Galatea Resurrects #16 (A Poetry Engagement)

Issue No. 16 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2011-04-05T00:55:00.000-07:00

[N.B. You can click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article.]

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
John Herbert Cunningham reviews THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO WALLACE STEVENS edited, and with an introduction by, John N. Serio; WALLACE STEVENS: SELECTED POEMS edited, and with an introduction by, John N. Serio; and WALLACE STEVENS AND THE AESTHETICS OF ABSTRACTION by Edward Ragg

Andrew Durbin reviews THE DIHEDRONS GAZELLE-DIHEDRALS ZOOM by Leslie Scalapino

Allen Bramhall reviews DOGGY DOO by Bob Brueckl & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

Marthe Reed reviews SONJA SEKULA: GRACE IN A COW’S eye : A MEMOIR : by Kathrin Schaeppi

Eileen Tabios engages SONJA SEKULA: GRACE IN A COW’S eye : A MEMOIR : by Kathrin Schaeppi

Allen Edwin Butt reviews PETALS, EMBLEMS by Lynn Behrendt

Eileen Tabios engages FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST: SHORT REVIEWS, OCCASIONAL PIECES & MORE by Bill Berkson

T.C. Marshall reviews THE ARAKAKI PERMUTATIONS and WORLDBOOK: 1925—A POEM, both by James Maughn

Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews DAYS POEM, Volume I and Volume II by Allen Bramhall

Peg Duthie engages THE GODDESS OF GOODBYE by James R. Whitley and IGNOBLE TRUTHS by Gail White

Catherine Daly reviews HOW MANY MORE OF THEM ARE YOU? and VICINITIES, both by Lisa Lubasch

Eileen Tabios engages THE NEW POETICS by Mathew Timmons

Caleb Puckett reviews HOW TO BE PERFECT and HOW LONG, both by Ron Padgett

Kimberly Wine reviews CUNTIONARY / REPENT AT YOUR LEISURE (OR THE FOLKLORE OF HELL) by Benjamin Perez

Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU PROJECT curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego and Eileen Tabios

Andrew Durbin reviews THIS TIME WE ARE BOTH by Clark Coolidge

T.C. Marshall reviews OPENING DAY and THE WHALEN POEM, both by William Corbett

Harry Thorne reviews THE ECO LANGUAGE READER edited by Brenda Iijima and IF NOT METAMORPHIC by Brenda Iijima

Tom Beckett reviews IF NOT METAMORPHIC by Brenda Iijima

Eileen Tabios engages 100 SCENES by Tim Gaze

Simon Perchik reviews CREATURELY DRIFT, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Allen Planz; EROS DESCENDING, POEMS by Edward Butscher; THE DISCOURSE LETTERS by Anselm Parlatore; THAT NOD TOWARD LOVE, NEW POEMS by Graham Everett; SILVER FISH, POEMS by Ray Freed; SHARPSBURG by Joel Chace; and BLUE EDGE by Susan Tepper

Allen Edwin Butt reviews TERMINAL HUMMING by K. Lorraine Graham

Micah Cavaleri reviews ENGLISH FRAGMENTS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SOUL by Martin Corless-Smith

Jessica Bozek reviews SUM OF EVERY LOST SHIP by Allison Titus

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman

Eileen Tabios engages THE SOURCE by Noah Eli Gordon; THUS & by Derek Henderson; and DOG EAR by Erica Baum

Tammi McCune reviews ITERATION NETS by Karla Kelsey

Jim McCrary reviews PITCH – DRAFTS 77-95 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and DAY OUT OF DAYS (STORIES) by Sam Shepard

Jonathan Lohr reviews DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY by Macgregor Card

Steven Johannes Fowler reviews IN THE ASSARTS by Jeff Hilson

Peg Duthie engages THE BOOK OF WHISPERING IN THE PROJECTION BOOK by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Guillermo Parra reviews YOU AND THREE OTHERS ARE APPROACHING A LAKE by Anna Moschovakis

Eileen Tabios engages X (ANGEL CITY) by Joseph Lease

Steven Johannes Fowler reviews CLERICAL WORK by Wayne Clements

Genevieve Kaplan reviews VENTRAKL by Christian Hawkey

Crag Hill reviews AD FINITUM by P. Inman

Eileen Tabios engages BONE BOUQUET: A JOURNAL OF POETRY BY WOMEN, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Winter 2011

Jerry Brunoe reviews A THIRST THAT'S PARTLY MINE by Liz Ahl

John Herbert Cunningham reviews THE SELECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan

Jim Tolan reviews AS IF FREE by Burt Kimmelman

Fiona Sze-Lorrain reviews AIRS & VOICES by Paula Bonnel

Eileen Tabios engages THE HISTORY OF VIOLETS by Marosa Di Giorgio, Trans. By Jeannine Marie Pitas

T.C. Marshall reviews ARRANGING THE BLAZE and PARABLE OF HIDE AND SEEK, both by Chad Sweeney

Bill Scalia reviews THE PACKAGE INSERT OF SORROWS by Angela Genusa

Micah Cavaleri reviews SCENIC FENCES | HOUSES INNUMERABLE by Aby Kaupang

Michael Boughn engages the article "THE HERO AND THE GUNSLINGER: DID ROBERT CREELEY AND ED DORN LOSE THEIR WAY IN MIDDLE AGE?" by Aram Saroyan

Marianne Villanueva reviews SONNETS by Camille Martin

Eileen Tabios engages NOVALESS (ELEMENTS TOWARDS A METAPHYSICS) by Nicholas Manning

Jerry Brunoe reviews ISHMAEL AMONG THE BUSHES by William Allegrezza

Jeff Harrison engages COMPLICATIONS by Garrett Caples

G. Justin Hulog reviews DIWATA by Barbara Jane Reyes

Aileen Ibardaloza engages BABAYLAN: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FILIPINA AND FILIPINA AMERICAN WRITERS, co-edited by Nick Carbo and Eileen Tabios and THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE BY WOMEN: THE TRADITIONS IN ENGLISH, Third Edition, volume 2, co-edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Eileen Tabios engages CHAPTER & VERSE: POEMS OF JEWISH IDENTITY edited by Sim Warkov, Rose Black, Margaret Kaufman, Melanie Maier & Susan Terris, and BLOOD HONEY by Chana Bloch

FEATURE ARTICLES
The Quincouplet: a Matter of Words
by Benjamin C. Krause

Kingdom by the Harbor by Nicholas T. Spatafora

THE CRITICS WRITE POEMS
Marthe Reed

Simon Perchik

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Moira Richards reviews CARRYING THE FIRE and BURNT OFFERING, both by Joan Metelerkamp

Richard Kostelanetz reviews the article "Re: Print: Poems from Ten Exciting New Books,"

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BACK COVER
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie...

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2011-04-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

I, like the character Cameron in Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster, like to count. So, there I was one evening gleefully counting the number of reviews that had been sent in for this issue, and I get this pathetic e-mail from Chandra E.A. Dickson. See, she didn't want to admit, The Dog Ate It! This is what she claimed about the fabulous NIGHT PALACE, a 2005 journal-collaboration between Auguste Press and Ugly Duckling Presse that was edited by faboo poet-editors Micah Ballard and Julien Poirier:

So, I have the funniest story ever, seriously, it's funny.

Last week, I was sitting down reading the book I was going to review for you and really enjoying it overall. Then I thought it would be a great idea to have a big glass of water to drink while I was reading. Then out of nowhere, I spilled my huge glass of water all over my lovely copy of Night Palace. Okay, so that really isn't that big of a deal except when the press of the book you're reading uses some sort of crazy black paper for the cover and back cover and it starts bleeding all over the pages making them hence unreadable...

Sigh. And her hands also apparently turned black as ... ink.

Well, I'm not really put out. We all know that poetry can be so ... unstable.

But, meanwhile: Thanks as ever to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have 73 NEW REVIEWS this issue! That's the second-highest number of reviews in a single GR issue, so far! I like to count and here are GR's latest poetry-lovin' 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 (one project was reviewed twice)
Issue 7: 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 9: 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)
Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)
Issue 15: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 4 projects were reviewed twice)
Issue 16: 73 new reviews (2 projects were reviewed twice)

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

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 6: 35 out of 56 new reviews
Issue 7: 41 out of 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 35 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 9: 42 out of 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 46 out of 68 new reviews
Issue 11: 46 out of 72 new reviews
Issue 12: 35 out of 87 new reviews
Issue 13: 38 out of 55 new reviews
Issue 14: 40 out of 64 new reviews
Issue 15: 43 out of 72 new reviews
Issue 16: 49 out of 73 new reviews

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies HERE. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is Nov. 15, 2011.

As of Issue No. 16, we are pleased to report that GR has provided 921 publications with new reviews (covering 387 publishers in 17 countries so far) and 69 reprinted reviews (to bring online reviews previously available only viz print or first published in now-defunct online sites).

*****

As I've said before, your Editor is blind, so if there are typos/errors in the issue, just email Moi or put in the comments sections and I will swiftly correct said mistakes (since such is allowed by Blogger).

*****

Wait for it! One more photo of my son Michael...oh, wait: he's now a teen and doing that teen-thing of disappearing. Well, here are the dogs ensconsed in reading chairs waiting to read poetry--your poetry!:

With much love, poetry and fur,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
April 4, 2011

3 BOOKS ON OR BY WALLACE STEVENS, written or edited by JOHN N. SERIO and EDWARD RAGG

2011-03-31T23:40:00.000-07:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens edited, and with an introduction by, John N. Serio
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007)

Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems edited, and with an introduction by, John N. Serio
(Knopf, New York, 2009)

Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction by Edward Ragg
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010)

Although born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Wallace Stevens did not see his first published poetry did not appear until approximately 1921 when he was 42 years of age. By that time, he had spent a great part of his life as a lawyer for the Hartford Insurance Company becoming vice-president. Certainly, he had written poetry prior to 1921—mostly to his wife, Elsie Kachel, whom he married after a five year courtship and spent one year happily married after which, while remaining married, each went their separate ways. This estrangement may have been as a result of Steven’s estrangement with his family over his plans to marry Elsie. Stevens was from a prominent New England family (his father being a prominent lawyer). As expressed by Joan Richardson in the first chapter of the Cambridge ‘Wallace Stevens: A Likeness’, “Stevens’ parents never approved of their son’s relationship with this young woman who was literally from the wrong side of the tracks.”(15) As Richardson presents it, at the time of their wedding, “No one from his side of the family was present.” He initially became involved in writing verse dramas such as Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise and Carlos among the Candles, neither of which received much, if any, acclaim. Which is why, with his first book, Harmonium (1923), it is surprising that he should emerge with such poems as ‘The Snow Man’ and ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ and become one of the major poets of the modernist movement.

To say that Stevens is a difficult poet is an understatement. Serio, in his introduction to Cambridge (hereafter ‘C’), refers back to Eliot when he states: “Eliot’s famous observation on modern poetry remains apt. It ‘must be difficult’ because the ‘variety and complexity’ of modern society, ‘playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more, and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”(2) Along comes Stevens to correct Eliot’s statement “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.” advising that, in order to read a poem, “you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.”

Stevens published his first book, Harmonium, in 1923 adding to it when it was republished in 1931. But he had been writing poetry, as already alluded to above, for some time. As Robert Rehder says, in ‘Stevens and Harmonium’, “he had started writing poems seriously when he was a student at Harvard (1897-1900) and made a new start in 1907 when he began composing poems for Elsie Kachel”(C, 23) Rehder shows how Stevens had been for some time considering the putting together of a manuscript but was concerned with the inclusion of ‘miscellany’ going so far as to correspond with William Carlos Williams upon the publication of Williams’ third book, Al Que Quiere! (1917). About this first book, Rehder states that “the unlikeliness of Stevens’ vocabulary is matched by the unlikeliness of his images”(C 26) and “There is no American poet more idiosyncratic than Stevens and with whom the strangeness is so often humorous. He uses the comic to avoid the sentimental.” but does find fault with it: “Despite Stevens’ efforts to find his true subject, there is a certain miscellaneousness about Harmonium.”

When you recognize that some of Stevens’ best and best known poems are found in this first volume, you know that there is much that must have preceded it. But Harmonium begins with such poems as ‘The Snow Man’ which opens with the line “One must have a mind of winter / To regard the frost and the boughs / Of the pine-trees crusted with snow”(7) and ends with one of Stevens’ patented philosophical lines “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” There is free verse here as well as blank verse the latter first represented by ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ which moves in 11-line stanzas so that the argument presented is always unbalanced. Based upon the sonnet, there is always a volte in the middle of the stanza as can be seen in stanza 5:

The measure of the intensity of love
Is measure also, of the verve of earth.
For me, the firefly’s quick, electric stroke
Ticks tediously the time of one more year.(9)

That line beginning “For me...”, the sixth line of the stanza, here provides the turning. The final quoted line shows one of Stevens failings—the overuse at times of alliteration. We get an energetic feeling in reading “Ticks tediously the time”, certainly not one of tediousness. The ‘unlikeness of Stevens vocabulary’ is found in stanza 3 where the opening lines read “Is it for nothing, then, that Old Chinese / Sat tittivating by their mountain pools.”(8) ‘Titivating’, which means to spruce up, to neaten, to add decoration, should have only a single rather than a double ‘t’. One of the most perfect lines in all of poetry occurs in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’: “This auditor of insects! He that saw”(20) —an Anglo-Saxon line with the exclamation marking a mid-point caesura with two stresses on either side, a completely unexpected line that startles with its perfection. Who else would have thought of ‘auditor of insects’? This is one of those moments where meaning does not matter; sound does and the sound is perfect. And all this found in the midst of iambic pentameter blank verse. Contrary to what Serio had to say about it, ‘Anecdote of Men by the Thousand’ is a work of philosophy masquerading as a poem. Stevens set out to prove the opening syllogism “The soul, he said, is composed / Of the eternal world.”(35) with the concluding quatrain “The dress of a woman of Lhasa, / in its place, / is an invisible element of that place / made visible.” Although an interesting proposition, it is far too vague to make it as a poem—a thing which demands the concrete. ‘Sunday Morning’, with its internal monologue of a woman eating an orange and its fifteen line stanzas which are reminiscent of sonnets except there is no volte, no turnaround, will always be one of Stevens best poems, its final lines as near to poetic perfection as one can get: “And, in the isolation of the sky, / At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”(45) that last seemingly a pagan recognition of spirituality. This is followed by a seldom discussed poem ‘Six Significant Landscapes’ which is a precursor to ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, also found in Harmonium and both reflecting Cubist influence, each one a facet of some poetic gem, each bearing significance. I’ll complete this discussion of the poems of Harmonium by mentioning one of Stevens most incredible and most ignored poems ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ which is the most Cubist of his poems with its four reflections on the ‘slopping of the sea’, each a subtle shifting of the image. This poem must have influenced the L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poets although, to my knowledge, there is no definitive proof that it did.

Stevens would not publish anything further for another thirteen years following the initial publication of Harmonium which led to some critical speculation that Stevens had lost whatever talent he had. Then the 1930s arrived. Alan Filreis, in his essay ‘Stevens in the1930s’, says that “a sequence of three books in just two years—Ideas of Order (1936), Owl’s Clover (1936), and The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)—forced [Stevens detractors] to abandon altogether their deciphering of Stevens’ post-Harmonium silence.”(C 38)

The first poem in Ideas of Order, ‘Farewell to Florida’, never makes it off the ground mostly because the rhythm implies a broken wing. Consider these absolutely pathetic lines from the third stanza:

Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees like bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.
To stand here on the deck in the dark and say
Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone.(67)

What was it that Stevens was thinking in releasing these lines. The repetition of ‘bones’ in lines one and two causes the poem to limp—but it is not broken yet. That is taken care of in the next two. The rhythm of line three exacerbates the limping particularly due to the repetition of the anapest—‘on the deck’ ‘in the dark’—but then that fourth with the repetition of ‘that’. A person who has never written a line of poetry in their lives may have written this. Even if we allow that Stevens was attempting to imitate the waves, those waves swamped that ship a long time ago. One would not think that the same pen could create this:

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.(‘How to Live, What to Do’, 72)

That opening line with its assonance on ‘o’— ‘moon’, ‘rose’, ‘rock’—taking into account just about every way to pronounce that vowel—followed by that play on ‘p’ and ‘u’— ‘impure’, ‘upon’, ‘unpurged’—is a master’s touch. The slant rhyme of ‘rock’ and ‘stopped’ is the ribbon that ties this package. This is incredible craftsmanship. For all of its shortcomings, Ideas of Order does give us ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, one of Stevens’ best. Consider the lines:

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.(75)

This is one of Stevens’ tour-de-forces that leave the reader breathless. One would think these words were written for a woman—but they’re not. They are written for nature (or for the muse). Nature was Stevens’ refuge, the place in which he delighted, where he encountered the spiritual. And these words, indeed, reflect a profound spirituality, although one that is more pagan than Christian.

Owl’s Clover, which Filreis describes as “the long poem...embodies an elaborate—at times allegorical—exchange between various advocates of the public and private realms, and it certainly carries on the discussion of in ‘The Men That Are Falling’ of the fate of the isolated poet in a time of real political changes”, has not been included in the Selected. This may be as a result of its chequered history:

The whole poem was published by a small press in 1936. The edition was tiny—just 105 copies were printed—and only a few readers saw this complete version. When the work next appeared, as one of the ‘other poems’ in The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems in 1937, published in a trade edition by Alfred A. Knopf, ‘Owl’s Clover’ had been cut drastically by 198 ½ lines. The titular reference to Stanley Burnshaw has been eradicated; in the Knopf edition, the second section was now titled ‘The Statue at the World’s End.’(C43)

The Selected having been published by Knopf, perhaps they wanted to shield themselves from this history. By the way, the reference to Stanley Burnshaw is important. Burnshaw was a reviewer and reporter who worked for left-wing publications and who had critiqued Stevens for having lost touch with the times and whose position had been supplanted by younger, more radical poets. Stevens wrote this poem in response to that critique.

Filreis describes The Man with the Blue Guitar as providing

a means of discerning why poets feel they must answer questions about content through the way their words, phrases, and lines are organized—arranged on the page, given meter, endorsed, or undermined by choices of tone or rhetorical devices. What is perhaps so exciting about these stanzas strummed on an instrument by a poet-figure thirty-three ways is that form becomes his only means of addressing ethical complaints raised against his mode. ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ is a poem that is organized, or styled, to account for charges to be made against the invariability of its ideas about art. It responds through sheer variability and an incessant shifting of positions. These positions are not just political ones, but are also the sitting, or setting, or arrangement that the guitarist-poet takes or assumes in relation to his guitar.(C46)

One may be reminded by the rhythm of this poem of Dr. Seuss—although I do not mean this in a disparaging way. Written in couplets, it moves along like an inchworm with its middle lifting up as its front slides forward.

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”(90)

Note how the rhythm is distorted by the first couplet, how ‘green’ is used in a humorous manner to contrast with the repetition of ‘blue’ to follow. By creating this rhythm in the first stanza and referring back to it throughout the poem, Stevens creates an interesting effect. The last two couplets in part XI are

Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnifies.

Deeper within the belly’s dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock (96)

The first of those couplets is a variation in the rhythm which is returned to in the second. Because of the strong reminder of the base rhythm throughout the poem, the variations create a counter rhythm where we hear both happening simultaneously—an effect borrowed from Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The 1940s were not a kind period for Stevens. Yet, this was the period during which ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ was written. During this decade, Stevens released two books: Parts of a World (1942) and Transport to Summer (1947) with Notes appearing in the latter. The former contains such dismal poems as ‘The Man on the Dump’, a fitting title for this:

The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these things except on the dump.(117)

Repetition had, by this time, become a hallmark of Stevens’ verse. We have already seen several examples where this has been put to great effect. Here, as in other poems in this volume, it is vastly overdone. In this brief segment there are eight mentions of ‘dew’. Perhaps Stevens was trying to satirize himself. He took it to overkill. This is the corpse being stabbed, shot and bludgeoned and the inspector attempting to discern the cause of death when one would have been sufficient. This volume is partially redeemed by ‘A Dish of Peaches in Russia’, the first two couplets of which are

With my whole body I taste these peaches,
I touch them and smell them. Who speaks?

I absorb them as the Angevine
Absorbs Anjou. I see then as a lover sees,(129)

Stevens is fully restored with the writing of ‘Of Modern Poetry’, a much underrated poem. The first stanza is brilliant in itself but leads to even better:

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.(135)

Stevens left the 1940s with Transport to Summer (1947) demonstrating once again why he is one of the best poets of the twentieth century. Included here is his long, fifteen part poem ‘Esthétique du Mal’ which begins

He was at Naples writing letters home
And, between his letters, reading paragraphs
On the sublime. It was pleasant to be sitting there,
While the sultriest fulgurations, flickering,
Cast corners in the glass. He could describe
The terror of the sound because the sound
Was ancient.(160)

This is a poem of ideas, of aesthetics written brilliantly. Undoubtedly, this poem, and others like it, was a major influence on John Ashbery. As James Longenbach, in ‘Stevens and his Contemporaries’, states: “Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, James Merrill, John Ashbery—major figures from each subsequent generation of American poets—have been shaped by Stevens’ seriously playful sensibility.”(C76) One can hear Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ within the tenor of this poem. But this is not all Transport has to offer. Toward the end you will encounter some ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’. Milton J. Bates, in ‘Stevens and the Supreme Fiction’ describes this poem:

Besides the philosophical challenges in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’ the reader encounters a couple of literary challenges. Though the poem’s prosody remains consistent throughout—each canto is composed of twenty-one lines of blank verse, arranged in seven tercets—the tone and rhetorical form vary considerably. The cantos are by turns rhapsodic and satirical, musing and bemused, impassioned and detached. They take the form of addresses to an imaginary pupil, a lover, and a soldier. They tell stories, stage mini-dramas, and develop arguments. They ruminate on the past and speculate about the future.(C50)

A couple of tercets from the first part of this voluminous poem will demonstrate the depth of Stevens’ poetic ability:

Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.

How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images...(195)

‘A voluminous master folded in his fire’ is a masterful line. An example, once again, of Stevens use of the Anglo-Saxon line this time with the caesura created by the necessity to pause between the difficult sounds of the ‘r’ concluding ‘master’ and the immediately following ‘f’ of ‘folded’. Each part has two stresses, the last of which for both parts falling on the ‘r’ sounds. The sound of the last part ‘folded in his fire’ is exquisite. The first line of the next tercet—a line of eleven syllables but iambic pentameter none-the-less—is also exceptional. The internal rhyme of ‘clean’ and ‘seen’ interrupted by the alliteration of the s’s on ‘sun’ and ‘seen’ creates an irresistible rhythm.

B.J. Leggett, in ‘Stevens Late Poetry’, writes of Stevens’ last volume of new poems, The Auroras of Autumn (1950), as well as the twenty-five previously uncollected poems attached to his Collected Poems—published to coincide with Stevens seventy-fifth birthday:

Although difficult from the beginning, Stevens’ poetry had become increasingly theoretical and abstract, and thus increasingly obscure, since Parts of the World in 1942, and The Auroras of Autumn represents the culmination of this tendency. Coming directly after this demanding poetry, the poems of The Rock are unexpectedly plain, stripped of the imaginative flourishes and epistemological quandaries of the preceding volumes. Stevens’ late poems are thus not of a piece formally or stylistically, even if they address many of the same themes.(C62)

By this time, Stevens was being recognized by many awards and honours—the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Gold Medal of the Poetry Society of America, a second National Book Award for his Collected Poems, a Pulitzer Prize as well as the awarding of honorary degrees from Bard College, Harvard, Mount Holyoke, Columbia, and Yale—as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth-century. In the title poem, ‘The Auroras of Autumn’, which Leggett refers to as Stevens’ best long poem, Stevens provides one of the most powerful opening lines of any poem “This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.’(221). This is a line guaranteed to grasp the reader’s attention. With such a powerful opening, demand is on the poet to deliver an equally powerful poem. Stevens does so sustaining it for ten full pages. Part II is no exception. The following two tercets demonstrate his ability not just to maintain but to build interest through repetition:

An ancestral theme or as a consequence
Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall
Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white
That was different, something else, last year
Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon.(222)

White, the emptying of color, of life—this passage builds to a crescendo where we know that Stevens is the white thing of that afternoon as he contemplates his own mortality. But Stevens will not let this section die without returning color to it in its final stanza:

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.(222)

Those latter colors are the colors of the poet and the state of same. Skipping over the single poem, ‘Someone puts a Pineapple Together’ from The Necessary Angel, we move into those twenty-five newly collected poems of The Rock. Leggett says of this collection:

This emphasis on the real and the paradox it entails—the premise that the apprehension of the real requires a supreme act of the imagination, a supreme fiction—persists in the poems of The Rock. In 1954, Stevens was asked for a statement on the major ideas of his poetry, and he responded that the ‘central theme’ was ‘the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfilment’. Stevens’ use of the term ‘supreme fiction’ dates from Harmonium, where he had implied that the poet’s supreme fiction, the poet’s attempt to reconcile us to our existence in the world, would replace religion’s supreme being, a fiction no longer credible. ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ was a tentative definition of the poetic fiction—it must be abstract, must change, must give pleasure—but in many of the poems on The Rock Stevens attempts to realize such a fiction, most often in his conception of a godlike imagination.(C69)

Stevens opens The Rock with ‘Lebensweisheitspielerei’ looking back at life and wondering what will be left in the end:

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls
In the afternoon. The proud and the strong
Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,
The finally human,
Natives of a dwindled sphere.(278)

Is this the life of the poet whose fiction has finally failed, that mock heroic being purporting to be an Argonaut? But Stevens has not lost anything, his poetic strength and wisdom remaining as he demonstrates in the last couple of couplets of ‘Long and Sluggish Lines’:

...Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal
Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.(293)

Up to the end Stevens adhered to his Symbolist influence. We see this in the title poem, ‘The Rock’, when he writes “Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright / With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams”(299). ‘Red’ had been a symbolic word for Stevens, part of his personal mythology, since the beginning of his career representing the sun and, hence, life and, also, poetry, the poem, and the poet.

Interspersed within the discussion of Wallace Stevens Selected Poems have been excerpts from essays contained in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. There are a number of essays remaining to be examined. In ‘Stevens and Romanticism’, Joseph Carroll writes that “For Stevens, romanticism is the highest form of imaginative fulfillment.”(C87) going on to discuss how Stevens sought to “create a new romanticism and thus to give new life to the imagination.”(C88) After examining the influence on Stevens of Emerson, Tennyson and Wordsworth, Carroll concludes that Stevens “own style and manner draw heavily on the style and manner of the great romantics, but it also has behind it the historical experience of realism, aestheticism (Parnassian?), symbolism, and modernism. Stevens’ new romanticism incorporates this experience, and it incorporates also the modern belief that all metaphysical ideas are merely constructs of the imagination.”(C101)

One of the most recent additions to the field of Wallace Stevens studies is Ragg’s Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction. This may have the honour of being one of the most welcome of additions to an already crowded field. Stevens was known as a master of abstraction. His ability to merge the greatest of abstractions with the reality of concrete images just before that abstraction succeeded in destroying that poem as if the image were the cavalry riding in at high noon was the hallmark of his genius.

As Ragg states on p. 4 of his introduction: ”This book is principally interested in the turn to abstraction and its influential aftermath that occurred in roughly 1935 in Stevens’ work. That the place of abstraction in Stevens remains underappreciated, misunderstood and the subject of considerable debate, makes careful ground-clearing desirable.” Ragg continues, on p. 5:

What emerges is a Stevens attracted to the mental processes enabling abstract figuration rather than a poet mimicking abstract painting in verbal form...Once he had embraced abstraction as a positive force in his writing—around 1937—the main aesthetic challenge Stevens faced was exploiting what abstraction offered. This would see him dispatch the overt abstract rhetoric and specialist symbolism of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1942) and embrace a more boldly abstract verse reflecting on the ‘baldest' concept: ‘metaphor’, ‘resemblance’, ‘description’, ‘analogy’, ‘the ultimate poem’. However spare these concepts appear, Stevens crafted from them a verse of human abstract meditation whose various expressions are intimately pursued throughout.

If it isn’t clear yet, Ragg makes it so with the title of his first chapter: The abstract impulse: from anecdote to ‘new romantic’ in Harmonium (1923) and Ideas of Order (1935). As he says, at p. 38,

By the mid-1930s, then, Stevens sought an abstract idiom he had not previously required which attempted to transcend the nominally ‘impotent’ aesthetic of Harmonium. However, Stevens craved rejuvenation not because the Harmonium anecdotes were defective but because ‘The Comedian at the Letter C’ inadvertently revealed he was uncomfortable integrating anecdote into larger, more realized poetry projects...To effect transition Stevens transformed the desire for a new aesthetic into a self-reflexive language designed to overhaul dead ‘romantics’.

Ragg confines his attention in this chapter to an analysis of ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’—an interesting choice given that this poem never made it into Stevens’ Selected Poems but which Ragg categorizes as “a pivotal poem in Stevens’ early development, its concerns over imaginative creation anticipating the poet’s own problematic silence from 1924 to 1929.”(48)

In analyzing ‘Owl’s Clover’ in his next chapter, ‘The turn to abstraction’, Ragg says

Fearing the ‘abstract’ as ‘evasion’, something removed from its context...Stevens ponders a poetic that risks ‘meaning without a meaning’. What the poet could not have known was that he was about to write a work which critiques abstraction in an abstract space. ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ achieves this abstract locale through ‘repeated phrases’, but those hardly comprise the superficial ‘meaning’ ‘Owl’s Clover’ rejects. In fact, repetition and rhyme create and dissolve meaning in ‘Blue Guitar’; a poem that neither reads like a ’Johnsonian composition’—which Stephens implies is writing a little too perfect and self-contained—nor has any truck with an ‘abstract man’.(58)

Ragg continues:

Stevens characterizes ‘Blue Guitar’ as being not pejoratively abstract; as intimate with ‘conjunctions’ between imaginative and actual life. In differentiating the poems in this way, however, Stevens overlooked the battle within ‘Blue Guitar’ between the poem’s assault on abstraction and the creation of an abstract locale where an ‘un-locatable speaker’ speaks.(58)

Stevens defines ‘pejorative’, in his essay ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’ (1936), as “The pejorative sense applies where the poet is not attached to reality, where the imagination does not adhere to reality, which...I regard as fundamental.”(59) Ragg goes on to indicate the changes in Stevens’ perspective during the early 1940s: “‘abstraction’ indicates neither the failure of the poet to ‘adhere to reality’ nor the imagination’s wilful distortion of ‘reality’, but a creative process where the idea of ‘poetry’ inspires realized poems.” Once having established a working concept of Stevens’ ‘abstract’, Ragg provides an in-depth analysis of ‘Blue Guitar’ taking the analysis through all thirty cantos of the poem during which he establishes some interesting insights.

In ‘The ‘in-visible’ abstract’, Ragg directly addresses Stevens’ indebtedness to the Romantics:

Although [he] derived much from the British Romantics, Coleridge especially, in forging an abstract vocabulary, Stevens was neither a latter-day Romantic nor a Romantic in quasi-Modernist clothes. Unlike Yeats, Stevens could never claim ‘We were the last romantics’, even where, contemporaneously, the poet manipulated Romantic themes. Yet, while Stevens’ relations with the Romantics have been repeatedly discussed, little scrutiny exists of how Stevens’ modern idealism combines with abstraction.(80)

After discussing Mallarmé’s and Heidegger’s influence on Stevens, Ragg quotes Stevens refinement of his conception of the abstract:

The abstract does not exist...the fictive abstract is as immanent in the mind of the poet, as the idea of God is imminent in the mind of the theologian. The poem is a struggle with the inaccessibility of the abstract.(90)

We will leave Ragg and Stevens with this quote from the opening paragraph of chapter 4— ‘Abstract Figures: the curious case of the idealist ‘I’’:

In 1938 Stevens entered one of the most fecund phases of his writing career. With The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems he reached the end of an experimental period, during which he realized abstraction’s potential and the poetic possibilities of a novel first-person speaker...In the poetry following ‘Blue Guitar’ Stevens would break new ground, attracting fewer comparisons with a dandy or Surrealist aesthetic...(110)

Following Stevens, poetry would never be the same. His explorations of the abstract would be continued by many poets, in particular, John Ashbery. Others would react against his impersonal manner of verse—such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Numerous poets up to the present day would, in one way or another, be influenced by him. The three books discussed present us with a strong picture of this maverick who remade poetry.

*****

John Herbert Cunningham is a freelance creative writing living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is engaged in reviewing Winnipeg cultural activities and novels for The Winnipeg Review. He reviews poetry and poetics books for several literary magazines both in Canada and the U.S. He is currently completing a poetry manuscript as well as writing plays, a novel and a short story. He is the host of Speaking of Poets Sunday afternoons on CKUW 95.9 FM, Canada’s only radio show dedicated to poetry.

THE DIHEDRONS GAZELLE-DIHEDRALS ZOOM by LESLIE SCALAPINO

2011-03-31T23:35:00.000-07:00

ANDREW DURBIN Reviews

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom by Leslie Scalapino
(The Post-Apollo Press, Sausalito, CA, 2010)

“Only Those Actions Occurring”: Leslie Scalapino’s The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom

Lesle Scalapino, who died early last year, opens The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom (a continuation of her novel Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows) with an introduction explaining that she wrote the book by “leafing through Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary choosing words by process of alexia, not as mental disorder but word-blindness: trance-like stream overriding meaning, choice, and inhibition.” Her initial goal, she writes, was “to bring about an unknown future” by way of a complex, syntactically expansive interrogation of narrative. (The book, like its first part, is billed as both fiction and poetry.) However, in the process of writing her “sensual exquisite corpses”—the prose units (with occasional dips into verse) that make up the book—Scalapino discovered that “there isn’t any future, isn’t any present”; rather, these event-clusters exist in another textual space altogether, as an ‘instant’ outside a past, present, or future, embodying a new, simultaneous tense. This is a difficult project to articulate, but for those familiar with her other works, it is a recognizable poetics. Like much of her poetry of the past twenty or so years, this book performs a panoptic analysis of events and their time through a continuous shift in perspective and tense. In Dihedrons, Scalapino has furthered her project by entering into even more “endless landscapes” of events and characters, both the fictional and nonfictional, where narrative in its usual sense (A to B to C) ceases to matter. In this regard, Scalapino’s effort is most like being in everyday life, where “narrative is from the outside always."

So how does this work? The book itself is divided into two sections, the first untitled, the second titled “Cromorne.” The first begins with an introduction describing the project, and ends with that same introduction recapitulated (with some changes) at the end in verse. Scalapino writes in the second version,

                        In the accumulating stream of events,
hybrids repeating parts of an event in different combinations,
the parts rearranged by imagination begin to pierce each other
            surpassing
single outlines and boundaries, the sense of infinite combinations are
            actions
bliss.

The events Scalapino chooses (and invents) are patterned, with much variation, throughout the book. Some of the most important ones that move throughout the first section are an octopus performing fellatio on a woman, the escape of orphans, the 2009 protests and Twitter activities of Iranian students, Sarah Palin’s bid for the vice presidency, the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, an escape from a plane, the CIA activities of the base runner (who’s also the octopus), the healthcare reform/death panel debate, and a woman’s memories of her father in World War II, to name a few. While section two resembles the first formally, it differs in its events (though we are told they happen simultaneous to part one), limiting itself mostly to the lives of the orphans. But in both sections, Scalapino creates several free-floating narrative hubs, which repeatedly establish and collapse the narrative “boundaries” normally present in fiction. By creating these interactive hubs, each as autonomous as it is subject to intervention, revision, or erasure, Scalapino attempts to realize a ‘timeless’ narrative space, in which all events happen at once, in an instant. In Dihedrons, there is no time; everything is always occurring. (The obvious comparison is to Gertrude Stein’s “continuous present.”) The point of all this muddying of normative boundaries and language, Scalapino writes, is to create a “paradise” free of restrictions of the clock. She writes toward the end of section one, “Therefore single events, that don’t exist anyway, are paradise—are at all (by such) and are paradise.” And later: “As sequence, in sequence, a single event is paradise.” The sensation of reading a novel unanchored by narrative convention, in which everything happens ‘at once’ and always, certainly seems paradisiacal to me. And like paradise, it seems equally impossible to reach on earth, if at all.

Several images by Jess [Collins], Masami Teraoka, Margaret Hofbeck, and Kiki Smith accompany the text but none, Scalapino writes (excepting Teraoka’s), have anything to do with the events described. While this seems true enough, it’s hard not to find Jess’s collages technically analog to Scalapino’s exquisite corpses or see the orphans’ faces in Smith’s spinsters. These images are more helpful as a technical compliments to Scalapino’s collages than as anything else. But their general indifference to the text (less so in the case of Smith) makes their presence feel somewhat flat to me. I am not convinced that their absence would lessen the book any more than I am that their presence improves it. Often, if anything, I found myself distracted by them. An intentional effect? Perhaps. It seems doubtful, and Scalapino does nothing to dissuade me from feeling this way. However, there are so few (fifteen in all) that it never seems so problematic as to lessen the text itself.

The narrative of the novel is quite complex. While the introduction is somewhat helpful, it takes some time before its ideas become clear. (I had to read the first thirty pages twice.) The highly elaborate syntax and word helixes, which often bucks univalent sense—and any authority other than that of the reader—in favor of endless meanings, might prove especially difficult to anyone unfamiliar with Scalapino’s work. Passages like

As boat-tailed grackle in air flow not mirroring boats below, is the bobby calf’s relation—the opposite of a bobby dazzler to sensation of time in the flower? Or/Oar is not existing (time). The old by not having ability have even as halve things with eyes sail up to them become bobby dazzlers. All of the flowers when radiolysis haven’t fear? Or/oar just not knowing.

might put a more casual reader off, especially if they’re in search of a novel with a recognizable and standard narrative. But passages like the above quote will become much clearer with some work—and a dictionary. A bobby calf, a young cow used for veal, is the opposite of a bobby dazzler, which is an English slang term for a well-dressed man; therefore “the time of the flower,” which I take to mean potentiality, would have quite a different meaning from one subject to the other. Radiolysis is, according to Wikipedia, “the dissociation of molecules by radiation”—an apt invocation considering the fate of the bobby calf.

Much of the book is an exploration of the violent exploitation of the innocent by those in power. From the orphans to the Iranian students, the persons and events Dihedrons explores all involve the terrible inequality that accompanies violence. There must always be a victim, which becomes almost unbearable for the book in part two. In blurbing the first part of this project, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows, Rae Armantrout writes, “Like the one we know, this world is filled with disaster and violence. The difference is that here we don't see it coming; we can't hide behind dead verbiage; we can't brace ourselves." Alexia, the brain defect that prevents a person from being able to read that Scalapino’s book imitates, does just this: it prevents the reader from reading the signs before her until it’s too late. To replicate this effect in text, where much of the sense of the action comes too late, after its already happened, horrifies me, as I think Scalapino intended.

The second half of the book is a more direct exploration of the impact of violence on the innocent. The section deals primarily with a group of orphan girls who have been captured by a group of terrorists/fundamentalists/children soldiers. The girls are to be sold into sex slavery, and each is named after their destination (e.g. Dallas, Des Moines, etc.). It seems that these terrorists/slave traders are the same who committed—are about to commit—the Mumbai attacks. In any case, a struggle and escape (which is alluded to throughout section one) ensues over a crocodile pit, costing the lives of many of the children until the gazelle-dihedrals (whose role in the book is somewhat mysterious to me; they seem to serve a far more abstract, atmospheric purpose than the rest of the characters) swoop in to protect the remaining orphans. I cannot stress enough the flawlessness of this section. While retaining much of the dense syntax of section one, section two breathes much easier to me, is far more certain of itself, and is, to put it simply enough, beautiful. Here is one of the final sections (“Parachronism”), in which the Antillean nighthawk is attacked:

The cricetid pneumotropic clinging at that place (at the lung) on the corpse corpses flung on trash heaps the bud breathing in some of them still flicker in some seaming corpse—Venus arising the arms raised above the ocean of on-lookers with the WHOK! in the air shouting cremorne cylindrical tube’s sound a soundless butterfly (the air that the cremorne’s sound parted) frenulum a strong spine on the hind wing of the butterfly projecting beneath the forewing serves holds the 2 wings together in flight dives who’s Venus WHAP! rallies with such strength the Antillean nighthawk hologram arises ‘then’

In this section the girls’ dilemma, articulated in such a complex syntax, is matched perfectly by Smith’s stark drawings. The other images would have worked better, I suspect, if they too had been played for their (complimentary) differences with the text, rather than as technical analog.

Dihedrons articulates much of my own ‘blinded’ shock at much of the violence of the events the novel covers. And it is, however despairing, a wonderful, relentless final book. It is difficult, and I suspect sometimes (but only sometimes) too resigned to accepting the world-for-the-way-it-is. This is perhaps a product of Scalapino’s Buddhism, and reflects a degree of patience with the contemporary moment absent in many others (including myself). But to say so risks too reductive a reading of Scalapino’s project. It is a restless novel, despairing of the fate of the innocent while endlessly critiquing the position and language of those in power, like Sarah Palin and the current Iranian leadership. I cannot imagine anyone finishing the book without feeling not only enraged at the many overriding injustices featured here, but prepared to act against them, however wounded we are by their persistence (as Scalapino seems to be). The novel ends, after all, with one of the girls “ranging among birds wailing with pain rage loose restedness too cuts to pieces.” Nevertheless Scalapino, in every recording I have heard of her reading from the book, treats the text with the utmost calm. She is even “heroic” in her attention, as Fanny Howe puts it, to the future as well as the present, both things she so effectively erases. These things happen everyday, we are reminded, and we must continue to confront them.

*****

Andrew Durbin's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Otoliths, Washington Square, Antennae, and NAP. He lives in New York and can be reached at ascottdurbin@gmail.com.

DOGGY DOO by BOB BRUEKL & JUKKA-PEKKA KERVINEN

2011-03-31T23:30:00.000-07:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Doggy Doo by Bob Brueckl & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
(cPress, Finland, 2001)

You were waiting for a poetry book titled Doggy Doo, I know. How shall I present it to you, eager Reader of reviews? You expect some charge, some lighting of fuse, else why place the book in consideration. Okay, I take the challenge.

I don’t know what to make of it. That’s my official response, and why you should hanker. The book’s strangeness does not prepare an easy invitation. Why should one bother with it?

I have the up here in that I have seen much work by both authors, as they send work (or is it play?) regularly (singly, I mean) to the listserv Wryting-L. Jukka should be known to many of you, assuming dear Reader has troubled to be troubled. Bob has been less forthcoming of his work to the wide view.

This collaboration mitigates two different processes into a formal mess. Jukka uses computer programs to dispatch the usual. He inputs stuff, if you want to get technical, and outputs other stuff. That’s how I understand it, and I am 100% percent certain I could be half wrong.

I do not think Bob uses such technology to overrun the ramparts of our language base. He absorbs language in some way then processes it according to rhythms of bespeak and bespoken that are mathematically ineligible. He praises Gertrude Stein routinely, as well as Zukofsky, Eigner, and Grenier.

So anyway, these two went back and forth over the course of some weeks to create this book. Bob wrote to me (I don’t claim objectivity here—what a silly feature that would be in a review!) that he could not always tell what part of Doggy Doo was by who. I thought I could guess but now I’m not sure.

So what up, dear Reader asks, fairly enough. I should just type the book into this review and leave it to you. Well, too, I could invoke capitalism to the degree of imploring you to possess this book. Just to exercise that part of the brain that has not dealt fully with the likes of Brueckl and Kervinen. I mean that not as praise, tho I am ready to praise them. I offer their work as earnest of possibility in the silly biz of writing poems that have not happened before.

Okay, so here are the first few lines of Doggy Doo:

wyf, iAS OmbaNK SQU)PANSY SMX;1IN ToDd cardoon rubber lil’ tiny nest b6StCEDPA snooty zwimpfer milkier coo istarted milkin’ the prostate concretions of the ghostly ghaist…

It goes on (transcription errors likely), but what make you of that? Hints that I can offer include that Bob scours a weird sort of scatological language, while Jukka contentedly sprays consonants together. Were you looking for ‘real’ words and real, um, sentiment?

Look closer.

Isn’t the first word above Old English for wife? Or if not, why couldn’t it be? iAS reverses capital first person, and includes the next word, as¸ for an impending but incomplete sentence (idea).

OmbpaNK suggests to me, obviously om¸ and the rest is breath and emphasis: bank, pank. See the way the letters, urgent to become words, shimmer into stances that one could ‘read’? Well, you’ll have to keep doing that, with every letter and every word. I don’t say it aint hard, I’m just saying that it’s there.

For more Bruecklian moments, this comes later: I assume they are Bruecklian.

Eight Heidegger hugger muggers:

I’ve got 5ive farkle fins!

& a little o –
der die das –

ein husk-tusk sunk in the sink,

skin’s dusky music

You might say that that makes no sense, and I would be inclined to agree. It does not make sense, it renders sense obvious in unobvious ways. As in, what does ‘making sense’ mean?

This is original poetry in the original sense. This poetry discovers awe, just in the way Emerson said each word originally was a poem. We as readers—I include you, dear Reader—let laziness confine us, assuring ourselves along qualitative lines about things that have no measure. Words within the veil of meaning have no measure.

This book indicates the gates of language. When the dire proclaim poetry’s importance, they shine a light on one of our utmost dependencies. Language happens every second, and it defines and integrates our lives within ‘it all’. The confident challenge of this book centers on how our limits, which Olson said we’re each of us inside of, define us and the world. The very fact that I don’t get it makes this book important. That’s the quickening of light that I received.

good god! so little ado
over nine pods of dapper doggy doo

*****

Allen Bramhall is the author of DAYS POEM (Meritage Press) and blogs at Tributary.

SONJA SEKULA: GRACE IN A COW'S EYE: A MEMOIR : by KATHRIN SCHAEPPI (1)

2011-03-31T23:25:00.000-07:00

MARTHE REED Reviews

Sonja Sekula: Grace in a cow’s EYE : a memoir : by Kathrin Schaeppi
(Black Radish Books, 2011)

Verbo-visual Inventions: Kathrin Schaeppi’s Sonja Sekula: Grace in a cow’s EYE : a memoir :

Drawing on Swiss artist Sonja Sekula’s assertion that “writing is drawing”, Kathrin Schaeppi’s exhilarating first full-length collection is formed at the intersection of the spatial and the literary, an ambitious codex of the verbo-visual possibilities inherent in language and typography. These poems are rife with invention, a tumult of language and image that echo the paintings to which the poems are responses. Patterned with sound and silence, as with typographic invention, the poems are divided into sections composing a memoir of Sekula’s life and work and Schaeppi’s engagements with Sekula’s work.

Sekula herself resisted the separation of modes of expression, writing of word-images(1) and image-words, of colorwords and wordcolors, her oeuvre marked by vivid poem-paintings, picture letters, and calligraphic abstractions.

Sonja Sekula’s picture letter to Adrien de Menasche (1961)

In this collection, Kathrin Schaeppi re-imagines typography, riffing on her futurist forbearers. At the potent intersection of sign/symbol/meaning, hers is an argot as concrete as it is abstract. Tildes paired with the punt volat. A fleuron-like ornament or star: “snowflakes” falling like grace or grief upon the gray landscape of each new section and between lines, a pattern of stars falling, foretelling what is to come. The plus sign marking both “and” and multiplicity itself, the impulse of the manifold visually emplaced within the linguistic space of the poems. Musical rests shimmer, shudder, stutter over the rare pleasure of the words composed beneath their surface. Box forms, arcs, rectangles, mirror images, bridge forms, poems in frames made of letters, shapes that cross and re-cross the space of the page, Schaeppi’s work recalls Jerome Rothenberg’s total translation, the fullest possible recuperation of the idea—visually, graphically, aurally—in translation: Schaeppi’s book a fruition of and homage to Sekula’s desire to bring out a book self-illustrated...with the painting ‘mixed in with’ the writing. In these pages, Sekula and Schaeppi demand we study the space between the leaves, the space between the verbal and the visual, and the new space composed of both + in the air between.

Schaeppi’s “memoir” collages Sekula’s language with her own, composing a hybrid memoir, an archeology of a lost life—Sekula, after years of electroshock treatment, being wrapped in wet sheets and left alone, isolated from the community of artists she had joined in NYC, committed suicide in 1963—a tribute to the multiple erasures that Sekula was subject to as a woman artist, a lesbian, and one of the mentally ill. Lines drawn from Sekula’s journals, artist books, and paintings haunt the page. Traces of desire, of an artist at work, of woman’s life: now I know • that I am an artist, even when “The ‘Giants’ (Newman, Pollack Reinhardt, Rothko, Still and others)…/ / /…request fewer women artists be included in Parsons’ program.” These pages become a habitation. As Sekula stands at a window, brush or pencil in hand—where one lives—Schaeppi returns the vanished to presence: swoosh of ink / wash over canvas • a town dawns brushbound. To read these poems is to touch the curve of ache.

Schaeppi’s lines interrupt one another, layered or lathed, juxtaposed atop and across each other, voices competing to be heard. To be heard. In “Private Totem”, a litany of personal saints and a prayer, we hear Sekula ask, how have you helped me when I was most desperate. In between: “I am the blue-brown collage • one only sees • when not looking.” In “Poeme, 1951”, two texts signing/singing against and with one another, Sekula and Schaeppi speak against gaps of time and loss:

                                     …the
(Now is the 16th of 1951 in March)              tip
to write a poem in my new home called hospital

Next Sunday we shall all jump out of
of              a spoon
                         the window
a paperclip

Signing to be heard. Between language and image lies the air between. Schaeppi records that air also, filling these hybrid poems with silences. The failed conversation of “Sample Gesture”, which dies as it begins, its voices stuttering into mute stillness. The great gap of white space between two lines beginning and two lines ending (“Improvisation, 1961-62”). The blank page of “The rooms, the holy (between), 1948”. What cannot be said, what silence speaks: “the distance from my eye to yours.”

Schaeppi has created a marvel of invention, hybridity, and stillness. A lamp in the darkness, a wild re-invention of the page that is as myriad in its forms as in its graceful passages though the language and work of Sekula. A dialog with what is lost and what remains, radiant and provocative, this is a fine beauty of a book: Kathrin Schaeppi’s Sonja Sekula: Grace in a cow’s EYE : a memoir :

+++++
(1) Following Schaeppi’s technique, quotes from Sekula appear in italics.

*****

Marthe Reed has published two books, Gaze (Black Radish Books) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer with drawings by Rikki Ducornet (Lavender Ink), as well as two chapbooks, (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations, both part of the Dusie Kollektiv Series. A third chapbook is forthcoming from Dusie Kollektiv 5. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPoesias, Big Bridge, Moria, Fairy Tale Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Eoagh, among others. Her manuscript, an earth of sweetness dances in the vein, was a finalist in Ahsahta Press’ 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Contest. She has guest edited an issue of Ekleksographia and served as assistant editor for Dusie Kollektiv. Further information about her work can be found at her homepage http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mxr5675/ and at the publisher page for Gaze: http://www.blackradishbooks.org/Reed.html

SONJA SEKULA: GRACE IN A COW'S EYE : A MEMOIR : by KATHRIN SCHAEPPI (2)

2011-03-31T23:20:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Sonja Sekula Grace in a cow’s EYE : a memoir : by Kathrin Schaeppi
(Black Radish Books, Lafayette, LA, 2010)

Kathrin Schaeppi’s first full-length poetry collection is unlike most first poetry books—for one, it displays a mature synthesis between its underlying poetics and the poems engendered. Sonja Sekula… presents poems ekphrastically founded on one of the artist Sonja Sekula’s artworks. I confess to not having heard previously of Sekula until this book; here’s the publisher’s press release about her:

“Swiss poete-peintre Sonja Sekula (1918-1963) was an avant-garde artist active in New Yor in the 40s and 50s. Her word-image combinations and ‘scratchboards’ are astounding and unique. Though Sekula exhibited in New York and was part of a broad artistic social network that included Cage, Cornell, Breton, Kahlo, Schwarzenbach, Carrington and others, her name is unfamiliar, even new. This poetic memoir, which is but a trace, is homage to this versatile, under-represented artist.”

As homage, Schaeppi’s book is a lovely tribute in part due to the poems’ intelligent manifestations of Sekula’s statement, “…to me writing is drawing.” For examples, look at the book’s first two poems. Here’s the first “Early Painting, 1942”(1):

The text

Not yet old enough to go alone to bed
every night alone in a lovely apartment
to go to bed

was inspired by a 1942 painting—it’s an “early” painting though I’m confused at the referenced age of “20” since, based on the press release’s bio, the artist would have been 20 years old in 1938, not 1942. In any event, one can presume it’s a painting made in the artist’s relative youth. Thus, it can be a sad poem, bespeaking loneliness. What’s smart—and visually so—is how the third line “to go to bed” is presented as indented. With the line ending where the first two lines generally do, it evokes a sad conclusion. Had the line been written flushed-left, the space after the short line could have implied a continuance. Instead, with the way the line is presented, there’s a conclusion there and it’s unequivocable: the poem’s persona went to bed alone. It’s not a small point—it’s this choice of visual placement that more effectively evokes what blurber Cara Benson calls “true pain”.

Then there’s the second poem entitled “Evolution of man and comets, 1942”:

The poem begins

amazons …
electrify one another

followed by the quad-centered phrase
I am
It’s obviously fitting that “I am” be quad-centered for emphasis. But it’s not just a matter of egotistic self-insistence; any arrogance about that placement is quashed by the following tercet

an artist
inside outing
a skin envelope

One need not know that Sekula was a lesbian to glean some (inner) clash between the “artist” and the self constructed by a particular body. The imagined psychic battles evoked by the tercet continues the hearkening of some “true pain”.

Last but not least on this poem, the last three lines which are set on the page’s bottom right corner. It’s the same corner, isn’t it, where many artists write their signatures on drawings or paintings? Yet the identity referenced there is the artist’s materials. The implied choice made certainly would be a painful one, as known by artists and poets whose journeys regarding identity have been accommodated to the demands of their art…? (I end this with a question mark because I raise it as a possibility, not as a definitive conclusion.)

The above are just two of the many lovely poems in the book, but exemplify how, with relatively small “marks”, Schaeppi can evoke so much as to warrant the book’s subtitle of “memoir”. That these are (often minimalistic) poems, thus involving the reader, does not preclude the full presentation of a life. The whole approach is so integrated that one looks at the dedication page anew with fresh eyes. That is, suddenly, this

is not just a “for you” dedication but the visual of that “U” suddenly evokes a vessel that can be filled, in this case, with the gifts of poems.

I consider these poems “gifts” partly because of the clear interest in, through art, creating a relationship (e.g. relationship with reader). The poem “Moist Bark, 1958”, for instance, concludes with

I wait for someone to
read with me + to realize
what I try to convey

I believe that “+” in the middle of the second line is significant. The poet, after all could have used “and.” But doesn’t “+” elevate the importance of what follows: a realization of what that “I” was trying to convey? It’s not sufficient to be with one (“read with me”); ideally, one also would recognize (“realize”). All from a simple mark, a “+”.

It’s worth noting, too, that a sense of gentleness comes across in reading through many of the poems—as if the poet was consciously careful not to be overbearing with her own “take” on Sekula’s works. The effect is such that even a most grandiose statement like (from “God with child, 1948”)

God with child is

oil with canvas

, with all the baggage that comes with the use of the word “God”, doesn’t strike a false note. The all of Schaeppi’s achievement is indeed a manifestation of Grace, a grace hrough a careful, wise discernment: from “Grace, 1952”:

we balance with the fireflies

that collide

where Grace is found in a cow’s EYE

+++++
(1) My photos come off dark; please know the book has white pages.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed or generated responses by Joey Madia in The New Mystics HERE; Allen Bramhall over HERE; by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE; by Leny Strobel over HERE; and by Jean Vengua over HERE and HERE. Her THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I is reviewed by Edric Mesmer in Yellow Field and reprinted HERE. Her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 is reviewed by Arpine Konyalian Grenier over HERE. Allen Bramhall also reviews the "Hay(na)ku for Haiti" series over HERE. If the latter two get you curious, please note that participating in this fundraiser for Haiti is supported by Marsh Hawk Press, publisher of THE THORN ROSARY: if you order at least $15 worth of booklets, you will receive a copy of THE THORN ROSARY which is priced retail at $19.95; this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

PETALS, EMBLEMS by LYNN BEHRENDT

2011-03-31T23:15:00.000-07:00

ALLEN EDWIN BUTT Reviews

petals, emblems by Lynn Behrendt
(Lunar Chandelier, Brooklyn, N.Y., 2010)

Lynn Behrendt’s first full-length collection petals, emblems (in an attractive edition from Lunar Chandelier) begins with the sentence “Thee thine hat is a ship called Ruth,” so we know right away to expect a degree of disjunction. However, the next line immediately qualifies that disjunction: “What is & what is & what isn’t a that?” We can parse this line a bit: what exists, and of things that exist, what is and what isn’t a that—what can and can’t be defined or demonstrated? The language is reminiscent of Aristotle’s definition of substance as “a this,” which Zukofsky called Stein-ish. I can’t help but hear all three of these people in Behrendt’s opening.

In any case, the question presupposes that something is that isn’t a that, that can’t be named or classified, and petals, embers feels to me like an extended attempt to track down these ineffable . . . what would we call them? This question’s precisely the problem, since to say what can’t be said is, on the face of it, impossible. Behrendt’s solution is to adopt a firmly immanent stance toward her material: she plants herself inside the language and attempts to “feel out” the space from within, to ask, “What are our whos? / Where are our whats?” The words ask questions of words, and the structure threatens to collapse—it’s a scary place to be, and Behrendt occupies it fully and confidently, setting up this poem’s final, disguisedly programmatic sentence:

It used to depend on red define it map—
a faux history, part prep part roach,
how the hook plex
re matters the so next now into such

exact pleural writhing—
love’s contextual It.

We can hear where the punctuation might fall in the first line: “It used to depend on red” then the command to define “it,” which can somehow be achieved by mapping “love’s contextual It.” While at the same time Behrendt tells us that the process of mapping takes the form of a faux history that revolves “the hook plex / re matters.” Hooks pull, -plex is a suffix of joining, re means regarding, matters could either be concerns or materials—a joining of something (words?) that isn’t quite the concerns of the world but has a real relationship to it. This overlaps with the second promise, one the ear hears: the book “re-matters the so next now into such // exact pleural writhing”—the book puts words’ detritus into new configurations, gives it new concerns, and makes it matter in a new way, to effect a writhing of pleura (a membrane in the lungs we need to breathe or speak). It’s hard to not hear “plural writing” in “pleural writhing”: Behrendt’s poems, as the gesture toward what can’t reside in words, cannot proceed by a naïve creation ex nihilo but engage in the fundamentally plural process by which meaning must arise, in which love’s It is necessarily contextual.

At the beginning of another stand-out poem called “The Ulna Slash Uvula Laid Bare Lingual Age” Behrendt tells us “I am a language vole too.” This feels instructive: voles burrow. The fourteenth issue of Galatea Resurrects contains an interview with Lynn Behrendt, in which she describes her use of word lists, limiting herself to a fixed set of vocabulary options so that she can better focus on “the glue or waste in between the static objects/ideas/things that linearly chronologically accumulate into narrative—the syntactical substance that moves, displaces, makes things ping off one another, or decompose.” It’s a method of approaching language from the inside, one that acknowledges the presence of collage at the bottom of any writing act—whatever we establish as the basic unit of composition is a material given, whether it be phrases taken from texts & Google-searches or words that we didn’t invent or the letters of the alphabet. Again, creation ex nihilo is not an option: Behrendt establishes rules and explores their implications, burrowing into the language.

The result of her methods is thrilling to read. In this sort of writing, the texture of the vocabulary comes to mean so much, and Behrendt seems to favor the “primitive” in her sources—when she writes of living things, she favors insects, reptiles, root plants—when she writes of the human body, she tends to write of its constituent parts. The poem “Slats” reads, in its entirety,

tree stripped of bark
moss miasma
coastal stain

lotus bowl
rope derision
forceps

chemical slipper
osmotic paste
rattle

slats
larval socket

The sequence of words has no “sense” because this poem’s subject, built by burrowing in words, is not a that. But to me, at least, this poem seems to evoke a very specific feeling: the tree gets stripped and gives way to moss and stain, the lotus bowl gives way to derision and forceps, and in the end the scale of the poem’s referents is reduced to the larvae of some unidentified species: though before we could assume the forceps exist to pull a human child into the world, we have no idea now what kind of larvae is developing. But of course, to tell us what the larvae are would be to make them into a that.

Elsewhere in the book, Behrendt builds an illusion of a stable “I,” one that flirts with the psychic integrity of the Confessional lyric only to step back and mock it. Quite a few poems and passages are based around an “I am this; you are that” pattern. For example, “Marcasite” includes the lines

I’m the clouds—I just coagulated—did you see that?
You’re the retrograde hail that starts to fall
a mathematical migration, boyscout carrying canteen.

You’re a bridge with a flag on it, obstruction in the rock salt road
a crucified rune or rock carving—after the third or fourth sedative
I’m something small & spin-dried, a bull in a labyrinth.

There are some broadly thematic trends we can notice in the poem: the “you” seems in each of these metaphors less ephemeral and more fully-defined than the “I”—even migration is mathematical (the math describing the event can outlive the event). But to call these metaphors feels imprecise, since they can’t be “solved” in the way that metaphors invite us to attempt. Like the “I” and the “you,” the metaphorical structure has been generated by working from inside the language: it’s being exploited as a rhetorical construction, not as a one-to-one equivalence among the things these words can signify within their “proper” contexts. (Having seen the way Behrendt can pull the rug out from beneath the language of the personal lyric, I was pleased but not totally surprised to learn that she’s working on a book that uses a Google-sculpting method similar to that of Katie Degentesh’s remarkable book The Anger Scale.)

All of which is just to say that I had fun with this book. It’s a joy to watch Behrendt twist the screws on words and make them do things that they shouldn’t. There’s always a sense of something sinister in her poems, and there’s always a swagger in the face of danger, as in this passage from the long poem Luminous Flux (formerly issued as a chapbook that, I think, is sadly impossible to get now):

give pussy some milk
prepare an all-night vigil near my vagina
I’m not minor I’m not minor I’m not nothing
drugged in the back room
papilla drawn on paper
verily my dried buffalo skin
performs coitus with just the thought of you
a tingling sensation doctrine
lump of something in the throat
it’s dangerous, isn’t it sister, dangerous
but I want to eat strange foods
and not even ask what they are
perform pathopoeia on what used to be
lumbered, embezzling
your gallows lousy with verbs

That, to my ear, is a virtuoso performance, building a unnerving pathos out of what used to be simply the material given of a word list. This is strange food, but it goes down smooth, and though I have finished the book I keep thinking about the unnamed, unnamable “I” and “you,” no doubt each pl(e)ural, that appear in so many almostsensical configurations in petals, emblems. It’s a beautiful book, well worth the time it takes to read.

*****

Allen Edwin Butt is a poet from South Carolina. His work has appeared in a variety of magazines and web publications, including Peaches & Bats, Otoliths, ditch, 2River View, Faultline (forthcoming), Venereal Kittens, and Poetry.

FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST by BILL BERKSON

2011-03-31T23:10:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

For the Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More by Bill Berkson
(BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, N.Y., 2010)

Weeks after I first read Bill Berkson's For the Ordinary Artist: Short Reviews, Occasional Pieces & More, I kept going back in my mind to something he'd said about Alfonso Ossorio whose works are known to me. Berkson said of (some of) them:

…they bespeak a love of (or anyhow fascination with) “immobility,” a.k.a. Inertia.

I'd never thought of "inertia" before as regards Ossorio's work, undoubtedly because of the riot of color, surfaces and found objects in his works. But, you know, Berkson is right (or, I agree with Berkson). There can be a flatness (and I don't say this negatively) in some of the surfaces/colors of Ossorio's work. There can be a paradoxical stillness within his assemblages, such as in the following image where each part (as can be delineated, say, by individual found objects) remains apart from each other:

In the past—and whether aptly or not—I’d often looked at Ossorio’s assemblages mostly abstractly—that is, focusing on the shapes and colors instead of the content. It’s Berkson’s “inertia” comment that makes me pause to note, Yes, that’s an eye; yes, that’s a piece of driftwood … and so on. This doesn’t dampen my appreciation—indeed it heightens my appreciation from having the benefit of additional information about process in addition to seeing the result.

Therein, for me, lies the way in which one approaches a book like For the Ordinary Artist. Because if it's a collection of writings on how Berkson engaged with various art works, how does one critique that? Everyone's entitled to their opinion, right? Or, regardless of the opinion, one could, I suppose, look at how well he wrote his opinion—and many such passages are deliriously and deliciously lyrical, e.g. the beginning of his essay “Empathy in Daylight: Edward Hopper and John Register”:

John Register gathers evidence of the material world around him like a private eye on a case where human presence has lapsed almost beside the point, so thoroughly have furnishings, light and weather—in short, the environment—absorbed its capacities for mythic import. The polished surfaces and sprawling, sunstruck angularities that fill Register’s pictures can be reas as contradictory signals of high expectations and abandoned purpose. They display a soulful luster like that of distant stars, compelling though uninhabitable except by a wild leap of empathy. The leap must be instantaneous, of its own moment; this eternity of recognizable particulars brooks no nostalgia. Perhaps this is why there isn’t in fact very much weather in sight in Register’s views, although the upper tier of a picture window prospect will have “sky” things going on in it. Many of the inside-outside vistas suggest, in the artist’s phrase, “waiting rooms for the beyond”—the built environment’s more or less coherent mesh of functions caught in a slow, entropic skid. The impending vacancy feels already flooded with recall.

In other places, his writing also gets witty and hilarious, such as the beginning of his commentary on Viola Frey:

Since the early 90s, Viola Frey has been prodding the outer surfaces of her ceramic sculptures to get the physical form together with a patchy, transfiguring impetus. In going for this extra vitality, she’s moved away from a prior refinement. Now thick, drawling paint and pitted overglazes coat the figurative contours, mimicking enlarged effects of light and shade and suggesting internal anatomy, too. Sometimes the modeled forms are so swamped as to seem complicated supports for high-keyed painting; at best however, the paint helps the eye follow each volume around from any angle so the figures’ three-dimensionality appears more blatant. It’s as if Frey were purposely reversing the procedure that Jean-Paul Sartre claimed for Alberto Giacometti’s thin people: she’s putting the fat back on space.

Yet to focus on the quality of Berkson’s written word seems to sidestep the point of art writing. Yes, art writing can be poorly written and thus be criticized on that basis. But isn't a more fundamental point how the art critic engaged with the subject art work?

And so I return to my determination, as exemplified by his writing on Ossorio, that For the Ordinary Artist is effective because Berkson’s insight widens further the expanse through which the reader-viewer may later engage again with not just Ossorio but generally with all art works. For me, there were other examples besides Ossorio, and to the extent I knew of certain artists he reviewed, I noticed how what he wrote impacted my previously held viewpoints about those artists. For example: I get everything he writes about Deborah Oropallo but his description of her paintings’ debates (about what is graspable, what can be grasped, what can be remembered, what can be identified et al) as a “perpetual deferral” radicalizes my own views about her balancing acts, making me appreciate Oropallo even more.

One can certainly speculate how Berkson came to his wonderful, profound eye. One can cite his erudition, sure. But I suspect a more key element is the love he clearly feels for his subject matter. To love is to show interest. Berkson considers his response to art work to be a continuation, or a sparking, of a conversation. Wonderful. Perhaps the ultimate test of art criticism is whether it makes the reader go out of one’s way to look at the reviewed art works. Well, thanks to this book, this Courbet-appreciator is now off to pay a closer attention to Poussin about whom, Berkson says in comparing two exhibitions at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, “To some eyes, stacked next to Poussin, Courbet ranked suddenly (and perhaps just this once) as a somewhat cheesy egotistical bungler….”

By showing how one might look deeper, the receptive reader can be a deeper looker, too. To such a book, one can only say “Thank You” and highly recommend.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed or generated responses by Joey Madia in The New Mystics HERE; Allen Bramhall over HERE; by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE; by Leny Strobel over HERE; and by Jean Vengua over HERE and HERE. Her THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I is reviewed by Edric Mesmer in Yellow Field and reprinted HERE. Her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 is reviewed by Arpine Konyalian Grenier over HERE. Allen Bramhall also reviews the "Hay(na)ku for Haiti" series over HERE. If the latter two get you curious, please note that participating in this fundraiser for Haiti is supported by Marsh Hawk Press, publisher of THE THORN ROSARY: if you order at least $15 worth of booklets, you will receive a copy of THE THORN ROSARY which is priced retail at $19.95; this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

2 BOOKS by JAMES MAUGHN

2011-03-31T23:05:00.000-07:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

the Arakaki Permutations by James Maughn
(Black Radish, Lafayette, LA, 2011)

and

Worldbook: 1925—a poem by James Maughn
([g.e. #5] Poetry Flash & g.e. Collective, San Francisco, 2010)

James Maughn has four books out now that I have, and they just keep getting better. That is to say, from book to book as I read them they are sharpening their practice, and as I read them again and again I get more from it. The last two to come to me are the Arakaki Permutations (SF: Black Radish, 2011) and Worldbook: 1925—a poem [g.e. #5] (SF: Poetry Flash & g.e. Collective, 2010). These books deal, each one of them differently, with form and feeling. These are the two most basic of the five skandhas or “heapings up” of consciousness in Buddhist thinking. These are no orientalist volumes, though, despite the presence of Maughn’s serious kara-te practice in one of them. In an “Author’s Note” at the back of the Arakaki Permutations, he explains his use of the kata forms that he has studied (and mastered, from what I’ve seen) in a previous book called Kata:

In that book, I explored the connections and intersections between my practice of traditional Karate and my practice of poetry … . I aimed to write a poem, grounded in my study of particular kata, that would somehow partake of the kinetic signature of that form.

He succeeded nicely in Kata, and now in the Arakaki Permutations he continues and deepens the poetic practice parallel to “focusing on a handful of kata” in his karate. He tells us of this more pointed practice:

In keeping with this change, I wanted to write a book that would reflect my new relationship with the kata I’ve chosen to make my own. Rather than writing one poem for each kata, I’ve written new poems for each line of the original kata poem, and tied the writing of those poems to my daily study of particular techniques and sequences in the kata. (117)

This is a serious practice and this is the more seriously “feeling” of the two books under consideration here, but lest this seem too serious—I would insist that the poems can be read nicely without this note and that Maughn did well to put it at the end. I have seen him read these poems and I have seen him demonstrate karate kata, each standing well for itself.

These are not illustrative compositions. They are not really demonstrative either, though they enact something. They demonstrate attention to the heapings up of consciousness described by the five skandhas: form, feeling, perception, concept, and consciousness. They delight a mind that can sustain a little “negative capability” for seeing how wording fits into this scheme. The empty mind of the “empty hand” (kara-te) practitioners is at the heart of this book.

There are five sets of poems played out from lines in the Kata poems based from these kata, five now gone further into. The reason I say they deal with form comes from both their kata forms, which I have seen but don’t know well enough to recall, and from this form of the book and the forms the individual poems take. Here’s one from “Niseishi Permutations”:

X. (cast light)
as likely
  through as
in-
  tercepted
                      aim
to deliver
  a pre-
conceived
concept in
           or on
the targeted
  date you’ll
laugh those
           eyes out
damage’s done
  bodies wall
as likely
  through as
up is
(23)

This shows the form as precipitous, grammatical, and shifty. Meanings gleaned along the falling through are not intercepted by a pre-conceived concept but moved up by the giddy vertiginous motion. And emotion.

The reason I say they deal with feeling comes from the feelings you get as your eye/mind moves through these poems; the raw data of emotion formed at the concept/consciousness levels are held here in precipitate suspension. It’s a feeling I trust to be accurate to the kata gone into here, but I don’t have or need any notion of what that form is; it is there throughout.

Here’s part of another from “Sochin Permutations”:

I. (fit to and awake)
what all I’m fit to finish
gets better left under
stated
than stood
up and without iron
except fitted over
the bone
shirt I’m bent on
(76)

The foreshadowing vocabulary of a sliding frame here lets “iron” link with “shirt” and “under” and “fit” and “fitted,” “under” also with “up” and “over,” “bone” with the un(der)stated “hair” suggested later in the image of an anchorite, as “bent on” recalls the sense of “fit to finish” even as it also fits the iron a smith might forge upon. That “bone / shirt I’m bent on” can only be the body and yet … and yet.

There are poems in this book that I don’t “get.” There may be some that you won’t either. But it is well worth finding out. The piling up of meaning is at work and on display here. I’d have to say that the Arakaki Permutations is a lesson without object in how the mind works, and I mean works.

Worldbook: 1925—a poem, on the other hand, is playful in its use of where it comes from. A little reading in it will reveal its source as the 1925 edition of the famous encyclopedia volume “from A to Bee” as it says on the title page. The language may all be found there. The composition is what we’re after. Diction encompassing everything teaches what a mindset is like. The composition gives the critical angle, and it’s hilarious. From the simplicity of “XVIII.”:

Give four reasons why basketry should be popular.

to the wild set of study questions in “XX.” about bees, we can see and laugh at the encyclopedia’s efforts to teach even as we learn about their more pernicious aspects in the image given of an Abyssinia looked at from the white world in “I.” “VI.” gives a serious critique of arithmetical calculations even as it makes us laugh; it asks:

how much stovewood in one

standing tree? does poultry
pay a profit? how
to determine the advantage

his neighbor may have over
him? with common
fractions & some fair degree

of rapidity largely occupied
with figures as true
as if a tool of perfect control

This is fine poetry both in its Jakobsonian use of grammar and its Lakoffian sense of parsimonious framing, as well as in its simple satire or its deeper perceptions. I get a kick out of it; you will too.

*****

T.C. Marshall is a beautiful curmudgeon living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, chasing the seasons as they come to him, book by book. He pays the bills, accepts gifts, and teaches. Friend him on FaceBook to converse and to find out more.

DAYS POEM by ALLEN BRAMHALL

2011-03-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS T. SPATAFORA Reviews

DAYS POEM, Volume I and Volume II by Allen Bramhall
(Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco, 2007)

Allen Bramhall’s Days Poem: A Critical Analysis of a Dying Art

“There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues. That is all.”
--Rebecca West

Allen Bramhall’s Days Poem addresses everything under the sun, with a blend of wit and cynicism, reminiscent of the disenchanted preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes and correspondingly enlightening. The phraseology within its verses is clever and succinct yet complete and rich in profundity.

“Torture”—the speaker’s consummate designation for dialog, encompassing several besetting metaphorical labels for mundane, trivial, belligerent, self-righteous and “me”-dominated mutually-exclusive verbal exchange—is repeated throughout this extended work of poetic prose. Bramhall makes frequent reference to the “bear,” symbolic of the strong and silent insolent, the “chicken,” synonymous with the perpetual loquacious, the “bird,” typifying the silent but ostentatious proud, “Tarzan,” “hobos” and the “train,” figurative of the uncouth, and the “ truck,” depictive of the oppressive. His tone bears no protective persona, blatantly advising the reader to “end the conversation before it starts” (47. 8. 1). Discerning the verses, the reader may thus come to appreciate the true nature and agenda of conversation or perhaps be rendered humble by means of exposure to the pervading lines suggestive that his inflated sense of self-importance and virility is ironically lain claim by ceaseless numbers of egos exterior to his individual rampart of uniqueness and significance.

It is apropos that the writer personifies diatribe as being “tyrann[ical]” since verbally abusive taskmasters may randomly direct such oral floggings in the forms of vociferous denunciation and threats at their vulnerable and defenseless underlings as a method of control and dominance (1. 3. 2). “[T]hey talk and react… / in quack” (28. 18. 1-2). Their “tornado” “skirts” the issue, its ravaging winds desperately endeavoring to devastate the hapless and disadvantaged scapegoat in its stead (345. 3. 8). The author wittingly refers to the bully as a truck, intimidating the smaller vehicles (43. 12. 1-3). Belligerent talk, however, is but a passing storm, and the staunch and enduring bear ultimately perseveres (28. 18. 2). Ironically, the verses ambiguously perceive the bear to be an admirable figure, respected for his “momentum” (39. 7. 1) and defiance of authority yet self-righteous in his own right, not practicing what he preaches (37. 2. 3). He is the noisy wheel, the whiner, “hungry” (69. 6. 3) and a presence to be reckoned with (64. 6. 1-2). Thus, the belligerent ought to beware of the bear that has had “enough” (351. 2. 1).

The reluctance to engage or assert one’s self directly in converse is an all-too-familiar syndrome, inciting insecurities and fears of vocal retribution by the receiver, and escaping into a world of solitude and isolation via the age of communication technology merely perpetuates this vicious cycle. Bramhall’s “Lewis and Clark” expedition parables such vagueness and indirectness, whereby the intimidated individual circumnavigates his statement or contention to his receiver yet ultimately “return[s] to the exact / word[s] [h]e meant to say” (1. 5. 3-5). The listener’s patience begins to wear thin: “[S]ay what you mean,” he abruptly replies (90. 7. 1). For the inhibited, “expression is half the battle” (129. 6. 1). What is assertiveness but a vocal expression of one’s inner turbulence; thus, effecting change in his recipient plays secondary in intent or objective. One’s agida is effectively mitigated through communication.

Inhibition and insecurity are further amplified in an atmosphere of competitive dialog. Who has not been exempt from “occupational challenge,” anxious to measure up to her peers who boast of vocational success (108. 8. 1)?

“[D]ialogue resumes as emphatic tornado” (1. 1. 1). Be it the voice of the proud, the insecure or the unenlightened, Bramhall subsequently refers to it as “ideologue,” coining metaphors to depict the bullish, indignant and often ignorant assertions of the provincial and self-righteous, which her audience may naively perceive to be confidence (1. 1. 3).

“[B]eware of dogmatic lightning,” hence, the absurdity and futility of open-minded, mutually enlightening political, theological or philosophical discourse with a one-sided “train” (35. 18. 3), personified as the narrow-minded, which can only conclude in altercation (26. 15. 3). Buy the truth and sell it not (Pr. 23.23). Educated and profound words are often in fact wasted on the “hobos,” “lost to ex- / planation” (59. 7. 1-2). Advice may arrive with “fresh towels” (72. 13. 1), but wisdom advises against placing pearls before swine. Thus, the wise are cautioned against conversations of substance with the provincial. But then, even Tarzan, with his “unkempt vocabulary” (247. 5. 1), is entitled to his convictions (100. 2. 1). Ironically, these self-ordained ideals are ephemeral to the ego, which defends them tenaciously until they are eventually replaced—“a page is turned, vacating the old plan” (34. 23. 1).

Broadcasting such emphatic “importan[ce]” on personal doctrine naturally invites a forum for debate, subjecting one to vulnerability (30. 2. 1). “Religious affronts occur” (54. 12. 3-4). “[D]iscussion / grows violent” (114. 9. 1-2). Acknowledging one’s fallibility, on the other hand, can prove to be a quite humbling and liberating experience.

Self-righteous dogma by the ordinary individual can in fact be disregarded. It is quite another story, however, when words are manipulated to conventionally define what those in authority find convenient and of benefit to themselves, and quite often appeasement is advisable, given these disadvantageous circumstances (50. 9. 2,4).

And then there are the malcontents, oblivious to the balance of assets and shortcomings of the circumstance at hand and ultimately destined to perpetually distinguish between a pot of gold and a mound of earth. They are “the appalled, [the] gregarious,” continually disputing and expressing discord (105. 1. 1). The flags of discontent are, however, necessary to offset tyrannical elements: “[S]omeone has to add” (105. 1. 3).

“[P]eople discuss their nature with elegant detail”; that is, one tends to glorify him- or herself with exaggerated, even nonexistent attributes and accolades (1. 7. 1). They “talk of their ‘colours,’ and of mountains they climbed just yesterday” (15. 7. 1). Carl Sandburg referred to this hyperbolized self-importance as a form of lying. The East terms it ego, and the West calls it self-esteem. Are our audiences a medium for sincere communication or merely recipients of one’s pretension, with the ultimate expectation of a word of recognition or “approv[al]” (1. 7. 2)? It is the speaker, paradoxically, who is ultimately impressed with himself—“little will be noticed” (18. 1. 3). Impressive news is ephemeral.

Such communication and self-gratification are virtually nonexistent, however, when two or more cackling “chickens” vie for attention from one another, each attempting to outdo the flock, further intensifying their notions of narcissism (1. 8. 3-4). “[W]e talk a lot, don’t we?” (1. 26. 5). “[T]here are so many who wish to / speak, but it’s a careless job best left to those with airy claims to make” (9. 6. 2-3). Individuals desire to be heard; however, waiting for that “opening in the conversation” can seem eternal with that speaker who is never quite at a loss for words (17. 6. 1). We all “have a word to say” and often wait anxiously for our “chance” to speak in this stichomythic game of musical chairs (66. 4. 1, 64. 2. 1).

Stories change and facts are “modified” (4. 16. 2-3); thus, “people will structure their words with newer ideas” to accommodate subsequent exaggerations and other falsities (1. 17. 2). “[W]hen things are explained, the package runs from one dealer to the next” (202. 2. 1). This is ironically their Achilles heel, their inconsistency ultimately being discerned through repeated exposure: “[W]hat say you [when] the musket shots pepper your ideology?” (76. 13. 3). When your pretentious and exaggerated claims and assertions are challenged? And what of their lasting impression (77. 7. 1)? Such braggarts edit their dialog, revealing only that which will elicit envy or respect (4. 16. 1-2). The covetous “I wish I had your arrangements” is the projected and likely reply (218. 2. 1). They “have their say, / and make something special,” but “don’t mention debt” (13. 3. 1-2).

The bird, the marvel of the animal kingdom, lays equitable claim for attention as does the braggart. Her method, however, unlike the latter, is nonverbal, precluding blatancy, procuring center stage, nonetheless, “sing[ing],…blow[ing] the whistle, or…simply [her] own horn” (237. 3. 1). She is a “balloon,” proverbially composed of torrid gaseous matter (237. 7. 1-2). Be not gulled, however, by her gracefulness, for she, too, possesses her dark side, which eventually is manifested verbally (238. 7. 1-4).

Is counsel truly altruistic, or is it ulterior in motive, further nourishing one’s ego with additional manifestation of self-importance and self-aggrandizement? Do we rejoice in our beneficence or delight in selfish fulfillment (1. 24. 1-2)? “[I]deas come and go” (91. 3. 1).

Advice, however, which the “counselor” deludes is a creative and original breath of wisdom, is merely a reinvention of a wheel long since patented (4. 14. 4-5). “[W]e talk into holes, thinking / we fill” (4. 23. 1-2). Indeed, delusions of grandeur continually infiltrate the egos of the narcissistic who fail to realize that their “answers” are in fact age-old: Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? (Holy Bible, Ec. 1.10). The same can be said of theories, [which] are remorseless and ongoing (284. 7. 1). “[W]eather itself is imaginary, [the] theorist indiscreetly declares” (317. 1. 38).

“[W]hat can we talk about today, that / hasn’t been mentioned before?” (166. 5. 1-2). Equally nauseating is the mundane and trivial, to wit, ceaseless and senseless idle chatter, essentially practiced to camouflage discomfort and quietude, which Western culture deems aberrant. Talk, “the world is full of talk and talk is full of words” (65. 3. 2). “[T]alking all night doesn’t make the night” (3. 5. 2). “[Y]okels” may practice such impertinent discourse, analytical discussion and debate, accomplishing nothing in the end (28. 19. 1-2). It is “cheap but so aren’t the people talking” (180. 8. 1). It simply generates further futile discussion (23. 21. 2). Philosophical principles, for one, are often debated and compared rather than discerned, appreciated and practiced.

“I love you”—a hackneyed, superficial expression, at best, and a deceptive lure by an unscrupulous “lover,” at its most destructive. The poet likens such shallow words to “houses that fall down when empty” (61. 6. 2). This often insincere declaration is equated with “a phrase painted on our foreheads,” when such an influential statement should be handled with delicacy (52. 4. 2). The naïve especially are vulnerable to the artificial “candidate” who “say[s] the same thing,” furnishing the gullible with agreement, assurances and other falsehoods (113. 2. 2-3).

Then there are the attention seekers, spewing words of fatigue, and perhaps illness, to those who will nourish such neediness through silent reception. The receiver need not respond, except for perhaps nonverbal gestures and countenances of sympathy, and any words of response may paradoxically be unwelcome (39. 4. 3-4).

Words are powerful (Dickinson). “[A]re you comfortable when you lay down?” (112. 4. 2). Perhaps you publicly uttered foolhardily, prematurely or unfavorably. Apprehension sets in.

Whether it is the diatribe of the belligerent, the egotism of the self-righteous, the reasoning of the unreasonable, the superficiality of the shallow, the demands of the pathetic, anger-induced self-recriminatory statements or the hyperbole of the artificial, one is inevitably exposed to dialogue, to torture. “[U]ntroubled airplanes are / above somewhere”; thus, ending conversation before it starts is ideal (203. 1. 2-3). To “give delight” and “take it” is unfeasible, however Utopian (284. 6. 1). Forewarned is forearmed, and discernment of the profundity in Allen Bramhall’s Days Poem will shield one against the impending barrage of verbal onslaughts and absurdity.

+++

Works Cited

Bramhall, Allen. Days Poem: Volume 1: St. Helena: Meritage Press, 2007. Print.

---. Days Poem: Volume 2: St. Helena: Meritage Press, 2007. Print.

Holy Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 1982. Print.
*****

Nicholas T. Spatafora is an educator at Joseph Pulitzer Intermediate School in Jackson Heights, Queens and an English Professor at the City University of New York. He holds two graduate degrees from Hunter College in New York City and has enjoyed a successful career in education spanning twenty five years. Contemplating a life in Catholic ministry, he attended Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in New York. He is a member of the Tao Society in Tai Pei, and prior affiliations include the Religious Society of Friends and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. Spatafora is the author of Hurt, the feature article “Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: A Fictional Account of the Life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha,” “A Review of Jack Lynch’s Manhattan Man and Other Poems,” “Challenging Perspectives: A Review of Thomas Fink’s & Maya Diablo Mason’s AutopsyTurvy” and “Kingdom by the Harbor,” featured in Eileen Tabios’s Galatea Resurrects. Spatafora and his wife Hsiaochen (Judy) reside in Flushing, New York.

BOOKS by JAMES R. WHITLEY and GAIL WHITE

2011-03-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

PEG DUTHIE engages with

The Goddess of Goodbye by James R. Whitley
(Wordpress, Cincinnati, OH, 2009)

and

Ignoble Truths by Gail White
(Scienter Press, Louisville, KY, 2006)

I’m typing this essay three days before the third anniversary of my mother’s death from cancer. Our relationship was troubled and troublesome through the end of her days, and beyond: given the similarity of our personalities (particularly visible in the form of congenital stubbornness) and the disparity between our priorities, the unhappiness and distress we inflicted on each other was both considerable and inevitable.

I am Asian American, and I am frequently asked about my parents by individuals patently curious about my ancestry. I get skittish when these individuals pursue answers beyond where my father and mother were born and when they arrived in the States. I'm young enough that the interrogator seldom expects to be informed that both parents are now deceased, and I'm cranky enough to resist (and sometimes resent) assumptions of any stripe regarding my feelings about the matter: I don't automatically sympathize with everyone at odds with their parents, and I'm ill at ease when it's seized on as a bonding point. That reaction is all too easy to understand, however, when I consider how often I grit my own teeth at marketing campaigns for Mother's Day and other manifestations of the all-families-are-tightly-knit paradigm. It can be an effort to remain polite when someone presumes to tell me how my parents and I must have felt or feel about each other. It's well-intentioned small talk, but it's about as welcome as gravel in my boots or bugs in my rice.

I requested review copies of James Whitley’s full-length collection and Gail White’s chapbook last summer primarily because I was intrigued by the titles. I did not know that they contained poems about the dying of difficult mothers. It is not a genre I actively seek out, but it is bracing to encounter the bluntness of White's "Last Encounter," which opens with

When I went home to watch my mother die --
solely because grown children do such things . . .

White's experience was not identical to mine -- among other things, I took pleasure in my mother's rejection of efforts to convert her to Christianity, whereas White writes of wanting hers "to tell me she believed / in an afterlife" and how "she wanted the same from me." I am grimly familiar, however, with White's impulse to "let pity talk like love, / the way a cheating husband talks who just / wants tears to stop and things to settle down." Whitley's mother was quite different from mine -- he's descended "from a long line of women who excelled / at telling men what to do," including "no more" to her treatment-focused oncologist ("The Goddess of the Hustle") -- but I am reminded of lovingly prepared cashew shrimp and mooncakes when, in "The Goddess of Salt and Sugar," Whitley displays a rueful appreciation of his mother's cooking skills:

Despite her well-deserved reputation for cruelty
in the other rooms of our sad apartment,
my mother was a saint in the kitchen --
her glorious coconut cake and sweet potato pie,
a prayer answered in every numinous slice.

White's chapbook is a limited edition (100 copies) of fifteen formal poems. The opening sonnet, "Would-Be Pastoral Elegy," delivers on the promise of the chapbook's title -- of uncomfortable, unromantic observations on offer. This is not the realm of pretty lambs and silver dishes celebrated by Marlowe and his kind:

Spring's back again, riding a surge of death.
My cats, the heralds of the holocaust,
leave lizards underfoot, and birds whose breath
their claws have stopped lie wrapped in Spanish moss
outside the door . . .

White's sensibility is closer to that of Villon, to whom she nods as she unrolls her "Ballade of the Common Lot," its envoi posed as "The Obvious":

No matter how the bills were paid
In spring, we'll be in debt by fall,
Either by getting drunk or laid,
Women and whiskey drain it all.

She writes about survivors: herself, as she fantasizes about her funeral ("there'll be no eulogy to sketch / my virtues for the friends who won't be there / since I'm intending to outlive them all"), widows ("Post Diagnosis"), widowers ("Life Went On without Her"), teachers ("For A Senior Killed On Prom Night"), and strangers ("The Psychic" working with police investigators to locate the bodies of murder victims). She writes about accumulation and layers: the widow-to-be secretly anticipates having sole control over joint possessions; a daughter celebrates the "dunes of mess" her neatnik mother would have never tolerated; death smothers a Pompeiian nursemaid and child in "the soft gray snow that falls in hell."

There are patches where White's choices don't quite work for me -- where the structural demands of the quatrain or couplet in question force the poet to opt for a phrasing or inflection that struck me as less than ideal. For instance, in "My Funeral," she suggests,

let's forget the incense and the hymns;
inter me in a crypt in a crumbling wall,
or better yet, before my memory dims,
just toss the ashes into Bayou Teche.
This is my carnival, and farewell, flesh.

"My memory dims" is too much an effort to match "hymns" by compressing what should read something like "memories of me are dimmed"; "flesh" is a terrific word with which to end a sonnet about death, but the sentence containing it seems to me disjointed -- its parts don't add up to a proper conclusion. (Are "carnival" and "farewell" adjectives or nouns -- or, is "farewell" here an imperative, and perhaps even a pun?) If sonnets weren't traditionally constructed with fourteen lines, would this sentence come across as necessary? (I'd be tempted to end the poem right at "Teche." )

Some of White's other endings, however, do possess the right cadence and snap. For example, "Virginia Woolf Reflects on a Visit from Her Sister" answers "What happens when we marry?" with "Nuns may know best: Keep your ambitions low / and live alone, or else with other women," and "Dialogue At A Wedding" concludes with a bald statement of "essential fact: / A heart in freezing weather, like a cat, / Will make a nest of anything it finds."

Whitley spells out this same truth in "The Bump and Grind of Life," as he revisits his friend Carla's confession about a drunken one night stand:

What I should have told her is that it is,
regrettably perhaps, normal to seek outside
sources of warmth, that sometimes we take
refuge in whatever embrace will have us
for a time and that doesn't make us weak or
immoral or hollow or whorish, just human.

Whitley speaks of craving such warmth himself, both in the next stanza and in "My Mother's Son," where comfort is to be found not from other people at all, but in the texture of chenille sofas and flannel sheets and "between the lush lines of a Robert Hayden poem, / in the sweet dark center of a rum-soaked raisin." His poems are populated with characters whose lives reside outside the confines of Sunday school lessons: one woman regularly sneaks into weddings to enjoy the sight of falling rice ("Long or short grain, basmati or wild -- / the particular type doesn't matter" ("Rice"); another warns fellow shoppers about the devil "through a mouthful / of stolen grapes" ("Overheard"); a minister molests the babysitter by moving "his righteous hand up her skirt / to feel how moist her faith is" ("Almost Sunday"); a parishioner calls "the rule books… inexcusably vague" and demands to know:

Seriously, how long were we expected
to tolerate innocence with that forked
tongue licking our naïve ears so sweetly,
with such emptiness growling in us and
so much ripe fruit dangling within reach? ("Hello Halo")

The narrator's rejection of traditional visions of heaven is even more explicit in "The Goddess of the Everlasting Otherness," where he pictures the souls of the departed

partying on some archipelago
of boundless rapture --
an impossibly large disco ball
where the sun used to be,
a never-ending supply of
the most scrumptious
hors d'oeuvres falling
into every joyous mouth,
cream sherry and creamier
milkshakes flowing… ("The Goddess of the Everlasting Otherness")

The book's dedication reads, "To Bettye Jean Whitley, in memoriam," and its three parts are titled "Mother," "Son," and "Ghost." Some of the poems dwell specifically on the life and death of the mother, whom the son describes at one point as "many / contradictory things at once -- / mother, antagonist, going, gone" ("The Goddess of Failed Indigo"). A long-cherished memory of watching the mother happily dancing to Chaka Khan is inseparable from recollections of her temper, the household's poverty, and "the man who later moved in with us / and beat her almost monthly" ("Covet Not the Flame Her Bright Feathers"). In "The Goddess of the Righteous Upper Cut," the poet recounts how his mother saved him from a molester by attacking the man with a meat cleaver; in "Chère Malaise," the poet reflects to that same mother how she treated him as an "unworthy punching bag," and how

truth be told,
I miss you less than I do the thing
that was growing between us, struggling
to break through the unforgiving
shell of our egos, the thing we surely
would have christened "Respect."

In the world of Whitley's poems, family is what he's had to save himself from: the chenille sofa celebrated in "My Mother's Son" also shows up in "In My Glass House," as the narrator's "plush foxhole" to which he retreats after a verbal attack from his brother. At the same time, the knowledge that there is escape from neither past pain, present grief, nor future loss permeates Whitley's work, whether he's invoking Greek mythology (e.g., the Trojan horse in "All Pardons"; Athena, in "At the Darkened Temple"; "Medusa Ghazal," presented in the voice of the gorgon), alluding to Christian cosmography (purgatory, in "Ikebana"; the world of the Great Flood "bloated with retribution," in "Pleurisy (Or How to Drown in A Dry Room)"), or asking readers to recalibrate their awareness of contemporary icons such as "Dahl's most deplorable hellion" ("The Truth About Veruca Salt") and Nina Simone ("Nostalgic").

The front cover of the collection shows the figure of a person standing waist deep in a large body of water: the person's shadow on the water is indistinct from the dark outline of his or her body; the sun appears to be bright in the sky and on the sea, and yet, at least as reproduced in the image, the sky is the dark brownish gray of burnt toast. The territory covered by the book's contents is considerably more colorful -- it includes roses and grapes, snow peas and violets, "red streets, white gods and blue blood" ("Political") and lost dreams compared to red pistachio shells -- but the sense of darkness hovering over the edges is seldom absent. The strength and ungovernability of water are also recurring tropes: in the opening poem, cancer is "an oil spill / in the once-pristine waters" of the mother's body ("Memento Mori"); in subsequent pieces, floods engulf sinners and fluids menace tired lungs, and eventually, in "It's Not Unlike the Sea," Whitley says straight out that

I'm not talking about water here,
but love -- the murky bottom of it,
the inviting waves seen by those not yet
immersed, how even the most buoyant can
drown in it, the surface then calming again,
healing, leaving no telltale scars behind.

*****

Peg Duthie has been known to quote, sing, and sometimes letter out Songs 8:7. She works in Nashville as a copyeditor and indexer, and periodically shares stray thoughts on Twitter @zirconium. Click here for her "Reviewers and Contributors" listing.

2 BOOKS by LISA LUBASCH

2011-03-31T22:51:00.000-07:00

CATHERINE DALY Reviews

How Many More of Them are You? by Lisa Lubasch
(Avec Books, Penngrove, CA, 1999)

Vicinities by Lisa Lubasch
(Avec Books, Penngrove, CA, 2001)

Note: Since this review was first written, Lisa Lubasch published two books of original poetry, To Tell the Lamp and Twenty-One After Days, as well as a book of translations of Paul Éluard’s poetry.

An artist's—especially a female artist's—pursuit of beauty involves an intricate series of negotiations with societal standards, artistic standards, and internal standards. At this particular cultural moment, it seems specific aesthetic and stylistic concerns overshadow the larger pursuit of beauty in poetry and those poets beholden to beauty. The colder idea, perception, more usually underlies the words and situation of the poet as observer. Lisa Lubasch knowledgeably and generously proceeds to write beauty, which is less about perception and more about plenty. In the United States, throughout the past century, Walt Whitman's sweep and cadence has served as a cornucopia, offering sloppy beauty, to Emily Dickinson's admirable, reserved, mannered person and verse “still life” beauty. In her poetry, Lubasch approaches the two different aesthetic standards of American ur-modernism in the beautiful poetry that Whitman and Dickinson—as well as a few others—have come to represent.

Vicinities form an accidental, almost-physical aura, as Lubasch explains in a poem more recent than her book, Vicinities, "Le Cineaste," which is online at HOW2. “The World is a Star./ Beautiful figures concern us." Vicinities and How Many More of Them are You? are similar titles in that both are concerned with surroundings. Vicinities are places which happen to be near some objective or standard, and are named by that goal or god, though not always directly related to it. As a phrase, "How Many More of Them are You?" complicates the "them" of the other which surrounds the personal with the intimate "you" of love and readership. On page 70, one of the Notes in her first book, How Many More of Them are You?, Lubasch combines the ideas of vicinity and transition from other to intimate:

Everything is saddened by anticipation (of it),

*

By its prodigious form, by its excess.

*

The word traverses me.

She continues to develop these ideas in her subsequent book, including in this section of the title poem, "Vicinities":

When you
became you no longer,
you were no where to be found—

(p. 28)

A series of morphology poems in Vicinities ("(A Morphology of Light)," "(A Morphology of Time)," etc.) continues the morphology poems ("Morphologies," and "A Morphology of Rain" parts 1, 2 and 3) which end How Many More of Them Are You?. Morphology is where nature meets language. These morphologies are very different, book to book. They have changed form. In "A Morphology of Rain, 2" from How Many More of Them Are You?, the beautiful images are built from the etymological relationships forests and meadows have to the printed page's marks and margins:

dark wood behind trees, transilient

                                 imperturbable ground—something
            not sourced, though constantly

            sound...

(p. 97)

"(A Morphology of Light)" in Vicinities is more explicit about boundaries:

can you define beauty for me?
can you?

(p. 37)

The you as opposed to the other, the vicinity as opposed to the objective, have porous boundaries, boundaries often crossed as a matter of their nature, and of the nature of their names. Towards the end of Vicinities, the morphology poems are replaced with the campy "Mutations," not the study of change, but the result of it. In "(A Morphology of Light)," the beautiful from the colloquial, "glomming on to us in the low / still heat, the low // Etruscan light, —" (p. 37) in the mutations section, "Finally I Decide to Close Myself to the Light," this becomes the dramatic "prostrate oneself before darkness" (p. 71). In the same mutations section, in the poem, "The Harboring of Ends," Lubasch writes, "We are, in this fashion, lost." Fashion is the opposite of the desire or search for beauty.

In both books, there are phrases which recall T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as well as some of his ideas ("Oratorio" begins How Many More of Them are You? with a parenthetical "do I dare?" as well as a comment about signification and sunset; in "Vicinities" a fog precedes the phrase "there will be time"), but other than small details, the ideas are similar because Lubasch, fluent in French, has similar source material to Eliot. Due to this similarity in origin, Lubasch’s poetry has been compared to the results of Jorie Graham's sterner and more explicit use of Eliot. There is some commonality in display and titling in Graham and Lubasch, although the content is voiced completely differently.

The text on the page negotiates the distance between Whitman's long lines and Dickinson's short lines and gaps, between Whitman's enthusiasm and Dickinson's exactitude. Lubasch's more recent work attacks the Eliotic "objective correlative" bugaboo by literally incorporating formulas, as in a new poem, "01/29/02" from combo 10,

lost inside the lost (sum) of

( ) & (- )

scaling the (boundary) wall

where aside from using a formula for a particular feeling, Lubasch uses a gap, not a variable. Exact, generous, more comic than coy, Lubasch's gaps and words finally grasp what surrounds us if our objective is beauty and we maintain a restless polynomial quest.

Lubasch creates a contingent beauty which is not beyond the world or transcendent, although it does bear the markings of an individually-forged tradition. Thought and emotion are identified with one another, "Things veer off. And each of us." (Vicinities, "Ground Sways," n.p.) The sound of the words expresses this union, "I am prolixity and passion, paramour and pact. the symbol of an act, whereby the act is ill-imagined, the symbol, inexact." (How Many More of Them are You?, "(Notes)," p. 67). The eye assembles, "plain dust / and a wall of irises." (Vicinities, "Beyond Each Preface," p. 15)

*****

Catherine Daly lives in Los Angeles.

THE NEW POETICS by MATHEW TIMMONS

2011-03-31T22:50:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

THE NEW POETICS by Mathew Timmons
(TrenchArt: The Maneuvers Series / Les Figues Press, Los Angeles, 2010)

I had a good time reading THE NEW POETICS by Mathew Timmons. I hope such is okay with the author—that is, there is a seriousness underlying this project so that I hope the author doesn’t interpret my having a good time as not taking the project seriously. Anyway, I do take it seriously—this intelligent parsing of how culture is made (read: enforced), focused generally on “new” as cultural capital and specifically how it’s applied in the poetry world.

Yes, as Rodrigo Toscano points out in his thankfully brief but expansively on-point Introduction, the new is subjective: “always… negotiated but never ‘settled’ haggle.” And so, through fragments, paragraphs and longer texts, or non-existent text beyond the title, Timmons explores various “new” stuff like (and I quote the beginning of the Table of Contents)

The New Acrostic

The New Aesthetic

The New Aesthetics Statement

The New Affect

The New Alexandrine

The New Approach to Nature

and so on. Indeed, I like the (new, possibly inadvertent) poem masquerading as the Table of Contents—I bet it’d sound great read/performed out loud! Having said this, I realized after writing the first draft of this review that such a reading/performance of a Table of Contents is not new—I once saw the late, great kari edwards do it when she read the ToC from her book iduna (O Books) at a reading in San Francisco. Hah: nothing new here! Anyway, going back to title, the writings are published on a run-on basis, i.e. without page-breaks between each piece. As it turns out, some of my favorite moments from the book are just when the titles follow each other as Timmons opted not to develop the titular theme further with additional text. I liked, for example, the effect of seeing the following:

The New Art

The New Art Form

The New Ashes

I suspect I like the effect of the above because it can be difficult to discuss a “new art”. And I’ve noticed that, in discussing such a “new art”, some people sometimes lapse to discussing the “form” of it—often a doomed approach in terms of resulting critique manifesting intent since art is more than form. Thus, the result is (critical) “ashes.” (This happens, for instance, in many comments stream as people agree/disagree and then lapse to snark ...)

Anyway, titles. I sensed a similar art-to-ashes effect in the progression of these three unexplicated titles:

The New Different

The New Difficult

The New Dirty

Am I giving the impression the author should have stuck with just listing titles or lines in the form of “The New ___Fill-in-the-Blank”? I don’t mean to offer that impression, even as I offer the following as a comparison. Compare “The New First Kiss” below with the following “The New First Kisss”—the latter doesn’t have any text following its title:

The New First Kiss

The trials of The New First Kiss included a series of formula red mixtures and entries in the form of Merlot and Tutti Fruiti mixes and Victory! The New First Kiss is like dice on a thread. Since the other one went to hell (ha ha! I made a funny!), here’s another one, The New First Kisss.

No longer Juliet, nor the same author of the original The New First Kiss has been seen and heard at least 289 times. I quote, “And doll, don’t wear it out.” Come check out The New First Kiss inside the love doctor, then you can listen to The New First Kiss soundtrack over and over again in New York City, and Mexico.

with simply

The New First Kisss

Which do you prefer of the above two? Maybe preference isn’t the issue, but I do think that, notwithstanding the droll appeal of the first, the second “The New First Kisss” is as effective even without additional text. I appreciate the visual effect of the extra “s” in “Kisss” and how such a modest mark can have such an immodestly resonant effect (what was that song written for Rhianna because she has a great way of sounding out those “s”es…?).

On the other hand, why did “The New Economy” remain only a title? I would have thought this alone could spawn a tome of writings. THE NEW POETICS was published in 2010, which means Timmons already would have observed the effect of the so-called “Great Recession.” To not sound out further (so to speak) the effects (and creation of) the Great Recession seems a missed opportunity—would it be because so much of the effects are not “new,” being just part of a general business cycle, albeit with more extreme peaks and depths than the current young generation are used to? I’m not really being critical here as being surprised—one would have thought that the limits of capitalism as presented by recent economic travails would befit the book’s subtext of, to quote Toscano, “eviscerate[ing] the already tripped-up taxonomies of culture-at-large.”

But perhaps “The New Economy” remains, except for its title, text-less because it is an old argument? When I said the title could spawn a tome of writings, it doesn’t contradict that, already, tomes indeed have been spawned. For Timmons to say more—would that just be (as I used to say as a newbie-economist in a prior life)—belligerently badgering that point of diminishing returns?

But at what point of linguistic degradation do we stop talking about matters of import anyway? I sense myself starting to blather ... but take this as a compliment to THE NEW POETICS -- how it makes you think until your brain hurts.

In any event, it’s more than time at this point to note where Timmons does do well with certain writings comprised of more than just the title. I appreciate, for one, “The New Emotion” which opens with

The New Emotion is a collection of movement; Automatic Mechanical Self-Winding Movement. The key concept of The New Emotion is a multimodal presentation by a lifelike agent of emotion expression. The computing industry of the 19890s enabled significantly higher image quality, boosting diagnostic accuracy with less radiation exposure, giving us The New Emotion. Both formats were sanctioned by the child-rearing theories of the day in which the father was admired for displaying The New Emotion while still remaining a function of The New Emotions.

Now, I happened to read this book shortly after the heralded bout on the TV show “Jeopardy” between an IBM supercomputer named Watson and the quiz show’s greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson won. I didn’t see the shows, but I recall being struck (charmed!) by one coverage of the match which claimed that Watson was most moving when he seemed uncertain.

That a machine comes off as affecting when it’s uncertain—surely that’s some sort of “new emotion,” I think, before I start pondering—was that an accurate observation? Was the effect in the observer versus the actual machine behavior?

Another favorite which presented text after its title is “The New Rejection Letter,” to wit

…with this being the email age, not responding to your email is The New Rejection Letter.

Yes! I remember when I first realized this phenomenon—I wrote a poem about it entitled “How Cyberspace Lost Midnight” which contains the line, “Emily Post is dead within the internet.” Well, wait a minute—I wrote that poem last century and it was published in a book, Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole (Marsh Hawk Press), that was released in 1998. Is this “New Rejection Letter” really new?

Which all finally leads me to a thought I had after finishing the book. “New” has such baggage, as Toscano points out in his Introduction (“Merely blurt ‘the new’ and watch the popcorn fly…”). Perhaps Timmons should have critiqued the “new” by changing all the references of “new” to “old”?

What would be the difference, say, between

The New Ideal Reading Experience

There is no match for….
The New Ideal Reading Experience.

and

The Old Ideal Reading Experience

There is no match for….
The Old Ideal Reading Experience.

Wouldn’t the critique remain the same, or sufficiently similar? Wouldn’t either version beg the questions, What is New? What is Old? as well as, last but not least, Who determines the Judgment? Who are doing the judging and who are being judged?

I am grateful to Mathew Timmons for writing a book that asks questions, then spurs the reader to ask more.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed or generated responses by Joey Madia in The New Mystics HERE; Allen Bramhall over HERE; by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE; by Leny Strobel over HERE; and by Jean Vengua over HERE and HERE. Her THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I is reviewed by Edric Mesmer in Yellow Field and reprinted HERE. Her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 is reviewed by Arpine Konyalian Grenier over HERE. Allen Bramhall also reviews the "Hay(na)ku for Haiti" series over HERE. If the latter two get you curious, please note that participating in this fundraiser for Haiti is supported by Marsh Hawk Press, publisher of THE THORN ROSARY: if you order at least $15 worth of booklets, you will receive a copy of THE THORN ROSARY which is priced retail at $19.95; this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

2 BOOKS by RON PADGETT

2011-03-31T22:40:00.001-07:00

CALEB PUCKETT Reviews

How to Be Perfect by Ron Padgett
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2007)

and

How Long by Ron Padgett
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2011)

Ron Padgett’s recent offerings, How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007) and How Long (Coffee House Press, 2011), are at once elegiac and playful negotiations of the demands of day-to-day life and the metaphysical longings of a lifetime. Padgett’s choice to use “how” in both titles is revealing, for it points to the intensive introspection that underpins much of his latest poetry. While How to be Perfect is an incomplete statement, How Long is an incomplete question. Readers may ask the poet, “How to perfect what? How long until what happens?” and expect direct answers—maybe even truths. They may wait around awhile before realizing that, for Padgett, play is the thing.

In both works, Padgett’s destination and the time it takes to reach it are subjected to well-staged disruptions. In a flash, the poet-trickster unmoors us in a sea full of strange creatures, scrambles our bearings and lauds some fair land (Was it the Garden of Eden or Hidden Valley?) that few have held on long enough to see. We have the love-child of Socrates and James Dean playing the captain and doubling as mutinous shipmate for a few dollars more. We are asked to think and rethink, and yet we are asked to enjoy and bring joy. We are left a bit woozy but somehow wiser as we emerge from the strobe-lit tunnel of Padgett’s theme park ride where history plays itself out among automatons posing as rum-soaked pirates. “And what exactly is the theme of this motley theme park?” we might ask as we unbuckle ourselves and shuffle into the confectionary-coated sunlight. It is “how”—how to discover and cultivate decency in a realm of staggering artifice and inhumanity. It is “how”—how to adequately respond to difficult personal experiences on a quest for two life-sustaining values: compassion and beauty.

How to be Perfect finds the elder statesman of the New York School cycling through wonder, tenderness, melancholy, and righteous anger as he meditates on the nature of transience and begins to “mark time” in his old age (74). Indeed, Padgett writes early on that “Death throws everything/ into high relief” and proceeds to show his readers, line by line, the “how” of cultivating human perfection—which is to say, some semblance of virtue—under inimical circumstances (20). However arch Padgett’s sense of perfection may appear, one cannot question the sincerity of his insistence on seeking beauty over truth—messy delights over austere verities—especially with regard to sustaining rightness in our relationships. Throughout How to be Perfect, the poet returns to this idea, stressing meaningful living in a manner that is characteristically quirky, arresting and seemingly effortless. The title poem, with its mixture of capricious, entertaining and yet sobering advice, succeeds in making suggestions for readers without sinking into pedantry. Like some latter-day Benjamin Franklin on a sugar high, Padgett lists ways for readers to enhance their lives:

Live with an animal.

Do not spend too much time with large groups of people.

If you need help, ask for it.

Cultivate good posture until it becomes natural.

If someone murders your child, get a shotgun and blow his
head off.
………………………………………………………………..

Expect society to be defective. Then weep when you find that it
is far more defective than you imagined.

When you borrow something, return it in an even better
condition
………………………………………………………………..

Keep your childish side alive. (24 and 27)

Published four years later, Padgett’s How Long may be seen in many respects as a companion volume to How to be Perfect. Padgett now explicitly asks “how” instead of telling “how,” juxtaposing the voice of a stoical old man with that of an impulsive youth. Padgett’s shifts in voice, phrase, image, and thought provide readers with off-kilter musings on memory, mortality and the value of seemingly ordinary moments with friends and family. Many of Padgett’s more intimate pieces would even appear to affirm Wordsworth’s well-known assertion that “The Child is the father of Man.” Padgett’s apparent affirmation, though, is by no means total, for totalization would lead to a forced and altogether false reprieve in a world of unending “how.” He is neither naïve nor willfully ignorant about the fragility of intimacy, the tyranny of nostalgia, the limitations of personal experience as a means of knowing, and the precariousness of 21st century America. In fact, the poet feels rather cynical at times, arguing that poetry, too, cannot but fail in the face of that overwhelming question and its attendant postmodern qualifications. In the title poem, he writes:

Do you mind me going on like this?
You want something else, right?
Perhaps you want what you think poetry should give you,
but poetry doesn’t give anyone anything,
it simply puts the syllables on the table
and lets you rearrange them in your head,
which you can do unless your head is a square
the size of a tabletop. (51)

While Padgett makes it clear throughout the work that he wishes to welcome experience, to seek out the freeing receptiveness of his youth, he cannot deny that age has rendered him at best “an open parenthesis” (82). Self-awareness of personal and artistic limitations complicate Padgett’s struggle for sure footing, and his fitful search for a window still open to some species of peace or even transcendence—that answer to the old blues refrain, “How long?” While Padgett is too comfortable with ambiguity to fall into a Prufrock-like psychic morass, like Prufrock he entertains the question of “how” and contemplates acquiescing to the machinations of Fate over the fog of his teacup. Fortunately, however, these melancholic and occasionally cantankerous twilight dilemmas are mitigated by self-possession and a freewheeling sense of humor that “keep[s] a ball of laughter inside that Hunh”—that “how” of living well in the face of outrageous fortune and finitude (58).

*****

Like Ron Padgett, Caleb Puckett used to live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Unlike Ron Padgett, though, Puckett’s northeasterly movement landed him in Kansas. Puckett’s newest prose collection, Market Street Exit, was recently released by Otoliths. Otoliths also published his previous prose collection, Tales from the Hinterland, in 2008.

CUNTIONARY / REPENT AT YOUR LEISURE ... by BENJAMIN PEREZ

2011-03-31T22:39:00.001-07:00

KIMBERLY WINE Reviews

Cuntionary / Repent at Your Leisure (or The Folklore of Hell) by Benjamin Perez
(BlazeVOX Books, Buffalo, N.Y., 2010)

Reclaiming Cunt

Benjamin Perez’s bi-textual “ur-cunt,” Cuntionary / Repent at your Leisure (or The Folklore of Hell), is a femanifesto on PCP. The thin volume, a generically transgressive mash-up of lexicography (at times reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devils Dictionary), folk tales, and poetry, provides a historiography of the cultural boundaries of biblical language and examines the paradox of religious belief in a post-Enlightenment Western culture with an intensity that almost defies this reviewer’s power to adequately describe. Impossible to generically define, it is both a treatise on language and a poetic plea for all of us to more closely [re]examine the complicated relationships between language, thought, power, and knowledge. The text begins with a warning for the reader that demands she question any and all received knowledge:

Scholars know very little about the author of Repent, but they do know three things: 1) the author was a low-ranking angel, a member of the order of cherubim (one of those adorably chubby, rosy, literally sexless—and winged—tots one finds dawdling about the clouds of Heaven, both actual as well as in gaudy paintings); 2) the author was an eyewitness of, but not a direct participant in, the first war in—and for—Heaven, as well as the subsequent Fall of Lucifer, that is, God’s casting of him and his throng of rebel angels to Hell (although not an overt member of the rebellion, scholars believe the author held deep sympathies for the rebels, and was punished accordingly); and 3) the text itself is the oldest known example of pre-Babelic writing, and is the closest scholars have to an actual example of Edenic—or Adamic—writing (alas, the original text is lost, so they are forced to rely upon an ancient bi-textual translation from the proto- Hebraic). Although scholars know very little about the author of Repent, this has not stopped them from creating elaborate—and competing— schools of interpretation. (1)

At its core, Cuntionary is a fragmented poetic tapestry threaded through with an unrepentant and torrential indictment of Abrahamic religious doctrine for its conceptual contribution to the lapsarian status of women in the Western world. The lexicon of “cunt” is filled with retold fairytales, a reconstructed mythology of the war in heaven (which is itself a powerful metaphor), a contextual analysis of western philosophy, and a Barthesian reclamation of the power of the word to define the world:

Cunt is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated “stuff” simply enriching the reservoir of nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel structures and processes
— M. De L., A Thousand Years of Nonlinear Cunt (3)

In what can only be described as a direct refusal of Western traditional cultural structures and beliefs, Perez challenges modern Western notions of a rationally ordered universe that can be described and narrated through logical discourse. Through the fragmentary narrative style, Perez [re]imagines a possible future outside of traditional cultural constructs. As these competing narratives vie for the reader’s attention on the page, Perez illuminates the holes in the tapestry of “Master Narrative” and instead provides a trangressive mash-up of “meta-narratives” designed to question our Western cultural acceptance of “God as supreme author” of the world. Reminiscent of Luther’s theses, the so-called “Great Notice” was composed in secrecy and simply appeared one day “tacked or nailed” to every church, bank, and city hall (1). The text posits a revolutionary philosophical vision that promises to be as powerful and controversial as the Protestant Reformation.

Like his first publication, The Evil Queen: A Pornolexicology, “Cuntionary” is both blasphemous and unapologetic in its rhetorical interrogation of religious conviction and unexamined acceptance of a “Master Narrative” that entitles white-male-privilege at the expense of all others. In a stanza of poetry entitled “SPITEFUL FATHER” Perez declares:

Spiteful Father sat on a gale
Spiteful Father threw down a veil
All of Her daughters and even Her Son
Couldn't free Mother from
bondage spite-spun (5)

Perez’s Cuntionary openly challenges the assumptions of Western religious indoctrination and misogyny while also explicitly examining the cultural baggage encapsulated within a Madonna/Whore mythos:
You have this image of yourself in a wedding dress sewn entirely of hymens—little ovals stitched together— faintly pink and transparent, like cherry petals, and vibrating with miniature howls—some of pleasure, some of pain, some of disappointment—and when you move there's the delicate sound of membranes tearing (5)

Throughout the text Perez entreats his readers to question their own ideological contributions to the cycle of sexual repression and silent complicity in legitimating violence against women. This text is not for the faint of heart; however, it is recommended for anyone who is prepared to fearlessly deconstruct her own ideological assumptions about the way language influences the construction of the world around us.

*****

Kimberly Wine is an academic writer who reads way too much Roland Barthes, loves generic transgression, experimental poetry, and avant-garde visual art that engages and interrogates the metaphoric borders of self and other in order to rethink conceptions of and the consequent definitions of identity, literary merit, and cultural value.

THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU PROJECT Curated by IVY ALVAREZ, JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN, ERNESTO PRIEGO & EILEEN TABIOS

2011-03-31T22:39:00.000-07:00

NICHOLAS T. SPATAFORA Reviews

The Chained Hay(na)ku Project Curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego and Eileen Tabios
(Meritage Press and xPress(ed), San Francisco & St. Helena as well as Puhos, Finland, 2010)

The Word: An Analysis of The Chained Hay(na)ku Project

“Too much knowledge had hindered him.”
Herman Hesse

Inspirational speaker Bo Lozoff once stated that the spiritual seeker tends to take an educational approach into her spiritual development, which has the opposite, adverse effect of obstructing her path rather than paving it. Curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego and Eileen Tabios, The Chained Hay(na)ku Project is the collaborative effort of sixty poets and artists, imparting elemental vehicles such as quietude and stillness of the mind and body for tapping into one’s inner Self as well as the hindrances, notably, the written and spoken word, that impede transcendence. Metaphorical words and phrases are succinctly and eloquently employed, illustrating these provisions and encumbrances. Cultural theologies and philosophies not necessarily mutually exclusive, the lyrics can be appreciated by both Westerners and Easterners alike.

Eastern theology parables one’s surface existence to a mere part in a play, the stage providing properties that the misinformed ego misinterprets as reality. “All the world’s a stage”; thus, the same holds true of our individual misguided purposes in life, symbolically depicted as “book[s]” from whose unreality the ordinary mind cannot transcend:

I’ve
fallen I’ve
fallen into the

book
I’ve fallen
into the book

of
my body.
[…] I can’t get

up.
(Alvarez et al., “Four Skin Confessions,” pt. 1a. st. 17. lines 1-3 - 1a. 20. 1)

Repetition of “I’ve fallen” emphasizes the figurative plunge befalling us who lose touch with the “Great Silent Calm” (1a. 2. 3), to wit, universal mind or the blissful true nature of spiritual realization (1a. 2. 3). Thus, the playwright cannot embrace universality with a script laced with “misspelled” “letters” (1a. 38. 3).

“I read books / looking for You” (1a. 35. 1-3). The speakers block case the Y in “You,” indicating reference to a Higher Power. This Higher Source, however, cannot be accessed through theological or philosophical text but by paradoxically liberating one’s Self from the quagmire of literary complexity that only serves to obscure it. Who are we in the absence of our surface identities? It is only through transcendence of the ego that one’s true nature becomes apparent whether it is “know[ing] thyself” or others, antithetically versed in ‘Broken Speech” and “Fractures,” two of a series of chain poems by Jean Vengua, Michael Fink and Margo Ponce:

[I]

know you

but do i

really

know you?
(lines 1-5)

In Eastern philosophy the ego is personified as an impostor: “Another self / translates another truth” (Breslin, Dutta, and Morris, “Transplant,” lines 32-33). Our ego-manifested need for “painted cakes” (Ram Dass), such as identity, recognition and acquisition, are no more valid than the impostors who “provide” them: “the / sweet caress / of a Judas” (Duthie, Carte, and Jettplace, “Violets Are Blue,” lines 10-12). Who is it that seeks an identity, a who? Earthly necessities? Knowledge? “[W]ho / [c]ares who” recognizes, “[loves]” and “protects” the imposturous ego we have spawned over the course of a lifetime—Majena Mafe, Natasha Narain and Mela Fitzgibbons literally and figuratively employ textual obscurity and ambiguity to deter the reader from paradoxically obstructing his “vision” through earnest analysis of the printed word, literarily exemplary of the sage who enigmatically deters the student from ideological acquisition and analysis, more intellectual turbulence that the mind must transcend (lines 1-3). Thus it is we who are actually “digest[ed]” by “[b]ooks,” “bodies” and “words” (Alvarez et al., pt. 1b. st. 13. lines 1-3).

Inordinate philosophical scholarship and discourse are but additional impediments to true spiritual enlightenment, the lyricists repetitively emphasizing quietude: “Nothing / is said… // [n]othing is / said…” (2. 9. 2-3 - 2. 10. 2-3). Words are ultimately impotent, as Amy Bernier’s, Bloomberg-Rissman’s and Priego’s “The things words” graphically-textually reveals.

“All of mankind’s struggles stem from being unable to sit still and quiet in a room alone” (Pascal), thus equally distracting is idle, senseless chatter, which correspondingly makes opaque one’s inner transparency:

[W]atch smoke rise

off
the tongue,
words like snakes.

…………………..

No
golden age,
no smoky page.
(Alvarez et al., “Four Skin Confessions,” pt. 2. st. 10. line 3 – 2. 11. 1-3, 2. 13. 1-3)

Veritable unity or cessation of duality is quintessential in experiencing one’s Higher Source. Employing seemingly endless day-to-day occurrences, it has been implied in Jeff Harrison’s “Green, and Still, the Three Graces” and Holly Anderson’s “*Marine Acid Air*” that words and distractions in fact “eclipse” (pt. 2/3x3. st. 8. line 2) transcendence (48-58; 37-44). This is symbolically synonymous to “[a] / white page / full of sand” (Bloomberg-Rissman and Priego, lines 1-3). The body does indeed “judge[ ]” better than the mind,” and transcending the ego’s metacognitive tendency can inversely be attained not through oral and written verbiage but through physical embracement of “[m]usic, images / [and] loveable skin” (Alvarez et al., “Four Skin Confessions,” pt. 2. st. 18. lines 2-3). Who has not experienced a profound and astounding falling out of the body from a symphonic composition, natural wonder, spiritual healing or deep meditation (2. 19. 1-3)?

“Breathe / through anything / and everything thrown // at you…” (4. 28. 1-3 – 4. 29. 1): a still mind free of continuous distractive thoughts and emotions lends itself to controlled, harmonious responses to adverse exterior stimuli, mitigating one’s inclination toward uncontrolled, negative and destructive emotional or physical reaction to such antagonism. We respond with poise, that is, “grace inside grief” (Anderson, Beasley-Baker, and Burns, “*Marine Acid Air*,” pt. 1/3x3. st. 4. line 3). “Thoughts pollute [the] mind” (Duhamel et al., “Visiting Therapist,” lines 26-27). John Bloomberg-Rissman’s “And Then” graphically depicts the emotional torment with which the human psyche is compelled to endure in everyday life from the inexorable verbosity to which it is subjected.

Verbal and literary locutions are, conversely, distractions to the fundamental and simple principles of realizing inner Self. The body is veritable authority over the mind, which Eastern philosophy likens to a “monkey,” unceasingly distracted and forever in motion. The collaborative insights of the writers who contributed to Ivy Alvarez’s, John Bloomberg-Rissman’s, Ernesto Priego’s and Eileen Tabios’ The Chained Hay(na)ku Project provide a gentle reminder of the importance of inner and outer cessation of words and the moment-to-moment path of tranquility.

++++++++++

Works Cited

Alvarez, Ivy, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego, and Eileen R. Tabios, curators. The Chained Hay(na)ku Project. San Francisco: Meritage Press, 2010. Print.

---. “Four Skin Confessions.” Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 5-29. Print.

Anderson, Holly, Caroline Beasley-Baker, and Lisa B. Burns. “*Marine Acid Air*.” Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 37-44. Print.

Bernier, Amy, illus. “The things words.” By John Bloomberg-Rissman (sampling and layout by Ernesto Priego). Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 96. Print.

Bloomberg-Rissman, Sam, illus. “A white page.” By Ernesto Priego and John Bloomberg-Rissman (sampling and layout by Ernesto Priego). Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 59. Print.

Breslin, Liz, Kunal Dutta, and Lucy Morris. “Transplant.” Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 94. Print.

Castillo, Horacio, illus. “And then….” By John Bloomberg-Rissman (sampling and layout by Ernesto Priego). Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 36. Print.

Duhamel, Denise, Ariana Mason, Maya Mason, Thomas Fink, Burt Kimelman, Molly Diablo Mason, and Sandy McIntosh. “Visiting Therapist.” Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 31-33. Print.

Duthie, Peg, Donna Carter, and Neal Jettplace. “Violets Are Blue.” Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 76. Print.

Harrison, Jeff, Allen Bramhall, and Anny Ballardini. “Green, and Still, the Three Graces.” Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 48-58. Print.

Mafe, Majena, Natasha Narain, and Mela Fitzgibbon. ”Who / cares who.” Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 75. Print.

Vengua, Jean, Michael Fink, and Margo Ponce. “Broken Speech” (from “Daisy Chain Poems”). Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 68-74. Print.

---. “Fractures” (from “Daisy Chain Poems”). Alvarez, Bloomberg-Rissman, Priego, and Tabios 68-74. Print.

*****

Nicholas T. Spatafora is an educator at Joseph Pulitzer Intermediate School in Jackson Heights, Queens and an English Professor at the City University of New York. He holds two graduate degrees from Hunter College in New York City and has enjoyed a successful career in education spanning twenty five years. Contemplating a life in Catholic ministry, he attended Cathedral Preparatory Seminary in New York. He is a member of the Tao Society in Tai Pei, and prior affiliations include the Religious Society of Friends and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. Spatafora is the author of Hurt, the feature article “Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha: A Fictional Account of the Life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha,” “A Review of Jack Lynch’s Manhattan Man and Other Poems,” “Challenging Perspectives: A Review of Thomas Fink’s & Maya Diablo Mason’s AutopsyTurvy,” “Kingdom by the Harbor” and “Allen Bramhall’s Days Poem: A Critical Analysis of a Dying Art,” featured in Eileen Tabios’s Galatea Resurrects. Spatafora and his wife Hsiaochen (Judy) reside in Flushing, New York.

THIS TIME WE ARE BOTH by CLARK COOLIDGE

2011-03-31T22:38:00.000-07:00

ANDREW DURBIN Reviews

This Time We Are Both by Clark Coolidge
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2010)

Clark Coolidge’s This Time We Are Both is “a result” of his first visit to the Soviet Union. The poem, Coolidge writes in an opening note, “follows the itinerary of the Rova Saxophone Quartet tour of November 1989: Leningrad, Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Tartu, and Moscow.” While the poem was written in the substantial period of The Crystal Text and At Egypt, it went unpublished for nearly twenty years. This will seem surprising to a number of its readers, as it is certainly as good as the other work of that time. It isn’t very clear as to why Coolidge kept the poem unpublished for so long, but I am thankful that it has finally been published.

The poem is divided into sixteen sections, each more or less the same length, with exception to one or two rather short ones. The poem is typical of Coolidge, as it exploits collage technique to subvert, undermine, elide, collate, and transform the various meanings of phrases and sentence units. The coherency of any syntactical unit is usually limited to a line, creating a ‘falling’ effect for the reader as she moves through the poem:

a shattered sugar
blades in the dark near time
tastes more than dark but lines
then not to rest

Both “Blades” and “tastes” can function as either a noun or a verb, and in that syntactical nexus, the potential range of readings available to a reader seem endless to me. This has always been one of the strongest aspects of Coolidge’s work—and I think he does it better than many of his contemporaries. Are there shattered sugar blades in the dark? Or does shattered sugar blade in the dark? Does time taste more than the dark? Or are tastes more than the dark? In any case, the poem is ‘open’ to the practices and biases of any given reader that inevitably “score for echo to agglomerate” into their understanding of the text. Coolidge here, as in his other work, rejects his own authority in order to make a text that isn’t intended to be ‘solved’ but rather operates as a site for potential meaning(s) not contingent on a pre-determined set of authorial possibilities. This ‘openness’ is a hallmark of Language writing. Interestingly, this hallmark—the absence of authority, of criteria by which an interpretation can be judged—becomes enormously problematic in the poem.

The political-historical context of the poem is important to keep in mind. This Time We Are Both is an artifact of the last days of the Soviet Union, written by an American poet traveling with musicians in a country that has been more or less closed (or ‘dark’) to them since the end of the Second World War. While the thaw in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union was more or less complete, and several other Language writers had already participated in a cultural exchange program in the 1980s, the extent to which the intricacies of Soviet culture was unknown and new to Coolidge must have been tremendous. I think this goes some way to explaining the poem’s preoccupation with light imagery, especially the play of shadows, and what light reveals or further obscures. The poem begins with light entering into a place, displacing a busy dark. Here is the opening stanza:

Dark hands pass
dark with no silence
lights in the smoke
hands that start, that light
pass the particles, link penetrations
to an amphitheater smell, that each corner well
treat the carriers, they small, they dark in the wind
the mind rose, the cable hands, a drench
of light smalls, close, a building of hair entire
how it dips in the time to see, we hear
they go forwards past
the inclination
darkening corners to form

The litany of sense perceptions of what emerges from—or remains in—the dark must be somewhat close to the experience of entering the daily life of a culture more or less unknown—or, rather, heavily distorted—until quite recently. This also resembles my own bewilderment when I started to read the poem: confusion by the content, uncertain of the form, nevertheless certain of its ‘likeness’ to what I’d read before.

In an isolated geography, Coolidge seems to locate and break off a vocabulary of competing senses of sameness and otherness. In section ten he writes:

where the name of a peace is the same as the world
they have signed to each other and not sent cables
the word has bubbles contains others

Later in that same section Coolidge writes about a ‘coded’ cultural milieu that resists understanding on the part of an outsider—or, for that matter, a reader:

The secrets are
be tides, masts in twist and noisy tents
decided things, all furled across the rest we have to go
an oath, and then more sun, then sure
if you are reading thinking this a code, it is
but only to be read up into further codes
is said, there is an ultimate outer
precariousmost position . . .

The second person address seems to constitute a double image of both the reader and the cultural other. In this sense, This Time We Are Both acts as both a visitor’s account of the Soviet Union and as the Soviet Union itself. The difficulty of ‘understanding’ a direct or indirect meaning in the poem recapitulates the difficulty one must have felt in encountering the collapsing U.S.S.R. Even the title implies that the social binary of the familiar and the other isn’t static, that while “this time” we are familiar, next time we might not. In recounting his first trip, Coolidge said in an interview in Jacket:

That year was right on the edge of the Soviet Union disintegrating — it was really quite a time to be there. I remember there was a jazz festival in Leningrad, and I'll never forget seeing a band of maybe 13-year-old kids playing like the Basie band! You know, from Georgia, or somewhere to the south, in Russia. And they were wonderful! They had this incredible guy who was their teacher who was just leaping up and down leading them, it just brought tears to your eyes. The way that music has spread really around the world . . . and good players, drummers with good time and everything, which wasn't always true back in the fifties.

Seeing a jazz festival in the Soviet Union, which had previously banned the music, must have fully-embodied a competing sense of familiarity and strangeness that forms the basis of Coolidge’s poetics.

The form of the poem creates a kind of scientific framework in which words play a quasi-metonymical game, simulating a whole as much as representing it. The relationship between the part and the whole, especially the underlying patterning that occurs, is one of the central preoccupations of the poem. Early on, Coolidge writes, “where we have been, some, particle in the side room to launch / is spoken in jungles as particular physics.” These “jungles” of particulars seems to me a perfect image of the poem itself: words form loose constellations in order to ‘represent’ an experience of the unknown, to describe the whole (Russia) to which they belong. In turn, lineation provides a framework in which these jungles are organized, creating an enormous amount of tension as to where a reader can locate the ‘experience’ of Russia: “Do we in fact have nowhere? it is us in the lines.” And for Coolidge, these linguistic physics are uniquely potent in Russia:

through to the Russian Territories where bodies
could mold themselves in an atmosphere of their own words
sigh and mold themselves to
my mouthpiece speaking

It is almost as though Russia wrote the poem for him.

For Coolidge these self-writing particulars shaped into lines create a kind of science or “strange math” perhaps analogous to fractals. The poem, in this formulation, works as a chain of self-similar parts that, divided from the whole, nevertheless remain representative of that whole. Toward the end of the poem, Coolidge writes, “Fractal field by fractal estuary, a totally / unfolded geometry,” calling our attention to a landscape’s endless divisions that cannot make anything but that landscape, however small (or seemingly separate) the new part may be. But to my mind, the central tension of this poem—and one that Coolidge constantly exploits—is that this kind of math doesn’t provide an algorithm for the realities of experience, that, rather, parts do differ from the whole in nations, that difference sets in despite the best efforts, political or not, to erase it. What Coolidge’s poem describes, and ultimately problematizes, is the degree to which an unknown might seem monolithic to an uneducated eye, even if that unknown has been reduced to its parts. This for me is the most interesting aspect of the poem. Here is one moment when the outsider’s position seems especially problematic—and tense:

Salts assumptions of our looniness to the grain
Moscow will have windows and a border of dust
included in the code of thoughts, will it predate dreams?
what lurks included in the code of balsa, low intensity loaves?
thought in dull whine then under dark bulb bus aisle
recalling each syllable in Lush Life as the juice peters out
through the road its socket
why where we in love with those lamps? as if in such a turning
all our words went landed and duly matched, a hard habit to be
simple
to be single, to bring home the notches from trees

The assumptions one makes about its place and its realities alternate throughout the passage: assumptions, Moscow’s architectural realities; questions of codes, a dull whine of a bus. The problem of codes, which occurs throughout the poem, and what to make of them (“will it predate dreams?”) is particularly poignant in a poem so concerned with its writer’s experience of a place. Did Russia really write the poem, or did, as Coolidge seems to suspect, the words land and match their objects in a convenient projection? At stake is the integrity of the poem as a document of travel. Was the placed ‘decoded,’ or was an entirely new, private code written over it? Coolidge doesn’t seem to have much of an answer, but it seems that the poem settles somewhat comfortably in a Keatsian doubt, confident of itself as a poem, if not as an objective account:

Start again? I don’t remember where we were

A dust the nicer makes

Or is it more nuclear to make a mistake?

Mark it down by law
trace it to the point it pales

They want things to be
people to be
you

Have all kinds of
my life, drift pencil

Coolidge is not content to believe in his experience of Russia as ‘authentic’ in the sense that it resembles that of a Russian. The degree to which one’s position as an outsider limits one’s knowing a new or foreign place is more or less unknowable in This Time We Are Both. In any case, Coolidge seems to enter an uneasy peace by the end of the poem, maintaining that, while his experience of Russia might not have been Russian, it was certainly his.

*****

Andrew Durbin's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Otoliths, Washington Square, Antennae, and NAP. He lives in New York and can be reached at ascottdurbin@gmail.com.

2 BOOKS by WILLIAM CORBETT

2011-03-31T22:35:00.000-07:00

T.C. MARSHALL Reviews

Opening Day by William Corbett
(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, 2008)

and

The Whalen Poem by William Corbett
(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, 2011)

It is an honor as opening day approaches once again to respond to William Corbett’s 2008 book Opening Day, full of tight poems from this century’s first half-decade, and his newly published book-length poem from 2007, The Whalen Poem (2011). Both are from the folks at Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn who seem to have stepped in where Zoland was for a long while, into the role of making sure we get Bill Corbett’s books. I have always been happy to have them. In my excitement, I’m going to give myself a little permission to intrude here with fragments of my own lived experience of more than just the poems.

This is poetry as an art of showing how living with a sense of response to each thing in its moment might look. It solves the Ashberyan dilemma by putting anything (not everything) in and leaving out what would keep what’s in there from coming across. It is, in its way, off-hand art with a steady hand that moves lightning-sketch-like over the pages and leaves you with something meanwhile. In Opening Day we have a fine display of the line-by-line technique that I’ve seen too few using fully since Ted Berrigan stopped production. It is especially fine in how the lines do have enjambments of sense and grammar but are each units unto themselves in the build-up. That is the firm hand of this off-hand technique. Not every poem in this book is his best work; heck, the Red Sox lose a few too. However, there are many fine passages.

These are poems of maturity. I’m not going to say any crap about fine wines; they are vodka sharp or beer fresh, but they reflect time spent and paid for.

Yes, time will
darken all we know, all we think we know.
Why is this a comfort? The outdoors in?
As if this splendid day were the under,
the other side of some filth, the truth
we know to be there and are relieved
to face, no hand raised in defense. (25)

…

The trick is to shake off
what we know and what we think
we know, to be not merely right,
to know what to let slide, to encourage
the love in others of what we love
so that what we love well remains
revived for us, alive in them. (29)

These are pieces of a long poem called “Backandforth” where he implores us, “Imagine this as a letter / in stanzas” (35) and reveals another angle on the poetics of WCW, whose friend EP cannot be missed in that passage above. The fact that “what thou lov’st well remains” and “the rest is dross” is true of anyone’s life, and here it is expressed.

I too am a deep-hearted baseball fan and lover of the Red Sox though from an odd distance: I went to the high school in San Diego that spawned Ted Williams (the other Williams here); I tell a story from those days of being slammed up against the trophy case holding Ted’s trophies when Commander Kosky didn’t like my haircut or the fact that I “forgot” to rise for the presentation of the colors one day during the Viet Nam war. This kind of memory and imagery is greatly what Corbett is working with in this book and on many pages of The Whalen Poem. That and how to get it all down “instanter” (as Olson did say) in tensely active wording. “Trotting Cucumbers” works with a case of the trots while job-hunting as a young man, remembered now sitting on the same bench four decades later. “Overtown, you travel there” works from the use of the term “Overtown” in a Michael Connelly Harry Bosch novel Corbett has opened in a bar and how he flashes to the “Overtown” in the town formerly known as East Mauch Chunk, PA, where his grandparents picked up the mail and went to the movies. Gratuitous moments where memory lights up and sneaks in or out, taking us with it into an enlargement of time.

Speaking of greater ruins in the book’s last poem “Cue,” written while editing Jimmy Schuyler’s letters, Corbett admits gladly

Imagine the highway desolate,
A ruin, treasured like a Roman viaduct.
I can’t. Or not convincingly in words.
I leave that and much else
To my more imaginative kind.
I write about what I see
And hear, what’s right in front
And disappearing fast behind me.
…
I write to cast a net of words
To catch more than I saw,
To surprise myself because
Without that surprise
It’s not worth writing down
In the first place. (132)

When he asks in the Overtown poem “Where’s this heading? Nostalgia?” and then answers blithely “Yes,” he moves in the next lines through that Connelly connection to Miles Davis and his “fake Spain” as an image of the classic tone that bridges artifice and artfulness. And Corbett simply expands upon that, suspending judgment, to include the change of name intended to bring business (through Jim Thorpe’s fame) and the way it has evolved into “a second-home town” for those who could afford to buy “the homes / of laid-off railroad men” and commute to NY. There’s a lot more than nostalgia here.

In the process of helping to edit Philip Whalen’s Collected, Corbett came up with another poem of memory association and heart-sharp imagery. The Whalen Poem seems a little uneven in its way, but it nicely hangs on the many ways it plays off of Phil Whalen strategies and occasionally drawing him in. The strategies seem to let Bill Corbett take some bigger loops here, and the bits of PW are not so much hooks he depends on as bright detritus in the greater flow. My favorite is an anecdotal reference to PW’s waning years and the near-blindness that caused him to have to put his nose to the page in order to read or even write his name. A friend

Called on Philip Whalen
unannounced, annoying
The master who saw him
Anyway. Whalen’s sight had
All but gone. He told Dan
He missed reading Jane
Austen another time.
At some point Whalen
Rose clumsily, stepped
In his wastebasket
And shook it all about. (31-32)

The master “hisself” is not the focal point of much of the poem and certainly not masterful here, though masterfully portrayed in an image he would have enjoyed. He is very present when Corbett borrows from Whalen’s “October First” (Collected pp. 675-678) to make lists as compositions (TWP pp. 46-48). Even more so on pages 34-35 when Corbett perfectly imitates the master’s way of bringing in a gone time through its proper names:

Home in the suburbs
Like no other
Bendix Zenith Fruit of the Loom
Pressure Cooker Blender Aspic
Adolph’s meat Tenderizer

And even adds the old F Troop joke:

Where the Fugawi?

Having grown up partly in that world, I see it composed in those words, but also because I know how Whalen did it with his world of The Dalles with early mid-twentieth century names. This is not nostalgia of an escapist kind. A world of memory as it presents itself is being composed here. Where

Barefoot Thelonious and Bruno
Run in the grass of memory (16).

There is also the pain of reaching the time when things have changed so much that you are wont to turn the catchphrase upside down to catch the moment:

Until memory no longer serves
The unexpected has come to pass (37).

Another classic Whalen move is to focus the line that pops into your head without its source. Pound wrote too about that, asserting that it was the very definition of culture when something was so ingrained that its source was left behind. Corbett takes from Whalen another take on this, emphasizing more the annoyance in not remembering which book. In one of two places where he uses this in The Whalen Poem, I had an out-of-Whalen experience in mis-reading a word and getting a better line from “The trail of the serpent is over all” as “the tail of the serpent” (16). Mis-memory and benign mis-quotation or jazzy re-representation of lines is a Whalen turn. Not knowing which book would lead the master to days spent thumbing too, and he put that in the writings. Corbett does it with the last bit of one of his lists:

20b. Can’t find Whalen “Fat shaving brush flower” line (48)

I couldn’t find it either. And then Corbett has it on the next page without answering the question:

Fat shaving brush flower

Right there
Where I wasn’t looking for it
Among all those naked ladies (49)

I laughed and sighed and wondered if it were in Highgrade among the doodles or even in one of Bill’s own peony poems. I went ahead and wrote my own poem beginning with that line, one about an artichoke heart “enarmored.” That’s the funny energy Corbett got too, and he used it certainly and well in The Whalen Poem. Opening Day probably has more variety to offer, even along the lines of what you can get from poets you love well. But both books practice the art of loving what words do and loving the world through that.

*****

T.C. Marshall is a beautiful curmudgeon living in the Santa Cruz Mountains, chasing the seasons as they come to him, book by book. He pays the bills, accepts gifts, and teaches. Friend him on FaceBook to converse and to find out more.

2 BOOKS by and edited by BRENDA IIJIMA

2011-03-31T22:30:00.000-07:00

HARRY THORNE Reviews

The Eco Language Reader edited by Brenda Iijima
(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and Nightboat Books, Brooklyn/Callicoon, NY, 2010)

and

If Not Metamorphic by Brenda Iijima
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2010)

As the parentheses that appear on the cover may suggest, The )((Eco (lang)(uage (Reader) is not interested in creating a predictable and staid academic niche. Instead of delineating an easily definable subject, the essays in Iijima’s collection disrupt and reconfigure the way we approach the categories of environment, nature, poetry and language. As Evelyn Reilly writes in her contribution, “in some ways ecopoetics is a correction, an amendment, a set of rejections” (Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux”).

The origin of the nineteen essays in The Eco Language Reader lies with a panel hosted by Iijima and Reilly as part of the Segue Reading Series in 2006. The writers in the collection responded to a prompt that asked, among other things, “How can poetry engage with a global ecosystem under duress?” Given the wideness of the remit, Iijima’s collection appropriately cuts across a multitude of concerns. Tracie Morris’ “Aurora Afro-Americana,” for example, collapses the distinction between eco-politics and racial politics through a reading of lyrics by Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Meanwhile, in “Thinking Ecology in Fragments,” Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands uses Walter Benjamin’s dialectical theories to read the landscape and history of Cape Breton Highlands National Park. There is even a photo essay by Julie Patton that uses painted children’s blocks to challenge the way we think about the linguistic representation of nature.

If there is a tentativeness to many of these essays, that is to their credit. Most of the writers here are not experts in the field of ecology, but poets and critics looking to open up new ways of thinking about language and environment. Although some of the essays work towards a definition of ecopoetics, these definitions create a self-reflective practice, not a closed set of arguments. As Jill Magi writes in her essay, “Ecopoetics and the Adversarial Consciousness,” “There may be no need for the word ecopoetics. I would define ecopoetics as a practice aware of the context of its own terminology.”

Iijima’s own contribution to the collection, the unusually titled, “Metamorphic Morphology (with gushing igneous interlude) Meeting in Language: P as in Poetry, Poetry Rhetorical in Terms of Eco,” mirrors the diverse nature of the book as a whole, as it moves across varied terrains making unexpected connections. Among other things, Iijima touches on the work of numerous poets including Jennifer Scappettone and CAConrad, examines the pesticide poisoning of our water, and challenges conventional understandings of disability. This interrelating of seemingly disparate subjects serves to complicate and deepen our understanding of the issues at hand. As such, her method stands in conscious opposition to an “economic imperialism” where “Being is converted into abstractions of zeros and ones.” Outside of the narrow economic world, Iijima asserts that there is a “teeming microlevel that hasn’t been reaped for profit,” a microlevel that poetry with its attention to “language opening and interrelating” is positioned to explore.

Iijima’s essay and The Eco Language Reader as a whole serve as an engaging and useful companion to the work of many contemporary poets, whose push to explore the interrelations and transformations of our many environments functions as a form of ecological investigation. Certainly, the diverse, disruptive and explorative aesthetic presented in the Reader is mirrored by Iijima’s own work, as evidenced by her new collection, If Not Metamorphic.

The extraordinary title piece of Iijima’s new book resists the temptations of lyrical ease and comfort by turning statements into questions (and sometimes questions into statements). The preponderance of question marks produces a disruptive reading experience, where the reader is not allowed to find a comforting rhythm:

A soft, green, beautiful mountain?

The strangling, like anger?

One nude war?                                     Kelp?

Illusionary?                         Encloses             the             neck?

                        Kelp?

There can’t be many poems that reference Kelp (a type of seaweed that is industrially harvested for its use in everything from ice-cream to shampoo) and that is partly why the question mark is so important. Iijima prevents the word from floating by, and asks us to stop and engage with it. We interrelate with Kelp, even if we don’t know it exists. Likewise, the question marks in Iijima’s poem invite us to participate in the poem and so remind us of our intertwined existence.

Elsewhere in Iijima’s collection, the mismatch between the world of “zeros and ones” and the “teeming microlevel” is made evident. In different parts of “Tertium Organum,” for example, environment is experienced as both the controlled office, “Self-aggrandizing grids and procedures/ Come into cubical for white light and carpet” and the organic intricacy of the wild, “So among the brook and hemlock outcroppings/ wildness hindered unhindered spiraling.” More often though, we encounter both worlds simultaneously in a collision of environments: “Spider dizzy with each cluster/How dense our politician eyes all natural obsolescence.”
In the final poem of her collection, “Panthering,” Iijima’s poetry achieves its maximum intensity, as can be seen by the opening lines:

Thrashing disability—
—Torn when edges
Remora mound where body—
| Went was covered
In grassy expanse
| Fangs
—Hail havoc
We exchanged feline brains—
—A twin incarnate coat
Cerebellum wished—
| Changed into globe
to spin worlds |

These lines have a ferocious energy, which is accentuated by the dashes, italics and vertical lines. The “Thrashing disability” is here not experienced as an impediment, but as a transformative force, what Iijima describes in her essay as the body asserting itself “in a burgeoning dynamical interplay along a spectrum of possible logics.” This is the “possible logic” of becoming another animal, of breaking the bounds of human encasement.

“Panthering” is a fitting ending to a collection of unusual synchronicities and dizzying transformations. If Not Metamorphic is as far from polite nature poetry as the Eco Language Reader is from a stale textbook on poetry and the environment. Both books renew the idea that ecology is connection and metamorphosis and convince us that poetry too can be ecological. As Iijima writes in her essay, “language is involved, so are you.”

*****

Harry Thorne's poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Chain, How2, The Indypendent, Octopus Magazine, and Textual Practice. His essay on Ted Berrigan's C Magazine can be found in Don't Ever Get Famous: Essays on New York Writing after the New York School edited by Daniel Kane and published by Dalkey Archive Press. He lives in Beacon, NY.

IF NOT METAMORPHIC by BRENDA IIJIMA

2011-03-31T22:25:00.000-07:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

If Not Metamorphic by Brenda Iijima
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2010)

Felix Guattari wrote in Chaosmosis that “The refoundation of politics will have to pass through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three ecologies – the environment, the socius and the psyche.” For Guattari “Production for the sake of production – the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies – leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relations to the world in a continuous fashion. The productive apparatuses of subjectivity can exist at the level of megapoles as easily as at the level of an individual’s language games. And to learn the intimate workings of this production, these ruptures of meaning that are auto-foundational of existence – poetry today might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined.” I’m reminded of Emerson, who wrote in Nature that “The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both.”

If Not Metamorphic collects four long poems (“If Not Metamorphic,” “Time Unions,” “Tertium Organum,” and “Panthering”), four long “eco-provocations” as Joan Retallack refers to them in her blurb, which I believe constitute in very real ways examples of the kind of productive apparatuses of subjectivity Guattari wrote of.

“If Not Metamorphic,” the opening title poem, lays the epistemological ground work of the volume. It is a text -- composed entirely of questions -- in which, I would argue, all three ecologies come into play. In his important essay, “The Poetry of Questions,” (http://jacketmagazine.com/34/fink-questions.shtml), Thomas Fink has explored how Iijima in“If Not Metamorphic” radically and eloquently employs “a variety of choices in syntax to ‘interrogate’ what it can be to ask a question. A number of her sentences that conclude with a question-mark otherwise appear to be declarative statements, and several sentences that have the syntax of questions end with a period.” Iijima herself, in an Author’s Statement, writes of this poem “Questions refer to the power of the state apparatus but also to interpersonal subjectivities: civic, imaginative, sensual and otherwise.” A taste:

Said?
The deep sea?            A deluge?
           Anticipation?
The ever-present     dancing     machines
           Lunge?
                      Threatened to kill you?
Designed by whom   Designed by whom
                                 Terrarium?
Departure it seems,          doesn’t it
                      By the roadside?
Threaten to kill   you?
                      Designed by whom
                      Departure it seems
                      Doesn’t it
A soft, green, beautiful mountain?
The strangling, like anger?
One nude war?            Kelp?
Illusionary?            Encloses the neck?
                                 Kelp?
A snake was circling?
Made virtual?
Made virtual by design?
Threatened            to            kill — design
Threatened to kill?
(page 3)

The second poem, “Time Unions.” is described by Iijima as a vortex within which “are autobiographical details of the year of my birth suspended in a column as well as whirling fragments of cultural detritus. These cultural facts are a sort of DNA sequence.” I’ve never read anything quite like this poem. So many registers are jiggered and jingling. It is a dizzy-making 25 page ride. It’s difficult pulling samples from a work like this. One can only really experience a vortex through total immersion. But here’s some sample stanzas:

Some foxy

plump future

plummeting

some curvature

horizon hellishness

sooty rain

can’t uncoil

from handmade

chagrin

Tao

tosses

boomerang

Controversial
                      air

controversial
                      water

controversial
                      tree

(page 43)

Iijima creates language environments, psychic rain forests, conceptual jungles.

The penultimate poem is called “Tertium Organum.” Iijima writes that “Ecological bellwethers and the fault lines of the social are the friction of the piece.” This is the longest of the 4 poems in the volume (over 50 pages). It is comprised of poetic fragments of varying lengths.

           Sex glistened in a theory

slated for production            I has been extricated from

           gesture, endures as a symptom

Representation, your sherrif

           To signify
an ego

(page 62)

Disassembling layers

           we swirl, girls

pledges of surge diaphanous, but also tight to the bodice

           Fine moist pendulum animalia beloveds foreheads

Instead of echo, logos deviations divinations stems, tendrils

           Frequencies, the contact

Water mixes sex
(page 66)

Enigmas with a little breeze

           are titillation
(page 71)

There are wonders to be found on every page. Each page is very much like the compost pile beneath which Iijima finds “The circulatory systems of trees lay here/Bamboo pleasure/showing groin/as sexy as elbow” (page 71).

Sometimes standing before a great work of art, one can only gape, openmouthed, dumbfounded. I often have that experience reading Iijima.

You sway in erasure

a tiny eclipse by your lips
(page 105)

The final poem, “Panthering,” according to Iijima,“came from an experience in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Along rural roadside Highway 106 heading out of town is the last extant Mississippian Indian intaglio effigy mound in the shape of a panther. In the National Register of Historic Places its historic function is listed as landscape and its historic sub-function is listed as garden. Fort Atkinson is named after General Henry Atkinson who served as commander of U.S. forces during the Black Hawk War. History as has been recorded is inconceivably unjust – and works with erasure as much as glorified exposure.”

Again I want to invoke Guattari (adding in a nod this time to his philosophical partner in crime Gilles Deleuze) in the course of reading Iijima as I see the author having become animal in “genocide’s kitchen”:

The black fur coat I was grew forlorn

I couldn’t hide in the snow

Domestication’s velocity stunned

A docile patch of seeming calm

These yellow eyes can’t lie

Like war rooms exuding perjury
(page 112)

In If Not Metamorphic the three ecologies (environment, socius and psyche) are parsed and then braided into what I can only weakly describe as a knotty book of fierce and (I suspect) enduring interrogative beauty. It is, I believe, important both poetically and philosophically. I will return to it often.

*****

Tom Beckett is a network of uncertainty that resides in Kent, Ohio.

100 SCENES by TIM GAZE

2011-03-31T22:22:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

100 Scenes by Tim Gaze
(digitally published by Transgressor in association with Wider Screenings, Australia, 2010)

One of my favorite poetry paradoxes is how reader-response can be most enjoyable when what’s being read doesn’t posit a fixed meaning or literally does not make sense. As such, I hold a special affection for Tim Gaze who first introduced me to asemic writings. As Wikipedia notes (and do click on excerpt below for more info):

The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content".[1] With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art.

Well, now, Gaze has released a novel entitled 100 Scenes, a tale that unfolds through a hundred abstract “scenes” such as the examples below. Gaze says in the Notes section that the images touch “upon two emerging areas: abstract comics (known in French as bandes dessinées abstraites, or bds abstraites) and asemic writing. These areas transcend languages, and offer the possibility of inter-cultural communication without words.”

The images themselves were created, as Gaze explains, as follows:

The images are raw scans of original pages made by me, using cheap acrylic paint on sheets of ordinary office paper. The pages were made over a period of 4 or 5 years. It took a few weeks to select which hundred to assemble into this book, and a few more weeks to decide on which order to put the pages. One page has a conspicuous black line on the right hand side, which I left there.

Most of the marks were made using a technique known as decalcomania. You spread ink or paint on a surface, then print off that surface, which results in chaotic, organic, blotty shapes. The Surrealist artist Oscar Domínguez invented this technique in 1936. Max Ernst made several paintings which used decalcomania along with other techniques. One example is Landscape with Lake and Chimeras (ca. 1940).

100 Scenes may well be the first whole novel (whole novel versus sections of novels) written in this manner, or at least Gaze can’t recall another such novel written in this style. Gaze's recollection matters as he's somewhat of an expert in the area. As a result, one of the book’s strengths is the very useful Notes section that goes into a history of influences and/or historical references ranging over Max Ernst’s collage novels, The Giant's Fence by Michael Jacobson which is a novella full of symbols invented by the author, abstract short stories by Rosaire Appel, Nautilus by Andrei Molotiu which is a series of abstract comics sequences, the science fiction novel Golem100 [I don’t know how to do it on Blogger but that’s Golem to the power of 100] by Alfred Bester which contains graphic sequences among conventional chapters, other novels like Peter Handke’s The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (English translation of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter) and Claude Simon’s The Battle of Pharsalus (English translation of La Bataille de Pharsale) which both contain a page or two that incorporates pictogrammes among paragraphs of words, Donald Barthelme's short stories The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace and At the Tolstoy Museum that utilize pictures as a basis for stories, the French avant-garde group known as the Lettristes (in English, "Lettrists" or "Letterists") who invented the hypergraphic novel (a novel which uses letters, symbols and images) and especially Alain Satié's Ecrit en prose (PSI, 1971) which Gaze considers “the most open-ended, and closest in idea to myown,” Henri Michaux’s works of hand-drawn symbols, the first edition of Laurence Sterne's classic experimental novel Tristram Shandy (Volume 3, 1761) which includes a single page of an abstract marbling design (examples can be seen at http://www.tristramshandyweb.it/sezioni/sterne/biography/
sterne_portraits/marblepage_gallery/index.htm) that could be interpreted to represent Tristram's state of mind and Victor Hugo who used to use inkblots as a “starting point” for his illustrations. As I said, the Notes are a good addition to the book.

And the Notes also provide a girding of sorts because the actual hundred scenes in Gaze’s novel will require proactivity from the reader. It is the reader who ultimately will create some story which Gaze’s scenes create but in a non-fixed form so that different readers can create different stories.

For example, here are Pages 7 and 8 from 100 Scenes:

Now, one can certainly do ekphrastic readings on the individual images. But key to reading them is also paying attention to the procession of images. So, for example, the first image above could be—lesseeee, well, it could be—an excerpt, I mean, a portion of a tree’s canopy. And then the second image could be part of a flock of birds winging away. When you combine the two images, it’s quite clear (ahem) that the novel’s protagonist (if such be the bearer of the gaze) was looking up towards the sky. With just such facets, layers of a story can be implied. Perhaps the gaze-bearer was a bird hunter, say…

… who, because of other images elsewhere in the book, was having an affair set in Italy and the couple managed to take a weekend off to go to Russia and continue their affair in some wooded area and the guy was taking a hunting break and then accidentally shoots the person he’s having an affair with and now must bury the body somewhere in the forest….and so on and so on. (I’ma jest sayin’, you know what I mean…?)

In conclusion, I recommend this book because it provides a good narrative. But you’ll need to read the novel as you might more effectively read a poem: you've got to invest yourself within its lines.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed or generated responses by Joey Madia in The New Mystics HERE; Allen Bramhall over HERE; by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE; by Leny Strobel over HERE; and by Jean Vengua over HERE and HERE. Her THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I is reviewed by Edric Mesmer in Yellow Field and reprinted HERE. Her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 is reviewed by Arpine Konyalian Grenier over HERE. Allen Bramhall also reviews the "Hay(na)ku for Haiti" series over HERE. If the latter two get you curious, please note that participating in this fundraiser for Haiti is supported by Marsh Hawk Press, publisher of THE THORN ROSARY: if you order at least $15 worth of booklets, you will receive a copy of THE THORN ROSARY which is priced retail at $19.95; this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

PUBLICATIONS by ALLEN PLANZ, EDWARD BUTSCHER, ANSELM PARLATORE, GRAHAM EVERETT, RAY FREED, JOEL CHACE & SUSAN TEPPER

2011-03-31T22:20:00.000-07:00

SIMON PERCHIK Reviews

Creaturely Drift, New and Selected Poems by Allen Planz
(Street Press, Sound Beach, New York, 2010)

Eros Descending, Poems by Edward Butscher
(Amagansett Press, Amagansett, New York, 2010)

The Discourse Letters by Anselm Parlatore
(North Fork Press, Deming, WA, 2010)

That Nod Toward Love, New Poems by Graham Everett
(Street Press, Sound Beach, New York, 2010)

Silver Fish, Poems by Ray Freed
(Street Press, Sound Beach, New York, 2010)

Sharpsburg by Joel Chace
(Cy Gist Press, Astoria, New York, 2010)

Blue Edge by Susan Tepper
(Cervena Barva Press, W. Somerville, MA, 2010)

Having read, written, published and analyzed poetry for more than fifty years, it is with sincere gratitude that I have now been give this opportunity to comment on recent collections of some of the poets who have enriched my life. Allen Planz’s poetry first came to my attention in the early 50s. Joel Chace’s is recent. But both they and all the others considered briefly here are poets worth your attention. I hope to make the case on their behalf.

Planz, who died recently, is the author of several collections, the first, A Night for Rioting (1969). Although that book is long out-of-print it is a testament to the promise gestating in the young poet. Creaturely Drift has now secured a place for Planz in the pantheon of modern American poetry. Though he made his living mostly from a boat his life was informed as much by the sea as by loneliness everywhere on Earth. We have all suffered a great loss. Allow me to quote a sample of his disarming, powerful lines.

Gulls

Some guys have girls, or pets.
I got gulls. I go no pets or girls
or guys. But on dock and deck I got gulls.
They want food. They want me.

There are some birds that if you stare at them
stare back. Or stare anyway, whether you notice
& dismiss them. Montauk gulls are tough:
when you give them baking soda
they don’t blow up like other gulls.

Today at dawn a gull grabbed my donut.
Then it took off
& circled overhead & shit on me
but missed as most gulls do when they try

…The stare of the gull is clear. It would eat
you. Starting with the eyes.

Also, from "Hauntings"

…This old man
is taking
over my soul.
When he bends
to write
I lean with him,
trying to read
what he makes up
from a script
known by heart,
a love poems
to Felicia,
begun fifty years ago.
The girl
long gone & the man
dizzied still
by his love for her,
the poem unfinished.

***

Edward Butscher, is the author of Method and Madness, the first biography of Sylvia Plath (reprinted by Schaffner Press) and Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale, the biography of Conrad Aiken (University of Georgia Press) which won the Poetry Society of America‘s Melville Kane Award , His poetry collections include: Poems About Silence, Amagansett Cycle and Child in the House. His present collection centers around the struggle between Eros and Thanatos and though we all know how that turns out we are doomed in this hopeless effort. Rage is one way, more rage another. Eros Descending, with its precision and care for the language is his most powerful poetry to date.

As in "HALF MAST"

The dreams continue into summer

Disappearing borders trench
the swamp that men age into
when a century’s spine snaps.

What face clamps my cock so hard
it quenches the fever that never
achieves a barracuda leap?

The moon’s almond after-image dangles
from ceiling dust with an Oriental
stare, gentle but feline-aware, a web
of infinite lines threatening
hysteria, unbearable joy:

I am earth, universe, orchid cunt.

black and white prints, near sepia
from the American 40’s when June
Allyson and Doris Day palmed automated
kitchens that ejaculated lace-curtain
brides and doll’s spotless apron
to wipe the cream cum off floral
bedroom walls, when Kate Hepburn
could blueball you for hours
while pruning Joyce’s trellis
and planning her next abortion
rally, Bacall going down on Bogie
for the third time, although
ambivalent Bette Davis crouched
behind a couch in broad daylight
like an angry ingénue, knives
of delight in her white-gloved smile.

Who lies spent beneath me
when a tattered dog star slinks home?

I am earth, sister, membrane veil
you slash night after night.

…Hold still. Lie still. Be still.

…I am earth, daughter, chaos come
round to wetnurse your dead.

…Let me lick you clean of my filth.
Let me lap shut the next crack of song
that cradles only crocodile meat.

…I am cloud to your brick shouts
moss to your stone keenings.

…Cat face dawns at the window, meowing
forgiveness, a half-eaten mole
sacrificed at the porch altar where
the old evil walks, stirring me
erect. I let her in and recall
the ghosts of dolphin breasts
nudging him safe and awake, weary
as the Dali poster of translucent
sexless ladies haunting a parlor’s
desert air before sinking back
into this heaving half-life
between mirror and shore.

***

Anslem Parlatore, is the founder of Granite, a magazine he founded while attending medical school at Cornell. He also edited The Alfred Review and Bluefish. He also edited Ten Japanese Poets, Granite Press (1974). He is presently a practicing psychiatrist. His vocabulary, rooted in science, is without doubt the most unique and original in American poetry. With complete confidence and control his poems are masterpieces of erudition and emotion, leaving the reader both consoled and stronger. The Discourse Letters is a sequence of 50 poems inspired by Eugenio Montale’s “Mottetti”. Once the reader is familiar with the territory staked out by Parlatore the journey is a comfort, the images profound...

As in "#1"

Improverished, lassitude in modulated tones
of light, evanescent trivialities detailing
the insolence of an apparition.
For this I wait. For this a sheltered
language, a lure, the exhausted
lure of memory, you turning
to back into the wind, closing your
umbrella. Such lavish brocades
in memory’s mausoleum. The way
you were shaking it. Keeping it at a distance.

And again, in "#38"

Vast austerity of the dirge; hymnals, antiphonaries
& graduals, temporales, the Master of the Beffi Triptych
illuminated for grace, transcendence. Such pellucid
& fragile adorations. Ambrogio’s fresco cycle,
Ghiberti & Fra Angelico at Linaiuoli tabernacle,
the Dominican Effigies. All this bright, brilliant,
very luminous, unlike your darkness or a distant corner
of the universe, where roiling stellar nurseries sweep
lacy wings & eerie nebulae flare. Your darkness
is seeing almost back to the beginning of time.

Allow me one more: "#50"

All the twilights have swarmed over the psalms
nettles, thistles, they flicker through memory’s gauze.
This is not a final nocturne, more a fragrant
& intricate, shaded & cool anguish. You always
delighted when the new seed catalogs finally arrived,
Johnny’s, Skagit Gardens, Territorial Seed.
Yellow post-it notes suddenly blossomed along the pages.
alyssum, achillea, dianthus, nicotiana, nigella, scabiosa, echinacea,
gaillardia, lavandula,spires of snapdragons, sunflowers.
There will soon be clear, cool water running up their stems.

***

Graham Everett, teacher and founder of Street Press, has be at the core of the poetry scene on Long Island, NY .since the 70s. His colloquial style is disarming but he never loses sight of the purpose of poetry: to heal, to leave the reader whole. And, without pretense, with gentleness, honesty and care, he succeeds:

As in "The Basics"

I got a lot of shoes and they’re all black
I’ve taken to wearing mittens in the dark

I put on snow pants when I go to bed
eager to recall what good prayers can do

One moment floats into the next
Most things happen somewhere else

Hard drives crash from here to there
What goes on: a bunch of stories by now

(Observe how she does those things with her mouth
She’s not even playing house or buying real estate)

Drama’s what most of it seems – The rest is work
Even though it’s what I want to do, it’s still work

I’m focused on remembering how to walk, to turn
the right phrases, and time the words just so

And his surprises are effective

As in "Winter Blues"

The sun rises late, the day goes grey
By early afternoon huge flakes
Off the ocean melt on ground and car

When does love begin to make sense
Is still a good question. Hired on to ride
The road looking for answer and reason
I find false statements abounding

Night falls and everyone wonders what’s the score
But that doesn’t save us and that doesn’t bother us

The authorities know what we want
When we want two weeks in Amsterdam.

And, in "Winter Coming In Again"

For three days the wind clears the trees of their leaves
Gathering across the yard and on to the road edges
leaves could get raked, or blown onto the flower beds
if I could talk with the Northern winds

More my thoughts and actions on closing windows
turning off the outside water spigots, putting lawn
furniture under the deck, stored and tarped

At work, an administrative secretary says, “Did you
ever notice that a lot of people die this time of year?”
Then someone yells, “The copy machine’s jammed”

Newly paved, the last block home
redefined by fallen foliage
leads me to dreams of walking with you
in a Paris morning rain

***

Ray Freed, who died recently in Hawaii, was the Poet-in-residence at SUNY Stony Brook, LI. He has been writing poetry since the late 60s and has published 12 collections. His style is conversational and vernacular, a sure way to reach the reader. But he too knows well what poetry has to do. And he doesn’t forget:

As in "Colors"

The day hot and shirtless
the sky blue and clear

at the outdoor market
pyramids of fruit
stun in the sunlight

yellow and red mangos
colors of sunset and dawn

I peel the rind in one spiral,
bite into the deep orange,
sweet juice runs down
my chin
my chest
my belly

in the distance the mountain,
green and brown, rises.

And "Islands"

Once in winter on Dune Road
I was a month alone,
not speaking.

Stepping onto a bus for the city
the driver asked “how far?’
but I couldn’t answer,
my voice rusted and unused.

In solitude I’m one,
with another a half,
with two a third
and so on.
In a crowd nothing of me remains.

***

Joel Chace has written a stunning collection of poems which are powerful, original and moving. He departs from the usual format and offers his poetry in paragraph form. That a poem should not depend on wide margins on each side the page seems obvious. To Chace’s credit, he seems very comfortable with the paragraph form. Moreover, his language is exciting and his images sharp. He has a good insight into the agonies of this world and writes with sincerity and confidence.

Allow me to quote in full the first of the untitled poems in Sharpsburg

After using a hammer to smash open the desk’s jammed roll-top, they found papers covered with sentences and the skeleton of a bat. Between physical fear of going forward, and moral fear of going back, there is a predicament of exceptional awkwardness from which a hidden ground hole would be a wonderfully welcome outlet. As our grandfather’s farm was being auctioned off, we sat high up in the dark haymow, trying to comfort his old barn dog. Syntax can be as lonely as anything you’ll ever see.

And the last untitled poem in Sharpsburg

Only then did he regret his embarrassment about walking with his mother. Thin layer with little railroad. The letter does seem to be his, based on the small amount of handwriting located in pension records. Compulsively fingering a pearl necklace, she turned toward us and back away, toward and away, just like a little old lady nobody wanted. So far as I could see, every soldier wore white gaiters around his ankles. Sentences are not emotional, while paragraphs are. Bach is the greatest composer in history, and so is Mozart. Absence or meaningless phrase, not ice. At dark firing has nearly ceased, and we hold our position and sleep on our arms all night.

***

Susan Tepper is the author of Deer & Other Stories, a collection of short stories and more recently co-author of the novel What May Have Been, Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G. Her poetry is highly personal, spare and taut. Leaps and surprises inform the work, and she commands a firm grip on the required tension throughout.

As in "PARIS"

A raincoat for Paris—
December and raining
you kept forgetting me

tramping narrow back streets
the buildings, gray air
flattening arms and legs
tinted spice:

I bought a scarf to cover
where my neck was drowning.

And in "DARKENED"

Barbed wire braided your hair
pulled tightly its roots and

trees along a train line
once for passing through—

the forest had darkened—

signs came during sleep
camps were not for crafts or
summer fun

–the photos came later.

Let me end with her "THAT"

Light formed concentric circles
all night he wanted to dance
the steep ridge
I was afraid of falling—
two horses trying to get through
a single opening
this wooden shank fence
along the highest trail—
somehow
that, and very blue along the ridge
clouds, a spring chill
Spokane and close to raining
always close to raining—
My mother cried a lot that season—
that, and a hard couch they stuck
in the middle of the living room
ordering me to sleep.

*****

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

TERMINAL HUMMING by K. LORRAINE GRAHAM

2011-03-31T22:15:00.000-07:00

ALLEN EDWIN BUTT Reviews

Terminal Humming by K. Lorraine Graham
(Edge Books, New York, 2009)

Page 62 of Terminal Humming simply reads “There is this humming in the air now like an open test to evaluate everything welling up in everybody.” To me, this calls to mind the image of a tuning-fork: a humming that evaluates the other humming, test to see what’s “in” the plucked or beaten string. The title posits the book itself as a humming, one that, if we follow this logic, intends to evaluates what wells up in those subjected to the humming: readers and sources, of which this book has many. I do not know how much of the text of this book is the result of collage, but if not it does rely on pastiche, pastiche that has been treated as material to cut and paste. The strategy in much of the book appears to be one in which diverse “sorts” of voices provide the words that she transforms into material and shifts about, creating groupings that expose the strains of contradictory violence (including, as Stan Apps notes in a blurb, covert “condescension or malice”) that underpin so many forms of daily speech and public discourse.

The poems are arranged into three sequences in which, for the most part, the page seems to be the basic unit, with shorter sections (some prose, some verse) broken off on a given page and sometimes subtitled. The sequences are entitled “If This Isn’t an Interview I Don’t Know What to Say,” “An Attempt to Unleash Inner Badness Begins Thus,” and “Terminal Humming.” To get a sense of Graham’s strategy, I think it will be helpful to look at the first page in full.

Most people are smart enough on the podium. Pick three and seduce—scan the hypercritical few. You think but I don’t care. Turn it off you’re trapped. I’d like to begin with an update on numerous events. Simple thesis/theme: Is she a mime? Little cracked sensations. Begin drawing them in. Save the thanks, conclude with a promise. By the time we leave here today trying to prove it a paradox. After dinner drinks, we left confused, entertained, wondering what he said. I’ll lecture you but trust you?

~

Active Phase

Catalytic roles
underway. The development
of institutional game-talk
process functionality.
Design recap. Change the finish.
Map and start.

~

3000 people played this sequence and blew up the world every time.

In this first paragraph, language gestures at communication (most specifically in its manifestation as “public speaking,” a tool for persuading and manipulating large groups), but it continuously undercuts the efficacy or even possibility of that communication: “You think but I don’t care”—can’t get what’s in the addressed person’s mind outside and into the speakers if there’s no empathetic common ground. The public speaking advice comes off as cynical in this context—do not inform, seduce. The people of the second section play “catalytic roles” designed for them by others and speak an “institutional game-talk” that Graham surveys in order to map out ways that words (in)form our thought and help to goad us into blowing up the world.

The poems in “If This Isn’t an Interview I Don’t Know What to Say” deal mostly with these kinds of broad anxieties. The poems inform us that while “[t]he growth of marginal identities [is] on track to critical mass” there are still those looking for “[w]hat it takes to clean up / kill or sanction Raj in the stars and / stripes omnimedia.” Modes of discourse are always at the center of the problem, as on this page:

Double sharp staff
seat expanding overtime
measured the relationship
between violence and inflation.
Character development, I
like it fine—believe in
foreign painted signify.
Renamed a new geography,
created a housing community.
Summertime landscape:
six dollars and hour
to lift in the sun.

~

Name

Church falls split behind
rocks molted for geological
experiments. Crusted sulfur, burning
ooze around steam wells
tourists never fall in.
It’s late for the sand for
the dry light peachpit
surface—snug little
turtle eggs, goodnight.

Through an act of “renaming” you can create a “community”—but only if you have cheap labor. Tourists never fall into the burning ooze because they paid to be there. In the verbal environment of this sequence, we are told that “you are citizen, / listening to the radio broadcast, / waiting for embassy news, looking up words”—reduced to absolute passivity, looking up words but unsure how to put them together without upholding the violence of the broadcasters.

The title sequence and the short “Attempt to Unleash Inner Badness” focus primarily on language that is either openly, covertly, or unintentionally misogynist—especially language that conceives of women as available for exchange. Often these words appear in the “mouths” of explicitly female speakers. Sometimes the language is clearly parodic, as when Graham writes, “I’d like to be a soft pretzel and be loved by all, all soft and twisted and inexpensive and consumable” or the first page of “Terminal Humming”:

Love Poem

And I want
And I want
And I want baaaaah

The love poem’s sheepbleat baaaaah is, perhaps, a little over-the-top, but the argument is consistent with that argued more subtly throughout the latter half of the book: that romantic love (and the women who are asked to be the “passive member” in its contract) is continuously equated with the aimless wanting of consumer capitalism. And, when that wanting isn’t satisfied, a well of violent sexual aggression makes its way onto the page alongside the kind of cynical detachment or put-on skepticism of the book’s first page.

Graham is also interested in ways that women internalize the values of an anti-feminine culture and the language it uses. For example:

As a thing:

In the supergirl outfit, I went to buy fruit to make a salad as a healthy desert alternative to ice cream. In several fan fiction accounts supergirl and batwoman hook up. The supergirl cape is short and does not snag. What thing do we mean doing?

Using this language, the thinker is tricked into inhabiting the “thing” quality of supergirl: a male-designed, nonexistent object of affection, rendered all the more desirable by the pliability of her nonexistence (she can’t complain about being made to hook up with batwoman). To be supergirl is, in one sense, not to exist, to be less woman than image. Elsewhere, Graham writes,

Now mother is placing
classified ads. For me.

Of course, we can read “for me” as “on my behalf” but it’s hard not to see the speaker as the product that the mother advertises.

Femininity and commerce are similarly inseparable throughout: the speaker on page 51 repeatedly asks, “Do I clash?” Not my clothes but I, because there’s no difference, or else the clothing constitutes the I, which can become unbalanced, clashing with itself if it consumes commodities incorrectly. That page ends “I clash I clash”—the more violent uses of the word pushing into the fore. The classifieds come back on page 55, a lengthy prose paragraph modeled after personal ads:

I've never been fond of parties but I go anyway. I look for all the regular things. I'm blonde I love dance and cheer I like a young woman who knows how to take care of herself. I love techno. I don't have expectations. I'm an alien from Jupiter. No. Not really. I do alot of things I guess. I like hangin' w/ my bestest friends & cruzin' w/ my other friends and flirtin' w/ the fellas I don't have much to say here. I like funny guys; I'm just lying—I like pretty boys. I just thought this would be fun. I like laughing, movies and having fun. Do you like having fun? Do you love Christ? Never happy. Currently in a weight training class. I'm just an average schmoe. Well, sort of. I'm blue-eyed and ditzy @ times. I've been here nine months and have no friends. I am just me! Also, I love glittery things, snowmen, and the color purple, autocrossing, fish keeping—salt and fresh. I currently live at home with my mother and have no license. To a great extent I am an understanding person. I like horror movies. Thank you.

The woman sells herself by highlighting either her passivity or her unthreateningly banal simplicity—and she thanks the recipient for the opportunity to do so!

The resulting book is often nightmarish in its vision of contemporary life and the language that life employs. That vision is a useful one, I think—if you play a note then other strings of the same note will resonate—this book hums for me—it seems to tap into a resonant strain of our speech. It’s a very smart book, and I like it a lot. My only caveat in praising it is this: how long do we reproduce the discourse of hatred before we’re just speaking hatefully? Is it possible that by occupying the role of a “citizen, / listening to the radio broadcast, / waiting for embassy news, looking up words” we fool ourselves into adopting “their” discourse as inevitable—what I mean is, how long can we depict ourselves as passive before we accept our passivity as inevitable? These seem like important questions for me—Terminal Humming strikes me as a very valuable part of a hypothetical poetic project in which hateful rhetoric could be clearly delineated as such (something Terminal Humming does brilliantly) and then vigorously attacked, marginalized in the way it attempts to marginalize dissent, hollowed out, and cast aside. In that sense, Terminal Humming isn’t what I hope American poetry looks like in twenty years (and I won’t even begin to try to predict the direction of “American poetry” or K. Lorraine Graham’s career), but it may be exactly what we need right now: an aggressive wake-up call to listen when we talk and ask ourselves if the language we use really describes a world we want to live in.

*****

Allen Edwin Butt is a poet from South Carolina. His work has appeared in a variety of magazines and web publications, including Peaches & Bats, Otoliths, ditch, 2River View, Faultline (forthcoming), Venereal Kittens, and Poetry.

ENGLISH FRAGMENTS by MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH

2011-03-31T22:10:00.000-07:00

MICAH CAVALERI Reviews

ENGLISH FRAGMENTS: A Brief History of the Soul by Martin Corless-Smith
(Fence Books, Albany, NY, 2010)

1. Somewhere someone wrote of the appreciation she had for a poet's work. That appreciation was out of friendship. The poems were still heart-breaking. I do not know Mr Corless-Smith. But I am his friend. His poems have broken me. And he is a liar! A liar!

2. ENGLISH FRAGMENTS is a retelling of the world. It is, as the blurb on the back tells us, the “final volume in a trilogy of 'alternate selves and alternate literary histories.'” It is a retelling of a world just to the left of our own, where Thomas Swan (var. Martin Corless-Smith) invents the stealing and linguistic strangeness of contemporary poetry hundreds of years before postmodernism's time and William Williamson (var. Martin Corless-Smith) riffs on being, writing out his poems and philosophy in fragments on the walls of his weaver's cottage on “a remote Hebridean island” where he worked as a radio operator during World War II. The world(s) of FRAGMENTS is , ultimately, the world in (light of) the author.

3. Aesthetics. History. Being. Lyric. The Whole.

Corless-Smith's language is stunning, to say the least. Its sounds are absolutely clear, maybe a bit yellowed from age, but the words and lyrical voices and imagery make the poetry ring brilliantly, blindingly. How does he get there? He walks backwards. There is a background awareness of postmodern language play sitting alongside a low-key visual poetry that sings through new forms and movement across the paper as well as a narrative poetry speaking in codes while remaining in the world of coffee, age and taxes. Corless-Smith backs away from the new. He is quietly aware of the whole history of English poetry...its contemporary forms and what they have evolved from...back to our not-so-English ancestors such as Petrarch. In his awareness of history, Corless-Smith longs for a lyrical poetry that speaks from the heart. He wants the honest sentiments and the music of romantic poetry restored:

Be vigilant–The same room in five years is not the same
room. You are shorter–your eyes dimmer.

For some reason–political acceptance–I have forsaken
The songs of beautiful girls.

Young men overcome their duty with energy.
Here I am again surveying the remnants of the slaughter.

One sees the hideous hermit crabs, four rayfish and
A red gunnet, wings tipped with violet and blue.

If you had time you might devise a method of escape
But you would never be brave enough to attempt it–even
Supposing that it might work.

Corless-Smith sees what it is in poetry that originally captivates us, the musicality and romance that moves us to write the “songs of beautiful girls.” But contemporary poetry assaults the source of poetry, tries to uproot poetry itself: “The labourer's heel must spade/ Through roots and ruinous foundations/ For his fruit–silent to his own antithesis.” The assault is not an assault in the end. There is fruitful work done. As he himself notes, Corless-Smith's digging ultimately leaves him exhausted and satisfied in the piles of earth he has dug into:

His hours his own–his elements apparent
All efforts are exact–all sober
Air and light until his lapse
To ordinary earth and extraordinary breath

We return...we fall back to earth. The earth we started from. The ordinary earth. Not through work. We return by exhaustion. The poet falls back to earth and breathes an “extraordinary breath” and takes his secure footing on the “ordinary earth” that stops his fall.

To recapture the lyricism and romance of past English poetry is not a straightforward task. For one, the forms and language of the past often strike us as overly revelatory, dishonestly honest: “And I'm trying not to lie, even in the pompous way I say this.” The honesty of FRAGMENTS is palatable, in part, because it is deliberate. The honesty is measured. It is meant to strike us as honest, even as over-wrought honesty. FRAGMENTS is the reappropriation of the sentimental, lyrical poetry of the past. Corless-Smith makes the old poetry new again by simply admitting a need (better: a drive) to do so. But his appropriation is more than rewriting Milton and saying so:

Song of the Swallow

It is this
Fever music
I exist

The broken language and slightly twisted grammar is wholly modern; the sound, sentiment and forced linguistic musicality is utterly ancient.

Being. History. The Whole. Aesthetics. Lyric.

These fragmentary poems and philosophical notes weave together bits of Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Petrarch, et al. Fragmenting history and bringing it back together, Corless-Smith erases the lines (“the whole book resembles/ a poem–from/ beginning to end”) between all fragments and eras, all writers, all genres and disciplines; and the result is a new history of English poetry that gives the author permission to explore all voices and concepts and forms:

The book is one model of the possible (nonexistent) interior. When we realize the self we have called into being is not touched by our invocations the book is our only resort. It is neither ourself, nor our consolation, nor strictly the articulation of our loss. If a book can fail to articulate the truth then it must. The nightroom illuminated in an infinitesimal (untraceable) tracing collage of sensations that I turned into memory.

The author traces for himself what is not there, but does so thickly, as a book, making his tracings real, a memory, a history.

Without the ordinary sorts of boundaries, the untraceable trace lines are all we have and FRAGMENTS is a work of living. It feels alive. Or, it is a life(live). There are at least three (four, five?) books in this one book. The opening unnumbered pages are titled Added here from last pages of Notebook and these pages are taken up again in the last unnumbered pages of FRAGMENTS. In between, there are at least two books trading (numbered) pages with one another. There are philosophical fragments together with the author's own philosophical notes. Thomas Swan's poems. William Williamson's poetry and philosophy. Martin Corless-Smith's own poetry and poetic fragments. But there is no clear line between a fragmentary interpolation from a foreign work sitting between two pages of a single poem and the organic form of a poem that grows freely with a single stanza on one page followed by its remaining lines on a second and third page.

Take, for example, the first page of the poem “Dark Matter”, a single stanza:

For (matter) he has made my soul
Just as a mirror (is) held up to a room
For how (else) (to) else know thyself/hisself
And in so doing a dark otherness

This opening rightly stands alone. It is a look inside the poet's notebooks. The reader peeks at his perfect thoughts, the moments when the author falls back “to ordinary earth and extraordinary breath.” We linger on that perfect moment. Why leave? The language is...perfect. So we linger, listen. The next page is not the rest of the poem, but a quote from Williamson: “Soul is the ever-expanding surface of experience.” And then we go on with the rest of the poem...on a third page. But elsewhere, we read “Reflections of a poor eye”, the first two quatrains on the left-facing page, the final 4-line stanza on the right. And those “poor eye” pages can sit separately, as notes by the author to himself for later use or correction. But the reader wants to read them together. “Soul is the ever-expanding surface of experience.” The pages of FRAGMENTS grow into one another, interpenetrate one another, regardless of their “intentional” relationships or simple, accidental besidedness.

The lack of clear lines is implied by the book's title, ENGLISH FRAGMENTS: A Brief History of the Soul. Fragments are small, separate units...but, usually, of an original whole. These fragments can be taken as separate pieces, but they want to be part of a whole, the book. There is present the idea that none of these parts belong together. John Locke is quoted: “We should do well to commiserate our ignorance,” suggesting that there is no hope in grasping FRAGMENTS as a whole with a unitary underlying substance, except, maybe, as some vague feeling:

There is something adrift in thinking consciousness can exist as something in its own right.
–Susan Greenfield.

Still, the parts hang together. At least, they are all beside one another. And the besidedness seems to make them a single being:

Language lives on the surface – unconsciousness withdraws from and overtakes the
spoken (which evolves into the written). Consciousness is light on the surface, reflected or projected.

The surface is immediate and impenetrable – penetration merely extends
the surface.
The surface trembles with possibilities – with elemental life.
Everything is played out on this dimension.

The surface is constantly moving into and out of being. Being is not apprehensible, just as the surface avoids apprehension. Apprehension is another aspect of the surface – of being.

We apprehend these pages of fragments as one; they are one. Maybe it is the multiple voices, created through different fonts and philosophical positions, poetry and prose, giving the appearance of a conversation across history and real and fictional worlds...maybe that is how FRAGMENTS becomes the apparent product of a single consciousness/listener/speaker...the author. I don't know. I don't care. It is beautiful.

The author argues (as a subtext) the more surface he offers, the more the book is a separate reality. I believe him now. Williamson tells us that “[t]he surface isn't so much dimensionless as it is the field of multidimensional interaction.” Corless-Smith has played this out on many different levels. FRAGMENTS is the conclusion of a trilogy (or a tetralogy, if you include the pseudonymous A Selection from the Works of Thomas Swan.) The multiple type fonts imply multiple works or voices. Quotations from historical and pseudo-historical figures imply a conversation across history on poetry, being and the soul. Even the division of the book into paginated and non-paginated, prose and poetry sections creates fault-lines that add surface area. As the author tells us in the quotes above on apprehension, surface and being, he has projected being onto the surface of the pages of his book. The multiple books/voices/histories penetrate one another, creating more surface area because we tear into that new third area where the multiple pieces are now interacting... “penetration merely extends the surface.” Even if Corless-Smith had chosen his fragments without deliberation, something new emerges. The ideas of the past mixing with the lyrical poetic language and philosophical speculations of the author makes a work that “trembles[...] with elemental life.”

The Whole. Lyric. History. Being. Aesthetics.

Officers (off her soars?) cavort
All heaven (all having?) a torn garment
Hysterical (his terror calls?) running and falls (anvils?)
A honey bird pinned in the wheat

A page before this stanza, which sits alone on its own page, “the wind turned into words/ which thus disjoined my leaves from me.” These lines may or may not be a part of the same poem quoted above. But they read into the poem. Wind is mistaken for meaningful speech, causing us to shudder. Language misleads us in the mishearing. The lack of pure, crystalline aural clarity gives us lyricism. The accident is poetry. “Ghosts emerge in our peripheral vision.” As the poet notes in his philosophical mode, “The language of poetry is infinitely open, and as such is a model of the divine soul.” Stumbling from word to word is the method of poetry in FRAGMENTS. The historical fragments move in the same way. The folds and fault-lines discussed earlier are accidents of recontextualization. Lyricism in poetry is similar. At times the music is the echoes of our words, as in the stanza above. Music is in the forced grammar of “Song of the Swallow” and in the unerased erasures of “Dark Matter”.

The stumbling, happy faults/harmonies discovered between words also drive the quotations and even stealing of other writers' material scattered through the book (and across Corless-Smith's other works. He even steals from himself.) FRAGMENTS hears the total openness of language. “I now think language deaf/ Its sentence blind unconscious read/ So much want these hundred hairs/ My face his eyes her ears unsaid”. Language is not a living, metaphysical being demanding to be read in one clear way. It is a deaf, blind physical thing to be used by want. That openness gives rise to so much. Music. Also, metaphysical entities:

Mind is, after all, the almost unimaginable complex emergent quality of the languaged organism.

[…]It is our dormant senses […] that engage with such a performance to convince ourselves the dream has a body.
– W. Williamson, Notes on Being

Language, found or heard or imagined, is open to making. To building. With.

“If it is linguistic, then it is external.”

Accidental language opens up everything, just as it sees to the core of art. Poetically phrased:

Painting the river's volumes
Depth from surfaces retracts
The sunken amber globes (glows)
Destitute of purpose or of finishing this present task

Depth is made by moving away from the surface. Loose, purposeless language...calls to mind echoes. There seems to be something there, we feel it, almost grasp it, but it is not there. Or, if it is there, we have read it there ourselves. We make it. SO, stealing. Stealing...artfully...is to retract from the surface, the original setting of the thing, and allow the stolen object “to make this art as it appears to want.” Corless-Smith says it so hauntingly:

Death disturbed the body
Blood whirling pointlessly in a circle
The faculties of the fallen died with them
The soul itself bubbled up.

Death reveals the soul... as nothing at all. Death leaves the body as a piece of meat. There is no meaning to the body except as a life, a person with thoughts and emotions and senses, the old-school faculties. There is no value to our art except as art. The soul of art is our taking it as art, using it as art. I am not detracting from the value of art by pointing out a rather simple and often ignored fact (at least ignored among artists and philosophers, who like to suppose a platonic heaven where their thoughts and feelings are alive like gods giving form to matter). I can say it differently: life is me making my own soul (and it dies with me.) That is a bit more positive, I suppose. Just don't let art die.

And why not borrow, cheat and steal from others, since we find music in echoes and it is in our nature to learn by aping others:

But I am prone to shadows, anxious matter in its dance
Consoles and Lunges after emptiness, and properties defile
the fields
excellent midnight, the shade of surplus agency, which drains
Heaven, makes a promise of the virtual or real.

Here, Corless-Smith steals from the past by taking its misplaced capitals, giving a visible form to his ancient sounding language. In stealing the old capitals and ancient lyricism (not to mention the metaphysics of the past), the author admits that he is shadowing others and embodies that shadow in a poem.

Even more astoundingly, Corless-Smith is able to shadow the works of Thomas Swan, at times lifting ideas and lines practically verbatim from Swan, yet Swan is not part of history. Corless-Smith has stolen the feel of a poet of the 1600s and smuggled himself into history as Thomas Swan! That is not all! Thomas Swan steals the lines of a contemporary, Nathaneal Culverwell. He admits to citing Culverwell in “from: The Dialogue of the Sunne and the Moone”. But the citations are unclear. Swan says the lines are “[q]uoted in this part from the manuscript of Nathaneal Culverwell's Discourse of the Light of Nature.” But the quotations are scattered and not really quotations in the ordinary sense. They are quite postmodern. Swan lifts small pieces of Culverwell's work interspersing them with his own writing and other bits of Culverwell's Discourse. Where Swan is quoting or rearranging or writing is impenetrable confusion, unless the reader wants to search through Culverwell's writings. (I did, but I am not telling what I read. That searching and mystery is part of the joy of the book we are reviewing.) More importantly, Swan does not exist. He never existed. Corless-Smith has stolen an identity, smuggled himself into the past, stolen the historical sense/feel of the poetry of the past and fused it with postmodern rearranging and stealing and grammar. The poet works against what is given: “my miracle is that which I cannot affect. My greatest part is that of which I can take no credit.”

This is poetry at work. FRAGMENTS is a workbook, in one sense. We steal, we shadow. We rearrange and we mishear. Ideas are lifted from Thomas Swan and developed by Corless-Smith, so that the opening stanza of “Dark Matter” evolves out of a fragment from Swan: “The soul conceived in God's alembic flesh.” Ideas are reworked in search of the proper articulation. So, we read that “Mysteries and corn stand side by side.” Later, “Stirring behind the curtain is a field of corn.” What is the proper articulation of a mystery in a life so real that it involves curtains and corn? Lines are recycled. “The Evening of a Faun” ends: “Dark house standing in a darker field”. The author is searching for the proper setting for an “extraordinary breath,” as he has lifted the dark house out of an earlier fragmentary poem:

How shall a modest love be had
The dark house stands in a darker field
The cuckoo plaints its seasonal
And nothing will oppose the fates

So FRAGMENTS is a method. One that works. That continually produces simply because there is something else there, “that of which I can take no credit”:

The object will make shadows unwittingly.

Its being written and its being read.

[…]

In our expanding universe the poem never manages to catch up
with the reader – or to reach the author.

[…]

I've written this before
I meant to.
However quickly it happens.

Poetry works...continually. Corless-Smith's work shows that in so many different ways. Poetry is in different voices, different fonts and textures, philosophical ideas and lyrical language, found texts and the newest writing. In lifting fragments from other works, Corless-Smith has realized a new artistic value/context for his fragments, a context not realized before. So, in a sense, a fragment is too early. Or, when Corless-Smith returns to rework an idea or line, he is admitting that the poetry fragment wrote itself, through him, without a clear sense of where it belonged. The poet is in search of the proper settings. The poet makes a fragment his own

Where the flesh of one body is indiscernible from that of another.

The poet scribbles down his perfect fragments, unclear of their contexts,

Transcribing the momentous sentence (no nearer than the voices are).

4. ENGLISH FRAGMENTS is the book the poet wants to write. the book the poet wants to read. to discover (secretly, in an old library, in the corner of a collapsing cottage). So Martin Corless-Smith has written his “Memories of an unread book.” The bits and pieces of historical and pseudo-historical characters, plagiarized lines and lies and original, “extraordinary breaths” are the life of a shimmery, infinitely folding, apocryphal being. Wonderfully, this book was in every moment of history until now:

Everything is an omen for everything will happen

FRAGMENTS is/sees all of history and every aspect of being as potential material for a poem. Or, really, it is all material for a poem the poet (whose identity is too fluid to hold in one poet) must write, compelled by what he hears and reads and touches daily:

The past seemed almost inevitable

The horizon is where the eyes run out

Not the author but a copy of his own book

It is, as it were, the presence of the absent,
such as we feel
in contemplating a familiar empty chair.

+++++++++

i. note on I Am Still Here and lying and art...the con as art

The central figures in Martin Corless-Smith's trilogy/tetralogy, besides the author, are William Williamson and Thomas Swan. Working on this review, I pored over pages of Google searches and ripped through Wikipedia and even read over old genealogical records in search of Thomas Swan and William Williamson. Thomas Swan seemed the easier target. I had more information on his background. But no references to Thomas/Tom/Tho Swan/Swann matched his apparent home in the area of Worcester as well as his birth in 1653 and his death in 1680. I was intrigued. A mystery...not merely written into a book of poetry. Corless-Smith's books were the mystery themselves.

A Selection from the Works of Thomas Swan (West House Books, Sheffield, UK 2001) was a treasure I discovered in my search. Originally, I came across a copy on Amazon and ordered it. It was the only piece of Swan I could find. The Worcester Antiquarian Society did not seem to exist anywhere...not anywhere appropriate. There is a Worcester Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts (which is not in England)...they have nothing on Thomas Swan.

From the beginning, I suspected something was askew. The philosophical writings of William Williamson sounded too familiar. His aesthetic tracked Corless-Smith too closely. And then Thomas Swan's work arrived. Edited by...Martin Corless-Smith and Alan Halsey. I convulsed with laughter. And then I read the book. And I convulsed with laughter, stopped by astonishment, then recovered, and I laughed convulsively with astonishment.

Corless-Smith's commitment to his alternative worlds and histories is complete. I believe that somewhere there is a cottage on a remote Hebridean island, and Martin Corless-Smith spends his summers there writing poetry and philosophy on the walls of that cottage and then carefully burns a small part of the cottage or leaves a window open to see what the rain will do to his fragments on the walls.

A Selection is quite obviously a fabrication. But the fabrication is not a waste. The poetry is beautiful. The small clues of the fabrication Corless-Smith scatters through the work...tickle me. They are small jokes (but not the “wink-nudge” that Michael Robbins is insulted by – an angry reviewer, offended by Corless-Smith's attempt to “dupe” him, and raging because anyone would ever write a book of lyrical poetry and philosophical fragments for its own sake rather than as a cutting edge treatise on metaphysics. Robbins, apparently, is unfamiliar with the vacuity of virtually all philosophical claims and aesthetic theories. Start with Gödel and Wittgenstein. Then stop until it is all fully absorbed. Then read Buddha on the direction the fire goes when it goes out. Then stop until it is all fully absorbed. Then start fresh.)

Reading over A Selection I noticed first that there is no discussion of Thomas Swan, except for a short bio on the back of the book. There are no notes explaining the editorial insertions throughout the work and there are no notes on where the editors see Thomas Swan in the history of English poetry. There are none of the usual trappings of historically important literature. And Swan would certainly be important given his very postmodern artistic sensibilities. In other words, the editorial notes are themselves part of the poetry. The alternative readings, the way that alternatives are indicated, the lack of the usual editorial remarks all tell us something about what is being written: a poetry that uses contemporary aesthetics within the context of the poetry of the 1600s, permitting the author to play with spellings, neologisms, music and form in a way that strikes the reader as proper to the time-period. But, of course, there is nothing proper about it. It is all fabrication and lies.

The improper layout of the book is very subtle. For instance, the book begins with a poem that opens:

I take myself up
over cliff trees
as swimming
a bright bursting off

And off to the right in the margins, we read the alternatives Swan apparently jotted in his notes:

i take myself on up
over clifftrees off
a swimming brimming cup
a bright bursting off

Notice how much is going on here to tip off the reader that something is not correct. The opening pronoun is not capitalized in the marginal variation, a very contemporary way to play with the notion of self. The words “cliff trees” are inconsistently run together in the marginalia. The stanzas, both/either, are mesmerizingly lyrical...but neither of them really says anything clearly meaningful. The lines are virtually purely suggestive...as postmodernity has opened up that possibility. Shakespeare did not have that option.

In other places, different methods of noting alternative lines or words are used. At times variations are marked “var.” with the variant to follow. In other places, the variants are noted below the poem, apparently found somewhere in Swan's papers. Still other places, inserted variations appear to be the work of Swan himself, and we are expected to simply know that the alternatives we are looking at were copied exactly as they were found from Swan's notebooks. The lines “that you may not another day as this day end/ in furious retreat from what is done ~~is out~~ ~~;(from what has beene)~~"look like they show the reader notes and erasures made by Swan. The parenthetical remark is set off in the margin of the book, apparently an alternative to “is out” being considered by Swan and then rejected. But the reader has no guidance from the editors. This is not merely sloppy editorial work. This is a whisper to look closer.

Corrections to Swan's work are just as loose. In the poem, “[To a friend]”, the brackets apparently indicating a title added by the editors, but who really knows, we have no guidance here, we read: “Nothing one days deed enough to end a life”, a line which fails to properly mark the possessive “days” with an apostrophe. On the page facing this poem, we read: “Was not the horses [sic] start”, the editors noting the unmarked possessive.

Brackets and parentheses are used to insert alternatives and editorial notes, but at times braces are used to indicate alternatives as well as give a feeling of antiquity:

The day a vast tree with a wasp-like waist {An Oak or Pear}
The day a spirit in a shell (vase) {a ~~faerie~~ whisper in a ~~fearie~~ ear}
The day a bell rings once at least {which makes both sides}
The day moves water north and west and south and east {the tides}
the day encounters of itself more (mostly) bravely {as an ant}
like the animal that faces death ~~impartial and in fury~~ {tiny giant}
in impartial fury

The different uses of different sorts of brackets are not explained, so it is left to the reader to discern their purpose. Square brackets seem to indicate the editorial notes of our contemporary editors, as in the stanza preceding the one just quoted, where we read: “The day as[?] a song we near ~~cannot quite~~ recall”. (Notice how the editors inject a question...without explanation! As if a question can exist simply by inflection or punctuation!) Parentheses, as we see above, indicate alternatives given by Swan in his notes, and the braces are, apparently, used to bring our attention to...what...thoughts Swan had while writing his poem...possible additions...a feeling of an antiquated note.

Probably the clearest declaration of the identity of Corless-Smith and Thomas Swan, besides the similarity in the sound of their poems, is the note on the title of the poem “Epistle of the Martyr”. In brackets to the right of the title, we read: “[Possible an erroneous title]”. There is no alternative title given, no justification for the note, which raises the question, “How can something be erroneous per se?” There must be some possible alternative or some different hand-writing used to pen the title...something to justify the suggestion that the title is erroneous. Otherwise, the title is just a title. Corless-Smith wants us to see his lie. The lie is part of the poem. He has adopted the conventions of historical scholarship as a method of writing poetry.

A Selection is not just a game. The few philosophical notes are poetry and the poetry is enjoyable, worth reading over and over out loud to no one:

The boundaries of forgiveness need not be confused with those of
knowledge
I am overrun with pettynesses – a hovering image of my alternative grace
the most galling

Martin Corless-Smith may be a liar, since he claims to have unearthed a poetic treasure. The lie is honest. It admits itself if the reader looks closely. The reader will want to look again.

ii. var. are

iii. The strange case of literary notes: they start as fragments and grow into each other.

iv. Don't just let art die. Steal it and give it new life.

*****

Micah Cavaleri lives in Michigan, where he runs and sleeps and writes and cooks while his wife explores the mysteries of the natural world. His book the syllable that opened an eye is available from Dead Man Publishing. Poems, etc are scattered about the web, with his most recent work forthcoming in the always beautiful elimae.

SUM OF EVERY LOST SHIP by ALLISON TITUS

2011-03-31T22:05:00.000-07:00

JESSICA BOZEK Reviews

Sum of Every Lost Ship by Allison Titus
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010)

Although I read it in the late-July heat, Allison Titus’s full-length debut, Sum of Every Lost Ship, is a winter book. The poems made me long for winter, a season I mostly can’t wait for to be over, but that I appreciate for its endless pots of soup, hand-knit accessories, and excuses to get into bed early with some crime fiction. The poems didn’t compel me toward this cozy version of winter, though. They made me think that even the parts where I can’t feel my extremities and I’m stranded on a floe in the Gulf of Finland–old empty vodka bottles sticking this way and that out of the thick ice–could be tolerable, with the right company.

The Don DeLillo epigraph, “There is a motel in the heart of every man” (from Americana), conjures loneliness, scratchy (or worse) bed linens (“the floral bed of our discount suite”), anonymity, simultaneous lives in extremity, last ditch efforts, and–maybe a bit more positively–love affairs. There’s something of all of this in Sum of Every Lost Ship. The book is “a forest / of motels”; it attempts to cut through the solitude and quiet–with radio, with postcards and letters, with a fetching how-to manual written by a whale (the sequence “Instructions from the Narwhal”). Motel rooms are where people make “a confederacy of meanwhile, tender by tender.” Confederacy, yet I read contingency–the acknowledgement that union is transient, however sweet: “What we need // is a surefire way to strap the bed / onto the trembling boat.”

Titus’s settings are desolate–tourist-places after the tourist-season, as we learn in “Exiled”: “Kind sir, the tourists have left / the cabins. The keys all accounted for / and rubber banded.” It makes sense, then, that if someone is always leaving, or someone is always aware that “after our one good year” someone will be leaving, remnants are cherished throughout the book. The poems allude to shreds and scraps, to acts of reckoning. In “Modern Romance” “The parts // of me that are on fire can’t / put the parts of you that are on fire out.” Romance isn’t total, but for the time-being it’s enough, as in “Self-Portrait as the Train Passes”: “I gave you that sleep, a pale / asylum from the hours I did not love / you and did not say.”

The speakers in these poems look at the past, with its triumphs (“If at first inelegant, every refrain of touch built / a sturdy harbor”) and its failures (“the hours … cosseted and bundled … as poor mutts pulled limp / from the river”). Titus observes what’s left of one speaker after the “good year”: “ I am already / black strands of hair // on the flat white / pillow, // fingernail clippings in the sink.” Weary acknowledgement pervades, but this book is never resigned–it persists in cataloguing, in making funny math of its parts. Tender acts of keeping, even against the awareness that relationships end, are figured as “Shepherding”: “We bundle our secrets / in winter clothes, leave them, / these sad culprits, to the wardrobe, / let the moths scrap the silhouettes to shreds.” Similarly, in “Obsessive Compulsive,” shepherding materializes in an unexpected urge: “Because I am in love with you / I imagine your dying. / This is how I keep you safe.” The superstitious speaker confronts apprehension through this awareness that we may lose what we don’t acknowledge as fragile. The second poem titled “Motel” (the book has four) is a study in tenuousness:

MOTEL

Once I conjugated every animal to sorrow. Every sorrow into a small small factory, manufacturer of salt, camping gear, fur coats and poorly upholstered furniture. Even now it seems like every version of melancholy rescues a nocturne for the pallid sky. A type of permanent dusk. Fold down the bedsheet. The room has earned its sadness. Nondescript despite how we have rearranged ourselves inside it, undressing with cold hands. Us with our pilgrim hearts. Stationed fast to parentheses of sleep and winter.

Here, the catalogue is “a nocturne” for what has to be the sweetest description of hibernation I’ve ever read.

Weather figures largely in these attempts to capture the contingency of relationships, as all too soon, “In unremarkable minutes the world passes / to habit.” The poems’ weathers “heave & flatten”; they amplify mood as sky becomes “a consumptive arrangement of fevers.” But weather is more than mere backdrop—it is itself a barometer, an instrument for relating how exteriors reflect and augment interiors. The untitled preface poem implores, “Think of the nights that / have broken without a word, // have left a starless sky in your throat.” Weather provides both protection and oblivion, two sides of the same coin perhaps: “Fog sews the afternoon over / us sews us inside / the afternoon.” Without moves within.

“Inclement” describes one way in which the poems of Sum of Every Lost Ship work–that is, as various bracing epistles to the heart’s cold:

INCLEMENT

Snow and after, each bidding
and restlessness turns the goat’s heart
fallow: long hours of ice and bluster:
asymmetry of wind.
Say every goat has in its heart
a field, and each field, a goat:
the slumber of muscle and grass
is still a different elegy. Every
heart writes a different letter
of winter to its cold.
Icicles on sheet
metal, bucket frozen in the well.

Once there was no language
for the weather, just The sky is low and birdless;
or The sky is a box of wings.

Yet, Titus “stak[es] a claim on the weather” and demonstrates, that if we only know how to look at it, weather can be the most interesting thing to talk about.

*****

Jessica Bozek is the author of The Bodyfeel Lexicon (Switchback Books) and several chapbooks, including Squint into the Sun (new from Dancing Girl Press). Recent poems appear in 751, Action, Yes, Artifice, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, horse less review, and Sixth Finch. Jessica teaches writing at Boston University and runs Small Animal Project (smallanimalproject.com), a reading series in Cambridge, MA.

NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS by VANESSA PLACE AND ROBERT FITTERMAN

2011-03-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2009)

The first thing to know is that conceptual writing is writing that is conceptual. The second thing to know is that conceptual writing is a whole lot of fun. It’s kinda like scrapbooking. Anyone can do it, and perhaps everyone should. But how do I get started? I hear you ask. That’s easy. There’s no better place than with this book.

Vanessa Place's and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms is a wonderfully succinct and straightforward how-to manual. It could almost have been published in the famed Dummies series as Conceptual Writing for Dummies, but it doesn’t have enough charts and illustrations. Luckily for all of us, Ugly Duckling Presse stepped up. And UDP did a wonderful job.

But there are a few apparent typos that can make things confusing for the neophyte. An apparent typo is something that looks like a typo but is not. This world is confusing enough without apparent typos, so I will take this opportunity to clean things up. I’m really only going to concentrate on one of them, the first, which fortunately or unfortunately occurs in the very first sentence: “1. Conceptual writing is allegorical writing.” “Allegorical” is clearly an apparent typo. A conceptual writing newbie might be tempted to substitute “anagogical.” I will rely on Nicola Masciandaro’s “Getting Anagogic” (http://www.rhizomes.net/issue21/masciandaro/index.html Rhizomes 21) for a discussion of anagogy:

This is it. There is no more. And it is forever. Today my remarks take aim at understanding anagogy as an essential, inevitable, and generally ignored dimension of hermeneutic experience. In open dialogue with some of its premodern concepts and instances, I mean to medievally think anagogy for the present, rather than demonstrate its past. This may be considered an attempt to study anagogy anagogically, to understand it in a manner that produces an anagogic sense of anagogy, a postmedieval foretaste of its presence. Mirroring the fourfold sense of scripture, I attempt this by speculatively splitting anagogy into literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. These I name Arrival, Constellation, Spice, and Now, respectively. … Anagogy is arrival in the literal sense of being an intersection between its etymological meaning and its position as the last and highest of hermeneutic senses, an intersection that situates finality in motion rather than stasis. Understood as the equivalent of sursumductio, ana-gogy (fr. Gk. ana ‘up’ + agein ‘lead’) signifies uplifting. But whereas uplifting is more generally thought from the earthbound perspective as elevation or raising, that is, with a reference that prioritizes the state left behind or what would otherwise remain below, anagogy inflects uplifting with an inverse transitivity that invests the terminus with motive agency. More precisely, anagogy is itself a transition within transitivity wherein subject/object and sign/thing boundaries directionally invert in a wonderful way. Such inversion typifies the Platonic principle of circulatory return. “The Good returns all things to itself ... All things are returned to it as their own goal,” says Pseudo-Dionysius, whose mystical understanding of anagogy fused with the hermeneutic concept to form its general medieval sense: the conjunction of signification and experience of final reality. That is, anagogy is the site where telic movement becomes intelligible only in the passive voice, where signs become something like upsidedown repetitions of their own event, and discourse is borne back upwards into its object, returning to by moving from its end, as Hugh of Balma says, carried upward by its own weight. Such is the weird shape of this sense, elegantly defined by de Lubac as that “which does not allow anything else after it.” So in the modern world, anagogy survives, like much else of medieval theology, in the register of horror: “I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more ... When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death” (Lovecraft, Dagon). Unpinning anagogy from its theological determination as participatory perception of an eternal beyond (a procedure whose imperative is retrievable from the way medieval discourse on anagogy is deeply about its metaphors), anagogy becomes intelligible as its own movement: the return of the word to itself. As Agamben explains, such return constitutes the word’s overcoming of its own internal fracture (between expression and representation, saying and showing, etc.), in other words, language’s self-fulfillment of its limitless secret prophecy (the end is nigh), the verbal undoing of the irresolution between telos and death: “Crossing over time and the scission that reveals itself in the place of language, the word must return to itself and, absolving itself of this scission, it must be at the end [essere alla fine] there where, without knowing it, it was already in the beginning; that is, in the Voice.” Literal anagogy, to echo Lacan, is littoral, a stumbling forward of the letter over its own shore, the zone where the world your word was headed towards is breathlessly sucking you into this one. So Garnier of Rochefort (†1225) speaks of anagogy as the state where the mind “by advancing fails in a marvelous way, and then advances more when it has arrived at its failure.”

Wow. Anagogy sounds pretty conceptual to me. Maybe allegory’s a real typo after all. But … I don’t think so. There’s something quite claustrophobic about anagogy. Conceptual writing wouldn’t be fun if it were claustrophobic, would it? Who wants to suffocate? Well there is sexual asphyxia. Maybe you do want to suffocate. Don’t answer that. It’s none of my business. Unless. Call me. Anyhow, allegory, as Place and Fitterman have it, lets the air in. See the little chart (there aren’t enough charts!) on page 14:

A conceptual allegory opens onto … who knows what? That’s the point, in a way, isn’t it? (I mean, why do people scrapbook? To retrieve what, exactly?) As Thom Donovan puts it:

The term allegory they [Place and Fitterman] derive from a discourse after Goethe, and radicalized in the 20th century by Walter Benjamin. A work of art is allegorical if it resists hermeneutic closure and remains open to multiple levels of interpretation. As Benjamin writes in his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama: “Allegories, are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.” For Benjamin, this fleeing/fleeting quality of cultural products (virtual ruins) relates to their place within a capitalist economy. After Benjamin, Fitterman/Place view conceptualist works as allegorical insofar as they exceed their symbolic meaning, thus elude the equation of significance with commodification.

(Thom Donovan, “Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place’s NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS, at http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=4662 BOMBLOG, 2 Oct 09)

This is important:

2g. … Conceptualism enacts Gödel’s Theorem: the degree of constancy/completemness of the “subject” and “matter” is modulated by the degree to which the linguistic object-image is limited/unlimited in nature.

This mandates the defining of the set. This invokes the one-that-is-nothing and the being-that-is-multiple posited by Alain Badiou.

If you’ve read the book, you will recall the notion that conceptual writing has a “thinkership” as well as a “readership” (heaven forfend that the two categories never overlap!). A “thinker” will take the reference to Badiou as more than just an artsy-fartsy name-drop, and will recall Badiou’s Being and Event:

For Badiou the problem which the Greek tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is the problem that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, it is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the one is not. This is why Badiou accords set theory (the axioms of which he refers to as the Ideas of the multiple) such stature, and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology: Only set theory allows one to conceive a ‘pure doctrine of the multiple’. Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set (that is, another set too). What separates sets out therefore is not an existential positive proposition, but other multiples whose properties validate its presentation; which is to say their structural relation. The structure of being thus secures the regime of the count-as-one. So if one is to think of a set — for instance, the set of people, or humanity — as counting as one the elements which belong to that set, it can then secure the multiple (the multiplicities of humans) as one consistent concept (humanity), but only in terms of what does not belong to that set. What is, in following, crucial for Badiou is that the structural form of the count-as-one, which makes multiplicities thinkable, implies that the proper name of being does not belong to an element as such (an original ‘one’), but rather the void set (written Ø), the set to which nothing (not even the void set itself) belongs. It may help to understand the concept ‘count-as-one’ if it is associated with the concept of ‘terming’: a multiple is not one, but it is referred to with ‘multiple’: one word. To count a set as one is to mention that set. How the being of terms such as ‘multiple’ does not contradict the non-being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology: for there to be a term without there also being a system of terminology, within which the difference between terms gives context and meaning to any one term, does not coincide with what is understood by ‘terminology’, which is precisely difference (thus multiplicity) conditioning meaning. Since the idea of conceiving of a term without meaning does not compute, the count-as-one is a structural effect or a situational operation and not an event of truth. Multiples which are ‘composed’ or ‘consistent’ are count-effects; inconsistent multiplicity is the presentation of presentation.

Badiou’s use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that (as with set theory) there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. Russell’s paradox famously ruled that possibility out of formal logic. (This paradox can be thought through in terms of a ‘list of lists that do not contain themselves’: if such a list does not write itself on the list the property is incomplete, as there will be one missing; if it does, it is no longer a list that does not contain itself.) So too does the axiom of foundation — or to give an alternative name the axiom of regularity — enact such a prohibition (cf. p. 190 in Being and Event). (This axiom states that all sets contain an element for which only the void [empty] set names what is common to both the set and its element.) Badiou’s philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the ‘one’: there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore — against Cantor, from whom he draws heavily — staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation ‘founds’ all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets — thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely ‘new’ occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently ‘pragmatically abandoned’ an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.

The event and the subject.

Drawing from 18 November 2006 "Truth procedure in politics" lecture
The principle of the event is where Badiou diverges from the majority of late twentieth century philosophy and social thought, and in particular the likes of Foucault, Butler, Lacan and Deleuze, among others. In short, it represents that which is outside of ontology. Badiou’s problem here is, unsurprisingly, the question of how to ‘make use’ of that which cannot be discerned. But it is a problem he views as vital, because if one constructs the world only from that which can be discerned and therefore given a name, it results in either the destitution of subjectivity and the removal of the subject from ontology (the criticism continually leveled at Foucault’s discursive universe), or the Panglossian solution of Leibniz: that God is language in its supposed completion.

Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory — Badiou’s language of ontology — to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology. He employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J. Cohen, using what are called the conditions of sets. These conditions are thought of in terms of domination, a domination being that which defines a set. (If one takes, in binary language, the set with the condition ‘items marked only with ones’, any item marked with zero negates the property of the set. The condition which has only ones is thus dominated by any condition which has zeros in it [cf. p. 367-71 in Being and Event].) Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible (nameable or constructible) set is dominated by the conditions which don’t possess the property that makes it discernible as a set. (The property ‘one’ is always dominated by ‘not one’.) These sets are, in line with constructible ontology, relative to one’s being-in-the-world and one’s being in language (where sets and concepts, such as the concept ‘humanity’, get their names). However, he continues, the dominations themselves are, whilst being relative concepts, not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought; rather one can axiomatically define a domination — in the terms of mathematical ontology — as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination. One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a ‘set of dominations’, which he refers to as the indiscernible set, or the generic set. It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls forcing. And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject — about which the ontological situation cannot comment — to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event. Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought.

Badiou’s ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: ‘decide upon the undecidable’. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains in which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) can potentially witness an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a ‘generic procedure’, which in its undecidability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place. Through this maintenance of fidelity, truth has the potentiality to emerge.

In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the evental [sic] (his translators’ neologism) rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of ‘decisionist’ (the idea that once something is decided it ‘becomes true’), but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability. As he says of Galileo (p. 401):

When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand — ‘movement’, ‘equal proportion’, etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?

(“Alain Badiou”, in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Badiou Wikipedia)

You see where all this leads, don’t you? Conceptual writing, in its open-endedness (recall that chart on p.14!), is communist! But not in any sense we’ve known yet: How could Galileo, etc etc?

Place and Fitterman try to pretend that they’re too jaded to believe this, that all is already lost (see section 6b1, which reads: “Note: the regime under which conceptual reading has flowered is the repressive market economy; this is a banal observation, nonetheless true. Note that there is no escape from this regime, …”).

But at least this “thinker” of conceptual writing is not so sure he believes them. Even though, as 7c has it, “Embodiment = failure.” Of course. And yet … “Brecht: ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared with the founding of a bank?’” (11d)

Let’s put on our black bloc masks, then, crank up the dubstep and … ‘die laughing’, as Anna Parvulescu, in her Laughter: Notes on a Passion, has it.

*

The volume also includes Place’s “Ventouses”, a separate text, and an appendix, which consists of a brief not-comprehensive bibliography of some conceptual writing.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman is the author of No Sounds of My Own Making (2007) and Flux, Clot & Froth (2010). His most recent chapbooks are World Zero (2007), the collaboration with Ernesto Priego, Inheritance (2008), and 50 (2010). He edited the international anthology 1000 Views of ‘Girl Singing’ (2009), curated, with Eileen R Tabios, Ernesto Priego and Ivy Alvarez, The Chained Hay(na)ku Project (2010) and is responsible for the publication of 2nd NOTICE OF MODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS (2010). His work has appeared in numerous journals and in several anthologies. His ongoing efforts can be seen at Zeitgeist Spam.

BOOKS by NOAH ELI GORDON, DEREK HENDERSON and ERICA BAUM

2011-03-30T23:56:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

THE SOURCE by Noah Eli Gordon
(Futurepoem, New York, 2011)

THUS & by Derek Henderson
(if p then q, Manchester, U.K., 2011)

Dog Ear by Erica Baum
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2011)

I enjoy learning about the processes or techniques that go into creating a poem(s). Said process employed by Noah Eli Gordon in his latest book, THE SOURCE, is among the most intriguing I’ve recently considered—if only because the author’s “A NOTE ON PROCESS” presents the relevance of “the name of God”—perhaps my reading is limited, but I don’t see God invoked often in process notes to poems.

As part of his process, Gordon also went to the Denver Public Library over a period of nine months to read Page 26 in nearly ten thousand books. From his readings, he compiled “bits of language” that he then “fused” into what became text in THE SOURCE. The rationale for Page 26? The poet explains

The choice of page 26, while obviously corresponding to the amount of letters present in the English alphabet, is also important in Kabbalist terms; it represents the numerical value of the Tetragrammaton, the four Hebrew letters that form the name of God. Additionally, according to the Talmud, the Torah would have been revealed during the 26th generation of the history of the world; thus, it is Moses who, 26 generations after Adam, receives the Torah transmitted by God. Interestingly, by using a correspondence table, where each letter is given in ascending order a numerical value (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.), the name of God in English has a total value (G=7, O=15,D=4) of 26.

It’s worth noting—and praising—how well Gordon’s concept is supported by Mickel Design’s book cover as well as choice of font. The cover is burgundy faux leather seemingly stamped by the gold-colored emblazonment of title and author. The font is set in Sabon, designed by Jan Tschichold in 1967 and used for the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. Not only are the design choices attractive but they exemplify how well-considered were the concepts that created this book. The reference to the Book of Common Prayer, for instance, is not a coincidence when Gordon is acknowledging a concern over whether "constraint-based, conceptual writing might have a spiritual dimension" [italics mine]): if you will, Form = Content. The cover effect also comes off as legal or biblical, both of which fit the notion of some Source.

Anyway, it’s old news that poets read other texts and lift from them to create their own; my immediate response to THE SOURCE was actually to recall a book I'd recently published through Meritage Press, Flux, Clot & Froth by John Bloomberg-Rissman; here, the poet went through about 4,000 books on his bookshelf for bits of language that he wove together into a book-length poem. (Bloomberg-Rissman continues this approach for his ongoing IN THE HOUSE OF HANGMAN series available at his Zeitgeist Spam blog.) This technique of collaging from other texts, in some cases with slight changes to the text, also has been popularized by the internet’s research capabilities. However, Gordon’s “surfing” of a non-virtual library—versus, say, a Google search—is refreshing in its return to a more bodily involvement with source material. Okay, rafting a river is still not the same as reading about the rafting of a river. But to lift one’s butt off of a computer chair and travel to another location where (unlike in one's writing studio) things happen outside of the author's instigation or control, and then leaf through these things called books that are supposed to be going out of existence—well, it can be a deeper or more committed or more deliberate involvement than typing on a keyboard in addressing or involving the world viz a poem.

Books contain different worlds from the reader’s. But what’s the significance of the poet leaving his domestic domain to go to a public library? Gordon, as with many other poets who've annotated others' texts to write their own, brought in many externals (viz the worlds in the books) into their poems. Gordon, however, extended this particular path by going to a public library—so the books he utilized aren't of his own choosing and the subject(ed) books are intended for a reading public of many versus the subjective choice of one. On this level, Gordon fully developed the concept he attempted to explore with THE SOURCE and validates his conclusion in his “A NOTE ON PROCESS” that “rigid and systemic modes of writing can embody an emotionally charged engagement with the world.”

This leads us to THE SOURCE itself. Many projects have interesting techniques and processes but the actual manifestations don’t quite shine. Here, Gordon’s sense of musicality that’s been displayed in his other works (e.g. The Area of Sound Called The Subtone and The Frequencies) is more than up to snuff. It needed to be more than up to snuff. Some mastery is required for deftly weaving together nearly 10,000 sources into a creature with some sense of cohesiveness. Let me open the book now at random (no, I’m not deliberately turning to Page 26) and offer an excerpt:

There is swift masterful decision, and yet an almost ethereal wistfulness and delicacy in all it has done to draw the eye of the viewer into the swirling totality of the actions it so powerfully portrays. For example, brightly colored crinolined ladies and top-hatted gentlemen cram onto a jetty where a steam ferry disgorges its passengers and prepares to depart again. Upon seeing this, one forgets that to possess the feeling of shame is to be near its energy. The same holds true of any other scale. It is enough to hear music that is, though simple, still music.

The borders of abstraction, the poise, the sheer depth of feeling, these one may well indeed copy from the Source, but, like ruminants, who in order to digest have to pass food through more than one stomach, it will not allow you to build a composition without a laughing infant accompanied by his haloed guardian in a boat smoothly issuing out of a cave into the rosy morning light.

There are the pleasing surprises in the deft joining of abstractions and specifics. More significantly for the creation of prolonged or book-length coherence is what underlies the joyous suppleness of language: a rhythm proffered by phrase-lengths and sentence-lengths that facilitates reading. Rhythm through the judicious use of commas and periods. Thus, music. They look block-ey, being prose poem paragraphs, but read them out loud and you’ll feel the word-dance.

The sources for THE SOURCE being what they are (i.e. random), there’s plenty of potential for creating the always pleasing turns of phrase. I’ll open the book again at random and, oh joy, here’s one:

It is difficult to concentrate on a ballet during the great debate between determinism and free will.

I don’t know about you but I thought that hilarious. I’m not a big ballet-goer but have attended a few in my time, and can easily imagine the above difficulty.

There’s plenty more in THE SOURCE to please. There’s dry wit:

A book written by a doctor ordinarily includes some talk for a cure.

There are those moments that lead you to nodding in agreement though you don’t know what you’re agreeing with, like

The first flash of candles tells all, or if not, enough and more.

There are several that offer the layer of being ars poetica statements, such as

“I was applauded, but no further interest was taken in me.”

I could go on. And, mentally, I did go on for much more than what I did for this review, plucking from the book one section after another and appreciating it. Which leads me to the book’s paradox. I do believe THE SOURCE is a cohesive whole. But it is also most appreciated by being read, not from beginning to end but, by being opened at random for some bits and pieces. I suppose such, too, can be considered a sign of the concept’s effectiveness—one, after all, doesn’t usually read through a ten-thousand-book library by starting on the beginning of one shelf and reading in order through to the end of the farthest shelf.

Obviously, I admire THE SOURCE as a conceptual project and as a book-length poem. But one possible caveat I have is whether the near-10,000 books referenced could have been presented in some way. I wonder about its possibilities as a list (list poem? And, hey, I once wrote a poem based on scanning titles at a bookstore and sensing the music that would arise when the titles joined—a la Cixous’ “attune[ment” to music that Gordon cites as one of the book’s epigraphs). Well, perhaps not; THE SOURCE does remind, “…a pianist conscious of his fingers during a furious set should immediately stop playing.”

Still, the occasional gothic tones, among others, within the book makes me wonder what exactly Denver is putting in its libraries—or the specific library visited by Gordon—and whether its collection needs expansion. We could assess the question if the list of books was available. Did we ignore possibilities of cultural critique here? But, never mind, these are just asides—one shouldn’t make the mistake of conceding to a project’s underlying concept and then “analyzing” it based on another concept, right? Just consider these last two paragraphs another indication of how THE SOURCE drew in this reader such that I, oh yes!, began to imagine a different reality for it. Which is to say, THE SOURCE successfully enticed.

*

Having said all that above, I reiterate my appreciation of Gordon leaving his writing studio to go to the public library and do his searching there. I believe I make a big deal out of this because it seems to me that so many poets have written and continue to write from the reading through, remixing from, collaging from, and otherwise sampling of other people's texts (a practice enhanced by the availability of internet searching) ... and I picture them all seated at a desk or lying on the floor or couch as they peruse publications as raw material. At least Gordon is helping to address the U.S.' obesity problem (I know i'm overreaching here as he may have driven to the library instead of ... uh, jogged there) in addition to ... reading through of other people's texts! Of course, this process with all its variations is a legitimate approach (I do it moiself); I just wish I'd see more ways for poets to exercise their imagination (self-implication conceded). Anyway...

Here are two more recent books that depend on others' texts for their existence: Derek Henderson's THUS & and Erica Baum's Dog Ear.

Henderson's approach -- and here I quote from the press release of its (fabulous for exploring innovative approaches) publisher, if p then q -- is summarized as:

Ted Berrigan's seminal The Sonnets is renowned for its famous use of cut up technique and reconfiguration throughout the sequence. Derek Henderson's erasue THUS & eliminates all words and typographical duplications. In addition to the strikingly beautiful, often minimalist, sonnets created by Henderson, THUS & reveals (conceals) not only the clusters of phrases/lines that were cloned by Berrigan but also words which he repeated; many obviously subconsciously. What is left in THUS & is part skeleton, and underbelly, of maitre-sonneteer Berrigan's The Sonnets and part alien remix by techno-magician Derek Henderson.

A tetchy aside on the above, by the by: wouldn't it be logical that the results would be "minimalist" given its process? I won't edit this aside out because it shows my mood as I write the review. And I do wish I read Henderson's book in a different mood from being text-shuffle-irritated; indeed, in addition to writing this review, I've been reformatting other GR reviews including of Karla Kelsey's Iteration Nets whose process also partly nods to Ted Berrigan's sonnets and begins by incorporating excerpts from outside texts (Kelsey's process is more than its beginning, of course, and you can read about it in the GR review HERE); elsewhere in the issue are reviews of another three, possibly more, books reliant on sampling from others' texts (after formatting this issue, I was ready for some witness poetry!). So, anyway, I wish I was not in a mood for an alternative process when I read THUS & because many of its poems are actually lovely, like XXIII with its particularly fabulous ending:

XXIII

                                    lines

                                                Tundra vine
Blood ran             muddy inspiration Walks             anyway
            slight film

                        waterbugs             fragile
Honey scorched

or to the pleasingly on-point

XLIX

Beside

Swans
Warm
Guiding

Fifteen

Inevitably, there are some misses given the arbitrary constraints. But the point may be -- and I'm rather surprised at this -- that there are less misses than I would have expected given its process' constraints. Thus, THUS & befits its existence as a poetry collection: it's a worthwhile read.

*

Erica Baum's Dog Ear relies on other people's texts by presenting images of (from the press release) "dog-eared pages of mass-market paperbacks [that] are photographed to isolate the small diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text." Here's one example where the line-fold has a pleasingly flash-of-gold effect across the darker background; I'm reminded of the notion of mining for the precious mineral, where a mark may bespeak the existence of the desired element -- a process that can be a metaphor for the idea of going through others' texts to create a new golden element that can be labeled as poem and/or art:

Kenneth Goldsmith, who wrote an Introduction, aptly notes that "the act of reading is up for grabs." He gives an example of two alternate readings of the image, which I paraphrase here for its usefulness. If Plate XXII was read by beginning at the upper left-hand corner and working its way around the outside, while ignoring the fold as a barrier to the textual flow, XXII can be transcribed as

and water. The lace was my laceless shoe? Caught
broken when I tore the door to my inner
so I threw it away. In there. Encounter-
top of the shoe, is mine must have
an old trick I office filled
cleaning out littered
my enemi-bought I
me, too me like
say.

The same Plate XXII, if read as two separate portions of text with the fold as the dividing line, it may be transcribed as

and water. The lace was
broken when I tore the
so I threw it away.
top of the shoe,
an old trick I
cleaning out
my enemi-
me, too
say

my laceless shoe? Caught
the door to my inner
in there. Encounter-
mine must have
office filled

Fun and intriguing. And all part of Baum's interrogations of how one may read/perceive the word/world. (But, again, I imagine another poet sitting on one's duff dog-earing pages to photograph. The method is a bit too hermetic for Moi, or at least in the mood I'm in while doing this review). But what elevates Dog Ear for me is its visual dimension. Between Goldsmith's essay and its opposite bookend, an essay by Beatrice Gross, Baum's works are photographs of the dog-eared pages. And color here is definitely a narrative. Much of the images are in various tones of sepia, befitting the age of the paperback books that were dog-eared for this project. The brown, yellow, and tan hues somehow evoke an emotional response. Nostalgia is one as the colors of fading and/or aging refer to some past. Compassion over human mortality is another when confronted by a browning color that bespeaks brittleness.

I don't think one needs to cite Josef Albers (as the press release does, even if "cursorily") just because the works are square-ish. There's really a visual integrity here that doesn't need such name-dropping. in Plate XVI, for instance, there's a luminosity in the spaces between words that fits (if you will) the implied searching surfacing from the words:

I?

I would not do that

differently.

Yes?

Yes.

How

Here's the above poem as visual art:

Harmony exists between color and text, e.g. the way a seemingly sunlit space illumines the perpetual searching of the questions and a definitive answer ("I would not do that / differently" that nonetheless provides no revelation as to what the answer "that" is.

Examples abound of such pleasing effects and, unlike with many remixed or recontextualized texts, I actually anticipate returning often to Baum's Dog Ear for its many pleasurable moments.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects as she's its editor, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed or generated responses by Joey Madia in The New Mystics HERE; Allen Bramhall over HERE; by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE; by Leny Strobel over HERE; and by Jean Vengua over HERE and HERE. Her THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I is reviewed by Edric Mesmer in Yellow Field and reprinted HERE. Her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 is reviewed by Arpine Konyalian Grenier over HERE. Allen Bramhall also reviews the "Hay(na)ku for Haiti" series over HERE. If the latter two get you curious, please note that participating in this fundraiser for Haiti is supported by Marsh Hawk Press, publisher of THE THORN ROSARY: if you order at least $15 worth of booklets, you will receive a copy of THE THORN ROSARY which is priced retail at $19.95; this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

ITERATION NETS by KARLA KELSEY

2011-03-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

TAMMI MCCUNE Reviews

Iteration Nets by Karla Kelsey
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2010)

Son[net]s of addition and erasure

In Karla Kelsey’s second full-length poetry collection Iteration Nets, also with Ahsahta Press, she incorporates lines from outside texts and homophonic translations to construct a sequence of sonnets, which she then “explodes” (Kelsey’s verb) into prose poems, and finally erases into fragments. She explains how in “A Note on Process” on the Contents page, clearly foregrounding her intriguing procedure.

The book is divided into three "movements." In the first, Kelsey appropriates lines from texts by philosophers, scientists, and writers, especially poets, thus questioning individual authorship while entering into conversation with these multiple voices and historical and contemporary writers of sonnets. An “Authors Sampled” index lists the names corresponding to each poem, though not the specific texts sampled. Dante, Shelley, and Stein appear, as do St. Augustine, Wittgenstein and McKenzie Wark, among others.

The poems are numbered, connecting their permutations throughout the book -- 1.1, 2.1; 1.2, 2.2; 1.3, 2.3, etc. In movement one, for each sonnet the first A B, C, D, E (etc.) lines are borrowed from outside texts; the subsequent rhyming lines are Kelsey’s “loose homophonic translation(s)” of the borrowed lines, creating what she describes as “tight little rooms of sonically driven language.” For example, in sonnet 4.1, sampled lines 1 and 2 (A, B)

Left in the ground it, rooted, grows
so that the roses glow forth in a higher red

are “translated”

cleft. Tin of sound, excluded, goes.
Go at a Moses flow, mirth tins and tires, says
(6)

These sonnets use various rhyme schemes and are mostly 14 lines long, but they eschew other elements of the traditional sonnet, such as a set meter or a clear turn. Along with appropriating some of Ted Berrigan’s lines, Iteration Nets reflects his methods in The Sonnets, with their sound-translations, repetitions, disjunctives and collage-like feel, and their exploration of the possibilities of language. Kelsey’s sonnets gather twists and turns of sound, word and image to build a present and continual “arc” of meaning-making.

This "arc" continues through the book’s second movement, in which Kelsey “explodes” her inter-textual sonnets into prose poems, transforming the sampled and sound-translated lines by weaving in “threads of narrative, philosophy, landscape, and lyricism.” Shared experience enters into this section: taking walks or drives, relationships and memories offer moments of relation and presence. For example, in prose poem 6.2, a dream and a childhood memory appear:

In the beginning heat of summer I dream a recurring February dream. And in that dream the light of the world goes out. Stunned by the pull of stars it exudes plasma stabilized in vast quarries of marigold then goes dark as we come to Earth’s rescue, make a little sun and drop it, there, in the garden blooming out sunset in the image of the bomb I found, age 7, sprawled with the National Geographic on the tiled California floor. Turnip, flock and gull. …
(36)

This “explosion” all from the first two lines of 6.1:

The light goes out -- it exudes
plasma stabilized in vast quarries of marigold, turnip, flock and gull.
(8)

Although these poems offer moments of connection, what seems more important is how the elements -- the borrowed lines, echoes, and images -- are juxtaposed, transformed and afforded multiple meanings. As the title conveys, this collection is a net (son[net]) that catches and then weaves words, sounds and images. Often repeated words recall the sonnet’s traditional themes of love, sin, mind, but they evolve in combination: sin bent, sad bent, mind bent. Reoccurrence is inherent to the process and the form, as in the linking of the sonnets by last and first lines; for example, sonnet 6.1 ends “tried glean. Missed. And then I throw,” while 7.1 begins, “I threw away abstraction. Mind-tried focus…” (8-9).

In the third movement, Kelsey “strips” (her verb again) the prose poems into fragments. But, unlike a similar exercise done by Jen Bervin (Nets, Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2004), in which she “erased” Shakespeare’s sonnets by bolding her word choices and leaving the original text in faded type, Kelsey simply leaves the retained words from the prose poems in the same position on the page, allowing her chosen words to radiate into white space:

                                                                                          Forgiveness
                                                                                          and

                                      feathers

dream of
     birds
(78)

The poem numbers appear in faded type, and the space between the poems is removed, creating out of the fragments a single poem, only one of many that could be wrought from this text. Kelsey's book moves from the spliced sonnets of the first movement, through its word-dense middle, to the openness of these final fragments.

Iteration Nets' methods of inter-textuality and erasure are compelling, as are the results of Kelsey's gathering, listening and weaving: the second movement extends the vibrations of the first, and the final poem opens to sound and silence. These poems do not offer resolution or meaning-encapsulating lines. This is a challenging book, one to be perused, paging forward and back while letting go of concerns of linearity and logic. Although it may seem that the method is most intriguing, the poems are enjoyed more after letting go of form and sense and focusing on the “re-iterations” and evolutions of sounds, the multiple connotations and associations of words and the beautiful blend of images. Without trying to determine authorship, or pinpoint a turn, or make sense of it all, readers enter the multiple conversations and the "folding, unfolding" of sound and meaning (7). Kelsey's Iteration Nets re-emphasizes for poets and readers alike the essentiality of sound and music to poetry, the contemporary complexities of authorship and the multiplicities of language and meaning.

*****

Tammi McCune currently lives in Hyderabad, India.

PITCH-DRAFTS 77-95 by RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS and

2011-03-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

JIM MCCRARY Reviews

Pitch – Drafts 77-95 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
(Salt Publishing, London, 2010)

and

Day out of Days (Stories) by Sam Shepard
(Vintage Books, New York, 2010)

Pitch – Drafts 77-95 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis

It was a cold and windy night that Rachel B. Du Plessis came to read at the University of Kansas. The wind whipped across Mt. Oread and the Jayhawks were in a mighty battle for first place in the nation, the fucking nation (!), basketball of course. You don’t know? But here is a warm room almost, really almost full of persons come out to here the poet read. And she did. Yes she did.
So for me, listening to RBDP was somewhat, and I mean all respect and that she deserves, but at first, for me, like Italian opera when first listened too. It is beautiful, magnificent, stunning….but I don’t understand Italian so have no idea what they are talking about. Or it is like the first few times one heard Jimi Hendrix at a party through a haze of dope and beer….someone leans in and yells: “Man, do you hear those words?” and you suddenly realize that Hendrix is singing? Know what I mean. RBDP is sort of like that, for me, since there seems to be a lot going on that I miss since I don’t know much German or Rilke, or French poets, or styles of poetry or Jewishness or modern critical thinking or numerberlogy or what not. I didn’t realize till after she read and then I bought the book Pitch and then looked in the back and saw the pages of “notes” that there was a lot of stuff going on in this work. I mean one poem, and it is a doozy, there are 2 ½ pages of ‘notes’ in really small print naming stuff like : plenary, and Heidegger and Derrida, and “syntactically altered citations”, the Natchez Trace, Ozymandias by Shelly…you get the drift (see notes below). So I guess, for me, sit back or sit up and read what you can. Ignore what you need too (remember first reading Pound – Chinese?). I really do think it is okay to say to ones self: “Okay, I don’t know why she is smiling as she reads this passage, but that is okay. That guy is laughing with her. That is okay too. Maybe he is some kind of scholar.”. And why not. I am not trying to be snotty here…or disparage the educated. That is there job for sure…and RBDP I am sure is very good at her job. No doubt. And she can write…she can write.

There are options. One can read as written OR one can read as written and then read what is written behind what is written. Should one be inclined? That is what the ‘notes’ are all about I suppose.

Here is what I treasure from this book Pitch and then I will stop.

From Draft 78 Buzz Track

S/one stalks those Sprechstimme blues.
Yeah, it’s noise that stays noise, nous saying news,
With a go and a blow and a ho-T-ho
And a We and a twee and a twisted three
Cawing heh-heh-heh and hoo-poo-poo,
And KUK oo,
Random biddyings
Swoop to the road, lope, this torsion and pip
That loop around the fitted middle of “home”.

These few lines in no way illustrate the works totality..but they do, for me, give indication of what she does throughout what little of the whole I have read. The sounding, the comic, the NOISE, the NOSE, the thoughtful combination that comes out as a whole, in effort, by the author to put down the line…no matter the interior reaction come up as it happens. This the artist at work.

Well, there are hundreds of pages to choose from, thousands of lines, maybe a zillion words…I am not counting just now. But I am sure RBDP has and one has to respect and admire the incredible amount of energy that goes into writing such a work as Drafts…yes THIS is such a thing and there are really very very few such around these days. Think DeFoe and The Crystal Text two of very few examples. Funny thing that RBDP, during the reading at KU last night, ‘apologized’ more than once, in an offhand way, about reading such long poems and how the audience should just “grit and bear it…” or at least that is what I heard. But perhaps she didn’t have to make the point…her audience as it looked to me, had been exposed to the long poem and the poets who spoke them in the past. They were ready and when it ended they responded with relish and charm. Who wouldn’t.

**

Day out of Days (Stories) by Sam Shepard

Well, what do you know? Another old straight white guy reviewing another old straight white guy’s book. Oh my…oh my. Let us pray that there is no mention of tennis!!! What we all pay for some jerk in Iowa making bad poetry and the rest of us who try not too. Well.

Recently I was on a trip and tried to read Keith Richards’s bio book and also Patti Smith.‘s book about her and friend Robert Mapplethorpe and this collection from Shepard. Ah the 60’s and the 70’s and the 80’s….dot dot dot. Well truth be told the only one I read thru was Sam Shepard’s recent collection of ‘stories’ from the last couple years. Not that the other two books were not worth reading….but not through and through. Richard’s had some funny stuff (anyone who calls Mick Jagger “Brenda” gets my vote). And Patti Smith well that was okay too but sometimes a bit too…flowery? Overdone? Mushy? I donno. Something just too much. Must a been okay for the prize giving out folks and who else is there besides Ms. Smith. Kinda makes me wish Jimi Hendrix was alive to write at age 65. Humm.

So…Sam Shepard writes with a style that creates the image for a reader that is hard to ignore. I guess that is how he writes plays…or used to. His plays, I think I can say, helped a lot of us get through the 60’s and 70’s which were not the easiest decades to be ‘outsiders’. It was Sam Shepard plays that one could find being put on in alphabet city store fronts or San Francisco bars called theatres sometimes. Walk in, buy a beer, sit on floor, fire up a Kool, lay back and watch some mad play about people going nuts and maybe some guy in a lobster suit bashing through a stage door (is that right?). So thanks to Sam for helping out. Was there any other theatre going on, other than in the street? Sure and it was a happening time. What happened to that?

This book, this collection, Day out of Days is rightfully termed (by Sam or his publisher) “stories”. Okay, maybe in some cases they are conversation or poems or letters maybe. Each does somehow tell a little something about an event in Shepard’s life as he drives around the rural US by himself and sometimes road buddies or travels to Mexico with family, for instance. Here is the closing line for a bit called Las Vegas, New Mexico: “She smiles sweetly and flees.” What does that tell you about the rest of the story? Not bad for a last line, I say, after reading a lot of modern writing in various forms. He says. Shepard is for one thing very funny, very very funny. And most times, it is he that is the butt of the joke. Ditto the sadness that comes through as always in Shepard's writing either for stage production or prose. A lot of time, like the story Land of the Living. Any one who has stood in a line for Immigration at an airport will identify with this one. He can, well he is a play write, certainly with few words bring the reader onto the ‘set’. But this one is, I suppose , a typical ‘short story’…that length. A lot of what is in this collection is a paragraph, a few lines of dialog, a brief description of a Normal, Illinois jail cell for instance. Or guns going off in the neighbors Minnesota woods. It don’t take Sam much to create a ‘scene’.

Well, I can’t go on writing a critical review of this collection. If you want to be taken along for a ride around the US of A…and a bit of Mexico…here it is. It IS entertaining and well written. Oh there is a cringe here and there….he is a skinny old white guy after all. Ex wives and kids scattered across the country for Christ’s sake! And you do know that Patti Smith had him as a boyfriend for a good while. That counts for sure. Good on ya, Sam Shepard.

*****

Jim McCrary's latest publication, Po Doom, is just out from Hanks Original Loose Gravel Press. The text is response to reading poetics blogs for a year online each morning. Along with Steve Tills, Richard Lopez and Henry Mancini, he will be publishing a series of chapbooks under Hanks Original Loose Gravel Press...stay tuned. Occasional blogging at: wwwresistingpoetry.blogspot.com/

And here he also is with kitty pal, Fae. Fae lives with her brother Che in barrio San Juan on the east side of Todos Santos, Baja California Sur.

DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY by MACGREGOR CARD

2011-03-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

JONATHAN LOHR Reviews

Duties of an English Foreign Secretary by Macgregor Card
(Fence Books, Albany, N.Y., 2009)

Timeless Poetry

No one’s ever yet travelled through time, but even so, that might be a bit of old news. To read Macgregor Card’s debut, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, isn’t to merely travel through time, but rather to simultaneously be in multiple times and places and to at the same time be both doing and not doing. Card constantly and effortlessly uses a traveler’s voice writing traveler’s poems and traveler’s frantic songs to flash the reader back and forth between these worlds.

This strange play with time is established in the second poem, “Contempt”, labeled as “a cento of last words”. (16) Constructed of passages taken from other authors, this poem has a foot in the past while Card’s emerging humor keeps the other foot firmly in the present. The lines, “I borrowed a cock / A king should die erect” (17) imply the history of extreme corporal punishment and royal honor and play it against the humor of modern word usage, overshadowing death with puns.

In the same way that the form straddles past and present, the subject matter straddles life and death. Card’s deathbed collage attains life through structure. Dante precedes Mozart who precedes Hamlet. Christians precede Saturn which precedes Madison Square Garden. The last words collected in the cento gain new meaning as they’re stacked together:

Moose … Indian
Empire, body and soul

Jefferson lives!
Goodnight
Empire, body and soul
I’m bored (19)

The words are able to throw off the weight of their dying speaker to become fresh lines of interaction.

Card’s poems play with ideas of past and history, clouding any sense of chronology. In “The Libertines’ Announcement” he calls past images into question and then reduces them to a language-shadow of their former selves:

Today the mayor planted
oranges symbolizing rage
Tomorrow, oranges
symbolizing hope
A third day, oranges
standing in for rage
as well as hope
will soon revert to rave
and the tree
is nowhere to be found (67)

Real oranges of the past have changed into symbols of abstractions. Then, they are reduced even further into standing in for those symbols. The oranges will fail at this task and then eventually won’t exist at all.

Card works the same clouding into active language in “Nary a Soul”:

Could if I could
Could if I no could

No, no could if I no could

Breaks down to:

If I could could could
No, could NO could could could

No, if I COULD could could could
If no no no no no NO no no no no no / No no no no (28)

Not only are images broken down, but the mere possibility action is stripped of its identity and reduced to repetition. It’s interesting how easily “could” can turn from a conditional verb to an almost nonsensical sound. Taken out of context, the eye wants to read it as “coold” or “cowled”. “Could” is stripped of its potential power and reduced to sound.

The title poem explicitly shows Card’s willingness to hold images and language in multiple times. The speaker calls back to different periods in British literature by exploring subjects, collecting them together in chronological refusal:

Prospero wailed on Ariel
and Ariel wailed
“What a boom year for material!” (72)

leads to,

I want to play my dove
in a magic show about John Donne (73)

leads to,

and I’ve got friends in London, no I’ve
got friends in London
None of my friends reads poesie (73-74)

These timeframes are held together by Card’s modern, sometimes conversational language. Shakespeare’s characters fight while discussing economics, John Donne is reproduced in performance and friends of the speaker are oblivious to it all. Tradition is consolidated and disregarded. By removing historical separation, Duties of an English Foreign Secretary exists both in the past and present, illustrating the tradition that carries the poem through time.

*****

Jonathan Lohr is a man about town in Oxford, Oh, where he can be spotted walking on all the right sidewalks and studying poetry at Miami of Ohio’s chic creative writing program.

IN THE ASSARTS by JEFF HILSON

2011-03-30T23:40:00.000-07:00

STEVEN JOHANNES FOWLER Reviews

In the Assarts by Jeff Hilson
(Veer Books, London, 2010)

Now more than ever, if there exists a measure of what one could call a national character, indelible and prescriptive, it seems unlikely it can be held in the terms we seem to utilize. The limited, faded suggestions of temperament, appearance and culture are increasingly fraught. The valuable misnomer that the poetic in poetry is that which is lost in translation is a fair indication of how national character is found in the lack of a culture’s culture. I can only truly speak of England and Englishness, and what I deem to be it’s immovable quality, both it’s worst and it’s best feature – an unpretentious melancholy, a moaning disposition laced with satire, a call to arms without action, a sadness that has not the melodrama to make it public, a desire for privacy, a wit and observational keen which is razor sharp and practically dull. It is Beckettian, absurd and yet profound and civilized. When discovered, to those who know the paradox which stimulates this characteristic, it is a reassurance, a genuine philosophy of stamina and a lackadaisical intractability. When an artist can build this ungraspable quality into the very fabric of their work, you know they can only have done so without preparation or motive. Jeff Hilson, as a master of this vernacular, stands as one of the most singular and gifted poets of his generation.

Hilson's use of distinctive vocabulary, a lexicon of the banal, utilises a finesse that pales the false poetic posturing of those working in circles created by perceptions of what has come before and held as the established “tone” of English poetry. He is the creator of poetic vignettes, an imagery not of the surreal but of the proto-mundane, couched in the wry, unpretentious drawl of a fogged civil servant, tired but not fatigued, worn but not broken. Hilson elevates the speech of the lived life, accelerates it, never seeking out absurdity, rather that would be too much agency for the singular voice purveying lines of observation and reflection. His poetic is not one of alarm, not one of lamentation – it is poetry of urbanity. The Assarts are 69 individual poems, collecting themselves in a distinctly humorous glossary of satire, using the language of faux British history interspersed with disjunctive references to the emergent world of the reader. Each poem is an imagistic and wry observation of acts escaping description, sending up anecdotal poetic masturbation, so prevalent in British letters, and doing so without caution or cruelty. Each Assart maintains an almost objectivist clarity and all the more does this seem so as the ineradicably English wit seeps glum between the lines.

13

Only in England when the sheriff turns up
& the sheriff
I mean you are completely hidden
in this relationship.
I want to know the men separately.
Harold who held my hand.
Steven was an easy catch.
Ed, Ed, some trees is just a shed!
This cannot be true meaning my love poetry.
I love you who are called ‘broads.’
And this new gigantic poetry
on the edge of the green –
I mean you never return my calls you
mean I never returned your balls.

Hilson’s mode is to shed light on the ever present – what we seem not to have noticed in its readiness, the pitted corners of language which are fundamentally drole and bloodless. The Assarts are potent in their act of redress. Their form – graceful, fleeting and wry is so exacting, that it makes it appear his excavations are both necessary and even neglected. They relay an architectural apparatus that requires a deep philosophical understanding of the speakers pathos, of the poet's own fraudulent and fragile voice as it emanates. Hilson mines with affection, for his voice is never harsh, never angry, almost never pitiless in its satire. It is the love in a pale dejection, the homesickness for an ugly English town. His work full of British ennui, if that term was not one that did not immediately refute itself.

42

only into Rymans o my soldier
& the month of May
I dreamed I wore a bloody crown
of staples o my bride
its just a red Rexel Bambi
I came over all
the Bisley cabinets
for instance
your sweet lavender highlighter
it's just a felt tip
pen correction pen
o my soldier
are we meant to hide away
in Rymans or come out & play

Hilson exposes too the churlishness of the poet who takes no time to examine their own position, the ego behind the pen. His honesty, his lyrical inventiveness, his affected bleakness produces a strong sensation in it's readers / listeners because of its central truth. It is then a poetry that is necessary because the poet does not profess its necessity. Only the reluctant can offer the objective truth that poetry must evolve, that it must be allowed to warp and break and rejoin in order to be in anyway new, and in being new, represent a culture that is truly contemporary. And even then, only within a form of an apology. Against Hilson’s work the concept of the poetic soul, the poetic pretension, is exposed as a welcome fraud. The melodrama of poetry is refuted and we are left instead with a very English sagacity of intellect and poise.

67

And because I cannot dance
with my parachute
I dived all over her.
Billy G's not my lover
she's just a girl
like I used to.
In fact the cry is boy-up,
cleaning the o-hole,
when I was a fag.
Oi I waited for the language
he did not have it down
or any pudding.
When you arrived jump boy
where are your lovely shining end

In old English the Assart is a word with two meanings; the act or offense of grubbing up trees and bushes, and thus destroying the coverts of a forest. Or it is a clearing, a piece of land that had been stripped of trees and bushes to reveal something new, man made, cultivated and given potential, despite it being just a scrub square of dirty land. So is Hilson’s mode, a reluctant bulldozer, a brilliance that just is, refusing to call attention to itself. Deeply underappreciated, “In the Assarts” maintains Jeff Hilson’s place as one of the finest English poets of our day.

+++++
For Veer Books ordering or other enquiries please contact:

Stephen Mooney, Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H OPD, or by phone on 020 85210907. (note the new postal address)
Alternatively you can email Veer Books at veerbooks@gmail.com"

*****

Steven Johannes Fowler (1983) is an employee of the British Museum. He edits the weekly Maintenant interview series for 3am magazine showcasing innovative, contemporary European poets and is the author of two forthcoming collections, Fights (Veer Books, 2011) and Red Museum (Knives Forks & Spoons press, 2011). www.sjfowlerpoetry.com www.maintenant.co.uk

THE BOOK OF WHISPERING IN THE PROJECTION BOOTH by JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON

2011-03-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

PEG DUTHIE ENGAGES

The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
(Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA, 2009)

This book has the feel of a jumble of storyboards. It is populated with vivid images and striking juxtapositions, but I found it difficult to decipher the narrative connection from one poem to the next, and at times from one sentence to the next. There are, of course, many collections in which the poems aren't part of a larger plot, and that may well have been what was intended here as well: after all, what is a "book of whispering"? Is it a binder full of notes scribbled by assorted movie theatre employees to pass the time when the reels don't require their attention? Is it a journal of jottings by a lone man or woman, for letters not yet answered and conversations not yet attempted? Is it a small library of dream diaries? After all, the chapter titles include "The Book of Falling Asleep in the Bathtub & Snow," "The Book of Trapdoors, Thimble-Light, & Fog," and "The Book of the Umbrella," sandwiched between cryptic pronouncements such as "If You Repeat the Names & Disappear" and "An Opening Made You Indelible."

In fact, the use of the pronoun "you" in these titles throughout the book makes me want to suss out the larger stories that these poems seem to be glimpses of. The "you" of the poems is not me, the reader: I am not the "you" who advised the diamond cutter to hold still, nor the "you" about whom the speaker of can claim, "I know the sounds you make sleeping & arriving alike," never mind the "you" whose letter "lured / me into the yard // with / a smudged wind / turning my coat black," not to mention the "you" dared by the narrator of "The Book of Trapdoors…" to open "our lodger's brown trunk." I don't have sisters whose "stolen stockings / sold // for carnival tokens & pistachio nuts," but it sure sounds like the "you" to whom that's addressed has a story to tell. It seems likely that there are multiple "you"s to whom the "I"s and "we"s address observations, predictions, and commands, but there are no names attached to any of the participants, so distinguishing between one "you" and another is a tricky business. The blurry boundaries separating one "I" from another (if they are in fact different "I"s) compound the sensation of sifting through a sheaf of snippets.

In my attempts to piece together the larger picture from which these poems seem to have emerged, I eventually realized that much of the language didn't strike me as whispery as all. It is true that there are allusions to secrets here and there (such as "A box of hummingbirds under the banister. // Your mother's dress patterns hidden / behind a chimney brick" and "How many secrets were you asked to buy & which ones did you bury?"), but the diction and flow of most of the poems didn't come across to me as particularly shy, furtive, or discreet. In at least a half-dozen instances, the declarations and decrees of the narrator(s) seemed to me bold or even bossy -- the imperative tense gets a good workout within this book. Its appearances include:

Hold still, I / need your song / to keep weather off the road.

Please come back with this hammer / taped to your leg.

Apply some pressure with this shovel & I shall use the name you gave the battered-open house in the west thicket.

Near the end of the collection, the prose poems "the thunder makes its easy way into your whole family" and "summer funeral" consist primarily of orders and advice ("You must take the boat on your back & then onto your bicycle" opens "the thunder," and "summer funeral" begins with "You should trick them & wear the charcoal suit with the canary tie").

It's not an unpleasant landscape for a reader to wander around in for a while, even sans map. The surreal, sometimes circus-esque tenor of the instructions quoted above permeates many of the other interactions between the inhabitants of the book's universe. The very first line of the first poem informs its unseen listener that "you will build a ship with pigeons & a city of rope," and the final poem in the collection echoes the hint of fairy-tale forces at work, telling the traveler that "you will find out what trouble means when you build your own road," that "you have one thousand other jobs to finish & you will need tools & several bolts of cloth," and that "it will snow for longer than what you can count up to." Strange journeys, outrageous assignments, peculiar weather are staple ingredients in the brewing of folktales and myths -- as are riddles and unexpected questions, which feature in The Book of Whispering as well, such as "could you take the other / side of this in your mitten // & make a kite with me?"

To return to the storyboard analogy: in spite of poring over the bundles of sketches handed to me, I'm no wiser than before in terms of identifying the master plot or its cast of characters. I'd be useless if asked to shuffle the scenes into order or to pick any of the actors out of a police lineup. I lack familiarity with the author's range of influences, which the marketing copy suggests played a significant role in the genesis of the poems; I would guess that a reader well-acquainted with the cinematic, artistic, and textual sources underpinning Wilkinson's world will find it easier to navigate.

Shortage of in-text contextual anchors notwithstanding, there were phrases and stanzas that resonated with me as soon as I read them -- no analysis or divination required. "The wind too will eat the scars from your face" made me shiver; "the air is burning a soft button into my ribs" is an arresting snapshot of a sensation; "one boy speaks through a keyhole to the others about a shortstop's hex" delights me. These are the equivalent of panels from the storyboards (or, say, single cells plucked from an animation sequence) that I would consider framing on their own. I was happily reminded of old, dark ballads when I encountered

I know six & a half songs & the chorus
to a seventh,
& if my voice weren't inside
my brothers I would sing something
through you

and, ten pages later, I admired this passage as well:

I want you to
remove something

from my question
& then I'll
ask you
with my hands for it.

I've found this particular segment rewarding to read from multiple angles. It matches the surrounding texts in style and attitude, making it specific to the "The Book of Trapdoors" and its inventory of "rusted padlocks," "potato-sized stones," "rope of ants," "dandelion seeds / in my blood," "calendar with the small moons crossed / carefully out," and other unsettling items. And yet, with just a step back, the request takes on a heartwrenching, timeless universality: it's not the first time I've witnessed someone struggling to maintain a connection by manufacturing a need for it, although the yearned-for exchange is rarely stated so explicitly -- if you're willing to take something that belongs to me, I'll have a reason to get in touch with you. And yet, on a sunnier, less cynical day, the request would present itself to me as an invitation rather than a demand: shall we share this question and the handling of its answer?

"I'll ask you / with my hands" is a phrase that carries extra freight in Wilkinson's world: for his narrators, hands are visibly active instruments of communication. Gloveless hands develop photographs; fingertips seal an envelope containing a paper airplane. At the start of the closing section, the poet quotes Edmond Jabés: "You no longer have hands. You are sleeping" -- someone unconscious being someone who isn't engaged in attempts at interaction. A rejoinder to the epigraph is voiced in "summer funeral," when the newly bereaved is advised, "You should definitely give the speech. Use both hands for that speech."

Postscript: There is a 27-page reader's companion to The Book of Whispering available online and free of charge. I was unaware of this resource prior to drafting the reactions detailed above.

*****

Peg Duthie's favorite films include Contempt and My Neighbor Totoro. She works in Nashville as a copyeditor and indexer, and periodically shares stray thoughts on Twitter @zirconium. Here's a link for her "Reviewers and Contributors" list.

YOU AND THREE OTHERS ARE APPROACHING A LAKE by ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS

2011-03-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

GUILLERMO PARRA Reviews

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis
(Coffee House Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2011)

The Wage Poetics of Anna Moschovakis

In the fall of 2006, I happened to be visiting New York when Anna Moschovakis gave a reading at the Poetry Project for her first book I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006). Hearing her read was a wonderful experience, as she and her poems that night were luminous enough to make me emerge from St. Mark’s Church feeling inspired. When I read her book soon afterwards, on the Amtrak back to Durham, the interplay of voices and texts in her work thrilled me as much as they did during her reading:

Because the man felt narrative that day
and walked around town breaking language with itself
and because the woman felt
manly that day and walked around breaking herself
with language

(“First Preparation,” I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone)

Five years later, ages in terms of how the world and myself have changed, I am once again moved by Moschovakis’s poetry, in her new book You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (Coffee House Press). The changes have been dramatic and in some ways unforeseen. While poetry remains as marginal as ever, the world itself is an accelerated and frivolous map of a decadent empire that might just as well be explained by poetry as by theory. Moschovakis is engaged in an ambitious project with her second book: to theorize our present to herself and to her readers through poetry. Moschovakis knows this is an impossible task, so her theorization is at once rebellion and contemplation, a book of poetry disguised as a discourse on self in relation to a broken world. In the acknowledgements, Moschovakis briefly discusses her method of composition:

Three of the four main poems in this collection were inspired by books chosen by title and appearance from the shelves of the Bibliobarn, a miraculous used bookstore in South Kortright, NY. The fourth was a gift from Matvei Yankelevich. (120)

She goes on to list their titles and to cite a few other authors and texts she borrowed from the Internet and from the archive of daily life. In all four of the long poems or sections, Moschovakis incorporates autobiographical elements in the form of reminiscences, along with lyrical and philosophical interludes. You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake might be considered a journal or notebook of sorts, albeit one whose entries have been carefully fitted together so as to create resonances beyond the private, the explicitly political or the lyrical.

The book is framed by a brief verse Prologue and a longer Epilogue of short prose blocks. The reader is thus carefully initiated and filtered through the work of the poem, which occurs in the future, when the book has been put down and its narratives begin to settle in the mind. I mention a political sensibility in this book because it is an essential component, one that Moschovakis handles beautifully:

Everybody should always have a position on everything
We take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach
The stools, when we abandon them, fade to the same color (9)

Although much of the material in this book is taken from other sources, one continually gets a sense of Moschovakis’s voice permeating each page, calm and purposeful. Theoretical and seemingly detached, Moschovakis achieves a balance between observation and a performative voice charged with emotion:

The challenge: to start
not with theory but with tangible performance (30)

Starting with experience, magic
genuine science (30)

It can be difficult to find single excerpts to highlight in this book, as all the components in the four sections blend into each other, extending into a book-length poem that borrows from daily existence. The poet is occasionally glimpsed at work, attuned to the project of writing the now, sometimes wary, as though she were being written by the project itself: “One goes blindly back to one’s desk” (30).

Moschovakis’s note on composition (“inspired by books chosen by title and appearance”) confirms what Jen Hofer writes in her “Brief Essay” blurb for the book: “This book is not going to tell us what we need, nor what to do with what we have. It is going to suggest there are alternative procedures to material conquest...” The materials Moschovakis appropriates could have been entirely different from the ones she chose and this book would have likely produced a similar effect on me as a reader. What counts for the poet engaged with her text in relation to the present are the avenues of insight offered by the act of reading. The image of the desk as an emblem of duty is framed by the light (and lightness) of the daytime sky, just beyond:

Behind the desk there is a window

A woodpecker is attacking the house
The sun is attacking the snow on the pavement

Everything helping itself
to everything else (27)

There is both solace and anxiety in that light flooding the poet’s desk. Interestingly, the book’s autobiographical moments are among the most detached and objective. It is as though the self were being filtered through a search engine and its past clicked on alongside a multitude of others with similar names or coordinates. In the final section of the book, “In Search of Wealth,” Moschovakis incorporates a series of glimpses into a self that is at once an other, beginning with the first line: “When you were twenty-seven you opened a big white envelope.” (93) This other we inhabit is evoked in a series of jobs and wages over time, ranging from “Chilly Jilly’s, 1987, $3.35/hr.” (105) to “Pratt Institue: $1,000-1,500 per course unit per semester, plus stipend for administrative work. Office with a view, borrowed.” (106)

The effect on the reader of this list of employment over three decades depends on one’s relationship to capital and to survival. I suspect the majority of us reading this book will recognize the contingency of such endeavors, the inescapable numbers that reflect the struggle to survive. At the end of this section, the poet reminds herself (and us) of her physical trajectory across the globe, an inventory of places where the self has worked and lived:

That was in Los Angeles.
That was in Paris.
That was in London.
That was in New York.
That was in Addis.
That was in Baltimore. (114)

As a reader, I am happy to be included somehow in this list of places, having been in the audience that October night when Moschovakis read her poems at the Poetry Project. I find my notebook from late 2006 and now transcribe what I wrote about that evening: “So, Anna read beautiful work from her new book which I bought afterwards, just released. She seemed very relaxed, with a glow about her. She was a bit nervous but read marvelously. Toward the end of her reading I was dozing off, exhausted from my day, but she wasn’t boring. I was almost falling into dream with her words & voice as blessed vision and awoke refreshed to the applause as she finished.”

My own limitations as listener and reader are evident in these notes. But I hope I have conveyed some of the pleasure to be found in Moschovakis’s poetry, the way she theorizes and reflects on the seemingly immeasurable movements of our broken era. In her books, poetry is enacted as a living, compassionate and dynamic process. Through her unpaid work as a poet, Anna Moschovakis momentarily sets things right (an illusion, but a necessary one) and offers us a luminous comradeship.

*****

Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA and lives in Durham, NC. He is the author of Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009). He is currently translating the poetry of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Venezuela, 1890-1930). Some of these translations can be read at his blog, Venepoetics.

(X (ANGEL CITY) by JOSEPH LEASE

2011-03-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

X (ANGEL CITY) by Joseph Lease
(Sacrifice Press, Corvallis, Oregon, 2010)

Sometimes, to write literary criticism on a poem is to swaddle that poem in a heavy wool blanket, which is to say, it deadens the thing to try to articulate something that cannot be articulated, e.g. the effect of a poem.

I feel that way about many of Joseph Lease's poems--their deft, adept, light lyricism. Yet it's ironic to feel his poems as so much lightness when, actually, they're quite political. Therein lies one of Lease's strengths as a poet: a political lyricism whereby politics don't bog down his verses even as his verses do raise political content.

And so I avoid reviewing (for fear of being a writing bull in a china shop) his recent full-length collection--though I recommend it--TESTIFY from Coffee House Press (but Galatea Resurrects's got review copies and I encourage someone else to please review it!). But I can at least share my pleasure over his slimmer chap from Sacrifice Press which provides a single poem, "X (ANGEL CITY)."

"Angel City" can refer to several things. I don't know why I insistently conflated it with the WWII detention camp Angel Island (perhaps the blockade-ish looking building on its front cover). And because it begins

before you broke me I thought I

was free (sinful but free)--how awful to live in

this box--I said I wanted to stop using the word

fear

But, as with many effective poems, what are evoked are larger than the specificity of the reference. In this single poem, Lease talks back against Empire--

property is death

USA was a parasite, a way of happening, a seizure

floating between word and meaning

Lease makes the poem matter to the reader by not leaving the words to simply proclaim. He brings in the reader with juxtapositions of personal references and intimacy:

they had a body crammed into a mailbox and it
was just a brown suit with bones
            sticking out

                                    prisoner /
                                    citizen

                        Dear You,

In the above, what was "a body crammed into a mailbox"--a description that by itself facilitates a distancing from the reader (like something you read in a newspaper about someone else) is turned about to be someone so close to the reader it may even be "you".

Thus, it seems to me that Lease is a political poet who never loses sight of how language matters so much that it inherently concerns itself with reader-response. Indeed, that language matters so much that language must even retain its beauty. I'll illustrate and end simply by quoting Section 6 in its fabulous entirety:

            Can you slide inside some wind,

Can you slide the sun back home,

            Can you pray inside your play, fray

Inside your day:

                                                You want to glint

Electric rain, it's hard to think of anyone but

You, hey shadows playing shadows, say the

Names, I'll try to flow like hair, like wind, like

Gold,

                                                I'll try to glint like

Birds behind the rain

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her books. Her newest book SILK EGG: Collected Novels is reviewed or generated responses by Joey Madia in The New Mystics HERE; Allen Bramhall over HERE; by Amazon top-notch reviewer Grady Harp over HERE; by Leny Strobel over HERE; and by Jean Vengua over HERE and HERE. Her THE SECRET LIVES OF PUNCTUATIONS, VOL. I is reviewed by Edric Mesmer in Yellow Field and reprinted HERE. Her THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 is reviewed by Arpine Konyalian Grenier over HERE. Allen Bramhall also reviews the "Hay(na)ku for Haiti" series over HERE. If the latter two get you curious, please note that participating in this fundraiser for Haiti is supported by Marsh Hawk Press, publisher of THE THORN ROSARY: if you order at least $15 worth of booklets, you will receive a copy of THE THORN ROSARY which is priced retail at $19.95; this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

CLERICAL WORK by WAYNE CLEMENTS

2011-03-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

STEVEN JOHANNES FOWLER Reviews

Clerical Work by Wayne Clements
(Veer Books, London, 2010)

Clerical Work is the latest collection from the Writers Forum poet Wayne Clements, and the latest release from Veer books out of the Birkcbeck based press. Clements' action, to form patterns of speech in both physical and verbal delivery, which seem exclusively bound to the repetition in his work, exposes the phonetic behind the philosophical. Clements actively engages in the complexity of his intensions, laying his text very much next to the incisive satire of the reduction he fundamentally employs. That is to say, he evokes the phrases contained again and again, strategically and decisively found as each fragment is, so they show up as traces, as shadows of texts so massive one needs not even to have read them to understand what action is being displayed in front of you.

The works of Marx, Kant, Berkeley becomes the poetic fragment, repeated, ad infinitum, and the great, indulgent works of masculine philosophy and are both held to the breast and exposed as pompous with the ingenious, Loki-esque impishness of the poet. His action is one of great affection and sly humour, of philosophical satire. It is the decision of poet who knows the reduction of thought is the wisest path but one that cannot be followed to satiate the mind of those who read philosophy. The words, the endless sentence, begin to open up the larger texts, and with genuine affection and kinship, the simplicity of the poems begin almost as a footnote or introduction to the spirit of the original philosophy. To take a sentence, a phrase from a work of a thousand sentences to work it into the listeners / readers mind is to make them realise the apparent necessity of an attention to detail in those works which they can never achieve. It is to create an infinite responsibility to the texts, and this, being by its very nature unfulfillable, makes the action humourous and sly and clever.

Moreover, and of central importance, they harry and corral the flimsiness of the language employed. Here again we see the sophistication of the action employed. Clements is exposing the oft-forgotten structuralist realisation, the divergence between signified and signifier. By weaning these phrases across his collection one becomes attuned to the action of absolute focus on each sentence, on each phrase, and as such the meaning of each word reaches a massive prominence. Whether one begins to lose sight of the words power or decency, or whether this becomes acute, the poetry is valid for this – it reminds us of the tenuousness of our linguistic assumptions in poetry and beyond.

Reading Clements work aloud is also inherent in this process, to work the poems out when being said exposes something inherent in the words, and when read, there is a rhythm, unique to his delivery in fact which maintains the fractious energy of the poet’s originating action. This collection is extremely valuable and productive contribution to the British poetic avant garde. It is well considered, well constructed and intellectually grounded.

+++++
For Veer Books ordering or other enquiries please contact:

Stephen Mooney, Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H OPD, or by phone on 020 85210907. (note the new postal address)
Alternatively you can email Veer Books at veerbooks@gmail.com"

*****

Steven Johannes Fowler (1983) is an employee of the British Museum. He edits the weekly Maintenant interview series for 3am magazine showcasing innovative, contemporary European poets and is the author of two forthcoming collections, Fights (Veer Books, 2011) and Red Museum (Knives Forks & Spoons press, 2011). www.sjfowlerpoetry.com www.maintenant.co.uk

VENTRAKL by CHRISTIAN HAWKEY

2011-03-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

GENEVIEVE KAPLAN Reviews

Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2010)

George Trakl is a late 19th/early 20th century German Expressionist poet. Christian Hawkey is a contemporary American poet. Hawkey’s recent book Ventrakl, subtitled “[a collaboration],” is an imaginative literary experiment bringing their two disparate voices together. While the book is framed as a series of translations for, permutations of, and responses to the German poet’s work, readers do not need to be well-versed in Trakl in order to enjoy Hawkey’s text—we are provided, though poems, lists, and untitled prose interludes, with background information on Trakl’s life and work. Hawkey shares that the prominent author was “born in Salzburg, Austria, on February 3, 1887, the fourth of six children” (29), fought for his country in WWI (74), was a cocaine and opium addict (60), was rumored to have incestuous relations with his sister (36), and that he died tragically young (122). Besides textual references, Ventrakl is scattered with low-resolution (and sometimes pixilated) photographs, images depicting Trakl, his family, and his surroundings (for example, a scene inside a German military hospital on page 53).

In addition to disclosing background information about Trakl, Hawkey directly addresses and questions the deceased poet, as well as describes his own compositional practices. These modes give readers the sense that they, too, are participating in a process of literary and personal discovery. One crucial part of Hawkey’s text is the series of untitled “interviews” that runs throughout the book. Here, the poet “converses” with Trakl, identifying the German poet’s often cryptic dialogue with italics. Hawkey writes:

You once wrote ‘the sound of a word expresses an unutterable thought.’
Do you see this phonetic experience as the unconscious aspect of language?

I see a red foliage filled with guitars.

Can you be more specific?

No.

(65)

Hawkey converses with Trakl, letting the poet speak for himself, and also refers to Trakl in third person throughout the book. These poems often seem wistful and reflective, reminding readers of diary or journal entries. Hawkey writes, “each time I slip quietly into the seat across from him, watching his eyes and they way they seem to gaze always at some point behind me, beyond me, I think the same thing: this is his dream, not mine” (64), and “Today I tell him what I saw during the morning, what I did” (104). The inclusion of photographic images allows Hawkey to explore ekphrastic modes of response as well. One prose poem is printed opposite a photograph of Trakl seated, hands clasped, leaning slightly forward. In the poem, Hawkey writes, “I am looking at his face. I am looking at his eyes. I am looking at someone I do not know, could never have known, since he died long before.…I am trying to look at his eyes, and I am trying to write about looking at his eyes….I am seeing words in his image” (83). These prose sections—intimate, casual, thoughtful—relay that even when Hawkey is not addressing Trakl directly, Trakl—the poet, the person, the enigma—remains the object (and the subject) of the language.

While all the writing in the book becomes a type of correspondence between these two poets., not all the poetry in the book is prose. There are lineated lyrics as well. As Hawkey explains in his preface, the poems included are centos, homophonic translations, computer assisted translations, and the results of decompositions (For instance, Hawkey describes “shooting, with a 12 gauge, an open Trakl book from a distance of ten feet, then translating…a remaining page of the perforated text” (8).). As a result, Hawkey’s poems often read as surreal or disjointed visions. However, even as the poems mention popular culture figures and references—“The unlimited access of a visa card” (31), “Ashcroft with his round, condom-colored eyes” (47), “Johnnie Cochran” (80), “Nuns wearing Diesel jeans” (84), and “Starbucks, / For example. A half caff tall” (107)—they work to evoke an uncomfortable present that remains anchored in Trakl’s past. As the poems are tinged with absurdities—“Hungarians touch your private Nissan, whispering / O my dwarf, Von Brot, under an herbed wurst” (63)—and we can start to see the bones of Hawkey’s sound-oriented composition techniques, the texts benefit from their proximity to the prose passages. The more emotional prose sections inform the poems—as much as the poetry could push readers away by its sometimes nonsensical design, every “you” or “he” in the mysterious verses becomes Trakl, every “I” reads as Hawkey, each “she” becomes Trakl’s sister Margarethe.

And the situations Hawkey has noted in prose—war, family, struggle, writing—clarify and echo within the poems. For example, in “Totenberg,” the lines

Otherwise, night’s leaflessness trembles beside you,

Cruel as a starless branch.
Unbeknownst to cisterns and mittens I am tone-deaf,
An orphan’s guided missile in my lips.
(95)

become about the writing process as Hawkey admits he is “tone-deaf” and Trakl becomes the lost but dangerous “orphan” who is guiding him. Or, when Hawkey describes “Ovaries dipped in gold,” “small glass jars affixed to her lips,” and “a black hearse, shimmering” (89) in “In an Alternate Stomach,” the poem—without mentioning these instances—evokes Margarethe’s perilous abortion and struggles with drug addiction (122).

The danger in a book like this is that it will be too academic, too alienating, too insular. After all, just because Hawkey is obsessed with Trakl, does that mean we need to be as well? But Hawkey toes this line with ease and grace—his “preface”, an academic construct, is written casually; his “relationship” with Trakl is an invented one that readers are invited to participate in as well; the book works as a container for its information, exploring and questioning the ghostly figure at its center. Hawkey explains, “Ultimately these are not my poems. Nor are they Trakl’s. They occur at some site between our languages, our texts, our names” (8). Ventrakl succeeds precisely because of this slipperiness—by admitting the mysteriousness of the game he’s playing, Hawkey calls us to join in.

*****

Genevieve Kaplan edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, which publishes literary translations. Her book of poems, In the ice house, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.