THE GREAT AMERICAN PINUP

"ARK" by Katie Ford

2009-07-01T13:13:00.000-07:00

Katie Ford offers up a genuinely poignant poem in the aftermath of the New Orleans floods in her newest collection, Colosseum, from Graywolf Press (2008). “Ark” is an example of how quickly a good poem can take its reader on an intellectual and emotional journey. Ms. Ford’s use of “we” and “us” creates an intimacy and a shared responsibility for looking at the world in this way.

ARK

We love stories of flood and the few
told to prepare in advance by their god.
In that story, the saved are
always us, meaning:
whoever holds the book.

I’m reminded of these lines from Czeslaw Milosz’s Preface to A Treatise on Poetry: “One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.”

SUE SINCLAIR — BREAKER

2009-06-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

While on a week-long trip to Humboldt County along the northern coast of California, I brought along with me a book of nature meditations that I thought might restore my desire to apprehend nature as it is captured on the page in the poem. Sue Sinclair’s Breaker is a book that is long on rapturous imagery and interesting metaphor. Her work is curious and intoxicating in the way it relentlessly takes on markers in the landscape and reflects on them. What it finds in them is that nature is a reflecting pool. Sinclair wrestles with the philosophical implications of simultaneously being in the world and thinking about it.

Drought

And overhead, the birds:
chips of bone in the sky, remnants,
fact of the world’s brokenness.

You look up, asking to be forgiven for a crime
you’re still trying to locate. You know it’s out there,
stare toward the edge of the marsh, the welt of bright water
shrinking before your eyes. A sky of pre-worldly clarity
only confirms your guilt, an inherent misalignment
that keeps you from knowing even a fraction
of what you see.

You cross the heat-ridden ground, the sweet brittle scent
of sage rising underfoot. So easy to pretend a single word
will occur to you, and that it will do all the good
anyone could hope. The earth is parched and lonely,
relies on dignity to protect it. Each thing hanging
by the thread of itself. Bleating crickets. Rustle of dry stalks.
The silence pushes you toward yourself:
it’s time to walk deep into the heart of what troubles you

Sometimes what is found is not so pleasant, just like in nature. Sometimes the discovery is troubling. One discovers one’s own deficiencies. It’s a cheap form of therapy. A hike into the woods and a tall conifer can be your analyst.

Many of the poems take a single subject and try to guess at the self through the subject. There is a poem about a pelican that issues thoughts on a vanquished will and the fear of the body and soul separating. A poem about a clearing speaks of a dark tunnel in things that we want to feel. Etc.

Sinclair is very much concerned with a mysterious undercurrent running through all of the subjects she focuses on, even through all of nature itself. It seems to be her self-appointed task to find that hidden vein in all that teems in the great outdoors. She explores this theme in many of the pieces, at times making it feel as though she is seeing all the way through to the back of the head of the animal she is gazing at.

Most of the poems work from “set pieces”. The author frames a scene and then thoroughly explores the intricacies of the scene the way one might observe a photograph by one of the Magnum photographers and look for the detailed elements that might explain more thoroughly what is going on . . . and more importantly, what is going on outside of the frame that is unseen. For this reason, it is no surprise that several of her pieces work off of photographs — Nan Goldin, Edward Weston. In these she explores the world within the snapshot. She gazes long and hard, thinking about them, then, in classic introspective philosophical manner, thinking about thinking about them. More often than not, she does manage to find a strain of the numinous — a Gaian animism.

As often as she does find some mysterious hidden otherworld behind this one that is visible, an elsewhere that beckons like a lost childhood. The speaker seems to long to place herself in that elsewhere “refusing all the blandishments” (as the book’s jacket blurb nicely puts it) of the scene the speaker is witnessing.

In Breaker Sinclair searches for the magic in a place (the way a fantasizing child might). In “Falling from a Great Height” Sinclair suggests that the desire to displace oneself is rooted in the way children want to displace themselves into the world of adults and adults want to go the other direction. The other realm is always luring us away.

Falling From a Great Height

A hardened, varnished afternoon.
Gulls pick at dumpsters
as boys ferry their basketball back and forth
over the centerline, stewards of the court.
Heat pours off the tarmac; they play deeply,
soulfully, until the day lopes off to the western
horizon and the game loses its appeal.

They go inside as darkness trembles
over the neighbourhood like an alcoholic’s hand.
A car passes; the sound of its engine wraps our minds
in its cocoon. We close our eyes, forget at last
what we’re made of and sink into the elsewhere
that cast its invisible shadow all day.
Heat drifts from room to room
not wanting to disturb anyone.

The garbage rots leisurely in the dumpster,
its rich odour attracting raccoons. Inside,
children and adults dream of changing places,
long for each other in the dark.

The world piles up its details as Sinclair antrhopomorphizes it to the point of animism. That “longing for each other in the dark” at the end of the piece is one of the inexplicable essential elements in Sinclair’s universe that defies any further definition. Other readers have noted a sense of brokenness in Breaker that invokes this sense of longing for the other (indeed Sinclair even refers to this occasionally and suggests it in the title). I also got this sense to a certain extent throughout the book. But what prevailed for me was the interest in the mysterious other not the disappointment that a prolonged connection could not be forged with it. Her aim at the mysterious soul of a place and its objects is remarkably true so I never felt like the speaker was overly self-consciousness of her missing that longed-for realm. Yet the speaker is insistent on the partition between the perceived world and its barely distinguishable flip side where mystery lingers.

So why does a poet insist on staring at the soul of a place? This is a fundamental existential question that I would have liked to see Sinclair engage with more fully. I wanted to know if there was some reason other than naked desire that she would send herself out into the landscape to hunt down its inner pulses of spirit. Why this obsession with the unknown/unseen lurking at the edge of her field of vision. Is this the kind of dance she does with a monstrous god when they decide to get it on?

Perhaps the answer to why the poet insists on staring into the beckoning abyss is that she finds it to be a way to be rescued by sleep. In the last piece in the book, “Asleep”, Sinclair’s speaker is tired of the world and sleep appears to be her only way of granting herself a vacation from it.

Asleep

A wasp-like hum in the room,
the something-going-on that passes for silence
in these quarters, for we want to believe in silence,
that our repose leaves nothing behind, empties all the chambers,
takes the present into our dreams with us and leaves
a void that works like acid on all that was.
Car headlights on the wall mean nothing,
the cramped, ungrowing furniture, nothing,
the church spires, tired bells, nothing.
They are but the residue of the day, less than echoes,
the last creaking stair on the way out of perception.
We have come to an agreement: tired of the world
in its inalienable unlikeness, we will give up coaxing it out.
So the night darkens, the curtain drifts
out the window, the very lateness of the hour ceases.
We sleep side-by-side with eternity, and never touch.

The failure to connect at the end here again belies the anxiety of the speaker about prolonged contact with the ineffable, but what underscores this anxiety is the fatigue the speaker has with the visible world and the “residue of the day.” Sleep is the only thing that can rescue such a fatigued warrior of the philosophical assault on one’s own presence in the world. But even in this sleep, however, there is also distance. In this case, it is specifically with eternity, but there is also the hint of sleep without touch. I’ve never been good at falling asleep within the clutches of someone else. I suspect I’d be a very poor dog. Sinclair’s speaker apparently would be too.

The one aspect of the book that I find extremely heartening about Breaker is that it does not flinch in its discussion of philosophy in the poems. It does not wish to entertain as much as edify, prolong the great battle with a meaningful existence. This is what renders it, I suppose, as particularly Canadian. Canadian poets have not sacrificed their souls to the entertainment gods as much as American poets have, who understand that they better keep their readers lighthearted and lubricated with fun. The philosophical burdens that Sinclair bears are seen as an American excess or perhaps just bad form, some endeavor that losers take on when they aren’t up to moving fast enough. In America it’s do (see “JUST DO IT”) not be. But there is a third option to the age-old contest between doing and being, between stereotypical Americanism and stereotypical Canadianism. This third option is what Sinclair is poised to capitalize on when facing the mysterious, ineffable shadow world — do. be. learn.

IDRA NOVEY — THE NEXT COUNTRY

2009-06-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

The Next Country is a travel book of poems, but it is not the typical kind of travel fare. It travels in two directions simultaneously. It chronicles the observations and experiences of a speaker moving through post-Pinochet Chile as it runs a parallel journey into the interior of the speaker, sorting out past relationships and one’s emotional landscape.

As journeys go, they are both rather sedate journeys, marked by close attention, tenderly deliberate. This is why I initially had trouble entering into the book. I guess I expect most journeys to be madcap, footloose adventures — one of those buddy pictures into the turbulent soul. But these journeys employ careful steps. They attempt to be less wild American than chronicler of a foreign culture where it pays to be careful of what you say for fear you don’t become one of the desaparecido the next time you visit. My expectation for such a journey might be to plumb the depths of the language and cultural idiosyncrasy to produce a kind of Oswald de Andrade-like Pau-Brasil, but Novey’s speaker is content to watch and calibrate the people that she sees moving through their lives. It’s a trip with a sociologist and spiritual seeker more than it is a philologist’s whirlwind tour of the libraries. Novey’s speaker seems to be watching, watching . . . ever vigilant. I imagine sitting next to her in a bus on its way to the Pantanal and saying, “Jesus Christ, would you say something?” as she continues to study the faces.

When I first picked up the book, I was in the middle of a very busy month, but now that I have slowed down for the summer months, I have come back to The Next Country and have begun to tease out the subtleties.

The book begins with “East of Here” and beckons the reader to travel with its last line: “there is a road if you want to go.” So, we hop on. The rest of the first section sets off poems like “The Wailers in Estadio Nacional” where the speaker is watching Ziggy Marley’s band play in Santiago’s largest soccer stadium against poems that detail relationships with family members — mothers, fathers, sisters. The one theme of travel to a foreign country is matched with the theme of traveling to the unexplored land of the familial. In the following piece, one gets a taste of Novey’s world of relationships:

For My Sister, Driving Away

From a picture, no one guesses
the relation until I explain

about our fathers: one black
and one white. Then everyone finds

a resemblance: your cheekbones,
they say. No. it’s your jawline.

Or maybe the eyebrows.
When I think story, I start

with the mother, but maybe
I’ve been telling it backward.

•

Where the water streamed
swiftest over the rocks, our mother

rolled up her pants, waded in.
Swaying, bell-like, almost willing

her fall, she called for us
and we laughed at her.

Is it possible to have a mother
pitching toward the water,

and alongside that falling
a margin of happiness?

•

Outside a Cineplex, I spotted a woman
in an ill-fitting dress. She was in line,

but only half-so. People milled
around her, her face like a town

along the Hudson — a mix of prison
and wilderness. I wondered

if she had children, if when they spoke
it was like unstitching

that ill-fitting dress
covering her body, if even then

their talk was a whisper, a sort of scissor
scraping the skin.

“her face like a town along the Hudson — a mix of prison and wilderness”? Wow. I’ve known quite a few people like that, but my empathy has never risen up to provide that level of description. Novey’s speaker is a superior empath. The sister is also briefly mentioned in “Stranger” (“Definition of a Stranger” here) as wilder, so we get the sense that the sister invoked is an actual sister.

Later on in the first section Novey uses a piece called “Trans-“ to suggest a kind of crossing over. The poem uses various different suffixes (-late, -gress, -mogrify, -form, -scend) as section headings. At the end, Novey writes: the whole of a life fits in a coconut / and you can whittle out the slivers / of its immaculate inner meat.

She begins to do just this in the wonderful “Into the Atacama” where once again the reader is placed in the foreign country. The speaker melds with all the personages on the bus — “We . . . became presidents. We became lovers” — and one gets the sense that the speaker’s empathy is spilling out onto everyone, rendering in full her desire to be an everywoman.

There is more traveling in section II, a brief stop in Tikal. Then as the section ensues, there is a shift back to the familial again. There is a delicious piece entitled “The Candidate” which explores the consequences of a woman’s honesty being challenged.

Section III begins with a tribute to Brazilian fiction writer Clarice Lispector with “A Maça No Escuro[The Apple in the Dark]” also the title of one of Lispector’s books. In this poem we begin to see the transformation of the “sister”. One careful sister stays home and is forced to listen to the libertine sister’s untamed ways. In this piece, though, is where I finally got the sense that the “sister” is the stand-in for “the other” in the foreign culture, and this sent a ripple effect throughout the first two sections, all the way back to “Definition of a Stranger.” For me, this piece acts as the pivot in the book for the reader to understand the symbolic significance of the sister/daughter, and it establishes the basic architecture of the book.

A strange little prose-like piece follows that maps the sister/sister dyad onto the mother/daughter relationship. I believe it is Novey’s intention here to reiterate the similarity of female experience, the sisterhood that connects one woman to another despite background and cultural baggage.

Two Women in a Barn

It happens that a mother becomes parchment
and rolls up gradually around the fictions
of her children. That she becomes an almond
softening in the pockets of cotton garments.
Sleeps with her glasses on in her daughter’s house
and vanishes in the morning. That she’s coerced
her grown child into feeding her blind horse, watching it
list oddly in the small paddock. It happens
that a daughter becomes a bottle, filling with twigs
and crinkled bits of leaves. That she likes to glint
in the water the way a glass bottle will.

With the sisterhood comes a disfigurement as well, a turning into glass bottle full of throwaway items . . . yet that glass bottle is given to moments of brilliance as well if we are quick enough to catch it glinting on the surface of the water.

Section IV, the final section, builds on the mother/daughter relationship at the end of section III and starts with several pieces that invoke the theme of dissociated children whose roots have been cut away from them, leaving them to become unmoored.

These lost children become Pinochet’s desaparecidos in “The End of Augusto” where the speaker, removed from Chile, notes the general’s death as a kind of siren echoing on the inside and ready to be uttered.

Moving further into section IV, an octopus , “washed up and gull-pecked,” arrives next, cast out from the brutality of the sea. A painted gourd turns up as a symbol of everything and suggests a certain sense of laissez-faire. A field serves as the metaphor for what one moves through, a country, its history, a family, a marriage, a life.

We see the restless associative movement in this last section where the subjects of the poem are crab-walking into each other. Everything is moving sideways and conflating until distinguishing lines can no longer be drawn. We arrive at the all-encompassing. This is the magnanimous heart, Whitman’s leftover pulse, traveling as it were over Latin America. One almost immediately asks whether Neruda can be very far off.

This is not to say that the associative movement is as frenetic as with the surrealists. It's leaps are not dashes across the riprap in the stream, not sure of where the next footfall will be, improvising. Novey will collect herself on a foothold and figure out where she is going to place her next footfall. Whose approach is more adventurous? They are both crossing the stream. Novey's approach illustrates an understading of what Brazilian singer Rita Lee describes as to chega mais.

Many of Novey’s poems find their objective correlative in objects that are removed from the actual subject she wants to broach. Several of the poems in the final section work this way. Moreover, quite a few over the course of the book use this strategy of the slant, the glancing. If one is not set to the proper tempo, one might miss the the glints, the connections. Yet, what is most assuredly the case is that Novey’s associative movement does provide the reader with a deep image effect. As she herself puts it in “Scenes from Moving Vehicles, IV”:

The sun sinks, its pink rim
dims tangerine — storied light,
where the reckoning comes in.

In The Next Country Idra Novey exemplifies a quiet identification with the everyman, not an exclamatory one. For those of you who come to Novey after Whitman, you might have difficulty understanding her notion of the group hug and how it differs from Whitman’s smothering exuberance. Novey’s embrace is more of a short, firm, passionate clasp (or perhaps a very subtle goose), one that provides bursts of that storied light.

MARY OLIVER TALKS TO THE TREES

2009-06-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

My friend June and I love Paint Your Wagon, the 1969 mining-camp musical that starred two of my childhood movie-heroes, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, and introduced my eleven-year-old imagination to the mystery of Jean Seberg. My nostalgia goes even further. At Gilliland Junior High, my buddy Carlos and I mumbled out a duet from the film in music class. Looking at our feet, we sang, “I was born under a wandering star,” figuring if Lee had the cojones to sing it in public, well, we did, too.

Paint Your Wagon was shot on location in Pine Valley, Oregon, the hometown of one of June’s and my mutual friends, the late Bill Baird. Bill’s brother was actually on-set as an adviser. Everett was a master of the pioneer art of driving a team of oxen. Bill told us Everett was caught on film driving a team himself. Unfortunately, June and I waited too long to watch the movie with Bill so we had to use our imaginations a bit to identify his big brother.

Right about now you’re probably wondering: how does Paint Your Wagon relate to Mary Oliver? Well, if you’ve seen the movie, you might remember the scene in which Clint sings, “I talk to the trees,” as he ambles through a summer-lit pine forest, pining for Jean Seberg. As for talking to the trees, he laments, "but they don’t listen me." In Ms. Oliver's poem, “When I Am Among the Trees,” not only do they listen, they speak.

I came across this poem in Thirst (Beacon Press 2006) during a break from reading an anthology of contemporary poems that were challenging my abilities as a reader. Simply put, I was exhausted by them. How refreshing it was to read a poem by someone who has been listening so carefully to the world, who is willing to make herself vulnerable by sharing what she's heard, and who can write so well.

I hope you enjoy this poem as much as I did, and you, too, can “go easy” in this world—if only for a moment.

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

FENCE 10th ANNIVERSARY READING—AWP Chicago [Feb. 14, 2009]

2009-05-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

Rodrigo Toscano reads "Clock, Deck and Movement" [5:59]

Eleni Sikelianos reads "Who thinking on Her Legs (Manifesto)" [2:20]

Eleni Sikelianos reads "Essay: History's Tree (Early Greece)" [1:00]

Prageeta Sharma reads "Value" [2:00]

Prageeta Sharma reads "Deliverance" [1:58]

Kristin Prevallet reads "Dream of Financial Ruin" [3:55]

Geoffrey O' Brien reads "Cascade" [0:37]

K. Silem Mohammad reads "Unobstructed and 4 Sonnets" [6:26]

Brenda Hillman reads "Wind Treaties" [0:51]

Brenda Hillman reads "Styrofoam Cup" [0:29]

Brenda Hillman reads "Sediments of Santa Monica" [1:22]

Duriel Harris reads "Short" [3:32]

Dawn Lundy Martin reads "Religion Song" [4:41]

Thomas Devaney reads "They're Fighting in Atlantic City in Atlantic City" [5:25]

Amy Catanzano reads "Chromatica" and "Notes on the Enclosure of Fields" [2:41]

Rae Armantrout reads "Currency," "In time," "Previews," "Hey," "Anchor," "Procedures" and "Number" [6:19]

Cathy Wagner reads "She May" [1:43]

Cathy Wagner reads "Well in The Chasm of Your Faith Opportunity Tree Why Don't You Crampon Up" [0:51]

Cathy Wagner reads "Song" [1:38]

After Her Stroke, Our Family Remembers the HurricaneAround the

2009-04-28T10:46:00.000-07:00

After Her Stroke, Our Family Remembers the Hurricane
Around the table, she blinks her response
to our questions and listens to the noise
the rest of us make, nodding her head
until someone forgets and pauses halfway
through the story: Tell us what happened next.
Through the window, this year's tobacco
is just visible behind the barn.
The room is bright and everything silent,
even the break of the crop's stalks in the wind.
Someone else picks up where the last
left off, and another interrupts to tell it
better, the afternoon losing itself to rain
that has just set in. She turns away
from us to face the windows, my uncle
visible beneath the thunder as he collects
damaged leaves. When she thinks no one
is watching, her hands rise to the neck
and I see her fingers trace the throat,
the outline where the voice once belonged.

-- Kerri French

WRITERS CORPS: Anthology Reading

2009-04-25T10:49:00.000-07:00

Chad Sweeney reads "The Piano Teacher" [1:59]

Jeffrey McDaniel reads "Day 4305" [4:58]

Elissa Perry reads "Becoming Darla" [8:01]

Maiana Minahal reads "Ordinary" [1:12]

Maiana Minahal reads "You Bring Out the Filipina in Me" [1:56]

Thomas Centolella reads "Transparency" [1:57]

Thomas Centolella reads "Dojo" [2:29] Text of "Dojo"

POETRY MAGAZINE READING: Not the Usual Suspects Feb. 12, 2009 at AWP

2009-04-13T09:21:00.000-07:00

Craig Arnold reads "Incubus" [7:10] Text of "Incubus"

Ange Mlinko reads "Year Round" [0:57] Text of "Year Round"

Jacob Saenz reads "Sweeping the States" [1: 32] Text of Sweeping the States

Ange Mlinko reads "Gallimaufry" [1:37]

A. E. Stallings reads "Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther" [1:04] Text of "Triolet ona Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther"

A. E. Stallings reads On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia [3:11] Text of "On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia"

PITT POETRY READING — AWP CONFERENCE [Feb. 13, 2009]

2009-04-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

Nancy Krygowski reads "Still Wet" [2:52]

Nancy Krygowski reads "I Get Happy Wen I Shudder" [1:55]

Nancy Krygowski reads "Velocity" [2:40]

Afaa Michael Weaver reads "Beginnings" [0:51]

Afaa Michael Weaver reads "Working of Miracles" [1:46]

Afaa Michael Weaver reads "Interpretation of Tongues" [1:22]

GRAYWOLF READING — AWP CONFERENCE 2009

2009-03-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

D. A. Powell reads "Chronic" [6:40]

Katie Ford reads "Colosseum Theater" [2:04]

Katie Ford reads "Flee" [1:28]

Eula Biss reads "Time and Distance Overcome" [13:11]

MATT HART AND DOBBY GIBSON at SACRAMENTO POETRY CENTER

2009-03-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

Dobby Gibson reads "Vertical Hold" [1:41]

Dobby Gibson reads "Mercy" [1:33]

Dobby Gibson reads "Fortune" [1:47]

Matt Hart reads "Revolutions per Minute" [1:59]

Matt Hart reads "History Lesson" [4:58]

Matt Hart and Dobby Gibson reads their e-renga "Late Make-Up Years and Decline" [1:18]

ALICE JAMES BOOKS READING—CHICAGO, FEB. 13, 2009

2009-03-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

Idra Novey reads "Second Snow" [0:44]

Idra Novey reads "A History in Six Couplets" [0:29]

Idra Novey reads "The Experiment" [0:46]

Bill Rasmovicz reads "The Moon" [2:40]

Bill Rasmovicz reads "Clear Smoke" [1:03]

Carey Salerno reads "Boss" [1:36]

Carey Salerno reads "Shelter" [0:35]

Lia Purpura reads from "King Baby" [4:56]

Frank Giampietro reads "Death By My Son" [1:20]

ELISE PARTRIDGE—CHAMELEON HOURS

2009-03-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

Elise Partridge’s Chameleon Hours (Anansi Press, 2008)

Elise Partridge’s fans are many, but they don’t always agree about her sensibility. Her editor, Ken Babstock, calls her “a technical wizard for whom thinking and feeling are not separate activities.” An equally admiring Stephen Burt, on the other hand, sees in her “a careful thinker's yearning for abandon.” Rosanna Warren applauds her “coolly surprising intelligence,” whereas Robert Pinsky (quoting “In the Barn,” a very strong poem he claims is in Partridge’s new book, but which I couldn’t find in the copy I got from Anansi Press—perhaps there’s a different edition out there someplace) calls her “ardent” and “compassionate.” Could it be that Partridge really is all of these incompatible things: a truly unified, zen-like presence and a hungry heart? A “hawk-like observer” (in Babstock’s phrase) and a healing empath? Perhaps, as her book’s title suggests, Partridge is a chameleon, taking on new colors as she pleases, and striving to be all poetic things to all poetic people.

The problem with this view, however, is that Partridge’s new book (as she has noted in a recent interview with Jared Bland in The Walrus:) revolves around an experience that not everyone (or every poet) has had: a bout with cancer. Indeed, the best two poems of the book (especially the “Chemo Side Effects” pair about vision and memory loss) tackle this experience more or less directly, with an implicit courage and unsentimental frankness that is wholly admirable. Partridge’s poetry comes alive most vividly when she fears losing the gifts of observation it has afforded her: “So many small things I still want to see: / sheen of my nephew’s corner eyelash, / snowflake circuitry, fleas’ thighs, / nebulae flocking in my husband’s iris, / the peaks and valleys of each mustard seed.” These observations are not uniformly breathtaking, but they have a good deal of restrained beauty, and we know what is at stake in them. Yet the book as a whole refuses to coalesce around this potentially powerful emotional center. Its four-part structure seems arbitrary; it may well constitute a chronology of sorts, but it is hardly a narrative, and the tense attention to detail that enriches many of the cancer-themed poems seems like an empty reflex in other contexts.

Part of the problem is that Partridge’s work is often far too obviously imitative. She is often cited as a disciple of Elizabeth Bishop, though that is perhaps a fate that inevitably befalls any female poet with formalist tendencies. Personally, I didn’t find Bishop’s influence as suffocating as that of D.H. Lawrence. Compare, for instance, Lawrence’s poem “Man and Bat,” with Partridge’s poem “Depends on the Angle.” I have never read a poem by a respected poet that reads quite so blandly like another, far more famous poem. Lawrence’s poem is too long to quote comfortably in full, but I’ll take some representative passages:

When I went into my room, at mid-morning,
Why? ... a bird!

A bird
Flying round the room in insane circles.

In insane circles!
... A bat!

A disgusting bat
At mid-morning! . . .

Out! Go out!

Round and round and round
With a twitchy, nervous, intolerable flight,
And a neurasthenic lunge,
And an impure frenzy…

Again he swerved into the window bay
And I ran forward, to frighten him forth.
But he rose, and from a terror worse than me he flew past me
Back into my room, and round, round, round in my room
Clutch, cleave, stagger,
Dropping about the air
Getting tired…

I also realised ....
It was the light of day which he could not enter,
Any more than I could enter the white-hot door of a blast-furnace.

He could not plunge into the daylight that streamed at the window.
It was asking too much of his nature.

Worse even than the hideous terror of me with my handkerchief
Saying: Out, go out! ...
Was the horror of white daylight in the window!...

He squatted there like something unclean.
No, he must not squat, nor hang, obscene, in my room!...
Hastily, I shook him out of the window…

And now, at evening, as he flickers over the river
Dipping with petty triumphant flight, and tittering over the sun's departure,
I believe he chirps, pipistrello, seeing me here on this terrace writing:
There he sits, the long loud one!
But I am greater than he ...
I escaped him....

Below is Partridge’s poem, which reproduces many of Lawrence’s effects quite faithfully, right down to the switch over to the bat’s point of view at the end:

Woke to find a brown lump
hunched on the curtain rod,
three-inch peeled gap
in the screen—
bat.
Malevolent blot,
gargoyle
blighting my daisied lace—
some sleep-of-reason monster
cruising for changes of scene.

Aimed to whap him out.
At first he tried to squeeze
sideways; then dove
through the glaring room
bleating—
squeaking—
pleading—
eave, corner, sill, sill, eave—
while some red-eyed, ghost-white monster
shrieked after him. Chucked a broom.

As a Lawrence admirer, I must note that Partridge’s ending also borrows from his even more famous poem “Snake,” where a prudish speaker also throws a stick at a fleeing animal. Here is a chameleon hour that reads more like plagiarist’s playtime.

If this were an isolated incident of borrowed inspiration, that would be one thing, but it is not. Nothing else is quite so egregious as “Depends on the Angle,” but echoes of Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, G.H. Hopkins (perhaps via Margaret Avison) and Robert Frost permeate this book until I feel like I am standing at the end of a very long hallway, listening to the vestiges of a very civilized, very well-read, but ultimately pointless conversation. In this echo chamber, small verbal tics loom large: Partridge’s habit of doubling up her onomatopoeic verbs (“flags flap-flapped,” “bellbuoys chiming-chime,” and its variant “buoy-bells ting-tinging”) is rather lazy, and her repeated use of the obscure, if deliciously archaic-sounding architectural term “narthex” (a word-lover’s word for the entrance of a church) is distracting and somewhat troubling. Do the words Partridge is using mean anything to her beyond themselves? If so, it is hard to see it.

That is not to say that there are no fine or arresting passages in Chameleon Hours. The Hopkinsian line “Earthward, staggering, reaching, reeled, thirteen” came at me delightfully, inevitably and yet out of nowhere, to rhyme with “trampoline.” A line from “Cancer Surgery” was also charged with startling, urgent vividness: “Chest a gauzy snowpatch, itchy with tape.” Despite a general queasiness, I found myself wanting more of these reeling, itching bodies to ground Partridge’s flights of fancy (she sometimes amuses herself by comparing herself to a bird, which is her right, of course, given her last name). Although bodily reticence can be a welcome reprieve from the blood- balls-and-guts of many contemporary poets, Partridge seems to take this retiring stance too far.

So I suppose I side with those who see Partridge as a small-scale perfectionist, an inhabitant of a private ivory tower. I like her willingness to play around with forms: the opening poem, “First Death” is written in flexible, unobtrusive (and even a bit prosaic) blank verse, and rhymes crop up now and then with agreeable yet surprising frequency. As a poet who loves to equivocate with rhyme and meter myself, I understand her ambivalence, and enjoy her opportunistic exploitation of sound effects. Yet what Jacqueline Osherow has called Partridge’s “flawless ear” can sometimes seem a bit tinny. Questions like “will our Möbius affections / start to grate?” are neither bracingly rugged nor plausibly smooth, and their abstraction heightens their awkwardness. The opening lines from the same poem (the sad but sadly uncompelling “Childless”) will make the point even clearer:

Helices snapped like crepe-paper streamers,
our DNA ladder
sways with frayed ends, an idle last rung.
No filaments spiraling us to the future…

Forced conceits of this type mar more than a few of the poems. The lines about the speaker’s husband in the same poem are also representative of the vague, purely gestural nature of human relationships in this book:

Your blue eyes in a rounder mien,
that three-generations’ compounded patience
that makes your stalwart pulse andante—
how I wanted that seeded, perennial.

Here a ceremony of what must have been genuine personal grief is drowned in what I can only call Yeats-and-water.

Of course, I feel awful saying all of this about a poet who has survived an encounter with cancer and who has chosen to share part of the experience with us. As someone who has just published a book of poems about his infant daughter, I came to this book ready to make all sorts of allowances for emotional special pleading, over-the-top gory details, blissful self-delusions, apocalyptic/ecstatic ranting, and self-pity. I found none of these, which worries me, in a way. One might say that Partridge is too conscientious and unworldly an aesthete to bother with the slog and tremor of disease, yet her literary manners are not without flaws. She does not refrain from minor didactic touches that seem at odds with her self-created status as an observer of reality. The feminism that underlies the quietly effective “Miss Peters” becomes snide and facile in “As I Was Saying”: “Slit open his mattress, insert two stinking trout, / tip last week’s beer over his speakers / and light out.” Her warning to “lost boys” in “World War II Watchtower” is more vapid than vatic: “don’t bivouac here… your open eyes aren’t freckled with Omaha sand; / you’re not the great-uncle bobbing at Juno.” I’m tempted to reply, “Yeah, so what? Neither are you.” In any event, to descend from the emotional heights of reading about chemotherapy to this lecturing tone is bathetic. I wish Partridge had managed to sustain the seriousness and dignity she shows in the best poems in this book, but I suspect that this would be beyond most poets’ powers. Maybe in cancer she simply encountered something that was more powerful, more visceral, more evocative than her poetry could handle. Most of us will suffer this fate eventually, but for her to suffer it so plainly and so meekly in this book is disappointing.

Review written by Brad Buchanan

49th PARALLEL READING—Canadian Authors reading at AWP [Feb. 14, 2009]

2009-03-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

Chris Hutchinson reads excerpts from "Cross Sections" [6:41]

Carolyn Smart reads excerpts "Written on the Flesh" [Myra Hindley] [9:30]

Adam Sol reads excerpts from Jeremiah, Ohio [7:09]

Sina Queyras reads an excerpt from Expressway [2:26]

AMERICAN HYBRID READING—AWP FEB. 13, 2009

2009-03-04T22:48:00.000-08:00

Ralph Angel reads "Blackout" [1:22]

Ralph Angel reads "Untitled" [2:10]

Rae Armantrout reads "Fit" [0:46]

Rae Armantrout reads "Scumble" [0:37]

Rae Armantrout reads "Unbidden" [0:38]

Rae Armantrout reads "Simple" [0:42]

Mary Jo Bang reads "Mystery at Manor Close" [2:00]

Mary Jo Bang reads "Man and Woman" [3:02]

JASPER BERNES—STARSDOWN

2009-02-24T20:59:00.000-08:00

In Starsdown a reader will experience some of the densest work this side of a black hole. The poems that Bernes writes/constructs swirl and accumulate matter like a tornado sucking up anything of value manufactured in the 21st Century. It is one part witness, one part commentary, and ten parts whirling stimuli found at your local Wal-Mart Mega Mart. The effect is like having language spit out by a salad shooter:

In the shakeout, comes pesticide, comes polyester.
Chewing gum, detergent, mustard gas precursor.
Heart valves, condoms, contact lenses, synthetic thought. [“Tar Pits”]

In his hyper-driven collection of digital detritus and electronic age ephemera, Bernes uses language that is visionary, daring, and ultimately condemnatory. The eyes and ears and life that has put together the assemblage that is Starsdown seems to be both addicted to the pleasures of a capital-intensive society as well disgusted by its excesses.

This is much the same feeling I get when I visit my brother, Dante’s, basement in Chicago. Dante is the owner of an original Altair back in the 70’s back when most were still wondering how their FM radios worked. Since that time Dante has accumulated various kinds of electronic devices and gadgets of every imaginable stripe and color. He has a collection of cut-off power cords that are draped over a light fixture hanging from the ceiling, one (maybe more!) for every year of his life. While some might look at this as a pathetic attempt to horde useless material for a reason almost assuredly to escape the minds of most modern humans, I tend to look at this odd collection (and several dozen others like it in his basement), as an expression of extreme hope. My brother is hopeful that there are enough appliances out there with faulty power cords that all of these “parts” will be needed for resuscitation of dead bread makers or waffle irons or computer drives.

Bernes’s Starsdown makes me think that there also can be no sound reason to collect all these word-bits on the page in order to construct a vision of a hyper-digitized LA, perhaps a post-industrial-apocalyptic LA given the good number of images that suggest severe decay. As striking as the juxtapositions are and as attentive an eye as there is present, the barrage can oppress after a while; however, like with my brother’s basement (which is very hard to move around in and get to the washer and dryer) there is a certain grandeur and spectacle to the whole massive undertaking. Fortunately, for most readers, Bernes’s book will most assuredly take up less space than my brother’s stuff, and the book is quite the value when measured against a lifetime of collecting spare electronic parts and gadgetry. However, the question remains whether it will serve as well in case of economic collapse. I am quite certain that my brother will be able to barter his way out of any situation should we be staring down the barrel of a full-scale economic and financial collapse. It is much harder to barter with words rather than their referents.

But Bernes at times wants to be the reader’s guide to such a collapse. The stranded and disconnected items strewn throughout the book serve as guideposts in a land where readily-determined sense has stopped production. This reflects what some might refer to a constructivist impulse, that impulse which constructs a world out of words rather than just represents/misrepresents an accessible manifestation of reality as per mimesis. However, Bernes’s eye collects so much debris, and he hears so much in the airwaves that it is hard to imagine how Bernes’s construction could exist without his accumulationist impulse. Also, because it is hard to imagine what kind of new machinery could be built without using the spare parts of the language, it is hard to imagine how any kind of constructivist endeavor could be undertaken without some kind of accumulationist impulse.

Of course, I doubt whether it is part of Bernes’s grand plan to deliver any absolute glimpse of the future degraded LA. The book wants to be the sounding board for a reader to derive his/her own vision of LA’s next incarnation. It forces a reader to tinker, to synthesize thoughts out of a bucket of screws, hardware, electrical tape and a massive coil of solder.

The darting back and forth from various different language sets (and I cannot recall a book of contemporary American poetry whose diction is so varied) does produce what Stephen Burt’s review of Starsdown calls “[Bernes’s] jumpy, almost ADD poems.” However, what Burt fails to realize here with Bernes is that the two D’s in ADD stand in for “drift” and “détournement.” These may be terms plucked from the Situationist Bible, but they are definitely in play in Starsdown. The drift in the book is an exceptionally difficult one to pull off with any authority. This is not the casual drift across a group of tourists on the other side of a city street, glancing at what seems to be out of place and wryly commenting on it. No this kind of drift entails a much more concerted looking. It stares intensely at the labels on everything and then disengages them through a few hot, short lingual bursts. This is where the détournement comes in. By referring to so much of the baggage that we carry around on a day-to-day basis as part of the experience of contemporary city dwellers, and then distoriting so much of it through the techniques of rapid jump cuts and juxtapositions, nearly every stanza in Starsdown is disorienting, decontextualizing. It becomes the sole burden of the reader to place himself/herself within the mix without fear of also becoming folded in by the language taffy machine Bernes employs. So, Bernes uses the language of our contemporary moment to unhinge the reader from his/her experience with it. The total effect is like wearing freshly laundered clothes after one has previously worn clothes through a month’s worth of LA grime. Bernes freshens the power spots in the language.

I can’t remember a recent book where one reads lines just for the sheer pleasure of what will be invoked, what will be fastened together in the next daring phrase, the next measure, the next run of sixteenths. The music is complicated though. A reader should be warned that making it through Starsdown while deriving the most pleasure requires a well-practiced reader, one whose sight-reading skills are well honed.

Many lines conspire with rhythms that are easy to trip over. There are short staccato bursts and inverted melodic phrases — near perfect renderings of the previous passage except for the slip of a single syllable. I enjoy the musical performance of Bernes on the page, but I must admit that I suffer a bit of note fatigue upon extended reading. Living with the book as I have for the past several months, I find its presence most comforting when I need to remind myself to be more daring with my language. It’s probably not the right companion though if one wants to trot out a nice well-behaved narrative. Starsdown doesn’t aspire to that kind of project. Yet there are unmistakable moments of near-narrative thrust, for example, in the following piece that resembles a creation myth:

Desiderata on a Desert Island

Each island marks the limits of the sight,
Each prisoner the center of a prism, thousand-
Faced, wherein the vision of others

Drowns in confounded distances. This
Is our city, our archipelago of sprawl,
On self-love built: one long block out, as on

A ring of reef, the repeated, bleeding gazes
Founder and collapse, sun-bald, like waves
Under the overambitious topweight of a forward push.

The horizon is a second skin, seeing
Sheathed by being, swallowed whole.
It kings us eye for I. It brings what

Flings us far near, an myopia, a fat
Cataract where the ocean ours over
The edge into threshing, blent serrations, scales.

Retinal flotsam, rods and cones
Wash ashore—eyechart letters, blurs
That form no common language. We must

Build then with lack a private
Shack, a charm for the sharks, a diction
Wholly homegrown. We were allowed to bring

One word each. We were allowed to choose.
My sister, protectless now, and lost, picked
Justice. I hear her hear here, sometimes, in the waves

Just this, just this, the beach each day
Levelled in the steady bevel of the tides,
Its hall of mirrors. An old friend, in front of us

At the all-night processing center,
Whispered verdant to the guards. She must
Live then with, for scenery, the names of trees and flowers

She’s never seen, garden overgrown with unknowing.
Impossible to gauge the time it takes
To pen these notes with only the empty

Amphitheater of the ocean, with only subtle
Inflections to distinguish one thought
From another, blue from green, gulls from pelicans,

Where exactly and how the water becomes
Symbol of a common, consanguinous solitude.
Is that love? God? Justice? What I feel

Seems to name the others farther and more pure.
Inarticulable difference, loves without object.
Sometimes the palm, grown so familiar, so commonplace,

Disappears in the empty-scented tradewinds,
Winnowed by excessive adoration.
My glyph’s desiderata, a stiff wind or wand of wishes

Which no longer refer to any world I can recall.
In name alone. A hive, a Latin hum
Of what’s not here and never was.

And in this way Los Angeles is made.

Embeddded in this poem is the following credo: “We must / Build then with lack a private / Shack, a charm for the sharks, a diction / Wholly homegrown.” This can’t be too far from Bernes’s ars poetica. The reason I have gravitated to this piece over many of the other fine ones in the book is probably because I am drawn to the orderedness of the piece vis–à-vis the rather wild diction (though the varied invocation is somewhat more subdued here than elsewhere in the book). The tercets and capitalized word at the beginning of each line suggest older English verse. This tension between the archaic and the birth of the most postmodern of cities (Los Angeles) is appealing if only a reminder of the constraints of the old forms that creak at the seams trying to constrain the diction. So much of the book is futuristic/contemporary critical that “Desiderata” is a quaint reminder that cities are built upon the past (as any good Marxist knows).

The “I” that appears in Starsdown almost always appears as a contrivance. That seems appropriate for the kind of book that it is. As a reader one can feel the experienced eye bobbing through the cultural flotsam, but that experience is not borne as an individuated persona through which we see the world of the poem. What makes Bernes’s constructivist project all the more appealing in Starsdown is the total collaboration with the culture Bernes pursues. Thus, the constructed language in the book feels like it has developed through some sort of seismic pressure of the culture itself and is not the work of a dazzling linguistic inventor (even though we know that behind the curtain is Bernes himself masterfully assembling and rewriting and rescoring his symphony of the La-that-is-now and the LA-that-is-to-come.

At times I wonder if the I that appears isn’t so transparent that Bernes should just remove his name from the book altogether and put on the cover the author as a particular period of time, arguably the contemporary but not necessarily.

Though Starsdown is as supercharged a linguistic fantasy as I have seen and could imagine, I wonder if it does not share some of the same pitfalls as my brother’s house. In my brother’s house, what was once contained to the basement has slowly crept up through the rest of the house. I had not visited him in Chicago for nearly twelve years since I had been living on the West Coast. This month I arrived to find that the manageable mess he had constructed in the basement had migrated through the rest of the house. The living room was piled high with old electronic components that once served some important function but now had surpassed middle age and had their printed circuit boards hanging out. There was an industrial size garbage bag full of plastic peanuts awaiting their time of disembarkment should the eBay gods shine down on my brother’s house one day. Even the bathroom was supplied with various electronic thingamabobs. Open a cabinet for a towel and three battery-operated conveniences fall on your foot.

In short, the sprawl is contagious. It overtakes a house the way it overtakes a city, a city like LA. Perhaps this is Bernes’s purpose to effect a textual expression of the city as subject. However, all I know is that if one tries to live in my brother’s house for more than three days then certain synapses begin to fail. You wake up in the middle of the night and fear you are beginning to become a clutterer, that a massive stack of plastic storage boxes will fall down on you in the night and perhaps steal your virginity, again!

With Starsdown Bernes’s language presses down into the neuronal interstices and begins to wear away at the very fabric that holds everything together.

Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction written by Ana Maria Shua and translated by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan

2009-02-20T18:24:00.000-08:00

Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction
Ana Maria Shua. Translated by Rhonda Dahl Buchanan
White Pine Press

Quick Fix: Sudden Fiction plays home to four of Argentina-born Ana Maria Shua’s fiction collections. These whirlwind fictions are so intoxicating that readers will find themselves rereading a piece half a dozen times before moving on to the next. Readers have to stay on their toes if they hope to keep up with this writer’s winking prose. These sudden fictions, as Shua calls them, take on faerie tales, perceptions of reality, and familiar stories and give them nice injection of sass, feminism, and snark. Here, the sudden fictions ask the reader to take a new look at old stories.

Shua’s work pokes holes through former patriarchal visions of women. The work in this collection retells the stories or takes a stab at redefining such women as geisha and Sleeping Beauty. In “#176,” Shua allows the Sleeping Beauty to take control of this sleep, to use it as a weapon to secure her freedom. Shua writes:

“Sleeping Beauty slept for one hundred years. She took one year to stretch after her prince’s passionate kiss. She took two years to get dressed and five to eat breakfast. Her royal husband put up with all this without complaining until that dreaded moment when, after fourteen years of lunch, it was time for a nap.”

When the princess wakes, she takes her time and grabs control of her waking hours. The sleep that “protected” her in the past is the sleep her husband grows to fear. Here, Shua shows the reader that such modes of control backfire. This Sleeping Beauty will take as long as she wants to dress and have lunch, and she will then return to sleep rather than lead a life of servitude.

The Geisha section is full of sly commentary on men and their objectification of women. The world of geishas has notoriously been a world where women serve men. Shua roasts the men who participate in such a culture. She takes on “neat freak” who takes forever to remove his clothes only to ask for a different woman, and in “Sophistication” Shua shows the hypocrisy and irony of the sex industry when a man asks for “the services of his own wife.” The poem takes on the sex industry and cracks its shell to show its most ridiculous parts.

In one of the more moving sections of the geisha-focused poems, Shua examines the idea behind a man's "dream girl." Shua writes in "The Girl Who It Not Here":

"None is more successful than The Girl Who Is Not Here. Although still young, many years of dedicated practice have allowed her to perfect the very subtle art of absence. Those who request her end up settling for another, whom they possess with indifference, trying to imagine that they hold in their arms the best, the only, The Girl Who Is Not Here.”

It’s poems like this that startle the reader and causes him or her to sit up straight and consider the world. Here, the man can never be satisfied by what is there. He is always looking for something else, something unattainable. Shua paints fantasy as absence, as the unattainable.

The strongest of Shua’s sudden fictions are those that take well-known characters and situations and spin them to create new tales. Instead of work that warns women or seeks to keep women locked away, Shua gives women their power back.. These fictions are shadows of the original or inverse or continuation of what once was. Shua rewrites history in #84:

“The real value of Scheherazade’s tales did not rest on their intrigue, but rather just the opposite, on their hypnotic monotony. Thanks to her extremely boring stories, she was the only of the sultan’s many wives who succeeded in making him fall asleep each night. Sheltered from the tortures of insomnia, the sultan rewarded Scheherazade with the greatest of all prizes: her own life. The stories of that collection, which is known as The Arabian Nights, and which, truth be told, are not totally lacking in interest, were created many years later by the sultan’s little sister, the beautiful Dunyazard, to entertain her royal nieces and nephews.”

Shua is well aware of the way history has treated women, and in this piece, she takes back history and reinvents it in favor of women. The sultan is shown to be a fool: one who sleeps when timeless stories are spun right before him. The women become the writers of the classics; the women become the people to pass these stories on to teach one another. This piece and others in the collection ask the reader to reconsider the canon, its authors, and the way history has been written.

There are times where the idea behind the sudden fictions seems to overshadow the actual language used to convey them. This could be the result of translation, or it could be that Shua wants her points to come across bluntly and clearly. The effect is sometimes a preachy or bluntness that seems too loudly chuckle at its intelligence. Though the idea is interesting, “To Each His Own” is almost too loud and too proud of its metaphors. The sly wink that has been present throughout the anthology is momentarily replaced by a lard thigh-slapping guffaw. In this sudden fiction, Shua plays on the animalistic side of the sex industry when describing vampire clients. Shua writes: “For sweet-toothed vampires: fat, listless, diabetic women with Modigliani necks….” The implications are clear: the men are sucking the life from women to fulfill their desires. The metaphor is almost too easy or loud for the collection. To refer to men who objectify women as blood-suckers seems not only as if it has been done before, but seems as if it’s been done so often that it’s become a cliché.

Shua’s writing is crisp, and her voice is loud. This writer doesn’t shy away from difficult decisions. The core Shua’s work is to provide women the chance to speak and the chance to take back their lives and stories. What would the world be like if our fairy tales were as sharp and women-centered as these pieces? It’s easy to picture a new reality by the end of the anthology, a world full of humor lined with barbed wire, a world where women make their way to the table. This is Shua’s greatest joke: these pieces are neither fictions nor sudden. Irony of ironies, it’s plain to see that nothing in this anthology can be solved or seen as a quick fix: not the fictions, not the extensive histories behind these fictions, and certainly not the revision of history.

KIM ADDONIZIO—Feb. 4, 2009 at Bistro 33 in Davis, California

2009-02-17T20:26:00.000-08:00

Kim Addonizio reads "The Matter" [3:39]

Kim Addonizio reads "Muse" [1:04]

Kim Addonizio plays "In New Jerusalem" [2:15]

Kim Addonizio plays a Deford Bailey Medley [2:25]

KATHRYN COWLES—ELEANOR, ELEANOR, NOT YOUR REAL NAME

2009-02-05T09:23:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Cowles’s Eleanor, Eleanor, Not Your Real Name is a book in which a good deal of effort is made to carve out a space for a person who does not exist. Or does she? The main concept guiding the book is whether the imagined Eleanor (who emerges little bit by little bit over the course of the book as an imagined character rather than a real person whom the author is addressing) is not the same as the author herself. The question that lingers is whether Eleanor is the author’s alter-ego or not. The details of Eleanor’s life are so closely observed and confidently enumerated that one assumes an intimacy between the author and Eleanor that hints at the lack of distance between the two.

About Eleanor

1) was small and is still for all I know
2) the wart under her lip looked like a beauty mark
3) was a beauty ad still is for all I know
4) a beauty with a limp
5) was always dusted with dirt; during a stint at a bakery it was flour
6) could climb trees well; her smallness was an asset
7) one leg nearly always broken
8) broken or with a limp
9) brown hair
10) at leant one of her bones came from a donor
11) legs unshaven, like trees in the wild
12) could ride her bicycle downhill when her leg was broken, but not back up
13) not a swimmer, but able to swim; superior floater
14) on Sundays we would float down on a mossweedy stream and when churchgoers walked by, we’d duck under the water and breathe through reeds
15) they could still see us, of course; that was not the point
16) was a knitter, scarves and hats
17) one summer we planted a purple petunia behind some bushes in memory of our favorite swingset, removed for safety; we watered the petunia at night in secret until someone found it and pulled it up as a weed
18) green eyes, greeeennnn, with extra eeeeees and nnnnns, slivers-of-triangle iris her strongest muscle of all
19) needless to say
20) was allergic to cashews; craved cashews
21) was a painter and is still for all I know
22) purchased thrift-store paintings just to paint over the canvases
23) sometimes all white or all red or all green
24) was not really called Eleanor
25) that part’s mine

Preceding by several years the current Facebook craze of listing 25 random things about oneself, Eleanor is treated to an eerily bio-like exposé here. The knowledge of detail about Eleanor’s life spans quite a bit of time. The author has known Eleanor through many life instances, activities and preferences. Already from this poem that appears early in the book one is assuming that the author has practically lived inside of Eleanor’s pocket.

The tension between author and Eleanor is continued on the next page in a poem entitled “Eleanor is Generous” that begins “She gives me a Catholic upbringing. She gives me a father who couldn’t read and a grandmother with hard candies stuffed in her bosom. She gives me a toy truck.”

The equation between Eleanor and the author-speaker is established here. Eleanor is physically and psychically present. The lists of items about Eleanor lengthen, and one begins to see the I is an other held at arms length yet lovingly observed.

The following poem “Letter To Reuben #3” reveals the following information: “Some things I remember that you don’t.” This sets up the expectation that there is not an exact equivalence between speaker and Eleanor. One is teased back into the notion that Eleanor is a third party, perhaps a real person whom the speaker knows exceptionally well.

In following poems we learn that Eleanor is a “painter of portraits,” laying another scrim on the game of identity tag we are watching. Who is it? Are we watching a portrait being painted? A self-portrait? The instability of the self that is Eleanor is writ large.

The biographical details keep coming about Eleanor and Kathryn (which we can presumably map on to the author . . . or can we?). There is Paul and Andy, a former friend/lover to Kathryn/Eleanor. Brian is the husband of Kathryn. We learn the speaker is not herself . . . that she is “the same yourself.” As a reader, one feels trapped inside a soap opera that is trying to be a lot like the movie Syriana with its many different personas and personages interacting with each other. However, unlike the movie, the strands of self are never completely sorted. One must persevere as reader with the uneasy feeling that a conclusion will not be wrung out of the book as it weaves its labyrinth of persona and projection, split personality and hard identity.

This is either annoying as a reader or a great liberation. For some readers I suspect that the inability to pin down who is who will frustrate the way it frustrated my wife when she watched Syriana. After 45 minutes she decided that the task of washing the dishes was more urgent and certainly more comprehensible.

For me, the thing that made the book most compelling during this game of pin-the-tail-on-the-author is how Cowles racks up personal detail to portray the sense of a life lived. The experiential is magnified and submitted to the thrills of the kaleidoscope. One is not sure how the pattern will change with each poem in the sequence.

However, as its strength, the details (in many poems just flat out listed) make for an interesting display, a racking up of mileage points in the body of another. However, as singular units the poems are not particularly exciting to read on the level of language used. Many read as laundry lists of self or to-do lists for the newly inhabited persona.

At times I found it discouraging how poems would end with another detail instead of trying to bring the speaker to a more reflective place about the nature and condition of being within the hall of mirrors that is the self. Of course, it is quite fashionable to resist making the big statement, the philosophical entreaty which might provide some distance on the self that has been created. Cowles’s depiction of self seems to say: just give me the stuff of self, the mounds of experience, and I’ll sort it out later when I have time.

Over the course of the book, though entertained as I was, I began to long for a more canny speaker that was self-aware of the predicament and willing to risk commentary on it, to attempt a psychological review. Perhaps to do so would have meant the game was up, that a centered self had been identified and pinned down. Eleanor and her many manifestations, however, do not wish to be pinned down. The game is to be played until the final buzzer.

The poems work within the concept of the book, but standing alone, they do not make much of an impact. [In fact, only two of the poems appeared in literary journals . . . this could be a result of Cowles’s not sending them out]. I can’t remember one particular piece in my readings that struck me as the poem that a reader could step back and say “That was the quintessential poem in the book in the way it summed up all the rest.” Each poem is an integral part of the overall effect. This is why the book hangs together so well. Each poem seems crafted to further the central idea of a slippery persona that may or may not be the author herself

As I think about the flatness of language and the accumulation of detail in the poems, I wonder if this strategy (if it is a strategy) has the effect of not making any of the poems “identifiable” in the same way that neither Eleanor/Kathryn in the poems is clearly distinguishable from each other.

Cowles very successfully chooses different modes by which to approach the concept of the slippery Eleanor. At the end of section 1 Cowles employs and interview with Eleanor in which the interviewer lobs a question at Eleanor that she is supposed to answer with full candor. The Eleanor character is not up to the task. She purposefully evades the sincere answer, then at the end arrives at the mock conclusion that “you can learn a lot about a person by asking.” Of course, the aim of the poem is to illustrate that she is not sincere about this claim either.

As events unfurl during the course of the book, Cowles takes great effort to level all events to the same level of impact. None has any greater impact than any other. In “Poem with Real Historic Event at its End” she says “Here is my historic event: One of my hairs got stuck to your shoe.” Later she confesses that this historic event wasn’t so historic. Finally, the poem ends on the note of the death of a famous person. The speaker realizes, “I never had to hang around my house with him dead before.” One can almost hear Mike Myers in the background saying “No big whoop.”

So, Cowles has killed off the singular psychology and the historical event . . . or at least brought them out onto the field of play.

The very next poem after “Poem with Real Historic Event at its End” finds the poem “Requiem in Five Parts” which is dedicated to Paul Cowles. Is this a family member? one wonders. The poem is delivered in first person and there is no winking at another voice in this poem. It is told with an affection for the dead man. The speaker effects some lovely details about this man before his funeral, but the final parting comment on the poem is about how the speaker’s will to see him flags because she assumes he had died heavy. While the word heavy here is loaded down by several valences, it is hard not to read this at face value as another attempt to reduce the life down to biographical detail found on a driver’s license: height, weight, eye color. The other meaning of heavy suggests that his life was one full of pain and burdens carried. The superficiality that pivots with heartfelt empathy on this use of “heavy” draws one back to the notion that there is duplicity in a single word.

The multiplier effect continues in Section 3 of the book. The title of the poem “Telling Eleanor from Eleanor” suggests that finally the author will reveal the real historical truth about the identities of Eleanor. The subtitle even states this explicitly.

in which the author describes how, though she has not seen them in the same room together, she knows they are not the same person.

The author, of course, like a good trickster, does not describe this at all. She makes comparisons between two Eleanors which enhance the confusion. Again she turns to equivocation; this time with the word “them.” One is left to wonder who the them is referring to. The two Eleanors? the father of Eleanor? Cowles is letting the conundrum hang out there, reveling in the lack of definition.

A sample page from a dictionary then intrudes on the next page of the book masquerading as “poem” with the definitions of the words Elamite, elán, elapsed time, elastic, elasticized, elect, electric. Through this juxtaposition Cowles raises the prospect of words having as multiple and slippery definitions as people. Eleanor, Eleanor is definitely rich with different media representations. Despite its adherence to largely experience in the content of the poems, the forms and strategies she employs inform the reader that she is savvy about how the structure of texts impacts experience, how one’s life becomes mediatized by the page.

The leveling of events in the book roots itself in a touch of graphomania. The speaker/author is aware of this in “No Name #3”

A handful of decimated raspberries
and I am writing it down again all of it
I can and you are peeling
oranges in the kitchen

And on the eighth day god said: Everything shall be reported. Cowles is aware of this tendency, and she seems to champion it from the perspective of a generation that understands every bit of information is weighed the same as every other bit of information. In the digital age everything has the same value as information as any other information.

Is this a tip of the hat to Kenny Goldsmith?

What seems psychologically false about this is that with experience one tends to value certain experiences over others. One selects on the basis of their curiosity, their emotional impact. Then one goes to sleep at night and the counters are reset. Still, certain experiences leak through to the next day, to the next week, the next year. Enough of them leak through and you have the semblance of a “self.” Perhaps this explains why the self has become so diffuse, so dissipated in Eleanor, Eleanor. In the absence of giving priority to events, in selecting out for some value, the self withers on the vine.

Without insight can the health of the self ever be improved? Consider:

Poem containing a line from a song

Let’s say I broke up my heart again. Let’s
say it’s my own idiot fault. Let’s say that
although it was my heart, when it broke, I
felt it in my stomach, like when I see a
snake, and that it lasted for half an hour, and
that I saw it coming.

Let’s say I got stitches in my side again for
the first time in months when I was running
the next day, like leftover slivers stuck on
m insides, let’s say, it’s the aftershake that
wrecks the weakened sidewalk hours later.
Not the earthquake.

I saw the Northern Lights for the first time
from an airplane flying over an ocean, green
and cold and cold and moving arbitrarily.
Brian was asleep.

Aurora Borealis, the icy sky at night

That’s right.
That’s it exactly.

The last line seems to agree with Neil Young and not with any of Young’s pithy insights in his song but with just a bit of his description. This is what a poem delivers, description? Clearly Cowles is expressing a fatigue with insight. In this world a thing is exactly what it seems. A cigar is just a cigar, of course, except when it isn’t, like with Eleanor. Is Cowles deliberately hinting at this tension with this strategy?

Section 4 of the book becomes much more lyrical. An unaffected I begins to appear in full form. There is even a heartfelt poem to Uncle Paul entitled “Wake” which provides a little more back story to the man who was grieved previously in “Requiem in Five Parts.” The tone is much more nostalgic here. The speaker seems much more codified. The scenes remain intact without intrusions from the contemplation of Eleanor. But right after that piece Eleanor does intrude again in “El El El Eleanor”:

2

Eleanor is a stutter I keep spitting her
Ella el Elenea N nn nor either or
everything I say

The alter-ego as stutter. Persona is speech impediment. Given the penchant for flippancy from Cowles, we can hardly believe this is a serious declaration. And so we move on.

Section 5 of the book is the conclusion to the drama of whether Eleanor is who the author says she is or whether the author can continue the ruse that she is wholly other than distinctly real. Will ephemeral Eleanor materialize in the back of a pickup headed towards the Mexican border wearing another woman’s boots and clothes? Confused yet? Stay tuned. You are beginning to enter entirely into this book’s aesthetic.

The soap opera aspect of the book continues. Brian, whom the speaker was married to earlier in the book gives way to Geoff, who is clearly the new love interest in the speaker’s life. Meanwhile, Eleanor is sighted with a body. She is beginning to materialize again as she had in the 1st section, not just a phantom lingering in the margins. The speaker is writing postcards to her as Eleanor ambles off in a distant land (is that New York City?). We are told that the speaker and Eleanor are two ships that passing the night at the very end of the book:

today some signs you left
on my porch chair
a hair a page from the Bible
the core of an apple
and you threw dandelions into my yard
next time stay longer at least just until I come back please don’t go.

So it is unresolved, this specter of Eleanor.

The first time I read the book I was confident in my reading that Cowles had signaled a congruence between herself as author and Eleanor, but on 2nd reading I’m not sure that Cowles, in her insistence in distancing herself from Eleanor at the end, isn’t positing her as a real entity whose imagined form holds sway in the material world. The immaterial, like language, is made manifest as concrete entity. It constructs reality, even a persona or two . . . maybe one for a friend if you’re feeling generous. This is the constructivist view of language as opposed to the evidentiary view of language that has language specifically relating to the tangible world. While arguably both views are important and mutually reinforcing, it has been suggested that the constructivist notion of language should enjoy primacy as the main part of the poet’s concern. Some suggest that perhaps the constructivist approach should be the exclusive domain of the poet. Poesis should prevail over mimesis. To dwell in such an outlook for too long, it seems, is to risk the physical health of the poet. A solely linguistic construction simply doesn’t have enough fiber, and then later on in the day, you’ll see that avoiding the dictates of the tangible is what causes so many poets to fare poorly in a fistfight.

More pointedly, in the case of Eleanor, Eleanor the elaborate construction of Eleanor that Cowles has endeavored to create is alluring in how it attempts to carve out a place for the imaginary alongside the ordinary pots and pans and potted plants. My questions is whether it does so at the expense of how selves apparently function in most functional adults. Are there not many stable points in the construction of the self that allow for one to get through the day? I think I’d get pretty confused at the grocery store if I thought Eleanor was going to tag along and interrupt my thoughts, to appear and disappear, as it were. In the end I wonder if this notion of alter-ego/constructed persona in continual flux has veracity.

I’d venture that Cowles is not trying to leave the reader with some big gestalt at the end about what the experience of the whole book was about. This would probably strike her as beside the point, perhaps even absurd.

Cowles, who might be watching (or is it just my construction of Cowles who is watching?) steps back and says, “Dude. You missed the whole point. Just relax and enjoy the book. Let your thoughts flow into it, into the moment. You don’t have to fake an intellectual orgasm for me.”

But if no intellectual orgasm, what then is the use of all this foreplay?

THE POP YEARS IS OVER; HERE COMES CHINA. Joshua Clover reading at Bistro 33—1/21/09

2009-01-27T08:47:00.000-08:00

"The pop years is over; here comes China" was my favorite line of the night when Joshua Clover read at the terrific series of readings that Andy Jones is putting together at the Bistro 33 in Davis, California. through primarily using Facebook, Andy has managed to get out the word to the town, its students and others in the surrounding area to meet for a 9:00PM poetry reading that, on Jan. 21 at least, lasted well after 11:00 after all the open mic readers were done. Roughly 140 people were in attendance. Yes, I will write it again in case you think that it is a typo. 140 people were in attendance to watch Joshua Clover read.

Joshua Clover reads "Stop It with your Strategies" [1:41]

Joshua Clover narrates a story about a library [8:56]

Joshua Clover reads "Return to Work at the Wonder Factory". This is a monumental piece with Clover describing his 4-year involvement with thinking about the poem and the financial crisis in the intro. [13:44]

Brad Henderson reads "Western Movies" as part of his neo-cowboyism series. [1:13]

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER ON THE POOR AND THE RICH

2009-01-08T14:12:00.000-08:00

Almost thirty years ago my best buddy Pete stopped by to say hello after work one day. Pete, one of the greatest minds I’ve ever known, was a hod carrier at the time and was probably covered in mortar. I was an art student writing Rimbaud-inspired poetry and short stories under the influence of Brautigan, Vonnegut and—not paradoxically—Kawabata. Through my Zen teacher I’d discovered Japanese writers, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm of the Hand Stories opened my eyes to a wider range of possibilities.

At that time, I wrote at a huge particle board drafting table, hand-built by my other brilliant best buddy, Jenny, who lived two doors down in another of the former motel rooms serving as off-campus housing. Laid out on the drafting table’s angled surface were drawings, photographs, scraps of ideas, and lists of topics about which to write satirical palm of the hand stories.

Topics ranged from the Reagans’ sexual fantasies to an excommunicated Mormon missionary (me) who becomes a television evangelist to pay his tuition (I didn’t go there personally). The list went on and on …

Pete giggled as he scanned it. “The only people you don’t make fun of, Pittard, are the poor.” He’d spotted my sacred cow. My parents were born during the Great Depression that Americans are just now rediscovering. My father’s stories about his father’s struggles to keep their North Dakota farm solvent, and their life after the farm failed, made a deep impression on my impressionable self.

These memories resurfaced when I came into contact with Hans Magnus Enzensberger via a Lannan podcast (http://podcast.lannan.org/). After listening to this bright and engaging man, I quickly purchased a copy of Kiosk (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1999). No subject or sector of society is off-limits to his mind or pen. Not even my sacred cow—the poor.

THE TIN PLATE (translated by the author)

About poverty all has been said:
that’s it’s tenacious, sticky, persistent
and of no interest to anybody
save the poor. It is boring.
It has too much to worry about
to complain about boredom.
Like dirt, it is to be found
way down. It’s contagious,
smelly, a nuisance.

Its omnipresence is striking.
It seems to partake of eternity.
Attributes which are divine.
Helpers and saints seek it.
Monks and nuns are betrothed to it.
With the rest of us,
all our lives on the run;
poverty catches up
at the next street corner,

unmoving, unmoved, majestic,
tin-plate in hand.

Of course, Mr. Enzensberger just as readily writes about the rich.

THE RICH (translated by Michael Hamburger)

Wherever do they keep on coming from,
these luxurious hordes! After every collapse
they’ve crept out of the ruins,
unmoved; through every eye of a needle
they’ve slipped,
rich in number, good heels and blessings.

Those wretches. Nobody likes them.
Their burden bows them down.
They offend us,
are to blame for everything,
can’t help it,
must be got rid of.

We’ve tried everything.
We’ve preached to them,
we’ve implored them,
and only when there was no other way
blackmailed, expropriated, plundered them.
We have left them to bleed
and put them against the wall.

But no sooner did we lower the rifle
and seated ourselves in their armchairs
than we knew, incredulous
at first, but then with a sigh of relief;
we too were irrepressible.
Yes, yes, one gets used to anything.
Till it happens again.

I admire the way Mr. Enzensberger positions the speaker in his poems: the way the point-of-view shifts. Sacramento poet James DenBoer talks about point-of-view as the “I” versus the “eye” in the poem. The poems in Kiosk help me better understand what Jim is talking about. Here’s an example from Mr. Enzensberger’s “On the Algebra of Feelings.” He writes, “I often have the feeling (intense / obscure, indefinable, etc) / that the I is not a fact / but a feeling / I can’t get rid of.”

In the Preface, Lawrence Joseph writes: “Often a poem will switch, or seem to switch, speakers; we’re in aesthetic realms similar to Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, John Ashbury.” He goes on to write, “Voice, for Enzensberger, is alive, emotional; when you read an Enzensberger poem you’re inside a patchwork, a mix, diversities of thought, held in suspense.”

Kiosk also includes a worthwhile essay on translation, “Translator’s Disappearing Act,” by Michael Hamburger. Mr. Hamburger translated the majority of the poems in this collection. Only a handful are translated by Mr. Enzensberger himself, as opposed to his Selected Poems. Mr. Hamburger writes about his enthusiasm, after an association of nearly forty years with Mr. Enzensberger, to translate the new poems in Kiosk. “Partly this must have been because, so strikingly, Kiosk had been composed as a single, coherent work, its four sections linked by the four parts of one on-going poem—and by a pervasive dialectic I cannot begin to trace. This made it more than another collection of short poems—a summa of all of Enzensberger’s diverse and wide-ranging concerns.”

I’ll close this posting with one of my favorite poems in Kiosk. Perhaps it’s a favorite today because I mentioned my Zen teacher, Koyama Shojiro Sensei, at the beginning of this piece. Whatever the reason, it’s a fine poem.

SIT-DOWN STRIKE

The Buddha takes to his legs.
The herald jogs along behind.
The fixed stars undulate.
Progress fidgets in the lay-by.
The snail loses its way, running.
The rocket limps.
Eternity limbers up for a final spurt.

I do not budge.

THE OTHER VOICE, RATTLESNAKE PRESS & THE HUMBLE CHAPBOOK

2008-12-17T11:05:00.000-08:00

“In a world ruled by the logic of the marketplace, or in Communist countries by state planning, poetry is an activity that brings no return whatsoever. Its products are scarcely salable and very nearly useless (except as propaganda in dictatorships and totalitarian ideocracies). To the modern mind, even though it will not admit this to itself, poetry is energy, time, and talent turned into superfluous objects. Yet against all odds, poetry circulates and is read. Rejecting the marketplace, costing almost nothing at all, it goes from mouth to mouth, like air and water.”

These words, from Octazio Paz’s essay, “The Other Voice” (collected in The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry, First Harvest, 1990), ring truer every time I read them. I quote them frequently. Each time I ask myself if it’s appropriate to quote them yet again. The answer is always: now more than ever.

This time, “The Other Voice” came to mind in Richard and Rachel Hansen’s midtown bookstore, The Book Collector. I’d dropped by during yesterday’s rainy mid-afternoon to buy a copy of Danyen Powell’s new chapbook, Blue Sky Flies Out, recently released from Rattlesnake Press. I asked Mr. Hansen how the release reading went last week and he beamed with enthusiasm. An enthusiasm widely shared since Kathy Kieth launched this chapbook series with the release of Danyen’s Anvil in 2004. Blue Sky Flies Out is number 45 in Rattlesnake Press’s Rattlechap series.

Danyen (Dan when we’re quaffing a pint) facilitates the Sacramento Poetry Center’s Tuesday night writers group. He’s been at it for over a decade, and writing poetry since he was a very young man. I’ve enjoyed seeing some of his poems in the early stages of their development, so the opportunity to read a new collection of his poems in final form is a real delight. Which brings me back to Mr. Paz’s essay.

“Its value and usefulness cannot be measured; a man rich in poetry may be a beggar. Nor can poems be hoarded: they must be voiced. A great mystery: the poem contains poetry only if it doesn’t keep it; the poetry must be given, shared, poured out like the wine from a bottle and water from a pitcher. All the arts, painting and sculpture in particular, being forms, are things; they can be kept, sold, and used as objects of financial speculation. Poetry, too, is a thing, but a thing that amounts to almost nothing: it is made of words, it is a puff of air that takes up no room in a space.”

While the poem itself may not take up room in a space, Mr. Hansen said it was a full-house the night of Danyen’s reading. Which is not uncommon. Sacramento poets turn out in enthusiastic numbers for Rattlechap releases. As do the foothills poets Ms. Kieth publishes. This was the case last month when my go-to writing partner, Moira Magneson, and Wendy Patrice Williams read from their newest collections. It is a personal pleasure to see my own Rattlechap displayed beside theirs at the Book Collector; beside those written by other friends and colleagues, including my teachers.

These Rattlechaps, and their associated release readings, are local treasures. Treasures that are aptly described by a quote Ms. Keith posted on her website, from the essay "In Praise of the Humble Chapbook," by Vive Griffith (Poet's Market, 2004): “They can be held easily in the hand, tucked graciously into a bag, slipped safely into a pocket. They can be read in one sitting. They are inexpensive to produce and purchase, and thus provide a perfect means for getting more new poetry into the world.”

In many ways, Rattlechaps are an example of the environmental community’s admonition to “think globally, act locally.” Grassroots, or bottom-up, labors like these are how we sustain what we value. I’ll leave the last word to Mr. Paz, whose essay is more relevant to our immediate times than he may have imagined.

“I argued, before, that if a new form of political thought were to emerge, the influence of poetry would be indirect: reminding us of certain buried realities, restoring them to life, presenting them. And confronted with the question of the survival of the human species on a poisoned and devastated planet, poetry can respond in no other way. Its influence must be indirect: intimating, suggesting, inspiring. Not logically demonstrating, but showing.”

INTO THE MOUTHS OF VOLCANOES

2008-09-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander over at The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on "Into the Mouths of Volcanoes"

POLITICAL POETRY: AN EPISTOLARY CONVERSATION

2008-09-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander over at The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on "Political Poetry: An Epistolary Conversation"

THE LIVES OF OTHERS

2008-09-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander over at The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on "The Lives of Others"

ANNIVERSARY OF PABLO NERUDA'S DEATH

2008-09-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander of at The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on the Anniversary of Pablo Neruda's Death [9-23-08]

THE BUTTERFLY'S BURDEN—MAHMOUD DARWISH tr. by Fady Joudah

2008-09-23T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Butterfly’s Burden
Mahmoud Darwish. Tr. Fady Joudah

Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry is as crucial a gift to his people and the Arab world as Wole Soyinka’s is to Nigeria or Derek Walcott’s is to the West Indies, yet he is not as well known in the US as his former contemporaries are. For these reasons, and more, this translation by Fady Joudah acts as a conduit inviting the reader of English to take a journey into the consciousness and history of the Arab and Palestinian people—but as with every major poet, it is a gift to also participate in the poem offered up as mirror to humanity, a reflection counter to the intransigent realities of myth, identity, exile, love, loss and language—realities all too often passively accepted. This mirror resists, for example, the West’s conjecture about Syria and reflects it as “…Damascus: / [where] speech returns to its origins.” Though this offering is Darwish’s, it has been made possible by Joudah, and so we must take up the offer, history demands it; but it is ultimately the reader’s journey, for “the land expands as much as your dream’s measure.” And the rewards, as one might expect from a major poet, are not merely those of an innovative aesthetic, or an evocative line, or even some sage bits of wisdom, but language as a force for shifting paradigms.

Yes, one is welcome to take pleasure from the raw canvas: “…she lifts her dress off her calf cloud by cloud;” or, from the poem “Like a mysterious Incident” delight in the surprise of language: “When poetry is obstinate I sketch / a few traps on the rocks to hunt the grouse”—or even become startled by the self-deprecating tone from A State of Siege:

This rhyme was not
necessary, not for melody
or for the economy of pain
it is additional
like flies at the dining table

But surely the poet is there to light the way to something beyond the force of his craft; his lexicon is large, it contains with it, for example, the brilliance of “anemones,” “lapis,” “Jahili poetry,” the subtle execution of tropes: conceit, absence, persona and metonymy, as well as offering a dialectic about myth, war, identity, language and love. How to get one’s head around the scope of Darwish’s work is its own Odyssey, but Joudah has been diligent enough for the reader to get more than just an approximation, but the ability to discern from his artistic rendering, the natural progression and relation it poses to other works of Darwish’s oeuvre.

The author’s rich metaphors, use of enjambment and the fluidity of his style, one imagines, would make it difficult to translate from the Arabic. Yet, it is testament to Darwish and his translator that the “twinning” of metaphor and cadence, of “prose and poetry” of “experience and exile” are consistently and accurately presented throughout the three volumes of this book, so that the reader can trace the newly rendered English lexicon backwards and forwards along its cyclical path. The reader also has the benefit of gauging and comparing the physical structure of the translations in their original Arabic side by side with the English translation. Throughout these three volumes, in particular, Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done, the themes are presented from slightly different positions in a more discursive line, and as an aggregation of specific treatments where the reader is asked to intuit the whole. Though discrepancies in diction and rhythm might arise, this is the nature of translation; and yet, Joudah must be commended because, with the aid of his poet’s ear, he has not yielded to caprice, but rather been sincere in his effort to understanding Darwish’s lexicon complete.

Regretfully, this reviewer must stop short before adequately delving into any of Darwish’s poems, but the journey remains: to Syria, or Andalus, Egypt or Tunisia, in discussion with the poet, the soldier or the lover, from “your “I” to your else / and your vision to your steps”—a place for the necessary imagination. Wherever these poems begin or end, they are also a celebration of “longing,” the first longing of Sumer—“that inexplicable longing / that makes a thing into a specter, and / makes a specter into a thing.” And we are thankful for it and for Darwish’s continual orbiting.

Reviewed by Zaid Shlah

Note: The Sacramento Poetry Center will be hosting a public memorial reading for the late poet Mahmoud Darwish at 6:00 PM on Sun. Oct. 5. Anyone is welcome to read works by Darwish or material related to his life as a writer. This reading is part of an international effort to organize readings in tribute to the life and work of Darwish. This international effort has been spearheaded by Ulrich Schreiber of the The Berlin Literature Festival.

SINGER-SONGWRITERS AND POETRY

2008-09-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander over at The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on Singer-Songwriters and Poetry [9-20-08]

SLOVENE INVASION

2008-09-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander over at The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on the Slovene Invasion [9-14-08]

THE POETRY-TRANSFIGURED ESSAY

2008-09-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander over at The Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on The Poetry-Transfigured Essay [9-11-08]

WELSH POETRY, PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY & ECOPOETICS

2008-09-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

Forrest Gander over at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog on Welsh Poetry, Psychogeography & Ecopoetics [9-08-08]

MARY JO BANG—ELEGY

2008-09-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

My first question about Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy is whether it represents grief as obsession or obsessive grief. The persistent attention that Bang pays to her subject—the death of a child, a son— is impressive, but after a while I started to wonder if it wasn’t a little macabre. All that energy that was expended by Bang to recreate the son image by image, memory by memory was undoubtedly a tender and thoughtful effort on her part, but it also felt a little bit like entering Borges’s “The Circular Ruins” with the dreamed image slowly being dreamed until it came alive. Very otherworldly.

I can imagine some readers being put off by the obliqueness of the speaker in Bang’s Elegy. After all, we are very rarely put in touch with a straightforward depiction of what happens. The reader pieces together most of the details of the situation from the glancing blows the speaker deals to its subject in poem after poem.

With this technique of erosion, Bang seems to be commenting on the slow dissipation of grief over time, how if one befriends it and doesn’t fight it, then it becomes a companion to while away the empty hours. This is an interesting notion; however, I can’t say that my brief episodes with grief have worked that way. The loss presses itself very urgently in the moments directly afterwards. Then there seems to be a point of activation where the grief evaporates very quickly (often life’s other pressing matters begin to wear on the lingering grief).

Then again, I might just not be doing grief right. One of my brothers accused me of not grieving enough when my mother died.

I thought mom would probably understand my “callous” behavior.

So, for me, this lingering in grief and biting off a bit more to chew on poem after poem seemed a death by a thousand cuts. It didn’t map on to my experience. But of course, it doesn’t delegitimize Bang’s experience or even her depiction of said experience. To me this experience of another’s grief is the most fascinating part of the book. I find myself gawking at Bang’s odd emotional striptease, discarding layer after layer of memory and image.

The fairly opaque language (Bang’s poems are rarely straightforward depictions of experienced scenes) can be viewed in one of two ways. One perspective might be that Bang doesn’t allow her speaker to co-exist in the same space as its subject, the lost child. It is not experience rendered with any interest in heartfelt anecdote. It finds its subject in more of the details and the detritus. Bang’s speaker is not regaling the good times and the bad times. One might wonder how one is able to hold such stories at a distance, why one, a mother, would be reluctant to depict the relationship with the son in such way. It is suggestive of fracture, strain, disconnection.

However, another perspective onElegy might be that it is actually one of Bang’s most open and accessible texts. In earlier work she seems very wedded to verbal and language play as seen in 2000 from Jacket 12 . . . and probably a holdover from her days as editor of Boston Review. There is still a good bit of sleight of hand in Elegy and at least one reader has confided in me that the verbal play is irritating. But in Elegy the turns always lead to a further definition of the subject of the book. In previous work those turns would always take one to the far ends of the universe. The wilder turn always seemed better.

I found there to be some beautiful moments, despite the rather rambunctious Heather McHugh-inspired machinations of her language. In fact, my favorite piece in the book was one that McHugh chose for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2007:

The Opening

1.
Open the door and look in.
Everything is in place.
The flickering heart
The owlet eyes are locked on.
A serpentine hair hangs over an ear.
A hand comes up to touch it.
A rhythmic hum runs ahead of the wave.
Someone turns her head
And hopes, no, lopes across the lawn.

2.
Open the door and look in.
The black magic cat is clawing the sofa.
The midnight lamp is loosing some light.
Someone is getting undressed.
Her pajamas are pressed
And she’s getting into a bed of flowers.
Ophelia is lying in the bog in the park,
A moment’s orphan in the afterdark.
Sing me a song, Pet, I beg of you.

3.
Open the door and look in.
The Vivian Girls are reading the books
Their countenances were cut from.
It’s like a mirror. The parent and the penguin
Child. Two men with two suitcases.
The hand mirror making its lake
Last as long as it can.
The self looking the depth
Of Wallace Stevens’ wife on the dime.

4.
Open the door and look in.
A murder, some mayhem, the night
News. A cloak on a hook in a closet.
There’s no rug on the floor and the wood
Feels warm. There may have been an arson.
Mistakenly Released Suspect Still Missing
In Dogville or Dogtown or the Down-and-out
Sorry state of things now. Listen,
Brenda Lee is singing, I’m sorry.

5.
Open the door and look in. Look
Down the page to the footnote. To the fine print.
To the FedEx box on the bedside and
The floral print jammies that are jarring
Against the previous-era paper on the wall.
Some ice-cream topper Jimmies
To top off the night. Red Yellow Blue White.
The deer-leg lamp, says Jessica, really does work
And with that, she twirls the shade like a top.

6.
Open the door and look in.
A pin under the bed.
A dust layer on the desk top.
The minutia and the microbe, the fear of failing
To ward off the inevitable, It will be done.
Whatever the It is. The static of darkness,
The dissolve of the moment.
The mouse crawls out of its house,
Remembers where it last ate a grub.

7.
Open the door, Mother, and look in.
The babies in their boxes are sleeping like beetles
In ladybug red, each with a Santa hat.
They’re all at the border of risk,
All about to vanish into the past
Of the unvarnished after.
A longer word for gone. Girl.
Boy. Girl. Boy. Girl. Boy.
If we turn out the lights, they will keep.

8.
Open the door and look in.
In her pajamas, she looks thin.
Pale skin, short nails, hail on the rooftop
And window glass. January is ant dark
Every morning and early in the late afternoon.
With a gloom aspect like a seascape
That was smoke damaged above a fire grate.
The wrapped-mummy mood mutes
The emo that spins like a Catherine Wheel.

9.
Open the door and look back.
Over your shoulder. A peach-cheek
Love bird on a cage roost
Is swinging back and forth.
He’s nature, but he also seems nervous.
The traffic din music comes floating in.
He’s nature, but he also seems nervous.
Sing us a song, Pet, and he does. He sings of arson
In Alexandria, of Helen of Tragic of Troy.

Despite urging the reader to play at Peeping Tom, to check in on the room where the one who is lost had stayed and has now been replaced by a woman in floral print jammies, this somewhat transgressive act of voyeurism feels permissible. Bang allows her speaker to comment on Bang’s own(?) condition as the woman in the floral print jammies, the mother whose meditations on the vicissitudes of human personality have her (also) peering in on the child shortly after it is born where it is poised at the border of risk (in so many more ways than one).

The risk that is alluded to throughout the book is the aggressively aberrant behavior (with respect to drug addiction and anti-social behavior) of the son (presumably that of 37-year-old-at-the-time-of-passing Michael Donner Van Hook — to whom the book is dedicated) that is hinted at by Bang.

One is never transported into a full-on account of the details of the son’s demise, and it is curious to me to see how Bang chooses the details around the life, the detritus of a life to stand in for that drama. You can tell she doesn’t write for television. If the same subject matter were touched on by television scriptwriters, we’d have action, action, action, followed by drama, drama, drama. I suppose this is what happens when you put twenty-somethings in charge of the depiction of tragedy.

Thankfully, Bang is much more seasoned and given to repose— a luxury these days, I guess.

Her discipline to the subject of her grief is the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. With the months as our tour guides, Bang takes the reader on a journey through her grief, quietly dipping into the past days and memories of the son, taking up just enough detail to sustain her for the next ritual act of writing about her grief. I kept asking myself whether this masochism was necessary. Finally, I concluded that for Bang it was. For me, probably not.

However, Bang also labors to make these poetic reflections [part oddly-turned phrase, part peculiarly-enjambed line, part alliteration-and-rhyme casserole) a work of art. This is a difficult task. One can appear to be exploitative. Yet as sensitively-attuned as I am to the gimmick or the crutch that one’s artistic efforts can be pinned to, I didn’t find those notions creeping into my head. Bang’s pain and care of attention were palpable, not an affectation in service of “art.” [Of course, I’m easily fooled by Hollywood films into thinking that what I’m seeing is genuine.] Yet, the sheer scope of the project seems to favor an interpretation of Bang’s efforts as lovingly rendered, not exploitative. The book’s theme at that point appears to be dedication, devotion . . . without doting, a difficult line to straddle, especially for a mother.

Another reader I talked to about this book observed that Bang seems to cycle through four of the five stages of grief as outlined by Elisabeth Kübler –Ross in On Death and Dying. 1. Denial 2. Anger 3. Bargaining 4. Depression 5. Acceptance. This reader commented that she saw Bang as cycling through the first four stages without ever quite arriving at acceptance. This failure to reach acceptance left the speaker’s grief unfinished, something that this reader saw as the possible future consequence for Bang. This story of the son would continue to haunt, continue to linger without any real acceptance, without any closure. Perhaps Bang hints at this openness to her grief in her language. Her poems resist closure and the delivery of platitude.

In “A Sonata for Four Hands” that initiates us into this grief space, Bang longs for the face in the photograph, then at the end juxtaposes it against the ornamentation on the morgue door. The two are synonymous. That kind of quirky association permeates Elegy and Bang’s work in general. In a sense it is, I hope, one of the things we come to poetry for, for the singular associations that a poet can bring to bear, the equivalences between the plethora of objects in a world of things. Is that beauty too? It just might be, Dorothy. It just might be. Or at least one of its distant cousins.

For those readers who might wish to have a poem’s subject more clearly delineated, Bang will seem a tad bit jittery (to crib from Tony Hoagland), and as a result, I suspect, such a reader will find such “jittery grief” off-putting. Or is it enlivening? Is Bang’s mind alive in her grief? Should we expect a more moribund treatment of the subject, a mind that stays within the parameters of just the subject, without diversion? What kind of grief would that be? What kind of voyeurs would we be to look in on that?

In “Where Once” the dead son is invoked but is immediately placed back in the world. Very often Bang employs this technique to animate the dead. It is the dead “as if”. Such a move on her part signals to me a great sense of personal regret for things turning out the way they have. Bang walks right up to the edge of accepting responsibility for fate, which, if she did, might signal a particularly unproductive space to dwell in. But I find this undercurrent of unnamed self-blame to be acutely present at certain times in the book. One almost wishes to console the speaker except for the speaker’s equally vehement resistance to being a sink for consolation.

That Bang can measure and balance these tensions consistently throughout the book is a testimony to her skill and experience as a poet. For many who have followed Bang’s wilder poems in the past, the tonal and technical shift in Elegy will be a curiosity. However, as one makes one’s way in the book, sees the subject matter at hand, one will understand this shift. In fact, it should deepen one’s respect for Bang as a practitioner. Her more obvious craftedness in this collection is done in deference to the emotional landscape of grief. Rightly, the extraneous and carefree diversion in much of the earlier work would seem out of place, like she is trivializing her pain too much, avoiding it for the sake of her own and her reader’s enjoyment.

In ”The Role of Elegy” Bang also raises the question of what social function grief serves. She seems to say that it is tragedy all dressed up, sorrow with a certain styling. But she goes further in commenting that once all of that veneer is stripped away, what remains is the compulsion to tell. In her this is a compulsion . . . one that will finally end up in the telling and retelling of the same story about a loved one until others around you know the story by heart? The “transient distraction of ink on cloth that one scrubs and scrubs” could be seen as her description of her poetic project in this book. Each poem is a caption on ridiculous events, and rehearsing these events reminds everyone what the purpose of elegy is. I Bang, an elegy’s role is simply to be.

There are plenty of other complications of tone and subject matter in Elegy if this more-stripped-down (in terms of the line) version of Bang displeases. As for me, I found it very interesting to see what happened when the generous line and imagination of Bang’s past work got toned down, became compressed by grief.

With still one more parent to go (not to mention two kids (heaven forbid, I should outlive them) Bang’s Elegy gives me hope I can get it right the next time and adopt a more circumspect tone.

Other poems from Elegy

HASS' TIME AND MATERIALS & BRENNAN'S BLANK OCEANS, NAMELESS SEAS

2008-08-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

Greetings from(?) this...

2008-08-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

Greetings from(?) this is me testing the new Jott. It's a short note which is all the free service allowed. Check it out at Jott.com. listen

Powered by Jott

BILL RASMOVICZ—THE WORLD IN PLACE OF ITSELF

2008-08-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

I have often mused aloud in this space why many American academics have taken a dislike to the surrealist aesthetic. There are many reasons why this has become the norm rather than the exception. Some include a disdain for the kind of surrealism that propels progressive rock bands to forge their names, the great disdain for a pop adaptation of an once-challenging aesthetic movement; another is that so much of the time surrealism’s distance from reality is off-putting. The way things are is quite interesting too. Boilerplate surrealism tends to overvalue the realm of the purely imaginary without paying homage to the fact that it is imagined.

Bill Rasmovicz’s The World In Place of Itself is an acknowledgment of that distance within surrealism, yet there is a very real intent to root the otherworldliness in direct experience. The images are grounded. In this way they represent more of the Eastern European branch of surrealism rather than the French and Spanish versions. The feel is similar to the great anthology of pre- and post-war Serbian poetry edited by Charles Simic The Horse Has Six Legs. There is even a Na Zdravje thrown in for added authentic flavor in the poem “Assimilation.”

This is not the surrealism of Dali and Tanguy painting their distortions of space. Nor is it the surrealism of Magritte-like logical absurdity. Rasmovicz’s poetry is where folk painting meets the development of a more complicated context, a world of things that is so unique it must be represented as directly experienced. It’s rendering of the world is the same as the odd juxtapositions of a man whose personal collection of objects contains a little bit of everything. An American attic surrealism. In Rasmovicz’s case, that little bit of everything is his collection of language and things in the world represented by that language.

But he has updated the old world Slavic style to include the furniture of a contemporary American life. No one would expect Popa to invoke “a desolate factory yard consecrated by bullet casings and chemical spill.” or “The evenings smell of tar, methane,” and “graffiti where no one can reach, someone scouring the dumpster with the instrumentation reserved for picking a lock.” The unexpected modern intrusions are usually of a gritty nature, one that can easily be contained within the largely old world feel. These modern intrusions are kept to a minimum, and more often than not Rasmovicz invokes more time-honored objects into his collection of featured language.

The effect is what happens when Transylvania and the suburbs of New Jersey merge. This can be quite a mess if these are forced. In general, this is another objection raised by academics to surrealism. In the worst hands it can be brutally forced. This is the greatest pleasure in reading Rasmovicz. Never does it feel forced. The imagery is propelled with a great ease. It seems to emanate from the slow burn of visual experience instead of the mind’s quick crucible of melded language. Despite the fantastic images, the poems feel lived in. The world is filtered through all of Rasmovicz’s sensory mechanisms. It is not quickly assembled to create an arcane object for others to gawk at.

In the title poem, Rasmovicz creates a scene where the presence of human longing seems miraculous, just the hope for a kind of desire appears as a marvel among the rather grim imagery. This is a world that seems on the verge of falling apart or becoming exposed to bacterial decay. One can almost feel the sepia tones creeping along the skin as you read.

The World In Place of Itself

The pressure coiled in my ears, I’d wake:
only trampled grass outside where the hoists and pulleys
were dragged away.

A steepletop prodded the sky to bursting,
though somehow the air was filled again with air.
The light at once arriving and having

always been, these were mornings after which the crows
had their long conversations with the dead
and silence could not be heard for its breaking.

At 8:00 a.m., a man floated by on the scent of his newspaper’s
promise and perils.
I could hardly believe the scaffolding of my bones

would hold, how my blood seized
and began again, seamless. Neighbors spoke shruggingly
and if there was talk of love

there was talk of war. Leaves taunted the wind
for more wind, and the sea, gnawed free of the moon,
flapped at the listless shore, resolute with going nowhere.

While through to each follicle,
the sensation: not desire, but a desire for desire,
and hardly even that.

So is Rasmovicz’s world one that can be inhabited only by depressives who wonder where hope and wonder went in the world? Certainly it is a world that seems to be punctuated by solitary investigations, but there is such beauty and care taken in crafting the images of this world that one senses a distinct joy in its presence despite some initially-perceived dreariness. It is a world carved out of some rich, dark hard wood. It is something that is hard to get through, but if one does, a thing of beauty arises at the end.

In ”Ars Metaphysica” a magical persists, a world that enjoys its own distinct alchemy of tire smoke and moon-eyes and soul-possessing wolves. But from the very first line we see that the landscape is one that exists in the head. It is imagined. This is another rhetorical move that separates Rasmovicz from boilerplate surrealism. The surrealist ethos is to posit a world that is beyond the naturally occurring one, or a world that happens in the interstices of the naturally occurring one. Rasmovicz, however, is not keen to this delusion. He, more realistically, posits his world as an imagined one. The author’s (and presumably the reader’s) consciousness serves as the filter between the naturally-occurring one and the imagined one. Rasmovicz is honest about his imagination’s machinations.

This would provide an insight to the title of the book. The world In place of itself suggests that while you were sleeping Rasmovicz decided to rearrange the furniture of the real world, free substituting one image with any other image that occurs. Of course, the nd result of this is that the furniture of one’s consciousness as it perceives that dar other world is also rearranged. In this way, Rasmovicz restores the classic mission of the surrealists (and he is more honest about this process) with his title.

It seems to me that the alteration of consciousness is an aesthetic aim of the surrealists that too often is neglected by them. The image play of many surrealists seems an affectation (another reason why many academics hate surrealists).

Rasmovicz’s world also exhibits a certain transparency. In ”On Becoming Light” the speaker’s hand transforms into light and then flies away like a bird. All of this suggests Rasmovicz’s world lost substantiality. Things seemed to pulse toward the brightness but now that seems hopeless. Even the shopworn notion of love is what is killing the speaker and the occupants of Rasmovicz’s world. The only form of redemption is the inexplicable magic of the place. To the extent one can rely on the magic of the natural world penetrating one’s body, then one can be all right in Rasmovicz’s world.

Rasmovicz’s experience and training as a pharmacist might provide some explanation as to why he has sought this dark world as refuge in his book. Often it is with the scripted understanding of the world via chemistry and biology that one seeks to take refuge in a more magical realm. I often found myself longing for more wonder as I made my way through my scientific training. The diagrams and equations made for a kind of unsettling certainty and confidence about the clockwork of the natural world. The majesty is often lost. Often it is poetry’s place to reseed the majesty, the unknown so that it can flourish again outside of human understanding.

One might also speculate amusingly that Rasmovicz’s knowledge of pharmacy has opened the doors of perception into his dark world. But oh how jaded I have become. Pharmaceuticals are not magic!

But with the remorse felt for the loss of the unknown, there is also a supplemental social concern, a desire for the unknown other.

Transpiring

Because of his limp I noticed him approaching,
a blister from too-tight shoes,
the bulk of his frame coerced into women’s attire.
His hair was sort of a landscape-of-Mars orange.

and his makeup, fermenting honeydew.
As a woman he wasn’t convincing. Not the gender
was the issue, but it looked painful,
and his struggle, mythic: man against himself,

his gaze fixed to where the sole of his shoe was loose
and stuttering now at the sidewalk.
Heat was rising from the pavement, the humidity
bearing down. He looked up, he gravity of my eyes

drawing his. I looked away—
how can the body feel so much
unlike itself as to believe it is someone else?
Who is it we should have been all along

and what part of our nature is in fact transmutable?
The cars were floating by like clouds.
The clouds, diminishing in the pink light of an August
almost gone. But given that we were all

what we may not have had in mind, who amongst us
hasn’t sought refuge outside themselves from
the heart’s inclement weather?
Should I say hello? The arc of his posture was a wave

about to break. And who was I to think he was
someone other than himself?
At that moment we passed each other, my voice
a stone in my throat, my throat collapsing into itself.

How do I acquire sympathy for the world,
an understanding of what it is to be you, when
the only way to know you is to be you?
I turned to look; he was small in the distance.

In the artifice of my body, I was small.
The pink light was gray. The sound of the cars, gray.
An almost criminal silence.
Then, sadness: I was afraid for us both.

Again the baseline motion for the piece is an all-pervasive sadness. Everything boils down to a longed-for perfect sympathy that can’t be achieved. There are seemingly a lot of very high expectations placed on this world, an after-effect of Rasmovicz ‘s inhabiting a scientific world where everything glimmers with the patina of being perfectly explained, perfectly functional. Falling short of the presumed optimal goal leaves fear and sadness to dominate.

What does this mean to have a filter of consciousness that provides a frothy world with more that is ephemeral than what is hard, substantial able to emit joy? Is this signaling a basic distrust of consciousness to provide for that which is ultimately satisfying? Is the filter of consciousness an object worn down by the visible world? Rasmovicz seems to distrust any notion that such a filter is capable of supplying anything other than its gothic charm. But perhaps this assumed weight is what allows the reader to take Rasmovicz’s world seriously as an objet d’art.

Despite the weight of what feels like a world borne out of hanging around in Europe’s great cathedrals, the craft and attentive care paid to the specific images wrought are more than ample reward for reading this book. If you love great imagery, then this book will surely not disappoint.

If, however, you are looking for a book that informs one about one’s contemporary historical moment in America, then one may need to look elsewhere unless one presumes that Rasmovicz is positing the US as a rather sad and ineffectual place, a place with its spiritual core barely intact.

The time and place are more reminiscent of Yugoslavia or the Czech Republic with the war’s aftermath lingering in the fabric of everything. Indeed, Rasmovicz invokes a war in lines from “Resumption”, such as “No one recognized the bars over their windows or the stains of war.” This could be read as a nod in the direction of the current predicament in Iraq, especially in the closing lines: “A man threw seed to his chickens like it was holy water, / while springing up from the dirt all around me / like tiny islands, the Roman empire.

Mostly, though, The World in Place of Itself is interested in looking at the emotional qualities of a world whose objects have been unmoored from their traditional contexts. The result is remorse for the lost world, it seems, as well as an acknowledgment for the dark beauty of the created world.

In ”The Accordion” (the version on this site is slightly misspelled and edited from the version that appears in the book) the afterlife has stolen away too, a relic. Everything that could possibly bring meaning has been bombed out. But by what? One has a tendency to ask. Perhaps it isn’t too far to read many of these poems as commentary on American spiritual malaise.

In “Manifest Destiny” Rasmovicz is speaking with more of a directness to an America than he is in nearly every other piece in the book.

<Manifest Destiny

Waking up, my eyes crumbled bricks,
my breathing labored from traipsing all night through

the catacombs of sleep. There were wars going on.
You could see it in the lay of their faces.

Dogs coursed through the streets with their own agenda.
Clothes flagged the alleyways. I too was trying to forget

who I was or wasn’t; my focus, the blister forming between
my toes from new sandals, where one might obtain

a cappuccino. Hansom boats lined the pier,
and tourists with new tans brandishing cameras, waiting

for the perfect subtropical sunset. Gardens were
strategically planted at the intersections, palms imported,

buildings painted adamant shades of pink and yellow.
There was at least the ambiance of someone trying.

Still, how could one help but wonder what the sea was
muttering behind the afternoon’s hazy sheen?

which receded, wave after truckling wave on the rocks,
and everyone so painfully absorbed in their own role:

the trees, bathers floating on their backs and cars
revving by; all of them, bawdy actors. Stand-ins merely

to make manifest the mind’s perambulations,
as even the merest absence is less than can be imagined.

What a besieged place. Is this America? The title seems to suggest so. The end result from so much longing, so much pushing outward, pushing west is absence. Even the absence is less, though, than the absence the mind can supply.

The mind’s perambulations are blessing the absence. They supply the absence. All knowing is lost. Is this the final frontier of despair? Perhaps in America as we begin to imagine our loss, we will also inhabit it in the naturally-occurring world.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved this book, but before you read it you should be prepared to get your inoculations against despair and loss. Don’t expect the mind to come and bail you out. In Rasmovicz’s world, the mind is what is stirring up all the trouble in the first place. The World in Place of Itself is world-weary and seeking respite in the darkness of an elsewhere, a yesteryear, an emotionally-barren plane of existence.

But if you keep coming back to The Horse Has Six Legs as I find myself doing in times of trouble, frustration with this world, and existential crisis, Bill Rasmovicz’s The World in Place of Itself is an indispensable volume.

NORA'S FAVORITE BRAD BUCHANAN POEM

2008-07-30T11:29:00.000-07:00

Nora is only three years old but she knows a good poem when she hears one. Especially one that was written for her—that was inspired by her very being. The poem was written by her father, Brad Buchanan, and is titled, “The Bubblegum Baby.”

The Bubblegum Baby

Her cheeks are so full
of themselves, they blow
up to such succulent shapes,
so pink and palpably delicate,
packed with a truculent
sweetness that bursts
when her breath tears its shell,
that we must choose
not to chew her too hard;
meanwhile she gives us
such jowls for our kisses
that it’s deliciously possible
to forget there are any
bones in her at all,
though she gums her own fist
and finds there are limits
to malleability, even in girls.

Brad says, Nora can recite parts of this poem—with prompting. If she gets excited, though, she cuts to the ending. She doesn’t know the difference between “succulent” and “truculent,” and pronounces each her own way, and she loves to say “malleable.” Based on this report, I’d say she’s a true connoisseur of poetry and language. She “gets it.”

Last week, Brad read “The Bubblegum Baby” and other poems at the Book Collector in Sacramento’s Midtown. The reading celebrated the release of Brad’s second book-length collection of poems, Swimming the Mirror. This collection is inspired by Nora, including the prenatal idea of Nora, and is published by Roan Press. Which was the other reason for celebration.

Swimming the Mirror is the first offering from Roan Press, a small literary press established by Brad and his wife, Kate Washington. Roan Press aims to fill a niche in Sacramento’s vibrant literary community by publishing book-length collections of poetry, as well as fiction, essays, and memoir (contact info: Roan Press, P.O. Box 160406, Sacramento, CA or by email to roanpress@gmail.com).

The entire event was a real delight. Not only does Brad write good poems, he reads them well, too. He was expressive, emotive, and engaging. There were several poems he didn’t read, though. Poems, he said, “that make me weep openly.” But he did read another of Nora’s favorites before the night was over. A poem, he said, “she gets.” Nora calls it “Eyelashes.” Short for “Her First News of Eyelashes.”

Her First News of Eyelashes

Eyelashes
are like brushes
on the outside
of your skin.

They comb the air
before it gets in
close enough
to form a tear.

So if you’re ever
very sad
because a good
friend isn’t there,
just blink your eyes
as fast as you can.

All the breezes
will pass by
without a single sigh,
so pure
that you won’t cry
unless you stare.

Several years ago, my niece invited me to be her third-grade class’s “guest poet.” It was a real challenge to find poems to read and talk about—with a roomful of exceptionally bright kids—that would lend themselves to a basic discussion of poetics, and engage both children and adults. I wish I had “Eyelashes” with me that day.

THE JOY OF LENDING BOOKS TO FRIENDS

2008-07-08T16:12:00.000-07:00

“I do not lend books to friends. I do not want to lose
my friends, nor my books. E. W.”

Being a book lover, I understood the hand-written sign photographer Edward Weston posted on the bookshelf over his roll-top desk. I was downright curmudgeonly, too, when it came to lending books—yet I managed to lose a book and a friend along the way. The book was Zorba the Greek. My friend (yeah, that’s you, Rich) simply couldn’t comprehend that the hardback edition I’d received as a gift was anything more than just another book. I remember watching both the book and the friend drive away toward Salt Lake City and wondering if I’d ever see either one of them again.

My attitude toward book-lending was adjusted when I met a genuinely generous man named Tom McCord. I met Tom at his home on a rural acreage in the Pine Creek Valley, Halfway, Oregon. He and his wife Nancy were childhood friends of my friend, Bill Baird.

The summer before Bill died, Bill’s son Larry and I took him back to his childhood home for a visit. Larry told me these three friends were a real delight to be around. They were that and more. When they got back together, in their early 90s and in various states of health, they were still the kids they were in the 1920s. Sparkly-eyed high-schoolers.

Tom had an extensive library of World War II books. He served in the artillery and fought at the Battle of the Bulge and beyond. Brutal experiences that made me ache to think about what that fine person endured. Nancy told stories of Army wives following their husbands from base to base during their stateside training. She told of towing a thirty-foot trailer behind their Pontiac, newborn in the front seat, toddler scrambling around in the back. These women established trailer camps to avoid the price gouging opportunistic landlords inflicted on their migrant families. It was a part of the war that people don’t want to talk about, Nancy said. I promised I’d come back and write their story down.

But let’s get back to Tom’s library. Tom had a semi-formal lending system based on index cards and he said that anyone who came to visit left with a book. I couldn’t imagine going back to California with someone else’s book, so I declined as politely as possible. Before we drove away, Tom asked once again if I was sure I didn’t want to borrow a book. “That way,” he said, “I know you’ll come back to visit.” Tom and Nancy died before I had the chance to return to Halfway. How I wish I had borrowed a book and made that trip back.

For more about Halfway and that trip, see my March 2006 posting, "Remembering Halfway, Oregon & Richard Hugo."

THINKING ABOUT JIM HARRISON'S "MOM AND DAD" ON FATHER'S DAY

2008-06-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

Mom and Dad

Gentle readers, feel your naked belly button where
you were tied to your mother. Kneel and thank
her for your jubilant but woebegone life. Don’t
for a moment think of the mood of your parents
when you were conceived which so vitally affects
your destiny. You have no control over that and
it’s unprofitable to wonder if they were pissed
off or drunk, bored, watching television news,
listening to country music, or hopefully out in
the orchard grass feeling the crunch of wind-
fall apples under their frantic bodies.

I love this poem. It makes me smile. In his gentle way, Jim Harrison engages his “gentle readers” and asks us to touch ourselves—our “naked belly button,” of all things. The intimacy of that directive sets the tone for a series of intimate musings about the moment of our conceptions.

Harrison’s casually-confident voice puts forward, as a statement of fact, that our parents’ mood at the moment of conception “so vitally affects / your destiny.” It’s the kind of statement I enjoy dismissing then chewing over for while. What if it were so? What if my destiny was shaped in that moment? That would explain a lot.

“Mom and Dad” is full of delightful contradictions, too. “Don’t / for a moment think about the mood of your parents,” he says, before we go on to thinking about their mood. He tells us “it’s unprofitable to wonder” while we wonder. Then goes so far as to hope they were “out in / the orchard grass feeling the crunch of wind- / fall apples under their frantic bodies.” How wonderful to wish that for one’s parents.

I am one of the lucky sons whose parents still love each other after fifty years of marriage. Not that it’s been easy. On my tenth wedding anniversary my mother said, “Now you can imagine what it takes to make fifty.” No small feat. Accomplished in part, Harrison’s poem makes me willing to muse, because they still feel the crunch of windfall apples.

“Mom and Dad” can be found in Saving Daylight, Harrison’s tenth collection of poems. It’s from Copper Canyon Press and worth reading from cover to cover.

The Noulipian Analects

2008-05-30T18:25:00.000-07:00

In their recent anthology, The Noulipian Analects, Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegner offer a diverse selection of critical and creative work reflecting the influence of Oulipo poetics on writers outside of France. Although I originally became interested in reading the book because it included poetry by writers like Christian Bok, Tan Lin, and Bernadette Meyer, I found the criticism just as compelling as Bok’s “nihilistic witticisms” and “flirts with philistinism.” Often exploring the role of gender in shaping the Oulipo canon, the essays in this anthology suggest new possibilities for diversifying and democratizing the constraint-based writing available to readers, an approach that proves thought-provoking throughout.

The essays in The Noulipian Analects that explore possible explanations for the dearth of women involved in Oulipo writing are particularly impressive. By looking at both the writings that are published and the dynamic maintained in classroom settings, works by Julianna Spahr, Stephanie Young, and the editors themselves prove provocative in their discussions of the ways constraint-based writing is frequently presented by male writers. An essay entitled “‘& and’ and ‘foulipo’” by Spahr and Young is a good example this trend. They write, for example:

We did feel this wok that uses constaint was ielevant, not to men no to women. We did not want to dismiss it. When we liked this wok by men we saw the eteat into constaint as an attempt by men to avoid pepetuating bourgeois piviledge, to make fun of the omantic nacississtic tadition, of all that tadition of fomalism. But at othe moments wi ween’t so sue that this was eally a feminist, antiacist self-investigation…It was often as if they wee using these techniques as a sot of dominance itual in the classroom, that at the women’s college whee we taught (although the gaduate pogram admitted both men and women) was aleady somewhat of a gende loaded space. (8)

While using constraints themselves, Spahr and Young present a complex vision of experimental writing that suggests the oulipo tradition remains at once subversive and patriarchal. Raising significant questions about the ways gender politics encourage and/or stifle art, “‘& and’ and ‘foulipo’” offers goals for the Oulipo community to strive for in the twenty-first century. Like many of the literary essays in The Noulipian Analects, this piece by Spahr and Young assesses and critiques while acknowledging the possibilities for activism via the tradition of constraint-based writing.

Other essays in the anthology treat such diverse themes as electronic writing, “‘Axioms’ of Oulipian,” the option of revealing or not revealing constraint to the reader, and new media writing. Although the book presents a wide range of ideas pertaining to constraint-based writing, the theme of new directions for Oulipo writing continues to resurface, raising questions about the types of writing that belong or don’t belong in the canon. I enjoyed Brian Kim Stefans’ essay, “Electronic Writing (or Privileging Language),” which discusses both the shortcomings and the opportunities offered by this medium, evaluating whether or not it really should be classified as poetry. He writes:

I’d also like to argue that in much electronic writing…language is being used to solve a formal problem in the artistic project—often to make the experience more concrete or to found out a metaphor—and the electronic elements of the project have not come around in order to solve a problem in the literary effort. Which is to say: digital art quite often needs poetry more than poetry needs digital art, though one would think in the field of electronic writing the latter should be more true. (61)

By implying that in poetry, language should take priority over the visual, Brian Kim Stefans presents a vision of experimental writing as being grounded in the techniques of traditional poetry. While acknowledging the potential for avante-garde literature to subvert such conventions, he also suggests that there’s a limit to what aspects of more traditional poetry can be abandoned altogether. Just as other essays in the collection delineate new possibilities for Oulipo writing and other experimental endeavors, Stefans’ essay and others strike a cautionary note in pursuing them.

All points considered, the Noulipian Analects is a diverse and provocative read, ideal for experimental writers and scholars alike. Five stars.

THYLIAS MOSS—TOKYO BUTTER

2008-05-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

I remember a graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota for Professor Bruce Lincoln’s discourse analysis class. Lincoln was a tough-minded, straight talkin’ son of a gun, and he would quickly disabuse you of any notion you might have that was even the slightest bit fluffy. But he was willing to take on all comers despite their area of expertise. For the final project of the class we assembled at this home and listened to various students give a talk or presentation. One woman from the theater department began her project that I believe had something loosely to do with the notion of the construction of identity. She sat down with an array of greasepaints and a mirror. She proceeded to apply one layer of paint to another, going through the changes of several different hues, until her face was very dark. Then she continued to reverse the darkening by lightening her face with many more applied layers of paint, each time dabbing on a little bit more until the hue of her face had lightened considerably. This process continued for some 30 or 40 minutes while the rest of us patiently watched her apply make-up to herself. Certainly we had gotten the gist of it after 5, but it was interminable. We all agreed that what she was doing may have been art, but we weren’t sure whether it was something we could ever tolerate watching again.

So it is with Thylias Moss in Tokyo Butter. The amount of infinitesimal detail from the lived life of the speaker (presumably Moss herself) and Deidre (or is it Deirdre), a dead cousin, offered up in the space of the book is mind-numbing. I haven’t experienced such a blankness of mind since I read Geraldine Kim’s Povel, another book that nodded toward the great concept but whose execution of it left me baffled. Tokyo Butter is no Povel, thankfully. Moss is much more generous, and occasionally, when she departs from chronicling every last angstrom traversed in her life, she provides some interesting forays into other materials, not the least of which is the work of Utamaro and the method by which Paul Tessier devised his surgical techniques on the skull.

These bits are swirled together with so much other ephemera that they are lost in the shuffle. When Moss does focus on them, it is for just a brief moment and then they are gone. Sometimes they reappear later in another context. Often they do not. All of the info-bits dumped into her long lines serve to illustrate the concept and theory behind her work, something she calls Limited Fork Poetics. From the back of the book (though you can read the entire thesis [“A Generalized Mapping of Limited Fork Poetics as of May 2006”]) she writes:

Limited Fork Poetics (LFP) believes that Poetry is a complex adaptive system, and because of that, page is unrestricted, and means “location of the poem.” Some poems will inhabit places for which there is not yet means of detection or interpretation. A dynamic poem is event, occurs in time, and in its totality includes all versions, all thought that the person encountering a form of the poem supplies—this can be a reader (who remakes the poem through interacting with it)or what is considered the primary maker (poet) of the poem. A dynamic poem is a system of poetry, so (shifting) interactions between the subsystems (all that the poem contains) is essential to making (mutable) meanings. A dynamic poem hosts interacting language systems(including sonic, aural, and visual forms besides/in addition to/instead of text). The activity of interacting systems takes place on all scales immediately. The landscape of a single poem can include multiple areas of constituents of the poem taking shape in multiple forms (including sonic, aural, and visual forms besides/ in addition to/ instead of text) simultaneously, in varying degrees of stability (forms of accessibility/incoherence). There is no definitive beginning or ending. A portion (or portions) of a poem is joined, is left in progress. Interactions at a given time help determine the observable stability or instability (and the perceived direction[s] of the activity). Metaphor is a tool of navigation that can enable instantaneous access to other event locations on any scale—akin to navigating wormholes. The journeys to and from what is considered the same metaphorical events may not be identical.

Amid the extensive pomo jargon and barrage of theoretical language, I derive the notion that Moss’s poems are supposed to be complex adaptive systems, which are inherently limitless and open to multitudes of artistic maneuvers (“the page is unrestricted”) and multitudes of interpretations. In short, the poem is the be-all and end-all of anything the poet or reader desires. However, my great concern is that in inscribing this space for free association and scripting, if it is determining anything at all. Certainly as I read large portions of Tokyo Butter and feel my mind go numb from the excess, I sense there is nothing to be determined. Perhaps this quavering vagueness is the feeling I am supposed to be having, but if it is, I wonder why this is the desired outcome for a reader.

Now I know that Moss is only invoking the term complex adaptive system in a very metaphorical manner and does not wish to be taken literally that her project is trying to create the equivalent of a complex adaptive system in poetry, but I wonder why this scientific terminology is invoked unless there is going to be some attempt to come to terms with and understand the real discipline that surrounds systems theory. Is this attachment to scientific language just an affectation?

For instance, it would have been useful to address some of the interesting qualities of complex systems such as what is noted in Duncan Watts’s excellent book for the lay reader Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age which discusses systems theory and complex adaptive systems with respect to economics and sociology. Towards the end of the book Watts provides this overview of some of his insights about networks:

claiming that everything is a small-world network or a scale-free network not only oversimplifies the truth but does so in a way that can mislead one to think that the same set of characteristics is relevant to every problem. If we want to understand the connected age in any more than a superficial manner, we need to recognize that different classes of networked systems require us to explore different sets of network properties. In some cases it may be sufficient to know simply that a network contains a short path connecting any pair of individuals, or that some individuals are many times connected better than others. But in other cases, what may matter is whether or not the short paths can be found by the individuals themselves. Perhaps it may be important that in addition to being connected by short paths, individuals are also embedded in locally reinforcing clusters, or that they are into so embedded. Sometimes the existence of individual identity may be critical to understanding a network’s properties, and at other times it may not be. Being highly connected may be of great use in some circumstances and of little consequence in others—it may even be counterproductive, leading to failures or exacerbating failures that occur naturally. Just like the taxonomy of life, a useful taxonomy of networks will enable one to unify many different systems and distinguish between them.

I fear that, as a system, what Moss has constructed in Tokyo Butter is neither complex nor adaptive. The result is more like a random graph, a system of nodes randomly connected together without respect for distance and likelihood of connectivity, rather than as small clustered groups tied together by a few overarching connections which is most often the characteristic of a complex adaptive system.

I could go on and question whether the “Limited Fork” has anything to do with bifurcation theory, but I know I would be taking what Moss offers in her theoretical speech way too literally. Though I must admit that bifurcation theory could be readily associated with the phase transition of a complex adaptive system. However, with Moss her Limited Fork poetics is, if anything, hardly very limited at all.

Moss does not make apologies for not recognizing boundaries. She sees her work as not recognizing any limitations because in putting up a limit in one’s work, one is privileging certain material that is included in the poem over other material that does not get in. Her project is a radical flattening of all material so that the most quotidian and droll information is not positioned any differently than “poetic language” that is immediately recognizable as such. It is a project of radical inclusion. It does this in order to avoid excluding anything. However, one person’s exclusion is another person’s selection. We all have preferences, and it is impossible to say that any work doesn’t have “symptoms.” isn’t symptomatic of certain things that draw our attention as opposed to others that don’t. I would go as far to say that all informational scanning has an aspect of selection associated with it. I do not randomly search for info when I jump on the net. It would take too long for me to come across something that might resonate with me, and I don’t have that much time on the earth to sift through all the info. Poetry, it seems to me, relies on some kind of selective attention for the reader to engage and trust the voice. Otherwise, one might get the same experience from a poem as one does by randomly clicking on hyperlinks, the flarfist’s game. I suspect that this kind of experience is not what poetry readers are looking for. But perhaps it is the experience of the radically distracted, those in perpetual need of being thrilled. Maybe this is who Moss is writing for, and she suffers only from a bit of a marketing problem by appealing to the more dull-witted poetry reader.

I might also offer the observation that Moss, like Geraldine Kim of Povel is not part of the WASP mainstream that is the dominant culture in the US, a dominant culture that puts up many roadblocks (read as “limitations”) to those who are not viewed as part of that mainstream. Both writers want to include everything in their work with particular emphasis on the minutiae of everyday life.. Is this a symptom of having so many limitations placed upon them that they may want to so radically unshackle themselves?

Without any limitations at all about what is included, readers must come to terms with the fact that any rendering of a life and its informational byproducts is on the same plain as any other. Anything that is collected is equal to anything else, perhaps even equal, by implication, to that which is not collected.

The effect is almost like one who is drunk on information, falling in love with it for the first time. So there is a great rush to include everything that is found like a beginning composition student just beginning to flush with excitement after discovering ProQuest or the Project Muse scholarly databases. What is even more pernicious is the fact that Moss dresses this up in a conceptual framework that justifies the practice. All is done in the name of a complex adaptive system that can adapt to any information thrown into it and, churned, (like butter, to use a much maligned metaphor of Moss’s in the book) will be integrated and functional. I felt like I was reading flarf at the paragraph level. Unlike flarf where short words and phrases were juxtaposed with other short words and phrases to produce an amusing word salad (wasn’t the point of flarf always irony?), Moss incorporates much larger blocks of information. Often this occurs without much metaphorical or thematic value being added. It is simple information dump offered in the name of poetry and expression. All of it goes to reaffirm what has become my growing suspicion: what goes on in the privacy of a person’s home is between her and her search engine.

But apart from this theoretical quibbling (though it is interesting to note how Moss, reminiscent of the best of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement, has dressed up her poems in a poetics that is potentially more enticing than her poetic output), I should try to say something about the poems themselves.

The central poem in the collection is “Deidre: A Search Engine.” This piece is an assemblage put together with the help of Google, something that Moss seems to refer to as a Google odyssey [so much for complex adaptive system; the main metaphor for this piece is “the trip”]. The “system” (assemblage) that Moss puts together is of a string of info-bits connected at the terminal ends to each other with the theme of the missing cousin Deirdre folded into the loose structure for the purpose of some semblance of coherence, a kind of hierarchical node that many parts of the system immediately relate back to.

One important aspect of the poem that makes it seem more like trip than system is the glaring absence of any kind of prolonged connection (except that of the Deirdre variety) between elements (read nodes) at the beginning part of the poem to those at the end. Apparently, all connections that tie in the superstructure of the poem must run through Dierdre. This, as I have mentioned before, is not a quality of a complex adaptive system. Complex adaptive systems generally employ more connection between sub-nodes. They do not all connect back to the primary node. Such a system architecture is inefficient. The basic architecture for this piece is of the thread with a few connectors to the main theme (main node) of the missing Deirdre.

Another manner in which the poems and book fail to serve as complex adaptive systems through their structure is if we consider the notion of node failure. Often within systems, if a particular node fails, then a cascade effect will occur which will eventually make the system shut down. An example of this might be with the electrical grid. If an important node goes down within the electrical grid, the excess capacity is pushed onto another part of the network and thus makes it more susceptible to failure. And if this second connection in the grid goes down, then even that much more capacity will have to be transferred.

Let us look at how the poem “Diedre: A Search Engine” is structured. [Pardon my crude Photoshopping.]

If one agrees that this is how the poem is structured, with the main node of “Deirdre” being the point of connection for all of the subsystems of the poem, then what would happen if that main node would be knocked out? I would argue that system failure would be inevitable. There is no considerable linking between the lower orders of the system.

I will quote from John H. Miller and Scott Page’s book on Princeton University Press Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life

The behavior of many complex systems emerges from the activities of lower-level components.

Ostensibly, What Moss has created is a linear system with one hierarchical node.

This poem and Tokyo Butter as a whole lacks this kind of linking between subsystems (with the possible exception of the many references to flowers sprinkled within the poems . . . however these are usually just brief mentions and do not serve as any kind of prolonged attraction within the system of the poem). I can certainly imagine what a poem that might have more subsystem connections would look like, but with that kind of poem it would be difficult to talk of what it is about though I think most readers would be able to discern that a number of attractors were resonating with each other in interesting ways (and not in random ways).

On the other hand with a complex adaptive system:

Each of the subnodes has a considerable number of connections to other subnodes, which are, in turn, minimally connected to other sub-sub-nodes.

But, by indulging in a little bit of mathematics, we can begin to speak of how these systems operate.

According to Stuart Kauffman in The Origins of Order there are two important variables to consider:

N=the number of nodes within the system
K=the average number of inputs to each node in the system

When K=N (a situation where every node in the system is connected to every other node) this is a completely random system (in other words, a random graph). These systems are highly chaotic.

However, as the value for K approaches 2, the system undergoes a phase transition from being a disordered regime to being an ordered regime; in other words, order begins to crystallize. These systems are poised nearr the chaotic regime and are ones which possess the most ability to adapt (self-organize) yet are still fairly robust and stable. They are ones which closely resemble those of natural biological systems. They abide at the edge of chaos.

The system I have drawn above utilizes 20 nodes; therefore, N=20

There are 44 inputs to these 20 nodes; therefore, K=2.2. This system is slightly into the chaotic regime, but it is approaching the K=2 range that Kauffman mentions.

Also, quite puzzling to me is the manner of the connection in this assemblage. Many of the connections forged are quite random (Florence Nightingale—Florence, Alabama), (blue nightingale, blue tongue, blue mouth, blue tattoo, methylene blue, etc), (“Snow often articulates as feathery as implications of her name,” “the living snow,” “The best historic attempts to photograph snowflakes . . .”). It is almost as though one could have focused on any other noun or verb in the text and built up connections to other texts based on those nouns or verbs. For that matter, Moss might have focused on adverbs or articles. Though perhaps I am dense, I don’t very readily see how the various connections relate to each other with any semantic force. The connections between the items in the poems are done with no apparent interest in making anything other than surface connections. The main aesthetic value that Moss is going after in this approach seems to be raggedness (as one can glean from the aforementioned “A Generalized Mapping of Limited Fork Poetics as of May 2006.”

The structures formed by complex adaptive systems, even when they occur within bounded or regular spaces, tend toward manifestation (especially over time) of irregularities and unpredictable details (a kind of raggedness) possible
within the limits of the boundaries (that are [or become, for some interval of
time] generally fixed though not infallible or immutable or without signs of
wear, signs of consequences of existing) of dynamic events. Clouds, and trees
with their bifurcating root and branch systems at either end of a comparatively
linear trunk, are both examples of complex adaptive systems and products of
complex adaptive systems. Clouds tend to form within the boundaries of clouds
though the precise details of each cloud formation as it appears at various times
from various angles are not predictable. The same is true of the human body and
of most natural objects and natural systems.

This aesthetic of raggedness (in bold above) is prevalent and may go a ways to explain Moss’s lack of restraint. Some of the moves she makes can be seen as either endearingly idiosyncratic or outright embarrassing. Here is a section from “Deidre: A Search Engine” on page 95 right after one of her riffs on butter, where she ends that section with “These are cures in alternative medicine. / This is the way it should go. Butter residencies / in apothecaries”:

In under an hour, a man with one leg,
the best way to single him out of the crowd doing this,
carved an entire butter army

and then there was a contest to defeat it, and it was defeated,
and an entire army was in one stomach. The carver had carved
no weapons for his army. Every soldier
was a general soldier, nondescript

—necessary for the time constraint, the detail an hour could hold.

They had no mouths.

Where he pushed in with fingernails, resulted at best in chins.

They had no mouths.

In the end, he went home successful
until daybreak

when the yellow flooded

so thoroughly even his spirit

was back in the butter

so he took a bath.

I am at a loss to accurately decipher the tone of this offering. I am not sure if some of these lines are meant to be funny or not, like “he was back in the butter / so he took a bath.”Or is this just a documentation of the minutiae of a life? Is the whole butter army supposed to be taken at face value or is this a brief humorous jaunt? I’m sure the reader-response theorist will jump up and say—make of it what you want. [Note: I don’t think the reader-response theorist really wants me to do that for fear I might deface the page, write over lines, cross out large sections.] Similarly, on page 94 Moss writes “The vow of poverty taken on by yeast, / single cells in the budding Order Saccaromyces. / Yeast priests.” I’m pretty sure that this is supposed to be humorous rather than just a flight of fancy, and I hope that I am the only one who has to pause a moment to decipher the tone of that statement. But there are many other instances where Moss’s wordplay makes me uneasy about whether I should snicker or marvel at her linguistic play, her verbal agility. I am often caught in these similar moments when I read Heather McHugh. McHugh is a great biofeedback poet. I read her when I need to tell if I’m having a good time or not.

I am also curious why the spelling in the title “Diedre” does not correspond to the rest of the book where the spelling is “Deirdre.” Only one reference in the poem seems to speak to this:

[at various times, goat has translated as ghost, ghost as goat
and continued after the error was exposed
for the sake of poetry,
for the beauty of leaks,
for the conquest possible only through translation]:

The main justification seems to be that this kind of variance can be exercised in the name of poetry. I guess I am supposed to be left wondering, and for that, I will be a better person for letting this question linger. Or perhaps the proofreader’s eyes glazed over.

I have looked at Moss’s earlier work from Slave Moth and The Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler, and in it she appears to show more restraint than she has in Tokyo Butter. I am able to derive more sustenance from those efforts. Perhaps I should stop trying to eat poems and just be inside them.

There is a good deal of exciting research that comes up from a variety of sources. During the course of reading Tokyo Butter I have learned terms like williwaw and druse, vitiligo and arowanas. These multi-syllabic gems are impressive. I have used williwaw to impress the mail carrier and the neighbor’s exterminator already. At this molecular, if not sub-atomic level, Moss delivers. But just as often Moss will torture many of the words/subjects she uses by making them undergo fantastical transformations. A good example of this is in “The Culture of Snowmen” where the snowmen seem, like the majority of Moss’s oeuvre, to have no limits. This is the delimited snowman, atomized, then put back together. With all of this fantastical morphing, the metaphor of the snowman (to stand in for human men?) becomes unstable. Again, the raggedness.

There are times when her selection seems right on, like in this passage in “The Magnificent Culture of Myopia”

our whole house of sons, drums,
saxophones, keyboards, replicas of hippos, and canaries
are now beneficiaries of peaches, heirs of fuzz,
scant fur of beginner mold about to bless
bread with blue beards

Other times, I find myself wading through my exasperation at the verbal flourishes:

and my presence which must be dealt with gets churned into
the meaning of what occurs there.
Assumptions butter the mind or coat it so that
what it doesn’t want can’t easily get through: butter barrier
greased pig thinking but once on your skin
butter can feel like your own secretion, your own rich oil:
bounty ooze crown melt —if only there was toast
in the picture, deli buns, biscuits, croissants, beignets
more obvious reasons to lay it on thickly, but sticks of butter
come architect-ready to build a house, plantation columns
and nothing is easier to sculpt
than pale butter skin all the way through, bone-free, dull knives
glide renewed, resuscitated: ghee glee.

Come to think of it, the exasperation occurs at a ratio nearly 5 to 1 with respect to those times I am imagistically or sonically satisfied. What is wrong with me? Let’s see. Butter is churned. It butters the mind and puts a protective barrier over it so that nothing can penetrate. This is similar to the secretion of the sebaceous gland. Then toast is introduced (and other delicious bakery items). Then the butter is used as building blocks, which quickly transforms us back to the notion of butter as skin.

All of this one in one stanza. One stanza in a poem that lingers for four pages, offering us more of the same along the way. God help us if Moss ever develops a penchant for rhyme as she does for metaphor. The result would put Dr. Seuss to shame.

Also with her venture into Limited Fork Poetics, Moss has begun to put together multimedia presentations of her work. This page at Limited Fork provides a collection of this work. One of the pieces that is posted thereThe Culture of Funnel Cake [mp3] is taken from Tokyo Butter. Moss’s son, Ansted, provides the background keyboard and Moss proceeds to half-sing/half-chant every line. The recording does not extend to reflect the entire 9 page poem. This self-described elliptical offering seems to meander in phase space between the abscissa of women who wait too long to realize their fertility and the ordinate of the dominant state of living things.

While Moss provides an interesting direction with her POAMs [products of the act of making—read as “improvised ad hoc pieces”] that fuse spoken/chanted word, manipulated images and ethereal keyboard soundtrack, I find that these “systems” also tend to make my mind drift for their bricolage approach to making videos. However, because she is one of the few poets out there willing to venture into the videopoem world in academia, she should be entitled to carve out her trace in a world where conventions are minimal. She seems to embrace the “go for it” spirit with these efforts. Sometimes, though, like with her poems, the presentations seem overly long. For example, I challenge anyone to listen to [The Song of Iota] with anything like full attentiveness.

With so much of the videopoem seeming like it owes a credit to the 30-second spot, I can’t help wondering if there aren’t lessons to be learned from the advertising industry for videopoem makers. Moss decidedly undermines all of that by diffusing the attention of the watcher. Her videopoems seem to be the antithesis of locating power squarely at the center of the presentation. [Yet it is curious how many of Moss’s videopoems feature images of herself.] She seems unconcerned if we get the tag line. She uses the language of “interacting language systems” to describe the multi-layered vocalizations. Another word for this might be cacophony. The effect of simultaneity is achieved. Again, though, I question the “interaction” of the utterances. Often there seems to be a talking-at-cross-purposes that is going on. I suppose this brings us back to Moss’s prevailing aesthetic of raggedness.

The raggedness defines the POAM, and it defies the description of poem as a consumable. I guess I can’t help wanting the poem as it is performed to be something that is ultimately reflective of experience, something where a person can say “this is what happened”rather than the poem as happening itself. I never understood rave culture either. But strangely enough, I have found the work of the Situationists to be interesting grist for the mill . . . perhaps because the cultural critique was sharpened in their presentations. Too often I get the feeling that Moss’s POAMs are advertisements for herself or the technology she uses. Or both.

Perhaps I am stubbornly boneheaded in my thinking that a poem is a “speech act,” one which reflects a community of speech acts and tries to place itself within that community by connecting to the history of those speech acts. I’m sure that puts me firmly within the grasp of tradition in the eyes of someone like Moss, but I don’t really feel like a traditionalist.

It is interesting to me that the types of inflection Moss uses in her videopoems are that of a somewhat melodic chant and a voice-in-slow-motion when she wants to underscore words for their weight. There is no throwing of one’s voice or snarkiness or any other kind of affect in her voice. In this manner, the renditions of her poems seem disconnected with the community of speech acts that I mentioned above. I suspect, though, that these observations of mine would be met with a rejoinder that poems are not “acted, “ but spoken. I would like to welcome anyone who makes such a rejoinder to go see a poetry slam. There is where poetry meets drama. The spectacle is upon one there, but I, usually, am not there. However, I am advocating for a larger vocabulary of vocal presentation than melodic chant/song and straight spoken “reading” voice.

As I look back onto what I have written about Tokyo Butter, I realize that I have been fairly harsh in my comments and criticisms. I wish also to applaud Moss’s individual spirit that makes her go it her own way. She deserves credit for acting on her vision for the possibilities of what a poem could be or should be. She trusts her own imagination in ways that few dare to emulate. Certainly I am not as daring. I don’t want to seem as if I don’t get her brave new world. But perhaps I don’t. Perhaps my resistance to her work is also because I have spent so much time thinking about how the ideas of those who are pioneering the new science of networks relate to contemporary poetry. I think it is important that if one invokes those ideas, even in the process of making them one’s own, one is responsible for upholding the integrity of those ideas and really coming to understand them, not just appropriating them for the sake of artistic expression. For me, poetic license doesn’t extend that far.

Like everything else, treading on another’s territory, in this case the intellectual territory of network science, is more bearable if it is done with some appreciation for what is there and what has been established. If not, then such appropriation looks more like a wildly exploitative move. Or worse yet, a dalliance. A whim that that fails to take the efforts of others into consideration.

POSTSCRIPT: "The Unbuttered Subculture of Cindy Birdsong" from Tokyo Butter. One of my favorite pieces in the book though I'm still not sure about the tone of "unspecified backup bird" and "shrunken heads don't need a redundant trip to the gallows" and "atomic and subatomic groupies." Perhaps I've just had a bad week and my sense of humor has been compromised. I love that radation-altered sunflower with the open head though.

Interview with Thylias Moss at Lily. "a study of the limits of precision at the limits of precision"?

"Dan, I lack a proper mindset. That is why precision is my goal. I have a mindset of awareness of simultaneous active zones of interactions visible differently through each lens used." I'm not sure what this means, how "precision" and "diferently visualized active zones"are related but I think it helps me contextualize a good bit of her output in Tokyo Butter

Skirt Full of Black by Sun Yung Shin

2008-05-13T20:00:00.000-07:00

Skirt Full of Black. Sun Yung Shin. Coffee House Press.

What happens in a world where language fails us? Sun Yung Shin’s poetry collection, Skirt Full of Black, fills in the gaps between language and between the past and present by crafting poems that dip from many pots. Shin’s eye is a critical one: This poet is definitely conscious of the social ramifications of not only her poems but also of different cultures’ practices, the news, traditions, and faerie tales. The poems in this collection are like a collage: there are different voices, material, and subject matter. What unites the pieces of these poems is their critical gaze: nothing escape’s this poet’s eye. The world seems open for the taking and for examination.

From the beginning, Shin’s intentions are loud and clear: the first poem, “Macro-Altaic,” takes on assimilation and “the color of death, Western clothing.” This poem maps the collection’s journey, and its attempts to make sense of what is lost between languages and what is lost at the cost of assimilation. In this first poem, Shin writes: “Date on the red book from Korea, year prior to birth, folk tales, year of gestation, folk tales, year a maternal body with double interior.” Time is marked in Korea’s color – red – and the past is referenced, as is the feminine and its misrepresentation. Shin’s work in this collection is focused around the “double interior” of language: Through a collage of perspective, the poems address what is missing, neglected, and/or oppressed.

And yet, with all the differences between English and Korean, there are still boundaries. In the collection’s first poem, Shin addresses this: “…not easy to draw boundaries in any language between what is a word and what is not a word and Korean is no exception.” What is and what is not are two dichotomies that exist in each language. This idea aligns to what is implied about each culture’s treatment of women: they are told what they can and can not be. She writes in “Flower I, Stamen and Pollen”:

Even the knot of her shadow reckoned him starlet, sparrow, hummingbird.

Her youngest older brother. His devotion was positively medieval.
Sanctified. Gilt. He had made a deaf rope of roots and her mute mouth

stained abundant with the prophecy of berries. A replica of paradise. Their

mother’s womb he scraped clean. Red-empty-red. Her favorite lineage.

Women are protected only to be used as a vessel, for their womb. The poem is as gruesome in its imagery as Grimm faerie tales. However, instead of the old faerie tales that were used to warn women against leaving or disobeying their parents or husbands, this faerie tale is a feminist response to a life of oppression, a life of control.

The major accomplishment of this poetry collection is the collection’s fifth section, “Vestibulary.” Here, Shin takes the Korean language (hangul and the old Romanization) and creates poems inspired by the traditional meanings, sounds, and associations of this language. Language is notoriously biased, notoriously linked to the patriarchy (historically made for men by men), but Shin takes this language on and gives each character, a story, a new life.

Women and their ethnicity are recurring subject matters: Shin gives women their voices and throws a spotlight on the generalizations of ethnic groups. Sometimes these spotlights seem to drown out their subjects. Like someone screaming from a rooftop, the reader can sometimes nod their head with frustration and mouth, “I get it; I get it.” Shin is at her best when she attacks subjects in a creative fashion and through metaphor.

It is in this section that Shin that her politics and poetics learn how to work off of one another make sweet music together. It is here where the collection’s ideas come together and coalesce. “Vestibulary” is a true accomplishment: part dictionary, part critique, part association, and a blending of perspective and culture, this piece of the collection is strong because it touches on many things at once. Here, Korean culture can meet Western culture. Here, what can not be explained by one language can be explained through their combination.

The pieces of “Vestibulary” touch not only on the literally meaning of the Korean language but also its look. Many of the poems take on the shape or allude to the shape of the Korean characters. For example, “kiyek,” is a poem based on a Korean character that looks very much like an upside-down “L” (and looks something like this: ┐). Here, Shin writes:

stained raw your lover’s knee,

precipice;

scythe, raw grain;

late, wet harvest;

half-chair in silhouette.

The poem’s language alludes not only to Korean culture and the tug-of-war relationship between English and Korean (i.e. “the half-chair in silhouette”), but the poem’s spacing and line-length links strongly to the character’s look: its shape and the thickness of its line.

Forever in limbo, Shin makes sense of the world through purposeful collision. English and Korean come together without losing their individuality. That’s not to say that this collection doesn’t explore the multitude of issues involved when two cultures not only compete for standing but oppress its members. The poems in this piece are loud with their discussion of

What one language can express, another can not, and Shin asks for more language, another language to speak for things that are unspeakable. In “Half the Business,” she writes:

We should all have two languages, one of our childhood, and one of our
deathbed.
God, let those two be the same.
No more songs about bureaucrats, armies, a confetti of human hair.

Shin asks for a language that can shrug off the confines of the patriarchy, a history of misogyny. Additionally, Shin seems tired of what has been said again and again in the same languages. The poem continues with “Every woman a scholar dissecting her own body, eating her own words / until the end of words.” Here, language again is linked to the oppression of women. To study language, to be scholar, one must “eat her own words,” one must see the limits of language. This love-hate relationship is one that is key to the poems in this collection, key to Shin’s plight. A poet may love language, but as a woman, language is as oppressive as anything else in the world. As someone balancing two languages – Korean and English – the struggle is even more complex.

Shin’s poetry collection is a revolving door of perspective. Like a skilled juggler, Shin flips the coins again and again to peer in on the reflections, the differences and the similarities. What is a poet to do when language fails her gender, her ethnicity? This poet takes the languages that have failed in the past and combines them. The resulting collage of perspective and language tackles its subject matter head on. Though the subject matter of these poems is loud and ablaze with a critical eye, the poems do not lack in sound play or form. Shin marries her poetics and politics, and the resulting poems will challenge a reader’s ear and assumptions. Language may have its limitations or its issues, but it is capable of redemption.

You can grab a copy of the book here and here.

BEATING THEIR TINY FISTS: CANTARABOOKS AND THE NEW PARADIGM

2008-04-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

Who remembers the ditto machine? On Saturday, I listened to San Francisco’s Susan Terris read her wonderful poems about the ditto and other bygone machines. Machines that were the envy of their time. Then on Sunday, I read an interview with Robert Hass, in which he talked about the mimeograph, and about how changes in technology have changed our ability to access poetry.

He said, “The difference I'm aware of is that young poets and would-be poets, through the Internet, have immediate access to a whole range of possibilities they didn't before. When I was a kid in San Francisco, I could find my way to City Lights Bookstore and mimeograph poetry magazines. If you were growing up in Worcester, Mass., you were out of luck.”

Hearing Ms. Terris and reading Mr. Hass over the weekend prompted me to reread a recent Subtletea.com interview with Cantara Christopher on Monday. The interview is timely and provocative and may be of interest to readers of the Great American Pinup. Her small press provides an example of the changing landscape of publishing and how technology is “increasing our range of possibilities.”

Here’s a quick sketch. Ms. Christopher co-founded Cantarabooks and the literary magazine Cantaraville with Michael Matheny. When they found themselves at loggerheads with the mainstream publishing world, they decided to strike out on their own. The result is an innovative blend of the new and the old publishing paradigms. Ebooks, paperbacks, and a literary magazine that is only available as a pdf file. Here’s how she described their venture to David Herrle in the Sutbletea interview.

“From the outset we decided not to operate like the more established small presses. Recent innovations in technology had created a New Paradigm, a new book world where it was possible for anyone at all to be published by Lulu.com for less than ten dollars; where an enterprising author could self-publish her novel, aggressively market it and make the New York Times bestseller list, like M.J. Rose with Lip Service; where a farsighted publishing company could make its fortune selling instantly downloadable ebooks of erotic fiction to women in the Midwest, like Ellora’s Cave. If anyone can write and publish a book, why publish under someone else’s imprint?”

Ms. Christopher answers her own question.

“The missing element has been editorial presence: the opportunity to collaborate with disinterested professionals possessing the skills to help shape and clarify a work; to gain prestige by being published by professionals with high standards of excellence. To participate in the eons-old Literary Dialogue, in other words. Until about twenty years ago, before the age of bottom-line gatekeepers, an author could submit directly to St. Martin’s or other independent press in the certainty that someone there would at least seriously read and consider his work. When the foreign conglomerates started buying up our country’s largest publishing houses and mandating them to concentrate foremost on profits, we were robbed of the aesthetic guidance those houses had traditionally provided.”

If you’d like to read more, follow the link to the complete interview.

http://www.subtletea.com/cantarachristopherinterview.htm

And follow the link below to read my 2006 review of Stephen Gyllenhaal’s Claptrap: Notes from Hollywood, from Cantarabooks.

http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/2006/09/claptrap-notes-from-hollywood-by.html

As for the “tiny fists” in the title of this posting, it refers to Cantarabooks’ motto: “Beating Our Tiny Fists on the Big Hairy Chests of the Corporate Literary World.” Check them out at www.cantarabooks.com.

KEN BABSTOCK—AIRSTREAM LAND YACHT

2008-04-23T09:41:00.000-07:00

Remember in poetry when you used to be able to get credit for a mind that moved in interesting ways? Now it’s just incessant talk of markets, markets, markets . . . how do you get a reader to swallow so that it can move like crap through a golden goose? Or you might measure who’s got the biggest one with demographic studies that seek to prove how Americans have moved beyond the word and are now looking at the pictures. Perhaps the loss of this form of valor is due to the fact that in the U.S. we no longer make anything and this fact can make us hope we can market our way out of our own mess.

However, in Canada, there seems to still be a focus on that which is more interestingly wrought, for which the gold standard is not what is most immediately accessible to a larger market. At least that is the case with Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht. Finally, after so many poetry books on the American market designed to capture the attention of this group or that group, we have a book, a major prize finalist at that, which forsakes the saleable niche and aims for the big questions again. The star of Babcock’s book is consciousness, and Babcock pushes his star to the point of breaking, and to the point of many other adjectives: crystalline, shivering, blackness, coated (in oil), off-and-on monitor, blackly stumped, Imperial. For Babstock it is almost as though the will to cerebrate is the will to live itself.

In the title piece, which appears towards the end of the book after many dense ruminations and hyperdriven narratives, Babcock equates an antique Airstream trailer to that of his consciousness. His consciousness is his Airstream Land Yacht.

Airstream Land Yacht

Where in the world to go, to go?
O where in this world to go?
This big old wagon’s slow, it’s slow.
My beautiful wagon’s
slow.

It shines a silver sheen, though,
its silver sheen a-glow,
This silvery ovoid’s sturdy, ho!
metallic armadil-
lo.

Born in nineteen six-and-oh, and Oh,
she’s factory clean.
Awesome to behold but slow, but slow;
she’s sort of like a
brain.

She’s sort of like a model brain, no?
Just sits there unless towed.
And a constant need to unload, to forego,
what we couldn’t take or
know.

The intimation in this piece is that his consciousness is too big and bulky to make a streamlined path through the media debris. It hangs on to places develops wind resistance in all the meaning it tries to extract. This year’s model of consciousness is much more stripped-down. It moves quickly enough to keep with the traffic, and there is very little storage for those who are inclined to stop at garage sales to load up on ephemeral bits. In fact, you can often watch like with the Prius, the progress of its mechanical function take place on the screen.

Or perhaps Babstock is making a comment on the state of consciousness in general which is just not built to keep up with the barrage of information of the everyday, the cutting from one application screen to another screen, the absorption of thirty different commercial contexts in an hour, then still needing room to pack in the news. How many sites have you surfed since you started this paragraph?

Though this is just the sad tale of the medical profession speaking. When I ask my programmer brother, he feels that the human brain is definitely designed for speed.

Yup. This is your brain. This is your brain on Internet hyperlinks. How fast can your brain move from context to context? Do you think it was designed to move that fast? A doctor says no. A software designer says yes.

Babcock seems wired for speed and possesses a good sized hard drive, but I like how he handles recall errors, errors of slippage, such as in his delightfully funny address to Christian (no doubt Christian Bök). Towards the end, of “Think, Pig” (the title itself cribbed from Beckett) he writes:

something he could
in good faith call
a project which might
take me years but
would leave me
in good stead with
certain people
in Buffalo, I said
Christian do you
remember Abraham
and Isaac and that
terribly sharp cleaving
instrument and
the talking shrub?

That “terribly sharp cleaving instrument” is, of course, a knife, and the fact that he “forgets” the name of this weapon, an item that would most likely sharpen the focus of attention on it, makes the poem even more of an immediate gesture. One attends to the speech act quality of the poem. It also reminds the speaker of the brain’s fallibility, both the speaker’s and presumably Bök’s (or God’s as the case may be). Whatever the case, we know from Gödel that any system (in this poem’s case, an algorithm-driven infinite loop of page references) is incomplete. It is incomplete because the system is unable to successfully refer to what is always outside of it. The brain can’t keep up with its context.

This, to me, epitomizes much of Babstock’s work in Airstream Land Yacht. The brain that can’t keep up with its context, but oh how it miraculously tries and it does manage to contextualize a damn sight more than most). It is that kind of effort that keeps me coming back to read individual poems again and again. In his miraculous efforts he covers enough ground with the trace of his consciousness that I want to wind back through the coils of his language to arrive at how Babstock’s compressed language extracts its funky localized meaning at the same time it hammers away on its superstructure.

In one of the “Explanatory Gaps”(there is one for each section: Air, Stream, Land, Yacht) Babstock writes:

Explanatory Gap

Would Form, Colour, and Motion please report to Area 17
where you’ll be met by Memory and Recognition. An unbroken
field of light is uninformative. The cracks,

the jinks, what won’t cohere or blend but bends, fissures,
falls to the field
or becomes figure. A visual percept is degraded light.
We all like to sound important. I was convinced I’d actually loved

by a hot tinny pain spreading downward from the sternum. She
was gone, though,
by the time the evidence appeared, and I’d moll around the train ditch
of an evening, reading German dictionaries and pulling
loosened spikes

from the tie braces, designing industrial versions of croquet.
Home shot:
through the St. Louis Arch to the CN Tower. Oil derricks and
wrecking balls.
I had no friends for a time. Whether

it happened or didn’t it felt as it did and affected the weather. I
was being fleeced, still I paid
for entertainment. It helped feel worse, and worse was where

lovely numb wet its tongue. I sucked it like a strip of dripping lamb—

From the moment where the brain is administrating its sectors to the bulk of the poem where the speaker is opening and closing many doors that lead to a variety of information holding pens, I, as reader, arc through with him and invest myself in his diet of images and anecdote and emotion. It is particularly exciting how this rich blend avoids becomiong twaddle (which is what happens when I often try to enter into this Friederike Mayröcker-like mode). It suggests that everything might get into the poem but it doesn’t. there is still a highly selective attention occurring. It is an attention that is also perfectly at ease with reflecting on itself, not an easy trick to accomplish without the bugaboos raising their heads and intimating a kind of navel-gazing going on.

The title of the piece helps in this regard. Even though it is willing to provide such an abstraction as “a visual percept is degraded light,” the poem has no pretensions about explaining anything. The explanatory gap is the place where this poem happens. It is the place, presumably, where Babstock places his poetic faith in serving as the locus for his work. It nods and nods and nods but never reveals.

Myself, I had an intense desire to order an gyro after reading this poem.

Another thing that I admire about Babstock’s writing in this book is how adeptly it follows the creed of the old Black Mountain School in its edict that content gives rise to form rather than form bringing about content. There is a lot of variation of form in Airstream Land Yacht. From this I can surmise that Babstock waits for his content to congeal in a manner that his consciousness apprehends, again making (his?) consciousness the star of the book. He describes this himself in an interview with CBC Radio’s “Words at Large”:

I start with a few words that make a particular noise, then I go in search of others. As I'm searching for the others, I try to be simultaneously allowing the new ones and those initial ones to inform me of some kind of appropriate patterning device or guiding principle so that they don't simply dissolve into a meaningless verbal porridge like this sentence…

Similar to many poets, Babstock allows his play [“Sometimes making is play, only that” from “Found in a Sock Monkey Kit”] to be his constitutive method, and then he assembles his various “outtakes” into an “appropriate patterning device or guiding principle.” The organizational impulse comes after, and it is guided by his trust that he will be able to find that organizing impulse afterwards. That kind of confidence that he will find a way to organize his tangle of threads (or it will find him) makes the book a pleasure to read as well. there is no style fatigue that one often finds with highly cerebral poets who find a particular method and then grind it out through the course of 60 to 70 pages.

In Airstream Land Yacht we find the architecture of sonnets, variously end-rhymed (or near-end rhymed) poems, a poem that grows and grows its end-rhymed lines [“Subject, with Rhyme, Riding a Swell”], a poem with open six line stanzas that ends with six aphoristic couplets, ["On the Dream of Union Ceasing”], a stanza mimesis where the first stanza looks, sounds and feels like the first with a few variations but produces a a very different meaning [Epochal”], dialog between texts of Kierkegaard and a hog raising manual, and a list poem of brief instructional language [“A Setting To”], as well as others that are too hard to classify.

In all of this variation one might hear Babcock underscoring his objection to Bök’s insistence on a single rigorous form. his method is to be highly unmethodical.

Further in that same interview Babstock describes the tool of poetry as:

Think of a compact case or powder kit for the mind. Small enough to carry around and helps deal with blemishes, imperfections, swellings that mar our pictures of ourselves and the world. Only it's not always about improvements to the reflected image

Poetry as putting on make up, another metaphor, but one that assumes a “fatigued” self in the morning barely able to cobble oneself together before the whole project falls apart by noon.

In this way, Babstock seems to be making a model (the male counterpart to putting on make-up) of himself. In a poem that uses this metaphor for talking about the construction of the self as well as comment on his poetic project, “Scale Model”

Scale Model

Tricked out in phantom gear, I imagined myself
perfected, at least made better to the extent
that I wanted nothing more, and could hurt no one—
which is when the world disappeared. Or
the world’s model displayed under glass with figurines
passing through parks and purchasing things
and boarding trains at dawn then transpiring, shattered
or melted, receding back into the far hills
of the false. The story of Stories Connected, and I
among them, constructed of them, a notch in the wood
of what’s happened, wound down to a farce, just
a face extemporizing the facts and making a meal
of what it had felt like to be. What had it felt like?
I remember a latch on a low gate; a kiosk on a platform
that smelled of diesel and grease; a rowboat blown
into reeds and the oars in the oarlocks; remember
my flesh on the flesh of another but limbs needed
moving and the air needed stitching with words, or
just murmurs, it all demanded doing and seeing,
removing the black box of immediacy to its place
on a shelf near a pot of dahlias gathering dust and
dying. Alone now, in the glow of an Imperial mind,
I curl to the chilled sense of being other; am bench, bolt-
hole, view of the Baltic coast, brother, or crayon set,
want to be implemented, bent to, used inside
the watched life lived—

“Used inside the watched life lived.” That says it all. Babstock very often uses the things he watches and sees through media (as well as his direct experience) as grist for the mill of his own actions. Experience and his media diet are conflated. Where does one begin and the other end? They appear to be continuous, contemporaneous. He has bridged the great divide that plagues the American scene between those mediatized poets, whom Silliman refers to as the post-avant and those experiential poets, whom Silliman refers to as the school of quietude. Babstock’s world is boisterous and smart, but it does not pursue its own end so that it might live one day serve as great intellectual achievement that may live on in the annals of glory at SUNY-Buffalo.

Babcock describes his writings in Airstream Land Yacht as multi-vocal poems which curiously end up sounding even more like himself. Yes, one feels the stitching but in doing so, one is even more assured that a singular consciousnes has weaved them all together and is talking at you.

It is the immediate removed (“to a shelf near a pot of dahlias”) only to be fed back into immediate experience after it has been filtered through the various sieves of books, emotions, stories, dictionaries, films, instruction manuals, travel brochures, conversations, etc. It is experience writ large with all its distractions and imperfections. He establishes the truth of his poetic project this way.

Each section of the book seems to provide poems that might be derived from “Air,” “Stream,””Land,” but in the last “Yacht” section Babstock seems to spend a lot of time on cruises. Or at least he imagines that he is on them. Most of them seem to depart from Schleswig-Holstein and ruminate on or react to the Baltic Sea. The Baltic is the ominous force that is shaping lives.

The Tall Ships Docked in Kiel Harbour

for Don Coles

Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Estonian.
A spectral mist had curtained the port and spread,
silken, dewy, over the crosded park grounds.
Can we say spectral or even mist, wasn’t
it more like a greased, Baltic fog? We can say
the masts appeared broken, occluded at times;
the water that slapped the low stone rampart
could be heard clearly but relied on inference
to be known or to be there, or, looking back, at the very
least, the edges of things went grainy, lost
substance, and shivered; mothers with kids
in their care sampled baked sweets or nudged hand
crafts on display tables then sank away into
enveloping dampness from which cries of
where are you carried through a muffled din—
No, this would have reached us as
Wo bist du and could we really have
isolated a phrase like that, being new to a tongue?—
An area roped off for children held rough-
hewn, log play-structures, the bark left on so they
looked ribbed and reptilian; metal boxes strapped
to lamp poles spat out cigarette packs if you
thumbed in the coins. We might have thumbed
in the coins. The masts, when they split
the slate-coloured veils, leaned and rattled, or
knocked against parts of their rigging, and small
triangular flags hung limp from the upper reaches
where the masts narrowed. Gulls landed—or terns
landed—on the crosspieces where the sails were
furled and tied like camping gear. It might have
rained, as our feet were soaked through, and we wanted
not to be where we were, but felt also an internal
pressure, like a note left for oneself in a home one
has yet to move into, to look, to take in the thick
beams of each building, the docks buried in fog,
the cider smell and steam from steel vats, the layer
of beaded wetness on things and the people who
handled those things: cups, wallets, paper containers
of food, rucksacks, umbrellas, the odd camera or
brass-handled cane. The ships lumbered away, sniffing
each other’s sterns; someone’s future warmed into
high resolution as love’s rags clapped in a weird wind.

The project is as rudimentary as any creative writing teacher could make it. Scene description. But it is so exquisitely visualized and intensely perceived that the scene is possibly more alive than if one visited it. Babstock goes beyond surfaces, but with the subtle inclusion of the speaker in the scene, “the we who might be thumbing the coins” and whose “feet were soaked through” that by the end of the poem the “someone” whose “future warmed” is almost assuredly a member of that group, that couple. The scene transforms the speaker. It is heartbreakingly rendered and mined for its hidden value. It seems to me a great object study in what can be wrung out of what is essentially a still life.

Oh to be so patient so as to let the scene come to oneself the way Babstock has done in this piece.

Then a few pages later we get “Compatibilist” [3:34] with its interest in compatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive entities in the world. Babstock is not afraid of the overtly philosophical, the big idea. It is a marvel how he can do so much else. As readers we should be obliged to take of this kind of weighty territory as well, territory that too frequently poets in the US fear to tread, or if they do, they do so ponderously. I guess they still grow ideas in Canada. Here in the US we just sell rock stardom.

I will be dipping into this book for a long time I feel. Every time I pick up the book and read a few pages I am indebted to its author for his ability to recharge my own instincts to write. He keeps it thrilling, and I encounter Easter eggs on every page. It is hard to encapsulate within one small space such as this the freshness that is contained in this book. Airstream Land Yacht is certainly one of my favorite books of the last several years.

But probably we should give Babstock the last word on his oeuvre in Airstream Land Yacht:

The Lie Concerning the Work

Most were written at home,
some done away,
a few in a bar,
one inside his head.

Many had a tendency to roam,
some felt grey,
a few went too far,
that last refused to be read.

STILL ANOTHER DAY—PABLO NERUDA tr. by William O' Daly

2008-04-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

Reading Pablo Neruda’s Still Another Day right after watching Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” reminds me of how hopeful in his lament for nature Neruda can be, how much his passion for a nation can root itself in a call to remember the spirit. Both of these could be lessons for contemporary Americans to take note of if we weren’t on our own peculiar spiritual trip of consumer satisfaction. Imagine this. A twenty-eight section poem and not one brand name is mentioned.

I have always been fascinated by how Neruda is able to cast his mystical spell over a reader by invoking a spray of disparate objects in his catalogs. Neruda at his best seems to intuitively understand the quality possessed by each object he invokes. He expertly picks each object for its right weight and sound. The disparate nature of the items he invokes establishes the breadth of his eye and mind, and I think this is what is most contagious for me in Neruda’s work. Perhaps this expansiveness might seem alienating to an American reader for whom the poem is a well-heeled display that never wanders from its frame, the way a contemporary American grade school student never wanders off his/her task and drill.

In this rather slim volume of twenty-eight short poems that Neruda wrote just before his death in 1973, William O’ Daly tends a very spare and taut line as one might expect in these poems that serve as guides and meditations. O’ Daly describes this long poem in twenty eight parts in this way:

The reader might experience this long poem as a sequence of distillates or perhaps crystallizations, clarified visions of recurrent themes, charged with the poet’s urgent need to consider them one last time

Like Gore, Neruda is concerned with his country’s land and soil as the essence of the nation, that element to which all humanity and history returns and is reborn. In the introduction O’ Daly describes the influence of the Araucanian indians’ resistance on Neruda and how their resistance, resulting in La Frontera, a borderland wilderness on the edge of civilization, makes itself present in the early poems of this sequence. O’ Daly also comments on how Neruda’s ear for the Mapuche language (of the Araucanian) as a child manifests itself in Neruda’s line, using hard vowel sounds that stand in contrast to the melodic runs.

Mostly Still Another Day is the story of Neruda’s attachment to his homeland. He tells us this in section VI

VI

Pardon me, if when I want
to tell the story of my life
it’s the land I talk about.
This is the land.
It grows in your blood
and you grow.
If it dies in your blood
you die out.

Clearly, Al Gore must have been channeling Neruda. Each one of Neruda’s spree of things named is like Gore with another one of his gleaming graphs of data. The cumulative effect is of a world perilously hanging on the edge, waiting for some breath from the south to breathe life back into it.

Neruda writes short poems that address Yumbel, Angol, Temuco, Clear Boroa, Harp of Osorno, Pedro and then Neruda turns to his own relationship with the land, acknowledging his uselessness in the face of it.

XVI

Each in the most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few, the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth.

Through the days, the months, the personages, the land, and the oceans, the glue that holds Still Another Day together is Neruda himself. At times the O’ Daly renders him, he sounds almost confessional, as in XVII when he writes:

I was that distant being
sickened by the carbon fumes
of the locomotive.
I didn’t exist, yet.
I had something to discover.
My poetry isolated me
and joined me to everyone.
That night I would
have declared Spring.

These sentences are very declarative, not the usual lilt one ascribes to Neruda. However, to my elemental Spanish (informed mostly by my knowledge of Portuguese), the translation appears to be right on. Is this unusually flat Neruda? I think so. One wonders if there isn’t an imperative as a translator to take liberties in order to bring the music back into the language. The strictest translator would stand aghast at such a suggestion. A translator like Bly would not be so ready to dismiss such a project. These are the two schools of translation as they have been passed down forever and ever.

Neruda reminisces about other items in his past, his grandfather Don José Angel Reyes, a kingdom the color of amaranth, how he once stopped in nothingness near Antofagasta. It is there Neruda seeks the purpose of a land (which parallels his own purposelessness in section XVI). He finds it in the sands of Isla Negra and at the whaling town of Quintay and eventually in the day itself and its rhythms, particularly those of the wave. It is that wave, the wave of humanity tied to a specific place, that does not die at the end — of course, it could be made uninhabitable due its being underwater as a result of global warming. I guess Neruda didn’t quite foresee that.

O’ Daly has made it his task for the last thirty years to translate the work of Neruda that was published after 1962. Still Another Day was the first book from this era of Neruda’s life that O’ Daly discovered back in 1975 in Modesto, and since then he has published five other volumes of Neruda’s work on Copper Canyon Press — Winter Garden, The Separate Rose, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, and the Book of Questions. O’ Daly will have two more volumes out on Copper Canyon later this year. But with Still Another Day there is a range of styles and themes that will reward the impatient newcomer and satisfy those who have long been acquainted with his work.

What can be said of the poet who toils and lives with a single foreign poet through most of his/her life? This is dedication that cannot be easily dismissed. It speaks of an obsession that runs in the opposite direction of what most American poets, particularly young American poets are about — dedication to the self and one’s own work, especially the selling and promoting of it. O “Daly, like his poetic counterpart Neruda, has entered into the polis of poetry and we, as readers, are made richer for his efforts. Long may they continue.

KIM BARNES

2008-04-09T00:20:00.000-07:00

Kim Barnes read from her Pulitzer Prize Finalist memoir entitled "Hungry for the World". She began her reading discussing the unwritten codes that we live by.

Kim Barnes reading from "Hungry for the World" [37:05]

Here she appears as 1920's silent film star Nell Shipman, famous for her role in the film "Back to God's Country" [1919].

FRENCH KISS DESTINY: THE DVD Live from the Heart of San Francisco. Written & Performed by MARVIN R. HIEMSTRA

2008-04-07T14:30:00.000-07:00

Marvin Hiemstra is living proof that a poem can make a person smile, even laugh out loud, and still be filled with social relevance, high-wire poetics, and deeply-felt emotion. I’ve been fortunate to see Marvin’s live performances twice now; once in Oakland, and again in San Francisco. He brought down the house. Now his work can be enjoyed on DVD. (If this sounds like a blurb, it’s not. I just plain like this guy and his work).

Marvin created this DVD to, as he puts it, “suggest the wild and wooly kick of poetry before the Victorians so relentlessly glued poetry to the printed page and sat on it.” French Kiss Destiny is not Spoken Word. Nor is it Performance Poetry in the vein of Hedwig Gorski’s poem-songs. Marvin’s performances are more akin to a theatrical experience. He makes full use of his voice and body and even a magical ring that whispers phrases into his ear just when he needs them: “arrogant hangnail.”

There’s a playful tenderness at the heart of Marvin’s poems. He’s “never met a quark I didn’t like;” he tells us “angels never need to floss or wax or flush;” and he thanks Vaughn, a beloved cat, whose “twelve years gave us a gentle world.”

The production value of French Kiss Destiny is good, but no frills. Marvin is at center stage. The poems are clear and audible. The DVD is organized into three segments, shot at three locations: The Garden, The Heart, and The Sky.

The Garden is filmed in an urban garden with the sounds of the city in the background, including the occasional horn and siren. He introduces us to “Reincarnation for Beginners” and provides a remedy to an age-old problem of people falling asleep during poetry readings: a Chinese tone block that he raps between phrases. He also tells us, “Poetry is just like fishing. Some days you don’t catch a thing.”

The Heart is set in the silence of a Japanese mediation room—the sliding door slightly ajar to remind us there is still a world out there. “Some poets can’t find themselves,” he says. “Why don’t they look in the nearest mirror?” He asks us to “begin each day with a quick review of your destiny” and to appreciate coincidence, which “never let’s you down.” In one poem, Marvin tells a story of himself as an Iowa farm boy just having seen Marilyn Monroe in the movie “Bus Stop.” He pronounces Marilyn a Star to his traditional Dutch community, who simply chalk his enthusiasm up to hormones. As an adult, years later, after watching “The Prince and the Showgirl” on television, he reaffirms his youthful pronouncement. “Let’s just screw gender for a minute,” Marvin says. “Nobody will ever be that irresistible, with that much delicious class, ever again.”

In the final segment, The Sky, Marvin takes us up onto a rocky hilltop. “Where oh where is my audience?” he asks. “Ah, deep blue sky.” He invites us to make our own trek to the mountaintop. “Please take your poem to the top of the nearest cooperating mountain and shout it out. Listen to the echo.” He brings us back to sea level and down to the very ground itself, kneeling to bestow a kiss of gratitude. “I always want to kiss the earth.” Kiss. “After all, I owe the earth big time.” Kiss. “I wouldn’t be where I am without you.”

French Kiss Destiny: The DVD offers the viewer a refreshingly good time. What I hold closest to my heart is Marvin’s reminder of “the importance of human affection in this totally terrifying 21st Century.”

You can order French Kiss Destiny (Zippy Digital, 2007) directly from Marvin. His email is drollmarv@aol.com. The price is $14.95. Book Stores can order it from Books in Print: the Video Listing. French Kiss Destiny: The Book is forthcoming.

A final note: Marvin’s poems read well on the page, too. A Pulitzer nominee, Marvin often writes about the challenges of writing poems intended to be both read on the printed page and heard in performance. Check out his column, “Poetry In Spite of Itself,” in the Bay Area Poet’s Seasonal Review.

Congratulations!

2008-04-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to The Great American Pinup team member Forrest Gander, who was recently named a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

ROBERT WRIGLEY—March 26, 2008

2008-03-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

When I talked to Robert Wrigley after the reading during the book signing, he asked me if I was the guy online who was making the baseball cards of poets. I said, “No.” But it sounded like a good idea to me.

Armed with my two sidekicks, sons Soren and Reiner, I sat through a 45-minute set with my younger son yawning only twice. But later that night, with an inscription from Robert Wrigley to him in Wrigley’s Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems, he fell asleep with the book next to him, slightly displacing his stuffed Sammy Sosa bear.

My older son began to smother the dog with affection after we reread “Do You Love Me?” together. It was a night to remember, the kind that kids (and others) want to keep talking about (even more than the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie!).

Wrigley started the evening off with “Writer’s Block” about a young man who is uninspired by his girl friend. He then proceeded to ”Kissing a Horse” [0:59], followed by “Moonlight: Chickens on the Road” [5:04]. He then turned to his family porition of the show and read two poems about his daughter, now 20 but who was 3 in the one poem and 12 in the other poem about the dog. The first of these was ”About Language” [3:11] and the latter was ”Do You Love Me?” [1:42]. These two poems about his daughter were followed by a poem about his wife’s fondness for a ventriloquist’s dummy ”Mouth” [2:03]. Next, he asked the audience if they thought they would like to eat a cow’s pancreas. Many of the attendees, not of Depression-era age, were not particularly taken with this idea, but it led Wrigley to introduce ”Sweetbreads” [3:17] and relate his grandmother’s claim to fame for expert preparation of the internal organs of a cow.

With the end of the family portion of the reading, Wrigley turned to one of his favorite subjects: nature. He read a poem about camping entitled “Discretion” that originally appeared in The Atlantic. Then he told a tale of how one moves the carcass of a dead horse with nothing other than one’s wits in ”Horseflies.” He ended his section of the reading from Earthly Meditations by reading “The Pumpkin Tree” and “Dark Forest.”

The last part of the program consisted of quite new and unpublished works or as Wrigley described them himself, “pretty green.” And they were a pretty green, kind of a kelly green, but maybe that’s not what he meant. The first was “A Lock of Her Hair” which, during the intro, Wrigley wondered what one should do with a lock of hair. He briefly went into a 18th century British affect to parody what “a lock of her hair might summon to him.” He further explained that the poem was the closest thing he had written to rap. He apologized for misspeaking a little, but all in all, listening to the recording again, there was no apparent discernible glitch. The audience was very appreciative, sensing that Wrigley was trying to meet them and their aesthetic concerns. This was followed by the short “Cemetery Moles” and finally, the evening was capped off with ”Progress.” [3:48]

Yet, after giving my consent to Wrigley for him to fully ply his poetic trade in its multiple dimensions in front of my kids, there was a line in “About Language” (I’ll let you decide which one it was), that was repeated as a mantra on the way home in the car, which just goes to show—you can dress ‘em up, even make sure their zippers are zipped up, but you can’t take ‘em anywhere. Yeah, they’re dangerous at 3, but still so at 7 and 9.

ANN KILLOUGH—BELOVED IDEA

2008-03-25T08:35:00.000-07:00

During contemporary poetry’s daily calisthenics of undermining deep meaning (even deconstructing signification entirely), devaluing image, eradicating continuity, erasing allusion, Ann Killough’s Beloved Idea endeavors to provide the next exciting installment of empty device—that of metaphor. Her project in Beloved Idea is to expose the stability of metaphor. In Beloved Idea, Killough endeavors to short circuit any connection to a stable single metaphor in a poem by exploding the possibility of a single metaphor in her poems. The poems present a seemingly stable metaphor in their titles which then are deconstructed throughout the body of each poem, usually in very self-referential ways. The deconstruction usually occurs in two ways: (1) the initial metaphor in the title starts to take on so much metaphorical weight so as to render it useless as metaphor (i.e. it is used as a metaphor for this and that and the other thing to the point where its stability as locus of insight breaks down; an infinite metaphor) and (2) other items in the poem sneak up on the title metaphor and compete with it, draining it of its power the way Superman is drained by Kryptonite, attacking it as the central focus until it is nearly dead. So is Beloved Idea really another venue to play the dead metaphor game?

Killough’s text works on another level as well, and this redeems its project masterfully. The central metaphor in the book (her beloved idea) is that of “the nation” (presumably our United States). Killough is set out to expose this metaphor as adeptly as she does the more solitary ones in her poem titles. In doing so, she is asking “what is a nation?” “what is our nation?” In this way Killough’s book ceases to be just about textuality and breaks through to our actual experience of hanging this absurd little title of “nation” onto all of America’s disparate populations. She asks how could it possibly fit (which is a question I have kept asking myself since 2003 . . . along with who gets to define how that metaphor of the nation is used).

It is this questioning of authority that Killough also echoes in the last line of the first piece “[The Wound]” in the book.

When the mob gathered and wrestled her to the ground she just kept yelling and pointing at visible articles of metaphor. the metaphor of the mob, for example, and of the ground, which was so repulsively comforting. She knew the metaphor of the wound was still safe in her poem, which was turning out to be a manger like all the others.

As though the poem had begun to cooperate with the authorities behind her back, which it undoubtedly had.

The notion of comfort and safety in metaphor which the poem addresses, of course, is similar to the kinds of feelings that we expect authority to project in terms of, say, national security. The fact that her own creation, her own offspring is complicit with such authority behind her back must be discomfiting for Killough. She acknowledges this discomfort and seems resigned to it, the way, I imagine, we might resign ourselves as readers to the discomfort of not being able to hang anything heavy on the metaphor for fear that it should slide off.

In ”Body in Evidence” Killough employs the similes “like a lynched man” and “like a lost sheep” in such a way that provides an insight into her technique. In the first case, the hanging metaphor is compatible with the idea of a tenuous “fabric of ideological evidence.” In this case we are given a metaphor that works reasonably well. However, just when we expect other metaphors to behave, they don’t. The second simile is more like this. How does a lost sheep hang? The obviousness is dealt a severe blow. So, as readers our expectations that metaphor will work are built up by the first usage and then dashed by the second. Of course, one might point out that by allowing the first simile to behave properly she is setting us up as readers to stretch ourselves past the apparent incongruity. We tell ourselves, “Well, it must fit. The other one worked pretty well. Maybe if I just stretch and tax my imagination more.”

The ”White Whale” is an obvious reference to Moby Dick a book so rife with metaphor, it serves as an irresistible target for Killough. Here we are reminded “one likely referent for the whale was the leviathan obsessions of the entire metaphorical body of her nation.” Here American desire seems to be implicated. Even more so in the next stanza/paragraph: “With its vast apparatus of conquest and its high-frequency cries of longing.” Moby Dick and the nation conflate, which points to the endless metaphorical chain she is building. It is endless like the “national desire.” and finally, the insanity of Ishmael is brought into the picture as it is mirrored by the collective insanity of the nation. Ishmael is alone in the water, tilting at windmills, so to speak the same way the U.S. has had to more or less go it alone in Iraq. The question remains whether we up to our collective arse in blood or oil.

By the end, “her nation” has its “relative sanity questioned to the point that there is some confusion about whether its relative sanity ever existed at all.”

Of course, what send-up of metaphor would be complete without a look at the grand master of them all, The Bible. In ”Holy Ghost” Killough explodes the notion of the “holy ghost” all over the screen. She seems to be duplicating the effect of television and how its duplication of image serves to concatenate metaphor, hyperlinking one image to the next through a few wonderful jump cuts. The holy ghost is the body politic. The holy ghost is a garment. The holy ghost comes upon the tongues of fire. The holy ghost as the actual process of consumption. Etc. This is reminiscent of seeing a car in five back-to-back commercials. What do all those cars mean? Why nothing, but such a comforting image sure does help in pushing the product. As Killough points out near the end, the holy ghost-become-body politic, become-garment, become-process-of-its-own-consumption becomes, finally, the site of its own annihilation. I wonder, though, if this means that I don’t have to pay attention to it anymore the way I don’t pay attention to commercials? Or, conversely, does it mean I have to pay strict attention to commercials to decipher how they may be manipulating me? Is it OK to feel manipulated? If one is manipulated without knowing, is this what is called pleasure? Or is that too old-fashioned?

I believe there may be a brand new form of pleasure packaged and ready to be delivered. This would certainly be in accordance with my experience up to this point in my life, though I might not be able to articulate how it has happened. If I accept it is my duty to attempt to articulate it, will my impulse to live solely within the frame of my own present experience be seen as negligence of duty? But what if this makes me happy?

Alas, I digress into a chain of babble which is fed by suspicion, a suspicion that I might not be happy, but that I could be happier if only I did or didn’t watch commercials.

There are other pieces in Beloved Idea which relax the speculative eye turned against Killough’s nation. One of these is “[Underpants].”

[Underpants]

Underpants as necessarily referring to the manly underpants of startling size that regularly were hanging in a row on the porch across the alley from her bedroom.

As though a row of overweight fathers had flown through Brookline in their underpants and gotten caught in a clothesline.

The kind of fathers that run the world means of secret meetings on every continent flying over the seven seas in formation like Canada geese.

But that now had to fly with no underpants, their international penises hanging down like unusable landing gear.

•

She always rejoiced at the sight of the underpants.

They seemed to offer a kind of hope, although she wasn’t sure what.

Perhaps the kind of hope that is normally offered by undergarments hanging on a clothesline with their scanned faces broadcasting a story of organized and intimate renewal.

Of how somebody is thinking ahead.

•

Or perhaps the hope was more foundational, so to speak, and had to do with the sturdiness of the operation that produced the recurrent row of underpants.

Not just the dependably loud and Russian argumentation out of which the underpants appeared to be extruded like a row of continuing and faithful facts, but also the unvarying style and whiteness of the underpants.

As if they were a testament to some rigorous belief, perhaps in the absolute.

Perhaps just in the indisputable rightness of at least one thing.

•

Which brought her back to the migrating fathers in the original hypothesis and what it was exactly they had lost.

What it was exactly they had left innocently hanging across from her like a succession of mute and outmoded pronouns.

Like a succession of hopes of protection from the humiliation of nakedness, a succession of humiliatingly naked and public hopes.

Without which they flew shamelessly over the seven seas but would never again be able to land.

In this poem Killough takes herself less seriously unless, of course, you are one of those people who takes underpants very seriously. Which I sometimes do. For example, I am of the opinion that boys wear underpants but those who sport “international penises” probably wear “underwear.” In fact, I would bet that any man over the age of 20 who referred to himself in a locker room as wearing “underpants” probably would be looked at as “not right.” This small detail aside (which, however, does cast some doubt on whether Killough has tread closely enough to that form of divine inspiration that is male idiocy she is criticizing) the fear of the Trilateral Commission is writ large in this poem. If only the kind of masculine junta that Killough refers to existed. Unfortunately, my perspective reveals no such thing. Mostly, I see male confusion exhibited during the game of “I’m wearing the pants.” But not only are none of them wearing the pants, so to speak. They aren’t wearing any underpants either. Which isn’t such a bad thing. I mean, really, why do any of us even wear underpants?

Finally, there is the Statue of Liberty, that most grandiose metaphor for the US that can be had. From “Statue of Liberty” Killough assures us that The Statue of Liberty is essentially plastic. It has “begun to change something even in you, even in me.”

Beloved Idea is a concept book. It rides mostly on its ideas and the situations it imagines. It is never afraid to take on weight and then dump it in a heap by the side of the road Killough is traveling. It is an interesting trip through the minefield of metaphor. Each one you step on has the possibility of exploding.

However, if you are the kind of reader who reads to have a poet map on to your experience, she may not live up to your expectations. Similarly, if you expect a linguistic tour de force with as much music as there is concept for the mind to chew on, then you may find yourself still wanting more. The music here is not gutsy solos with a lot of flashy eighth notes and moments of syncopation but quirky minuets.

My main question is whether after we have emptied texts of all their devices whether we will want to read any of them anymore in their present condition or whether we will want to acknowledge them and embrace their shortcomings as we invite them back, one by one, into our texts, even, god forbid, into our narratives. Killough distrusts the glorious metaphor when she writes:

That if one feels compelled to pursue a glorious metaphor and defoliate the hell out of it one should probably go away and reexamine one’s linguistic priorities.

While her unkempt garden speaks to my desire to let the oleander overtake the highway median, I can’t help myself too often in awe of the last few riverine oaks poking up out of the floor of the Valley into this Valley air. If someday I might get lost in the upper branches of its canopy, please help to remind me to come back down to the ground. Meanwhile, onwards with the birds . . . may someday they land somewhere.

Edythe Haendel Schwartz—3/10/08

2008-03-11T22:32:00.000-07:00

The “very determined” Edythe Haendel Schwartz arrived in Sacramento on a lovely evening that saw a few of her cohorts in the Davis Aquatic Masters come to see her. The first piece she read was a new piece entitled “Olympics,” and it was an homage to the notion that “the prize goes to the last one alive.”

The next piece she read was from her chapbook put out by Finishing Line Press entitled Exposure. The piece was called “Chromatic” and it was dedicated a couple she had known some years ago, Jim and Marion.

Nest was “Body Project” and “Does it Hurt?” which focuses on a child’s lesson about pain, such a profound question to a 5-year-old child.

The title piece “Exposure” dealt with water themes and fear, fear that comes from the external environment and the fear of the bureaucratic machinery in the city. The poem was a composite of voices she heard and internalized growing up.

“Reprieve” involved Edythe’s husband, Sy, encountering a sparrow that had struck the window.

Edythe’s father was a civil engineer and “Suspension” was triggered by Edythe’s memory of her father stopping the family car at various suspension bridges and discussing the details of them, in particular the difference between stress and strain.

“Care” was about a former student of hers who became sick, and then came two ekphrastic pieces: “Still Water” (about the indiscriminate placement of a figure in a landscape painting) and “Francois Gilot Tells Picasso He Must Paint Peace” (about Picasso’s “War and Peace” at Stone Chapel in Vallauris, France).

In “Rafting” Schwartz explored the flow of the Limay River through the Patagonian Steppes and the current of intolerance leading to massacre through the centuries. The final line asks, “What’s to come?”

“Habanera” was written in remembrance of the time when her mother had died. the poem reflects on friendship and art, the two keepsakes from her that are objectified in the poem by a friend’s flowers, yellow jonquils, brought to the house and the presence of the music of Carmen.

Finally, “The Conchologist and the Shoemaker” was inspired by the conversation she overheard between a blind professor at UC Davis and a shoemaker. In the poem the conchologist makes the reader he is very aware of his world despite the loss of one of his major senses.

PAUL HOOVER and NGUYEN DO at Sacramento State

2008-03-03T22:48:00.000-08:00

Nguyen Do and Paul Hoover came to Sacramento State to do a bilingual reading of some of the pieces from their anthology of post-1956 Vietnamese Poetry entitled Black Dog, Black Night on Milkweed Editions.

They initially spoke of the importance of poetry in Vietnam as a vehicle to carry important information in Vietnamese culture and of the importance of belonging to the Vietnamese Writers Association, a distinction which confers immediate unquestioned status to its members and gives them the equivalent rank to that of major in the army.

In particular, the anthology examines the work of members of the Nhan Van (“Humanities”) movement, whose emphasis on freedom and expression found them at odds with the official poetry culture of the Vietnamese Writers Association and the government.

Van Cao, also a member of Nhan Van, and a composer found himself on the outside of the accepted norm in spite of the fact that he is the composer of the Vietnamese national anthem.

Nguyen Do was, himself, asked to leave Vietnam in the early 90’s when he came to the United States. Nguyen Do’s work reflects an urban melancholy full of despair, if not downright nihilism. You can see and hear this in the poem he reads both in Vietnamese and in English ”Unlucky Days” [2:14]

Another one of his pieces read by the author in Vietnamese and Paul Hoover in English is ”Headache” [1:39].

Hoover talked of his experiences in Vietnam meeting the top members of the Vietnam Writers Association and noting the extreme respect for authority that exists there. He also spoke of the great amount of cultural authority that poetry possesses in Vietnam, how, for example, he was whisked through the streets of Hanoi with the help of police cars in front and back of the “poetry motorcade” sounding their sirens all the way. For the American poet, his tales bordered and then crossed over into the surreal.

The two of them ended the evening by reading two pieces by Hoang Hung, one of the leading figures of the Nhan Van movement. The first one, Untitled [Where Do the Stairs Lead Us] was read by Nguyen Do in Vietnamese first and then by Paul Hoover in English [1:43].

Finally, Paul Hoover read Hoang Hung’s “The Smell of Rain [1:35] and offered a brief commentary on how he came to be trusted to participate in the translations of the work in the anthology.

At one point Nguyen Do chided Paul Hoover that Paul would sing the English translation of the poem. To which Paul looked up and rather quizzically asked “Sing?” so it is with heavy heart that I must inform everyone there is no digital record of Paul singing any luc bat that night.

ANDER MONSON Caught LIVE in the middle of a very adult game

2008-02-24T23:58:00.000-08:00

Ander Monson arrived at the UC Davis campus to audition for the role as main subject in a very adult game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. It was a game where you stand in front of a bunch of scrutinizing adults, stand still long enough so that each thumb tack jabbed into your rear end will make you bleed.

He performed this audition while reading a story about a couple’s obsession with a stove, or was it a range? The couple was trapped in an Extreme Makeover-like hell, from which there seemed no escaping. But the reading of that story was accompanied by a system crash which rendered the whole thing moot.

However, there were additional “injury” minutes tacked on to the end, where Monson had to field a stormy brew of inquiries, which, lucky for him, led to a series of amazing brain flips which we, up in the booth, are still referring to as “Spontaneous Essay With No Particular Authorship No.1” and “ “Spontaneous Essay with No Particular Authorship No.2”.

NOAH ELI GORDON—NOVEL PICTORIAL NOISE

2008-02-20T09:17:00.000-08:00

So why has American surrealism taken a tumble in the eyes of American readers (particularly within academia) recently? This tradition championed by the likes of many notable French writers, Lorca and Alberti primarily among the Spaniards, Sachs and Trakl in German (to name just a few on the short list) has spread its tentacles throughout the world, boasting of adherents in many eras and nations.

I suppose the kind of juxtaposition of disjunctive-yet-strangely-associative imagery has found its own orthodoxy, right down to its sensibility seeping into the everyday pop song and band name. This kind of strangely associative (dare I say resonant) imagery was reminiscent of a kind of subconscious treatment of the world. Many of its adherents would look either fondly or negatively upon another’s work for the full commitment a poet might have to this subconscious ideal. A poet whose work seemed to be fully subsumed by dream might be afforded authenticity among surrealists. Ones whose work might embrace just some of its absurdist accents might be relegated as one of its more marginal constituents.

For the surrealists, the essential tension was between that of the world as it was experienced, mostly seen, the visualized world, and that of another world which was not seen but was somehow ever more present, present at a level which could be apprehended subconsciously. Perhaps more essentially, surrealism pitted the experienced world versus the subliminally perceived world.

This essential tension has been supplanted more recently by what seems to be the two immovable objects which some may claim have hardened into poetry “schools” today in American poetry. These two immovable objects are one’s direct experience of the world (primarily through the senses) and one’s experience of the world as it is brought to an individual through various different mediated forms. In short, direct experience vs. mediatized experience.

The category of mediatized experience is much broader in its critique of a fully observable and interactive physical world than the critique of the physical world that the surrealists advanced.

Those who understand the world primarily through its mediatized forms (ostensibly through reading — or, in effect, language — through moving image, through information dumps and news sources, to name just a few) inhabit a post-modernist world, and those poets who try to deal with the realities of this world tend to make their poems more and more like these sources, and in so doing, comment on what life is like in the highly mediatized 21st century. One essential question these poets tend to ask is what human life has become when it has become various kinds of sucking at these mediatized sources. They do this at the expense of asking what someone’s experience is who might be miliking a cow or scraping the remnants of food off of another person’s plate.

Another way of thinking of this dichotomy is through the categories of Ron Silliman, who tends to break the world of poetry down into two main groups: post-avants vs. the school of quietude. I will refrain from rehearsing these ideas again except to point out how the post-avants in their often hyper-disjunctive and perambulatory episodes seem to mimic the behavior of a person with a remote control and a Red Bull. In other words, all experience seems to be delivered from elsewhere and the poet is parsing his environment. On the other hand, the school of quietude seems to refer to those who have actually experienced the world in some tangible and physical way and the moment of quietude, the moment of reflection, if you will, is what the poem swirls around. That moment is the illusion (the post-avants might say) of an utterly comprehensible moment in one’s life that delivers a milligram of truth and insight about human experience in the physical world (something that seems to me to be not only relevant but also at times enjoyable).

While the dichotomy I refer to above is an arbitrary one, for one could easily enough break the poetry world down into other categories, there is a certain utility to these terms which Simon DeDeo over at Rhubarb is Susan has discussed in his “Opinions I hold About Poetry”

"post avant" and "school of quietude" are irritatingly useful terms, we all know what they mean, and given a room full of poetry books any three poets chosen at random could easily sort them into the two piles with little disagreement.

Or Eliot Weinberger in an interview in BOMB

Getting back to poetry, what’s surprising to me is that, with all these things in the world, American poets are mainly preoccupied with autobiographical anecdotes, or pomo ironic skating on the “surface” of language. Every man is an island in the sea of information.

I don’t dispute Simon’s and Eliot’s claims. I just can’t resist conflating their categories no matter how time tested they seem.

This brings me to Noah Eli Gordon, who if he isn’t a surrealist, he most assuredly is a post-surrealist, whatever that means. In his prize-winning book Novel Pictorial Noise Gordon navigates between the immediately experienced world and the mediatized one, asking:

Would you choose the event or the box from which it’s broadcast? A shadow mars the screen. Light blinds the owl

And we are off chasing down the margins of the natural world and the hungry mediatized one, presumably reflecting an image of the natural world that can be experienced.

Novel Pictorial Noise persists in setting up a tension between a fluid block of prose that moves in interesting thought patterns (almost always with a clever end rhyme at the end of the block) and a disarticulated erasure on the opposing page. While one is reading it, one gets the feeling that one is receiving the detritus of a post-apocalyptic English on the left hand side and on the right hand side a monologue of one of its frantic denizens poised at the tipping point before it slides into the abyss.

These monologues are the meeting place of (as the book title suggests) of the sheer novelty and invention of language, the image and sound. The delightful playspace that Gordon carves out as these three things converge make for an interesting read. The erasures I was not as taken with. I kept waiting and hoping for them to engage in some sort of cross-talk with their opposing pages, but any connection I made seemed forced and arbitrary. The erasures page is not commentary. It stands alone and challenges you to name what is missing. Or perhaps these are fragments of dilapidated language machine. In any case, as items to ponder they held my brief curiosity but were mostly just that, curiosities.

The monologues are where the “real” meat of the book lies. Whether you like the portrait of a mind moving a million miles an hour as it twists through the air like a bullet, one must find that the sheer energy that is felt rising out of these text assemblages is impressive. Many readers might find that this reckless speed is showy and unnecessarily risky. I found myself reliving moments of the car chase in The French Connection, my scrawny hide mounted right up there on the dashboard next to the rolling camera.

But sometimes the meditation is more involuted:

When the actual is transformed into its representation, representation becomes actualized, as though a net were cast not to catch whatever punctures its vicinity, but to make transparent the lapse of possession one proffers through the introduction, disappearance, and reappearance of an image whose architecture is such that in setting forth one is simultaneously building a synonym for backtracking, a barrier torn down, erected again in a slightly more ominous manner, the knowledge of instability orbiting, uncertain where to land, until one realizes that every action contains a kind of flag waving, a constituency worthy of saving.

[Note: the block nature of this prose poem has been sacrificed as well as the drop cap letter that starts the poem]. The old surrealist ploy of subverting the authority of the speaker is at work again here. The block prose and the drop cap lettering suggest that this could be some sort of encyclopedia entry from a turn-of-the-century tome.

The authority might be highly suspect except for the fact that if one stays with it long enough (lets face it: there’s an outside chance of this happening), one can derive some sort of commentary on what it is like to hold an image in one’s head and then recapture it. Certainly the piece is metatextual, setting up its own barriers that force the reader to backtrack. This kind of perversion of setting up text as object lesson seems like a noble gesture to the reader, not as coyness as some readers might submit. Or if you need the author’s intention to be stated a little more directly:

It is “the knowledge of instability orbiting, uncertain where to land.”

I can also imagine a reader who might see this kind of writing as a male fantasy of word play and thought play which is being substituted for other playthings no longer publicly allowed during the course of adult malehood.

I, however, as a male, resent this implication, for playing with words is its own distinct pleasure.

The other technique that comes to mind when reading the monologues is that of the cut-up. The shifting diction that Gordon employs suggests this technique, yet Gordon maintains a tautness and control that other practitioners of the cut-up might not opt for. Disjunction is often the theme that these writers underscore. To his credit, with Gordon I get more of the feel of insane lecture than I do of sampled text. I can get text samples from Google searches [enter: flarf].

I like how both Gordon and Ben Lerner use the prose poem as a container for very elaborate and labyrinthine thinking which might not be approved by the American Philosophical Association. This is magical thinking the way God intended it. Gordon writes, “I hold that thinking is an image of art.” Does he really mean here that the artifact is dead? Or does he mean that the thought process that goes into creating an art object is itself the object? Both possibilities are intriguing, but one might assume that his thought is the spectacle he is creating.

It is wild. It circles back. It leaps. It rolls over itself. It turns back and attacks. It sends a Hail Mary into the end zone. It habituates to the tall grass. It bites off and refuses to swallow. It darts and drifts, darts and drifts. It denotes and expects to forget the denotation. It’s hyperactive and it sighs. It creates surpluses and then mails them off to relatives for free. It slices. It dices. It even makes Julienne fries.

There should be no doubting it is part of the lineage that John Ashbery has spawned, and the argument you might be having with yourself while you are reading it is the same argument you had with yourself twenty years ago when you were reading Three Poems. Artifice and surface are clearly foregrounded. The act of reading [note: a mediatized experience] is of great concern as well. However, to return to my main point at the outset about the dichotomy between the mediatized and the actual experience, I get the sense in Gordon that among the surfaces he is creating and while he does his semiotic squirming, he is pointing to actual experience.

. . . A shadow mars the screen now that the night sky has dislodged a light snow. I think of the hunt I’ve no dog in, invert the thought to return to an heirloom of excess conjecture to the auctioneer’s kennel. The owl is asleep. The sunflower is asleep. Dogs are sleeping. Snow falls over my perpetual excuse, turning the narrative loose.

Here the object lesson is definitely “turning the narrative loose.” But there is a perfect pictorial logic in this series of images. Gordon is not referring to another world. He is referring to the physical world. Yet while he makes this reference, he is also talking about the technique of how the surface of the text has been assembled. We arrive at commentary on the mediatized life as well as the immediately experienced.

Crafting a line like “To annul a model of the universe one need only assemble it in reverse.” signals a spatial awareness which suggests intimate knowledge, perhaps such intimate knowledge that Gordon can point to its absurdities.

The question arises then: why does he point to its absurdities so often and not to its plainness, its comprehensible beauty? I think that this is a valid question that should be put to all surrealists. My own surrealist homunculus responds by saying that absurdities are the little knots of thought where if we pull on a loose end hard enough, something will miraculously break free. I still care about that something that breaks free. That is vital experience, wondrous. The rest sometimes feels like an exchange of commodities.

As Gordon surges forward in the book, he explores many more object lessons: generating the imperceptible fable, wearing the face of the inadvertent anti-sage, an assertion of descriptive speech where “one need only to climb a real tree to see the artifice rooted in the external world,” “the attribution of captions to an otherwise blank page,” sustained advance to capture interest, the uprooting of ornamentation, self-erasure. All of these strategies are played out for a while within the monologue blocks. They are contained within them. It’s like he is playing hopscotch on every page, but in each case employing slight permutations of the rules.

Towards the latter half of the book Gordon turns his attention to not so much the reading of text but the creation of music, another form of mediation, but quite different from the textual concerns he addresses earlier on in the book.

And yet, perhaps it is among the wavering bits of music, the clang of percussion cutting through any discernible melody, that rays of light bend the whole of landscape in some nameless seed growing over the course of several millennia into the hardened stuff of history, as one must, after all, master microscope as well as telescope, note as well as chord, the dynamics of solvency and subtle exchanges of the plant kingdom, in order to see not only the square mesh in front of one’s face but also the slant of the hills just beyond the screen door, the exterior’s decor.

Here sound and light wreak havoc on the natural world so that it becomes a mere copy of itself, artificial even in its reality. Gordon seems to imply that even the natural world has artifice embedded in it.

Cherry Creek Road is, of course, composed of concrete, another neorealist line on the abstract canvas of the earth.

The conflation of the real and the unreal until they are indiscernible entities exploits the postmodernist fetish for the surface as the breeding ground for what is most important. Plant language in one of these surfaces and watch it grow.

However, I am not interested in Noah Eli Gordon as a postmodernist. There are enough of those kind around for the word to grow a little bit flabby. I referred to him earlier as a post-surrealist.

Now here is what the post in post-surrealism means. Surrealism is no longer about the subconscious floating around in an image bath. The new surrealism is more structural in its approach. No longer does the subconscious mind do battle with the perceived world and rehash it as imagery. It also does battle with all the forms of information and “packaged” elements within its browsing window. All of those appropriated forms.

Gordon not only successfully navigates them, exploiting their diction along the way, he comments on how his language imitates them, parodies them. His object lessons buried in the blocks of prose are the key for how a reader is supposed to read them. They are the machine code that, once gleaned, tells the reader how that information should be processed. And the subconscious is riffing on all of this and barely allowing the hint of the machine code to bleed through to conscious awareness.

It’s an insidious thing he does.

This insidiousness might not be something that hits a good number of readers at gut level, but Gordon’s percolating self-consciousness and daredevil movements have a visceral impact on me. They evoke a sensibility that is hard to articulate. I might even hazard that such a sensibility is close to being an emotional state that I can almost come to terms with. Gordon isn’t just telling his readers what to feel the way an American film does, he allows the nebulous to creep in. Others who are surer about the emotions that they want to have via poetry may feel a bit cheated.

Gordon may insist (though maybe insist is too strong of a word) he is “veering toward rhetorical extremes by assigning each a human face.” Each human face he assigns is a reminder that there are emotional markers attached to all the data flow. All the data really does make us feel an intoxicating nausea, and that’s the closest way, that I can imagine, of describing the human reaction to the physical world as Breton envisioned it.

Review of Kevin Rabas's poetry collection, Bird's Horn & Other Poems

2008-02-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

Rabas’s subject matter is a revolving door of topics: the poems in this collection explore everything from the jazz he swoons over to the particularities of love, writing, and family. The collection travels interesting territory: from jazz clubs in Kansas City to rural sculpture gardens and family anecdotes and a father’s rite of passage.

Legend is a common theme in this collection, and it extends from depictions of such icons as Charlie “Bird” Parker and family lore about “your father’s mother’s people." Rabas has reverence for the world’s quiet moments just as he holds a great love for the jazz alluded to in the collection’s title. In the title poem, Rabas writes:

Nights, I lent him my horn.
Afternoons, I wrapped my hands
around the horn Bird blew.
This was not unusual. Bird was often
without a horn. He’d blow into town, and everyone
would offer him one. He’d play anything.
Played a plastic saxophone, especially made,
just above the level of a toy in Toronto, I’m told.
They kept it. Put it in a museum.
Piece of plastic, played once, full of only
his spit. I didn’t learn a damn thing from him,
except to keep my hands
on my horn, keep my
hands on my horn
whatever horn I had.

This poem’s every twist and turn is highly controlled: one cannot deny its sly sense of humor circling the circumstances, skilled enjambment, and tornado-like shape? Rabas is well-aware of how legend is made – through repetition of story – and the artifacts, the toy-like sax Parker once touched, are met with the poet’s snark. The ending lines of this poem are like a hymn; the repetition in of sound and words is intoxicating. This is a poem to turn to when looking for Rabas’s collisions of sound and meaning: his sense of the line is keen, and what’s even keener is his sense of syncopation. Like Fulton’s fractal verse theory, the order of this poem is found in its disorder. The order in this poem is like whirlwind: one only ends the poem to begin it again.

The enjambment and repetition of “Love at Once” is like the best scatting and wailing of any blues song. Here, love revolves around the push-pull of expectation. Rabas begins the poem by writing,

She always found it easy to love,
and he found it hard to find love,
although there were few he did not
love. She gave everything at once,
and gave nothing until he knew
he could have everything
at once, until he knew he would not lose
everything at once, until he knew.

Again, Rabas uses repetition to pull the reader into the poem’s leaps. The yin yang pull of the poem’s partners is represented by the very structure of the poem. The connotations to a magnet are not accidental. There is a ripple-effect to these poems: we see the poetic lake and moments of change, but the change vibrates past the page, just as context shudders in the background.

If there’s a stutter to the collection, it’s when Rabas is too bogged down in context and story and when an image is too directly told: sometimes the charge of an idea or moment doesn’t translate and the music seems notched down for the sake of meaning. Is it fair to ask this skilled poet to forsake meaning for the grand leaps and crafty line work? Probably not: these images and stories mean something or this poet wouldn’t have made them timeless.

Rabas does find a balance between the jazz poems that focus on sound and the later narratives that focus on family, students, and fatherhood. His poem, “The Moon,” is able to reach past narrative or statement and tap into the music of his jazz poems. He writes:

I.
Don’t wait until you’re under. Don’t wait
until they’ve dressed you in a gown
with a slit along your spine. Don’t wait.
They’ll white-wall you, plastic glove you,
breathe into you from a plastic mask, metal tank.
They’ll fill your arms, your chest, with tubes –
use long, spent, see-through tubes on you,
never roots, never stems, never
fingertips on your chest, nor lips.
That cold touch of coffin sides holds
beneath every wheel and every rail.

II.
Everlasting day, say goodbye to night.
We’ve cut and sectioned our moon
and tied its pieces to our ceilings,
put the pale, big-bellied man on a rack
and split him, carted his parts
in every separate direction.
When we each keep a piece of him, he dims.
And we wonder why we can’t keep from staring
deep, deep into our TVs. We’re spot welding,
searching for another star. No, we’re
cooking our eyes with filament, lit wire.

Here, we have a poem that moves in and out of perspective. Here, we have Rabas’s trademark repetition and rat-a-tat-tatting pumping through a poem about life. The rhythm of this poem is controlled, and, like the other poems in this collection, there are grand leaps of logic and image. The piece begins with direct pleas to the reader, to the self, and to the world, as the poem progresses, the language grows more and more wild.

This is a poet to watch: his leaps of logic, use of line, and musical sensibilities are a breath of fresh air. Here, we have work that’s skilled without bowing to revision’s soul-sucking plague. Here, we have a poet who swings from poetry’s branches.

http://kevinrabas.com/blog/

Two Reviews of THE FORTUNATE ISLANDS by SUSAN KELLY-DeWITT

2008-02-06T10:23:00.000-08:00

The Fortunate Islands, Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s first full-length book, is glossed by a quote from Dava Sobel in reference to the Roman Egyptian mathematician, Ptolemy, who was “free to lay his prime meridian, the zero-degree longitude line, wherever he liked. He chose to run it through the Fortunate Islands…” With this kind of an epigraph, I had expected Kelly-DeWitt to expose her own longitudinal line in the guise of her spiritual philosophy, or the path that her life has wandered. The blurbs on the back cover of her book also presuppose issues of a tough childhood, father-issues, and a deeply impacted voice.

In the latter presupposition, Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s collection does not disappoint. Her language is wide-ranging and steeped in experience. The opening piece of the book suggests the cornucopious offerings to follow:

Question Mark Café

I’ve been sipping coffee in the dark café
which is my today-mind uncurtained: stark café.

The morning started crying for no apparent reason.
The dreads were circling, shark café.

How marooned I feel on this island of thought.
I’m reviving like a half-dead verb in the word café.

Name a word, any word. Soul could be the one you
choose. Go ahead, it’s okay, in the remarks café.

Who if I cried would hear me among the angelic
orders? (Rilke. The same old question mark café.)

Today I’m that torn moth lipping the jack-
in-the-pulpit of history, who’ll fly away: ghost café.

There is so much language to unpack here. The refrain word that terminates each couplet is modified over and over suggesting the multiplicity of mind in existence, indeed, of Kelly-DeWitt’s “today-mind uncurtained.” The third stanza also echoes the title of the book and established Kelly-DeWitt as a universal “marooned” speaker adrift on an “island of thought.” All of these foreshadowing events ground the text that follows in possibilities of un-exacted thought that stretches to the “angelic orders” and beyond. The “jack-in-the-pulpit” (a highly variable species) mentioned in the final line also connotes a sturdiness and/or variability to come.

The remainder of the first section, “Credo,” provides seemingly experiental pieces such as “Summer of Grandmothers,” which touches on “the way the dead always return when you need them the most;” in addition to more exploratory pieces like “The Trees” that explore ideas of religion, mysticism and death where:

…the souls of the dead

creep back to their graves
in the jungles of the faraway
in the absolutes of belief
or superstition…

Poems like these charge Kelly-DeWitt’s language with superstition and a strong belief in the supernatural where ghosts both act as counsel for the speakers in her poems, and romp in the backdrops of her landscapes.

To some, Kelly-DeWitt’s discussion of the soul, that most-personal, and tangentially sentimental poetic element, might seem overbearing, but the variation that she employs in her discussion of religion and the supernatural is constantly refreshing. In her poem, “Bypass,” she equates the breathing machine that keeps her husband alive to “God…” Still in other poems, Kelly-DeWitt’s language becomes mystical and is responsible for religious transformations of objects, as in “Egrets at Bolinas Lagoon” which accuses a quote of Van Gogh’s for the transformation of “birds that glowed like headlamps…into painters and poets.”

In, “Credo,” her final poem of the first section, Kelly-DeWitt posits her belief in the expectation of happenings. These happenings range from the mention of “the deeper grasses / we call love” to expectations of returning home, and observing nature at work and at rest. These types of broad expectations inform Kelly-DeWitt’s entire collection in various ways, but for the time being (at the completion of the first section), we are still left “marooned,” wondering where we are headed, or if we are ever getting anywhere at all.

“Whiskey Nights,” the name of the second section of Kelly-DeWitt’s collection, provides a solid backdrop for the variety of voice that she chooses to employ. Here is where we are finally introduced to “the child at the mercy of the loved, feared, drunken father made flesh by Roethke’s poem,” as Carole Simmons Ole points out in her blurb. It is apparent in this section of her book, that Kelly-DeWitt’s poetry is informed by the dizzying effects of her father’s whiskey breath; she is both intoxicated with her love for him, and by her fear of him.

In this more personal section, Kelly-DeWitt confronts her father as both an “angry man” as in “The Day Gandhi Died,” and a hummingbird as in “Sugar-Water.” The best reflection of Kelly-DeWitt’s confused attitude towards her father shows itself in her poem “Cold Sweat.”

Cold Sweat

Last night
I woke up
cold, in bed
next to you.

The hair
at the nape
of my neck
was wet.

Perhaps
my spirit
was weeping
into my pillow.

Perhaps
my father,
dead now
twenty

years,
came sailing
down the river
one last time

and I ran
to greet him
through the wet
grasses.

Here we are presented with a speaker who is both frightened and excited about the prospect of seeing her father, even if only her father’s spirit-body. Using this type of multiplicity of attitude towards a subject-matter is an echo of (indeed, most-likely a reason for) the admittedly pluralistic credo that Kelly-DeWitt lays out in the first section of the book.

Her third section, “Inventing Anna,” continues with Kelly-DeWitt’s personal exposé, but is more firmly established in the realms of feminism and the strength of women. Kelly-DeWitt focuses a good portion of the second section on experiences of pioneer women and difficulties in mothering and being mothered, but most in-line with the themes of the rest of the book seem to be Kelly-DeWitt’s emphasis of a stronger form of language. In her poem “Roller Derby, 1954,” the speaker is both in awe of the strength and the “unabashed toughness in women,” reflecting on her own female role-models as “docile, / genteel— their voices like silk / bandages over the wound of talk.”

All of this discussion of language and toughness in women is justified just in the fact that it so nicely highlights Kelly-DeWitt’s interpretations of the powers of language. Where she sees so many women being “docile” and “genteel,” Kelly-DeWitt is unafraid to make her language grunt and gasp just like the women at the roller derby. However, this third section of the book seemed disjunctive when compared to the previous two sections of the book. The last two sections of the book also take the overall experience of the collection in a new direction, so I wonder if this third section doesn’t represent some sort of transition or hinge from the first two sections to the last two sections.

In section four (“Red Hills and Bone”) and section five (“The Fortunate Islands”), Kelly-DeWitt leaves the single-voiced speaker of the first two sections and transitions to a speaker who is deeply concerned with the idea of the individual soul and the second-self. The first poem of the fourth section immediately establishes this duality:

Fifty-One

This morning when I searched the mirror
I found someone so vastly unfamiliar
that I recognized myself

as that other who has passed
her whole life inside my body,
the one who set-up house

like a small, worried, spider
at my birth. I found traces of her
torn webs under my eyes,

her busy scratchings at the corners
of my mouth. Later, when I sipped
my coffee from a warm mug,

I knew I tasted the full, bitter flavor
with her lips, her tongue.

Here the image of the mirrored self becomes dark and worrisome. In fact, this idea of duality becomes an obsession, perhaps one that is understandable to someone marooned in her own thoughts (as we are told in the very first poem of the book). This second-self brings darker imagery into the collection in poems like “Crows at Evening,” and “Storm Brewing,” that seem to focus on the question of mortality and the travel of the soul after life, of where our second-selves go when they lose their flesh-laden companions.

The fourth section is book-ended by a poem that asks these very questions: “How Will My Soul Get Free?” Is Kelly-DeWitt creating a map for her soul with this book? I think that is a probable conjecture. Not only does she outline her soul’s history in the beginning sections of the book, but she provides her soul with an ideal of language which it can communicate with. If other souls are allowed to roam freely betwixt the pages of the book, then why not hers? The only question still left unsolved, then, has to do with the epigraph that I mentioned so long ago, and which we have yet to fully comprehend in the larger overarching scheme of the piece.

The final section of the book is by far the most fragmented, sampling widely from many of the ideas discussed in previous sections. However, there is a sense of closure towards the end of the section when Kelly-DeWitt begins dealing with artistic interpretation and how that effects the second-self. In “If You Want To Know,” Kelly-DeWitt’s interpretation of what it means to have a second-self is most clearly defined in the final lines of the piece:

…You must imagine the two
white carnations as spirits, children

she would have had, twin palindromes;
that the red one tossed down so casually
spells out with tempera the name of her
equal, her vivid love.

Here, the red carnation (that is, the one instilled with life) is engrossed in the act of describing its equal in words which it “spells out.” Looking back over Kelly-DeWitt’s book shows careful exercise in spelling out vivid loves, experiences, and second-selves; she pays constant homage to the experience that has brought her where she is, and that allows her to spell out her vivid loves in such strong, unyielding language.

This second-selfliness finally blossoms in full form with connection to the epigraph. Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s collection, though fragmented in sections, provides a metaphor of the human body with one perfect prime meridian splaying the self on some undiscovered plain into two “twin palindromes,” equals. “The Fortunate Islands,” the final poem in the collection, extends Kelly-DeWitt’s sense of self into a larger context, describing where she draws her “zero-line;” suggesting that her physical and mental self represent the point of orientation for her world (indeed, the point of orientation from which we all view our worlds). She becomes the prime meridian wherever she is, and is therefore constantly left with binary oppositions where she goes, she can go forward from her zero-line or back, she “can cross the wooden bridge / in either direction” (from “The Fortunate Islands”).

What Susan Kelly-DeWitt provides for us as readers is a map for our own souls. She tells us that we are all “fortunate islands,” for we all choose where our zero-line intersects with the world. She is not only providing a map for her own second-self, but for all second-selves to learn to interpret their pasts, the language that they used, and the feelings that they encountered, allowing those experiences to come into being as robust and multi-faceted “islands of thought” where we are all constantly “marooned,” but also left in good company with our own vivid loves.

— Jordan Reynolds

In The Fortunate Islands Susan Kelly-DeWitt writes as though she has seen ghosts, and she has. She has seen the ghosts of her own life carry her from the starkness of a difficult childhood with a father whose troubles with alcohol left their deep imprint on to the woman she has become, one whose credoes about spirit, work, dedication to art have placed her “in the deeper grasses / we call love.”

Kelly-DeWitt writes careful, studied poems where the things she invokes seem to throb with significance. Those looking for more surface in the rendering of a life need look elsewhere. There is an abundance of natural imagery — hummingbirds, mountains, crows, a snail, egrets, rivers — but most frequently there are flowers which acknowledge Kelly-Dewitt’s lifelong passion for gardening and other “thrills”of the botanical life. Most of the scenes are quiet ones — ripe for contemplation. Domestic scenes proliferate throughout the book and offer their blossoms of truth, sometimes beauty, sometimes something a little more brutal.

The “Credoes” section of the book provides many poems that travel through Kelly-DeWitt’s country of belief. The two greatest of these are belief in wonder, the puzzling out of a life, and the belief in love as the ultimate redemption. Arguably these two beliefs could be the cornerstones of spirituality. The puzzlement and wonder is never drawn out so capable as it is in the opening poem “Question Mark Cafe.”

Question Mark Café

I’ve been sipping coffee in the dark dafé
which is my today-mind uncurtained: stark café.

The morning started crying for no apparent reason.
The dreads were circling, shark café.

How marooned I feel on this island of thought.
I’m reviving like a half-dead verb in the word café.

Name a word, any word. Soul could be the one you
choose. Go ahead, it’s okay, in the last remarks café.

Who if I cried would hear me among the angelic
orders? (Rilke. the same old question mark café.)

Today I’m that torn moth lipping the jack-
in-the-pulpit of history, who’ll fly away: ghost café.

The opening questions it puts forth are then answered throughout the book. However, the main question seems to be how one can find respite in a frequently dreadful world. For Kelly-DeWitt, her prime meridian, her zero line is the great fortune she has been afforded, which has made her path leading away from a bittersweet past more bearable, a path made possible by her dedication to those less fortunate (like the prisoners who frequently appear) and to her art.

The second section of the book entitled “Whiskey Nights” finds its thematic ground in the impact that the lives of men have made on her, particularly her father. Kelly-DeWitt paints a portrait of him as a troubled military man whose respect for order did not necessarily carry over into his private life. We see him in the throes of his military glory, ignorant of his future troubles. We see him as a fugitive from himself, engaged in all sorts of erratic behavior, including leading his family away from the house under the cover of night.

In the “Inventing Anna” section Kelly-DeWitt examines the impact that women have had on her life. However, her mother and other family matrons must share time with other women — women in a painting class, mail order brides, roller derby queens, a woman found dead on the side of the interstate. In all of these women, Kelly-DeWitt signals the femal project of invention, how it can sometimes successfully transform, how sometimes it can leave a woman with a “puzzled ghost still wearing / it’s unfamiliar posture, its veil of brutal perfume” or as someone who “will be lost to oblivion and childhood fever three years / later, but the lover striking out across the plains / to meet his luck.” The stories of these women parallel Kelly-DeWitt’s own transformation, her shift from child of fear to woman of hope.

Her passage between these two is also marked by a movement from an “invention” phase to a phase where she becomes more rooted, and for a western poet, naturally, the thing that imposes itself on her inventions is the land, the geography, a sense of place. In the 4th section, “Red Hills and Bone,” Kelly-DeWitt enters at “fifty one,” where “this morning when I searched the mirror / I found someone so vastly unfamiliar / that I recognized myself / as that other who has passed / her whole life inside my body.” The long path to feeling familiar with one’s skin has set in. The landscape announces itself of both forgiving and unforgiving from luminescent trail across the river” to “ the day’s interior darkness” and “the ultimate harshness of a man trapped by his own anger which leaves him alone like a vestigial bone.” One can see how this title piece for the section was abstracted from a Georgia O’ Keefe painting. Finally, the gauntlet that Kelly-DeWitt has to run through geography and nature provides her with the impetus to ask her how her soul can get free.

We are treated to a glimpse of her response to that question in the last section of The Fortunate Islands. She appears to find it as she stares “through the portals of memory” and her homage to love. But this love is not entirely a garden of earthly delights. It is also “graves / covered over in haste / /by the side of the road — victims of the overland journey. Love for Kelly-DeWitt is also the devotion to the life of the aesthetic. Kelly-Dewitt invokes Givanna Garzoni, a 17th-century artist-spinster who “willed a considerable / sum of money and all her possessions / to the Academy of Saint Luke.” It is Garzoni’s “vivid love” that carries the poem to its conclusion. Garzoni’s dedication to her art mirrors Kelly-Dewitt’s. their art is their salvation, their reason for being, their redemption from that which challenges the soul. It is the tool whereby
Kelly-DeWitt’s “past seems far away.” Besides Garzoni the spinster we also see Dickinson whose poems give solace to presumably the young Kelly-DeWitt caught amid scenes of family tension where lives bubble over due to circumstances not meshing with expectations.

Living the life of the aesthetic as Kelly-Dewitt has done in Sacramento, a still largely agrarian town, is more like living the life of the ascetic. She has not given up much, though, in the intensity of her images and the transmitted feel of the objects in her world, each with its subtle weight. Her precise images and highly wrought phrases are suffused with a quiet dignity. One wonders, though, if a faster life lived in a faster realm would have produced as much depth. Still, in The Fortunate Islands she explores how gender, nature and art arc through a life and effect beauty, truth, and love. This might not be the most radical thesis, but it has legs. It broadcasts its own comfortable power. One might want to take it along to a place that “feels right” and read it, or like myself, you might take it along with you the next trip you make to New York.

— Victor Schnickelfritz

POETRY IS A KIND OF LYING

2008-01-02T10:29:00.000-08:00

Emily Dickison said, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Richard Hugo put it this way: “You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” And Jack Gilbert calls poetry “a kind of lying” in this poem from Monolithos: Poems, 1962 and 1982 (Graywolf Press, 1984).

POETRY IS A KIND OF LYING

Poetry is a kind of lying,
necessarily. To profit the poet
or beauty. But also in
that truth may be told only so.

Those who, admirably, refuse
to falsify (as those who will not
risk pretensions) are excluded
from saying even so much.

Degas said he didn’t paint
what he saw, but what
would enable them to see
the thing he had.

DISTRUSTING MEMORY

2007-12-06T11:13:00.000-08:00

My memory can no longer be trusted. Until recently, I thought I knew my own history. I was even writing a series of poems about a time I thought I knew well. Then I found an old journal, written when I was twenty years old.

According to me, several significant events occurred that year. Events, I’m sure, that my twenty-year-old self would think unforgettable. But here I am, on the eve of my fiftieth birthday, and I can’t remember them. This revelation put into question the “truth” of the poems I’m writing.

In many ways, the twenty-year-old self I’ve been writing about is fictionalized by memory—by the retelling of old stories. By rationalizations and justifications. Writing in the third-person point-of-view helps account for that distance. It's something Jack Gilbert may be doing in his poems.

Mr. Gilbert has become a major influence on my writing. I admire the way he writes so bravely about his life. James Dickey wrote this about him: “He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion. Gilbert is the rarest of beings: a necessary poet, who teaches us not only how to live but to die creatively, and with all meaning.”

Sometimes Mr. Gilbert writes about his past in the third person. This provides an interesting sense of perspective, some distance between the present and the remembered past. “A Year Later,” from The Great Fires: poems 1982 – 1992 (Knopf, 2006), provides a good example.

A YEAR LATER

for Linda Gregg

From this distance they are unimportant
standing by the sea. She is weeping, wearing
a white dress, and the marriage is almost over,
after eight years. All around is the flat
uninhabited side of the island. The water
is blue in the morning air. They did not know
this would happen when they came, just the two
of them and the silence. A purity that looked
like beauty and was too difficult for people.

In “Infidelity,” Mr. Gilbert writes about the past not only in the third person, but also in the present tense. Doing so makes the poem feel as real today as did on the day the event occurred. And the poem rings true.

INFIDELITY

He stands freezing in the dark courtyard looking up
at their bright windows, as he has many nights since
moving away. Because of his promise, he does not
go up. He is thinking of the day she came back
from the hospital. They did not know her then.
He was looking down because of the happiness in her
voice talking to her husband as they went across
the courtyard. She saw him and, grinning, held up
the newborn child. Now it is the last time ever.
He finally knocks. Her eyes widen when she opens
the door. She looks to indicate her husband is home
as she unbuttons her dress. He whispers that his hands
are too cold. It will make me remember better,
she says, and puts them on her nakedness, wincing,
eyes wild with love. It is snowing when he leaves,
the narrow street lit here and there by shop windows.
Tomorrow he will be on the train with his wife, watching
the shadows on the snow. Going south to live silently
with perfect summer skies and the brilliant Aegean.

ZAID SHLAH at Sacramento City College Nov. 29, 2007

2007-12-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

Zaid Shlah came to visit the Sacramento City College and talked about his love of Arabic culture, poetry in particular. He read several pieces from his book entitled Taqsim [Frontenac, 2006]. Taqsim are short improvisational pieces played on an oud, and the pieces that Shlah read had a feel of meditations by route of stringed instrument. He explained how the cover of the book was a photograph of a favorite uncle who lived in the north of Iraq near Kirkuk, a man who had dedicated himself to Arabic cultural traditions, in particular to the playing of taqsim. For Shlah, there was no other photograph that evoked the spirit of taqsim more than this one.

He read selections from “Taqsim”, followed by ”Afternoon Confession,” “The Reception,” “Arabic Snow,” “Driving Towards Gethsemane,” “Leaving Iraq, Entering Alberta,” and finally, “Asking Iraq to Comply.”

Shlah answered questions after the reading ranging from personal questions to questions about his work. He talked about his tenuos position as an Iraqi-Canadian who now finds himself in California. He also revealed he enjoyed reading his taqsim to an oud accompaniment like one might experience at a salon in Iraq where the poet and the musician are counterpoints to each other.

ELENI SIKELIANOS—THE CALIFORNIA POEM

2007-11-28T10:29:00.000-08:00

Crossing over the border into Eleni Sikelianos’s The California Poem is like watching an epic biopic with lots of cameos by many known and unknown actors. One goes through the various scenes playing the game of name-that-face, continually familiarizing and defamiliarizing oneself as the movie continues. Mostly the actors are aspects of California’s flora and fauna, its physical landscape. At times the images appear in such rapid succession that the eye is quickly sated and the mind is overwhelmed. Kind of like Peter Greenaway is the director. Like Greenaway, Sikelianos uses many ornate multi-syllabics and the technical language (genus and species names proliferate like the animals they describe) of biologists and geologists. However, her California also inhabits the fanciful nature of the place by extrapolating the sober references and creating very imaginative Hollywood-like spaces. There is history of all sorts too. All of these are brought together via a playful sounding that is often rhyming or alliterating itself across the expanse of the page. It is a wild place one might hear someone say from the Midwest who has come to visit.

The textual variety within the book is impressive. Not only is personal autobiography present alongside of the copious amount of material on the natural world, but there are photos, the backs of old postcards, sign language demo graphics, collages, small little diagrams [see page 47 on Google Preview above] that look like they are crude representations of networks or patterns of growth among sea slugs or winged insects. Sikelianos is an avid collector of Californiana throughout the book, a hoarder of every word that washes up on the beach. Through it all though, one particularly strong current running through the book is a sense of loss, a sentimentality for the unfettered California of the past. One senses nature is being encroached on everywhere, and Sikelianos is trying to reimagine the script for its players, sometimes in chronicling the goings-on in the neighborhood of the tidepool, sometimes with a deflating gesture toward the artificial world that has been created by the humans around it.

any peasant with a dumb
cow can make whipped
cream but it takes a chemical factory
in California to make Cool Whip

Also, there is ample quotation in the piece, sometimes attributed, more often not. There are a lot of people talking, creating a strange cacophony that enforces the notion that Sikelianos seems to embrace “Suddenly, everything belongs in California.” The residents since birth are forced to be generous hosts. They accommodate by clearing more space.

The language that is used to negotiate the natural world in The California Poem is dense and profuse. Surely, there is a prodigious talent for naming and describing the natural world in the piece, so much so that it seems almost unnatural to carry around that much language about flora and fauna in one’s head. Frequently, I wondered if all this “language about nature” wasn’t a construction from scientific texts as they were applied after the fact of an experience with them. In her Jacket interview with Jesse Morse, she reveals:

Early on, I loved leafing through biology, oceanography and science books. I’ve always loved that language and its richness.

Yet, Sikelianos takes such great care to ensure that the reader is witness to the author’s experience that I was curious about how much was experienced and how much was come to afterwards, constructed in a language game. Indeed, it is not entirely impossible that where many of us see “a pretty blue shell” she is seeing radial symmetry. In fact, we are told, “At Monterey, I collected 136 hermit crabs to uncover the mysteries of population dynamics.” Is this the work of a budding marine biologist who was thwarted midstream with a growing realization that she was a sensualist? [The ecstatic Whitmanesque language throughout the piece suggests that her transformation to sensualist is complete.]

Sikelianos has mentioned in her 2005 “Live From Prairie Lights” reading at the University of Iowa that she did copious amounts of research for the book which took her some 7 to 8 years to write. She looked at the history of flora and fauna and also the rich linguistic history before the conquest of the indigenous peoples. The density of language in its Whitmanesque swirls makes it hard for me to believe that these passages are coming off the top of her head as per Ginsberg. They often feel constructed because of their density. Yet Sikelianos’s ear is so adept that rhythmically a seam never appears. The flora and fauna do seem to erupt out of her in a long effortless flow of source. The conversation is exhausting, but one is taken in by the breadth of it, the way it darts here and there after more prey for the intellect to feast on.

Her breath is Olson’s, but the absurd and surrealist-tinged turns are Ginsberg’s.

I suppose how the lines are constructed doesn’t really matter (except to a wonk like me who is perpetually interested in such technical matters). The rich, dense language, no matter how it was arrived at, serves what she says is the purpose of the piece:

mythologizing the landscape beyond recognition
like some simulacra of Saturday Night Fever

The various opossums and nudibranchia are the stars of the piece though. [Picture them beneath a mirror ball if you have to.] These and the hypnotic and expansive language that always seems to branching off to form another dendrite (symmetry be damned!). One might experience a good bit of frustration as I did when I first started reading the poem. I was lingering over each line, expecting it to deliver its weight. I read it like it was a scientific paper. When I realized the rhythm was more “Beat”, that I needed to read it like I read Ginsberg, skimming over the surface of the language, I began to settle in and enjoy Sikelianos’s topsy-turvy California where it seems

California // is the palace where we’re making continents up

(sand, sand dollar, rock . . .) Your job is to

tell the history of each & every piece

Hers is a “Beat eye for the ethologist guy.”

The great inclusiveness is reminiscent of Whitman, whom Sikelianos mentions in the Prairie Lights reading as someone she considers to be a California poet as well. Unlike Uncle Walt, though, Sikelianos commingles with gastropods, mesa cliffs, hummingbirds and sea-hares, those citizens whom Sikelianos has deemed worthy of taking up residence in California. Whitman’s eye turned to the human activity of all the people taking part in the great democratic experiment that was the United States mid-nineteenth century. Sikelianos’s nod to the human realm is largely concerned with her personal experiences in California. She recalls where her friend Adam Davies went down in the King River. The memory of Adam Davies is then projected on a metro busker shortly afterwards, but the human chain ends there. At one point she even muses aloud:

What do I have in common with my fellow humans?

Her reverence stops short because “There [in California] reverence is a kind of fear.” One is awestruck and afraid by the complexity and multiplicity that is the many heads of California, some with jaws that bite.

Another personal bit that is dropped into the mix is a short and affecting section that seemingly sums up her teenage years in California:

reprisal:

I was a waitress in a white dress,
an avocado goddess in the land of Phocis
Queen of the Drought in the kingdom
of Prop. 13
I set forth
It was four blocks to the beach
What did I see there?
a kegger with lots of young men
preparing to drink

Go ahead. Say “avocado goddess” three times. That’s fun, isn’t it? Six staccato bursts followed by a hissing “s”.

The sound of the line is very often generative for Sikelianos as she moves through her disparate images and kinds of texts. I’m reminded of Anne Waldman’s work whose blank spots on the page do not measure erasure (like with Cole Swensen) as much as they are rests in a musical score. This kind of presentation is a grateful reminder that the poem, at least many of the more lyrical parts, is still intended to be read aloud. It is not just an artifact bound to the page, which sometimes when I’m reading Paterson or The Maximus Poems, I get the sense they are only alive on the page. The Waldman influence would be perfectly understandable as Sikelianos cut her teeth at Naropa and was probably familiar with how Waldman could expertly perform difficult texts, her graphic presentation directing the page. Perhaps the most significant contribution that the Beats made to American poetry is the development of bop prosody, which allowed American poetry to escape the rhythms of the marching band and the ballad, and begin to explore the explosive multi-syllabic runs which allow complicated language to fit snugly inside of a line. Here is a bit for effect:

bathing bathers of the big black lake, SPACE, bodies like golden
apples hanging on the dark branch, EARTH, like
Great Alexander or Eleni or little children finding the ripest apples, last places to be within;

kissing mystical ventral surfaces, occiscles; rise up
for arboreal views
of passionate showy brittle stars (Ophiuroidea), mirror or watery earth & sky;

Uncle Aristotle’s lantern, urchin, my mouth remains close to the rock
while the shell falls
off; enter the

sun, such the masseur bully sun
big fiery fruit in his rhymes of ray-on-stone, pounding
the flesh, the one, one, the one
sun was the
melancholy team sun in
matrices whose elements are birds
(words) whose elements are branches,
ladders, shadows, shadders, birds

Each stanza is a distinct musical thought, a complete musical phrase. Between “enter the” and “sun” (that starts the next stanza), the short caesura signals the horn solo is about to head off in another direction a la Sonny Rollins when he cuts from one recognizable melody to another or to a flurry of scales during one of his long and intense solos.

The “School of Disembodied Poetics” (as Naropa is less familiarly known) is also an influence in how Sikelianos likes to remove the speaking voice in the poem from her self. The speaker is invoking mightily throughout, the imagination careening off of the tangible minutiae of the golden State, and this expansive state of the speaker lends itself to an extraordinary amount of inflation which must be regarded as the souped-up construction that it is:

Cilia, spirochete, composite beings
born of symbiont meanings
(humans) fall apart Are you speaking of molecules
or cummunity interactions? I’m speaking here
only of the heart

This direct address to the speaker and challenge to the speaker reminds me of what might be the central project of the Beats, of Whitman: to expand one’s self so that it is no longer a part of you. It has moved on without you, moved on to engage the world and to circle around and check back with you from time to time. It floats disembodied, an almost comical balloon that is so precious one cannot let it pop.

The Eleni narrator becomes an affectation throughout the piece as well. While the collected bits of personal narrative indicate that this Eleni is a marker for an experienced life, especially towards the last quarter of the book, that Eleni becomes unhinged and ready to fly away from its moorings from that experienced life. Eleni is other, one more piece of the mythologized landscape that circumscribes the California.

Like any assemblage the size and scope of Sikelianos’s California, as a reader, one is forced to do violence to it by trying to make it cohere, by trying to insert Tab A into Slot B. Sikelianos’s California is really quite resistant to this readerly impulse though. Besides the autobiography and the persistent references to the natural world, there are not many glaring motifs which are rekindled. If there are motifs, miniature stones resurfacing through the sand on the beach, they become subsumed within dream. Sikelianos’s California is a dream as much as a place to dream:

From Jacket 23

Any dream that includes/ends with Marlon Brando growling, “Get up, you scum-suckin’ pig” has got to be reckoned with.

The “filmy Vistavision” model of California that Sikelianos has created is an experiment in narrative that brings the disparate home to lodge in the self. It interrupts the stable psychological state (mirrored by the instability of the Golden State), which indicates the ego-self as more fluid than solid. Or perhaps an entity engaged in a hundred phase transitions in a single minute. The result is a surfactant able to exist in one realm while clinging to another. More modern chemistry. And like so much modern chemistry, there are many residual byproducts to negotiate within the racemic mix. California is the perfect laboratory for such an experiment. Its space is essential to sort out the chiral sprawl, the radial outgrowths of successive dreams.

Sorry. I got taken up in a little bit of Sikelianos’s verbiage, trying to extend a good hard science metaphor into the world of galloping verse. It’s easy to get carried away by this book.

I found that I was cheering for the language more and more as the book wore on. The impulse to parse all the information was stripped away. However, as I mentioned above, it was not my first impulse to read it that way. Perhaps as time goes on I will want to pick out sections for a deeper reading, do my homework on all of the obscure words found there (I’m still looking for “occiscles”). Is reading Sikelianos’s The California Poem what reading Pound would be like if he had lived in a trailer park and visited the beach?

Another point of reference for The California Poem might be Philip Lamantia’s Meadowlark West. Lamantia, also associated with the Beats, tends a little bit more to the world historical like Pound, but there is a significant amount of California flora and fauna that exists between the covers of Meadowlark Wet. The same hyperbolic language exists, and it works the same way in mythologizing the West, which leads me to wonder if it is always the case that hyperbole and myth go together. Is myth a form of hyperbole? What about writers like Robert Hass who are also trying to mythologize the West to a certain extent, but do it with a very burnished rendition of the quotidian? Would someone challenge that a poet like Hass is not mythologizing the West as much as he is documenting it? Can the documentarian and mythologizer exist in the same room together? And if they can, would they take their clothes off?

All in all, as I go back to The California Poem (and I expect to visit again over time . . . if for no other reason than to help me parse what I’m looking at in the tidepools) I expect that more of its “sense” will leak into me. I will be able to track down more and more of its paratactical moves. However, I suspect that I will be dipping into The California Poem more as a reminder of how ferocious the language can be, how intense its curvatures. I think I will pick it up to help me jumpstart my lines when I feel they are getting too stale, when I resist keeping bodies in motion for keeping them at rest. It’s a primer for how to juggle. The California Poem has so many interactive particles within it that it is a veritable cyclotron of activity. Despite the missing gluons, the particles whirl and swirl like they are in a popcorn maker, the more time spent with them, the more likely it is for each kernel to open. The bodies in motion ricochet off of each other at exaggerated speeds that make each one begin to sweat a little, cry a little, bleed a little. There’s a lot of body sauce flying around.

Other excerpts from The California Poem

From Cento Magazine

From Octopus Magazine

Blake's Violence, Bush's Violence

2007-10-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

That in plate 5 of William Blake’s AMERICA a PROPHECY, the figure clasped by Albion’s angel at the top of the engraving and, at the bottom, clutched upside down and headless in the coils of an encircling snake, is the king himself.

That Blake’s images make clear his attraction to the flex of power in violent struggles for liberty.

That in his visionary theology, an apocalyptic revolution of faith and values is imperative. In several manuscripts we see Blake representing revolutionary terror in terms of Christian apocalypse.

That Blake’s depictions of insurrections aren’t limited to his images. Many poems throb with violence, from outrage for the murdered “Little Boy Lost” in Songs of Innocence to the shout of “Pull down the tyrant to the dust” in “Gwin, King of Norway” to the description of “flames of Eternal fury” in The First Book of Urizen.

That there is a yet more subtle violence linked to Blake’s innovations as an artist.

That it is Blake’s re-visioning “hand or eye” which dares to frame a radical catachrestic symmetry in which images cross over into words and words into images.

That Blake rejected the Lockean convention that words are the arbitrary signs of ideas. That for Blake, words are living things. Blake’s ears “have heard,/ The Holy word,/ That walk’d among the ancient trees.”

That by focusing his attention on the phonetic, graphic, and etymological properties of words and by developing a novel technique for engraving words and images directly onto copper plates—a technique that treats words as images—Blake diminished distinctions between the linguistic and the pictorial.

That language and image rehearse as part of a singular performance in Blake’s engravings.

That if we look again at AMERICA a PROPHECY, we will see the A on the title page efflorescing into wheat sheaves. That in the last line of the first stanza, we will see the first stroke of the letter M in Meet dangling into the flame spewing from Albion’s sword. That this flourish is mirrored by the W in Washington, the first word in the next stanza.

That the letters are fuses lit by a “fire fierce glowing.” That Blake’s words are both denotative and performative.

That on the first plate of EUROPE a PROPHECY, the plumed serpent’s forked tongue is mirrored by the Y of PROPHECY as well as by the figuration extending from the R of EUROPE. That the serpent’s body loops in an unnatural way to from O’s that rhyme, visually, with the O’s (and C) in EUROPE a PROPHECY.

That equating spirit and letter, visualizing them in the same dimension, Blake noted to himself on the back of one drawing, “Angels to be very small as small as the letters.”

That violence is an act of possession.

That in Blake’s illuminated manuscripts, we see image seizing word to make it image. At the same time, word seizes image to make of it a letter. This more subtle violence in Blake’s art disarms the continuity of genre: printing and engraving, image and word collaborate in a communion of meaning, an adventure in possibilities.

* * *

It may be worthwhile at this moment in history to remember that Blake set out to yoke together word and image at a time when the difference had collapsed between attempting a violent act against the English king and imagining a violent act. Anyone could be hauled into court, tried, and imprisoned for merely thinking about violence, not to mention representing it.

It may be worthwhile to remember that Blake was in fact accused of sedition and tried. Sedition, in Blake’s time, included everything from criticism of the king to outright acts of terrorism.

* * *

In the 2007 post-Patriot Act United States, legal distinctions between acting violently and imagining a violent act once again have disappeared. Bush legislation has banned habeas corpus, legalized torture by Americans, and decriminalized it retroactively. Bush’s retromingent spray of dogma and crusaderism extinguishes the visionary impulses on which the United States was founded.

In Bush’s tenure, image has been torn away from word.

In William Blake’s work, violence is an expansive creative force. In George Bush’s policies, violence is absorptive. It absorbs freedom, subsuming it into a field of self-interest.

Blake’s violence collides with what restricts imagination; Bush’s violence collides with what lives.

In Blake’s visionary AMERICA a PROPHECY, words and images collaborate in an expansion of meaning and imagination. In Bush’s AMERICA a PROPHECY, the words and images cannot be linked.

For George W. Bush, violence is a means for denying history in the cynical severance of linguistic from perceptual representation.

In contradistinction, Blake believed in the violence necessary to free oneself from confinement in a culture of exploitation and pacification. For Blake, violence is involved in the imagination of a bond between language and image, word and act.

For Blake, violence means transcendence into freedom. For Bush violence has meant ascendancy over freedom.

For all the distance in time and space, Blake’s astonished horror translates too easily into our own:

The weeping child could not be heard.
The weeping parents wept in vain.
They strip’d him to his little shirt.
And bound him in an iron chain.

And burn’d him in a holy place.
Where man had been burn’d before.
The weeping parents wept in vain
Are such things done on Albions shore.

Review of Bobbi Lurie's poetry collection, Letter from the Lawn

2007-10-25T05:01:00.000-07:00

Look! It's a post (by a newbie)! Gasp! Applause! Golf Clap!

Cue cross-posting: Jacket Magazine!

DONALD REVELL—A THIEF OF STRINGS

2007-10-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

Last week after coaching my son’s soccer games (one a delightful romp in victory, the other a game which featured another goalless loss) I came home to a sobering scene. The dog was lying on its side, breathing heavily and looking kind of glassy-eyed. An attempt to bring her outside resulted in her legs buckling and her falling to the grass. The situation looked dire. A quick trip to the vet confirmed our suspicions. She was dying, a ruptured spleen. The life or death decision arrived at about five o’ clock that evening. My wife deferred. The decision was mine. Do I extend her 10-year-old life through extraordinary means or do I get used to mornings waking up without any heat-sharing hound next me, a den of one?

Donald Revell has provided me with a number of meaningful experiences through the years. His early books like The Gaza of Winter, New Dark Ages and Erasures were instrumental in illustrating the use of recursion as a strategy for coherence beyond any kind of formal structure. This knowledge served as a crutch for many years. Whenever I didn’t know where to turn next in a piece, I luxuriated in the look back. Revell excelled in such Byzantine recursion that it inspired awe at how he could orchestrate his poems so that they coiled so tightly in around themselves.

Of course, now in his recent collection of essays entitled The Art of Attention Revell eschews such “strategies” as a kind of training wheels for the imagination which would be better served if they were just taken off. His aim is for an Eden where the senses are clicking on all cylinders. If one only pays attention with all the energy that attention demands, really paying attention, then one arrives through the imagination at the poem as it can be fully imagined. One keeps one’s senses open, one’s eyes attuned, reacting intuitively. This leaves out a lot of talk of strategy, technique, and craft. In fact, it leaves out all talk of it.

I’m not sure I can fully get on board with an aesthetic that entrusts its leaping to faith. I have a penchant for strategy and technique, and I often find myself trying to elucidate that in many of my essays. I find a cryptic will to be an unsatisfactory explanation for how a poem is put together. Even if there are intuitive moves, there seem to be reasons for them, if only after-the-fact ones. The irrational/sub-rational has its structure too.

Another reason I am wary of letting the intuitive imagination be the essence of the creative act is that without some reflection on technique, the imagination can get locked into making many of the same kinds of intuitive moves. One starts to write the same poem over and over again without some sort of critical faculty stepping in. Perhaps in Revell’s case that critical faculty is intuitively built in as well, but it would be nice to see it in action, evaluating and deciding, not endlessly drifting to another shore.

Also, I suspect much of the leaping of faith that occurs within Revell’s discussion of his aesthetic in The Art of Attention as well as his collection A Thief of Strings is due to his newly found devotion to God, a mystical Judeo-Christian God, who sits smack dab in the middle of the poems with all the associative sparks running through wires to electrodes fastened onto the bashful deity in order to jolt it to life.

Here is an example (the poem that closes out section II):

What If Christ Were a Snowflake Falling into the Sea

The water is taller than itself,
Covering spirits of the air beneath.
And so the land, so mountainous beside,
Does not exist.

Have you thought about the future?
Take your finger and rub it across a stone.
Do you feel it?
Heat where nothing but cold most certainly is.

The water does not suspect.
A distant star is plotting with the center of the Earth
Against the Earth.
And the lake rises. The outlet rivers rise.

There is also an uprising in Kiev.
God is love.

It is interesting how Revell, who seemed more focused on sociopolitical history has taken a more spiritual focus with his later books. In A Thief of Strings this religious outlook is at its most pronounced. One wonders if, after a good deal of one’s younger life spent thinking about the intricacies of sociopolitical and historical intrigues, Revell hasn’t burned out on all the cynicism it generates and has opted to dismiss all of it for a more sweeping view of how social change occurs. Agreement with this take by Revell would hinge upon the debate about the efficacy of the monks demonstrating in Myanmar this week. Are they merely graves?

It is almost as if Revell has reversed the poles on Pessoa, whose sensate poet Alberto Caeiro took precedence early in his writing life only to be displaced by the more complicated, nuanced Alvaro de Campos. I prefer the older Revell in the same way I prefer de Campos to Caeiro.

However, I wonder if my preference isn’t a terribly mean and confining trick I am playing on both myself and Revell, like saying the new Bruce Springsteen doesn’t hold a candle to the classic old style of The Boss whose work at that time captured everyone’s imagination and attention.

Also, I must recognize that as a born-again heathen (who experienced a brief conversion to the God-is-love crowd during a high school Bible camp only to fall back into my slovenly way of thinking once I returned home) my tolerance for Christian platitude is not very high.

I shrink from those who declaim environmental decay, social unrest, and the impending destruction of the planet by a supernova star and then summarize their stance with “God is love.” Unless one believes that God loves us by punishing us. . . you wear the black latex mask and body suit, Christ, O my Commander.

But perhaps I am not being fair to the Christian Revell. Maybe I am not reading his work in the spirit he intends. Perhaps God in his work is not really a deity per se as much as it is the concept of god, an ecumenical habit of mind [though I must admit that a capitalized G in God is loaded; it makes it hard for me to see such a thing as reaching broadly across the religious spectrum despite what supporters for the Pledge of Allegiance to keep “under God” might say]. Certainly he aims again and again at the metaphysical with his God, and I am willing to follow him there despite my not feeling particularly compelled to name things in the afterlife.

I freely admit that I am among the faithless. I don’t believe very well, my genetic shortcoming.

The first half of the book is crowded with references to God and Heaven and Eden and prayer. Angels seemingly appear as “white linen floating in the sky” in the anchor piece of the first section entitled “O Rare.” But apart from these forays into the spiritual superstructure, Revell interlaces copious amounts of witnessing nature, almost as if he has become tired of the travails of men. He is becoming animal, informed by the memory of his father that “my eyes and my sister’s eyes were brown like those of a deer.”

Revell also includes quotations from somewhat obscure literary works: the writings of Goethe and, later in the book, Thoreau’s journal and Thomas Traherne’s meditation no. 28 from one of his Centuries. Often I feel I am caught between the vice grip of the literary Revell who alludes to rather obscure texts and to the Revell who is obliterating himself, his knowledge, his memory, with what is displayed as divine before his senses, his art of attention.

Here in ”Bartram’s Travels” Revell travels alongside the 18th Century American botanist William Bartram who chronicled his explorations through the south among the Seminole and Cherokee to explore and record the flora and fauna of the area. In this poem the crossing over is the central metaphor, and like some tag-along of The Ghost Shirt Rebellion, the speaker here emerges on the other side remarkably unscathed showing “no signs of burn.”

In ”Landscape Near Biloxi, Mississippi Revell flashes his environmental concerns through reference to murdered islands, both figuratively and literally. But it is the dismemberment of both Pentheus (mistaken for an animal hiding in a tree while he spied on the bacchic rites) and Actaeon (torn apart by his own hounds after setting eyes on a naked Artemis bathing in the woods). In the poem it is the shrimp boats and other commercial fare that are degrading the barrier islands. The loss of these barrier islands has been mentioned as a strong reason for why New Orleans and the surrounding area were hit so hard by the recent hurricanes. In this Revell acknowledges that “the god is a destroyer . . . the goddess is a maw.” Revell questions the justice of such gods, but could not a Christian god be implicated in similar acts of destruction? It is curious to me that the Greeks have to bear the full force of Revell’s judgment of being unjust.

In ”The Wisdoms” Revell returns to his contemplation of the sociopolitical realm. In particular, he seems to be commenting on the loss of unity in America. He laments: “Time was, a man or woman had to love me. / That was America. That was a chief concern.” But the disunity he addresses does not seem to be based on religious or foreign policy differences. It is based on the colors: “Broken glass is alive too, / In the colors. In them, I was a republic.” The speaker, a spokesperson for a country, talks of the loss of status as republic. The title appears to make reference to the wisdom lost in not paying attention to the colors. This could be read symbolically, as above, for the ethnic and racial diversity of America or as an appreciation for the dance of light that is reality. Revell seems to be saying that seeing things clearly without any filter, can restore unity. After all, the epigraph seems to refer to the moment of Goethe’s passing and his monumental utterance of “Light! More Light!” on his deathbed. The wisdom that Goethe passed on was that seeing, perceiving, was enough of a reason to linger in the realm of the human.

On top of all of the poetry of witness and the literary Revell is a heaping helping of the apocalyptic vision. The passing of the world of men is treated as a foregone conclusion in many places in the book, especially in “The Last Guitar,” a three-part piece in the last section of the book . In this piece, Revell invokes “the last guitar” as the final song that humanity plays. He is imagining what comes after, and through God, he assures us as readers that “the last guitar is but the first of many.” This would be a hopeful sign if it weren’t for the fact that all but the heartiest of creatures will be dead. It is here that we see mortality as only an intermission in the big musical Herr Direktor has planned.

Mortality also is apparent in the jaunty little “Stoic.” Despite its title and final image, the tone of this piece is not so weighty. It invokes the WWII invasion of Norway (presumably) as a parallel, no doubt, to our own current American disaster of an invasion, but then there is paratactical shift to what seems like an episode of Lassie where we, as readers, await some sort of rescue. However, the only rescue forthcoming is from a blissful ignorance, a return to sensation that feeds the soul and keeps us alive. King Kong, another animal, is watched, and then the ominous animal appears in the last line. Is Revell commenting that the only respite from the current war and the death it brings is to busy ourselves with watching animals as a reminder of who we are, of our fragility?

Stoic

My soul is a mind and a meander, a Mrs. Luxe.
Little Spartan boy, release the animal in your shirt!
It isn’t a wolf cub, it’s a puppy soon
To be Lassie, and she’s needed
For the invasion of Norway, that disastrous offensive.

Her parachute opens.
A minute or so later,
Her paws touch delicately down
Onto the glacier, and instantly
The ice turns a radiant deep sky-blue
Wherever she goes. Peter Lawford
Is rescued and returns to England.
Lassie remains behind,
Changing every inch of the arctic earth into blue sky
Which is becoming my mind.

My soul has turned from now to then.
It’s all a luxury, this being alive.
Read me that women’s poetry, I’m watching King Kong.
There’s an animal up my sleeve and it’s killing me.

The literary forebears Revell invokes are solitary types, and this collection is imbued with a solitary tone. In almost every piece the meandering associative presentation gravitates between a solitary witnessing and the spiritual implications of watching the world, tinged with a copious amount of literary learning. This is not to say that it is boring and plodding. Revell is never guilty of being boring. His associative leaps are almost always daring and fresh. this is the part of the show that everyone who comes to it admires and respects. At times I can’t always ride along with him on his daring mission, and I have to watch as he travels into terra incognito. This is the stuff that second, third, fourth readings are made of. At times it can be a little annoying as when he makes grand surrealistic moves like “The sky is sassafras / And also a balloon landing.” “There are stars / made wholly of woodsmoke.” “Between French and death / The houses sail like baseballs.” These are rather isolated examples and they are taken out of context; however, I could not rope them to any cleat in the larger poem. [When one operates according to instinct, some moves are going to land in a particular reader, others won’t.] Contrarily, Revell also delivers some absolutely zinger lines. My favorite in the book is:

Easternmost archangel, untune my words and teach me tanager.”

I’m not really sure why the easternmost archanagel should be called upon for such tutleage; however, I find that, at times, I would like to learn tanager too.

The untuning of the mind is a large concern of Revell’s too, following in the footsteps of his anti-rational Francophile heroes. Rimbaud appears a couple of times in the book, but paired with an interest in those American writers who lean toward a transcendentalist mode, Revell seems to encourage an overcoming of the mind by dismantling it, suspending reason. This is the way of faith I am told, but I am too weak and exhausted in my present condition to use it as a guide for raising my children. If I don’t keep my wits about me, they’ll start stealing all of my food.

I suppose that Revell would caution me to be mindful that none of what is part of this earth, what is perceived, can be owned for very long. What harm can there be in a little stealing, a little redistribution of wealth if the aim is honorable, such as grasping for a more spiritual plain through song.

In the thirteen-part title poem “A Thief of Strings” Revell introduces us to a thief of guitar strings that he again is witnessing from a distance. He uses the EBGDAE of a guitar’s standard tuning to riff on, one line beginning with a word that corresponds to the E, followed by the next that begins with a B, and so on. These sequences of invention recur throughout the piece and serve as a way to bind the reader to one of the central events in the piece—the stolen guitar strings. Revell seems to side with the motives of the thief who is only aiming to do what birds do naturally. Furthermore, Revell makes an even more radical claim for dispossessing oneself, for “disowning” and “helplessness” such as in the poem’s final section:

from A Thief of Strings

13.

Outside his shop
In the leafy sunlight
The clockmaker smokes at ease,
Singing a little,
Rapping a cadence
Against his artificial leg
With his good leg.
His shop sign is a broken clock face
Filled with leaves.
These metaphors mix themselves,
And I say hurray for helplessness!

Who made my eyes? Not I.
And an almshouse everywhere?

When I am alone the air
is flecked with sassafras.
Crowded before me in shoals
Happy shrieks grow old.
I say hurray for helplessness!
What use to a man is Man?

When I left the train I could hear
Singing in the trees. It was the trees
Who sang. When I was a boy
It was the trees who sang. My whole life
From the end of childhood
Until this very moment
Is one bird nowhere.
Not forgotten. Free.

Revell reminds us that we are paying tribute with our eyes, that everywhere is an almshouse. This is the price we must pay for being free like animals.

I’m reminded of Rilke in the eighth Duino Elegy (tr. by Edward Snow):

If the assured animal that approaches up
on such a different path had in it consciousness
like ours—, it would wheel us round
and make us change our lives. But its existence
is for it infinite, ungrasped, completely
without reflection—, pure, like its outward gaze.
And where we see Future it sees Everything
and itself in Everything and healed forever.

Sometimes though, the reality, strangely enough, is elsewhere. A price is attached to the life of an animal. That said, I still could not give up on my dog. I suppose it was not so much for the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to disown the dog and allow it to untether itself from its moorings in this world (though that may be partly true also). The thing I kept thinking about in my rather haphazard anthropomorphic way was that if the tables were reversed, and she were making a life and death decision about my continued existence, she’d let me have one more fighting opportunity, one more chance, rationality be damned. And so it is with Donald Revell and me. That comfortable relationship I’ve had with him as literary kindred spirit has been strained by circumstance. His forays into the spiritual have caused me to question why my meanderings into spirit have stopped short of the chasm of faith. However, there is still enough there, still enough “wet tongues on the nose” to make me want more, to want to see him fight for more of that sassafras air. In the end, I just can’t put the ol’ dog down.

Other poems from A Thief of Strings: ”Sibylline”, Landscape with Warhol and the Coming of Spring, 2003”

RAMSON LOMATEWAMA'S Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams

2007-09-29T14:55:00.000-07:00

Flagstaff, Arizona is a place of high winds. Perched at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, this Ponderosa Pine forest country is Arizona’s northern highlands. My family has a cabin here—on the northwestern flank of Humphrey’s Peak, at 8,200’ elevation.

I’ve been living here in isolation for two weeks now—working toward finishing a book of poetry I’ve been writing since 1981. Bow hunting season for deer ended on Thursday. The leaves on the aspen trees are faintly yellow. Fall is here.

In the solitude of my nights, I listen to the notorious winds whip the treetops. I walk in and among the swaying timber. Watch the phases of the moon through the thick branches. Some nights I believe I hear the old voices. Like I always do when I sleep out in another home-away-from-home: Joshua Tree National Monument. There, I hear the Cahuilla. And I know it. But here, I’m not so sure I know who or what I hear.

When I woke up today I was determined to find some contemporary indigenous poetry—to help me understand those voices. I cleaned myself up and drove the twenty miles into town, to Starrlight Books on N. Leroux Street, near the busy railroad tracks. Starrlight is a first-rate independent bookstore. Compact and well organized. I was guided graciously to poetry written by both Navajo and Hopi poets.

I live close to the bone financially, so I appreciated the freedom I was given to read through my many choices. Finally, I decided upon Ramson Lomatewama’s Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams (Entrada Books, 1993). Mr. Lomatewama’s biography says he had previously published two books of poetry: Silent Winds: Poetry of One Hopi and Ascending the Reed. He also works with stained glass and carves kachina dolls.

I come from agrarian roots, too, so his frequent references to the weather and to the Hopi’s staple crop—corn—made me feel at home. His poem “Ants” truly won my heart, though. Its initial images could be from a T’ang Dynasty landscape poem, but he achieves an upside-down parable by the poem’s end.

Ants

Silence is reflected in the sky
for the blue haze is but a mirror.

I can feel
the subtleness of the breeze
and the silent fluttering of the moth.

A field of tall grass
sends a gentle wave of light
across the land.

It flows to eternity.

I gaze upon the ants
who toil for their children

for they do not consider
the lilies of the field.

Mr. Lomatewama successfully turns a biblical parable on its head, something I appreciate, being especially fond of Jack London’s upside-down parable: “Dig moved more mountains than faith ever dreamed of.” Amen, brother.

I struggled when choosing a second poem to include in this posting. There are many tender poems, such as “Separation I” and “Separation II,” as well as poems with compelling images. I especially enjoyed the last lines of “After the Rains.” “There is no need / for us to speak. // Silence / will speak / for us.” But the title poem is an anthology of the voices that influence Mr. Lomatewama. This poet of the “Fourth World” is truly a poet of the world.

Drifting Through Ancestor Dreams

They come from all sides, these words and songs of ancestors.
They slide out on tongues of Felipe Molina, flowers, and deer,
and from spruce trees, long houses, and Joe Bruchac.
They fly at me across deserts, from summer stars over Awatovi,
and from bottomless silver words of Mike Kabotie.
I see their words are made of bamboo, tradition, and myth,
and images of Jung and Campbell, and long ago walks in cornfields.
They find me and speak to me through memories of Chicago streets,
Lee Young Lee, Sybil Dunbar, and Ofelia Zepeda’s jagged mountains.
Their words and songs come through dreams of Rex Jim and Harold
Littlebird, whose poems, words, and drumbeats dance all around.
They whisper in flights of hummingbirds and high mesas, through
Luci Tapahanso and Shiprock, and through journeys of Simon Ortiz.
Ancestor dreams come to me from your world, from dark skies,
from unborn children, from New Delhi and from Tuuwanasavi.
I dream-travel through ancestor songs; dream over eagle feathers
dipped in honey and rain; around summer clouds and roasted corn.
I listen for ancestor songs in all people and all places.
I am drifting through ancestor dreams,
drifting
to my final breath.

Transcendentalisticism

2007-09-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

By James DenBoer

A friend of mine is outraged. So outraged, she's told me this same story more than once, and told it publicly at readings of her poems.

A professor at a University of California campus told her that all poems have to do with the Resurrection of Christ. I can see why she's outraged, even years later. (And so much for the myth of UC professors being atheistic communist terrorists.)

But I think I can understand why someone would say such a thing, and not only because it's exactly the approach to poetry I was taught at my own Calvinist college.

To give the professor the benefit of the doubt, I think he meant to say that all poems are about transcendence of some sort; that the Resurrection was a metaphor for that larger meaning. I'd still argue with his "all poems," but even then half-heartedly.

Many poems are about new life, rebirth, arising from the death of love or battened sensibilities or choked opportunities, breaking into something new and rewarding, meaningful, valuable, liberating. And many standard metaphors clinch that meaning: flowers blossoming, rivers crashing into the sea, the joys of sex, the changing seasons; the list is long, and often used as well in religious discourse.

But not all poems are about new life. Many are about day-by-day life, whether it's looking at the birches in your backyard or noticing the bearshit on the trail. Some are about wounds, crimes, injustice, racism, poverty, war and bad love. Or about back-breaking or mind-breaking labor, welding Hummer frames or making a line of a poem sing. About all the misfortunes and indignities and hurt we suffer. But somehow, stupid humans, we all hope it will be a little easier, and believe it will, someday. As if we might be "resurrected."

I think the professor meant to offer this kind of interpretation, too: whatever a poem is about, the satisfying beauty of nature or the despairing ugliness of much of life, the poem itself is an artifact that celebrates and ameliorates; that the poem as poem is an exemplar of rebirth. I don't so much mean that the poem says this: but that the poem dares to speak, it opens with any word at all and ends with any word at all, and the getting from that first word to the last is a story about and a story of the poem's own progress toward birth; that it moves from blank-page death to formed life, by its own nature. The poem is a living example of resurrection, perhaps, as it, word by brickish word, finds some way to make itself live.

But that can be too easily feigned; I'm also of the opinion that poems ought not to end there, telling you they are alive and you ought to be too. I'd like to write poems that don't end at all: too many poems have punch-lines, as if they were jokes, shaggy-dog stories. Why are good lines often held until last; why do poems "wrap up"? I'm fighting and so far failing to write many (or any) poems that don't "end," that stay open, that leave the reader hanging, that don't essay answers but more questions, that remain mysterious. But that's just me, and also the many poets who feel the same way, all of us struggling to keep poems from closure.

And transcendentalisticism is of course not closure; it is not a metaphysical or logical system that cranks out an answer; it is more of an opening, an opening of the eye, the circle that Emerson celebrated. And that long word isn't even a word, just my own neologism for professorial stuffiness. "Falling" is a word I like instead, much simpler, and the thought that falling is in fact rising.

But the glib shut-the-door statement of my friend's professor, even to grant him a metaphor to mean something larger, is disheartening, because constrictive, banal, too stuffed with a Big Answer, which is the death of poetry. That's what made her so mad all these years; a stupid professor, not a stupid idea.

James DenBoer's newest book is Stonework: Selected Poems, from Sandra McPherson's Swan Scythe Press. He has had grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, the Authors' League and other institutions. DenBoer lives in Sacramento, California.