GALATEA RESURRECTS #4 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 4

2006-11-30T23:58:00.000-08:00

November 30, 2006

[N.B. You can scroll down for all articles. But since this is a large issue, if it takes too long to upload the entire issue, you also can click on the individual links below to more quickly get to a review or article that interests you.]

CONTENTS:

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
From Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Steven Fama reviews THE NIGHT I DROPPED SHAKESPEARE ON THE CAT by John Olson

Elizabeth Kate Switaj reviews THE END OF RUDE HANDLES by Jen Tynes

Nicholas Manning reviews UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by Tom Beckett

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by Tom Beckett

Andrea Baker reviews LITTLE EASE by Aaron McCollough

Jim McCrary reviews ON EARTH: LAST POEMS AND AN ESSAY by Robert Creeley

David-Baptiste Chirot reviews SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS by Gabriel Pomerand

Craig Perez reviews I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET THROUGH TO EVERYONE by Anna Moschovakis

Eileen Tabios reviews SCRAWL by Susana Gardner

Laurel Johnson reviews UNDER THE WANDERER'S STAR by Sigman Byrd

Barbara Jane Reyes reviews GUTTED by Justin Chin

J. LeClerc reviews GARNET LANTERNS by Sally Rosen Kindred

Nicholas Manning reviews VAUDEVILLE by Allyssa Wolf

Madeline Tiger reviews UNCOMMON GEOGRAPHY by Therése Halscheid

Thomas Fink reviews INSIDE THE OUTSIDE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AVANT-GARDE AMERICAN POETS, Edited by Roseanne Ritzema

Eileen Tabios reviews BOYS, A-Z: A PRIMER by Dan Waber

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews THE OBEDIENT DOOR by Sean Finney

Lynn Strongin reviews AN APOLOGY FOR LOVING THE OLD HYMNS and HOUSEHOLD OF CONTINUANCE, both by Jordan Smith

Allen Bramhall reviews MAINSTREAM by Michael Magee and MUSEE MECHANIQUE by Rodney Koeneke

Richard Lopez reviews MY SPACESHIP, Edited by Mark Lamoreaux

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews THE AFTER-DEATH HISTORY OF MY MOTHER by Sandy McIntosh

Craig Perez reviews DO NOT AWAKEN THEM WITH HAMMERS by Lidija Dimkovska

Diane Lockward reviews SEEDPODS by Glenna Luschei

Allen Bramhall reviews POST~TWYLA by Jack Kimball

Jesse Crockett reviews POST~TWYLA by Jack Kimball

Susana Gardner reviews ORGANIC FURNITURE CELLAR by Jessica Smith

Leny M. Strobel reviews NOT EVEN DOGS by Ernesto Priego

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews OPERA: POEMS 1981 - 2002 by Barry Schwabsky

Michelle Bautista reviews OPERA: POEMS 1981 - 2002 by Barry Schwabsky

William Allegrezza reviews ON THE FLY by Amy King

Julie R. Enszer reviews MARBLE GODDESSES WITH TECHNICOLOR SKINS by Corinne Robins

Lynn Strongin reviews NECESSARY ANGELS by Carolyn Maisel

Dion Farquhar reviews INCESSANT SEEDS by Sheila Murphy

Steven Fama reviews BIRD-BOOK by Jessica Smith

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews THE GOOD CITY by Sharon Olinka

Eileen Tabios reviews NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY by Thomas Fink and OTAGES by John Bloomberg-Rissman

Beatriz Tabios reviews UNPROTECTED TEXTS by Tom Beckett

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews WARP SPASM by Basil King

Laurel Johnson reviews BREAKING THE FEVER by Mary Mackey

Rhett Pascual reviews MUSEUM OF ABSENCES by Luis H. Francia

Eileen Tabios reviews SIGNED EVEN AS A WAITING by Paul Klinger

Erica Kaufman reviews THE ANGER SCALE by Katie Degentesh

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews GAGARIN STREET by Piotr Gwiazda

Fionna Doney Simmonds reviews THE GOOD CAMPAIGN by Amy King

Nicholas Downing reviews EPISODES by Mark Young

Vanessa Kenyon reviews A BOOK OF HER OWN: WORDS AND IMAGES TO HONOR THE BABAYLAN by Leny M. Strobel

Julie R. Enszer reviews THE FIFTH VOICE by Pamela Hart, Allen Strous, Victoria Givotovsky and Noah Kucij

William Allegrezza reviews METEORIC FLOWERS by Elizabeth Willis

Julie R. Enszer reviews NATURAL DEFENSES and FIRE IS FAVORABLE TO THE DREAMER, both by Susan Terris

Lynn Strongin reviews NOW YOU CARE by Di Brandt; SPEAKING OF POWER: THE POETRY OF DI BRANDT, Edited by Tanis MacDonald; and SEEDPODS by Glenna Luschei

Eileen Tabios reviews A PLACE TO STAND by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Susana Gardner reviews A BEDSIDE GUIDE TO NO TELL MOTEL Edited by Reb Livingston and Molly Arden

Jim McCrary reviews BOOK OF SKETCHES by Jack Kerouac

Mark Young reviews WOMEN OF THE BEAT GENERATION by Brenda Knight and
SAN FRANCISCO'S BURNING by Helen Adam

FEATURED POETS
Guillermo Parra presents JUAN SANCHEZ PELAEZ

Eric Gamalinda presents IAN BRAND

Paolo Javier presents AARON PECK

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
David Buuck reviews IN THE HEART OF ANOTHER COUNTRY by Etel Adnan

Joyelle McSweeney reviews the time at the end of this writing and 60 lv bo(e)mbs by Paolo Javier

Steffi Drewes reviews like wind loves a window by Andrea Baker

Elizabeth Treadwell reviews POEM FOR THE END OF TIME AND OTHER POEMS by Noelle Kocot

Christine Hamm reviews PIECES OF AIR IN THE EPIC by Brenda Hillman

ROASTING THE EDITOR
John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews REPRODUCTIONS OF THE EMPTY FLAGPOLE by Eileen R Tabios

INSIDE BACK COVER
Woof Woof!

OUTSIDE BACK COVER
Purrrrrr.....

FROM THE EDITOR

2006-11-30T23:57:00.000-08:00

WITH MUCH TONGUES IN CHEEK

I am purrrr-ed to announce that this issue presents poetry books that, for the first time in Galatea Resurrects (GR), are receiving their third reviews or engagements. I am open to GR publishing more than one review of the same publication because I believe that such deepens the engagement with the work. The first publications to get reviewed for the third time in GR are:

UNPROTECTED TEXTS: Selected Poems 1978–2006 by Tom Beckett

Museum of Absences by Luis H. Francia

OPERA: Poems 1981-2002 by Barry Schwabsky

Tom's UNPROTECTED TEXTS holds the special charm of receiving three reviews in one issue -- and in the issue released right after his book's release! I can attest that two reviewers said that the book's unique bookmark, which is accompanied by a condom, helped interest them into reading the book...upon which the reviewers discovered much poems to respect! Transparency Alert: My press, Meritage Press, is the fortunate publisher of Tom's book -- so, I need to preen as I obviously hit on a successful marketing tactic for the poetry book: the condom. Whatever. As Madison Avenue long has proven: Sex sells.

As books receive more engagements, it's logical that not all will be positive. Response to poetry is sufficiently subjective that different readers can disagree on the same work. Still, I know that negative reviews can hurt the authors. So, as an experiment a few months ago, I commissioned seven million of my best friends to write a negative review on one of my books. I asked seven million as I found it difficult to imagine how anyone could have anything negative to say about my poems (pause to delicately sip the hot coffee). Much to my surprise, all seven million replied they could do it -- these are the same best friends who've always complimented my work. Hmmm, I thought. Still, the distinct majority of my friends recovered from insanity before this issue's deadline, such that only one person became lucid enough to send me a review. Thank you, I think, to John Bloomberg-Rissman for reviewing my Reproductions of The Empty Flagpole.

Although, I have to say that now that I see what John says about my book (and Reproductions happens to be the most favorably reviewed ever of my 14 poetry collections to date), I see the wisdom of continuing my original policy of not having my books eligible for review in GR since I edit it. John's review (under the one-time "Roast The Editor" section) is the last review to be featured in this issue -- may your reading eyes get too tired to scroll down there. But seriously, this is to suggest to poets who've experienced criticism: don't be discouraged; look at the company with which you're sharing the Sun's heat ... and light! (Hmm: now why is that coffee getting hotter, rather than cooling down, over time?)

As I continue to sing about Moiself, I am also delighted to announce that I WON MY BET! I won my bet with Senor Cynic-You-Know-Who-You-Are. To wit, this issue of GR presents more new reviews than did the third issue! Here are the purrr-generating stats:

Issue 1: 27 reviews

Issue 2: 39 new reviews (one book was reviewed twice by different reviewers)

Issue 3: 49 new reviews (two books were each reviewed twice by different reviewers)

Issue 4: 61 new reviews (one book was reviewed thrice, and three books were each reviewed twice by different reviewers)

I love upward trajectories -- thank you to all the volunteer reviewers for making this possible. I would have thought it'd be difficult to beat the third issue's 49 new reviews -- and it was. I even snared my own mother to do a "review" (so to speak), and it turns out that I didn't need her. This, of course, is my poetics -- be blind if you're going to play poetry poker. Which is to say, I feel that Poetry is also about Faith.

Of the new reviews, 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

So I continue to encourage publishers and authors to send in review copies -- reviewers from around the world are paying attention (indeed, this issue presents the first participation from writers living in France, Australia and Canada). For information on submission and review copies, go check out Galatea's Purse.

This issue also presents, for the first time, reviews written as poems. But of course!

Lastly, please feel free to email me or put in Comments section any errors or publisher web sites information related to the books. I might have been distracted by the newly-started Holiday Season as I was working with this issue. Speaking of which, do you think that, maybe, Gabriela and Achilles don't like these red deer antlers?

I certainly hope reading through this issue will elicit different responses than those absolutely tortured expressions on Moi puppies' faces!

With much Love, Fur and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
November 30, 2006

THE NIGHT I DROPPED SHAKESPEARE ON THE CAT by JOHN OLSON

2006-11-30T23:52:00.000-08:00

STEVEN FAMA Reviews

The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat by John Olson
(Calamari Press, 2006)

The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat is not for the faint of heart. John Olson is an ardent explorer of language for whom poetry is “a whirl of energy in a shell of sound.” He embraces impulse and his poems thrive on autonomy. As he puts it, “Bees moving in and out of a hive. Words moving in and out of the mind.”

I first learned about John Olson in early 2001 from Philip Lamantia. Philip told me that Olson was “extraordinary,” had “made a discovery,”and was writing “the greatest prose poetry [he’d] ever read.” TNIDSOTC is Olson’s third book of prose poems in three years, and at 160 pages -- comprising 70 works, including an essay on poetics -- it is the largest of the bunch. He is clearly on a roll.

TNIDSOTC includes many kinds of prose poems. There are meditations on particular things, narratives, autobiographical pieces, poems responding to art, and philosophical reveries. There are poems that mix these genres and poems that can’t be classified at all. You never know page-to-page what you will find. This unpredictability is a big part of why the book is so fun and such a challenge.

The poems which meditate on particular things, such as “City of Water," “Unconscious,” “Laundry,” and “Starlings,” are among the more conventional works in the book. Francis Ponge is the obvious precursor in this genre, but Olson writes with more energy and stronger beats. His poems are from the age of rhythm and blues and rock ‘n roll.

“City of Water” is presumably about Seattle, where Olson has lived for the last three decades. The poem engagingly evokes the region’s foremost geographic feature (over 40 percent of the area is water) and its well-earned (although usually over-stated) reputation for wet weather. It begins, “I live in a city of water. Water in all its forms. Vapor, clouds, drizzle. Fountains, rivers, lakes. Inlets, ports, sounds. There is water everywhere.”

The poem continues for a page, mostly in short vigorous anaphoric sentences. Olson riffs on the ubiquity of liquid in his city, using sharp details and poetic leaps that are hallmarks of his writing. Here’s an excerpt:

“Water punctuating the earth in commas. Puddles promiscuous as nickels. Puddles impertinent as pickles. Water streaked with whorls of delinquent oil. Everywhere the sheen and luster of water. Rivers in reveries of water. Water pushed to extremes. Water falling from cliffs. Water sprayed over melons. Water in beads on the blade of a fern. Water in rivulets on a window. Water impelling a current water moving in a kind of languor water moving reflectively from rock to rock.”

The poem ends with an unexpected image of movement and stasis, enlightenment and color: “Water wiggled under a Buddha in jade.” Seattle ought to pass a resolution making “City of Water” its official poem.

A few works in TNIDSOTC, such as “The New Neighbors” and “Monsieur Dupont,” are poetic short stories. “Monsieur Dupont” is an entertaining yarn about a poet with a big house who travels through time (so yes, it’s a sci-fi prose poem too). This paragraph from the poem-story seems to reflect Olson’s own views:

“There are numerous advantages to being a poet. Poets can work at home. It may be to one’s advantage to go out into the world occasionally to seek imagery and wisdom, but on balance, the information that goes into a poem is not limited to the debris and data of external reality. Much of what goes into a poem is spun from the silk of one’s own mind.”

In addition to the stories and poems about things, TNIDSOTC also has a few works that respond to art. “Miro’s Blues” concerns a series of large paintings (Blue I, II, III) by the Spanish surrealist and is especially impressive. For almost ten pages Olson puts the paintings under a microscope and launches reveries about what he sees. Here’s an excerpt about Blue II; typical for Olson, its associational train is both focused and freewheeling:

“Running diagonally across the canvas, from right to left, is a thin black line. It is barely perceptible. It is so thin and delicate that it assumes the power of eternity. A skeleton trumpeting death. The joy of candy. Spray from a rock. Electricity in lemons. A head full of heaven.”

TNIDSOTC also has a few purely autobiographical poems. The book’s title piece is six long paragraphs concerning B.B. King heard at a distance, seeing the Rolling Stones on French TV, the spin of information on CNN, classified ads for sex, the movie version of Julius Caesar, the meaning of “that delicious space we call fiction,” and, yes, the night Olson dropped Shakespeare (the heavy Riverside edition, accidentally) on his cat. This last scenario may cause alarm, but without giving anything away I can assure everyone that no animal was harmed in the making of the poem.

Another autobiographical poem is “Philip Lives: A Lament for Lamantia.” Written after the San Francisco surrealist’s 2005 death, it is a moving remembrance and celebration of a poet who Olson obviously greatly admires. (Olson’s poetic and aesthetic pantheon includes many innovators; he has published poems or essays acknowledging the importance of Rimbaud, Stein, Ashbery, Mac Low, Dylan (Tarantula), and Dubuffet, among others.) “Philip Lives” also shows how Olson allows his impulsive poetic energy to take over. Here’s a paragraph from near the start of the poem; notice how its simple directness pivots and takes off:

“Philip lived and breathed poetry. He called poetry a miracle in words. Which is precisely what it is. A miracle in words. Rhapsodies of pain passionate wavelengths tortured minerals sublimated into bubbling autonomy. Delicious anomalies paradisiacal pancakes morning prayer in the bowl of dawn. Fireworks in Mexican villages. The aroma of dragons. Analogues parallels pantisocratic parakeets.”

TNIDSOTC also has poems that are philosophical reveries (for example, “A Bee Is a Predicate With Wings”). It also has poems that begin as one type of poem (a Ponge-like piece, for example) but then bend or twist into something else. Olson is unpredictable even within the poems themselves.

The majority of the poems in TNIDSOTC don’t fit into the categories already discussed, or perhaps any category at all. I call these unclassifiable works “out there.” The term is used as shorthand for the poems’ singular wildness and nonconformity. Olson in “The Fabric of Fabrication” writes that “anything can be constructed out of words.” In the “out there” poems he shows just how immeasurable and mysterious “anything” can be when built with language in the free play of imagination.

In the “out there” poems, sentences usually have no overt connection to one another, and the same can be true of at least some words within the sentences. “Meniscus,” a more or less typical example of the “out there” poems, begins as follows:

“The flamboyance of trout awakens the cadence of water. It is a symptom of birch. Piano and rocking chair confirm the belt of Orion. The fungus did to the salami what the salami did to the harmonica of fable. It became a scrap of royalty, an amaryllis by the bay. Everything turned quiet as a mountain trumpet.”

The poem continues in this way for more than a page. Olson relentlessly introduces images and associations, stretching and re-inventing language and meaning.

Some readers will be put off by the “out there” poems’ mix of wild energy and experiment. Those looking for messages or logical development will be disappointed. Olson at least gives fair warning to readers in a few sentences towards the end of “Delinquent Circuitry,” the first poem in the book. “Do you seek meaning and wisdom in a poem?,” he asks, and then writes, “I seek the occurrence of sound in protein. In propulsion. In bas-relief.”

The only way to take these “out there” poems are on their own terms. Readers able to love them as they are -- with their sui generis energetic oddness, indeterminancy, freedom and occasional warts -- will find them compelling and fun. They are uncompromising invigorating adventures into the possible. Each poem is “a leopard of thought moving . . . through a jungle of words.” That’s a quotation from Olson’s “This Other World: An Essay On Artistic Autonomy,” a seven page essay on his poetics which ends the book (and from which the quotations in the first paragraph of this review are taken).

All the poems in TNIDSOTC are marked by an almost otherworldly richness of language. Not rich in an overly-luxurious or heavy way, like caviar or chocolate mousse, but something far more nutritious and necessary. Olson’s prose poems are mother’s milk for healthy imaginations. His sentences are full of life. Life that is eruptive, wiggly, maniacal, and unquantifiable, to again borrow words Olson himself uses, in “This Other World,” to describe his writing.

Olson writes in “Free Will Is Not A Profession” that “astonishing coincidences surge ceaselessly everywhere.” His dedication to this aspect of our existence, especially as it manifests within language itself, animates his writing. Olson’s sentences, particularly in the “out there” poems, are full of surprising chance encounters between words and images. “Values in the egret city were such flippers as to hair the swells with suites of honeyed obscurity,” the first sentence of “Other Than Carrots,” is a typical example.

Occasionally, the surge of coincidences comes so fast that sentences are pared down to a word or two or three. The last part of a paragraph in “A Bee Is a Predicate With Wings,” for example, has a sentence of conventional length (“An aperture in the mind dilates into orchards and monkeyshines”) and then the following: “Resolute buccaneers. Rope and canvas. Mermaids. Fiddles. Verbs.” This staccato not only drums up rhythmic variety but also serves as an object lesson of the astonishing surge that nourishes Olson’s poems.

Olson only sparingly uses certain of the poet’s tools, such as metaphor and simile. But when he does, watch out! “Time is but a jackknife between mayhem and rhapsody,” Olson asserts in “Native Emulsion.” In “Absorption Spectrum” he writes, “Reading is like pouring a famished eye on a page of fluorescence and ore.” Pierre Reverdy, who counseled poets to bring together the most distant and distinct realities, surely would approve.

One tool not used sparingly is sound. Sound may be the outstanding feature of TNIDSOTC. Most of Olson’s poems beg to be read aloud. The sounds are varied and can be huge. The first sentence of “The Conservation of Strangeness” reads, “It is keen and convincing to quiver a who.” I’ve been repeating that aloud to myself and friends for weeks now. I love how the hard consonance and other alliterations resolve into a hoot-owl exhalation: “It is keen and convincing to quiver a who.”

Olson unleashes an onomatopoeic ornithological alliteration for the ages in “The New Neighbors,” a lovely long rant about the people who moved into the apartment upstairs. Near the end of the poem he describes the noises he hears, including the mating calls and snoring of frogs (the new neighbors are quite unusual), and then writes:

“To this was added the cacophony of birds. Thousands of birds. Golden-rumped tinker barbets, Burchell’s coucals, Klass’s cuckoos, spotted dikkops, purple-crested louries, and tambourine doves.”

The extraordinary vigor of this passage is emblematic of how words rock and sing in TNIDSOTC as a whole.

With its variety and number of poems, overall length, and richness of language, TNIDSOTC is massive and dense. It can take weeks to take in its many pieces. This may discourage readers. These days, a poetry book is commonly a short chap or a 100 page or less perfect-bound edition. Although I sometimes prefer a quick hit of a writer’s work, or a longer focused collection, I am grateful that Olson published this profuse potpourri of prose poetry. It’s a book to read not for day or a week, but a season or two, and to re-read for a long, long time.

John Olson has earned a measure of recognition in his hometown of Seattle. Two years ago he received a “genius award” from the city’s weekly newspaper, and currently his writing notebooks are on display at the University of Washington’s Henry Museum. But elsewhere his work is not nearly as well appreciated. This is partly due to the fact that Olson was a late bloomer in terms of publication. His first book (a chap) did not appear until just before his 50th birthday. Next year, he will turn 60. I hope he has a very long life. His poems, I believe, most certainly will.

*****

Steven Fama lives in San Francisco and recently became eligible to join AARP. He reads lots and lots of poetry.

THE END OF RUDE HANDLES by JEN TYNES

2006-11-30T23:51:00.000-08:00

ELIZABETH KATE SWITAJ Reviews

The End of Rude Handles by Jen Tynes
(Red Morning Press, 2006)

In The End of Rude Handles, Jen Tynes faces the problem of presenting a coherent picture of a world that's shattered as soon as she tries to explain it or, as she puts it in the poem that precedes Part I ("ALL MAY BE MERGED"), "When I snap pictures tender soars apart at the roots". She attempts to "enfold the brimming object to you" by presenting a series of apparently complete shards connected by more open maps. Small rooms and scenes, which visually resemble traditional short poems, alternate with more open compositions that serve as diagrams of the spaces in between. It's important to look at the relationships between the pieces and pages, because according to the acknowledgments section at the front, this book is to be regarded as a long poem.

The more traditional-appearing poem-pieces on the left-hand pages give us short scenes or spaces--slices of time and space. These spaces range from hopeful to violent with mundane transgressions elevated by Tynes' rich use of language.

As its title implies, "HOUSES ARE STILL STANDING" is the most hopeful section of the long poem. It's a love poem about two people who have passed through a strangely animated landscape. Their journey ends in trust, symbolized by the speaker taking the addressee's hand, despite the disappearance of "solid article[s]".

Violent poems stand out more, some using the color red to connect blood, violence, and passion. In "IT IS NOW AMONG ADULTS", "A stripped switch / / [that] eventually brings blood" and "Little pots / of fire" are contrasted with the gray "crepuscular machine [that] give[s] / out". Only the bloody and burning lasts. Later, after spending ten lines on cheerful neighborhood children and leaving on the lights in "CONVERGING INTO THE GROUPS AND CENTERS", the poet admits

I take a bundle
of sticks and redden
their ankles if they misbehave

It's difficult not to read the Roman fasces into this.

The color red is only implied in the menstrual blood that appears at the start of another, seemingly untitled, section:

Dark splatter
or seep along
my pantleg is animal
in nature

An animal natural implies instinctual violence and sexuality and, once again, this is connected to blood.

Violence, of course, can also be against animals, as in "THE RECOLLECTION OF AN OBJECT FORMED FROM IT":

I watch a cat sleeping

on your chest then tossed
across the sunporch.

The grammatical construction protects the poet from having to name the human perpetrator of this violence and, in doing so, draws the reader's attention to the person who did it.

Finally, violence overlaps with mundane transgressions in "THE KEEN UNPASSIONED BEAUTY OF THE GREAT MACHINE". The three who keep eating the speaker "til gone" add a chill to what would would otherwise be an eccentric picture of someone's odd old grandmother: "Your ornery biddy / saves bones." Alternatively, the presence of a the comical "biddy" makes the transgression of murder or of collecting pieces of the dead mundane.

But there are far more mundane transgressions highlighted and celebrated in this long poem. One section begins with apparent synaesthesia, sight being tasted, since you don't eat lanterns:

Taste of
your supper,
lanterns

are like
that.

but later you realize that it perhaps isn't synaesthesia, as you're presented an act of transgressive eating:

. . . Chew
on good blades,
feast in dry

grass.

Mundane, however, does not mean unimportant. "Between times" mentions the "small business" that one deals with between the more dramatic, apparently important things. Tynes subtly undermines the belief that such commonplace things don't matter by asking "what am I / supposed to cover next?" as "Sashes // ceremoniously gather around" her, suggesting the expected appearance of something "significant", worth putting on stage.

Moreover, even mundane transgressions are significant, because

Even a herd of cattle

on borrowed land
knows dissension, makes eyes.

Every small act of defiance is detectable and can change the attitude of the crowd.

The spaces of such trespasses are stitched together by open field compositions that are brief enough and leave enough blank space to violate the appearance of a traditional volume of poetry. Appropriately, the phrases in these pieces are often the names of quilt designs: "Gentleman's Fancy" and "Sunrise on the Walls of Troy", for instance.

These right-hand page maps start out as simply phrases thrown like guideposts on a mostly blank background, signs in the wilderness between meaning-laden scenes. In the second half of this book (Parts III and IV), the addition of phrases or whole pieces in all caps suggests an increasing distance between sites of meaning--one that requires shouting or telegrams.

The first exception to the pattern of short poem/scene on the left side with diagram on the right comes in the first section and starts with the line "An open box is a signal". This is appropriate enough, given that the break in the pattern consists of the left-hand poem being visually opened up with extra space between lines.

So what is this opening a signal of? If the poem's next line is to be believed-- and since we are in its world, we really have no choice but to believe it--friendship. Friendship is both an opening up (of oneself to another) and a sewing together (of two once more separate individuals). The spaces between lines here give us an opportunity to insert ourselves more fully into the world of the poem. The aspect of being sewn together is represented once again by quilt names and by the next page being, once again, a traditional more put-together poem. Having once entered a poem, the closed-appearing poem includes us rather than excluding us, even as

To pass on

their dialect
Delegates shackle

the tongue.

Meaning being reliant on some degree of shared language, the possibilities thereof must to some degree be limited. Finally, the alternating pattern is reestablished with a diagram leading into Part II.

The second break dedicates a full two page spread before the concluding, eponymous poem, as if that final, as if that long promised goal were more distant from its neighbors than the rest of the slices of Tynes' lush world are. In keeping with the theme of the importance of the mundane, however, this last poem does not stray from the representations of hope, violence, and transgression but rather compresses them all into its final lines:

I burn my own

mark into each animal
long after thinking it.

The mundane act of branding is pondered like a serious transgression: ideas and claims must be thoroughly thought through before being staked out as one's own, especially if the animal has been considered someone else's-- and we have no reason to believe they are not. Moreover, it is inherently violent to brand an animal, as the verb "burn" emphasizes. Nonetheless, the act of branding is full of hope at least for the one who enacts it, as it represents a belief in a future time when that mark will matter to the one who made it.

Tynes does follow this long poem of hopeful, violent, mundane poems that appear traditional stitched together by open field compositions with a statement of poetics, "Ways of Contrariness" that could be taken as an act of branding. But, unlike so many such statements, it never veers into abrasive manifesto and never becomes as painful to the reader as the act of branding is to the subjected animal.

*****

Elizabeth Kate Switaj is a small press poet, an ESL teacher, a kimono copywriter, an ex-expat, an amateur aerial acrobat, a Seattle native, and a Brooklyn resident. She blogs at http://qassandra.livejournal.com

UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by TOM BECKETT (1)

2006-11-30T23:50:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978-2006 by Tom Beckett
(Meritage Press, St. Helena and San Francisco, 2006)

The title of Tom Beckett’s much overdue Selected is revelatory: for in what way are Beckett’s texts “unprotected”? Well, perhaps we can conceive of the notion of “protectedness” in poetry as being a question of that with which the poem surrounds itself: its mode, its means, its audience, its ontology, its reason for being, etc. This cushion, this veritable air-bag, is in the end what allows a poem, any poem, to be read: it is, in short, all which enables us to identify it as a poem, as a certain type of poem, and moreover to read it in a particular way.

Its status and its statute.

Now, whether a poem shows or does not show a certain acquiescence, a compliance with regard to these protective structures, is perhaps the degree of its protectedness. In an important way, this is not to say that such “acquiescence” must necessarily result in conservatism, in New Formalism, in the British Movement or in the School of Quietude, as, for example, such texts as T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are “radical” in certain ways, but may still be seen as relatively “protected”: that is, they are more or less comfortable with their own statute as pieces of writing, of what, finally, they are really trying to do.

Tom Beckett’s poems do not demonstrate this comfort. Tom Beckett’s poems have chosen that dangerous path which consists in the sack and pillage of their own protective structures. And why is this dangerous? What may happen to a poem if it is not surrounded by this veritable condom--the image is Beckett’s –of mode, means, audience, and ontology? (Or rather, if such elements are so dynamic, existing in such a constant state of flux, that they become almost imperceptible, and thus unusable?) Well, simply, such a poem, having thrown off the shackles of its protective structures, runs the risk of not being understood.

Yet the resounding triumph of Beckett’s aesthetic is precisely the fact that these poems are understood. That, all the while refusing to content themselves with being read in one way, all the while writhing and kicking, changing, in true Protean fashion, their form, genre and gender, they remain resolutely, determinably, open.

As, for these poems, “protectedness” is not so much a protective shield as it is a barrier, an imposed limit. “Anything that occurs is a structure” Beckett tells us in the first pages of this deeply rewarding collection, and one has the overwhelming impression that this inevitable structuring of the world--and of writing--is in the end unfortunate. For in order to make sense of reality we must, to a certain extent, restrict it, restrain it, just as we much restrict and restrain language. “A world is not frame”: no, but we need frames, don’t we, somewhat, in order to understand the world? And poetry, to a certain extent, is “frame”: as Beckett remarks, stanza is room in Italian, and even the very page, like Greenberg’s flat surface, is an imposed limit . . . For this reason, Beckett is extremely interested in the question of limits, barriers, horizons, walls: by all that which puts limits on our lived, and poetic, experiences, by imposing upon them a (necessary?) structure.

So what, then, does Beckett advise us to do . . . “Sleep in long unbuttoning templates” . . . This beautiful phrase is in the end quite explicit: templates, frames, may be necessary for us in order to initially make sense of things--language and world--but they are in the end mere templates which may be “unbuttoned”. The adjective, charged with Beckett’s usual playful eroticism, also has a certain Steinian echo to it, and we see this “unbuttoning” in the very poem in which this statement occurs. For this poem, “Frames”, is apparently a list-poem, but we soon remark something which occurs so very often in Tom Beckett: the poem does not obey its own rules! It does not do what its told! It writhes and kicks! As for some ten lines there is one sentence per line, one sentence per numbered-point: then it is as if, tired of its own protectedness, of its fixed definition as a certain type of poem, the poem decides, “Basta”, and begins to break down, or rather, to break out.

For Tom Beckett’s poems, like children playing, make their rules up as they go along: and in this way they are the perfect counter-point to such schools as Oulipo who attempt to impose a pre-existing framework of constraints, to which the poem must subsequently simply adhere. But Beckett’s poems are living organisms; they see what they are becoming, and maybe they do not like what they are becoming, so they change, or attempt to change: their form, their audience, their pronouns, even their gender.

Like us.

But there is a rewarding complexity, another side entirely, to these questions, as: “Partitions are lovely sometimes.” It is this “sometimes” which is important. For Beckett is not an anarchist, is not an advocate of the utter dissolution of all points of reference. The poems– again like children, and I think the analogy is useful –often return to known structures in order to feel comforted again: they are not entirely free radicals, they simply change the rules if they need to, and obey them when it suits.

“Pronouns articulate indefensible space”: this is the space of the poem, indefensible because of the dynamic nature of language. Beckett loves altering the meaning of phrases solely by changing one syntactical element: an article or pronoun, which shows that language is not constructed solely, or even principally, around its “powerful” signifiers, its verbs and nouns--words which do and denote respectively--but more perhaps around its apparently innocuous pronominal and prepositional bits and bobs: “I”, “you”, “to”, “for” . . .

The result of this attention is that one is constantly “misreading” Beckett: which is, finally, simply a proof of the fact that one is reading him. For example, on the mostly very beautiful pages of “The Nude Sentience”, I read “Property is theft” instead of “Propriety is theft”, and “Meaning, in fact, is synonymous with context” instead of “Meaning, in fact, is synonymous with contest”. These confusions are, of course, subtly intentional, but they are nevertheless disturbing; for they explicitly illustrate the extent to which we often read, instead of the “real word” upon the page, rather what we expect--or most want?--to encounter. And this feeling of unease is, of course, a very good thing . . .

“Words as reruns”: no usage, Beckett knows, is a first usage, and his series of subtle variations on words, “context” as “contest”, puts into haut-relief this rerun quality of words, their adaptability, indeed their recyclability. No word is a priori: “all language leaks” . . .

There is so much in Beckett: self, space, sound, sex, gender, mimesis, ekphrasis, praxis. Windows and walls. He is a poet of abundance--with the faults too inherent in this abundant project. (Some of the conceptual pieces, for example, those which Beckett calls “repetitive” or “modulatory”, and which in the old high tradition of conceptual L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, sometime just go on much too long. After six pages, we have understood the variations, and their constant morphing and remorphing adds little to our understanding, other than screaming I AM BEING CONCEPTUAL.) But we forgive these brief moments of perhaps personal ennui and concentrate rather on the fact that sometimes Beckett is an aphorist the equal of Karl Kraus or René Char, sometimes a great pornographer, and always funny: “Does anyone out there really like their plot?”

A final question: why is this book so late? Why wasn’t this given to us ten years ago? For the fact that Unprotected Texts is Tom Beckett’s first full-length book of poems is indicative of a surprising paradigm in the way literary reputations today are made and consolidated. For Tom Beckett seems, since the 1980s at least, so much a part of the landscape of late 20th century poetics: from his seminal decade editing The Difficulties to his various chapbooks, blogs, guest-editorial stints and appearance in In the American Tree, his invaluable contributions are undeniable: they just haven’t yet made up that object we call “book.”

In his interview with Crag Hill and Thomas Fink which concludes the volume, Beckett articulates the understandable feeling that: “If I’ve despaired at times at the little attention my work has received, it hasn’t been because of a big ego. Rather I’ve always hungered to be part of ‘the conversation’, part of a thread in the fabric of our time’s poetry writing weave.” Let’s simply say then that Tom Beckett is now resolutely a part of this fabric, and may indeed prove to be one of its most vibrant filaments.

*****

Nicholas Manning is Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Strasbourg, France, currently writing his doctoral thesis on rhetoric and sincerity in post-war European and American poetry. His poems, articles, translations and reviews have appeared in such places as Verse, Fascicle, Free Verse, Dusie, The Argotist, BlazeVox, MiPoesias, Eratio, Cipher Journal, CrossXConnect, Shampoo, among others. This year he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by TOM BECKETT (2)

2006-11-30T23:45:00.000-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978 – 2006 by Tom Beckett
(Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, 2006)

Wow! What a spin! This book is performance poetry in print -- I felt I had to rush upstairs, tie my hair back in a severe chignon and pull on a black turtleneck and Capri pants a la Hepburn, before sitting down to write about the sizzling poetry the collection contained. A volume that influences, imposes identities, whose use of the page is as of a stage, it exists in dark rooms, wreathed in pungent French cigarette smoke and smelling of cheap wine. How else could you describe the impression left by two square shaped pages of nothing but the line "How do normal people BLANK?" in The Nude Sentience repeated over and over again.

I will confess to being unfamiliar with Beckett’s work. His name I know, but if I had come across any of his work, it had not left any impression on me. What intrigued me to request a review copy of his book (and yes I know, I am a complete sucker for gimmicks) was the publicity stunt bookmark with its EXTRA LARGE condom attached!

To say that this was an interesting collection to review is an understatement. Its playful experimentation challenges boundaries that are placed upon linguistics.

The Domain of Qualification

What can not be possessed

The faculty of reception

Sex and thought are identical – only reversed
--from "Interruptions"

As a genre it allowed me to appreciate, more, poetry that does not conform to the particular forms and ideas about poetry that I found myself to be biased towards. Beckett scatters words all over the page in carefully considered mayhem; the challenge for the reader is to make sense of what he is doing, to appreciate his exploring new avenues. The avant-garde continues with more obviously philosophical poems:

What
is sex
but a language

game
written
sighs, gasps, grunts

and
the commingling
fluids we leaked.
--from "7. Wittgenstein Improvisations"

The collection’s expedition into the crevices that make up Beckett’s brain sometimes make you flounder in an abyss and at other times happily skim along a surface beneath which lurks multiple interpretations for a downfall. I particularly enjoyed a surreal plateau entitled the “Little Book of Zombie Poems”.

Zombies have
no Inside.

They are
our projections

melded with
their reflections.
--from "Zombie Psycho-physiology"

This little section of poems about zombies tickled my fancy with the multiple approaches Beckett made to this topic. Completely disregarding the horror stigma attached to zombies, Beckett views them from all sides as normal rational “beings” creating an intensely interesting and arresting group of poems within the larger collection. A long interview at the back of Unprotected Texts reveals Beckett to us warts and all. Reading it, you get a sense that the poems truly reflect the man as he is, and this makes the collection all the more intriguing, adding to its air of performance poetry -- rather than explaining any of it!! The book becomes a history of his personal quest for the poetry that best expresses what he wants to say.

Unprotected Texts: Selected Poems 1978 – 2006 is a collection to challenge even the experienced experimental poetry audience. It creates thoughts the reader would never have imagined having. As such, it fulfils an important function in challenging our brains. Buy it -- you may just like it.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds has published many reviews of poetry both in print and on the net. Formerly the Poetry Editor for feminist literary ezine Moondance.org, she has recently left that position in order to concentrate more on her writing. Living in the beautiful English county town of Shrewsbury, Fionna continues to draw inspiration from all around her and look for more ways in which to develop a wider appreciation of poetry in herself and others.

LITTLE EASE by AARON MCCOLLOUGH

2006-11-30T23:40:00.000-08:00

ANDREA BAKER Reviews

Little Ease by Arron McCollough
(Ahsahta Press, 2006)

In many ways, Little Ease troubles me. McCollough writes as a distant, but psychologically aware and keenly watchful thinker. He renders a subtle moral angst with phenomenal control and depth of feeling, but, here, even feeling seems to be navigated by a removed intellect’s, “cold humors,” as the breath roams disconnected, “above the city’s face far from the body.” I am not a reader easily sympathetic to such intellectualized remove, but I do find that if I invest myself and allow the poems their speculative voice, they unpack a startling sadness and awe: “Old wobbly world tearing down you make me hate me/ You fling light around your dark flung fill.”

Little Ease was a small (4’ square) cell in the Tower of London, which denied captives sufficient room to stand or lay down, instead forcing them to remain in a cramped squat. Little ease, the cell, is an apt image for Little Ease, the book, which foregrounds a quiet sense of constraint imposed by the speaker’s distrust for the physical, sensory world. For instance, in the book’s opening poem, we are asked to, “Consider the perspective boxes of Samuel Van Hoogenstraten.” Hoogenstraten worked for a time in Rembrandt's atelier where he grew fascinated by light and perspective. His boxes are diorama-like structures of realistic interiors, rich with shadow, light, and rooms seen through painted doors. McCollough asks us to consider these boxes, and then asks, “where the painted light falls and where the painted shadows crouch… what do you consider?” His angst is both existential and ontological. He seems confounded by both the subjectivity of experience and the object that has spurred experience.

This restlessness is a major theme and one of the many way in which McCollough echoes George Herbert. The second section of Little Ease is titled "Superliminare," the Latin term for a joist above a door or window, and the title of Herbert’s poem of mystical warning to those approaching his poetic altar.

McCollough’s Superliminare poems, though, are domestic with “household gods” who smile at “the man… tying the woman’s shoe// in the street.” These poems have upbeat, staccato rhythms, a good deal of formal play (another Herbert trait), and playfully address constraint in passages like, “I am like my marriage// which is like// a good war” or “in lying down// again I offer god// an image of my death.”

I can only think that McCollough has intended these poems of fragmentary real world grounding as a threshold. The next sequence is written in the voice of Jan Vandermeer, a character for which I can find no reference, so I assume to be fictional. These are poems in which, “the light ignites itself// reveals the signature of distance/ the silhouette/ inside the trunk.” Each line becomes a lyrical, melodic structure. We are given the instruction “As no one asks the threshold how the light works// Just saunter through and halleloo.” We’re told “the world is fair// And foul it reaches for me reaching for it.” Here, again, we have that distance. We learn that the speaker and the world reach for one another, but their reaching only highlights the strain of their interactions.

In the following section, "Sonnets Manques," the playfulness extends into humor:

and you know x           the neighbor cat           got hit

one cat-long wound           x           turned upon itself

in the right lane           (take away x what’s left)

the street that runs from Flint to Bowling Green

However, both the precise staccato and graceful lyricism of earlier sections are gone--instead, poems are presented awkwardly without internal musical structures. “Manques” translates from the French as “lacking,” so I assume this styling is entirely intentional. Here, I admire McCollough’s facility and control, but am unsure of what I can take away from many of the more rambling passages such as:

the task of taking on a skin like rose

we’ve tried to grow them           petal and stem

are skin like taking on a film of soot

Detroit           the city of roses and phlemgm

What color           Jesus Detroit           what resolve

After these ‘lacking’ sonnets, we face the multi-voiced "From the Restoration." It is in this section that Little Ease stakes its claim. Here, when reading, I find myself looking away from the text and into my white walls, stunned by what an impeccable work of art this text has become, but also exhausted by the large effort required to make my way through.

The poems are now very bare, words are scattered across the page with no steady music to carry the reader through. Instead, distinct, disembodied voices come and go in bracketed, half-bracketed, and un-bracketed passages as themes return, expand, and then drift. Take only the first page, rendered here as best I am able:

little ward

          [ my urchin spirit]

[::which is the] Fonder choice sun? shade?
Awe? Ache?

[if Adept Lu chooses one, how can the other be wrong?]

My task
Work

[,or charge,]

          li t t

           le

                     ease[::]

To the space I was           am now           in

in a column [my narrative excuse]

bred in Fetters under
the labor
under

[the rail between the stiles]

Here we have bondage: “little ward,” “My task/ Work,” “the space I was am now in,” which I presume to mean the body, further labeled, “a column,” as if the body’s walls are restrictive. As “Fetters” is capitalized, I googled it and found that they are a leading manufacturer of bondage equipment. The bracketed material functions as self-reflexive editorial comment, “[my narrative excuse],” and “[or charge],” or, with the mention of Adept Lu, a Taoist leader reportedly born around A.D. 796, they also stand as entirely other strands of thought.

These weavings are overwhelming, but fascinatingly well-coordinated as the text both addresses and demonstrates constriction. Elsewhere, the theme of bondage is expanded to consider the puzzle-like constraints and freedoms of married life, “[I] gave my [shelter] to a woman.”

We have only one short passage that approaches a place of rest:

This only hope relieves me, that strife
Is another[r] name
Fo[r]
Worship

in this light

elected / pains and slaveries

Toward the end of this section, we have no resolve, but what is perhaps a proposal for alleviating some degree of suffering:

Home

          plant it round with

        Acts
          Or sweet Lyric Song

The final section, "Penalty," demands much less from the reader. Many of these poems are titled, “Letters from Prison,” or “Prisoner’s Wreath.” Interestingly, there is no sense of guilt or wrong-doing in the prisoner’s voice, which is in keeping with the concept of living as its own prison.

Herbert is again at play here as the “Prisoner’s Wreath” poems reflect Herbert’s “A Wreath.” But, where Herbet’s poem identifies his “crooked winding ways” with the wrapping of the wreath, McCollough is confined within the circular structure: “This charcoal way surrounds my spot in dust.” Herbert offers the physical wreath to God as a temporary gesture, until he is able to live, “straight as a line, and ever tend to thee,” and, “give thee a crown of praise.” McCollough doesn’t address himself to a personal God or any singular other. Instead, he offers a generalized, “Leisure here at my expense try this leisure,” and I’m reminded again of the earlier,

This only hope relieves me, that strife
Is another[r] name
Fo[r]
Worship

My own reading of Little Ease is not yet final. I expect it will be several months before it migrates from bedside table to bookshelf. For now, I remain simultaneously engaged by and ill at ease with its methodology. It would be easy to point out that such a work does not intend my ease, but I’m not ready to dismiss my desire for more connection through gesture and emotion and less through a demonstration of the intellect’s constraints.

*****

Andrea Baker was the recipient of the 2004 Slope Editions Book Prize for her first book, like wind loves a window. She is also the author of the chapbooks gilda (Poetry Society of America, 2004) and gather (moneyshot editions, 2006). Raised in Florida, she now resides in Brooklyn, NY where her apartment is small and entropy upsets her. She maintains a blog at andreabaker.blogspot.com.

ON EARTH: LAST POEMS AND AN ESSAY by ROBERT CREELEY

2006-11-30T23:35:00.000-08:00

JIM MCCRARY Reviews

On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay by Robert Creeley
(University of California Press, 2006)

First is the size and maybe it is the black and white of the jacket -- but just reminds me of the Pocket Poet series from City Lights Bookshop in 1960’s. You know we are all imprinted with that edition of HOWL. Anyway, nice the size of this edition. And a great painting by longtime Creeley collaborator and friend Francesco Clemente on the cover. Creeley did respect the long tradition of friendship and working with a painter. Nice touch in the end. This collection of "Last Poems and an Essay”, according to intro, come from a folder Creeley had with him during a residence in Marfa, Texas. These the works then finished just prior to death. One immediate thing about flipping through this book was discovering that three poems in this small collection are for and to Ed Dorn, Paul Blackburn and John Wieners. And to read these poems and realize the love and what else...adoration, respect Creeley felt towards them so late at the end of his life. And to realize that he chose these three men to write to...not Olson, not Zukoskey, not Duncan or Corman, not any others. Well, personally, fine with me because coming up like I did through the poetics of mid-twenth century -- these are the guys that I could read. Not Pound (who knew history), ditto Olson (who cared about history), not the academics (who studied)...not Snyder even though we all tried, you know, the Boy Scout outside, hiking and Zen stuff. No in the end, and I really do not think I am all that unique here the raucous, city of Paul Blackburn on a NYC subway or in McSorleys and John Weiners bedrock, down alley Boston or Dorns fucked up cowboy stance. Ah....those guys were poets. Well, too, for me, there was Kyger no less then any of them and other women for sure. But not in this book. (Aside: Also nice to see within the Whitman essay Creeley points to one Gregory Corso, who, in my humble opinion was the ONLY member of anything worth calling the New York School of Poetry. Sorry all you Friends of Frank etc...but Corso was the only one who did it and deserves it.)

There is also great surprise and, well, head spinning reality that many of these last poems from Creeley are rhyming lyrical almost classical in there reading. That is a surprise. Something in that to ponder. And not that they are less to read. Oh No. Consider:

The Ball

Room for one and all
around the gathering ball,
to hold the sacred thread,
to hold and wind and pull.

Sit in the common term.
All hands now move as one.
The work continues on.
The task is never done.

Channeling Ms. Emily? Who knows, but there it is and wholly Creeley. And to find very funny anti-war poem which is not quite a nursery rhyme in form.

And there are the classic Creeley poems to ponder over:

Saying Something

If, as one says, one says
something to another,
does it go on and on then
without apparent end?

Or does it only become talk,
balked by occasion, stopped
because it never got started,
was said to no one?

What’s up with that? Is this Creeley perhaps contemplating a past poem that perhaps became, for better or worse, his most well known “Drive he said....”. Was that poem simply “...said to no one?” Ack, who knows. Doesn’t matter. Important that we have this new poem to carry.

And then the essay of the title: "Reflections on Whitman in Age." Queer title but Creeley begins an explanation in the opening sentence. “In age one is oneself reflective, both of what it has been to live and of what that act has become.....”. Perhaps the “in age” reference is something from the Northeast lingo like “down east”. Who knows. But this essay is for sure Creeley thinking of his position in life and surrounded by Whitman and some others (Keats, etc). Creeley looks at Whitman’s attachment to the sea as a common thread thru his lifetime writing, among other notions. Looking, Creeley is, to see how Whitman manages in late life. Here a quote that says much:

“The roll and turn of the physical waves, their ceaseless repetition, the seeming return of each so particular, the same and yet not the same -- this is the “call”, recall (recoil), he has come to, an indeterminant spillof memories “By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a nothing.” But one hopes to have been included even so, to have mattered, taken place, been part of, done -- as one says in this utterly merciless country -- something."

This is a striking bit of writing and perfect to end this “slim volume”. Something to carry in ones pocket, ones hand. Something for us to have. Oh sure, the collected, selected, all of everything he ever wrote in 4 volumes from California will appear for just a few hundred bucks.........can’t stop that can we. Good for the future graduate students I suppose...but for now, for we here....to find this group of poems and text by Robert Creeley as a final gift.

Oh Robert, you have done something and it matters.

*****

Jim McCrary lives with his wife, painter, Sue Ashline in Lawrence, Kansas. His latest chapbook from Really Old Gringo Press is titled: Oh Miss Mary and speaks to the real life of Miss Mary Magdeline -- who IMHO is a true Holy Ghost.

SAINT GHETTO OF THE LOANS by GABRIEL POMERAND

2006-11-30T23:31:00.000-08:00

DAVID-BAPTISTE CHIROT Reviews

Saint Ghetto of the Loans by Gabriel Pomerand. Translated by Michael Kaspar and Bhamati Viswanathan, Afterword by M. Kaspar. 118 pp, 50 of them illustrated rebuses.
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Lost Literature Series #1, 2006)

LIKE A ROSETTA STONE Anarkeyologies of the Future in a Lost Book’s Return to its Living Avant-Garde

For Roberto Bolano (1953-2003): Tireless investigator, participant in, inventor of, and lover of historical and his own fictional--especially obscure--avant-gardes, poets, books, lives.
For Michael Moynihan: historian, documentarian, writer/artist/musician among international undergrounds.
For Tim Gaze:
working with Lettrism’s futures, visual poet & publisher

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels, one day I will tell your latent birth
--“Voyelles/Vowels”, Arthur Rimbaud

I want it understood that only the avant-garde of the intelligence itself preoccupies me, and not all the schools this avant-garde fits into. I dread the day when the name of the invention--which is a phenomenon of commodification--overshadows the real search for transgression . . .
Throughout my life, I’ve had no other goal than to be an extremist, at that battlefront which alarm clocks suggest even as they lure us into the traps of life.
--Gabriel Pomerand, in Saint Ghetto of the Loans

An Anarkeyological Time Line:
1798: Rosetta Stone found by French soldiers in ruined wall of an old fort. The Greek writing, one of three on the Stone, is a decree passed by priests in Memphis in 196 B.C.

1824: Jean-Francois Champollian, working from an inked and rubbed copy of the Stone’s texts, publishes book announcing his breakthrough in translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. He write that this complex system “is both symbolic and phonetic in the same text, the same phrase ,the same word”, opening a method to be put to use for visual/sound poetries of 20th Century.

1905 (ca.) Fellow painter Henri “Le Dounaier” Rousseau tells Picasso: “We are the two Masters of our epoch--you in the Egyptian Style, and I in the modern.”

1949: Cairo, Egypt. The Lettrist artist/poet/”Archangel” Gabriel Pomerand marries Roxane Chiniara, daughter of King Farouk’s Greek insurance agent.

1950: Pomerand publishes Saint Ghetto des Prets (Saint Ghetto of the Loans) in which he announces “We’re the new Egyptians.”

1954: Memphis, in its Tennesee manifestation. Elvis Presley begins recording his first singles for Sun Records. It is frequently noted retrospectively that the young Isidore Isou, founder of Lettrism in 1942/46, looks amazingly like the young Elvis Presley.

The history of the avant-gardes of the last 150 years--as any rummager and gleaner among the “dustbins of history” will tell you--is an immense, rhizomatic, international labyrinth of brightly lit passages, flickering alleys and obscure footpaths. Some are short cuts between well lit squares, some deviations from the walkways in shadowy parks, others weed-grown cul-de-sacs. There are cracked decaying Utopian playgrounds, mutant Maldororean organisms surging through shattered barrios, industrial wastelands in chemically etched ruins, art brut assemblages arising amidst junked conceptual and technological Installations, long “lost” manuscripts floating in the puddles and dust of forgotten publishers’ cellars, erasures of book print and wall grafittied palimpsests fighting their way free of enchaining imposed texts and whitewashings. And that’s in just the urban areas. Beyond lie the thousands of rural groups with their creations-solitaries, Bronte-esque families, communes, nomadic bands, all with their astounding outpourings. The life stories and works of untold numbers of as yet unsung creators lie patiently awaiting the light of a future--which can always be right this very minute--in which they will receive momentous recognition, or at very least a promising footnote. This is the stuff of legends, of myth, where the realities of historical discoveries, rediscoveries and fictions like those of the brilliant Chilean writer Roberto Bolano meet. (In Bolano’s works both historical obscure poets and movements and imaginary ones exist--each one heightening and illuminating, or corroding and making more sinister the other.)

Yet even in the age of the internet, in which one can electronically search and stalk the most obscure movements and figures, the barrier of translation still makes the views of the labyrinth differ from language to language, creating time lags and gaps in their “discovery”, reception and impact. And within a language, geography creates its own barriers--an avant-garde will be born, grow, flourish, disappear or continue into the present--be a well known feature of a landscape, a local culture, and yet not far off or to another language group, or dialect of the same one, be obscure, precious and remote.

Such has been for the most part, with a few exceptions, until relatively recently the history and influence of French Lettrism in the USA and other Anglophone countries. Some print and e-texts in English tend to either overexagerate Lettrism’s “obscurity” and “neglected”-ness, or, in some cases, take the opposite tack and over-inflate its historico-political role in 1960’s France and influence on other movements outside France. [1.] Ironically, this mimics the principal of “the minimum and the maximum” as laid down and employed by Lettrism’s still very much alive and productive founder, Isidore Isou. In his 1949 manifesto La Soulevement de la jeunesse (The Uprising of Youth), Isou had laid the groundwork for future events by being the first to propose the demographic of youth in itself as a potential revolutionary force. This was picked up on by the Situationists and other groups, developed further and put into action in Sixties France. While not one of the detonators of the explosions, Isou had already planted the time bomb awaiting the detonators’ putting it to use. As always, the more one learns of the actual history and works of Lettrism, the more interesting and inspiring than its minimal/maximal urban legend versions it proves to be.

This makes the bi-lingual appearance this year of Gabriel Pomerand’s legendary and very rare 1950 visual rebuses/textual booklength prose poem Saint Ghetto of the Loans a truly major event. It provides a kind of physical Rosetta Stone (in a doubled way) for each reader’s further anarkeyological researches into the past and living world of Lettrism, as well as inspiration for artists/poets in many media to do verbivisivoci work in and outside the range of media the Lettrists continue very much to work in. Ugly Duckling Presse couldn’t have picked a better book, in an excellent translation by Michael Kaspar and Bhamati Viswanathan, to begin its Lost Literature Series with.

Especially exciting is to finally be able to see/read the entire fifty pages of Pomerand’s rebuses, until now known only in reproductions of a few pages. What makes Saint Ghetto different from other Lettrist texts using rebuses is that side by side with them is their original French text (with above it the English). This is the book’s Rosetta Stone aspect for French readers--other Lettrist texts using rebuses came without their texts. Even those who read just a little French will find a great deal of pleasure and wild humor in seeing how Pomerand finds ways visually and via sonic puns to express a word, sometimes syllable by syllable, sometimes syllable by letter by syllable, sometimes letter by letter, sometimes all at once. [Editor's Note: You can see some images of Pomerand's rebuses at David Baptiste-Chirot's Blog.]

Even if you read no French, it is astonishing going though the pages and looking at the profusion of sometimes familiar signs and images, and ones invented and unknown, their arrangements in patterns that change from black and white reversals of fore/backgrounds and changings in the directions of the forms forming the “lines” of the writing. It’s like watching a movie from another dimension. Without any known rules to hold you back, you can start using the signs to create your own words and sounds to go with them, and create your own Lettrist performance. Since solving rebuses in your own language is quite a bit like playing charades, it’s not hard to imagine all the things you can dream up with the unknown linguistic meanings of signs in the way of sounds and actions!

And there you have arrived at one of the key ideas in Lettrist meta- and hypergraphics--the use of signs without meanings already known, bearing the potential for new languages, new ways of acting and being, a continually renewing creativity. This is also a key to Lettrism’s enduring existence and potential today, regardless of how well or poorly it is known.

Very often when a movement or artist little known outside its own culture is translated and disseminated into another language and culture, the potentialities their works unleashed in their own culture find a new soil to grow in. The impact can be quite great in all sorts of surprising and unexpected ways. Two or three years ago Tim Gaze, the Australian visual poet and print publisher of asemic, (and now also the on-line Avance, e-books of asemic and Lettrist-influenced work) sent me a letter and some visual poems by post, in which he wrote that from his view, Lettrism was what offered the most towards creating the future in visual poetry. I think Saint Ghetto may help Tim’s “gaze” into the future find many forms of realization.

Lettrism sprang from the head of Isidore Isou (Jean-Isidore Goldstein, 1925--) in the 1940’s in his native Romania, in a most appropriate way: via a revelation caused by a creative misreading. On the 19th of March 1942, Isou was reading a text by Keyserling in which he misread “ le poete dilate les vocables”. Since “vocables” in Romanian means “voyelles” (vowels) in French, the 16 year old Isou read the sentence as “le poet dilate les voyelles”. In a state of inspiration, Isou immediately wrote his first Lettrist manifesto and texts.

Inspired by the example of his fellow Jewish Romanian poet-PR man the Dadaist Tristan Tzara before him, Isou went to liberated Paris with a suit case of manuscripts, ready and driven to spread the New Tidings. In 1945 at a Saint-Germain soup kitchen for Jewish refugee orphans, he encountered the 19 year old French-born Pomerand, who became his “first disciple and friend”. Isou meant “disciple” in spirit and letter both: he brought with him a novel, soon to appear as his second published work, called l’Agregation d’un nom et d’un messie; “The Making of a Name, The Making of A Messiah”. Gabriel’s self-appointed role was to become the “cantor” and later the “Archangel” of Lettrism.

Isou in those days was a brilliant and very convincing speaker--a thread-bare, completely unknown refugee, at barely twenty he was able to get himself a contract with the prestigious publishing house Gallimard, much to the envy and shock of many insiders--and his effect on Pomerand was profound. In the Introduction to Saint Ghetto Pomerand writes:

I have to say it was Isou who set loose this new phenomenon that manifests as my understanding . . . we wandered the streets together, deep in debate, and he filled my head with a mess of ideas in which the surprise of youthful poetry, of theater, of erotology, of philosophy, of metagraphics, and perhaps, one day, of medicine, was expressed succinctly, too fast and mixed up for me to grasp anything except that which thrilled me the most: verse.

Isou’s ideas were set forth in the first manuscript he submitted to Gallimard, “Introduction to a New Poetry and New Music from Charles Baudelaire to Isidore Isou” Rather than the will to survive, Isou posited the will to create as the fundamental human drive. And since creation was God’s work--via creation humans can become gods. Was not Isou the messiah himself a living proof? (His 1950 metagraphic work is entitled Diaries of the Gods.) God-like creating humans could make a new paradise on earth, designing and constructing the architectures, arts, sciences, philosophies of what Rimbaud had foreseen and foretold as “the Splendid Cities”.

Isou’s basic principle regarding creation is that the arts go through alternating and mutually necessary phases of “amplitude” and “chiseling”. In Western poetry the amplifying phase lasted from Homer to Victor Hugo. The modern phase of chiseling opened with Baudelaire’s blasting away at poetic dross in language to get the modern world and its imagery and words into a new poetic form. Narrative is carved down to anecdote. From Baudelaire, there proceeds a continual and direct line of chiseling: of form into verse by Verlaine, of verse and anecdote into word by Rimbaud, of word into patterns of sound and spaces by Mallarme and of sound and space patterns into nonsense/nothing by Tzara. Isou’s arrival announces the ultimate act of making the letter alone the basis of poetry. And via the example of poetry, all the arts were to follow suit, in a far reaching chiseling, down to their basic building blocks. Once this base is reached, the Lettrist phase of amplification begins, contributing to a totalisation in the new forms of creation throughout all aspects of the arts, from household furniture to architecture, painting, film, writing, theater, sculpture, body art, performance art, music, urban planning. The effects of this totalisation are to be the extension of creation throughout all aspects of life. Creation will be continually transforming life, liberating it into new ways of being, new ways of creating. Everything will be affected--the sciences, economics, politics, medicine, mathematics . . . A new Utopian era will begin.

Isou’s vision of a totalizing, transformative creation can be seen as a chiseling decomposition and amplifying recomposition of Medieval religious festivals or Wagner’s Gesammtkunstwerk, though the forerunners much closer to his both in time and spirit are Marinetti’s Italian Futurism (founded in 1909, with a great many of its ideas and works in all media also still too little known in many ways in the USA), and the multi-media work of German artist/poet/performer/Merzbau architect/dramatist/layout designer/collagist Kurt Schwitters. Since he grew up during the Depression and chaos of the 1930’s and WW2, Isou (I am only hazarding a guess) may well have known very little of these two examples: the work he writes of in his first book is French.

Schwitters in a 1926 manifesto on “Consistent Poetry” had also isolated the letter as the basis for poetry:

Consistent poetry is constructed of letters. Letters have no concepts. Letters in themselves have no sound, they only offer the possibility to be given sound values by the performer. The consistent poem plays off letters and groups of letters against each other.

The Russian Futurist Zaum (trans-rational) poets Alexei Kruchenyhk and Victor Khlebnikov had even earlier, in 1913, produced a manifesto on “The Letter as Such”.
This calls for poems to be copied by hand by artists from the poet’s original ms. The emphasis is actually on the handwritten, and by an artist, production of the letters, rather than on the letters in and of themselves. Since handwriting can vary so greatly from person to person, mood to mood, its artistic use is to further break down the standardizations of type written/printed letters visually, as a means to liberating them from fixed meanings and ways of being sounded and performed.

Trying to get Lettrism launched into the poetry and /art world and above all get the attention of the media eye, the messiah and his archangel prepared their first provocations. Not surprisingly, Isou and Pomerand with their now small band of recruits met with opposition from some heavy hitters of the earlier Russian Futurist and German Dada avant-gardes.

On 8 January 1946, Isou gave a lecture at the Societe Savant which prompted a counter-demonstration by the famous expatriate Russian typographer, layout designer and book artist Iliazde, whose career began in the 1910’s, alongside the Futurists. Iliazde came equipped with materials to demonstrate that what Isou was doing was nothing new under the sun. The event and counter demonstration didn’t generate enough noise to get much notice. Later that month, on the 21st, another event generated far more publicity, really putting the Lettrists on the map. The former Surrealist Michel Leiris was to give a lecture before the Vieux Colombier premiere of the play La Fuite by Isou’s old idol, Tristan Tzara, who was gracing the evening with his presence. Led by Pomerand, who had rounded them up and purchased their tickets, a small group of Lettrists kept interrupting Leiris’ remarks by shouting “We know about Dada, M Leiris—tell us about something new! For example—lettrism!” ”Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!” Taken aback, Leiris obviously had no idea what they were talking about. “You’re kidding! What!—You’ve never heard of lettrism?” “The Lettrists!” “Oh I want to hear them! Let’s hear the Lettrists!”

Drowning out Leiris and driving him from the stage, the Lettrists waited while the play went on. As soon as it ended, Pomerand strong-armed his way through the crowd, took the stage and announced that Isidore Isou, creator of the new Lettrist era in art, was going to present his theories and recite his Lettrist poems. Most people left as Isou took the stage, but those that stayed provided some fresh recruits.

The next morning the left-wing newspaper Combat ran headlines and copy: the Lettrists had carried the day in classic scandalous style. Overnight they had made a name for themselves in Paris and established their reputation as the first real new avant-garde of the post-War era.

To add insult--and a very serious one--to injury, the Lettrists later in 1946 came out with one issue of a journal called La Dictature Lettriste (The Lettrist Dictatorship). In a Paris reeling from the almost overwhelming daily revelations of new horrors left by one dictator, and with several others still in power, it was an appalling and calculated incitement. I think the title perhaps also had another meaning, however, referring to the “Dictator” aka “Pope” of Surrealism, Andre Breton, whose movement Isou had pronounced dead. The Lettrist “Dictatorship” mocked the deposed dictator and his vanished power and importance. “Ding dong the wicked witch is dead!” The Lettrist Dictatorship declares the end of other dictatorships could also be a way of reading the message--a bitter reminder that as soon as one dictator is gone, there is always another springing up.

Raoul Hausmann, one of the founders of militant Communist-oriented Berlin Dada (1918-1920/1), disputed inventor of photo-montage and sole inventor of Optophonic poetry, responded with a communiqué called “B.T.B”:

Some two dozen French and foreign upstarts have founded the “dictature lettriste” in Paris. They claim to be the inventors of the sort of phonetic poems we created between 1918 and 1921. But we have had an interview with them by the medium of telebrain (B.T.B.) and we reproduce it here for our readers.
Qu: h gf mjh ert gguhnjj . . . (questions and answers continue in this style for a page.)

Schwitters’, Hausmann’s, the Russians’ and Marinetti’s conceptions and uses of the letter are limited to literally what are accepted as letters in the languages which they are using. (Those of their alphabets, Roman and Cyrillic.) Isou’s conception of the letter is far more open and leads to an embrace of asemic writing and signs. Isou regards the letter as a pure sign without meaning, a condition for the possibilities of new and as yet unknown meanings. The asemic letter-as-pure-sign allows for the invention and use of endless new signs and letters as well as new uses for existing ones and for any past or present script, calligraphy, icons, symbols, hieroglyphs, etc. The creator can produce new alphabets, new languages, whose meanings may not yet be known, but whose apprehension as language is immediate. ( In the way one can look at a writing/script/calligraphy/hieroglyphics in a language foreign--or imagined--or “lost”--and not known to one, yet know immediately it is a language, by its layout, its visual arrangements.)

This desire--demand--for a direct, pure immediacy is impossible in the mediation of language: Lettrism therefore will deliver this “utopian” immediacy of communication via the performance of the asemic signs. Communication as a communal, shared experience of Lettrist immediacy becomes possible through the oral performance by a Lettrist sound poet. For this purpose, Isou and his “chief lieutenant” Maurice LeMaitre devised a system of approximately 130 signs indicating different sonic possibilities. While Lettrism is primarily considered in terms of visual poetry today, it’s essential to its spirit and not just its letters/signs, to keep this sonic performative element in the mind’s ears as it were--performing them aloud with oneself/others--when looking at Lettrist works.

Sound poetry performance was Pomerand’s forte and what he was primarily known for in the early years of Lettrism. He also was well known to the police for his penchants for brawling, obscenity, and public displays of indecency--various states of undress during and outside of performance. He was sued for defamation and sent to jail for various of his lectures delivered at a hall in the Societe de Geographie on such topics as “The Advantages of Prostitution” and pederasty. (As always, a few humorless individuals in attendance failed to get the “message” and complained of indeceny and outrage. Unwittingly, they had become part of the purpose of the pieces: to create a provocation and action in disturbing their complacency. To shake them from their torpor. Unfortunately, often complacency was easily disturbed but torpor not readily shaken.)

Pomerand was a late night regular and house star on the stage at the Tabou Club in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood, where Isou lives to this day in the same apartment he has since the 1940’s. The Tabou counted among its regulars Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, (usually gone by the time Pomerand took the stage), Juliette Greco, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, and a mix of celebrities, faded aristocrats, existentialists, wealthy tourists, students, models, photographers, gossip writers, would-be artists and neighborhood characters.

When Pomerand’s turn came, the audience called for him “Koum Kell Kerr!”
and “Biniminiva!” Boris Vian--who played with his Jazz band earlier in the evenings and was the house and neighborhood historian--wrote that the slight, dark-haired, dark- eyed Pomerand was one of the surprises of the Tabou. When he was hurling with maximum confrontational force his Lettrist sounds into the world, Vian said, one asked each instant where that voice came from and if there would be any left for the next word--if there were Lettrist words--and if not, the next sounds.

Pomerand was writing a good deal of Lettrist poetry at this time as well as the Symphonie en K, which had choruses in a Lettrist work for the first time. Due to his lifestyle of the period, very little of this work has survived. Depending on the clientele and their whims and the sizes of their pocketbooks, Pomerand might stay for a while in a classy hotel--and then one day find himself back in the street, sleeping under bridges again. With all his writing, making paintings, performing and founding a Lettrist center at the Librairie de la Porte Latine, a Saint-Germain bookstore, it is amazing that Pomerand had any time and energy left to do the extensive researches he made and put to use in making the rebuses in Saint Ghetto. One gets the sense of a man burning himself up with a fevered, fervent passion--and at the same trying to be cool and detached, keeping an inner sense of equilibrium aloof, an eye in the storm in and around himself. It is this which Pomerand wants the reader to find expressed in his book:

This book is unusual and immobile, yet orderly as a caste. I’d love it, if in future, the organic world showed such an icy face, impassive and tough . . .
I’ve dug out from nothingness each of the signs that make up this work, like one obliged to invent wisdom. Impassive Brahman, thus do I picture my potential and future reader . . .

I dream of a book of mysteries equal to the arrogance and serenity in faces carved on pharoahs’ mummies . . .

Geometric priestliness, or the dream of a clear and obscure style.

What will no doubt strike the reader, at first, when considering the pictograms in this work, will be the geometric deliberateness of its images. I allowed myself no freedom in these expressions, as if contempt for my self and its weakness could perfect the quest for solemnity.

In the opening lines above and those that follow towards the middle of the Introduction, Pomerand sounds like a hardline High Modernist Elitist. He even writes of writing with gloved hands, which sounds very aristocratic, (or like a killer not wanting to leave any fingerprints) and of being caped and masked, as at a wealthy spectacle. Yet beneath these facades and masks--which Pomerand makes clear are both the written text to be clothed in pictograms and the flesh and blood of a woman’s body likewise “monstrously clad”--is a body--of text, of a woman, but also of Gabriel Pomerand, who seems to realize in the course of events that he has been mummifying himself, or allowing himself to be convinced to mummify himself. The organic body wants to break out, break free of borrowed and imposed, labeled signs, the signs of everything not directly one’s own. (His arrests for indecent exposure come to mind--) Back to the degree zero of oneself with nothing except a pen, a writing instrument. Smash the “icy face, impassive and tough” of that future world desired in the Introduction’s opening sentences. And to pass on this message to others via the prosepoem and rebuses of Saint Ghetto.

From wanting to be a Priest (or cantor or Archangel) the poet returns to facing the never ending rebellion of an anarchic “outlawed” artist. Pomerand’s illness forced him to retreat more and more from the violent and vibrant activities of his earlier life and social world, and becoming an outsider in this way also confronted him with having to question the absolute necessity of remaining part of a group identity and name. In the words of that great outlaw, convicted manslaughterer, grand larcenist, gallows escaper and officially banished poet Maitre Francois Villon:

“I’m biased against all laws impartially”.

Pomerand writes near the Introduction’s end:

I’d like to reflect on each and every word. I’d like not only to give each one a different subterranean meaning, but also to break its jaw and thus transform the face it apparently intends to possess forever . . .

I hope this book’s morphology borrows means from interior modes of writing and from diverse other manners to better expose its inner workings, the digestive system of the organism.

Moreover, I don’t insist too much on diverse means, for they’re as varied as the universe of graphics.

What’s essential is to not live on what’s inherited, to not accept ill-gotten gains, and to ponder the potential for other, richer meanings.

What’s essential is to reflect on each of these expressions and to find substitutes that go beyond an illustrated Larousse (dictionary).

In Saint Ghetto’s Introduction, Pomerand makes clear both his debt to Isou and Lettrism and also his independence as an artist and thinker in his own right. Heretically, Pomerand locates and expresses his interests, intentions, ideas and images in phrases which are highly charged and ambiguous at the same time. On the one hand, they sound like the words of an artist who has found himself via Lettrism, been liberated by it into new creation. On the other hand, they can be read as saying, Lettrism gave me a go ahead sign, but it was I found the way and made this map, of Saint Ghetto. And the map shows that the continual way of creation, the avant-garde, proceeds as something separate from whatever names are put on it, for these end up putting limits on the limitless, or price tags on objects in the market, labels on images in museums. In short, the avant-garde too can become a ghetto, by becoming attached to names, having names attached to it. And as “Saint Ghetto” one can end up worshipping at its shrines and trapped by the hold on one it has by the loans it doles out at exorbitant interests. In Maitre Villon’s understanding of the situation:

“What’s to do? Redeem again my pawned goods!”

Pomerand writes:

No doubt Isou made me a sign once, in the course of I no longer know what lost morning, but not only have I alone made my work, but also all my tools, focusing especially on research fro a system of intrinsic figuration . . .

I want it understood that only the avant-garde of the intelligence itself preoccupies me, and not at all the schools this avant-garde fits into. I dread the day when the name of the invention--which is a phenomenon of commodification--overshadows the real search for transgression.

I love perpetual risk and effort of every kind, whether it is fighting against rules or against the nature of things.

Pomerand lived from day to day, under the bridge one night, in a posh hotel the next. Feast or famine, looking like a bum or dressed like a millionaire. (Vian recounts people’s surprise on finding the married Pomerand always immaculately shaved and coifed and dressed. His wife in their brief marriage, Roxane, to whom Saint Ghetto is dedicated, was the daughter of the insurance agent for King Farouk of Egypt.) Pomerand had a decidedly Villonesque character to him; in the words of Master Francois:

In my own country, I’m in a distant land
Beside the blaze I’m shivering in flames
Naked as a worm, dressed like a president . . .

I’m sure of nothing but the uncertain
Finding nothing obscure but the obvious
Doubt nothing but the things that are sure
Knowledge to me is mere accident
I keep winning and remain the loser . . .

I never work yet I labor
To acquire goods I don’t want . ., .

I’m biased against all laws impartially
What’s next to do? Redeem my pawned goods again!

People who knew Pomerand during those first roller coaster years noted that the only thing he ever could be counted on to always have in his possession was his beloved ball point pen, then new on the market.

If you look at the history of visual poetry in the West, you will find that very often periods marked by renewed interest in it, and many new explorations and creations in it, coincide with times of appearance of new technical means and techniques of transcribing, copying, printing, and distributing words and images. Saint Ghetto is also a child of the dawn of the ballpoint pen era.

After 1949, it was more than the uncertainty of his lifestyle that played a part in this growing inner independence from even his attachment to Isou and Lettrism. In that year, the same in which he converted to Greek Catholicism in order to marry, and began work on Saint Ghetto, Pomerand also learned he had tuberculosis. From the mid-Fifties on, he was quite ill with the disease (sometimes nursed by Juliette Greco) and also had developed a drug habit. (A lifestyle for which he was already well prepared.) He continued to paint and though expelled from the Lettrists in 1956 for “laziness”--despite his devoting his entire life to the movement from 1946-50 and writing five books and many pamphlets, participating in the movement’s most important demonstrations and events--his works continued to be shown in Lettrist exhibits into the 1960’s. (When the Lettriste Internationale split from the Lettrists in 1952, they had purged Pomerand immediately from their ranks on the grounds that he was a “falsifier’ and a “nullity”.) He produced a book for the Livre du Poche in the early 60’s and in 1966 his contribution to drug literature, Le D. Man, from his experiences with LSD. In 1972, he committed suicide.

Eerily, after singing loudly the praises of Saint Ghetto/Saint-Germain in the book’s first half, Pomerand envisions the horrors of its being turned inside out, the poets being hung, (the haunted shades of Villon), everything happening as though in a chiseling of the first half’s amplifications.

And, the final chiseling, after the exposing of the place as a simulacra which has replaced the original:

Besides there’s no Saint germain des Pres.
There’s only scenery . . .

Saint germain des pres is like Donogoo-Tonga, a neighborhood specially built for the needs of foreign clients--like Venice for American tourists- . . . .

Come firefghters. Come Machinists.
Carry off the scenery of Saint germaine des pres.
You see, there’s no one left, no one, but me, down on my luck, all alone like a dog howling at death in the solitude of an empty desert.

Ending his Introduction, Pomerand notes the doubled meaning at the core of his life’s goal: “Throughout my life, I’ve had no other goal than to be an extremist, at that battlefront which alarm clocks suggest even as they lure us into the traps of life.”

I find myself thinking of the entwined destines of Isidiore Iou and Gabriel Pomerand, two teenagers meeting over 60 years ago in a cafeteria for refugee orphans, even French orphans like Pomerand, arrived from Marseilles. One is advocating a continual renewal and revolution via creativity, the other, who becomes the disciple, is the extremist wanting to be at the battlefronts. One still lives in his apartment near their original meeting place, continually creating, the other, via this book’s bi-lingual reappearance a half-century later, still at the battlefronts.

But just as the alarm clock rings both for battlefronts and the traps of life, so Pomerand’s writing in his Introduction that he “dread(s) the day when the name of the invention . . . overshadows the real search” and that “only the avant-garde of intelligence preoccupies me, and not at all the schools this avant-garde fits into” has a chilling trap to it.

In this case, the trap isn’t life, but one’s place in history.

In 1946, in the scandalous Lettrist Dictatorship, Pomerand had written: “Dans l’histoire due lettrisme, j’ai ma place fixee a l’avance, cette place qui m’attend deja depuis toujours, comme un tombeau.”

“In the history of Lettrism, my place has been fixed in advance, that place which already has always been waiting for me, like the tomb.”

In honor of Gabriel Pomerand still being at the battlefront, read and look at his book to find him, his work made by his tools, his hands and in his own “write”. And also allow him to tell you about back home and his old friend still living and working there.

In both cases, Pomerand’s Rosetta Stones for you to find and learn the keys to the new hieroglyphs/hypergraphs of his and Lettrism’s.

And besides, since the history is not over, being in continuous creation, and Saint Ghetto back in circulation in the open air--can we really think that Gabriel Pomerand is in his tomb?

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[Footnote 1. Those claiming Lettrism’s enormous role in May ’68 are confusing it with Situationism, which, as the Lettrist International, had split from Lettrism in 1952. The LI became the Situationist International in 1957, and played an important part in especially the student events beginning in Strasburg in 1966 with mass dissemination of a Situationist tract “On the Poverty of Student Life”, illegally paid for with University funds, and leading up to and including May 1968 in Paris. Via Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren, the SI had a huge and enduring influence on Punk. Though declared over with in 1972 by founder Guy Debord, the SI continues to inspire, influence, mutate and develop, as well as cause controvery and arguments worldwide. The Situationists’ direct influence on the slogans of May ’68 is well known; Lettrist influences showed up in the making of posters, most often by art students, also by some Lettrists. The poster art, seen in newspaper photos and on tv, influenced posters in other countries that year—USA, Mexico, Czechoslovakia for example. These events and their effects have been astutely mythologized since the interpretations of May ’68 began—in June ’68 of course. Except in mainly student circles in Paris, none of this mattered at the time to the rest of the fifty million people in France, 11 million of whom went on strike on their own. Due to strikes in the transportation, telephone, telegraph, mail, and for a period tv, very little was known for example in Arles, where I lived at the time, of what was happening in Paris. There was some radio news, but always taken with a grain of salt—who in such times would be telling you anything but what they themselves wanted to hear? Besides, everyone was enjoying a month on strike, including against news. I had been reading about Situationism in the newspapers in 1967-8 due to its notoriety from the Strasbourg “scandal”. Some tracts had even reached Arles. Living in Paris in 1969 is when I first encountered Lettrism, by chance seeing a small exhibition of works, mainly posters, attracted by the bright colors and dancing forms.

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A Few Books in English With Accounts of Pomerand and of Lettrism
Lipstick Traces A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Greil Marcus--Dada, Lettrism. Situationism, The Sex Pistols, Punk as modern millenarian movements-lots of documentation, photos, quotes--
The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents From Lettrisme to Class War by Stewart Home a classic--also an assault on lot of the movements included, by a former Neoist--very sardonic humor--very informative-available online here
Manuel of Saint Germain des Pres by Boris Vian On the spot reportage, gossip, history, of the post WW2 years in the neighborhood--Pomearnd has page to himself with photo and brief handwritten sound poem--and several references to him--tons of photos--
The Tribe--interviews with Jean-Michel Mension, lots of photos--this is about the early days of the Lettrist International, after the split with the Lettrists--Guy Debord and company in what Debord saw as the golden age--

Some Lettrist Sites On Line
The major site in English, Kaldron at Light and Dust

Best site by far even if you know no French: the Site Officiel of Lettrisme--endless links to visual works, sound works, news of current exhibition and happenings—etc etc--profusely illustrated with Lettrist works and photos of Lettrists and Lettrist history--http://www.lelettrisme.com
Also a very good Italian site linked to this, in French and Italian: http://lettrisme.org
On-line Lettrist bookstore: http://www.lettrisme.com

As well as blogs--there is a blogger named “Pomerand” always busy with a lot of news and photos for example
For Situationism--the official sites with the original documents in English--and then hundreds of sites, links, blogs, music downloads, video etc
For Lettrist Sound Poetry and Films: ubuweb.com has excellent collection

*****

David Baptiste-Chirot: born in lafayette, indiana, grew up in vermont. lived in gottingen, germany, arles & paris, france, hastveda, sweden, wroclaw, poland, boston and milwaukee. since 1997 essays, poetry, visual poety, performance/event scores, sound poetry, prose poetry have appeared in 90+ print journals, dozens of web journals and sites, 300 mail art calls. several books: found rubBEings (Xerolage 32) ANARKEYOLOGY (runaway spoon)REVERBERATIONS (Lulu) ZERO POEM (Traverse) tearerISm (singlepress) HUNG ER (neotrope) and chapbooks, work in many anthologies in USA and UK. google search david baptiste chirot / blog: davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com. "I work with a profound faith and energy in the found, everywhere and always to be found."

I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO GET THROUGH TO EVERYONE by ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS

2006-11-30T23:30:00.000-08:00

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ Reviews

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone by Anna Moschovakis
(Turtle Point Press, N.Y., 2006)

*
Stop reading.
Better, isn’t it?
Now that we’re on heightened
ambivalence alert
I’d like to review [...] (25)

Anna Moschovakis’s first book, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, relentlessly keeps the reader on heightened alert, foregrounding the continuous present of reading and the presence of the reading moment.

Moschovakis skillfully manages a breadth of style and a depth of thought to create a thoroughly engaging first book. The collection is divided into seven titled sections; each section explores different formal strategies and contentual themes (combining the sensibilities of OBERIU, the NY School, and the post-avant).

*

On the acknowledgments page, we learn that some of the poems were published in the anthology 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11th. Since I first began writing this review on 9/11, the title acquired the mournful tone of phone messages from 9/11 victims, their families, and those inside the city without phone service.

The title also suggests O’Hara’s “Personism,” a desire to establish an intimate, manic connection with the reader (the desire to “get through to everyone”). In turn, this creates a particular ethic: the poet has a message and (to push the analogy to its conclusion) the book becomes the carrier.

At the same time, the title cuts through its ethical and elegiac tone with an ironic humor: the absurdly utopian idea that contemporary poetry can get through to everyone:

Thinking I might like to write
An optimistic poem
I loaded a font called
UTOPIA
It crashed my computer [...] (68)

*

The collection opens with an untitled, preface poem that immediately establishes Moschovakis’s voice:

I can’t remember what it is I’m supposed to be doing.
I can’t think of anything but lists I’ve made, lists I’ve broken
the spirit of. It’s always a fine time for breaking
things, like plastic forks and poetic trends [...] (1)

The voice -- intimate and playful -- pulls me into its world where plastic forks and poetic trends have equal fragility, a world both absurd and memorable:

[...] I don’t remember my grammar
rules. I don’t think English is very good
for a certain kind of inventioning. I gather
some readers don’t like being
confronted with the language in every word.
I want to be a word. I would be abstract
with an inscrutable ending. (1)

Throughout the poems that follow, Moschovakis breaks the rules, forces English into new kinds of “inventioning,” confronts the reader with the language of and in every word, and inscrutably embodies the poems with an alluring abstraction.

*

The first section, “Thought Experiments,” consists of poems with obliquely footnoted titles, followed by three mostly paratactically arranged paragraphs. Yes, the poems are as interesting as they sound:

Thought Experiment: The Ring of Gyges*

Someone is probably reading over somebody’s shoulder. The train is probably running late; the content leaves something to be desired, but nobody knows what it is. Instead, they all know each blade of grass, how a criminal’s made, what constitutes grief and how it’s removed. In addition, they (kind of) know Kung Fu, Swahili, and the waltz.

One of them -- probably the shoulder -- knows that the Greeks gave women nine-tenths of sex (isn’t that who was meant by the unmoved mover, producing motion through being loved?) The other one thinks he’s invisible.

Somehow, these accidents rattle the car. Bodies bruise bodies, shoes pierce shoes. Up on the roof, two rows of handles rock noiselessly back and forth. Nobody uses them; nobody reaches up there. (7)

* In which one who previously swallowed invisible desserts happens upon a weapon with which to conquer the tyranny of consequences.

This work is difficult to paraphrase, forcing me to stop reading in any conservative sense and to pay attention to the way Moschovakis experiments with my ideas of reading. The content, abandoning narrative, leaves an absence and a desire to constitute that absence. This does not mean that these poems “leave something to be desired.” On the contrary, these poems “conquer the tyranny” of desire and allow the production of further narrative movements.

*

To describe the joy of the second section, “The Match,” I need only quote one sentence: “Filip told me that my desire to pair George Herbert with Jack Spicer was based on an unconscious link between herbs and spices” (14).

*

“Preparations,” the third section, uses narrative itself as a narrative vehicle. Moschovakis’s storytelling resists the traditional and allows for absurdist shifts to emerge and erupt:

Because the man felt narrative that day
and walked around town breaking language with itself
and because the woman felt
manly that day and walked around breaking herself
with language [..] (21)

In these poems, the reader lets go of expectation to follow other suggested avenues of discovery:

If you can’t find a concrete block, find a door.
If you can’t find a door, find a heavy table.
If you can’t find a heavy table, find a piece of glass. (30)

It is easy enough to surrender to these shifts because they are seamlessly woven into the narrative. The reader never finds what is usually sought after because something new is found around each turn:

One says listen and the other says
I’ve given up the ghost.
There are no constructions in the river.
There are no drawers in the tent.

At this point the river assumed the narrative
Because it was not a real river
Let go (30)

*

My favorite section is titled “The Blue Book” (perhaps a reference to Daniil Kharms’s The Blue Notebook, published by Ugly Duckling Presse). The speaker meditates on experience, language, narrative, meaning, naming, history, sex, love, etc. The poems are constructed of one stanza, about 27 lines each, each line ending in a period. Besides the thoughtful playfulness of this section, I’m also impressed that they maintain a propulsive rhythm even though each line is end-stopped:

Name is a word that can be both active and descriptive.
Like many people, I like hearing my name spoken during sex.
A feeling of intimacy after sex can often be mutual and sincere.
This can be true even in a setting of filtered sunlight.
Intimacy is only possible because people are seen as different.
My name comes from my father’s side of the family.
I sometimes wish I had a different name, or no name at all.
I sometimes imagine what sex would be like in a world without names. (35-6)

The movement of thought and syntax allows the reader to get lost in the “streams-of-consciousness.” Furthermore, the speaker is never pedantic, never boring, never shrewd:

The title of the book is Letting go of the Past.
The past is often said to be seen through a window.
Use of this metaphor is common in books and conversation.
A metaphor, when common, can ten toward cliché.
With overuse, it loses its character of irony.
In some languages the past tense is known as the imperfect.
The present perfect and future perfect also exist in these languages.
I wonder if this is a commentary on progress.
The irony is that with perfection, progress ends.
The book’s subtitle is and learning to live in the present.
I wonder if the woman has learned from the book.
I believe there is a past perfect tense I’ve forgotten.
Its existence would discredit my theory.
The woman looks up to examine me between passages.
When the lights flicker off the window disappears. (45-6)

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone progresses through various forms and contents, tones and textures. This book teaches the reader to “live in the present” by continually re-imagining the construction of narrative memory. The reader never knows if the next word, line, image, metaphor, statement, or sentence will build upon the one that came before, or will completely redefine the moment. Although I haven’t been able to capture every joy of this collection (the last 3 sections are equally engaging), I hope I’ve been able to get through to everyone that this book makes the present moment of poetry a little more perfect.

*****

A native of the Pacific island of Gua’han (Guam), Craig Perez immigrated to California in 1995. He recently completed his MFA at the University of San Francisco. He is an assistant fiction editor for Pleiades literary journal, and a poetry editor for the online journal, Switchback. His work has appeared in Watchword, the Redlands Review, Quercus, Galatea Resurrects, Facetime, and String of Small Machines. Visit his blog at www.blindelephant.blogspot.com.

SCRAWL by SUSANA GARDNER

2006-11-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

SCRAWL by Susana Gardner
(Dusi/e, 2006)

“Ocular-matopoeia” means a word that looks like its meaning. For instance, “boob”, an example that always makes me giggle (and maybe “giggle” is another example, too!). And I’m ruminating: what would be the term for a book that looks like its nature, including “meaning”?

I don’t know, so let’s call that term “bull’s eye” for now. And Susana Gardner hit it right on the spot with her chap, SCRAWL.

The word “scrawl” can be argued to be an example of ocular-matopoeia. Particularly when “scrawl” is handwritten so as to emphasize an informal splay and sprawl of the letters. I don’t raise gratuitously here the reference to “hand” for its presence is ubiquitous in the way SCRAWL was created.

The chap’s physicality is so eye-catching that one’s first stroll (s...crawl?) through its pages is just to look versus to read. Galatea Resurrects received two review copies and both are made differently, which raises the possibility that each chap is unique. This bolsters one of the pleasing conclusions to the project: this is “book art” as much as it is a poetry collection.

One chap, sized at 5 3/4” x 3 5/8” has a cover of pink, grey, red, black and burgundy vertical stripes set against a white background. Pasted quad-center is a cutting from the same patterned paper that, lying horizontally, cuts across the stripes. A gold vertical edge signifies where the cover ends along the right side—a significant edge since the otherwise white backdrop would have been seamless against the whiteness of the first page.

Visually, why should there be no seamlessness between book cover and internal pages? Well, as with the second review copy, there is no cover text—no title or author’s name—so that one can interpret the book covers as visual art. The book cover’s edge then should be part of the frame to the cover image (in the like manner that a book cover can frame interior text). The vertical striped image(s) evokes Op Art, for example.

The second review copy, sized at 6” x 4 1/2", offers a primarily black cover. Its left edge is the tattered edge of a faux animal print in brown and beige with black spots. The black is not pure black—at certain angles, silvery glitter can be discerned winking against the dark background. The glitter, along with the animalish border edge, offers a plane evoking certain monochrome paintings—how the canvases are supposed to be one color each and yet that singularity of color (in successful works) does not preclude activity, resonance, depth and imaginative interpretations.

Beyond the covers, none of the interior pages are cut straight and the right black edge looks ripped—again befitting the lookness of “scrawl.”

And so, finally, we enter the book intending to read. We note the obligatory Title/Acknowledgement/Copyright page and then see the first word. It is the first poem’s title:

P RO EM

Simply marvelous. I read it to say: the project is pro-poem!

“P RO EM”’s concept (as I interpret it) summarizes, too, the multilayered text that follows. First, a distinct majority of the words serve as visual poetry. I’ve seen poets feature vizpo by tinkering with individual words, but Gardner’s text is the first time I’ve noticed lengthy poems that string together such words. The example of

her(o)

becomes more obviously feminist/political when embedded in the one-word line

thesmallher(o)

Gardner is clearly interested in wordplay—and not just visually but also through sound. There are puns and riffs—the latter would seem particularly a logical effect from doodling. Doodling, or scrawl-ing. Thus, from “Aster Asterias” we get that poem’s title as example as well as its first few lines (N.B. in the featured excerpts, spacings between words and letters are uneven, scrawled, and not necessarily replicated here due to Blogger constraints):

A REALISM LOST HER NAME : M A R I E (O) SHE SHE STROLLS IN HRS

NAMES MARI / S/HE TELLS HER/E &HERS &HER HRS SO(U)LS AS ASTER HARMS IRES

TELLS (O) A HARM IRES LET LOS (O) A SEASHELL TRIM OR, A LARAMIE SUN

LESS ATLAS SIR, AN HRS ASTRAL ASTROL ASTROL O()R MUSES

HER HAT HRS IN & SO, A GRANDAMES ERR HER LATERAL LOSS LOS S/TILLS

Or the first three lines from “MINARETS”:

ASTER ASTIR TATS A NAME SIR, A MANE STIR, A MEAN STAR AS

REMAINS ARE MAIN, SIR ARE MAN IT’S NAMER IT’S A N M E

SIT(OR SAT) A NAMERS NAME IT REMAINS TRI TRIM&TAME MEANT

One admires Gardner’s lines for showing how scrawling is not inherently sloppy. The poems combine lyricism and philosophy, as also exemplified in these first two lines from “SCRAWL”:

from the markings of the small her( o) when morning wakes b r i g h t

wakes unfoldednewgestureinthespaceof ortowardabalanceorpossibilityof w h a t

This is intelligent work. And it is steeped in its times. Nothing is ahistorical and Gardner nods to her times with this “interjections” from “:her(o):” from which I excerpt:

yes, the small her(o) must surely
wonder where feeling went
toward the end of the 2oth
                              century?
When narrative and confession
Begged prosaic 7 so chill
&so              to be
heard again when the next
g e n e r a t I o n

m i g h t very well r e a d
this we/us
          --as dull
as is merely broken parted&
distorted us/we as thoughtless
or unduly heralded&
such &so side-stepped
in way of marginalia

Wisely, this is not the ending tone to the collection. Gardner does not let didacticism have the last word. Instead, here are the lines from the chap’s last page, which is to say, joy in language carries the day—a fitting ending since this project is foremost pro-poem:

and all this when her coming &all is so need-f u l l&

inevitable as it always was so demanding and intriguingly s e d u c t I v e

in its speechless revelatory stasis provoked any suns previous “I” might w h i c h

set eyes upon her or had wondered or imagined when s/he& t h i s her(o)

her prescience desirable as any as small s h e& o v e r l o o k e d she (in way of voice)—

wayward she wary she so pointed always gives new breath as she is so surly b ent

I don’t believe chaps need to be mere harbingers of longer work. I think a chap’s offering can be its own integrated whole (and what to excerpt is also a creative choice, after all). But even though SCRAWL literally—visually and physically—succeeds as a stand-alone project, the texts do make me long for a loooo…o…nger book by Gardner. I’ve love to see someday the longer text(s) from which this project concedes it is “from”.

It’s also worth noting that Gardner’s reflection of the (her) times is evident in the materials that went into making the chaps. The pink yarn that sews together the binding as well as the slips of paper that make up the book covers and papers are small enough to seem to be left-overs from other projects (and I am aware that Gardner makes chaps by recycling material). It is a small but nonetheless heroic gesture—recycling the most tiny portions out of a big-hearted concern for the environment.

Even the scale of the chaps—smallish, intimate, tender—don’t seek to displace many trees. The beauty of language is that words can communicate as effectively even when their fonts are teensy. Against the bluster of the times, this is a gesture of empathy with nature…even as, again, the small scale befits how one usually scrawls on tiny fields, from the back of an envelope to the inside of a matchbook cover, to a napkin scrap and so on.

All a long way to saying that, ultimately with SCRAWL, Gardner has achieved a fragile but most definite harmony.

*****

Eileen Tabios' books are not eligible for review in Galatea Resurrects because she edits this puppy; these orphans languish here; here; here; here; here; and here.

UNDER THE WANDERER'S STAR by SIGMAN BYRD

2006-11-30T23:15:00.000-08:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

Under the Wanderer's Star by by Sigman Byrd
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, N.Y., 2006)

Sigman Byrd's debut book of poetry was chosen as the 2005 recipient of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry prize. I'm not surprised at that honor, because Byrd's work has the lyrical rhythms of classic poets. Much of it is magical in the finest sense of the word, coupling a child's wide-eyed awe at the mysterious and wonderful with a world-weary sense of outrage at life's injustices.

"The Jack-Tar's Song" is a delightful adventure, a blissful discovery beyond imagination:

Ship of convicts and dreamers,
ship of exiled lovers and cosmographers,
ghost ship of my desire sailing
to the lands of Gog and Magog,
let me go with you, don't spare me
the day, the hour, the precise
moment of your great discovery.

"The Child Astronomer" encourages the seeking adventurer in all of us. This excerpt challenges us to explore the mysteries regardless of outcome:

Don't tell him Galileo went blind
staring at sunspots or swashbuckling
Tycho Brahe had his nose
sliced off dueling over equations.

No, he'll discover on his own one day
how even the noblest quests burn up
to nothing in so much random solar wind….

"Any Second Now" is a chilling, haunting remembrance of one awful moment in September. Any commentary I might make is weak in comparison to the poet's words:

….flattened out from above, anonymous,
               it still matters
what he said, what she said,
               kiss the kids, honey, I love you.
Then the collapse. The watching of it orphans us.
               The complicating arc
of the story, the unbargained-for event curve
               that carried us abandons us,
leaves us behind to imagine – we who are heirs
               to this gruesome traffic –
a knocking where the seventy-third floor was,
               a faint voice in a line-up
of available shots, the black box singed and buried,
               blinking and singing.

Sigman Byrd is a wanderer who heartily believes "in all things / fabulous and inconsolable." He does not want to live an isolated life resembling "…the alcified
numbness of men / encased in their lives like fossils." He shares his hauntings and joys with readers, transmits his message generously in each poem and every thought. If you enjoy thought provoking poetry, this prize winning debut book is well worth reading.

*****

Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review; Review Editor for New Works Review; Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review and Irish News and Entertainment. Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.

GUTTED by JUSTIN CHIN

2006-11-30T23:05:00.000-08:00

BARBARA JANE REYES Reviews

Gutted by Justin Chin
(Manic D Press, 2006)

Grief is accurate. Grief is not accurate.
Do you want to know the facts or do you want
the details?

Justin Chin’s third poetry collection, Gutted, which is dedicated to the memory of Chin’s father, Dr. Chin Jeck Soon, is comprised of poems conveying a son’s exhaustion as he comes to terms with his father’s terminal illness, and his own illness, in which the death process, and the process of grieving are public and participatory. These poems are unadorned, honest, and gritty, and as a result, Chin manages not to manipulate or force the reader to pity for either the loss of the father, or his own looming death.

Formalistically and emotionally, Chin’s poems move between the rigorous and disciplined, the fragmented, and the sprawling and chaotic. He begins with a ghazal, “Tonight again,” in which the end rhyme of each couplet’s second line serves as a refrain or litany, indicating resignation to a cycle of lamentable situations in which the grieving individual is stuck:

I’m slipping down the barrel of this pigpen.
Looks like it’s bareback again tonight.

[…]

Under all the sand in the Sahara, all the fossils melting into oil.
How can these bones lay down their arms afield again tonight?

[…]
My spectacular failures, my holy spooks, my brilliant bugaboos.
Hold on, little boy, you’re going to bruise like heck again tonight.

There are the individual crises which the speaker has brought upon himself, and then there is the geopolitical; the speaker is subjected to both of these contexts simultaneously, almost indifferent to those things which continue to bring him harm: “Blah blah blah, over and over, again and again, again tonight.” In this way, he is inconsequential. Throughout Gutted, navigating the private and the public, the speaker runs the risk of becoming inconsequential, as in the untitled poem about the one monkey who’s called in sick, one of “a thousand and one / monkeys pounding / away at one thousand / and one iMacs.” It seems so silly, but consider that amid the dull and incessant noise of trendy and cute technology, individuals, barely valued for their work, are dehumanized.

A note on the forms tells us that Chin utilizes a loose variation of the Japanese zuihitsu, “diary entries, lists, quotations, observations, commentaries, fragments,” and this mirrors that emotional range of the son experiencing the father’s terminal illness and the grieving process which is realistically muddled, disordered, and rough. Chin presents us with various fragmented ironies and absurdities, language and concepts his speaker just cannot make sense of while in this prolonged emotionally vulnerable state. In “(Petit Mal),” he writes, “A little evil, a small illness. Why does it sound like a pastry?” And after actually witnessing a petit mal (seizure), “Small is relative. / Illness all.” The L-consonance of this poem underscores the unapt lightness of the word, “petit mal.” Also inappropriate in this time is pharmaceutical language: “Suicidal ideation… Medicine to cure will do this. / Irony? or HMO?” We wonder if it the medicine which causes the suicidal ideation, when we hold such faith that medicine ought to “cure” this. Instead, we find an insert of a Schering Corporation pharmaceutical drug package:

“…may cause patient to develop mood or behavioral problems. These can include irritability (getting easily upset) and depression (feeling low, feeling bad about yourself, or feeling hopeless). … Some patients think about hurting or killing themselves or other people and some have killed (suicide) or hurt themselves or others.”

This, placed at the bottom of a page which begins, “W.W.J.K. // Who Would Jesus Kill?” And with this combination, Chin has provided us with something strange and pointed to think about.

In “Incontinence,” Chin presents us with the father, whose medications’ side effects include loss of urinary and bowel control. Here, no reassuring platitudes from the son, no attempt to clean up the evidence of soiled clothes and floor can restore a grown man’s dignity, nor a grown-up son’s long gone image of a father who provided safety and ease:

And I just again want to be the one
who fell asleep in the stands with his head
in his dad’s lap at the home team’s first game…

What is admirable here is that Chin does not relent in faithfully describing a real situation that is most awkward and embarrassing, where other writers would perhaps use a metaphor, and where readers would find his words off-putting and gross: “And any dignity that you can hand back / to someone who has just crapped his pants in public…”. But this is the reality of treating terminal illness, in which doctors and family members must weigh symptoms of disease against side effects of medication, in which the family must assume the role of caregivers and decision makers, well beyond what they believe they are capable of knowing and carrying out. In the poem which begins, “clotting, weight, brain fn, responsiveness,” we read the son’s scrawled notes, after meeting with the father’s oncologist, regarding what appears to be aggressive treatment for cancer: “alt. to surgery? necessary? // … how know / not working? How decide to stop.”

When the father’s death comes, the son must settle medical bills, close bank accounts, and order the funereal urn. He must then sift with bare hands through the heap that is his father's ashes, which coat the hands as he scoops the remnants of a man into an Oriental soup tureen, heeding the matter-of-fact, pragmatic instruction from the crematorium: “Use your hands ... you can wash up later.” Again, Chin does not relent from providing a faithful description; among the remains of his father are chips of bone resembling coral, and from skullpieces, the surgical twine which has survived the incineration. How easily can this all blow away, and then the physical evidence of the man is forever lost. The son thinks of the adage, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” which is now literal as he washes the remnants of his own father down a sink drain.

In a very dense, untitled prose piece, he writes of what happens in the wake of the father’s terminal illness, as the family turns outward, necessarily concerning themselves with a very public mourning; this is similar to the opening ghazal, “Tonight, again” in which the emotionally vulnerable individual must simultaneously inhabit heavy private and public spaces. The family ties black ribbons on lampposts in the neighborhood and town; they greet each guest and order enough food for these numerous extended family members who subsequently converge upon the family home and stay as houseguests. They talk story, and the son finds different versions of the father he thought he knew. Many days of this public ritual, and the heaviness begins to lift: “We start giggling and laughing, laughing and giggling, if only because we’ve cried so much, each in private, each in our own bewilderment, that we don’t think we can cry anymore.”

Gutted is very, very funny, and oftentimes, what is funny is also filled with tenderness and compassion, as in “Me and My Helper Monkey,” where, post-wake, the speaker continues to deal with his own illness, and comes to care deeply about the emotional well-being of his lovelorn monkey helper, Steve. Here, the monkey is humanized, as he is valued not simply for performing household chores, contrasting the previous monkeys pounding away at iMacs. In “Me and My Helper Monkey,” the speaker and Steve come to help each other, and to connect as many humans do not, and in this way, neither he nor Steve is inconsequential:

While sorting rice, Steve, My Helper Monkey, and I realize our bond
we realize how truly alone we are in this world. My family
and homeland so far away and I somewhat disconnected from them;
and he, his jungle razed to the ground so the 12th largest
football stadium in the world could be built…

With the repetition of “Steve, My Helper Monkey,” we are reminded of Chin’s opening ghazal; here it seems the speaker has grown from the ghazal, as he now speaks lightly of his own death and its inevitability. He is more concerned about Steve and his grieving. The speaker has come to terms with his father’s death, and now has someone who cares enough to grieve for him.

Chin’s humor is also quite serrated and screwy, and it is as bloody as an elephant gone amok upon human test subjects as observed by glass-encased scientists. And at the same time this humor may be appalling, consider that through humor one can divulge one’s deepest and most hysterical fears:

“My great fear is that I do not know / what happiness actually is… And snakes, of course. // That, snakes and giant hairy killer spiders… Each of the spiders would be wearing a hockey mask / and wielding a chainsaw.” Gutted is effective in communicating to us that if we live every moment fully aware of our mortality, then in every moment, we must be brave enough to risk sounding ridiculous.

The bottom line on Gutted is this: I am relieved to be reading a cohesive poetry collection that is largely unsentimental and simultaneously well worth my emotional investment.

*****

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005) which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her author website is http://barbarajanereyes.com/

GARNET LANTERNS by SALLY ROSEN KINDRED

2006-11-30T23:00:00.000-08:00

J. LECLERC Reviews

GARNET LANTERNS by Sally Rosen Kindred
(The Anabiosis Press, 2006)

Far from Fallujah and the Khyber Pass comes a poet woman from Baltimore -- City of Poe, of Unitas, of Billie Holiday. City of the dark ravens -- and of the orioles, with their black and orange raiment.

Call a woman Sarah, or Susannah, or Ruth. Call her Mary. Call this woman by her name in truth -- Sally Rosen Kindred. Ms. Kindred teaches poetry writing on-line to high school students. She works through the John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. She lives with her husband and her adoptive son.

Kindred’s steel mesh poetry spins out of her family experience and her own sense of being in the world.

Is she a poet of some “domestic” school? No. No, that wouldn’t get it at all. But, to give you an idea of where she’s coming from, consider the first two sentences of “YOUR ARM” -- a spousal love poem out of a mage’s mouth.

I call it thick music, I call it milk, and bread,
your skin under my tongue under the night-blue roof
of some twilight town we’ve never seen.
I call it sweet engine driving your hand
to my eye, coarse magic, one wand
over the water.

There you have one angle of her poetic idea. The marital erotic expressed as milk, bread, a night-blue roof, a twilight town, sweet engine, coarse magic. Yes. Magic. Be it coarse or satin.

Then there’s “RED LIFE”. Red is one the Kindred specials. One of the alchemical words in SRK’s heart-crafted lexicon. Red. The color of fire and ripe apples and blood. One color of a world that finally drains down, drains down to one variant color, drains down to Rust and Brown (see “TO EVE” –- first cut of the text under discussion).

The second poem in the tome (after “TO EVE” but, before “YOUR ARM”) is “TO NOAH”. A stripped down abridgement might go a bit like this:

At some point you have to rise…,
and find the water, the broken world,
the wet mud-and-milk gut of the earth
risen and spilled over what you remember

and wolf-colored waves gaping and turning
under winds gray as the death-coat
someone’s thrown over the moon.

Mud and milk join red in the Kindred notebook of chant-words. And what of wolf-colored waves?

Pure poetry. It was that way a long, long time ago, with Homer and his wine-dark sea.

But, then again, I was writing of the poem named “RED LIFE”. Within it I treasure these passages:

Form is Baltimore
summer, desire. Form’s boastful, wearing scarves for a season///////
form’s not ready for bed. She kicks
at pink sheets in the lucky dark.///////
Repent.
Form’s a waltz with Jeremiah, the most
defeatist prophet.///////
Form is the last best
daughter, who holds for red life to the rain.///////

Why search for the “logical”, the “objective” paraphrase for such beautiful writing? Its very being is its only necessary justification.

From “NOAH WAITING, NOT PRAYING”:

hurling birds up into
the botched sky. A burden
starless and rough
as gopher wood.

pine morning’s reckoning
of red birds on ice, the wrenched
amber chords of the lioness.

that was self-doubt,
the shattered ocean
of your mistaken Word.

Reading this recent chapbook through one time, then twice, then thrice -- I got the feeling I had a much-read little classic in my hand. But that feeling is not shared in the world outside my reading mind.

Why does America not know of its fine poets? Why do such poets not read before throngs in great stadiums? Why not a new and radiant talent's arrival greeted by general acclaim? Why such quiet? Why such comprehensive lack of recognition? We cannot hear. I say we cannot hear elational words in our national lightning stricken atmosphere.

Now what follows in this review is a succession of brilliant fragments abstracted from the red and raven striped line of GARNET LANTERNS' beautiful, mystic, and common sensical poems.

From "SECOND MOTHER"

elephants and airplanes nose up
from the deep sands of his dreams

From "HOLY DARK"

Tell me. I want to love you. Say you'd believe
when everything soaked itself in blue,
the color angels wear when they've learned something.

From "THE RAVEN'S WIFE"

You are the bird that does not come back.
Your wife waits
at the prow's edge.

From "TESTAMENT OF THE DOVE"

The silver taste of olive
stuns the tongue with rain's
divine dark splinters, as you
who fed us forty nights must know.

From "NOAH'S WIFE REMEMBERS"

She does not want to know about my own palms torn
on the cedar as I sanded the boards.

From "THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO"

My first night at the theatre was Noah's Ark
at Friendly Road First Baptist, an all-youth

production: for our neighbor's eyes and all God's rain
I traded my snouted, thick-laced correctives

for one night's shine of Mary Janes.

From "LEAST BREATH"

Ask yourself
If you will be the dove, gray bird
That returns bearing gospel greens,
Or the raven, spool of unraveling pitch,
The bird that does not come back.

Penultimately, From "NO EDEN"

Sad pear. God gave you
No fine story. Eve walked right past
Your twilight body

And, to close, From "ANIMAL DARK"

Somewhere to the left of this story
There's a moment when everyone's inside,
Everyone's saved, and it's enough to be alive
In the warm animal dark,
Alive in the journey through wreckage and Writ-
But back at the center, there's just
A family awake through a storm
There are fists of wind
Hammering walls,
There are adders in the straw.

"GARNET LANTERNS" is both inspired by, and is a critique of the Old Testament. The Book of Genesis and those of the Prophets are the texts referenced throughout the work. The critical element of the chapbook points (or hints) at inequities in the contemporary social and political order, but the use of solely ancient texts suggests that Kindred's idea is that humankind is in a fallen condition. But her argument begins, rather than ends there. She rejects a fatalistic religiosity. She is all for the rotting away of apples of discord, all for giving up the wait for roving, scavenger ravens, all for casting out adders.

"ISAIAH REPLIES" ends with these words of the yearning of human life. Red life.

They do not want a prophet's words
They are ready for salvation,
The brief whistle of eternity.
They are ready to split into song.

*****

J. LeClerc is a writer of both prose and poetry who works for the Goshen Public Library and Historical Society. He is also the guitarist and musical arranger of the poetry/performance group The Janet Hamill Unit. He resides in the Hudson River Valley with his wife, the poet Janet Hamill

VAUDEVILLE by ALYSSA WOLF

2006-11-30T22:55:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Vaudeville by Allyssa Wolf
(Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, Otis College of Art and Design, 2006)

Now, here’s an initial admission: I felt scared, often, when reading Allyssa Wolf’s Vaudeville. Not scared as in “unsettled”, nor as in “disconcerted into a certain reconsideration of my readerly assumptions” . . . No, just scared.

Scared as in scared.

I did, it is true, read Wolf’s debut in a dark Parisian apartment at 3AM, with what I can only presume to have been my neighbour’s dog masticating upon the stairs. But the origin of this sound could, I am sure--it is equally possible--have been a dead doll brought to life, or a bird with three heads, a butterfly-rabbit, a raccoon-pigeon or owl, a maggot, or, just as charmingly, a shriveled man licking his own teeth . . .

For all these weird (and wonderful?) organisms make their appearance on Wolf’s creepy little stage of Being, her curbed arena of poetic invention. Ill-lit, haunted by odd and changing back-drops, this is your local community theatre gone gothic. Vaudeville, in the dynamism of its diverse coteries, is full of these points of perceptive light--objects bathed in a stunning luminosity--but surrounded by masses of epistemological darkness:

The simple, quiet
Everyday things
Come on
Can’t sing
Bird’s dead said
You
Like a spike of light

Yes, but these “things” are not simple and quiet anymore, Allyssa Wolf, are they? Alive and “drooling”, they have been shoved together, made grotesque under the piercing halogen of a very atypical perception. And in this way many things, appropriately, glitter in Vaudeville, are “washed in glitter”, though we know, from the strength of Wolf’s acuity, that what is, or may be, behind this shimmer, is simply “a luminous loosening/ Flesh” . . . For in the special, squalid dive that is Vaudeville, the light and darkness are so interlaced that it is in the end impossible to distinguish the two: the shadows caked with gleam, and the gleam a simple mirror beaming back an empty light. Thus, “one is not to land in Technicolor/And to establish that land”: one must remember the bone behind the sparkle.

In this diverse and perverse universe, pop culture seems bizarrely out of place: a first sign of precocity, perhaps, for Wolf’s modernity lies not in her winks to “7Eleven” and “Alf”, but in the power of a singular vision. She has the flourish and style--the formal tidbits--of some sort of neo-Baroque, but couched in an indisputable control:

hangar

flowerless

to a flaw
harps occurring

Such verse, in its sound (sublime assonance of hs and fs) as in its spatial weight upon the page, is mulled with a Mallarméan perfection. This is the best of it: it is true that in other places it is all a bit too much, that sometimes we veer off the rails into dryly unemotional territory: but the daringness of this poetry, its assurance and occasional vivid beauty, are easily compensation enough.

Language, Allyssa Wolf suggests, is a menagerie. Words are mutants, deformed by the evolutionary progresses of grammar: a “post-” stuck on as a prefix, a trans- rendering a true trans-formation. To the old Horation rule, then, that

If a painter had chosen to set a human head
On a horse’s neck, covered a melding of limbs,
Everywhere, with multi-coloured plumage, so
That what was a lovely woman, at the top,
Ended repulsively in the tail of a black fish:
Asked to a viewing, could you stifle laughter, my friends?
Believe me, a book would be like such a picture,
Dear Pisos, if it’s idle fancies were so conceived
That neither its head nor foot could be related
To a unified form.

Allyssa Wolf gives the finger, literally. As in this, from "The Recollection of a Finger":

part to uniform the furnace
part hanging by a single wire

Wolf’s is a poetics made of bits of hauntingly complementary debris: not the debris of a waste land, which will not cohere, but a debris which, when brought together, forms strange, new, and living organisms. The very forms which Horace forbids the poet, then--though of course, yes, Horace is talking about the work of art as a whole, and not the wondrous creatures which populate it--are precisely those which Wolf revels in: those “tail-like”, or in “spiral forms”. For where does one object stop and another begin? In our most fluid perception, where does one being distinguish his or her own body (thus being) from that of the world?

neck
tubes
roads
body

How are these “things” all the same thing? Why is it unpleasant to think of their resemblance? (Moreover, the poem graphically mimics this resemblance, letting us have simply no peace).

For there is here a certain fierce theatrical vision of humanity, which recalls the German Expressionists: as many times in my reading of Vaudeville--now at 4AM, raccoon-pigeons certainly getting closer--I dreamt of those faces in the drawings of Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, emerging vaguely deformed from out of some unformed darkness. Now of course, Wolf is her own artist: these are simple associations. There is not, for instance, the same fear or consecration of violence in Wolf as one finds in the artists of Die Brücke or Der Blaue Reiter. Wolf is less afraid too of deformity than they, and though her regard is neither cold nor scientific, she wants still, simply, to know what such “abnormality” might mean.

In this way, Wolf is much less a Lautréamont than a Baudelaire, her vision wierdly genial in the midst of apparent “ugliness”. For finally it must be noted that her strange, living dolls dance:

I did my step and dance
But being built in an unregulated window
My own hands hunted me
When I danced
My hips made children’s circles
I was corrected
More than once
I sought to slice my own forehead
More than once
I did

Maybe not a particularly joyous dance, but as all in Wolf, it is the grotesque mis en mouvement, the misshapen given life, and given thus the chance of becoming other, or rather, of being seen simply in a new and very surprising way.

And for that, and much more, this is a stunning debut.

*****

Nicholas Manning is Assistant Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Strasbourg, France, currently writing his doctoral thesis on rhetoric and sincerity in post-war European and American poetry. His poems, articles, translations and reviews have appeared in such places as Verse, Fascicle, Free Verse, Dusie, The Argotist, BlazeVox, MiPoesias, Eratio, Cipher Journal, CrossXConnect, Shampoo, among others. This year he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

INSIDE THE OUTSIDE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AVANT-GARDE AMERICAN POETS Edited by ROSEANNE RITZEMA

2006-11-30T22:50:00.001-08:00

THOMAS FINK Reviews

Inside the Outside: an Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets, Edited by Roseanne Ritzema
(Presa :S: Press, PO Box 792, Rockford, MI 49341, 2006)

Should we use the term “avant-garde” any more? It probably caused more trouble than it’s worth. Introducing Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets, editor Roseanne Ritzema admits that the poets therein use “widely divergent methods” and have significant “philosophical & aesthetic differences,” yet she insists upon their common ground as writers who “seek to break through barriers,” “have been active in the small press movement,” and are often “influenced by sister-arts, such as painting, music and drama” (7-8). Of the thirteen poets collected, at least five—the well-known Lyn Lifshin, Harry Smith, Eric Greinke, A.D. Winans, and Lynne Savitt—utilize traditional narrative or meditative techniques too consistently to be considered experimental. Ritzema is “satisfied that the major schools have been represented” (8), but where is a “Language,” a New York School, or a Black Mountain poet? While John Keene is a gay African-American experimentalist, at least one Asian-American innovative writer and a clearly experimental feminist woman should have been included. Nevertheless, the odd stylistic diversity of Ritzema’s anthology makes it an exciting test for readers who fancy themselves as poetic pluralists. My focus here will be on three especially engaging experimental poets.

The book features a generous selection from the work of Richard Kostelanetz, a major figure in the multi-genre “Avant-Garde” since the late sixties. In Kostelanetz’s “Visual Poem (Black/White),” a symmetrically fragmented rectangle, “WHITE” disappears, letter by letter, into its first letter on the top left-hand side and moves from just “E” to its totality in a nicely incongruous black boldface on the lower right (87). This movement is reversed with “BLACK on the lower left and upper right respectively. Therefore, both terms in this most striking of binary oppositions articulate their contrast and also succumb to diminution in each other’s formidable presence. However, the poem’s most intriguing feature is the quasi-diamond shaped center, in which “BLACK” diagonals flow from top to bottom and “WHITE” ones from bottom to top. Perhaps Kostelanetz asks us to see white as a reversal of the “logical” visual progression of black type on a page. Further, if we read the poem’s central diamond as horizontal lines, the top word is “BE,” and the rest are suggestive nonce words. Then again, if one frames the poem as a commentary on U.S. racial relations—before non-black/non-white categories gained the mainstream’s attention—then s/he can see that notions of appearance/disappearance are played out in four segregated corners and that the center features a desegregated complexity.

Kostelanetz’s abecedarian poem “MULTIPLE GHOSTS” (92-96)uses boldface for certain groups of letters (separated from other such groups) in a word to allow other words to emerge from within each one. In the title, one might expansively read: “Multiple ghosts tip hosts.” Apparitional or not, these extra words offer gratuitous signification to words in whose “houses” they reside. They “tip” us off about the signifier’s “materiality” and its “liberation.” “AMBIGUOUS” (ambiguous big us) alerts his community to the impressive size and potential of doubling discourse.

Like Kostelanetz, John Keene often calls attention to the visual and material presence of language. “’Inbetweenness’ (Morton Feldman)” literally foregrounds the framing of words by placing different parts of his carefully spaced poetic lines in boxes, some of which overlap or bisect one another. The bisections mimic liminal territory of the “music’s/ lyric revolt” against “the persistence/ of dead systems” (185) and thus provide a complication of caesuras in what is otherwise a straightforward Romantic homage.

In Keene’s “Prisms,” a vertical line down the center of two staggered columns with one-line stanzas complicates reading: even if this thin line seems a barrier to jagged horizontal scanning and a warning that the columns are segregated from one another’s poesis, it also dares us to leap over and subvert proscription. Let’s trying reading the title and first six left-hand lines, “Prisms/// attack motion// less mathematical than lyrical// effort notation// iconographic force// private ghosts dialogue// catching scribble,” and the first six right-hand lines, “Richter echo// breathing thinking// emotional event in mark// emanating splendor// by sensograph and eye// pictorial storms,” against a unifying of the columns: “Prisms/// attach motion/ Richter echo/ less mathematical than lyrical/ breathing thinking/ effort notation/ emotional event in mark/ iconographic force/ emanating splendor/ private ghosts dialogue/ by sensograph and eye/ catching scribble/ pictorial storms” (190). Even if unfolding of syntax, rhythm, and thought in the two columns and in the diagonal version are similar, and even if all can be considered meditations on prisms, interesting differences surface. To cite only one of several good examples, prisms’ “attack” on “motion” constituting “lyrical// effort notation” is not the same thing as this “attack” behaving as an “echo” (measurable on the “Richter” scale) that embodies “lyrical/ breathing thinking” before it is also recognized as “effort notation.” While the attachment of “lyrical” to “effort notation” is sublimely incongruous, the linkage of “lyrical” and “breathing” (as in bardic inspiration) seems much more “natural.” Multiple possibilities of signification proliferate further in Keene’s “Geodesy” (189) and “Oscillation” (195), in which five columns (without a separating line) of five words each can be read vertically, horizontally, and perhaps diagonally.

Perhaps my claim that Ritzema did not include Language Poetry in this anthology is only nominally accurate. Though historically unaffiliated with this group, Mark Sonnenfeld fractures continuity in ways that make his work resemble a good deal to be found in anthologies like Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree. In “flower green repellent tip a) spec dualism,” disjunctive effects are densely staged:

all in-between anyway to what I suppose is going
claw style sil crafts this crafts this knuckle language at
least in vertigo, alouds, contingency,
scream systema hoods pru for the drop
like notes in its analysis from unknown
like there suppose (ache, pound) (263)

Setting his sights on the “vertigo” of “contingency,” an “in-between” that does not gently synthesize but aggressively “screams,” “aches,” and “pounds” against comfortably known “systema,” Sonnenfeld uses a “claw(ing) style” to re-“craft” grammar and syntax, turning the adverb “aloud” into the third-person singular verb or plural noun “alouds,” and he shatters prudence into the untranslatable but viscerally cogent “pru for the drop.”

Reminiscent of Ashbery’s poems in The Tennis Court Oath that were so important to early Language poetry, the fifteen numbered fragmentary utterances of Sonnenfeld’s “1. vomit” offer meaning in the process of disappearance or dis-integration: “9. Gooney. one of the manhole./ 10. is red airfoil is variation./ 11. film treatment tablelands./ 12. small limp tumble two:nine” (268). Sonnenfeld sometimes assails the integrity of the word, as in a brief poem’s opening part: “Vh dden transmitterunderio/ rehsilLd-// F a t ramaticalil term a n (,s)ckjeep C., nHorndo" (279). As in the work of Steve McCaffery and David Melnick’s Pcoet, the more recognizable vestiges of words, piled together, tease the reader into trying to find a sensible transmitter hidden under the jumble—with “tra(u)matic” non-results.

Inside the Outside would be a misleading starting point for someone seeking to get up to speed on the innovative poetry of the last thirty or so years, but it helpfully covers some material that other collections usually leave out. For those who already read a good deal of this kind of writing, I can report that it introduced me to Keene and Sonnenfeld’s writing and made me more fully aware of the variety and range of Kostelanetz’s poetry.

*****

Thomas Fink is the author of four books of poetry, mostly recently No Appointment Necessary (Moria Poetry, 2006) and After Taxes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2004), an e-chapbook, Staccato Landmark (Beard of Bees, 2006), and two books of criticism on contemporary poetry. His work has appeared in Talisman, Verse, Jacket, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Otoliths, and numerous other journals. His paintings hang in various collections.

UNCOMMON GEOGRAPHY by THERESE HALSCHEID

2006-11-30T22:50:00.000-08:00

MADELINE TIGER Reviews

UNCOMMON GEOGRAPHY by Therése Halscheid
(Carpenter Gothic Publishers, Island Heights, N.J., 2006)

VISIONS OF LIGHT

Therése Halscheid writes a unique “religious” poetry, a kind that comes out of very early religion. It leads back, beyond pantheism, to ancient customs and “First People.” It is influenced by folklore, and by the sun. It is steeped in primitive awareness, and an impassioned connection to earth. This earth-sense seems unconsciously (but intriguingly) Freudian as connections are made to the female body and mind. The body gives pleasure as part of nature, and thought is made organic.

The work is Buddhist in respectfulness, in awe, and in its ultimate human orientation.

Influenced, perhaps, by the spiritual poetry of Mary Oliver and surely by Native American folklore, Halscheid uses the power of the line and the breath of space-on-the-page to reach for what she needs to articulate. She comes close to forests and swamps, she learns the dark places.

Luminosity becomes a motif. Meditation on trees leads to awareness of a mystic aura:

...every leaf wears/
an aura...

My own fingers/
are becoming illuminated...
My hands continue to shine...
(from “The Exchange”)

This is a visionary poetics, presenting the lessons of illumination. The poet hears signals from ancient, solid things of earth —rock, soil, mountain, and finds communion with its creatures, snake and elk. She mediates through a faith in the great wholeness of everything. Sky rises over these poems. There is a persistent examination of the relationship of soul to body, of human spirit to “round earth,” and of earth, sun, moon—all perceived as sentient—thinking of us.

The woman/ speaker/ shaman-like, becomes empowered as earth is:

Who else sweats light from a stone...

Repeated organic references connect the female body to the elements. In “When Clay Speaks” the poet celebrates the artistic process and the act of loving a woman’s body. The medium imagined is both the clay and the woman; but the primary medium here, in careful, sensuous use is language.

There is devotion to human life, bearing hopes for cultivation and care. In “City Garden,” the poet discovers that the manmade garden becomes more wondrous than the first Garden (Eden). The one she observes is a small piece of earth going back “across the narrow brick walk...” and “coming to life from underground”. Once, birds arrived, then

sun and the moon... began dragging themselves/ across the haze of an urban sky...
And the garden began to know itself
As a forgotten way of being --

It’s a re-Creation mystery with a modern human focus.

The poems are lyrical meditations but also persuasive arguments—for the power of intensely focused seeing, thus knowing, and, finally, merging. There is a modern emergency too, in the fusion of nature and speaker; it is not theoretical.

The transformations, shifts of awareness and of being, are deeply realized. With language. The poet’s work is not “magic”: it is fine craft bringing the speaker and the listener to awakened consciousness and a merging with the concrete and ethereal world. Thus, religious.

*****

Madeline Tiger's most recent collection of poetry (her eighth) is Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000, Marsh Hawk Press, 2003. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She has been teaching in the NJ Writers-in-the-Schools Program since 1974, and has been a “Dodge Poet” since 1986. She won the Artist/Teacher Award of Playwrights Theatre of NJ in 1993. She lived in Montclair from 1963 until moving to Bloomfield in 2000. She has five children and six grandchildren, and lives under a weeping cherry tree.

THE OBEDIENT DOOR by SEAN FINNEY

2006-11-30T22:45:00.001-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

The Obedient Door by Sean Tumoana Finney
(Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, 2005)

It is difficult when reviewing a book to ensure you approach it as independent of any others that you may review. Sometimes that can be remarkably easy, at others one struggles to find something new. Sean Finney’s The Obedient Door is one of the latter. This does not make it a bad book. The writing is strong, it is well presented and enjoyable to read, but then so are so many other collections out there. The back blurb by John Ashbery calls Finney’s book “cheerfully slipshod”, and that is what they are. However, this underestimates Finney’s affinity with words:

To blink at someone
with those eyes.
Posture cannot save you.
It’s egregious love
that waves like new boots.
Answer me by being
a prostitute. I’ll stay still
while you roll in spaghetti
--from “Hawaii Fragments”

Subtle words emphasize simple lines ‘with those eyes’ (italics mine) changes a dull line to one full of meaning. What is it about the eyes? Whose eyes? Are they merely beautiful or do the eyes reveal a depth of emotion? That line would fill an entire afternoon’s lecture on modern poetry and language!

Finney’s poems possess an energy that bounces the reader all over the world, Hawaii, China, Egypt, Rome and there are poems we associate with place we have been, the readers. He has found a way to reach a broad audience. Unfortunately, this energy heightens the lack of difference this book possesses. If there weren’t so many mediocre books covering a broad range of topics as The Obedient Door does, it may have had a change to get a better and more appreciative audience. As it is, there is little to set it apart. His fans will read it, but I doubt it will reach many people unfamiliar with his work, which is a crying shame. It is a good book and it deserves better.

On the circus floor,
I miss you, jug of wine.
On the banks
no expensive bridges
a nudge to find cracks free of needles
sententious flat appraisal.
--from “Rome Again”

Why I have ended with this quote I’m not sure. Perhaps it is because it sums up for me the bleakness of an opportunity lost. Editors and publishers need to be careful what they put in our bookstores -- it is too easy for little gems like The Obedient Door to be passed over. This is Finney’s first collection. I look forward to his next one.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds has published many reviews of poetry both in print and on the net. Formerly the Poetry Editor for feminist literary ezine Moondance.org, she has recently left that position in order to concentrate more on her writing. Living in the beautiful English county town of Shrewsbury, Fionna continues to draw inspiration from all around her and look for more ways in which to develop a wider appreciation of poetry in herself and others.

BOYS, A-Z: A PRIMER by DAN WABER

2006-11-30T22:45:00.000-08:00

EILEEN R. TABIOS Reviews

Boys, A-Z: A Primer by Dan Waber
(Kite Tail Press Publication #17, 2006)

All boys come disguised, especially from girls.
Here is juicy knowledge, lessons maybe no one
previously quilled. Relax, sit tight,
uncover villains while x-raying y-chromosome zone.
--from "Boys, A-Z" by Dan Waber

Simply, this is a gem!

With Boys, A-Z, Dan Waber has taken the alphabet to giddy heights -- not necessarily the heights of transcendence but that of the rollercoaster. His book presents 26 text poems, each of which begins with a boy’s name that also follows the alphabet: Adam, Billy, Charlie, David and so on.

Each text poem is comprised of 3-5 lines -- and it is a scale that emphasizes their wit -- centered on the page. There’s a boyish cheer and more than a couple of snickers permeating the sensibility of the poems, as in W's:

William Xerxes Yancy Zoopodopoulopoulos.
A business card doomed. Etched formal glassware?
ha! Inconceivable! Japanese kanji looking monogram!
Names overlay personality, quite right. Still, that's
unbelievably verbose.

But what makes this collection truly fun are the images facing each text poem: each letter of the alphabet has been transformed to symbolize a boy’s face or head that somehow mirrors the character of that boy as presented by the text-poem. Thus, for "A", the text poem reads as

Adam builds computers,
digital engineersing finagle gates,
his insistent keystrokes lay most networks open,
plunder quarantined remote systems.
This uninhibited vandal will X10 your zippers.

and the visual poem is

Here are two other examples. "C"’s text poem reads as

Charlie doesn't eat fish,
grains, hamburger, instant juice,
kiwi, lemons, mangoes, nectarines or pork.
Queer religous sects take unhealthy vows.
Why X-rate your zaftigness? Appetites belong.

and the visual poem is

"F"’s poem reads as

Frank's greased hair is jewelled, knotted, layered,
marcel-waved. Nattiness overdone. People quietly retreat.
Something thickly unpleasant, viscous, wet, X-rayproof
yo-yos zig-zaggingly around. Babies cry, dogs escape.

and the visual poem is

It’s deeply-clever. I love the idea of the letter presented as if from a manufactured stencil or from a print-out, then looping off calligraphically to form the image. Computer, meet Zen! Zen, meet Computer!

Waber is one of the foremost teachers (for me, anyway) as regards concrete poetry -- I recommend his blog entitled “minimalist concrete poetry”. Perhaps the letter-images count as concrete poetry -- that’d make sense to me, until I read his blog and realized there’s a whole discourse about the topic about which I’m not up to snuff. But my ignorance really didn’t detract from my pleasure in this project.

I can’t resist calling these, too, to be Boyish hiijinks! As delightful as puppy dog noses and waaaay better than snakes! Rarely does the Y chromosome get so fun-ly and funnily proposed!

*****

Eileen Tabios' books are not eligible for review in Galatea Resurrects because she edits this puppy; these orphans languish here; here; here; here; here; and here.

2 BOOKS by JORDAN SMITH

2006-11-30T22:40:00.000-08:00

LYNN STRONGIN Reviews

Two books by Jordan Smith:
An Apology for Loving the Old Hymns (Princeton University Press, 1982)
and
Household of Continuance (Copper Beech Press, 1992)

AN AMERICAN LIGHT:
“One Stopped at the Center of an Explosion”

(Introduction)

The first word that lit up in Jordan Smith’s work for me was Hymns. The second was Love. Last in the trio came the ironic use of the word, Apology. I felt I’d come into the church by the backdoor: this was no formal religion: Such an apology was, clearly, praise using verbal music as vehicle, creating spoken hymns, redolent of early America’s sung hymns. In this interview/study of two of Smith’s books, An Apology for Loving the Old Hymns (1982) and The Household of Continuance (1992.) I will focus upon both the highly personal light he sees in American landscape and history and upon the hymn he speaks in question as often as in veiled praise: these poems are largely narrative. Smith says that the only hymn he ever got by heart was “When I survey That Wondrous Cross.” Reading these poems, I feel I stand atop a hill in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, rural upstate New York. He lives where he views, in fact, a kind of secular cross: industrial and rural upstate New York: the interior lives of people in the interior of homes they have built. Here, pride is grown “bright, turned bitter, ragged fallen.” This is a post-fall world, to be sure, with spent ash coloring it, sky itself “half-stained,” becoming filled with clouds. But there is a moment when, the house done, well-timbered that peace comes:

“. . .that half-expectant peace you feel, head bowed,
after the choir has stopped, and still you’re sure the verses will jug on.”

This “half-expectant peace” is the pause in which we live. Although the songs will scatter like leaves perhaps like the divine spark, the pause confirms “the last word sung/to be a blessing.”

These are highly polished poems that leave one filled with longing. Nowhere is this more exemplified than in “Vine Valley”:

“There will be nothing left to forgive.
This is what you meant by grief: a stroke of charcoal
lost against the dark weave of the scarf, that sorrow”
. . .
and there was no one left to speak:
That sorrow is original

a fellowship of loss lying at the root of things.”

The echoes this poem sets up are those of an insatiable yearning which is our human fate. Echoing Ralph Waldo Emerson, Smith is both classic and romantic: romantic in his enthusiastic tone; classic in his formalist approach: balanced stanzas, regular and irregular rhyme-schemes, above all the poetic technique he links, alliteration marking his work. That America he sings (like Whitman singing his America), finds its nexus where the country began: the Northeast—soon to be scarred with damns, brickmills and linen-mils, the industries which change its motors. Both Democratic and following the injunction of Christ to offer “charity,” without being avowedly Christian, Smith is an exponent of the brotherhood/sisterhood of humans, whose birth-duty is to forgive.

(Interview)

l) You speak of “An American light, as if stopped in the middle of an explosion.. Using a violent metaphor, it captures a moment of stillness. Can you speak to me of this precise light: why do you feel stopped in the midst of an explosion?

The explosion is time. Emerson celebrated it, those changes by which the self outgrows its circumstances: in “Nature,” where he writes of the danger of the unanchored imagination producing a labyrinthine explosion of images. It’s in the landscape too, of the Hudson River painters, the energy of the rivers and the insistent presence of the rocks, the almost psychedelic sunsets of Frederick Church, the sunset over the Alplaus Kill in Burnt Hills. The light is the perception of someone at once in the midst of this transformation and apart enough to notice it.

2) Born and raised in the Northeastern United States, your poetry is situated there. Although you attended Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers Workshop, I see you in Northeastern light and landscapes, towns and villages. Have you ever wanted to immerse yourself in any other region?

Well, I’ve never lived anywhere else long enough. I have written about Baltimore or Iowa—you’ll find those poems in Lucky Seven—so I can’t say what might have happened if I’d ended up teaching and living somewhere other than the Northeast. But I do feel at home in upstate New York, with the history of the place, its beautiful and run-down landscapes, it’s legacy of eccentric spiritual seekers. My father used to stop at the yellow and blue state historical monuments when we drove around: he had a copy of Carl Carmer’s wonderful old book about traveling through this area during the Depression, Listen for a Lonesome Drum: it is one of the first books I really fell in love with, a sort of tourist guide to the depth psychology of this landscape.

3) I see you as a formalist: you write in long-lined lyrics. lyric-narratives. Have you consciously chosen models such as Browning’s “My Last Duchess?” Do you see yourself continuing these monologues? I see you as bricoleur, bricklayer: particularly in your taking on historical personages, you layer experience and detail. Do you consciously create with this layering, like the tempera artist who applies brush stroke after brush stroke of egg-yolk tempera to create the radiant color of the Middle Ages artists?

I think the idea of layering is exactly right. I re-write a lot, and that sense of adding layers as the revisions go on has always been crucial. I had the good luck to study with poets who took form seriously, but who weren’t elitist or proscriptive in their sense of it. Donald Justice was particularly valuable here, with his insistence that free verse is itself a formal choice. As for the monologues, I think I got my Browning mostly second-hand, through Richard Howard’s work, which opened up the possibility of speaking as “another self,” of finding narrative and dramatic, rather than expressive solutions to getting things said.

4) You tell me you have no formal religion you feel at ease with, but feel closest to the Quakers. Your work reminds me of composer John Adam’s Shaker Loops. Has any specific music influenced you?

Lots: different music in different books. Behind the poems in An Apology, there’s the Ives first quartet and second symphony, with their use of hymn tunes and American themes (both literally and in the context the pieces create). Kurt Weill’s Silbersee provided the impetus for a poem in Lucky Seven, as did Thomas Lawes’ “A Sad Pavane for these Distracted Times.” Opera was a big influence on the poems in The Household; there’s one long poem which uses an imagined broadcast of Tristan as background and commentary. But John Dowland got in there too. Poems from the last several years have been strongly influenced by my interest in American old-time and bluegrass. Old American fiddle and string-band music especially, has been on my mind for years: the mystery of it, the eccentricity of the tunes and their timing, the combination of evasion and rawness in the lyrics, the connection with history and place.

5) Many of your poems have a domestic setting—“Gingerbread,” etc. Household establishes that.. These too are hymn-like: giving thanks for the gift of domestic life. Do you see your Apology for Loving. . . as a collection of lyric-narratives which could be considered hymns?

Hymns don’t strike me as being only, or even primarily, about praise. Or it might be better to say that praise also implies a questioning, a desire to understand the relationship of the self to that other being addressed, the world. An Apology is a more interrogative collection I think, looking at the world. Household looks at the domestic life and tries to see, what matters in the midst of all the details of a household.

6) Apology and Household appear exactly a decade apart: What chief differences do you see between your first and your second full-length books? Did you decide to grow in certain ways? Did reviews of Apology, such as Helen Vendler’s in Parnassus, Or David St John’s in The Antioch Review affect you?

Well, there’s another volume in between, Lucky Seven, which appeared in 1988. I don’t think that reviews have affected my practice very much—not out of any desire to dismiss what has been said, but because I don’t usually feel that I have much choice in what I write. I’ve changed as a writer—from the historical monologues in the first book to the conjunction of narrative and shorter, song-like lyrics in the second, on to the much more formal structures and meditations of The Household, to the more voice-driven, mostly free-verse poems of the two forthcoming collections.

7) Do you place yourself within any school such as The New York Poets or the Black Mountain Poets?

I don’t see myself as part of a school. For example, I like Liam Rector’s work, we’ve talked and corresponded about poetry for over twenty years. But Liam's work and mine, whatever our affinities, don't necessarily share a “school” sensibility. I think the concept of schools is both interesting as literary history and useful as starting point. But I like poets from a variety of allegiances. Why would anyone give up the privilege of having Alice Notley in the same pile of books as Thom Gunn or David St. John? of James Schyler or Marvin Bell? Michael Burkard or Eleanor Lerman or Jane Cooper, Paul Blacburn, Richard Hugo, James Merrill? The list could go on. . .

8) Household and Hymns both deal with communal experiences: one suggests a choir, one a marriage. Roberta Berke speaks in Bounds Out of Bounds of your extending metaphors: “These images do not remain static pictures.” . . .In “Daguerreotype,” an old woman’s letter is “pressed in the diary/ until its violet ink has blended with the black/phrases of the moon.” (P. 152 Bounds.) Here, I see both solitude and community. The woman is old, hence much alone, but the letter links her with the past in a way that gives her community. Berke speaks of your metaphors extending over borders “like figures in a watercolor.”

Solitude and community, that’s pretty much what we’ve got, isn’t it? I don’t see myself at all as a hermit—I’ve got a job, a family including kids in three different schools, an obsession with playing fiddle that gets me out of the house—but I don’t feel particularly comfortable in the world we’re making here, despite the fact I’ve got good friends in the world of American poetry, a world including many writers I respect.

9) What of the seasons? Have you a favorite? One that creeps into your poems more than any other? “Rexford” takes place in a somewhat romantic autumn atmosphere of joined flame: how does season shape landscape for you? Again, Roberta Berke says of “The Oxbow”: “This poem drifts like a boat with its oars up, yet the backwaters it glides over reflect and focus all of Smith’s previous concerns. . .It is autumn, and the house’s windowpanes are broken, yet it is welcoming.” “Convention and covenant”? To borrow a phrase of yours from another poem? Is homecoming not both of these, yoked? Roberta Berke says, “The coming ice is strangely welcome, and is awaited. “A woman/ who leaves the coffee on the stove and stares/ at her face in the window to see her husband/ come out of the snow.” (p. 154, Berke.) She perceives a necessity to take upon herself another warmth which is not only against the blizzard, but against a longer cold. You become bricoleur once more: whiskey-stain on wallpaper; barge of coal by peeling walls; dead muskrat. What season of the soul of man are we in? Is it totally bleak?

Fall is definitely my season in Hymn. I’ve always found something uncanny about autumn. Maybe it’s Stevens: “death is the mother of beauty’—autumn is certainly the season that articulates that. But I felt that way long before I ran into Stevens, or thought of myself as a poet. There are things that produce a feeling—an autumn day can do it, leaf smoke, a modal fiddle tune, a line of hills-- words framing a scene with mystery.

10) Vendler speaks of your handling best “the artist’s love of his medium, its almost female flexibility.” What do you make of her phrase” “almost female flexibility”? And, do you think she is correct when she notes your echoes of Whitman, and Stevens?

I think what good critics do is to create their own narrative of the work, which may or may not be what the author had in mind. It’s the critic’s response to the work, and if it is compelling, that’s because the story the critic has made of it is a revelation of the critic’s sensibility interacting with the writer’s material. So a critic is a pleasure to read in many of the same ways that poetry offers pleasure, as the articulation of the movements and habits of a particularly engaging mind. And a good critic offers ways of looking beyond the particular poet or poem to a view of how poetry itself works, [Vendler is] right about Whitman and Stevens, both of whom I was very engaged with when writing that book. And in the sense that language, the medium, is almost a presence in the process of writing, and can seem to have its own body. Each poem. . . is such a tunnel-vision sort of thing. I’m usually aware of the next word, the next line (or hoping very much to become aware of them), and I often don’t have a very clear idea of what I’m up to in any particular poem until it’s done.

11) Virtually every critic I’ve read of your work notes that you have a keen sense of beauty. The arts come into large play in your poems. I think of painters: Hogarth, Edward Munch (in Apology) as well as my favorite shorter lyric in this volume “a Side of Beef,” inspired by the Jewish painter Chaim Soutine.

“So I have come to love the body on the edge of ascension”

This sentence would seem an illuminating comment on the body of your work. Depicting a peasant woman beneath a bridge, you pick out that small truth “where she hangs between fire and water, a stillness/that lasts only so long as the soul cannot choose its element." That is our human predicament: we cannot choose our element and despite this paradox must proceed, suspended.

You bring off what you admire in Homer, a type of vigil in which you summon the deceased: “those great imaginings.” Which image prevails at the end of this poem? The girl “too plain/not to forget with the rest” a child who “fetches blood in a shallow earthenware basin,” one who could see her face reflected, would see “ochre broken over vermilion.”? Or the side of beef, the poem’s concluding image? “slaughtered. . ./ hides transfigured/in the afterimage/of leather and a guttering lantern: on a blue ground,/ochre and vermilion.” Ochre and vermilion are echoes of the opening image of the child. I came away with both images. This poem has its life, draws its being from painting.

Music inspired “For Dulcimer & Doubled Voice,” just as it does, “A Lost Sonata.” Can you speak to me a bit about your personal involvement with the arts, principally these two arts and how you see them figuring in your work? Is this a conscious decision such as-- I will put on Handel’s Messiah for inspiration today. Or subconscious? that subliminal art, music always in your mind. (Was Wallace Stevens' Susanna and the Elders on your mind?)

I’ve almost always seen music as inspiration. I usually have music on while I write, although I’d guess the effect is more subliminal than intentional. I like the visual arts—painting and photography in particular—especially for their narrative aspects, especially if the narrative is suggested, so that the viewer is left to play with, to speculate about the images and their relationships. If you think of poetry, all art really, as essentially metaphorical, then the same cluster of emotion and experience can be represented in a variety of ways. (The truth is, I envy visual artists and musicians the physicality the performance aspect of what they do, the activity of it.)

12) Tell me a bit about your method of composition.

Ok. I’ve thought of composition for as long as I can remember as a layering process. It doesn’t seem to matter much what tools I’m using. I start with a line or two in my head, carry that around awhile before I write it down, usually longhand on a legal pad or notebook. But sometimes directly to typescript. Recently, I’ve acquired an oil-cloth-covered notebook I carry around. Often enough, not much happens. I’ll work on drafts that are farther along—then circle back to new material, waiting for something to suggest itself, maybe trying out different ways of phrasing or handling lines. New poems often don’t extend themselves more than a few lines or stanza at a sitting.

Once I have what seems like the full length of the poem (typescript by then), I go over the printed copy, scribbling in changes. Then, I type in edits, followed by more hand-written changes. I’m often going back and forth between several poems, or sets of poems, in different stages. So I may suddenly end up with three or four poems that seem pretty much finished

Sometimes, it’s different. When I started the long Strindberg poem in “An Apology,” (“A Lost Sonata”) I thought of the idea, did some background reading, got nowhere and gave up on it. Until one day, crossing the intersection of North Charles Street and 36th in Baltimore, I knew what the poem was going to be, the whole thing. It took a couple of days to actually write it. That doesn’t happen much. Sometimes I vary work methods, pushing myself all the way through a draft early on just to see what happens.

I like that “the intersection of North Charles and 36th." For me, often poems take shape as an intersection—or on a few occasions, at one.

13) To switch gears, tell me about your admiration for Thom Gunn.

I’ve liked his poems for a long time. I admire the clarity and precision with which he sees, and his way of allowing the self to appear as a function of that seeing, rather than as a matter of direct presentation. I also admire his formal skill—his ability to write so well in free verse, syllabics, traditional meters: equally musical, equally direct. Gunn’s life, who he is, seems to me an essential part of his poetry, but it isn’t the reason for being of any one of his poems. Instead there’s a desire for understanding the particularities of the people who become subjects for his portraits.

14) Have you tried to cultivate that kind of understanding of the characters who are subjects for your portraits?

I’ve used mostly fictionalized figures, historical or imagined, as my subjects, so the poems are more portraits of portraits. I hope in the poems I’ve written out of my own life and experience that I’ve learned to err more on the side of sympathy, which is Whitman’s lesson.

15) Where do you see yourself moving? More into history, say, another “art,” or ardor in your books?

I have two books coming out shortly—Three Grange Halls, a chapbook from Swan Scythe Press, and For Appearances, a full-length collection from the University of Tampa Press. Together, they represent more than ten years of work, all the poems I’ve wanted to keep since The Household of Continuance was finished. They’re still involved with history, although as context rather than as subject; they still refer to music as subject and model, although the music is from the American folk tradition. They’re mostly free verse, although I hope a musical free verse. I was surprised when reading through them to see how abstract many of them are, which makes me think that the syntax, the sentence driving down the lines, was more in my mind that in the earlier poems. I think I managed a more natural, more idiomatic voice.

I’m just beginning work on new poems, but I’m not sure yet what they will be. Character and narrative seem more important in the drafts I’ve managed so far.

16) Like New York painter, Walter Hatke, about whom you’ve written a descriptive booklet to commemorate a show opening, you feature windows and doors. “These do not stop the eye, they lead it only to a further opacity.” The surprise here is the word “Opacity.” One would imagine an open door or window to lead to transparency.

Walter’s work is very interesting that way. He often paints public places, but there’s a sense of intense privacy.

17) In conclusion, this saying attributed to Mother Ann Lee (founder of the Shakers) could stand as commentary on your work as well:

“Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as you would if you knew you would die tomorrow.”

What do you think?

I think that anyone who comes to work in the arts—or to any craft, for that matter, at least partly comes out of a love of form. You’re making something with a care that can seem disproportionate; you’re making something you hope will last.

18) So we’ve come full circle like John Adams' Shaker Loops, a music resonating thru your early formal narratives, and the later lyrics. Your first book opens with an epigraph from Washington Irving’s Sketch Book:

Such is this boasted immortality. A mere temporary rumor, a local sound, like the tone of that bell which has just tolled. . .filling the ear for a moment—lingering transiently. . –then passing away like a thing that was not.

This captures and transmits for me the dark-lined, story-tale spectral, almost phantasmagoric, quality of America’s great fiction writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Present in Irving too, it draws upon the metaphor of music, “Bell” suggests death “Just tolled” transience, a “boasted,” but not real “immortality.”

I was really happy to find that epigraph—it seemed just right for both the tone and concerns of the book, and helped me locate it in an American tradition of folktale and story-telling.

19) Are you not that man who knows his songs finally will end as broken branches, yet still wants the last word to be this blessing? Am I right in hearing overtones of surveying the world as a wondrous cross—the only hymn you ever got by heart?

I don’t know why that hymn stuck with me so, something about the simultaneous presence of pride and self-abnegation in it. I haven’t a formal religion. I was raised as a Protestant. But something about the institutions of religion has always made me deeply uncomfortable. I’ve been most happy, in this regard, when I’ve attended Quaker meetings, because of the combination of silence and spontaneous speech or song. Think of Emerson in this connection and Whitman, both guides to a sort of do-it-yourself, autodidactic spirituality.

20) Your poems are cut with just the her right facet of irony to make them glisten. Am I right in seeing you as both traditional and modern, a late American Romantic, fascinated by the arts, in addition to having a passion for architecture and history?

I think so. The alternatives to romanticism—the modernist gathering of shards, the post-modern reveling in shattered reflections—don’t seem as available to me. But this isn’t nostalgia, just a matter of how the world makes sense (or doesn’t) to me. I don’t see art as evolutionary, a relentless push from style to style. The older styles, the meanings they make possible, stay with us, if only in a form that also acknowledges what has come after. Maybe that’s where the irony comes in.

21) Pride and self-abnegation: I like that conjunction. Very New England. Very bricoleur: it habits the countryside you love. I see your poetry as a poetry of restraint, of understatement.

I think the modulation of emotion by language, by image, by gesture would be a fair description

20) Back to that peculiarly American light: “one stopped at the center of an explosion, can you give me a few last words?

Overwhelmed by change and image in a country that doesn’t have a stable center, we are caught by a self that outgrows its circumstances. The light stopped in the middle of an explosion? It’s the sunset over Aplaus in Burnt Hills. Emerson celebrates its energy; so did the Hudson River painters. It’s in the landscapes and tumbling streams; in the rushing rivers and millennial rocks. The explosion is time itself, spilling with cumulative force, a young energy with a peculiar and abundant radiance: an American light.

(July—Oct 1, 2002)
Victoria, B.C. Canada—July—September 2002)

*****

Lynn Strongin's new book of poems, Short Visiting Hours for Children: Rembrandt's Smock, is forthcoming from Plain View Press, Austin, Texas. This review is a chapter from Strongin’s forthcoming book Returning the Light: Portraits of Hidden Faith in Fourteen Contemporary Poets. A full introduction to Lynn Strongin is available at her website: http://members.shaw.ca/stronginweb/index.html

MAINSTREAM by MICHAEL MAGEE and MUSEE MECHANIQUE by RODNEY KOENEKE

2006-11-30T22:35:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Mainstream by Michael Magee
(Blaze Vox 2006)

and

Musee Mechanique by Rodney Koeneke
(Blaze Vox 2006)

quickly now, two books from the same publisher. both are actual flarf books, fresh on the hoof. I don't mean to conflate them or their authors beyond the convenience of their sharing that same publisher, tho as flarf list vets there must be cross-pollination. not that how anyone expends their pollen is any of my beeswax.

Blaze Vox is not particularly a flarf publisher, but these two writers definitely flarf, and will tell you that they do, too. both books show flarfian strengths, but I to wish to avoid that specious cultural war of flarf-good-or-bad. that's so last tuesday at the elementary school. I'm talking majuscule P Poetry here, not some sordid segregation.

Michael Magee's Mainstream has already bitten off a good piece of controversy. here's one of my rules: if a work stirs up strong emotion, it is worth reading. the immediate corollary to this rule: if a strong emotion does occur, find out what's underneath it. also, try committing yourself to what is on the page, not to imputations about the author (the who?). in fine, my advice is: check it out.

fine then. Mainstream, for starters, is a tough, raucous affair. the humour is possessed, political, and often quite nutty. not wry like, say, Billy Collins or James Tate. definitely absurd, but biting as well. Magee preys on the collisions of pop culture and the real war. somehow, I want to say that his work is both instrument, and a meter of that instrument. I mean meter as in a measuring of extent. if I were to speak of intention, I'd say Magee wants to frag someone, but in a kindly if conundrumical way.

you'll probably push the wtf button several times as you read, because his confrontations combine with a density that makes nothing easy. and it shouldn't be easy. if one plans to treat of racism, sexism, homophobia and other interstices of political smearing, one can't be simplistic. or one can, it happens often enough, but that's in preparation for stun guns and other such abject arguments.

here are the first few liens of the title poem:

“Poems are, like, total bullshit unless they are
squid or popsicles or deer piled
on elk in the trunk of David Hasselhoff's
Cutlass Sierra”

Magee seems to be extending Spicer's real lemon, and ReaLemon, it occurs to me, is a product for your purchasing pleasure: reconstituted lemon for those times when you need something like the real thing. I hope you have a similar ah hah! moment as I just had. a few lines further, we encounter:

“...I could kill an entire day
with a popsicle stick and a small jar of insignificant
brain cells lost in the 70s by George W. Bush.”

the specificity is important, being pretty much a demand to notice all the crap, no matter how common, local seemingly innocuous. or how about this plaint:

“What kind of deity has 40 years to perfect His culinary skills and can't do better than manna?”. some of our most spiritual moments are crabby.

that density that I mentioned is where the work begins. the syntax is not obvious, tho you may wish it were. remember, poetry is not opinion. I found Magee's Afterword quite helpful, as he speaks of his method and also of how flarf developed. this Afterword may just give you a foothold into the flarfian realm. or just call it poetry and don't fret the catalogue.

Musee Mechanique differs considerably from Mainstream but both reside on the same planet. Rodney Koeneke also provides a useful Afterword. he's a veritable newcomer to flarf. his first book, the wonderful and award-winning Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003), predates his involvement with flarf. I note that his method may have changed or evolved, but the voice remains identifiable. and no sophomore jinx!

Rodney's humour is rather oblique, but fun. I especially like his series called On the Clamways, taking off from Clark Coolidge's spunky On the Nameways. sassy and dippy at the same time, this series pleasantly shakes your peach tree. well, it did mine, I don't mind saying. “And by the way, clam culture as it happens / Is ruled by this bitchy little number called 'Snappy / the Clam'.” omfg!!!

there's a happy friskiness to Musee Mechanique (which, in fact, On the Nameways also possesses, not to push comparisons between Coolidge and Koeneke). poetry is language at play, say I. goofiness and tenderness mix together in Musee, in a supple registration of poetic energy. here's “Sparrow” entire. try to read the map carefully:

Often I return
to a management compensation situation:
we lie together gazing up at the spackled ceilings,
wan mirrors of ourselves.

Each month brings it flaccid enchantments
around like a dim sum cart. We choose
among absences, forgotten rooms
in an underused vacation home.

Today's colonoscopy went swimmingly
I think. First I saw inside myself,
then a snow hove off the eaves.
A white-breasted nuthatch nests in my
urethra, and begins to sing.

this is poetry, right? so what's with that sticky phrase in the second line? how do colonoscopy and swimmingly happen to work together? likewise nuthatch and urethra? ah me, our rare thoughts occur in a world of spackle, vacation homes and colonoscopies. we reside in a war zone of many functions, and it drives us kind of batty. anyway, do you see the advance here, the acceptance? and isn't there tenderness here, as I already suggested?

with both Mainstream and Musee, I found that I had to slow down my reading. the felicities are kinda quirky, you've got to give them time to greet you. both employ disjunction as a sort of destabilizing effect. just as you start seeing things in a clearcut, simple way, you are routed from your complacency. I admire that sort of rupture of the given. that rupture might be a definitive component of flarf. I really highly recommend both books, but only if you are willing to give them proper time. I don't know whither flarf, but these two books are excellent and to have.

*****

Allen Bramhall: sharing a birthday with Herman Melville, Jerry Garcia and Lt William Clark is only one of my many accomplishments. I am a lifelong righthanded resident of Massachusetts, have published one book with more to come, and I paint. I am traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AHB, and am open to a leveraged buyout.

MY SPACESHIP, Edited by MARK LAMOREAUX

2006-11-30T22:26:00.000-08:00

RICHARD LOPEZ Reviews

My Spaceship, Edited by Mark Lamoreaux
(Cy Gist Press, 2006)

First off, I must admit that I love themed anthologies such as My Spaceship ed. by Mark Lamoureux, the second chapbook from his Cy Gist Press. The idea behind this collection was to have a clutch of poets write ekphrastic texts based on the images taken from a childhood coloring book of sci-fi pictures. The images are preserved specimens printed en face to the accompanying texts. What I find wild is how this coloring book, Lamoureux's I'm guessing, survived the ravages of child play. My own such items have long been ripped into wispy strings void of any readable printing at all.

Okay, so there is the gut-level reaction to the images in the collection itself, but the poems are the meat of the matter. Here's Tom Beckett's text in its entirety:

My Spaceship

Is a Freudian slip

Of a thing

Lips colored

Outside its lines.

Beckett embraces his task by penning an eponymous poem of the collection proper that accentuates the sensuality of coloring on paper, which in turn are embodiments of the eroticism of writing and language. Rather the spaceship Beckett refers to is not a slip of a thing but a vehicle for one of the responsibilities of poets and poetry: love, in all its messiness outside the lines, whether or no the language is writ in crayon.

Another excellent poem by Noah Falck must be quoted in its entirety too. For in it Falck extends the sci-fi theme toward our dystopian near-future.

Alone Exacto Place

The sky was a prehistoric black,
a space helmet and four moons
suspended themselves in my peripheral.

The sound of the neighbor's ignition
was like the first flushing toilets of space
and that's when the system crashed

my memory, my hard drive.
It felt like being stranded in a parking
lot without a calendar of moon transfers,

like speaking in code as the great
tick of music ran wild beyond my ears
across the corporate universe.

Less about the images in a coloring book then the brave new world of the early 21st century. Falck does what good ekphrastic writing must do, and that is move beyond its subject, the image itself, and into a something larger, even if that something pitches toward the void of the loss of memory and information, items so crucial for intellectual life in our new millenium. Poetry is not a code as some who are put out by intense, abstracted language might suggest, rather poetry runs swifter and deeper beyond the corporations that seemingly control life in the 21st century.

That is one of the strengths of poetry, and why this collection is such a delight. Poetry, thus far, resists commodification, so far it has not been coopted by corporate interests and is vitally a part of play, in life and art. No better way to express that play than within the pages of a child's coloring book, for in it we have only the image, the crayon and the imagination to blur outside its lines. Poetry is the blur of ink, the tick of music, the messiness of our crazy life.

I've quoted two poems from My Spaceship in this brief review, I could've easily done the whole of the book. But that wouldn't be a review at all but a reprinting of the entire collection. Indeed, instead I'll list a sampling of other good poets in this chap; poems by Jon Leon, Nate Pritts, Jess Mynes, Eileen Tabios, Stacy Syzmaszek and Suzanne Nixon. It was Nixon who coined the phrase in her poem "(!)" 'alien nectar' which is a pretty damn good description of the contents of this excellent collection.

*****

Richard Lopez lives the life electric at really bad movies.

THE AFTER-DEATH HISTORY OF MY MOTHER by SANDY MCINTOSH

2006-11-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

The After-Death History of My Mother by Sandy McIntosh
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2005)

Sandy McIntosh’s The After-Death History of My Mother is whimsical, sharp, humorous and clever. It’s multi-hued content reflected in the multicoloured joyful painting of its cover. The joi de vie of the art is a shocking contrast to the stark declaration of death made by the title. This juxtaposition continues through the book with poems sectioned into moments of contrast to those before and after them. It seems to dare the reader to follow the thread of McIntosh’s thought, to try to keep pace with what at one moment is funereal slow and the next as fast as the night creature avoiding the glare of a porch light.

Within the covers a wistful melancholy subtly spiced with an occasional touch of anger or a pinch of malice accompanies the title section. Frustration, hurt and confusion are emotions we are left with despite attempts to portray moments lightly. There is a strong sense of these poems section being written as a kind of therapy. The second section "With" continues an investigation into what is left behind when people die. This time by teachers, mentors, poets rather than family members. He begins this section with a notation giving the meaning of padeuteria -- a poem giving thanks to our teachers -- and in each poem McIntosh shares with us eccentricities and individuality.

That evening was long ago. Hays died first, then several years later,
Ginsberg. Ignatow, never subtle in person, looked significantly at his
wristwatch, then at me.

When Ignatow died he left me his watch.
--from “Ignatow Interrupts a Dream”

In these lines there is love, there is regret, there is humour, and there is more than a hint of hero-worship. The camaraderie is stated in the preceding passage in which the poet has been sitting on the porch with these venerable figures. Tender emotion is powerfully suggested as McIntosh lays bare any barriers erected by life. There is elegance in the poems of this collection and a sophisticated imagery that keeps the reader on the sidelines. Poems like “Obsessional,” “Ignatow Interrupts a Dream,” “With Ignatow” and “With Hays” are infused with a grace that reminds me of AS Byatt and her bestseller Possession. These two writers possess an indefinable ability to mythologize. What they create is not going to be merely for the moment, it is going to remain with the reader, be compared in the future to new writings. McIntosh and Byatt write for the lofty hallowed halls of immortality, whether they mean to or not.

The room dusky,
Flickering candles.
Brutal cinder block decorated
With streamers. Each rickety table
Disguised with gift paper.
--from “IV Obsessional (This is it)”

McIntosh’s ability to skip a whimsied path between prose and poetry is one of the most enduring factors of this book. He feels no need to confine himself to one style within a poem; occasionally he brings in drama as well. Perhaps in his next collection he will add lyrics and a news report, and the one after that can bring in a thesis and biblical sermon. I wouldn’t underestimate anything about this poet. He is a wild card, and they are often the best to read and follow. The After-Death History of My Mother is an energetic book. The reader is dazzled, bemused and caught unawares by the way McIntosh approaches his subject. A surreal book for a surreal today!

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds has published many reviews of poetry both in print and on the net. Formerly the Poetry Editor for feminist literary ezine Moondance.org, she has recently left that position in order to concentrate more on her writing. Living in the beautiful English county town of Shrewsbury, Fionna continues to draw inspiration from all around her and look for more ways in which to develop a wider appreciation of poetry in herself and others.

DO NOT AWAKEN THEM WITH HAMMERS by LIDIJA DIMKOVSKA

2006-11-30T22:20:00.000-08:00

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ Reviews

Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Lidija Dimkovska
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)

*
At this age it’s best if somebody else
cuts your umbilical cord,
and I am not afraid of Virginia Woolf,
I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard of her? (3)

I hadn’t heard of Lidija Dimkovska until reading this bilingual collection (translated from the Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid), the twelfth book in Ugly Duckling’s Eastern European Poets Series. Dimkovska, born in 1971 in Skopje, Macedonia, has written four books of poetry (Progenies of the East, Fire of Letters, Bitten Nails, and Nobel vs. Nobel) and a novel (Hidden Camera).

*

Although I’ve always appreciated bilingual editions, even if merely to see the textures of the poem in its original, I was disappointed that there wasn’t a preface from the translators discussing their difficulties, insights, or methods -- especially considering both the protean quality of the work and how, at one point, Dimkovska consciously addresses the translators:

Authorized translator, that’s you, not me. Check it over,
read me again, correct the errors,
give form to the text, give form to me with the tip
of the tongue (lingue / parole). (17)

Although this kind of preface isn’t necessary to enjoy the poems, it would offer the reader some sense of what was lost in translation.

*

Because there’s nothing formally interesting about these poems (they are almost all single block stanzas, with very little weight / weightlessness employed at the line breaks), the “burden of engagement” relies heavily on content and the speaker’s management / mismanagement of content. Fortunately, Dimkovska skillfully manages vocal / tonal shifting, humor, thematic texturing, and intimate gestures to engage the reader.

*

From now on I shall speak in onomatopoeia,
Or better, in metaonomatopoeia [...]
We’re having tea, biting each other’s nails
and licking our lips. Chirp chirp! Metachirp metachirp! (5)

“Metaonomatopoeia” aptly describes Dimkovska’s method, and relates to the meta-chirpings of Levertov and Marinetti. From Levertov’s “Some Notes on Organic Form”:

In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds, acting together with the measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia—I,e., they imitate, not the sounds of an experience [...] but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture.

And from Marinetti’s “Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility”:

There are different kinds of onomatopoeias:

Direct, imitative, elementary, realistic onomatopoeia, which serves to enrich lyricism with brute reality, which keeps it from becoming too abstract or artistic. [...]

Indirect, complex, and analogical onomatopoeia. E.g. in my poem Dunes the onomatopoeia dwn-dum-dwn-dum expresses the circling sound of the African sun and the orange weight of the sun, creating a rapport between sensations of weight, heat, colour, smell, and noise. [...]

Abstract onomatopoeia, noisy, unconscious expression of the most complex and mysterious motions of our sensibility. (E.g. in my poem Dunes, the abstract onomatopoeia ran ran ran corresponds to no natural or mechanical sound, but expresses a state of mind.)

Psychic onomatopoetic harmony, that is the fusion of 2 or 3 abstract onomatopoeias.

Dimkovska’s method of “metaonomatopoeia” combines Levertov’s sense of capturing the feeling, tone, and texture of experience, and Marinetti’s idea of embodying complex and the mysterious motions of consciousness to create a “psychic onomatopoetic harmony” (Dimkovska’s “metachirp”). This difficult compositional method allows the reader to “read read read”:

Let consciousness stream, let my mind stream into the wedding menu:
“brains in breadcrumbs traditional style.”
Tradition is a stream of the unconscious: so if I die, I’ll die of laughter.
In this room? In some other? In a room with a tax number?
My crane, shall I lower you to the ground or leave you in the heavens? (71)

A dynamic, poetic voice streams through this collection in surprising and unexpected ways. The reader never knows if the poet will provide us with hypotactic grounding, or lift our perception across a paratactic paradise:

Had you not set out to conquer the void
between the balcony and Budapest
I wouldn’t have left you without one ear,
I wouldn’t have held you in a total derangement of nerves.
Rimbaud could not foresee everything.
Let him come judge for himself
if life is more expensive than a TV set –
particularly as the Romanians have PRO-TV
and Macedonians have 200,000 refugees –
and if he can be fenced in by a TV screen without turning love
into a public performance of trained cats.
I owe you a small spoon of Immunal for every word
and for your nails – a book of poems on which,
according to decree No. 07-3944/2
issued by the Ministry of Culture, a reduced tax shall be paid. (11)

The poems fluently re-arrange the reader’s nerves through different registers, capturing the harmonies and disharmonies of consciousness. Dimkovska ultimately shows us how “life becomes the avant-garde of the underground absurd” (81):

The walls hurt from my mother’s Gobelin tapestries.
The girl with a small hat, the Pirate Woman, Dirty Jean,
and even more from the photographs hung beside them,
of my sister’s wedding, of the reception of the President’s.
Today they have hung my diploma on a nail.
and room will be made for some Medals of Labor, too.
Tomorrow we should stick up the Orthodox calendar
next to the one which allegedly counts a different time.
Whoever comes leaves traces of themselves,
sticks up small pictures and plastic hooks,
and they hang their shadows around the wall clock
on newly hammered nails.
I had to support the walls with my life till dawn
when the masons came to rebuild them again.
The walls fell asleep, I had already died.
Do not awaken them with hammers, pray do not awaken them,
leave them bare, and me alone with them, and me alone with them. (33

)
*

Dimkovska’s poems do not awaken the reader with prosodic or semantic hammers, but with an honest confession:

that art is not – but should be –
a delight, an elixir, communion, massage, homeopathy. (105)

*****

A native of the Pacific island of Gua’han (Guam), Craig Perez immigrated to California in 1995. He recently completed his MFA at the University of San Francisco. He is an assistant fiction editor for Pleiades literary journal, and a poetry editor for the online journal, Switchback. His work has appeared in Watchword, the Redlands Review, Quercus, Galatea Resurrects, Facetime, and String of Small Machines. Visit his blog at www.blindelephant.blogspot.com.

SEEDPODS by GLENNA LUSCHEI

2006-11-29T23:59:00.000-08:00

DIANE LOCKWARD reviews

Seedpods by Glenna Luschei
(Presa :S: Press, Rockford, MI, 2006)

Glenna Luschei’s name is well-known in poetry circles. She’s been moving in those circles for many years in many different roles. As a poet she has published seventeen collections. As a translator she has published an additional three books. As the founder and publisher of Solo Press, established in 1966, she made it possible for many other poets to see their work in full-length collections. Now in its fortieth year, the press no longer publishes books, but continues to put out a chapbook series as well as Solo Café, an annual journal. Luschei also served her community as the Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo for the year 2000. As a philanthropist in 2002 she permanently endowed the editorship of the highly regarded journal, Prairie Schooner. And as if all this weren’t enough, she’s also an avocado rancher.

Luschei’s two loves--poetry and the things of this earth--come together in her latest collection, Seedpods, a chapbook of thirty poems. The attractive cover, a single branch of Japanese Lanterns, immediately suggests Luschei’s reverence for Nature as does the collection’s title. Even the bright green endpapers imply vitality. The title poem, wisely placed first, plants the seeds for what will bloom throughout the collection— dreams, memories, places, living things. Here the speaker feeds mosquitoes by fattening their bellies with her blood; soon she recalls the Long Island Red she rescued years ago from her grandfather’s axe. “I was champion of the rooster,” she says. The image of seedpods then becomes a unifying motif, seen again in “Sierra Suite”: “Ears in drifting pods / hear the ancient song of the sea.” And later in “Jacaranda” the speaker asks if the word jacaranda is “a Spanish name for heaven.” This thinking of things Spanish leads to the poem’s closing lines: “In the rattling of the seedpods / I still hear castanets.”

Throughout the collection Luschei touches all four of the traditional elements: earth, water, air, fire. In “Synch” the speaker describes a harmonious morning scene: “The sun’s kettle / drum tunes up tighter / to burn through fog. / My Hong Kong orchid / gives a bow. . . . // Sun out, birds singing, / everybody planting tulips.” In “Water Song,” a praise poem, the speaker reminds the reader that during a storm, “You fall in love with water again. // You forget the blackened Berkeley hills, / friends routed from their burning homes. . . . // In the ancient path of glaciers, / we praise the green hills.” In “Snapped” we find water, now in the form of snow, along with fire and wind as the poet recalls a storm in the Blue Ridge mountains: “Farmers predicted ice. // Telephone poles snapped. / No power in the Blue Ridge. / We opened our house, / laid a fire with hickory. . . . / Blizzard turned to sacrament.” This holy moment is followed by acceptance of personal loss: “I pressed to drag you back / from the winds that tore you, / until something / in me snapped. / I had to let the snow enfold you.”

Luschei’s feeling of oneness with nature is additionally captured in several poems that focus on the earth’s fruitfulness. In “Treading on Plums” she remembers “The night of the Santa Anas / [when] wind swept blue plums off the trees.” The image further stimulates memory: “The sweet-sour aroma of rotting plums / stirs up my parents / pouring choke-cherry nectar / through cheesecloth.” In “Jacaranda” the poet presents one of the collection’s loveliest, most delicate images: “Periwinkle filigree of tree. / Around it plant a field of agapanthus / and blue and purple arbors / will billow you through summer.”

Like Whitman and Dr. Williams before her, Luschei also praises what is not conventionally beautiful, finding beauty in all of nature’s creations, even the lowly worm, memorialized in “Night Crawlers.” Again she interweaves image and memory. “The odor of rain on cement” calls forth “Nebraska memories” which, in turn, “jolt / night crawlers from their dens.” She recalls a storm, puddles filled with worms, and how she “pushed the night crawlers / back into the grass,” for “We were all workers in soil. / They manufactured the soft / earth that held up radishes.”

Not surprisingly, Luschei also expresses concern for humans. An undercurrent of longing for the past and the people she remembers runs throughout the collection. In “Bare Root,” for example, the speaker, in a new home, poignantly says, “It’s bare root season. / In this strange land / I yearn for the canopy / of foliage, / yearn for my old home.” But her pity is reserved for the hungry and oppressed. In the midst of preparing a Brunswick stew in “The Cardinal,” the speaker’s eyes move to “the photograph in the magazine: / Sierra Leone’s children with amputated arms. / No way to eat.” She then drives to the store to “buy a feeder shaped like a bell / to remember the starved, the lost.”

Nature also supplies Luschei with some of her most charming metaphors. “Rain,” one of several brief, haiku-like poems, revolves around a single metaphor:

Rain
our first night in a warm valley.
We are lodged
in the whale of the Andes,
lighting a new life.

Somewhere outside is the sea.

In “Dream of Snow” the speaker asks her listener to “Hold / the opal of my heart / until it warms.” A flower is personified as a lover in “Sunflower”:

It’s only March
and here you are
Loudmouth
all puckered up for the sun.

The direct address works with the personification to convey a feeling of intimacy with nature.

Another strategy Luschei often employs to convey intimacy is the question. “Ars Poetica” begins with a question; “Visit to the Painted Ladies” ends with one. The speaker in “October Sun” asks, “Will the leaves be yellow now? // The October sun must still be warm. / Does it float past your door / on a string?” Such questions convey a sense of wonder and bewilderment, but this poet is wise enough to know that they are best left unanswered.

The collection’s final poem, “I Thought They Would Never End,” concludes with words that serve as both question and prayer:

Can my world stay the same
no boundary wars no bombings?
I put my teapot on and lose my head again in steam.

These words circle us back to the beginning, to “Seedpods” where the speaker says, “I stand up for beauty.” That is precisely what Luschei does in this fine collection and, in fact, in all her endeavors. In her poetry, her public service, and her generosity, she makes the world a better place for the rest of us. Readers, let’s stand up for Glenna Luschei.

*****

Diane Lockward is the author of two poetry collections, Eve’s Red Dress and What Feeds Us (Wind Publications, 2003, 2006). Her work has recently appeared in The Seattle Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner, as well as in the anthologies Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times. A former high school English teacher, she now works as a poet-in-the-schools for both the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

POST~TWYLA by JACK KIMBALL (1)

2006-11-29T23:55:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Post~Twyla by Jack Kimball
(Blue Lion Books, West Hartford, CT & Espoo, Finland, 2006)

Jack Kimball's latest book of poetry rates as an event. That statement is the sort that typically comes at the end of a review: a stylized lavishness signaling that the reviewer has finished the job. I lead with the sentence because it bears the thunder of truth (truth as in I actually believe what I just wrote). Or plop it down to how impressed I've been with this work from early meetings with it. I first heard Jack read much of this manuscript last May as part of the Demolicious Reading Series in fair Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jack read solely and extensively it. He was clearly ready for people to hear it. A couple of months later, my wife and I were with Jack at a certain Parnassian coffee shop when Jack, a-brim with excitement for what he hath wrought, invited us to his place to see, on the computer screen, the manuscript, and hear him read it. Okay, so you're thinking, well, isn't that special!. Forthrightly I reply: you betcha. Let me count the reasons why.

First: the book is 346 pages long. The grudging economy of poetry books has trained us to expect them to top out at about 80 pages. I like to see that limit breeched. I like to see poets consider extent. I like, really, to see works exactly as long as they should be. Post~Twyla feels like it is.

Second: Jack sustains his enthusiasm across the expanse of pages. The Muse stayed with him, so Jack must not have offended.

To be more specific, Jack attains a dazzling array of tonal shifts. Some of these poems are funny, some pained, some oblique, some loving, some nasty, all warmly human. These tonal shifts twine together, informing, amplifying and denying each other. The effect is lovely and touching. Human, like I just said.

Twyla consists largely of short poems, poetic snatches, you might say. Here's the first:

Death is old and speech is everywhere
I'll turn the excerpts off, fuck despair.
Let's begin.

That's a considerable zap for a beginning. Most of the pieces are about that length, tho some run for pages. The pace is quick. Each piece presents a certain daring, as if it were a trick to confide so briefly. Which it is.

Here's number 7, a sort of effront to effrontery:

You totally screwed up.
If we were Love Boat
You'd be Julie.

Anger and hurt, and Julie from the Love Boat. Makes sense to me. Here's number 28:

Every stroke counts, but he power of
now – it's been downgraded to junk
status,
Everything is illuminated, cheater, yet
fading
Like, why is Hello Kitty so angry?

Tastes philosophical to me, but in a funny way. But that's only my read. You can make your own proofs.

Quoting Twyla feels like zero sum: there's too much to highlight. And oh, by the way, Jack considers the full 346 a poem, not a collection thereof. Feel free to argue the point, but recognize how themes return, twisting yet reflective.

Mixed with these poetic gems are what Jack has referred to as reviews. Yup. These reviews are just as fleeting, oblique, serious, thoughtful and funny as the poems. Might divagation be the right word? Divagation is always the right word. Jack treats of Alice Notley, Rod Smith, Alli Warren, among others, great lesser knowns all, without jostling our give-us-another-poem-here intrepidness as we roam with dedication the many pages. It works, I'm telling you it works.

For all its aroma of grand oeuvre here, a term I don't use lightly, Post~Twyla is just plain fun to hear and fun to read. I give you one more brief glint:

Rosa Parks's eccentricity
Makes it easy to underestimate
Norman Mailer

I have given you the scantest of maps for a vast and delightful territory that I hope you feel inspired to eploe.

*****

Allen Bramhall: sharing a birthday with Herman Melville, Jerry Garcia and Lt William Clark is only one of my many accomplishments. I am a lifelong righthanded resident of Massachusetts, have published one book with more to come, and I paint. I am traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AHB, and am open to a leveraged buyout.

POST TWYLA by JACK KIMBALL (2)

2006-11-29T23:52:00.000-08:00

JESSE CROCKETT Reviews

Post~Twyla by Jack Kimball
(Blue Lion Books, 2006)

Readers of Jack Kimball have their interest in the prospect of cold fusion for dummies quantified into a pragmatic education, and approach this text as if it is glossed by the poet something phantomly and irresistibly abstract as an earnest poetics of what besides language makes us human for a definite challenge to the tolerable mesmerism of what does that mean, compared to the subliminal play of a crapshoot with one attempting to formulate against the house. No one will touch Post~Twyla to believe that that can ever succeed, but there exists always the kinetic desire for a packaged experience in pure luck, "Impassioned, so nowhere is low." Our poet takes duty then from the realization of such desire to administrate a selfsame education, "I can feel the world stop." Association to theoretical physics becomes inexorable for an irony which is patently wrung through its each tinted holler and shaded whisper, constantly re-taking a measure of specific gravity that even in full accordance declines to be revealed to us.

The crossing that boasts diode lanterns
to the dark ends off blades, the dungeon
of hardened arms fire unobstructed by a
cause other than war, you see.

*****

Jesse Crockett blogs here and is editor of ListenLight.

ORGANIC FURNITURE CELLAR by JESSICA SMITH

2006-11-29T23:51:00.000-08:00

SUSANA GARDNER Reviews

Organic Furniture Cellar by Jessica Smith
(Outside Voices, 2006)

Plasticity of Poetics,- A Most Transitory House

Jessica Smith’s first book of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar, introduces a poetics as well: The Plasticity of Poetry (A Poetics). And so, OFC bravely sets up house, and the house is on the foundation in which of course is the cellar, the base of the structure, similar to the Arawaka and Gins art installation she writes about as metaphor in the books foreword. Poetic plasticity forms both simultaneously as well as organically in both the eye and mind of the reader. The reader: a she, who is taken to task in terms of readership and process--one in fact which varies from reader to reader and perhaps even the author herself in terms of its creation and subsequent understanding--verstandnis. Or perhaps, firstly in the cellar, like many old houses, which still has a dirt floor, low beams and many small compartments for structure….all of these things described are directly based on the STAMM or stem of the house. An ever rooting wake of language and possibility surely, literati or non, it all begins somewhere and somewhere is in the cellar. Based in the mind and experience of she as what she has read before, or what has come before her, all of which will certainly impact on what she will find and thus discover/rediscover and define as being here and which paths in reading she will choose.

Virtual in its inception, yet smartly unlike the virtual realm of hypertext, whereby the reader can choose multiple paths in reading, all said coded paths are known and set forth by the writer. So while the journey differs from reader to reader--from reading to reading--the journey and the meaning are already calculated and foreseen. Once the previous window closes there’s no going back, the screen closes and only the further path or tangle lies ahead and therefore any possible vestiges of plasticity abandoned. We could of course go back and reread or try to follow another path, but the reader is not in control of the reading space. So while hypertext often seems to rely on paths or varying degrees of linking movement, plasticity seems to rely more on base or STAMM of what is found there and so explicitly unique for each reader--a contiguous mapping of sorts, blueprinting the very house of she. Cleverly, the organic breadth of plasticity is what makes it unstable--as the reader is given the cellar or house to navigate and read as she will and might so manage. An uncertain path, she/author cannot foretell or plan what will be read or how she might so choose, in terms of order or its subsequent meaning or findings will be turned or questioned. A very daring premiere, open not only to what unexpected turns and tumbles of the reader as she makes her way but one which also undoubtedly sets itself up for a very weary criticism as well, in it bravura, youth and swagger.

A first book or house and a foreword nonetheless by the said she--the poet herself--which is brave as well as a bit reckless perhaps, announcing herself as she will in a time certainly not accustomed to a female stage presence with said aforementioned swagger of Smith, and certainly not so young. Kind of like an unknown acting and producing a debut film--not wanting to miss out on any aspect, direction or acclaim. She puts forward her house or first book on her own terms and style in way of doing all the structural work herself, a real d-i-y adventure, in way of typesetting, layout, design and publishing. Calling-out to be heard, self-published and unapologetic, she certainly could have published elsewhere, but seems to have planned and created OFC exactly to her own specifications. Perhaps even acting as a strong predecessor in terms of POD for younger poets, wanting to have more control of their work or simply get it out there. Smith still went the traditional way and published with a non-POD printer, but erected her press Outside Voices earlier. And while the reader is responsible for her interpretations, there are so many readers and so many so&so&so,- there are just so many possibilities or she’s--she’s outside of Jessica Smith and her house of poetry which does in fact seem to write of her (the authors) own life and experience in her poetics--namely through mapping, place marking and dog-earring time--but as she allows for interpretation . . . there is no set or definite reading or commitment as to meaning on her part, and this might underhand a straightforward approach or poetics--long establish and followed, long endeared and thus not jived with some critics--how dare she disrupt our house? I expect the aspect of she is as much involved with the criticism, unquestioningly. I suspect she simply enjoys the many interpretations and chatter over this she and her said house.

OFC’s house is cleverly covered with a William Morris print, much like the tapestry which guards the door to the ever mysterious and many hallowed female attic quarters of literature past. Smith instead makes us begin in the cellar, clearly as far from the attic as possible. She grows and discovers or maps and buries various words, poems and unending possibilities for said she&she&she to discover. Imparting a lot of German throughout this also influences the she/STAMM of the house…though what if the she is not fluent in German or poetic theory, will she lose her way or will she find directives elsewhere in the house? Perhaps further investigation into plasticity is necessary.

The Canal Series is compact in its format--the first leaves of Common Blues is more like an implosion which is only activated after the STAMM /root-work is established and steady. Not unlike maps or blueprints in their layout it seems to focus heavily on words as each is set alone--set off it is set up to she to navigate and find what meaning she will. The initial implosion slowly quarters its breadth and physical physiognomy in the pages which follow.

Exile is the strongest section for me in terms of shape, form and plasticity. Perhaps intentionally so--if the STAMM is meant as a poetic groundwork to build on if the entire piece be thought in terms of plasticity, versus a straight through linear read-through, perhaps she is simply finding the reading of the text itself easier as she goes, organically so. So, we are led thus far, up to a point where she is comfortable, this persona-poet she as well, with the intruders earning keep as fast guests in her house, and so perhaps at this point she just relaxes a bit? We’re in the house so long we’ve made our presence clear and it seems that we’re finally offered some tea, perhaps for our work done so far in way of her or with her. And so, the section Telling Time is given as our stay in her OFC is nearly done--in way of some pressed flower poems. Poems which neatly and compactly center on the page versus the earlier tending more toward implosions or combustions of sorts in their wild map-like leaves and disorder. Archipelago is the last section and perhaps, like a musical score, repeats some of the earlier obvious layout forms and styles of plasticity, though some Swedish islands of ö’s are thrown in for good measure--as we are in Sweden no less, a far leap from the earlier canals and German infused text--we are now put to task with some Swedish, perhaps like airy filled crumpets, as reward for our work so far. It is not difficult to see how much the beauty and curiosity of language appeals, influences and inspires Smith’s poetry and poetics.

ForM. being the dedication as much as form. It is with an interesting energy and musing that I finish the book--peaked and ever curious at the interesting end in way of the poem, After The Hours--as my day in the house of OFC closes.

*****

Susana Gardner can be found here, here, and here. You can also see some of her reviews here.

NOT EVEN DOGS by ERNESTO PRIEGO

2006-11-29T23:50:00.000-08:00

LENY M. STROBEL Reviews

NOT EVEN DOGS by Ernesto Priego
(Meritage Press, 2006)

For Ernesto Priego's Not Even Dogs

You
Said: Poetry
Is like Music

But
Priego's jainaku
Is like Dance

The Body speaks
In these
Poems

I
Found myself
Following the moves

Breathe,
Flow, Pause,
Piroutte, Undulate, Gyrate

Try
Different rhythm
For another meaning

Haynaku
As Dancing
Is Body speaking

Can
Your Body
Speak for you?

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

Thank you, Ernesto, for your poetry. The poems remind me a lot of Eric Gamalinda's (before I noticed that he's blurbed this). I was surprised by the bodily resonances...maybe it takes a large dose of single-author haynakus to move my (fat) body!

*****

Leny M. Strobel does not recognize the binary of *Poetry Or Scholarship*. Her newest book is A Book Of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan (T'boli Books, 2006).

OPERA: POEMS 1981 - 2002 by BARRY SCHWABSKY (1)

2006-11-29T23:45:00.000-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

Opera: Poems 1981 - 2002 by Barry Schwabsky
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2003)

Barry Schwabsky loves words. He is practically orgasmic about them throughout the masterful Opera: Poems 1981 – 2002. There is a depth to his poetry that only when you read it allows you to realise how shallow other poetry can be. Musical analogies abound, but in this collection’s case they are not without merit. Each poem is an aria and each section a scene within Opera. The book as a whole combines Wagner with Mozart. Each page is also an expression of light -- light as space wholly filled with poetry, light as the thick white page supporting a poem, light as the object of the poet, as an obsession that he feels and see the light source and that he conveys it to his reader. Opera is a daring book. Daring for the poet who destroys words and rebuilds them into poetry, daring for the publisher who believed and daring for the reader who enters a no-man’s land where nothing is familiar; structure, sentence, word. This is ‘deconstructed’ poetry at its most beautiful.

My impatience can never reach
the end of you. As the mirror
corrected my face, your pleasure corrected
my pain. A woman is most beautiful
reading. She hears: silence, noise,
more silence. Each sound turns
to you. Heliotrope: An unusual word unpacks
a sky rife with exclamations.
--"Opera (ET club mix with Chris Bowden’s
saxophone solo)"

Random phrases and words are thrown together to create a range of images that in turn create a visual poetry in one’s mind. Schwabsky uses this imagery in a number of different ways to create a juxtaposition of messages and impressions.

I mistake
your paintings, a potential paradise
of everyday rejections.
--"Burning Sounds"

There is an incredible sexual power in his words. Take "Poem":

You’d rather be painting
by starlight. I’d rather be reading that sentence
inscribed across your chest.

Simple words imbued with frustration and longing. A couple torn by their unrelated desires. Two sentences sum up a relationship in three lines. This is an example of how Schwabsky rips off the bandage to reveal the gangrenous wound that festers beneath. In a similar way he also uses the pantoum to devastating effect.

Momentary
weakness. I fall
asleep
in your
skin. Forget memory.
Please
blow on my dice.

I fall asleep
in
your skin. Ignore
the gentleman in the book.
Dress
what remains
in middling horror.
--"A Later Hymnal"

It is difficult to explain what Barry Schwabsky does with words. He decimates, caresses, adores and discards. While he occasionally allows conventional form, it is tempered by his savage whimsy. I Remember Lavender is a prime example of this teasing play.

Barry Schwabsky is a poet that cannot be tied down or pigeonholed. His work is ever evolving and challenging for the reader. Opera is a wonderful collection of his work. Other poets may have created a larger collection over the twenty-one years this collection spans, but when you read this book you understand that every poem is quality with nothing sacrificed in the pursuit of quantity. Order it. Buy it. Read it. And prepare yourself for a surreal journey.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds has published many reviews of poetry both in print and on the net. Formerly the Poetry Editor for feminist literary ezine Moondance.org, she has recently left that position in order to concentrate more on her writing. Living in the beautiful English county town of Shrewsbury, Fionna continues to draw inspiration from all around her and look for more ways in which to develop a wider appreciation of poetry in herself and others.

OPERA: POEMS 1981-2002 by BARRY SCHWABSKY (2)

2006-11-29T23:40:00.000-08:00

MICHELLE BAUTISTA Reviews

Opera: Poems 1981 to 2002 by Barry Schwabsky
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2003)

Upon Reading an Opera

I promised I would get to know him.
Cover to cover. An Opera. Words standing in the
spotlight of this page. I have no patience for black
tea. He tells his friends he never sees me write
poetry. Like holding your breath through the tunnel
to make your wish come true. It is difficult.

My eyes wander. Read. Reread. I still have trouble
understanding what I have read. I have no patience
for black tea. Wait for it to brew. He tells me that
he falls into my skin. Yet I resist his entrance. Like
holding your breath through the tunnel. Scientists
have measured the amount of dilation, the flushness
of skin, the redness of lips. Pleasure, he says, is the
new pain.

Line after line. It is difficult to hang on till the last
period. Counting to 8 till the bull decides he is done.
My sister and I talk of turkey and bibingka recipes. How
I grimace as white people speak of marshmallows on
sweet yams? Is this what their face looks like when
I tell them chocolate is not an ingredient of chocolate
meat? I have no patience for black tea. I read another
poem. A balance of sugar and milk.

The tea darkens as I pour. The milk falls like mushroom
clouds. the color inside my wrists where your lips
pressed upon them, too much milk. The shade of my
tanned forehead, too much tea. I have no patience.
I will ask, what would you ask of yourself. He never
sees me write poetry as my eyes widen. The ink within
pupils. Between a woman's voice crooning Mona Lisa's
smile and the theme song from Once upon a time in
China that women like cranes ruffle red tipped feathers
to. He pleads, "Pleasure is the new pain." Asks
me to hang on as he falls into my skin the shade of
caramel, of rose petals in black tea.

it is just air.

He tells his friends he never sees me write poetry
as if, he says, "it comes from air". My eyelids widen. I
feel their tension in my cheeks. Like holding your
breath. Reading white words on white paper. The
black letters grow so I may see the spaces within
as he falls into my skin. Bautista y Lorca have
given birth to a new duende.

Please keep it secret.

He blows smoke into my mouth so I don't have
to lie about holding my breath. About cigarettes
touching lips. Speak white words on white paper.
Milk swirl like clouds that enter my skin. Tension
in my cheeks. Flush. Read. Reread.

Water, mochiko, sugar, a stick of butter. Simple.
Reread each line. I do not understand white words
on white paper. He has never seen me write poetry.
The way lungs burn when he pleads, "Stay with me."
Make the wish come true. The tightening of my chest.
The color of my palms. Milk mushrooming clouds.
I swirl the cup as if mining for gold. Find sugar
crystals, milk, and tea. He has never seen me write
poetry. My eyes widen, dissolved crystals in tea like air.

This is where I write poetry.

In my eyes, he sees, his reflection falling into my skin.
The tightening of my chest gasping, pleading for me
to stay. Wait. Patience. Insert the key, pull back slightly,
turn. There is a trick. Hanging on. I count the pages
left. Count the minutes til closing. add. 1+1. Count to
8.

Ride. Ride. Read. Ride.
Resist. Read. Rose. Rose.
Red. Rose. Read. Red. Reread.
Hold on.

Pleasure is the new pain. Clenched. Water, sugar, tea,
rose petals fall. Like holding your breath. Like poems
never written. Like wishes that come true. Like lungs
boiling black tea. Like secrets of birth. You asked me
to stay.

Stay.
Wait.
Count.
Push
the
air
deep.

Hold the breath long. Fall deeper into my skin;
the way sugar permeates tea, air dissolves. Strain
of my neck to keep breath still while kisses
dissolve on caramel skin. Hold on. While my
eyes widen as if closing them will end this dream.
Let me fall. Deeper. Black tea. Breath. Air. Poetry.
My arms clutch his body. Press him into me. White
words on white paper. Stay with me as I fall. A pain
so great as pleasure. The pupils of my eyes.

The last period.

*****

Gura Michelle Bautista is a 4th degree black belt in the Kamatuuran school of Kali under the direction of Tuhan Joseph T. Oliva Arriola. She recently released her first book, Kali's Blade (Meritage PRess, 2006). She is a SF Bay Area poet and performer, having worked with Kearney Street Workshop, Bindlestiff Studios, Asian American Theater Company, KulArts, and Teatro Ng Tanan. She has been published in Going Home To A Landscape, Babaylan, maganda magazine, Eros Pinoy, Asian Pacific American Journal, TMP Irregular and MiPoesias Magazine.

ON THE FLY by AMY KING

2006-11-29T23:35:00.000-08:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

On the Fly by Amy King
(New York: Flux de Bouche Press, 2005)

Amy King’s On the Fly is a book of questions, a book that takes language as we know it and twists it so that it seems on the point of meaning something but something not entirely clear. At times, the poems border on the surreal, whereas at times a satirical lyrical figure peaks through with clarity. Her statement in “Tell the World What You Want Them to” works well as a theme for the collection: “The truth is we’re all detectives finalizing / a statement on what’s true and increasingly bogus.” What’s true is multifaceted in this work, for King takes narrative and splinters it into myriad fragments of consciousness that seem to deepen or at least expand a reading of the text.

“Putting the Foreign in Place” is a good example of her technique, for in the first stanza we can see her use of parataxis and subtle connections:

The truth is, the alien befits us.
Lightning, likewise, draws sound.
We think pale green and grey
will cover these bruises,
cloak or camouflage or whatever it takes
to join a neighbor’s part, pretend we’re one
of them, holding onto daddy’s arm
for the sake of deeper fragilities.

The first two lines do not seem connected in any clear way until we read the rest of the stanza, and even then, what connection there is seems tenuous, as if a barely conscious connection, but since the stanza ends with the “deeper fragilities,” barely conscious connections might be just the most important motivating ones for action or inaction.

Reading this text, one needs to be able to float in language, ready to pull in peripheral bits into a whole. That’s how King’s technique seems to work in this book, through distortion. As we see the slightly familiar distorted image in front of us, we try to recognize it and incorporated the bits of distortion. In this attempt we see interesting new ideas emerge and see language pushing us to new insights.

On the Fly is a short but interesting collection, one that grapples with questions of language, politics, and self. It’s a collection that would fit well on any shelf of books devoted to seeing what language can accomplish, what its boundaries and points of flex are.

*****

Musician, sailor, poet, critic--William Allegrezza teaches and writes from his base in Chicago. His poems, articles, and reviews have been published in several countries, including the U.S., Holland, Italy, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Australia, and are available in many online journals. Also, he is the editor of moria, a journal dedicated to experimental poetry and poetics, and the editor-in-chief of Cracked Slab Books. His e-books and books include The Vicious Bunny Translations, Covering Over, Temporal Nomads, Ladders in July, and In the Weaver’s Valley. He occasionally posts random thoughts on his blog p-ramblings.

MARBLE GODDESSES WITH TECHNICOLOR SKINS by CORINNE ROBINS

2006-11-29T23:30:00.000-08:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins by Corinne Robins
(Segue Books, New York, 2000)

INITIAL ENCOUNTERS WITH MARBLE GODDESSES

I take seriously that the first work of the poet is to read. Developing effective reading strategies to both seep my mind and my spirit in contemporary poems and poems of yesteryear is a central concern of mine. My approach to Corinne Robins’ book Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins engaged me in these questions as I encountered this book for the first time.

Corinne Robins has now published three full-length collections of poetry. Her most recent book, Today’s Menu, was just published in 2006 by Marsh Hawk Press. Robins’ second book, One Thousand Years, was published by Marsh Hawk Press in 2004 and reviewed by Galatea Resurrects #2. Her first book was Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins; the book features cover art by Joyce Romano, a montage of sculptures of women’s bodies, missing arms, breasts exposed.

Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins is divided into two sections. The first, titled “Artists” contains forty-eight poems that take us on a whirlwind tour of art. The second section, titled “Coda: Mythologies,” has nine poems. The poems in the first section are arranged in approximate chronological order by the artists’ lifetime, beginning with Carravaggio, born in 1573, and extending through Anselm Kiefer, born in 1945. In some ways, Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins is like walking through a museum with an astute guide who provides narrative more compelling than any offered on the usual audio guides. Only one thing is missing from this guided tour: the visual experience of seeing the art. That my, however, be the greatest gift of the book. It provides us as readers with the opportunity to encounter and engage the work first through our own imagination and through the careful and precise language and narration of Robins.

Robins has great expectations for her readers in terms of the knowledge and understanding of art. While she provides the requisite information to keep up for those of us who are not art scholars, the poems invite, even sometimes beg, readers to engage with them more deeply and from a more informed and knowledgeable perspective. For instance, in “Cut with a Kitchen Knife” After Hannah Hoch, Robins writes,

What did she know building her

Ethnographic museum of mutilated girls

“cut with a kitchen knife?”

Her face fades surrounded by pictures of men marching.

Hear the sounds of their feet. The Nazis are coming.

If you, like I, are ignorant of Hoch’s work, Robins poem is bound to send you to Google to learn more. Each of the forty-eight poems in the first section of Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins are like this. Robins invites us in and encourages us to engage more. My own fascination with Louise Nevelson helped me appreciate Robins’ poem “Nevelson” in which she writes:

And raging, raging,

assembling her soldier columns,

her horizontal pilings,

constructivist looking glass shapes,

tall as a queen,

remembering all the silences of being ignored,

Robins’ tour de force about Ana Mendieta “who fell from a high window in 1985” titled “The Woman in the Ground” enchants us with these lines:

How far do you go back, how far did Ana go back?

Everything begins in landscape, bark prints,

her imprint, the silueta, her sculptures in the land,

that drawing, a core of moving black branches,

insect legs or arms so small from Ana--

Both artists, Nevelson and Mendieta, are on my list for further engagement thanks to Robins thoughtful poems about this. All of this is not to say that Robins poetry is not accessible to poets outside of the art world, it is just to acknowledge that in this book we are in the midst of an art scholar who will both educate us and point us to how we might further educate ourselves.

Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins is also a collection of poetry that reminds us of the power of ekphrasis for poets. There is something magical about putting together visual images with words. It is a core passion of Robins and a practice that inspires and compels many poets through the ages.

At its best, poetry teaches us something about the world that we hadn’t encountered or experienced for ourselves. It drives us in new directions expanding our sense of what we can know and want to know. Corinne Robins’ first book Marble Goddesses with Technicolor Skins does that. For me, encountering this book, not only directs me to seek her other books, but also to seek the experiences of engagement with art which have been so productive, and profound, for her.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. Her poem "Six Conversations about Cancer" is in Under Our Skin: Literature of Breast Cancer, and her recent essay, "When Women Poets Die Young" is at ICORN. You also can read her essay, "Queer Culture: Our History and Legacy" at the Woman-Stirred Blog. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

NECESSARY ANGELS by CAROLYN MAISEL

2006-11-29T23:25:00.000-08:00

LYNN STRONGIN Reviews

Necessary Angels by Carolyn Maisel
(Lost Horse Press, Idaho, 2007)

FINDING ONE’S WAY BY THE MOON

Introduction:
“Like Smoke from an Enormous Fire”

On the heels of Hurricane Rita, Carolyn Maisel took herself into a doctor set up in temporary flood-clinic headquarters to check her bronchial cough only to learn that she must now engage in a fierce battle for her life. Her lung cancer had spread to liver and bone. A miracle was needed to save her. Prone to providence (in an off-beat manner, an ironic providence, to boot) Maisel did witness a miracle: Lost Horse Press, Idaho accepted her final manuscript Necessary Angels. This and one other book, Witnessing, published over thirty years ago comprise her life’s oeuvre.

She emerged more daring than ever, her voice and her embrace of existence, unthrottled having come thru a sorrowful life to this realization:

This Destroyer is not caged up in my imagination only-
in my single soul. The Brute we thought we drowned
a thousand times to build the city of the mind
lives in us all.
--“Evdokia, Meditations in Prokrovsky Monastery”

Her love for this green planet may be an Edenic reflection of her early years in Mississippi when, with two sisters and one brother, she ranged the freedom of their delta yards. Later, came pre-adolescence bringing its suffering largely a result of her brother’s accidental death, and her parents’ indogenous depression.

The cool monastic grace that lies upon the living here
is that none witness other’s agony.
--“Evdokia”

*

Witnessing is the title of her first full-length book of poems, published by L’Epervier Press in the sixties. Maisel has proven herself to be both survivor and witness who peels back our eyes till we see. From early adolescence Maisel experiences disaster after disaster which includes surviving her only brother’s death by shotgun (mysteriously resembling childhood suicide.) She has been called upon to witness the ravaging body-burns her father endured when he fell into a catalytic cracker working at a Texas oil refinery. Too, she survived the violent act perpetrated against her in her forties by living beyond her own stabbing and rape in New Orleans, that city of “stone confections” and the jockey club, that city of which she was made poet Laureate. Her psychic and physical wounds left her battling post-traumatic stress for many years. Perhaps because of this continuous barrage, she has emerged engaged with a luminous life which would have reduced other people to ash and bone. Carolyn Maisel, like the phoenix, has risen from the ashes, and proceeded, dispassionately to document existence like a reporter struggling to get a handle on what is beyond words.

*

History is portrayed as two peacocks “engaged in a serious and beautiful struggle” (“Turning.”) Evacuating Port Arthur, Texas,in 100+ weather, she amazingly does make it out of an apartment with its ceiling on the floor. Like the Swedish journalist, among those who flee with her, Maisel is one of a group taking refuge in a Holiday Inn.. The Swedish journalist goes out “to photograph the storm.” Huge metal pieces, tree branches fly thru air hitting the building “like cannon shots. Journalists went crazy.” But the poet’s eye is that movie film which continues reeling, meticulously recording. “So the tiredest woman in Texas went to her sister’s house and then to the Emergency Room” for bronchitis only to learn that she was sleeping on a ticking time bomb.

*

Prone to providence, over the past thirty-five years Maisel has been quietly keeping, writing an American Vigil. Now, she has come to the last things. “It’s so strange to say, ‘That’s the last time I’ll ever see dark thunderheads, piling in the sky or the Mexican guy blowing leaves in the drugstore parking lot.”

In a backward glance, one can see how “dark thunderheads” piled early were prophetic, or the Mexican guy blowing leaves italicize her as a poet keeping an ardent, yet ironic, even wry American vigil from a benighted childhood onward. It’s a good thing she did not have a crystal ball. Now, the poet notes, her voice is beginning to change. This is the physical voice. I listen to the grieving of the soul watching the physical body husk off.

The woman who always “wanted to do something with the foghorn at Wellfleet whose beautiful voice sounded out” has done that thing, with other landscapes and emotional atmosphere, in the lyrics “Summer Kitchen," and “Gentilly Woods” among the strangest, most haunting of them planting her in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey. In Wellfleet as in Texas, the landscape is exquisite. Maisel may leave us a slender legacy, but like Satchmo whom the poet’s mother heard, lasting. “Blue Movie” unreel casting its spell by the minor fifth, the jazz chord.

Muse, it is a cold, sunlit day, the citizen
in the street hums contentedly, and I
have only you to speak to me – Speak!

Providentially, her poetry films the light at the end of night whether she ends up delivering vision, or child like the birth of her daughter, when labor pain almost killed her. She winds up in a city where the most amazing thing “is the twilight flight of several million bats that live under the Guadeloupe street bridge. . . You can sit on the hotel patio to see them when they emerge. It’s an endless spiral floating up in the air like smoke from an enormous fire.”

Finally, smoke from an enormous fire could serve as metaphor for her poems. A sickly child, she had come close to losing her life twice. Meningitis occurred in early childhood when her father was on a long military absence and learned of his daughter’s near-death experience by long distance. Her parents left the kids alone one day with a shotgun and her only brother shot himself. After this childhood suicide, and her mother’s recurring inborn depressions, did she tire of unnamable pain?

For a long time Carolyn Maisel has been looking at earth as those it comprised the final things:

This large and fine orange afternoon
steps in the French windows,

lies down to burn in a shy,
passionate rectangle on the rug.
--“Gentilly Woods”

This does not seem to be an entirely earthly afternoon, although all we have to taste it with are "Our mouths and hands, those soft animals of please -- / Creatures of the unfallen / angel who has paused considerately / over Gentilly Woods." Life is fraught with danger, partially in such close relations as mother-daughter. “Listen, Mother” says:

even the perfect-sighted
crash into one another

and when tears come for no reason
a stranger’s child is grieving / in us.”

Maternity exists in “the exhausted, naked lament of winter” which “is a mother.” She would like to hush and “swear it will be all right” but knows better.

In her recent journey, we can see that this student of the Iowa writer’s workshop (admired by both Marvin Bell and Yusef Kumonyakaa among others), has kept an American vigil which she rifts open again and again. Having taught a night class at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with Norman Dubie and an admirer of the greatness of spirit in Denise Levertov, Maisel was imbued with spirit of chiaroscuro which permeates American poetry in the Twentieth Century. Maisel cuts thru dark valleys and wide plains. It is a fearsome landscape, one of extremes reminiscent of the Southern gothic vein in American writing. Carolyn Maisel is an introvert, intimate in emotion like Anna Akhamatove, a poet she admired. She charts her own eerily lit terrain: with her own “cool, monastic grace,” she is a cartographer of the known interlaced with the astonishing half-glimpsed, unknown things. Peacocks bloom at the junction where the poet is able to look at “this green planet” she has loved so intensely, curious about what’s on the other side.

"I find I'm quite curious about what's on the other side and I don't entirely regret leaving this green world of ours that I have loved with such passion. Valerie Martin entitled a book 'The Consolations of Nature.' I'm jealous because I feel that's a phrase that sums up my experience. No matter how bad things are, you can always find yourself by the moon."

*

Prone to providence? The work was burnished, mature from the start and grew more so. It would have gone thru even more subtle turns of language and vision; I believe it would have developed further. Carolyn Maisel died in March, 2006. Her final correspondence with me was both passionate and vehement revealing a soul unafraid of death, although finding the balancing daunting, challenging tipping as it did both light and dark to cast stranger shadows than she had ever known.

Muse, it is a cold sunlit day, the citizen
in the street hums contentedly, and I
have only you to speak to me—Speak!

*****

Lynn Strongin's new book of poems, Short Visiting Hours for Children: Rembrandt's Smock, is forthcoming from Plain View Press, Austin, Texas. This review is a chapter from Strongin’s forthcoming book Returning the Light: Portraits of Hidden Faith in Fourteen Contemporary Poets, which is currently looking for a publisher. Maisel also appears in Strongin’s anthology The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy (University of Iowa Press). A full introduction to Lynn Strongin is available at her website: http://members.shaw.ca/stronginweb/index.html

INCESSANT SEEDS by SHEILA MURPHY

2006-11-29T23:15:00.000-08:00

DION FARQUHAR Reviews

Incessant Seeds by Sheila E. Murphy
(Pavement Saw Press, 2004)

Words are incessant seeds, and Sheila Murphy their relentless sower. Her book is homage to change and difference, to language that evades certitude and finitude—for better and for worse. Incessant Seeds is as dizzyingly disruptive and unpredictable as its formal properties are unvarying. Each of its (annoyingly unnumbered) 84 pages consists of 14 lines, with each line having 14 syllables, a form that was both “the yield and record” of a rule-bound process, Murphy tells the reader in her introduction. The more she practiced her 14-syllable, 14-line page form, “the more in sync [she] became with the vibratory pattern inherent in the rule itself, an ironically liberating practice.” Like with any repetition, the more one reads Incessant Seeds, the more one sees.

Murphy’s breathless enjambments function both to hurry the reader from line to line while magnifying the thicket of cultural allusion and association. In fact, the only quasi-breaks come at the end of each 14-line page. Using a mélange of techniques including word-play, pastiche, pun, and collage, Murphy invents meaning by switching and mixing language paradigms and levels of abstraction and concretion within each prose line. Each page offers unpredictable pleasures of discovery.

Her themes are the alternating glory and horror of seasonal American life (Perfume to us during the let-go of the leaves that burned/ To crunch-walk across with steady faith in plexitude tapped [3]), kinship (The given specs, the risen dough, maternal wishes whined [15]), bodies (Here the comi-cardio begins at rest, here safety [57]), knowledge (The itinerary that occurs post-now is not known [58]), each other (You and your rotisserie estrangement from twelve selves late [66[), and the various institutional hells that confine us (Omniplex where divans have been planted beneath sharp fans [60]). She alternates austerity with sensuality (That’s when the talk begins to pour forth, measured, flamed, supposed [49]), belief with skepticism (For being lied to with a splurge of effort on the part [14]).

Though I have little interest in the project of recycling religious language as a vehicle of transcendence, Murphy’s engagement with the Christian lexicon doesn’t deter me from my pleasure in her words. She announces her interest in religion on the first page (How many moot points does it take to move a mantra, how/ Does divinity compare to home loan depth [1]), alludes to it subtly countless times (Would read the office during whole hours pacing afternoon [7]); and explicitly in others (For altar play occasioned by resemblance once perfected [6] or As the skin rehearses prayer, slowly evenly parched [11]).

Particularly evident in the first half of Incessant Seeds is the casual weave of atavistic religious vocabulary—creed, faith, eternal, prayer, grace, belief, blessings, soul, sacraments, repentance, heresy, pontiff, votives, martyrdom, genuflection, etc.—into secular non-sequitur. For me, these function to flag the continued persistence of Euro-Christianity in our stark postmodern midst, extracting hope where one can: Resist fate as hosanna’s prescient nightfall scurries far [4].

She dextrously weaves the existential backdrop

Reconnaissance or martyrdom perhaps this much a plea
For going to work, the reason for existence rounded
To a surface pieced together from the fragments known [27]

to medical (or class) serendipity:

Mobility’s another word for dance light skittering [77].

Murphy’s genius is what she makes language do--walk the razor’s edge of a rich range of feelings while committing to relentless abstraction and intellectualism that never descends to the academic. It is this success that jolts the reader into celebrating our ambivalent condition: While still the question yet propped open hovers sans response [83].

Murphy’s voice is idiosyncratic, breathless, though never random or rambling. Incessant Seeds resists definitive decoding, ensuring disruption at precisely the point that s/he might be sinking into the routine comfort of a few lines development of a theme segment:

Summation of gestation pactifies fill dirt stretch goals
Prompt in sucking goods and services from source code minute
By minutia, parasites gesture lethargy winced
From seedlings bovine gradual and diametric, finned [15]

Incessant Seeds registers the erratic pulse on the burning philosophic (Lasting perfection oxymoronic at its base [9]) and political (the distemper even/ Bombs cannot enforce [51]) themes of our time: the nature of memory (Distance weights into our living, visceral replays spawn [18]) and history (Fixed between bookends of past and future in the only/ Instance one can prove, the rice pudding, the lemons rounded [25]).

There are few lapses from the fever pitch Murphy manages to sustain for most of the book, though in the places that her language play sags, its didactic clip doesn’t slow, as in her portrayal of the schizoid beauty and bleakness of the personal and familial, a dominant concern in this volume:

We see our mothers worn, taken for granted very tired
And left behind by heart, while pushing through each day with all
There is to give, everyone forgetting everything
The moment it has passed, and moments are piled like used up
Ornaments no longer commemorating anything
So wind continues punishing, and we forget it’s there [50].

She’s more lyrical, though more negative here, on the same theme:

, to brat one’s way life-
Ward envious of shaken shoulders for the touch itself [19]

Incessant Seeds also takes up weighty questions such as the politics of epistemology with little fanfare. Murphy navigates the contemporary suburban landscape of normative family life and the national hegemony of fall football—her rendering no less trenchant for its ambivalent embeddedness:

Play, pretend to like the others with whom we are in stiff
Competition for the benefit of onlookers who
Have zip to risk in all the fray of sparring and delay
Gladiatorial observation presses upon
Open minds and swerves them shut, …/ [41].

Incessant Seeds is fallible, urgent, gutsy, celebratory. I love it.

*****

Dion Farquhar is a poet and prose fiction writer. Obsessed by her formative experience of the Sixties and repudiating nothing, she is currently finishing a novel. Her poems have appeared in Otoliths, Main Street Rag, Poems Niederngasse, Perigee, The Argotist, AUGHT, Xcp: Streetnotes, Rogue Scholars, City Works, boundary 2, Hawaii Review, Lip Service, Cream City Review, Sinister Wisdom, Painted Bride Quarterly, etc.

BIRD-BOOK by JESSICA SMITH

2006-11-29T23:10:00.000-08:00

STEVEN FAMA Reviews

bird-book by Jessica Smith
(detumescence e-book, 2006 [second expanded edition])

“The Brain– ” Emily Dickinson wrote, “is wider than the Sky.” Jessica Smith’s bird-book shows how this can be. Smith’s way of arranging poems, her use of word fragments and individual letters, and her commitment to unfixed meaning expand--really stretch--the mind.

The twenty-two poems of bird-book are very short (50 words or less) and printed one to a page. They have neither stanzas or even full lines. Instead, the poems are made of short phrases, single words, word fragments, and individual letters, which Smith places all over each of her almost square pages. Text is as likely to be found near the right as to the left margin, the bottom as to the top, or anywhere else on the page. There is plenty of white (blank space) in between the printed matter.

It is a most uncommon look for poetry. Based just on appearance, each poem might be called a kind of miniature minimalist work of abstract art, with words and their constituent parts (fragments and letters) the marks used by the poet-artist. In this regard, Smith has a knack for laying out her poem-works. The designs are smart and varied. Each poem appears balanced, but not obviously so. The poems seem anchored to the page, yet the dominating impression is of wide-openness.

The poems’ wide-open arrangements also create uncommon opportunities for reading. The poems can be read in the established (for English) left-to-right, top-to-bottom manner. But even though each poem’s title is located in a conventional spot (the upper left corner), it is difficult to read in the typical manner. Because there are no traditional lines, and lots of blank space between the words, there are plenty of options about what “comes next,” and choices inevitably must be made.

In fact, Smith uses several features to entice a reader to move around the page. Many poems align words or phrases in one or more tightly or loosely defined vertical columns, which draw attention because of their distinctive shape and volume. Sometimes words attract the eye simply because they are clustered together, even when not structurally organized. On the other hand, a word, phrase, or letter sometimes stands out because it is isolated on the page, surrounded by blank space. Finally, Smith scatters individual letters and word fragments, which the reader must try to fit together into complete words, and sometimes that requires looking for the matching letters or pieces elsewhere on the page.

Most of bird-book’s poems have all these attention-drawing features, and because of them and the poems’ wide-open arrangements it quickly becomes almost natural to jump around the page. It’s definitely different, peculiar even, but why not? Maybe a reader should hover and flit about the page, the eyes hummingbirds to the nectar-blossoms of language. Besides, what self-respecting reader wouldn’t enjoy exploring and trying different alternatives when the author has worked hard to provide just such opportunities? Repeat readings of bird-book are essentially de rigueur given the multiple possible paths through each poem, and because most of the poems are hard, in the sense of not revealing themselves immediately. Because the poems’ words, phrases, etc. can be ordered differently during re-readings, associations and meaning can vary as juxtapositions and sequencing shift. When subsequent readings are different than those that came before, and the memories of the earlier readings layer atop and mix with each other, the poems become richer and more textured.

I think the way the poems are arranged, constituted, viewed, read, and considered reflect Smith’s interests in the workings of our perception and memory. Although these meta-themes are mostly unstated, I believe her poems, and how we read them, are meant to mirror the fragmented, non-linear, random, mutable, subjective and sometimes frustrating ways in which we apprehend and remember. It’s a very convincing use of form and process to underscore a substantive truth.

Smith of course has more specific themes. As the book’s title suggests, many poems in some way concern birds. Many of these present bits of ornithological detail and a few include very brief representations of bird calls (Smith lists birding references as source material). One or two poems (such as the first poem, hero/n) can be read as a relatively straightforward minimalist-cubist lyrics depicting a bird. However, these poems are the exceptions; most are neither direct portraits nor simple paeans.

In fact, many poems include catastrophic images of ecological disasters. Smith also cites Silent Spring as a source, and on the acknowledgments page specially thanks that landmark environmentalism book’s author, Rachel Carson, stating, “without her bird-watching might be a rather dull and hopeless activity.” Among the phrases one comes across in the poems are “d/ead lake,” “and no bird sings,” “loss of ability to fly, paralysis, convulsions,” “sterilized,” “grotesque hybrids,” “driven out, poisoned,” and “hideous wings.” These might be historical facts, nightmares narrowly avoided, or prophecies to be feared. However taken, the images are very disturbing. They create a powerful tension when read with the bird-details which, generally speaking, evoke the beauty of nature.

One of my favorite poems in bird-book is “das lied von der erde” (Smith italicizes and lower cases all titles). The poem among other things concerns springtails, the common name for a group of “primitive wingless insects” (Smith’s phrase) which create topsoil by digesting fragments of soil and litter flora and fungi. The poem commemorates the “creative magic” these bugs work and the “minute / ceaseless / cycles” and “constant change” of which they are an essential part.

At almost the very center of the poem Smith places the phrase, “macerate chomp chomp” (italics in original). I find this almost off-the-wall imagining of the insects at work both humorous and persuasive. Persuasive especially because the springtails’ making of something (in their case, topsoil) by taking in and re-arranging bits and pieces of other things serves as a highly unusual but totally apt metaphor for the work of both the poet and her reader. Give Smith credit here for getting down in the dirt and charmingly buggy to describe what both parties to her book actually do in “the classic caress of author and reader,” as William Carlos Williams termed it in Spring & All. Of course, the making of something from bits and fragments of other things might also describe how we interpret and remember what we experience in general.

Smith in das lied von der erde does more than just commemorate the insect-aided eco-cycle or use that process as a metaphor. In the midst of the words and phrases concerning the insects, Smith drops a simple interrogatory -- “are?”– that -- as a present tense form for the verb “to be” – raises the question of existence. More specifically, given the context in which it appears, the poem’s interrogatory raises the question of our transience amidst the “ceaseless cycles” of nature described in the poem and the possibility that the insects or the cycles of nature might themselves vanish. I love how just a single word and punctuation mark do the heavy lifting of raising these fundamental concerns, and how the verb tense delivers the here and now into the poem. It couldn’t be more subtle or effective.

And then there’s the poem’s title. The translation from the German is “The Song of the Earth,” and that’s a fitting name for a poem about soil biota. But das Lied von der Erde is also a song-symphony by Mahler. It is a magnificent piece, with magnificent themes based on Chinese poems that chiefly concern, as scholar Michael Kennedy writes, “the beauties of nature being renewed every year even though men and women could enjoy them for only a comparatively brief span.” I see similarities here between Mahler’s and Smith’s themes. Smith’s use of the title also means that in my imagination Mahler’s work, especially its long final movement with its mostly spare sometimes near-silent music (also a kind of analog to Smith’s use of blank space), serves as a soundtrack to the poem. I hear the music when I read the poem, and I can’t get either out of my head.

I also can’t get out of my head how Smith in almost every one of bird-book’s poems breaks up one or more words into their most basic parts–individual letters or fragments of two or three letters–then scatters those letters or fragments about the page. It’s up to the reader to figure out what the individual letters spell.

Some of the scrambled words are relatively easy to make out, mostly because the letters that fit together are near each other on the page or have an obvious lexical relationship. In das lied von der erde, for example, the diphthong “th” stands alone but just a bit further down the page the fragment “read-” is seen, and the two fragments (even with stand-alone meaning of “read”) are easily joined together. The resulting “thread-” is then connected to “like,” found on an almost directly across the page, to complete compound word “thread-like.”

However, some of the scattered letters are a lot harder, even for those with an aptitude for making words in Scrabble® or solving the newspaper game Jumble®. In these harder cases, the letters seem to be placed just about anywhere on the page and the solutions aren’t immediately apparent. Deciphering the words requires trying different combinations or possibilities.

In certain poems it is damn near impossible to assemble the letters into words. I couldn’t piece together the scattered letters in japanese beetle, water skeleton, silence any song, and kites. Frustrated, I wrote Smith, asking if the letters really formed words. She replied that they did, but that “it isn’t necessary to put them back together.” I like that she accepts that some readers, similar to “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men,” won’t be able to put the words together again. I’m guessing Smith accepts this in part because she knows that our existence has a certain core Humpty-ness, that try as we might there will always be bits and fragments that don’t cohere into an identifiable or unified whole.

Smith’s scrambled letters, particularly the hard or impossible ones, invigorate all the language of her poems. In trying put together the scattered letters, I found myself looking very closely at bird-book’s complete words, looking for clues or analogs that might help me solve the puzzles. Everything -- roots, prefixes, suffixes, diphthongs, vowel combinations and even individual letters -- was torn apart and put back together. It was fascinating to see exactly how each complete word came together from its particular cluster of letters. These complete words, simply because they worked, became wonders of nature. In this way, Smith’s scrambled letter technique proves that words, even the most basic articles and prepositions, are minor miracles. This may be her neatest trick of all.

Smith’s poems, I think it fair to say, have a lexical and rhetorical austerity that is probably deliberate. I think Smith recognizes that a more vigorous vocabulary, or more extensive use of poetic “devices” could easily come off as overdone in poems so short and so unusually placed about the page. Plus, I believe Smith’s poem’s reflect actual memories, ans so the words used may simply be those that actually were remembered. I can’t second-guess her assumed aesthetic decisions and/or laudable honesty on these matters.

Yet perhaps a bit more is possible. The book’s few super-charged phrases (“crypt-throated” in water skeleton and “thumb-sucking knowledge” in kingfisher, for example) show that when she wants Smith can adventure in language’s more flamboyant realms. Similarly, the repetition all over the page in kingfisher of the words “blue” and “green” -- which although simple creates a convincing spotlighted effect, as if in a theater -- and the use of consonance in a number of other poems, show that she knows her way around the poet’s toolbox. Although bird-book creates plenty of possibilities just as it is, I’d love to experience the poetic synergy should Smith choose to upgrade the intensity of words and effects while continuing her remarkable way of arranging words and scattering letters.

*****

Steven Fama lives in San Francisco and recently became eligible to join AARP. He reads lots and lots of poetry.

THE GOOD CITY by SHARON OLINKA

2006-11-29T23:00:00.000-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

The Good City by Sharon Olinka
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2006)

Rarely does one come across a collection as heartrending and thought provoking as Sharon Olinka’s The Good City. Journeying between past and present, male and female, victim and persecutor, Olinka has created a powerful collection that lingers in your conscious.

Olinka taps unapologetically into feelings of painful alienation. Whether it is an immigrant in Smyrna, a tourist, or trying to come to grips with a home you no longer recognise or that you have had to make for yourself in a foreign land, she creates poignant images.

All of the men
gone to Melbourne or New York. And places
where they flicker in showy profusion
like cheap candles. Or mumble in store fronts,
shadows meeting shadows.
--"Orpheus Social club, Members Only"

These lines conjure up for me the image of a small café that was frequented and owned by Polish immigrants on Acland Street in St Kilda, Australia when I lived in Melbourne from the end of 1999 to the beginning of 2001, an Australian feeling like an alien in her homeland and pining to return to England. Perversely, I related to the community of exiles that drank vodka in the middle of the afternoon, reminisced about their homeland, and had their plates piled high with exotic spicy smelling sausages and sauerkraut, or sweet delicate pastries.

However, this book is not all forlornness. At other times, a lovely sense of fantasy accompanies the reader. A peeping through the looking glass at a time of mystery and exoticism.

When I die
bury all my jewellery
with me. Give my poems
to Heroditus Atticus.
He will know
what to do with them.
My daughter
will inherit this house.
And five groves
Of fig trees.
--"Courtesan, Ancient Smyrna"

One can smell the heady perfumes and see the rich drapes of the house her daughter will inherit. With such an exotic locale and time, it would be difficult for Olinka to not achieve such evocatism. The title poem, "The Good City," brings together all the elements of Smyrna. It is deliberately confused, like the jumble of thoughts that the poet creates the poem out of. The jumble haunts her and she ends the poem with mournful envy for our simpler lives:

You can come here
anytime, be a tourist.
The dead will not deter you.
You can imagine Smyrna.

While the collection revolves around Smyrna/Izmir, Olinka infiltrates its sacred hold on the reader with poems about 9/11, Beslan, Keats, and Beauty and the Beast among others. While there is a large sense of melodramatic soap that accompanies Ataturk Fights Osama bin Laden for the World: November, 2001, Olinka has patriotically attempted to apply a bandage to the gaping wound by the World Trade Centre.

Osama knows
right away, he’s made
a mistake.

A spirit can’t be killed. The first thrust,
to the heart
bounces right off
Ataturk. Now Osama
bobs and weaves.
It’s all defense,
from here.

For "spirit" read New Yorker, the US, the Western World: you get the picture. The only poem that I felt disappointed in was "Ataturk Fights Osama bin Laden for the World: November, 2001." I feel it is a little too long, losing impact the longer it meanders and becoming a poem to reach the end of, not to savour. Its obvious patriotism is commendable, but for this critic, a little too melodramatic. "Beslan Child Hostage," on the other hand, contains none of the sentimentality the above poem has, and it is perhaps a stronger and better poem for its bluntness.

Don’t think of me
with angels. When air
touched my perspiring skin,
I howled. In my mad dash
from the gym, shit
ran down my thighs.

I found myself returning to this poem again and again. Its images possessed me. Its very shortness and lack of artifice creating the most impact of all the poems that were not a part of the Smyrna/Izmir thread.

Sharon Olinka is an incredibly sensitive poet. Her poems transport the reader wholly to the scene in which they take place. I love everything about this collection. The book is a good size, the poems are evenly and thoughtfully arranged, the glossy cover is a fine mixture of images that help cement the pictures her words create in the reader’s mind. Some of the poems run together as little verse novels within the larger collection and I enjoyed the change of pace this afforded. Olinka is a professional, and her work will go a long way. I look forward to her next collection. The Good City is a great read and I will savour it again and loan it to my friends. That is high praise.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds has published many reviews of poetry both in print and on the net. Formerly the Poetry Editor for feminist literary ezine Moondance.org, she has recently left that position in order to concentrate more on her writing. Living in the beautiful English county town of Shrewsbury, Fionna continues to draw inspiration from all around her and look for more ways in which to develop a wider appreciation of poetry in herself and others.

NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY by THOMAS FINK & OTAGES by JOHN BLOOMGBERG-RISSMAN

2006-11-29T22:55:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

No Appointment Necessary by Thomas Fink
(Moria Poetry, 2006)

and

OTAGES by John Bloomberg-Rissman
(Bamboo Books, Culver City, 2006)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. When I concocted the hay(na)ku back in 2003, I never anticipated that it would become the global phenomenon that it is -- okay, that’s obviously self-aggrandizing but I felt like preening. So: preeen. But now, turning this review to not be about Moi, I wish to note – and recommend -- the particular riffs off of the hay(na)ku that are now available in Thomas Fink's No Appointment Necessary and John Bloomberg-Rissman's OTAGES.

I focus on Fink’s -- eh, let me say, Tom’s -- hay(na)ku variations, though many other poems are written in other forms. But as with the other non-hay(na)ku poems in the book, Tom’s hay(na)ku “box sequences” offer text that relish and make the reader relish musicality. Upon reading Tom’s poems, one inevitably starts reading them out loud to fully enjoy his works’ rythms and sounds. Here’s a sample from “HAY(NA)KU/BOX SEQUENCE 2”::

You,
collecting pockets,
can one spiral
into
an honest magnet? I have
fished
thrift. We
await them impatiently.

And this is what leads to the wonderful paradox of Tom’s hay(na)ku box sequences. They are called “box sequences,” I assume, because in addition to relying on the hay(na)ku form (the basic hay(na)ku is a tercet comprised of one-word, two-word, and three-word lines), the poems are also crafted visually, with one stanza per poem always designed to have the outline of the box. Certainly, this “vizpo” strategy hearken’s Tom’s painterly practice; for me, the shapes offered by the box-sequences (and other poems elsewhere in the book which also offer different shapes, a la concrete poetry), evoke similar (fragmented) shapes seen on his paintings (for examples, see an earlier art review I did of Tom’s hay(na)ku paintings here).

Yet the boxes in Tom’s poems are punched open in the middle, as in this example from “HAY(NA)KU/BOX SEQUENCE 2”:

One state must not define luck for others,
but does,                               often without
conscious                               effort, Cross-
roads                                   become
needlessly                               oppressive.
Can a                               death solo
gum up                               the common
pact formed with enrichment and utility?

Brilliant -- in this deceptively simple manner, Tom notes the difficulty in -- not being boxed in, but – attempting to box in others. These are difficult times, with, for instance, a U.S. administration too reliant on trying to enforce their will on other countries. Tom’s poems are political poems because, notwithstanding their reliance on forms, the words themselves can be politically explicit.

From “HAY(NA)KU BOX SEQUENCE 1”:

…That
underbudgeted chorus of
ironed
tigers has
ignited its own
props,
and the
big cleanup will
come
out of
many sore pockets.

And, from “HAY(NA)KU BOX SEQUENCE 4”:

One
cloud spreads
out over several
cities.
The impossible
tan will make
its
inhabitants surf,
suffer, Youcan
throw
your welcome
against split peanuts.

And, from “HAY(NA)KU BOX SEQUENCE 5”

…Can

a male CEO
swiftly fire rickety
managers?
His paternal
Instinct imprisons (him).

From text to image then back to text again, Tom’s circular approach harmonizes poetic forms and music with its underlying politically-charged poetics.

There is one more hay(na)ku variation in the book—the “Mayan” hay(na)ku created by Tom’s daughter, Maya. In this variation, not only are the tercets based on six words but each word-choice must comply with an increasing number of letters. Thus, in this example,

O
Is an
Eye? Sun. Pun.

the first line’s words are based on one letter, the second line’s words are each two letters, and the third line’s words are three letters. The musicality and politics continue to be avident:

A do on
The run. Oil
Rain rant, snow muss.

Tom’s is an intellectual poetry. But as pleasing as music.

*****

Now, Bloomberg-Rissman's -- hell, let me say, John's -- versions touch particularly close to home because his approach melds with another poetic strategy close to my heart: the joint collaging/riffing -- or as John puts it in a “Note” to the poems, “quote (and misquote)” -- from "found" texts (though they are "found" only in the sense that the poet still chooses to engage with them in creating new poems) or after others' images.

John seems to practice something with which I agree: that one can make up, but need not make-up, poetry … because poetry is all around us and one need only pay attention to discern their existence. All of the poems in OTAGES are hay(na)ku sequences, and this hay(na)ku sequence, inspired by Jean Fautrier's paintings, is just pitch-perfect:

Otages (Jean Fautrier, 1943-1945)

You
Might almost
Say that water

Is
Insane … There
Is something about

Those
Lines. And
What do you

Make
of the
Black border? And

Those
Cracks that
Remind you of

Something
Lunar? You
Might almost say

You
Were happy
Once. And you

Are
Almost certain
Those were eyes.

In John’s case, to be open to other writer’s words is not different from simply being open to the world. And so this collection, like Tom Fink’s, is also not ahistorical. Here is a clear example where the title also basically explains the poem’s process (the poem’s text is all-italicized as John uses italics to denote words that are quoted):

Every Word Belongs To Laure
Ghorayeb, Beirut, Lebanon. I Stole
Them From Her Blog. I Just Thought You
Should Know A Little About What It
Feels Lilke ON The Ground These Days

I
Remember the
Fear that used

To
Transform my
Saliva in a

Taste
Of earth
Lifted by bombs.

On
The 8th
Day I am

Looking
To What
Is left from

Myself.
The fire
Ball entered the

Entrails.
In the
Upcoming days no

Shouts
Neither prayers
To survive. The

Hour
Follows the
Hour. We are

Lighting
Candles to
See the bombs

Explode.
From 12
To … Where’s

My
Mouth? Villages,
Airports, bridges, parts.

And
The rest
Of my body?

What elevates OTAGES to justify its existence as a cohesive, stand-alone collection instead of just being a sample of ongoing, larger work -- did I mention that OTAGES is a 28-page chap? -- is partly the thread of humility in terms of authorial authority:

Rain
On Sea.
I am trapped

Between
The Lines
--from “Tete d’otage no. 1 (Jean Fautrier, 1943)”

Or, another section more to the point—this from “Tete d’otage No. 23 (Jean Fautrier, 1945) (Ceasefire) (Eleventh Hay(na)ku (Slight Return))”::

(   )
(   ) (   )
(   ) (   ) (   )

And now, it is ridiculous to further discuss OTAGES. Simply, the poems should be read because no second-hand account can explicate one of OTAGES’ strengths: a tone. A tone I would describe as a black-glassed mirror reflecting back (as it reflects upon) the world.

Hopefully, OTAGES will be reprinted.past its original print run of 30 copies. Thirty copies! (Though you can guarantee yourself a copy by reviewing the second review copy sent to Galatea Resurrects –wink.) Seriously, the joy of OTAGES should be more widespread than a limited edition can allow. OTAGES is complete on its own, but makes me want to read more.

*****

Eileen Tabios' books are not eligible for review in Galatea Resurrects because she edits this puppy; these orphans languish here; here; here; here; here; and here.

UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by TOM BECKETT (3)

2006-11-29T22:50:00.000-08:00

BEATRIZ TABIOS (& DOPPELGANGER) Review

Unprotected Texts: Poems 1978-2006 by Tom Beckett
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2006)

Editor's Note: My mother decided to read Tom Beckett's Unprotected Texts after she witnessed me pasting X-large sized condoms onto bookmarks touting Tom's book. I tried to explain along the lines of "being for unprotected texts does not preclude one for advocating safe sex" but she just raised her 76-year-old church lady eyebrows at me. (I hate it when she does that.) Anyway, she read through the book and shared some thoughts. Later, I had a dream about our conversation over Tom's book. In trying to recall now and write out this dream, the lines blur between what Mom actually said and what I dreamt. But, it's an engagement and so I share it!

DREAMT REVIEW

Mom: I found this book interesting...and intriguing.

Moi: Why?

Mom: Because it's not like much poetry I've read. I didn't see much obvious narcissism ...

Moi: Do you like his poems?

Mom: I think so. But I'm not sure I understood some of them.

Moi: Like?

Mom: Well, some of those zombie poems -- like this one:

Zombie Reproductions

Zombies can clone
themselves by

looking in mirrors.
If a zombie

looks at you
from a mirror

you've become
a zombie too.

It's a poem that, after the first read, I immediately felt, Ah ha! as if I got some sort of epiphany from it. But on second or third read, I'm not sure I understood it -- that I got it.

Moi: Well, it's okay for different readings of the same poem to elicit different reactions....

Mom: That's the kind of statement that, although true, can also mask a lot of confusion...although, at least this guy is religious.

Moi: Why do you say that?

Mom: Well, look at this poem:

Zombies aren't

Zombies aren't
usually affiliated
with organized
religions. They're
visibly uncomfortable
in church,
synagogue, temple
or mosque.
Zombies don't
read poetry.
Zombies don't
read pornography.
Zombies read
telephone directories.

See? He's saying that those who don't go to church (or synagogue, temple or mosque) are zombies...I'm assuming, of course, that "zombies" here in this poem is an insult.

Moi: Some critics would say you're making the mistake now of assuming that the author is the same as the poem's persona...?

Mom: [shrugs] Eh. A poem may not be about the poet, but it always reveals something about the poet.

Moi: What else?

Mom: He repeats a lot of words or lines...

Moi: He might do that as a way of facilitating some rhythm he's got in mind.

Mom: Oh, then my not appreciating the repetition is my fault. Because I didn't read his poems out loud to myself. And it's difficult to appreciate rhythm if you yourself don't read the poem out loud.

Moi: Yeeeea...a...ah...?

Mom: As I think about it, I do like the book. At least it's unusual for me in that it's not like a lot of me-me-me poetry that I've read

Moi: Good that you like it.

Mom: But why must the cover show those hairy nipples?

Moi: One of Tom's pals, Geof Huth, jokingly suggested that it's a self-portrait of Tom on his book's cover.

Mom: Well, then Tom must be old, or as old as I am. That's how my body looks at age 76. Flabby belly, breasts sagging and one sagging lower than the other. At least I don't have hair all over my left breast.

Moi: I think Tom is younger than you are. But I suspect that statement might please him.

Mom: Why?

Moi: Because if you're projecting that you and Tom share the same body, then Tom, I think, would be pleased at the idea of the "I" collapsing with and into the "Other" of you as, say, Reader.

Mom: [gives Moi a weird look bespeaking how she thinks I'm blathering something idiotic] Well, all I can say is -- this poetry isn't like anything I read growing up. Or like much of the poetry I manage to read by other newer writers. I guess that's good, although my mind may be too old-fashioned to understand.

Moi: C'mon Mom. You know better than to be self-deprecating. In Poetry, AS YOU KNOW, sometimes, you don't have to understand but just to feel.

Mom: Well, Okay. That, I can understand.

[Pause]

Mom: Anyway, I hope others think it a good book. It has a lot of that hay(na)ku you've foisted on the world. This one's nice:

Wittgenstein Improvisations, #13.

Around
each circle:
the little deaths.

Around
each circle:
the murderous conventions.

Around
each circle:
the unexamined life.

Moi: Uh, Mom? Foisted, Mom? What do you mean I "foisted" the hay(na)ku on the world...?!

Mom: Eileen, you can't fool your mother. Are you telling me that you were serious when you concocted -- and then foisted -- that hay(na)ku onto other poets?

Moi: Well, that doesn't matter, does it? I mean, it's more significant that others responded to it seriously enough to take up the form...

Mom: You didn't answer my question.

Moi: Mom, I'm always serious about Poetry.

Mom: You didn't answer my question.

Moi: Okay, I think I'll take the Fifth.

***

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

WARP SPASM by BASIL KING

2006-11-29T22:45:00.000-08:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN reviews:

WARP SPASM by Basil King
(Spuyten Duyvil, New York, 2001)

1. “In the Lost and Found”

One must, certainly, inscribe in words, in images. One cannot escape the necessity of representing. It would be sin itself to believe oneself safe and sound. But it is one thing to do it in view of saving the memory, and quite another to try to preserve the remainder, the unforgettable forgotten … (Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, p. 26)

These are simply “first meditations” while reading Basil King’s WARP SPASM. If you would prefer the USA Today review, here it is: Important. Read it.

2. First Meditation: On Narrative. Some Rudimentary Thoughts

Narrative (like history, “one damn thing after another”) is an epiphenomenon of neural networks. It’s what life does to organize the myriad inputs, conscious or subconscious, “clear and distinct” or “returned through the repressed”, which make up the self or its equivalents. It may (or may not; how would we know?) be a fiction or a deception but we couldn’t function without it. All those inputs, unorganized, would overwhelm. However much we “write” narrative or it “writes” us, the babble, the cacophony, the roar must become something “coherent”. Without narrative we truly couldn’t take a step.

“However much we “write” narrative or it “writes” us” … is there a difference?

Narrative. Here’s the dictionary definition: “a spoken or written account of connected events.” I’d leave out “spoken or written” or I’d note that those are only special occasions of narrative. But those are the ones we’re most interested in here.

Around 1870, something happened to the several-thousand-year-old connections the master narratives of “Western Civ” had come to depend on. We could digress and discuss that something (“death of God”, rise of big capital, industrialization, increased pace of urban life, Darwin, etc. etc.), but that’s been done and done and done … and I’m not sure anyone really knows, anyway:

The transitions had gone. He knew it was over. They had taken everything with them. (“ABUSE / A COLOR CHART”, p. 22).

But he was wrong. It wasn’t over. And, as it turns out, they hadn’t taken anything essential with them; everything in fact “always had been always will be” connected to everything in an incredible web. It’s what Buddhists call “dependent origination”. But it was all just somehow different now. At least that’s how it felt. We simply (!) had to find new ways to go on.

Here are a few that artists found:

Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautreamont was struck by

the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella

.

And later, so were the surrealists. That “touch of the marvelous” sufficed for many (as if anything “sufficed”) through the 1930s.

Around midcentury, Frank O’Hara, in “Personism”, put it thus:

You just go on your nerve.

Around the same time, Philip Whalen referred to his writings as

… a continuous nerve movie …

(Side note, or maybe not: I think of midcentury as the era in which the big pharmas came up with meds specifically aimed at our jangled “nerves”. These were (for the first time?) distributed en masse. “Coincidence?” as the comedian asked, adding ominously, “I think not.”)

In 1982 Bob Perelman wrote,

Attempts to posit an idealized narrative time would only blur perception of the actual time of writing and reading. Persona, Personism, the poem as trace of the poet-demiurge – these, too, are now extraneous. The problems that narrative had fulfilled … are now dealt with more directly by a variety of procedures. A priori forms and lengths may be determined. Specific areas of vocabulary and syntax, or modes of patterning will be investigated.

This would seem to indicate that procedures would come to constitute the new “connections”.

Well, they did and they didn’t. Sure, artists in all media (including yours truly) have used countless procedures from the Oulipean to the aleatory to eliminate the imposition of an imperial will on the materials (that desire being a story in itself). But that isn’t all they’ve used. And, more importantly, when procedures are used, who has responsibility for them? It’s not as if they’ve fallen from the skies …

So we’re back to those neural networks, the synaptic self, what make us us. Perhaps the word for how to go on, how to put one word next to another, one foot in front of the other, how to “narrate”, is trust (something like “nerve”, I guess), whether it’s trust in the surreal marvelous, trust in nerve itself, trust in procedure … or in those ancient standbys, “possession” (cf. Plato), whether by Martian radio or the holy ghost or some other breathy emanation, and memory.

It is my habit to bring disparate things together. If I can see them, if I can feel them, how far away can they be? (“INTRODUCTION”, p.6)

And after all, it’s not as if these various “compositional strategies” are mutually exclusive, or that any piece of art is bound to any one of them, unless the artist so chooses. And it’s a rare work of art in which the artist (consciously) makes all the choices.

Cf. flarf for one example where borderlines blur between procedure, the aleatory, the demi-urge …

In any case, when I say trust, I mean TRUST. In his PREFACE King describes a Warp Spasm:

… before you went into combat the Warp Spasm would seize you and make you into a monstrous thing, hideous and shapeless, unheard of. That your body would contort so violently that no description can do justice to the menace you would become. (“PREFACE”, p. 7)

To become the play of such forces one must TRUST.

Must Rinzai raise his stick? “Kaa!” Do you understand him?

2a. On Narrative. One More Rudimentary Thought

As the master narratives came to be recognized as the dangers they so obviously were (and, in debased forms, still so obviously are) a great deal of artists’ energy went and continues to go into subverting narrative altogether. But. Here’s a story John Cage told:

We’ve now played the Winter Music quite a number of times. I haven’t kept count. When we first played it, the silences seemed very long and the sounds seemed really separated in space, not obstructing one another. In Stockholm, however, when we played it at the Opera as an interlude in the dance program given by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown early one October, I noticed that it had become melodic. Christian Wolff prophesied this to me years ago – he said, we were walking along Seventeenth Street talking – he said, “No matter what we do it ends by being melodic.” … (John Cage, “How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run”, in A Year From Monday, p. 135)

3. Second Meditation: On “the jews”

… the expression “the jews” refers to all those who, wherever they are, seek to remember and to bear witness to something that is constitutively forgotten, not only in each individual mind, but in the very thought of the West. And it refers to all those who assume this anamnesis and this witnessing as an obligation, a responsibility, or a debt, not only toward thought, but toward justice … (Jean François Lyotard, as cited by Michael Peters, “Jean-François Lyotard, Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)” http://www.pum.umontreal.ca/revues/surfaces/vol4/peters.html)

As much as a book is “about” anything, WARP SPASM is a book about “jews”. A few “jews”: Chaim Soutine, Gwen John, Basil Cohen, John Weiners, Suzanne Valadon … maybe even Karla Faye Tucker … it is not our job to decide who “gets to be” “a jew”. And a book about “jews” is a book that assumes “this anamnesis and this witnessing as an obligation …”

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. (James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson, p.34)

Joyce himself knew better. Why else all that poring over maps, all those letters to Dublin, confirming each detail?

Nobody, nobody paints just for themselves. Nobody. Oh, let there be nobody. Paint nobody, paint language. Nobody, nobody, paints just for themselves. Let the shadows unroll. Let the shadow cover the mountain. Let the shadow be. Let the world stop. Let paint be. Nobody, nobody, paints just for themselves. Let poetry cease. Let the shadows be. Nobody, nobody paints just for themselves. (“GWEN”, pp. 34, 41, 43, 46)

“Oh let there be nobody.” When one assumes “this anamnesis and this witnessing as an obligation” one assumes what Peter Sloterdijk calls “the unbearable”. And one bears it. How?

“gesture

sentence

word

expression

silence”

(Robert S. Leventhal, “Jean François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)” http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/holocaust/lyotarddiff.html)

My cousin Michele turned to me in the car and asked, “Do you remember when we were abused?” Martha was sitting in the back seat next to me. Yes, I do. (“ABUSE/A COLOR CHART”, p.9)

Washington, D.C.: Martha and I walked to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We hadn’t lost anyone in the war. We came to see the sculpture. As we approached the entrance the anguish of the living and the anger from the dead rose up in front of us. Our emotions told us not to go in. Martha took my arm. We turned and walked to the Smithsonian. (“GWEN”, p. 41)

“ … the anguish of the living and the anger of the dead …”

One’s misery thus consists not so much in one’s sufferings as in the inability to be responsible for them – one’s inability to want to be responsible for them. The will to accept one’s own responsibility – which is, as it were, the psychonautical variant of the amor fati – indicates neither narcissistic hubris nor fatalistic masochism, but rather the courage and the composure to accept one’s own life in all its reality and potentiality. (Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, p. 90)

“ … the anguish of the living and the anger of the dead …”

She had been warned that another world war was about to start. She must have paid attention to what she was told, because on September 1, 1939, she got off the train with the intention of returning to England. She collapsed in the street. Most probably from a lack of food. She had no luggage and was considered a derelict by the authorities. She became another unknown soldier. Her grave is unmarked. (“GWEN”, p. 47)

Except by

gesture

sentence

word

expression

silence

Nobody, nobody paints just for themselves.

This story like every other short story has no ending. No short story ever ends. (“GWEN”, p. 33)

When Rinzai roars, then, to what do we awake? To our responsibility. To our response–ability.

Warp spasm.

4. Third Meditation: On I don’t know its name (“bearing the unbearable”? “It’s all right ma, it’s life and life only”?)

But time has not passed
Time is just not there
Time would pass, if at all it existed. (Rajenda Bhandari, “Time Does Not Pass” http://international.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=7448)

When Basil Cohen moved to the USA he brought his books.

He was wounded and I covered young Basil’s wound [his name as inscribed in his books] with Band-Aids and woodruff. The Band-Aids and the books are on a shelf. The woodruff is gone. The wound remains. (“IDENTITY”, p.48)

It is not so easy (!), then, to cure a wound, to efface a name, erase experience. Basil Cohen was 11 or 12 when the time for his move came. I was slightly younger when my family left a Jewish neighborhood on the north side of Chicago and resettled in a blond suburb on the west side of Los Angeles. I remember (as Joe Brainard would say). First day of school. The blond strangers who were to become my classmates were gigantic. I could see that even from the other end of an infinite playground. They were doing something I’d never seen done before and had no idea how to do. They were playing … kickball. SPACE may be the central fact to those born in America (I quote/paraphrase Olson’s opening to Call Me Ishmael), but if space was the central fact in my part of Chicago it was because it was absent, at least in the sense I found it now. I believe that’s the moment I became bookish.

This way to the canvas. This way to the clouds. The sky’s the limit. Three colors, three faces, three winds. Not our faces, not our colors, not our faces. Not my face. Not my father’s face. Which face. My face, “Endurance.” (“IDENTITY”, p.50)

From a poem I wrote after looking at a painting:

For
A moment
Just maybe I

See
Your face.
The face you

Wear.
Prior to
Wearing your face.

Wishful thinking? In the following, notice the upper case.

“You did it to him, you damn fucking Jew.” Jonas was sitting behind his typewriter. “You Jews are all alike.” Again he quoted Pound. Hate poured out of him. “JEW! JEW!” Was he quoting Hitler? Before I’d gone to the dog track, the two of us had argued. Banking, Pound, usury. We didn’t agree but I didn’t think anything of it. For the first time I was frightened. “JEW!” That’s all I heard. I’d been there before and it was ugly. I felt betrayed. I’d wanted to meet Steve Jonas. The anger in his poems hadn’t scared me. And I felt stupid. I hadn’t taken his poetry seriously. We were both screaming when Fielding came to. “Basil! You… all right? you okay?” (“IDENTITY”, p. 61)

What was the face Steve Jonas wore prior to wearing THAT? I’m sure there was one. But there’s more to “IDENTITY” than the faces we wear:

In the garden of the Lost and Found tulips have opened up. Pink, yellow and orange. Martha and I found over fifty Asian lilies in the grass after lunch. Strange, they endure winter and we never know how many will bloom. They probably don’t know that we want them, but there is some communication between us, otherwise it wouldn’t work. (“IDENTITY”, p. 67.)

In spite of (because of?) “the unbearable”, in spite of (because of?) the “nightmare of history”, the flowers raise their stick and roar. And we roar back at them. Or better: we roar with them.

And so one becomes, is born, becomes, is born, a human. An artist. A jew.

5. Fourth Meditation: And then there’s Karla Faye. On “I will stick my hand inside you and squeeze your heart”

In 1983, Danny Garrett, age 37, and Karla Faye Tucker, age 23, put over forty pick-axe holes in a man and woman. Later, Karla Faye Tucker was to tell a friend, “I came with every stroke.” … What painter, what artist, wouldn’t want to say, “I came with every stroke.” But murder? Killing? Do soldiers do it? Did Murder Incorporated come with every stroke? (“KARLA FAYE”, p. 75)

Argh.

All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, tr. Walter Kaufman, p. 72, as cited in Peter Sloterdijk, Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism, p. 81)

All that exists … but what of memory?

Half of memory remains unprimed. The other half is not always what you think it is. (“KARLA FAYE”, p. 77)

What does that say about “anamnesis and … witnessing as an obligation”? What does this say about “bearing the unbearable?” (Narrative may be all we’ve got, but what does this say about narrative?)

Karla Faye, take care! (“KARLA FAYE”, p. 79)

Was she learning that we invent ourselves? (“KARLA FAYE, p. 83)

… on February 3, 1998, the state of Texas killed her by lethal injection. (“KARLA FAYE, p. 86)

Do the strong and the weak together do what nobody else can do? (“KARLA FAYE”, p. 85)

The final section is called “MEAT”. It’s just as good as the others. In “MEAT”

… there is also a sense that sex is not far away, that rape, sorrow and responsibility have been measured. (“MEAT”, p.95)

To retrieve my Met shopping bag I had to hand over the card that had been given to me when I’d come in. It was the Queen of Diamonds. (“MEAT”, p.96)

I can tell the queen of diamonds by the way she shines. (Grateful Dead, “Loser”)

Art makes life available. What else does it do? (“MEAT”, p. 98).

Must Rinzai raise his stick? “Kaa!” Do you understand him?

Reimburse the void, for the two of you have become inseparable. Reimburse matter, for it gives what you cannot give. Give, even if it is the last thing you will ever give. Give, and don’t ever remind yourself that you have given. (“MEAT”, p. 112)

Am I meditating or am I half asleep and dreaming? Someone has just stuck his hand inside me and squeezed my heart. “… it is one thing to do it in view of saving the memory, and quite another to try to preserve the remainder, the unforgettable forgotten …”

I can’t tell you where I am.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman’s most recent publication is OTAGES, which was written during the recent Israeli/Hizbollah conflict in Lebanon. In 2007 Leafe Press should publish his TRAVELS TO CAPITALS. His current project is a hay(na)ku called NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING, which in fact includes very few sounds of his own making.

BREAKING THE FEVER by MARY MACKEY

2006-11-29T22:40:00.000-08:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

Breaking the Fever by Mary Mackey
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, N.Y., 2006)

Poet, novelist, screenwriter, and educator Mary Mackey communicates in language clear and cogent. From the exceptional title poem to the last page, you'll find no obtuse shorthand in this book. Mackey has enjoyed a multi-faceted existence and polishes those facets with her words.

"Solo" is a personal revelation, allowing readers a peek into Mackey's creative process"

this is a land
of private imagination
where nothing
rules but
the intemperance
of dreams

"Witness" is simple, powerful, and shocking in its gentle presentation of man as a voracious, self-serving predator:

small things died
things we hardly noticed:
wild grasses
obscure fish
plants that didn't flower
bacteria
tiny brown birds
a kind of grasshopper that only lived in Africa
a plant that grew high up in a tree in the Amazon
where no human being had ever seen it
a biting gnat that people were glad to see go
clothes moths
a Siberian squirrel
some weeds along the side of the freeway
some silly-looking thing that lived in the sand
that the curlews ate
some tiny green plankton that floated in the sea
that no one knew about

soon only the oldest of us could remember
a time when we woke to the humming of the locusts
when a coyote danced in the sagebrush
a beaver felled a tree….

In "The Freedom of High Places" the trees speak through the poet's words, sharing their legacy before falling to the chainsaw and axe:

we leave you with regret
willing you all we have:
our orphaned termites
our displaced birds,
some memory of green
and shelter and shade
our unfinished seductions
our eloquent stumps.

These poems are memories gleaned from life. Through good or not so good times, humans persevere, even when "the weight of living / stamps you flat / as a dime." Through a masterful command of language and images, Mary Mackey helps us see life through her eyes. If you're not familiar with her work, I recommend you start your adventure with Breaking the Fever.

*****

Laurel Johnson is a Retired Registered Nurse and the author of four books. She is Senior Reviewer for Midwest Book Review; Review Editor for New Works Review; Staff Reviewer for Shadow Poetry Quill Quarterly Review and occasional submitting reviewer for The Wandering Hermit Review and Irish News and Entertainment. Her poetry and prose can be found online in various literary e-zines. She lives in Nebraska with her husband of forty years.

MUSEUM OF ABSENCES by LUIS H. FRANCIA

2006-11-29T22:30:00.000-08:00

RHETT V. PASCUAL Reviews

Museum of Absences by Luis H. Francia
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2005)

Luis Francia achieved a rare feat with his book of poetry, Museum of Absences. This book is critical reading for everyone. This book is a life guide; this book is history; this book is prophecy.

The book creates a literal museum where the very best and the very worst of humanity are picked apart and laid bare for inspection. Displayed in the museum rotunda, the first section "DIS/APPEARANCES" deals with the works of a man dealing with the past. How does a poet deal with religion and colonization? How does a poet deal with racism and anti-miscegenation laws? How does a poet reconcile the past with the present?

In the second section "ZERO GROUND," the poet depicts the human spirit as the main attraction to the museum. The violence and the chaos is melded with the creative power of humanity. And in the last section, in the recesses of the museum walls, Francia shows brute poetic power in "MEDITATIONS." The section is only for those who dare discover the truth within themselves. The task is not easy nor is it straightforward. But self-discovery is worth the pain. For those interested in understanding humanity's double edged nature of violence and grace, the museum is open for entry.

The knowledge of Francia is breathtaking. The book takes everyone on a tour of humanity from the plains of Sarajevo to Manila to Ground Zero. Time freezes as Francia leads the life of a "manong" in 1920's United States. Religion's grip on Filipino life is palpable as Francia tells stories of cathedral spires slicing the belly of heaven. Francia challenges the reader's intellect to keep up. Very often, the reader has to call to the internet to interpret the double entendre, sometimes even triple entendres. To gain full appreciation of Francia's work, one must already be on a journey of self-discovery. To be at any other stage in life will lead the reader to stare at truth and call it just another fable.

In the "Manong Chronicles," Francia flexes the bones and sinews of poetry. To depict a life in narrative is possible because of the limitless flow of narrative. To depict the life of a "manong" in poetry is writing at its finest. Poetry is a delicate rose petal. Add too much of anything and poetry becomes a burden. Add too little and poetry is vacuous.

In Francia's poetry, the anger, the disappointment and the debasement of a manong who immigrated into the land of liberty is freed from the page to the flesh.

Often have I stood naked upon

An imaginary peak, surrounded

By decay, and felt, though I was

Brown, the overpowering sense

Of negritude.

Desolation, my keeper

Hostility, my bread.

Being Filipino is an experience in contradiction. In the early twentieth century, America was promised to the Philippines as the land of the free, where liberty and justice are for all. Yet, for a manong who finds himself remembering the youthful lessons from his American teacher, the contradiction of lesson and reality is immediate and life altering. All the dreams of riches, success and glory vanish. America is only free if you are white or look white.

The poem "Blue in the Face" echoes a poem that in many ways encapsulated race relations in America. The poem is hilarious in its irony. The poem is deadly serious in its depiction of the racial divide of America.

I can tell you I am a man
Of some weight and a certain
Past, a brown man

Until I am blue in the face

And I can tell you what I am
Not, not black nor red
Not yellow and not certainly
White

I can tell you all this is true
Until I am blue in the face

I can tell you
Only the moon speaks to me
Only the sun listens

I can tell you
Until I am blue in the face

Only pigeons coo over me
Rats whisper in my ear

Telling me to sing even more
I, a St. Francis manque
My miracle
Is this, that I can
Turn blue in the face
While remaining brown

Francia's "Blue in the Face" shows the exasperation of a manong and a generation of manongs with the racial divide in ingenious imagery.

I can tell you I have hurtled

Through circuses of towns under

The big beautiful American

Tent, defying the whistles, the desire to see

This body in a shotgun marriage with dirt

The shock of reading "a shotgun marriage with dirt" freezes the brain. Stops the mental process. Makes a person look away and think. Then, the realization slaps one back into the early 1900's. What Francia has is an uncommon gift of imagery that controls time with words.

Francia addresses religion, a great contradiction in Filipino life in "A Manong Complains, as the Star-Spangled Banner is Played".

Padre, my spirit has been

Sterilized, my slate clean, my text

Jittery with purpose but

Unhallowed by spark.

Padre, I demand my god to be dark,

Squat, thick-lipped, bright with

Garlicky speech and

Full-fledged erection,

To infect my tongue with divine

Blasphemy that I can charm hibiscus from my

Dead lover's hair far away and

Hear once again earth beneath me sing.

The double entendre of "padre" is poetic genius. If the word "padre" is taken to mean "priest", the poem is a confession of desires unfulfilled. If the word "padre" is taken to mean "friend," the poem becomes a declaration of independence from colonization. The poem is a treatise to freedom. Freedom to pursue life, sex, speech, and thought.

On a more personal note, during Lent, my siblings and I visited Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija where religious piety took the form of prayers to the stations of the cross and processions meandered through the streets in brilliant defiance of the night. The passage above brought me back to this time, to this place of my youth to remember that my image of god was that of a white man encased in glass. The town prayed to an aquiline nose, thin lips and brown hair.

How does a Filipino deal with life when he goes to work and sees the image of a god he prayed to as a child in the form of his coworkers? Perhaps this is one of the purest ways of describing dislocation. To see with your own eyes your god come to life, yet, to know with your mind that it is not a god. And to experience through interaction how far this person is from understanding the tenets of morality. For me, Francia is revelatory in allowing me to the freedom to trespass and demand that my God look like me.

But perhaps, god's true identity is revealed not in man, but in a dog? The poem "dogless in manhattan" asserts this point of view.

he looks at me now with

compassion, pats my

hand with his head,

tail motions all's Well

reasserting normalcy

engulfing me in his love

I know beyond a seer's certainty

that he will die for me

The word play of "god" and "dog" has been around for a while. But Francia takes the topic to the metaphysical realm. For what are the virtues of a god that one can not find in a canine companion? All the anger, the pain, the love… canine companions have it all. Dogs even have the look of knowledge, the compassion in the eyes that see through man's struggle with existence and the meaning of it all.

The second section of the book deals with the human spirit. Francia's imagination takes the form of a dying man in Sarajevo, his grandparents, and a New Yorker after the collapse of the Twin Towers. More importantly, the section bares the great contradiction of human life. Out of the chaos, violence and death of war in the Philippines, a love between Agatona of Aringay and Henry of Philadelphia happens.

To the world, her pupil brown

Looked to have bowed before

his emerald eye, looked to have
Dropped her books to

Set up house, but this

Green text she took to school

Polishing his life's syntax

The rough grammar of a Yankee soul.

This is the miracle of human existence. That from chaos, there can be creation. From death, there is life. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were killed during the Philippine-American War. A century later, a Filipino living in New York recalls his grandparents meeting in the midst of a war. The story is hope. The story is timeless and eternal. But truth is so subtle that it can be mistaken or denied.

The third section of the book called MEDITATIONS grapples with some of the most fundamental questions of men: life, love, religion, and existence. In each of Francia's poems, he reveals his lifelong struggle to understand and balance the intellect and the emotions.

In perhaps the most revealing poem "#11", Francia bares his soul and the soul of many Filipinos:

I have known too many cathedrals

Known and worshipped in them.

I have heard too many bells,

rung them and rung them.

Cathedrals and bells – oh hell!

Why was I so eager for heaven

When I hardly knew earth?

With the backdrop of religion's role in the colonization of the Philippine Islands and its people, Francia shows what happens when a colonized mind wakes up. In seven lines, the effects of war, poverty, power and greed are revealed. Even in its simplicity, a Filipino immigrant can not help but flinch.

Rarely has a book of poetry attained such heights of passion, meaning and relevance to the world. To an immigrant, Museum of Absences prints into words his experiences. To a New Yorker, the book depicts the emptiness of war and the meaning of love. To an intellectual, the book is a challenge of understanding the double, triple entendres. To a human being, Museum of Absences highlights the elements which make man more than an animal.

*****

Rhett V. Pascual is a poet, photographer and scientist. He documents the lives of Filipinos in America.

SIGNED EVEN AS A WAITING by PAUL KLINGER

2006-11-29T22:25:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

Signed Even as a Waiting by Paul Klinger
(Dusi/e, 2006)

I'm charmed by this chap: its scale, its palette, its drawings, its editings -- such that its maker Paul Klinger has created a visual poetry manifesting landscape (vs. place). And from landscape, which one can extend to environment, one then can visualize a poem made from a poetics of attention.

Signed Even as a Waiting by Paul Klinger was created by taking a print-out of P.J. Bailey's "Festus" and then making erasures (black lines blocking out words and phrases) to create a new result. Maybe I'm drawn to it because I just released a new book, too, that relies on others' texts viz hay(na)ku extractions and my translation of the painterly technique of scumbling (that'd be DREDGING FOR ATLANTIS -- sorry (well, not really) for the advertising of my own book here. Anyway...).

In Signed Even as a Waiting, Klinger's editing creates lines as valid as the source text, and often intriguing ones -- lines like

lights, the morn
falsely wear
the mere auroras

The eye dims
whitely
to one point
small;
radiance,
motley
thought

In the second example, the semi-colon is critical and that Klinger didn't block it out means he wasn't just erasing phrases to draw a visual image.

I mention visual imagery because the edited pages do work as drawings. My interpretation of the images are locked into terrain -- that what I see are rivers, the edges of cliffs, valleys, mountains and so on. Such sense of terrain is enhanced by the palette: a pale brown cover, cream pages, the "Festus" text presented as brown copies against the cream backdrop, and the editing occuring through black ink.

At one point, I was tempted to look up "Festus" and compare all of the original lines to Klinger's extractions. That might still be interesting, but I opted not to (at this point, or for purpose of this review) because I thought what Klinger created was an entity whole upon itself. That is, the poem transcends its particular process (which it overtly indicates on its title page) by not requiring the reader to rely on any knowledge except what one reads right then on the poem's pages.

With his balance of drawing and text-editing, Klinger offers a fresh take on the not-so-new approach of relying on others' texts to create new poems. It is a charming result -- perhaps summed up by another excerpt meticulously lifted from its source:

first words
points from which
;

amid the ruins of
one theme--
the story of the land

more
but it saddens
like shadows
no mark
like a pure
hoped, sought
front

*****

Eileen Tabios' books are not eligible for review in Galatea Resurrects because she edits this puppy; these orphans languish here; here; here; here; here; and here.

THE ANGER SCALE by KATIE DEGENTESH

2006-11-29T22:21:00.000-08:00

ERICA KAUFMAN Reviews

The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh
(Combo Books, 2006)

Katie Degentesh’s debut full-length collection is a remarkable union of flarf, formalism, and social commentary. The Anger Scale, a book that takes its overarching title as well as poem titles from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI),

“the most frequently used personality test in the mental health fields. This assessment, or test, was designed to help identify personal, social, and behavioral problems in psychiatric patients.” (wikipedia.org)

By framing the book in this manner, Degentesh not only calls into question definitions of sanity (how or what is deemed publicly acceptable), but, through the utilization of Google search results and the reincarnation of found language, she creates a more interesting psychological evaluative system.

The Anger Scale begins with “I Do Not Tire Quickly,” a poem whose title aptly sets the stage for the rest of the book. The overall tone of these poems is one of intense energy and zest for language, as well as one who is savvy to the commentary that can be made through the juxtaposition and collaging of words. “I Do Not Tire Quickly” begins,

“Even if your heart is messy, I will clean it up.
I have no sense of touch, I do not hear the events around me
and haven’t even had a fever for many years.” (11)

In this opening, one gets the sense that the speaker is omnipotent. Yet, a closer read reveals that the very words that indicate power are placed beside words that negate this (“your heart is messy”—we are human, aren’t our hearts supposed to be messy?). Similarly, the speaker cannot feel or hear, not quite an indicator of strength, rather a hint that he/she is practicing the art of avoidance, of tuning things out. And, sadly this pattern of repudiation is one behavior that seems to have become the norm in today’s society.

As a member of the Flarflist collection, Degentesh is able to pinpoint these sorts of problems and, consequently, negate material subject matter and written forms. And, she does this in a masterful way. To quote Rick Snyder’s essay, “The New Pandemonium: A Brief Overview of Flarf,” “Flarf poets can also evince an obvious concern with poetry as excess, as burlesque, as a practice that needn’t conform with the mannered conventions and niceties of both mainstream and experimental poetries” (Jacket Magazine, Issue 31). So, the “Google sculpting” of Flarf lends its hand in that it frees the writer from restraints. In the case of The Anger Scale, this linguistic pilfering is barely noticeable, what shines through is a wildly assertive, humorous, call to action—or rather, call to reaction.

Degentesh writes in “No One Cares Much What Happens To You,”

“no matter how public it all seems
there’s a forced casualness to this conversation” (13).

This is another instance where language is taken advantage of in such a way that the move between lines, between words makes for a surprising truth, applicable to most any societal circumstance. Another moment like this occurs in the poem, “I Certainly Feel Useless At Times,” where Degentesh writes,

“technology should be allowed to evolve
God will put anyone to use who has the real thing” (18).

This couplet is a great example of the turn of events that can be manufactured by a poet, such as Degentesh, who possesses “line break expertise.” Here the “technology” line echoes as politicized and familiar, while the second line is just jarring, but jarring in a way that slows the reader down, challenges the reader to unpack his/her thoughts.

In “I See Things or Animals Or People Around Me That Others Do Not See,” Degentesh writes,

“And I can’t tell what is serious and what isn’t.
Is it supposed to be funny? It is incoherent.” (28)

This excerpt is brilliant in that these lines work ironically as both a commentary on the poem’s title (question from the MMPI), as well as a commentary on Flarf or the act of writing itself. Yes, the idea of this is funny, the words are funny, but what does this accomplish? Degentesh answers this question in a subsequent poem, “I Very Much Like Hunting,”

“This is a very interesting game.

They grab what you’ve got.
Slippery smooth & fun to play.
I wish you of creative good luck.
Just make sure to bring nice shoes.” (42-43)

The Anger Scale is a book that is a “part of a counterplot through history” with “assurances of love braced through sentences.” “It is extremely difficult to achieve perfect randomness,” yet Degentesh does that and more. This book is beyond an enjoyable read, a learning experience, a political awakening, and a multi-faceted societal critique.

*****

erica kaufman co-curates the belladonna* reading series and small press. her poems can be found in or are forthcoming in: LIT, CARVE, jubilat, Bombay Gin, the tiny, puppy flowers, and elsewhere. she lives in Brooklyn.

THE GOOD CAMPAIGN by AMY KING

2006-11-29T22:20:00.001-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

The Good Campaign by Amy King
(Dusie, 2006)

The Good Campaign brought images of “Thelma and Louise” to my mind. It is a gentle poem with a kick ass message about feminism…I think. One problem facing many reviewers of poetry today is the number of collections/poems in which there is no clear topic, no thread to pick up and gradually unravel the mystery behind the writing. Poetry to some of us is more than just a string of words that make a beautiful line, it conveys powerful messages, sometimes subliminally, at others in your face, and that message is intended, received and then interpreted. The Good Campaign borders on being incomprehensible to this reviewer, but on my last reading (of which there have been a frustrating number of) I glimpsed a thread of feminism lying innocently among some pretty amazing lines.

Organised crime into easy access panties
With whatever method gets you by, sings a pink

June Bug baby, bankrupt by the dew of clocks,

Decades skitter by as the reader desperately tries to pin the lines down to a recognizable moment. Pre-war, post-war, it is a harsh moment that we recognize, but King won’t throw us a lifebuoy, just lines that disturb and enthrall. She has a way with language that makes us forgive her for making this such a difficult poem to "get". Her words alone deserve a review with the lines she composes being independent of any influences I know of.

Having desperately caught at the feminist thread, I can now read this collection and begin to makes some sense of it. Lines thrown into a context I just couldn’t understand now become the most important on the page.

Who will seek your footnoted solos
for the gender that sidesteps its name?

I breathe a sigh of relief. This review will not carry the shame of my not "getting" it. Of course, I may have missed the boat altogether -- it may be that the woman is a personification of fur and that this is an anti-fur protest poem -- but I can give MY interpretation of it now, as a feminist poem. Amy King can write -- this much we know -- BUT her images are overloaded to the point where it is difficult to see the poem for the words that enwrap it and this is really the only criticism I have to make about it. It is not a light poem -- it is heavy, but not stodgy -- a bit like Christmas pudding on Boxing Day around 9 pm after the leftover roast has been made into sandwiches. Her imagery, however, despite being overwhelming, is fantastic.

A feminine body needs to slice, not bubble,
the air that masks us clearer.

The same could be said of King’s poetry. This is the kind of poem that I would really enjoy bringing into a group discussion. A bunch of poetry enthusiasts, sitting around an open fire, drinking heavy red wine, heatedly debating the images that flood this chapbook. It is not a book for the fainthearted, definitely not for the novice. To appreciate this book you must be a serious poetry lover. It is also, having said that, a book for the poetry writer. Amy King has an amazing manipulative way with words that is an inspiration to anyone interested in the written word.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds has published many reviews of poetry both in print and on the net. Formerly the Poetry Editor for feminist literary ezine Moondance.org, she has recently left that position in order to concentrate more on her writing. Living in the beautiful English county town of Shrewsbury, Fionna continues to draw inspiration from all around her and look for more ways in which to develop a wider appreciation of poetry in herself and others.

GAGARIN STREET by PIOTR GWIAZDA

2006-11-29T22:20:00.000-08:00

FIONNA DONEY SIMMONDS Reviews

Gagarin Street by Piotr Gwiazda
(Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Baltimore, MD, 2005)

Gagarin Street is a profoundly political and philosophical collection. The poet, Piotr Gwiazda, was originally from Poland and now lives in America as an Assistant Professor of English. He has written the kind of collection I would expect from someone of his background. Every poem is concerned with the consequences of life, love and war. Perhaps it is a bad sign that I guessed what the content would involve, but his poetry is of a respectable enough calibre to defeat any potentially negative preconceptions.

When I was a child I lived on Gagarin Street.
Today it’s called Pilsudski Street.
Ten years ago the sun rose, a little wind blew, a little bird sang,
a little empire fifty kilometres away
fell, and so did its heroes: Lenin, Pzerhinsky,
Bierut. This one, though, makes you pause for a moment
After his lonely voyage in spinning Vostok,
after his tumble from orbit, his fifty-fifty chance of survival.
After all, he was our hero – this they taught us
in middle school – “our” meaning all of us, all of the world.
Not so. Today his spacesuit rots
in a museum basement, his Russian face with Soviet smile
disappears from history textbooks, his round the globe celebrity
revoked (unanimously) by a municipal
subcommittee. Well, I suppose that’s how history is made
or unmade. Nothing is certain till it becomes history
and then it is unmade. I’ve been carrying
this city in my pocket for so many years and today –
look: a hole. What’s happened to it?
--Gagarin Street

A restless searching runs like a thread through these poems. Whether or not it is a result of the political disruptions that have occurred in Gwiazda’s homeland, I would not like to say; sometimes it is in connection with home, while with others it exists on a more personal level: "Have I ever loved? I don’t know. My past is still at large" -- The Refugee.

This is a good collection, but criticism I must point out is a dangerous flirtation with monotony, of a single depressed voice. However, not to be too harsh, it is Gwiazda’s first book -- lessons have to be learnt, criticism accepted or rejected. This is a good collection to read through once, but Gwiazda needs to be aware that some people may not be inspired to pick it up again, and to want to reread a collection is a sign of a good book.

That people will be tempted to pick up this book is for definite. It is an attractive book and the enigmatic cover of the collection depicts three fighter planes in pink negatives. It is an interesting image: the fighters fly in formation but their menace is not tempered by the colour, and it reinforces the message that no matter how you dress up war (Bush and Blair’s "fight" against terror, for example) it is still a disaster; it still wrecks hardship, oppression, desolation, destruction and loss for those directly involved and watching from the sidelines. This book is a lesson of what the consequences of war and oppression are. Perhaps the above-mentioned "leaders" could do with a copy.

There is much "angst" driven poetry about at the moment, largely led by the events of 9/11. What makes Piotr Gwiazda’s collection different is that it stretches the "angst" back further in time. It stretches to World War II, to pre-history, to birth. This is a collection that urges us to look beyond recent events, to put all in perspective and not allow other conflicts to be forgotten.

*****

Fionna Doney Simmonds has published many reviews of poetry both in print and on the net. Formerly the Poetry Editor for feminist literary ezine Moondance.org, she has recently left that position in order to concentrate more on her writing. Living in the beautiful English county town of Shrewsbury, Fionna continues to draw inspiration from all around her and look for more ways in which to develop a wider appreciation of poetry in herself and others.

A BOOK OF HER OWN: WORDS AND IMAGES TO HONOR THE BABAYLAN by LENY M. STROBEL

2006-11-29T22:15:00.001-08:00

VANESSA KENYON Reviews

A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan by Leny M. Strobel
(T’boli Books, San Francisco, 2006)

When an individual finds truth and congruency to the very ideals that create change, it should be celebrated, marveled and set free. Like the canopy of torn garment mended together by Leny Strobel, we too can find beauty in the art of healing. A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan is a delicate yet powerful dance between what is intrinsic and what is objective in the Filipino experience. Her book combines meditations, scholarship and poetry to reflect the varying levels to which transformation and recovery take flight for the decolonized psyche. As a Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Sonoma State University and author of Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization among Post 1965 Filipino Americans, Strobel magnificently illustrates her experience to the question: what does one do after you decolonize. By weaving together a menagerie of thoughts and experiences, Strobel paints an eloquent story of journey in the minds of her readers and creates ample opportunity to explore, reflect and question. Thus, allowing a shared experience through her words: It is empowerment.

However, A Book of Her Own goes beyond the continuity of postcolonial theories and retrospective histories of an indigenous people. It even goes beyond a paradigm of race, culture and religion as tied to the Filipino experience as well as her own. Subsequently, it takes life in the most quintessential form of a gift. And by gift I mean art. If we recognize that in life we must always return home, than understanding the roots and beliefs of a people is the most pivotal piece in gaining insight. In a piece called “Art as Gift-Giving,” Strobel explains:

“Putting our gifts back into circulation is an ongoing practice that is measured by the generosity of one’s spirit and generosity of attention that we are willing to give each other…What we are trying to articulate is a way of being, in a sense, that would undo the damage done by what was imposed on us from the outside. And to me, reaching for materials from our own cultural backgrounds and theorizing from there, is a good way of doing that.”(p 72)

In my own process of engaging with Strobel's mastery I began what felt like a hypersensitive state of awareness and inquiry. I could liken this experience to that of turning on a light after being in such darkness. Strobel acknowledges that

"These dark places would like to remain hidden, but the still small voice says: in order to be a whole person you must let the light shine on the dark corners. This is a pain filled time but a time for becoming strong as well." (p 188)

In these moments I could not escape my own shadows hidden within the context of my very own amnesia. I found myself perplexed in delight with the personal stories, dreams, and letters as they brought me into Strobel’s world (mother, educator, historian, journalist, warrior, writer). At times lost, disconnected, struck with childlike glee or sheer emotional grief, I found myself picking apart aspects of who, what, and from where I came.

Dante once wrote, “Beauty awakens the soul to act.” This idea that the essence of our person has the power to transform and create is a resilient theme that runs throughout her book. As a participant, reader, and fellow sojourner I, too, reveled within a process of discovery and reflection. From a new set of terminology (loob, babaylan, etc.) to the ownership of what those concepts mean to me. It is no coincidence that journey is a powerful reclamation for self, for the Filipino/a, Filipino American or any seeking mind. This process of reclaiming self is a gift to be given. With this interdisciplinary approach and shared process comes awareness. With her awareness comes a guide to which I reply the question: what does one do after decolonization? I write a poem to suggest--

Re-build (the self).
Create.
Let Go (give).

[This is how it begins]

*****

Vanessa Kenyon, a Fil Am biracial, is the Outreach Advisor for Upward Bound Programs at Sonoms State University. She completed her undergrad work at SSU in American Multicultural Studies and Psychology with a concentration in Social Behavioral Science.

EPISODES by MARK YOUNG

2006-11-29T22:15:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS DOWNING Reviews

episodes by Mark Young
(xPress(ed), Espoo, 2006)

I become Mark Young after reading Mark Young. His way of seeing becomes my way of seeing. I listen differently, and I think I talk a little differently. I grow sensitive to odd puns, like in the poem "Sang":

Didn't realize
how much
blood there was
in memories

until she
threw them over-
board &
the sharks
went wild.

The title might or might not have anything to do with singing, but it also means blood.

Mark Young's episodes is a generous collection, wide ranging in topic, styles, constraints, but unified in voice, and humor. Words spark and slip, ideas live out strange, short lives behind the lines of these poems. "...the / comparing of one / experience against / another." It is that choice of the word "against" rather than "with" that makes Mark Young's way of seeing so compelling and contagious. Simply to compare one thing with another -- our brains are doing this all the time, as a matter of unconscious routine. But in Young's poems, there is a tension, a sparking, a frisson that comes from two distant points joined by a short blurred line.

He is also adroit at devious bait-and-switches, like that of "The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde," in which we imagine Ghengis Khan alongside the Native Americans in the wild west shows and circuses of the late 1800s. The effect is both chilling and funny.

The few photographs
of Ghengis Khan that
are known to exist
date from the Barnum &
Bailey years & show him
standing either before
a backdrop of The Great Wall
or outside a circus tent
made up to resemble
a yurt.

If wonder is not seeing strange things for the first time but seeing familiar things as if for the first time, then Mark Young's poems are indeed wonderful.

*****

Nicholas Downing (not his real name) was born in Chicago, Illinois. He lived for many years in Minneapolis and for many months in Santa Fe, as well as southern Florida and northern Scotland. He has worked in cubicles and corner offices, washed dishes and wiped kindergarteners' noses. His interests include the shapes of things, the origins of things, and the sounds of things. He lives in northern New Jersey and works in Manhattan, fixing broken things. His work can be found in print in The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and online at the Otolith. His blog (currently on hiatus) can be found at newbroom.blogspot.com.

THE FIFTH VOICE by PAMELA HART, ALLEN STROUS, VICTORIA GIVOTOVSKY & NOAH KUCIJ

2006-11-29T22:10:00.000-08:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

The Fifth Voice by Pamela Hart, Allen Strous, Victoria Givotovsky, and Noah Kucij with an introduction by Ilya Kaminsky.
(Toadlily Press, Chappaqua, NY, 2006)

The Fifth Voice: A Quartet of Chapbooks

Toadlily Press delivers its second book in the Quartet series that gathers four chapbooks into one perfect-bound book of poetry. The Fifth Voice reflects a leap forward for the press; the gorgeously designed cover signifies a finely printed book. The four poets included are well-served by the press and its delivery of poetry into the world.

The first chapbook in The Fifth Voice is titled The End of the Body and is written by Pamela Hart. The thirteen poems of the collection concern themselves with corporeality and the transience of the body. As Hart writes in the title poem,

Then I saw—how fast the mind

takes hold of looking—him fade

to language him no longer body

and we still wanting to know

The chapbook concludes with the poem “how we rush to tell the story of the body as it leaves” and these final lines,

the body talks in brush strokes

in utterances in breaths

about how it folded itself

around lumbar and sacrum

to make a grammar of muscle and joint

how it praised lung and heart

the body making and unmaking itself

The End of the Body is a strong gathering by a poet with a careful eye for image and a strong editorial hand in assembling a chapbook with the perfect balance between thematic unity and poetic variation.

The second chapbook in the collection is Burned Papers by Noah Kucij. The first part of this chapbook presents a sequence of poems with southeast Asian themes. These poems delight, as in these lines from “Ramen Shop,”

you’re eating sticky bales

of rice awash in rose petals

and salt, the human clock around you

slurps the seconds out of ever’s

fishy broth

Compressed and sharp in their observations, Kucij makes the material sing. He also mounts a powerful found poem with material from a mathematics professor’s diary in “Hypergeometric.” It’s an ambitious project that could be pressed further. There are interesting lines and poems among the twelve in Kucij’s section, although, overall, the chapbook doesn’t cohere with the strength established by the first.

The third chapbook in the collection, Elegies and Other Love Songs, by Victoria Givotovsky has its most luminous moment in the poem “Meeting Akhmatova” which concludes with these lines,

I saw the ashtray

Where she burned her poems, because in that room too,

I looked out her window to see what she had seen,

Her eyes stared back at me through fingerprinted glass.

In this poem Givotovsky mobilizes language and imagery in powerful ways to move her narrative. Some of the other poems rely on language that is more abstract and common, but Givotovsky gives glimmers of her strength as a poet in this chapbook leaving open the imagination for her future poems.

The final chapbook, Of This Ground, is by Allen Strous. It concerns itself with the modern pastoral. In “Pear Trees,” Strous writes

And past the silvering of the cracked,

crackled, crazed

bark, lichenlike

at a distant

the trees blasted black

stem,

burnt,

the long-ago in it,

insists.

Strous’ strength is the rich content from which he draws his poems. There are lovely closely observed moments in the fourteen poems from Strous in the chapbook. Attention to the craft of the line and to making the language fresh would propel his future work.

The title of this second installment in Toadlily’s Quartet Series comes from the idea that bringing the four voices together in a single collection creates a fifth voice that emanates from the unified text. I felt that fifth voice more from the first gathering of the Toadlily Series, Desire Path (reviewed in GR's second issue here). In this collection, however, the chapbooks don’t speak to one another as intimate familiars in the way that the voices of the last collection did. The Fifth Voice as a publishing strategy for chapbooks may be an essential one, but, for some poets, the loss of their autonomy in an individual chapbook is great.

The collection of four chapbooks together remains an interesting project. It may be that, as publisher Sandy McIntosh, writes, “the survival of the chapbook as an artform will be accomplished by Internet-based magazines and by printed collections, such as this one.” Chapbooks are growing in attention in the world of poetry today. A recent profile in the AWP magazine on chapbooks as a literary form and websites such as Chapbook Finder, further highlight the significance of chapbooks for poets and lovers of poetry. Recently, Blackbird, an online journal from the English Department Virginia Commonwealth University and the New Virginia Review, began reviewing chapbooks as a regular part of the journal. I can only view these as positive developments. Certainly, the precious first fifteen to twenty pages of a poet’s career bound together in a first chapbook are delicate like the wings of the moth emerging from the pupa. We all in the world of poetry benefit when the sun is warm and caring on these new wings like the good people at Toadlily Press seem to be with their Quartet Series.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. Her poem "Six Conversations about Cancer" is in Under Our Skin: Literature of Breast Cancer, and her recent essay, "When Women Poets Die Young" is at ICORN. You also can read her essay, "Queer Culture: Our History and Legacy" at the Woman-Stirred Blog. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.