, and looking below for clarification, find: “refers to the scribe’s case of shingles.”

Even stranger instances occur when Hollo, within his footnotes themselves, begins to surreptitiously note the preceding note. From the bottom of page 48:

“‘The range of . . .’” and “‘How could we avoid . . .’” – USAmerican poet Charles Bernstein and Irish poet Randolph Heally in e-mail tertulias. Tertulia– Spanish for regular, informal, literary or artistic gathering.”

And what, the critic may ask, is an “e-mail”? The question sounds facetious, but this passage does make one wonder precisely what determines the presence or absence of one of Hollo’s notes. As, what is “clarified” or “contextualised” here is in fact fairly random: we are given information, for example, neither about “The Protocols of Elders of WASP”, nor “Bizet”, nor “The Iowa Writers’ Wokshop”, where for many people with many different backgrounds, these references are more than obscure.

All of which makes one think that this simply must be an elaborate joke: a self-reflexive, Bernsteinian, intra-diagetic, twinkling grin, paramount to: “my notes make up part of my poems.” But, even if it is all a gag– and I don’t think it is –these notes almost ruined my reading experience. On my third read-through I actually tore off a piece of paper to use as a veil over the bottom of each page, thus exterminating an authorial voice who, after the perhaps interesting line “but the sea slug remembers everything, you hear?”, found it necessary to tell me: “sea slugs have been immensely helpful to human memory and dopamine receptor research.”

Believe me: I sincerely wanted this to be a joke. Quoted here, it even sounds like a joke. I’m partially convinced, however, that it is not, and that moreover, it is something perhaps more alarming. Namely: a play for accessibility gone wrong.

For these annotations seem a mystery until we realise why they are perhaps there: they are there “to help us”, and in doing so, to make us feel, as The San Francisco Chronicle helpfully tells us, that these poems are “highly personalized”, that their purely abstract, poetic vision is supported, to quote The Boston Review, by “snaps of contemporary life.” These notes are, in short, a short-cut: a wink which, under the aegis of “greater accessibility” and “anti-hermeticism”, exist to allow the reader to be emotionally comfortable and semantically reassured.

Am I wrong? I would like to be wrong. But it made me think in fact of what I feel to be a strange Event Horizon often visible in both generations of the New York School, where a version of O’Hara’s Personism rejoins Confessionalism and an almost militant “Quietude”. That Hollo thinks, for instance, that I care whether or not the phrase “Red Bug Dermititis” in one of his poems “refers” to his medical condition, is unusual. O’Hara didn’t, I think, fall into this trap of equating personality with accessibility; to quote the man himself:

“How can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? for death?”

Thus, a “laudable prioritization of the personal”? The “anchoring of a poetic in the singular, unassuming, quotidian life”? No. For the idea of “personality” rendering value to a poem is, we know, deeply problematic. It’s an implicit presumption many critics would mock without hesitation in a “Quietest”. And yet, when it comes to Hollo, we are prepared to ignore it?

It is worth noting that Hollo was elected “United States Anti-Poet Laureat” in 2001 by the Buffalo Poetics List. Yet Billy Collins too, I suspect, might also seem to suggest that readers need poetry to be “supported” by “real” shingles (ie. Anselm Hollo’s) and “real” conversations with friends; that they need to know that poems are not “just language”, but rather that this is ME, Anselm Hollo, talking to YOU. For what else do these notes, and these poems, often imply than: “Do not be afraid: all this comes from LIFE”? As Tomaž Šalumun unfortunately notes: “[Hollo’s] voice is so vivid you can feel his presence while reading.”

I don’t mind Guests of Space: it is, as I said at the beginning of this review, vigorous and formally proficient. My suggestion is simply that perhaps the two US Laureates, in spite of their differing syntaxes, are in the end not as far apart as we, or in fact they, may often think.

*****

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

THE GODS WE WORSHIP LIVE NEXT DOOR by BINO A. REALUYO

2007-08-31T22:45:00.000-07:00

ROCHITA LOENEN-RUIZ Reviews

The Gods We Worship Live Next Door by Bino Realuyo
(University of Utah Press, 2006)

This is a long overdue review of Bino Realuyo’s poetry book which received the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. I’ll confess that the delayed writing of this review doesn’t have to do with my not having time to read the book, nor does it owe its delay to hormonal interferences (I was pregnant when I read the book). My difficulty lay in how my every attempt to write a review failed to capture what this book meant to me. This is an attempt to give the reader an impression of the book.

Divided into six parts, Diaspora: Five Million, Spain (1565-1898), U.S.A.(1898-1946), Japan (World War II:1942-1946), Witness, and The Gods we Worship Live Next Door (A Poem in Eleven Parts), Bino Realuyo traces the history of a people.

Diaspora opens with a poem entitled "Filipineza." This poem sets the mood of the entire collection and tells the reader that this is more than pretty poetry, while more than a political statement.

Bino writes:

If I became the brown woman mistaken
for a shadow, please tell your people I’m a tree.
Or its curling root above ground, like fingers without a rag,

Without the buckets of thirst to wipe clean your mirrorlike floors.

This opening to a poem that speaks of how Filipino women are often pushed into servitude because of economics moves the reader not only because of the emotion it awakens but also because it speaks of a sad truth.

My whole country cleans houses for food, so that

the cleaning ends with the mothers, and the daughters
will have someone clean for them, and never leave
my country to spend years of conversations with dirt.

These lines remind the reader of how the country’s number one export product is human labor, and how a great percentage of the Gross National Product proceeds from the remittances of women who have left behind homes and families in order to provide their children and loved ones with a better future.

Diaspora tells of the tragedy of separation imposed by economic need. It travels from Singapore, to Amsterdam, to Dubai, and in doing so, reminds the reader that these are the places where the reader can find the majority of domestic workers. Here, Bino writes about Flor Contemplacion, and Sarah Balabagan, two women whose names have become symbols of unspoken tragedies and casualties. These poems are a reminder to the reader not to forget and not to overlook their suffering, and the reality of injustice towards women.

In the sections Spain, U.S.A., and Japan, the poet traces foreign occupation of the Philippines. I found the section on Japan particularly interesting.

The poet begins with these lines from "Pantoum: The Comfort Woman":

Moonsoon country, so expectedly, wind uproots memory.
Rain is the voice of a storyteller, one without pause
Like my nightly return to the hundred days of bulb light
And curtains, laughter and weight of soldiers outside, lined up.

These lines ache with the pain of recollection:

I never told you, my dear, that every night, I leave my hands beside you
To carry the rest back to the cruelty of their smell, of their mornings:
Nine months of war in this hut, my body as food, my life as nothing.

They speak of a historical event and how it ravaged the lives of so many young Filipina women. I had to reflect on the contrast between those times and now. Then, they used to say: “Hide your women, the Japanese are coming.” These days, the cry seems to be otherwise, as the poet writes in "Japayuki":

Everybody was talking about it. All young women went there,
Sing, dance, they would do all that: “O genki desu ka?”

The Japan section ends with a poem written in memory of Bino Realuyo’s father who was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. Entitled, "From a Filipino Death March Survivor Whose World War II Benefits Were Rescinded by the U.S. Congress in 1946", the poem tells a numbered story that heightens its impact on the reader.

In particular when the poet writes:

19.46. . .
20.06. Sixty years. I couldn’t wait anymore.

Witness, which is the fifth section of this collection, references news events and the daily lives of Filipinos. It focuses on the struggle of the common man to survive in a land whose economy has been plundered over and over again.

The sixth and last section entitled, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door is a poem in eleven parts that tells the story of the war in the southern islands of Mindanao. I found myself on the edge of tears reading this poem. I think it is impossible to fully grasp the horror of war, the killing of the innocents and the abuse of power until we are confronted with it.

In this last section, the poet brings this reality close to the reader. He gives faces to the victims of the war in the South of the Philippines. We see a mother, her unborn child, her six children, her husband, her body, her home, her struggle to survive, to save her children, and we see her helplessness in the face of bullets.

Reading this poem as a mother, I cannot help feeling this mother’s pain, I cannot ignore her fear, and I cannot ignore her loss and her grief.

Here is an excerpt from the poem:

The children began to cry, all six of them. They pushed each other to
               hide inside her dress. Always this sense of knowing where to turn;
               the sun’s familiarity with the mountain from which it rises, a
               mother’s sudden remembrance of the thirteen years spent raising
               her children.

Don’t touch them!

One by one, she felt her children’s heads inside her dress. She held her
               stomach, as if by doing so she was keeping the unborn.

But that day, nothing was going to be kept.

We are not what you think. We are not communists! My husband is
               not a communist!

You muslims have always been communists! That was the last time she
               heard them speak. From then on, it was all her:

Don’t take my children, please I beg you. Let them go. They’re too
               young—

No two hands can forever hold each other.

And then the poet writes:

Once in uniform, a solder never remembers the meaning of a
mother’s cry.

The Gods We Worship Lives Next Door, is more than just a prize-winning poem collection. It is a reminder to the reader that we cannot ignore injustice and violence. War and the abuse of power are inexcusable because those who lose the most are innocent.

*****

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is a writer, a mom, and a volunteer for Stichting Bayanihan (a support center for Filipinas in The Netherlands). Her work has appeared in a variety of print and online publications both in the Philippines as well as abroad. She is a regular columnist for The Sword Review, an editor and columnist for Haruah—a magazine of Inspiration, and a columnist for Munting Nayon (a newspaper for the Philippine-Dutch community). She is currently working on a number of projects, including a poetic memoir—excerpts of which are included in Route’s Skin Byteback Book, the Chickflicks Ezine, and in a book to be released by OMF Lit Philippines. She also blogs intermittently at http://rcloenen-ruiz.blogspot.com

THE SECOND CHILD by DEBORAH GARRISON

2007-08-31T22:40:00.000-07:00

JENNIFER BARTLETT Reviews

The Second Child by Deborah Garrison
(Random House, New York, 2007)

Deborah Garrison is proof that the wool can still be pulled over the public's eye in regard to poetry. Evidently poems these days do not have to be good. As with other genres, their writers just have to be well-connected and their work as fluffy as, well, Fluff.

The first thing that was disturbing about The Second Child is that it took me about 20 minutes to read the entire book, as compared with the 20 minutes that it takes me to read ONE Robert Duncan poem. The poems are lacking in any linguistic complexity. Garrison confessed on NPR that she writes her poems on the bus, and it shows. Interestingly, Garrison does have a grasp of some ideas that are fodder for good poetry (the anxiety and intense love involved in having children or the realization that every moment is not predictable). However, Garrison doesn't have the ability (or the desire, perhaps) to speak in the language of a mature poet. Instead of writing poetry, she merely "talks" to us as if we were girlfriends sitting in a coffee shop.

Her use of rhyme scheme gives this reader a sense of dizziness. Some rhymes she employs in "Goodbye, New York" are:

You were the big fat city we called hometown
You were the lyrics I sang but never wrote down

You were the lively graves by the highway in Queens
the bodega where I bought black beans

Surely, Frank O'Hara is doing a summersault in his grave! Later, in "September Poem," the poet writes,

Now can I say
On that blackest day.

And in "Bedtime Story"

Number Two happy at the tit
in the nursery while First one has bit

These rhymes are so bad that this reader thinks surely they must be ironic and kitschy. But, "September Poem" is about 9/11, so that erases any possibility of a purposeful kitschy rhyme. No, they are just plain wrong. Also, words like "tit" used in a poem are, to this picky reader, like nails on a chalkboard. The rhymes and "tit" are just the beginning of what I find to be a long list of poetically sophomoric moves: using a title for a first line ("A Piece of Paper"), using cliches non-ironically, claiming to be an atheist (oh, how trendy!), but Jewish enough to insist on a bris, painfully obvious metaphors, and a sex poem that sounds like it was generated in a 10th grade creative writing class (with my hand/to keep you awake
awhile).

I know how difficult it is to be a working mother, but I just can't drudge up much sympathy for the mother in "Sestina for the Working Mother." This woman who "chooses" to work, has a six figure income, and a full-time nanny and housekeeper. Garrison's living conditions were described in the New York Times in probably the only portrait of a living poet they ever published. I'd like to see a sestina by a single mother in Atlanta working ten hours a day at Walmart.

As a poet and thinker, I expect more from the genre and hope others do too. There is certainly a place for beach reading: all the Shopaholic, Nanny Diary stuff. But, I can't put my mind around unfairness that the mainstream media buys into this kind of poetry -- Garrison somehow landed good press from Elle, the Times Book Review, Interview, and Newsweek -- no doubt from reviewers who think Ezra Pound is a shoe designer. Interestingly, Garrison has no kudos from actual poets.

It's not like me to pick on poetry. My general stance on reviewing books is to focus on the positive. But, I truly see Garrison's success as a slap in the face. So many poets who write wonderful work will never be in the New Yorker (NATHANIEL TARN!) where SEVEN of these poems appeared. "The Second Child" focuses on poems about motherhood. These poems have the possiblitity of so many more readers than the great works of mother-poets such as Alicia Ostricker, Rachel Zucker, and Alice Notley (to name a few). For this reviewer's money, the New York Times would have been better off reviewing Catherine Wagner's and Rebecca Wolff's seminal anthology Not For Mother's Only.

One thing I do admire about Garrison is that she is aware of her limitations. She confesses that she would never be able to write as well as the poets she edits at Knopf. But, this makes me suspicious. If she really believes this, why didn't she forsake one of her seven publications in the New Yorker to make room for another, perhaps "better" poet. Or at least one who has not worked there. I was taken to task a number of months back for criticizing Garrison for using her connections to get were she is. It was pointed out that we ALL use our connections. But, I wanted to believe that no matter what connections a poet has the cream must rise to the surface. Now, I'm not so sure.

*****

Jennifer Bartlett's book, Derivative of the Moving Image, is available for pre-order from the University of New Mexico Press. She maintains a blog at saintelizabethstreet.blogspot.com

BROKEN/OPEN by JILL JONES

2007-08-31T22:35:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Broken/Open by Jill Jones
(Salt Publishing, Camridge U.K., 2005)

A radiant lightness stubbornly permeates the poems in Jill Jones’ Broken/Open. For example:

Where Wind Falls

If you surrender details
they gather “a portion of the beauty”
in blue suburban clay.

In a clouded space
there’s room to step shadows
where wind falls under the sun.

Ways you still
hear the grass
strata, fine planes, slips of craft.

But light leans in from the left
expecting more than
another opinion.

What do you need to know, to walk
land along the lines of its wounds?
Nothing is beyond question.

Or, this poem written “after An Exotic Garden Viewed at Different Levels, a painted door by Donald Friend, and in response to a poem on the same subject by MTC Cronin”:

Pavilions of Longing

Past the carved notches of painterly thought

Embellishing glass that reflects the green way, the blue light

On the surface of everyday is a dream garden, made in an eye, of six panels

Out into song memory, floors offer their patterns to the lush, leaf shadow colouring

The gold dark bird sings—remember how light came this way through tropics of longing

Walls belly out from closures, into world rot and growth snaking the pavilions of air

The strength is not a trick to the eye but a fantasy of fruitfulness

Past the heavy entrances we need to take, a cycle of making

When I wrote this review’s first sentence, I checked myself to wonder why I noted “radiant lightness” rather than “radiant light.” And, over a glass of wine last night (), I thought that I might have used “lightness” because there is something to the “-ness” component—a materiality of language (and narrative references!) facilitated by specific images for which mere “light” would provide erroneously the sense of disembodiedness:

Air Poetry

The Madison by morning
still taps beer and music.
At an outside table
he plays air drums. It’s a great roll
on the nine am wind—a gas gas gas
—chasing the ale
of some long gone youth.
Cymbals, that great crash.

If only I could stand up
like that
with my air poetry
quieter except for my hands
and a little wiggle of torso—
it’s a gas gas gas.

Yes, these are quite “bodied” poems, which is to say, they are in the world rather than presenting a more distant observant voice. Witness the second stanza from “I Was Walking”:

It’s the white day
                smoke in the mouth
                               turds on the path
walking stick at the gate
                intonation of pain
                each              step
                               the redemption blues

Within seven lines, the poem moves from an abstraction (“white day”) to a sense of the physical (“smoke in the mouth”), then to something indeed quite physical if not visceral (“turds”); then after a transition that deftly manifests a pause (“walking stick at the gate”), the poem moves towards significance, towards a psychological engagement, and then something (“the redemption blues”) that hearkens a conclusion even as it remains open to multiple interpretations by referring to something outside of the poem (What caused the blues? What is being redeemed?).

I mentioned at the start of this review the “stubborn”-ness of radiant light. I didn’t consider this light transcendent, you see—more of a reflection of an admirably dogged alchemization of the blues into something without regret:

Life in Autumn

Under the rain of grass, reaching for dirty life.

Reading skin, this old book of mine, this new.

When the prime minister’s teeth stare like a thousand grim moons.

An old Florentine bagpiper darts indoors, out again, into the midst of life.

Filmic days unravel my wound, like Montale’s arrows of love, the swimming.

Summer loses its sticky flavours, the last dribble on the chin.

A line has been drawn in the desert, and it blows us away.

The method is the question, so long as the notes with bluesy life.

For weeks all the poems were birds, now taking a dive.

Earthed in the morning, we try not to gush, but held. Particles.

Throw on a frock, sometimes the parade rhymes!

I have rubbed paint across my eyes and cry in messy colour.

After dark, I track my way home, this smell I recognize as life.

Words rain from my hair, flaky memory.

Further burnishing light into radiance are how some poems may approach the elegy but never lapse to it. This collection reveals a wise poet writing with much poise—a poet now making poems at the peak of her craft.

*****

Eileen Tabios recently released THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007).

THE ELEPHANT HOUSE by CLAUDIA CARLSON

2007-08-31T22:25:00.000-07:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

The Elephant House by Claudia Carlson
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, N.Y., 2007)

Critics have described Claudia Carlson's debut collection of poetry as "witty, powerful, playful, inventive, and surprising." Such raves come as no surprise because her history as wordsmith is impressive, and she inherited such gifts as the daughter of poet Helen Z. Carlson. She remembers her mother in several poems. These poetic "pansies to Valhalla" were among Claudia Carlson's most powerful memories. She skillfully shares her past and present, her hopes and sorrows, and the small details that bring color and depth to every life.

In "Leaving Your Toys to the Dogs" she abandons her toys and a wobbly perambulator while being chased and taunted by other children. She returns the next day to find her toys torn to shreds. A child's fear, and understanding beyond her years, come alive in this poem:

I saw them coming,
shadows on the edge,
the ones that hated
my voice, my mother, our wrongness.

* * *

I kept close the cruel satisfaction
of seeing the worst made visible.

A visit with her grandfather to the Bronx Zoo is featured in the title poem, "The Elephant House." This is another childhood view of a sad reality, powerfully written in retrospect:

Grandpa George does not remember
things he used to know;
he does not remember how to get
us back to Brooklyn.

Carlson uses humor and whimsy to surprising effect in "Mendel's Garden Pea," in which she speaks for the experimental pea pollinated by the father of genetics:

I'd prefer sex with bee, beetle or breeze.
The monk's stubby fingers clip my stamens and
bruise my blossoms; how could a man who has never
pollinated a woman know the finesse of fertilization?
Petals are the blessed marriage bed!
Instead I suffer this man…
a wilted bud in his brown robe --

In addition to her honesty and straightforward reminiscing, Carlson is a master of metaphor. A menopausal insomniac becomes a "wet plank," a "lightning rod" for hot flashes. A footpath angling between a stone wall and a river becomes "a triangle of rough plenty" for a hungry wild turkey. And -- my favorite -- her mother's folded dissertation is transformed into "…origami trousers / sharp enough to crease the silence."

Experiencing Claudia Carlson's poems is an adventure. She focuses with crystal clarity on her memories, her realities, and shares pieces of herself with readers. My congratulations to her mother for passing on these fine poetic genes, and to Marsh Hawk press for publishing this exceptional debut collection.

*****

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

a(A)ugust by AKILAH OLIVER, with BRENDA IIJIMA

2007-08-31T22:15:00.000-07:00

ALYSHA WOOD Reviews

a(A)ugust by Akilah Oliver, with collages by Brenda Iijima
(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2006)

Akilah Oliver’s latest chapbook, a(A)ugust, floods the reader with the color orange, invoking the autumnal month ablaze with red and gold leaves. An august presence, venerable and majestic. A season of loss and imminent death. Or rather, change and transformation.

Collages by Brenda Iijima, taken from Pakistani and English language newspapers, make up the chapbook’s cover and also appear on the title page. They mirror the cut-up appearance of Oliver’s text, which was collaged from such sources as The New York Times and works by Jacques Derrida. Recalling the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina during late August 2005, and the Lebanon/Israel conflict of August 2006, Oliver inserts her own language within the terminology of terror, war, and popular media, allowing it to inhabit and mutate inside of these structures.

                “What then is to cross the ultimate border?”
          leave the Fernald nuclear site in Ohio    How and
where do     you construct spaces of desire?    Salvage
“what should be understood by the end”

a(A)ugust’s form roams from newspaper columns to collage, to paragraphs of gorgeous, emotive dissonance. The last four pages seem to be further cut-ups of previous text, ending in a final page consisting of composite word fragments and sounds. Oliver speaks inside of the Homeland Security Advisory System’s Level Orange “High Risk of Terrorist Attack” code language. a(A)ugust is indeed a “speech act,” a body of activated and activating speech forms. Her tongue is then a performative device, enunciating alongside “government speak” and journalism, creating intimate ruptures.

i touched you, the
beginning again post-Katrina New Orleans, now showing at the Met to
remember every thing you couldn’t say &i outline your lips
with my fingers your acne is gone

Variations in typeface visually demarcate Oliver’s cut-ups, so that each piece functions as a snippet of “news.” This allows the edges of and borders between words and phrases to become active, magnetic spaces, across which multiple opportunities for signification and reference erupt. Oliver questions the forces that dynamite or break apart speech, speaking within a corrupt political language that cannot be trusted. She asks, “Is the body the / place where the sentence ends?” Are we willing and able to continue?

*****

Alysha Wood holds an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, where she wrote her critical thesis on the poetry of Padcha Tuntha-obas in relation to other poly-lingual texts. Wood’s work has appeared in Glimpse Abroad, “Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices,” and is forthcoming in an Asian American female poets anthology. Wood is also a contributor to Feminist Review. She thanks Brenda Iijima for help as regards information concerning the source texts.

BELLUM LETTERS by MICHELLE DETORIE

2007-08-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Bellum Letters by Michelle Detorie
(Dusie, 2007)

One of the paradoxes to technological progress is how, the more tools we have for accomplishing things, the higher might also become the potential for loss. That the farther we go, the more we leave behind.

Computers and the internet provide tools for harnessing information. So how does a writer continue to create printed matter for an audience that one assumes is also steeped in the e-age?

In the print version of my recent chap, THE SINGER And Others (Dusie), there is a reference to a blog link where I offer the poetics underlying the chap’s design. For my just-released book The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press), much of the 376 pages reflect how various drafts were not just created on, but reliant on the form of, blogs; thus, references abound to numerous blogs and other internet sites. In allowing my printed material to contain e-references, I had to accept and adjust for the possibility that a reader may never have the inclination or time to follow up by actually looking up the internet links. So that the layers to the work allowed by the internet sites may never be presented to the reader of the printed versions.

For Michelle Detorie’s Bellum Letters, I wasn’t surprised by the copious notes to each poem (copious notes offer one method for connecting printed matter to online references). Detorie’s Preface reveals that she wrote the poems, one a day as an exercise for the “National Poetry Month” of April at her blog, ovariessequins.blogspot.com. As she puts it,

“The poems were therefore composed for an online environment and contain hyperlinks to news stories, photographs, graphics, statistics, blogs, videos, government documents and databases about the war. For the presentation of these poems on paper, I’ve underlined the words that are also links in the online versions. Since I could not possibly include the contests of the links in a hard copy, the addresses and a brief description of the various web sites are included in a notes section at the end of the text. In some case, the links have expired; thus, the poems are also documents in which a sort of digital disintegration is an integral feature of their underpinning.”

Thus, in reading the poems in Bellum Letters, one faces texts with underlined passages whose underlines might not be warranted based on the words themselves. They were underlined because they were online links but on the printed page, of course, the texts go nowhere but remain merely as underlined phrases.

Therein lies the poignancy—and much of the work’s power—for me. The realization that something is lost, the insistence that all the poems are inherently fragments. That each page contains voids.

For example, we have the poem

WHICH THINGS COULD WE USE?

1. Luther, hook, we should try
to be so hard. String-wound. Coil.

2. All the sewn books go tap tap tap at
the tabernacle door. Rib-swifts. Lung-guards.

3. Threaded jar-lip. Tender rips. Dome
of forget-me-not blue. Rotten we.

4. Soldier-love and spark-sparrows
lifting wool where needles fall. Curtain dirty.

5. Monstrous sail eight times folded
to a purse. Cotton-wire crewel.

6. Paneled hilt. A spring-pulled
labyrinth. Hoof-print-primed.

7. Vernacular gills web cold tablets, close flaps. Arrows: little
throats stuffed with thread.

Labels: bellumletters, napowrimo, poem, protest, war

This poem was noted in the chap’s back “Notes” section to bear nine links, e.g. the reference to “forget-me-not” in the third couplet relates to “Thousands Without Food and Supplies Due to Failing Distribution System” at http://electroniciraq.net/news/3012.shtml. Despite the description allowed by the headline of the article, the substance of the article, of course, is not accessible through the printed page.

And so the poems in Bellum Letters consistently leave me grasping at what I cannot grasp in non-virtual reality, forcing me further to realize that, for some sense of completion, I would have to leave the physical world and go virtual.

Consequently, I find Bellum Letters ultimately to be heart-breaking, not just because of their subject matter (protesting the Iraq war) but because their very form manifests Loss.

Detorie says that “digital disintegration is an integral feature of [the] underpinning” to Bellum Letters. But it’s not just “digital disintegration” that surfaces. There is the loss of Faith in one’s political leaders—the New Yorker article recounting General Taguba's account of how Donald Rumsfeld & Co. managed the Iraq war is a must-read. And for the reader of the printed chap, Loss occurs, too, through—if one wishes to follow up on the internet links—virtual reality’s requirement of a departure from the physical body and others’ physical bodies. How sadly fitting—how this form manifests content by calling for the body's erasure, so that one is reminded of more tragic Losses:

To those who have died in Iraq, R.I.P.

*****

Eileen Tabios recently released THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007).

POSIT by ADAM FIELED

2007-08-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

STEVE HALLE Reviews

Posit by Adam Fieled
(Dusie, 2007)

With an I to an I for an I

Postulation of one's own existence via tempest-in-a-teapot verse will not cut it anymore, and despite Adam Fieled's recent posts on his blog Stoning the Devil about a new and exciting confessionalism, he wants to shake contemporary mainstream poetics to its core in his new Dusie chap Posit.

In Lewis MacAdams's book Birth of the Cool, MacAdams describes Paris's post WWII existentialist crowd, led by Sartre, as calling themselves "les rats," but what happens to existence and the self-as-meaning-maker when something bigger comes along? This is precisely the question taken on by Fieled in his poem "Le Chat Noir" (The Black Cat). The poem's layers allow for varied interpretations from the confessional: I smoke some pot and wander into an alley in freezing cold weather and a black cat crosses my path, oh shit; to the philosophical: I'm feeling something, I'm cold and high and surrounded by darkness (Creeley's "I Know a Man" anyone?) This feels real, but then superstition intrudes in the form of the black cat. In an existentialist reading, if they are "the rats," as the "I" of this poem seems to be, then what to do when the black cat comes along? After all, cats kill rats, right? We can make no meaning of making this meaning except to say "look a cat / a black cat le chat noir oh no" and perhaps run away, O'Hara like, from this clear and present danger. Or we can return to a quasi-literal reading of stoned speaker dreaming the 19th century Parisian bohemian cabaret Le Chat Noir appearing in a Philadelphian hallucination...

While I think "Le Chat Noir" the cleverest, and haply most ambiguous, poem in Posit, the title poem's not bad either, giving us the straightforward location of this chap in dealing with the first person:

I want
but that's
nothing new.

I posit
no boundary
between us.

Of course, the poem looks the part, shaped as it is like a giant "I," and asserting the way in which contemporary mainstream poetry attempts to connect with readers, "I say you, / I know you, / I think so," covering the I-you relationship of Rimbaud's "I is another" while leaving room for the fashionable, if nowadays heavy-handed, indeterminacy in poetry. In a closed circuit such as the I-you, the third person never gets asserted, and a real arrogance exists in believing one knows another rather than having the wisdom to call the other, other. This brand of poetry "could / go on / forever," politically and correctly asserting the I knows everything, everywhere, everyone.

But then the cats and eyes/Is also emerge in the fine poem "Eyeballs," a poem playing with the story of Oedipus, who married his mother, Jocasta, and tore out his eyes upon discovering so. Jocasta commits suicide and therein we lay our scene of eyeballs beneath dangling feet. Jocasta's "stout / ex-maenad" maid comes upon the scene, and instead of being horrified, she pockets the eyeballs in a moment of Dionysian/Maenadian-mystery, as the lurid things resemble grapes. Then, oh no, the eyeballs become even more lurid, playthings for her cats, (perhaps they are black, the poem doesn't say). How absurd! It's easy to make some existential meaning out of that: cats don't kill rats, they play with eyeballs...I-balls. As Fieled indicates in loosely veiled lines, poet and speaker in unison, at the end of the poem, "Perhaps there is / use for everything." (the eyes, the I, this myth) "and if I am a thief, / who will accuse me?" More than a little intimation of Thomas Stearns Eliot (or T-Sizzle, as I call him) in that line, eh?

While Fieled crams a great deal of thought into a small-chap space, some of the poems disintegrate into sexual innuendo, which does not scratch my readerly itches, as it were. For example, "10:15 Saturday Night" begins with such promise, using speech-inspired, pick-up line type verse:

then like how bout we give this
thing a chance or at least not bury it
beneath a dense layer of this could
be anyone, we could be anyone,
anyone could be doing this, just
another routine, another way of
saying hello, & goodbye just

and here's where he loses me:

around the corner like a dull
dawn layered thick in creamy
clouds, ejaculations spent

The poem loses me at the end because I think I was getting to the sex anyway, more subtly from the pickup language, which gets mighty heady in transposing sex-as-physical-act for the sex-as-end-all-be-all-moment, so that I didn't need the hammer of ejaculations spent on me (pun intended, I guess). Or maybe I'm wrong, and this is why I write in the first place to use my (jungle cat-like) poet's rhetorical nimbleness to turn rock-head, jock-head pick up lines into "creamy clouds" of post-coital detritus.

All in all, Fieled's Posit is a solid read. It's lurid and surreally entertaining enough to bring me through once for fun and packed with enough thought-meat to keep me chewing, thinking and returning, which is ultimately what we all want from poetry.

*****

Steve Halle lives in the suburbs of Chicago where he teaches high school and coaches American football. He manages the blogs Seven Corners (which publishes Chicago poets) and Fluid / Exchange (which publishes Steve's own culture-related thought-detritus). Steve has critical and creative work published or forthcoming in Jacket, Moria, PFS Post, Alehouse, Cordite, OCHO, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), and others.

THE BOOK OF OCEAN by MARYROSE LARKIN

2007-08-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

PAUL KLINGER Reviews

The Book of Ocean by Maryrose Larkin
(i.e. press, Los Angeles, 2007)

Her and the of of Her: A Lineaged Clarity

HD: I thought my thought might spoil your thought.
MRL: I don’t want to fall. I want to remain discrete…
HD: When you are a cup…

Going back to H.D., discretion in her work. The personal sits up, is not set up. This is notable as an idea of discretion that Larkin shares. Separating personal thought from private setting, the difficulty of translating discretion. That a personal thought does not have to retain the appearance of its original setting. That it can remain personal and take a discrete form. Detaching the diary and scratching person as a genre. Grammar of anticipation.

MRL: what is an asked division
RJ: when the mingled frame of mind
MRL: compulsively light without seam or axis
HD: where each, with its particular attribute, may be invoked
RJ: Linkings, inklings
MRL: texture truant chronicles verge
RJ: externity in gauged antiphony
MRL: everything in pieces

Come in, Ronald Johnson. Externity as a way of describing H.D., her detached diary, and Mary Rose Larkin’s Book of Ocean. Larkin’s Ocean verging with Johnson’s ARK, at strategic points. Happy fragment in history, shards presently. Diary, detached and also “truant,” wandering from its appointed place, requiring as Larkin calls it, “a detective of tangents.”

HD: I feel the meaning that words hide…
MRL: words less tocsin than costume
HD: …little boxes conditioned to hatch butterflies
RJ: It is as if you yourself were your own onlooker

One shoot of disembodiment. A certain discretion leaning towards privacy and its effects on self-imaging (making one’s little discreet boxes). Calling oneself, as Larkin does, “an interval at a party.” That is, externity.

MRL: What is a required division
HD: I want to minimize thought…
MRL: my garden spun from absence
RJ: New hushes through the polyhedral push and crux
HD: …concentrate on it till I shrink, dematerialize, and am drawn into it
MRL: a woman inhabited is an interior apart, flying

Breaking off hidden space and calling it whatever: Absence, says Larkin; Hushes, says Johnson; Dematerialized, says Doolittle. The severe influence of geometries on these descriptions. Gems in HD’s The Flowering of the Rod. The spires of Johnson’s ARK. And of course, Larkin’s prisms.

RJ: Line eye us.
HD: A new sensation is not granted to everyone
RJ: artifact rather than argument
MRL: yes what does not meld yes
RJ: sustained sequentially as to insistence
MRL: trying to make what doesn’t exist veering past clarity

The outcomes of their poetics. Treating the precedent self, grammatically, etc. Slipping is more than a problem of hierarchies, classifications. “Have I forgotten to occur,” Larkin asks. Less reminder, more pointer. Within her question, ultimately, lapse. Idea complicating faiths. Here, the discreet ones.

*****

Paul Klinger sometimes advertises for the University of Arizona Poetry Center, which has a new building that is really something. If you are ever in Tucson and you like poems, come check out the library at the Poetry Center, now located at 1508 E. Helen Street.

BIRDS AND FANCIES by ELIZABETH TREADWELL

2007-08-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

MICHELLE DETORIE Reviews

Birds and Fancies by Elizabeth Treadwell
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, UK)

Thoughts on Birds and Fancies

One of my favorite things about Elizabeth Treadwell’s Birds and Fancies is its simultaneous engagement with multiple histories--personal, literary, imagined, received, represented, remembered, recovered, and invented. These histories tangle and cleave in poem-maps and poem-weaves that invoke a dream-like sense of space and time. Birds and Fancies contains archaic spellings, collaborations with family members, kennings, music, epigrams, and complines. The title, after Margaret Cavendish’s 1653 book Poems, and Fancies, suggests both a companionable whimsy and a response to pre-existing texts. The relation of these histories and whimsies is idiosyncratic and intimate, sweet and un- self-conscious, risky and vulnerable. It is also political.

While Treadwell is clearly very interested in conceptualizations and representations of literary traditions, her poetic project is deeply personal--driven by interest, impulse, curiosity, pleasure, and politics. Politics because the personal is, after all, political, and Treadwell’s engagement with tradition is pursued in this vein. For Treadwell, making sense of the politics around what is presented as “traditional” and “historical” is a personal project, and this makes it all the more important to us.

Birds and Fancies is a book about being a woman and being a poet. It is also about being a mother. It questions the categories/ construction of “woman,” “poet,” and “mother.” Birds and Fancies is dedicated to the author’s daughter, and some of the poems seem as though they were written in anticipation of the daughter’s birth. There are also many references in Birds and Fancies to women poets and writers. In addition to Margaret Cavendish, there are references to Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, Etel Adnan, Joyelle McSweeney, Renee Gladman, Melissa Benham, Medbh McGuckian, Jessica Smith, Juliana Spahr, Sarah Anne Cox, Elisa Kleven, and Beverly Dahlen. There are also references to Myles Coverdale, Philip Jenks, Timothy Gentner, and Robert Pinsky. For Treadwell, the references to other writers seem to be part of her negotiation of literary tradition; although history is a powerful political tool, tradition can also be a trap. Thus, Treadwell’s selections become even more powerful--strategic.

Birds and Fancies is 96 pages long and divided into five sections:

Long-legged waders (or a History of English Verse)
The Clove-pink
Ladyless or Gayntyl Maydenys
The Clove-pink: The Carnation Skirt/ Pink druzy
Mrs Greensleeves

The title of the first section suggests the animal as a type of history, yet it is only called “a History” in parentheses. I like how the formal definition and labeling of something that happened as “history” is something that occurs here in parentheses--in the margins. This first section also introduces the style and themes of the collection. The cadences are familiar, but also made strange. Additionally, the poems often engage a sort of unfettered syntax. These aesthetic choices align interestingly with Treadwell’s thematic concerns with tradition, family, and history. In the first poem “in cabbage-rose; or the mercy and glorie of Haley,” the object becomes the subject of the sentence: “Yes us will mix a lot, in palace glare, next quiet pool.” This sentence construction is employed throughout the poem, as are the archaic spellings and somewhat sing-songy rhythms. There is also a sweetness and optimism in the affirmation of this poem, particularly in the concluding imperative to remember: “Remember, yes, in the days us say. Oh daughter thou shalt grounde & playe, in these sweet days, happy happy shall you be, dressed like the sea, in cabbage-rose. In cabbage-rose.”

The second and fourth sections extend Treadwell’s cartography by mapping (enacting in language) what is received and transformed and resisted. The second section, “The Clove-pink,” contains 13 pages of very spare text, some of it dialogue (a daughter speaking to a mother); most of the pages have only two lines at top. The fourth section is similarly titled “The Clove-pink: The Carnation Skirt/ Pink druzy.” In this section the inspiration ranges from mishearing, Vogue magazine, and the blogosphere. The last poem in the fourth section, “Temporary,” ends with the lines “Resist the false maps of conquest./ England like a pile of sticks.” In the notes sections, Treadwell indicates that this poem is informed by both her daughter and her niece, as well as J.B. Harley’s essay “New England Cartography and the Native Americans” and the anonymous c. 1584 poem “A new Courtly Sonet, of the Lady Greensleeves, To the new tune of Greensleeves.” Thus, the poem exists within a matrix of inspiration and pre-existing texts. That this poem is called “Temporary” seems important: resistance and recovery can undermine the “false” authority of maps and received histories

The third section, “Ladyless or Gayntyl Maydens” contains two of my favorite moments in the entire collection. “In Cloudland” is a poem Treadwell indicates as “for and with my niece Violet.” It is a brief and whimsical poem, but it is also a powerful inquiry into the ideas of writing and authorship. There is an epigram from Ms. Musgrove’s Victorian Fairytale In Cloudland, which tells us Cloudland is a place where “children are able to visit in their shared dreams.” This sense of the dream/poem as a community space is especially powerful.

Up alphabet hill
& down the shady
hard curved roads
of your tiny youth

How’s it going,
Queen?

The phrase “alphabet hill” suggests a landscape composed of letters, just as fairytales, histories, and poetries are also composed of these materials. Moreover, the relationship/collaboration as it is represented in language/text is a reminder that an understanding of “authorship” is dependent upon a text’s presentation.

Underneath this typed text is the awkward, handwritten print of a child. The handwritten print is not exactly legible; some of the letters are backwards, but one can just barely make out “Elisabet”(written backwards) and “Royal Highness” (also written backwards). The deciphering of this text is both pleasurable and challenging. It seems important that we make the effort to read this writing---not only for its meaning, but for its reminder of how we read. Here, it reminds us that we are reading the work of multiple writers, and also that one of the writers is a child. As much one of Treadwell’s strategies is to “unlearn” a certain type of training in language, the juxtaposition of her writing with that of her niece illustrates that this process of unlearning is different from simply returning to childhood.

The poem “Stuffed animals crammed into the Natural History Museum” is also a favorite and, like “In Cloudland,” is also written for a female relative. Treadwell indicates that this poem is “for my sister Margaret.”

The Individual palaces
of masculine and feminine
have crumbled
are crumbly in our time

into the global wrecking crew
into the bewildering fire
the surreptitious claims

far a girl can walk herself to kindergarten these days
in most kinds of western weather
with a glimpse toward the dustbinny wishing well, perhaps a short peek
into the books & equipment

The palaces, though crumbly, retain a sort of a power and one must confront their presence. Like relics, they are reminders of the past. One of Treadwell’s questions is whether and how representations/edifices of the past should be wrecked or revered or recovered. The recognition of these representations as gendered is important, for it forces us to ask if the crumbling of this difference is equally beneficial to men and women, and if there are differences in the types of crumbling. Additionally, as in other moments in the book, a sense of geography is intertwined with this tradition/history. The words “far a girl can walk herself to kindergarten these days / in most kinds of western weather” are a reminder that there are places where there are no kindergartens for girls or where women can’t walk alone at all.

The fifth and last section, “Mrs. Greensleeves,” contains a number of complines, thus mixing religious and folk traditions, the holy and the profane. “Mrs. Greensleeves,” a traditional English folk song, is said to be about a promiscuous woman or prostitute (her sleeves are green with grass stains). Complines, the final church service in the tradition of canonical hours, are also know as night prayers. Historically, these prayers were often said to “complete” the day and to commence a period of communal silence. Treadwell does seem to use the compline as a way to create community. This is most palpable in the poem “anonymous compline”:

we’ve all kind of in
the same spot been

The syntactical strangeness of this poem is made palpable by the familiarity of its sentiment. Additionally, the re-arrangement of the traditional word order echoes the idea itself; which is to say, just as the words are not in their usual places, so have “we” been in and out of our usual “place”--both literally and figuratively. There is an elegance in this seemingly simple gesture, and it seems integral to the entire collection’s underpinning.

That the word “other” is within the word “mother” suggests the difficulty of bringing another human being into a world already populated by human beings and their multiple histories. For Treadwell, the poem is one way of making sense of this difficulty.

*****

Michelle Detorie edits WOMB and Hex Presse. Visit her online: www.daphnomancy.com

ERRATUM TO A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS (LEVIATHAN PRESS, 2001) by GILES GOODLAND

2007-08-30T23:41:00.000-07:00

Eileen Tabios Engages

ERRATUM to A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS (LEVIATHAN PRESS, 2001) by Giles Goodland
(Dusie, 2007)

Dusie--founded, published and edited by Switzerland-based poet Susana Gardner--truly deserves praise for having achieved one of the most creative meldings of the internet and the page. Dusie accomplishes this through its Dusie chap series. "Chap" here doesn't just mean chapbooks but other types of publications and ephemera, ranging over perfect bound books to broadsides. Basically, a collective of poets agree to have their manuscripts published online through the Dusie site; in addition, the poets create hard-copy versions of their manuscripts which they then are obliged to exchange with each other. Of course, most poets create more hard copies than the number in the collective, which they then can disseminate to other non-collective members.

This arrangement allows the manuscript's text (including reproduced visual imagery in some cases) to be available to the public through the internet. But the lucky recipients of the hard copy versions have seen a wondrous diversity of such limited edition versions. Many are hand-made. Many incorporate components that are not available in the online versions, whether it's drawings, a variety of colorful threads, a variety of papers and vellums and cardstocks, collages and so on.

Among the new chaps from the 2007 series is ERRATUM to A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS (Leviathan Press, 2001) by Giles Goodland, a witty conceptual poetic act that swiftly plastered a grin on my face. The Dusie publication is an "Erratum” slip that corrects a line in one of the poems in Goodland’s earlier book, A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS published in 2001 by the British Leviathan Press. ERRATUM is printed on a folded piece of white paper, so there's nothing fancy about its presentation (especially compared to some of the other hard copy chaps in the series). The slip is slipped into the folds of the referenced book. It's a project that points out a correction in one of the poems. Simply, ERRATUM notes:

Page 32 (poem 1931) line 15: insert double line space after the word ‘soup’; delete semi-colon

Here is the line in question, featured below with the Dusie correction in place:

a poisonous reptile, called aranai, was found in the soup—he opened his mouth, but before a sound came out of it, Doreen said

The initially-used semi-colon can be appropriate. As Wikipedia notes about the semi-colon:

It binds two sentences more closely than they would be if separated by a full stop/period. It often replaces a conjunction such as and or but. Writers might consider this appropriate where they are trying to indicate a close relationship between two sentences, or a 'run-on' in meaning from one to the next; they might not want the connection to be broken by the abrupt use of a full stop. // It is used as a stronger division than a comma, to make meaning clear in a sentence where commas are being used for other purposes. A common example of this use is to separate the items of a list when some of the items themselves contain commas.

However, it’s easy enough to agree with Goodland’s change. Again citing Wikipedia, or rather the Chicago Manual of Style that it quotes:

The em dash is used "to denote a sudden break in thought that causes an abrupt change in sentence structure."

A “sudden break in thought” or “abrupt change in sentence structure” would seem apropos in light of the overall poem which is comprised of lines that exemplify these approaches; here’s an excerpt from the poem before and after the Dusie-corrected line:

the occurrence of emotional elements and pseudoperceptions (centrally evoked perceptions)

in the complex, involved, manifoldly conditioned “appearances” of the kaleidoscopic world

a poisonous reptile, called aranai, was found in the soup—he opened his mouth, but before a sound came out of it, Doreen said

heart-stirring, memory-haunting Coty odeurs are what every woman secretly hopes for

in this manner the head officials of a prosperous company conceived the idea of putting through the wages books large sums in respect of fictitious names and “dead: men

What’s brilliant about Goodman's ERRATUM slip is that regardless of whether one considers the change significant or not, it introduces his earlier book to a group of over 70 contemporary poets which comprise this year's Dusie collective, a good target for new readers of a poetry book. I don't know anything about the status of A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS, whether it was well received when it first came out or whether it’s languishing in obscurity somewhere. But I hadn’t heard of it before and now have a reason to read it versus any of the other thousands of poetry volumes out there clamoring to be read. Indeed, from the sample poem of “1931”--its interesting juxtapositions that remind me of Ron Silliman--I am eager to read it. It’s in a result like this where ERRATUM succeeds in its intention (as I perceive that intention).

(And I'm also pleased to note that GR's review copy for ERRATUM... has been picked up by another reviewer, and I suspect that reviewer will actually include a review of the 2001 book in his purview. If so, that again testifies to the success of Goodland's strategy in reviving interest in his earlier book.)

*****

P.S.
Oh what the heck. I opened A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF YEARS, going to the first pages of the book. The first poem “1900” begins:

There is no true poet who has not again and again been mastered by that strange feeling of helplessness in the hands of

the automotive actions of vegetative life.—Under this head we have (a) those of the respiratory neuro-mechanism: (b) those of the

loss of the power of naming objects or of recognizing names

“Who was it?” said he. At once the spirit indicated a desire to use the alphabet

the connection was made, and I called up one part of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and realized that by grace of this marvelous instrument I

Actually, one opens the book to first see a question at the bottom of the page:

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?

Smart. It’s a fitting question to what looks to be poems comprised of fragments or incomplete thoughts that invite the reader to complete them. I probably need to read more of the book to discuss the reference to the Book of Job. But for now, yep, I am hooked!

To the rest of the book, I shall be proceeding Onward!

*****

Eileen Tabios recently released THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES: OUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007).

NAMES ABOVE HOUSES by OLIVER DE LA PAZ

2007-08-30T23:40:00.000-07:00

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ Reviews

Names Above Houses by Oliver de la Paz
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2001)

In an interview on Boxcar Poetry Review Issue 8, Oliver de la Paz describes his conception of the parable as a story form: “It’s a compressed narrative that offers instruction, though often the instruction is subject to interpretation and thus, to misinterpretation.” Names Above Houses, de le Paz’s first collection, explores the possibilities of the parable form through the character of Fidelito, a young boy who wants to fly, and his parents, Domingo and Maria Elena.

Flight becomes a powerful symbol throughout this book, representing, at different times, migration, escape, adventure, metamorphosis, and magic. To ground these various flights, de la Paz deftly tells these stories through narrative prose poems, with short, simple clauses establishing the main unit of rhythm from which he often takes his own lyric flight.

Names Above Houses opens in a recognizably magical realist “village”, complete with the village crazy man, anthropomorphic insects and rodents, and the strange occurrence of mail tearing itself open and spreading throughout the village to reveal one villager’s habit of discounting melons in exchange for marmosets. Usually I wince at the exoticizing of cultural memory through the magical realist touch, but de la Paz narrates with sparse language and a casual tone, giving the tendencies of the village a more natural feel:

When Fidelito’s first tooth fell out, his mother threw it on the roof so that the rats would find it. They were up there searching for coins. Evenings on the tin roof, their nails clicked like hail—they were always up to something: gambling, counting money. The change in his mother’s jar once filled the glass to the mouth. Now she swore she had seen rats with silver disks between their teeth. Still, the old women in the village who muttered about refusing dark fruits and curing tetanus with the ends of a cephalopod, the plastic part of cuttlefish bone, said rats were lucky. They told her to throw her son’s first lost tooth on the roof for them to find. When the new tooth grew in, it would be strong like the rat’s. (3)

Fidelito, forced to move from the comforts of the village where anything is possible (possibly a mythic village in the Philippines), travels across the Pacific to the American States. In describing this flight, de la Paz strips away the magical, without abandoning its magic, to capture the banality of travel:

The fasten-seat-belt light flashes and the boy, pressing his hands to the walls, locks himself in the bathroom cubicle, draws his knees up to his chest with his arms, and squeezes his body into a ball.

He misses so much. When he turns on the faucet to drown the sounds of the engine, he passes Guam. When the diaper-changing board falls on his head, he’s missed Hawaii. The mouths of volcanoes jaw at the plane as it passes while the bags in the overhead bins huddle together. (18)

Flight, in this poem, is a painful migration. I sympathize with Fidelito’s desire to hide in the confined space of an airplane bathroom for he doesn’t know where this flight will lead him. The small gesture of turning on the faucet is a powerful touch by de la Paz, who recognizes that these small moments can be infused with emotional impact. Since I am from Guam, and also moved from Guam to the American States at a young age, it was striking to me that de la Paz includes my homeland in this poem. In my own limited readings, this is only the second time I have encountered “Guam” in a poem by someone not from Guam (the other is Robert Duncan’s “Uprising: Passages 25”). In both cases, Guam is represented as simply a place to pass, either a migratory passage from Asia to America, or in Duncan’s case, a military passage from the U.S. military bases on Guam to Asia (during the Vietnam War). This is not meant to indict either Duncan or de la Paz for their superficial representations of Guam, but merely to displace, for a moment, the hegemonic representation of Guam as simply a site of passage for others.

When Fidelito reaches America, life becomes a struggle to maintain the magical. De la Paz captures this tension quite beautifully in the poem “School Years”:

They last long for Fidelito, who is not of the earth. With its alphabets and loose-leaf, sheets of construction paper, oranges, blues, lunch boxes, crepe paper, papier-mâché, the teacher talk and rasp of chalk, long division, multiplication, pronunciation, spelling and quelled hungers at lunch hour, the recesses of chase the girls/boys catch-as-catch-can, freeze tag, war with rubber balls and big red welts the size of baseballs, war with a deck of cards, war of pencil breaking, or tether ball, kick ball, being goof balls in back near the coat racks, learning to cuss and whistle at the same time, saying Jesus, Mary, Joseph, holy, holy, holy…Lord, the girls who dare each other to kiss Fidelito, as he sits in the corner, dazed, watching birds in the frozen light. (25)

The list of objects and experiences from his school years becomes transformed by that last moment of “birds in the frozen light”. De la Paz’s move from the quotidian to the magical shows us how the imagination can still instill magic into the everyday—something many people no longer have faith in (Fidelito, as de la Paz mentions in the interview, is a diminutive for Fidel, meaning Faith). Fidelito has faith in his dream to fly; however, in the poem “Fidelito Takes Flight up a Ladder”, he quickly realizes that there’s “Nowhere left to go” (28).

In addition to Fidelito’s own discomfort in his new country, his parents—Maria Elena and Domingo—suffer from a similar alienation. For Maria Elena, “the world is no longer her own” (38), and even though she has “the house she wanted”, she seems to long for “the ghosts from the streets of her childhood” (39). For Domingo, his transition from fisherman to channel-surfer is tragic. In “Domingo, Too Old for Fishing”, de la Paz creates an incredibly touching scene where the magical realist technique truly captures Domingo’s emotional state:

Hangs his net from the tallest tree in the backyard, much to the neighbors’ dismay. All night, wing sounds and the sad cries of trapped birds resound—

The ground turns a bleached white from droppings. There is no escape from the smell. Even Fidelito, stuck in the net, wants to come down because of the unbreakable stench.

For weeks flocks rule the neighborhood, until Domingo, tired from noise and sleepless nights, cuts the tangled ends of the net. The black-winged mass of the net rises, begins to fly southward.

Fidelito, without his father knowing it, is woven in with the birds. He hangs to a corner of the flock-quilt and dangles far above his town. (42)

Domingo continues to deteriorate: a blood clot leads to the amputation of his leg and the gradual disappearance of his eyes, hearing, and memory, and finally, to his death. How the family deals with his death is haunting and absolutely heart-breaking. Domingo’s shoes, for example, walk on their own, and every time Maria Elena “puts them in the closet to forget”, she finds them “huddled at the foot of her bed by dawn” (62). Fidelito’s response to his father’s death is equally sad:

Fidelito is a small thing, but exaggerates his size by putting on his father’s dress shirt backwards. Arm holes empty, the sleeves hang like limp wings. Fidelito steps outside in the fall air and runs fast, observing the sun following […] Fidelito runs that way, feverish, sad, and armless. (65)

Names Above Houses is a tale about one family’s difficult passages—a story that anyone who’s ever migrated to a new land can relate to. Oliver de la Paz narrates with grace and attention, experimenting with the possibilities of the parable to incorporate the magical and the real. The flexibility of his prose is impressive, and his images are almost always striking. In the poem, “Domingo’s Advice for Fidelito”, the father warns his son about the dangers of flight, particularly that Fidelito will “miss finer things: chairs and beds” (45). As if taking Domingo’s advice, De la Paz keeps his eye on these finer things in his poetry. Attention to the everyday, however, does not betray the magic of the imagination: “Close attention to things makes them strange” (53). To me, the “instruction” of Names Above Houses is to have faith in Fidelito, in the magic of life, which will give us faith in surviving and singing life’s difficult passages:

Let us sing what can be carried.
Let our songs be of hand-carry and Balikbayan boxes.

[…]

Let our worries be of constant singing. Praise our worry.
Let our singing be constant passage. (16)

*****

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of 2 chapbooks: constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, forthcoming 2007), and all with ocean views (Overhere Press, forthcoming in 2007). His reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, First Intensity, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Rattle, How2, Slope, Octopus, and Traffic, among others. He blogs at blindelephant.blogspot.com.

OSIP MANDELSTAM: NEW TRANSLATIONS Edited by ILYA BERNSTEIN

2007-08-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY Reviews

Osip Mandelstam: New Translations, Edited by Ilya Bernstein
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)

It cannot have occurred to anyone that Stalin thought executions “were the berries”. One poem is translated twice, another thrice, a third five times by five different hands. This points up Bernstein’s “must necessarily become elusive” and his “triangulated grasp of the complex outlines”.

The early poems go well and are admirable. With 1931, the first doubling. Mandelstam contemplates Siberia, and between Fridman and Halberstadt a good idea of his plight is obtained. Probstein gives “Impressionism” cleanly, Gritsman’s “Old Crimea” lacks a note or two. Some of the “Octaves” later. “I live among high-minded vegetable gardens” is like a scene from David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. Now the trio of wintry desolation again unfolds the meaning of Mandelstam’s eight lines.

The quintuplet of translations on the bare plain in winter and the poet’s heroism bespeaks a certain form of discretion, as in another way (after the following spring poem) Bernstein’s treatment of the last poem, gliding over the oxymorons of satire and the deeper contradiction of the second, final stanza.

So much for an overview. “Hagia Sophia” is imperishable, “Notre Dame” a model of composition, Homer the very thing. From these acmes, then, to “Moscow’s five-domed cathedrals, bathed in their / Italian and Russian spirit, seem / Like bright Aurora rising in the air, / But in fur coat and with a Russian name.” Greece before Christ, “The Tortoise” of the lyre, “Where no one breaks the loaf in two and bites, / Where there are only milk, honey and wine”, evoked with Villon’s snow. He concludes the decade in 1920 by resolving on an art “to ease the burden of time.” Straightaway he exercises it on Venice, “Venetsya... Venetyanka... Susannah must await the elders.”

“Leningrad”, a famous poem, is like Nabokov’s nightmare of return. He is in exile, the wolves are about but there is a fine interlude of summer.

“Octaves” represents perhaps a change of startled expression, “All we are is Hagia Sophia / With an infinite many of eyes.” He needs them, to bear witness, yet “see how I go blind, become strengthened / bowing to the smallest of roots? / Are my eyes not blown apart / by the exploding trees?”

There is “an uneven sweetness in her steps / She walks—running a bit ahead // ...carried forward by a constrained freedom / Owed to an animating shortcoming / And it may well be that a lucid guess” etc., answered in the second stanza by the women at the tomb, the permanence of sky and earth and promise.

*****

Christopher Mulrooney has written criticism in Small Press Review, Elimae, The Film Journal, Tadeeb and Parameter, poems and translations in City Works, Beeswax, Red River Review and The Hollins Critic.

ANYWHERE AVENUE by OSCAR BERMEO

2007-08-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ Reviews

Anywhere Avenue by Oscar Bermeo
(self-published chapbook, 2007)

Anywhere Avenue, by Oscar “de la Palabra” Bermeo (a.k.a. Oscar “The Jícama Blowdart of Multiculturalism” Bermeo), roots itself in three locations: Ecuador, The Bronx, and The Bay Area. At the same time, this collection routes the “anywhere-ness” of migration through the “everywhere-ness” of poetry.

Bermeo reflects this movement in the form itself: the poems range from narrative / disjunctive prose to free verse, from spoken-word litanies to a carefully crafted, bilingual pantoum, from minimalist statements to a sonnet. The opening poem, “viewing the world from the back of a turtle” creates a mythic space from which the speaker begins his migrations:

I was born in the breath of the Pacific Ocean, child of shore and nets […] Without warning, I grew wings and was pulled from the Pacific and Andes and the word abandon became a cut in the roof of my mouth that has followed me since. (2)

Bermeo manages lyric nostalgia without flailing into sentiment. Every time I read this passage, I am floored by the moment when it seems that the “and” after Andes will suggest another location, yet its gives us the word “abandon”. Not only that, we are not actually pulled from the word, but the word becomes, cuts, and haunts the speaker. Anywhere Avenue emerges from this cut, charting foreign shores and the “ripening hues” (5) of diasporic experience (“where the cord was first cut”).

Perhaps we can even theorize “cut-and-abandon” as the technique used in the poem “an atlas of nationalism”:

scrolls revealed deeply problematic new areas marked as unknown find symbols where to look blue areas unknown no data available to assign a probability ferocious blank face animals exotic creatures filled early maps of region most of the interior of America remains incognita if it didn’t exist i would have to invent place seeking mythological lands location nebulous areas (4)

The abandoning of narrative threads accents the collage / cut up feel of this poem. In addition, the necessary theme of mapping highlights Bermeo’s desire to re-invent the singular place as a nebulous area. In “The Truth (and some lies) about the Bronx”, Bermeo represents the Bronx through a fractured mirror:

The South Bronx is not a place; it’s a ghost story.

You better get yours now in the Bronx.

Don’t worry if you are lost in the Bronx

Who would want to visit the South Bronx.
The South Bronx is best viewed through a mirror.

The Bronx always takes care of its own.

Watch your back in the Bronx.

The South Bronx is “worse than London after the Blitz.”

Planned shrinkage is the most efficient way to deal with the Bronx.

When in doubt: Blame the Bronx.

The Bronx would benefit from a period of sweet recklessness.

In the South Bronx, it’s best to sleep with your shoes on.

Does any one know where the South Bronx starts or ends? (11)

In Bermeo’s aesthetic cartography, the South Bronx becomes an unlocatable place—that is, a site of contesting representations. If no one knows where the South Bronx begins or ends, then its borders becomes determined by the “sweet recklessness” of our own individual mirrors.

Not only does Bermeo re-invent place, he also re-invents the self. The poem, “Dedication”, is one of the most powerful meditations on the potential, limit, and function of the “I” I’ve ever read:

The devotion makes you, the I, write in English forges what has been wished. Fact: you do not belong in English. The I, it belongs nowhere; but English, it cannot explain here.

You don a declaration, which the I will carry. Devotion inside the great production of isles which (in the forge of the writing) has already faded. Fact: When this I is here, it still does not explain what is inside the great isles, yet it goes out and does not belong. Just inside the English I, in the place where it can spread, there is where it belongs.

Make the delivery, the statement deep inside your English other, forcing discoloration. Fact: This other does not explain your English, it exits but does not belong to the I, the place which disseminates it.

Listen to the declaration, within the scarred you, that already has written to ingles. Fact: When these internal parts of English stand unexplained, they will finish not in himself but in the place which spreads himself in her, relative places where English belongs to all.

Bristle at the instruction, this explanation, within your sacred I as your other is cutting through ingles. Fact: With this internal part still unexplored, with its touch terminated not in English but in the visible, which makes it other, in places where word ties everything. (14)

Since the “I” belongs nowhere, then it has the potential to belong anywhere. Bermeo roots the “I” in various (dis)locations and “relative places where English belongs to all”. In a place where memory, experience, and perception are separated by great distances, Anywhere Avenue (which, in my imagination, intersects Borderless Boulevard, Liminal Lane, and Subaltern Street) becomes the nebulous area where “word ties everything”. Palabra.

*****

Craig Santos Perez's reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, First Intensity, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Rattle, How2, and Traffic, among others. He blogs at blindelephant.blogspot.com.

STIGMATA ERRATA ETCETERA by BILL KNOTT & STAR BLACK

2007-08-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

CHRISTOPHER MULROONEY Reviews

Stigmata Errata Etcetera with poetry by Bill Knott, collages by Star Black
(Saturnalia Books, 2007)

Knott has no use for mourners and their “ignorant verities”, he is up against the dilemma, this is his account of it. He has two sides of the question, like the Schoolmaster. To the rest he says a hello and a goodbye there are, so they will not understand him wrongly.

“All the ways they praise have lapsed,” but the silo empty of grain is an oversight, a strange illusion. A balloon doesn’t pop in the master barber’s hands, but so it must. Amid so many styles (“Pageboy”), “most of the time I’d like to rhyme that / maybe-mussed-a-bit muse Erato’s ringlet”. He knows very well that his hauteur and disdain are liable to go wrong, yet he is clear-eyed, “Time is thin in the arms of a machine,” and he is not deceived by his signature.

Babel is everywhere, also Pisa’s Tower, Galileo’s experiment. There is the immaculate verse he does not write, hence his title. He is not in sync, ahead of his time, collapsing all about, “Each day we open / a door whose keyhole / shrinks around us.” Yet he knows better, how it’s been done, how it’s done now. “Snows and Snatches” where the poem comes down into the book as witness, as contrast with the shaver of cacti. Such a praxis is anathema (“What”), eggshell skullwork, even “postnuke postplague / (I’ll crack it like an egg)”, but for this you must shatter the gold of the “Wishingwell” with your silver, “with my claim / on the future, my need to be / rewarded with all I owe.”

A memory of the past won’t serve, “Sight cannot / even in summer when it is hot / share the air enjoyed by the eyed,” a Mirage of non-writing is provided by Black here, facing the poem, “The I Did”. You’re in it now (“Reconciliations”), the poem is recorded with images of “the happy couple”.

And again the Schoolmaster with evasive pupils, miles of them, boys and girls. He dreams four words, “the arms of care”, to comfort them. The question remains, “The shallows / is where I sight myself; / the abyss / shows all you others. // Which is worse?” The bonnet and the tea-kettle head (“Quickly I place a teakettle / atop a dead volcano / and learn to wait for its whistle.”) from Black. It isn’t just the critics’ hate, it’s what they love instead (“Discrimination”). Things are lost that way (Black’s beautiful Writer Frog and Safe Money).

Cornerstones “make home my dream / my ideal occupancy”, remains of buildings consecrated and blasted, “ampukisses on limp horizons. These / tendernesses dispensed in my wake / constantly plant tendrils around my intent.” The voice of complaint, it comes from acres of possibility and wishful thinking. Spring has its rites, here he is, classic, clamoring, a connoisseur of art—the poet, the opposable thumb.

The forgeries of the hand depart, he inclines (like Char, like Lorca) to the fact of existence.

*****

Christopher Mulrooney has written criticism in Small Press Review, Elimae, The Film Journal, Tadeeb and Parameter, poems and translations in City Works, Beeswax, Red River Review and The Hollins Critic.

THE STATES by CRAIG FOLTZ

2007-08-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS GRIDER Reviews

The States, Vols. 1 and 2 with poems by Craig Foltz in a postcard-book project with photographs designed and edited by Ellie Ga. Photographers: William Gillespie, Justin Ulmer, Martin Bland, Sabra Cox, Kristina Del Pino, Simona Schneider, Florence Neal, Jon Ciliberto, Stephen Mead, Christa HOlka, Don Goede, Lyn Lifshin, Shelton Walsmith, Marie Kazalia, Rebekah Travis, Lara Khalil, Tracy Lee Carroll, Jennifer Stahl, Barbara Henning, Jade Doskow, David McConeghy, Jared Zimmerman, Alice Arnold, Robert Matson, Mary Wrenn, Julia Marta Clapp, Tina Burton, Jim Simandl, Philip Metres, Chris Hampton, Hayley Barker, Thomas Ciufo, Meredyth Sparks, Shannon Shaper, Renae Morehead, Ryn Gargulinski, Robert S. Dunn, Jen Hofer, David Gatten, Jerilyn Myran, Shara Shisheboran, Courtney Fischer, ARiana Smart Truman, Tod Seelie, David W. Lee, Katherine McDowell, Mike Mahaffie, Willile Baronet, Karen Lillis, Paul Yoo, Justin Simonsen and Elizabeth Willis.
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)

There’s a lot to be said about the poems in this book project, though the poems themselves almost get buried under the structural and design tropes that dominate the book. The States is a book of fifty poems, one for each state, but it arrives in the form of six green-tinted accordion-folded and perforated “postcards” that imply a relation to the kitsch of the state or local postcard proudly trumpeting the landmarks or picturesque scenery of a given state. The postcard idea is an interesting one, but unfortunately it gets clouded by a few authorial and design choices that almost get in the way of the text itself. The first of these are the fifty photographs included in the book, one for each poem/state. The photographs themselves are a clever choice in that they (like the poems) work against a hazy idealized portrait of statehood in their refusal to adequately reference the states they’re supposed to relate to: most of the photos are of skies or clouds that could have been taken anywhere but are, allegedly, taken in each state by 50 photographers named on one of the non-poem postcards. The suggestive possibilities of this refusal get lost, however, in the uneven quality of the photos themselves (some of which look like vacation photos that never made to the family album/flickr site) and the decision to aestheticize the photos by desaturating them and tinting them all the same hue of camouflage green. You could probably argue that, because the photos are a function of the postcard conceit, the presentation is less important that the idea, but positioning the photos as something to be glanced at rather than studied under cuts their conceptual usefulness as part of the overall work. The photos nod toward the absurdity of separating land according to “state,” but because they’re not given the same kind of careful attention as the poems they end up just distracting from what’s at stake in the book, which is Foltz’s positioning of the poem as landscape in a way that unsettles the idea of “the landscape” in much the same way that Stein’s portraits interrogated the meaning of a “portrait” and the relationship of that concept to language.

The point I’m slowly approaching, here, is that the poems themselves do a lot of heavy lifting, and don’t necessarily need the photograph/postcard conceit; though the packaging is beautiful, and I’m all for experimenting with the form of a book, part of me would like to simply ignore the format and get to the meat and potatoes of Foltz’ lexical landscapes. Because I grew up in Wisconsin and I’m fascinated by the flat yet accurate idea non-Midwesterners have of what the Midwest must be like, I flipped to that poem first, and initially I was not enthused, confronted with what seemed like a list of “stuff people think of when they think of Wisconsin –

brett
favre’s shovel pass is stuck in the drive.
separating during the threshing, he mutters.

Immediately following this, though, are a few great lines that demolish the idea of these poems as collections of factoids:

I’ll mix
the frosting, if you’ll remember to smooth the
neighbors. the undocumented dreams of teenagers
and hayseed oil. piled with pillows and glass
noodles. lemongrass stalks. packers posters
line the bedroom.

There are a lot of great things to note here: first, there’s the sudden turn from a mostly normative use of verbs to the phrase “smooth the / neighbors.” Then there’s the ambiguity of the teenagers and hayseed oil line, in which hayseed oil could either be an agent with undocumented dreams or simply something else offered alongside a mention of teenagers. Finally, there’s the return of Wisconsin Culture in the form of the “packers poster” though small-P “packers” here is something loose and alien among glass noodles and lemongrass. Not to mention the fact that they line the bedroom, not your or his or her or my bedroom, presenting a kind of ur-Wisconsin Bedroom that shakes the poem loose of any responsibility for a specific point of view. This is where landscape writing comes in, again: the texts are rigorously non-narrative and non-invested with a subject position, allowing them to float through the subject of each state in a way far more sophisticated than the clouds on the back. From the same poem:

this is an answer and this
is an answer and this is an answer too.

There’s no referent for “this,” but that’s what’s exciting about these poems: their refusal to orient themselves from a particular subject position’s relationship to a particular landscape makes space for the poems to be landscapes themselves. “Wisconsin” and the other 49 poems aren’t fixed to their actual places any more than the clouds pictured on the reverse, so that rather than Wisconsin being a place where Brett Farve and lemongrass make contextual sense, they are Wisconsin—or at least they produce a “Wisconsin” somewhere between the actual place and its TVland identity. This is probably the best way I could think of trying to go about a project held together by statehood: get rid of the idea of “statehood” as a prior condition altogether.

I could go on and on like this for all the other states, but you get the general idea; in any case, if you’re looking for something akin to “landscape writing” that doesn’t fall into traps of local color or normative language, this is a good place to start.

*****

Nicholas Grider currently lives in southern California.

BRIDGEABLE SHORES: SELECTED POEMS (1969-2001) by LUIS CABALQUINTO

2007-08-30T23:16:00.000-07:00

BEATRIZ TABIOS Engages

Bridgeable Shores: Selected Poems (1969-2001) by Luis Cabalquinto
(Galatea Speaks, an imprint of Muae Publishing/Kaya Press, New York, 2001)

My daughter Eileen and I were chatting idly over coffee when she asked, “Have you ever been encouraged to do some creative writing—poems or short stories?” We were discussing the time I spent at the graduate school in Silliman University in Dumaguete, Negros Oriental, Philippines.

My answer: “No.” No time. I was a part-time graduate student and part-time college English instructor. As a new instructor I was just a chapter or two ahead of my students reading our textbook. I had to study my graduate course, write related term papers, research and prepare my master’s thesis. And I had to eat and sleep, too. I had a very disciplined routine for two years. I still marvel at how I survived with only four hours of sleep a night.

Then it occurred to me: Yes, I did do creative writing—a lot of it. It’s just that they were never published in magazines or elsewhere for public consumption. But at the same time, I also thought that my “creative writing” efforts might have been thwarted by being encouraged at the time to function more as a literary critic.

Eileen interrupted my thoughts: “Why don’t you review some poetry books? I have plenty looking to be reviewed.”

“I no longer remember the literary tenets I once knew,” I replied.

“You don’t need ‘literary tenets’—just share something about the poems and how you responded to them. Readers of [Galatea Resurrects] arrive at the journal within the internet, so the readership can include those who don't know, or care about, 'literary tenets'. Readers include those who don't ordinarily pay much attention to poetry,” she said.

I said I would “try.” Later, Eileen gave me four books. I took them to my bedroom where I chose one which happened to be Bridgeable Shores by Luis Cabalquinto. I opened the page to the first poem, “Depth of Fields,” and started casually to read, but then paused to read more slowly as I felt as if the first two lines were created for me:

I walk some hundred paces from the old house
where I was raised, where many are absent now

“where many are absent now” caused a lump to form in my throat; I could feel the possibility of tears. I read on until

it changes me now,
like someone restored to the newness of his life.

I broke down and wept. I wept for those “who are absent now” in my life.

My son, Roy, died about 26 years ago from a car accident when he had just turned twenty-one. How does a mother bear that grief and loss? Family and friends, my church family, rallied around to offer comfort. As the days passed, I felt a deep need to go Home, home to that little barrio where I grew up. I strongly felt and believed being in my old home in the Philippines (where Mother was still alive) would make me whole again.

We did go. My husband and three children and I. And I did feel “like someone restored to the newness of [my] life.”

What is it about going home that haunts one when away from home? I had a family, I had a new home made of my husband and children and myself—but why did I feel I had to be in my old home? I was already surrounded with friends and relatives and their warmth and love, but still I needed to go back to my earlier home.

I was not disappointed with my return. I still grieved, but I felt the burden of my loss and grief become more bearable.

And as I continued to consider Luis Cabalquinto’s poem, I continued to weep—this time for my mother who died when she was 88 years old. Two years before she died she lost her desire for food. More often, she would eat only one or two meals a day and she ate very little, according to my niece (a nurse) who took care of her. She would tell my nieces and my brother when they urged her to eat that she was “ready to go.” She said the same thing to me—I visited twice a year during her last few years. I couldn’t stay long with her because I also had to take care of my husband who then had just undergone open heart surgery. How does one feel when the props of one’s life are suddenly taken away?

And my tears continued as the poem also evoked my youngest son, Glenn. Our family had thought he was in good health but at age 43, he died unexpectedly about two years ago. He had been tinkering with something in the garage and when his daughter went out to ask him something, she discovered him lying flat out on the yard. He was brought to the emergency room of the local hospital, but he never revived. I wept for my daughter-in-law and my then 14-year-old granddaughter.

And I wept all the harder for my husband whom I lost to brain cancer just a little over a year ago, three days after our 50th wedding anniversary.

Many are absent now in my life. Would my childhood home still have the power to restore and rejuvenate me?

Well, I just returned from a visit to the Philippines. The old house, mine now according to my mother’s wishes, resounds with new life. My niece and her husband, with their three lovely young children, live in it. Because of them, I can say my old home, “where many are absent now,” remains a part of my life.

My youngest brother—there’s just him and me now among the original four siblings—and his wife built a new house next to the old house that my mother bequeathed to me. I stayed there, felt absolutely welcomed, during my trip. One of my brother’s rooms was reserved and furnished for me. Yes, going back to my hometown, to my birthland, still has the power to restore and rejuvenate.

I turned more pages of Bridgeable Shores. I read more poems before pausing at page 62 which contains the poem “At Lake George.” The first three lines held me and stopped me from moving on to the next page:

it seems it is the one sane act you do
this week, which puts some substance
to the whole business of living

These words are for me! “One sane act”—what is this one sane act that “puts some substance to the whole business of living”? Only after a while did it dawn on me—and I was shocked at this realization!—that I had given up on the “whole business of living”! Ever since, following my husband’s death, I arrived to live with my daughter and her husband here in St. Helena, my thoughts underlying my acts had to do with “many are absent now” and it won’t be long before I’ll join them, too.

I wept for myself, too. Among other things, I realized that I had been insulating myself from feeling more grief, for example, turning to reading light fiction so that there’s no room for memories of absent beloveds to lodge in my mind.

So I finally wept with gratitude for coming across Luis Cabalquinto’s poems. “At Lake George” shocked me into realizing that I had stopped putting “some substance to the whole business of living.”

I suppose the concept of "bridgeable shores" relate to bridging the shores of the poet's two residences or homes: the United States and the Philippines. But in finding such direct relevance in the poems to my own life, I feel that the poems also act as bridges between the author and the reader.

I also want to say that part of the poems' "healing" effect on me didn't just have to do with their narrative content, but the general tone of calm and peace throughout Luis Cabalquinto's poetry collection. It's a calm that fits tone to content in a very effective combination.

And, now, how do I begin “one sane act” that would give renewed substance to my life? I read on:

…this engagement
with tall pines [here, I substitute oak trees which abound on the mountain where I now live with Eileen] …
the new air’s friendship, the people
with laughter in their talk
and looseness in their gait
the finest words come easy in the mind
…
there is something special
about remaining with the living after all
…
something there is about evenings
in green and moist villages that brings on
a reaching out to an old self that is
being repeatedly lost and replace
for tomorrow…

So I shall begin my “one sane act” then with the thought:

there is something special
about remaining with the living after all

*****

Beatriz Tabios, 77-years-old, received her B.A. with English as her major from the Silliman University in Dumaguete, Philippines. She developed her love for poetry as a sixth-grader reading Homer, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Alexander Pope, William Wordworth and Samuel Coleridge while trying to survive World War II. She would further develop her appreciation for poetry as a college student instructed by poet Edith Tiempo, the first woman to receive the title of National Artist for Literature in the Philippines. The late Dr. Edilberto Tiempo, then the head of the English Department, encouraged Mrs. Tabios to continue her study of English and American literature. With Edilberto Tiempo’s encouragement, Mrs. Tabios wrote her Master of Arts thesis which was the first investigation, regarding Filipino literature, of “(The Use of) Local Color in Short Stories in English.” Later, she taught English literature at Dagupan College (now University of Pangasinan) and University of Baguio, before becoming a teacher at Brent School, a boarding school initially built for children from U.S.-American military, missionary and gold-mining families stationed in the Far East.

THE SALESMAN'S SHOES by JAMES RODERICK BURNS

2007-08-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

CARLOS HIRALDO Reviews

The Salesman’s Shoes by James Roderick Burns
(Modern English Tanka Press, 2007)

In the early ‘80s, Cy Curnin of the Fixx famously complained “Why don’t they do what they say/ Say what they mean/ One thing leads to another.” Ah, the charming innocence of those Reagan years. Things were simpler then. Our conservative Republican president knew how to cut and run from the Middle-East, pulling the Marines out of Lebanon while the going was good. Donahue was the only talk-show on the air, and he dealt with these things called “issues.” We all wanted more from our politics and our pop-culture… more openness, more honesty, more words. In today’s cultural wasteland of morning talk show marathons and the “hey, let’s put this on YouTube” mentality, form gives way to content and content is whatever you feel like putting out there. Many don’t exactly “say what they mean.” Instead, they say much more than what they mean, and show more than any of us want to see.

It is fascinating to find contemporary poets that buck the larger cultural trend, of linguistic, intellectual, and emotional exhibitionism, and undertake the challenge of expressing their emotions and thoughts in strict poetic form. The British poet James Roderick Burns recently imposed such a challenge on himself in The Saleman’s Shoes (2007), a marvelous collection of Tanka poems published by Modern English Tanka Press. For those of you, like me, who wonder, “Hey what’s that?” It is a classic Japanese form that adheres to a strict syllable count of 5-7-5-7-7.

The collection is dedicated to his wife and daughter, and in memoriam to Jack Burns, the poet’s deceased grandfather, and perhaps the more blue-collar salesman of the title. The book is an episodic journey through the life of the poet, a mid-level office worker in Scotland with a wife and a young child. The poems deal with the daily frustrations of office work, the awkward loneliness of blue collar work, and the emotional tug of the family. Under the strictures of Tanka, the most successful poems in the collection open a deep well of ideas and emotions through a few choice words, and well-drawn, carefully juxtaposed images.

Much of the collection looks at the two broad types of employment available to most of us: blue-collar work or mid-level office jobs. The first poem sketches a poignant picture of the solitude of night watchmen all over the world:

Seeing traffic lights
sequencing through green, amber
red for nobody
the night watchman’s heart blows out
like a torn bicycle tyre.

This is a loneliness that not even company can shed. Without pouring bathetic tears for the working man, Burns let’s us know the plight of the blue-collared, salaried employee who can’t even fantasize about better days, like at least the office drone can. Other poems capture the numbing routine of the middle-class familiar to the poet:

Middle class at last--
after a blossom shower
fussing and tutting
over these sticky traces
matted into the footwell.

The poems that acknowledge the pitfalls of blue-collar work, like the first poem, give the poems critiquing middle-class living greater depth and weight. In this collection, unlike in many of the pop-cultural representation of middle-class ennui, there’s no easy romanticizing of the blue-collar “alternative” to office work.

Indeed, Burns captures how frighteningly sealed the life of an office worker can be when in his cubicle he drifts to thoughts of his daughter:

Hot stink of metal,
shrieks and the roundabout whoosh--
in this cubicle
how sorry I feel for you
my unfortunate daughter.

This is a multi-generational No Exit set in the office park. These kinds of poems have an emotional and intellectual depth that one would be hard press to find in a treatise about the work world. The noise of blue-collar construction work (Is the noise coming from outside or from inside the poet’s head?) makes the office worker in his cubicle-cage feel sorry for his daughter. But why? There are a couple of answers to this question, and they are tied together. The poet laments that his daughter will likely grow up to face the limited choices of exhausting blue-collar work or office drudgery. However, the working poet also fears that his cubicle-cage traps him at home with worries about what needs to be done tomorrow so that he cannot always be the father he wishes to be.

Still, the exigencies of capitalism cannot bury all the beauty of life beneath paper work and metallic dumping grounds. We have limited free spaces where quiet moments of contemplation can emerge. Burns captures such a moment with subdued wording, but transparent generosity of spirit:

How wonderful -- snow
bright and short-lived descending
with equal magic
on the couple from Iran
and our wide-eyed one year old.

Through this small portrait, he shows us the beauty that can embrace us all. The poem’s soft caress is more powerful when placed within a collection of other poems that caress, kiss, kick and scream baby, wife, and work.

Of course, not all the poems in the collection are successful. Reading collections of works in strict form is a little like watching a tightrope act; you want to see success as much as you want to see misstep as long as the tightrope walking poet has the safety net of talent beneath him. James Roderick Burns has a strong net as a gifted and talented poet who says much with few words. Thus, his collection of Tanka poems, The Salesman’s Shoes, is a success, leaving you wanting more… more Tanka poems, more poems, more words that mean more than what they say and lead from one powerful thing to another.

*****

Carlos Hiraldo is an Associate Professor of English in the City University of New York. He has published various poems and reviews. His book Segregated Miscegenation was published in 2003 by Routledge. His article on Asian Latinos was recently accepted by the Asian American Law Journal.

FOLLY by NADA GORDON

2007-08-30T23:10:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Folly by Nada Gordon
(Roof Books, 2007)

“Decorativity’s anodyne”, sneers sometimes the pomo fairy. But what if we could spangle it? Take a bodice and rather than it being stricture or base confinement, stud it with jewels which imply a gauche but sparkling autonomy? That the stitches of received “wisdoms” should be undone, and under them should be not nakedness, but the supple and flowing silks of a language undulating in its absence of received ideas! For Nada Gordon’s Folly is only folly in the sense that a courtly mask masks its true purpose. On the wasted heath, of course, the Fool speaks reason more than Lear. Moreover, what is often deemed to be the trivial ripples of “mere surface”, is often simply that which refuses the mock gravity of the deeper establishment monsters. Why mistrust surface, and the sun which glitters there? Mainly, there is a lightness to all tinsel, and yet its gleam, properly handled, may be blinding. For this, it’s scary. One would hate to think language the only jewel gifted with self-glint awareness; and yet, strangely, it seems to be thus, and we may only hope to occasionally see our own face in the diadem.

As, alas, what’s heavy and sinks, declaring itself in combat against “all vile cliché” or “artificial expression”, itself falls into the hole it has dug for others, and must sit there in the dark till Ted Kooser screams hello. Thank deity we have Folly to dance us gaily around this pit, blithe to a “legitimacy” wherein the lightest airs are swallowed and homogenizingly chewed. To this comforting mastication, I’d prefer to float on dazzling clouds of Gordon’s “gingko perfume”. I too “want it all – ferns! fizz! – the woiks”.

“It’s ordinary to want to move around on top of a glittery puzzle piece – why not?” Why not indeed! You mean I’m not abnormal? You mean others, who hate us, don’t possess the “true language”? I thought Babel had been built and its divine address hidden, but now I find :

Who isn’t envaginated in rhetoric?
Slathered with its perfume, pigs root through
the debris of the 20th century – a scuttling octopus,
a spidery machine, ghosts of ocean rays.

Consider me envaginated! For Folly knows that an inherent artifice in language – en tant que moderative formality, sense, and music – does not necessarily lead to any “falsity” of consequent production, any more than a jeweled veil warps possible skins beneath. Floating over the face, the veil-language is added to that spoken by the tongue – itself a modified truth – and by pressing it through such small spaces for light, breaks it into competing, dialectical beams.

In this way, “the same old/ arguments” may perhaps “all disappear in a shower of gluey sparks”. Sparks which because of their stickiness may again coagulate: but the initial breakage is necessary, allowing us to spangle murky borders with the fireworks of new perspectives : “Cora Pearl: Believe in my heart – how the art divides on you.”

Thus the Rhétoriqueurs, dear Jean Paulhan, will come out of their closets, and greet their hypocritical readers brotherly. This is like discovering the poem’s an all-inclusive carnival, where feathers, breasts and chests are both sexually real and semantic fioritures, and where no-one’s made fun of for not knowing “the moves” :

Helen: My dance is a gift and a victim and an honor and a load. It increases brilliantly.

Poets! Erasmus tells us we are all “rapturous with self-love and flattery”, that we “tickle the ears of fools” with “mere toys and fabulous shams”! But what if our fabulous shams made a carnival more ripe to life’s sadness than any cavernous metaphysical meanderings? What if we’d prefer to dance among the “plume wigglers”, “high kickers” and “panty flashers”, seeing in life’s festival at once Life and its Totentanz? :

The porpoises fling up their
orange underthings; swaying
in the wind, their heavy rotation
is brief and horrifying

full of bright scrawls, of thin
and lacy garters.

Yeats wrote no more adequate stanza with swans, and this gyre is strangely appropriate, for Folly is indeed a book of “bright scrawls”. Such language confers value where value was denied: “She denied the concept that a nail art is only superficial on fingertips.” Who indeed declared nail art unimportant? Those constructing the grand canon? Superficiality is indeed specific: and what “they” call “mere glitter”, Nada Gordon sees as a shifty way to suppress glitter, to make it dull.

Better to clear out the cobwebs with lashings of spark, creating thus new spaces for the deployment of speech: “By representing their fitting color or shapes, it enables to see your new status”. Thus, the Golem will liberate the ghetto, and Gordon will partly unfetter a language from swamps of “sage expression”. “Together we stand, divided we freak out”, though Gordon’s Folly is of course much less freaky than most of that which passes for sane :

Ai – my artifice is floating . . .
isn’t it nonsense
we stopped all this time?
The porn of breath,
the shame of ugly public muckling?

“I had some difficulties understanding curculios”: comprehension’s here lucky to be subjected to arabesque, which marks out a much finer line than the Fox-of-Oppression dressed as the Lamb-of-Expressivity. To say that this is Roof Books’ most energetic and luxurious production in quite a while would be neither hyperbolic nor litotic. Suffice to say it’s fine enough that no animal analogy’s sufficient: it has Peacocks who speak of Courbet, and Bunnies who speak of Rothko, and this convergence of four eloquent, complimentary corners will sadly have to do.

As for specifics, “Sheepnose”, as poem, is too like Un Coup de Dès, and too near-perfect, not to be named big-F Folly. “Coney Island Avenue” is too prolix, discursive and rad, not to wear its own tight Folly T-shirt. As Lucille Ball remarks in “Succomb”: “C’est ici la sagesse” (“Here is wisdom”). The epistemological table, so violently inversed, can only be termed: right Folly.

Needless to say, Gary Sullivan’s rowdy and vital brush only brings to this party more cool kids to dance with. As such luminaries as Desiderius Erasmus, in these pages, reminds us, the realm of folly, against that of restrictive wisdom, is vast. Women are Folly, decorativity is Folly, surprise is Folly, kitsch is Folly, invention is Folly, elegance is Folly, expression is Folly, orange negligées are Folly, stupid didactic gills are Folly, hirsute plunges and mouthed apricots, yea, are Folly, porpoises are Folly, as is all public muckling.

Long live Folly, and fuck the wise.

*****

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

TRESPASSES by PADCHA TUNTHA-OBAS

2007-08-30T23:07:00.000-07:00

ALYSHA WOOD Reviews

trespasses by Padcha Tuntha-obas
(O Books, 2006)

[Editor's Note: Due to Blogger formatting constraints, some of the poem-excerpts below may not appear as intended in terms of formats.]

In her first full-length book of poems, trespasses, Thai writer Padcha Tuntha-obas employs the act of trespass as a device that allows her to inhabit not only a “foreign language”—whether it is English for her or Thai for English speakers—but also the concept of “foreignness” itself and language-making as a process.

trespasses negotiates specifically and in a prolonged fashion with the process of translation, whether it is within the philosophical texts of Plato and Wittgenstein in her series “sophos symposium,” or her own arrival in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Operating between the borders of Thai and English; memory and country; and word, sound, and script, translation functions as a strategy that acts upon her, but that she also enacts.

The longest piece in the book, “a poem composed to call one’s self,” contains Thai script written in the traditional 60-line Dok-Soy Thai poetic form, with sections of English above and below each line of script, as well as a strip of English text that runs at the bottom of each page.

                              whispered, there is every meticulous
                                             thought

               [Thai script]

in these utterances. among them,
her self. somewhere. no matter how
composite, regardless of what sound.
somewhere, her self.

               they are free. their routes only then exist in the wind (46).

As in the above excerpt, Tuntha-obas wrestles with the “self” she knows in Thai and the “self” being created in English, while western authorities repeatedly define both her language, symbolized by the Thai script, and her body as ineffable, amorphous, and meaningless. She returns to the metaphor of pollen and “the wind that / drifts through it” (48) to illustrate the quality of her “language body,” as well as to portray the weight of both its silence and its enunciation, in which it continually shifts and reconstitutes itself. Considering the form of “a poem composed…”, Tuntha-obas succeeds in voicing herself in multiple locations, by allowing multiple voices speaking simultaneously to trespass the page.

In fact the form throughout the entirety of trespasses is many-layered. The title poem, noted as “In admiration of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” can be compared to an annotated grammar rule book and a standardized multiple choice test. Each section includes a block of rapid-fire, staccato sentences punctuated by periods.

… derangement. mad.
chaotic. conceptual. such.
established. my now.
being. here. subtly. I
turn. watching. my.
being. inside out. or is
it outside in side (63).

In passages like these, her abrupt rhythms infiltrate the colonizing force behind such concepts as perfection and fluency, an act through which she refuses to be silenced. A similar infiltration of language occurs in “translation in six steps: thai to english.” Tuntha-obas translates a short Thai school book passage in six different ways, using a combination of Thai script, transliterated or phonetic Thai, and English. In an effort to make the Thai language “visible” to the non-Thai reader, she gradually applies English grammar conventions to the phonetics. As the piece progresses they become colonized, or transformed, by the introduction of commas and periods, capitalization, and plural and possessive forms.

Choojai kaows kor Seetaow, baow baow.
Seetaow choos kor, porjai.
Manii hua-rors.
Toe mahars Maanii
Maanii kaows hua Toe.
Toe choos khor, deejai.
Choojai hua-rors.
Maanii is porjai (72).

These overlays of English grammar morph the Thai into a hybrid language, so that it becomes an enunciation that pronounces itself between languages. As in her concluding poem series, “trees,” trespasses is a work in which Tuntha-obas’ transplanted voice grows in this fissure, a contradiction without contradiction, “yearning to be debordered” (3).

*****

Alysha Wood holds an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, where she wrote her critical thesis on the poetry of Padcha Tuntha-obas in relation to other poly-lingual texts. Wood’s work has appeared in Glimpse Abroad, “Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado GLBT Voices,” and is forthcoming in an Asian American female poets anthology. Wood is also a contributor to Feminist Review.

THE MCSWEENEY'S BOOK OF POETS PICKING POETS Edited by DOMINIC LUMFORD

2007-08-30T23:00:00.001-07:00

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets Edited by Dominic Lumford
(McSweeney’s Books, 2007)

Back in the days before Internet, I was susceptible to a type of chain letter. I would participate, if it meant I would get something in return by way of the U.S. Mail. I quickly learned that I usually wouldn’t get much money, although it was fun to see where the mail came from. My favorite chain letter was the one that left me with several dish towels. I loved piecing together the connections of which people knew which friends, and which connections yielded the most interesting responses.

The same principle works in the book, The McSweeney’s Book of Poets Picking Poets (McSweeney’s Books, 2007). The editors of the book chose ten poems from ten different poets. Each poet was asked to contribute another one of their poems, as well as to choose a poem written by a different poet. Then that new poet was asked to contribute an additional poem that they had written, as well as a poem by someone else.

The resulting book has ten poetry chains, one hundred poems in all. This approach creates a reading experience not like any other I’ve had. At first, I read through the chains, looking for links and obvious influences. Even though there are two different types of introductions to the book, I wanted more information about how each poet came to choose the next poem. That pondering led me to wonder, if I had to choose just one poem of someone else’s to contribute to a book, how on earth would I choose.

Some of the poems have obvious links. For example, Harryette Mullen's “Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name” has subtle links to “Little Slave Narrative #1: Master,” the poem that comes after it and written by Elizabeth Alexander (the next poet in the chain). In ““Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name,” Mullen uses varying images of America in all of its corporate, Capitalist glory to paint a portrait of modern life. The speaker in the poem drives to Family Dollar for supplies for the Fourth of July picnic, and all sort of associations ensue: “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of Lipton instant tea,” and “Oh beautiful, those spacious aisles stacked high with seasonal interest.” The last lines show the husband grilling while the son plays with his World Peacekeepers Patriot Soldier, “a twelve-inch fully posable action figure that plays the national anthem.”

Alexander's “Little Slave Narrative #!: Master” reminds us of a grim side of American history, with its depiction of a cruel slave master, who “would order the women to pull up their clothes, / ‘in Alabama style,’ as he called it.” He puts ads in the paper to try to retrieve his runaway slaves, ads which mentions their disfigurements. It’s a darker look at the Capitalist system that roots itself in the oppression of many for the gains of a few. Upon reading the two poems together, both intent on dissecting a piece of Americana, I saw subtle connections that I would never have seen if the book hadn’t presented these poems as part of a poetry chain.

In the end, it was most fun to just dip in and out of the book, delighting in the connections that I saw, not spending too much time in analysis of the chain itself. The book offers a multitude of fascinating poets and their poems, a variety of forms, something for everyone. For those wanting more, there’s a list of publication credits that tells where each poem originally appeared, as well as contributor’s notes and a flow chart, for those inclined to the fun of the chase of the chain.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals and was one of the top ten finalists in the National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook Competition. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, where she has just been promoted to Assistant Chair of the General Education department.

THE ENEMY SELF: POETRY & CRITICISM OF LAURA RIDING by BARBARA ADAMS

2007-08-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

JOE LECLERC Reviews

The Enemy Self: Poetry & Criticism of Laura Riding by Barbara Adams
(UMI Research Press, 1990)

The Poet in No One’s Pocket

Bob Milby introduced me to Barbara Adams in early Spring of this year.

Dr. Adams and I ( Doctor Not) were among the participants in an open mike reading at the Florida (Orange County, New York) Public Library.

I was enthusiastic about Prof Barbara’s poems. Quite subtle, nuanced, craft-wise (SNC).

Note: “Open Mike” is NOT SNC-centric. Mike likes Obvious, Loud, and Wis _ _ _ (OLW).

But, never mind Mike. Let’s get back to Doc B.

After a minute or so of colloquy, I was whoa-wowed to learn that Barbara A. Ph.D. did 18 years teaching at Manhattan’s Pace U (a few blocks away from where I tenementented 1970-1990).

You see, meta-mysterious coincidence was not limited to mere geographical proximity. No, in addition to the nearness, there were the scholarly and the not so scholarly minds working in unbeknownst tandem.

How so? Dr. Barb was writing about Laura Riding. LeClerc was holed up in his Vandam Street flop reading a blue and brown bound paperback of Riding’s writings.

So, about 20 years later, I meet B. Adams at a little Hudson Valley library. She’s telling me she wrote The Enemy Self. I’m telling her I definitely have eyes for her text.

After all, the late Laura - late of a fruit farm in Wabasso, Florida (The State. The State. Not the Village where the library…,), but born in New York City (Barbara and me too.) as Laura Reichenthal - whiz-kid who scholarships up to Cornell.

In Ithaca, she writes about growing up in a socialist, secular, Jewish household in Brooklyn. Red Dad and Mom were earnest about human progress. They weren’t big on animal rights though. Dad slew all of Jenny’s (Laura’ cat) kittens as his way of welcoming them into the world. Laura the non-sectarian would later write “cats were Christian pleasures”. An unusual thought , that.

Whilst versifying and being long gone of mom and pop, Laura ups and marries History Professor Dr. Gottschalk. Doc and Mizuzz G. leave Cornell before Laura gets her degree. Now a spouse, and never to be a bachelor, Laura was 22 when The Fugitive accepted several of her poems. Several other prominent journals did as well.

Meanwhile, the roving couple jumped form New York for a short stop in Illinois. From there they ambled to Louisville, where Doc Gottschalk got a teaching gig

With Laura now taking up residence in the Confederacy, Allen Tate ( the fugitive from The Fugitve) visited her in Kentucky. He was enchanted with his young contributor. “Her intelligence is pervasive, but always you get the conviction that the Devil and all Pandemonium couldn’t dissuade her of her tendency.”

Tate’s take on Riding would be echoed by all sorts of distinguished people - including Professor Barbara Adams herself.

Surely, Laura was sure of herself for sure.

Nevertheless, Tate was bemused, bewildered and bewitched. So Riding rode the railway to Tennessee - the Brooklyn Dodger who could hang with the bourbon and mint julep guys.

The fugitive group included Tate, John Crowe Ramson, Robert Penn Warren and others whose names I cant remember right now.

They were men of high learning, and a social and political conservatism that was born out of a sense that the “southern aristocratic tradition” was being eroded by technology and finance.

No one will ever think Brooklyn a place where the Stars and Bars could ever fly - but the impressed and somewhat puzzled gentlemen at Vanderbilt accepted the brilliant but severe philosopher-poet as a true blue and gray fugitive.

Now having charmed-dominated Lee’s last hold-out lieutenants, Riding dumped Gottschalk and moved back to New York. Somewhere in a two year?- whirlwind, J. C. Ransom mailed a copy of The Fugitive across the Atlantic to the still WWI weary Robert Graves. Graves was very much impressed with Laura Ridings poetry.

Back in the Apple, Laura was doing La Vie Boheme in the Village. Again, her companions were noteworthy: Maxwell Bodenheim, Malcom Cowley, E.E. Cummings, Mark Van Doren and her new best friend - Hart Crane,

Riding and Crane got along famously, had intense and passionate conversation about High Art, and the feast that WAS Gotham. Their intimacy halted before the door of the erotic.

But such was their closeness, that others saw them and winked and grinned to other salacious third parties. Those folks imaginings were awry. Riding did double duty as both constant companion and beard for the man who wrote The Bridge - and , while doing so, managed to cover the waterfront.

Robert Graves wrote ardently to Laura, In 1925, he invited her to stay with him and his spouse Nancy Nicolson in London. She accepted.

This commenced a ménage á some number not precisely known. What is known clearly is Graves’ obsession with Riding. She served as house guest and Roberts’s myth-muse white goddess. Riding took the her -worship in signature stride.

Crane voyaged to London in 1928. It all started well.Hart epistled; “Laura Riding and Robert Graves have been delightfully hospitable. I had a most luscious plum pudding with them Christmas. “

Plum pudding was the high point. Shortly thereafter, Crane was bitching about “…indigestible food AND Laura Riding’s hysterical temper…,”

She reciprocated in contempt, and spoke of “falsifactory characterization”.

Crane went away mad. “Mad” would be a word to characterize (in a non-falsificatory way) the pile-up by the Thames. After three years with Bob and Nancy - and then with and Irish bloke by name Geoffrey Phibbs, Riding took a back breaking plunge from a window of the flat in Saint Peter’s square.

She never recovered entirely from the fall. Only time, and not self (?) inflicted defenestration would silence Riding She lived another 60 plus years after the incident.

Nancy divorced Robert. Riding and Graves took Gertrude Stein’s advice and moved to Majorca in 1929. There they founded and both of them were management and labor for the little publishing house that could and did print beautiful, limited editions.

While on Majorca, Laura Riding maintained her own high standing amongst modernist literati. During her Balearic stay she published what is one of my personal library favorites, A Progress of Stories.

Graves became famous. He was published world-wide with Goodbye to All That and I, Claudius. He escaped obscurity forever. His demons, however, stayed put for his celebrity.

Many young writers made pilgrimages to the couple’s home in Deya. Among them - Alan Hodge, Norman Cameron, and Julian Symons, Tom Matthews, a Time magazine editor also arrived. Decades later, he wrote Jacks or Better - an account claimin Riding drove Graves crazy. And, eventually, stole his pal Schuyler Jackson for good.

Julian Symons (once famous for his mystery novels) wrote of her . “She came in, wearing a dark dress almost to the ground, and using a stick for her lameness. She was in her late thirties, and beautiful in a ferocious way…, There was something oppressive in Laura Riding’s certainty of tone…,”

I’ve mentioned enough judgments of a peculiar kidney. That is to say, Riding is masterful, authoritative, cock-sure. Her writing is unquestionably impressive…, BUT.

The connective “B” word is attached to Laura Riding’s literary reputation like a flagrant birthmark. Even Barbara Adams has it at the ready.

And, reader, please know it; Adams is truly authoritative regarding Laura Riding. Her 114 page book is a swift, well informed, and fine-styled piece of writing. I know of no better book about Riding than The Enemy Self.

BUT.

But Riding was her own woman. Although an honorary Fugitive, upon first meeting her, Allen Tate had to qualify his admiration for her genius.

Tate, Ransom, Graves, Hart Crane, T.S. Matthews, Julian Symons…,

As I write this review - Wikipedia, that fount of all collected tidbits, says, in essence, “Yes. BUT.”

The second wave feminists of the 1970’s claimed proto-feminist writers like Woolf, Sackville-West, and the great and savage train wreck that was Sylvia Plath. They could even embrace the whip-smart maverick Susan Sontag. But with Riding, they held back.

Adams at a couple of points likens Riding to Ludwig Wittgenstein. The simile is apt.

So then. Why is the solitary, angry, notoriously difficult Wittgenstein valorized in the many hundreds (more likely thousands) of books about him ? His faults are always duly noted. And, after said faults being noted, why is this hero of thought almost always forgiven for his bad behavior?

Why is forgiveness absent from critical writing about Laura Riding.

I don’t know. But, I really don’t care.

Riding is one of the key figures in early 20th century poetry.

Her critical work was a seminal influence on a literary generation that believed in great literature.

As a modern philosopher writing in the English language, her only peer is Wittgenstein. And realize, reader, Wittgenstein admired the poetry of others. He just couldn’t write the stuff himself.

Required Reading:

               The Poems of Laura Riding
               A Progress of Short Stories
               The Telling

Laura Riding. No ands, ifs, or buts.

*****

Joe LeClerc is a writer and musician. He lives in the Hudson River Valley

LIBIDO DREAMS, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by GLENNA LUSCHEI

2007-08-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

HUGH FOX Reviews

Libido Dreams, New and Selected Poems by Glenna Luschei
(Artamo Press, Santa Barbara, CA, 2007)

Reading Glenna Luschei’s latest book Libido Dreams, the words that kept flowing through my mind were evanescence, ephemeralness, transience, loss, because the whole book is in essence one vast lamentation for the loss of time, life, the precious, transcendentally romantic NOW. At the same time, though, it’s not a message printed out in large letters on the living room wall, but hidden, subtle, artistically difficult.

Take “Kestrel,” for example:

Dammit! I couldn’t send you a Val-
entine this year; I drove you....I mean
your ashes to Yosemite.

When I saw you in your mask
I swerved into the fence post
but you perched again and

again, kestrel beside crow on the high
tension wire, everywhere along the Grapevine.
In the Lodge, too, the Kachina figure

of the kestrel said endurance.
The turtle on your garment said energy
from underground. In your codicil

you requested Delphi, the navel of the world.
Sure, I would chew those laurel
leaves for you, shimmy down the crevice

and screech my prophecy, “You’ll fry in Hell
for leaving me!” Fat lot of good that would do.
So I hike...unstead on the ice to

Bridal Veil Falls, throw a fist full of you

2.

into the mist. My nostrils catch grit
flying back. Not bad.

Kestrel’s message from underground:
Endurance. I couldn’t get rid
of you if I tried.

Be Mine.

(pp. 14-15)

On the surface it seems to be about a kind of falcon dying and being incinerated, turned into ashes, the ashes thrown into a waterfall....but there are levels and levels inside the poem. Fifty pages later and I could be still speculating about the multiple meanings. Why Delphi, the shrine of Apollo, the site of the Delphi oracle....a word that comes through the centuries to us (delphic) meaning ambiguous, multi-leveled.

That Luschei is!

And always the sense of evanescent time next to permanent eternity/death. Like in the poem “Amber,” which on level one is about a boat-trip to Copenhagen. The other passengers are off to tourist, but not Glenna. She finds amber ,” ...Resin locked in trees/for 53 million years. A mosquito’s/pinned down, wings back. Not a bad way to spend eternity.” (p.49). Life, touristing, versus the eternity of death.

The message keeps coming back over and over again: While you have it, enjoy it, when it vanishes, it vanishes forever.

Like in “Rain Dance,” one of her sons marrying a Mexican beauty, meeting her former husband at the wedding, dancing with him: “...we danced in the rain until dawn/until all the roses fell upon our path.” (p.25).

3.

Always endowed with a powerful sense of the beauty of the Now, and the most arful, delicately delicious ways of portraying it, the message never escapes us, “Expand into what you have....while you (evanescently) have it!”

A classic.

*****

Hugh Fox, born in Chicago in 1932, has some 86 books published, BUT HIS MOST IMPORTANT WORK STILL REMAINS UNPUBLISHED, ESPECIALLY HIS MAJOR NOVELS. A book of his plays is coming out in 2007, as is his fantasy novel Voyage to the House of Yama and a book of poetry from Higganum Hill Press. His autobiography, Way, Way Off the Road was published by Ibbetson Street Press in Somerville, Massachusetts.

THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA by VICTOR HERNANDEZ CRUZ

2007-08-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

The Mountain in the Sea by Victor Hernandez Cruz
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 55401)

The poetry of Victor Hernandez Cruz is internationally read, respected, and renowned. His work, like the man himself, is a meld of experiences, races and cultures from North Africa to Spanish Harlem, Spain to Puerto Rico. His poetry is rich with timeless Mediterranean and Caribbean influences. His latest book is the story of life, of many lives that communicate the essence of this poet's history. One brief excerpt from "Fez" stood out as a description of the poet and his work. The light truly shines within him. He is a living museum, sharing the bittersweet taste of his memories:

The candles lit in the
room of the body,
The museum of flesh,
The flavor of memory.

"The Medina Poems" transported me to another place and time. Breathless, I experienced everyday life in the poet's beautiful, exotic Morocco, and to quote him, "It's almost like a word is a place / that you can enter and dwell." Through the words of the poet's journal, I did enter the place to see the streets, courtyards, and people through his eyes:

Listening to the sounds of Arabic
melting in my afternoon ears
walking through the medina's nougat taste,
Amina's hands are my hands
Slowly the awareness of significance
comes, syllables that bring hints,
a flavor in the word, henna kissing
hands waving the new sounds,
a smooth turning opens like petals
in the air of so many people
between me and my ears…

The section, "Portraits," is a poet's eye view of icons who influenced his life and thereby his poetry. He captures the life and genius of their gifts with stunning simplicity, as in this excerpt from "Rafael Hernandez:"

Island beauty inside the resonance
of the guitar
With words he saw the way the
mountains see themselves.
Creator's eyes.

In fond memory, the grand musical frames of "Ricardo Ray y Bobby Cruz" are memorialized. Ricardo Ray:

The Brooklyn Bridge was his
keyboard,
An overpass to protect
from the lava meltdown
Reddish clave below the bongos,
and the vegetative scratch of
the gourd….

Bobby Cruz:

The singer's face receives a splash
of notes from Ricardo's fingers.
His wooden face
a sculpture begun in Ghana
that jumped out of the Orinoco.

"Tricofero" is a long poem dedicated to the poet's father, a man with hard edges who lived a harsh existence. With incredible compassion, the poet considers his father's life, and his death:

I buried his body like a seed into the
ground,
sensing his hair will sprout in another dimension
as guayaba fruit,
scent returns to Allah.
Through the opening of caves,
Dios who selects children and parents,
deep inside the sperm dance.

My advice to readers is to savor these poems. Hidden within them are generosity of spirit, compassion, forgiveness, joy, and pride. Highly recommended.

*****

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

THE WIND SHIFTS: NEW LATINO POETRY Edited by Francisco Aragon

2007-08-30T22:20:00.001-07:00

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ Reviews

The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Edited by Francisco Aragón
(University of Arizona Press, 2007)

The two most important aspects of any good anthology: the title and the editor’s introduction. The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, edited by Francisco Aragón, takes its title from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera:

Dogs sprawl in the heat
tongues loll, drop saliva,
flanks ripple off flies.
The wind shifts.
I smell mesquite burning.

Allowing Anzaldúa to name the anthology establishes the main theme of Aragón's introduction: expanding borders.

The criteria for selection: any Latino/a poet who had no more than one book in print and who was approximately forty years old or younger. “New” and not “emerging” because the former suggests “poets who have only recently begun publishing.” It’s adequately ambitious that Aragón chose “new” as the adjectival guide for his anthology, placing The Wind Shifts in dialogue with Donald Allen’s seminal anthology, New American Poetry. The title also resonates with this sentence from Muriel Rukeyser (whom I’ve been reading): “There is new inside, / We witness.”

In the first paragraph of the introduction, Aragón situates his anthology within the borders of seminal Latino/a poetry anthologies from the 90s: After Aztlan (ed. Ray Gonzalez, 1992), Paper Dance (eds. Victor Hernández Cruz, Leroy V. Quintana, and Virgil Suárez, 1995), El Coro (ed. Martín Espada, 1997), and Touching the Fire (ed. Ray Gonzalez, 1998). In doing so, he traces their common concern of presenting Latino/a poetry that addresses the social and political. According to Aragón, the poets in The Wind Shifts belong to the generation that succeeded poets published in these major anthologies. The Wind Shifts “suggests that the canvas is now larger, its border expanded to include subject matter that is not overtly political. Rather [...] it is work that is equally, if not more, informed by an exploration of language and aesthetics.”

To map the topography of the expanded border, Aragón points out how some of the Chicano poets in this anthology—Brenda Cárdenas, David Dominguez, John Olivares Espinoza, Carl Marcum, Carolina Monsivais, and Paul Martínez Pompa—express “a poetics of witness,” focusing on the social, political, and familial without sacrificing a lyrical “attentiveness to language and sound.” Aligned with these poets are other Latino poets—Naomi Ayala, Kevin A. González, Lidia Torres, Venessa Maria Engel-Fuentes, and Adela Najarro—who also explore the vital, narrative strand of Latino poetry while accentuating the prosody of these narratives.

Aragón then names Albino Carrillo, Gina Franco, María Meléndez, and Deborah Parédez as examples of poets who “enlarge the parameters of Latino poetry in terms of newer perspectives on familiar themes.” We conceive new Latino poetry as originating in the poetics of witness, expanding the sites of witness, and seeing these sites with new eyes and aesthetic techniques.

The poets Sheryl Luna, Eduardo C. Corral, and Emmy Pérez are seen as re-visioning a major theme of Latino poetry: the U.S.-Mexico border. They take on a familiar, freighted subject with “a poetics that takes some of its cues from the more experimental tendencies in American poetry.”

Although Aragón sketches a “group portrait” of the contributors, he reminds us that all the poets cross the thematic and aesthetic borders his introduction establishes for them, foregrounding the “nomadic” quality new Latino poetry. Richard Blanco, Francisco Aragón, Steven Cordova, David Hernandez, and Urayoán Noel become examples of the nomadic: Blanco and Aragón have traveled extensively outside the United States; Cordova and Hernandez lyrically travel through various subject matters; and Noel linguistically travels between English and Spanish.

The edge of Aragón’s complex map is marked by Rosa Alcalá and Scott Inguito, poets who “share affinities with some of the more avant-garde tendencies in American poetry” and “resist and work against what might be called the more narrative or lyric traits most prevalent in Latino poetry up to now.”

Besides the introduction, Aragón draws another map: a “Further Reading” page that lists books by poets who fit the eligibility requirements, but who weren’t included. These poets include: Blas Manuel de Luna, Miguel Murphy, Blas Falconer, Manuel Paul Lopez, Sarah Cortez, Ada Limón, Ariel Robello, Roberto Harrison, Gabriel Gomez, Cynthia Cruz, Rigoberto Gonzalez, and Tim Z. Hernandez. Furthermore, Aragón acknowledges other Latino/a poets who haven’t yet published a full-length book at the time of publication, but who are “doing good work”: William Archila, Carmen Calatayud, Diana Marie Delgado, Suzanne Ocampo-Frischkorn, Angela Garcia, José B. Gonzalez, Octavio R. Gonzalez, Javier Huerta, Martin Lemos, Raina J. León, Pablo Miguel Martínez, Kristin Naca, Victor Olivares, Marisela Treviño Orta, Ruben Quesada, Peter Ramos, Verónica Reyes, Jorge Sánchez, Rene Soto, and Roberto Tejada. Aragón knows that no map is complete, so he provides us with a constellation of names from which we can further navigate.

Despite the comprehensiveness of Aragón’s introduction, nothing can really prepare us for the poetry that is found in The Wind Shifts. The “new” is inside this anthology; by reading, we witness the shifting borders of the “new”—their fragility and freight. The Wind Shifts posits that new Latino Poetry roots in the politics and aesthetics of Chicano poetry and crosses the borders between local / global, narrative / experimental, grounded / nomadic, national / international, aesthetic / political. Aragón’s anthology not only maps the expanding borders of Latino poetry, but it also encourages the wind to shift towards new horizons.

*****

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of 2 chapbooks: constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, forthcoming 2007), and all with ocean views (Overhere Press, forthcoming in 2007). His reviews have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, First Intensity, Rain Taxi, Jacket, Rattle, How2, Slope, Octopus, and Traffic, among others. He blogs at blindelephant.blogspot.com.

PUNK POEMS by JOHN BURGESS

2007-08-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT Reviews

Punk Poems by John Burgess
(Ravenna Press, 2005)

When I got John Burgess’ book, Punk Poems, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I worried that my knowledge of punk music wouldn’t be vast enough for me to enjoy the poems. I wondered if I would understand all the references. Would I be like my father, the classical music enthusiast, who sadly shook his head at the music he heard blaring from the stereo of his teen-age daughter?

This book has no notes at the end, nothing to help a clueless reader decipher all the nuances of a poem. In some cases, that’s not a disaster. After all, can there be very many people who don’t know who Dale Evans was? In other cases, I had to do a Google search. I’m fairly certain I got accurate information, but one never knows for sure.

Some of these poems are rooted in the work of punk artists, but many of them are not. One of my favorite poems made reference to June Carter Cash: “Not so much love but a flood--/ Not desire touch skin / Not intimate but a river--.“ Each of these punk poems, the first 48 poems in the book, consists of ten lines. These lines often form a perfect image (sometimes perfect in its effect of disturbing the reader). Likewise, the poems in the section, “17 Views of Mt. Fuji” often attain a zenlike, koan quality of mysticism.

My favorite section of the book was “10 Imperfect Sonnets.” I was drawn to that section of the book because of its epigraph from Meriweather Lewis, and its references to early country music artists, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash. My favorite poems in the whole book are the last two, with lines like “Since you left I’ve been as lonely / As a Johnny Cash song solitary / As a man without parole” and “O—if I had to live off the land . . . Know how to persevere / Hammer and shotgun near.”

This book seems written by a poet who takes great delight in a wide variety of musical forms, which gives the poetry a diverse richness. All of the poems are short, most only ten lines. Often I wished for more. Of course, that is often my downfall in life: give me the perfect morsel, and I’ll wish that I had a whole plate. I’ll spend a lifetime trying to recreate a moment that was perfect. Poems like these remind me that sometimes satisfaction can be found in one, small, carefully crafted gem.

*****

Kristin Berkey-Abbott earned a Ph.D. in British Literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published in many journals and was one of the top ten finalists in the National Looking Glass Poetry Chapbook Competition. Pudding House Publications published her chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard, in 2004. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, where she has just been promoted to Assistant Chair of the General Education department.

SUGARING by ANN CEFOLA

2007-08-30T21:38:00.000-07:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Sugaring by Ann Cefola
(Dancing Girl Press, 2007)

TRANSFORMING REVIEWS, Experiment 1:
The Anti-Transformation, A Discursive Review

The twenty poems gathered together in Ann Cefola’s first chapbook, Sugaring, are a fine entry for her into the world of poetry. In the opening poem, “Magnetic North,” Cefola traces a friendship through the seasons and the points of the planet, writing,

Your jade hands lifting to warn of summer thunder. Crisp red
and orange leaves yielding and playful. Root. Memory. Soil.
My life rings in yours:

How did we, unprotesting, collect hard blue frost? You tell me
to give it all back, release every cold-carved facet,
every crystalline dagger, into soggy earth.

Cefola’s use of metaphoric language to excavate relationships is effective and a fixture in the chapbook. In “Confessional,” Cefola writes, “Frieda Kahlo is painting me making conscious contact with the divine./Bracelets jangle on her birdlike wrist as brush taps palette.” In “For a Coyote Crossing Route 10,” she commands, “Don’t tell me nature means never outgrowing a wild puppyhood.” This metaphoric often precedes a stark revelation. In the final poem of the first section, “Who Banned Rain?” Cefola concludes the poem,

A priest I knew, always caught in downpours, would say Enjoy.
I like his gospel: Heaven is meant to break wide open.

I have met thunder on the sunniest day, and greeting you, rain,
on the dirt road is the only way I can feel sky on my skin.

Cefola’s poetry seeks to explore the natural world in counterpoint to human relationships – a theme and a trope that is worked and reworked throughout the poems of Sugaring.

The concluding poem of the chapbook is the title poem. “Sugaring” is perhaps the strongest poem in the chapbook. It ends with an observation of opposites and the word yes. Cefola writes,

You drench; I drizzle. I push my half-empty pitcher across the table.
You say, Are you sure? Such sweetness tapped makes me lick my lips
yes.

As a book, Sugaring is organized into two, evenly divided sections. There is a solid arc of the poems within each section the chapbook demonstrates Cefola’s commitment to powerful images and well wrought language.

Sugaring is published by Kristy Bowen’s upstart publishing house, Dancing Girl Press, after her great success with the e-zine, Wicked Alice. She makes the chapbooks carefully by hand and Sugaring has a gorgeous, full color cover done on fine columnar paper. Bowen not only serves Cefola’s poems well, but also serves all of us, hungry for new feminist poetry, well.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

TEAHOUSE OF THE ALMIGHTY by PATRICIA SMITH

2007-08-30T20:53:00.000-07:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Teahouse of the Almighty by Patricia Smith
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2006)

TRANSFORMING REVIEWS, Experiment 2:
A List About Patricia Smith’s Teahouse of the Almighty

Ten Great Lines from the Book

1.
the virus pushing
her skeleton through for Nicole to see.

2.
Gwen Brooks hissed Follow. We had no choice.

3.
Then we began our walk toward separate sounds.

4.
shuck you silver peas for dinner.

5.
pan water dab cheap smellgood

6.
Don’t hate me because I am multiple, hurtling.

7.
What men do with their mouths

8.
What do we do with these huge gifts of the throat and tongue?

9.
A sweet beginning I can hide in my mouth.

10.
My child you will conquer the spice.
You will swallow.

What Reading Teahouse of the Almighty is Like

Get in your car. Go to a long stretch of freeway. Turn on your radio. Loud. Hit the scan button. Listen to the blend of voices and music, jazz, blues, pop, hip-hop, rap, news, talk, all together in short recurring though seemingly random increments.

Artistic Forbearers

Gwendolyn Brooks
Mary McLeod Bethune
June Jordan
Koko Taylor
Ray Charles
Stevie Wonder
John Lee Hooker
Ella Fitzgerald
John Coltrane
Erica Jong
Nancy Friday
B. B. King
Eric Clapton
Martin Luther King
Mother Theresa

Can you hear their voices, their sounds together? Patricia Smith can.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

CINEPHRASTICS by KATHLEEN OSSIP

2007-08-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Cinephrastics by Kathleen Ossip
(Horse Less Press, Providence, R.I., 2006)

TRANSFORMING REVIEWS, Experiment 3:
In Which the Entire Review Is Contained in Footnotes

Wrapped in Saran wrap *1

Not one, not two, but three staples *2

The cover smudges on my hand *3

Twenty-four poems *4

Nine or ten lines each *5

Most about contemporary movies *6

Ek-phrasis *7

Cine-phrastics *8

+++

1. The book came to me entirely wrapped in Saran wrap. Not shrink wrapped as books that come from Amazon with a stack of buckslips promoting products or services that I don’t want and not shrink wrapped with tight perfection that requires scissors as some books come from certain publishing houses. This book was wrapped in Saran wrap and clearly was wrapped by hand as well, a small blob of Saran wrap on the back had been pressed firmly in as though to cover a small imperfection. It was done with care, certainly, but I could almost feel the frustration of the static as the wrapper molded the Saran wrap around the completed book.

2. The book is a perfect square, 6 inches by 6 inches, with three staples on the left hand side. A friend of mine published a chapbook over a year ago and when she told her sister, an aspiring poet, that her book was going to be published, her sister asked if it would have a staple. I suppose to distinguish it from a perfect-bound book, as if a book with a staple and not perfect bound were less of a book, as if the poems in the book were less good or less work because they were bound with a staple. I think about that now always when I pick up a book with a staple binding. Back to this book. This perfect square with three staples. These are big staples, almost industrial staples. I confess, I’m jealous of the publisher for owning such a stapler. I struggle with my basic office stapler, which only will easily fix about seventeen pages of standard paper. I’d like to have a large stapler to affix securely so many pages. I wonder though, why three? With a six inch spine, wouldn’t two suffice? Yet, who am I to second-guess this modern handmade artistry? No one. I search for meaning in those three staples.

3. Ah, the significance of the Saran wrap is revealed! The gorgeous cover art, which is both the cover and the back, with artwork by Kate Schapira, smudges, slightly but definitively, on my hands. Black thick paper with white art. The black smudges my finger tips. I don’t rub it too much. I rewrap it carefully each time I put it away.

4. The twenty-four poems of the book each take their title from a movie. Each poem is settled on the bottom of the page. This leaves plenty of room for white space which seems to provide mental space for one’s own recollections about the film as elicited by the poems themselves.

5. I feel like this is a particular form, but I cannot identify it.

6. Contemporary movies all within the past decade. I rush through the volume the first time reading especially the poems about movies I’ve seen, wanting to cherish the ones about movies I love. “The Hours” disappoints. “Ella Enchanted”--which I haven’t seen--delights.

7. Ekphrasis is poetry written in response to another object of art. Often a piece of visual art, sculpture, painting, watercolor, sketch, or other object contained in an art museum. Ossip craftily combines the Latinate cine with phrases to name her poems in this collection.

8. The new word--a form of poetry and a content basis--that defines a standard for writing poetry about films.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

THE PARAGON by KATHRINE VARNES

2007-08-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

The Paragon by Kathrine Varnes
(WordTech Editions, Cincinnati, OH. 2005)

TRANSFORMING REVIEWS, Experiment 4:
Review in linguistic and visual conversation with Kathrine Varnes’ The Paragon in the style of her poem “The Great Refusal”

[The text of this review is intended to be in 20-point type as one definition of paragon in regard to printing is a 20-point type.]

III.*

Form is the negation, the master / of disorder, violence, suffering; / even when it presents disorder / violence— / suffering— ? These lines are the lines from Varnes’ final dialogue in “The Great Refusal.” She makes the philosophic language concrete, translating form to containment as with Mason jars and concluding with silk scarves and a ring box. While the final poem is extraordinary in its juxtaposition, the penultimate poem, in which Varnes put her experience in dialgue with Adrienne Rich is perhaps the greatest achievement of the collection. In recounting Rich’s words, The distance between the universe of poetry / and that of politics is so great, . . . . that any shortcut / between the two realities / seems fatal to poetry, Varnes injects her own experience in the forest and the fear from the leap between the two universes as exemplified by raspberry jam, birthday cards, unread manuscripts and silverfish.

II.

Imagine answering the telephone and someone says, Hi, this is weird, but I’m so-and-so’s second wife—. With these words, Varnes begins the second section of The Paragon which contains a “fence” of sonnets with forty-two interlocking sonnets plus a coda. Subverting the traditional content of a sonnet sequence—love or the pursuit of a lover—and instead addressing the lost love affair through a divorce, Varnes packs a broad emotional range into this sonnet sequence though it ends effortlessly and as though contained in a single telephone call with these words. (His next ex-wife hangs up the telephone.)

I.

The paragon is a model or pattern of excellence and that word as a title seems appropriate for a new formalist poet. In The Paragon, Varnes demonstrates her formal chops; she proves herself to be a match, to parallel or rival, in short a paragon. Varnes writes quatrains, terza rima, sonnets, and a triolet with equal ease. I’m just telling you “Like It Is;” Here is a spray of heliotrope / in a fuchsia bloom.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

KALI'S BLADE by MICHELLE BAUTISTA

2007-08-30T17:13:00.000-07:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Kali’s Blade by Michelle Bautista
(Meritage Press, San Francisco and St. Helena, CA, 2006)

TRANSFORMING REVIEWS, Experiment 5:
Diagramming Michelle Bautista’s Kali’s Blade

Featured below are the texts within the above circles:

Circle 1
One of the concepts in kali is that of concentric circles. I stand in the center of the circle; each layer that is added is another identity.

Circle 2
Bautista experiments with how we see text on a page versus how we see text on a computer screen. The differences between these two experiences are going to transform how we read and write. Bautista is the canary in the coal mine.

Circle 3
Time is changing. It is becoming more incrementalized, more subdivided. Bautista’s poems reflect the influence of the internet and the influence of time as constructed online.

Circle 4
There are many delightful things about Kali’s Blade. These are just two circles I have drawn.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

THREE BOOKS by ROCHELLE RATNER

2007-08-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Quarry by Rochelle Ratner
(New Rivers Press, St. Paul, MN, 1978)

Combing the Waves by Rochelle Ratner
(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, NY, 1979)

Practicing to be a Woman by Rochelle Ratner
(The Scarecrow Press, Inc., Metuchen, NJ, 1982)

TRANSFORMING REVIEWS, Experiment 6:
A Visual and Textual Reading of Early Work by Rochelle Ratner

I confess to being a book junkie. I love them. I especially love oldish books and books that reflect independent--and feminist--publishing. Eileen Tabios graced me with three books by Rochelle Ratner from early in Ratner’s career. I’m an admirer of Ratner’s writing and have reviewed her most recent two books for Galatea Resurrects here and here. Therefore in the spirit of these “transformations,” I conclude with what I call a visual and textual readings of three early work by Rochelle Ratner.

While this book (a chapbook? Hardly at 48 pages, but with two staples and not perfect bound) appears to be orange based on the image taken from Rochelle Ratner’s website, it is actually brown. This is one of the things that books teach us that the Internet cannot. True colors. The book is brown with thick, textured cardstock on the outside, but inside is the most delightful burgundy paper with a design of a flower or leaf--before it was printed the master was obviously hand-wrought. Today, it might be done with a computer and so it would be perfectly repeating and crisp and clear. Looking at this paper, now, though, I imagine the people behind it--their work and their care. I appreciate it. I know that while we’ve gained things through technological advancement, we’ve lost things, too. I cannot recall a contemporary book with such a lovely front paper.

Holding this book reminds of printing before desktop printers or copiers. I remember, albeit vaguely and indirectly, when ink was loaded into presses. It’s evident in this book as the artwork that faces the title page is printed in brown, while the title page is printed in black. The brown knits through the book because a single page loaded onto the press and printed with one color was cheaper than printing multiple colors on a single page and each single page on the printing press becomes at least four pages and sometimes more laced through the final, cut and bound, book. Soon, I become entranced with each image in brown, French coats of arms with fanciful and magical creatures – primarily unicorns but also stags and birds and cherubs – because I know that each picture printed in brown will yield a poem in the book on subsequent pages, also printed in brown. These are the details of printing that are easy to forget, but when remembered seem important and somehow profound.

Combing the Waves, published in 1979 by Hanging Loose Press, entered the world at what I consider the height of the women-in-print movement. During the 1970s, feminists, committed to taking power over their own words and getting their work--poems, stories, essays--into the hands of other women as a way to incite and further the revolution, learned about printing and book production in time period that we call the “women-in-print” movement. While Ratner’s book was not published by a feminist press, it feels like an artifact of the forces of feminism shaping it’s existence.

Hanging Loose Press, founded in 1966, has a strong history with publishing feminist work. Combing the Waves is an early example. The cover art--a block print of a mermaid--sets both a thematic tone for the book as well as a visual element that is continued throughout. There are seven block prints in total in the book, including the front cover, that explore various aspects of the mermaid icon. The final poem of the book, “The Little Sea Mermaid,” explores the Grimm fairy tale with a feminist lens. It end with the haunting line, “Sister, you can still be one of us.”

Ratner’s first book of collected poems, Practicing to be a Woman, appeared in 1982. It is a blue hard bound book with a simple and elegant design. The book brings together almost all of the poems from Quarry--but without the images, a real loss--some of the poems from Combing the Waves and a number of poems from the other nine collections of poetry that Ratner had published prior to 1981. These poems, distilled to their thematic title, present an important document of feminist writing. The lines that begin “Practicing To Be a Woman” provide a glimpse of their significance to the time period as well as their relevance today,

Not that sort of woman,
sticking her little fingers out
to be dainty

the ones I’m attracted to
have more sensible things to do

like putting effort
into being friends with women.
not all of them

but one woman:
me.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

FEATURE ARTICLE by CATHERINE WAGNER

2007-08-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

Objections to the Beauty-Object: A Reading of Two Poems by Barbara Guest
By Catherine Wagner

[First published in Five Fingers Review, Winter 2006. Editor Jaime Robles]

This talk is dedicated to Barbara Guest, who died on February 15, 2006 and was writing madly beautiful poems till the end.

I wrote the original version of this talk suspiciously easily; it was a diatribe against beauty as a goal for the poem. Rereading it, I realized I disagreed with myself— my objections melted away when I viewed them as a warning, not as an inherent problem in writing.

My thinking began with a worry about how we function as writers when we seek the perfection and completion often associated with beauty. Edgar Allen Poe took this view of beauty to a chilling extreme when he said, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” Elizabeth Bronfen, assessing our attachment to beauty in Over Her Dead Body, calls our love for beauty an obsession that’s linked to our horror of death: “We invest in images of wholeness, purity and the immaculate owing to our fear of dissolution and decay.” Our desire to escape change and imperfection leads us to try to make poems that are beautiful objects.

But our forgivable desire for beauty can lead us to separate ourselves from the poem as we write. Since beauty is an attribute of the object, one is subject—that is, agent—and judger in relation to its beauty. Such beauty does not act; it does not have agency. Seeking to produce beauty, to write it, seeks the end of the creation of the poem too early. It puts the afterward in front. Pursuing the poem as beauty-object means pursuing objecthood for the poem, trying to come around ahead of the poem’s trajectory and look at it, take pictures of it, ask whether it’s a beautiful object. The attention of the writer pursuing beauty is on the poem instead of through the poem.

Let me say: I don’t object to beauty or to what I take to be beautiful poems. I love them. I have the beauty-response to Barbara Guest’s poems, the awestruck flushed feeling. But the beauty of a Guest poem is a side-effect of an elegant and committed attention. She has so absorbed her mind in the act of writing that the surface of that act glows with beauty. Here’s a quote from Force of Imagination, Guest’s book on writing:

The ‘spirit’ or the ‘vision’ of a poem arises from the contents of the poet’s unconscious. Let us say the vision of the poem has above it that ‘halo’ you see in religious paintings when an act of special beneficence is being enacted by one of the persons in the picture and that person is given a halo. The poem is an act of special beneficence and the poet is rewarded this halo. The poet is unaware of the halo, just as in the painting the persons are unaware of the halos but it is there as a reward for a particular unconscious state of immanence. Now I am not speaking of a religious state of grace in regard to the poem, the poem is let us say its own religion. I am using the word ‘halo’ because you and I can see it in the painting and this halo has value to us; it reflects a state of mind, or a condition that the mind has attained.
(Force of Imagination, 27–28)

The poem, for Guest, is not in pursuit of beauty. It’s not consciously in pursuit of anything. I interviewed Guest in 1996 and asked her about beauty in her poems:

—So do you make poems to be beautiful?
—Oh, I don’t think I’m guilty of that [laughing].
—Oh, I think you might be.
—I think I want beauty to occur, but I don’t think it really means a reference to…the way a poem can be formed or the way a poem is born.

Guest expands on this idea in Force of Imagination: “Words contain their own beauty of face, but they desire an occupation. They cannot exist on beauty or necessity alone . . . The poet needs to understand the auditory and spatial needs of a poem to free it so that the poem can locate its own movement, so that it is freed to find its own voice, its own rhythm or accent or power” (29–30).

Barbara Guest’s work is so beautiful that I think it’s perfect to use here—the beauty in her work is a result of the beauty of words and the quality of her attention to them; but as these poems point out, a known, predetermined beauty is not their goal or their pathway. I want to address two short Barbara Guest poems—written about 30 years apart—both of which announce a debt to an agency or subjecthood that is not the author’s. The first is “Windy Afternoon,” published in 1962. The poet here expresses an absence of goal a number of times:

Windy Afternoon

Through the wood
on his motorcycle piercing
the hawk, the jay
the blue-coated policeman

Woods, barren woods,
as this typewriter without an object
or the words that from you
fall soundless

The sun lowering
and the bags of paper
on the stoney ledge
near the waterfall

Voices down the roadway
and leaves falling over there
a great vacancy
a huge left over

The quality of the day
that has its size in the North
and in the South
a low sighing that of wings

Describe that nude, audacious line
most lofty, practiced street
you are no longer thirsty
turn or go straight
(Selected 18)

The “you” at the end of the poem, apparently the street, was the silent woods a few stanzas before; the “you” can also be read as the reader, free to make her own decisions, or the speaker or author of the poem, free to type on the typewriter “without object,” goalless, in fact paradoxically commanded to be so. The confusion of pronouns here is a familiar tactic in Guest’s work that’s been called “multiple subjectivity”—it’s familiar also from John Ashbery’s work. I want to note that it’s not just multiple subjects that we encounter in “Windy Afternoon,” but multiple objects. The street, in describing its own line, is subject and object of itself; and the street stands in for the poem that also describes its own “audacious line” and is both subject and object. The beauty here is a result of the poem’s taking an audacious line with Guest. The poem is not merely object; it’s agent too.

The other poem I’d like to discuss is from Guest’s recent jewel of a book, Miniatures (2003). This is a complete section from the seven-page poem “Pathos”:

Arms flutter close to the body, skating on pure ice, harmonious
composition,—

                              body in mellifluous line—

face in profile witheld itself, thin smile,
self approval.

                              Lithe her romp!

lithesome her romp upon the indignation of ice.

               She is falling!

                              Shiver of the fallen,
of the tulle skirt.

               Disarrangement of composition,

                     Snow falling from tree.

(Miniatures 29)

The self-approving skater romps, creating a harmonious composition, but falls, disarranging the composition. This disarrangement is associated with a natural and rather Japanese, haiku-style description, “Snow falling from tree.” Guest finds beauty in melting rather than freezing, in the uncomposed, discomposed, discomfited, decomposing. The beauty of the scene is not the skater’s goal—she wanted a different beauty; nor, if we read the scene as metaphor, is beauty the author’s intention. Guest, here, creates a scene that suggests beauty be discovered, not manufactured.

Let me begin to argue here against my concerns about the dangers of pursuing beauty. My argument conflates beauty with objecthood. Guest’s poems lead us toward a different definition of beauty: one that does not limit it to the completed, perfected, and static. Despite their materiality, neither beauty nor the poem can be defined simply as objects. Without having consciousness, they have attributes of subjecthood. They act upon the writer; they are agents in the world, able to participate in the making of the poem.

Emily Dickinson asked Thomas Wentworth Higginson whether he would “say if her verse was alive.” A poem that is “alive” emerges from an act of attention that moves us beyond subjecthood and objecthood. That act of attention is an ethical act. A poem that can create the feeling Guest called “mystery” is made in a realm beyond subjectivity in which the poem itself is no longer object, the writer is no longer subject; the poem is involved with the writer in the act of attention, the act of creation. There are any number of ways to describe this mystery—inspiration, the Muses, Jack Spicer’s Martians—the moments when the kite-object that is the poem finds its own way in the wind as the writer holds the line.

The poem in both its making and in its interaction with the reader demolishes the relation between subject and object in exactly the way talking to another human can, when we do it consciously and with attention: no one is not actor, no one is not receiver. But it’s easy as we talk to one another, as we water houseplants, as we make war, and as we write, to cast ourselves in those subject/object roles. So I return to my original suspicion about the dangers of pursuing a poem as beauty-object: when we aim for a known, predetermined beauty as we write, we catch ourselves in the same trap.

Permitted agency, the poem folds subject and object together. It outstrips my will. Like a dream, it enacts an alternate, multiple consciousness. This is the secret ethics of the making of the poem. (The ethics a poem proposes are a separate issue, part of the individual poem.) I want to see poems that pursue beauty as a living, morphing unknown. In the act of attention and imagination that writing ideally ought to be, one cannot attend to the future perfect. I don’t know what will be beautiful to others and to my future self. I want the poem to instruct me about that.

A poem that moves its writer beyond subject and object is a product of astounding attention, the attention Barbara Guest says gathers a halo around it. Let’s say the halo is beauty. A saint doesn’t become a saint to get a halo. A saint gets a halo because she is a saint.

+++

WORKS CITED

Bronfen, Elizabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Guest, Barbara. Forces of Imagination: Writing on Writing. Berkeley: Kelsey St. Press, 2003.

Guest, Barbara. “Freedom, Confinement and Disguise: An Interview with Barbara Guest.” By Catherine Wagner. How2 (Spring 2006). A much shorter version of this interview, edited and re-ordered by Guest, was published by Colorado Review in 1997.

Guest, Barbara. Miniatures and Other Poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Guest, Barbara. Selected Poems. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995.

*****
Catherine Wagner's books are Macular Hole (2004) and Miss America (2001), both from Fence. Her latest chapbook is Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large (2007), from Bonfire Press. She teaches at Miami University in Ohio.

FEATURE ARTICLE by AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL

2007-08-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

THE OCEAN AT NIGHT: AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE POETRY PROCESS
By Aimee Celino Nezhukumatathil

[First published in PINOY POETICS: A Collection of Autobiographical and Critical Essays on Filipino and Filipino-American Poetics, Editor Nick Carbo (Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco, 2004)]

Okay, I’m cheating. “The Ocean at Night” is a title I wanted to use for a poem. I’ve scribbled it in my little Moroccan red-leather writer’s journal almost over a year ago now and still have not been able to use it. I’ve started many scraps of a poem with that title but it always seemed so fake, so forced somehow. My fascination with the ocean at night stems from a recent trip to the Bahamas—Nassau, to be exact—where I snorkeled and swam with stingrays for the first time. In the coconutty breeze rippling the surface of the water so I couldn’t see my toes quite as clear as I would have liked, I suddenly found myself alone (against the tour guide’s warnings) and had snorkeled and bubbled my way out to sea just a bit further than I should have:

COCO CAY

At Coco Cay, I snorkel
               close to the buoys
                              that mark where They
               are not responsible for you
anymore & find myself
               in a school of blue and gold
                              skipjack fish. Nothing but
               luminous fishcolor, small bits
of ocean. The skipjacks
               surround me, don’t budge
                              unless I kick flippers. Would
               they be brave enough
to kiss me (they are known
               as kissing fish, pressing
                              their swollen blue lips
               to each other, a wall
of clams, aquarium glass)?
               A kite-shaped shadow
                              flies into focus a couple
               of yards away. Easy
to recognize the ray’s slide,
               the undulation of wing
                              over a helpless line
               of shrimp. Panic. I flipper
my way back till I’m within
               shouting distance of shore.
                              Tiny red seahorses glide in
               & out of the coral shrubs.
I want one to curl
               its ribbed tail around
                              my finger, a mermaid’s ring.
               The next time I press my hand
on my lover, he would feel
               the gallop. The cavalry is here.
Every neigh & wild whip of hair.

(originally published in Ratapallax)

Panic. Such an exhilaration and sudden high and heart slamming underneath my soggy swimsuit. I was hooked. I fell in love with that giant stingray, its wings wider than my arm span. There was no holding it, even if I tried. When I got back to the states I was hooked into reading and trying to find out just what kind of ray did I see (Southern). This notion of darkness underwater, even when it was daylight (and oh, the sun! So bright so loud it scorched my skin dark and papery thin) enthralled me. And I discovered this nocturnal ocean creature one night sitting in my office among a stack of extra large books—the kind the library has to store on a special shelf because they are too big to fit with all the other neat and tidy books. I like them best—big and bold, they make no excuses: rebel books.

The Vampire Squid. Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Literally, the vampire squid from hell. For it’s size, this particular squid has proportionally the largest eyes of any animal in the world. A six-inch specimen will have eyes that stretch across its gelatinous body, eyes about a whole inch-wide across, roughly the size of the eye of a Labrador Retriever. The largest eyes in the entire animal kingdom. I paused. When I was little, some neighborhood kids used to tease me about having eyes too big for my head. “Quarters!” they’d shriek as they sped away on their BMX bikes, referring to what they thought was the size of my eight year-old eyes. I closed the book. My new friend. My new kernel of an idea for a future poem.

And so it goes for most of my poems. I’d have to say 95% of them stem from an actual observation or experience (I know it’s not very fashionable to admit your poems are autobiographical, but there. I said it.) that led me to research something else entirely. And it never fails. Any time I set out to write a poem about one thing, it leads me to something completely unexpected. And oh, the rush, the sheer joy of playing with language, that leap or turn that seems to come out of nowhere, but most probably comes from some lavender fold in my brain, the place where I store file cabinets and file cabinets of arcane trivia and bizzaro bits of scientific fact. The book on insects of the tropic or the memoir of a sword swallower that I read last month may not garner a poem of tropical circus life right now, but later I know those pages will fit solid, fit square into a poem.

I subscribe to several scientific and nature magazines. I regularly browse my local half price bookstore for discount field guides, order seed catalogues (free!) even though I live in an apartment and I’d hear the stomp of my landlord’s muddy boots if I dared etch my own designs into his landscaping. Reading other poets and prose is important, sure. My creative writing teachers made no secret that we wouldn’t get anywhere if we didn’t know the work of our colleagues, or, as I looked at it, the seemingly golden ring of Published Poets. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know what else was out there and bound to repeat the same work, never try something new. But I find reading about the natural world is a minefield of poems waiting to be written. I’m in awe of the fact that we only know one tenth—that’s 10 percent, folks—of the world’s insect population. Imagine all the possibilities: in poems, in language, in colors we have yet to see exist.

In his poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass writes, “…a word is elegy for what it signifies.” For poets, that’s what I call a gauntlet thrown! That no matter how hard we try, no description, no magical arrangement of alphabets, of words strung like bugle beads—none of it can match the actual experience. That by merely describing the experience is to give it a sort of death sentence, keep it buried deep in the cloudy waters of the sea. But I disagree (if we don’t, why are we writing in the first place?). Some of the greatest trips and vacations I’ve ever taken have been not through some sparkling white cruise ship or counting the clicks of the tracks across a countryside, but through reading the glossy pages of my magazines and oversized photography books from the library. I may never swim with stingrays ever again, I may never come face to face with my beloved vampire squid hanging still and silent in the water column, but I can see them again and again in my poetry, and bonus—know even more about their astonishing bodies and behavior through further research.

An article in Scientific American described a relatively new discovery about the vampire squid: “…this strange animal has a bioluminescent organ at the tip of each of its arms that begins to pulse and glow, and when provoked, the arms begin to writhe. It becomes very difficult to tell one end of the vampire squid from the other. Then, it ejects a mucus, full of thousands of glowing spheres of blue bioluminescent light. When the light show ends, it’s difficult to tell if the squid has flown away in the dark, and if so, what direction, or if it merely faded into the lightless waters around it.” So many secrets spinning on this earth, flying quiet in the sea. So many poems that need to be written.

*****

Aimee Celino Nezhukumatathil was born in 1974 in Chicago and is the author of At the Drive-In Volcano and Miracle Fruit, winner of the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry and the Global Filipino Literary Award. She is associate professor of English at State University of New York, Fredonia. www.aimeenez.net

BOOKS by NAOMI SHIHAB NYE and MOHJA KAHF

2007-08-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

CATHERINE WAGNER Reviews

19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye
(Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins), New York, 2002)

and

Emails from Scheherazad by Mohja Kahf
(University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 2003)

[First published in MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Winter 2006 (31.4) Special Issue: Arab American Literature, guest-edited by Salah D. Hassan and Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman ]

The Empathetic and the Impudent: Two Approaches to Activist Poetry

Two new books by Arab-American poets offer surprisingly different methods of pursuing similar political agendas. 19 Varieties of Gazelle collects famous Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s elegiac poems about the Middle East for young adult readers (though the book is just as appropriate for adults). Emails from Scheherazad, a first book of poems from Syrian-American poet and scholar Mohja Kahf, is probably too racy for kids: it’s a bold, sexy book that attacks common (and restrictive) wisdom about gender and cultural identity. Both books are political acts that set out to represent and celebrate and build political capital for a particular group. For Nye, that culture is mostly Palestinian, while Kahf focuses on Middle Eastern women living in America.

Nye’s poems amass everyday emotional details of Palestinian lives so that her readers can identify with them, see their humanity and, Nye hopes, recognize their plight. She sees poetry as a powerful tool for peace. One knows what to expect from a Nye poem—a graceful, empathic rendering of characters in pain:

Even on a sorrowing day
the little white cups without handles
would appear
filled with steaming hot tea
in a circle on a tray
and whatever we were able
to say or not say,
the tray would be passed,
we would sip
in silence,
it was another way
lips could be speaking together . . . (105)

This poem, like most of Nye’s, emphasizes the characters’ everyday, ordinary dignity in order to remind us of our shared humanity.

Kahf’s poems celebrate humanity, too, but they aren’t often in pursuit of dignity. They’re deadpan or passionate by turns; they present a cast of characters from goddesses to babysitters to painted odalisques, and they’re formally quite varied. Though the bulk of Kahf’s poems are casually conversational, her frequent use of anaphora (along with certain images and literary references) invoke traditional Middle Eastern poetries. Kahf’s poems, like Nye’s, describe the details of Arab-American and Middle-Eastern lives, and often to similar effect, sparking understanding and compassion in the reader. Kahf’s characters feel edgier than Nye’s, though. They’re emphatically doing their own thing. They don’t need your empathy, and they expect your respect; they’re presented as a welcome threat to conventional American cultural assumptions. Many of Kahf’s poems are enjoyably hyperbolic: ancient Middle Eastern goddesses such as Ishtar romp through American cities, raising havoc and hackles as they exercise their confidently sexual, provocatively destructive and creative feminine powers. Such poems suggest Kahf’s hopes for an expansion of the possibilities available to women, Middle Eastern and otherwise, in America today.

I’m not suggesting that these poets are actually at contraries. Kahf, the younger poet, probably admires Nye enormously. Still, the differences in their work are significant. Nye, who lived in Jerusalem as a teenager, avoids aggressive language entirely, while Kahf’s poetry riskily uses violence as a figure for a powerful force in American society that we ignore at our peril—energetic and daring Middle Eastern women. Kahf’s stance is complicated. Her poems evidence a strong affection for the American everyday, its mishmash of stores and driving and peoples—that’s simultaneous with a fervent disdain for American cultural and political ignorance and ethnocentrism. Kahf writes a sex column for a progressive Muslim web site called www.MuslimWakeUp.com, and she sometimes wears the hijab. I told a friend about Kahf’s progressive attitude, adding that the picture of Kahf at the end of Emails from Scheherazad shows the author wearing a headscarf. My friend said, “Don’t Muslim progressives want to get rid of that kind of restrictive headgear?” Kahf vigorously combats such assumptions: she’s a feminist, she writes sexy and aggressive poems, and she’s a Koran scholar who wears a headscarf. If you thought you knew what a feminist was or what a Muslim was, Kahf insists that you think again.

The anger Kahf’s poems express is much more aggressive than the poignant hopefulness in Nye’s work. Nye’s poems frequently try to comfort, to provide by the end of the poem some enlarging image to connect suffering to a larger stability. In her poems as in her eloquent letter “To Any Would-Be Terrorists” (www.arches.uga.edu/~godlas/shihabnye.html), Nye maintains that anger is not the answer; she uses personal details to explain that we are all people, that we must recognize that and stop hurting one another. Nye hopes and trusts that knowledge will bring empathy. Kahf offers us similarly evocative details about Arab-American lives, but her poems often simply allow the details to inhabit our minds. “Just another driver on the demographic edge of New Jersey,” ends one poem (33). The poems don’t often call upon the closing strategy Nye’s poems employ: locating some tiny comfort or universality in the difficult situations she describes. In Nye’s description of luncheon in a park in a town shredded by war, the characters are still able, gracefully, to make a toast to “you”:

. . . who believe true love can find you
amidst this atlas of tears . . .
[P]eople moved here, believing
and someone with sky and birds in his heart
said this would be a good place for a park. (37)

Though the poem certainly doesn’t suggest that the problems of war can be erased by a brief and generous meeting over lunch in a park, Nye concentrates on the positive: let’s celebrate the moments we can, and our celebration may do some work toward bringing us together.

Whereas Nye’s work focuses on the peaceable wisdom her characters have in common, Kahf trusts that we’ll be attracted to the assertive, jokey energy of her characters, and perhaps hopes that we’ll be galvanized into taking a stand against sexism and bigotry by their raucous calls to action and rowdy threats. One of Kahf’s most daring poems, “Copulation in English,” describes an aggressive sexual encounter: the Arabic language seduces the English language, making English “hoarse with the passion we will have taught English to have” (72). The poem ends:

after this night of intense copulation,
we may slaughter English in its bed and redeem our honor,
even while pregnant with English’s bastard. (72)

A hyperbolic image, to be sure, but the poem serves both as desire and warning. Kahf is claiming that Arab-Americans are part of America—more so every day—and other Americans had better learn to enjoy the ride or get out of the way. I’ll quote one poem in full, one in a series of poems about bigotries Muslim women encounter while wearing headscarves:

Hijab Scene #7

No, I’m not bald under that scarf
No, I’m not from that country
where women can’t drive cars
No, I would not like to defect
I’m already American
But thank you for offering
What else do you need to know
relevant to my buying insurance,
opening a bank account,
reserving a seat on a flight?
Yes, I speak English
Yes, I carry explosives
They’re called words
And if you don’t get up
Off your assumptions
They’re going to blow you away (39)

The poem, written before 9-11, is prescient: as our government continues to make decisions that alienate Arabs around the world, our assumptions become more dangerous. Kahf’s language is confrontational in a way Nye’s is not: it calls for audaciousness on the part of progressive Arab-Americans, for a move away from conciliation and toward bold self-definition. Kahf’s poems take action from a new and evolving perspective—threatening, cajoling—and where oppression is perceived, Kahf unapologetically counters with aggression. The aggression, of course, is not literally violent; it’s embedded in language. The aggressive quality of Kahf’s work comes from its sometimes-shocking assertions, its feisty attitude and sexy sense of fun, and its occasionally violent terminology. Kahf isn’t literally calling for violent action (though “Hijab Scene #7” hints that oppression breeds violence). Her poems call for community—for acceptance of different kinds of dress and behavior, loving acceptance even of the Arab machismo she occasionally complains of; however, when a loving attitude doesn’t seem an appropriate response, Kahf freely expresses anger.

For Nye, it seems, a loving attitude is always an appropriate response. Her effort is always to locate common ground. Though she’s not as contrarian as Kahf’s speakers, Nye can be critical, too. In the following poem, she wonders what can be in Israeli soldiers’ minds when they abuse Palestinians:

On the steps of the National Palace Hotel
soldiers peel oranges

throwing back their heads so the juice
runs down their throats

This must be their coffee break
guns slung sideways

They are laughing
stripping lustily

They know what sweetness lives within
How can they know this and forget

so many other things? (32–33)

Though Nye is reproaching the soldiers, her approach remains empathetic. She wants to understand them emotionally, and though she fails, her honest attempt to feel what they feel makes her criticism of them feel even sharper. In the preface to 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Nye says she believes that her beloved dead “wise grandmother” wants her to speak for those the soldiers abuse: “‘Speak for me too. Say how much I hate it. Say this is not who we are,’” the grandmother says (xviii). Nye hopes to persuade Americans and Arabs alike that the Arab tradition isn’t about fundamentalism or terrorism—that Middle Easterners are good people. Honoring them is part of her role as a culture worker, an effort to move us toward mutual understanding, toward peace.

Kahf isn’t interested in persuading anyone of the goodness of Arabs, though she does give us a sense of Arab and Arab-American culture’s diversity and verve. Her Arabs are everybody: flawed or brilliant, hip or angry, sexist or beautiful. Arab-Americans, she seems to think, though they’re as imperfect as anyone else, have perhaps even more to offer and say than most; anyway, they’re here, and we’d better pay attention. Reading Kahf, I find myself relishing the raffishness of everyday culture. When I read Nye’s images of exquisitely patient Palestinians, on the other hand, I worry that she risks depicting an unlikely Palestine that would be entirely perfect and loving if only the horrible wars would go away. Criticisms of Arab society are almost absent in Nye; Kahf, on the other hand, rails against what she sees as Arab men’s sexism—while simultaneously confessing respect for and sexual attraction to the same men. The complexity of her relationship to Arab and Arab-American culture is best represented in the poem “My Body Is Not Your Battleground,” which insists that women’s bodies remain independent from those who would use them for political purposes:

My breasts do not want to lead revolutions . . . release them
so I can offer them to my sweet love
without your flags and banners on them . . .
My hair will not bring progress or clean water
if it flies unbraided in the breeze
It will not save us from our attackers
if it is wrapped and shielded from the sun . . .
My body is not your battleground . . .
Is it your skin that will tear when the head of the new world emerges? (59)

Kahf isn’t inclined to speak politically for others; she does write poems in others’ voices, but the poems represent multitudinous difference, not just of background but of attitude. The people in Nye’s poems say a great variety of things, too, but their words all point in the same direction. They represent patience and intelligent optimism and grace amidst huge destruction and pain. Nye claims the value of the small and daily and human—always, for her, associated with wisdom—in the face of large, inhuman political stupidities that kill:

I support all people on earth
who have bodies like and unlike my body,
skins and moles and old scars,
secret and public hair,
crooked toes.
I support those who have done nothing large,
sifter of lentils, sifter of wisdoms,
speak. If we have killed no one
in the name of anything bad or good,
may light feed our leafiest veins. (56)

The small and daily is always separate from killing, and the way the two keep getting mixed up in one another is a source of mystery for Nye. After a description of a marvelous feast and party, one poem adds:

Where does fighting
come into this story?
Fighting got lost from somewhere else.
It is not what we like: to eat, to drink, to fight. (60)

Those who eat and drink and work are not those who make war: those who make war are other, are evil and not to be understood. Such a view does make sense in view of the Palestinian situation, one of the saddest stories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but it is oddly simple, as if those who eat and work and drink are never prone to violence themselves, not part of any cycle of violence. Central to Nye’s vision of the Middle East is a sense that it is always “they”—that is, others—who are violent. “Who made [the bombs]?” she asks. “Do you know anyone who makes them?” (61). When people pick up guns, it is “because guns were given” (134). Violence is imposed on unwilling victims. Nye’s poems do not represent those victims who turn violent; she restricts herself to representing the wise multitude who abstain from violence. Her poems thus depict a bifurcated world of evil killers and innocent victims in which violence is an incomprehensible evil and its victims are always wise and good. Nye is probably right when she says in her preface that the grandmothers and children of this world would never permit the outrageous violence that ravages the Middle East (xviii). Perhaps this is one issue that is exactly black and white: violence is bad and those who suffer from it are good. I can’t help suspecting that the moving simplicity of Nye’s representation of the Middle East is a valiant effort to encourage us all to identify with what is right and to reject violence, an effort that—perhaps forgivably—ends up tidying the messy borders between good and evil. Nye takes seriously her grandmother’s urge to her to “speak for” others. She feels responsible to her Palestinian-American background and to the millions of Palestinians whose voices have been silenced; she has decided to be their stateswoman here, and in a way her sense of responsibility limits her: she must always be positive, she must always offer comfort with her poetry. Poetry may succeed in healing when all else has failed:

We will take this word in our arms.
It will be small and breathing. We will not wish to scare it.
Pressing lips to the edge of each syllable.
Nothing else will save us now. (67)

Despite Kahf’s punchier attitude, the poem “Affirmative Action Sonnet” makes clear that she, too, believes it’s up to language-workers to close the distances between us:

Where is the salve? We write.
We recognize
—we must—each other . . .
or we will die from what we do not know . . .
I came across the world to write for you. (92)

*****

Catherine Wagner's books are Macular Hole (2004) and Miss America (2001), both from Fence. Her latest chapbook is Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large (2007), from Bonfire Press. She teaches at Miami University in Ohio.

CATALOGUE OF COMEDIC NOVELTIES by LEV RUBINSTEIN

2007-08-28T23:30:00.000-07:00

CATHERINE WAGNER Reviews

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems by Lev Rubinstein, Translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004)

[First published in Interim, Spring 2006. Editor Claudia Keelan]

The Rabbit/Duck Puppet: Emotion and Irony in Lev Rubinstein

Lev Rubinstein’s work, like Paul Celan’s, may become a touchstone for debates on translation—not because of its knotty wordplay or syntax, but because what’s initially appealing about it to an American reader may be exactly what it ironizes and puts in doubt for a Russian reader. Rubinstein was part of the 1980s Moscow underground art movement known as Moscow conceptualism. He worked as a librarian for many years (perhaps still does) and the job gave him access to the catalog cards on which he composes his texts, one line or stanza or paragraph per card. For Rubinstein, the works don’t take their best form on the page. The cards are their primary and best vehicle.

His texts pull together series of anecdotes about assorted anonymous characters in comical or banal or painful situations, such as these from “Farther and Farther On”:

Someone is strolling God knows where. You can still make him out. There he is;

Here someone is trying to save himself without any help. He’ll never make it...

Someone has said something and now waits for what will come next. And what could be next?

The notecard technique equalizes each of these segments of the human comedy; there’s one segment per card, and because the cards are identical no segment is given more value than another—one could even shuffle them. But because the segments are funny or tragic or otherwise interesting in themselves, I find myself emotionally swept up in the poems, thinking of people I know or could imagine knowing who are like the people Rubinstein mentions. I revel in the feeling; simultaneously, I’m uncomfortable noticing my emotional reaction. I sense I’m being made fun of, or that the rhetoric I’m responding to is clichéd or borrowed, intended ironically.

I wondered why I felt such discomfort and looked for help. I read the excellent intro by the translators, Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, and what I could find on Moscow conceptualism: essays by Boris Groys, Mikhail Epshtein, Mikhail Aizenberg. Patrick Henry, in a review of Ugly Duckling Presse translations of both Rubinstein and well-known Moscow conceptualist artist and poet Dmitry Prigov, explains that Moscow conceptualism “emerged in totalitarian societies at a time when the grammar of a single, dominant, passed-down art was disintegrating. In order to break down a prevailing system of signs, old imagery has to be recoded and recontextualized.” The conceptualists, that is, were doing some cultural recycling. In conceptualist writing, says Mikhail Aizenberg, “it isn’t the author who expresses himself in his own language; languages themselves, always someone else’s, converse among themselves.” The content of a Rubinstein text is, then, not an expression of his personal intent; instead, his text butts various other texts up against one another in order to put them back in motion, pushing them out of a static cultural position or breaking down our assumptions about that position. Rubinstein’s work is constructed of quotes and echoes from previous texts: familiar novels, poetry, Russian primers (in one famous instance)—textual “debris,” as Metres and Tulchinsky put it. His work would most certainly feel ironic to a Russian reader. But as an American reader unfamiliar with most of the source texts, I began to worry I ran the risk of taking the work “straight.” Perhaps for Russian readers the emotional situations in Rubinstein are so familiarly sentimental that a strong emotional response would be inappropriate. Rereading Rubinstein, I realized that despite my identification with various anecdotes, I’m not overtaken by emotion to the point of escapism. The segmented form of the poem brings me repeatedly back to the surface to notice the construction of the text; its characters pop up like variously colored puppets on the stage of Rubinstein’s stack of cards.

I’m convinced, though, that somewhere behind the curtain Rubinstein does mean to play on my emotions. The use of emotional anecdote, as well as the melodramatic moments that recur at the ends of his poems, are hints that Rubinstein stages these poems so that they’ll move me. At the same time, the quotedness of the poems and their fragmented form instruct me that Rubinstein wants me to be aware of the way I’m being manipulated.

“Life Everywhere,” a fairly typical Rubinstein piece, is constructed mostly of cheesy pseudo-quotes based on a quotation familiar to Russian readers that begins “Life is given to us . . .” (it’s from Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered). These echoes, each given its own notecard, are interrupted by announcements in capitals from, apparently, a mysterious film director, who tells the “speaker” or “speakers” of these echoes to “GO AHEAD!” or “KEEP GOING . . . GOING” or “PERFECT!” or “STOP.” These instructions seem to bear no relation to the moralistic philosophobabble that’s being “filmed.” We can’t take the observations made about life entirely straight—they’re things like “Life is given to us humans for a reason./Be good, my friend, and worthy of your life.” Despite such cheesiness, the observations build to an emotional climax, a melodramatic maximum that persuades me that at least one of the trajectories this work carries me through is an emotional one.

At the same time, the quoted, mass-produced feel of the text makes me embarrassed to be moved, in the same way that the 1980s AT&T ad campaign “Reach Out and Touch Someone” made me simultaneously weepy and self-conscious about the ease with which I'd been manipulated. Of course, the AT&T ad was straightforwardly twiddling with my emotion-buttons in order to get me to make expensive long-distance telephone calls. Rubinstein’s work, on the other hand, exposes the manipulation: it drives a wedge between cultural production and the culturally produced. I’m not expected to do anything or buy anything, I’m flickering between emotion and ironic awareness; that is, I’m learning about the way I work when I encounter language. Rubinstein's work reminds me of those visual puns known as figure/ground illusions—the famous rabbit/duck picture, for instance—that instruct the viewer not to choose between one view and another, but that it's possible to train the eye to flip between both views. Rubinstein lets me acknowledge both my human emotion and its quoted, cultural ground.

Patrick Henry’s review of the Metres/Tulchinsky translation calls their work too literal, saying that a “good translation would not reproduce the semantic content of the text and would instead look for ‘an equivalent range of Englishes.’” For Henry, translations faithful to the original text “impose a notion of representation (translated as the mirror of the original) that the poet . . . explicitly reject[s] [in his] own work.” That is, Rubinstein doesn’t believe texts remain the same when they enter a new frame, and his poetry, which is all about reframing, proves his point. In offering us a literal translation (Henry argues), Metres and Tulchinsky prevent our access to the kind of cultural intervention the text enacts in Russian. Respectfully, and acknowledging my ignorance of Russian, I’d argue against Henry that texts that emerge from Russian culture don’t have easy equivalents in American culture, and Rubinstein borrows from such varying registers and genres in any single poem that we’d risk butchering the relationships he sets up if we attempted to translate the text as Henry suggests. A better solution would be a thorough set of notes (could Henry could write them?). Meanwhile, I’m glad the Metres/Tulchinsky translation is here—it’s elegant, provocative and compulsively readable, and though I wish it provided more notes, it includes enough to get me thinking about the textual origins of the work. Henry’s argument makes me long for versions of Lev Rubinstein in English alongside translations such as Metres’ and Tulchinsky’s—whole new poems using Rubinstein’s discomfiting, stimulating method.

*****

Catherine Wagner's books are Macular Hole (2004) and Miss America (2001), both from Fence. Her latest chapbook is Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large (2007), from Bonfire Press. She teaches at Miami University in Ohio.