Galatea Resurrects #14 (A Poetry Engagement)

Issue No. 14 TABLE OF CONTENTS

2010-05-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

2010-05-05T10:24:00.000-07:00

By Eileen Tabios

Of course, I’d like to share my son Michael’s first English-language poem, written from when his English as second language class explored the acrostic poem--and isn't it wonderful that the acrostic is introduced in an ESL-type class!):

T O R N A D O S

Tables smash
Oh no!
Run, run for your life
Nobody is safe
All the houses are
Down, televisions crashing into cars
Oh my god, my
Son is safe!

Editing 101: Moi the Editor discussed his first draft gently. First, he originally wrote the second line as "Oh oh", and I had to explain that that doesn't work since the phrase is spelled as "Uh, oh" (such nuances as one learns a new language!). Then, we agreed that the first draft’s first line of “Tables move” would be better as “Tables smash” since the latter has more punch and is more specific. We’d been working with adjusting generalities or abstractions to specifics—so we also changed the original reference to “furniture” to “televisions” in the sixth line. Relatedly, his original sixth line simply had been “Down” but he thought he should add more details to that one-word line—isn’t he clever!

A close reader no doubt would glean the expansiveness of this 14-year-old’s world view—this poem is not written from a personal “I”’s perspective (not that there’s anything wrong with such) but from, moithinks, his parent’s point of view. So the ending lines of “my / Son is safe!” is him extrapolating from the loving care he receives at home. Makes this close (and unbiased) reader sniffle….

Here is the brilliantly budding poet; he is fresh out of the shower and bleary-eyed (or is it that he looks tortured by me?)—but I chose this photograph as he is also shown here stuffing a “Hay(na)ku for Haiti” (H for H) booklet into his pants for his school’s Pocket-in-the-Poem Day. It is ___ as you read this—have you ordered your fundraising H for H booklet yet?

So, to official bidness: Thanks as ever to GR's numerous, generous volunteer staff of reviewers. In addition to some wonderful feature articles, we have 64 NEW REVIEWS this issue! I like to track GR's progress, so here are some poetry-lovin' stats!

Issue 1: 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice by different reviewers)
Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one project was reviewed thrice, and three projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 5: 56 new reviews (four projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 6: 56 new reviews (one project was reviewed twice)
Issue 7: 51 new reviews
Issue 8: 64 new reviews (3 projects were each reviewed twice)
Issue 9: 65 new reviews
Issue 10: 68 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice and 1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 11: 72 new reviews (1 project was reviewed thrice)
Issue 12: 87 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 13: 55 new reviews (1 project was reviewed twice)
Issue 14: 64 new reviews (3 projects were reviewed twice)

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

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

I continue to encourage authors/publishers to send in your projects for potential review. Obviously, people are following up with your submissions! Information for submissions and available review copies HERE. Future reviewers also should note that the next review submission deadline is November 1, 2010.

As of Issue No. 14, we are pleased to report that GR has provided 776 new reviews (covering 343 publishers in 17 countries so far) and 64 reprinted reviews (to bring online reviews previously available only viz print).

*****

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

*****

I'd like to make a special mention of only the FOURTH non-poet to appear on Galatea Resurrects as a poetry book reviewer (I exclude students in writing/literature courses from this count as I know them as students, versus poets or non-poets). Which is to say, it's difficult to spread the Poetry Word out beyond the limits of "po-world", but it can happen. Welcome to Meredith Caliman, Esq. -- a lawyer in Southern California who graciously agreed to review pro bono. And which book did she review? Well, your mischievous editor sent her Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present co-edited by David Kader and Michael Stanford (University Of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2010), described by the publisher as "the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States." Click HERE for the lawyer's take on poets writing about the law -- it's depressing. Actually, later in the issue is my review of THE OTHER BLUEBOOK, a novel written by poet-playwright Reme Grefalda based on her experiences as a paralegal for three "Big Law" firms -- this one is funny. Law: depressing and funny--that seems about right, says your editor...who happens to be married to a lawyer.

And I wonder what it means that of the four non-poet reviewers to date for GR (and one of them is Mom who I shanghaied outside the hallway of her bedroom into writing reviews), two are lawyers. In any event, GR would love to hear more non-poets' views on the poems being written today. C'mon, Peeps -- send your, uh, dentists, plumbers, masseuses (especially masseuses!), UPS or Fedex delivery people, etc. over to me! As regards poetry, I believe everyone's opinions can be worthwhile!

*****

I also want to note GR's first review of Zimbabwean poetry--I like the continued expansion of GR's scope, this with the help of Emmanuel Sigauke who reviews INTWASA POETRY [anthology of 15 Zimbabwean poets] edited by Jane Morris and published by amaBooks in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Yay.

*****

It occurs to me that you may be interested in this special themed issue on Poet-Editors which I curated for Otoliths. Since it contextualizes why I edit Galatea Resurrects, I raise attention to it...and hope you enjoy reading it!

*****

Wait for it! One more photo of Michael, this time as he soothed Artemis aka "Botero Kitty" (her fur makes her look fat) when she injured herself and had to be in a cast for nearly two months. (Go to link if you want to see the special offer to GR reviewers with pets!)

With much love, poetry and fur,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
May 5, 2010

SHOULDER SEASON by ANGE MLINKO

2010-04-30T23:55:00.000-07:00

CRAG HILL Reviews

Shoulder Season by Ange Mlinko
(Coffeehouse Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2009)

Poet Beyond Borders

Despite notions to the contrary blaring from conservative television, America grows through its economic, political and cultural interactions with the international community, importing and exporting not only commodities and resources, but also languages, customs, economic/political innovations, and, in surprisingly profound ways, transformative art. American music has incorporated the rhythms of Africa, South America, and the Caribbean into its jazz, rock, and folk music; America has infused the movement of dances from around the world into its choreography (is there a less insular art form than dance, motion translatable in ways that images and words are not?); and America has folded the indeterminacy of French literary theory into its poetry, to highlight how American art but in a few instances has been influenced from afar. Yet America also virulently excludes, flings up economic and cultural barriers, battening down its hatches. Though most of the political spectrum in the U.S. is currently recoiling from world citizenship, one side of the aisle has taken so many knee-jerk reactions in the last decade I can’t tell if that’s a kneecap I’m seeing or a bald face (lie).

In Shoulder Season, however, Ange Mlinko is no blind-folded superpatriot. Through poetry, she takes a Whitmanesque bear hug of the world thriving above and beyond the arbitrary borders of nation-states. As she says in a conversation with poet Jordan Davis, “I like poems that engage the world. I love shows of brilliance and virtuosity. I don’t share the American prejudice for modesty in poems.” In this her third collection, Mlinko is as unparochial in style and subject as one can get. In today’s political climate, steeped in bitter tea, Mlinko’s inclusivity is downright un-American. I’m going to report her to Sarah Hannity or Sean Palin or whatever their frickin’ names are.

Mlinko eschews provincialism. Her poems are teeming not only with references to places in the eastern United States, but also to myriad places in Europe and the Middle East: Paris, Gibraltar, Zurich, Venice, Breton, Azerbaijan, and Beirut, among many others. These references aren’t placed to impress; this isn’t name-dropping signify nothing. Mlinko’s details add flavor. In one instance, in “World Lit,” she quotes al-Harith passing by a secret cabaret, disclosed by the green light emanating from its transom:

if we cross that threshold
we’ll be in Agadir
with the hated Germans who go topless
as the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche
(“World Lit,” p. 9)

Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche is a church in Berlin that has gone topless since being bombed in 1943, a geographical reference then that both provides a humorous simile, but also speaks to how nudity, a common practice on public beaches in one culture is a grave sin in another. Mlinko’s poetic world is replete with these bridges, jarring cultural associations reaching across differences for shared spaces.

Mlinko’s global vocabulary shouts in the face of Americans who want their news to be as monosyllabic and black-and-white as possible. Thalassotherapy, synovial joints, cruets, pollards, orts, plewts, pentimentos, jacquards, urushiol lacquers, and langoustines abound. These are not strange words used for shock value; they reach beyond the common vernacular to encompass a greater means of articulation, fine gradations rather than rough, broad expressions. Americans might have to download a dictionary app on their mobile devices to parse these poems, but they better make sure it isn’t an Ameri-centric dictionary.

With a style at times colloquial and at times eloquent, Mlinko is not only plucky enough to employ a variety of rhymes (riff/if, Massachusetts/massages, clock/talk/rock), she unabashedly rips off similes and images that would make lesser poets cringe:

Love will be organized like notes from a piano
emerging like ants from the furrows of a peony
( “Peonage,” p.12 )

The sky was laced with Irish cream mist
( “A Not Unruffled Surface,” p. 13 )

You putter in the wooden shoes a lathe cut like gouda
( “X’d The Go-Go,” p. 36 )

I saw the chess players over their griddles, all the furor of thinking
swallowed like a song in a furred flute
( “Eros of Heroines,” p. 47 )

Only a poet who is in part the progeny of the New York school could have the cajones to pull off these at first glance inept comparisons.

As Mlinko romps across the globe, she closely maps the world of consciousness, of attention, as well. In the first two poems, Mlinko stakes out her cognitive ground. She acknowledges the natural world as a respite from the man-made world, or, rather, the world un-made by man (America’s leadership in this domain is only now being challenged by China). The natural world is measured against the war-ravaged streets of Beirut:

a little spa for the mind–seeing butterflies
set themselves down by the dozen like easels

on bromeliads, when out on the street the boutiques
are dilapidated, construction can’t be told from ruin
(“Treatment,” p. 1)

On the other hand, in the flipside to the opening poem, a sequel with the same title, she asserts that the projective construction of the external through the lens of the internal has its fatal limitations. When human destruction is indistinguishable from what has been made new, to retreat to the imagination is an immoral escape (as stated in the imperative “You can’t”):

The Mind is not a little Spa.
You can’t retreat to its imaginary
standard distance
when outside construction
can’t be told from ruin.”
(“Treatment,” p.2)

Intellect cannot be a retreat from a landscape the body is in the midst of despoiling.

One of the best poetry books of 2010, Shoulder Season isn’t a flawless collection. Some of the formal experiments fall flat, e.g. the two column poems “Engineering” and “This Is The Latest.” The two flush left columns with ragged caesura in between drag the poems down, a sluggish staccato that detracts rather than adds. If reading across and down the columns would have increased the number of possible readings, the form might have been justified. In one poem, “Thalassotherapy,” the italicized chorus lines–“What remains of the rue,” “What remains of the crabgrass,” “What remains of the butter-and-eggs,” “What remains of bog sage”–seem to be tacked on, an afterthought, the chorus a frail closure for each stanza, a forced connective tissue deployed in an attempt to hold the poem together.

Mlinko surged onto the poetry scene with Matinées (Zoland Press, 1999), vigorously followed up by Starred Wire (Coffee House, 2005). She was one of those few poets whose work arrived fully mature, stylistically urbane with finely-nuanced content. Have her poetics in ten years not changed, not developed? Perhaps. I’d argue that though they may not have evolved, their application as demonstrated in these poems has become increasingly robust. She now plies her aesthetic to a wider, ever-expansive canvas, carrying her aesthetic across larger spheres and concerns.

Pirouetting beyond fields plowed and sown by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Alice Notley, Ange Mlinko is creating her own space in the world of poetry and more. To encapsulate her fecund body of work, the word glee keeps coming to mind. And that may be the most American aspect to her work, its joie de vivre. This may be the Shoulder Season, yet no one has to go slumping through it without some ecstasy.

*****

Crag Hill until recently edited SCORE, one of only two journals dedicated exclusively to concrete/visual poetry. In the last three decades his work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including several available on-line. His creative and critical works in progress can be found at http://scorecard.typepad.com. He teaches English Education at Washington State University.

MUCH LIKE YOU SHARK by LOGAN RYAN SMITH

2010-04-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

STEVEN FAMA Reviews

Much Like You Shark by Logan Ryan Smith
(dusi/e-chap kollectiv, 2007)
[on-line PDF here!]

Vast are the seas of poetry, including the mighty ocean of the contemporary!

The poetry-life in these waters is so abundant that it’s just not possible to see everything, even when the currents bring so much so close. So much gets away!

Still, the ever-flowing bounty of poetry creates energizing possibilities. Keep your eyes open, maybe poke around a bit, and all sorts of wonders can come your way, even if it’s later than you’d like.

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Logan Ryan Smith’s Much Like You Shark is a chapbook length poem. It has approximately 450 lines organized in 23 unnumbered and untitled sections. No section is longer than a page and each section, regardless of length (some are quite short), has its own page.

The opening six sections (about 100 lines) of Much Like You Shark were first published in March 2007 as a super-limited (50 copies) Big Game Books / Tinysides chapbook. The entire poem was then published twice later in 2007, first as a limited edition Dusie chapbook and then as part of Smith’s collection Stupid Birds (Transmission Press). In early 2008, Much Like You Shark was again published, this time as an on-line PDF in a dusi/e-chap kollektiv post.

I missed every single one of these publications when they first appeared. And missed too Jared Hayes’ August 2007 blog-rave for Much Like You Shark (“Fuck! This book is the shit!”) and C.A. Conrad’s May 2008 enthused comments (“FANTASTIC BOOK!”) on Smith’s poem.

But a few months ago, while browsing the used poetry at Books and Bookshelves here in San Francisco, I came across the Tinysides chap that prints a long excerpt from Much Like You Shark. The chap’s cover – an intense toothy Great White – was an eye-grabber, and the title intrigued me. After all, the apex predator is a kind of neighbor, given that here in the City where I live The Red Triangle is just off-shore.

And so I read Much Like You Shark right there in the bookstore. The poem’s sharp energy (sorry about this) bit me hard. I bought the chap and as soon as I made it home found the full PDF version on-line. I’ve read the poem many times since, including via the Dusie chap hard copy that Galatea Resurrects kindly provided for this review. Smith’s poem continues to put me in a kind of poetic (you know it’s coming) frenzy.

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Much Like You Shark takes the form of a dramatic monologue addressed to a shark. In the poem – and I borrow here from C.A. Conrad, who I think got it right – Smith uses the shark, or the idea of one, as a way to find the world and see himself. All this is apparent right from the opening lines:

Much like you shark
I meet the world harmlessly
but in bad weather and murky waters,
shark,
in the noise of the blue open
skyscraper
tree-lined city street chatter
chatter
chatter-box teething
little gums ringed with blood

like you
tiger shark . . .

The poem moves with similar rhythms and energy through its 450 plus lines. And it’s the poem’s rhythm and energy – its start-to-finish propulsive movement – that’s most impressive to me. It may not totally be “the even, liquid grace of a creature completely at home with its place in the Universe” (that, natch, is how scientists describe sharks swimming) but it has a lot of that feel, I must say. The words, the lines, the sections, just keep coming. Attention stays taut.

Smith creates the motion-energy of the poem, the sense and feel of something alive in action, through several methods. One key technique is varying the length of lines, stanzas, and sections. With regard to line lengths, the look in the opening stanza above, in which medium and short are irregularly mixed, shows up in many of the poem’s sections. The shorter lines, obviously, move quicker than the longer ones, and thus insert a bit of speed the text, but the main point is that you can’t predict what’s coming next.

Similarly, the twenty-three sections of Much Like You Shark vary, both in format and length. Five of the sections are single stanzas, and they range in length from as few as six to more than two dozen lines.

Smith mostly arranges the lines in the other eighteen sections into stanzas (i.e., groups of lines with spaces in between). But these stanzas vary widely in length. Smith for example will start with a tercet, then have a couplet followed by a quatrain. Or in another section he’ll book-end couplets with stanzas of five and eight lines, respectively. Only two sections have stanzas of the same length throughout (couplets are used) , and both of those are sandwiched between sections that contain no couplets at all. There’s also a section that begins with an indented block of prose followed by a mix of stand-alone lines and couplets.

The variations of form, the changes or shifts within and between the sections, are relentless. It’s energizing, the changes in rhythm and densities, making Much Like You Shark seem alive, as if it’s constantly in movement. Not knowing what’s coming, you keep your eyes on it.

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There’s also variation and unpredictability in the substantive matters observed and reported.. “I keep my eyes moving,” Smith states (twice) in a section near the middle of the poem. He also has (as it’s put in another section) “heightened senses sensing.” As such, he brings in all kinds of things. Sometimes he’s “amongst the hammerheads” but other times he’s far from the water as in the report, in the ninth section, of everyday urban traffic:

the consistent circling
signs signaling
no left turns
and lights
going
on
and
off

Through either simple references or sometimes more elaborated description, Smith brings into his poem matters as diverse as a blackbird’s struggle with a hawk in a parking lot, shadows off the coast of South Africa, memories of standing on a shore, “glorified / doppelgangers,” migraines, glass-sided buildings, “saddle-weary city walker bloody / mary shit talker,” the shadow of clouds, the Atlantic and Missouri, and the shores of Japan.

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As he addresses the shark throughout his poem, Smith makes a number of assertions about himself and the world. Two of these are particularly memorable. The first is an explicit criticism of his and our way of being, of the human condition:

how sickly we all seem
crowded in the street
at a party
or in the bar
with our sick glances
and sidearm touches
how stupid we are
not owning what we hold

Related to this criticism is a recognition of forces within that can’t be controlled. Two excerpts from different sections, one short and one longer, point to the centrality to Smith of desire:

like you shark
I find my desires
overcome my will
I will
be consumed
by my needs

[ . . . ]

much like you shark
when they find my
bloated body
crumpled up
in the gutter
and they roll me over
to cut open my gut
they’ll find
a bunch of rot
and junk
a lot of things
I had no business putting in me
but I’ll speak now
I’ll speak for you and me
since it’ll one day be our innards
they’ll be judging:
I cannot claim that I didn’t know better
and I never meant to hurt a thing
but I cannot explain
desire
anymore
than you can cause time to stop

Time to stop.

I like this focus on desire, the acknowledgment of its power and mystery. I think of Andre Breton (“the marvellous precipitate of desire”) and the theories of the 19th century French utopian Charles Fourier, who championed the role of the passions.

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Perhaps not surprisingly given the instincts and behavior of the animal that serves as the poem’s central trope, there’s much that is violent in Much Like You Shark. Particularly explicit and forceful in this regard are the lines in the poem’s next to last section:

and when I rip your face from your face from your nose
and your skull
and your skin from your arms your forearms and biceps
your triceps and wrists
and when I rip the muscle from your legs the calves
your thighs and ankles
when I tear into your stomach your liver your intestines

This is unsettling, to say the least, and thought provoking. Throughout the poem – as the excerpts above illustrate – the “I” has referred to Smith (or the voice of his poem), and the “you” to the shark that’s addressed. Here, however, there seems to be a shift in that the “your” with its forearms, biceps, legs, ankles, etc. can’t be a shark, obviously. What’s getting ripped apart is us, or perhaps – remembering here the earlier reference in the poem, mentioned above, to doppelgangers, some other within Smith himself.

I can’t fully connect the meaning of this climactic rampage to the rest of the poem, and the same is true of the short (five line) final section which follows. There, Smith flashes to a moment after the above-described attack:

when standing again
we’ll watch the terns
turn and scurry

as we stupid birds
get pulled under

The conclusion here may look or read as if its neatly wrapped, but I don’t think it is. First, a poem-concluding uplifting affirmation this is not! It’s suggestion of foolish life drowned, is anything but that. Plus, the pronoun “we” disorients: I can’t pin it down. Does “we’ll” and “we” in these lines refer to Smith (or the poem’s voice) and the shark? Or the poet and his readers (including me)? Or is it instead different facets of Smith’s mind or personality? I like this uncertainty, especially here at the end: it sends me back to the poem for yet another reading, to again (yep) swim through Much Like You Shark.

*****

Steven Fama among other things tends the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica. Previously here at Galatea Resurrects, Steve wrote about Jessica Smith’s bird-book (click here to read) and John Olson’s The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat (click to read, if you please).

BOOKS by NEELI CHERKOVSKI, VINCENT FERRINI, EDWARD SANDERS, ELENI SIKELIANOS & WALT WHITMAN

2010-04-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN Reviews

From the Canyon Outward by Neeli Cherkovski
(RL Crow Publications, Penn Valley, CA., 2009)

and

The Pleroma by Vincent Ferrini
(Tiger Moon Productions, Bangalore, India, 2008)

and

Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century: Selected Poems 1961-1985 (New & Revised edition) by Edward Sanders
(Coffee House Press, Minn., 2009)

and

Let’s Not Keep Fighting the Trojan War: New and Selected Poems 1986-2009 by Edward Sanders
(Coffee House Press, Minn., 2009)

and

Body Clock by Eleni Sikelianos
(Coffee House Press, Minn., 2008)

and

Leaves of Grass, 1860: the 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition by Walt Whitman, ed. by Jason Stacy
(University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2009)

NOTES ON WHITMAN & THE PROMISE OF THE AMERICAN BARDIC EAR

The singers of successive hours of centuries may have ostensible names, but the name of
each of them is one of the singers,
The name of each is, a heart-singer, eye-singer, hymn-singer, law-singer, ear-singer,
head-singer, sweet-singer, wise-singer, droll-singer, thrift-singer, sea-singer, wit-
singer, echo-singer, parlor-singer, love-singer, passion-singer, mystic-singer, fable-
singer, item-singer, weeping-singer, or something else.

- Walt Whitman

… if people want to get religion into poetry, fine; but poetry itself is a religion. And it too is a tradition—even when poets make breaks into Schools and Movements.

- Vincent Ferrini

A Greeting

Walt Whitman adores you. Whoever you are, whatever your occupation; nationality; whether you walk to work, ride a bicycle, take public transit, or drive yourself in your automobile, Whitman travels alongside you with the adoration of a lover pouring out from him. He expresses his expansive love for you in his great Song, Leaves of Grass, and would be delighted for you to join him with your own Song. Acknowledging his role (as it is everybody’s) as self-progenitor, Whitman puts out the call for poets of the future, filling his poems with a vast passion for the company of others. His poetry is as personal as it gets yet simultaneously never solely concerned with just his own person but fully embracing and expressing the concerns of others as well. He wants you to be his lover in and of words: the pact of the page.

I.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Whitman’s 3rd edition of Leaves of Grass, significant in that this is the first enlarged edition Whitman saw through the press bulking up the volume to over two thirds its size from the original 1855 edition—which also lacked titles upon individual poems (in this edition Whitman is still testing out possible titles, for instance what will later become “Starting from Paumanok” is here titled “Proto-Leaf”). With every edition Whitman saw through press over the years (and there were many until his death) Leaves of Grass and its author personae, Walt, experience an ever evolving state of presentation. As Jason Stacy, editor of this facsimile edition notes, although “The critic Roy Harvey Peirce believed the third edition to be the culmination of what Whitman began in 1855 and only tinkered with after 1860… Whitman undermines easy narratives like this: ‘Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold! / Already you see I have escaped from you.’” Stacy argues what’s probably the best interpretation over the merits of the various editions: every edition offers a different variation of Whitman’s schematic, every edition, therefore, counts.

The 1860 edition offers an interesting read given the historical relevancy of the times in which it went to print. Stacy’s introduction gives an easy-going yet rigorous encapsulation of all the relevant details, for both Whitman himself and the country, while also highlighting aspects of the design and layout (which Whitman oversaw himself through publication at the publishers in Boston) including Whitman’s numbering of his verses, so as to form an “American bible” in celebration of the “organic democracy” he believes nascent in the land and people of the United States. Stacy extrapolates upon the belief systems Whitman drew from, painting a broad background for present day readers:

Whitman incorporated popular scientism into his American bible and, in the clusters “Enfans d’Adam” and “Calamus,” drew upon the theories of phrenology—an early form of psychology based on indentations and bumps in the skull… to support his argument that nature had written union into existence itself via organic compacts…he situated the third Leaves of Grass in the heart of an American discourse…

Near the end of his Introduction, Stacy insists “Whitman’s new bible insisted that readers do their own part to bring it alive. That is as true in the twenty-first century as it was in 1860.” There is little point arguing against this claim and nothing demonstrates it better than the monumental pull and influence Whitman has had and continues to have upon poets to this day. Whitman’s omnipresence (especially in the Americas) is evident in the work of poet after poet. To demonstrate the relevancy of his ongoing influence, rather than focus on reviewing Whitman’s poems in isolation, this writing takes up recent publications by four additional later poets of varying generational/geographic and stylistic/formal concerns in order to explore and celebrate the great swath of poetic lineage that Whitman stands as progenitor of.

II.

Vincent Ferrini, a mainstay of the artistic gut and hub of Gloucester, Massachusetts, passed away Christmas Eve, 2007. His final volume of poems The Pleroma was released shortly after his death. A fascinating book, which successfully reads less as a thoroughly well thought out construction than a hodgepodge assemblage of documents, The Pleroma (a “Gnostic term used by Jung,” which Ferrini understands as “the period of fullness before birth and after death”) offers up a tribute to the poet and man in the form of poems and letters sent to editor/publisher, Terry Reis Kennedy, and which in Kenneth Warren’s words serves as “the culminating point for the autobiography, bibliography, phenomenology, poetry, psychology and religion that informs Ferrini’s whole utopian narrative… the final telling of his desires, defenses, fusions, inflations and inspirations.”(“Preface”) In short, it is not to be missed. The immediacy and warmth of Ferrini’s writing leaps from off the page with glimmering delight, proving that the twinkle of the poet’s wrinkled visage as seen in the photograph on the book’s cover is the bedrock for the illuminated seer-like awareness his writing demonstrates for his place in the span of things.

This last publication of Ferrini’s is both a terrifically inspiring introduction to the poet for those unfamiliar and a well-spring for further meditation to readers who have long been under the spell of his ever-humorous, deeply searching cosmic vibe.

The Choir of the Forest

Long before Christ,
there was Krishna
& His cowgirls.

Whose time
are we in?
What’s the problem?

The solitary leaves
have their own
language

blinded by
the Soul’s
Beauty

the Earth
in love
with Itself

the Peace
underground
meditating…

Ferrini passionately lives in the moment(s) of his writing. His belief in what is said via his poetry is paramount and insurmountable as is his openness to all he encounters. Occasionally, his writing has a rather pell-mell appearance, arising as it does from an experience in which he is so completely a part that he is incapable of dispensing with arrangement of words and phrases as they arrived in the process of writing. For Ferrini, to an extent, Writing is Being. This makes it difficult to imagine anything but the possibility of acceptance or rejection. There’s nothing to debate: readers will take it or leave it. And Ferrini appears nonplussed with either inclination. His writing unabashedly unmasks expectations with the encouragement usually come of familial support and love, gazing ahead and pushing Whitman’s call for future poets, embracing with sudden intimacy the call for poems to serve and benefit all.

Pro-Vision

THIS hard period
the fisherman and their families
are deluged with
will pass away
and a time will come
when the nations of the world
will farm the oceans
to feed the people
of this Spectacular celestial LIGHT
and exploitation
be a useless word in the dictionary
and sooner than
most
believe

III.

Eleni Sikelianos’ book-length The California Poem clearly aligns with many of Whitman’s grand themes with its long breath lines of land and politics, the poet’s life and lore spilling over with immediacy into the writing. In her latest collection, Body Clock, she takes up the Whitmanesque theme of the body—the writing began during her pregnancy as a measure to mark the passing of time, the image of the body literally as a kind of clock, and the book is dedicated to her daughter. Her initial impulse when writing, as she explains to Selah Saterstrom, was, “Could I quit my capitalist tendencies, stop worrying about how I “spend” my time? Walter Benjamin’s (and many other authors’) idea that idleness is one of the writer’s indispensible engagements was in my mind.” (http://selahsaterstrom.blogspot.com/2008/05/eleni-sikelianos-is-author-of-monster.html) Sikelianos exults in the exuberant spirit of Whitman’s, “I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass!” (“Walt Whitman” aka “Song of Myself”) embracing the opportunity of being in the moment, exploring it in all its appeal.

With Sikelianos, the masculine prerogative which works so well for Whitman’s bombastic declarations is allowed to evolve further along as she writes her own experience doing and moving, forthrightly and nonchalantly occupying the space of writing.

A RADIANT COUNTESS OF WHAT’S IT

I love it
when women eat sweet ribbon, sweet
rabbit, sweet meat, when women

are the scene
of several utopias

when the body melts back into shadow
beginning with the feet

Women are as much carnivorous and prowling poetic predators as any men. Yet Sikelianos doesn’t bother to push the fact of her being a woman, she simply accepts it as the given identity round which the writing commences, her pregnancy being no different than any other state of affairs an individual passes through and comments on in a lifetime. And she does so while still keeping the writing personal, held close to, literally of, her and hers:

in the quiet sleep of animals
from the balcony of a belly
say your speeches
no cow licked you
I do
(“DOUBLEBLIND (BODY CLOCK)”)

This celebratory and sensual acknowledgment of the body is central to poets writing in the Whitmanic lineage. As Whitman bluntly states, “If I worship any particular thing, it shall be some of the spread of my own body.” (“Walt Whitman” aka “Song of Myself”) Whitman’s robust and intimate enunciation of the masculine has been well recognized and critically regarded. Sikelianos follows up on his meanderings and returns with lines of images celebrating the feminine, expanding upon practices Whitman may have been first to develop and implement, but clearly never exhausts, “The body’s stain returns to the body, a / backward pleasure / like dusted wings that refold / a lucky wounded symmetry or / the lips of the cunt closing.” (“ACHILLES ON A BALL”)

Ferrini, too, if a tad overzealously, celebrates the body, as in these lines he attempts relate a lesson to a female reader of the strength and acceptance of her own beauty.

Feel the heat flowing
up and down.
Put both hands between your legs,
sliding over the cut.

See the pleasures in the mirror.
Part your overjoying lips,
fingering your vagina’s character,
dare to be amazed
at the hidden bounties
rising to a heavenly height.

Still looking deeply into the mirror
behold this Other You
you are repossessing…
(“At Psyche’s Art School”)

While Ferrini’s language may inadvertently be sexualizing the moment of her “repossessing” he is assuredly not attempting to possess the woman, her body, or its image for himself. The purity of Ferrini’s embrace throws out the problematical thorns which any would-be commentator might wish utilize as gloss for criticism. His belief in an eternal situation in which what matters is only what remains real in the moment, overrides such criticism: there simply is no room for it. His ideal is the same supreme equalization Whitman consistently sought to remind and embolden in his own readers.

Great are Yourself and Myself,
We are just as good and bad as the oldest and youngest…
[ …]
Great is Youth—equally great is Old Age—great are the Day and Night…
(“Leaves of Grass”)

IV.

Early on in his writing, Ed Sanders, embraces the beauty of an organic wholeness, finding freedom to write poems that sing out, announcing and celebrating the freedom of sexual bliss without concern for what may shock or draw scorn, lines such as:

             in to the oily crotch
                         place dick

…

             come into the cool grey
bark the hair-grey color of Persephone

             how difficult it is
                         to be fucked
             in the volcano!

…

I have given myself to the elm
I have soaked the dryad’s shawl
What a wonderful world,
a palace of gentle sexual aggression.

…

Let me sing
of the need to fuck
            “Elm-Fuck Poem”)

and

when the prick sputs
the hot come
                         into loins
& the lamb looks back
with her eye
                      & glazes me
in the freak-beams,

            “Sheep-fuck poem”)

or religious heights of unabashed sexual glee awash in anti-orthodox classicism:

Bent over Bent down
& I flipped it to the
buns, and knew the
god-rose in the snatch
felt the god-butt
knew her &
spurted thru the
blessings, droplets
of spangled jissom
in the Red Halls of
Demeter, the Goddess.

(“Holy Was Demeter Walking th’ Corn Furrow”)

The recent republication by Coffee House Press of a revised version of Sanders’ Thirsting For Peace In A Raging Century Selected Poems 1961-1985 (from which the above lines were taken) accompanied by his Let’s Not Keep Fighting The Trojan War New and Selected Poems 1986-2009 provides rich opportunity to read his work anew taking delight from his lively informed discursive ear. As Joanne Kyger writes in her introduction to the second volume, “this…Investigative Poet, in the bardic tradition, knows how to publicly present poems to bring about the rebirth of the voice, with songs… Poetic reality enters into a public presentation of verse.”

The Question of Self-Publishing

For 25 years William Blake
            kept the copper plates for
                         the Songs of Innocence

to print a copy or two on a need
& then he hand-painted the colors
                                                 with Catherine’s help

Walt Whitman helped set & print
                                     his own Leaves of Grass
             in the Brooklyn vastness

Woody Guthrie
a mimeographed edition of his songs in ‘39

& Ginsberg mimeo’d some “Howl”s
                                     in ‘55

& how about Chekov’s Tales of Melpomene in 1885
                         which he paid for
or Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility
of 1811?

                                    & so it goes
                                    & goes so well

Sanders picks up and continues the overarching celebration of freedom found in Whitman’s poems; cajoling, declaring and demanding the reach of the poet go on: that poems lunge out towards readers, firing up and challenging expectations of what’s possible.

Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allowed the eternal purport of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
(Walt Whitman, “Salut au Monde”)

V.

Whitman is the giver of first permission. Writing from out Whitman’s allowances, Neeli Cherkovski found his lifelong love of poetry amid poets in California cities, as a youth hanging with Charles Bukowski in Los Angeles and later with an infinite number of North Beach poets in his adopted San Francisco. Cherkovski’s latest collection, From the Canyon Outward comes near to being nothing short of a hands down wonderful demonstration of a poet at the grip of his powers. Here is nothing but the certainty of a quiet assuredness.

Meditation Nearing Sixty

sixty years in July, It’s a bit embarrassing
I was never meant to be old
like this, just like I wasn’t meant to serve in the military, or
to sit on a jury, or to
fend for myself as other men do, the sun is climbing
in my window, it is burning a hole in my solitude, it is asking me
onto the deck and into the garden, here in the garden
I can play with my dog or read from Lorca, or
simply stare at the bushes
and the trees, I have watered my plants through two desert wars
and taken the measure of the misery
we’ve caused, the pain and suffering
we, ourselves, come in with and go out with,
I find the shadow of the blackbird warring with the bluebird and
when I listen to Beethoven, or “Bitches Brew” by Miles Davis
something like hope rises
out of the doom and I think
it is good to make music, it is good to write poems, it is fine
to make paintings and to sit alone
for the afternoon
in meditation:
sixty winters, sixty dreams, one day
of reckoning, one father, one mother, one sister, one lover, one
dog, a garden, a redwood deck, a work room, a bedroom,
a guest room, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a TV room
all the ordinary stuff of the middle class…
a new born child clutching
a dream of the one poem
that rises from our common desire

In this lyrical drift of lines Cherkovski weaves in much that concerns many of Whitman’s, and those of the other poets here under discussion, poems: utter equalization of ages and time, making the most of the moment, cataloging-lists as poetic tool, and the irrevocable damnation of the waste brought about by humanity’s bent for waging war. That, while even in the welcome gladness of a serene swooning afternoon calm, there is beneath any sense of peace the persistent glare of the resistant human endurance for inflicting pain unto others and amid such unfortunate circumstances acceptance—yet of a sort that does not fail resist—is still to be found.

VI.

4.

             The Feather of Justice

I believe in the Feather of Justice
The Egyptians
called it the Maat Feather
It’s light
             It’s perfect
                         It belongs to eternity

I believe
in the Feather of Justice

It measures our lives
                         in the World of Forms

It calls the evil
                         away from the good

It’s in our cells
It’s in the path of the sun

& sometimes the universe
cuts the Feather
                         to make a pen
                                     for the bard

I believe in the Feather of Justice
La Plume Égyptian

I’m thirsting for peace in a raging century
Thirsting for peace in a raging century

(Ed Sanders, “Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century”)

In the face of violent human conflict, the only relief that comes at times is to wake to the fact of the possible endlessness of the situation. Sikelianos writes (rides) it out with grim, biting humor which refuses not to always keep pushing against the hanging gloom.

CONTENANT ET CONTENU
(This was on a bottle of shampoo.)

The water evaporates from the glass,
the child outgrows her shoes, the wood
erodes, the paint chips, the painting fades,
the leg breaks, the war
explodes.

What is the body’s container?
From soldiers we learn about each other.
Nothing is contained.

_______________________________

unstoried soul a stoned dark doll a
soul doesn’t tell stories
it’s a baby playing in
the poles of the universe —did you mean puke?
War is how we know each other.

To live is to struggle. The further the poet confronts and questions what’s happening around her, the quicker looms the darkness behind any shimmering light-filled peacefulness. Poems are the rubble piled against the bitter war-wrought bantering death and destruction of the times in which the poet lives. And yet poems, as Whitman reminds, are not always to the benefit of all, no one and no art is purely good.

Nor will all my poems do good only—they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit—
(“Calamus”)

Everybody (even a poem) is only human, after all. Among the job of poems, and thus poets, is to serve remind how delicately thin the balance between light and dark is. Cherkovski, in lines such as,

I take my rage by the throat
and embrace it
on the couch
in the front room
under a yellow lamp,
next to a wall
of books,
feeling helpless, yet
not entirely without hope
for a resolution made
out of a dot symbolizing
one of everything,
no more, no less
(“The Rage”)

tackles just such edges, pulling down pleasant masks worn to fool himself and others into easy comfort. The serenity of relaxing with one’s own person and time does not come easy, but it is “not entirely without hope” if greeted with challenge. In like spirit, Ferrini celebrates a vibratory splendor assured that there is a larger order to which all belong whether or not they’re aware and struggling towards engaging with it.

Song

Paradise is the Process
we are all ways
&
Holy
Here

For Ferrini, as for Cherkovski, the realization of abiding peace is at the center of poetic engagement. It’s no surprise that Whitman inspires such shared brotherly endeavor, no doubt Ferrini’s poems such as,

MANTRA

I am happy
Free
Everything’s on time

find him much at home with the North Beach poetry crowd, among whom it’s difficult to imagine nary a negative nudge against Whitman that wouldn’t be drowned out by a thousand cheers, if not a forceful shove or two.

VII.

Poets, like everybody, have to stick together. The poetryworld racket doesn’t receive much care or real interest, for that matter, from the rest of the day-to-day world. “It’s a tough life” as the Kris Kristofferson tune puts it, and all poets are always reading the same mail: bills and rejections—on all fronts. In the closing lines of “for Ted Berrigan”

It is an
utter &
complete disgrace
that there was
no free national
health system
to which you could
have consulted
             readily
                         & easily

America, where bad
teeth cost as much
as a Honda

where poverty
the curse of Chatterton
& Edmund Spenser
still eats
the marrow
                         of poets

Sanders picks up the rattle-bag in favor to a fellow poet long ill-served by society not because poets are special beings somehow above others who deserve special benefits, but because poets are just as human as anybody and everybody deserves the chance to live a decent life and be cared for by the powers that be. The fact that poets often get the shitty end of society’s stick only results in them being granted the opportunity to voice concerns of those who are less privileged. This is not just petty grousing, under “poverty / the curse of Chatterton / & Edmond Spenser” untold numbers suffer and it is the alleviation of such pain towards which the writing is directed.

Reading and writing poems effects cultural change in society via effecting change in individuals, person by person, reader by reader, the poet learns from leaning out, risking and asking of her own person, willingly surprised at what she may find and bring to the awareness of her readers. The act of voicing a shared concern does not allow for any suffering to languish in isolation. Sikelianos brings Whitman’s spirit to bear in present Song, strong and clear, encouraging by way of her work his emphasis on the power of words to startle and jerk readers into active awareness of and care for the world around them. That her first intended future reader in this instance is her own daughter only increases the intensity and power of the endeavor.

Head: let the skull bones slide apart
& the brain grow big

type: orb
shape: universal

stepping on the rind of the earth
below which that trash heap Hell

It seemed impossible to tell
what country we lived in

some sad gray faces pass

a brown dwarf, a
             failed star

in the blended light of a planet & its sun
the dust & the photons rise

             Butter Princess, I saw
a huge cross of lights laid out in the land
& it was some city
between Sioux Falls & Detroit
            (“NOTES TOWARD THE TOWNSHIP OF CAUSE TROUBLE (VENUS’S CABINET REVEALED)”)

In the end, nothing but the work yet to be done matters. And, as Allen Ginsberg (an ever faithful student of Whitman) reminds us, “what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.” (“Memory Gardens”) May Whitman’s influence continue through each future generation coming to read and write songs of their own, that the world’s measure of joy be continually altered, increased thereby to the benefit of all, thing to thing.

As Exit

“The words of poems give you more than poems”

- Walt Whitman

~

To all the creatures of our precious cosmos!

Love,

Vincent

*****

Patrick James Dunagan has lived in San Francisco on and off for the last decade or so. His writings have appeared (or are expected) in: Big Bell, Blue Book, Box of Books: Vol II, Chain, Forklift, Fulcrum, Galatea Resurrects, Jacket, Octopus, ON2, Otoliths, Pax Americana, poem, home: An Anthology of Ars Poetica, Puppyflowers, Try!, and Vanitas. Recent chapbooks include From Chansonniers (Blue Press, 2008), Spirit Guest & Others (Lew Gallery Editions, 2009), Easy Eden w/ Micah Ballard (PUSH, 2009) and her friends down at the french cafe had no english words for me (PUSH, 2010).

THE LAST 4 THINGS by KATE GREENSTREET

2010-04-30T23:40:00.001-07:00

KRISTEN ORSER Reviews

The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet
(Ahsahta Press, Boise, Idaho, 2009. Includes DVD)

What happens when you place things side by side, when even ideas become objects to put next to windows? Kate Greenstreet's The Last 4 Things connects the dots and accepts the multiplicity, the many other ways the dots could have been connected. As readers, we are pursued by the work—by the collection of inner voices, which may or may not be a singular voice; by the exterior world with familiar and somehow unfamiliar doors, dust, and teeth; and by the sense of perpetual activity, a poem that is always holding a thought, many objects, and many ways to understand the connections between thought and thought, thought and object, object and object.

Before we're haunted by the movement towards happening and away from clear and linear sense, we are invited into the most intimate landscape—the mind—and we are tempted to think through the poems instead of about the poems. Greenstreet entices us into the home, memory, cameras, and a series of collected dreams and wishes. It's almost as if these places are one in the same place; at least, distinction matters less so we are enabled to disappear. We start to think things without concern for truth value, to drop our rationality and follow the language, and to resist conclusions.

In the way Greenstreet pulls the reader, The Last 4 Things is honest. It is all honest. It is all a type of portraiture that resists setting the gaze in one place or limiting the perspective to one frame. Instead, it is writing towards truly seeing what is already seen. This honesty is, like all thoughts contained in the text, completely and incompletely like in “4 December,”

I found a small dark rug on top of a junk pile on the curb and dragged it upstairs. Scrubbed it with a stiff brush and water. “Things are right in front of us,” he says. “Why make them up?” (60)

It's easy to see this kind of honesty, this kind of portraiture. It's harder to see that “up” is down. Harder to see that this is Greenstreet tilting her head, closing and opening her eyes, or standing upside down to see and interpret what is seen and how what is seen is seen. “Gloves, hands, the representation of hands—these are the spaces / I have in mind” (66). Readers too, desire to move into the spaces that are both real and unreal, familiar and unfamiliar. It's more than vision—it's language, memory, and thoughts considered for their multiplicity, for the way they unfold.

When I sit at the table with a friend to describe the book, its ideas, I am unsure what to say. I say, “It's about ideas.” And my friend bites into her burrito and asks what kind of ideas. And I remember the line, “Things that aren't possible come to pass.” I say that. She says nothing.

Then, I sit with my students and we watch the DVD included in the book. They discuss the “film” like it is high art—like it is the combination of all ideas happening at once. And one student says, “That isn't so new.” We all ask what he means. He clarifies, “Of course it is everything at once. That's all it ever can be.” I think he is saying something here and I know I should push him to be explicit, but maybe that is what works about Greenstreet's poetics—there is something there and, in its “somethingness” it is more clear than if we said it concretely. I don't ask the student to clarify, but I ask him to “press harder” (67). He knows I mean just as much and as little as what he meant before.

As readers of Greenstreet's work, we are faced with the pleasurable task of having everything at once: memory and happening, things and ideas, poetry and stories, diaries and fantasies. And because it is always this way, there are always so many turns and directions, nothing feels completely strange. We are with the poet in understanding and wanting; we are with her when she says, “I wanted words, the look, // but everything they meant / seemed wrong” (6). Because we are with her in this investigation of putting words to ideas, we will follow her through “page after page of places” (33), things, people, and thoughts. We follow her and let the sense of the work gather.

It would be easy and clear to say, “Greenstreet explores the possibility of narrative.” It is a narrative that is after in all sense of the word. It is after meaning—both in being post-meaning and in actively seeking meaning. It is after childhood, both in remembering “Once we went under a tree...(55) and in reclaiming an integration of imagination with the admittance of difference, “'This is what I look like now'” (62). And it is after forgetting and remembering.

There is an insistence to record with dates; specifically, to record the memory of thoughts that refuse to unravel or complete their thinking. Like in “6 January”:

And then you have the little being. The little being in the world. Everybody loves their little baby. It's a lot of work, yes, but you're in a trance—you're in a trance of love. You get sick of it, sure—but you're still in the trance. Unless you hate the baby for some reason. But that didn't happen to me.

--Would you call these nightmares?
--No, they're just regular dreams. Afterwards, you forget. (80)

As a reader, we can't help but wonder what happened? Did she not hate her baby or did she not have the baby to begin with? And the refusal to give us more than what is given is part of the game of the book: we are watching a mind indulge and resist itself at the same time. We are watching everything at once: additions, omissions, perspective, forgetting, etc. Sure, we could read “6 January” and a lot of the poems as poems about poems— where the “baby” is the poem and the writer is coping with the complicated relationship of authoring something, but I think that would that would limit the work and would ignore the ghost inferred by Greenstreet's repetition of invisible, disappear, and lost. Clearly, something has happened.

If the sense of ghosting is considered, then we are returning to the poems being after something. There is grieving and sobering up, there is defeat too. “She stays behind and gathers meaning” (66) because there is nothing else to do when something has happened. There is nothing else to do “[b]ut remember when I asked if you were carrying an umbrella / and I asked you what you felt and I think there was a blind / person sitting near you” (52).

I am in the same position I was in when I was sharing burritos with my friend. I am in the position Greenstreet's entire book documents: I want to interpret the text, but I am too busy celebrating the simultaneity of all of these threads Greenstreet is pulling. Thankfully, she is here with me, in the enclosed DVD and I've come to depend on her inchworm reading. Matching the reading voice in our head and Greenstreet's candid voice on the DVD, “[We] come such a long way to think” (5) and the fragility of thinking is revered in this collection. “We're never any closer” (5) but we are clutching the stream of images in the DVD and the struggle to give language to what is unsayable in the poems.

I am worried that I am making this sound more abstract than it is. Really, it is the most forthright book I've read in a long time. Greenstreet admits to the terrible profundity of her own subject, of her own textual desires. She asks, “are we traveling?” (43) and we know we are traveling through the mind, through the attempt to give language and shape to the mind, but Greenstreet admits “[a] stair is missing” (43). This is nothing new. Like my student said, “Of course it is everything at once” and it's no surprise to be missing a stair to understanding everything at once.

Still, Greenstreet is after it all. “Let us know our end. Let us know our end and the number of our days” (43). Could it be easier than this? Could Greenstreet have written about a more human subject? She is writing about desire and any reader can appreciate the complexity of such a basic thing like wanting something.

*****

Kristen Orser is the author of Folded into Your Midwestern Thunderstorm (Greying Ghost Press); Winter, Another Wall (blossombones); Fall Awake (Taiga Press); Squint (Dancing Girl Press); and E AT I, illustrated by James Thomas Stevens (Wyrd Tree Press). She is certain about being uncertain and she might forget to return your phone calls.

POESIE DER ENTSCHLEUNIGUNG: EIN LESEBUCH by ROBERT LAX

2010-04-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Reviews

Poesie der Entschleunigung: Ein Lesebuch by Robert Lax, Ed. Sigrid Hauff
(Pendo Verlag, Munich & Zurich, 2008)

ROBERT LAX AGAIN

Robert Lax (1915-2000) for me epitomized the legendary small-press writer whose books appeared not because a publisher thought he could make money on them or someone at a university press had enough power to get them printed but because his publishers loved Lax's profoundly innovative work.

His work's first loyal loving publisher was Emil Antonucci, a Brooklyn graphic designer whose Journeyman Press produced classic Lax chapbooks in the 1950s and 1960s. Then came Gladys Weigner and Bernhard Moosbrugger, Swiss, whose Pendo Verlag in Zurich issued modest perfectbound Lax books from the 1970s into the 1990s. This imprint has survived Moosburger's passing thanks to Sigrid Hauff, a Munich litéraratteur, who edited and introduced this new anthology of Lax's best writing-in English translation, Poetry of De-Acceleration, or Speeding Down. Hauff also wrote A Line in Three Circles. The Inner Biography of Robert Lax (Norderstedt/Germany: Books on Demand, 2007).

Though Ms. Hauff's introduction is entirely in German, all the Lax texts appear with the original English on the left-hand (verso) pages, and brilliant indeed they are, making this German book the best selection of an American poet's work. My own new favorite is not a severely minimal poem, which was Lax's forte, but a prose text titled "21 Pages," which begins: "Searching for you, but if there is no one, what am I searching for? Still you. Some sort of you. Not for myself?" Nothing known to me resembles this.

Why is it after decades of a self-congratulatory National Endowment for the Arts that so much of this first-rank innovative American writer is still published abroad? What truth is implicit in that fact?

For many years, Lax's larger books reprinted a blurb attributed only to the New York Times Book Review: "among America's greatest experimental poets, . . . the last unacknowledged-and, alas, uncollected-major poet of his post-60s generation." Crediting the NYTBR annoyed me, whose words they were, who sneaked the encomium into a 1978 review of Thomas Merton's Collected Poems. Never has anyone else connected to the NYTBR acknowledged Lax's (or most other American avant-garde) poetry. Never. That's never.

One virtue of James Harford's Merton & Friends (Continuum, 2006) is crediting me, thanks, though the book's dust-jacket mentions only the NYTBR, dammit. Otherwise, Harford's book is a charming memoir that connects the legendary Trappist Merton to his college buddies, Lax and Edward Rice. The last published the influential liberal Catholic magazine Jubilee in the 1950s and 1960s to which the others, including Moosbrugger, contributed.

This Catholic emphasis accounts for why a fourth, equally influential college buddy in Merton's circle is slighted—Ad Reinhardt, a Protestant, whose minimalist paintings were likewise concerned with higher spirituality, whose prose was as concise as Lax's.

May a respectful publisher, perhaps Continuum, someday release a book anthology remembering the best of Jubilee, which I would review, much as I'm now gladly re-reviewing Robert Lax.

_____
This article is part of Richard Kostelanetz's PERSON OF LETTERS IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD which is forthcoming via Kindle.

*****

Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz's work in several fields appear in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Webster's Dictionary of American Writers, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Directory of American Scholars, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Art, NNDB.com, Wikipedia.com, and Britannica.com, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.

CHAPS by JULIET COOK, LUCY HARVEST CLARKE, NICOLE MAURO, DANA WARD, JOSEPH WOOD, JAMES YEARY & ALEX SAVAGE

2010-04-30T23:25:00.000-07:00

JIM MCCRARY Reviews

Mondo Crampo by Juliet Cook
(dusie kollektiv, 2008)

Silveronda by Lucy Harvest Clarke
(if p then q classics, Manchester, England, 2009)

The Contortions by Nicole Mauro
(dusie press, 2009)

Goodnight Voice by Dana Ward
(House Press, 2008)

Gutter Catholic Love Song by Joseph Wood
(mitzvah chaps, Lawrence, KS, 2010)

my day aimlessly walking vancouver, wash by james yeary, illustrated by nate orton
(abandoned bike inc, Portland, OR, 2010)

THE FLESH IS LIKE A KID OF MUPPET CAPER by Alex Savage
(Hey Tiger Chaps, Kansas City, Mo., 2010)

When Eileen asked for people to review, I emailed her and said, “Yes, send me books.” She did and here now was a box full of slim volumes…all of them by women. The books, and standards and levels of production various and original and, of course, the spectrum of texts imagined. And then it was, just then, that I began to see, it seemed on every web page or blog or online publication or whatnot was in front of me on screen…was a constant textural barrage about THE REVIEW OF POETRY. In some form or another it seemed everyone one was suddenly commenting on the review…was it necessary, productive, possible…what about the positive or the negative…who should or shouldn’t do it, why do it, did it matter inside or outside the academic the street the MFA the FFA the FAA. Could a man review women’s poetry books? Should they? I was beginning to believe that perhaps I should box up the books and send them back to the mount st poeta from which they came. My first glance at one of the books and my first thought was holy crap, am I old enough to be this persons father, grandfather. Is this going to be like me reading my kids diary for chriss sake? Maybe they are right…I have no fucking business even trying to read these publications….really. Stop it. You’re going to make a further idiot of yourself. Yeah, right.

To begin, this set of chapbooks , obvious not academically produced by look or details or whatnot. Produced with thought though. Goodnight Voice by Dana Ward; The Contortions by Nicole Mauro; Mondo Crampo by Juliet Cook; Silveronda by Lucy Harvest Clarke.

First things first. Grandpa out here wants Dana and Nicole and Juliet and Lucy to send to him some of what they are smoking because whatever it is I need it. I am your elder out here. You got to respect that you know. If it wasn’t for guys like me running mimeo machines 40 years ago…blah blah blah. Okay sorry for that. But geez, this group of publications, every one of them has juice…lots of juice. Each of them knock me out with the immediate reaction to what they are doing with the language…it is on fire, it is knockabout, it is fucked up. It makes me laugh out and keep reading. Oh and sometimes uncomfortable either feeling old or ignorant of some nuance or other. Some shit I don’t know about..but that is not a drawdown at all. And even if I cannot truly know exactly how and with what they were created…that is okay for now. I mean if it has anything to do with drugs, I repeat, you must share. If it has to do with Google or IPad or IPods or whatnot…well don’t know if we can get to same place or not. I still use email I confess don’t have the Smartphone or stuff like that. So what.

[Editor's Note: Am inserting here a photo of Grandpa McCrary with partner Sue gallivanting somewhere in Mexico:

Note the lovely, ah..., befuddled look...]

So here is Goodnight Voice by Dana Ward. Cracks me up the cover has not the title or author…ha ha…but does have nifty drawing of tea party goings on. And wasn’t there a kids book Goodnight Moon (I read my kids Go Dog Go so I don’t know) And it is hand sewn folded…old school for sure. The first lines

The title is Kerri Says…
“I think that I’m somebody else
&that thought is city block common
At every turn dogs pigeon shit lovers too
Where the arm can be slid in and out like a sleeve…….”

So the title is un presumed in that it is simple, Kerri Says…who don’t matter and what why but the two words are immediate and local…I as reader have no need for reference…,it is here is Dana and here is Kerri somehow. Then stated a ‘thought is city block common’ rocks me here. What that does to bring so much into a reading without garbling up the page with ‘need to know’ reflex from me. It just is what it is….that concrete block common. It is like here is a ‘poem’ to call it, that I am invited to walk through, and I can walk with it and keep my head down and mouth shut and just…walk with it…see where it ends up. Oh “Our Pernod” Kerri says”…that’s the last line I see. Perfect. And she continues through this collection of 18-20 poems with a fresh taste for the lingo of her head brought out. How can you not take in the title poem: Goodnight Voice which begins:

“As a simple container of impulse I hew
To her book
Want to version its sudden fluidity
Through it back boring & make something false I could
Care for, I could be that kind of poet…”

Here is the text with enough original and thoughtful and living contained in it and obvious to we who find it that, I think, encourages with an easy feeling to continue. To read. What else is there. I wish Dana Ward all she can.

Reading Nicole Mauro’s The Contortions, to me today, is like trying to read E. Pound a long time ago…what the fuck I gotta learn Greek? And then I heard a tape (Google that if need be) of the voice of Ezra and I was moved greatly. And then I realized that if I listened I didn’t have to know ALL the words to ‘enjoy’ the poem. So too with the first text in this book, Kilter, which is about 30 short lines long. If I were to have to stop and look up unknown words I’d be fucked. Words like oscurations, ologizing, ohphsizing, cavitations, antrum, and fundus. Maybe these kids today have some machine that you can use, I donno. So what, I can imagine, yes? Or not…well that is not what I want to consider just know. Do I get the drift that Nicole is indicating? I think I do. Kilter. What a great word that. Then she does a series of text responses (?) to inkblots and the first one, number 1, begins: “O fuck”. And why not use that to open anything. Sets a lot going. Number VII ends with the lines:

“…Begin again or continue
past. I long for longer
bygones, a box
for the attic.”

Mauro seems to be taking a very familiar combo and making it not so. It is to be recalled again and again for us all that those boxes of memories in the attic…along with what…dead rats and crazy sister dead in a trunk? Sure and why not…she is fucking writing off inkblots. It is a very original riff done well. The book ends with The Ending of Days which is ‘found text’ actual TV Guide soap opera updates…you know Bobby has Jasmine at gun point in the basement which is flooding and Bret has just shot himself in the ass, etc. Mauro does a call and response…but it seems to me like an example of a how to write a poem exercise deal you might find in a ‘teachers handbook’ than anything else. Not that it is poorly conceived, oh no, but just a bit too much for me. But then again I have read the little texts in TV guides about those daily shows for years and I suppose I suffer for that. Nicole Mauro is a good writer. Because I have just now read this book of hers, I will look for more of the same. You too.

Now comes MONDO CRAMPO by Juliet Cook. What is this here…red cellophane cover over zerox of someone’s underwear. A book held together with…are those grommets? Didn’t I make ‘books’ with these same materials for mom in grade school? I see London I see France. That is my first response to finding this in the stack of books received. I can’t help it and don’t apologize or analyze either. So what, again. Point is this book has introduced itself with unique style and agenda and attitude that is hard to resist. Where to begin….aside to Juliet: I flipped open the book to Donut Holes poem and read:

“Now every time I roll up a tube of red lipstick,
I’m going to think about dog penis.
I ‘m going to confuse myself with puff poetry.” (She wrote ‘pastry’)

I would be somewhat misdirecting the reader if I admit that my reading was not just what the author meant anyway…wouldn’t I. One of those questions not gonna be answered here. I should insert a link to some Ken Goldsmith essay but not gonna do that either. Here is what I say….reading Juliet Cook is a total delight and I need no more or less information that what is before me to say that. I do not need to know how she does it (except as requested above), where she does it (what program?), on what she does it (Ouija Board) what font, what device etc etc. All I can do is read it and rejoice and laugh. Bust a gut we used to say. This text comes out my nose about every third page. And what do I know. The freaking CONTENTS page outdoes the majority of what comes down my pike termed poetics these days. This book joins a short list, whip me for that if you must, of the likes of Lenore Kandell, Joanne Kyger, Ann Waldman, Anne Boyer, Shannon Compton and some more women to read and reread. The one who can write out Ovarian Follies:

“I was cutting & pasting the contents of my latest diorama.
It was the pinking shears and re-painted papier mache phase
when I felt them twinging, pinging, plotting, besotting
and then my ovaries jumped ship.”

Thus begins a classic modern text, quite adorable as Ed Dorns Gunslinger in its own way. Cook can take apart any part of her own or the global anatomy and using her graphic ability to write down exactly what sounds and looks perfectly at ease in a stanza, for example, the text called : Clean it Yourself. With a title like that, maybe a bit reluctant to ‘enter into a dialog with the text’. But why not. Am I not to be reamed like a freakin sewer pipe? Skewed like a freakin butthole? So what, read on:

“You’re drinking it up so ‘artistically’
In your latest cum guzzling fantasy.
When you strutted in here, you were svelte enough, but now?”
HA HA I say.

“YOU ARE SO BLOATED!” she continues in the poem. I give up. I can only read it as it is.

More titles Fuzzy Womb, Dim Sum Womb, Smoosh, Kitten Fur, Undressing, Backstage and the postscript…Prune Juice. Eeeeewww. Can I even quote this? But wait. Here is the last ‘sentence’ in the book: “…A speech impediment walks into a breast implant.” And with that Juliet Cook closes the book called Mondo Crampo, picks up her half empty pint of IPA and walks off stage. The itty bitty crowd (that is me)howls and howls and howls. For more. Please.

I am going to give a long quote from beginning of Lucy Harvest Clarks SILVERONDA, which is one good example of some very good poetry being published by small press in the U.K. today. This from poem indicated in contents as: “with map”

“-with map stick sliding on map
-electric rave in woods
how you circum so
circum nomad
-a car crash to be fling
go elope
guilty template
-bullet hole domes
to regenerate
-cold glass alignment
-the stretching contorts
to tether
-all will and above
suspended
-remembrance though
and its flowers
it hands
-under trees under
stinking ghosts
-a falling wheel…”

I don’t think reading this again and again that I have anyway to respond except to give you this much from the book. What follows for some 81 pages are, after all, varieties of the above. In placement, in visuality, in ‘subject’ or attitude. I cannot for the life of me give you more than that. I am sure that many, many pages could be given over to ‘close’ or ‘critical’ readings of Clarke’s writings. Hope someone, well maybe…not even sure of that. What I think….a lot more people should read this than will perhaps. If I could I would hang it on doorknobs, stuff it in mailboxes. But can’t do that. You can take the above quoted lines and run with them. Be not confused or afraid. You can wet your pants in joy or fear. Have at it. Let your eyes flicker and follow what the author gives you. Great return for little effort. Remember to breath. I look forward to more.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Three chapbooks received. These, I see, are produced with more intent to physically and visually call attention to the actual materials used i.e. how the cover is folded or manipulated. Could one call them ‘art books’ without laying some horrible pre-conception on them. Oh well.

Gutter Catholic Love Song by Joseph Wood

The unique design of a folded cover with drawing attached hand sewn holding 13 full pages of text broken into 5 line stanzas. The obvious or first response after reading them all is that Wood has given us a heavy dose of his attempts to collect time passed. Here midway thru the chap book, an example:

…a flagellation in silver stain, above the alter ten
Stigmata drip your eye sockets, you’ve grown
Tired of playing the lyre to piss-poor gamblers, you
Stand, flip the craps table, dice fall to the ground
Like broken teeth, halos shoot like Tyson upper cuts…”

As the text continues, so do the images and language of daily stuff…politics, religion, sex , drugs and rock and roll. Not to diminish any of those. Joseph Wood powers through the days of the week and more, leaving behind a record that seems unique and to be looked over. If you can find it. Google Mitzvah Chaps.

my day aimlessly walking vancouver, wash by james yeary, illustrated by nate orton

A slim volume, with holes in the cover, stapled and zeroxed together. Ink drawings of Vancouver in detail or nuance you might not expect. Pieces picked up, gathered from the street are taped inside on some pages. Details, smudges, rubs, graffiti, quotes, overheard lyrics and more. Maybe it is, after all, all collected…as yeary (maybe?) says: what else can you say about a city? You can, as these two have, walk thru it, take note, gather it up and reproduce your ‘notes’. The poetics, if it can be said, of this kind of publication, lives within what is found on the pages…no matter the look, no matter the context, no matter the dirt from the street picked up. That is the magic.

Thanks james and nate.

THE FLESH IS LIKE A KID OF MUPPET CAPER by Alex Savage

Alex Savage is a funny guy. He can write something called: Gettin' Baked with Kenny G. and make it work you over on the floor. Join in I guess. And lots of other 'routines' in this collection which have guts and guffs. Like a whole page list of stuff Christopher Columbus did or maybe like "Christopher Columbus wanted to go home." or "Christopher Columbus bought queso." or "Christopher Columbus loved to hold and be held." It goes on. It is all very very whatever and that is okay. Alex Savage is a younger poet. He will grow older along with his talent one hopes. Yes he will. Thanks to Anne Boyer (publisher) for bringing him to print.

*****

Jim McCrary blogs at http://wwwresistingpoetry.blogspot.com/.

BOOKS on and by ANDRE BRETON and PHILIP LAMANTIA

2010-04-30T23:20:00.000-07:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Selections by André Breton, edited and with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti
(University of California Press, Berkeley 2003)

Martinique: Snake Charmer by André Breton, translated by David W. Seaman with introduction by Franklin Rosemont
(University of Texas Press, Austin, 2008)

Hypodermic Light: The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism by Steven Frattali
(Peter Lang Publishing Inc., New York, 2005)

Tau by Philip Lamantia / Journey to the End by John Hoffman, ed. Garrett Caples
(City Lights, San Francisco, 2008)

André Breton was surrealism. Both king and court jester, he was the ultimate hall monitor expelling recalcitrants who fell afoul of his mercurial whim. Philip Lamantia was surrealism’s most well-known American exponent. We will call on Wikipedia to provide a working definition of this nebulous term:

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members.

Surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s on, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.

The latter paragraph is undoubtedly incorrect. As will be shown later, Dada developed in Zurich shortly after World War I was declared arriving in Paris as a result of such personages as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp as well as Andre Breton. Again relying on Wikipedia for a concise working definition:

Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works. Its purpose was to ridicule what its participants considered to be the meaninglessness of the modern world. In addition to being anti-war, dada was also anti-bourgeois and anarchistic in nature.

Although there was a connection between Dada and Surrealism in the sense that, for the most part, each supported the other and each were counter-cultural, the important Surrealist precursors were Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, in literature, and, to a large extent, Hieronymus Bosch in the visual arts. Thus, it would be more accurate to allege, at least for literature, that Surrealism developed out of Symbolism than out of Dada. Even then:

The real revolution of this period, however, ultimately had little to do with Dada, or with any of Breton’s previous literary models. In the spring of 1919, before Dada came to Paris, and just as his first book of poems, Pawnshop (Mont de piété), was coming off press, Breton turned back to his psychiatric studies and to the startling imagery that he’d heard from his traumatized patients during the war.(Polizzotti, 14)

Born in Normandy on February 19, 1896, Breton began studies in medicine and psychiatry which were interrupted by World War I as well as his lack of interest in those or any subjects. His training did, however, put him into a position serving on a neurological ward in Nantes during the war where he came into contact with soldiers suffering from shell-shock (or what would be known today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). From that position, he struck up friendships with Alfred Jarry (the creator of the pataphysical concept) and Jacques Vaché. The latter’s suicide at age 24 would have a profound effect on Breton plaguing him psychologically for the rest of Breton’s life. He, along with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault in 1919, founded the literary review Littérature. At first infatuated with Dada, he invited Tristan Tzara from Geneva to Paris but later turned his back on the Dadaists going so far as to disrupt one of Tzara’s readings leading to a riot. In 1924, he published the Surrealist Manifesto , originally conceived as an addendum to a collection of automatic writings but which afterwards achieved more prominence than the writings it intended to introduce. Disappointed when Freud, who was sent a copy, showed little interest in what Breton considered an application of Freudian theory, he then courted the French communist party as he considered surrealism a meeting place of Arthur Rimbaud and communist theory. He was spurned by them as they considered him not orthodox enough according to the Stalinist view then in vogue. He then turned to the Trotskyite version spending time in Mexico with Trotsky, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. He died on September 28, 1966.

Selections opens with an excellent concise biography and analysis written by Mark Polizzotti – something befitting a person the stature of Breton and something which all other publishers should take note of. This, in itself, is worth the price of the book – and that’s only the beginning. The only thing that one could still wish for were that this was a bilingual editiion.

Polizzotti expounds on Breton’s predecessors in the following passage:

The intricate collage of Breton’s poetry begins, as if following a classical apprenticeship, with the imitation of his predecessors. His earliest pieces were wittingly obscure sonnets styled after the nineteenth-century Symbolists, whose verses he discovered in his early teens. It was from the Symbolists, with their penchant for abstruse formulations and sensual decadence...that the young man early on adopted a taste for hermeticism that never entirely left his writing. He absorbed the precious aestheticism of such now forgotten writers as René Ghil and Stuart Merrill, the dark and fusty enigmas of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Jean Lorrain. He became a passionate devotee of Stéphane Mallarmé, perhaps the most arcane poet France had yet produced, whom the young Breton considered ‘God made manifest.’ And at almost the same time, he was enthralled by the liberating insouciance and perpetual adolescent revolt emanating from another literary deity, Arthur Rimbaud, ‘a veritable god of puberty such as no mythology had ever seen.’(1-2)

When it came to his own poems, “whether dredged raw from his unconscious or based on a very deliberate appreciation of his environment, generally followed the prescription he first sketched at age seventeen: that the true merit of poetry is to ‘unsettle the walls of the real that enclose us.’”(4)

Polizzotti quotes Breton in regard to his early poems inspired by Rimbaud:

These lines were the closed eye to the operations of thought that I believed I was obliged to keep hidden from the reader...I had begun to cherish words excessively for the space they allow around them, for their tangencies with countless other words that I did not utter. (10)

Polizzotti adds his own assessment:

If there is one overriding aesthetic of this period, it is the collage, an assemblage of ‘indirect loans,’ disparate fragments borrowed from life, literature, advertising, slogans, and any other element deemed useful...In his 1918 trilogy of poems, Breton uses the minutiae of admired literary figures as sign-posts, guides for the text, even as accomplishes – just as he named his friends in many of his prose writings throughout his life. Even Breton’s daily existence at this time was a collage, a sundry patchwork of military duties, long-distance literary activities, periodic exchanges with his friends Aragon and Soupault, and, more than anything, his infrequent but much-awaited encounters with Vaché, who was now back on the frontlines.(10)

Polizzotti addresses the import of the Surrealist Manifesto by first referring to Breton’s mock-dictionary definition:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure form, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concerns.(20)

He then adds this quotation from Breton: “Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful...It is a call to man, ‘that inveterate dreamer,’ to reject the ‘lusterless fate’ promised by centuries of Greco-Latin logic.”

‘Age’ was written in 1918. It clearly shows its indebtedness to Rimbaud:

Dawn, farewell! I’m coming out of the haunted forest; I’m braving the roads, torrid crosses. A foliage that gives blessings is ruining me. August, like a millionaire, has no cracks.(52)

Compare this to Rimbaud’s ‘Drunken Boat’.

Two years later, Breton wrote ‘Black Forest’. Here, he is indebted to Apollinaire, in particular, the Apollinaire of Calligrammes, published posthumously in 1918, for the layout of the poem:

                                                                   Out
Tender capsule            etc.derby
Madame de Saint-Gobain finds time goes by slowly when alone
A cutlet wilts

                                 Outline of fate

Where            shutterless                       this white gable
Waterfalls
                      Log-haulers are favored(53)

The difference between these two early poems is astronomical. We can clearly see the collage technique that Breton also borrowed from Apollinaire, an indebtedness to Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist experiments in the visual arts.

Breton, in ‘For Lafcadio’, from 1918 as well, telegraphs his technique at the end:

Better to have it said
that André Breton
collector of Indirect Loans
is dabbling in collage
while waiting to retire(54)

In 1920, Breton published The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs magnétiques). Polizzotti describes this period, on p. 15: “That June, while awaiting discharge from the army, Breton spent hours in his hotel room with Soupault, ‘blackening’ sheets of paper with a rapid flow of words jotted down without premeditation or vigilance – words that, he hoped, would form a verbal record of his unconscious.” Here is a brief segment of the result, ‘Honeymoon’:

To what are mutual attractions due? There are some jealousies more touching than others. I willingly wander in such baffling darkness as that of the rivalry between a woman and a book. The finger on the side of the forehead is not the barrel of a revolver.(58)

It is clear from ‘Choose Life’ that not all was purely automatic in The Magnetic Fields. Here, Breton revised the automatic at least to the extent of adding a refrain “Choose life”:

Choose life with its conspiratorial sheets
Its scars from escapes
Choose life choose that rose window on my tomb
The life of being here nothing but being here
Where one voice says Are you there where another answers Are you there
I’m hardly here at all alas
And even when we might be making fun of what we kill
Choose life(69)

He was, also, not reluctant to play with typography once the automatic writing had been recorded as can be seen in ‘Angle of Sight’ on p. 73.

Written and published in 1924, Soluble Fish is the poetry collection attached as an appendix to the Manifesto of Surrealism, the reverse of what Breton originally intended as the Manifesto was to be merely a preface. This is another example of ‘psychic automatism’:

In those days the one thing people were all talking about around the place de la Bastille was an enormous wasp that went down the boulevard Richard-Lenoir in the morning singing at the top of its lungs and asking the children riddles. The little modern sphinx had already made quite a few victims when, as I left the café whose façade some thought would look good with a cannon, although the Prison in the neighborhood may pass today for a legendary building. I met the wasp with the waist of a pretty woman and it asked me the way.(76)

The Manifesto itself is provided in an appendix where the thread of Breton’s musings runs from man, “that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny”(143), through the word ‘freedom’ which, he writes, “is the only one that still excites me”(144),to madness where he “is willing to admit that they are, to some degree, victims of their imagination”(145) while complaining that “we are still living under the reign of logic” to Freud and psychic activity ultimately arriving at dream where he states that he “believe(s) in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.(150)

The poems contained in Soluble Fish deserve more attention than they received at the time of publication and even today where they remain overshadowed by the Manifesto. We must accept that not all is unconscious although it may have begun in that manner. A case in point is ‘Free Union’ which begins:

My wife whose hair is a brush fire
Whose thoughts are summer lightning
Whose waist is an hourglass
Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger
Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude
Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow(89)

It is hard to accept that this blason is the result of a completely unconscious process. Certainly it doesn’t follow the ‘accepted’ course of the medieval blason which would move directionally rather than jump from hair to thoughts to waist and back to mouth. Certainly, the imagery is not one of extolling the visual virtues of some fair maiden nor do they produce the reverse blason that Shakespeare became so renowned for from his ‘My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun’. The imagery here, while somewhat guided, moves, to a certain extent, with the immediacy of thought but of thought applied, not of thought unleashed.

“Surrealism’s recent changes of course, notably its rejection of pyschic automatism in favor of Communist politics and, more internally, its excoriation of some of its own members”(23) was signalled, almost as an apologia, by the publication of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, which reads in part:

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point. From this it becomes obvious how absurd it would be to define Surrealism solely as constructive or destructive; the point to which we are referring is a fortiori that point where construction and destruction can no longer be brandished one against the other.(153)

It is this Manifesto that contains these famous words:

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as one can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.(154)

Polizzotti next includes poems from Fata Morgana written while in southern France awaiting embarkation to America and escape from the deteriorating European situation of WWII. He includes a quote from Breton regarding the “epic work...a poem which ‘states my resistance, which is more intransigent than ever, to the masochistic enterprises in France that tend to restrict poetic freedom or to immolate it on the same altar as other freedoms.”(30) The excerpt begins:

The bed hurtles down rails of blue honey
Freeing into transparency animals from medieval sculpture
It tips and nearly spills onto the slopes of foxglove
And is lit in flashes by the eyes of birds of prey
Loaded with all the emanations from Otranto’s giant feathered helmet
The bed hurtles down rails of blue honey...(111)

In 1948, Breton published a self-selected anthology titled Poèmes which Polizzotti says was “for all intents and purposes...Breton’s final poetic word.” He continues:

The war had taken its toll on this level as well, for the later poems in the collection occasionally sound an unfamiliar note of fatigue...As the poems become more conscious, more directed, and more far flung geographically, they lose some of the adventurousness from the pre-war years. Instead, Breton’s true sense of exoticism emerges on home ground; his earlier writings evoke a Paris in brilliant electrical darkness, proliferating in fantastic human and animal creatures.(34)

Of Breton’s legacy, Polizzotti says “Only after his death on 28 September 1966, at the age of seventy, would the lasting impact of Surrealism begin to be recognized, as students adopted his phrases during the May 1968 riots and the disquieting aesthetic of Surrealist art infiltrated the visual idiom of everyday life.”(36)

Martinique: Snake Charmer is, in part, about Breton’s flight from France in late 1940. He and his family stayed in Marseilles for a few months while awaiting embarkation to the safety of the U.S. having passed briefly through Martinique on the way. The trip was quite eventful, to say the least. Franklin Rosemont, in his introduction, describes some of the events:

On December 3 [1940], the eve of Vichy premier Pétain’s visit to the city, Breton was arrested and held for four days. The official report described him as a ‘dangerous anarchist sought for a long time by the French police.’

In February-March 1941, Vichy regime censors forbade the publication of two of Breton’s books, the Anthology of Black Humor and the poem Fata Morgana, with drawings by Wifredo Lam.

Eventually, with the unstinting help of Varian Fry and the American Rescue Committee, Breton succeeded in obtaining a U.S. visa and was able to secure passage for himself, his wife, Jacqueline, and their daughter, Aube, on a transatlantic steamer, which left Marseilles on March 24.(3)

The trip across the Atlantic was itself memorable given that Breton, along with others such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, were described as ‘scum’ and “slept on crude mats in the hold.” Nor was their arrival in Martinique that much more pleasant. “When the ship arrived at Fort-de-France, Martinique, after a month at sea, it turned out that word of the ‘dangerous agitator’ had already reached the island’s Vichy authorities” and Breton “was promptly sent to the Lazaret concentration camp, a former leper colony. Released a few days later, he remained under constant police surveillance throughout his few weeks on the island.”(4)

Martinique begins with a Preface in which Breton states “in Martinique, in the spring of 1941, our vision was split in two.”(39) He goes on to make it clear that Martinique is a collaboration between he and André Masson:

in the following pages, we decided to devote one section to lyrical language and another to the language of simple information. We were both wildly seduced at the same time that we were wounded and indignant. Hence, our use in deliberate opposition of these two forms, which our unified voice shelters from dissonance, but which furthermore are bound together here by a conversation between us. In this dialogue, even as our spirits yielded unreservedly to the magnetic force of this ideal and real place, our conversation maintained a simultaneously sinuous and familiar turn, reassuring us that it is less important to view this world as artists than to respond to it as human beings.(40)

The first piece, ‘Antille’, is by André Masson. It begins: “At night, the house-fires admire themselves in the land’s glance. A grand ballet of palms, set in place by silence, motionless, rustles in the fresh dancing air.”(41) Here, personification brings the scene vividly closer to us. “On the lawn of your lips the protruding tongue of the hibiscus”(42) is but one of the memorable lines to be found in this brief but magnificent poem.

Collaboration proper begins with ‘The Creole Dialogue between André Breton and André Masson’. The process of collaboration appears to be that they took turns writing paragraphs or groups of paragraphs. The difference in style is discernible from the first two stanzas:

“Look at this white spot there above us, one might say it was a gigantic blossom but it may as well be the underside of a leaf; there is very little wind. The night here is full of trap doors, of unidentified sounds. But what is most beautiful, because it is least believable, is still the break of day. It is totally unforgivable to miss it.”

“The forest surrounds us; we knew of it and its sorcery before we arrived. Do you remember the drawing I called ‘Delire végetal’ [Vegetable Delirium]? The deliriousness is here, we touch it, we experience it. We are one with these layered trees, bearing in the elbows of their branches miniature swamps with parasitic vegetation grafted to their supporting trunks; rising, falling back down, active, passive, festooned from top to bottom with garlands of starlike blooms.”(43)

Even if we didn’t know that Masson was also a painter, we could guess that the first paragraph was by Breton and the second by Masson. Breton’s is much more jagged than Masson’s which has a painterly smoothness, which is much more interconnected while continuing to create science fiction landscapes. This ‘conversation’ is accompanied by extensive notes, as is the rest of the book, explaining the sometimes rather obscure influences. Wisely, these notes are endnotes rendering them unobtrusive although the quantity of them and their sometime unimportance to Martinique itself give one the impression they are present merely to show off the erudition of the translator more than as support for the work which is all notes – endnotes or otherwise – should do.

The subsequent prose travelogue alternates between the two as well. But this is a travelogue written by madmen. An excerpt from what is presumed to be Breton’s ‘The Dark Lantern’ will demonstrate:

Rain sets its hurricane glass around the bamboo grove, in sconces of vermilion flowers clinging to branches with suction cups, where, not a minute ago, dance steps spun, taught by two butterflies of pure blood. Everything unfolds in the depths of a bowl the way Japanese flowers do; a clearing opens; heliotropism jumps in on its shoes with curling toes and spiraling fingernails. Heart-stopping, flights up the sensitive tree, a feather crest, causes to swoon the fern whose burning mouth is a wheel of time. My eye is the closed violet at the centre of the ellipsis, at the tip of its tail.(59)

The next, ‘Bearer with no Burden’, preceded as it is by a sketch of what appears to be a fruit tree with legs and breasts, is assumed to be by Masson:

Like a spirit returning at regular intervals because its habit is periodicity and belongs to it alone, young black women pass by, often unaccompanied, carried along by the same rhythm; each is the very one Baudelaire was thinking of; his image of these women is so unforgettable.(61)

The reason for Masson’s incredulity at the sight of unaccompanied women was that it was still unheard of for European women to transgress unaccompanied the terrain occupied by men.

‘Troubled Waters’, a lengthy prose work, is more in keeping with the realist memoire and bears littel resemblance to anything that could be termed Surrealist. It is Breton’s account of his stay in Martinique.

‘A Great Black Poet’ is written in the same vein but begins following Breton and his family’s release from Pointe-Rouge, Martinique’s jail converted from the former leper colony of Lazaret. Breton describes his encounter with the first edition of Tropiques, the literary journal edited by Aimé Césaire and his wife, Suzanne, and with Césaire himself.

Martinique concludes with the poem ‘Formerly Known as Liberty Street’.

Martinique does not present any counter-argument to Polizzotti’s claim that Breton’s best work had occurred prior to his leaving France. It is a fascinating read but not one that adds anything to the annals of Surrealism. But it does herald Breton’s arrival in America where his and the Surrealist influence will be imparted to American poets, the chief of whom would be Philip Lamantia.

Born in San Francisco in 1927, Philip Lamantia initially has his poetry published in the magazine View in 1943, when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the American Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. Affiliated initially with the San Francisco Renaissance of Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, he later became involved with the Beat movement and, in fact, appeared at the historic San Francisco Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first. He then embraced the Surrealist Movement in the United States when several of their representatives, including André Breto, fled to the U.S. to escape WWII. He died in 2005. During his life, his poetry was greatly underrated and virtually unknown.

Frattali seeks to remedy this oversight. Frattali says of his book: “perhaps examining the work of one of its more obscure figures will prove to be a useful means of reconsidering the [Surrealist] movement as a whole, as though one were to be led into a large and famous public building through a little-used side door.”(2)

Frattali divides Lamantia’s poetry into phases committing a chapter, and a color, to each phase. The first is Red: The Erotic Vision. This process is just a little bit too cutesy and should have probably been reconsidered. He describes Lamantia’s poetry in this first phase as:

work governed by the spirit of Breton. It presents us with erotic poetry which takes the erotic itself as the point of departure for a visionary impulse and makes of it a vehicle for encountering a range of metaphysical questions. Many of these pieces are in fact early and are written in an unfashionable ‘poetic’ idiom – incantatory and dream-like – and are often centered on an idealized woman...We are reminded that certain elements of European Surrealism, particularly in France, were a kind of modern rebirth of Petrarchism, and we find in such poems a special baroque complexity which codes desire and its transformations in an ornamented and deliberately conceited idiom.(3)

The erotic theme is well-researched and informatively written. Frattali begins with the assertion that

European Surrealist poetry, in dealing with the erotic, approached an ultimate degree of mannerism and stylization, a kind of baroque style...Perhaps it is natural that these anti-realist tendencies should be especially marked in the genre of erotic poetry. In dealing with this charged subject, the poetry strives to exceed normal expression, to create an overflow of meaning that is caused by and also creates a surplus of images and of figures.(11)

He goes on to indicate that this ‘superabundance” may not be to an American audience’s taste as “it follows an aesthetic quite at odds with much contemporary American poetry, for it in no way models itself after natural speech. Instead, it resorts to the hieratic, the enigmatic, and the incantatory, seeking in the radiance of its figures a light beyond the merely rational and a warmth other than that of ordinary passion.”(12) He then goes on to examine Lamantia in this light:

In Lamantia’s case, erotic celebration is a vehicle for exploring a range of experience, both literal and imaginative, which takes him into areas of metaphysical concern, ideas of transcendence, of self-hood and of alterity. We find an array of striking associations and images, combined with a sense of exultation, which we can compare with Breton. Or, in a somewhat different vein, we find passages in which an affinity with Desnos seems to show itself in a style more somnambulist, a bit less rhetorical, and perhaps closer to song.(12)

Frattali compares this surrealist form of love poetry to that of the medieval troubadour before quoting from Giorgio Agamben on the concept of trobar in Language and Death:

It is difficult to understand the sense in which the poets understood love, as long as we obstinately construe it according to a secular misunderstanding, in a purely biographical context. For the troubadours, it is not a question of psychological or biographical events that are successively expressed in words, but rather, of the attempt to live the tropos itself, the event of a language as a fundamental amorous and poetic experience.(16)

He calls this “the opposite of the Puritan model” going on to describe the difference as one of ‘inner’ v. ‘outer’: “one first has an experience, an ‘inner’ experience, and then professes it in words, perhaps aloud. And yet writing of the kind that Agamben describes is not merely performative; it is itself a becoming, and a becoming other.” The comparison of this troubadour love to that of the surrealist which follows is quite fascinating, particularly when he arrives at the statement: “These erotic poems, therefore, do not describe the beloved. They respond to her and to the libidinal excitement and psychological challenge she represents.”(18) Certainly, he means by this that the beloved is objectified as an other. However, all love poetry, whether written by male or female, objectifies the persona of the beloved. Frattali essentially states this otherness when he compares the surrealist to the Platonic:

Platonism sees such personal beauty as a lure toward the apprehension of a Beyond. The Surrealist response, with its mythology of the Marvelous, bears some relation to this at the level of thought: the Beloved is an emissary from elsewhere, ailleur, and embodiment of something more; the Marvelous is a door opening to an unthought-of realm. Yet at the level of writing, the response amounts to a disintegration of rationality in a flight of images which, following Lyotard, we might characterize as figural.(18)

He concludes the opening chapter with explications of several of Lamantia’s erotic poems.

Frattali ascribes the colour black to Lamantia’s second phase describing it as:

poetry dominated by the influence of Artaud, probably one of the few such bodies of work written in English. In this phase of his career, coinciding roughly with the decade of the 50’s, the poet’s writing exhibits a Gnostic vision, in which there dominates a sense of the fallen, residual nature of the world and of language itself. The body is often viewed as a charred remnant or dross. There is an exasperated impatience with literary language, a kind of sparagmos of the poetic world, and the explicitly political poems become angrier. Comparisons may be made with Cesar Villejo, with the Lorca of Poet in New York, and with some of Neruda’s pieces in the Residencia sequence

He begins the chapter with a very brief digression to Levinas’s concept of the il y a, the ‘there is’, the response to which is one of horror and therefore something similar to Kristeva’s ‘abject’. He then turns to Surrealism and says:

The typical subject of Surrealism, therefore, is enigma, which it nonetheless presents frontally, boldly, and as though in a joyous wondering. In the erotic mode, this presentation is prompted by the desire for union and lured by its glimmering possibility. Despite the enigmatic context, there is a boldness of representation: the enigmatic is, paradoxically, exhibited, placed directly before us. We are intended to see more than we normally would, to see into and to see beyond the merely factual. In reading Surrealist texts at their most exuberant we might almost feel that we witness the fecundity of the heart of the world, a fecundity that exceeds both being and non-being, an excess and a surplus at the root of all existence and all genesis.(44)

To this gnosis he ascribes woman as the Beloved. He then goes on

At the heart of Surrealist vision is a special type of horror, a special type of shudder; it is not a rustle but a clamor, the clamor of Being itself. Yet as long as the imagination maintains as its central point the body of the Beloved, this horror, or at least its portrayal, remains somewhat muted, covered, as it were, by the erotic.(45)

He applies this to Lamantia’s use of language:

We find this torment of reason and of language in Lamantia...In the style, in particular, of some of his work, we observe a language quite different from what we saw in the erotic poetry. There it had verged upon non-sense, or perhaps an excess of meaning, and yet it was buoyant and fluent nevertheless, a voluble and ecstatic speech. Yet in this later phase, as likewise in Artaud, we find a halting and aphasic idiom marked and abraded by a too-harsh contact with the evil of the world. To speak this way is to speak in gnostic terms. In such a vision, the poetry’s key element, which had previously been light or perhaps water, becomes darkness.(45)

This materializes as

recessive and harsh, a charred remnant, and crossed with waves of negative affect which disrupt syntax, rhythm, and stylistic register. The inscription of a sentence no longer follows from the natural impulse of desire toward its object, however much diverted from baroque hesitations and redundancies; rather, the unit of utterance is as much the phrase as the sentence; expression falters and continually reorients itself toward an object, Being, which it can approach only reluctantly, or from which it shrinks in an attempt to create an alternative condition, which yet it cannot imagine or have access to through any of the objects in the world. There is, in fact, and quite naturally, a sort of hostility toward objects, as likewise toward nature as a whole, and images sometimes seem chosen for their grotesque inappropriateness, or even to be chosen at random.(46)

Frattali refers to this denial of desire towards the object un-American

The evil of the world, which capitalism has multiplied and decorated, consists in this very fecundity. (There are new models of cars every year.) This evil must now be called forth before itself, and us, in a series of denunciations. There is a certain paranoia implicit in this, and yet vigor as well, a vigor of rejection. It is quite simply the rejection of the society of consumption in terms as insulting to it as possible. For the frenetic activity of this society, which we usually call ‘consumerism,’ seems to be the perfect embodiment of the false, the wasteful, and the decadent.(50)

In further support of this concept, Frattali makes a comparison between W.C. Williams Patterson and Lamantia via Artaud

We might recall the spectacle which William Carlos Williams celebrates in his excursions to the park on Sunday in Patterson. Williams reaction to the vulgarity and candid sexuality of the sunbathers is appreciative, even admiring. Yet Lamantia has an opposite response. In this he would be joined by Artaud himself, whose intense discomfort with sexuality has to do with the assent it imposes on the human subject during moments of passion and jouissance, an assent which runs violently counter to his gnostic quest for freedom(51)

From this, he discusses language as violence

Yet it is the schizoid breakup of this voice which creates holes, gaps, and fissures through which social existence itself is made manifest, not merely in the form of its scattered linguistic traces but also in its underlying spiritual nature. We see, in fact, an irruption of the social and the historical into the space of writing as they mark themselves upon it in the form of a pure violence. We also witness an attempt at resistance, though the self which must resist is fragmented.(54)

The comparison to Williams and the concept of language as violence are mentioned at the beginning of Frattali’s explication of the title poem ‘Hypodermic Light’ which is one of Lamantia’s major works. They have been included at they are applicable to much of the poetry explicated in this chapter. He concludes this chapter with an explication of several other poems. Such explications would register more should he have included excerpts from the poems to which he refers. There appears to be an expectation on his part that the reader will have ready access to Lamantia’s collections – an expectation that is completely unfounded.

We are now given the ‘go’ sign, green, although ‘amber’ might be more applicable to this description of the third phase ‘Green: Becoming Visible’:

quieter, more reflective, and continuing into recent publications...a return of a utopian vision, but this time the focal point is not so much the Woman as the physical world and our ecological relationship to it...Here lines become longer, and the surrealist baroque yields, to some extent, to a more visually oriented imagism. This phase marks something of a break with surrealist style as we usually think of it, and yet it also reminds us that this understanding is sometimes too narrow and that surrealism has at times forced itself to confront the real more directly.

This reminds one of the Breton of Martinique. Up to this point, Frattali has provided a fascinating portrait of Lamantia. However, he takes up the first six pages of this chapter with philosophical musings on perception culminating with the philosopher Lingis leaving the impression that this was an essay written for another purpose but which he decided to stick in here as an afterthought. He eventually arrives at an interesting statement regarding Lamantia which extends his statement in the introduction (quoted above):

In Lamantia’s poetry an increasing sense of the visual and the factual develops gradually over time. The gradualness of this development is a matter for speculation yet we might note that such writing, more attuned to the facticity of the world than the more overtly surrealist work we have looked at till now, requires a language responsive both to the external as well as to subjectivity, and to the non-linguistic signs by which the visible is made available to us in perception. The new item in such writing is the precise visual detail.(79)

This description could be equally applicable to Breton’s Martinique and , more particularly, to ‘The Creole Dialogue between André Breton and André Masson’ contained therein. This last quotation leads into an interesting statement regarding Breton and Surrealism:

The objective of Surrealist writing for Breton, was the search for the Marvelous, which he defined as the beautiful, though, importantly, he preferred uncon-ventional (sic) beauty and in particular chance revelation of such beauty. The ultimate purpose was to foster an expansion and a heightening of awareness beyond the constrained perspectives of everyday life. It was this reawakening of perception and insight into the real which was the fundamental objective, however much this was pursued by means which were themselves so startling as to sometimes overshadow this underlying purpose. Yet a clear style was not in principle ruled out. More to the point, the visual, as opposed to the dreamlike, was always considered a possible means of revelation. For what was always sought, after all, was a revelataion into the nature of the real, and the clarity of the visual, as in photography, can place that reality before us with particular sharpness.(79-80)

Frattali equates Lamantia’s thought in this phase with the liminal experience of ritual:

Though he undergoes initiation, what he is initiated into is not occult. Everyone may participate equally in these truths, which, because they are based upon perception, are not mysteries, although the full substance of the vision is perhaps given only to those privileged to enter into the rituals in the fullest sense...

...The rituals and everything connected with them are the result of an attentiveness which does not merely occur, however much the experience it is based upon might strike the observer with an extraordinary force by virtue of its sheer beauty, dignity, or uniqueness. Rather such attentiveness and such receptivity presuppose instruction, albeit of a special kind, and this instruction, which these aboriginal societies have preserved in their rituals and lore, must be preserved. The ability to impart it and the disposition to receive and to understand it are cultural achievements that must be carefully guarded. The speaker recognizes this ongoing project in the native groups he visits and whose hospitality he accepts, and this recognition, as much as the magnificent natural setting, contributes to the tone of reverence which is a distinguishing feature of this phase of his work.(84-5)

It is again unfortunate that Frattali fails to provide source references so that the reader can determine what it is that gives rise to these expressions. We come to a couple of important statements in furtherance of this discussion. The first is that “If the image of the speaker created by the early poetry was that of an erotic supplicant, or perhaps victim, the figure that confronts us now is that of a shamanistic observer, participating and yet also witnessing.”(87) This, and the preceding discussion of ritual combined with the fact that Frattali is making these statements in reference to poetry written in the late 50s makes one wonder why this is not reflective of an ethnopoetics and why Jerome Rothenberg’s name goes unmentioned. There should at least be a statement comparing and contrasting Lamantia’s and Rothenberg’s work during this period. What we do get is “In this work, the exploration of awareness pioneered by Surrealism is enacted in a new way, outside of the exclusive and restricted context of writing alone and the equally restricted context of the individual and his or her desiring subjectivity, and for that purpose not merely of enlarging awareness but of enlarging it in a particular way – the fostering of a greater receptivity of individuals, especially Americans, toward other cultures and toward the environment.”(87) This sure as hell sounds like ethnopoetics to this reviewer.

The fourth chapter, ‘Elsewhere: The Unique and Incommensurable Experience’, is a grab bag of poems, none of them excerpted, that Frattali was unable to assign a color to. He states in his introduction:

Not written under the sign of any color but rather that of a place or a dimension, the elsewhere. Like the erotic vision, it is not confined to a particular volume but is an ongoing and recurrent impulse. Elsewhere marks out concepts of transcendence that are found in the work, sketching a range of limit experiences for reason, which by this means delineates the extreme edges of its world.

As this chapter consists of explications of unexercepted poems, it is of very little interest.

It is unfortunate that what initially promised to be a much needed exposition on the work of one of America’s leading surrealist writers never achieved what it aspired to as a result a failure to include any excerpts from Lamantia’s poetry. Why Frattali chose to proceed in this unwarranted manner is never addressed? Explications are not that interesting or useful when what is being explicated is never present.

It is a good thing, then, that City Lights has published Tau so that we have an opportunity to see some of Lamantia’s work. Tau has been combined with John Hoffman’s Journey to the End. Referring back to that historic event at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, this latter is what Lamantia chose to read, John Hoffman being a friend who had recently died. As such, it is very fitting that City Lights chose to release the two together. In ‘A Note on Tau’, which opens this book, Garrett Caples states that “While Lamantia’s desire to pay homage to the life and work of his friend is understandable, and the self-effacement of his gesture characteristic, the fact that the didn’t read even one of his own poems is curious and, in later years, when pressed for a reason, he tended to be evasive.”(1) Apparently, Lamantia was undergoing a crisis of conscience at the time. It was not unusual for him to destroy his work: “Lamantia still wrote much more than he ever published, and had even burned a great deal of unpublished work somewhere around 1960, an event alluded to in the title of his third book. Almost a decade of activity, from 1946-1955, was apparently destroyed at this time, apart from a few poems scattered in periodicals.”(4)

Following his death on March 7, 2005, his wife, Nancy, while going through his belongings, stumbled upon this manuscript. Caples describes it as “a collection of seventeen poems, many untitled, only four of which were even published.”(5) At p. 11 he continues, “In terms of his own poetry, Tau clearly develops out of what Lamantia sometimes called the ‘naturalistic’ section of the two-part Erotic Poems, printed before, though written after, the visionary automatic surrealist poems of the second section. By Tau, naturalism has been dispensed with, leaving behind only an apparent austerity in comparison with the flow of images in his earlier work.” Caples concludes:

the formal preoccupations of Tau would increase through Ekstasis, Narcotica, and Destroyed Works, and my sense is he viewed none of this work as surrealist. Yet is is hard to withhold the designation from the Artaud-influenced texts of the latter two volumes, or indeed to certain poems of Tau, which opens with an invocation of the concept of ‘Mad Love’ so celebrated in Breton’s book of that name.(14)

The opening of ‘Mad Love’ is somewhat pedestrian. Lamantia doesn’t get going until the middle where he begins to play with typography:

O Mad Love where untempered
You remain, tunnelling trains of art –
Deflecting horizonless
                                 depthless

Light
           on this voice – these sounds –
A heart whose wails you dream
Into actuality swims halfway
To your always perilous oblique and
Always
           vanished
                      shore.(19)

Interesting how the emotion of the poem erupts out of ‘Mad Love’ evolving into a mezzo-soprano release of energy (think the passionate anger of ‘Carmen’). Frattali would include this in his ‘erotic’ category with the erotic unleashed in the shifting of the lines.

Another poem showing the influence of French Surrealism is ‘Going Fourth by Day’:

To such the sign from circumvolutions
He can cast diced divagations
To the four winds. Nothing and the sun
Will speak for him. He speaks from the sun.

On temporal levels, on this level Now,
The personaged past interpenetrates
On the weird slung head
And screams screams
On all sides of the snakes of Tau.(24)

This is Lamantia’s most Bretonesque poem. It fulfills Frattali’s requirements for ‘the Marvelous’. But this is also, in a sense, a descent into shamanism, the elsewhere marked by ritual and incantation.

There are also poems that seem to be touched by the softer strains of Spanish Surrealism as derived from Lorca. The untitled poem on p. 28 is one:

Out of crystal beginnings
He watched the sunbleached sky
Trail before moonscaled ceilings
Where light ript the darkness down,
- his love loveless in a cloud

That last, indented line becomes a refrain.

And then there are those that echo the voice of Artaud:

She sped to me a winter word
When wound in welts & wounds of dawn
Black lights flayed on growning ground
The sun blocked on us & swooned a summer artichoke
In winter’s spleen
A rant of graves in a thorn
Of that her sleep, that spent a shrieking vein.(32)

Interesting that within this one winds an echo also of both Robert Frost and Baudelaire. But then, strange echoes constantly strain against the confines of Lamantia’s imagination. The numerous compressed words made us think of Hopkins sprung verse. And then there is ‘Question’ that seems Shakespearian in tone:

Not I, but it, should die
when it twists against sinuous walls
diminishing me in a jaw of stains death made:
not I, but it, to stammer in voids, shriek hells,
and once it dead, I live!(36)

This shouldn’t be that surprising as Shakespeare was a master of ‘the Marvelous’.

This concludes the discussion on Philip Lamantia, André Breton and Surrealism. Although the book containing Lamantia’s Tau also contains an essay on John Hoffman as well as Hoffman’s Journey to the End, this played no part in American Surrealism even though Lamantia chose to read it rather than his own work at the 1955 Six Gallery reading. Therefore, it will not be discussed other than this brief mention.

*****

John Herbert Cunningham is the host of Speaking of Poets – a half-hour radio show on Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, reviews and interviews. He publishes regularly in half a dozen literary magazines in Canada and the same number in the U.S. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with the free jazz group ECMW – Experimental Creative Music Workshop. He is currently studying the alto sax, the Chinese flute and the darbouka.

BHARAT JIVA by kari edwards; NO GENDER: REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE & WORK OF kari edwards, Eds. Julian Brolaski, erica kaufman & E. Tracy Grinnell (1)

2010-04-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

Bharat jiva by kari edwards
(a Venn Diagram Production by Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2009)

And

~~kari edwards:~~ NO GENDER (Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards), Edited by Julian Brolaski, erica kaufman & E. Tracy Grinnell. (Includes Cara Benson, Frances Blau, Mark Brasuell, Julian T. Brolaski, Reed Bye, Marcus Civin, CAConrad, Donna de la Perrière, E. Tracy Grinnell, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, erica kaufman, Kevin Killian, Wendy Kramer, Joseph Lease, Rachel Levitsky, Joan MacDonald, Bill Marsh, Chris Martin, Yedda Morrison, Eileen Myles, Akilah Oliver, Tim Peterson, Ellen Redbird, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Smoler, Sherman Souther, Eleni Stecopoulos, and Anne Waldman)
(a Venn Diagram Production by Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2009)

*

This text which is not one. That’s how I think of kari edwards’ work. In terms, I mean, of an environment of separations, assertion, and yearning.

Bharat jiva constitutes a realm of recognitions, pleas, prayers, rants, indictments. It’s a book-length poem of many registers (a kind of multimodal mosaic yoga, really) where “even doubt” will “build walls faster than regulatory principles.” I won’t try to explain away. I can only point. Here, for instance:

I watch as we barricade ourselves in and get
ready for the unbelievable, unimaginable,
unspeakable and unquestioned gender deity
of selective speaking to deliver an
uncompromising message of the
undersigned, replete with regret that other
than self-funding fusion that forms a
separate self in others, nothing’s going to
happen sooner than late. (p.30)

Bharat jiva is an untidy work of resistance to the monolith culture we are all increasingly implicated in.

I can not begin to know
producing difference by deferring
second third person construction
in the first third person narrative
promising surrender to the dead
acknowledging, I am an unknown participant
something maybe, something blind
consuming scarcity
producing hunger
constructing gender
breathing markers
making someone a thing
scapegoat instance
another perfect occasion
construct of a common sense sentence
out of many different bank accounts
apparently to produce
a final outcome
illumination legible
newspaper flyspeck
on the edge of an abstract noun (p. 70)

I’m not explaining my relationship to this text anymore than I am kari’s relationship to it. To do so would require a history of, and of my relationship to, the avant art and literature of at least the last 50 years, not to mention the politics (not excluding the sexual politics) of the same period. But I can’t resist saying that there are moments when I think of the mature kari edwards as the love child of Allen Ginsberg and Kathy Acker.

There’s a preoccupation in Bharat jiva with death, the possibility of transcendence, and despair.
everyone’s dying
everyone’s dying to die
everyone’s in my way
on my way to die
it’s too hot and dusty to die
I am eating the ashes of the dead
eating the exhaust of cars
an image sacrifice
looking for a boat to heaven
(p.80)

who will finally complete themselves
to not exist
to see the unseen of the unsaid
in the book of nothingness
that began before birth

who will everything everyone
happening in blood and urine

whose content is not reiterable
(p.109)

Art is questions. And, make no mistake, edwards is an artist (trained as a sculptor).

nothing shatters space
like the imagined real
disturbing regularity
with its regular
promising something
like a real show

nothing gathers up stones
replaces them with shadows
replaced by space
containing neither
proposition or time
(p.108)

*

~~kari edwards~~: No Gender is an exemplary collection of responses to the life and work of kari edwards. There’s work by Frances Blau (kari’s partner), Kevin Killian, CA Conrad, Yedda Morrison, Leslie Scalapino, erica kaufman, Akilah Oliver, Tim Peterson, Julian T. Brolaski, Jen Hofer, Brenda Iijima, Reed Bye, Lisa Jarnot, Sherman Souther, kari edwards &Chris Martin, Chris Martin, Ellen Redbird, Mark Brasuell, Donna de la Perriere, Bill Marsh, Wendy Kramer, Marcus Civin, Joan MacDonald, Rachel Levitsky, E. Tracy Grinnell, Joseph Lease, Eileen Myles, Eleni Stecopoulos, Cara Benson, Anne Waldman, Michael Smoler, Rob Halpern.

kari is reported to have had the habit of signing hir name under erasure: ~~kari edwards~~. It’s a gesture that provides the title of this important volume, and a gesture which speaks volumes about edwards’ sense of identity.

kari’s project was, in many respects, about finding forms of resistance; particularly in regard to being identified. Here’s kari responding to an interview question from Akilah Oliver:

Well, I may be fortunate or not to be dyslexic, so I have the ability to look at an object and lose its name; for a moment I’m in the presence of that object. I guess the same goes for gendered individuals. I no longer see it as male-female, but the person in front of me; it could be that they are male or female but I never try to fix them to a position. (p. 43)

Tim Peterson’s “Fuck Transcendence: A Close Reading of kari edwards’ Bharat jiva” is a particularly engaging essay in this collection. Peterson keys in on the emotional tenor of the book as well as its constitutional dimensions (its affects and effects). I found both of these passages particularly valuable:

The immersion in this unending dialectical process of agony, yearning, and more agony makes edwards’ book a challenging read. Never in any previous book has the poet worked hirself into a space this fraught, conflicted or bleak. The book begins with the following phrase: “even when issues arise and obedience can not be secured by the bludgeon, the bludgeon remains.” From the start there is a flat-out denial of optimism or hope as a way of knowing; instead, it is literally axiomatic that the bludgeon (presumably power, manipulation, warlike impulses, the juridical) cannot be
eliminated. (p.45)

This reading situation is further complicated by the fact that edwards’ writing was generated through such a process of reading, reaction and projection. Sie would often write by appropriating the words of other poets and rewriting or revising them repeatedly, like building up paint over a surface until the original image was no longer visible. The subject or content of hir writing tended to become the act of revising and rewriting words, a narrative of thought process in the contextual moment of composition. The original thought in the borrowed text which had once provoked in hir a reaction of passion, engagement or revolt was nearly eliminated. It began to take on the status of a third text hovering in the background, an unreachable original to which the imparseable abstractions on the page refer. (p. 48)

edwards’ work reminds one of what art is supposed to do: raise questions, and problematize experience.

*****

Tom Beckett lives and works in Kent, Ohio.

BHARAT JIVA by kari edwards; NO GENDER: REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE & WORK OF kari edwards, Eds. Julian Brolaski, erica kaufman & E. Tracy Grinnell (2)

2010-04-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

~~kari edwards:~~ NO GENDER (Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards), Edited by Julian Brolaski, erica kaufman & E. Tracy Grinnell. (Includes Cara Benson, Frances Blau, Mark Brasuell, Julian T. Brolaski, Reed Bye, Marcus Civin, CAConrad, Donna de la Perrière, E. Tracy Grinnell, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Brenda Iijima, Lisa Jarnot, erica kaufman, Kevin Killian, Wendy Kramer, Joseph Lease, Rachel Levitsky, Joan MacDonald, Bill Marsh, Chris Martin, Yedda Morrison, Eileen Myles, Akilah Oliver, Tim Peterson, Ellen Redbird, Leslie Scalapino, Michael Smoler, Sherman Souther, Eleni Stecopoulos, and Anne Waldman)
(a Venn Diagram Production by Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2009)

And

Bharat jiva by kari edwards
(a Venn Diagram Production by Litmus Press / Belladonna Books, Brooklyn, New York, 2009)

kari edwards, according to many who wrote about hir in NO GENDER, was a being committed to engaging deeply with hir environment and other people. One of the manifestations of this—and I have experienced (been blessed by) it—was kari’s ability to make you feel that sie is truly listening to you when you talked together. And it wasn’t an act because when kari responded to you, the nature of hir response was usually one that showed much thought and sensitivity about what you both were discussing/exploring. I found that a sizeable source of kari edwards’ powerful charisma was hir sincerity, and that kari cared about you, regardless of who you are.

Thus, I have always, as the saying goes, felt close to kari edwards, though the offerings in NO GENDER remind me that I didn’t really know kari (or know hir as fully as many of NO GENDER’s authors). Indeed, I came late to my acquaintance with kari, meeting her shortly after I moved to San Francisco about 10 years ago, long after sie’d already caught people’s attention as a visual artist, student, teacher, activist and caring friend. And even after we met, we didn’t socialize together and usually only met in person at poetry readings (which I’ve never really attended with much frequency). Our backgrounds are also different; I’m an ex-banker who turned to poetry-writing at age 35 and kari, as hir partner Fran Blau says in her contribution to NO GENDER, was “a refugee from the world of visual art” who then taught sculpture and performance art at the University of Denver for 12 years, who later worked at a homeless shelter, and who became an advocate for transgender rights.

It wasn’t difficult, though, for kari and I to find common ground. For example, when I shared my explorations of (the limits to) post-colonialism, sie was an effective conversationalist not only because of hir intelligence but because of hir empathy. To put it reductively, it was evident to me that kari's struggles as a transgender created an empathy with all struggles.

NO GENDER elucidates on many of kari’s struggles, but also how kari’s empathy inspired and helped its authors. A moving example is the contribution by Lisa Jarnot—an excerpt:

The real gift kari gave me was an entrance point into the history of and evolving politics of the transgender movement. Sie gave me a chance to reconcile with my own modest insecurities about gender and desire, and more importantly to come into a clearer understanding of the socially-constructed aspects of who-we-are. These days it feels beside the point to make the judgement of male or female or male-to-female or female-to-male. Kari was kari, and when I think of the people I love, there’s a real beauty in the places where the boundaries of gender begin to melt.

This last summer when I was teaching Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw in a class at Wesleyan, I got an email out of the blue from kari. Sie and hir partner Fran were at the end of their stay in India and preparing for a return to San Francisco. Sie’d happened upon the class website, wished sie could be there, and provided a reading list for my students:

           McCloskey, Deirdre N. Crossing: a memoir
           Richards, Renee with Ames, John. The Renee Richards Story: Second Serve
…
           Wilchins, Riki Anne. Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender

When I told kari that the students were overloaded and agitated with the radical perspectives on gender, sie wrote back to tell me that I was doing my job. Sie included the advice that sie sometimes gave out as a counselor:

“parts are parts…you can name them any things you want. But if it feels good go for it.”

There’s a lot to come to terms with in kari’s death: hir work as a writer is remarkable, unique, and simply high-energy trans-genre beautiful, and hir commitment to social justice emanated from the core of hir being. Sie gave an awful lot to a world that often didn’t have much to give back to hir.

“Sie gave an awful lot to a world that often didn’t have much to give back to hir.” Sadly, I believe that this captures too much of kari’s life. I know sie gave me more than I ever could return.

***

It’s usually tricky (and often silly or even stupid) to relate a person’s biography to that person’s poems. But I find it makes sense to do so with kari edwards—for instance, when I reviewed a few years back her book iduna (O Books), I noted how her font-designs created multiple designs of text and seeming layers from the page’s flatness—the overall effect, I hought, evoked flesh. Is it silly, or simply obvious, to note that kari’s experience with the body, including (relatively) radical transformations, would lend itself to such an approach? All I can say is I felt a sense of recognizance when I read the following from the editors' note to NO GENDER:

By “attempting language” as a way of combating the oppression of forced identification, kari shared with so many others this desire not to write the self into a genre, rather to find a space where gender could be written out, where a body can exist just as a body—not a body gendered, but a body othered, a queer fluid body, “a body without organs.” (footnote here says: kari Edwards via Deleuze and Guattari via Artaud)

This resonates; one can open Bharat jiva at random—and I do so now for purpose of continuing this review—and come across something like:

with a hollow ribcage, my throbbing skeleton
continues on an excursionist outside, headlong
into an apex of corpses strewn on cash
register trail. but first, I must tell you of the
million dead children, fast food shrinking
bodies, eyes burnt for the privileged and let us
not forget, force fed through metal pipes,
fattened pate de foie gras. but that is another
story, and I must pass onto more plausible
explanations by the text, where plausibility is
plural in triplicate, with surrender to customs
for approval, paid off government officials for
expedience, blind eye’s turn from the shifting
curtain of vital collateral. the throbbing
continues, there is a morning call to prayer, an
encasement of a village by sound waves, and
all this could explain the sequence in various
ways; could explain the quest, could explain
the novelty, could explain the island episode
with its three part mini-series, or the semi-
cultured girl Friday volunteer opportunities.

There is just so much compressed in the distilled poems of Bharat jiva. So much that it’s useless for me to explicate on them…but let me offer another excerpt (by opening the book at random):

who will be the first to quit talking

in intimate unfolding

Decontextualized from what might have pushed kari to pen those words, does not this couplet resonate/resound in our era of social networking? “Social networking”—I type that and I hear kari laughing…

Ultimately, I feel a lot of grief in Bharat jiva. For me, the grief overwhelms even the anger that would logically arise from kari’s observances/experiences. Though Bharat jiva was written as a result of kari's trip to India, I think it fair to say that hir experiences encompass more than what sie experienced there; kari traveled there with partner Fran Blau in 2005 to live in an international spiritual community called “Auroville” (in Tamil Nadu). “Bharat” is the Hindi term name for India, deriving from “Bharata” a tribe in the Vedic tradition (many Indians, especially Hindu nationalists, prefer “Bharat” as they consider “India” to be of foreign origin). “Jiva” means “living spirit.”

Bharat jiva is the posthumous publication of hir last manuscript and begins with two epigraphs:

The will to live is the ground of our existence.
Its negation is our salvation.
—S. Radhakrishnan

Oh to be not anyone, gone
This maze of being skin
—Patti Smith

After a preface, Bharat jiva is comprised of two sections: “process” and “aftermath”. The surface narrative, then, can be quite accessible—kari (and I deliberately say the author’s name here rather than “poems’ personas”) experienced and wrote about her experiences (in “process”) and then meditated/wrote about the implications/significances of those experiences (in “aftermath”).

But the “aftermath” offers no resolution, no definitive Conclusion to what kari experienced during the process. “ Aftermath” begins:

nothing to say any more,
expelled from injured paradise
incarcerated in plural driven substitutions

nothing to imagine anymore,
given another calmer euphemism
left blank for another weak absuridty

One can sense the disappointment that kari and Fran Blau experienced in India, that as I believe kari told someone (that I read in some blog post I can’t recall now) in so many words, “People are no different in India than anywhere else.” Also from Blau’s essay is this knowledge: “When we left San Francisco to move to Auroville…we did not harbor any illusions about the place; the ethical, artistic and spiritual problems that we encountered there were huge and not easily resolved.”

Synchronistically, as I was writing this engagement, I happened upon esteemed poet CA Conrad’s post about kari and Bharat jiva, available HERE. I was struck by Conrad’s discussion of anger vs peace in the collection, specifically how he finally gets the “peace” that was found in Bharat jiva by another reader, Thom Donovan. But Conrad’s initial sense of the book was one of anger (please click on link as I don’t wish to reduce people’s opinions here). I can understand where both poets see anger and peace, but what I primarily see in Bharat Jiva is grief. Here’s the end to “aftermath”:

it taunts with a succession of proofs and
irresistible lies

whose house swarms with rats
coming from whose faces
whose words
only offer momentary purity for a bitter
end
where nothing is true and all is false

(By the way, it’s paradoxically one of kari's greatest achievements and yet perhaps least important that kari wrote such engaging, palpable poems without overt narrative references to the body, without relying on the body and its limitations...even as the significance of body is not denied. If I had reviewed Bharat jiva on its own, without also keeping NO GENDER in mind, perhaps I’d wax longer on this stellar poetic (technical) achievement. But for now, kari’s life—which means hir activist concerns that are still so problematic today—must be privileged in my thoughts…)

So does kari’s life end in a “bitter / end”? I don’t think so—one does learn from Blau’s essay in NO GENDER that, notwithstanding the disillusionment from their India experience, they had been preparing to return there before kari suffered the heart attack that killed her body. But that heart attack did not, as the saying goes, “take her life.” Kari edwards’ Jiva, “living spirit,” clearly continues as exemplified by the existence of the NO GENDER project which both continues by itself and promises as well the further continuance by others of kari’s fight for justice.

For now, it’s all right that kari edwards’ last manuscript has no neat conclusion or neat ending. After all, does not injustice continue?

And perhaps I’ll be easy on myself, too, for the messiness of my articulations—things like grief and anger tend to make stuff messy. (And I also so miss kari...) Perhaps the more important thing is what kari was in the process of doing when kari died: returning to those sources of anger and grief, and _____

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) over at Litter Magazine and at Tributary. The book's "Afterword" essay by Joi Barrios is also newly-available online at OurOwnVoice. If these reviews get you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY is priced retail at $19.95, this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

NEW EXERCISES by FRANK ANDRE JAMME

2010-04-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

New Exercises by Franck André Jamme, Translated from the French by Charles Borkhuis
(Wave Books, Seattle, WA, 2008)

Novel and Ancient: Capturing Word Mysteries

The English translation of the French writer, Franck André Jamme’s Nouveaux Exercises, released by the Wave Books in 2008, is a very much unexpected — and atypical — booklet of poems. Published in a chic and elegant pocket-sized format in which space is as much valued as words on the page, the book opens with a warning to the reader “Not too fast,” before plunging into eighty-one little word puzzles of aphorisms, dictions, phrases, riddles, thoughts, interrogations and fragments in which alphabetical letters are arranged tighly in both symmetrical and asymmetrical squares or rectangles of “word search.”

Franck André Jamme’s introduction sets out the game clear and square, though with a touch of secretiveness:

Tablets like these used to be found on small gold leaves in ancient Roman graves. These leaves were typically folded inside the closed hands or mouths of the dead. They could be read as maxims, wishes, recommendations, or favorite sentences probably meant to seal the crossing over to the other side, that totally unknown country whose existence itself is so uncertain — the country of “the most numerous,” as the Romans called it.

In the following pages, there is no message for or towards the beyond; instead, just a pet hobby that materialized without warning then developed, like a fire, until it became a book. A game played with thoughts that are neither funny nor playful; a “game” in that it was amusing to watch as these thoughts drew steles, and amusing again to spend time, days later, trying to decipher them.
— p. V

Although it is hard to decide or judge if each “fragment” or word search leads to one another (or if they do indeed lead to somewhere), the experimental form of such tiny word searches are more than conventional word puzzles. Intriguing and appetizing, they do contain a certain strong allure, enticing the reader to decipher the aphorism by presenting two or three seemingly obvious words at the beginning or at the end, or somewhere in the body of the puzzle. One may often be misled into dismissing the puzzle as “easy,” when in fact another hidden message is still literally (and physically) lurking around the corner of the puzzle cube. Each alphabetical letter looks at once naked, pure and deceivingly “identical” when in truth, each letter does not quite belong to one another. Take for instance, Page 7:

(Hidden message: “To sense the arrival of the creeper of the dreams through its pearly hiss”)

Or a “longer” puzzle (on Page 39) in terms of its verticality, even though only four letters, except the ending line, grace each “stanza”:

(Hidden message: “To be able to instantly call any gathering of things which shine and dance”)

Or perhaps a “shorter” one (on Page 10) in which there are three horizontal lines, in the strictest sense:

(Hidden message: “To approach with only time on your hands”)

While some words are more visible than others (and again, this is a question of subjectivity and concentration), other “invisible” words still necessitate a game with the eye before coming alive on the page. The equal spacing in-between each capitalised letter, and the meticulous arrangement of the puzzle on a page mostly dominated by emptiness all adds up to an overall enigmatic aura. In an inexplicable yet subtle way, I grow to like the whiteness around the letters greatly, in part because they seem to speak more than the letters themselves when my eyes fail to work out the riddles as fast as I would like. They are a sort of silence surrounding a labyrinth of words. They are what makes the text — and its simplicity —elusive.

Given that I am a Parisian and francophone, I regret not being able to locate and read the original French version before embarking upon this review. (The original French text was published by a small press, Éditions Virgile in Dijon, in 2002). In fact, I am very curious as to how the aphorisms would work and how each word puzzle would still function as an effective word search, considering that the French syntax differs from its English counterpart, and that as a hasty generalization, phrases tend to be lengthier in the French tongue. Would the accents give away the secret of words more easily when rendered in French, for example? How did Charles Borkhuis the translator negotiate with specific word choices, given the limited possibility of space and the demands of concision or density? How did he translate the elusiveness and exquisitivity? Perhaps this act of translating these tablets, as Jamme had called them, is also part of the visceral invisibility made visible.

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of a book of poetry, Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010), and co-founder of Vif Éditions, an independent publishing press in Paris, France. Also one of the editors at Cerise Press, and a guzheng concertist, she lives in France. Visit her website: www.fionasze.com

GRIEF SUITE by BOBBI LURIE

2010-04-30T22:55:00.000-07:00

JOEY MADIA Reviews

Grief Suite by Bobbi Lurie
(CW Books, Cincinnati, OH, 2010)

“To Look Death in the Eye”

Bobbi Lurie’s third book of poems is sometimes hard to read.

To look honestly at Death, that’s how it must be.

From its sterile hospitals rooms and invasive procedures to the family secrets and slow declines that scream and whisper as they bubble, ooze, and bleed, Grief Suite takes the reader on a journey through guilt, anger, denial, accusation, and regret—aspects of the “five stages” so many counselors and workshop leaders talk about. But after experiencing this collection of free-verse and prose poetry, there is little question that, when it comes to Grief, nothing is as cut and dry enough to be categorized as neatly as we want.

Grief must have its due. It demands of us our souls.

The collection begins with “Traveling North,” a poem that uses strings of prosic image-phrases that call to mind Kerouac’s Mexico City works and Burroughs’s cut-up writing. The punctuation works like a drum, beating the battle-rhythm before the carnage. (In a later poem she writes: “I fragment short prayers, picking at the worded wounds.”)

The poem as prayer is most clearly present in “This Amputated Place is My Soul, Lord,” operating more as mantra–meditation than a traditional Christian invocation:

“Lord, preserve me, Lord, I am faltering
Lord, I am Lost in a skull of thoughts”

Death does not center just upon the body—it infuses its razor-blade judgments in every aspect of our lives. Poems such as “Codependent Nation” dance with Death as a spectre tangled up in an essence of Love that is dark, dangerous, and unromantic. The speaker is represented by the small “i” as she speaks of how she “met my first love/at the vending machine/in the mental hospital.” The poem, which runs half a dozen pages, keeps the reader off-kilter and engaged with its varying rhythms, line breaks, and use and absence of punctuation. The imagery is unencumbered by typical mechanisms that might clutter it up or make it more palatable.

There are stories here that the authors needs to share, and we all need to hear (“In print she says every/thing/In life she’s contrite”).

The poems of Grief Suite are not obsessed with Death. They are not Gothic or morose. There’s a subtle sense of Life and Light at work in all of their ever-deepening darkness. Purple and yellow are often mentioned, as well as scents like perfume.

The title poem, “Grief Suite,” begs numerous readings due to its length and complexity. The reader gets a clear sense of the Process grief entails, the back and forth between Past and Present, warring and reconciling with themselves now that Death has taken the Future forever away.

The poem details the dying and death of a mother, an event that brings out of dusty closets and long-locked drawers the childhood memories and present contentions in the mother–daughter, mother–sons, sons–daughter relationships. It reads like a diary, so the reader is positioned as a Voyeur, whether invited or not. There is much here that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced a similar “death event” in their own family, especially if one sibling stayed behind to care for the parent while the rest went off into the world.

Two of the poems, “Once My Heart was Wide and Loved the World” and “Tossed Out Box of Treasured Possessions” function like sutras in the form of two-line meditations and dialogues:

“Black spots of cancer.

Like a small boy pointing a magnifying glass to an insect.
Interested in the way the body burns.”
(from “Once My Heart”)

“And what will you do with the rest of your possessions?
I will never collect possessions again.”
(from “Tossed Out Box”)

The final three poems, “Rasa,” “Waking in Old Age,” and “Soft Fibers Adorn the Diminishing Landscape” are beautiful, disturbing poems with stark language that gives us only flickers of insight, like the lone swinging bulb in an otherwise lightless room. Nurses bat about their “crude humor” as they joke about the patient’s incontinence… and threaten with their detached demeanor even worse:

“…if they were to pull the drapes around me they could beat me blue
with bruises blooming daily on my body anyway.” (“Waking in Old Age,”)

Grief Suite does not promise Hope or an easy prescription for getting through the loss; its poems instead tell us that it takes immense Will to not give in to Death.

For it’s our Will that makes us live when at last the Grief has gone.

*****

Joey Madia is a playwright, actor, and educator who writes in a wide variety of genres and styles. His poetry, essays, and short stories have been widely published and have earned him several awards. His first novel, Jester-Knight, was published in 2009. He is the founding editor of www.newmystics.com, an art and literary site. He is the Artistic Director/Resident Playwright of New Mystics Arts, Inc. which is home to two social justice theatre companies (in West Virginia and New Jersey) and Resident Playwright at Youth Stages, LLC. His 12 plays for young audiences have been produced across the United States and his series of books on using theatre in the classroom are helping teachers redefine learning. He is currently adapting the award-winning Sad, Mad, Glad books by Jim Strawn and Chuck Stump into a touring musical for elementary students. As a teaching-artist he has worked with, taught, and mentored thousands of students in both theatre and creative writing and he has spoken at many schools and national conferences. He specializes in working with young students and performers to develop new works in the classroom and for public performance as well as helping teachers integrate the Arts into their classrooms.

GENJI MONOGATARI by MARK YOUNG (1)

2010-04-30T22:45:00.000-07:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Genji Monogatari by Mark Young
(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2010)

I had the privilege of selecting the poems and writing an introduction for Mark Young’s Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008 (Meritage Press, 2008). Young, a New Zealander transplanted to Australia, displayed a broad diversity of poetic modes in his Selected Poems, and to be sure, the book created pressure for his next volume or two to be distinctive. Genji Monogatari fulfills that challenge as a book-length serial poem that, to some extent, comprises an homage to the monumentality of Murasaki Shikibu’s achievement, the range of her depiction of experience in a complex and fascinating cultural milieu. However, in most of the 54 single-page sections (all of which except two are single-stanza poems), Young forces this achievement to engage in dialogue with topics that are decidedly contemporary concerns: the opportunities and dangers of computer technology, our environmental crisis, the negative impact of commercial factors on aesthetic and spiritual aspirations, and deconstruction’s challenge to the tyranny of binary oppositions. Two or three topics are frequently juxtaposed in a single section, as Young does not engage in linear poetic meditations but collagistic ones.

Genji and his fellow characters sometimes show up in the present. For example, in XXXXI, prior to reaching “Ustusemi’s door,” Genji is mired in speculation about financial affairs that have a dubious effect on possibilities for world peace and the globe’s overall welfare. Though “sweat lodges/ put [him] in touch with [his]/ holistic inner self,” he depends “upon the most innocent/ bits of consumer culture—/ LL Cool Jay lyrics or the/ latest news on the Tampa/ real estate market” to predict how “power games” will materialize in “the next conflict” (46). Lady Murasaki’s original text was rife with conflict and power plays, but the crassness of the character’s expression of his desires and strategies is something added, as though Young is yanking the high/low and ancient/modern collage-effects of Eliot’s The Waste Land into an even more troubling period. In another section, Genji is quoted as telling the Akashi lady, who reacts gloomily: “’. . . I want/ to be part of the machine/ & make my mark from/ inside it’” (17).

Young’s poem manifests a constant awareness, not only of opportunities “of turning emails into/ fortune cookies by making/ an inside verse out of the/ imagined message” (6) but of contemporary poetic bricolage enabled by an overwhelming supply of web sources. We learn that there are “one hundred &/ forty-eight YouTube/ clips of the Rolling Stones/ doing Sympathy for the Devil” (59). Even a marvelous rock ‘n roll song can be diluted by overexposure. Imagine Genji, once steeped in a tradition that honors how “old poems/ have much to say about the/ unchanging human heart” (52), worrying about the emptying out of thought and affect or, worse, an intensification of cynicism, in a collage-poetry where associative triggers are endless and incredibly fast:

Was scent
the trigger? The military
jewelry continually up-
dated from thousands of
sources on the web? Or was
it simply the evanescence
& hostile change he sensed
around him that caused
this bricolage, this making
things out of materials
that were lying about? He
recalled the tanka that
accompanied the dance—
the degree of difficulty that
a mountain climber faces
is unimportant to the tourist
whose only interest is
filming the mountain from a
distance. Which one was he? (15)

In each section, an insistent enjambment tends to push the reader from one reflection, image, or trope to another yet allow for the brief pauses that show how successive terms stand in relation. The “change” fostered by Web 2.0 is perhaps “hostile” to a significant “degree of difficulty” in intellectual and aesthetic work. Tourist-like bricolage seems comparable to gliding and surfing rather than mountain-climbing, but does it have to be? Although Young is making use of the internet’s infinite source-supply and is not unhappy about that option, I suspect that he does not appreciate that “hostility.” The recollection of “the tanka that/ accompanied the dance” in Genji’s (original) time suggests that assiduous aesthetic effort and a respect for the natural world should still be an important priority for those cultural workers who use the latest technology. Those who are familiar with Flarf might read the passage above and other moments in Genji Monogatari as a veiled critique of the movement’s relentlessly leveling and perhaps facile uses of found text.

“LIII. The Writing Practice” offers an ironic account of multi-media sampling without the aim of critical understanding. “In a hurry to be inspired,” a woman has decided not to accept “the limitation of words” and instead, “opened two additional/ browser windows & used/ satellite and aerial imagery/ to explore brief snippets/ of everything from the/ lo-fi aesthetic of classic/ reggae 45s through to/ Mstsislav Rostropovich/ playing Bach” (58). The speaker then intones: “Too much/ distraction—what she was/ after was not conceptual/ knowledge but keyholes.” However, one can be diverted from distraction and toward inspiration by “real time” natural events: the woman goes outside to watch a snowfall, writes the Japanese kanji for “heaven,” and begins to cry “bitterly.”

Throughout Young’s poem, there are pointed references to the environmental crisis, whether apparently factual, provocative, or evocative: “waste disposal/ at a landfill facility [is] much/ more expensive than/ recycling” (13); “The price of crude oil/ is a psychotic ghost/ that haunts my/ poetry” (16); “The Earth/ is a closed system; activity, no/ matter how refined, takes/ nanoseconds off its life, &/ this was gluttony” (51). While none of the sections comprise a full meditation on major ecological problems, the references seem to entail a haunting of the mindscapes of characters who are trying, otherwise, to fulfill their desires and confront their (smaller) problems. Images like that of “North-central Texas. . . stranded in a/ snow storm” (32) serve as a reminder that other concerns could cease to be relevant if human, animal, and other life itself is headed toward doom.

Section VIII opens: “The relativity principle/ holds only inso-/ far as the reduction/ in biodiversity in the/ rice paddies can be/ attributed to the over-/ use of agricultural/ chemicals” (12). A quick Google search may not connect “the relativity principle” directly with the other elements in this sentence, but there has been a great deal of interest lately in Japan and elsewhere in the promotion of “biodiversity” in and around “rice paddies.” Later in the section, Young places the old logical positivist question in an apocalyptic context that is alien to its origins: “The/ longbow moon is met/ by the silence of crickets/ & frogs, provokes the/ rhetorical koan: do/ flowers blossom when/ no-one is there to see/ or smell them?” Regardless, Japan’s venerated cherry blossoms would not be the flowers of post-cataclysmic earth, but some toxic monstrosities.

In a long poem that conveys a sense of a great swath of time while also suggesting that little time may be left for “geo-engineering the Earth/ to control rising temper-/ atures. . . without/ breaking the budget” (57), time is not something that can be experienced in a leisurely or coherent way, especially when Genji takes to the freeway: “He looked in his rear-/ view mirror to make/ a lane change, only to/ see both past & future/ interrupt the present” (37).

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Clarity and Other Poems (Marsh Hawk Press, 2008) and two books of criticism. He is also co-editor of a 2007 collection of essays on David Shapiro. Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs published his chapbook, Generic Whistle-Stop, in 2009. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2007 (Scribner’s). Fink’s paintings hang in various collections.

GENJI MONOGATARI by MARK YOUNG (2)

2010-04-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Genji Monogatari by Mark Young
(Otoliths, Rockhampton, Australia, 2010)

I usually appreciate poems that, while addressing whatever it is they address, can’t help but also reveal an ars poetica. Perhaps all poems concurrently contain ars poetica, but I’m talking about something so deeply held that they can’t help but capture a reader's attention soon enough, before (without necessarily supplanting) other concerns. I found such poems in Mark Young’s Genji Monogatari whose title obviously indicates that it relates to the “classic work of Japanese literature attributed to the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century.” But, and as facilitated by the collection’s epigraph, these poems also reveal how “The function / of poetry is painfully reached” (“The Paulownia Court”). To wit, the epigraph:

And if you cut it in half again, it gets fuzzier still.
But even if you have a square centimeter of the
original hologram, you still have the whole
image—unrecognizable, but complete
--Samuel R. Delany: Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones

reminds me of something ancient Greek art scholar J.J. Pollitt wrote in his groundbreaking book The Ancient View of Greek Art which was of, let’s just say, aid, in helping me navigate the instability of language as I made or read poems. Pollitt wrote:

When a term like symmetria is used by a late antique rhetorician, one should probably not expect it to have the rigorous precision of meaning that it conveyed to a sculptor of the fifth century B.C. In general, it may be expected that the technical value of a particular term—that is, the value which is dependent upon the special knowledge and training of a particular group—will diminish as the size of the group using the term increases.

I see time’s destabilizing effect (and I include riffs and translations in “time”) implicit in such lines from Genji Monogatari as

“The walls / exhale smoke”
(--from “The Paulownia Court”)

and

“Semiotics no longer / depend on logic”
(--from “The Shell of the Locust”)

But so enough with my own pet and pat empathies, except to say that all of the above only makes more impressive the turns the collection makes into clearly political poems, e.g. “Heartvine” which begins and ends with the following excerpts:

A number of crucial
points where the domains
of experience can be found
in the military manual
detailing the day to day
operations of the U.S.
military’s Guantanamo
Bay detention facility.

[…]

The colors of the heartvine
bleed into one another. The
roads are full of people
& vehicles. The political
revolution is dying down,
is now more sensed than
thought about. Phenomenal.

Well. Is that a powerful illumination on perhaps the limits of phenomenology, which certainly has not been an unpopular trend in contemporary poetry? And perhaps how ironic given how The Tale of Genji is sometimes called “the first psychological novel”…?

And then there’s “The Orange Blossoms” which asks:

He recalled the tanka that
accompanied the dance—
the degree of difficulty that
a mountain climber faces
is unimportant to the tourist
whose only interest is
filming the mountain from a
distance. Which one was he?

Relatedly, I note how “An Autumn Exersion” ends with the line

“Only in music. Symmetry.

I initially read it with a colon: “Only in music: symmetry.” But there is no such colon which would have created a cause-and-effect that would have had the extra layer of being an ars poetica. Poetic enhancements clearly are not a means to abstract one’s self from the world. From “Purple Trousers”:

Carrying a boulder on one’s
back is both a metaphor
& a painful way to go
shopping.

And so we return to the genius of Young’s take, so to speak, on “Genji Monogatari”. Reading the Delany epigraph that commences the book, I initially thought that Young was to present poems inspired by, perhaps hearkening to, things he read in The Tale of the Genji—that perhaps Young was allowing himself to offer a contemporary re-vision-ing of the tale because, while the original was to be lost in translation, the poems nonetheless would evoke a “complete” sense of and from the original tale (I was speculating in this way before I read the Lulu blurb by Martin Edmonds that describes Genji Monogatari as “a sequence of 54 poems, each keyed to a chapter of the 11th century Japanese classic by Murasaki Shikibu”). But what surfaced more for me was how Young’s poems relate to The Tale of the Genji’s literary technique rather than its plot, by which I mean what Wiki observes as that “The work does not make use of a plot; instead, much as in real life, events just happen and characters evolve simply by growing older.”

Thus, Young wrote his poems as he read through The Tale of the Genji but without disregarding the 21st century world in which he’s living. As with The Tale of the Genji, these also are poems with a psychological impetus. In fact, Young’s book reminds me of Kimiko Hahn who’s also written poems based on her readings of Shibiku’s tale; Hahn uses her intertextual readings to write poems that explore the “relationship between gender, language, body, desire, and subjectivity”. Young’s poems, on the other hand, seems to critique globalism, political and military policies, pop culture, among others, and poetry’s role in such critiques. As regards poetry’s role, perhaps relevant is

…the fishing
lure whose etymology
is entomology
(-- from “The Floating Bridge of Dreams”)

And so we get back to ars poetica. These are poems not just commenting on the world but poetry’s and/or the poet’s role—that despite the open-endedness of language, poems must still be written, no matter how “painful” it is to reach “the function of poetry”. I read “pain” here not to be of (just) writerly angst but given the facts about which poems are made—“Guantanamo” may pop up in one of Young’s poem but “Guantanamo” is not just a word.

Thus, “Early Ferns” may be a conclusion (at least from the standpoint of “Genji”):

Made lunch. Chicken
korma, with coriander &
lemongrass. Taste-testing
as he went, occasionally
adding a bit more spice
to suit his palate. Ate &
enjoyed it, finished off
with an informal cup
of tea, all the time brooding
on traditional Western
philosophy, its hierarchal
dualistic separation, binary
opposites, one privileged
over the other. How different
in structure—preparing
the meal had triggered the
train—from that of Eastern
cooking whose theory
& practice are relational:
Practice informed by theory,
Theory altered through
practice. The history of the
present served up en japonais.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) over at Litter Magazine and at Tributary. The book's "Afterword" essay by Joi Barrios is also newly-available online at OurOwnVoice. If these reviews get you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY is priced retail at $19.95, this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

THE FAT SHEEP EVERYONE WANTS by BERN MULVEY

2010-04-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

PEG DUTHIE Engages

The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants by Bern Mulvey
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland, Ohio, 2008)

In one of my former incarnations, I was a buyer for an international bookstore chain, and my duties included teaching assistant buyers the art of seeing into the future. On the first day of training, I would tell them, "My job is to show you how to predict what someone will buy when they walk into one of our stores six months from now, themselves not having decided yet what they're going to buy."

We had an assortment of tools for parting the mists in our crystal balls, of course, including a powerful database and access to publishers' reps and media kits. We could sometimes parlay our personal reactions toward a book into a few extra copies hither or a recommendation thither, in hopes of improving the odds for a sale it might not have otherwise attracted.

All the educated guessing and calculated marketing notwithstanding, the fact remained that there were a multitude of factors beyond our control -- in particular, the personal history of a potential buyer, and his or her mood on the day he or she considers spending time with a given book.

I was reminded of this when thinking about who else might enjoy Bern Mulvey's poetry, because when I read this collection, it connected with me in ways it wouldn't have even a mere three months ago, let alone three or ten or twenty-five years ago. For instance, the poem "Secrets" is prefaced with the note, "In rural Japan, it's still the custom for the terminally ill not to be told about their illness"; I read this but a few days after a friend's mother-in-law passed away, in Japan. The poem contains lines that would have resonated with me no matter what, such as

Strange how one can lack something there's so much of,
like a fish dying of thirst

but remembering my friend's distress at her own family's secrets invested the very next lines --

I want to say,

Tell him, for God's sake, but I say nothing --

with an extra layer of helpless sadness, with my current recognition of that line as one that will speak directly to someone I care about.

Thirty years ago, I had a huge chip on my shoulder about being an Asian kid growing up in rural America; it seemed like everyone else in the world expected me to care more about being Asian than I actually did, and I would've resisted any effort to steer me toward Mulvey's work: he's an American professor in Japan, with (at least, implied by the poems) a Japanese wife and children, and at least one ex-lover (who, upon my first reading of "Snapshot," I'd assumed was Japanese, but on second reading, perhaps not). At that point, I would've assumed that our interests lay at opposite poles.

Ten years ago, I hadn't yet visited Japan or encountered the manga and anime that would fuel my current, ongoing interest in its history and culture; three years ago, my mother hadn't yet been diagnosed with the cancer that would kill her less than a year later. I requested the book for review in part because I was intrigued by the blurbs I'd read about its Japanese-inspired content, and also because I'd greatly enjoyed an earlier book in the Cleveland State poetry series (Alison Luterman's The Largest Possible Life). What I hadn't anticipated was how the book is so much about the missing and the dead -- or so it seems to me, but do those themes stand out for me so much more because of my own losses (of friends as well as relatives, and of illusions as well as personal connections) over the past decade? The writers quoted on its cover seem more entranced with the themes of (failures of) communication and (failures of) cross-cultural connection; yet, if I had two prospective readers at hand -- one preoccupied with Japanese/American encouters, and one with themes of loss -- I would hand my copy to the second reader.

The motif of things gone missing or lacking is present even in the title and the cover. The phrase "The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants" in itself suggests a limit to abundance: its shadow side is that some people will have to make do with the scrawnier sheep, or perhaps even no sheep at all. It is the shadow hovering over the father-to-be in "The Window Tribe" whose child fails to arrive as expected; the aging mother in the same poem who plaintively asks, How did I get so old?; the mother-in-law in "Summer Festival in Tamura Village" whose stamina likewise isn't what it used to be; the terminally ill woman in "Jean"; the terminally ill girl in "How to Make Cranes"; and, for the author's dead father, "Hands," about how

there is space, still something escapes
somehow until it's all gone and you look
at what you have and it's nothing
but hands that couldn't hold
even water.

Things that vanish sans explanation: the author notes that 1960s reproductions of the cover artwork -- some panels from a Tokyo museum -- included flocks of sheep. However, the sheep are not on the screens owned by the museum -- a mystifying circumstance to all involved. In "Lost Dog," a pet disappears, and with it, belief in parental omnipotence, the father recording how "I just wanted not to fail" even as the story inexorably proceeds to "We found nothing, ever. The night stumbled on,/ and so did we." The shadow of scarcity colors this poem as well: the son is "borrowed this weekend from his mother in Texas," and even as the father holds the crying child, he cannot help but remain aware of the child's suitcase as "an open mouth by the bed." A sense of impending doom also informs "Low Tide near Mikuni, 1990," where the narrator ties a summer day on the shore to "the letter I hold from my brother in Germany,/ the would-be Rambo…", and "Trouble in Birdland as Two Lost Parakeets Move in with the Asuawayama Crows," the hapless "twin scoops of sherbet" about to lose their nest to the avian equivalent of "a biker gang/called Death's Head or Satan's Spawn." "Snapshot" makes a point of describing lost illusions:

A photo can't capture this: I had not met
your mother, you still thought me
Byronic, I thought you could hold a job.
We don't keep in touch.

In short, this is not a collection for the sentimental, or for those in search of a happy-ever-after of West meeting East. That said, neither is it mired in unrelieved despair. The final section of "The Window Tribe" consists of these lines:

EIHEIJI TEMPLE

Three of us, waiting out a storm.
He teaches me, Decorate the end with beauty;
the elements up, words dissolve like salt.

This sense of fractured yet enduring hope also appears in poems such as "Bending a Stiff Branch," "After" (about a 1995 earthquake), and "Blizzard in Sabae," the last closing the book with an image of the narrator walking alone under a moon that "unveiled, shatters, becomes a million reflected stars." It could well serve as a metaphor for the potential of poetry, both in general and of this collection -- that it too can serve as company and mirror for ourselves and our losses as we continue waiting out storms and walking through their aftermaths.

*****

Peg Duthie graduated with honors from the University of Chicago, followed it with an MA at University of Michigan, and has since worked a variety of jobs, ranging from yogurt machine cleaner to military software designer. Her poems have appeared in flashquake, Strange Horizons, the Hay(na)ku for Haiti series (#10), and elsewhere. Her favorite poets include Vassar Miller, Alison Luterman, and Lynda Hull.

CATALOGUE OF BURNT TEXT by TIMOTHY DAVID ORME

2010-04-30T22:30:00.001-07:00

PETRA BACKONJA Reviews

Catalogue of Burnt Text by Timothy David Orme
(BlazeVOX, Buffalo, N.Y., 2009)

whereupon alone by the leaving tree I sit…

Pay attention to the trees and to their leaves, trees that reach, balance, span, grow, fall, lighten, shade and levitate on the pages of Timothy David Orme’s book of poems, The Catalogue of Burnt Text. Leaves here are copious and evocative—they leave us with an overwhelming sense of solitude.

Solitude, but also a sort of mannered plenitude. The pages of Orme’s book, their generous whitespace, have fastened to them provisionally as in a scrapbook, Latin sentences, fragments of seemingly archaic English songs, lists, lyrical interludes, asides, cryptic epistles, generously titled [and subtitled and untitled] poems—pastoral, visionary, punning and anagrammatic.

The pseudo-catalogue is a mannered literary device, and the burnt text—well, our era seems to favor the simulated historical artifact delivered as an artistic product. All of this places Orme’s Catalogue of Burnt Text squarely in the postmodern tradition and might predispose the critic to cynicism. But Orme invokes Osiris who, dismembered and re-assembled, is the god of the present moment. Orme offers us a near-enough anagram, and justifies his own poetic practice:

The taking of two for one to exist

Or desire. |osiris dies! (50)

Very little of the book resembles a catalogue. The formatting—strikethroughs, gappy arrangement of text, parenthesis—suggest transcribed (and likely annotated) literary remains whether burnt, torn, worn, weathered or (self)censored. The simulation is not heavy handed, but almost ethereal. No, it is ethereal, and the book is heartbreaking.

The Catalogue—or at least the first 20 pages—is ostensibly composed by an unnamed poet and dedicated to another poet—Ipsentius. If you’re like me, you’ve also come by some Latin, neither liturgically nor academically, but organically. Trust your hearing of “absent” in “Ipsentius”, and then consider who and what might be absent. Consider, too, that absence has shape and form. The vital engagement, and arrangement, is with what is “not there”, not wholly anyway. Ipsentius, the younger poet’s mentor, is evoked in Ovid’s Latin as a burnt elm which, though blasted by Jove’s thunder, is “laden with the tendrils of a vine” (19, 62).

Incidentally, reader of Orme, do not be intimidated by the Latin quotes. They are translated at the back of the book. As for the seeming archaic fragments of English song, they are not impenetrable. Recall that a “welkin” is a cloud or the sky, and that Peter Riley used fragments of English madrigals to great effect in Distant Points. In fact, it is to Distant Points that Orme’s Catalogue might usefully be compared, both formally and thematically.

Orme did not tag the Latin quotes and poetic fragments with their author’s names—Cicero, Pliny, Ovid, Crashaw, it is as if their names no longer matter although something of them still occupies space:

Another re                 turn to the ancients
                                    (for solidity -- or the
                                    impression thereof) (42)

And a return too, to the elemental for even more solidity, or for the trickful, immaterial impression thereof. In the Catalogue, streams and mountains are generic. Water is water and mountain is at most “rock mountain”. It’s a youthful past or a primal world, but also a simulation of these, a painted backdrop.

Most of the trees in this world—Orme often addresses them directly—are unspecified, like his Latin poets. There is one aspen, one tamarind, and the aforementioned elm. Birds in Orme’s Catalogue are also overwhelmingly generic, although a song sparrow and a nightingale lend their voice and flutter to two poems, one of them in which the “gentle auspices”—the Roman diviners of the future via the flight pattern of birds—are also invoked (37). Flowers, however, as they were in Milton’s funereal Lycidias, are named—“o leander”, hellebore, hyacinth, marygold, moonflower, dewdrop. Milton’s blindness drove him to lament the loss of the “sight of vernal bloom” and Milton’s age was as mannered as our own and as particular about specifics as the internet.

But back to Orme—he has created a catalogue which, in that it eschews particulars, evokes them, and some great absence too, as overwhelming as it is common. Things—trees, but poets, too—lose their specificity when they fall out of relation with other things. It happens especially to the legions of dead.

The middle section of the book [after the lovely lyrical “Summer Songs”] includes the old fashioned expanded table of contents of an “Enchiridion” or “handbook” which self-referentially describes its own blowing away in the wind in its last chapter (31). The page that follows “Enchiridion” is a list of tentative questions for the Catalogue as a whole:

why such a name
why names
whence the Latin poem
…
why all this construction
why all this why all this again (32)

The list is eponymously titled “the catalogue of burnt text (inquisitions)”.

“Thoughts and Remembrances” is the last section of the book and is comprised of lyrical arrays, titled and untitled poems and sections of prose. There’s yet another eponymous list-poem, “extended catalogue of burnt ~~text~~” (44), and the poignant, archaically styled “Come w Me” which at its close has a line by Ovid written from his exile, “I’ve told you why I write…I want to be with you any way I can” (47), supporting the illusion, if not the fact, of two souls’ close association. This association that spans time is mirrored in the poem beginning “don’t believe that”, an arrangement in three columns of phrases. The left-hand column is in contemporary English, the right-hand column in archaic English, and the middle column has but two words. The eye falls about the columns of text—left to right, right to left, it hardly matters—as a leaf might fall among tree trunks. Orme’s arrays require a movement of the eyes not unfamiliar to readers of graphic novels and the mental images created in the free fall through Orme’s text can be stunning.

*

why all this why all this again (32)

The poet’s seemingly singular voice that spans the entire book is itself an assemblage, a collection formally circumscribed yet paradoxically hinting at the transcendence of limit. To read the Catalogue is to watch it variously declaim and whisper against a painted backdrop. This theater set, with its generic trees and birds, water and rock, simulates the span of worlds up to our own. It is where the Catalogue is lived, written, burnt and transcribed from voices, at intervals human, bird, the rustling of leaves, the leaves of books and of trees.

*

A photo (by Jay Saenz) of a burnt tree trunk, supine and about the size of a human being is on the cover of Catalogue of Burnt Text. There’s an empty school-type chair and a tin can in the picture, too. The backdrop is a brick wall, maybe a school. The ground is concrete pavement. The Romans invented concrete, and their concrete and brick construction revolutionised architecture. The cover tableau is a sort of “school of the ancients.”

Greek and Roman architecture extended human reach upwards, and classical buildings with their columns and capitals took the form of orderly forests. If burnt text evokes anything, if human activity does too, it is the ghost of spent forests. So here is another mannered stance—the great age and decreptitude of the world. The 17th century described it as brittle, tired, lame, “out of joynt”. In a similar spirit, Orme’s expressions of isolated futility increase by the Catalogue’s end, they are as leaves on some remaining tree:

[ ]
What does the tree offer? It leaves
[us]      changes
                                     [us] as we grew accustomed.

                                                                 Me vix misereque sustento. (57)

“I keep going with difficulty and wretchedness”, wrote Cicero, in one of his letters to Atticus. The implication of Orme’s arrangement of these lines is that change and transformations occur. Leaves, trees, whole forests of poets—they fall.

When one “leaves” and cannot be found even in one’s own words, in the leaves of one’s own book, the exoneration is to not struggle against this:

                  You do not need to understand or remember. Already
                  You know what I say. (61)

Sonically, “leaf” is “feel” backwards (53). Orme, having explored the rhyme of human hand and leaf, the symmetry of their touch and aspiration, finds their fates symmetrical too.

                                                      *

I like a catalogue, a list, a summation, bullet points. It’s as if in the enumeration of things, the things themselves are sufficiently present and related, one to the rest. In a melancholy way they are, as in Orme’s sensitively arranged pages, and as such they create their own remedy for solitude.

*****

Petra Backonja lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her poems, lyrical essays and drawings have appeared in Phoebe, Word For/Word, Big Bridge, Indefinite Space, and 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry. An online portfolio is available at http://petrabackonja.wordpress.com/

MANHATTEN by SARAH ROSENTHAL

2010-04-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

DELIA TRAMONTINA Reviews

Manhatten by Sarah Rosenthal
(Spuyten Duvil Press, 2009)

Memory and Storytelling: A review of Sarah Rosenthal’s Manhatten

Sarah Rosenthal’s Manhatten recounts a woman’s relationship with the borough of Manhattan, filtered through the lens of her interactions with lovers, friends, and family members. In this collection of prose chapters sporadically punctuated by short poems, the narrator tells her story—mostly in the past tense, but sometimes shifts into present tense as if propelled forward in time by the power of her own narrative.

While reading this book, the reader is struck by Rosenthal’s use of memory in her storytelling. Indeed, the way in which the “I” recounts her history says much about how we all tell stories; we protect ourselves from shame, forget the useless or perhaps painful, and focus on what is meaningful at any given moment. It is because of these authenticities of storytelling that one forgets this is a work of fiction. The reader assumes he or she is privy to a private conversation where the character reveals her history, with all the omissions, corrections and hindsight human beings possess when they venture to expose themselves.

The play of accuracy and memory is evident in the title, which is an exercise in misstep. Rosenthal spells “Manhattan” with an e. And since this ordinary spelling mistake might easily be overlooked by the reader, she italicizes it, highlighting the accident. It is like she is saying to the reader, “Let me be clear, my narrator makes common mistakes.” These might be mistakes in relationship, in memory, or in spelling. Rosenthal’s narrator is fallible and she is honest enough to tell us up front.

Manhatten reminds us that remembering and forgetting often go hand in hand. Rosenthal’s “I” refuses to be her own expert, admitting to the reader that she forgets, or perhaps did not have the details straight to begin with. “He told me about volunteering on a hotline for people in some kind of trouble” (7). The missing content creates the atmosphere of humanness. “One of them was the girlfriend of his brother, something like that”(19). We can only assume that the “I” does not choose to fill in or make up details she does not have or remember. But perhaps the “I” is fabricating most, if not the story. The reader does not know if, also on page 19, the opening act at a club that the narrator visits was actually “Night of the Living Dead spliced with Fantasia” or if this is just something she made up for lack of accurate memory. We assume the details, as well as the gaps, are “authentic” to this narrator’s story. This “forgetting” of (possibly) superfluous information creates a trust in the “I.” We feel that she is telling from a place of genuineness; she will not give us false information for the sake of completion. At the same time, we know of her imperfection. We know this story is being told through the filter of human remembering, which is colored by the teller. If Rosenthal’s “I” told a seamless story with no hint of forgetting, yes, we might trust her more. But that trust might be ill-advised, as it always is when we believe the entirety of someone’s narrative.

The reader has no doubt that this story is being TOLD, not merely revealed to the reader by the omniscient “I.” When we tell our stories, we do not start at the beginning, including all the salient details in chronological order, but instead discover those details in relevance to what we want our listener to know. Rosenthal tells a story this way, by forgoing linearity to recreate the way we tell others about ourselves. The narrator of Manhatten at times backtracks: “Down the steps to bump into a former fellow grad student. We’d spent the night at her apartment in San Francisco at the end of grad school, with a guy I’d slept with who was trying to hit on her best friend, watching ‘The Life of Brian’” (106). Sometimes she flashes forward: “He and his wife Charlotte. I know them a lot better now” (9). She tells memories within memories: “On a trip to Manhatten in May 2001, I lay on my friend Rachel’s turquoise couch, freezing. In two more days I’d have a ferocious head cold. I was too cold and far away from myself to get up and change into the warm pants I had in my bag” (12). She tells and retells anecdotes: “Late that night, in the kitchen, Susan’s mother Charlotte was internal. Paranoid from lack of sleep I said, Is it me. Was I mean to the guests. No sweetheart she said kindly, shocked, taking my face between her two hands the way she does” (14); “When I got back to the Golds’ Max was getting ready for bed, Carrie was sleeping, Charlotte was moving solitary in her kitchen. Putting things away, thinking. I said, ‘Was I too bossy with the photos?’ ‘Too bossy? You? Of course not, dear,’ she said, smiling, taking my face in her warm hands and pressing her head into my neck the way she does” (16). The narrator’s return to these items reveal their importance but also show that the story was not told in entirety the first time, and probably isn’t told completely now. The chapters themselves create whole jumps back and forth in time. There is no discernable pattern to how the chapters are laid out, except to assume that the “I” is remembering her story in this order. Memories are like that; triggering each other and creating paths in personal narratives.

Throughout Manhatten the reader is very aware of focus. The narrator zeros in on certain details, which act as descriptors for the “I”, showing what catches her attention. “He’d keep nodding at whatever I was saying and reach for a tiny piece of paper and scribble and stick it in his pocket and pick up exactly where I’d been” (56). “Laurie and Matthew both selected peach-ginger; I took spearmint” (70). These items help the reader envision the story but also reveal the narrator as someone who remembers these details. In theory, these particulars of focus could be greater in number; Manhatten could be a much longer piece of work. But instead Rosenthal keeps these moments at a minimum, letting them illustrate the focus of the “I.” Again, uneven focus and fluctuating levels of attention are indications of human bias in storytelling.

However, when one looks at the 15 scattered poetic pieces that punctuate the book, we see Rosenthal demonstrate a different level of authority. Instead of a narrator whose accuracy must be questioned, we see a more omniscient speaker. It is clear that the narrator of the poems has a wiser vantage point and understands the consequences of action and relation: “saw too-skinny/ too-many-patterns. I shouldn’t have / tracked the toddler’s path/ so pointedly” (24). The “I” speaks to outcome and certainty; she makes statements: “buildings will weep for lost siblings/ kohl-circled eyes will stare above dusty cheeks/ the river water will resemble river water/ but only under a certain sun/ a softened body will learn to tell time” (55). Later, on page 85, “you will be asked to run a number of tests/ your signature will be illegible/you will not be in the helping profession. . .” Not only does this narrator know what the “you” will do, but she has also calculated the errors. And unlike the imprecision in the rest of the book, the language here lets us have full confidence that this narrator is quite accurate. Other times the idea of consequence is introduced without clear depiction of outcome: “Had the murder blighted/ my kin (cowering/ victim), had/ we rolled/ to sea level (horse/ and wagon),/ had we sweated/ under layers/ (mercury collects),/ had the past/ been swallowed (throat/ lump),/ silence with pinholes (prickle)/ solo (oboe)” (68). In this entire poem, we do not hear the results of these actions that were presumably not taken. Yet the poems’ narrator knows these actions could have landed the “I” in the prose sections in better standing.

Manhatten is, more than anything else, a story about story. The narrator knows she is constructing her narrative: “I recounted all of the above to Rachel, lying sideways on her couch” (32). “My progress to date, consists of having arrived at the statement ‘Someone’s got to lose and from now on it’s not going to be me.’ I’m trying to move beyond that” (33). Of course we relish in the details of this woman’s life and recognize ourselves in her insecurities and adventures. But we also recognize how we talk, how we relate to others and how we present our own personal narratives. It is rare to see a written work so perfectly depict the way memory functions. Rosenthal has created a narrator who reminds us we are never as accurate as we might hope, but the real story lies somewhere between our accessible details.

*****

Delia Tramontina is from Queens NY and received her MFA in Writing and Poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 2001. She now resides in San Francisco. Her poetry has appeared in Ur Vox, Bombay Gin, Tinfish and Spore. She is currently working on a manuscript of poetry.

NTST: THE COLLECTED PWOERMDS OF GEOF HUTH

2010-04-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

ntst: the collected pwoermds of Geof Huth
(if p then q, Manchester, U.K., 2010)

ntst is one of the funnest poetry reads I’ve experienced: a veritable nest of fun! Every single pwoermd encourages you to not just read but play! A pwoermd is a one-word visual poem created by Geof Huth and ntst collects 775 pwoermds he’s written from 1986 to 2009. Here is Huth’s own introduction of the pwoermd (first published in Dirt: A Journal of Minimalism:

Minimalist poets work with a tiny number of words in each poem, trying to wrest some eternal insight out of the smallest of spaces. The tendency towards minimalism, which was a hallmark of much of twentieth-century art, seems empty to many people, who see minimalism as an anti-art trick. But minimalism is serious play, making it among the purest of the arts.

The height of minimalism in literature is the pwoermd, a one-word poem that has no title save for itself. The pwoermd must make its effects in the smallest of spaces; the very smallest being the four letters of Aram Saroyan's "Blod." Because of the huge limitations on the creators of pwoermds, these poems are one of the most challenging forms to create successfully. Somehow, the pwoermd must capture our intellectual imagination in the space of a few letters. For this reason, many of the best pwoermds focus on language itself and its illuminating shortcomings. Pwoermds tend to come in many styles, though, just as the creators of pwoermds might be visual poets or haiku poets or language poets.

And "pwoermd" itself? Where does it come from? I created it in 1987 by folding the word "poem" into the word "word." "Pwoermd" is a tiny mouthful to pronounce, but that is not a problem, since it is not a word meant for the air. It is meant for the page, and I see it as a little visual pwoermd itself: the "pw" at the front mirroring the "md" at the end, and in the middle there appears that old poetic "o'er."

I’ve always had trouble seeing words as visual art, versus things to be read; after I wrote the first draft of this engagement, I can see how my bias or imaginative constraint might limit my reactions. For example, for the first pwoermd in the list below, I initially didn’t focus on how “ei” mirrors “ie”, thus physically manifesting the “either” concept. Instead, I noticed “ei”’s transformation to “ie” as exemplifying, from a meaning versus visual standpoint, the concept of “either.”

Indeed, some of the most enjoyable pwoermds are those spelled exactly to fit their (implied) definitions, like

eithier

forwords

imaginotion

so that you realize that the pwoermd is the more accurate spelling. I could push, by the way, for this as a more apt spelling--

wooman

--but, as a woman, I’m biased.

Some of the most effective pwoermds make you think. For example, doesn’t

marrage

make you wonder if “marriage” is also “mirage”? Similarly, doesn’t

bottop

evoke that whole topping-from-the-bottom thing? Again, note the limitations of my reactions: how I’m responding to the inevitability of a word’s meaning more than the cleverly-harmonious (or harmoniously-clever) visual effect.

But to continue…, when Huth anoints an existing word as a pwoermd, it also highlights how purr-fectly that word already is spelled. For example

awkward

Some pwoermds say more about the reader than perhaps anything intended by the poet or poem (except that said pwoermd be about the reader). For example, I thought the following pwoermd to be XXX-rated:

bonecoming

The pwoermds, despite their minimalism, can even act as critical commentary, e.g.

Anar-chic

o)ught(s

As regards the latter, the example is also part of how Huth uses punctuation to create nifty emphases (logical, of course, if he considers these to be “visual poems), e.g.

se(le)ction

wind[ ]w

di(ction)ary

Doesn’t the adjustment of “dictionary” to “diary” intrigue? So, it’s obvious that, while I appreciate the visuals (including visual symmetry)of certain pwoermds, I can’t avoid relating to their (implied) textual meanings. Again, this has always been, for me, one one of the tensions of words as visual art, but in the case of ntst and pwoermds, I don’t find (as I’ve had in the past) this tension irritating. The whole thing is just fun! Let me continue sharing what I found in my read...

Some poems are so dead-on but will forever frustrate spelling bee participants, e.g.

unneceszxzsary

Other pwoermds are cleverly created by melding more than one word into one word. For example, “devil in the details” becomes

devtails

cleverly affirmed by the evocation of "dovetails."

Nonetheless, a pwoermd--as with many other poems--can be more resonant when it doesn’t spoonfeed meaning, e.g.

we’ed

which could be “we wed” (into one) or “we did something that united us but that something is unknown.” This turn towards more abstraction-as-a-way-to-clear-space-for-the-reader-to-inhabit (or, as I would put it in a failed pwoermd, “abstruseded”) is something I welcome generally in poems and thus I welcome it, too, in pwoermds. It took another 24 hours after reading “we’ed” for me to realize the visual component: how the apostrophe slips up through the words like…a weed might surface from a sidewalk’s crack.

It's even fun to try to pick our pwoermds that don't work! I might debate, for example, that even as I get the visual of it,

twinns

is a bit obvious. I also found

urinse

unconvincing--that it felt a tad arbitrary or one-note. And I guess I just don't get

joyforlife

though readers should feel free to teach me). But in all cases, the reads--and subsequent debates spawned with myself--were fun!

Ultimately, ntst’s pwoermds provided so much pleasure that I’m forced to conclude that these also are poems for the Beloved. Really. To wit:

readear

even as I sheepishly note the mirrored image belatedly after meaning. Nonetheless, I think I’ll catch more of the visual implications in a subsequent reading of the book—which is to say, ntst accomplishes what many great poems effect: an expansion of the reader’s mind.

++++++++++++++++++

It also seems fitting that ntst would be published by one of the most interesting new publishers around, if p then q. I found very interesting this publisher's vision from an "About if p then q" flyer that was posted in the review copy -- I want to present an excerpt as I think it offers much food to consider:

If p then q is a publisher of poetry books. Based in Manchester it aims to be consistent and cutting edge; without manifesto yet clearly against certain ways of pursuing poetry.

The poetry published brushes shoulders with contemporary art and does not marginalize itself. It places itself genuinely within the contemporary art world. This means accessibility, intrigue and academia. The poetry if p then q publishes can be approached in a three tier model (this does not suggest that the poet writes for an audience however).

* The first level is that the reader simply likes the poem (this could be that it works on a relatively simplistic, accessible level in par to rin the whole) or that the work is aesthetically interesting--a comparison here is the minimalists.

* The second level of the work is that a reader may want to (is encouraged to) 'dig' deeper and see the ideas through, without any need of specialist background knowledge--poetry or otherwise.

* The third level is that of a reader, who does have some prior knowledge to somethign contextual, allowing them an understanding of content or form. The audience who has gone through level one and two is prepared to research (because it's gone through level one and two).

A book like Geof Huth's ntst clearly manifests the publisher's vision in an enjoyable and often enchanting way.

*****

Eileen Tabios does not let her books be reviewed by Galatea Resurrects, but she is pleased to point you elsewhere to reviews of her newest book THE THORN ROSARY: Selected Prose Poems & New (1998-2010) over at Litter Magazine and at Tributary. The book's "Afterword" essay by Joi Barrios is also newly-available online at OurOwnVoice. If these reviews get you curious, please note that its publisher Marsh Hawk Press is supporting a fundraiser for Haiti relief by giving a free copy if you order at least $15 worth of booklets through the Hay(na)ku for Haiti fundraiser; as THE THORN ROSARY is priced retail at $19.95, this is one of the best bargains in the poetry world, even as it helps out with a Haiti fundraiser.

BOOKS by and on CHARLES BAUDELAIRE AND ARTHUR RIMBAUD

2010-04-30T22:00:00.000-07:00

JOHN HERBERT CUNNINGHAM Reviews

Charles Baudelaire by Rosemary Lloyd
(Reaktion Books, London, 2008)

The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Keith Waldrop
(Wesleyan University Press, Middleton, CT., 2006)

Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, translated by Paul Schmidt
(Harper Perennial Modern Classics, New York, 2008)

The Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Donald Revell
(Omnidawn Press, Richmond, CA, 2009)

In the past few years, interest has returned, if it ever waned, to two of the most important Symbolist poets – Baudelaire and Rimbaud – as testified to by the four books (which do not of themselves comprise all written in recent years) under consideration. But before launching into a consideration of their merits, or lack thereof, it would behoove this reviewer to consider the nature of Symbolist poetry itself.

Wikipedia provides as good an introduction to the nature of Symbolist poetry as any:

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the movement had its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire greatly admired and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stephane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers. The label "symbolist" itself comes from the critic Jean Moréas, who coined it in order to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadent movement in literature and art.

What we still require is to understand the poetics behind this movement. For this, we turn to textetc.com:

Symbolism in literature was a complex movement that deliberately extended the evocative power of words to express the feelings, sensations and states of mind that lie beyond everyday awareness. The open-ended symbols created by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) brought the invisible into being through the visible, and linked the invisible through other sensory perceptions, notably smell and sound

Here is our starting point for the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

Given the importance of Baudelaire to this poetry and his and its influence on subsequent poets and poetic movements not just in Europe but, in fact, in the entire poetic world, we will begin with an examination of Baudelaire’s life as given to us by Rosemary Lloyd in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series. This text, with its judicious use of earlier texts such as Baudelaire’s Oeuvres completes edited by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, takes a microscope to the events in Baudelaire’s life. For example, Lloyd relates a story of Baudelaire and his mother attending the residence of a Mme. Pancoucke where toys are splayed out on the floor. She then quotes Baudelaire “first imitation into art, or rather, it is in the toy that the child first perceives the realization of art” to support her statement that “this apparently simple tale offers, therefore, a powerful insight into the ways in which the young Baudelaire became aware of the possibilities of art and their close relationship with the senses.”(17) Details provided are minute and seemingly unimportant although they add just that much more roundness to the portrait painted. For example, it is not enough just to advise that Baudelaire caught his first bout of venereal disease in “the autumn of 1839”(29) from a prostitute. We are also advised that it was apparently caught from “a cross-eyed prostitute known as Sara.” Important as well is the statement following that “the cure, which he obtained with the help of his step-brother, involved the use of opiates, and brought with it not only stomach cramps and headaches but also an increased sense of tedium.”(29) Surprisingly, Lloyd doesn’t seem to make the connection between this incident and Baudelaire’s use of ‘spleen’ and ‘ennui’ as descriptors of contemporary existence.

Lloyd begins her second chapter, ‘Revolt’, with the following image: “The ill-fated poet, rejected by his family, despised by the multitude and starving to death in his garret, was a standard element of Romantic mythology well before Paul Verlaine published his Poètes maudits in 1884. That Baudelaire was already beginning to work his way into a personal variant of the myth in his early twenties is already obvious...”(39) Even though bequeathed with a reasonable pension on which to live, Baudelaire discovered credit before credit became fashionable. About this Romantic mythology, Lloyd states “Baudelaire would not have been Baudelaire without Romanticism, but Modernism would not be Modernism without the poet, whose thinking was profoundly shaped by the difficult years leading up to 1848.”(50) She then gives us, through a passage contained in “a never completed letter”, an insight into what would come to be Baudelaire’s tour de force, Les Fleurs du Mal: “Why, he truculently demands, must the poet be a maker of sweets? Why should he not instead be a ‘grinder of poisons’, ‘a breeder of serpents for miracles and shows, a snake-charmer in love with his reptiles and enjoying simultaneously the icy caresses of their coils and the terrors of the crowd?”(51) In discussing Baudelaire’s friendship with the poet de Banville who had published a collection of poems at eighteen which Baudelaire referred to as ‘the happy hours’, Lloyd contrasts Baudelaire’s patience with de Banville’s precociousness, she states “[p]oetry, for Baudelaire, would not be exclusively about the happy hours, but would show the fugitive nature of joy and indicate how even the gifts we receive, the momentary pleasures we enjoy, are steeped in poison, like the cloak that the centaur’s wife gave him and that destroyed him,” hearkening back to Baudelaire’s uncompleted letter.

Baudelaire’s response to Romanticism is interesting as he saw himself enmeshed within its strictures. For him, Romanticism was “modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, colour, an aspiration to the infinite, expressed through all the means that the arts contain.”(68) Lloyd comprehends this by filtering it through the following: “we need to remember that what he saw as Romanticism was above all an intensely felt and powerfully expressed response to the modern world, seized in all its transience, colour and complexity.”(50) We also see, through another of Baudelaire’s art critiques (excerpts from which Lloyd liberally provides) for which he was becoming justly famous, his concept of aesthetics: “all beauty contains, like all possible phenomena, something eternal and something transient, something absolute and something particular.”(73) It is unfortunate that Lloyd does not extend this into a comparison with the concept of ‘the sublime’ to which such Romantic poets as Coleridge and Wordsworth subscribed. Wikipedia provides a reasonable statement of this aesthetic describing it as “the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.” Baudelaire’s concept appears to be a development of this concept as it seems to imply a mixture of secular and spiritual, both being necessary and essential to the beautiful. It would be useful as well at some point to compare Baudelaire’s statement with that of Lorca’s ‘duende’.

Lloyd’s examination of Baudelaire’s art criticism proves insightful once again when she examines his essay on what he termed ‘honest’ plays and novels. She states:

the critique of the ‘honest’ plays and novels is, to a considerable extent, a literary manifesto, and it points forward to the masterly critical essays of Baudelaire’s maturity...this is a fiery argument for freeing literature from any demands of morality, and one that remains as compelling as it is timely. The school of good sense is contemptuously dismissed for its lowbrow promotion of petit-bourgeois values, but Baudelaire’s prime purpose in this review is to explore what can legitimately be demanded of art. He concludes, in a judgement (sic) that projects a particularly clear light on his later writings: ‘Vice is seductive and must be painted as seductive; but it brings in its wake exceptional moral illness and suffering, and these must be described’. This, indeed, is one of the central unspoken tenets in Les Fleurs du Mal.(86)

Lloyd’s backgrounds to the creation of Les Fleurs du Mal are a must-read for anyone interested in this seminal work – which should be anyone interested in the art of poetry. Such reading shall be left to the reader. We will move on to the unfortunate aftermath of publication - the prosecution (and persecution, as he saw it) of Baudelaire. As Lloyd relates, it wasn’t so much what Baudelaire did (although the above quote alludes to the nature of the beast), but the climate in which publication occurred:

The timing was not good. In late January and early February Gustave Flaubert had been taken to court, accused of immorality in his novel Madame Bovary, which had been serialized in the Revue de Paris the year before. Probably the real reason for this trial was political: the Second Empire, with a prudent eye to its conservative supporters, professed an intransigent morality which led to the trials of many writers and publishers whose depictions of a more realistic morality put them at odds with the government. Flaubert was exonerated and no doubt this failure to convict him sharpened government resolve to impose its views at the next possible opportunity. It certainly embittered the prosecuting attorney, Ernest Pinard, and made him all the more determined not to be vanquished when that opportunity came.(11)

Again, it is the seeming inclusion of unnecessary details, such as the prosecuting attorney’s name, that breathes life into this biography. Lloyd implies an unexpected benefit from Baudelaire’s conviction and consequent fine of 300 francs as well as the suppression of several poems:

Enraged by the court decision, and forced as a result to reconsider and rework his volume, he was to transform it into something far richer and far more complex, building into it a stronger structure and bringing the total number of poems to 126 [from the originally planned 100]. The court had in fact done Baudelaire’ a curious and significant service, whipping him into a creative fervour that would produce some of his finest writing, both critical and creative.(114)

Perhaps the best and most succinct statement of Baudelaire’s aesthetics and poetics (are these terms identical?) is that found on p. 128:

Throughout his art criticism he has insisted that what raises art from mere technical competence to greatness is the way in which the artist’s temperament and imagination interpret and transform what is seen. Imagination, Baudelaire insists, is capable both of the close-up, analytical view, and the synthetic vision that pulls together elements that may have seemed disparate. It is what spurs all other faculties into action, not just the sine quo non of all great works of art, but essential also to warriors, diplomats and scholars.

In February, 1860, Lloyd relates, Baudelaire attended a concert of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. It must have been quite the memorable experience giving rise as it did to Baudelaire’s only piece of music criticism. This particular piece sheds light on Baudelaire’s views on the responsibility of the audience “In music, as in painting and in the written word, there is always a gap to be filled in by the listener’s imagination.”(138) This may be the earliest writing to elicit this important theme which would eventually assume the guise of reader-response theory.

In August, 1960, Baudelaire, while preparing the new edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, wrote a letter to his mother in which he said:

Les Fluers du Mal is finished. We are in the process of completing the cover and the portrait. There are 35 new poems and each of the old poems has been profoundly revised. For the first time in my life, I am almost content. The book is almost good, and it will remain as a witness of my disgust, and my hatred of everything.(156)

Lloyd indicates that there was very little evidence of any substantial reworking of the poems although “What did change from the 1857 version, however, was the order of the poems. In this new edition we find a far stronger and more complex architecture underpinning the work as a whole.”(158)

Although the bulk of Charles Baudelaire is given to the writing, publication and problems associated with Les Fleurs du Mal, which is only as it should as this is what dominated the majority of Baudelaire’s life, Lloyd does not neglect Paris Spleen. She quotes from his 1863 letter to the art critic Arsène Houssaye:

Who among us has not, in our days of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and spasmodic enough to adapt itself to the soul’s lyrical movements, to reverie’s undulations, to the leaps of conscience?(162)

Lloyd continues with her own commentary: “Without rhythm and rhyme: what he means, of course, is not that he would completely abandon these two powerful elements of poetry but rather that rhythm and rhyme would break away from prosodic rules and therefore be free to express the ideas and suggestions a specific prose poem explored.” She then states that

This is what Barbara Johnson has justly termed Baudelaire’s second revolution, after that of Les Fleurs du Mal: a poetry whose modernism stems from a deliberate turn away from the lyrical to the suggestively prosaic, away from the beneficial constraints of form towards a freedom that facilitates a reflection of the chaotic rhythms that characterize the modern city. Not, as some have believed, a minor form or a sign of declining poetical powers, the prose poems are now widely regarded as offering exactly what Baudelaire had claimed for them, a pendant or counterpart to Les Fleurs du Mal, writing that is both thematically and stylistically as experimental and powerful as the verse poems, and central to the birth of Modernism.(162)

Suffering as he had been for years from syphilis, deeply in debt and impoverished, Baudelaire died on August 31,1867 leaving a legacy of two books that would profoundly change poetry ever after.

The most recent translation of the former of those two books, Les Fleurs du Mal (although you wouldn`t know it given that that title does not appear anywhere in the translation other than buried in the introduction), is that by the noted translator Keith Waldrop. The only title for the book is The Flowers of Evil. Perhaps this translation was executed during the American fries period. Whatever and whenever the case, it is inexcusable for a university press, this being released by Wesleyan University Press, not to publish a bilingual translation. There is so much information made unavailable to even the average reader, the reader who does not speak, read nor understand the other language, such as the form and rhyme structure of the original which often suffers in translation in order to preserve the sense of the original. As sensitive as this translation may be, it will always carry that stigma of not being as fully revealing as it otherwise might have been.

Having said that, Waldrop may almost be forgiven for his transgression given the quality of his introduction. In the succinct space of sixteen pages, he provides a brief sketch of Baudelaire`s life and, something which Lloyd neglected to do, discusses the terms that would become associated with Baudelaire. Relying on Baudelaire`s ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Waldrop presents Baudelaire’s concept of the effect and influence of original sin:

Go through, analyse, everything natural – all actions and desires of the pure natural man. All you find will be atrocious. Anything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation. Crime, a taste for which the human animal has drawn from his mother’s womb, is natural in origin. Virtue, on the contrary, is artificial, supernatural, since it has been necessary, in all times and in all nations, for gods and prophets to teach animalistic humanity what man, alone, would never have managed to discover. Evil comes about without effort, naturally, by fatality; the good is always the product of an art.

The great deficiency of Lloyd’s book is that she appears to fail to understand the importance of these terms to Baudelaire’s oeuvre. Spleen is mentioned but once and that in connection with the title of that second book Paris Spleen. It is surprising that it had to be left up to Waldrop to provide the French title, Spleen de Paris, as Lloyd was almost anal in using just the French title for the first. But it is thanks to Wardrop that these terms receive the attention they not only deserve but demand. As to ennui, of which Lloyd provides not a mention, Waldrop states:

A basic translation would be ‘boredom’...It enters very early, in the introductory verses ‘To the Reader,’ where it denotes a force threatening to destroy the world, by engulfing it ‘in a yawn.’ It is the world as tedious and tasteless. The first, and longest, section of the book suggests two possible antidotes to ennue...
One is by embracing the Ideal, by a cult of beauty or by rejecting the physical world for the immaterial. The latter is sometimes regarded as Christian, but I see it more as Schopenhauerian.(xx)

Waldrop goes on to associate the word ‘dandy’ with this referring to Baudelaire’s notebook where it is written “The dandy... must aspire to sublimity without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror.” Lloyd used this quotation as well without drawing the connection to ennui. And as to spleen:

Spleen, this ennui of all things, is the natural state. A life of ennui...may be accepted, consciously or unconsciously, controlled by religion or philosophy. It may be overcome by the Ideal. Or it may be allowed to follow its (natural) inclination for evil. An evil act, or thought (or poem) interrupts the natural tedium, signalling itself with a flash of horror that intensifies our awareness of existence.(xx)

We, today, associate Baudelaire with the prose poem. But Waldrop makes abundantly clear by stating it baldly and boldly in no uncertain terms that “Les Fleurs du Mal is a book of metrical rhymed verse, formally varied both in line and in stanza, but in its versification not at all innovative. Writing in prose would not have been innovative even if Les Fleurs du Mal had been written that way as the innovation of the prose poem is generally credited some years before to Louis-Jacques-Napoléon “Aloysius” Bertrand.

At the end of his introduction, Waldrop very briefly mentions the history of Les Fleurs du Mal’s translation into English beginning with Arthur Symons, whom Waldrop mentions in a very deprecating tone, before making the statement: “Since then, there have been versions in rhyme and meter, in blank verse, in free verse, in prose...I see no reason to reject any of these formal choices. The choice that is not available is ‘in the original meters,’ French and English meters being incommensurable.”(xxiv) He does mention his use of versets as his means of translating but makes no comment or apology for the failure to provide the original along with the translation.

It is time now to turn from the rhetoric to the work, time to examine the poems themselves that comprise Les Fleurs du Mal.

Baudelaire announces his work with the prefatory poem ‘To the Reader’ which opens “Stupidity, error, sin, cupidity – they squat in our minds and torment our bodies, while we nourish our comforting remorse, the way beggars feed their lice.” and ends:

           But among jackals, panthers, bitch hounds, apes, scorpions, vultures, serpents – monsters yapping, howling, grumbling, crawling, in the foul menagerie of our vices.

           there is one still uglier, meaner, filthier! Who without grand gestures, without a yawp, would gladly shiver the earth, swallow up the world, in a yawn.

           Who? Ennui! Eye brimming with involuntary tears, dreaming of gallows while puffing on his hookah. You know him, reader, this dainty monster – hypocrite reader, - my fellow, - my brother! (5-6)

There it ends with perhaps some of the most famous words in poetic history “— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!” set out, in the original French, in the pedestrian rhyme scheme of abba cddc etc.

Perhaps the poem that created all the excitement, the one that would launch the Symbolist movement (note that Baudelaire himself is generally not considered a Symbolist) is the poem ‘Correspondences’, written in the same rhyme scheme as ‘To the Reader!’:

Nature is a temple whose columns are alive and sometimes issue disjointed messages. We thread our way through a forest of symbols that peer out, as if recognizing us.

Like long echoes from far away, merging into a deep dark unity, vast as night, vast as the light, smells and colors and sounds concur.

There are perfumes cool as children’s flesh, sweet as oboes, green like the prairie. And others corrupt, rich, overbearing,

with the expansiveness of infinite things – like ambergris, musk, spikenard, frankincense, singing ecstasy to the mind and to the senses.(14)

This was the siren call of Symbolism with its collation “smells and colors and sounds concur” that became the holy trinity of Symbolist rhetoric and even beyond. You can find their essence in John Ashbery who eventually broke their allure by extending the roll call to four rather than three. Present as well is the guiding hand that compresses one essence onto another “sweet as oboes”.

‘Carrion’ is as good a poem as any to display the new direction Baudelaire would take in terms of subject matter. The first two and the last stanza will be quoted:

Recall, my soul, the thing we saw that fine mild summer morning, there at a bend in the path, loathsome carrion on a bed sown with cobbles,

legs in the air, like a lewd woman, scorching and sweating poisons, reeking belly split open nonchalantly, cynically

...

Then, O my beauty! tell the worms that feed on you with kisses that I have kept both the form and the divine essence of my loves-in-decay!(40-41)

Baudelaire has been accused of being misogynistic. This poem, and others like it, may be the reason - this one ripe (pun intended) with it. Of course, this may just be his means of getting back at his mother for not providing him with the finances he constantly demanded and begged for.

Several poems bear the title ‘Spleen’, the first of which begins:

The month of drizzle, the whole town annoying, a dark cold pours from its urn in torrents on the pale inhabitants of the adjoining cemetery and over the mortals in foggy suburbs.(97)

Baudelaire brought the city into poetry with poems such as this.

Baudelaire is also capable of writing such lyrical masterpieces as ‘The Sun’:

Along the old outskirts of town, where Venetian blinds in hovels hide secret lecheries, when the cruel sun strikes with redoubled ray town and country, rooftop and wheatfield, I go to practice by myself my whimsical swordsmanship, sniffing at any corner for chance rhymes, tripping over words like curbs, bumping sometimes into lines long sought in dreams.(112)

It is poems such as this that would appeal to the Surrealists. The original appeared as two octaves and a quatrain.

Waldrop concludes ‘The Flowers of Evil’ with the inclusion of the banned poems. From ‘Lesbos’:

Mother of Latin games and Greek delights, Lesbos, where kisses, listless or joyous, warm like suns, cool as watermelon, embellish days and glorious nights; mother of Latin games and Greek delights.

Lesbos, where kisses are like cascades falling fearlessly into bottomless abysses and flow, sobbing and chuckling in turn, stormy and secret, teeming and deep; Lesbos, where kisses are like cascades!

Lesbos, where Phrynes entice one another, where no sigh goes unechoed, the stars admire you even as they do Paphos, and Venus has reason to be jealous of Sappho! Lesbos, where Phrynes entice one another.(185)

One can see why this might have scandalized a puritanical Paris with its prurient refrains. Three stanzas were included so that this nature could be revealed to the reader of this review. The original consists of quatrains rhymed ababa with the last line identical to the first.

We will turn now from Baudelaire to one of his disciples, Arthur Rimbaud, who looked upon Baudelaire as a god.

In the introduction to his translation, Paul Schmidt talks about trying to find the true Rimbaud, the youthful poet who produced for five years and then disappeared into North Africa. He arrives, finally, at this:

The events he lived seemed suddenly no more that the fictions of some ‘artistic’ imagination. Had a romantic poet set out to imagine Rimbaud’s life, he could never have produced such a profusion, such a dazzling luxuriance of events – but in Rimbaud’s own imagination, in his poetry, there is only vision, lucidity, clarity and courage. It is poetry, yes, but it is also a process: a poetic, an attempt at a method...”(xiv)

Schmidt’s assessment of Rimbaud as a poet is contained on p. xvii:

He was, more, rigorously preoccupied with himself as a poet – in the strictest technical sense of the word, a craftsman. His innovations in versification and the theory of poetry, though stated clearly only in his poetry, were radical, and remain influential. His poems are a study in the styles of nineteenth-century French poetry: the often breathtakingly swift development from one form to another, and into new forms, is one of his greatest accomplishments as a poet.

Rather than providing titles of poetic volumes, such as A Season in Hell or Illuminations, which some have applied as delineating factors in Rimbaud`s work (more about that later), Schmidt, due to the difficulty of obtaining accurate dates, merely divides the work into what he terms `Seasons` - referring to one of Rimbaud`s favourite poetic words saison. The first season is subtitled `Childhood`. In a brief introduction to this, Schmidt states that “what seems clearest in all Rimbaud’s work is his overwhelming consciousness of himself as a poet. His first poems are strongly influenced by the popular poets of his day: Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Charles Leconte de Lisle, François Coppée, Théodore de Banville. Their tropes, their allusions, their subjects, are his; later we shall see him turn against them in parody.”(4)

Rimbaud initially saw himself as a Parnassian poet, Parnassianism defined in Wikipedia as:

a literary style characteristic of certain French poetry during the positivist period of the 19th century, occurring between romanticism and symbolism. The name is derived from the original Parnassian poets' journal, Le Parnasse contemporain, itself named after Mount Parnassus, home of the Muses in Greek mythology. The anthology was issued between 1866 to 1876, including poems by Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Stephane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée and José María de Heredia.
The Parnassians were influenced by Théophile Gautier and his doctrine of art for art's sake. In reaction to the looser forms of romantic poetry, and what they saw as excessive sentimentality and undue social and political activism in Romantic works, the Parnassians strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and classical subjects which they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment. Elements of this detachment were derived from the philosophical work of Arthur Schopenhauer.

In addition to poems, Schmidt has accumulated various other writings – letter, prose – written by Rimbaud. This is invaluable for getting a sense of him. For example, in a letter written to Théodore de Banville dated May 24, 1870, Rimbaud writes “I love all poets, all the Parnassians - since the poet is a Parnassian, in love with ideal beauty,,,In two years, perhaps in a year, I will be in Paris. Anch’io, gentlemen of the press, I will be a Parnassian!”(38) The letter was written when Rimbaud was seventeen. Already, he has declared his future as a poet. This declaration he had made even earlier in the final stanza of the poem, ‘Ver Erat’ (‘It was Springtime’), in which he also reveals his Parnassian leanings:

Meanwhile the doves returned, in their beaks they bore
A crown, a laurel garland; crowned thus, Apollo
Delights to strike with his finger the sounding strings.
And when they had bound my brows with the laurel crown,
Lo, the heavens opened before me and suddenly
To my astonished eyes, hovering on a golden cloud,
Phoebus! His divine hand offered me the sounding lyre,
And with fire from heaven he traced these words on my brow:
YOU WILL BE A POET...(13)

We are indeed fortunate as the original, which is in Latin, unrhymed and contains quite long lines, bears, at the end, the following: “First Prize in Latin Composition, November 6,1868, Rimbaud, Arthur, Age 14, Born Charleville, October 20,1854.” Even though there is certainly room for improvement and tightening, this is an astonishing accomplishment – the poem, not that fact that he placed first – for one so young. It would rival and surpass the majority of poetry written today by those considerably older and with considerably more experience.

‘Second Season’, subtitled ‘The Open Road’ begins with Rimbaud’s first escape from home when, in 1870 at the age of fifteen, he escaped to Paris to be with his rhetoric professor, Georges Izambard. Rimbaud was arrested and imprisoned for a short time before being returned home to his parents. The poetry of this period is definitely Parnassian juvenilia as the poem ‘Faun’s Head’ amply demonstrates:

Then, like a squirrel, he turns and disappears,
But his laughter lingers still along the leaves,
And, shaken as a startled chaffinch soars,
The Golden Kiss of the Woods is left in peace(44)

Beginning during the ‘Third Season: War’, the period of the war between France and Prussia beginning in July 1870, we begin to sense a maturity in Rimbaud’s writing. This can be seen in the first quartrain of the sonnet ‘Asleep in the Valley’:

A small green valley, where a slow stream runs
And leaves long strong strands of silver on the bright
Grass; from the mountaintop stream the sun’s
Rays; they fill the hollow full of light.(62)

The Parnassian still holds sway as this stanza from ‘Crows’ reveals:

Armada dark with harsh cries,
Your nests are tossed by icy winds!
Along the banks of yellowed ponds,
On roads where crumbling crosses rise,
In cold and gray and mournful weather
Scatter, hover, dive together.(71)

Even this demonstrates a definite tightening of Rimbaud’s verse. Although today we would frown upon the line “In cold and gray and mournful weather” with its unnecessary conjunctions used artificially as padding to obtain the proper rhythm, we must remember that this was a perfectly valid and acceptable poetic practice at the time.

This progress continues in the ‘Fourth Season: The Tormented Heart’. Schmidt characterizes the poetry as follows: “Still, few adolescent rebellions have yielded such a harvest of vitriolic verse. Nothing escapes him: God, the Church, the Family, the Nation, the town of Charleville, its citizenry and institutions and, above all, its women. For the main burden of these poems is scatological – the furious body scrawling ‘shit on God’ on the sidewalk in front of the church is clearly their author.”(75) Schmidt goes on later: “Yet out of all this fury comes a conviction – of what it means to be a poet, and what a poet must do to create poetry.” In a letter dated May 13, 1871 to Izambard, he states: “Right now, I’m depraving myself as much as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working at making myself a visionary; you won’t understand at all, and I’m not even sure I can explain it to you.” Yet, two days later, he writes a letter to Paul Demeny, a childhood friend, which does just that:

A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessence. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable; other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!(116)

There is a sense here that Rimbaud has discovered Baudelaire. This sense is heightened when we encounter the imagery of ‘Evening Prayer’:

I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber’s chair,
Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,
My neck and gut both bent, while in the air
A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.(77)

This certainly seems the furthest thing from Parnassianism. There is also this stanza from ‘My Little Lovelies’: “One night you made me a poet, / Ugly blond whore. / Get between my legs, / I’ll whip you.”(83) or this from ‘The Savior Bumped upon his Heavy Butt’:

The Savior bumped upon his heavy butt,
A ray of light across his shoulders; I sweat,
Begin to shout: “You want to see the sky turn red?
You hanging there waiting for the roar of floods,
For milk-white stars, and swarms of asteroids?(94)

Poems such as this will make Rimbaud the darling of the Surrealists.

At the ‘Fifth Season: The Visionary’, Rimbaud enters his own. It was during this ‘season’ that Rimbaud began his affair with Verlaine which scandalized Paris, began to drink absinthe, or ‘absumphe’ as they referred to it, began to smoke hashish, was shot by Verlaine in a hotel room in Brussels for wanting to end the affair which resulted in Rimbaud being hospitalized where he had “the scratch on his hand bandaged”(135) and Verlaine imprisoned for two years, and led to the completion of Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), published in 1873.

Finally, Rimbaud reveals himself for the great poet he was. He has surpassed the Parnassians. He has surpassed Baudelaire. He has surpassed Verlaine. The only one at this time who may have been his equal was Mallarmé. These were the gods of Symbolism. A Season in Hell is a reason to believe in heaven or, at least, in the divine muse. Take ‘The Drunken Boat’ with its opening stanza:

I drifted on a river I could not control,
No longer guided by the bargeman’s ropes.
They were captured by howling Indians
Who nailed them naked to colored stakes.(137)

From ‘The Vowels’ with its bursting synesthesia:

Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O – vowels.
Some day I will open your silent pregnancies:
A, black belt, hairy with bursting flies,
Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties,(139)

‘”Does She Dance?”’ takes off in the middle with a supersonic jet sound - a shwooshing of s’s:

Does she dance? In the first blue hours
Will she wither like the dying flowers...
Before this sweep of splendour perfumed
By the flowering breath of the bustling town!(171)

The last line catches the ‘b’ sound initially presented in the first line and echoed in the third which is nicely accompanied by the internal and end rhyme of the last each based on the ‘flow’ with the internal cleverly reversing the order of the ‘b’ and the ‘ow’ sounds. To think that all this is taking place just in the translation. The reader is left to wonder what the original looks and sounds like?

In a letter dated ‘Junphe, ‘72’ from Rimbaud to Ernest Delahaye, we get a rare glimpse of Rimbaud’s writing practice:

I work at night now. From midnight to five in the morning...At five o’clock I’d go down to buy bread. Workmen were on the move, everywhere. That was the time I used to go get drunk in the bars. I would go back to my room to eat, and go to bed at seven in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to make the termites crawl out from under the tiles. Early morning in summer, and evenings in December; those are the times that have always enchanted me here.(195)

Schmidt has included in this section what appears to be the entirety of the sordid shooting incident that led to Verlaine’s imprisonment. This includes correspondence between Rimbaud and Verlaine, police statements, court transcripts including testimony and the order of the court sentencing Verlaine to “two hundred francs fine and two years at hard labour on a charge of assault and battery.”(213)

Schmidt’s introduction to ‘Season Seven: The Damned Soul’ begins:

Here is A Season in Hell, the book that Rimbaud wrote that summer of 1873 in the country. He had it published in the fall, but no one read it. He couldn’t afford to pay the printer, and it stayed in the cellar of the print shop for twenty-eight years. A few author’s copies Rimbaud sent to Verlaine, to other friends.(218)

He describes the book as:

a set of philosophical meditations, a confessional handbook, a mystical vision of the Soul. But it wakes new vibrations in its style: a nervous, compacted, often vernacular use of poetic language in prose. It is, as Rimbaud said, “absolutely modern”.
...
In the profoundest sense, we are witnessing the notes of an addict’s withdrawal and his attempted cure. An addiction to Verlaine, to alcohol, to the life of an ‘artist’ and to ‘artistic’ poetry, to mystical flights, to occultism – to all consideration of ‘the mind’s disorder as a sacred thing.’ And underlying all, a rejection of the pose of revolt, of the pretensions of the rebel. “I am sent back to the soil, to seek some obligation...” The rest of his life was to be a search for that obligation.(218-19)

A Season in Hell opens with ‘Once, if my Memory Serves me Well’:

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
One evening, I took Beauty in my arms – and I thought her bitter – and I insulted her.
I steeled myself against justice.
I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care.(219)

Rimbaud takes poetry to unexplored places in these prosaic musings. For example, in ‘Night in Hell’:

I have just swallowed a terrific mouthful of poison, - Blessed, blessed, blessed the advice I was given
- My guts are on fire. The power of the poison twists my arms and legs, cripples me, drives me to the ground. I die of thirst, I suffocate, I cannot cry. This is Hell, eternal torment! See how the flames rise! I burn as I ought to. Go on, Devil!(225)

This is writing as exorcism, as a depilation of pain by pain pulled out by the roots. In ‘Second Delirium: The Alchemy of the Word’, he attempts to expurgate the past:

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of consonants, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.
I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.(232)

Rimbaud mixes forms, merging the prose poem with poetry proper, becoming a predecessor for the language explorations of Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, to name but two.

Rimbaud had reached the apex of his poetic career. In the ‘Seventh Season: A Few Belated Cowardices’, Schmidt sums it up: “His concerns are now with other things, grownup things: making money. He was no longer a child. How then could he still be a poet? Together then they died, the child and the poet, abandoned, passed over, swallowed up in practicalities. And Rimbaud went off, a man half-grown, to wander through the world.”(248) Schmidt has collected into this saison additional poems, but with the proviso “What poems were written now, what poems were merely recopied, we can only conjecture,” and further correspondence.

In the final season, ‘Season Eight: The Man with the Wind at his Heels’, “we are concerned no longer with poetry, but with biography alone. The writings of Rimbaud from 1875 on, as far as we know, consist of only letters and business documents.”(285) Due to a cancerous tumour in his leg, Rimbaud’s health deteriorated leading, on November 10, 1891, to his death at the age of 37.

But before we leave Rimbaud and this review, there remains one other book to discuss, a book which Schmidt, in his introduction, denied existed: ‘Clearly, then, the title, the actual contents, and the order of any collection of poems called Illuminations are all hypothetical, and cannot be traced to Rimbaud himself.”(xvi) Schmidt sets out a detailed chronology of the item that should have been issued under that title, but clearly believes same never did. It is unfortunate that Donald Revell never addresses this controversy in his Afterword even though he has selected epigraphs from Schmidt’s book and, therefore, must have known of its existence. This must be considered a huge cop-out by Revell. But still, it is nice to have a fresh translation of several of Rimbaud’s poems, poems which Schmidt had spread throughout various seasons.

The first poem to be included by Revell was the first one that Schmidt had included in ‘Seventh Season’ as being of unproven date. This is ‘After the Flood’. In Revell’s translation, it begins:

As soon as the mind of the Flood grew calm, a hare paused in the shivering bellflowers in holy clover, and he said his prayer to the rainbow through a spider’s web.(17)

It is insightful to compare this with the Schmidt translation:

As soon as the thought of the Flood had subsided,
A rabbit stopped in the clover and trembling bell flowers,
And said his prayers to the rainbow, through a spider’s web.(249)

Apart from the difference in style – Revell’s in prose, Schmidt’s in verse, the impact is vastly distinct - Revell anthropomorphizing the flood. One huge benefit of the Revell book is that it contains the original French which reveals that the original was a prose poem. This anthropomorphism in the Revell translation persists as can be seen in the second ‘stanza’. Here is Schmidt’s:

Oh! what precious stones lay hidden,
What flowers were already looking down.

And Revell’s:

Oh! The gemstones gone into hiding, - the flowers already up and alert.

Although we must condemn Revell for not addressing the issue of the existence of The Illuminations, we must in turn thank him for providing a bilingual edition. It is understandable why Schmidt didn’t do so as his volume was already 347 pages. The importance of having both is readily seen as it demonstrates the importance of having the original for comparison even if your comprehension of the original is minimal at best as this reviewer’s is of French. Did Rimbaud intend the anthropomorphism? This reviewer couldn’t tell you – but it is nice to see the different ways translators approach their work. Revell’s ‘After the Flood’ is a different work from Schmidt’s as a result of this difference. The original Rimbaud, if read in the original without the baggage of translation, is different again. Viva la différence!

*****

John Herbert Cunningham is the host of Speaking of Poets – a half-hour radio show on Sundays on CKUW 95.9 FM. He resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where he writes poetry, reviews and interviews. He publishes regularly in half a dozen literary magazines in Canada and the same number in the U.S. He is also a multi-instrumentalist with the free jazz group ECMW – Experimental Creative Music Workshop. He is currently studying the alto sax, the Chinese flute and the darbouka.

BOOK MADE OF FOREST by JARED STANLEY

2010-04-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

HARRY THORNE Reviews

Book Made of Forest by Jared Stanley
(Salt, Cambridge, U.K., 2009)

Dirt, Weeds and Heavy Metal

Jared Stanley’s first full-length volume of poetry, Book Made of Forest, won Salt Publishing’s Crashaw Prize, and while prizes are not always the best judge of a book’s worth, in this case, Salt has brought to light a unique investigation into the relationship between people, language and nature. Stanley’s poems are alert to the gulf between the abstraction of language and the physicality of nature—as his title ironically suggests, books may come from trees, but there is an immense distance between the human-made and the natural. Accordingly, the strange pairings and juxtapositions of Book Made of Forest are a world away from the safe conceits of more familiar nature poetry: “The tree’s blossoms smell like crotch/the whole town says ‘why not’” (“Garage Sale”).

Many of the poems in Book Made of Forest focus on the environment and people of the American Southwest. Yet while the poems are rooted there, they are far from celebratory—Stanley is all too aware that a Whitmanesque salute to the place of humans in the natural world can now only be registered in ironic terms:

oh my people

you fennel, rocks and vandalism
you fees, you gates, you group of kids

(“State Park”)

Likewise, in the contemporary world, a poet’s desire to “become as one” with nature is merely pretension:

I had ground-up flowers
from road weeds rubbed

into my eyes and cheeks,
an animistic pretension

that worked for a while
as a bluff or veer.

(“June 7th, For Awhile”)

Through both avoiding and parodying the clichés of traditional nature writing, Stanley seeks to open a new imaginative space. In this pastoral vision, it is not flowers that are central but weeds:

I want all the weeds and old people
I can eat!

(“What is Outside”)

A kind of announcement
in the weeds that replaced the grass
volutes spreading from a cluster
of overspread beige.

(“Town Called Mercy”)

in the weeds another picture will come around

(“Weed Patch Floral”)

The only difference between weeds and flowers is a linguistic one, and by placing weeds at the core of his poetry, Stanley highlights the arbitrariness of our aesthetic judgments.

Stanley’s approach to nature reminds me of Joshua Corey’s definition of the “avant pastoral” poet as “the brocoleur, reassembling the linguistic and natural givens of a world damaged by institutional logic and industrial exploitation into new configurations.”* Stanley fulfils this role by consistently puncturing our expectations about the form and content of poems about nature:

Dissolute striped forms
high-canopied pines,
where is the conviction
you were not made
to pierce, as if conviction
the sky? Who.

(“Fact Without Its Heart”)

At first, the description of the pines might seem like typical nature poetry, yet the pines were “not made” to supply us with an easy metaphor. The final “Who” with a period rather than a question mark, “reassembles” the “linguistic given,” refusing to conform to “institutional logic” just as the pines refuse to be encompassed by an overly simple metaphor.

While most of the “reassemblages” in Book Made of Forest focus on place and nature, in the section, “Admirations: Covers, Portraits and Articulations,” Stanley turns to biography with a series of prose poem portraits of an eclectic group of poets and artists including Robert Duncan, Nick Cave, Lisa Jarnot, and, bizarrely, Ronnie James Dio. There can’t be many published poems about the heavy metal singer, who is famous for screeching vocals and fantasy novel lyrics, yet it is precisely this implausibility that Stanley celebrates:

Master, malocchio jeans malocchio torbus, evil’s pants sag at the knees, tiring of the gentleman of evils, this one is short, this one is brandishing swords, a terrible show, light from a candle in the footlights.

There is considerable humor here, of course, but the choice of a mocked heavy metal singer as subject also resonates with the book’s focus on the rejected objects of nature.

In the last two poems of Book Made of Forest, Stanley returns to nature, and in the final poem of the volume “Decoration of Cloud and Pine” he offers an elegy for dirt:

Where the city coils
around cities at the antipodes

and pine wreaths form a chain
at the outskirts, dirt is mostly decoupage

or limned to death

In a synthetic world, dirt is merely ornamental—its mystery and life-giving properties are lost—and in the final four lines of the poem, the death of dirt is equated with the death of the imagination:

It leaves us here
with no dirt left

to dig ourselves
to the opposite of the world.

Both language and nature form the necessary ground for the imagination, and while there may be an inseparable gulf between words and the natural objects they are describing, Stanley’s poems revel in the messiness and possibilities of both.

+++++

*Note: The quote from Joshua Corey comes from page 3 of his PhD
Dissertation and can be found online here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/19474694/The-American-AvantPastoral-Ezra-Pound-Louis-Zukofsky-Ronald-Johnson-Joshua-M-Corey

*****

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

POEMS OF THE BLACK OBJECT by RONALDO V. WILSON

2010-04-30T21:53:00.000-07:00

JAI ARUN RAVINE Reviews

POEMS OF THE BLACK OBJECT by RONALDO V. WILSON
(Futurepoem Books, New York, 2009)

In the opening circle of the 2009 Kundiman poetry retreat, Ronaldo V. Wilson was thinking about the texture of his mother’s sewing room. At close we danced to top 40 singles, each break and pop a release, as if we’d both been waiting to beatbox our bodies. Later we leaned on a ramp railing in a campus parking lot, letting night slick our sweat. Soaked, I sat next to Myung Mi Kim, whose laughter had punctuated my diva glam. This is part of it, too, she said.

Am thinking about the moment between feeling and the written text, action and the ‘said’ thing, the ‘felt’ thing, the grasp is the point, but then what is the gasp or the breathing... (46)

PRINT //: SPACE (47)
Borrowing Ronaldo’s curve I use it as a gate, a leant equivalence, an “as to” askance. “//:” = the gasp, the moment when Eileen Tabios “tears up the book,” when limbs fling out, guttural burst.

PRINT //: )SPACE( (47)
At a Small Press Traffic reading in San Francisco on March 13, Ronaldo showed up in an impeccable dress suit and shoes, reading from Poems of the Black Object and talking about cock. His voice cut and slammed words into small crevices, then the corners fell out and air whistled through the letters—I sensed a luminous, dirty, sparkling, pulsating precision of something completely uncontrollable. And then he sang some.

...singing taught me a little something about blackness and being as a collective sight... (43)

As I think of him standing before the microphone the angle was indeed “//:”; I think of the word “gleaned,” the consonant ‘g’ sliding off and into the water below, descending slowly to what we wait and hope to be an end, teasing us in its claim to incompletion, in not letting us see.

To go under, to go down, to avoid, to sink, to slip, to see the idea of confronting the head-on collision in being found. (45)

PRINT //: SPACE
While reading Poems of the Black Object I bookmark the page with a metal clip. Not my usual library checkout receipt, it’s a sloped leaf or back gashed that dips to a bulbous bitten stem. Bent to eat the page, nudged between its teeth until it breaks.

I write notes to Poems of the Black Object on recycled paper with a red uni-ball vision fine point whose tip leaks. A found pen, not my usual blue or black generic 99 cent store purchase. I skim the excess ink off the nib and write “it //: memory (97).”

I think of the composition of Poems of the Black Object as a series of poses, “...breaking apart language and pointing us in new directions and modes through which to spear space. SPEAR!” (46)

COMPOSITION //: POSE
In a bookstore I find a copy of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, but not Poems of the Black Object, which I brought in my bag to read bits of on the train before the onset of motion sickness—“The Breaker’s Pose” inbound, outbound through “Vergelioian Space.”

And now, what would a thematics after (gas p) loss, silence, hiding, hindrances, gaps, cuts, slits, vacancies, holes, (ga sp) desecrations, ah-loves, olives pose or manifest or re-pose or (g asp) anti-manifest? (44)

I wanted to hear the gasps between Ronaldo’s words in unpredictable spaces, see the text in motion. A friend and I skirt Union Square and hunker through North Beach to the Poetry Room in City Lights, late. We read Dorothy Parker, Nathaniel Mackey and Audre Lorde out loud, my friend is thinking about Caliban, I pull Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest and Notebook of a Return to the Native Land from the shelf—)“‘I have wandered for a long time and I am coming back to the deserted hideousness of your sores.’”(—and I think about breaking the image.

NARRATIVE //: FOUND PHOTO (57)
Ronaldo’s very tiny Filipino mother throwing a very big, expensive bag at the lead dancer of a Swedish avant-garde version of the Nutcracker (44) made me laugh. It’s one of the reasons I wish my Thai mother and his mother could meet. I imagine them like old junior high BFFs watching tennis on television together, riled and emphatic. Like Ronaldo’s mom she doesn’t have any fat on her either. She stopped eating meat, sugar and carbohydrates. She likes 100% fruit and vegetable juice and Kashi, but only if it’s on sale for $2.25 a box at Big Lots.

NOT TO LOOK AT //: BUT TO THINK OF (57)
In an interview with Bookslut (http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_03_015753.php), Ronaldo asks, “...what are the ways that one imagines a revised self that detaches into pieces whose embodied fragments mark the process of its own new becoming?”

To identify with the fractured self, the process of the it forced apart by language, again, is where the self explodes out of the text not by narrative as story – one act – but more simply as found photo – another act – as forming poetic. Becoming through narrative, or becoming by reaching lazily under a bed to find something valuable, or again, more simply, digging under one object and stumbling on meaning asks: Does this narrative begin in a black hole? Does it create another diasporic space? Is this space black? Is it a black? (57-58)

Ronaldo’s lines break like the space between frames in a film, where the image breaks into another image similar to but not exactly like it, as in a photograph of a transgender person of color’s brutal murder, published as news, the body misgendered and shadowed again in death. Or the space between pornographic nakedness and a desire for that image to come to life, to fulfill you.

Poems of the Black Object writes itself into a flow as in a dream, where one thing (wet walruses) replaces another (bloody boxers). In “Dream in a Fair” one line replaces the next—Ronaldo writes “one layer of sense into another” (58)—his breath breaks the lines across the gap, after the gaps, becoming lucid—as in the pause between exhale and inhale—as you would between breaths—that turn, that shift, that erasure, that reveal. Like Kazim Ali in Bright Felon—“...one line after another, one thing and then another disappearing....obliteration. What I want to do now is find myself somewhere or to disassemble into air.”

Each shot (photograph, point, poem, sentence) my memory, truncation, embrace, deferral, a poetics, is not writing out of or into, but through the center of whatever I mark to be the current state of what is the deliberate gesture in:

It is impossible to say who I am. (59)

Through the center. Through.

Spear it.

*****

Jai Arun Ravine is a transgender-identified, multi-disciplinary writer, dancer, visual and performing artist of mixed Thai and white American heritage and the author of the chapbook IS THIS JANUARY (Corollary Press, 2010). Jai received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University and a BA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Hollins University. A Kundiman fellow, Jai’s work appears most recently in the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement and is forthcoming in Drunken Boat. For more information, visit http://jaiarunravine.wordpress.com/

AS IF FREE by BURT KIMMELMAN

2010-04-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

As if Free by Burt Kimmelman
(Talisman House, Jersey City, 2009)

Burt Kimmelman’s book As if Free is the type I just fall into, and by that I mean that once I started reading it, it just felt like I was there with the poet listening. The pieces are smooth and daily, and in that is their insight, for Kimmelman excels at focusing on the details--a spoon sticking out of a coffee cup, a chair slightly turned to the side, a flutter of the sparrow’s wings. And he connects the details to larger issues, such as in “Back in Brooklyn” where we move easily from a coffee shop scene to longing and brief absence:

warm weather in every turn of
the head, casual hip and shoulder. I
miss you and Jane.

We drift from a straight scene into something that seems more significant, and his process mirrors the ways in which we jump from thought to thought when alone with ourselves. And really, the book is a working through Kimmelman’s world. While one poem might be based on a painting, the next might be based on a poem, the next on a restaurant scene, the next on nature, and the next on a memory. The pensive nature of the pieces kept me interested, as did the sound of the pieces. Take, for example, “After Robert Creeley,” a poem in which Kimmelman’s short lines and line breaks bring Creeley’s spirit into the poem:

The embrace
is all there
is—what can

be said, all
the things of
this world, are

left behind,
abandoned.
And yet there

are words, words,
which we love.

These brief lines convey a wide array of ideas, from the contingent nature of humans, to the desire for touch, to the way that words touch us, to the way in which a poem can exist in us beyond the material (beyond the things we lose). And more, the poem suggests that Creeley’s poems have touched Kimmelman, and through Kimmelman, they touch us through technique. Interestingly, throughout the book, a reader is able to hear echoes of Creeley, Oppen, and Bronk.

The "nature" pieces struck me the most. They reminded me of Gary Snyder's in that the poet seems to be one who is used to looking at nature--he seems comfortable with what he sees. In “The Cardinal,” we get an everyday glimpse of a cardinal that seems more than everyday:

Red flash and quick chirp
from a branch of the
backyard maple tree

reaching across the
neighbor’s fence, casting
a shade in sunlight—

the cardinal flies
free, flits among the leaves,
suddenly drops down

into the tall grass,
jerks his head this way
and that, hops and turns,

then leaps up into
the green above, no
longer to be seen.

This brief poem follows the movements of the cardinal, but Kimmelman is not compelled to add a commentary on the scene. He doesn’t explain its significance as poets in proper MFA fashion often seem to do. We simply have a brief appearance of a cardinal and then its disappearance. We are left to fill in the significance, if any, ourselves, and I, for one, like to see this piece as symbolic of our brief human condition, but we can enjoy the description and beauty of the alliteration without being pushed for meaning.

With the nature pieces, I imagine Kimmelman as having the sensibility of the high haiku writers. In “Abandoned House,” Kimmelman’s poem reminds me of the special sense of loneliness discussed by Basho:

Thin tendrils of moss,
bright green in the shock
of morning sun across
red brick steps, stand up
straight to touch the light.

This poem works like the great haiku with a leap in thought that the reader is required to bridge. One could imagine similar pieces being written long ago by Saigyo.

Ultimately, this collection is reflective and calls for a meditative response. To me, the experience of reading it was peaceful and welcome.

*****

William Allegrezza edits the e-zine Moria and the press Cracked Slab Books. He has published five books, In the Weaver's Valley, Ladders in July, Fragile Replacements, Collective Instant, and Covering Over; one anthology, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century; seven chapbooks, including Sonoluminescence (co-written with Simone Muench) and Filament Sense (Ypolita Press); and many poetry reviews, articles, and poems. He curates series A, a reading series in Chicago dedicated to experimental writing. In addition, he occasionally posts his thoughts at http://allegrezza.blogspot.com.

TAKE IT by JOSHUA BECKMAN

2010-04-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

CRAG HILL Engages

Take It by Joshua Beckman
(Wave Books, Seattle, 2009)

1. I weigh the flour and water, which I recommend, because depending on your measuring cups (and/or measuring skill) poems can vary wildly.

2. 1st, That the grace of God shines gloriously in the justifying of a sinner through the righteousness of Christ. 2dly, That it is a dreadful sin to frustrate the grace of God. 3dly, That all who seek righteousness by the law, they do frustrate the grace of God. 4thly, That no true sound believer can be guilty of this sin. Frustrating the grace of God is a sin that no poem can commit.

3. If you're extremely tuned in to your poem's rhythms, you may begin to suspect you're pregnant soon after conception.

4. But the small, dull weight continued to drag and nag.

5. The night opens her lap.

6. I have not relinquished and will not relinquish poetry.

7. What the hell is antimatter?

8. Other poems was wooden, but was burnt down or was fell under people's weight.

9. Before you start trying to hook up Reason to Poem, please make sure that Reason is working normally.

10. The court is not persuaded that if the poem is allowed to stay that the injury would be negligible.

11. He was warming up his vehicle, going around the back to put his dog in the bed of the truck, when he was struck on the side of the head by something or someone.

12. After the poem, I felt much better.

13. The tricky part is acquiring the right gear; there is a lot of rubbish sold to unsuspecting novices.

14. The painful post-divorce aftermath, characterized by getting unhorsed as an authority figure in your children's lives by a vindictive woman in cahoots with the State,* taught me why some non-custodial poems just walk away after a divorce and do not see their children.

15. Your precepts abound; You reveal to me the wonders and secret mysteries of Your Poem.

16. Be sober when you proclaim your love.

17. It's DIY folks like you that inspires the rest of us to think.

18. Beckman’s genuine sorrow and grim perception create an impassioned dialogue between the values the Romantics held dear (love of truth, beauty, Nature) and a modern world that could care less.

19. No luminous vision, still a passion point.

20. It asserts the indivisibility of humans and poetry – the mutual interdependence of one upon the other.

21. I felt as if I were lost, not in Tokyo, but in a particular kind of pulp fiction.

22. I want to smoke Cuban cigars the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking poem.

23. Thus, it is very difficult to objectively quantify their characteristics in terms of intensity, magnitude, duration and spatial extent.

24. Nowadays, there are a lot of poems whose content only promotes sin.

25. Vampires do this in the sunlight.

26. Chic vintage 70's pink kitten bow poem. Front fastening. Darts at the bust.

27. It wasn't like a poem; it was like some damned Juggernaut.

28. God intends and desires for this poem and strategy to rise above all other marketplace endeavors and become the preeminent priority in all your leadership opportunities.

29. Then I graduated to even nastier conflicts.

30. They wanted a perpetual poem and they got it.

31. What poem hath set the jaundice on your cheeks?

32. His lawyer is not known to have been notified of a scheduled execution as is required by law, although in some poems executions have taken place without this notification being issued.

33. This book is bitter-sweet, just like life.

34. I find it useful when I have a very big expanse of flat wash to do, which will not have much added to it, but my work tends to be emptier of content than yours (probably because I am lazy...), so you probably wouldn't have a use for it.

35. Just remember that you don’t need to show your chest to accumulate massive amounts of poetry, nor to gain any amount of self-confidence.

36. To discuss this with complete and unguarded frankness -- and I should not insult you by being otherwise than completely honest, however indiscreet -- it will be necessary for me to be a little impolite regarding certain institutions and persons of my own greatly beloved land.

37. We are going swiped out foot forward, toe tap and back to place.

38. All that from tree bark.

39. People remember when music existed as an art that motivated social movements.

40. And few are aware that, in the US, no tax law based on that illegal amendment was ever passed. ... like the great Hawaiian volcanoes on Earth, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter ... I am afraid we have run out of poems.

41. Solar activity changes the structure of Earth's outer atmosphere.

42. Us on the ground didn't know what was going on at the time but when we were told to move now to get to this position, we went down to that position.

43. You have this lingering hope that there will be a miracle.

44. The poem of might erodes international relations like a cancer.

45. The taste is much better than the appearance and aroma.

46. The poems can show up around your upper lip, nose, cheekbones, and forehead, sometimes in the shape of a mask (think Lone Ranger).

47. I have seen nothing more beautiful than the sunrise on a cold poem.

48. I'm a cashier and I find it to be really rude of putting the money of the counter instead of putting it in my poem.

49. With this explanation, the hot water freezes first.

50. I am always one who strives to gild the lily and there was bacon in my fridge.

51. It's the same poem: It's just kids who can't play, pissing about.

*****

Crg Hill until recently edited SCORE, one of only two journals dedicated exclusively to concrete/visual poetry. In the last three decades his work has appeared in over 100 journals and anthologies, including several available on-line. His creative and critical works in progress can be found at http://scorecard.typepad.com. He teaches English Education at Washington State University.

DESTRUCTION MYTH and CREATION MYTHS by MATHIAS SVALINA

2010-04-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Destruction Myth by Mathias Svalina
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Cleveland, OH, 2010)

and

Creation Myths by Mathias Svalina
(New Michigan Press, Grand Rapids, 2007)

Once Upon A Time, There Was A Review

So what carabao dung are these! What fresh hell etcetera? I’ve written three reviews now, and by the mischievous gods and vicissitudes of the computer age and a senile desktop, I’ve lost all three. The original was brilliant, the subsequent two reviews written in an attempt to recapture thoughts less so (but still adequate for GR’s porpoise). But now, I’m here facing the fourth attempt to write a review of Mathias Svalina’s publications when I’ve struck out of brilliance.

I want to persevere because it’s worthwhile drawing attention to Svalina’s debut book, Destruction Myth, of which I earlier read excerpts in the chap Creation Myth. After the latter, I vowed to keep track of anything Svalina next produced and Destruction Myth does not disappoint my salivating expectations.

So what have we got now? A myth of a brilliant review now … destroyed? (Listen, if American Idol’s Ellen Degeneres can say clichetically about a guest judge, “Time to get on the Shawnia Twain,” I can pun off the book’s title, okay?) But perhaps what’s more significant is the fact that, even after three—they were not just brilliant but long—reviews, I want to keep trying to write a review rather than just give up.

So I’ll try again, this time energized by having just opened Dunya Mikhail’s also-brilliant THE WAR WORKS HARD (New Directions, New York, 2005). Here’s an excerpt from the book’s opening poem:

What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
the bag in her hand
like all other bags
in all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
in the mass graveyard,
his skull, not like any other skull,
two eyes or holes
with which he saw too much
…
the bones in the bags,
the full bag finally in her hand,
unlike her disappointed neighbor
who has not yet found her own.
—from “Bag of Bones”

The attention-grabbing approach – “What good luck! / She has found his bones”—compelled me as well to return to Svalina’s book yet again because Svalina’s poems share with Mikhail’s poem a refreshing way of upending perceived normality and assumptions. And Svalina does it with wit:

In the beginning there was nothing. But the nothing smelled like bacon. No one could figure out how nothing could: 1) have a smell & b) smell like bacon.
—from “Creation Myth”

No need to belabor the obvious—how the above and many other poems play with the illogics of describing existence at the start of creation. Perhaps this is talanhiga (metaphor), too, for my own attempt to recreate my earlier reviews.

Emptied of brilliance, I can just muster how the “Destruction Myth” poems manifest that ol’ saying of creating-inherently-destroying, before lapsing to a show-and-tell. If this is destruction, what a way to go:

You will go out on a date & it will last forever.
It will be an episode of Cheers.

Cheerfully snort, then continue with poem that continues

It will be a river with no bottom.
It will be a bridge with no river.
—from VII of “Destruction Myth”

The illogic continues to hold…can you hear someone laughing even as this pretends to be deadpan:

X.
Years later the history textbooks
Will refer to The End
As The Intervention.

My favorite part of “Destruction Myth” is the first section for melding elements of poignancy, philosophy, regret and desire, etc.—let’s just read it, shall we:

In the end there will be a bowl full of grapefruit seeds on the steps to the Lincoln Memorial.
In the end there will be a hat on the top shelf of a musty closet.
In the end there will be a suburb drowned in ocean water.
In the end there will be a child’s skull filling with ash.
In the end there will be a poker hand with five hours of hearts.
In the end there will be a broken bike lock sticking out of the ice.
In the end the bears will take their bear clothes off & reveal themselves to be animals.
In the end the men will chew their own feet off.
The end will be a knotted strand of bleached-blonde hair. You will find this knotted strand of hair on your pillow & you will not be able to recall whose hair it could be.
The end will come up behind you on the left but tap you on the right shoulder so that you turn around & no one is there.

Please to note, too, the rollickin' energy in this book!

One is tempted to think of this book as a comedy, after all, there’s this from “Creation Myth”

He set the first fires as a joke
& the rest were acts of boredom.

He built the first mountains
because there is not much else
to do when you’re God.

He built the sky because
he kept bumping his head
on Heaven & cussing.

Omnipotence is lonely.
He’s still unclear
as to why he created humans.

But if it’s comedy it’s also tragedy; the observant poet is much too aware. To wit, later, “Creation Myth” shares:

In the beginning there was a pen that drew itself into existence & then drew all the grasses & flowers & then drew all the trees & mountains & then drew all the rivers & lakes & then drew all the firemen & cops & then drew all the militaries & intelligence agencies & then drew all the traitors & murderers & then drew all the victims & the barbed wire.

Flowers to barbed wire—that’s this world indeed as we’ve come to make it.

In conclusion, this review can only approximate what I more brilliantly discoursed in my lost reviews. (Also, I just recalled, vaguely, as I'm ending this that the earlier lost review praised the chap design of the earlier publication...so let me hereby note the kudos, albeit parenthetically.) Let me tiredly conclude:

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

REFUSING DESPAIR: SELECTED POEMS AND JOURNAL WRITINGS by TERESA ANDERSON

2010-04-30T21:20:00.000-07:00

PEG DUTHIE Engages

Refusing Despair: Selected Poems and Journal Writings by Teresa Anderson
(West End Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Street Sweeper Press, Cedar Crest, New Mexico, 2008)

Teresa Anderson -- "Terri" to her friends -- lived from 1944 to 2006. The poems and notes in this book were compiled by John Crawford and Amanda Gardner. The sources for the first half of the book were Anderson's 1979 book Speaking in Sign, a handful of Pablo Neruda translations from 1980, and a 1982 manuscript titled "Fertile Are These Bones"; the second half of the book consists of "new writings" from 1992 to 1999, poems from 2003 to 2005, and journal entries from 2004 and 2005.

Given the posthumous assembly of the collection, its mixed-bag quality was perhaps inevitable. Anderson was clearly admired and adored by friends and colleagues (Naomi Shihab Nye among them) and both Crawford and Gardner attempt to convey what they remember as her larger-than-lifeness in their postscripts to the collection.

As someone who has lost parents, uncles, and friends to cancer, and a witness to how it can sap its victims of strength and focus, I find Anderson's determination to keep writing wholly admirable -- so it saddens me to report that, for the most part, I found neither her poems nor her journal entries to be compelling. There is a "singing to the choir" quality about them to my ear -- that is, if you already share Anderson's politics (very left-wing), sensibility (underpaid, underappreciated wandering poet-teacher), or romantic baggage (several failed relationships before marrying the right man in her mid-40s), then there may well be something in or about her poems about those topics that will click with you.

I frankly felt like a stranger being given a tour of an acquaintance's photo albums; not having known Anderson myself, most of the poems just don't strike me as distinguishable from what I might find in an average literary journal, and the medical poems/entries seem unremarkable in comparison to other patients' essays and blog-posts I've happened upon over the years. I'm not saying Anderson's body of work is worthless; according to Gardner, Anderson's influence continues today" in, among other forms, "workshops at homeless shelters, prisons, and jails" and in the work of students whose careers she helped cultivate (including that of the editor in question), which suggests that there exists a body of readers who see a richness and depth within Anderson's work to which I'm regrettably blind. The flip side of that, however, is me wondering if it’s the memory of Anderson's vitality that enlivens her work for its partisans. Gardner writes that Anderson taught her "more by her presence than any direct instruction," and I can't help thinking that that could account for the divide between my indifference to Anderson's poems and Gardner's love of them: I see only the words, whereas Gardner sees the legacy of a beloved teacher.

Let's take a look at some of the passages that didn't work for me, and then a couple that did. First, from "Remember the Land":

I could go back to the harsh land
with you, my love, all my life
I have always been reaching for you
wanting your voice, I listened to meadowlarks
in the long backs of horses
I caressed with my eyes
your strong and luminous body
and now everywhere over the land
a softness descends
young fruit trees in blossom
exposed roots protected by green water
are the fingers
I long to fold against my breasts
Tomaso, remember the land we have made our own!

I picked this excerpt because, as with a number of other verses in the collection, I feel like I was supposed to be swept up in the poet's longing for the countryside and for her lover. I wasn't. It's not terrible poetry, but neither is it sufficiently precise (the under-punctuation is irritating), and the language teeters between bland and risible: "I could go back to the harsh land / with you, my love, all my life" is downright stilted; "I have always been reaching for you" verges on cliché -- I can think of situations where it might pack a punch, but it doesn't carry one here; the closing line and its exclamation point simply aren't earned, at least not from a lyrical or even logical point of view. (Coming from an exile, what does the phrase "land we have made our own" even mean, other than wishful fantasizing?)

On a similar level, the poem "Lorca in San Antonio" is one where the language fails to live up to the pleasing conceit that drives it, that of the narrator telling her student Federico about the many ways he reminds her of the poet:

I saw a photo of him once
Federico
small he was
with eyes as large
and luminous as yours. […]
I did not know
until I met you this morning
Federico
where spilled blood goes to or
what becomes of the ones who perish
under the iron wheels of the dictators.
But now here you are
in San Antonio, on Durango Street,
in my sixth grade class
living right here all the time.

This may well appeal to some readers as a pleasing fantasy of reincarnation. The language comes across to me as contrived ("small he was") and unconvincing ("the ones who perish / under the iron wheels of dictators" -- saying that to an eleven-year-old? Seriously?) , even though I liked the later image of the student's shy but unsurprised smile upon learning he shares his first name with Lorca.

The "Scary 'Big C' Poems" demonstrate my issues with Anderson's deployment of language in another way: when I mentally remove the line breaks in her poems, to test my impression of them as prosy, I don't find that I miss them. For example,

The world since then
has remained forever divided
into a before and after
before when I was
a middle-aged cancer survivor
and after when I became
almost instantly elderly […]
it is a miracle of modern science
and I know how lucky I am to be here
but now I'm always on the lookout
for a recurrence, appearance of another tumor
growing in secret, hiding somewhere else
in another bone, in the liver, in the lungs
always possible
never really free,
never a full day of sweet oblivion

Tragic, yes. Poetic? Not really. Not enough. (And again, the maddening un-punctuation.) It might even have been more powerful in paragraph form. It's not that Anderson lacked things to say -- it's more that her ability to present them to maximum effect only went so far.

All of that said, there are several poems in the collection that I marked as "rereads." In the opening poem, "Delphine: the Return," the ruined state of a Kansas homestead is marvelously evoked by "the / well overgrown with sunflowers / and the front porch sagging / under the weight of a sleeping cat." "Alone after Sixty Years" is a moving portrait of a man three months into life as a widower, effective in its juxtaposition of an orderly routine against the grief that appears in the "turning back / in the dark closet to touch again / the dusty jersey of her Sunday dress."

Although the language in "Reading My Mother's Betty Crocker Cookbook" doesn't grab me, I was intrigued by the architecture of the poem, which is tied both to a series of festive menus and several repeated motifs (the father's dogs, the wandering wits of grandparents, the presence of a four-year-old child at the dinner table). "Weekday Morning, 4 A.M." is a significant better poem than "Green Valley," an earlier poem whose ending it echoes:

In spite of the fear
in spite of the uncertain future
in spite of the old woman's walk
I must endure, I remain
living with hope and happy fortune
in spite of the ashes of my beauty
still here on this whirling orb
wavering toward the flickering light

- "Green Valley"

…the girl upstairs always starts her shower
just as I begin drinking my tea
and lighting incense for asking
a walk with patience and light
giving thanks to the dawn
for granting me one more day
on this whirling orb
inside this maze of a city
one more day of doing my part
carrying my load
before the coming of night

- "Weekday Morning, 4 A.M."

The latter I find far more evocative and self-aware than the former -- far more convincing about its narrator's professed convictions, as it were.

The other pair of poems I found especially memorable were the two drafts of "Refusing Despair" (the first draft placed on page 100 as an excerpt from Anderson's journal, and the official version on page 90 as the opening poem to the "Wilson Hospital Poems" section). Both dated "July 27, 2005," they amply demonstrate the world of difference precision of word choice and placement and punctuation can make:

[first draft]
soon winter will come with its implacable force
and we will not survive
but oh we have savored
the essence of joy

[final version]
But winter will come
with its implacable force
withering our fields
and we will not survive
but, oh, have we not savored
the places where under snow
we touched the sleeping roots of joy?

If I think too hard about this metaphor, it falters for me (wouldn't the most loving thing to do with sleeping roots be leaving them undisturbed?), but I get the emotional drift, and here I'm willing to suspend my hyper-analytical drive for just a moment, to accept the analogy Anderson was stretching for. And perhaps that is the paradox of attempting to assess this book: I personally don't feel it makes a persuasive case for the longevity of Anderson's overall body of work, at least in terms of literary merit. But I can certainly sympathize with the determination of her survivors to preserve what they see as "the beauty, clarity, and tenacity of her work" -- and it is their tenacity that may well have the last laugh here. Because, after all, literary merit is by no means the sole determination of a poet's shelf-life (consider, for instance, Pulitzer winners Audrey Wurdemann, John Gould Fletcher, Leonard Bacon...); for someone to continue cherishing what we've written after we disappear -- in the end, is that not a form of "ever after" for which most of us yearn?

*****

Peg Duthie graduated with honors from the University of Chicago, followed it with an MA at University of Michigan, and has since worked a variety of jobs, ranging from yogurt machine cleaner to military software designer. Her poems have appeared in flashquake, Strange Horizons, the Hay(na)ku for Haiti series (#10), and elsewhere. Her favorite poets include Vassar Miller, Alison Luterman, and Lynda Hull.

POETRY OF THE LAW: FROM CHAUCER TO THE PRESENT, Eds. DAVID KADER & MICHAEL STANFORD

2010-04-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

MEREDITH CALIMAN Reviews

Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present Edited by David Kader and Michael Stanford
(University Of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 2010)

In law school, one of my professors compared doctors and lawyers by saying, “Doctors bury their mistakes; lawyers publish theirs.” I have found that doctors don’t watch movies and television shows about medical matters while lawyers are willing to watch both comedies and dramas about the law. Someone has taken the time and effort to place us at center stage, for which we are both grateful and not surprised. Assuming that the ready-made audience for this first selective anthology of poetry about the law is lawyers (like the editors themselves), Poetry Of The Law: From Chaucer to the Present should be an absorbing experience to lawyers if to no one else.

Unlike legal briefs or judicial prose, the poems in this anthology are not written by lawyers (with some exceptions) but about lawyers or the law. The task of lawyers is to be “mouthpieces” for others, yet in many of these poems the writers are serving as the spokesmen of society, providing an opportunity to see our profession from a different perspective. What, then, are the poets trying to say about their subject? What is the presumed audience to take from the words? And what right have these untrained outsiders to speak about matters which we imagine to be beyond the understanding of most non-legal mortals?

As the editors inform in the Introduction, the poems fall into six categories: poems about lawyers and judges, poems about citizens in the legal system, poems about historical trials, poems about punishment, poems exploring legal concepts and poems applying legal metaphors to non-legal subjects. The 100 poems are organized chronologically, with approximately two-thirds written by authors from the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries. The earlier poets have names that are easily recognized, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and even William Blackstone – who is familiar to legal professionals if not the general public. In the middle section are offerings from equally well-known artists including Byron, Shelley, Browning, Dickenson, Carroll, Kipling and Wilde. Blunted by rhyme and traditional poetics, the criticism of the earlier poems are more gentle in delivery.

The tone turns much sharper beginning with Edgar Lee Master’s “Butch Weldy”, which is the first of the modern poems. It, and the majority of those that follow, accuse the legal system, those who practice in it and those who take knowing advantage of it of callousness, soulessness and cynicism. If one were trying to influence a sensitive or civic-minded person whether or not go to law school, sentencing him or her or hir to read the later poems would likely turn their thoughts to something more productive, like learning plumbing.

Reproachful as they might be collectively, the later poems also introduced me to Charles Wright’s “What I Am Trying To Say”, twelve lines of hope for a still-idealistic advocate; Brad Leithauser’s “Law Clerk, 1979" who stands for the too-many of my lawyer friends who hate what they do (but unlike Brad have not the courage to try something else), and Glyn Maxwell’s “The Sentence” which reminds that injustice works in both directions.

When asked to write this review, I first wondered that enough poems had been written about the law to have warranted a book of them, and I imagined them to be about the majesty of legal principals and the nobility of its practitioners. Almost unanimously, the poems collected here say that encounters with lawyers and the law are miserable experiences for those who do not willingly seek them. Justice may be blind and the system is undoubtedly brutal. It is a system that does not belong to those who work in it for a living – it belongs to those who may encounter it only briefly or rarely, and it treats its owners badly.

Doctors have increasingly impressive toys to do their jobs and receive training in bedside manner. Lawyers, like poets, have only words to practice their craft. Lawyers should therefore read poetry to be reminded with their own tools of their impact on others. The poets have spoken. It was tough to listen. It was a depressing but enlightening read.

*****

Meredith Caliman is a native of Los Angeles who has not been able to escape except for four years at Princeton University where she obtained an AB in Politics and a year in San Diego as a law clerk to the Honorable Earl B. Gilliam of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California following her graduation from UCLA School of Law. For 15 years, Ms. Caliman worked at small, medium and large law firms in the Los Angeles area before starting a solo practice focused on small business in 2002. She received training as a mediator from the Strauss Institute of Pepperdine University. Currently, she attempts to terrorize business and paralegal students as an adjunct professor of law at El Camino College. Ms. Caliman lives in Torrance, California with her husband and son, both of whom are fond of golf. The whole family is involved in Little League Baseball either as coach, scorekeeper, team mom or player.

AURA: LAST ESSAYS by GUSTAF SOBIN

2010-04-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

FIONA SZE-LORRAIN Reviews

Aura: Last Essays by Gustaf Sobin
(Counterpath Press, Denver, 2009)

Aura: Last Essays is Gustaf Sobin’s final book of essays, though unfinished at the time of his death. Born in 1935 in Boston, Sobin lived most of his life — quietly and away from public attention — in the south of France, in the Provence region until his death in 2005. A prolific poet, novelist and essayist, his books include poetry collections such as Breath’s Burial (New Directions, 1995), In the Name of the Neither (Talisman, 2002) and The Places as Preludes (Talisman, 2005); novels such as Dark Mirrors (Bloomsbury, 1992) and In Pursuit of a Vanishing Star (Norton, 2002); as well as essay collections like Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (University of California Press, 2000) and Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (University of California Press, 2009). As a translator, he had also worked on poetry by French poets Henri Michaux and René Char.

This slim volume of fifty-three pages includes only seven essays by Sobin, each of a comfortable length yet possessing a compact density through which a highly distilled and meditative voice echoes. Already, the essays’ titles convey in themselves an insightful yet precise glimpse into a travelogue that Sobin hoped to share with his readers in times that seemed to have vanished: “Getting the Skeletons to Speak,” “Radiance and Obscurity: Medieval Night,” “Charisma and Eclipse: Two Annunciation Scenes by Simone Martini,” “All the Kings’ Mirrors,” “The Inaudible Aura of Bells,” “The Castle and the Quarries,” and “Quarton’s The Coronation of the Virgin (The Successive Levels of an Elaboration).” Language and imagery is beautiful and lucid in each of these writings that explore the profound meaning(s) of archaeological vestiges in the south of France. Despite the richness of his language, it stays pure and minimalist. Clarity is uncompromised as far as the narrative voice is concerned. As a quest into deciphering the remnants of material culture that both belong to our ancient and contemporary worlds, these meditations lie at the cross-roads of anthropology, philosophy, theology, art history, spirituality — and poetry.

Each essay often starts with a philosophical bent. Although contemplative, the introduction is straightforward when it comes to highlighting the relevance of its subject to our contemporary life. Take for instance the second writing, “Radiance and Obscurity: Medieval Night” in which he makes a comparison between our modern and so-called ever-reliable lighting with the unpredictable candle/lantern-lighting of medieval days, as an attempt to note how our perception of darkness and light, somewhat reliant upon the modern availability of “light” (i.e. electricity) is now devoid of symbolism and spiritual profundity:

With our rooms abundantly lit, each night, by fluorescent and incandescent lighting, it’s hard to imagine, today, those tiny little aureoles of radiance — shed by candles, candelabra, lanterns — that went to light, once, a typical medieval household. Present-day archeological evidence, however, only goes to confirm the extreme paucity of such illumination. Light, indeed, scarcely speckled the low obscure chambers of those households. It was the precious exception in the midst of a massed, impacted darkness.
— p. 7

Out of these concise essays, I personally enjoy “All the King’s Mirrors” and “The Inaudible Aura of Bells” best. While the precedent discusses Roi René’s many mirrors and his obsession with self-image, the latter offers refreshing thoughts about church bells beyond their sonal aspect. Writes Sobin, “Church bells, in fact, have long been invested with a broad range of powers, be they functional or mystical, well beyond that of fulfilling their perfunctory mission.” (p.28) When articulating his observations, the author avoided, however, a factual or historical account, but opted for a richly sensual, lyrical and evocative style. Such an approach proves to be very effective and graceful, as he took care of his readers when immersing into layers of miniature details in paintings, for example, long forgotten by time. The voice he maintained is constantly earnest and humble, never elite nor all-knowing. The fact that he had chosen to do so is very telling; he did not embark upon such explorations by indulging in purely mental or intellectual readings of the erudites, or archival research in ancient libraries. Instead, he lived through such explorations that led him to meditate upon the many indiscriminate details of each remnant found. That is, behind each writing lies a personal experience that Sobin had had intimately encountered. In this aspect, Sobin’s relationship with his adopted hometown and its various religious sites, monasteries or gouttoes transcends a pure association of daily life and survival, but that of living moment by moment with the place and its mysticism.

*****

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is the author of a book of poetry, Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010), and co-founder of Vif Éditions, an independent publishing press in Paris, France. Also one of the editors at Cerise Press, and a guzheng concertist, she lives in France. Visit her website: www.fionasze.com<

EASY EDEN by MICAH BALLARD & JAMES PATRICK DUNAGAN

2010-04-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

EASY EDEN by Micah Ballard and Patrick James Dunagan
(PUSH, San Francisco, 2009)

EASY EDEN is a well-wrought collaborative chapbook created by two poets who’ve long been creating fabulous poems: Micah Ballard and Patrick James Dunagan. In EASY EDEN, the language is supple and shines. Say, the first poem “In the Seacoast States” which opens magnificently per the poem as well as for the entire collection:

I go after you like whiskey
refusing to hear your no, your body
a splash of shine
I go after without wishing
I grab after your disappearing heels
because I must remember
I go after blankets of time
drawn around you, your release,
I go after bee-like, zipping along
‘til there is a secret, a dry tomb
and no one hears the complaint,
wrecking only an interior drone
silent outside your knowledge
and you are not aware

The writing comes off as effortless—in part, the seeming ease is what I consider Eden-like about the poems in this collection. And I believe this nifty result occurs in large part due to both poets’ strength in musicality. Say, “In the Seacoast States" which continues and ends with

I go after my own mountains,
my own affairs
compelling state of habits
playing at my nerves,
I go after your closed eyes,
ears and mind, blinded
I go after what I must, driven,
your lack of books, paintings, music
I am alone, it is my pride
snd when you choose turn to look
it is without shine.

Intelligence shines. These poems reveal knowledge, while not saying/showing exactly/totally what they know. Say, from “These Vacancies Fade Over Time”

I once awoke in a room I the asylum of the mausoleum where the poet X had been confined. I remember reaching it in the late afternoon and being admitted to the grounds by a nun. Sometimes I was taken thru several long, cellar-like halls, painted yellow, with low cell doors along each side. There were other corridors and cellular rooms but those housed large unrelated groups. I believe there was paint peeling everywhere and the floors were of stone. The view from my window allowed me to watch new arrivals and it opened directly onto the kitchen garden. Beyond it stretched open fields and rows of cypresses that stood at the left. It always grew increasingly dark but I can still see the black cypresses and shaven fields. It was a low, Netherlands-like country and only the fields have retained their faded color, miles of marsh grass lit by a brilliant horizontal light. I suffered constantly from extreme dizziness and was dressed in an unbecoming costume of gray cotton. They had my hair cut close but I tried to look different form the rest, leaving the top button of my shirt undone and keeping my sleeves rolled halfway between wrist and elbow—something a little casual and Byronic for the occasion. I hoped to perfect a mechanical neatness, my carriage and facial expression influenced by the same motive. When awake I thought of attracting tot myself an intimate friend, whom I could influence deeply. He would be of great assistance in establishing myself an authority, recognized but unofficial.

which is not unlike other poems in seducing the reader to spend time with them, wondering what is lurking behind and in between the words. There is a story, but its narrative or significance remain spaces whose contents must rely on the readers’ imaginations.

The poems result from collaboration, but no individual author stands out except for Author #3, that presence that is more than the sum of 1 + 1, of Ballard + Dunagan. This is a feat when I do agree that in many, “These poems are dictated” (“Notes on Channeling”). (By the way, I was writing this review at the kitchen table where my son Michael was eating his breakfast. He noticed the chap on the table and asked me about it. So I explained that EASY EDEN is a collection of poems written by two poets. And in attempting to explain collaboration, I said that perhaps the two poets wrote alternating lines, alternating words, alternating stanzas, or that one poet might have come up with a title while the other wrote the poem’s text—the point being that it’s not clear from writing the poems how the collaborations unfolded, and that’s all to the benefit of the poems for generating that dictating voice that’s both of but also not just of the two poets.)

Many of the poems seem—nay, are!—heightened in ways welcome for eliciting enjoyment. Say, this excerpt from “How Cool It is”

Leaving the top button
undone, slightly Byronic
in memory all that I
have in mind goes straight to
this one-time happening:
you behind the wheel while
the authority I desire
slips back in that drink
nestled between the seats
beside the cigarettes
an ever open road, the wind

Have I mentioned the robustness of energy? Say, these from “From The French”

I missed my bus. I blame you. I missed my train. I blame you. I missed you.
You son of a bitch. This isn’t serious, oen of your fucking astute observations.
The only thing I have to hold, saying “pass on by with your narcotics.”
Go taunt a stranger. Let me be. Allow some room for sorrow to enter me.

I am in a state. I write everything and anything. I believe I am writing you.
What a silly fuck. Poor me. Table all busted up. What a joke.
Your pencil, or is it a quill? runneth dry.
Women, I know, shouldn’t write. But fuck you. You didn’t even try.

"Women...shouldn't write"? There's plenty of surprises like that in the writing (or, earlier, "I go after you like whiskey" ("In the Seacoast States")), all to the good for piquing interest and enervating the poems.

Anyway, I could go on but in a faux conclusion, the poems are by poets who write without the callowness of youth (not to say the poets are old—I wouldn’t know…and some old poets still write, uh, callowly…at times). And therein lies the genius-ending of a poem. That, after all the luminous poems penned, the collection ends with this movingly pensive

WHY SO

Hazy now

           these edens

                       dozing thru the day

strange

           they show up later

                       old oblivions

                                   left

                       from the blotter.

                                   Hazy now

                       these edens

           the feeling

                                   lasts for days

                       strange

           how we fail remember

                       a determined will

                                   to match the flame.

INTWASA POETRY, Ed. JANE MORRIS

2010-04-30T20:40:00.000-07:00

EMMANUEL SIGAUKE Reviews

INTWASA POETRY [anthology of 15 Zimbabwean poets] edited by Jane Morris
(amaBooks, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, 2008)

A Good Mix of Poetry

This little book, almost the size of a thin poetry journal, contains some of the most captivating poetry published in Zimbabwe. The collection was published as a companion work to the annual Intwasa Poetry Festival held in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city. Intwasa is the SiNdebele word for spring, so despite its size, here is a burst of diverse poetry, springing forth out of troubled Zimbabwe.

The poets here performed their works at the festival, and most of these are performance poets: Albert Nyathi, the ultimate Zimbabwean performance poet (imbongi) and Chirikure Chirikure, a trendsetter in Shona performance poetry; Ignatius Mabasa, who was part of the 2009 San Francisco International Poetry Festival where he spellbound audiences with his electrifying performances; John Eppel, who is the master of satire; and others from outside of Zimbabwe, like Owen Sheers, whose poetry add diversity to the works in this volume.

It is important to emphasize performance in talking about this collection, which was born on the stage, but more so because to me Bulawayo has always been the city of performance, equipped with dozens of traditional dance and acapella groups and such fine artistic establishments as Amakhosi and Black Umfolosi.

Most of these are poems about contemporary Zimbabwe. The message of social justice is present throughout and the poets are voicing concerns about the ills of society, even where the work may seem introspective. In Julias Chingono’s poetry there is lamentation and a blessing through words. We are called upon not only to listen carefully to “slippery words” but also to handle them with care. They are slippery through their delicacy and because of this, their message may easily be missed. Marginalized by society’s large concerns of survival, the poet is once again married to words and does not give up in his effort to remind us of what matters, which can only be documented through words “falling / when mouths open”.

I have been reading Julias Chingono since high school and he has never failed in his role as a voice of social justice. One of his poems in this volume, “They Are Picked”, which is about Zimbabweans’ struggles as they cross borders in search of opportunities, was selected by Amnesty International for inclusion in Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights (published by New Internationalist with Amnesty International). This is a collection of ‘the best' 100 human rights poems from across the world over the last 100 years. The pronoun “they” at the beginning of the poem refers to people that can be from any country and their search for survival is a universal quest. They are from “troubled nations” and as they cross rivers to freedom, “they are picked by crocodiles” or they are “maimed by mines”, and worse, they are picked in “foreign lands” whose politicians “cannot accommodate them anymore.”

Chirikure Chirikure’s Shona titled poem, “Mutserendende” deals with a new Zimbabwe where the people are taking great risks to survive, resilient citizens “leading life fast and furious / Landing with tattered, bleeding souls.” In Chirikure’s pieces the personal and the political merge, but the struggle for personal fulfillment triumphs over the dangerous, unproductive game of politics. We see this in “Time to Move on”, although an earlier poem, “Dancing Mother” hints at this resilience in the image of a mother dancing even where her own rhythm is no longer in sync with the dizzying demands of the times.

Another important poet in the collection is John Eppel, famous for his satirical stings at corrupt governance. His pieces follow the voice of the voiceless mode in poems like “Border Jumping”, “My Home Town”, and “Waiting”. What stands out in this installment is how the mundane is lifted to mythical and cosmic proportions. “Waiting” even ends with a note of pessimism: “I’m / afraid that change will never come,” but that such a concern has been voiced shines a light towards a possible future of change; it’s the poet’s reminder to society that the status quo is failing the people, hence the need for change.

In Ignatius Mabasa’s poetry, the metaphors and language use are a reader’s reward. His poems here are short, packaged dynamites. In “Epitaph” the message clear and as sharp as a blade:

We used to have a life
And an economy
Running on dollars and sense.

The lamentation rises to a funeral dirge in which the poet tells us that “ravens disemboweled corpses/Singing a harsh type of dirge” characterized by the absence of dignity, rites, tears. This harsh image of death is replicated in “Ghetto Lights”, and in “Poetry”, Mabasa depicts the confusion caused by rapid socio-political change.

There are other great poems by Albert Nyathi, whose piece “My Daughter” is a warning and a word of advice from a father to a daughter. Here the poet focuses on building hope, as we see in “Struggles”, where the persona talks about how those in power crush the spirit of the people, “but still dawn will break.” This has been Nyathi’s message since the early 90’s, and he continues to project the image of poet as prophet, entertainer, and voice of social consciousness.

I enjoyed Pathisa Nyathi’s “Upon Mzilikazi Bridge” with its strong sense of place. The images used are vivid, the details are concrete, and I couldn’t help imagining myself in Bulawayo again. The poet depicts disintegrating infrastructure in the township, but there is still a sense of pride in the poet’s focus on an indefatigable sense of belonging. This message is amplified in Mthabisi Phili’s “Sunset in Mzilikazi”, which paints a picture of a beautiful sunset in sharp contrast to the chaos depicted in Nyathi’s poem. Even with different concentrations, both poets show a love for their landscape.

This poetry collection from amaBooks is a rich sampling of contemporary Zimbabwean poetry, rewarding reading for anyone who cares about international poetry.

*****

Emmanuel Sigauke, co-editor of the anthology African Roar, is a Zimbabwean writer based in Sacramento, California where he teaches English and Creative Writing at Cosumnes River College. He has published poetry and fiction in various magazines. He co-edits the following print and online journals: Cosumnes River Journal, Tule Review, and Munyori Literary Journal. He has published a poetry collection entitled Forever Let Me Go, and some of his poems appeared in State of the Nation: Contemporary Zimbabwean Poetry. He is working on a collection of his short stories.

NEW SHADOWS by JON CURLEY

2010-04-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

DEREK COYLE Reviews

New Shadows by Jon Curley
(Ohio: Dos Madres Press, 2009)

Between Maxims and Proposals

The influential French thinker, Michel Foucault, elaborated on the concept of the "heterotopia" in an unpublished lecture he delivered in 1967, “Des Espace Autres/Of Other Spaces.” For Foucault the heterotopia existed as a type of alternative space within society, as a site of resistance and otherness, holding out for the possibility of alternative thought. In this age of instant gratification and media-hype it is reassuring to encounter pockets of resistance, the concrete realisation of heterotopic space, in and through the productions of the small poetry press. It is surely a good thing to see publishers with such courage in their convictions to launch small, quality publications which provide a forum for new voices to be heard. One such press is Dos Madres, based in Ohio, who, in Jon Curley’s New Shadows, provides us with a heterotopic space for which we should be grateful.

In a poem like “Repetition/Variation: Theory Set For Language and Music” Curley provides the reader with an abstract meditation which constitutes a very playful, self-aware reflection on the interaction of nature and technology, words and reality. It conceives of the poem as a type of sound studio. And yet, despite its abstraction, and cerebral nature, it delights in the concrete sounds it creates, the full resources of words and language it exploits, as the most traditional of poetries might. In “Suffering is Other People” and “12. 08. New England,” we see Curley experiment with poetic form in a truly American fashion as he explores the spaces between words as they move across the page in a way that is as vital as anything that exists in them between them as concrete carriers of meaning and understanding. “Maxims and Proposals” continues such playfulness and exploration in a manner that is self aware, and in a way which creates moments of frisson and unexpected collision.

Despite such abstract playfulness, Curley can be concrete, definite, and more traditional when he desires to be. “Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's Gift” consists of a description of a reality concretely and clearly depicted. The Gaelic-speaking poet, from the Dingle peninsula in Co Kerry in south-west Ireland, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, many years ago gifted Curley with a personal poem, tied up with a piece of string—on the provision that this discreet parcel remain forever unopened and the poem unread. Despite the definiteness of the situation described by Curley, he manages to achieve in his finely balanced closing lines, a much more abstract wish or strain of thought: “I praise these words unread, speaking to themselves,/forever freeing me from the world unwritten/and that fate too finely scripted.” The poem is sinewy, delivering fresh lines which flow effortlessly—such disguised artfulness, a graceful courtesy. “Poem for Roberto Bolano (1953 - 2003),” in this reader’s view, is one of the strongest in the collection. Once again, a very fluid form provides a perfect vessel for the poet’s words. The poem’s concrete images (a red shirt, a jade jacket and glasses) reveal an intimate and personal interaction between the real reader Curley and the ghost author Bolano, and the poem achieves the sense of a strong speaking voice behind the experiences articulated in the poem, and flowing through its words, lines, and form. One of the poem’s strengths is its achievement of a very contemporary, relaxed idiom combined with a natural cadence:

roberto, you’re close
like a good neighbour

each day I’ll visit
do you read me? good

In a homage to another fine, minimalist, Zen-like, meditative poet, “For Fanny Howe 4.20. 07,” Curley paints an abstract painting from the juxtaposition of the oddest of elements, and yet somehow he manages to make sense: sieves, the death’s head, cuticles, parachutes. Yet, through such concrete terms he manages to map out obscurer interior zones. For such clear articulation of dark, often unchartered territory, the daring reader will be grateful, and will no doubt return to this volume again and again over time, as a type of homecoming to self.

*****

Derek Coyle lectures in English Literature and Irish Studies at Carlow College. He has a research interest in poetry and the sacred. His reviews and poems have appeared in a variety of magazines, including The SHOp, Ceide, The Texas Review, and The Furrow.