GALATEA RESURRECTS #5 (A Poetry Engagement)

ISSUE NO. 5

2007-02-14T23:56:00.000-08:00

February 14, 2007

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

CONTENTS:

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
From Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
Ron Silliman reviews HAVING BEEN BLUE FOR CHARITY by kari edwards

Mark Young reviews HAVING BEEN BLUE FOR CHARITY by kari edwards

Guillermo Parra reviews Micah Ballard’s poems in 6x6 #5; BETTINA COFFIN; ABSINTHIAN JOURNAL; SCENES FROM THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT; UNFORESEEN; DEATH RACE V.S.O.P.; EVANGELINE DOWNS; and NEGATIVE CAPABILITY IN THE VERSE OF JOHN WIENERS

Julie R. Enszer reviews BALANCING ACTS by Rochelle Ratner

Ernesto Priego reviews THE ANIMAL HUSBAND by Christine Hamm

Nicholas Manning reviews NIGHT SEASON by Mark Lamoureux

Eileen Tabios reviews FIRST ADVENTURES OF COL AND SEM by Dan Waber

J.O. LeClerc reviews BOWERY WOMEN: POEMS, Ed. by Marjorie Tesser & Bob Holman

Ivy Alvarez presents a Chap Roundup reviewing MY LIGHTWEIGHT INTENTIONS by Pam Brown; SURFACE TENSION by Mackenzie Carignan and Scott Glassman; TRANSLATIONS FROM AFTER by Joel Chace; OH MISS MARY by Jim McCrary; DOVEY & ME by Strongin; and THE NAME POEMS by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Julie R. Enszer reviews A HALF-RED SEA by Evie Shockley

Nicholas Manning reviews TRACT by Jon Leon

Mary Jo Malo reviews BLOOD AND SALSA / PAINTING RUST by Jonathan Penton

Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor reviews THE GODS WE WORSHIP LIVE NEXT DOOR by Bino Realuyo

Eileen Tabios reviews THE ALLEGREZZA FICCIONES by Mark Young

Jeannine Hall Gailey reviews NAVIGATE, AMELIA EARHART'S LETTERS HOME by Rebecca Loudon

Nicholas Downing reviews CIVILIZATION by Elizabeth Arnold

William Allegrezza reviews KALI'S BLADE by Michelle Bautista

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by Tom Beckett

Tom Beckett reviews A READING, 18-20 by Beverly Dahlen

Eileen Tabios reviews WIND IS WIND AND RAIN IS RAIN by Brynne

Allen Bramhall reviews DOWN SPOOKY by Shanna Compton

Lynn Strongin reviews SHOT WITH EROS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS and SEED PODS, both by Glenna Luschei

William Allegrezza reviews I OF THE STORM by Bill Lavender

Richard Lopez reviews OH MISS MARY by Jim McCrary

Craig Santos Perez reviews THE TIME AT THE END OF THIS and 60 LV BO(E)MBS, both by Paolo Javier

Anne Haines presents reviews RADISH KING by Rebecca Loudon; LIVING THINGS by Charles Jensen; and MORTAL by Ivy Alvarez

Lynn Strongin reviews THIRST by Mary Oliver

Mario E. Mireles reviews excerpts from NOT EVEN DOGS by Ernesto Priego; Matsuo Bash’s “The Narrow Road of the Interior" in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Ed. Maynard Mack; and Octavio Paz’s "The Tradition of the Haiku" in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literatur.

William Allegrezza reviews ELAPSING SPEEDWAY ORGANISM by Bruce Covey

Laurel Johnson reviews CALLS FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD by Robert Hershon

Eileen Tabios reviews BODY OF CRIMSON LEAVES by Celia Homesley

Eileen Tabios reviews THE PLANT WATERER AND OTHER THINGS IN COMMON by Kathryn Rantala

Julie R. Enszer reviews OSIP MANDELSTAM: NEW TRANSLATIONS, Ed. by Ilya Bernstein

Hugh Fox reviews SEEDPODS by Glenna Luschei

Marjorie Light reviews COMING FULL CIRCLE: THE PROCESS OF DECOLONIZATION AMONG POST-1975 FILIPINO AMERICANS and A BOOK OF HER OWN: WORDS AND IMAGES TO HONOR THE BABAYLAN, both by Leny M. Strobel

Mark Young reviews SONNET by Matt Hart

Eileen Tabios reviews THE GRACES by Elizabeth Treadwell and SONNET by Matt Hart

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Andrew Joron reviews ULTRA VIOLET by Laura Moriarty

Britta Ameel reviews ALASKAPHRENIA by Christine Hume

Sharon Mesmer reviews OPPOSABLE THUMB by Joe Elliot

Eileen Tabios reviews OBEYED DILEMMA by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

Alfred Yuson reviews BELIEVE & BETRAY by Cirilo F. Bautista

Alfred Yuson reviews MATADORA by Sarah Gambito

Alfred Yuson reviews FAULTY ELECTRICAL WIRING: POEMS by Ruel S. De Vera, A FEAST OR ORIGINS by Dinah Roma and ELSE IT WAS PURELY GIRLS by Angelo Suarez

BACK COVER
What it Means to be Missy WinePoetics’ Dawgs

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

2007-02-14T23:55:00.000-08:00

This issue is dedicated to kari edwards (1954-2006). kari was a Guest Editor for Galatea Resurrects' Inaugural Issue. I won't -- can't -- say what's impossible for me: how kari had so engaged, affected, and shared. So I thank Ron Silliman and Mark Young for manifesting this issue's dedication to kari with their reviews of hir posthumous -- and awesome -- poetry collection, having been blue for charity, accessible for free from BlazeVox Books HERE.

*****

While the total number of reviews for this issue is lower than the prior issue's it's still a pretty hefty example of Giving! And if you adjust for Issue 4's spike in reviews from my e-begging for reviews so that I don't lose a bet that would have made me hang out naked in the cold on University Avenue in Berkeley for a day, then you'll see that the pattern affirms a consistent rise in reviews -- a rise in interest and participation from the poetry community. Thanks to you volunteer-reviewers who've contributed to the following:

Issue 1: 27 reviews

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

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

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

Issue 5: 56 (four projects were each reviewed twice)

Of these engagements, the following were generated from review copies sent to Galatea Resurrects:

Issue 1: 9 out of 27 new reviews
Issue 2: 25 out of 39 new reviews
Issue 3: 27 out of 49 new reviews
Issue 4: 41 out of 61 new reviews
Issue 5: 34 out of 56 new reviews

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

*****

Between the prior issue and this issue, on a poetry-related List, a teacher cited Galatea Resurrects as a Creative Writing resource! Yes -- indeed! Resource Galatea!

And as always, please feel free to email me or put in Comments section any errors or publisher web sites information related to the books.

*****

In 2006, Galatea Resurrects released four issues encompassing 176 new reviews and 31 online debuts of reviews first presented in print publications. I hang out with members of the secret organization, "Oenophiles For Poetry." I'm the only poet in the group. But the others sometimes get tipsy enough for me to trap them into doing something to support poetry.

So, at one of our recent gatherings, I was able to persuade Oenophiles for Poetry to read all of Galatea Resurrects' 2006 reviews. From their reading, Oenophiles for Poetry chose their favorite read, and we now are pleased to announce that Galatea Resurrects' 2006 CALENDAR AWARD goes to

Mr. Sandy McIntosh

for his review, viz a memoir, of LIVING IS WHAT I WANTED by David Ignatow as well as SELECTED SHORTER POEMS and THE TABLETS, both by Armand Schwerner.

If you did a review in 2006, don't get insulted yours wasn't picked. This isn’t a “best of reviews” contest; full disclosure requires me to say the judges were deep in their goblets when they picked the recipient of this CALENDAR AWARD.

The CALENDAR AWARD comes with two prizes. The first is a $20 gift certificate good towards the purchase of a poetry book. I hope that future years' awards will be worth more, but that's all that the total came to from the loose change that I managed to steal this year from the winos' pant pockets and cocktail purses which don't ever carry anything but lipstick (why is that, oeno-ladies?). Still, $20 should at least cover the purchase of one poetry book and that is a good thing, No? I mean, Yah?

The award is so named because the second prize is ... [insert drum roll] a Calendar. This, of course, is special because it is a 2007 Dutch Henry Winery calendar (y'all know I'm Dutch Henry's Poet Lariat, right?) and when you turn to the March page, you will see the same drop-dead gorgeous photo of Achilles and Gabriela that was featured in Issue 3. So, isn't that spe-cial?!

*****

Now, speaking of that famous photo of Achilles and Gabriela:

Those who know me know that Moi's flagpole, as a poet, is empty. But Galatea is flexible enough to allow nations to visit, if it means that she can also raise the Dawg's Flag:

Because they guard my poetry so well, I'll do anything for Achilles and Gabriela who love to see their photos interrupt air:

I really can't believe I allowed flagpoles on the property, but as you readers know, I indulge my dogs -- rather, I indulge myself indulging my dogs. Woof.

With much Love, Fur and Poetry,

Eileen Tabios
St. Helena, CA
February 14, 2007

HAVING BEEN BLUE FOR CHARITY by KARI EDWARDS (1)

2007-02-14T23:50:00.000-08:00

RON SILLIMAN Reviews

having been blue for charity by kari edwards
(BlazeVOX Books, forthcoming 2007 and downloadable HERE)

If you Google BlazeVOX Books, Geoffrey Gatza’s great little press in Buffalo, NY, the first listing will be “BlazeVOX [books] publishers of weird little books.” This may be truer than it seems, once you realize that BlazeVOX has published both Michael Magee’s Mainstream & Kent Johnson’s Epigramititus, the former being one of the first “big” books of flarf, the latter being Johnson’s latest attempt to challenge other poets to pay him heed. There are also volumes by Noah Eli Gordon, Joe Amato & others, plus a line of e-books published in PDF format. In this context, kari edwards’ forthcoming having been blue for charity is going to fit right in, something edwards never did very easily during a too-short life -- just 52 years to the day -- but which, particularly over the final decade, edwards had learned to make not just a virtue of, but indeed the center of a life’s work.

Three years ago, as I was preparing to read with kari at Philadelphia’s smoky La Tazza tavern on South Street, I wrote a review of Iduna that consciously avoided using any pronouns that suggested gender. As I suggested in the review, edwards’ lines

I am a man being a woman
I am a woman being a man
I am a homosexual being a straight woman being a homosexual man --
I am a homosexual woman being a straight man being a homosexual woman --

were more than simply playful. kari’s commitment to all sexual minorities began at home, literally. So far as I can tell, the one person who noticed was kari, who thanked me first thing for not making any presumptions, or at least not assigning any to print. To which I responded by saying something obvious like, “I thought that was the point,” to which edwards’ eyebrows punctuated a broad grin.

having been blue for charity is the first, hopefully not the last, of edwards’ posthumous works, a 120-plus page sequence divided into four parts. The titles of these sections just roll off the tongue:

1.7b.
-.7+b+n
(having been blue for charity)
<..\x+1+n^
~..7px(z7-x{___}

Each contains a series of works that range from fairly direct prose poems and texts centered on the page in the manner of Michael McClure to others that are typographically so disruptive that I have no hope of reproducing them here. There are even prose paragraphs that lean to the left or right, others with narrow columns of justified type ALL IN CAPS, pages where the type is printed with a different orientation (including the diagonal). Consistently, however, what one finds, reading having been blue for charity, is a challenge to the reader not so unlike this one that occurs in the very first text:

it’s a trap and you start kissing me . . . you’re reading
this book or listening to me . . . you kiss me all over
. . . I can’t stop you or won’t. you’re my personal
vampire. I want you to suck my nipples, instead you
go down on me. your tongue is in my pussy or on
my cock (you decide). we are out of control. you’re
between my legs. I want to grab you, whisper something
. . . scream something. I feel the full-engulf
of payment. I am your road and you’re filled with
passion, aggression or ignorance. (pick one) I am
your mother, your sister, or that little boy next door.
you square time. I am breathless. heavy on the floor,
damp with sweat. this is a baker’s dozen, the hot surface
of creme brulee’. something in rapid repetition.
a loud gesture with a zealot’s thought. I think I hear
something. is there someone else? kiss me and leave
. . . you must. punish me, trample me. show me the
future in cards. paris is burning. I wait fifty or sixty
times. I’m alone in your lore. I am hungry. I didn’t
expect that. I have been driven out of the auditorium
for a minute. I didn’t expect that. I thought you
were jean genet, aleister crowley, or gertrude stein.
no, maybe virginia woolf. my breast. my wetness.
raspberry body stockings. a false penis, words and
tongues. I can no longer remember being a dog or a
possum. just words. you are my consciousness. I am
you, sitting there reading or listening, content and
embellished.

The most important phrase here, at least to my reading, comes toward the end: just words. you are my consciousness. I am you…. Edwards’ gift, both as a writer and to us, is to have been perhaps the most sensitive person ever as to the borders of personhood, the confusions & transgressions that can lie there, the politics of it (presented almost always in the most practical, rather than, say, academic-philosophic, fashion). Precisely because kari varies presentation throughout this book, the reader’s sense of vertigo at being left at this precipice constantly is buffered from ever being too much. There is, as the section above suggests, a wicked sense of fun not that far from the surface, just as there is a sense of hurt, of alienation that can be overwhelming.

kari edwards is the first major writer to have died in the 21st century to have also only published books during it. That’s worth thinking about here in 2007. edwards was clearly a “late starter,” although kari had an earlier life involved in the visual arts in Philadelphia -- Gil Ott, himself a master of marginalization, was an important influence as, I take it, was a stay somewhere along the line at Naropa. But edwards arrived fully formed, albeit ever self-transforming. Try reading, for example, “good questions….”:

quick answer, no; quick answer, there is no here-to-there-there; no, quick answer, no, face-to-face, tag you’re it; quick answer, there is no answer; quick answer, stop being a body with organs; reach escape velocity; undo the gender tape on the body, put on with super glue, stapled in for good measure; can you spell escape route? quick answer, no-yes, yes-no, no-yes, yes-no; quick answer, how would you like your macmac’alike today, served your your way way, this way or that, choice (a) or (a) or (a) or (a) or (a); no; quick answer; maybe, (toto knew), home is where all objects cower in demonic mimicry; community is the now of now, of now of now; quick answer, can the tools of the master race, tongue or master master major major be anything more than have it now moments; quick answer, become unrecognizable, schizophrenic in a minor key; quick answer, no; quick answer, I am of the air waves, virtual, vital and a good fuck on channel 4; quick answer. it is always post-post historical postpost, never and can be, divergent unexpected endless curves, always post-post never-never’s or always bold holocaust road maps, one or the other guiding one through future mine fields; quick answer, the coyote and trickster; quick answer; feel the deep talons of commodity sink into flesh; quick answer; resistance is futile, you are already virtual, stuck in quantum glue...... quick answer, no, it’s already too late.

The idea of reading (or writing) as a game of tag makes total sense here, while at the same time the percussive music of the prosody drives the text, jabbing a verbal finger into the reader’s chest. It is no accident that sound here as in any text derives from breath. The text, literally, is hyperventilating.

For someone whose publishing career lasted under a decade, edwards proved remarkably successful almost immediately. We are fortunate that so many of us were ready to read edwards almost at once and that kari got to know just how important these words were proving to readers of all genders and orientations. It’s hard to imagine that anyone with kari edwards’ combination of gifts is going to stop this way again any time soon.

*****

Ron Silliman will release two books this year: the University of California Press will publish The Age of Huts (compleat) in April and the University of Alabama Press will publish The Alphabet in 2008. Meanwhile, his Tjanting continues to be available from Salt Publishers.

HAVING BEEN BLUE FOR CHARITY by KARI EDWARDS (2)

2007-02-14T23:45:00.000-08:00

MARK YOUNG Reviews

having been blue for charity by kari edwards
(BlazeVOX [books]; Buffalo, N.Y., 2007. Downloadable HERE)

I wonder, what it
would be like to say: you have five months to live….
hanging from the sky

Lines like that. One wonders if the end was known before / the ending. Read that in the first poem, with the knowledge, & everything that follows has a different feel about it to what it might have otherwise been.

Everything has a different feel about it anyway. Words acquire power they never had until kari used them. Together, but often the singular. In context. It is / outpouring. It is "an emotion riff of rearranged things folded into an immense tableau."

Brilliance, yes. An edge of pain. It is killerpain, taken twice, thrice daily, before / during / after meals. It is pain softened by the finding of a spiritual home in India. Internal but not always the external. "who are these strangers?" It is struggle within, internal turmoil. It is exploration & exposition of living in

"…the space one holds, not an essential objectification one is held in, where one is stabilized into things in space, places with borders, bodies with procedures, proper behavior by corporeal containment, compulsory reproductive management, polarizing populations, producing mythological projections, slicing every single living energetic instant into bipolar neurosis for further control of an imagined boundary." (from an editorial in EAOGH)

The power is not affected but / more peace. It is form even when there is no form. Structure. Not always obvious until one sees poems presented in a different way to what they were when one saw them in their first appearance. The content constant but the structure moving. Then sometimes software-shifted. Not always successful but it would have been. Sooner rather than. Knowing the drive was there. Determination. Recognizing the power of, the power behind.

& yet, & yet. This is a book that was being put together but not quite finished. Little bits of dyslexia catch in the teeth. One wants it to be perfect. & yet, & yet, who gives a fuck about the imperfections? The strength, the vision, the power of the flow of words, the shaping & positioning of them, their putting together -- these things paper over, overcome small flaws. & isn't the adage that there should always be some flaw in the otherwise perfect?

kari is one of the great poets. Has always been to me. Will always be. having been blue for charity reinforces that. The regret is / that there was more to come. Much more. Unfinished busyness. Infinite brilliance. Discovery, discoveries. Aware of. Teasing.

am
playing possum in a hole, being a dog in blue ink that
turns black after my death

Vale.

*****

Mark Young is the editor of Otoliths where some of the poems included in having been blue for charity first appeared. An earlier post on kari appeared on his blog gamma ways.

8 PUBLICATIONS by MICAH BALLARD

2007-02-14T23:40:00.000-08:00

GUILLERMO PARRA Reviews

Micah Ballard’s poems in 6x6 #5
(Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2001)

and

Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners by Micah Ballard
(San Francisco: Auguste Press, 2001)

and

Absinthian Journal by Micah Ballard
(San Francisco: Old Gold, 2002)

and

Bettina Coffin by Micah Ballard
(Portland: Red Ant Press, 2003)

and

Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript by Micah Ballard
(Snag Press, 2004)

and

Unforeseen by Micah Ballard
(Cambridge: Faux Press, 2004)

and

Death Race V.S.O.P. by Micah Ballard (co-written with Cedar Sigo and Will Yackulic)
(Portland: Red Ant Press, 2005)

and

Evangeline Downs by Micah Ballard
(Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)

Regarding Micah Ballard

I first became aware of Micah Ballard’s poetry at the end of 2001, when I read his work in issue 5 of 6x6 magazine. That issue opened with Frank Lima’s stunning poems in response to the events of September 11th. Soon afterwards, 6x6 #5 became a collector’s item when most remaining copies were destroyed in a fire. Since being introduced to his work, I have associated Ballard’s poems with the rarity and power of that particular issue of 6x6, destroyed by fire, clothed in archaic stanza forms and inhabited by ghosts we might not perceive as such, unrecognizable and camouflaged in the sweetest of lyric pulses. Ballard’s sparse stanzas (one poem in sestets, the rest in tercets) contrast nicely with the effusive torrent of imagery and allegorized grief in the longer lines of Lima’s work. In Ballard’s four poems for that issue, one finds a fully developed writer, his tone formal and elusive. Ballard is assured of his own sound, and he allows the reader to share in that bravery, that generous confidence. The first of his four poems, called “Of Yours,” begins thus:

What I’ve become is nothing
           other than what I used to be
soon as you place me there.
           Neither now nor ever
have I been anyone, besides
           that who you wanted me to.

Which is to say, Thanks to You
           I am more myself today
than I have been any other.
           It is this easiness & prodigality
wherein again I lose myself
           that I give you what you want

& so am sitting here, crotch
           in hands, alone, wanting to be
just that. Or somewhat in this way
           of speaking, manage to turn into
great personages so shaped by you.

What astonishes me when I read Ballard’s 6x6 poems is how he situates each text as an intimate collaboration with the reader. We are kept at a distance (“…alone, wanting to be / just that…”) yet still drawn into a type of communion with the lines, asked to stay close, to listen and watch the lines make their music. This direct address to the reader reflects the poet’s conception of reading and writing as forms of friendship. One befriends the poet through his or her work, delighting in commonalities and disagreements via the magic of the page, held up by the poem’s architecture. In “Impromptu,” he reminds us that poems hold a type of time-machine power in their structure:

& smoke, so I have
one more drink
bring out the bottles

take another toke.
Then back to books
& onto the street for looks,

where I find my friends
especially, the old ones
who no longer live

but are alive
in someone else’s heart.

In the spring of 2004 I showed my 88-year-old grandmother, who was a painter, a copy of Ballard’s Absinthian Journal, published two years earlier in San Francisco by Cedar Sigo’s Old Gold imprint. After flipping through the book, she chuckled and commented on the ever-diminishing amount of absinthe in the bottle portrayed in seven drawings by Will Yackulic that accompany the sequence of sestets. She mentioned how many of her favorite XIX century French painters often indulged in that turquoise liquor. She also noticed the skull that appears on the empty bottle’s label in the final drawing. As an artist, my grandmother often noticed the smallest details in a work of art, and she was aware of how those tiny moments can sustain an entire work. Now that my grandmother is no longer here, I fondly recall that afternoon together at her home outside Boston, as we flipped through the pages of Ballard’s book together for a few minutes. I’m pleased to think she might have noticed the enchanting, jagged rhythms and imagery of the opening poem in Absinthe Journal:

Tripped into a turquoise

tomb garden & suffering

from a nervous exhaustion

again I am eaten by the remains

of that classic pain red love

now burnt black. Out of all beauty

Death is a dynamic, almost inspirational, presence in much of Ballard’s writing. Not necessarily in an anguished or lamenting mode, but rather in the spirit of the realism so often invoked in hip-hop culture. Ballard is, as I read him, a hip-hop poet. And I’m not insinuating that one read him within a musical or pop culture context, though those elements can be found in his poems. By hip-hop, I mean he invents and thrills through minimalist Romantic techniques, street-hardened yet always ready to divulge an earnest vulnerability in his verses.

The beautiful, hand-made Old Gold edition includes green end paper that allows one to read the title page through a filter of solid absinthe. Before the book begins, one is already immersed in the intoxicating effects that Ballard’s poems depict and induce. Beauty does not, however, imply an escape from reality or suffering. Ballard is not an escapist, though his poems can often transport one beyond material reality. When I associate him with hip-hop culture, I’m trying to point out the extreme realism that inhabits his fantastical stanzas. As when he writes, again in Absinthe Journal:

into those shadowed places

of vague horror where doubled

in subterranean removals

the moon bleeds white crosses

across the sky & the colors

of sorrow soundsear in fear

Had my grandmother been able to sit down and read the poems in this book more closely, I imagine she would have approved of their painterly quality, the wash of colors and emotions Ballard can invoke for the reader on every page. In his poetry, one never knows what image or sound might appear next. He tends to work in fixed, or traditional, stanza forms. This might be as a way to assure his visual imagination is provided an adequate stage to perambulate. Again, the hip-hop I associate Ballard’s aesthetic with is rooted in ancient cultural techniques, that can be found in the archival poem-songs of African griots or the political and social commentary of Shakespeare’s multitude of characters.

Besides the audacity and beauty of Ballard’s poems, what excites me about his writing is that he works exclusively in semi-secretive, one could say epistolary, forms of publication, including limited edition chapbooks, magazines and web publications. It is thrilling to know that his poems live and breathe in such hand-made, organic editions. One is reminded of the humble, utilitarian folios that actors used for memorizing plays in the Elizabethan era, talismans the reader can carry anywhere.

Portland’s Red Ant Press has published two texts by Ballard. The first of these is a long poem in eleven parts called Bettina Coffin. While I am looking at Ballard’s work more or less chronologically here, this book reminds one of the consistency and timelessness of his poetic project. Born in Louisiana in the 1970s and now a resident of San Francisco, where he works at the New College of California, Ballard does make specific references to time and place. And yet, I keep noticing an effort in his poems to write verse that will not be contained by local or chronological factors. Instead, it is an allegiance to his “friends / especially, the old ones / who no longer live” that animates his work. This is where the reader is provided free reign within his poems, invited to participate in a ritual that transcends our limited decades of physical existence. Ballard is writing for the archive, acknowledging our temporary nature, even while singing of his own relative youth. He writes under the sign of a Keatsian self-awareness that sees youth’s illusory nature, “this living hand” the poet stretches out to his lover, and by extension to his readers.

The first section of Bettina Coffin, which I quote in full below, opens a conversation that could be heard as frantic, or maybe as being deeply engaged with a person beyond the poem’s reach:

Who is that shouting at me? Is
           it you old friend
               turned back from dust
at dusk?
               Down. Down.
Down. Is it now I come see
                              look who else is in
for the chanting. Through
& through I knew you then
           as you do me
               somehow right now.

This is Ballard’s method for invoking a listener beyond the stage of the poem. It might be us as we read his work, or it could be ancestors or friends from distant regions. What remains clear is Ballard’s belief in the poem as an invocation, a ritual that can transport and protect specific moments chosen for their power to move us. In this respect, I associate Ballard with a Romantic tradition that balances pleasure, poise and solitude, the intimate relationship a poem can provide for friendship and companionship, across the street and across decades or centuries. This transcendental impulse is never frivolous, perhaps because Ballard maintains an awareness of how fragile a concept lineage can be. The poet writes to continue a tradition that is never completely safe from the threat of annihilation. In part VI of Bettina Coffin, he refers to this link between self and past:

  Loyal to death
  my knowledge of the Cult comes
               from my African Ancestors
   “& this is Charles the Grinder speaking,
  one hundred & twenty two years after
Marie Laveau has died, June 16, 1881
                              on St. Anne Street. & I have come
               with the moon in the sky
  percolating & simulating according to
  certain mineral matter which I expose
               myself to.”

The second Ballard book published by Red Ant Press is the more recent Death Race V.S.O.P., written in collaboration with Cedar Sigo and Will Yackulic. Composed as those poems are in a spirit of communal anonymity, one can still make out Ballard’s distinctive voice among the short, violent lyrical bursts of that collection. Poetry is understood as an “encrypted order” that the reader and writers are inducted into through the process of composition and reading. As the three poets dissolve themselves in collaboration, likewise the reader is included as yet another component of the verses. One can think, for instance, of Rimbaud’s direct address to his readers throughout Une saison en enfer. These poems carry that same intense playfulness, violence and irony that Rimbaud employs in his final book.

Jack Kimball has done us all a favor by releasing Ballard’s Unforeseen (2004) as part of his series of online books for Faux Press. Anyone with access to the Internet and a printer can have a copy of this great book. Before you finish reading this review, go to the link above and print it out. Unforeseen has several poems that are published elsewhere. I’d like to cite an entire poem from this collection, one also included in Evangeline Downs, because it so clearly delineates Ballard’s allegiances:

9/13/96

Nefertiti over
right pec & serpent
with jaws open
on left shoulder.
German cross

with Exodus 18:11
across back, Playaz
on nape of neck.
Christ in crown
of thorns & flames

on left biceps
Heartless with skull
& crossbones on right.
50 Niggaz over sternum
Fuck the World

in script across shoulder
blades & trapezoids.
Laugh Now with mask
of Comedy on lower
sides of back, Cry

Later with mask
of Tragedy. Outlaw
down left forearm
Thug Life with bullet
across abs.

The poem is obviously, at first glance, a portrait of slain rapper and pop culture icon Tupac Shakur. I must admit I was never compelled by Tupac’s style and I found his death to be a predictable, if tragic, result of a life lived dangerously and foolishly. So, ostensibly this poem should mean very little to me, as I prefer a version of hip-hop one might find in figures like Jean Grae, Raekwon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Ghostface or Nas on his first LP, rap experimentalists who continually fuck with form and the lyric impulse, contradicting themselves and challenging the listener. I’ve always found Tupac’s work to be dull and commercial. And yet, I keep returning to this poem for its elegiac portraiture and in turn I’m taking the time to reconsider Tupac’s value as an artist fully immersed in his particular era, the 1990s. As Ballard portrays him, he is archived through the tattoos that grace his magnetic but doomed body.

The enjambments of these stanzas echo the hard edges of his short life, lived as it was under the imperfect glare of fame and a commodification that helped to destroy him. Ballard has reminded me why that particular rapper resonates so deeply with millions of listeners across the globe. His contradictions and ancestry written out across his body in tattoo script, he is poetry brought to living fruition. When I read the poem, I think of him in his brilliant role in the film “Juice” (1992), where he portrayed a charismatic criminal who was ruthless yet sweet, poised between survival and generosity. Through Ballard’s homage, I can stop to appreciate Tupac as a poet immersed in life, an artist who embodies the contradictions and brilliance of an autochthonic and visionary art form.

Since finding a copy of Scenes from the Saragossa Manuscript a couple years ago in New York, I’ve tried to hunt down the film the title refers to, directed in the mid-1960s by the polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has, who in turn adapted his work from a novel by Jan Potocki (Poland, 1761-1815). The story concerns a French officer during the Napoleonic wars who discovers a manuscript in the Spanish city of Saragossa. Ballard’s ekphrastic sequence of 10 poems in unrhymed quatrains is printed in a beautifully crafted edition by Snag Press, with an inside cover displaying a scene from the film: a man hiding his face behind a human skull. I’ve also tried to find out who edits Snag Press and from where but to no avail. So, for me, this manuscript is clouded in bibliographical mystery, though if anything that serves this sequence of poems quite well.

Rereading this book, I’m immediately drawn into its oblique drama, the pull of the semi-archaic language Ballard employs in his carefully chosen lines. The texture of his language is what keeps me informed despite my lack of knowledge about plot details and references to the film. Ballard is writing an ars poetica at times in these quatrains, asking the reader to remember that poetry should be an adventure, a dangerous and exhilarating excursion. One that begins or rests on the page but which is never limited to that precinct alone. Section “III” of the poem brings us to ideas encountered in much of his work: the relation between poetry and death, not as a melodramatic or nihilistic bond, but rather as a spiritualized one. I quote in full:

But to sit on the throne in Tunisia
among harems, gardens & fountains
in the company of Golemez women
as to have drunk from their chalice

this potion. At mercy of crows
& unknown powers am I still too young
to be a cabalist? Tho I carry also
the same rope ‘round my neck. Yet

to experience poetry w/out ghosts
hang a mirror outside the door
shunning gypsies, informers of barren
words whose tone I hone. So now

to choose position of beggar as it does
not dim a nobleman’s jewel, be endowed
by contradictories which I know not what.
Is it that voice from above that must order

this astray, unless of testimony to lead
one away from countless worldly sins
hands & feet bound to the boards of this
upside down tree, cross I too must carry.

I delight in Ballard’s willful obscurity, which is enacted not for the sake of pretension or atmosphere, but as a reminder that poetry must be taken as a living force, one that directly concerns both reader and poet. Ballard’s latest work is a pamphlet with a beautifully designed glossy cover by Will Yackulic, yet another inimitable release from Ugly Duckling Presse, a publishing house that always manages to read their authors very closely, designing covers, pages and font that accurately reflect each book’s individual spirit. Evangeline Downs begins in a disaster zone, the poet’s native Louisiana on November 25, 2005, weeks after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. But the book is not merely a direct lament for a horrible devastation. It is also a stage where Ballard’s continuous interplay between the living and the dead is performed. In these poems, he is speaking to us and beyond:

Flambeau

There are two red chambers
& you are on the other side
only ashes. The vines along

the wall tell all, but what
remains? Old habits return
nightlife wanes & ordained

to find the source we scan
the sky for her war-torch.
Children of the Dead, House

of Napoleon, cobra & carnelian
where do the dawns draw out?
Far off & legendary

may the voices recall their lives
the brides remain lost to hide
for there is no age here

just these walls of ivy
with single trumpets
of blood.

Notice the way he builds towards such pointed questions in these stanzas, so as to seem so effortless, colloquial in their mourning, yet powerful in their evocation of a loss that is not mythologized or transformed. It is a loss written out in blood along the walls of a devastated city, a snapshot of the countless desperate graffiti murals so many of us saw scrawled all over New Orleans on our TV screens. Ballard takes on the poet’s task of remembrance and creation in this book. Not in some false redemptive or populist manner, but by reminding us that we constantly walk with death in its most banal yet cosmic manifestations. There is no time for elegy or frivolity in Ballard’s latest book, although one will find much pleasure and homage in these poems. There are, for instance, the appreciations of how family and friendship can sustain and nourish us. As we find in the penultimate poem, “Night Chant”:

Bring to his bed
company, so that
he might rest again.
Lay them down
one after another

& let them leave
or enter all as to
their own coming
or going. See
that his beard be

trimmed, tab paid
& poems printed.

I want to keep quoting entire poems from this book because it’s so magnificently sequenced all the way through. Even poems one has read earlier, in magazines and elsewhere, take on a new sheen in this collection. This is a slim, pocket-sized book one can easily carry on a bus, subway or airplane. The poems are short yet demand repeated visitations. I trust that eventually a publisher will release an edition that would include all these publications I’ve been discussing in one single, perfect-bound volume. And yet, there is so much pleasure in knowing these miscellaneous texts exist each in their own particular universe, pockets of glimmering sound stretched across half a decade and an entire nation’s landscape.

To conclude this all too brief foray into Ballard’s poetry, I return to the year I first read his work, when he published an essay on John Wieners. Negative Capability in the Verse of John Wieners was released by Auguste Press, which Ballard co-edits with his wife Sunnylyn Thibodeaux in San Francisco. I don’t know if Wieners was able to read this essay on his work before his untimely death in 2002, but if he did he surely would have appreciated the close reading Ballard gives his poetry. While Wieners continues to be hugely influential on several generations of American poets, at times it can feel as though his work has been banished from the academies and libraries, not to speak of newspapers and magazines. Very few critics seem to engage with his work in the sustained manner it deserves. Ballard’s essay is a necessary evaluation of Wieners’s writing in relation to John Keats’s well-known theory of “negative capability.” Ballard quotes extensively from the letters of Keats (the 1990 Oxford University Press version edited by Elizabeth Cook), and from all of Wieners’s major work, including the marvelous edition of his journals published by Sun & Moon Press in 1996.

Ballard assumes that his reader is familiar with the poetry of both Keats and Wieners. This works well for the essay, since it allows Ballard to immediately begin exploring the fruitful parallels between both authors. One can imagine that for many Keats scholars or readers, John Wieners might be considered a bit too obscure to consider as an equal to the young English poet. And yet, as Ballard proves in his eloquent essay, Wieners's own radical contributions to postmodern American poetry are very much rooted in certain traditional aspects of the English canon. Like Keats, Wieners is often concerned with the confluence of truth and beauty. Keats’s famous dictum on those two elements is often misinterpreted or dismissed as a naive visionary notion. Ballard attempts to dispel that misreading of Keats by discussing the young English poet’s 1817 letter to his brothers, where he outlined his theory of negative capability. Ballard begins to outline Keats’s theory in the following manner:

Though knowledge and reason are requisites and educators of the
imagination, only through the abolishment of what Keats termed
intelligence, or “consequitive” reasoning, can the unconscious, an
intense, intuitive and instinctive force, function as the intellect of
the imagination. Here, with half-knowledge and the use of the senses,
phenomena of the actual world are sympathetically welcomed,
conceived, and united equally to the mind. Moreover, by letting
sensations be the representative power of all nature, the imagination
can remain as the central force in the mind, heart, and human soul.

Ballard’s essay turns to various aspects of Keats’s theory, as delineated in his letters. This intuitive approach to the poetic imagination is not directly superimposed onto the poetry of Wieners, but is instead drawn out through careful consideration of the latter’s work over several decades. This essay made me remember the scant amount of critical work that has been produced on Wieners, not to speak of a properly researched biography. I mention this because the poems Ballard quotes from are related to such a wide cultural stratum of English and American poetic traditions. As much as Wieners is read as an outlaw poet (and I do believe his work challenges so many literary and social conventions) he was also deeply aware of himself within a specific continuum of poetic practice. When he spoke of himself as a Boston poet, he did so both ironically but also with a deep love and respect for the history of that place, which is the history of the United States. So, I find Ballard’s analysis of John Wieners within the context of John Keats’s poetic theories to be a proper acknowledgement of his importance as a poet.

Looking back at what I’ve written here about the books by Ballard I’ve managed to procure, I feel I’ve rushed through them too quickly. I can only entreat you to go find his books. I have no doubt his poems and essays will one day be widely available at bookstores and libraries. But for now, we will have to track down his work, text by text across the country.

Midway through his essay on Keats and Wieners, Ballard quotes from the journals the latter kept while he was living in San Francisco in the late 1950s:

                                             Oh lush
                                         life
come to me out of your graves,
                              it is the day
the dead shall rise and populate
                              the skies.

In a sense, this resurrection is what Ballard is attempting in his own poetry. He is doing it in an esoteric, classical and humble idiom. In his poems, one encounters that same “intense, intuitive and instinctive force” he identifies in the work of John Keats. I look forward to seeing where he takes his readers in the future, and I trust you will find as much pleasure as I do in Micah Ballard’s dynamic verse.

*****

Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970. He is the author of Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and he lives in Durham, NC.

BALANCING ACTS by ROCHELLE RATNER

2007-02-14T23:35:00.000-08:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

Balancing Acts by Rochelle Ratner
(Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, NY, 2006)

Rochelle Ratner’s Powerful Poetic Performance

Rochelle Ratner’s newest book Balancing Acts is a collection of seventy-two prose poems that, according to Ratner, “chronicle the growth of one woman or a mythic Everywoman, from early childhood through adulthood.” Balancing Acts is another strong book by a prolific and important contemporary poet and writer.

The individual poems of Balancing Acts and the collection as a whole raise interesting questions about genre and form issues in contemporary writing. The prose poem continues to become more popular in contemporary poetry circles. Mary Oliver’s recent volumes have included prose poems and many have included the phrase “prose poems” as a part of the subtitles. Mary A. Koncel’s book, You Can Tell a Horse Anything, is a poetry book comprised completely of prose poems. In addition, there are at least two anthologies of contemporary prose poetry, Ray Gonzalez’ anthology, No Boundaries, published by Tupelo Press focusing primarily on contemporary prose poems, and the historically comprehensive anthology, Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, edited by David Lehman. Ratner’s contribution and, in fact, innovation in contemporary prose poetry is to bring a strong narrative perspective to the collection of prose poems. That is to say,while many prose poems rely on narrative within the poem itself, Ratner’s book has a narrative arc that is created through the interlinking of her prose poems.

The narrative arc of her book is not, however, entirely linear. Ratner notes in her description of the work that the book moves between one woman and a mythic Everywoman. Sometimes that move is a glissade and there is a sense that the book does hold a truthful center of a single woman, but sometimes that move is jerky and I wondered if the reach to Everywoman was compromising the narrative. Despite this, the overall narrative arc of Balancing Acts is a compelling one from start to finish.

Balancing Acts, also raises the usual questions about prose poetry, What makes a poem, a poem? and What makes prose, prose? These questions, despite their apparent simplicity, are worth reflection and renewed reflection when engaging in Ratner’s book. Ratner utilizes a pretty standard form of the prose poem in her book with each generally having between 150 and 200 words. It is perhaps for that reason that the poems which stand out as exemplary in this collection are the longer sequenced poems, particularly “The Exterminator’s Daughter,” “Food Fights I,” and “Food Fights II.” Each of these poems contain multiple parts within them. In these sustained poems, Ratner demonstrates the strength of her narrative vision and trajectory in the book.

More significantly to me in the reading of the book, however, related to questions about the lines between fiction and creative non-fiction as raised by Ratner’s text. The woman in the book is referred to in the third person; this provides a particular distance between the poet and the character and undermines the sense of reading autobiography or memoir, however, the tone and emotional intensity of some of the poems open themselves to reading as memoir or confessional poetry. In many ways, Balancing Acts could be read not as a book of prose poems, but as a novel of creative non-fiction or as fiction. Each of those options would change the reading, I would argue, and each would enhance and detract alternatively from the text. Thus, one of the achievements of this book is the way in which it challenges the conventional categories of text that we use today.

Setting these philosophical questions, while important, aside, and considering the text of Ratner’s work, which she titles, poems, there is great strength in the poems. Ratner shines in these prose poems when her imagery is tight and the conclusion revelatory. For instance in “Frozen Peas,” Ratner writes, “She always keeps at least two boxes of frozen peas in the freezer.” This reflection on peas, “little frozen green marbles,” turns into the story of a friendship, which concludes, “this was the beginning of a friendship that lasted ten years then just rolled away from her.” Similarly, in the poem “Last Week” Ratner writes, “For her last week of wife training he sends her…flowers or a plan…she can’t remember.” This poem concludes,

They held onto the card at least, kept it on its white plastic spoke and placed it in the base of the iron tavern puzzle she’s bought him years before, two hearts intertwined. The trick is to part them.

Ratner’s ability to develop an image and bring the unexpected and revelatory to the conclusion makes her strongest poems.

It is in this realm where she also demonstrates her broad tonal capacity. In the final poem of the first section, for instance, Ratner writes of house that she passed “on her way to and from grammar school. The house with the beautiful lawn. . . .” In this house was a junior high school teacher; “He was the sort of teach who romped on his large, pristine lawn.” Ratner concludes this poem,

A teacher who mowed the grass himself. Later, he would start a day camp. Later still, he would murder his family.

This creepy comment on the beautiful lawn demonstrates one of the many unexpected joys in the tonality of Ratner’s book.

Balancing Acts has many special things happening in it. The final special thing that I noticed is not about Ratner’s text but about Marsh Hawk Press. Something special is happening there. I’ve read a number of their books over the past year, many through the auspices of reviewing here at Galatea Resurrects. They have gathered a highly creative and talented group of authors and are putting out beautiful and interesting and provocative books. Huzzah, huzzah!

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

THE ANIMAL HUSBAND by CHRISTINE HAMM

2007-02-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

ERNESTO PRIEGO Reviews

the animal husband: poems about animals and food by Christine Hamm
(Dancing Girl Press, 2006)

Christine Hamm's poems in this 31-page chapbook run like bodily fluids over dry skin. I do not mean this as a metaphor but as literally as possible. I have been reading these poems over and over again over a period of six months, perhaps more, and the experience of both excitement and uneasiness only grows with each reading. I could attempt a "serious formal analysis" of Hamm's poetics as presented here, but no radiography, no clinical study explain, at least to me, the uncanny feeling of both pleasure and repulsion that infects me.

Before anything else, there is a silence. A need to remain silent. Surprise. Perhaps fear. No, disgust. No, enjoyment, pleasure, jouissance.

[...]

The throat gets dry. We take the chapbook to the toilet, to read it there -- of all the places where we have read this chapbook, perhaps the most appropriate one. I open the chapbook for the millionth time, and I start re-reading from the last page. From bottom to top. I know this poem almost by heart, titled "Toilets I Have Known", and the last stanza, beginning with the line

The Island:

reminds me of where I am. Not the toilet, but the island, perhaps not Hamm's Island, but this is not Hamm speaking, is she, but this voice of hers (of hers? who is she? Isn't it all about that, anyway?), who has known these toilets, these highlights of her toileting experience, we could say, the ultimate human place, the definitive repository of human life as waste and cycle and new beginnings.

[...]

So here we (we? isn't that what this is all about, methinks, now that I read this chapbook for the zillionth time) are sitting and reading and the last stanza of this prodigy of a poem has a last sentence that reads, most appropriately,

Makes me feel three again, new at this.

And there, not here, because time has happened and things have passed since then, I finally understood what the animal husband did to me. It made me feel three again, new at this. New at this business of reading and writing poetry, yes, but not only that. New at this business of life, of being a man, whatever that means, of being a living creature, a person inhabiting this world, breathing, eating, drinking, loving, having sex, going to the toilet.

Like three again, when discovery was an everyday experience and when pleasure and fear where more confused than ever.

And I am sure we are not making ourselves clear here. Let us try again.

the animal husband: poems about animals and food has been for me the ultimate contemporary poetic experience of my recent days. I dreaded writing about it, saying something about it. I kept it under the pillow, forgot it at the most unusual places, had to ask a friend to save it from the debris of my past life across the apparently insurmountable distance of the sea and into the new chaos of my new-found life in this Island. The chapbook traversed the earth, so to speak, as it followed me from Mexico City to London, got dirty, got folded out in violent and unexpected ways. Poor thing: but here I am telling you the truth.

Because we begin reading and the first poem asks, as a title, "Who has not wished her husband into a cat?", and concludes, mercilessly, frankly, violently,

Animal love is the only love
men allow women.
and it is so short:
only that moment
in which a bear cub murmurs to himself
and begins to suck.

As a male reader, I feel the stomach fold into itself and chest join the back as one closes the big volume of an encyclopedia. Dust comes off after the dry, empty sound. The punch.

The second poem, single-handedly called "Marriage", describes in first person a husband apparently obsessed with the cleanliness of some forks. The last stanza, a couplet, sums up the intimate domestic picture:

The forks will take care of him
in the morning.

And so the animal husband builds itself as an essay on domesticity. It is amazing how Hamm constructs this beast of a chapbook, this cookbook of a bestiary, this zoologia fantastica for the 21st century, as if every poem were part of a perfectly well-designed plan, an insurrection, a betrayal, a complot, a vengeance, an act of justice.

The vulnerability of sitting on the toilet, pants down, the echo of the white material, the peaceful liquid awaiting behind, the male organ feeling the chilly air of the emptiness of the basin is the best space and the best situation for this subversive literature -- because that is what it is, and if poetry has not the power to subvert, then what -- where man/husband is "reduced" to animal, sometimes vermin, sometimes pet, sometimes victim, sometimes predator.

In "A Mouse", Hamm defines her poetic universe (kitchen/bedroom/food/sleep/husband/cat/mouse/sex/fluids) and comes back to that shakespearean ghost of domesticity and revenge, of wash basins and bloody hands, the manifesto of a poetics of retaliation through softness and lyricism, metaphor and symbolism, and right in the middle of the poem the poet pushes the sharp trident of a fork into our chests in a stanza of three lines,

a handful of blood and intent
he is the small thing that never lets us
forget what we have done

[...]

the animal husband is an amazing collection of poetic artifacts. These poems make the psyches of the Desperate Housewives of Wysteria Lane seem like childish, luminous fairy tales (if there were ever such). Because Hamm seems to be rewriting here everything from Alice in Wonderland to Red-Riding Hood to Cinderella to Snow White, and constructs a universe of bodily fluids, animality, passion, hunger, lust and sloth. But her poetry is not only terrifying and uncannily abject, but also incredibly tender. In one of the best poems of the chapbook, "Amorous Morsels", the first stanza reads like a homage to e.e. cummings,

Come in my mouth,
He said
(my heart like a starling beating against the window)

and what follows is the sexiest description of a cunnilingus, down to its most graphic details, a delicious example of pornopoetics that nullifies all attempts of euphemizing it as mere erotica.

Gasp.

And maybe this explains why I always ended up reading the animal husband in the toilet. A Freudian paradise of contradictory drives, a desiring machine that creates more desire, a literary definition of jouissance, a symbolic assassination of everything paternal, a catalogue of anxieties, a teratological treatise of husbandry and masculinity.

Genital, vocal and anal, the animal husband is, above all, a joy to read, but not in that enjoyment to which we are getting so used to in these tabloid-obsessed days of ours. A joy which is hard to digest, hard to endure, hard to maintain. Maybe chapbooks are like erections, and it is difficult to keep them going for a long time ("it is so short", the first poem complains/warns/describes) unless a certain art is mastered. What Hamm achieves with the animal husband is a celebration of all pleasures and abjections with the mastery of an experienced Yogi.

Like all worthwhile pleasures, the animal husband also hurts, and perhaps this is why I like it so very, very much.

*****

Ernesto Priego studied English Literature at UNAM, Mexico as an undergraduate, critical theory at UEA, Norwich, England as a master's student, and is now attempting to do a PhD at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College London. His translation of Jessica Abel's award-winning graphic novel, La Perdida, is just out from Astiberri Editores (Bilbao, Spain). His first book of poetry is Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006).

NIGHT SEASON by MARK LAMOREAUX

2007-02-14T23:25:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Night Season by Mark Lamoureux
(Available online at Dusie, 2006)

This is a mixed review. Let’s begin near the beginning:

Parthenogenesis lives in the red steps
               that were paining,

each night the wanted body
               eats the tail of the wasp.

(An orange heart pinned
               to a map, emitting

grace.) No cause for doubt, what
               appears in a hill of ash

or on the underpass—a veil who
               manifests & vanishes, a name

burned in granite. Chromium
               swaddle & lyre, a poultice

to loose that voice, to wade
               in the blood-colored, the tepid.

I could go on, but this is clearly glorious: waverings of colour, movement, with hints of Jack Spicer or the Spanish surreal. In contemporary terms I thought of MTC Cronin -- though Mark Lamoureux is somewhat more disquieting -- who has herself used these offset couplets to good effect. Here, the form gives pull and energy to Lamoureux’s otherwise delicate phrasing, acting as a necessary visual and aural stimulus.

So much for a first point: many of Lamoureux’s poems in Night Season are, I think, largely unfaultable. It will be important to bear this in mind over the course of my following remarks, which will take a more explicitly critical bent. Unfortunately, it is sometimes easier for a critic to speak of the faultable; it is also true, however, that what works less well can often act as a sort of window into a poetic, allowing us to better see -- precisely by means of this “gap” -- the internal functionings of the mechanism.

For me, then, the problem is this: Mark Lamoureux’s supple, modal writing is precisely not a poetics of excess. For this reason, any slippage into excess stands out, appearing remarkably stark. My hypothesis is that the effect of this deeply evocative poetry is here and there lessened by a tendency towards what might be called a type of poetic “overstatement”.

Now, this is a jeopardous thing for a critic to say. Firstly, the notion of “overwriting” is so atrociously common as to have become a dreaded workshop cliché. It is a criticism that all poets have heard, myself included, and yet it is usually not very clear what one means by it. So, I will attempt to explain what I mean.

Let us take the following extract from Night Season, which for me is perhaps the weakest moment in the book:

We sleep even
as figures march
through snow
or dust to enact
violence.

Now, I may be wrong, but this seems to me quite a known poetic cliché. I seem to remember its presence in Alexandr Blök, Georg Trakl, even Wilfred Owen. The sentiment perhaps strives for Audenesque oratorical proclamation -- “we sit in peace while the dogs of Europe . . .” etc. -- but it is nothing we have not seen. Of course, cliché is fine if it serves a purpose; but the apparent general idea -- that “passivity may lead to violence” -- while perhaps formulaically true, is here flatly and unremarkably presented.

My point is that what I identify here, for want of a better word, as overstatement, impacts badly on Lamoureux’s delicate verse by disclosing to us more than we need to know. Why not figures “walking”? Because we must be explicitly told, by “marching”, that we are dealing with an “army”?

But then, we come across Lamoureux at his astonishing best, the way I always want him to be:

The new grass
hammers at topsoil.
The world doubles
over in the pain
of its own birth,
long face beset
by everything
that tumbles from
metal-colored skies.

This is gorgeous: supple, yet with the tensile strength of thin metal, the writing’s formal concision contributing to the impression of fragile strands weaved somehow into a strong fabric.

I am delighted. I read on:

Anxiety forges
a crown of wrens
around the mind.
May my death
never come.
Still—I am just
a plant like all the rest.

In this deftly wrought opening, the apogee of poetic sentiment is for me situated in lines 4 and 5, at the Berriganesque avowal of desired immortality -- for Berrigan, the more direct “I will never die”. This is also, I think, the strophe’s rhythmic and melodic high-point: the sonic tension built up in the three first lines is released by this shorter, condensed affirmation.

But then, in the last couplet, what has happened! “Still -- I am just/ a plant like all the rest.” Why this dissipation, this watering down? So sadly for me, the acme of sentiment -- “May my death/ never come” -- is immediately followed by deep bathos: “Still -- I am just . . .” What does this concluding remark do save remove the tension so willfully accrued in the preceding lines? What is this but the covering of deep emotion in the daily vernacular of self-comfort?

This final couplet seems to me to pull the poem down out of its highest spheres of evocation and image into those of reductive explanations, of the type: “I do not wish to die, but this is after all what happens to all those who make up part of the organic community.” I do not want to leave the poem in this way. The poem is more complex than this summation leads us to believe. I want to leave it with the wondrous impression of an “anxiety” forged around my mind in a crown of wrens! This ultimate couplet leaves me empty, and I cannot help thinking that what is at play here is a form of poetic self-protection, the suspicion that the direct statement concerning death had somehow “gone too far”. This protection concerns me: I don’t see its evident necessity, certainly not as “explanation” of the luscious suite of tone and imagery established in this strophe’s first lines.

Lamoureux’s poetry can be so delicate, almost insubstantial, and yet it is still often able to approach the “grand statement.” This is its strength. But by subsequently -- or consequently -- covering such grand statement by the reflex of the quotidian . . . Doesn’t this lack a degree of poetic nerve?

Well, that is a big thing to say, all the more so for the fact that Lamoureux is elsewhere, in the more “faultless” poems, so daring, and so aesthetically successful in his risk-taking:

Our noble star
               emits the colors of the zodiac,

speaking to the ground,
                           tell me

where the carriage horses go
               at night, divorced

at last from their nameless
               burden.

“Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus”, perhaps. Except, then we are presented once more with a moment where there is a little too much: too much given, explicited, formulated or framed:

Praise,
for the dumb arms that pull the bag
over our heads & seal the rift
with the blue wax without mass
or shape. Praise, for the mouth
that ends words, each curse I hurl
at ether as the clasp of days closes
end to end.

Or here, in a case of syntactic, rather than lexic, surfeit:

Follow the faint arrow etched on each
dark wall, into a ring that laps the arc
of our one bitter sun, into a sunless shade.

The syntax escapes and runs quickly beyond the sentiment, tripping itself up and requiring the insertion of the rather stilted comma: “, into a sunless shade”. Is it a desired effect? Perhaps. But I’m not convinced of its effectiveness. For, precisely where there is less, Lamoureux is so intensely beautiful:

Not-yet-spring blooms
               like the Cyrillic at Brighton

                           Beach, before
the quiet sea, humped

by freighters & on the street
               all is twitching stillness

There are not less words, necessarily, but there is less support. There is an autonomy to this language, robbed largely of its meanderings, of its own explanations of itself.

I hope it is clear what I mean. This is sometimes a difficult impression to describe, and though I have talked a good deal about it, I do not want these critiques to detract too greatly from what is, in all senses, a resolutely achieved book. I would simply have liked to see these mostly wonderful poems be allowed to stand on their own, always: with no bathos, with no post-facto validation. To quote Mark Lamoureux -- ironically, in this context -- I would have liked to have seen them “divorced/ at last from their nameless/ burden.” Allowed to thrive thus in the splendor of their textured sounds and forms: “under no moon/ with no floor below.”

*****

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.

FIRST ADVENTURES OF COL AND SEM by DAN WABER

2007-02-14T23:20:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

first adventures of col and sem by Dan Waber
(Kite Tail Press #21, 2007)

Boy oh boy did this book ever irritate me!

So. Yeah, yeah: there I was thinking myself oh-so-smart. So intelligent. So insightful. So wise. So visionary. So so Moi. Etcetera etcetera.

There I was all a-perky over my sharp little self that I even thought to be the one to reveal to the universe “the secret lives of punctuations”—to reveal what punctuations really think, to reveal their usually hidden lives.

A scholar even affirmed the brilliance of my work with punctuations—in this case, a decolonialism scholar. Here’s deep-thinker Leny M. Strobel who, in an essay I’m amazed I didn’t bribe her to write, notes:

What happens when the elided, marginalized and invisible take on center stage on the page?

As I write this, I am reading Postcolonial Melancholia by Paul Gilroy. He asks the same question but in a different but related context. How can we avoid recyling the narratives of an imperial past that has become useless to the present? How do we deal with the post-imperial trauma (of Britain and by extension, the U.S.) that must rely on these recycled narratives to keep the dead empire alive? How do we deal with the Other who now lives in the (dead) empire’s center? How do we get ride of racism that is at the root of Other-ing?

His reply: De-familiarize the familiar. Dis-entangle ourselves from the old narratives. Withdraw our consent from the empire’s attempt to continue fanning the fires of racism and xenophobia in the name of protecting the empire’s image of its glorious past. Face the reality of the traumatic consequences of colonial conquests.

Could it be that one way of doing that is to begin to look at the greatest tool of the empire of the 19th and 205h century: the English language and its grammar rules?

In a way, I see Eileen de-familiarizing punctuations in these poems. In giving them new and not-so secret lives, she challenges the reader to conjure new relationships, new images, new stories.

That essay is part of my 2006 book, The Secret Lives of Punctuations, Vol. I (xPress(ed). That’s right: “Vol. I”. Someday, I thought, I’d insightfully blather out the gems Vol. II, then Vol. III, Vol. IV etcetera to a universe breathlessly anticipating my insights.

Well. Suffice it to say, Dan Waber may have just aborted that particular journey.

Boy, did he make my blood run cold with his first adventures of col and sem. His bloody book bloody well presents punctuations’ real lives, not through my suddenly-lame strategy of utilizing words but by presenting, indeed, the punctuations themselves!

!!!

Here’s an example from my “Parentheticals” which seaks to reveal the secret lives of parentheses:

(dungeons: a waste of marble)

Contrast that with this excerpt from Waber’s book. The book opens with the phrase

they meet

and then punctuations centered on each page. That is, each of the sets of punctuations below are presented one to a page, centered, on a page:

: |

. . |

. | .

. / .

. \ .

~;

! / !

. / ,

. / ?

! \ .

~; :

By presenting images that encourage one to imagine a narrative of a first meeting—a narrative based on mere tweakings of tiny marks—Waber indeed proves himself a master of both minimalism and concrete poetry. The way a straight vertical line relaxes into a slant or the way a question elicits the emphatic answer of an exclamation point—both can aptly mirror the tonal shifts of such a conversation. The latter, for example, could symbolize how col and sem discover something pleasurable in common…!

“Col” and “sem”, I assume, are short for “colon” and “semicolon.” That their names are cut off means the reader has to be the one to complete their identities into, respectively, Colon and Semicolon. This involvement of the reader is synchronistic with how, for the overall project, the reader engagement is critical for the successful unfolding of a meaningful narrative.

I don’t know whether postcolonial issues entered into Waber’s poetics as he explored punctuations. But he certainly did achieve what Strobel admired about “de-familiarizing punctuations ... In giving them new and not-so secret lives, [Waber] challenges the reader to conjure new relationships, new images, new stories”

All without words. Words suddenly unnecessary. How irritating for me to see how deftly Waber proves that saying: Poetry isn’t words.

Even his byline is witty. Not just “by Dan Waber” but instead:

By
Dan Waber
:

Colon, get it? Colon: and then the book unfolds.

Sigh. So. This is a witty project sure to be enjoyed by readers who, unlike me, don’t suffer from the delusion they know punctuations better than anyone. I am forced to recommend this book, even as it makes me throw my pen against the wall. Let those letters fall!

The Queen is Dead! Long live the King!

Through Waber’s devious fingers, the punctuations arise!

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou.

BOWERY WOMEN: POEMS, Ed. by MARJORIE TESSER & BOB HOLMAN

2007-02-14T23:15:00.000-08:00

J.O. LECLERC Reviews

Bowery Women: Poems, An Anthology Edited by Marjorie Tesser & Bob Holman
(YBK Publishers, New York, NY C.E. 2006)

There’s a place called The Bowery Poetry Club (BPC). BPC is located on The Bowery on the isle of Manahatos in Noo Yawk City (The Reviewuh’s hometown. Yuh gotta a problem wit’ that?).

The proprietor of BPC is Sir Robert Holman. A night in shining orlon. Bob is very famous for divers (muchas) things (cosas) poetic (poetica). Bob also knows everybody (todas personas en el mundo) -- even the reviewer. If the current anno was 500 B.C.E., Bob would know Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Plato and Earl Stanley Gardner. Bob has been “profiled” in The New Yorker (gasp!) and will no doubt eventually be a Nobel Laureate for Molecular Biology.

Full disclosure: Back one night in 2004, I was bar flyin’ at BPC. The club has many tasty brews on tap. Upon that evening, I did consume a rather large amount of British Ale. This (of course) resulted in me insulting everybody in BPC except the bartender named Laurel. I do describe Laurel as Aphrodite armed with the largest lexicon of four letter words I ever did hear. Although my wife Janet was present, I did tell Laurel that I loved her. Laurel told me to shut my bleepin’ loud mouth. Janet expressed similar sentiments in rather more genteel terms. Now: the reason I’m tellin’ you all this is because Proprietor Bob Holman coulda easily had the behemoth bouncer throw me outta the place long before I pledged my troth to Laurel (actually, any six year old child coulda 86’d me that nicht). But Bob didn’t do that. Instead, he offered me a glass of Pernod on the house! Whatta Guy! HE realized I wasn’t just some drunken jerk! HE saw that I was a drunken jerk with poete maudite potential!

So you see, the preceding belabored tale tells why Bob Holman can get jiggy with Hank Kissinger in Kent, Connecticut on any given weekend (Dr. Kissinger will probably plead plausible denial of my asseverations). And by the way, the book being discussed is really edited (and beautifully so) by one Marjorie Tesser.

But the subject at hand is the text Bowery Women: Poems. The text has 76 pomes by 76 wimmin swimmin in the Parnassian Ocean o’ The Bowery Potree Club. Of the 76ers, some are quite well known -- I refer, of course, to such luminaries as Anne (Whoa!) Waldman, Jessica Hagedorn (Philippines born and bred! And -- she wrote a book [among quite a few others] called Dream Jungle {a blue diamond title}), Maureen Owen (MO OH !!!), Janine Pommy Vega (another being who knows everybody and has been everywhere -- although she don’t know me -- but I don’t think she’s losing any sleep over that fact), and Patricia Spears-Jones (I’m gonna tell you straight out. Do not mess wit’ P. S-J! She really is one strong woman).

The five aforementioned plus 71 equals a Book Garden of Earthly and Celestial Delights. Just think on these names: Alana Ruben Free (gee-zuzz! whuttaname!), Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz (yes. yes. YES!!!), Ann Bettison Enzminger (That’s whut ah sed…,), Jennifer Blowdryer (after a tingly, soothing shampoo), and Zhang Er (wellsir, ‘round these parts, folks jes’ call her Er). I could go on, but I won’t. All 76 are wonderful, including Reggie Cabico (Senator, I know Reggie Cabico. I shook Reggie’s right hand on New Year’s Day, 2007. And Senator, Reggie Cabico is no Reggie Cabico. Oh Yes Reggie Is ! I was jus’ kiddin’).

Now, I can’t give a roll call of all 76 of ‘em. I mean. The Colts jus’ beat The Bears in The Super Bowl (Prince did an incredible half-time show). Does that mean I have to memorize both team’s complete rosters!? Including the defensive coordinators!?? Come on. I got things to do. I gotta defrost my rusty Subaru – that in itself takes about an hour in the NE rust-belt (♪ She Wore a ♪ Yeller Rust ♪ Belt…,♪).

Whut I am gonnadew is quote out sum outstandin’ laahhns from my partikewlar favoritos. Afteryewbyethuhbookyewcandoolahkwhahzz (yu juz reduhrunnon stetmuhn).

Startin’ up: The Poet Cynthia Kraman. The Poem "Speak in the Dark"

O ocean’s glassy waves, speak in the dark
O sticky countertops, speak in the dark
O uncontrolled thoughts, speak in the dark
O mountain, mouse, morass, speak in the dark
Running blood, ampersand, speak in the dark
Mossy stone, silent lark, speak in the dark
O remaindered poetry, speak in the dark

Kraman lays out 14 more lines like the above stuff. If you can’t hear that magic, there’s nuthin’ ikendoo to help whutalesyuh, Doc.

Next please: The Poet Jackie Sheeler. The Poem "Marlboro Woman"

I started killing myself at twelve
with Mom’s Pall Malls and Dad’s Lucky Strikes
but I’ve always been the impatient type, needed
to kill myself a little faster, found

more exotic poisons:…,

We called it hair-on in the ghetto
talking shit while blood dripped to the concrete
of abandoned building alleys from our veins.

Jackie S. knows where she’s bin. How ‘bout you? How ‘bout me?

And (of course): The Poets The O’Debra Twins The Poem "Puppet Love"

I have a confession to make. I think The O’Debra Twins are Fabulous! I am their unknown love-slave! I don’t care who knows it. So there.

The very day shall come, yea, when The O’Debras, yea, shall vaunt above, yea, even those twin, yea, beasts of the Apocko -------!!! Yes! Them!

I refer, of course, to (yes) Oh-Purra & the insidual (aaargh) FizzissionFill !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Their poem "Puppet Luhv" is actually a PLAY (yaay!!!). It is far superior to Stoppard’s doppelslop The Coasts of Utopia (and the amazing thing is…, regular people and irregular people are actually allowed ( ! ) to come inside ( !!! ) the extremely important BOWERY POETRY CLUB and enjoy the O’Debras performances !!!!! The only people allowed to sit and numbsnore through U2oo-Pia’s Coastwaddle are Neilsin Mandelowicz and Susan Saranrap! Methinks Tom will embrace Tony like Liz Tailor on the National Velveeta Pony. The point being - Puppet Love is a Laff-Rot. I love puppets. QED.

So I think you should really check out Bowery Women: Poems.

Women. Poetry. Kwite-a-Kombo.

*****

M.. LeClerc is a poet. And, as such, not yet distinguished from all the other bewildered ones & multiples driving divers all-wheel drive “sport” utility vehicles through stormthermal Norsestikold sturmvintners. LeClerc resides in a navy blue color community with his spouse The Distinguished American Poet Janet Hamill. Jayo plays guitar and reads a lot of books & other things. He even has a 1977 F train local subway schedule in his vast, superterranean library. JOLC is sometimes thought vexatious, and, yes, yes, even lunautical bleu by faux haute bourgeois white fakes. In spite of, or, perhaps, because, of (not precluding other possible reasons), such white spite, LeClerc has some fantastic friends. Such as. The scintillant S’s (Patricia & Bill), The NaturallyVeryNice N’s (Jen & Phil), Song-Writing’s Mazda Master Andy J, Rockabilly Search Wizard Matty G, and (of course) zine eddy-aytor & whoa-ever so evermerry great saintrix known here (within this document) -- on these most cryptick & (Shall we not say so Sir ?) most fantastical labarynthium (devised so & so disguised so kleverlee & (oh so verily they are) so the magickal mysticulous & caramba-la-la spacie saycheekie pages so only, AND, it is so necessarily Dee-sew-tow-Dakota-Po-tay-tuh-toe, as the only, but, nevereverknow (no -- not ever) lonely -- through wind, rain, and, yea, bitter storm snow -- the Brave, the Courageous, the Famously Good, yea, (and we indeed shall say Sir) code page.

CHAPS by PAM BROWN, MACKENZIE CARIGNAN, JOEL CHACE, SCOTT GLASSMAN, JIM MCCRARY, LYNN STRONGIN, & JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT

2007-02-14T23:10:00.000-08:00

IVY ALVAREZ PRESENTS A CHAP ROUND-UP REVIEWING

surface tension: a 10-day tryst by Scott Glassman & Mackenzie Carignan

and

The Name Poems by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

and

Translations From After by Joel Chace

and

Oh Miss Mary by Jim McCrary

and

Dovey & Me by Lynn Strongin

and

My Lightweight Intentions by Pam Brown

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

surface tension: a 10-day tryst by Scott Glassman & Mackenzie Carignan
(Dusie, 2006)

surface tension: a 10-day tryst is the second collaborative project between Scott Glassman & Mackenzie Carignan, the first being Helixes. Surface tension is a property of a liquid’s surface layer that allows it to behave as if it were an elastic sheet, on which small objects or insects can float. Working together online collapses the distance between Carignan’s Chicago and Glassman’s New Jersey to create surface tension. From this, one might speculate not only about the poets’ relationship and the invented relationship between the personae in their poems, but about relationships between people as a whole, their elasticity, permeability or otherwise. Even the chapbook’s title and subtitle generates a certain frisson, an electric undercurrent zinging in the words ‘tryst’ and ‘tension’. But does this buzz exist in the poems themselves? Or is it merely ‘surface tension’?

During the ten-day tryst, a word or two provides a glancing cohesion between the two speakers and their words, linking each paired poem for the day: green, moving, fences, pomegranate, windows, river. Like secret safe words, they increase the sense of intimacy between the correspondents. The first days’ poems begin tentatively, the speakers still getting to know the other person’s quirks and foibles, while referring anxiously to significant pronouns: ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘he’. Who are these people? Tension mounts with every sensual detail:

Who gives
their heart to the parasite—the one
who wants it most?
(‘Heartworm’)

The tightest part. The space where we are
up against each other, limbs taut and twined,

seeing how hard we
can push without disturbing the words.
(‘cold compress’)

The one thing contributing to a sense of indefinable identity is that the poems are not attributed to either poet. Part of the fun is speculating who has written which poem, since each poem retains clues to each poet’s style, where one has a fondness for parentheses and slashes, while the other prefers couplets and tercets. While one might prefer a bit more melding between the voices, of spillage and admixture that more closely reflects the intermingling within a tryst, instead of the poems remaining distinct, surface tension is a very exciting collaboration between two emerging poets who are on the verge of a breakthrough, and it is all the more valuable as this chapbook forms part of an artistic process that points to their next potential co-creation.

As if glimpsed from behind sheer hotel curtains, surface tension would pique anyone’s voyeuristic tendencies. Seductive in scope and stirring in execution, there is no earthly reason why one should not give in to temptation. Go on, I say. Take a peek.

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

The Name Poems by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
(Sisyphus Press, Chapbook Series #19)

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s The Name Poems is a chapbook of twenty-three intensely frolicsome sonnets, shining brassily in a dimly lit noir bar while a chanteuse croons on stage and a greasy mobster tries to buy the poems a drink. Wreathed by the obscuring cigar-smoke of sophistication, it is sound-tracked by toasting champagne glasses and tinkling laughter, reels from tipsy fun to wistful whimsy:

I dreamed of hurricanes in empty rooms,
more empty than your spike heel
now we’ve polished off the Beaujolais.
(‘The Last Hurrah’)

The sonnets in The Name Poems are dedicated to names such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Anne Waldman because, as Wright explains in his Foreword: ‘Lita [Hornick, a sometime co-creator in the chapbook] was also a wealthy patron and would take me to dinner with poets like John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg…’ Such name-dropping carries its own ironies and meta-ironies.

‘What’s in a name,’ Shakespeare asked. A name serves to identify and also, to mark out the space of the person it represents. Notably, the chapbook’s cover image is composed of initials, presented as cut out letters in the style of a ransom note. The initials represent the dedicatees, who all have a sonnet or two dedicated to them. Perhaps, in a way, a name also holds something to ransom, by withholding the person in exchange for the name, so that before one meets her, the name has created several expectations of the person behind the name.

Spiritual urgency purrs
lapping at ladders as you
twirl my silver pony tail.
Have faith, my dear. This we count
on all year. […]
(‘Follow’)

‘Follow’ is an absorbing sonnet Wright co-created with Hornick, one of a few. With its obvious love for words, its sense of play with assonance and rhyme, it evokes a non-stop party lifestyle, with its associated surreal moments and peculiar, narcotised sadnesses. So successfully do Wright’s poems benefit from his collaborative efforts with Hornick, resulting in poems that are intriguing, exciting, immediate and fun that, if not for the fact that Hornick died in 2000, one would like another chapbook created tout de suite. Wright’s closing couplets in many sonnets are particularly satisfying.

The Name Poems points to lives beyond the level of the poem, a metanymic world of hothouse relationships, populated by characters reminiscent of orchids, beautiful and blossoming in the claustrophobic steam of art, privilege and money. Real or not, it is both pretty and scary, and not a little hard to believe.

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

Translations From After by Joel Chace
(anabasis.xtant, 2004, email: xtant@cstone.net)

Translations From After by Joel Chace, the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, is a multi-voiced work that moves and stirs and forces the reader to engage with the poems, to formulate something that makes sense. It is a standard relationship—the poet presents the material while the reader gleans meaning as much as possible to decode the poem. Yet Translations From After goes that little bit further. Chace makes the reader work for it, and such toil is not without its pleasures.

Poems such as ‘milkweed’, ‘time’ and ‘fog of’, with their tropes of war, gamesmanship, manipulating controls, seeking a prize, averting death, strange instructions and spells, also feel like online text adventures, while ‘flying night fisherman’ has the added element of theatrical staging: ‘enter HAPPYFISH’, ‘enter SURERSTRING’. Many of the poems in Translations From After exhibit not only Chace’s ease with layers and intersecting voices, found documents and signs (changes in voice and source material denoted through font style):

                                             GHOST
NIGHT LIGHTNING
                                             dies
like an old cow
                                         with each
first light of the mind rising
up out of that ground to
float
                              get chicken
prices for your egg
                                             (‘farm’)

… Chace also uses onomatopoeia with a certain grim joy that is somewhat startling:

After this ddddddd… This after ccccccc is
before aaaaaaa before ends.
What quests?
(‘Translations, #9’)

‘Translations’ is a long work comprised of 21 poem-sections, most 12 lines long. [Those stepped lines are tricky buggers. Note the numbers’ reverse symmetry: 21, 12.] It contains one of the other pleasures in the chapbook: Chace’s evocative word-creations from which we can create multiple meanings. From ‘Priable functures, splenters’ (#18), we might extrapolate ‘private’, ‘friable’ and ‘pliable’, ‘function’ and ‘punctures’, ‘splinters’ and ‘renters’, among many other connotative words. As with any translation, there is an element of the Rorschach blot in one’s interpretations—one can reveal more about one’s self than intended.

As section #10 asks, ‘Where, lies the / aftermath of matters?’ It is up to the reader to create meaning, construct something new. Joel Chace’s Translations From After is a vigorous reminder of this satisfaction, of using one’s imagination to fill in the blanks and creating something else entirely with one’s mind.

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

Oh Miss Mary by Jim McCrary
(Lawrence, Kansas: Really Old Gringo Press, Larence, Kansas, 2006)

Oh Miss Mary is the latest chapbook from Jim McCrary, a publishing veteran of numerous chapbooks, pamphlets, broadsides, zines and various ephemera, including My Book, Hotter and Now, and Holbox. In his bio posted after one of his Galatea Resurrects reviews, he describes this chapbook as speaking to the real life of Mary Magdalene ‘who [in my humble opinion] is a true Holy Ghost’. The chapbook’s prologue sets the scene for a quirky and audacious re-imagining of the relationship between Mary and Jesus:

Dude also offered to take her with him to his upcoming show which was gonna feature free wine and sandwiches. Well, our girl thought, a crowd is a crowd. What really sent Mar into a swoon was dude talking about walking on water during a storm. Whoa!! To someone with a foot fetish to begin with, this man was saying all the right things.

In this long poem that brings Mary Magdalene forward to the 1960s, the style seems more incantatory chant than the straightforward narrative that the prologue would suggest. At several points in the poem, interpretation becomes uncomfortably open:

Ah…take Mary for me
Take her for me again
Seven times seven times seven
They call it
Possessed she was

I call it fucked

“You got to pick up every stitch….”

By ‘fucked’, does the speaker mean literally or metaphorically? Is it criticism or pragmatism? Certainly a sexual interpretation is likely, borne out by the use of such ambiguous words as ‘come’, ‘fetish’, ‘rapture’ and ‘nailed’. The appearance of the ‘I’ speaker at this point in the poem raises a number of questions as to his role and relationship to Mary [did he take part in the ‘taking’ or was just a voyeur?], questions that are not really answered by the poem’s end.

‘Oh Miss Mary’ is threaded by a refrain from ‘Season of the Witch’, a song by 60s British pop singer Donovan, the effect of which creates a songlike rhythm and adds to the sense that, just as one might do a rain dance to call down the rain, the speaker is calling down a saviour to save everyone from ‘The bitch Bush witch in the white house’.

In its epilogue, the chapbook ends by defining more explicitly the intent of Oh Miss Mary, coupling it with a warning to would-be detractors, too: ‘Also, to Toozer or Collins or Lehman who might consider this ‘crap’ – fuck off. It is my language and I love it to death and mangle/handle it with loving abuse.’ And you can’t say fairer than that.

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

Dovey & Me by Lynn Strongin
(Solo Press, 2006)

In Dovey & Me, a chapbook by Lynn Strongin, she dedicates this work ‘for the homeless’. Its poems are likely to drop a quiet enchantment on the reader in this portrait of a friendship between two ‘bird-women’, who have made their home in a hut on the beach.

The first poem, ‘Dovey’, introduces a few unexpected words, such as ‘watry’ and ‘slipt’, the spelling of which evokes speech that is either slangy, regional, mediaeval or all three, effectively setting the scene for the rest of the chapbook:

I went down to the beach,
to discover this strange heap
asleep, breathing, yes, a she, & breathing

in a den as snug as a sweet potato hull:
living under a windblown-log
muttering, “Welcome. […]

A strange atmosphere pervades this relationship that brings to mind Macbeth’s three witches. These two characters have created their own world, which leaves everybody else beyond their ken:

Nobody understands us now.
Our tongue Elizabethan. We are known as the old & the young

bird-women.
(‘Dovey Has a Triangle of a Mirror’)

This theme of beguilement resonates. Theirs is a brief, charmed existence, living ‘as in a sweet potato shell’, but it cannot endure forever. Even as the speaker chronicles their best moments: ‘We have been together so long her wingtip reaches for mine’, already change scents the wind, so that any day the spell might be broken.

Fragility is another theme in the chapbook, finding its embodiment in images of glass: sea-glass, windows, mirrors and jewels, scattered throughout the work. Time works against them, crawling during their bored hours, reading Shakespeare. It ignores them with cruel disregard: ‘the human // race driving itself on’ (‘Human Race’). It flies past much too quickly even when the speaker tries to hold on: ‘Every day I try to make a bit more / of the mystery’ (‘The Mystery That is Us’).

Strongin is a poet of detail and mood, her language and technique so very assured that reading Dovey & Me is a definite pleasure. There is plenty to linger on and re-read. Exploring and setting down the particulars of such a complex and multifaceted relationship is not without difficulties, yet the love Strongin conveys between the speaker and Dovey is plain and evident. Dovey & Me is a sad, tender and tough elegy, honouring a friendship and a love that flourished even in strange circumstances.

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

My Lightweight Intentions by Pam Brown
(Never-Never Books, New South Wales, 2006)

Pam Brown’s My Lightweight Intentions was originally published by Folio (Salt) in 1998 and the poems have not aged in the intervening time, with their acerbic observations that still sting. Consisting of seven poems, Brown’s chapbook offers up a range of humorous and poignant disclosures, oftentimes in the same poem. In ‘The Ing Thing’, she writes:

                          ,                you’re
outperforming
               those spacy
                              year planners !

               lead us to your
               Writers’ Centres !
dot                dot                dot
(p. 2)

This is a sharp contrast to the more quiet reflections later on, made during sleepless hours:

morning’s nothing
floats along
like an unrecovered
flight recorder
(p. 3)

Peppered with snippets of conversation and televisionary sound bites, this long poem could have continued indefinitely in this vein—so when it ends, it registers as a shock, yet it is one of surprise and recognition.

The chapbook’s last poem, ‘Miracles’, contains further shocks of recognition, as if the speaker has rediscovered the hidden order of the world:

one poet chooses another –
stick some truisms
on my back cover
& appropriate this –
“a crude empiricist”
“a natural empathiser”
declares the text

Though the speaker denies her naïveté (‘I know / how corny & disorderly / the whole thing is –’), her own closing, declarative text speaks of a certain and wilful optimism: ‘I believe in miracles’.

My Lightweight Intentions reveals itself as not being as frivolous of intent as it purports to be, veiling its prevalent themes of social and political frustrations under a scrim of humour and cynicism, which partway reveals the face of the disgruntled idealist underneath.

*****

Ivy Alvarez is the author of Mortal . Her poetry appears in journals and anthologies worldwide and online. In 2006, she was awarded a grant to write poems for her second poetry manuscript from the Australia Council for the Arts.

A HALF-RED SEA by EVIE SHOCKLEY

2007-02-14T23:05:00.000-08:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

A Half-Red Sea by Evie Shockley
(Carolina Wren Press, Durham, NC, 2006)

A Profound Book to Read and Uncover

When an extraordinary poet creates a book that both innovates and extends the work of contemporary poetry, she demands a publisher who can innovate and extend with her. A Half-Red Sea, written by Evie Shockley and published by Carolina Wren Press, is a moment where these two have come together with astonishing results. With A Half-Red Sea, Shockley’s debut collection, she has written a tour de force that combines narrative, lyrical, and experimental poetry into a satisfying whole and that in its presentation to the world demands inventive publication, which Carolina Wren Press delivers. A Half-Red Sea is a book that matters from a poet who matters. Profoundly.

The range of styles and forms that Shockley utilizes in her work is extraordinary and is one of the first and most noticeable things about this book. A Half-Red Sea is organized into three sections, passage, rafts, and pull, each with fifteen or sixteen poems. Throughout each of the sections, Shockley weaves formally structured poems, such as pantoums and sonnets, with free verse poems. She moves easily between and among these structural elements as well as writing powerfully condensed prose poems and emerging forms such as the “bop.” This alone would be enough worthy of praise, but Shockley also layers A Half-Red Sea with poems that depart from existing structural conventions. Shockley utilizes typography to explore and press language. She experiments and innovates on the page. Structurally, Shockley resists classification.

One of the most powerful experimental poems in A Half-Red Sea is the one that concludes the first section of the book. Titled, “a thousand words” Shockley gathers a thousand words all surrounded by the word torture. This poem requires a larger fold-out page in the book adding to the accumulative power of the poem. It is an unusual artifact to find in the book -- both the publishing strategy of a fold-out page and the poem itself.

Shockley’s poems balance between narrative impulses, such as her poem, “wheatley and hemmings have drinks in the halls of the ancestors” in which her wry and imaginative wit takes center stage or “the ballad of anita hill,” written in rhymed quatrains, in which anger is masked and unmasked repeatedly, and lyrical moments, such as her poem “ode to ‘e.’”

These poems accomplish their meaning through repeated layering of meanings. This is visually accomplished most pointedly in the poem, “poem for when his arms open so wide you fall through.” This poem, printed not vertically on the page but horizontally, is four poems beneath the title words that read almost as an acrostic, that is both across and down the page.

Shockley gives some guideposts to assist the reader in the notes at the back of the book, but the meaning of the text emerges from repeated readings and investigations of the allusory elements of the book. While the easiest thing to say about the book is it’s thematic elements, and they should be mentioned -- much of the narrative and allusions that Shockley mines in her poetry emanates from narratives of African-American history and literature -- the work of a A Half-Red Sea, grounded in Black history and literature, both extends beyond and returns to this point again and again throughout the book. Poems for Gwendolyn Brooks, ntozake shange, and Phillis Wheatley only begin to describe the many places A Half-Red Sea takes the reader.

From Shockley’s mastery of multi-focal structures to the power of the language that she distills in the text, from her impressive bank of narratives woven into these poems to her powerful experimentation with language, A Half-Red Sea is an urgent and imperative book. Read it.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

TRACT by JON LEON

2007-02-14T23:00:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS MANNING Reviews

Tract by Jon Leon
(Available online at Dusie, 2006)

Jon Leon’s chapbook Tract was, for me, a sobering experience. The reason is that Leon’s is one of those poetries which, according to all indicators of my personal Established Aesthetic Parameters, should logically irritate my critical Inner Demon.

Briefly, I should hate Jon Leon’s poems . . . And yet I do not.

I like them.

It is perhaps a common readerly experience. It is certainly one I’ve felt before, the two most marked examples being a reluctant marveling at W.H. Auden (despite his occasional soap-boxing Manicheanism couched in conservatism), the second, even more disquieting, being my discovery that, in spite of his critical lunacy, some of John Barr’s poems are actually good.

But why should anyone display such initial cynicism towards Leon’s aesthetic?

The reason will take some telling. Before my move to the Continent some years ago a lot of people involved in Australian journal culture seemed to me addicted to what I came to think of as Cool Poetry. To my sensibility, Cool Poetry, though as gorgeous and empty as Quentin Tarantino leaning on a Chinese vase, seemed not very difficult to write, consisting primarily in:

1) Dis-junctiveness
2) Capitalized Product Names
3) Scenes from contemporary films (pref. sex)
and
4) Irony

These four elements often seemed to guarantee a pretty sure-fire positive critical response, engendering the usual: “resolutely contemporary!”, “culturally engaged!”, or “daring in its resolute contemporaneity and cultural engagement!”

To add to these four content markers of Cool Poetry, I felt foolhardy enough as to want to distinguish three dominant Cool Poet mindsets. Listed here, in least to most developed:

1) “My poems try to be cool, but I do not know that trying to be cool looks uncool. I am an inexperienced Cool Poet.”

2) “I know that couching my coolness in irony makes me look more cool, because I know that trying to be cool looks uncool. I am a more experienced Cool Poet.”

3) “I know that couching my coolness in multiple and infinitely repeating levels of irony, equally canceling one another out in expanding mandelbrots (i.e. Russian Dolls), means that the only thing left in my poems at the end is the word ‘Coca-Cola’. I am the most experienced Cool Poet.”

Now, what’s important is that the content markers listed above are all apparently present in Tract. Glitter, cinemas, condos, condoms, phencyclidine and Shirley Maclaine. There is much sex. But whereas other poets treat this material as mere cultural fodder to be gratuitously inserted, thus rendering poetry “contemporary”, Leon is, I feel, committed to something else.

For it is Leon’s approach in Tract which is so manifestly different. Mainly, instead of taking easy symbols of studded glitz and subsequently rubbing this glitz on to words, Leon goes further. His extraordinary, even extraordinarily revolting, excesses, actually end up showing how aesthetically and ideologically tame much Cool Poetry really is:

Rocks and Bottles

Burning again, cars overturned and scorched. The flat inside:
Dez, Julie, Ricardi. Coming toward the trio in leather bootcut
jumpsuit -- Travis. Travis takes his miniature ‘ville slugger and
whops Ricardi. Ricardi jets him. The white owl goes merry the
quartet. Seville in the parkway. Julie: Have a nice ride. A condo
in Bristol Heights. Sticks and stones. Julie is wearing barely
nothing. Dez: hook 'em bucko. She lies down while Travis and
Ricardi get strapped. The Onkyo blares Heavy Nova. One leg in,
two. Three cocks go round in a seated ferris. Like a hunger.
Julie dives. Three bangs in a face-hole. I'm twisted underneath.
Standing back to the wall on my head, my shooter directed at my
chin. Three licks -- gone. I take a pinky to the powder. Ricardi
bolts from the closet, a handful of rubber cement between his
nostrils. The slugger latex'd.

See, I should have hated this. We have first names, we have fashion, we have a condo in Bristol Heights. We have references to, I presume, Robert Palmer. We have cars and cinematic sequences. We have sex. We have pinkies in a powdery drug.

But . . .

How over-the-top can you go? For our characters names are Dez, Julie, and Ricardi. Their slang is not cool: it is ridiculous. “Hook ’em bucko”. If this is sex, it is anything but sexy, or anodyne: “Three cocks go round in a seated ferris.” (For importantly in Leon, the vocabulary of sex can lead to the most unsexy of atmospheres: “a handful of rubber cement between his nostrils. The slugger latex’d.”)

So, rather than inserting here and there a product name in order to cool-up suburban rhetoric, Leon takes his material and drives off into exaggeration’s crimson sunset: “Relieved from the greedy nobs I stretch out with a glass of punch, then slam it on the ground and fuck like pigeons in the gleaming shards.”

Leon doesn’t simply let his material lie back and glitter: he shows us hidden layers. Everything here is “twisted underneath.” Leon makes me realise that what bothered me in Cool Poetry was really not its content, but rather the passivity of its praxis: the way in which this content simply expected to saunter up and make some sort of impression.

Like Bogart.

But Leon travails his focus-points with untiring effort: “Ideally, I call the Goat on my T-mobile and meet three Muslims parked in a twitched sedan.” This is not Miles Davis. Similarly, just when one expects the suavity of a polished one-liner, the apparent dialogue kicks in, amusingly stilted: “Hoist me Todd.”

Some poems do seem to cultivate what is for me a less successful offhand vacuity. Like "Winter Bikini," quoted here in full:

To open their eyes and to turn them from darkness to light. Sweaty
mouth goes whorl on Tim. He plants him, erects him, and penetrates
him. Tim gets to sucking the pelican cock at his forehead. Surprise.
Invaginating hustlers pose as Greeks on the twin bed. Dry ice steams
in the trunk. I whistle for a condom though I won’t use it. Coruscating
terms. No shelter. We crack a Heineken and watch the bats out the
bedside window. Deepen yourself.

Death, sex, Heineken. The evident motifs are perhaps here too strong, and the praxis too impotent. The tonal contrasts could lead us to believe that we are not as far from Elmore Leonard as we thought, (though the poem is no doubt saved by the presence of “pelican cock”).

But to return to the initial, admittedly provocative lists at the beginning of this review, I have the feeling that what Leon actually displays is an acute lack of irony. There is playfulness, yes, but this is not play over Irony’s strong safety-net; rather, the material engaged with is taken to its furthest extremes. It is not protected by knowing authorial winks: “It looked like Iraq but it was only some GI’s with their necks cubed. Three guys and an electronic rodeo. Pow! And the Technics deck go like French rap.”

No sarcasm, no derision. The antithesis of the Cool? The New Cool?:

"Serial" licking the porter with Neapolitan in the cup of
his back and Joey just under his hump. Two dildos and a nose
ring. My flesh is on fire so I traipse to the ice bin. Meet up with
Linda and bring her back to Tammy. In a cleaning ladies high she
uprooted and furled. Later, chained to the air conditioner I’m
heaving ripe.
(from ""Flipped Bangs & Pentothal")

To my sense, there’s an almost weirdly baroque tendency in Leon’s embroidery here, his exaggeration, brassiness and flourish. His shamelessness. His willingness to lay everything on the line, to go all out into the workings of language as both cultural product and reflector: “Standing back to the wall on my head, my shooter directed at my chin. Three licks -- gone.”

Jon Leon probably didn’t expect to read his name next to those of W.H. Auden and John Barr. The critic apologizes. It is a bizarre list, but Tract is a bizarre book.

Gorgeous and empty? Gorgeous and full.

*****

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.

BLOOD AND SALSA / PAINTING RUST by JONATHAN PENTON

2007-02-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

MARY JO MALO Reviews

Blood and Salsa / Painting Rust by Jonathan Penton
(Unlikely 2.0, 2006)

Boundless

An encounter with Jonathan Penton’s new double chap book, Blood and Salsa and Painting Rust, powerfully challenges the illusions of genre, reality, eroticism and the boundaries of human experience. These books don’t merely invite engagement with his poetry or suggest activism: they demand both. This poetry crosses borders, and you will consciously decide where you choose to be. Blood and Salsa and Painting Rust are an entanglement with Penton's passion, pure and direct, but never simple. He offers no justification or apology and requests no absolution.

Poetry reviewers attempt to place poetry within a particular genre, school or style. Jonathan Penton intentionally defies formula and rebelliously crosses the lines drawn by pedants. He deftly expands the confines of and mocks assumptions about Realism, Romanticism, and Confessional poetry, approximations of his unique blend. You’ll wonder whether a particular poem is a likely or unlikely story, and perhaps such distinctions bleed into one another. He seems mischievous and teasing, yet painfully earnest. Penton adds a unique dimension to Confessional poetry, a subtle proposition which questions just exactly who is initiating which reality. His own take on it is more universal than solipsistic. He isn't concerned with the relativity of realities but rather their source and flow. Confession implies connection, and there is no empathy without it.

In her essay on Confessionalism, Regan Good suggests

“It may prove worthwhile to restore the term, if not to its original definition (which was coined by a critic and is misleading in its emphasis on the Catholic ritual of absolution), then to a positive identification. Thus we might again speak of a kind of poem that is self-mocking and dead serious, metaphysical and secular. These are not poems of "self-expression" or personal epiphanic resolution. Rather they articulate moments of primary existence: a graph of language, time, and identity such that the resulting artifact--the poem--is indivisible. The best confessional poetry uses detail from life to position the poem's speaker in psychic moments from which truths--hilarious, grave, desperate, terrifying, fraudulent--are spoken … But to reject the confessional mode as passé or reductive would be to reject a kind of poem that has a great capacity to humanize.” (1)

from Painting Rust

She asks me what she can do to help
I tell her that any problem worth solving
is beyond the human capacity to solve

I am wrong. She gives me love, love gives me sleep, and
sleep gives me dreams
Dreams give me a few hours with the dead

It’s not much, but it’s as much as I got while they lived

David Yezzi believes

“Confessionalism is a question of degree. What makes a poem confessional is not only its subject matter—e.g., family, sex, alcoholism, madness—or the emphasis on self, but also the directness with which such things are handled ...What they have in common, what sets them apart from other poems that incorporate details from life, is their sense of worn-on-the-sleeve self-revelation and their artful simulation of sincerity. By relying on facts, on “real” situations and relationships, for a poem’s emotional authenticity, the poet makes an artifice of honesty. Confessional poems, in other words, lie like truth.” (2)

What does Penton himself think about Confessional poetry? In his previous book, Last Chap (3), without mentioning Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell, he wrote:

On Romantics and Liars
The “confessional” school of poetry was made up
of two greats, both of whom hated that term

“I lie a lot,” one said, in an attempt to refute her reputation of
openness.
And when a poet that great
admits to being a liar,
it feels like the end of the world.

But if it was,
the world ended
a long time ago[…]

Blood and Salsa and Painting Rust abound with apostrophes and ars poetica that aptly demonstrate the difficulty for artists in separating their work from their life. But why should they? His allusions are generally very contemporary, and this also encourages immediacy and engagement. In some instances Penton reaches back beyond his own generation, but all his references reinforce his method of questioning human motive.

On the many things I do not understand

He speaks of a passion, strange and wonderful

I think of Joanie Vollmer
I study her death beside Tupac’s and Cobain’s
I wonder at the precise size
                                 of the hole in her forehead

I think of writing, this attempt to force others
to spend a moment with the thoughts I think every day
[...]

Hashem, Jesus, and King James's Sexy Legs

                                         It's a crock and you know it
                                        an ancient tyrant's power play
                                       the very oldest trick is The Book

Third Crush
After David Mamet
One day I met a woman with eyes like a Townes Van Zandt song
                                      She told me I looked like Jesus, or perhaps Adam
                                         We got along like dykes and dogs but

               I knew it wouldn’t last
so I decided to love her leave her                and spend the rest of
my life writing poems
               about how much I missed her
That way, I could enjoy the pain of losing her and not have to
listen to her voice
[...]

Yet Another Letter to Bill Burroughs
[…]
Your wickedness
ran deeper than mine
and offered you more inspiration
a better vocabulary of hatred

a richer way to spread pain

and call it art
[…]

Is it worthwhile
to push oneself past one’s limits
to experience horror, cruelty and hatred
just to learn how to write?

Ah, but Bill
we both know

anyone who asks
is destined to find out on their own

In Universal Heartbeat, Juliana Hatfield sings, “Beauty can be sad. You’re a proof of that ... A heart that hurts is a heart that works.” We tend to label sadness as a negative emotion. With each poem Penton avoids my own temptation to alleviate sorrow which is beautiful in its “always already.” In their möbius relationship, love and anger, desire and death, are merely a heartbeat from one another. His poems are bleak, angry and ooze loneliness, but he isn’t hopeless.

I try not to publish anything I don't consider life-affirming. I consider hatred, anger, and despair to be life affirming subjects for poetry. I love poems about hopelessness, since true hopelessness does not write poetry.

Deep Throat Nihilism
Never forget that beauty is destructive
and poetry is its most destructive form
[…]

Penton's poetry is very accessible because it’s concise, lucid, and utterly lacking garnish or gilding. A horrible example of metaphor was aptly expressed by Orphan Veli. “The death of 10,000 people in Warsaw isn't like a carnation with red lips.” The battle for realism requires vigilance. Contemporary Realism is Romanticism through the mediation of Plain Language. In a rare instances, Penton uses appropriately violent metaphors.

Oddly enough
[…]

I remember truth as a gun
Fantasy as a bomb
And lies for every possible purpose
I remember the alcohol that couldn’t help me forget

I remember which details can be abandoned
And which memories can’t be lost

There are simple, sad realizations.

Watching You Say Goodbye
I am learning about my father
I am learning about him when I see the love in your eyes
mixed with the fact
that you can never trust me again

Melancholy doesn’t need embellishment.

all I want
is for you to grab hold

of my sin

from the inside

surely
from that vantage

you can squash it forever

leaving me free

to truly love

all the
women who aren’t you

These poems are bold expressions of passion. They’re devoid of abstraction, deeply psychological, and not easily dismissed. You’re bound to react to Penton’s poetry, but eventually you will thoughtfully respond. He relentlessly returns to an emotion with fresh vigor. Penton's blunt portrayals may shock you, but this forces you to examine your own, similar experiences. His poetry doesn’t allow you to flee the scene unscathed: you either enter it and suffer or let your disbelief destroy the possibility for empathy. He photographically describes universal experience, snapshot by snapshot, pointing the camera in both directions. His poems reflect like unavoidable mirrors and demand that we gaze into them. This poetry disturbs me and causes me to suspect that how I perceive myself is a choice. If, as Andrei Tarkovsky believes, “The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather admirers,” Jonathan Penton greatly succeeds.

A nearly unbearable loneliness and persistent disappointment permeate Blood and Salsa and Painting Rust. To live is to dip our hands in blood from birth; and because we live in a complex political economic system, we will, at one time or another, also participate in blood shed. The other flowing hot red substance is salsa, our desire for love and connection. Shari Nettles' cover photography evinces the stark feast-or-famine essence of relationship. She superimposes color on negatives which depict a table, lamp, and a human hand reaching into a bowl of tostadas. You literally have to flip Blood and Salsa upside down before reading Painting Rust. These wonderful effects enhance our involvement.

The wicked humor that suffuses Penton's poems will help you survive the read.

The Rules of Attraction, Poetry Style

If you crave violence
and I crave violence
is it then cheating to stab you in your sleep?

This is poetry of the moment. Penton once asked how anyone could envision or anticipate their work surviving their death:

The quest for literary immortality is a conceit and a delusion, but we're all guilty of conceits and delusions, no sweat there. I have no interest in that particular conceit. Why would I want people to go on misunderstanding me after I'm dead? If I write about love and death, it is because the subjects have forced their attention upon me. If I write for others, let it be about the issues we share -- let it be communication, not lecturing from the grave. May my immediate descendents remember me fondly. That's living more than long enough.

Yes, universal themes have uses beyond the misguided desire for immortality -- it's always nice to be able to reach people who are outside of one's immediate frame of reference, while one is still around to say "I didn't mean quite that."

In any case, artistic isolationism is an interesting phenomenon . . . The artist who chooses to share their work with others is attempting to communicate. The artist is attempting to communicate a thought, feeling, or process for approaching thoughts and/or feelings, that has not yet been entered into the domain of human consciousness (otherwise he/she is a plagiarist). This is extraordinarily difficult, and more often than not, we are mistaken when we think we've succeeded. People misunderstand us. If our work survives the generations, they misunderstand us homicidally . . . Therefore, it is preferable that our art not be remembered past the point when we can discuss them, or at the very least, not past the point when the cultural context for them has dissipated.

Penton invites us to cross borders within ourselves; between him and us; and between us and our world. His political poems provoke me. We must, at least on the principle of solidarity, speak out against one another’s persecutions. His intensity disturbs me and accuses me of apathy and fear, but I need that.

Post-Coital Depression
[…]
Today I ponder                the role of an artist
at the close of a war
                                             and the dawn of an empire
And what it means
               to believe in something
                                             anything
in a time of blind faith
                              in blind and stupid leaders

Today I am an artist and a businessman

so I look over my projects

what is due, what is due me, what will be due soon
what must be achieved today so that
other artists will still consider me important

so they will come to my rallies
and come to my readings
and thank me for my politics
and thank me for my energy

Today                               at home
I think of the best way to relieve the burden
of living, writing, and voting in the country
destined to conquer the world

Today I think of stacks of burning bodies

dictatorships established in the name of democracy

and the motherless sons who will come back to America
and do everything they can to bring it down

and what does that mean to anyone,
                                             anyway?
[…]

Penton’s poetry is erotic because he contemplates love, sex, and death as a natural and powerful dynamic. As Georges Bataille contends, “Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism -- to the blending and fusion of separate objects.”

It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea. The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity. Stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self. Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals. Possession of the beloved object does not imply death, but the idea of death is linked with the urge to possess. If the lover cannot possess the beloved he will sometimes think of killing her; often he would rather kill her than lose her. Or else he may wish to die himself. Behind these frenzied notions is the glimpse of a continuity possible through the beloved. (4)

The implicit vulnerability of desire is terrifying, but so is the despair of its nonexistence. Yearning and sex are similar to eating or devouring; disappointment so like death; and obsession so like murder. Which then is worse, the fulfillment or absence of desire? When we realize we can’t pursue our longing without the experience of loss or failure, we continue amidst the damage, hopeful and actively engaged with life. This is what Penton means by Painting Rust. We are powerless to possess the objects of our affection or control our desire without dying a little.

from Painting Rust
[…]
I don’t care
about
your existential tragedies

Come to me naked or avoid me altogether:
Leave your facades for those who think in words.
Show me the silence
behind
your mouth and body language

                              We are in a room
                              too small for movement
                              Dance me with your stillness
                              or shut up

My encounter with Penton’s work resurrects some phenomenology I once contemplated. What is the wellspring, the source of an original thought or emotion? How does it flow? Through language, physical places in our brains are sharing thoughts and emotions with others. If there is no dualism of the brain-body, and thought-feeling is shared, why would our bodies be excluded from this transcendence? The reader and the poem travel along a continuum of specific words, and meaning is the intersection of two or more observers. If we can share moments of similarity and familiarity, is there really a boundary between bodies and language? Words are information packets, like photons passing through the screen of our brain, left as fixed points or particles, but then also flowing onward as waves. Words are fixed and fluid. Language is the now of the past and future. Through language, we can transcend the physical boundary of separate bodies. In terms of poetry, this is how language put us on the same page.

Carefully chosen words result from an excruciating poetic process and then transcend the page to initiate engagement. Great art has the power to behave mimetically, to secure its place in an other. Jonathan Penton practices the difficult art of what not to say in order for a poem to provoke empathy. Images and emotions are co-created, a result of the reader’s visualization of the narrator and his/her own simultaneous identification with the poem. Aware that this is a possibility, the poet creatively draws on memory to share the future engagement of the reader.

In the Company of Them (Painting Rust)
So I’m sitting here in San Fran
In another used bookstore
On another hipster block
In this fuzzy hipster town
And I’m browsing through the bookstore
And I’m looking through the comics
There are shelves of graphic novels
And I think they must be recent
From the flashy well-done covers
And the hip PoMo technique

So I grab some graphic novels
And I’m setting on the benches
And I’m getting up, and walk around, and find a comfy chair
So I lean back, and I’m comfy, and I open up the comics
Which are trendy, which are clever,
Which have lots of lit-techniques
There’s this one with the stone giant
Who starts out as a hero
Who might be old King David
or George Washington Carver
and he bests the evil villain
who was belittling his race
but now he’s getting bigger
and he just keeps getting bigger
and pretty soon he’s enslaved all the creatures all around
the metaphor was obvious
though the subject imprecise
He might have been Israel
Or maybe Nashville, Tennessee
But the book was tortured, troubled
And so exquisitely drawn
The artist must’ve worked
As long as Karen Hughes been ugly
It was twenty-eight dollars
U.S. dollars
with proceeds going to charity

And I’m looking at these novels
And I’m looking at the shelves
’Cause there’s dozens of these comics
Dozens of these graphic novels
’Cause there’s dozens of these artists
Dozens angry tortured artists
Who sort of kind of made it
In the graphic novel world
But if you walk down through the Mission
Past the chickenhawks and junkies
You’ll find hundreds of these artists
Who will never, ever make it
Though it’s hard to see the difference
Between the published and the losers
Because every artist’s screaming
Every artist’s fucking screaming
Every artist wants to warn us
Of all the evil that we do
They’re all warning and they’re screaming
And they’re bringing up the issues
With their hip PoMo devices
And their so unique techniques

And besides the hundred artists
There’s a thousand folk musicians
With their lyrics tried and tested
And their chords so true and blue
And besides the thousand singers
There’s a million sock-drawer poets
Who’ve put down their San Fran paintbrush
To write of what will happen
To warn the world of what will happen
If we let a madman rule us
If we let the wealthy lead us
If we sign away our neighbors for another cup of Starbucks
And the artists are all drawing
And the folkies are all singing
And the poets all recite their angry lines at open mics
But there’s no one really listening
No there’s no one really listening
And the few who clap politely never do a goddamned thing
But the days are getting hotter
And our lives are getting shorter
And the Fertile Crescent won’t be fertile for four billion years
While MSN reports on Fox News
CNN reports on Slate
CBS reports on Sharpton
And Al Sharpton studies Fox
While the talking heads keep talking
And the bloggers keep on blogging
And the artists keep pretending there is something left to say

Bound and offered together, Blood and Salsa and Painting Rust make evident the greater violence or apathy which directly connects to personal acts and omissions. There is no hard boundary between the individual and society, only a membrane that leaks blood and fails as a rust inhibitor. Penton scathingly suggests that some traditions and rootedness perpetuate borders instead of loosening them. The implicit function of a boundary is to enable observation, transference and interaction. Awareness of border should fascinate and draw us across to expand our experience. Jonathan Penton is a revolutionary poet because he insists on inclusion. He proposes that boundaries be seen for what they are -- artificial and temporary. Better to consider them doors we open and close through conscious decision; because in order to overthrow the behemoth of boundary, profit and control, we must rebel, one by one.

-------------------
(1) Confessional Poetry: My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did by Regan Good (Fence Magazine - Vol. 1)

(2) Confessional Poetry & The Artifice of Honesty by David Yezzi (The New Criterion - Vol. 16)

(3) Last Chap by Jonathan Penton (Vergin Press 2004)

(4) Eroticism by Georges Bataille (Marion Boyars 1957)

*****

In a former life, Mary Jo Malo worked as a sales, marketing, and advertising coordinator for a manufacturer of large electrical power apparatus. In 1993 she was disabled in an auto accident in the Rocky Mts. of Colorado. Never fully recovered and forced into early retirement, she’s had abundant time to pursue the poetries and philosophies of cosmology and evolution. She prefers to read than write, and you are most likely to see her name when she has found a way to combine the two activities. She is a frequent contributor to Galatea Resurrects; host and moderator of the 'new and improved' Company of Poets, a poetics mailing list/discussion group; and currently a staff reviewer for Unlikely Stories.

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

2007-02-14T22:45:00.000-08:00

REBECCA MABANGLO-MAYOR Reviews

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

The Gods We Worship Live Next Door by Bino Realuyo won the 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by Grace Shulman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. Before reading Realuyo’s collection, I was unaware of either the contest or the poet honored by the prize. In researching for this review, however, I came to a more nuanced understanding of Realuyo’s poetic and political depth as revealed in this collection.

Schulman, in her comment quoted on the back cover, praises Realuyo as possessing “that rare gift of transforming modern horror into art.” At first I was taken aback by this description since I align modern horror more with genre fiction than literary poetry. Horror in The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, however, takes the form of revealing the effects of social, political, and economic disparities and makes these complex and often cerebral concepts concrete in the lives and bodies of Realuyo’s characters. According to Amardeep Singh, Assistant Professor at Lehigh University, Ali did something similar with his work, as he “blended the rhythms and forms of the Indo-Islamic tradition with a distinctly American approach to storytelling.” In addition, Singh notes that Ali’s poems were not “abstract considerations of love and longing, but rather concrete accounts of events of personal importance (and sometimes political importance). He was also intensely interested in geography, and often blended the landscapes of America (especially the southwest) with those of his native Kashmir.”

Realuyo’s collection is similar in nature as revealed by the division of the first half of the collection into four historically defined parts: I) Diaspora: Five Million; II) Spain (1565-1898); III) USA (1898-1946); IV) Japan (World War II: 1942-1946). Each poem is grounded historically and provides the reader with the context necessary to gain a deeper meaning from each poem. Even as it can be easy to dismiss the suffering in our world due to the sheer volume of information battering us on a daily basis, protest poetry can be overlooked as polemic and sentimental. Realuyo does not let the reader off the hook, however, by giving us the specific names, dates, and places integral to the poem’s message. The footnotes and epigraphs give the reader unfamiliar with the history of the Philippines and its interaction with world powers the chance to step into each piece with better understanding.

Realuyo begins the process of bringing the reader into his particular artistic view through the title of the collection: The Gods We Worship Live Next Door. Taken from a poem by the same name by Filipino poet and fictionist Bienvenido Santos, the title evokes ideas of sacredness and community in an ironic fashion. Gods come to dwell with humans, residing in homes clustered suburban-style. I imagine backyard barbecues and block parties between dieties. I imagine Desperate Housewives-style intrigues and martini lunches. But the next door neighbors are the Joneses "we" try to keep up with, and Realuyo and Santos deftly point to mental and physical effects of colonization, where the colonized never feels part of the neighborhood, and instead serve as wannabes among powers capable of changing destiny at a whim.

The first four sections of Realuyo’s collection point to the varied methods and effects of colonization. The first section, set in the present, illustrates how power, desire, and poverty have led to the globalization of suffering, humans have been commodified, and choice becoming an illusion. The next three sections reveal that this colonization/globalization process has been ongoing for centuries and alludes to the fact that even now the process is being repeated in other countries to other people, demonstrating that we have learned very little from the aftermath of First World foreign policies.

Section IV ends with the most personally poignant poem titled "From a Filipino Death March Survivor Whose World War II Benefits Were Rescinded by the US Congress" in 1946, dedicated to the poet’s father who died in 2003. A twenty line list poem, it reminded me of my grandfather who joined the Philippine Scouts at the age of 19, fought the Japanese during the first months of the invasion, survived the Bataan Death March, managed to rejoin the Scouts at the end of the War, and went on to receive full retirement benefits as a member of the U.S. Army. I am left questioning why Augusto Roa Realuyo’s story was so radically different from Arcadio Mabanglo’s story, how it could be that Truman rescinded benefits to so many men, some still alive today, even after all their sacrifices and suffering. Shocking the reader out of complacency and turning the reader to questioning is one of the strengths of Realuyo’s work.

The second half of the collection is divided into two sections: V) Witness and VI) The Gods We Worship Live Next Door: a poem in eleven parts. Witness is just as it is subtitled, a series of poems which witness the everyday, but the very title calls the reader to Witness, to stand and declare that the events presented in the poems happened, to not sit benignly by and click tongues about the ills of the world. Even the humorous The Pepper-Eater gives the reader a glimpse into a character with a unique viewpoint on the world, an observer and participant in all that is spicy and hot and difficult to comprehend inside and outside social orders. Section VI is magical realism at its best, lush fabulism where Realuyo pulls out all the stops and takes the reader as deeply into his artistic vision as possible. Every poem preceding Section VI has prepared the reader for the final poem and Realuyo deftly pulls the strings of all his arguments and images into a set of tight, evocative images and unforgettable characters in the piece.

By the end of reading The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, I was left parched and thirsty. I went back through the collection thinking that this was because Realuyo had used thirst as a running thematic image. I found Buckets of thirst…Aged by years of thirst…(always drinking water)…pulp fed to thirst, after a long day…whose thirst is like yours… he has always been thirsty… But then well dried up, and with it, the easy way to read Realuyo’s work. I’m left thirsty, then, because the longing embedded into this collection is palatable, visceral, and touches on the instinct to survive.

Ali once described the poetic form ghazal in which a poet establishes a scheme, then can become a slave of that scheme, resulting in a poetic tension of a slave trying to master the master. Realuyo’s collection, with its ability to hold up a mirror to history and memory, to hold the reader’s gaze unflinchingly, and to bring the neighbor out of his panoptic temple and into the full disclosure, is a fitting legacy of Ali’s life work and a tribute to the survival of so many unheard voices.

*****

Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor received her MA degree in English with honors from Western Washington University in 2003 for her thesis “Notes from the Margins,” a mixed work of memoir and fiction. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in the Katipunan Literary Magazine and the online magazine Haruah. In addition, she has served as a freelance writer and editor for several trade journals. Currently she is working on her first novel, tentatively titled Maganda’s Comb, and she performs regularly as a storyteller in her local area. Her blog is Binding Wor(l)ds Together.

THE ALLEGREZZA FICCIONE by MARK YOUNG

2007-02-14T22:40:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

the allegrezza ficcione by Mark Young
(Otoliths, 2006)

I sometimes begin my engagements with someone’s work by first talking about myself (e.g., my review of Dan Waber’s First Adventures of Col and Sem elsewhere in this issue). I do so because I don’t mind -- and for transparency, even prefer -- when reviewers (myself included) first share something about themselves that would color how they read a book.

To the allegrezza ficcione, Mark Young’s novella viz poems and not just prose, I must concede: I first groaned. You see, I thought that Young -- eh, let me call him Mark -- achieved something I’ve been attempting for years: a novel whose narrative unfolds based on what are inspired by poems written by others as well as poems written earlier by the same author in a different context (than writing a novel). I’ve been trying to write such a novel for years without success and Mark, I thought, did it! And so, I read his book, loved it, but also … Groaned.

As it turns out, I’m wrong. Mark apparently used a different approach. And I might as well quote his emailed response to a query I’d sent asking about his process (it’s an email I sent before I decided to engage with his book for Galatea Resurrects). Mark replied:

My use of poetry was a bit akin to Raymond Chandler's dictum about if you don't know what to write next, have somebody come out from behind the door with a loaded gun.

There are only two "genuine" poems in the novella, one by Alisher Navoi & one by Rudaki, neither of whom I knew anything about before I started, & one genuine quote, from William Gibson. Everything else is a ficcione. All I had was that first chapter, which, similar to the book, could have taken a journey in any direction, in any time. I used Bill's surname for the main character because his vicious bunny "translations" were akin to what I was doing with my ficciones. [Editor’s note: “Bill” refers to William Allegrezza; I also recommend his book The Vicious Bunny Translations]

The other thing was that I was writing it as a serial. My favorite book by Charles Dickens is Hard Times, which he wrote as a contract serial for a magazine, one chapter to be delivered a week, sparse writing, no room for embellishment. I didn't have that temporal deadline, but I did feel a considerable amount of internal pressure to keep it going. It went like a Markov chain, what happened in the current chapter / post determined what would happen in the next. & if I couldn't think of the next part of the journey then a poem as either an aside or a stepping stone.

Plus, like all my ficciones, it has to be historically accurate, that is, placed in a time where it would be possible for these things to happen. [Poet-critic] Tom Fink, in an email, described it as "pseudo-scholarship" (not maliciously) &, in a sense, that's what it's all about. I think of the things lost to the world through human destruction -- the Library of Alexandria, the Buddhas at Bamiyan; I think of what may still be out there, hidden or lost; I add the things that I like -- Monkey, Paracelsus, Hassan-i-Sabbah, Gibson, fable from everywhere -- & a bit of contemporary stuff but give that a history which it may or not have.

Thus, as I’d initially thought, there wasn’t a set of poems that worked as a scaffold to Mark’s story. Instead, it was process-based, unfolding “like a Markov chain.”

The process-based approach, of course, is how many poems get written (and Mark is a poet, after all). But it also is an approach that receives my empathy for its attempt to write the novel in a non-conventional way -- by non-conventional, I mean something different from how many novelists rely on an outline for the narrative and/or idea for a story ahead of the novel being written. Of course, there are overlaps to the approaches but I suspect that most novels do not rely as much as poems might on process if the novel (unlike a poem) is to be bound by story. And, as with process-based poems, the effectiveness of the work often relies on the author’s having done sufficient homework to be able to source a myriad of interesting references. Thus, part of what impresses me about Mark’s novella is its capaciousness. Within its mere 80 pages, we see the protagonist Umberto Allegrezza move across time and space -- from a caldera lake in Hokkaido to Julius Caesar’s Rome to Tehran to the Turkmenistan border to the Pamirs where he died during a climbing expedition. Sprinkled throughout are poems presented as Allegrezza’s translations of “historic Central Asian poets.” The scope testifies to the poet’s admirable breadth and depth of interests.

But since this is a novel(la), what is the tale? I could say it’s Allegrezza’s exploration of roots, his search for an ancestor. Let me collage in here the book’s description which is as good a summary as any I can offer:

MARK YOUNG's the allegrezza ficcione is a speculative novella about journeys — the contemporary journey of Umberto Allegrezza as he seeks to discover the truth about a legendary journey East from Europe made by an ancestor decades before Marco Polo. Other journeys are intertwined; the journey made before Tripitaka to bring back the Buddhist sutras to China, the relocation of the Library of Alexandria, the continued existence of the followers of Hassan-i-Sabah.

But the insertion of poems by Mark and others, as well as faux observers commenting on Allegrezza’s life, create poetic disjunctions and leaps that make the whole transcend its plot summary. For example, here is one poem (by Mark) in its entirety:

For Shahryar

Given the here
& now

of this place
it is

not surprising
you

found only the
past

worth writing
about.

The poem is effective on a stand-alone basis. But within the novella’s narrative, it’s presented as an “entry … found in the visitor’s book at the Poets’ Memorial, Tabriz” where the protagonist Allegrezza visited. One need not know anything about Tabriz to appreciate this poem which could be applied to many other “place(s)” and times. But the poem is also enervated by its context within the novella, which says about Tabriz:

Tabriz used to be a great cultural centre, a major stopping point on the Silk road, one of several places that had at various times been known as The Dome of Islam. Taken without bloodshed by the Mongols in the 13th century C.E. it had thrived. It was where the Ambassadors from Venice were received. The Blue Mosque -- the Jewel of Islam -- was built. Several of the greatest religious schools of the period had been established here. Now of the schools only the towers of the Shanb Gazan survive.

Tabriz had come apart during the war between the Safavid Dynasty & the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century. The artists & many of the carpet makers fled to Isfahan, the only poets left were those buried in the Poets’ Cemetery. It became a city modified by each successive modern era.

It had been the capital of Persia during the Qajar dynasty. The Constitutional Movement was born here in the 19th century, revitalized again in the first decade of the 20th when it had succeeded in forcing the creation of an elected parliament despite the execution of two of the leaders. The first modern school was founded in Tabriz. The first printing hall, the first theatre, the first periodical, the first municipality, all were established in Tabriz. The first Town Hall in Iran was built here, designed to resemble “an eagle with widespread wings.’ What was perhaps the major demonstration that led to the exile of the Shah & the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini had taken place here in 1978.

But modification & modernity at a price. The best carpets were no longer to be found here. The market had been reduced to a fraction of its former size & its infinite variety. The Poets’ Cemetery had been built over with apartment blocks & shopping malls, the graves replaced with markers & a monument erected in 1976. Only the death of Shahryar, author of the famed “Haydar Babaya Sallam”, in 1988 & the subsequent creation of a small park around the monument ot celebrate his life & writings have left a whisper of the former glory.

Allegrezza left a small poem in the visitors’ book…

Even more clever and amusing -- though I am biased given my role with the hay(na)ku -- is the presentation of a hay(na)ku presumably written by Ptolemy. Supposedly -- and in a context that helped develop the book’s narrative -- this astrologer, astronomer, geographer and mathematician who lived in the first-second century wrote:

The
Sun—the
Universe’s true centre?

It couldn’t have been possible for Ptolemy to have written a hay(na)ku since I publicly inaugurated the form in 2003. Mark didn’t identify the tercet as a hay(na)ku so, to a reader unaware of the hay(na)ku’s existence, it could just be another tercet. But the hay(na)ku’s presence and the reference to the last name of William Allegrezza (Moria’s editor/publisher, poet and blogger) are just two of the clues that point to the book’s creation in the early 2000s when poetry blogland truly took off, introducing poets around the world to each others’ existence and writings. Such relates to perhaps the most brilliant facet of the novel: its ending.

I don’t think sharing the book’s ending will be a spoiler because there’s really too much in the book I’ve not shared here. Only your own reading of the book will make you appreciate the level of trickstery that Mark pulled of -- a process that Mark says pays homage to such beloved writers as Borges, Eco and Samuel Delaney. Regarding the ending, here’s first an excerpt from the section, “A Postscript”:

A reminder of the [2001] tragic death in a climbing accident of the late Umberto Allegrezza, the Italian scholar who resided near Bukhara for a number of years, has come about with the publication in a Finnish literary journal of five poems, purported to be translated by Allegrezza of Phoenician writers.

Nils Pedersen, a Danish systems analyst, claims to have been given a notebook containing the poems by Allegrezza in a backpackers’ café in Termez. “It was a strange gift, but I thought it was nothing special at the time,” said Pedersen. “Then a week or so later I saw a report of the tragic accident on State TV & wondered if he’d had a premonition of his imminent death. I decided to keep the notebook until I returned to Oslo & see if I could get the poems published. I have just arrived back here after five years abroad.”

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, the editor of the magazine xStream in which the poems appeared, said, “I have seen the notebook. It has on the first page the inscription ‘Translations from the Phoenician, #3, Umberto Allegrezza, Bukhara 2001’ with five poems on the next recto pages. The hand-writing on all these pages have been verified as that of Umberto Allegrezza. I believe in the poems’ provenance.”

I tell ya! Great things come out of Espoo! From Espoo (where Jukka resides), there is a real-life (uh, I think) as well as virtual Jukka-Pekka Kervinen who has been editing/publishing some of the world’s most innovative poetry and literary journals online, spanning xStream, textual conjectures, xPress(ed), minimum daily requirements, Black Lion Books (coedited with Peter Ganick in West Hartford, Conn.) and, most recently, epidermis, among others. And this is in addition to his extensive solo and collaborative blogs!

And check it out! xStream really did publish in December 2004 a set of five poems -- “Five Translations from the Phoenician” -- by an “Umberto Allegrezza!” Now, xStream’s readers most probably read the poems as stand-alone poems, that is, not as part of another project that would become the allegrezza ficcione. The fact that xStream published these poems is a hilarious cap to the narrative of this book which, basically, melts down -- alchemizes -- history into a very mischievous novella.

The mischief is significant: isn’t reality often more bizarre than fiction?

Through xStream, Mark’s project becomes one that literally jumps off of his book’s pages. the allegrezza ficcione is a novella that also unfolds as performance, an e-performance. Its conclusion -- bringing the reader from the book into the world (internet) -- brilliantly parallels this excerpt found in the journal of Allegrezza’s ancestor, Giovanni, as presented by Mark's novella:

“That there be someone who, at a later date, will read this journal I have no doubt, & let me say to them that what I am about to set down, no matter what they may think, is, although fantastical, a veracious account of my travellings. This is not a ficcione.”

Indeed. the allegrezza ficcione may be fiction, but it is not just fiction. This is imagination “writing reality.”

I admire this book and not just because I wish I wrote it. I admire it because I am glad I read it. Not only is it an enjoyable romp that extends modernism but, as great literature often effects in its readers who happen to be writers, it raises the bar for me in my own attempts to write the novel in a fresh way.

The effects of blogging on literature are obviously still being written. Mark Young’s the allegrezza ficcione is undisputably one which will reflect how history, poetry, speculative fiction and magical realism were alchemized into something differently-modern through the existence of poetry blogland (some of the “chapters” were written through Mark’s blog) and the internet.

That’s right -- you heard it here first: Mark Young’s the allegrezza ficcione is historic and will come to be considered a 21st century classic. CHECK IT OUT HERE.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou.

NAVIGATE, AMELIA EARHART'S LETTERS HOME by REBECCA LOUDON

2007-02-14T22:35:00.000-08:00

JEANNINE HALL GAILEY Reviews

Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home by Rebecca Loudon
(No Tell Books, 2006)

Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home, Rebecca Loudon’s chapbook from No Tell Books, is saddle-stitched with a glossy cover, with radiant art by Stacy Elaine Dacheux depicting a watercolor version of Amelia Earhart with her arms out and paper airplanes sailing overhead. In a move reminiscent of Jane Mendelsohn’s novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, which imagined Earhart’s life trapped on a deserted island after crashing her plane on her infamous last flight, Loudon’s whimsical collection details the imagined ephemera at the end of Amelia Earhart’s life. The writer inhabits Earhart’s persona so intensely you have to remind yourself that these are not artifacts from the aviatrix’s real life. For those of you already familiar with Loudon’s work, never fear: the collection lacks none of Loudon’s trademark ferocity, vivid, dream-like narratives, and dark humor.

The poems are a bit like hallucinogenic line drawings, trying to evoke the unknown imagined last days of the famous pilot with pieces of childhood memories, fragments of lists, diaries, letters and imagined conversations – the things she wished she had brought (“Oh for a good scotch,”) curses on a childhood piano teacher, unwritten feelings for friends, especially Neta Snook, the female stunt pilot who taught Amelia to fly, her father, husband George Putnam, and Fred Noonan, the navigator who was in the plane with Amelia when it went missing. It helps to know some background about these people and their relationships to Amelia Earhart to appreciate all that this collection is trying to do, but it’s not mandatory – the gaps can be filled in by the reader’s imagination.

Stylistically, the poems vary in form, making the whole chapbook a kind of collage; some pieces appear to be letters with formal punctuation and spacing, while others are unpunctuated paragraphs, short-lined lists, or little lyric stanzas. For instance, the heart-breaking last poem, “Where are you Fred?” takes the form of short unpunctuated lines, which seem to resemble the last breaths of the heroine, resigned to death:

“the bright sea
you punched my arm
you said the fuel tanks
bubble with champagne

I want to tell you how it felt
falling and knowing
what a bad idea it was
to have decided against the parachutes

ha ha

I was a seed pod tumbling
thought I could flap my arms
shout your name and Snook’s
join hands
like synchronized swimmers

Forever yours,
Amelia Mary Earhart”

Contrast that with the imagined letters to her father, which is a vivid descriptive paragraph. Here are a few lines from one of these:

“…There are animals here feral dogs but sleek with slick fur or no fur in certain kinds of light and rabbits and pigs. They are slippery wet…You once told me I was too big for a girl and too small for a horse. Now I’m too small for even a girl. I believe the wasps are thread-waisted or mud-daubers…I scraped the stingers out with a clam shell…”

In that poem, you can feel the speaker clinging to scientific observation and a will to survive as she presents the situation to her father. Compare that to the more intimate tone in the letters to “Snook” and the “from the missing diary excerpts,” which both ramble in punctuation-free frenzy. From “Darling Snook:”

“Thank you for inquiring about my eating habits rice but not rice something like rice I soak in sea water gigantic heads of cabbage that are not cabbage that grow on trees membranes covered with vines rockfish spikes and split open a terrible dead smell I’ve named rotfruit I eat fruit all day and fish raw I reach in snatch them in my hands there is a flower here the size of a man spongy wet petals a kind of skin when they fall when I fall decayed flesh I worry about my feet I have thatched the wing with petals now the rain is back a putrid roof…”

Here, the poet allows the falling apart of the diction to resemble the beginnings of madness and desperation, the honest obsessions with the stomach and the mortality of the body.

And some pieces are just grocery lists, like this piece labeled, again “From the missing diary:”

“toilet tissue
chocolate
oranges
yeast
flour
nails
oil”

This piece may be evocative, surely, of the things one disconnected from civilization would miss the most sorely, but on its own, it wouldn’t have the power that is does taken in with the other poems in the chapbook. The whole chapbook presents a vulnerable, desperate, but still inquisitive and strong woman who struggles to be a survivor.

Certainly this chapbook collection would be of interest to anyone who has identified or been interested in Amelia Earhart, but its appeal reaches to any reader who enjoys identifying with a strong and passionate voice. Acutely sensual, startlingly agonizing, these poems reveal an individual, likeable but idiosyncratic and aching with a desire for freedom even at the cost of life itself.

*****

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a Seattle-area writer whose first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books in 2006. Her reviews have appeared in The Cincinnati Review and American Book Review; her poems have been on NPR's The Writer's Almanac and Verse Daily and in journals such as The Iowa Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, and Pebble Lake Review.

CIVILIZATION by ELIZABETH ARNOLD

2007-02-14T22:30:00.000-08:00

NICHOLAS DOWNING Reviews

CIVILIZATION by Elizabeth Arnold
(Flood Editions, 2006)

I find myself not trusting the poems in Elizabeth Arnold's Civilization. My mistrust developed gradually, incrementally, as I shuttled back and forth in the book, acquainting myself with its voice. Early in the book, I came upon the Poem "Daddy." It runs as follows, in full:

never seeming closer than when wordless,
heavy shape of meaning, prehistoric.
When he dived, he didn't hold his hands in front
so that the head hit first, blunt.

These first four lines are compelling, powerful, and perhaps some of the strongest writing in the book. But then she gives it to us, with the last line:

His whole being like that.

I had actually taken her point without being told. Why else would the poet have devoted half of such a short poem to that description? The word "blunt" suggests that how he dives into water is a metaphor for his whole identity and approach to life. While we are trusted to understand that he is diving into water, and that this isn't a description of, say, how he jumped off the roof, the giveaway of the last line nevertheless implies that the poet does not trust the reader to get the analogy.

Once I felt my ability as a reader was called into question, I began reading with greater suspicion. This one, for example, called "Europe in the Middle Ages." In its entirety:

In Europe in the Middle Ages, just to show fish
flying in the sky, birds under water, was sedition.

It was? The Middle Ages lasted a long time. Exactly when was it seditious, and against which boneheaded monarch? Certainly, I don't know for sure if the sedition claim is true, but I've studied Medieval history for years, and have never heard this before, or anything like it, and anyway, the burden of proof is on the claimant. Where are her endnotes? Hardly a page goes by without some quote or allusion, and though she does indeed have a small "notes and acknowledgements" section in the back, it's three lines long, and does not offer any attributions or provenance for the vast bulk of her allusions and quotes.

However, for the sake of argument, let's assume the "sedition" statement is true. So what? What about it? Are we supposed to feel superior to those Medieval dummies? Is this some little post-9/11 cautionary tale?

Arnold is highly allusive, and often writes about science, cosmology, and medicine. Poetry, even if it is made of bad ideas, must be made of compelling language. Even when her science is not wildly inaccurate, it is often expressed clumsily -- as in this poem, "Nijinsky's Dance," which I again quote in full:

It's been known a long time
that malignant cells can be engendered
by the damage minute particles inflict
as they pass through the body.

Quite apart from its substance, this is just a bad sentence. Is this how she thinks scientists write? The second verse reads:

Earth passing through dead space.
Augustine amid anarchy. Nijinsky saying
just before he veered wide of his
barely ordered mind, stopped dancing:

"Let this be the Body through which WWI passed."

The concluding quote does not ring quite true. Would someone of his generation and nationality really have referred to the Great War as "WWI"? Did Nijinsky speak English, or is this quote a translation, and if so, then what translator would use the term "WWI" in a quote by a Russian-speaking Ukrainian? Again, no endnotes. So I can only guess.

On the other hand, if I had read the slight poem "Solstice" first, or in isolation, I might have enjoyed it. Here is the whole thing:

We laugh to think the Romans lit great fires
to persuade the sun to come back. To persuade the sun!

After "Nijinsky" and "Europe" -- and too many others -- I find myself questioning everything she says. "Solstice" makes me think we are supposed to laugh at those Medieval zealots. Now, of course I can see what she's trying to do in these poems, but at some point, they've lost my sympathy completely.

The lack of almost any endnotes leads me to question whether she is using her allusions -- and there are many, many allusions throughout this book -- responsibly. She trots out such names as Thucydides, Melville, Archilochos, Apollonius, Picasso's Guernica, Pound, and many others. They either feel perfunctory, like garnish in a homework assignment or, worse, they have the parasitic heaviness of borrowed gravitas. But mostly, they just feel like so much name-dropping.

Too much of this work reads like a non-intellectual's idea of "intellectual poetry." Poems help us to see and hear the world anew. The experience of reading a poem transforms language, and transforms the world. The poems of Civilization, all too often, do neither. Take, for example, the pedestrian "Rare Earth," in full:

The biophysicists who think there's little chance
that life (advanced, that is) exists

anywhere other than on Earth

say what I felt last night before I read their book,
in which they state

we're right against it, the abyss

-- a word whose tone had killed it for me
until this.

I acknowledge that poetry can be obscure and ambiguous -- indeed, sometimes it must be if it is to explore the ineffable puzzles of mind, language, and the cosmos. But this poem is just awkward. Someone reads a book that confirms what she'd already thought, but which employs a word whose tone had killed something for her until what? Until she'd read the book?

Setting aside whether the poems are factually valid or even interesting: are they beautiful? And if they aren't, then what's the point? I am willing to concede that other readers will find these poems consistently and resoundingly beautiful. If, however, I do not see beauty (or I don't see enough beauty to forgive the poems their faults), and there is little accuracy to be had, then what am I left with? Authorial sincerity is not enough.

*****

Nicholas Downing (not his real name) lives in northern New Jersey. His work can be found in print in The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, and online at the Otolith . He can be reached at newbroom at gmail dot com.

KALI'S BLADE by MICHELLE BAUTISTA

2007-02-14T22:25:00.000-08:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

Kali’s Blade by Michelle Bautista
(Meritage Press, St. Helena & San Francisco, 2006)

Kali, the goddess, the martial art, and now the poetics--Michelle Bautista’s book Kali’s Blade is a fascinating attempt at writing poetry through the Philippine art of Kali. In the introduction, Bautista explains the poetics of the book, exploring how they relate to the concepts and movements of Kali, the martial art. She tells us that she allows herself “to see the poetry that occurs naturally around me.” She’s not trying to force herself into writing a certain way. In fact, several of the poems seem to have arisen out of information from the Internet, specifically Craigslist and e-mails, and several of the poems respond to events or people. Bautista stresses this idea of being open to experience in the introduction, stating, “I must let go of an ego that says I should be in control because I ‘know’ what I’m doing. It’s usually the opposite: I have no idea what I’m doing, I simply do.” Her poetics is one of overcoming fear and letting go, trusting that you will come to something through the chaos that must be faced, through the experience you are most afraid of--writing, death, whatever. Such a poetics comes from the grace and rhythm of Kali, but it also comes from a contemporary mind exploring experience. While Bautista states of one poem, “A quintessential postcolonial poem,” that it is “a collected poem,” the same could be said about much of the collection. In this work, we find hay(na)ku, collage poems, prose poems, blog poems, and even a play. The book keeps a reader’s interest with its variety, and the fine ear of the poet help us reach beyond our usually poetic boundaries.

Kali comes to the fore in a straight-forward narrative in some of the poems, such as the poem “How to Battle a Wind Goddess,” a poem in which the speaker talks of battling a wind goddess for “my love:”

For hours upon hours we fought.
When I trapped her in my cloth
she carried me through the heavens.
I hid amongst the bamboo learning

to bend and sway in her breeze.
I screamed but she deafened me
with her howls. She encircled me,
crushing me in her tornado.

And then,

I swallowed her. Inhaled her,
held her, drove her deep, deep,
into my lungs, my pores.
Til she infused my blood.

Where she became my flesh
I became a wind goddess.

In this excerpt, we can see the speaker learning to adapt to experience in order to battle the wind and ultimately to take on the wind’s power as goddess.

While “How to Battle a Wind Goddess” is beautiful and narrative, it is far different from other poems in the book, such as “A quintessential postcolonial poem” in which we read:

Subject: Re: kuwentong duwende
the fear slowly lessened
us and why
duwendes observing them back
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>>>>>> At 11:32 AM -0400 8/27/02
>>>>>> wrote a poem about it
>>>>>> have a good day!

This poem borrows the language of e-mails and crafts something new out of them. It creates a story out of technology and given language. It’s fractured and “collected ” and deals with a subject specific to the Philippines, the duwende. In many ways it reminds me of the last section of Eileen Tabios’s Post Bling Bling (Moria Books, 2005) where she prints a series of e-mails that deal with postcolonial issues related to the Philippines.

From the formally playful to the narrative, Michelle Bautista’s Kali’s Blade is exciting in its variety, in its craft, and in its exquisite rhythms. While reading, one imagines being invited by the poet into the dance of Kali, into the experience of re-understanding the senses in order to re-conceive the spaces around us. That dance is one that should be experienced by many readers.

*****

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.

UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by TOM BECKETT

2007-02-14T22:20:00.000-08:00

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews:

UNPROTECTED TEXTS: SELECTED POEMS 1978-2006 by Tom Beckett
(Meritage Press, 2006)

1.

So we celebrate breasts
We all love to kiss them
- they’re like philosophers!
(Gary Snyder, “Breasts”)

Set aside whatever Snyder meant as irrelevant here. When I read these lines I was grappling with Beckett’s work and immediately thought: yes, a way in.

Breasts: the image on the cover of Unprotected Texts is of Robert Gober’s Untitled, 1990, a 3-D representation of a torso, more or less (more more than less) hermaphroditic. I take this torso, these breasts, as synecdoche for the body as a whole, prior to/after the conscious elimination of its limiting by cultural gender assumptions. Prior to … An old Jewish belief: we were once both man and woman, one flesh, and we are trying to get back there. Adam was split in two. The Talmud explains the verse, And G-d took one of his sides, to mean that Adam was originally a composite of both male and female aspects side by side.

Not that that’s all the Gober signifies, but Beckett’s certainly very concerned with the unlimited body, the scary body, the pleasure body, the it’s all one body, the our body ...

Philosophers: here’s a bit of Musil on Törless’s first confrontation with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:

… because of the profusion of brackets and footnotes he didn’t understand a single word, and, when he conscientiously followed the sentences with his eyes, it was as if an old bony hand were slowly screwing his brain out of his head.

When he stopped in exhaustion after about half an hour, he had only reached the second page, and sweat stood on his brow …

By evening, he did not even want to touch the book. Fear? Repulsion? He didn’t quite know …

That’s philosophy, not philosophers. Philosophers? Let’s not confuse philosophy and philosophers. Just as dangerous as confusing poetry and poets. Philosophers -- and I work with philosophers -- are just poor slobs breaking their embodied brains against the mess we’re in. Hegel liked to play cards. Who would have thought the author of the philosophy that had, among myriad other things, “unfortunately … remained bogged down in the remnants of the Platonistic idea of the search for ahistorical truths” (Rorty’s view, as paraphrased by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) liked to play cards? Philosophers are not philosophy.

Anyhow, from Beckett:

I don’t see poetry and philosophy as separate activities. The both proceed from similar questions: What can I know? What can I do? Who am I? Who are you? What can you do? Can we make something together? (Interview)

I remember body parts (freckled breasts, a dimpled ass) and passages from books equally well. (“Vanishing Points of Resemblance”)

Writing and sex are inseparable. Both are utopian projects – messy searches for connection coupled with the exploration and explosion of limits. (“Vanishing Points of Resemblance”)

It’s all about … that certain frisson, which occurs when words rub up against one another. (Interview)

So, breasts, philosophers -- I’ll add poems -- we love to kiss them. We each have our reasons. Mine: because they try so hard. Because they’re sweet. They’re sexy. And ultimately, at least in my case, because I love kissing.

2.
Speaking of poor slobs breaking their embodied brains, I spent weeks breaking mine against these texts, seen through the lens of the title of the book. Unprotected texts? What could that mean? Are there protected texts? What protects a text? I asked the publisher if she could help here. Her unauthoritative yet perceptive response:

… the text exposes the author's psyche and/or exposes the author to potentially negative reactions but it [doesn’t] matter as he's willing to take the risk and leave himself unprotected for said barbs.

My problem with that is it seems to elide the (inevitable?) gap between authorial intention and reader response. What closes this gap is mimesis, in the broadest possible sense. Mimesis: Greek for “imitation” or “representation”. Aristotle and Plato used it to mean representation of nature. Auerbach in his Mimesis used it to mean representations of reality. I’m way too “postmodern” for that. To me mimesis means “a shared language that creates the appearance of a shared world”. If there’s a we, we have to share something. How reconcile unprotectedness, then, with the line in “Rehearsing”:

Um, mum’s the mimesis.

??

Beckett himself (in the interview) says, re “unprotected texts”:

My art … is potentially about the possibility of unalienated, liberated existence -- desire, jouissance! …

I think this too may elide the (inevitable?) gap between authorial intention and reader response, and doesn’t really address the issue of protectedness. (Though see a comment in 3, below, which recontextualizes this comment, and finds another truth in it.)

He also says

A poet creates a text. A reader in some sense completes it.

If “mum’s the mimesis”, if there’s no appearance at least of a shared world, then … how? If mum’s the mimesis then these texts are pretty damn protected, it seems to me.

But, all this brain-breaking aside, the texts do exist. I was tempted to scare-quote exist, but I won’t. They do exist, in exactly the same sense we do (you can make of that what you will).

But then I started to laugh. I wouldn’t BE a poor slob breaking my brain against the title, coming up with all these half-baked-theoretical-cum-pseudo-philosophical considerations if no appearance, at least, of common ground existed between author and at least this reader. Mimesis is not quite mum, in spite of the assertion. And the texts are indeed available for my “completions”.

So I decided to read them once again, considering that for me they are as protected/unprotected as any other text, and to cease worrying about any special status the title seems to attempt to confer on them.

So I re-read them just the way I normally read.

3.
These texts are smart and sexy, and deal with issues that interest me: desire, identity, etc. Life and death. “Other minds”. The big questions. And they are fun to read. I was happy to read/happy while reading them. Unfortunately for you, dear reader, I’m getting old, and as old folks often do I tend to tell the same stories over and over. So I’m going to quote something I’ve said umpteen times in other contexts to elaborate on “happy”: “when I say happy I mean so damn glad to be alive”.

Wikipedia:

Jouissance is a French term, which can be roughly translated as “enjoyment” and is contrasted with plaisir. In every sense of the word it is whatever “gets you off.” Something that gives the subject a way out of its normative subjectivity through transcendent bliss whether that bliss or orgasmic rapture be found in texts, films, works of art or sexual spheres; excess as opposed to utility … Leo Bersani considers jouissance as intrinsically self-shattering, disruptive of a ‘coherent self’.

So, there is indeed a tad bit of jouissance going on here after all. Maybe not a self-shattering amount, for me at least, but I do get off. And lest this be taken as damning with faint praise, a little jouissance goes a long way around here.

4.

Anyhow, enough blather. Time to share some of the pleasures of Beckett’s work. I’m not going to explain these poems. I can’t. They are what they are, and you’ll either or you won’t.

First, let’s get philosophical. And mock-philosophical (which is also philosophical). From “Little Book of Zombie Poems”

Zombie Psycho-physiology

Zombies have
no Inside.

They are
our projections

melded with
their reflections.

I’m not going to explain, as I said, but I will note that I can’t count the number of issues philosophers get passionate about that are present in these few lines. If only the pros found their problems so funny, maybe poor Törless would have made it past page 3.

On another level, a craft level, the Zombie poems (and many others as well) have brilliant line breaks, which make me jealous of Beckett’s ear and skill. It looks easy. It ain’t.

You’ll also find folk-philosophy here, as well as the technical stuff. From “You Never Know”:

…That’s the way the ball
bounces. Take what is given you.
Stop your complaining. Eat crow. …
…Adapt to circumstances.
Reverse the situation or relationship. Serve or
Control. You can only get so far. You never know.

And later, towards the end of the book, from “Wittgenstein Improvisations” (and please note the poetic formality of these improvisations. Most are hay(na)ku). These are especially good if you are familiar with W’s Philosophical Investigations:

3.

Are
you conscious?
Are you someone

who
does not
understand our language?

Bring
me that
slab of sentences.

Now, let’s add a little frisson to philosophy:

7.

What
is sex
but a language

game
written in
sighs, gasps, grunts

and
the commingling
fluids we leaked.

I’m particularly taken by two things here, besides the playful/serious take on W’s later philosophy. First, the way the formal hay(na)ku structure allows Beckett the perfect stanza break between “language” and “game”; second, the way he has chosen to end this with a full-stop instead of a question mark, as if there is no question that what we tend to call language is only a fragment of language after all.

Finally, let’s add a little philosophy to frisson. From “Vanishing Points of Resemblance”:

I caress myself, pretend to be touching someone else.

The Subject may be having a convulsion or an orgasm or dancing or in his or her death throes. Who can tell the difference? Sometimes it is impossible to know.

I want to suck my own cock like a thumb.

“… the possibility of unalienated, liberated existence – desire, jouissance …” ??

Indeed.

5.
One final point. Unprotected Texts is subtitled Selected Poems 1978-2006. The first poem starts on page 8; the last concludes on page 161. There are about eight pages (I kept getting distracted by the texts so I lost count) between pages 8 and 161 without poems on them. And there is a serious lot of white space, as well. So here’s my question: is Beckett relatively unproductive? Or is he simply the most disciplined poet around? What would a collected poems look like? If the work in Unprotected Texts is any indication, I can’t wait til one comes out.

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman’s most recent publication is OTAGES, which was written during the recent Israeli/Hizbollah conflict in Lebanon. His most recent completed project is a 200 page hay(na)ku called NO SOUNDS OF MY OWN MAKING, which in fact includes very few sounds of his own making. He is currently working on a series of semi-ekphrastic LIGHT POEMS relating to the photos of Marcos López. He is well aware that anything called LIGHT POEMS will immediately suggest Jackson Mac Low. But Mac Low’s not the only one being ripped off here. Among other things, these poems plagiarize every Meritage Press publication Bloomberg-Rissman can get his hands on. If you’re lucky, you’ll be next.

A READING 18-20 by BEVERLY DAHLEN

2007-02-13T23:55:00.000-08:00

TOM BECKETT Reviews

A Reading 18-20 by Beverly Dahlen
(Instance Press, 2006)

The 3 sections of Beverly Dahlen's long poem under consideration here were composed in the 1980s. The work stands undiminished by the passage of time.

Dahlen writes through reading, but not in a facile procedural way. Her critical intelligence is fully engaged (in this case with the work of Engels, Derrida, Kristeva, Watten, among others) and all of her antennae are extended; she's a licensed Spicerean receiver with a unit right out of Jean Cocteau's Orphic radio car. But she's also self-consciously working the gap between sign and referent. She's troubled by her signifying activity:

The desire for meaning, to produce meaning, fills me with dread and anxiety. We do not want to hear of another's anxiety; there is nothing we can do with it, nor about it. Anxiety, Freud observes, "corresponds to a libido which has been deflected from its object and has found no employment." An unappeased ghost, incessantly circling. The parodic and diminished double of all that was holy.
(page 13)

The passage just quoted speaks to the micro-darkness of an individual, the displacements felt in the act of trying to make libidinal sense of the world transparent to another, not to mention sentiments concerning absences and presence, hauntedness , and the "Eros, who never appears." A Reading wrestles too with macro-darknesses, the darknesses of our times: the darkness of death squads in El Salvador, of terrorism, of the numbing effects of the media, of the archetypal Father, and of the forced alienation of peoples from their inherited world.. Throughout the course of this poem, those dark strands of loss are braided:

mourning becomes etcetera
(page 45)

I don't have the patience or skill to describe the cumulative power of this patient, skilled and powerful work. It overwhelms me. Read it, please, and think about the ways in which a life writes itself and is written, overwritten (in multiple ways), and you will begin to be overwhelmed by its immensity too.

*****

Tom Beckett's selected poems, Unprotected Texts is available from Meritage Press, Small Press Distribution and Amazon.com. His interview blog, e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s, is a series of poetics duets and trios which bears checking out.

WIND IS WIND AND RAIN IS RAIN by BRYNNE

2007-02-13T23:50:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

WIND IS WIND AND RAIN IS RAIN by Brynne
(Horse Less Press, Providence, RI, 2006)

A book may not be judged by its cover, but this chap’s wonderful handmade cover by Kate Schapira drew my attention to this poetry collection. Otherwise, perhaps WIND IS WIND AND RAIN IS RAIN by Brynne might have sat a bit longer amidst the piles of still-to-be-read review copies.

The cover is a lovely painting/drawing against a turquoise backdrop—there are peach abstract swirls evoking conch shells, or ears, or okir, done with grainy-surfaced paint. The brushstrokes aren’t just abstract gestures—there is a vibrant liveliness to them that promote a sense of activity on the page—synchronistic with an entrancingly drawn outline of a moving puppy or small dawg in the bottom half of the cover page. The overall effect is really enchanting.

So I admired the cover and since I had the chap in hand, proceeded to go ahead and read the poems. What a relief that the poems are just as entrancing as the cover that presents them! Here’s a poem in its entirety:

As a Rubber Chain

Rubber is lighter than a chain
more delicate than a chain

A chain would be safer
if you were flying from rooftop to rooftop

I think it would be better
to jump from rooftop to rooftop
if they were as close as you could step

It’s not real
Never tell your children
that it’s real
because it seeks an automobile

As the flowers go
from the automobile
Visual Australia goes
flowing to the rooftop

You never know
if voodoo is real
Perhaps it is
perhaps it’s not

It’s something that I smiled through the whole journeying through the chap’s pages. And how delightful to discover on the chap’s last page the following “bio”, to wit:

Brynne is six. She enjoys playing with her petit fauve brother. She loves toads and trains them to do really cool stuff. She wants to be a gymnast and a veterinarian when she grows up. P.J. Harvey is her favorite singer.

This is a chap of poems written by a six-year-old poet! Yet the poems’ child-like (if you will) nature wasn’t what comprised my initial reactions. I reacted more with such notions as ‘charm,” “freshness,” and “a piquant directness”!

The directness, in particular, is among the poems’ strongest assets. The collection offers a seeming lack of mediation between what the poet experienced and how the poet shared that experience. For example, the first part of “Horses Horses Horses”:

Horses horses horses
All I see is horses

Horses horses horses
All I see is horses

Horrrrrses
A thousand horses

running around
with their hooves

clip clop
clip clop

That “Horrrrrses” is particularly effective with its encouraged rolling r’s to emphasize visually and verbally the relishing of, the delight in, the experience.

These poems are why I believe in that saying, “We’re all born poets. It’s the living that can leach the poetry out of us.” Here’s another, uh, taste…from Brynne’s “Fox Food”:

I saw a fox in the garden
eating a rabbit already dead.

I could live with seeing a fox eating
but could not live with seeing a rabbit dying.

After relishing the chap’s experience—after feeling the WIND [A]S WIND and the RAIN [A]S RAIN—I contacted Jen Tynes, the poet-publisher over at Horse Less Press. The press, by the way, prides itself as where “all…publications are constructed by hand”—and in this intention this chap is particularly successful as Schapira’s cover was the most welcome presenter of the interior contents. To Jen, I mentioned my interest in doing a review and wondered whether I should include Brynne’s last name.

She replied that Brynne’s parent thought that “for safety/security reasons because of her age, it would be better not to give her full name on the internet, etc.”

Fair enough. Oh, but that engaging cover? Jen noted that the artist “was really happy about making the cover according to Brynne's specifications (that it be pink and purple, glittery, and involve a terrier).”

Okay, so I’m old and getting blind and maybe what I thought was peach was pink and what I thought was purple was turquoise and what I thought was grainy was glittery. But a terrier! Well, I said puppy or small dog!

In any event, I was charmed by this whole experience—on and off the pages—of WIND IS WIND AND RAIN IS RAIN. It, indeed, is what it is: an uplifting weather.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou.

DOWN SPOOKY by SHANNA COMPTON

2007-02-13T23:45:00.000-08:00

ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews

Down Spooky by Shanna Compton
(Winnow Press, 2005)

I'll start with voice, which can be a theoretical pressure point, I suppose. we all hate the 'I' that seems battened to preposterous assertions and singleminded expansions. we readers hate that because we know better. or think that we do. we know the poet lives in a world including, basically, us. we may even be reading along. that's why I like Shanna's inclusive pronouns, we and you. “If we do not engage, we are sequoia-like.” the poems are conversational and relational. not confessional like that, but simply in a place where the voice carries. “What belongs to us are these units of linguistic structure and as much as they can hold.”

writing poems, of course, acts within or upon these linguistic structures. “Yes, they're trees. But try not to think of it that way.” the poems are structures but not walled citadels. the poet kindly leaves the door open. yet it is not a museum tour, or if it is, it is interactive. these units of linguistic structures hold as much as they can. yes, I had to use emphasis. they are shifty units at best.

what I just wrote (flailing, no doubt, would be the right descriptor) may be too metaphorical to be of use. but what of a poem that begins with these lines:

“To my dear and loving head wound
there is no beautiful mountain
anywhere near where you were born.”

imagining that there were a pretty mountain there (“instead of woods and marsh gas/instead of dualie pick up trucks”), this assertion:

“You would have climbed it first of all.
I would have too, to meet you.”

and there the poem (“Contraposto”) ends. I like this meeting in the elected space. it strikes me as the poem process for Shanna: arriving at a place, and coming to terms. a poem is not a poet, as we all the time forget. this poem is a picture of voice in the air, and integration. that sounds like something trundling from a thesis done for the most dour prof, yet let us agree that we seek a warming comfort, even a vindication of just finding a place to stand. poetry does that for me, anyway. not solely, but oftenest. it's why you can point to Frank O'Hara's work and say, there's someone. meaning not him, but a poem. a poem can be a report from the headwinds, carrying within earshot. a poem communicates, even if much of the time it looks like it doesn't want to. not statements, but kindly related entrances to the next step. as we go on together, that is, writer, reader, and the poem itself.

Shanna's poems twist on a wit as they work their way home: “Must we be perpetually ON THE AIR? The best answer I can give is No Ma'am. I can't believe I said that either.” I don't find a glibness here, despite the ease of these works. I see a recognition of the shifty ground upon which she walks, upon which we all walk. definite statements aren't poetic, unless they turn on a dime: no things but ideas.

okay then. perhaps you see that my strategy here is invitational. same as the poems themselves. poems change with different light. I only want to suggest their working processes here, not the proposed, inferred message beam from the most recent reading. I'd like you to try these poems because they want to be with you. I mean, you can graph different notions of vigour--for instance, I think you can discern some feminist clarity here--but I don't want to enclose these poems too carefully. their process seems just, and they brim with pleasures to be had, pleasure like a loving head wound. I should think that would prove tempting, dear Reader.

*****

Allen Bramhall: My exciting biography includes anticipating the spring publication of my double-wide opus Days Poem, Volumes One and Two, by Meritage Press, and conferral of Masters Degree from Lesley University in May. Seeking teaching work now.

2 BOOKS by GLENNA LUSCHEI

2007-02-13T23:40:00.000-08:00

LYNN STRONGIN Reviews

Shot with Eros: New and Selected Poems by Glenna Luschei
(John Daniel & Co., Santa Barbara, CA., 2002)

and

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

GLENNA LUSCHEI: Prairie Child & Celtic Singer

If one doesn’t think of Canadian poets as mystical, perhaps it is because one hasn’t looked closely enough at Anne Hebert and Margaret Avison. Margaret Atwood has described a people colonized, characterized inside as ironic stoics in a sort of “garrisoned consciousness.” Constance Rooke has written “Fear of the Open Heart” (1989) which argues those poets in this land suffer from a “Scots-Presbyterian repression feeling.” But a handful of Northern poets are visionaries. Thomas Gerry has written about Gwendolyn MacEwen as a mystical poet. Russell Morton Brown argues for Al Purdy, who might laugh at the idea of “visionary breakthroughs” painting a man in the backyard of his Eastern Ontario home overlooking Roblin Lake. Purdy looks at a workman climbing a steeple whom he refuses to let become a symbol of transcendence” Nonetheless this has been a visionary experience The presence of the numinous” was seen in Margaret Avison, Jay MacPhreson, Anne Carson.

This brings us to the question: what is visionary in poetry? An almost pictorial revelation, which transcends words but which, takes place in the realm of the world. It tends to be “momentary” and vulnerable. Awe and illumination are components of a visionary experience: “Not a terror of the dangers . . . of nature, but a terror of the soul” (Northrop Frye) Reason cannot account for our existence: it beggars a visionary frame. Glenna Luschei, Di Brandt and Margaret Avison are three poets who sustain this visionary frame. Magnum Mysterium was a phrase beloved of the medievalists. Mystery takes each of these three poets by the throat and whirls her around. Idea of the North, stun of Mennonite severity upon children or Celitc blaze all inspire awe. which astounds “I have always tried to use incantation and ritual in poetry,” Luschei says.

Erin Moure wrote Little Theatres whose title comes from Elisa Sampedrin, 1991 who wrote In little theaters, that there are but faces. Boots are faces, a table is a face, and the grass has an expression that is facial. When Levinas said, “the face is not of the order of the seen” he was making the right connection, but backward. All of what is seen is faces. (Elisa Sampedrin, 1991) The poet of the North does not suffer frostbite. Avison, Brandt, and Luschei create camera boxes, microcosms of the globe, theatres in which the drama of life is played out and in these is the visionary breakthrough.

The combination of a mystic’s solitary communion with nature as well as holy terror have come to be synonymous with the North although they are also reminiscent of the South: the heat of St. John of the Cross; of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Portuguese nun; the Southern mystics. The prairie moves Di Brandt; the Nebraska fields stir Glenna Luschei. James Reaney has written a poem “The Alphabet” which critic which can be seen as moving like the Bible’s wheel, from the dewy morning of Eden’s fields . . .”The stone is the wind, the wind is the stone.”

***

It is my intent to trace mysticism in each of these poets first tied to her formal religion, then espousing breakaway freedom. Since mystical experience challenges what can be put into words, the issue of language is crucial. (Stan Ragland sees language as an issue in Canadian poetry--it is in all poetry.) He writes:

These writers are all languaged inside words. But . . .keep returning to a point of permeability between themselves and the non-human others with whom they share the world.

“Poetry is the rearing in language of a desire whose end lies beyond language,” Lilburn says.

Glenna Luschei: Never Blocking the Radiance

In August 2006, Glenna Luschei wrote:

"It amazes me how my Celtic background has been a revelation to me, even though my life studies have been in Spanish and Portuguese, Gaelic, from Galicia, being a language of the Celts, and Northern Portugal holding some Celtic settlements. Passion, poetry, magic and ritual are the four tenants of the Gaelic Cult as scripture, experience, prayer and tradition are of my present practicing Methodist faith. I am the covener. . . of an activist group of Methodist Women, Cosrow in which I lead my sisters in some Celtic rituals. Once I am exposed, however, I feel that I may become one of the New Mexican penitentes, Spanish priests who lived in isolated communities so far from the Church that the began the practice of crucifying their own members."

Steven Sher wrote, "Glenna Luschei is a modern-day Judith, life's passion bared, tempting us to enter her tent: these poems, as honest and intoxicating as lust, are as exotic as dream. Here is writing at its most intimate and sensual—poetry as aphrodisiac, imagery seductive.... Love, for Luschei, is the only peace we deeply know, the one sure legacy we leave." Robert Bly observes of Luschei, “"Glenna Luschei's poems are always lively, brave, sometimes biting as lime juice—written by an enchanting mind."

One who keeps the covenant, Luschei never stops, never resists the radiance about and within her. Of her Nebraska roots, she says, "I dream most about my grandfather's 'farm' in Furnas County near Beaver City where I lived as a child. He had come to Red Cloud in a covered wagon before the turn of the century and became the county defender, starting a family tradition that includes my brother John Stevens Berry and my son, Erich."

Shot With Eros covers thirty years in the writing career of poet/rancher/publisher Glenna Luschei, the editor/publisher of Cafe Solo Magazine and Solo Press. Poems here are moving, intelligent, deeply personal and celebrate that willpower that overcomes tragedy and loss. Her ear is fine tuned, her eye takes in the natural world, and above all she is attuned to countryside and speech of human relationships." End here and move to next paragraph beginning "Her book Unexpected Grace."

Her book Unexpected Grace was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Incantation has always fascinated. The poems clearly argue that this woman knows earth’s labors: bearing and birthing children (four) preserving jams, gathering harvest, farming in Nebraska toil, yet knows the idea of heaven or earth-ecstasy equally. Her latest book Seedpods (Presa Press, Michigan) makes this is abundantly clear. “Arts Poetica” (p. 25) prays to get wet fingers “digging out rot / around the daffodil.” Daffodil is poet, not rot. In her continuing unfolding revelation she is connected to earth. Her lists, like those in Ecclesiastics which the preacher sings are revelator: “Treading on Plums” reveals such things in proximity to one another as “choke-cherry nectar” and “cheesecloth,” stocking a cellar with jelly and a father “who labored all day, a/ at night boiled rice for drifters / riding the rails through town.” The alliteration is effective and so is the poet listening to “laments of losing farms. / licked jelly from the paraffin.” A wax seals the vision as isinglass seals the fire behind the Franklin or Edison stoves.

Through fingers spread like a fan she sees “Periwinkle filigree of tree” and introduced the exotic Spanish name for heaven Jacaranda in the title poem of the book:

In the rattling of the seedpods
I still hear castanets.

Haiku have inspired Lucshei’s poems with her epigrammatic wisdom and images. The couple “Zebra” (p. 33) observes radiantly, humorously “Even his skeleton / has stripes!” “Our blades Cutting Horse Tails” reveals earth at a new angle, oblique to sky, blade-sharp.

Our blades cutting horse tails
we loved the world from one new angel
. . .skated the sky.”

If we sink deeply enough, we might understand. However, what if we can’t breathe? We are torn between the desire, the need for oxygen and the desire to move below the surface “waving antennae, upside down.” Not to skitter but to plumb the depths is our urge. And yet despite the ecstasy, we are mortal, beauty and our perception of it are finite:

I thought they would never end
the walks through the meadow of the blue vervain
where the heron nested in eucalyptus.

I thought they would always remain
my four blue eggs.” (p. 38)

Are these not her four children, the eldest of whom died in her prime? The word cannot remain but the poet concludes, “I put my teapot on and lose my head again in steam.”

This immersion characterizes Luschei’s poems with the opened mouth of true religious feeling. “O,” we perceive the poet saying over and over as one goes thru earth’s compendium like leafing thru an enchanted library stack of books, keeping one’s carrel always on the side, the idea of it, retreat. “Time is the canoe. / we climb into our vehicles. . .We go unswerving. / We do / what is to be done.” Stoic, she watching October sun “float past. . .door / on a string? knowing it will disappear. So her firstborn, so at last her life. Meanwhile, she yearns for the healing blanket, the anonymity and comfort of snow—akin to death but not death. “Birches” (p. 19) begins with an epigraph from Tom McGrath, “Love belongs to the North.” One senses that this poet is incapable of self-pity, inculcated from childhood to the rigors of the north. She craves snow “crusted on rows and rows / of poles on barges.” This she yearns for as they “encompass the Arctic Circle.” But no, she sees only birches with white bark and recalls the letters (languaged, once more) which each of her children carved, their “first letters to me on birch bark.”

Incantation, she uses repetition for effect. Strangely, “There is room in the ocean / for the doll, the skull and the anchor” occurs in “Over Four Corners” which ends with the perception “When you lose someone / he is treading the water near you.” The lost, those who cross over are always close, another insight of the mystic.

Finally, Luschei describes and dwells in the Arctic circle of distanced passion where the cardinal “hot as a cinder / burns out his alphabet in the icy drive.” Lanugaged, alphabet-driven and gifted, she combines opposite which results in paradox. She scrapes her “kabbala onto the windshield" This is a poetry somewhat based in eastern religions--Buddha, Kabbala, yet opening out into the vision of revelation as light which exists in both new and old testaments. She dreams the children of Sierra Leone come to her house after the image of those (who are they?) who came to her house “fasting / but the Brunswick stew: / country ham, black-eyed peas, onions, corn, squirrel and a whole bottle of ketchup” are gone. An elusive poem, it depicts the “alphabet in ice” which has been “Sculpted in snow” thus must go.

She envisions in “The Cardinal” letters which she carves with her breath. For her new life she must both “act fast” and “fast” an intelligent pun. She must “become the cardinal pecking frost. / My engine at last catches hold.” She drives to Lowe’s to “buy a feeder shaped like a bell / to remember the starved, the lost” and that is the most she can do. It is sufficient because encompassing the Arctic Circle it endures. Where “thistles blow” . . .”where the souls go” she dreams of snow holding the opal of heart till it warms.

Is Glenna Luschei’s poetry simple, crystalline, haiku-like short liens and stanzas encapsulating her vision? Or is it highly enigmatic, paradoxical, at times clear, and at others opaque? It is all of these: He glints “in the straw of life” (“The Emerald Tablet” p. 13). she is part of the Magnum Mysterium, Mysterium Tremendum and Mystery trembling, tenuous.

Over and over again, in direct yet strangely juxtaposed images se creates a crystal carol thru which the bodies of the beloveds, both living and departed, and the cherished earth can be seen in a glass snowball over which at last the blizzard of death binds, whirls. She does strange mysterious things such as “feeding Fish by Flashlight” (p. 9) Islands “skim the window” of her plane. Faith momentarily blots it out. And that is all we have. Quick pain can be tethered “quick pain / part of nature.” (Bare Root, p. 14)

*****

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 book Returning the Light: Portraits of Hidden Faith in Fourteen Contemporary Poets which is now seeking a publisher. A full introduction to Lynn Strongin is available at her website: http://members.shaw.ca/stronginweb/index.html

I OF THE STORM by BILL LAVENDER

2007-02-13T23:35:00.000-08:00

WILLLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

I of the Storm by Bill Lavender
(New Orleans: Trembling Pillow Press, 2006)

Bill Lavender’s I of the Storm starts and ends with very different tones. The beginning poems are gossipy, Southern story-styled poems that seem like a mix of the New York School, David Antin, and Ignatius J. Reilly. They have a quick pace and are filled with humor and commentary that starts off local and grows. The last two sections of the book dramatically change because they are a record of and response to Hurricane Katrina. They trace Lavender’s experience of the hurricane from being in New Orleans when it hit, to fleeing the city, to worrying about friends, and finally to returning. The entire book has that raw type of Antin feel; the second poem in the book is even a meditation on Antin’s writing and Lavender’s poetics, but the end poems pull us from the raw meditation on average life in New Orleans to what happens when everything changes dramatically before your eyes so much so that in context simple lines become charged with meaning, such as

9.
hard to believe
this is only the second night.

10.
lying in bed
we hear the frogs
just like on the river.

It’s easy to respond deeply to the Katarina poems in this collection, especially after reading the first part of the book, for in the first part we are welcomed as voyeurs spying over Lavender’s shoulder at an active poetry scene in New Orleans before the hurricane hits. We hear the gossip--poets in the Quarter drinking and talking about poetry, lamenting over the poetry scene and complaining of jobs. We also overhear Lavender writing about his own past and of local issues in the city. One such issue that seems amplified is from the third poem in the book, a poem in which Lavender meditates on a new bar moving into his neighborhood, about how he was initially worried about the noise and nuisance but changes to liking the bar when it opens because it just seems like a great place to hang out. His meditations lead him to talk about the nature of fear in the neighborhood, about how having the bar brings people together, and about how the bar lets people bring dogs into it:

that set me wondering about the whole issue
with the hood like all this neighborhood watch
and crap like that’s really nothing but saying no dogs
allowed in the bar so maybe the problem wasn’t
the hood and what we needed wasn’t a crime watch
but an attitude adjustment and then the bar seemed
just the thing for that.

On its own, this poem provides an interesting commentary on societal fear, but the poem becomes even more interesting in the context of the book because by the end, we realize that the nice urban scene that we read about, the bar with the dogs on the floor, might be gone, totally wiped away by the hurricane, and that all of the people we overhear in the beginning are scattered by the end. Seeing this first hand from Lavender’s account strengthens our sense of loss. In the beginning poems we experience life in New Orleans; in the end poems we see Lavender at random moments shedding tears.

This collection is fascinating for its lyrical language and variety of subjects. Having lived near New Orleans for several years, I found the book very moving, but with Lavender’s approach and welcoming style, this book should be of interest to anyone. The book points to the past vivacity of poetic New Orleans and hopefully to its future.

*****

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.

OH MISS MARY by JIM MCCRARY

2007-02-13T23:30:00.000-08:00

RICHARD LOPEZ Reviews

Oh Miss Mary by Jim McCrary
(Really Old Gringo Press, Lawrence, KS, 2006)

Never did get into the Larry Brown craze of last year regarding the conspiracy theories of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene marrying and producing offspring. And it's not like I don't dig a good conspiracy theory. We all know that MIBs roam the earth telling the innocent that what they saw on a moonless night was not some UFO but swamp gas and light from the planet Venus. And as for the film The Da Vinci Code the less said about it the better, even though I count myself a fan of Tom Hanks.

Perhaps it's because I grew up catholic that I became allergic to the power of Christian mythos. Whatever. What good did come out of last year's Magdalene fad was the most recent chapbook by Lawrence, KS poet Jim McCrary, Oh Miss Mary (Really Old Gringo Press; 2006). First, a disclaimer since I first read this short collection in manuscript and that I'm named in the book itself as a witness to McCrary's political sensibilities long before the flare-up regarding President Hugo Chavez's remarks at the United Nations about Bush being the devil. I am; and Bush, or to use the marvelous phrase by the late, great Molly Ivins, Shrub, just might be.

Who knows. Strange times we live in. Better still are the poems in this collection. McCrary is famous for self-publishing long before the phrase DIY became the mantra by which many poets preach and practice. This book is no different in that McCrary's minimalist poetics takes the best from Dorn, Weiners, Bromige and a little Creeley and (re)news the art. The gist of the matter is an imagining of Magdalene's hallucinations as she meets Jesus C, and a summoning of her during our present political crises. The phrase "Must be season of the witch" by 1960s singer-songwriter Donovan is one of the epigrams of the book and is used as a constant refrain at the bottom of many of the texts.

McCrary never lets the reader forget Mary's trade. That is how she meets the big guy himself. Being a religious icon does not prevent one from being human. Here in the introduction we learn that Mary even harbors a couple of fetishes.

What really sent Mar into a swoon was dude talking about walking on water during a storm. Whoa!! To someone with a foot fetish to begin
with, this man was saying all the right things.

And off she goes on her adventure and into the pages of one of the greatest texts of all time. Mary's humanity is again detailed by this short poem.

With that

As fiction

Wont last

But her hallucinations were very real

And lasted

And her hair fetish was very real

And lasted

For over 2000 years her myth lasted. It is a testament to the powers of an excellent poet that we read not a delicate portrait of some divine creature, but an earthy woman of enormous appetite. She is also a political person who comments on our present day troubles. McCrary takes a bit of spit and venom learned from the best of Dorn's writings and crafts powerful poems of damnation. Knowledge, collective and self-, that we are all damned, including Mary, might develop into hope in that we could just survive if we hone our bull-shit detecting skills. Thus this poetry is necessary reading. Take this as an example.

Mary oh Mary

You come back to

The season of the witch

The bitch Bush witch in the white house

Mary oh Mary

It certainly

"Must be the season of the witch. . . . ."

If we are lucky we get the poetry we need. And this collection by Jim McCrary is just that necessary. I shit you not.

Finally, a word on McCrary's language. McCrary uses a syncopated language based on slang and broken grammar. "Itz za zame ol ztory" is one of many examples of it. These are the tools of, and I don't use this phrase lightly, a master craftsman. These poems are as earthy and desiring as the woman they summon forth. This is how McCrary explains his language:

I don't really write much but write a lot on what I am writing. So, no I am not trying to write a million and I have really only been writing one poem for 40 years. Maybe two or three. Also to Toozer or Collins or Lehman who might consider this 'crap' -- fuck off. It is my only language and I
love it to death and mangle/handle it with loving abuse.

Bug McCrary at his blog smeltmoney.blogspot.com for a copy, or two or three. Yes, do it now!

*****

Richard Lopez's most recent chapbook is Super8 (Superblast! Press; 2006). email him at len200AThotmailDotcom for a copy.

2 BOOKS by PAOLO JAVIER

2007-02-13T23:25:00.000-08:00

CRAIG PEREZ Reviews

the time at the end of this writing by Paolo Javier
(ahadada books, 2004)

and

60 lv bo(e)mbs by Paolo Javier
(O Books, 2005)

Paolo Javier’s first collection, the time at the end of this writing, echoes long after the time at the end of the writing arrives. Javier’s poetry embodies what Robert Duncan called “beautiful compulsion,” a lyrical urgency that “establishes measures that are music in the actual world” (‘The Structure of Rime II’). The very first page of the collection exemplifies this compulsion:

Yellows leave fall on the sidewalk, so the storeclerk sweeps.
Yellow leaves tumble past my weeds. My landlord emerges yellow

in a gold Camry. Down a camera creek of Mercurys a sleek
Continental glides. Content in a rental, with a panda on his back

a man passes. He makes a pass, pauses, the sun in his mouth. He has
hurt teeth. Off-yellow, fall. Trees leave. The storeclerk weeps. (11)

Javier sculpts sound, syntax, and image into an interwoven texture, coloring the lines with a unique musicality. The measures fall, tumble, pass and pause as they emerge from the page as “music in the actual world.” Javier describes his method in ‘Naturally’:

I see every sharp occurrence
from beyond unbreakable distance, crystal clear, like silence.
I feel it mostly, such method of events as you prescribed
in the accurate world. Each time since then you question my place
in like surroundings, I think to feel to know it’s real. (80-1)

With a sharp eye, measured ear, and embodied mind, Javier feels his way through the poems’ fragile distances. This establishes an immediate and intimate tone most powerfully captured in‘Mi Ultimo Adios, ayon kay Original Brown Boy’:

It’s 825 pm &
the name as it appears on my death certificate
Paolo Rafael Santos Javier.

That's PJ to you if you're K.O.,
Pao to my kamag-anak in Toronto,
Lu Pao if you're Papa,
Paowie if you're Tita Eva, &
always Kuya, of course
to Eric & Patricia.
Rene—pare, if you can hear me, talaga
pogi pricks my ears up.
But if it's you, Cacay, hollering, then
by all means, please holla
pangit, MB, or, even better, OBB—
yours alone & short for the
Original Brown Boy. (22)

Throughout the "personist" poems that book-end the collection, Javier seamlessly navigates the sentimental, playful, hip, sarcastic, tragic, and philosophical. He acknowledges the diverse influence of Rilke, Neruda, Villa, Berrigan, and O’Hara, and yet manages to discover his own unique voice at the interstices of influence.

The central poems of the time at the end of this writing deviate drastically from a "personist" approach. For example, there’s a ten page ekphrastic poem (after Manuel Ocampo) arranged with spatial and typographical variation (unfortunately titled ‘Pimples of Love Swastikating Through Inattention’). There’s also an experimental “annotating” of a reading of Nick Carbo’s Secret Asian Man.

Javier’s most interesting experiment is ‘I sculpt poems,’ in which he re-orchestrates Eileen Tabios’s poem, ‘The Erotic Angel,’ into a 30 page operatic experience. Using the page-as-field and typography-as-tone, the poem reads like a sexed-up ‘Un Coup de Des,’ with the major symbols in the poem being “her arching back,” “my bed,” and “a blindfold of cracked leather.” Javier’s revisioning of Tabios’s poem reminds me of a passage from O’Hara’s ‘Memorial Day 1950’:

At that time all of us began to think
with our bare hands and even with blood all over
them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never
smeared anything except to find out how it lived.

Throughout the time at the end of this writing, Javier finds the life of his subject matter by seeing every sharp occurrence and transforming these feelings into music. He suggests that the time at the end of his writing is the time when we all begin to think “with our bare hands” and find out not only how it lived, but also how we live in the “accurate world.”

Whereas the time at the end of this writing is a collection of disparate poems, 60 lv bo(e)mbs is a long poem fairly coherent in structure. Because the first “bo(e)mbs” are homophonic translations of Pablo Neruda’s Veinte Poemas de Amor, it’s generative to read these texts side-by-side:

Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos,
te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega.
Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava
y hace saltar el hijo del fondo de la tierra.

Cure the demure, bilang ko                call her muscles bilang ko
to parse almond unto attitude                intrigue
my cure in a puddle of mud                rig salvage
why hasten alter                Elijah Delphi achara (2)

Javier translates the Spanish into both English and Tagalog, which gives the work a further linguistic texture. He maintains the “beautiful compulsion” of his translations, which often feel sensual, visual, and improvisational. It is striking to see what Javier invents: “Mi sed, mi ansia sin limite, mi camino indeciso!” becomes “my sadness, my anxious sin limited, DJ Cam1 indecisive” (2); “de modo que un pueblo pálido y azul” becomes “demoted Kai pebble Paolo why azaleas of Zaleela Montes” (3); “Y las miro lejanas mis palabras” becomes “you lasso Miro’s loneliness parabolas” (6); “Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso” becomes “Yellow keys Villa Satan tumbling mickeys” (31); and (my personal favorite) “He ido marcando con cruces de fuego” becomes “the id markings ex-con cruises fugue” (14).

Reading the poems without the Spanish becomes increasingly tedious because their sonic density overwhelms any attempt the words might make to signify. More often than not, the words only spark the briefest semantic moment, a “blink blink minutiae” (“tus blancas manos”).

As if anticipating this tedium, Javier quickly introduces the use of erasure to counterpoint the homophonic translations. Where the seventh love poem should be translated, we only find one line halfway down the page: “despair amended spies asul sober Ocampo,” (a translation of the last line of Neruda’s seventh love poem: “desparramando espigas azules sobre el campo”). The erasure is completely unexpected, and the blank space offers a retreat from the overwhelming sounds of the preceding poems. In the same way, Javier’s use of intralinear space airs the line, enacting the momentary pauses of translation.

As soon as these devices start to lull, Javier shifts again and collages lines from the first set of poems into new poems. He also seems to translate his translations and write between the lines of his translations. By the time we are midway through the book, it becomes impossible to distinguish as we become swept up in Javier’s generative process. In turn, the poems reach critical mass:

In case of fire they’ll say hello kill uncle enter Donny Osmond tayo na limited lunar delay
Grrr Tita errantly Nietzsche look cadaver to hose down
A vertical content Australis tryst dulcinea
Hustling Tom Cruise the lotting enter Missy Elliot haya
Fois gras Metal Mickey zulu Nietzsche the Alaska landlady leche
Meek horizon die Voltes Five come involuntarily colloquial (63)

From the relatively simple technique of homophonic translation and erasure, to the more complex modes of collage and improvisational generation, Javier arrives at the dizzying upper limit of musical noise. Thinking of Zukofsky, who also worked with homophonic translation, it’s interesting to imagine 60 lv bo(e)mbs as a post-avant fugue. The statement of the theme becomes textured by various voices entering and re-contextualizing the theme until the material develops a contrapuntal, improvisational composition (fugal technique, such as inversion, retrograde, diminution, augmentation, stretto, and false entries could also be used to describe some of the movements in Javier’s work).

In “A Statement of Poetry,” Zukofsky writes: “The parts of a fugue, Bach said, should behave like reasonable men in an orderly discussion.” 60 lv bo(e)mbs does not represent an orderly discussion, nor do the many incarnations of Javier (Paolo, PJ, Pao, Paowie, or OBB) engage in a reasonable discussion. Instead, Javier orchestrates a hustling, fugal structure “to feel to know” his own polyvocal, diasporic experience.

Besides the pure aesthetic pleasure of such a project, Javier argues that there is a political dimension to this work. In an interview conducted by Eileen Tabios (E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S, 9/20/05), Javier describes how “during friar rule in the Philippines, a method of homophonic translation called ‘fishing’ was used during the church sermons by the uneducated, non-Spanish speaking native congregations.” He then quotes Vicente Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism:

‘for whom the priest's words rouse in [them] other thoughts that have only the most tenuous connections to what he is actually saying. It is as if they saw other possibilities in those words, possibilities that served to mitigate the interminable verbal assaults being hurled from the pulpit. To the extent that such random possibilities occur, the native listeners manage to find another place from which to confront colonial authority.’

Javier suggests an analogy: the way in which he “fishes” Neruda’s Spanish to find and construct variable possibilities parallels the native congregations’ “fishing” the Spanish sermons. To me, this is a barely tenable analogy considering that Neruda’s Spanish is not being hurled at Javier from any pulpit; nor is he assaulted, linguistically, in as desperately strange a situation as the “native listeners.” We should also question Rafael’s “as if” in “as if they saw other possibilities,” which overly romanticizes native resistance (it seems less romantic that the native listeners just didn’t listen).

Perhaps I would be more convinced of this analogy if Javier chose an actual Spanish sermon to translate, or some other Spanish document relating to the colonization of the Philippines. In the interview, Javier explains why he chose Neruda:

I remember as a college undergrad how I would take my dog-eared copy of WS Merwin's translation of Neruda's book everywhere I traveled, luxuriating in the poet's vision of eros while remaining (blindly) uncritical of its overt objectification of the female. & this complication troubled me.

Choosing Neruda seems almost completely arbitrary at this point, and this fails to strengthen the analogy of “fishing” that Javier wants to construct as the political scaffolding of the work. This, of course, does not weaken the aesthetic value of the poems themselves (which is beyond my lower limit review), but is only meant to open discussion on how the work confronts the Filipino past of Spanish and American Imperialism.

Since 60 lv bo(e)mbs is the first of seven cycles, I look forward to reading how Javier continues to transform this ambitious project. It’s quite amazing that his first two collections both present an incredible range of technical experimentation and intuitive improvisation; in my mind, he has established himself as one of the most aurally and visually perceptive poets writing today. The epigraph of 60 lv bo(e)mbs, from Mahmoud Darwish, reads: “Any madness, for I have turned into words,” and the last lines of the time at the end of this writing read:

These lines the selves are gathered by
I, Paolo Javier, the Original Brown Boy
Submitting, finally, to you:

‘Me too.’ (90)

*****

A native of the Pacific island of Gua’han (Guam), Craig Perez immigrated to California in 1995. He completed his MFA at the University of San Francisco, and he is co-founder of Achiote Press. His reviews have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Jacket, Traffic, Slope, and Rain Taxi. He blogs at http://blindelephant.blogspot.com.

COLLECTIONS BY REBECCA LOUDON, CHARLES JENSEN and IVY ALVAREZ

2007-02-13T23:20:00.000-08:00

ANNE HAINES Reviews

Radish King by Rebecca Loudon
(Ravenna Press, 2006)

and

Living Things by Charles Jensen
(Thorngate Road, 2006)

and

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez
(Red Morning Press, 2006)

The Internet may offer many time-wasting possibilities, both delicious and otherwise, but over the past couple of years it has afforded me the pleasure of discovering many new and emerging poets, most published by very small presses, who I would probably never have discovered otherwise. This review spotlights three of those poets: two with full-length books, one with an award-winning chapbook.

Radish King by Rebecca Loudon (Ravenna Press, 2006). In some ways this is an odd little book, wider than it is tall to accommodate the postcard-proportioned cover image; the funky size does more than just serve the cover art, though, as it lets you know before you even open the book that this is not going to be your standard "pretty much like any other collection" poetry book. The book’s format gets the reader’s attention, but it is up to the poetry itself to sustain that attention, and that it does, with moments like this one from “The Harmonium Machine”:

There is a lump on the back of her head.
Is it the hole she spent an entire summer
falling through? On Tuesday a magnolia
blossom wriggled in her hand, pink
and wet. It is, he assures her, a fever,
a handsome kind of sickness.

She stands in the shower with a bottle
of olive oil, combing glue from her hair,
half her head covered in zebra stripes,
no idea how they got there, wears a pill-
box hat to cover them and fabulous shoes
missing a toe, no hooves, thank God,
grateful to finally have a popular disease.

These are fever-dream poems, poems in which fire and unanticipated body parts pop in and out where you least expect them. More than once I found my expectations about voice, language, and content subverted, in a good way. Books that do this usually make me pick up a pen and start writing, and this one was no exception -- in fact, I suspect this will be one of those books that I'll turn to when I feel stuck, so it can shake the words loose for me.

+++++

Living Things by Charles Jensen (Thorngate Road, 2006). This slim little chapbook, winner of the 2006 Frank O’Hara Award, announces itself with striking cover art: a black-and-white photograph of a lifeless bird, one wing visibly withered, pinned against a wall as if in flight. Strictly speaking, these are elegiac poems; but I think of elegies as being in some way about the person being mourned, and in this chapbook, the deceased beloved is present only as body -- we don't get a strong sense of what he was like in life. From “Parlor”:

The undertaker asks, “Would you like to view the body?”
But I’ve seen you.

The air around the body is cold. You chill it.
My neck is cold. The blank coins of your eyes
have been removed.

He’s laced your fingers
incorrectly. You’re left-handed:
left thumb goes on top. A lover would know
these little details, like how

this isn’t the first time
you’ve worn lipstick.

Your hair remains immaculate.
You mannequin, you. In your new black suit.

You, mannequin, on your back.
No one’s going to love you like this—

In the absence of the beloved as character, the experience of mourning itself takes center stage and serves almost as a character, a personage. There is the necessity of dealing with the body of the deceased, the necessity of funeral and ritual, the necessity of coping with the day-to-day post-funeral mundanities (e.g. bills that continue to arrive), and there is the way mourning rings out into the world and, for a time, changes everything the mourner sees. These poems aren't about the dead, or even really about the memory of the dead. As the chapbook’s title -- and the last line of the last poem -- acknowledge, they're about the living: “You are dead. And I still have my living things to do.”

+++++

Mortal by Ivy Alvarez (Red Morning Press, 2006). These poems intertwine the matrilineal experience of breast cancer (which does often run in families) with the Demeter/Persephone story, here reconfigured as "Dee" and "Seph." The book ends up not being "about" breast cancer so much as it is an exploration of the mother/daughter bond and what is passed from one generation to the next, which is sometimes dark and bloody and painful. From “touch”:

my mother’s mother
my mother’s sister
knew its touch
my father’s father
my father’s brother
smelt its breath

breast to breast
it leapt, like lightning
from inner gnawing to outer eye
all along our blood’s line

forking like a fault line
across concrete foundations;
every window in the house
cracks wide

Going through chemo must be kind of like going down to the underworld and hoping that eventually you'll be permitted to emerge again. Mortal doesn’t follow either the cancer narrative or the Persephone/Demeter story in a straight line; rather, the poems pick up bits and pieces of the stories, weaving them together and picking them apart. Despite the simplicity of the language and structure of these poems, it's a complex book, and one I expect I will return to.

*****

Anne Haines’ poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in a number of literary journals (both in print and online), including Blackbird, Calyx, Cortland Review, Pebble Lake Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she works as a staff member in the Indiana University Libraries.

THIRST by MARY OLIVER

2007-02-13T23:15:00.000-08:00

LYNN STRONGIN Reviews

Thirst by Mary Oliver
(Beacon Press, Boston, 2006)

[Note: all references are to the book Thirst unless otherwise cited.]

"PAST THE HOUR AND THE BELL”

God, how did it ever come to you to invent time (P. 18)

ONE

This is a slender book containing forty-three new poems. Thirst is a collection in which I fall in love with lines rather than with whole poems as I have usually done with Oliver's work. The central theme is Mary Oliver’s loss of her partner of more than forty years, Molly Malone Cook. The book attests to the strength of what she lost: a sweet deep shared life, which was fine in its details and in its arc.

This poet’s unified field has always been the world. Her earliest book was No Voyage(Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston, 1965). Before taking a voyage one must learn grief. ”Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them / Did not board ship with grief amount their maps?” (p. 1, No Voyage) In an earlier poem, the poet lies on a cot before a window “While the birds in the trees sing of the circle of time.”

They are what saves the world; who choose to grow
Thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.
(On Winters Margin, p. 64, No Voyage)

And

Tomorrow I will prove
How towers and rivers and ride its actual space.
This day I stand in leaves that blow like the last
Edge of the easy dream; and pray for grace.
(P. 56 NV “A House in London”)

Though she goes “to see the great ships ride from harbor. . .Here or nowhere [she] will make peace with the fact.” In Thirst she makes peace with one of life’s hardest facts: death. Here she struggles to travel beyond Molly’s death which leaves her opening boxes of darkness, an ironic gift in a home still filled with light? (“The Uses of Sorrow” “Someone I loved once gave me / a box full of darkness. (p. 52)

Yeats knew that “man is in love and loves what vanishes: what more is there to say?” Oliver turns elegy into moments into celebration. Thirst contains “a long conversation” with God. Memories of the beach in Provincetown, of the dogs they loved—earth-ecstasy, butter-and-egg-daises: all mark this late book of Oliver’s as they have left their signatures upon her previous work. Anew direction, the challenge to truly attain faith, marks Thirst as different from her previous books of poems.

Love of the physical, tangible world which has been her watermark for over forty years is here while she is challenged to live “Past the hour and the bell,” but she has never been “a quick scholar” (echoing Dickinson.). She dwells—her wish is to dwell “In the household of God She yearns toward “the physicality of the religious poets” a thirst unstanchable for the lost beloved, the first step of a lifelong journey where vivid specifics of the shared life such as “Butter-and-eggs” daises vivify life.

In the “Epilogue” to Thirst, Oliver voices a psalm:

Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have. I walk
out to the pond and all the way God
has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord,
I was never a quick scholar but sulked
and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell.”
(P.69)

The old pond, Blackwater Pond, is there but she is in process of learning the difficult, beautiful lessons God has set us without knowing where she will be sent yet. With these prayers she is slowly learning the thirst which is the metaphor, symbol of the volume.

“Lesson” is a recurring word mirrored by the old-fashioned term “lectionary.” The volume his set both in a naturalistic and biblical context which separates it from the devotional feeling of the early books as the poet struggle to enter more formal religion. She struggles. She does not arrive.

We are in a “school,” over and over again learning a “lesson.” Even the dog Percy is admonished:

Run, run, Percy.
This is our school.
(p. 60)

Like Emerson, she sees God ‘s body everywhere in the most directly Biblical poem “On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate” (Psalm 145)

All day up and down the shore the
fine points of the waves keep on
tapping whatever is there
(p. 55)

Like Wordsworth, Emerson has been a forbear with profound influence upon Oliver who has written an essay in Long Life, “Emerson: An Introduction.” In this she claims him to be enormously spontaneous. “What we bring forth, he has taught me as deeply as any writer could, is predictable” (p. 51, Long Life) And what is that? To have “Confidence. Confidence in what? “in the laws of mortals as of botany. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice,” Oliver quotes Emerson (Ibid.) In his first essay, “Nature,” Oliver states he taught us “this web of God”, namely everything “that is not the mind uttering words.” (Ibid, p. 46.) In Thirst, the poet is caught in this web of God, the mind attempting to utter words. She attempts formalized religion. Her setting of church as school occurs as often as nature. Her thrust is devotional, her ambience Provincetown, and the ocean.

“Tapping” is an arresting word conjuring an image of waves as typewriter spelling out “whatever is there: scatter of broken / clams, empty jingles, old;’/ oyster shells thick and castellated” She compares the flotsam and jetsam of short to “This sweetest trash rolling / like the arms of babies through the / swash—in a feathered dash . . .” Again, the ocean is spelling out mysteries. She asks of God, and the ocean, “how many mysteries have you seen in your / lifetime? and compiling a catalogue concludes that God’s body is “everywhere and everything; ashore and the vast / fields of water.” (p. 57.) She segues to the recurrent plea in Thirst “I would be good” upright, good. But to what end? “To be shining not sinful, not wringing out of the hours . . .heaviness, ashes.”” To what goal? Not to enter “Hope of heaven” but “the other kingdom: grace and imagination.” (Ibid.)

She observes grace incarnate in a man, unnamed, likely a neighbor “Christ’s ambassador”’ with resolute, not fooled kindness. (p.58) He has soldiered for God, rising out / under the storm clouds, against the world’s pride and unkindness / with both unassailable sweetness, and consoling word.” (p. 558.) In this poem the difficult task she has set herself--to love the world, again reminiscent in the poet assuming role of scholar of Dickinson--her stark opening declaration in “messenger” is “My work is loving the world; here, she acquits herself with honor.

Other poems here are less successful in conveying the poet’s struggle and we are left with exhortations, sayings which are too abstract to move.

Belief isn’t always easy.
But this much I have learned—
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.
(P.63 “In the Storm”)

The poem’s opening stuns us with its idiosyncratic use of the verb “shrug”:

Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
it was snowing
(p. 62)

If Thirst generates a love for lines rather than full poems, this could be because the grief has not ripened yet and the poems are premature. The volume creates a thirst in me, which is not quenched, although the eye of the poet when dealing with specifics is ravished. Both ravished and raptor of the world.

The grass never sleeps.
or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
(p. 45 “Gethsemane.”)

Nor does the poet’s grief sleep. That is Oliver’s Gethsemane, the insomnia of grief. Such lines as “Jesus said, wait with me. (Ibid.) And maybe the stars did,” and the extraordinary lines following drive home the love for the world which the poet struggles step-by-step to regain:

maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn’t move,
maybe
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
(Ibid.)

A reader once advised me not to write homilies. I had a temptation to underline a metaphysical vision with a moral tag: it invariably failed.

In this book, which is likely to be transitional, a bridge from grief to resolution--Oliver dwells “in the city called Wait” (p. 48 “Logan International.”) Where we wait is in a “broken world” (49.0). What we wait for is uncertain. Devotion drives her voice to speak (p. 37 Praying.”) "spurred by a blue iris or “weeds in a vacant lot, or a few / small stones.” The necessity is to pay attention. (37).

I looked for water words in Thirst and found “fish”, “ocean”, and “waters”. I searched for words related to religion and came up with “Jesus”, “Priest”, “ Gospel”, and “Lectionary.” But there was no stanching the thirst at root of these poems. Grief is part and parcel of living as it is of the language, which portrays life. She is at her best in such poems as “Making the House Ready for the Lord” where she has “swept” and “Washed” but no amount of householding nor elbow grease can bring up the lost shine.” Echoing Robert Frost in “A Boy’s Will,” she enjoins at the end of this poem “Come in, Come in.” (p. 13) In “The Winter Wood Arrives,” Oliver struggles to “rise from morning prayers, / [to remember] love, that leaves yet never leaves,” an inspired pun on autumn leaves. She struggles with winter wood, having recently been delivered, moving as though with the body of her beloved to be burned at a funeral pyre, with logs “bundle by bundle, / to be burned.”(p. 15)

Thirsting drives her to “look most deeply into His words. Clouds are not only vapor . . .silky sacks of nourishing rain. The pear orchard is not only profit but a paradise of light.” (p. 7 “Musical Notation: I) In this Provincetown, oceany world, still she is parched. There is providence in Provincetown but also the boxfuls of darkness, gifts.

TWO
In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famed “Divinity School Address” first published in Boston, in 1831, he looks for “the new Teacher, that shall follow so far those shining laws [The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures’ immortal sentences] “that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their enduring complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul.” (p. 117, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Self-Reliance and Other Essays, Dover Thrift Edition, 1993.) The Bostonian minister, like Oliver, sought the divine reflected in the universe. He envisioned the “transparent eyeball.” Oliver, also a Massachusetts poet, sees the labor of love in her opening statement to Thirst: “My work is loving the world.” “Messenger” (p.1) She has accomplished in part this work at least as we hear her say at the service of her beloved: “(Lord, see how well I have done.)” Tellingly, she puts this statement in parentheses. Emerson’s opening words to his “Divinity School Address” are similar to Oliver’s. Emerson writes “In this refulgent summer it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life.” (p. 103). Oliver keeps her heart, her eye, open. She refuses to let grief milk it over like a cataract over an eyeball. She consistently vows to count her blessings. Nonetheless, “Messenger” which first appeared in Nature and Spirituality opens a book essentially an elegy where the poet constantly admonishes herself, as though spiritually rapping herself across the wrists, too. Keep her mind on the most imperative thing: her work. In old boots and a “coat torn” the poet “no longer young, and still not half-perfect.” (p. 1.) She is a perpetual learner, like Dickinson although quite different in tone. Her imperative is her work “which is mostly standing still, and learning to be astonished.” (Ibid.) There is no death, no grief, from which the will to pay attention and be amazed will save us. But it is by small steps. It is almost arbitrary, not quite: “”I open the book / which the strange, difficult, beautiful church / has given me. To Matthew. Anywhere.” (”After Her Death,” p.16.) Like the Bostonian minister, the church is her schoolroom. There is an agenda--going to church, walking the beach, playing with Percy the dog—but does it work? She will answer the phone, pay the bills, and do the laundry reciting her chores as though the good child to the parent. But at the end of it all her must say the beloved name over and over. “Percy (IV)” (p. 17.)

Thirst is a book of elegies addressed to a woman. Yet, near the end Oliver addresses the traditional male God: Granted, it is an interpretation of Psalm 145.

. . I am thinking
not of His thick wrists and His blue
shoulders but, still, of Him. Where, do you suppose, is His
pale and wonderful mind?”
(p.57 “On Thy Wondrous Works I will Meditate.”)

The poem concludes:

O Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am
not ready nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.
(59)

While astonishment is wakened by the phoebe and the delphinium, darkness comes when she is “Among the Trees \” where she “would almost say that they save [her] and daily.” (9?) “After Her Death” states “I am trying to find the lesson / for tomorrow. Matthew something.” In the framework of these Emersonian lessons, she hopes to find her salvation in “Which lectionary?” Isn’t it very much in the American grain to teach in poetry? The schoolroom, even if all nature, is for her as for Emerson the saving and difficult grace.

Mary Oliver is a poet who does not have to strive to be religious: she inherently, at core, is. Whether she grieves or not, she dwells in ‘A House of Light.” Listen to these two prose passages to catch a sense of the life she shared with Molly Malone Cook: the first is from the opening of the essay “Blue Pastures” the title poem of the book:

M. and I steered our wooden boat with the ratcheting motor to the breakwaters and a little ;beyond, threw out the anchor, and baited our hooks. All afternoon we drew in the trembling lines. . .As far as fishing went, we used the wrong bait and did not engage it to the hooks properly, we were in the wrong part of the harbor at the wrong time according to the tides, and so on.

W were rather glad. . . the hours passed pleasantly and we found that we were content to have wrested no leaping form from the water. . .the water was deep and luminous”
(p. 23 Blue pastures.) (Blue Pastures, Harcourt, Brace & Company,; 1995)

The second passage comes from the essay “Dust” in Long Life: Essays and other Writings (Da Capo Press, 2004):

It is five o’clock or maybe earlier on a winter morning when I come down the stairs. The sky is black, but not for long. I make coffee and walk form window to window, lifting the shades, watching the pink, tangerine, apricot, lavender light dart and sail along the eastern horizon, then climb like a mist and tremble there, on the inner curve of the darkness. The intimacy of the universe!
(p. 78 Blue Pastures)

The third quote, also from Long Life, is form the piece “Flow.” All three pieces suggest water, note.

We live, M. and I, about ten feet from the water. When there is a storm and the wind pushes toward us from the southeast we live about a foot from the waters. It sings all day long and all night as well, never the same music. . . Every day; my early morning walk along the water grants me a second waking

This enormity, this cauldron of changing greens and blues, is the great palace of the earth.
(P.? 3 Long Life)

Of course she thirsts: Molly has made the final voyage and the poet is left alone. Yet, this thirst was born with her when breathing began. She has the ocean, the ponds she has learned and loved, “Blackwater pond” “Round Pond” and the everpresent, symbolic “waters of the poor.” Even embracing, exalting this world, one feels an other world in waters where the cormorants dip for a while which nourishes her in these “beautiful, dark seas / they push through.” (p. 18 “Cormorants.” The poet too is struggling, pushing thru radiant but dark seas on this the first step signaling the initiation indo a far longer journey beginning with grief over the death of the beloved and ending--one knows not where, but in that light of the final poem “Thirst” (p. 69) where one walks out “to the pond and all the way God has / given us such beautiful lessons.” One may “stumble in recitation” but the hope is that the God who created the ironic equation of Time will at least give one ear. The recovery will not be a re-finding of the beloved. Could it be her revelation will yield something even more incandescent, more receiving than the forty-year passion in living shared with Molly Malone Cook? In love with what vanishes, what will be the later words one says? God has burdened and blessed us with time: our lives occur within a parenthesis. Things in this book are still very much seen “Through a glass darkly.” This is a book of survival. It has come to God to invent time: now we must make our lives in time: after loss, this means mustering bravery, magnetizing the light. We will make love our work, the love of living, which is far, more than just ghosting life in. With Oliver, we wait for the epiphany. Long ago, Oliver staked her claim as a visionary poet. It is a hard theme with which she has acquitted herself with honor. Now, Now, “past the hour and the bell” we watch and wait.

*****

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 book Returning the Light: Portraits of Hidden Faith in Fourteen Contemporary Poets which is now seeking a publisher. A full introduction to Lynn Strongin is available at her website: http://members.shaw.ca/stronginweb/index.html

NOT EVEN DOGS by ERNESTO PRIEGO, PLUS ESSAYS BY MAYNARD MACK AND OCTAVIO PAZ

2007-02-13T23:10:00.000-08:00

MARIO E. MIRELES Reviews

Matsuo Basho’s “The Narrow Road of the Interior” in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces Edited by Maynard Mack
(W.W. Norton & Co, New York, 1997)

and

“The Tradition of the Haiku” by Octavio Paz in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature
(New York: Harcourt, 1987)

and

“Cities” series of poems in NOT EVEN DOGS by Ernesto Priego
(Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, 2006)

From Syllables to Words: The Road to Hay(na)ku

The haiku is a centuries old poetic form that has influenced writers across the world and through time. Its succinctness and brevity have allowed it to capture moments or snippets of life that may have otherwise gone by unnoticed: this is where its permanence and timelessness lie. In the 21st century a particular kind of poetry emerged and, like the haiku, it presented a set form in which it was to be written. This form received the name Hay(na)ku. Just as Basho’s The Narrow Road of the Interior allows readers to understand the spirit and soul of haiku, so too can these same readers delve into a deeper understanding of hay(na)ku through Ernesto Priego’s “Cities”: a series of ten poems with an accompanying photograph of each (unnamed) city. The similarities and differences between both poetic forms go beyond a graphic representation on a page and make them what they are: the embodiment of their times.

It was not until the 1890’s that the term haiku arose after this type of poetry had been written for centuries (Zimmerman). The origin of the haiku can be traced back to the classic Japanese poem: tanka or waka. The tanka consists of five verses divided into two stanzas, one of them of three lines and the other of two. With the tanka came the renga which is a succession of tankas written collaboratively by various poets. In the sixteenth century some renga practitioners began “to write in a witty, satirical, and colloquial vein. This type was called haikai no renga” (Paz 251). What the haikai featured was an introductory stanza that set the tone for the entire poem. Many of these introductions “set the scene by including a reference to the location and season” (Zimmerman), this introductory stanza is called hokku.

The haiku was born as a combination of both the hokku and the haikai. The birth of the haiku occurred at a point in time when Japan was moving away from its historic isolation. Japan began to interact with other nations “when feudalism was weakening [and] merchants and trade were strengthening” (Zimmerman) during the seventeenth century. This meant that the popular language used in haiku also represented a moving away from the “severe and aristocratic aesthetic” (Paz 251-52) of the traditional renga.

The origin of the hay(na)ku is in some respects similar to that of the haiku and in many others it is markedly different. The hay(na)ku was created and “inaugurated on the Web on June 12th, 2003” by poet Eileen Tabios. Like any other literary form or genre it owes its origin to works that have come before it. Eileen Tabios created the form with “inspiration from Richard Brautigan, Jack Kerouac, and meditations on the Filipino transcolonial and diasporic experience” (Zimmerman). The traditional hay(na)ku form consists of a tercet (3 lines) and six words: one in the first line, two in the second and three in the last. The hay(na)ku can be left as a single stanza (like haiku) or it can be linked to other stanzas to create longer poems.

Both poetic forms have been adopted and adapted by writers of many cultures and languages. The voyage of the haiku has been a long one, it has taken centuries for it to be read, understood and studied by people outside of Japan. The approximations that were made were through translation and adaptations of existing works of haiku:

In 1955 a Japanese friend, Eikichi Hayashiya, […] proposed that […] the Two of undertake a joint translation of Oku no Hosomichi. Early in 1956 we handed our version over to the publishing department of the National University of Mexico, and in April of the following year our little volume appeared. It was received with the usual indifference even though, to pique critics’ curiosity, we had emphasized in our forward that our translation of this famous diary was the first one into a Western language. (Paz 247)

What Octavio Paz illustrates is just how arduous has been the journey of the haiku into, not only the general public’s consciousness, but to that of people more intimately connected to poetry. It is a little known fact that not until the second half of the twentieth century was Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road of the Interior translated, not to English, but to the Spanish language.

The spread of hay(na)ku is markedly different to that of the haiku; time, language, and geography have all been overcome. Hay(na)ku was born at a time when globalization goes hand in hand with communication and has thus been interpreted in many languages. The spread of Hay(na)ku throughout the world in a little over three years is comparable to that of the haiku over hundreds of years. Each one represents not only their origin but their overall spirit.

Humanity is witnessing the battle between the computer and television. We now have the ability to tap into vast resources of information and entertainment in mere seconds thanks to the internet and television; this is reflected in the arts. The hay(na)ku is young, vibrant, fast-moving, showing a rather quick adaptability, just like the internet era that it was born in:

WHAT IS POETRY
it’s
the fly
in my smoothie
(Vengua)

Jean Vengua ponders on what poetry is and how she can describe the indescribable. The question is direct and, as the title of the poem, it flows naturally into the hay(na)ku itself. She takes a familiar (and annoying) universal image (the fly) and a common drink in many countries: the smoothie. What Vengua does is ponder a timeless question and reflects on it in a unique way, almost tongue and cheek.

In haiku there are also many questions answered and sometimes the question itself isn’t necessarily revealed. This sort of writing leads to a reflective exercise on the part of the reader. What is seen as common or quotidian can, and does, have the potential to change the notions and ideas that a person may have at some point:

An old quiet pond—
Frog splashes into water,
Breaking the silence
(Basho)

Basho also takes common images from everyday life and reflects on what they mean to him. The lack of a title allows the reader to interpret the haiku in many different ways and according to his or her ideas and impulses. The reader must take a step back and actually reflect and give shape to the idea that germinates in his or her mind. The haiku is slow, patient, reserved, with a hint of equanimity, akin to Japanese society during its time as an isolated nation.

Japan slowly opened up to the world at a time when the printed word was a fairly new phenomenon; Basho took advantage of the incipient literacy at the time and became well known (Mack et al. 2108). Poetry nowadays can be easily accessed at any time from basically any place in the world through the internet. If the eras that saw the development of both of these forms are complete opposites there is still and inherent commonality that bridges them to one another as Robert Bly has noted:

As we know from the Japanese experience of the haiku, as well as the experience of many brief poems in the Western tradition, poetry can be presented in fifteen words, or in ten words. Length or meter or rhyme have nothing to do with it. (qtd. in Guth and Rico 28)

Bly touches on an important aspect in both forms: length. The haiku is stripped of any verbosity in order to honestly capture that which it is trying to explain or portray. An image or feeling, for example, has to fit into seventeen syllables. In hay(na)ku the overall length of a poem is malleable but each stanza has a set number of words that are allowed:

The count, obviously, is always in mind. There’s no room to spew out a string of words before counting, because the counting has to start now. One is always thinking about whether the word will fit into the line, and if not, what will happen if you unpack the word, and take it apart, piece by piece. (Vengua)

The hay(na)ku like the haiku also has to be thought out and not merely written as a spur-of-the-moment type of literature. Even though the hay(na)ku is dynamic it does not mean that it is sloppy or unplanned. These shared features between both forms allow for a sense of permanence and poignancy. These same features are noticeable in the words of Matsuo Basho and Ernesto Priego: the former in haiku and the latter in hay(na)ku.

Both Basho and Priego have traveled and have left a memory of that which they experienced. Basho wrote The Narrow Road of the Interior in 1689 “when Basho embarked on his most ambitious journey […] to the far corners of northern Japan” (Mack 2110). Priego’s “Cities” were posted individually and then together in September of 2005 on his blog neverneutral.blogspot.com which is his main writing outlet [later published in NOT EVEN DOGS]. Priego traveled to many cities around the world and left his impressions of such cities in the form of hay(na)ku poetry.

Traveling and poetry, as evinced in both poets, go hand in hand even though traveling is sometimes something that is not easily done. Basho’s main limitation was the lack of technology and not having appropriate transportation for parts of his journey. Priego’s limitation is the ubiquity of technology which he overcomes by moving beyond flawed mass information and the apathy of wanting to see the world beyond a computer screen. Just as the haiku spread with the advent of technology and trade, the hay(na)ku must move beyond technology and manifest itself beyond a server or CPU:

The French poem is wrong: to travel is not “to die a little,” but to practice the art of saying good-bye so that, our burden that much lighter, we may learn to receive. Detachments are apprenticeships. (Paz 248)

In both cases travel is of the utmost importance; to and from the other. The “detachment” that Paz writes of is the moving away from everyday life and exploring that which is beyond. Once the poet begins his travels there is little that he will not learn from or take away in the form of inspiration.

The sense of loss and remembrance permeates through both works as seen in this haiku written when Basho is in the middle of a courtyard and sees leaves scattered throughout:

To sweep your courtyard
of willow leaves, and then depart:
that would be my wish!
(2132)

The poet wants to clear the courtyard of leaves because he knows that new ones will continue to fall in an endless cycle. The leaves have fallen, they are the past and new memories will arrive, one must always allow for the past to live and not overtake what is to come. This, Ernesto, in Second City, understands perfectly:

It’s
the dead
leaves under me

as
I walk
that hurt me:

Priego, unlike Basho, arrives at a city covered in leaves and in memories. Someone else has departed with the wish of sweeping the leaves but the city is overbearing with passing memories. Priego, at the end of the hay(na)ku goes even farther to illustrate this internalized sense of loss:

Walls
of rooms
inside my dream

are
covered with
your faded paper,

city
of memory;
of coming back.

The 21st century poet comes to realize as does the 17th century bard that that memory and that wish are always of coming back. Their wish is of returning and giving to time the ability to leave its indelible mark on them.

Both poetic forms give the poets the ability to filter their ideas and feelings as these ideas become too overwhelming or impressive on their minds. Their weight is in the carefully selected and meticulously arranged syllables and words. In both cases the language is fairly simple to understand yet the intricacies that they imply go beyond simply reading a string of straightforward words. When Basho and his companion Sora arrive at Takadachi, Basho is so moved by the nothing that remains of Yasuhira’s castle that he can only weep and transcribe Sora’s words as his own:

A dream of warriors,
and after dreaming is done,
the summer grasses.

Ah, the white hair:
vision of Kanefusa
in deutzia flowers
(2123)

The warriors have become a memory and their feats and lives are now the base for the summer grasses that grow over them. The cycle alluded to before is now evident here and all they can witness is the graying of hairs and the passing of time.

Priego comes to realize just how much has changed and what time has taken with it in his home city:

You
were here
before I could

understand
what cities
do to people.

I
used to
play baseball in

cornfields
now condos
with tennis courts [.]

Priego’s thoughts seem to echo those of Basho and Sora, the cornfields are now condos that have been built over his memories. It’s as if he were reproaching the city for allowing him to understand and comprehend that what cities do to people is make them change, forget, move on even they don’t necessarily want to. Change is the only constant in a city.

It comes as no surprise then that both poets knowing how life, cities, countries and cultures change that they choose to write poetry firmly cemented on form. They can vary their poems any way that they wish but the basic structure will be the undercurrent to anything that they write. Haiku and hay(na)ku were created in completely different eras and their development and diffusion are opposite of each other but their essence is similar. They allow those that read and write haiku to learn to take a step back and view the world in a different way. Those that intend to do the same with hay(na)ku can learn to interpret and give form to their world while allowing their world to give form to them.

+++
Works Cited
Basho, Matsuo. “The Narrow Road of the Interior.” The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Mack, Maynard, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1997. (2112-2134)

Guth, Hans P., Gabrielle L. Rico. Discovering Poetry. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Paz, Octavio. “The Tradition of the Haiku.” Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature. New York: Harcourt, 1987.

Priego, Ernesto. September 2005. Never Neutral. 27 May 2006.

Vengua, Jean. Interview. Poetry at Ariadnes Web. 27 May 2006.

Zimmerman, Joan. 2005. Poetry at Ariadnes Web. 27 May 2006.

*****

Mario Esaúl Mireles (Leon, Mexico 1978) is currently an online student at Ellis College and will be completing his B.A. in English this year. Translation and literature are his passions and have led him to write and translate for various publications and organizations.He has been working on translating essays by Mexicali writer Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz, and Chilean poet Hugo Vera Miranda. He lives with his wife Alina and daughter Ximena in Mexicali, Mexico and works in Southern California.

ELAPSING SPEEDWAY ORGANISM by BRUCE COVEY

2007-02-13T23:00:00.000-08:00

WILLIAM ALLEGREZZA Reviews

Elapsing Speedway Organism by Bruce Covey
(No Tell Books, 2006)

Elapsing Speedway Organism--Bruce Covey’s book is appropriately titled, for in this collection many different types of poetry are thrown at us while we watch them speed towards or past us. Poems with different forms and content--list poems, self-help styled bowling poems, love poems, poems that incorporated other texts--these poems ask us to take in a lot and adapt to new reading styles. It helps that Covey uses humor to ease our transition into the new styles and that each of the sections seems to have a controlling theme, like a section on love poems.

Humor, though, makes these poems stand out. Covey’s humor is quirky, paratactic, and interesting. He throws in lines that seem to come from nowhere, like “If your socks wear out, try my yellow ones” or “Is Hart Crane a style of kung fu?” The lines come at us sideways, so we have to step back and see what’s happening. For example, take a poem like “14 Kung Fu Climaxes.” Knowing that this book is published by No Tell Motel, famous publisher of . . . well, sexy poetry, the references to climaxes seems inviting and violent at the same time, but then we read through the poems and they are life climaxes in kung fu fashion:

2.
And that’s when, slipping on a lemon peel,
I bent over to pick it up, admiring the
Brilliance of the yellow, then had my throat
Severed by your sword.

In this series of fourteen, Covey uses humor and repetition, but he also brings in the big ideas:

5.
And that’s when, as I realized all battles
Were really only spiritual and metaphysical,
I felt the need to pee and ran out
Of the room.

The poem moves from spiritual depth to low humor quickly, showing us scenes repeating in different ways, and like many poems in the book, this one shows a clear link to writers like Kenneth Koch or Rod Padgett.

Covey’s humor even shows up strongly in the section of love/flirtation poems in lines like “Insert your hyperlink in my ear.” Interestingly, his humor is definitely one ready for the contemporary world. Note his reference to a computer term in the above line, the speed at which the poems come at us, and the paratactic fragmented nature of some of the pieces. In sum, this book is complex and intriguing; plus, this book would be rewarding to read over and over.

*****

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.

CALLS FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD by ROBERT HERSHON

2007-02-13T22:55:00.000-08:00

LAUREL JOHNSON Reviews

Calls From the Outside World by Robert Hershon
(Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn, 2006)

In his 12th book of poetry, Robert Hershon allowed this child of the Plains to visit places I would never see otherwise. He conducted my imaginary tour with priceless humor, delicate nostalgia, plainspoken regret, and a soupcon of racy reminiscences. These are rich, full-bodied poems from a man who's met life head on and survived to tell about it.

This excerpt from "My Passage Through Grub Street" is quintessential Hershon at his tongue-in-cheek best, with a generous measure of reality thrown in for balance:

….Actually, I took a job writing
speeches. Say, I don't know how you do it,
the speechgiver would say, it sounds just like me.
But it didn't, it sounded just like me, except for the
god bless thises and the god bless thats.
So I figured I'd better keep moving before
I did sound just like him and I gave up
writing for money and started writing poems
for bits of red ribbon and chunks of blue glass,
fine ribbon, shiny glass.

Hershon's sentiment is often portrayed as accidental, an emotion shared in passing. The resulting words have greater power than if he wept openly over every line. I quote "Sentimental Moment, or Why Did the Baguette Cross the Road" in its entirety:

Don't fill up on bread
I say absent-mindedly
The servings here are huge.

My son, whose hair may be
receding a bit, says
Did you really just
say that to me?

What he doesn't know
is that when we're walking
together, when we get
to the curb
I sometimes start to reach
for his hand.

"A Woman Strangles" is Hershon's response to the sort of news we read every day. The conclusions he draws in this poem may seem overtly cynical, but lean towards a starkly realistic view:

A woman strangles her fourteen-year-old daughter
to drive out the demons which possess the child.
Very efficient: demons are gone,
a fine demonstration of the role of religion
in everyday life In fact, she had the assistance of her
sixteen-year-old daughter (who held her sister
down) so this can be considered an instance of
organized religion. If they had just dragged
the girl's body across, say, the Canadian border
they might have established international standing
and qualified themselves as "one of the world's
great religions," thus entitling them to destroy
as many school buses, mud villages, supermarkets,
workers' pubs, tent cities and prime ministers
as their fervor, good book, and geography required.

In the poem "Lunch with Lizzie and Dinner With Donna," Hershon's daughter Lizzie says she's in a family put together out of scraps. The same might be said about the poems in this book, which have been skillfully, happily, deliciously created out of scraps of everyday life.

*****

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.

BODY OF CRIMSON LEAVES by CELIA HOMESLEY

2007-02-13T22:50:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

Body of Crimson Leaves by Celia Homesley
(The Backwaters Press, Omaha, NE, 2006)

In Body of Crimson Leaves, Celia Homesley’s song floats effortless through many notes.

The voice is innocent. An innocence not dispelled by age:

Tonight, I am an old woman
sitting prettily, drinking tea
—from "Widow Moon"

It’s an appealing voice with a femininity that, while overt, is not overbearing:

She lies still
as a cloud shadow,

a body washed up
on a shore of violets.
—from “News a Park, Green as Heaven”

The voice also exudes light

Joy was
window light
nourishing
my iris
—from “My House: A Treatise”

which facilitates the lyricism in not just individual poems but enhances the overall lyrical tone of the collection -- the whole more than the sum:

How could you have known
that the feather would serve only

as a reminder

of when you stood in water
purer than heaven,

and a bird flew
overhead.

You were a girl.
The sky was the sky.

The sun drizzled gold
on your shoulders.
—from “Unfairytale”

Let’s not miss the sensuality of many of the poems

When I think of love,
I think of the way
Rain rushes around us,
And sifts through our pores,
Feeling for home.
--from “We Are Vessels for Love and the Rain”

And throughout, and marvelously so, there are the many examples that surprise the reader, intriguing the reader:

Naked Lady

The girl in the photograph
Runs naked from the town just bombed. Or consider
The lily, leafless, blooming in full.
--from “The Garden Where Girls Grow”

or jogging the reader into pleasure:

I want to be worshipped, the way
Bees worshipped the oak tree
At peace in the flower garden.
They flowed in and out
The dark knothole
Hearing the souls
Of violas.
--from “The Holy-Body”

Even light is presented in a fresh way, always good to see in poetry which, I think, will always be replete with poems on, about, or discovering light:

Dahlia

Gold and swollen light
Bristling, curves full,
Burst-lip, open-mouth,
Offers her breasts, star-
Mind, glitter-wrist, kneeling
On earth: rewind this
Scene over and over.
--from “The Garden Where Girls Grow”

Many poetry collections possess a lot of the same tones above. In fact, of light, I empathize with how Jake Ricafrente’s enchanting poem “Regarding Glass” begins as: “I won't begin with bending light— / we've had so many of those before…” (from MiPOesias Asian American Issue).

What makes Body of Crimson Leaves stand out from its light-filled, lyrical peers are lovely imagistic gems that rely on pastoral (in the sense of rural versus urban) metaphors. Here is one poem in its entirety:

Mother of the Dead

The river lies still,
nerves rotted.

It traveled for years
beneath the mountain

of flowers that
shatter like glass.

It carried the shards
Like a mother carries children,

around and
around the earth.

Ultimately, this collection is yogic -- unites body with the (natural) world:

Dawn

An albatross
is flying

over oceans
dark as emeralds

to a lighthouse
whose little pulse
is mine.

It’s a well-titled book: Body of Crimson Leaves. The human body formed by leaves. Human and nature yoked. From Wikipedia (sorry, it’s just so easy to rely on Wikipedia):

Sanskrit yoga is a derivation of yugam "yoke", cognate to modern English yoke, and Latin iugum in Latin, all from Proto-Indo-European *yugom, from a root *yeug- (Sanskrit yuj-) meaning "to join" or "unite". // The term is attested since the Rigveda [a sacred Hindu text] in the sense of "act of yoking, joining, attaching, harnessing…"

I could conclude there, but then I paused over the back cover’s “Author Photo.” It looks like Homesley is a redhead (russet?). Well, the color of her hair, I slowly realized, sets the tone for the palette of the front and back covers: differing shades of autumn. And why not? Yoga, too, is about harmony. The Body of Crimson Leaves yokes together the poems with stellar book design, as well as joins the reader closer to the book if that reader is paying attention.

It’s a subtle design -- you really have to pay attention to, rather than glossing over, the cover’s colors and images. On the front cover, the forefront presents trunks of birch trees -- deftly strategized as one then sees trunks and it's the reader('s eyes) not the poet which must complete the transformation of the trunk to tree. The trees are set against a forest blazing out an Autumn rapture -- a palette you then would be able to link back to the poet herself through her hair color, if you’re attentive enough. But, of course, one can’t yoke with the world if one isn’t paying attention to that world. Mulling over this, I recall this ending from “Widow Moon”:

But it is autumn,
it is dark,

and the moon,
I feel her

jungle of arms.
She is wrapping

around this house,
pulsing through crevices.

I want to slip out
of my blue housedress

and into my young,
beautiful body.

The poet observes the world (moon) and ends up into her suddenly sensualized (young, beautiful) body. I don’t know whether Homesley practices yoga. But I am certainly grateful to her for showing how poetry and yoga can be paths accommodating the multiplicity of One.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou.

THE PLANT WATERER by KATHRYN RANTALA

2007-02-13T22:45:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

The Plant Waterer and other things in common by Kathryn Rantala
(Ravenna Press, Edmonds, WA, 2006)

I've read quite a few poetry collections where interconnectedness is--as I read them--an underlying poetics. Kathryn Rantala's The Plant Waterer makes it fresh--by creating her own garden from this seed (sorry, couldn't resist the pun). Witness:

Once when I was unlocking the car, the air blew up and surprised me so that I dropped my keys. When I bent to pick them up I was surprised again. An amusing, conversational air. One day when I could think of nothing to say, it ventured out in front of me in a breezy sort of way.

I feel good to be elaborated this way. As old as I become I will always shudder at the cruelty of fans.

Next week I am planning a trip that will take me aloft. I wonder if the winds above are of the same temperament. How many varieties will be there? Maybe the parents of this gentle breeze? I imagine their pride when they held this little zephyr in their hands. I hope they hold my plane in the same protective way; that I will be sustained by the casual buoyancies of the sky.
--from "The Air"

"Casual" is a good, albeit deceptive, summation of the collection's overall tone. There's an equanimity throughout -- a lack of straining:

Day 1:
"Pointing Figure" is the wooden portrait of a man wearing a hat, made sometime between 1890 and 1900 for a group of the Raven Clan. An earlier Pointing Figure was set up on Cat Island by ancestors of the same group for a deceased relative.

Andy Moses helped with the carving of this memorial but never inquired into the story behind it since he was a young man and, like many young men, uninterested in such matters.
--from "Alaska Day Tours"

But that equanimity is hardly simple. Part of the book's charm is how the poise seems effortless. Artless, indeed:

the cars just swarm onto the deck of a
ferry as if they know where they fit best
--from "Sometimes"

The overall effect is quite pleasurable, and enhanced by the intimate drawings throughout the book. I assume the poet is also the visual artist since there's no information to the contrary. And, if so, it's nice to see the book's equilibrium also manifested through the drawings' delicate deftness.

One drawing is even a visual ars poetica--the first drawing is of a tree whose trunk ends in a lighbulb, set amid full leafy hair (with a bit of a halo effect). After all, without light, one would not recognize the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated matter--from a "porous toothpick" to the Borealis to potato soup to The Mohs scale to a "theoretical, joking wind". Without light, we wouldn't see what "things in common," as the collection's title offers, are shared. As the very apt opening poem offers (in its entirety here):

Last night

in a movie something suddenly was made quite clear.

It had to do with the idea that forms of speech held in common are not arbitrary. Or are; I forget which. Last night it was all so suddenly, you know, clear.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou.

NEW TRANSLATIONS OF OSIP MANDELSTAM, Ed. by ILYA BERNSTEIN

2007-02-13T22:40:00.000-08:00

JULIE R. ENSZER Reviews

New Translations of Osip Mandelstam, Edited by Ilya Bernstein (with translations by Ilya Bernstein, Ian Dreiblatt, Lev Fridman, Andrey Gritsman, Alex Halberstadt, Christian Hawkey, John High, Kevin Kinsella, Eugene Ostashevsky, Luba Ostashevsky, Ian Probstein, Natasha Randall, Alan Shaw, Val Vinokur, Seth Zimmerman)
(Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, NY, 2006)

There is a particular joy in encountering a book that you know was made with love. There is even more joy when you realize that the book was made by people, who are unknown to you but who share with you a love for books. That’s how I felt encountering Osip Mandelstam: New Translations.

Osip Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived from 1891 until 1938. He is one of the central figures of the Acmeist school of poets, which also included Anna Akhmatova. Mandelstam saw the school as “yearning for a world culture.”

Ugly Duckling Presse has gathered eighteen poems by Mandelstam translated from Russian by a variety of translators into a small, elegantly produced chapbook. It opens with these lines from the poem “Hagia Sophia” as translated by Ian Probstein,

Hagia Sophia--it was commanded by the Lord

That kings and nations halt in wonder here!

Your cupola, in the eyewitness’s word,

Seems raised towards heaven on a chain.

Mandelstam’s work captures the world in which he lived as above in “Hagia Sophia” and in the poem “Leningrad” included in this collection. Mandelstam also writes about other significant events of the time as in “Impressionism” where he evokes the work happening in the art world at the time.

Perhaps the most transcendent poem of the collection is the final one written approximately eighteen months before Mandelstam’s death. Here it is as translated by Ilya Bernstein in its entirety,

There are women who belong to the damp earth,

Whose every step is like resounding sobbing.

To escort the resurrected and to be the first

To greet the dead is their calling.

To demand tenderness from them is a crime,

And to part with them exceeds our powers.

Today, an angel, tomorrow, a worm from the grave,

And the day after—nothing but a shadow. . .

All that was moving once will be removed. . .

Flowers are immortal, the sky is all-embracing,

And what will be is no more than a promise.

In addition to making available these new translations of poems in a beautiful chapbook, this book gathers multiple translations of a single poem. This great contribution and textual practice not only brings greater insight into Mandelstam’s work, but also engages the reader in thinking about the decisions of translators and highlights the significance of translation work.

Ugly Duckling Presse is the great publisher that made this fine book available. According to their mission statement,

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit art & publishing collective producing small to mid-size editions of new poetry, translations, lost works, and artist's books. The Presse favors emerging, international, and "forgotten" writers with well-defined formal or conceptual projects that are difficult to place at other presses. Its full-length books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, magazine and newspaper all contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

I trust I am just one of the many readers appreciative of their work.

*****

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and lesbian activist living in Maryland. She has previously been published in Iris: A Journal About Women, Room of One’s Own, Long Shot, the Web Del Sol Review, and the Jewish Women’s Literary Annual. You can learn more about her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

SEEDPODS by GLENNA LUSCHEI

2007-02-13T22:00:00.000-08:00

HUGH FOX Reviews

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

How magnificently refreshing to enter into a world without presidents and wars, gangs, rockets, disease, institutionalized religions...a world made up totally of re-creations and meditations of Nature itself, in all its totality:

Winter is shedding her skin.
The last thin
snow is a cobweb
in the eaves.

Your love
is threading my ribs.
Free as a spider
1 glide to you.

See the sun
through the fingers of trees
This is the church.
This is the steeple
These are the lilies at the edge of spring!
("This is the Church," p. 32)

Huge buddhistic influences here, yes, and also Luschei's immersion in Portuguese-Brazilian literature and the Portuguese-Brazilian philosophy of ecstatically glorying in The Now.

There are poems about night crawlers, feeding fish by flashlight, rain in the Andes, mountain lions, racoons and hummingbirds, birches, Santa Ana storms....and always mystic little touches that adroitly refer back to major philosophies/world-views that form the basis for her visions.Like in the poem "The Cardinal" where you almost miss the reference to kabbala unless your're a very attentive reader aware of the seeds that Luschei is always sowing:

North Carolina house sculpted in snow
the cardinal, hot as a cinder
burns out his alphabet in the icy drive.

Yes!
craving new letters for January
I scrape my kabbala onto the windshield....
("The Cardinal," p. 16)

Luschei isn't merely a poet but a subtle impressionistic prophet whose work immediately begins to change your whole world-view.

*****

Hugh Fox, born in Chicago in 1932, has some 86 books published, BUT HIS MOST IMPORTANT WORK STILL REMAINS UNPUBLISHED, ESPECIALLY HIS MAJOR NOVELS. A book of his plays is coming out in 2007, as is his fantasy novel Voyage to the House of Yama and a book of poetry from Higganum Hill Press. His autobiography, Way, Way Off the Road was just published by Ibbetson Street Press in Somerville, Massachusetts.

2 BOOKS by LENY M. STROBEL

2007-02-13T21:55:00.000-08:00

MARJORIE LIGHT Reviews

COMING FULL CIRCLE: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans by Leny M. Strobel
(Giraffe Books, Quezon City, 2001, 2001)

and

A BOOK OF HER OWN: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan by Leny M. Strobel
(T'Boli Press, San Francisco, 2004)

Decolonize Your Mind

decolonize Your mind
reclaim your expression
start your own struggles
find out the intersections
dismantle your oppression
then enter a new dimension
so we can be free
so we can just be

I cherish the indigenous
what they tried to take away from us
the soul survives within
it lies just under my brown skin
within our bodies lie cultural memories
the way things used to be
the way things are supposed to be
I create my own rituals
to connect with the sacred spiritual
the life force that feeds us
they can never take that away from us
so I must bust and I must flow
I must show and make visible my own soul

I live on the borderlands traveling between worlds
as I analyze systems of power they all begin to unfurl
I don't believe in your constructions all your constructions I shatter
I defy labels and boxes I defy the slave master
seeing through the eyes of the snake and the eagle
Filipina feminist growing up with my people
traveling the world collecting beats from my indigenous tribes
keep the music alive cuz its a tool to survive
guerilla warfare its a way of life trained through everyday battle with the
stress and the strife
state apparatus is ready to attack and trap
but I won't let them break this bridge called my back
reclaim what was denied for so many years
step up and wash away all of the fears
be a warrior and take back what is ours
fighting and destroying to take back the power
I was given this chance but some sisters are not
across the street and the ocean their dreams shrivel and rot
I was born in the US so I have more privilege
to express myself get educated in college
that's why I'm reaching for the top I'm reaching for the stars
make sure my life and career go far
move from immigrants' daughter to position of power
implement policy rebuild the system structurally
empower the community and mobilize politically
then analyze it critically for any hypocrisy
that's right son I'm gonna take this and run
take the knowledge give it back to where I come from
it's what I want
it's my desire
take it to the next level take it higher

decolonize Your mind
reclaim your expression
start your own struggles
find out the intersections
dismantle your oppression
then enter a new dimension
so we can be free
so we can just be

I'm a woman of color anti-racist feminist
I'm a hip hop scholar ethnomusicologist
I'm a punk rock riot grrrl artist activist
I'm a girl with a mestiza consciousness
I'm the girl waiting at the 180 bus stop
I'm the kid from Northeast L.A. straight out of Eagle Rock
Asian woman with the rhymes that make you go into shock
I stray away from the rest of the flock
I'm the Filipina fresh off the boat
I'm the one who can't pay because she's flat broke
I'm the diva who scores 99 on the magic mic
I'm a woman who fell in love at first sight
yes I'm every woman it's all in me
any mic you want I'll rock it naturally
but I'm not an individual I'm part of a legacy
in the mirror see my ancestor's face looking back at me
much respect to the teachers who come before me
I come with love and peace
hope our numbers only increase
we speak up even though we might be scared
feel unprepared
even so we must dare
to question society critique this institution
deconstruct the theories and start a revolution
it doesn't matter if your words aren't perfect
it doesn't matter because someone out there needs to hear it
claiming space for our community
so that we can come together in unity
I think what we crave is visibility
are you hearing me
are you feeling me
cuz you're healing me

decolonize Your mind
reclaim your expression
start your own struggles
find out the intersections
dismantle your oppression
then enter a new dimension
so we can be free
so we can just be

*****

Marjorie Light is a Filipino American artist who was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She has been writing and self-publishing her zine, Some Misplaced Joan of Arc, an independent publication of poetry and creative writing, since 1998. Marjorie has performed her poetry at Beyond Baroque, SIPA (Search to Involve Pilipino Americans), The California Plaza, and several times at FPAC (Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture) in the annual poetry slam. Most recently she performed in “Pinoy Stories,” a show that sprang out of a Filipino American oral history workshop, where she acted, danced, played the Kulintang, and did spoken word. She graduated from Pitzer College in 2006 with a double major in Women of Color Art and Activism and World Performance Traditions, majors she designed.

SONNET by MATT HART

2007-02-13T21:50:00.000-08:00

MARK YOUNG Reviews

Sonnet by Matt Hart
(H_NGM_ Chapbook Series #3)

Matt Hart's SONNET, brought out
as #3 in the H_NGM_M CHAPBOOK
SERIES, is a series of fourteen lines
each of fourteen lines, though there's
an occasional part fifteenth. It's a
bouncy little book that creates
its own momentum & draws you
into & along with it, reprising
threads of thought that generate
a continuity, a completeness. But—
isn't there always a but?— it is so
full of familiar references to the
author's friends that one occasionally
thinks it's Matt Hart's DIARY that has
been opened by mistake.

*****

Mark Young is the editor of Otoliths.

THE GRACES by ELIZABETH TREADWELL & SONNET by MATT HART

2007-02-13T21:40:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

THE GRACES by Elizabeth Treadwell
(Dusie, 2006)

and

SONNET by Matt Hart
(H_NGM_N Chapbook Series #3)

Reading Mark Young's review of SONNET (see above post) and, shortly thereafter, Elizabeth Treadwell's THE GRACES offered me a mini-epiphany as regards a role for poetry chaps. Up to this point, I've not differentiated much between chaps and books, except when the former clearly presents itself as a presentation of a sampling from a longer work; that is, I think a poetry collection can be as valid in chap form as book form -- it all depends, for me, on what's on the pages (regardless of page count) and whether such works viably/organically as a "poetry collection."

THE GRACES and SONNET, however, illustrate the possibility of allowing for a truly intimate, nay personal, gesture -- that a chap can embody a specific personal address (even letter) to a specific someone(s). While personal address can be achieved in book form, the chap's production can enhance the personal.

In SONNET, references abound throughout the poem to the poet's acquaintances and friends. In THE GRACES, the chap is a poem dedicated to the poet's husband, thus bringing in the presence of said husband into the work (actually, this is the first time my eyes did not ignore a dedication in a chap/book; I think my eyes incorporated the phrase "for my husband" in the poem due to the nature of the chap's production -- more on this aspect in last paragraph below).

I easily can imagine the pleasure(s) felt by Treadwell's husband and Hart's friends in perusing the chaps (I'm assuming they had a chance to see the chaps).

But, importantly, that directed pleasure does not get in the way of another reader's read due partly to the lovely lyricism in both chaps -- a lyricism that transforms the poems beyond direct addresses to specific someone(s) and draws a stranger-reader into their heightened wor(l)ds. Both also share an admirable ability for linguistic twists and turns. Of course, comparing these two chaps is still a bit arbitrary since their energies are so different. Hart's chap -- a rolicking fun ride enervated by puns and riffy re-mises -- contains a more active energy than Treadwell's, as shown in these excerpts below:

From SONNET

The end of the road by the mailbox...
And the hawk swooping down, down and down.
My friend Brett says, "rhinoceros," and the world
claps its dainty hands together, because ht eworld
is a girl and full-flowing stop atop the mountain
he has made in his mind. I find there any number
of god things gooders. O Nature, you time bomb,
which is to say, the seasons thus exploded
blow up our clocks and everybody ducks for cover
or dons a fur bathing suit, or mindful full
bright bellies of stars. All of it stolen (lovingly)
from the mouths of babies--and certainly Brett
doesn' tmean babies, he means rhinoceros,
or dances his ass off with charm. The world
is a boy or a girl.

From THE GRACES

unfold the hours
as your skin
becomes a weary suitcase

as the sun glides
molten into moonlight--
in the dreamy shadowguard
chasing relatives
throwing fruit

all the sounds
a tongue
can make

the starlet's
recompense

but I've grown more
               than weary
of such herald tourism
my hands like
               stiff'ning gloves

now I've left these odds
               + hours
for a dream procession
of the circuit ministries

build me a lesson here
in the handheld
               commune

One difference between book and chap is how the latter, a more limited edition, can offer more opportunities to practice one-of-a-kind book arts. In this matter, THE GRACES, a limited edition of 33 hand-made chaps, offers something that SONNET's production does not. SONNET, while a charming presentation of 4 1/4 X 5 1/2 sized pages is like a pamphlet; its charm is enhanced by the bird drawings of Jane Ortrun Carver but I assume all copies in the edition are the same. THE GRACES -- that is, the copy I have since each copy of THE GRACES is different from each other -- is 2 1/2 X 2 1/4 with a bluish-silver, foil-like cover, an endpaper of what looks like a page from an antique book, and bound together with turquoise, silver, red, yellow, and black yarn or threads. It's a presentation that facilitates an enthusiastic invitation to the reader into the poem's world. In reviewing THE GRACES, kudos, therefore, must also be given to publisher but also Dusie book-designer Susana Gardner. Here, the design makes the poems's call ever more fetching.

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou.

ULTRAVIOLETA by LAURA MORIARTY

2007-02-12T23:55:00.000-08:00

ANDREW JORON Reviews

Ultravioleta by Laura Moriarty
(Atelos, Berkeley, CA, 2006)

[First published in RAIN TAXI, Vol. 11 No. 4, Winter 2006 (#44), Ed. Eric Lorberer]

Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta is a novel about a spaceship named Ultravioleta, a spaceship that is made of paper, or more precisely, of “personal letters” that are “passionate, desperate, and philosophical.” As the reader soon realizes, the novel is itself the very spaceship described in its narrative, posing a paradox akin to mathematical logic’s “set of all sets” (which must contain itself as a member, and so becomes self-swallowing).

This game of reflexivity is played throughout the novel: in Moriarty’s vision, the human universe, invaded by an alien race known collectively as the “I,” has been wholly transformed into language, making people and things susceptible to constant revision, if not contradiction. After the invasion of the “I,” writing becomes the primary means of travel. Characters, who frequently doubt their own existence, think or write themselves into outer (i.e., inner) space, limited only by the “Case Barrier” that defines the boundary of the universe. Halfway through the story, Ultravioleta sets sail in an attempt to break through the Case Barrier and attain the Paradise beyond––a space where “I” can finally, fully relate to “thou.”

Along the way, the novel offers a picaresque tour of a solar system in which semantic forcefields have replaced the laws of physics. People and things, no longer able to be distinguished from words, resonate richly with all the associative power of their names: Mars, named after the god of war, becomes the scene of an endless war; Marys (the clones of Mary?), being orthographically related to Mars, are called to fight in the war. Marty, another Martian, is Ultravioleta’s shipbuilder, while Pontius Pilate, the story’s most villainous “I,” serves as its pilot.

The characters flit like quanta between Earth, Mars, and a satellite orbiting the Jovian moon of Europa. This satellite (made of paper, of course) is the site of The Gutenberg, a vast Borgesian library which is also a hotel, administered by Ada Byron (one of several characters bearing the names of historical or literary figures; the historical Ada was the mathematically-minded daughter of the poet Byron). One by one, the characters assemble––i.e., their thought-travel writings are archived––at The Gutenberg before embarking on the Ultravioleta.

The story of Ultravioleta––whose mission is destined to fail, or to succeed by failing––dramatizes the fate of the thinking subject whose only access to the object of meaning is by means of language. For behind the sign stands only another sign, and so on endlessly: even in a spaceship made of words, the thought-traveler never can reach the terminus, or ground, of thought itself. The best that can be hoped for, Moriarty seems to indicate, is a dialogical oscillation between self and other, or within the self as other.

And Ultravioleta is very much a dialogical novel, in which the characters––with phrasings that are by turns ironic, erotic, philosophical, frantic, and funny––literally write themselves, and each other, into existence, all the while pondering their own fictionality. Dialogism at this rate of reflexivity begins to shade into monologism, or into a kind of philosophical prose poetry in which the author’s voice bifurcates into multiple, yet self-similar, voices (as in the writings of Edmond Jabès).

The poetics of the novel, in one respect, accepts the basic tenet of postmodernism in general and Language poetry in particular: namely, that reality is a linguistic construct. In another respect, however, that construct is posited here as a latticework spinning in the void, or as a vessel traveling into the unknown. The shipwreck of Ultravioleta is caused, as one of the characters puts it, “by thinking about what can’t be known,” a distinctly Romantic impulse. It is not skepticism but longing that has the last word here.

Moriarty’s earlier work has typically incorporated aspects of the fantastic, as in the medievalism and Orientalism of Rondeaux, or in the exoticism of Persia. And L’Archiviste, a long poem about an archive as vast as a city, was inspired by a French graphic science-fiction novel. With Ultravioleta, Moriarty greatly amplifies these tendencies: indeed, the novel is rife with allusions to other works of speculative fiction. The “I,” for example, may trace their ancestry to Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites; and in Ultravioleta’s climactic scene, the characters discover a sentient ocean at the heart of Europa, a notion clearly indebted to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.

Ultravioleta represents a highly original synthesis of experimental poetics and science fiction. Here, language is treated not only as a social construct to be poetically deconstructed, but as a medium, seemingly transparent and all-pervasive as air, that permits flight.

*****

Andrew Joron is the author of several books of poetry, most recently FATHOM (Black Square Editions: New York, 2003.) A collection of his essays and prose poetry, THE CRY AT ZERO, is forthcoming from Counterpath Press in 2007.

ALASKAPHRENIA by CHRISTINE HUME

2007-02-12T23:50:00.000-08:00

BRITTA AMEEL Reviews

Alaskaphrenia by Christine Hume
(New Issues Press, 2004)

[First published in CUTBANK, Ed. by Brandon Shimoda, 2006]

There are 39 poems in Christine Hume’s Alaskaphrenia, 72 words between “language” and “landscape” in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Alaska is the 49th state at a latitude of 54° 40' N to 71° 50' N and a longitude 130° W to 173° E. Hume counts, maps, mines, names, explores, lists, categorizes as the surveyor of her Alaska-of-the-mind. She surveys not only the literal landscape, replete with bears and moose, ice caves and ocean, mountains and planes. Hume also surveys the “poetic” language meant to arrange our uncontrollable internal states, where we “will be a bellwether bomber, you dream-bomb the last place: a dogsled dream, campfire dream, pioneer dream, pioneer, lynx, lynx, lynx.”

This surveyed Alaskan consciousness is under-punctuated, grammatically wild, written on scraps of paper edged with fire and water, folded several hundred times to fit in a pocket. Hume has “adopted an Alaskan ear long before; with it, it’s not unusual to hear from inside the hammer: stampeded terrain, yea, avalanche.” The inside of this hammer sounds, indeed, like avalanche: words shape-shift and metaphors crumble under sound:

Under these circulations
You could not wear cirrus the way cows do

Always your mange meant to be smoke
molting, moonglow

This associational, sound-driven logic (“lynx, lynx, lynx”) powers the surveyor’s 4x4, which explores the transforming and transformative nature of consciousness. And this particular Alaskan consciousness is ultimately both circular and fractured requiring prosaic and instructional structures to navigate: documents like brochures, diagrams, comprehension questions; structures like indices, instructions, explanations, translations, dialogues, do’s and don’ts. These are the maps pinned under otherwise confounding experience, and Hume instructs:

If you cannot work the Eskimo yo-yo, you must walk around and create a map inside your muscles. There, a secret heat makes air remember birds. In their flight, your absurd hands go to seed. Only the other day your pacing made something stop sleeping; it made nowhere a shook-out place.

And again: “Never let what you think fool you.”

The parallel Hume draws between the surveyor’s language and poetic language feels at every turn right for complicated consciousness. Yet, what startles most is the fact that both languages are essentially inaccurate, and indeed almost violate the very areas and emotions they are meant to represent. Hume’s act of surveying, though, exposes the rich veins of landscape and mind, which, though imperfect and impure, are made once again original and exquisite. This reader wouldn’t want it any other way, for Hume has

…outened the world
to show you real barenness:
a void a light
warps into want and then wants
until it warps all it glances.

Warp away, Hume, we’re with you on this expedition, counting as we go.

*****

Britta Ameel received her MFA from University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Fugue, CutBank and others. She lives in San Francisco.

OPPOSABLE THUMB by JOE ELLIOT

2007-02-12T23:43:00.000-08:00

SHARON MESMER Reviews

Opposable Thumb by Joe Elliot
(Subpress, 2006)

[First published in The Poetry Project Newsletter, Ed. by Brendan Lorber, Feb.-March, 2007]

In this long overdue full-length collection, the oppositional phenomena Elliot mindfully catalogues work together to create an ideal form that not only partakes of the parts but produces a third, more delicious, thing, delicious because it floats free of all attempts to place it. And that third thing is often not an object, a state of being or an event, but merely a further questioning -- a caroming off of the edge of completion into a completely new direction.

The word "work" is of primary importance here, because the book is filled with references to utility and functionality, and questions about the nature of purpose. The first poem, "even if," addresses these ideas:

even if
it turned out
to work

I don't see
it happening
now when

I have to
go to
work so

whatever it was
going to be
this

will have to do

This opening piece reiterates a bit of the overall sectioning of the book as presented in the graphic layout of the Table of Contents: poems divided into five sections (two longer sections and one shorter one). In "even if," those "haves" and "going to be's" and that final "will have to do" act as place markers or pivots from loving to having, from moving to resting, from exhaling to filling — as in these lines from "Rehearsing For Shows I Know Won't Open":

Does love have to have . . .
Swinging your arms back and forth like a kid so your walking
becomes as restful and clear as a found object

And if we dare exhale the sail will fill and the boat we are
in tilt and begin to move

Though not in relation to us

And there's possibly the key to these paeans to the revelatory familiar: revelation is something that falls outside our understanding:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Consciousness
doesn't budge, how could it, could only watch
the moving reflection of its feet into hooves into fins, etc.
O smiling etcetera, you never lift a finger."
(from "Office Work")

The open sound of that wonderfully archaic, stand-alone "O" asserts itself in several poems, and seems to act as a first or final breath of surprise as things constantly become other things:

O, intimate decompositions, ascend into wonder
(from "For Immediate Release")

Reduced to one enormous NO
O, terrible is the highest thing
(from "Index")

"Index" is one of several wonderful long poems that are sectioned and convey the feeling of unfolding over time (having unfolded that way to begin with, with the poet as reporter: Joe Elliot as "our" Billy Collins). The others are "The Times Where We Meet," which is a kind of day-book of the month of January, and "Office Work," the book's pièce-de-résistance which yokes the "work" theme to a new idea, that of language and its contents (and, of course, its dis-contents):

… your void has a recognizable shape,
can be spelt and passed around. If that doesn't work
cut the image in half and re-glue it head to toe.
Tell me, isn't this the party to whom I am speaking?

Opposition, spake Blake, is true friendship. And Elliot's artful poems present opposition as the pivot into an understanding (but not necessarily acceptance -- that would be un-poetic!) of the workings of duality.

*****

Sharon Mesmer's forthcoming books are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (poems, Combo Books, 2007) and The Virgin Formica (poems, Hanging Loose Press, 2008). She is the author of Vertigo Seeks Affinities (poems, Belladonna Books, 2006), In Ordinary Time (stories, Hanging Loose Press, 2005), Ma Vie à Yonago (stories, Hachette Littératures, France, in French translation, 2005), The Empty Quarter (stories, Hanging Loose Press, 2000) and Half Angel, Half Lunch (poems, Hard Press, 1998). Lonely Tylenol, an art book from Flying Horse Editions/University of Central Florida (2003), is a collaboration with the painter David Humphrey. Her fiction and poetry have recently appeared in New American Writing, Abraham Lincoln, Big Bridge, Traffic, LIT, Combo, Van Gogh's Ear (France), Tears in the Fence (UK), Gargoyle, and The Brooklyn Rail.

OBEYED DILEMMA by JUKKA-PEKKA KERVINEN

2007-02-12T23:30:00.000-08:00

EILEEN TABIOS Reviews

obeyed dilemma by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
(xPress(ed), Espoo, 2005)

[First published in The Secret Lives of Punctuations by Eileen Tabios, xPress(ed), 2006]

PARENTHETICALS

“(problem margin mad hymn optical slaying”
—from obeyed dilemma by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

(as if the number of carats is symbolic)

(although the audacity of the cruelty was not his primary concern)

(imagine that caravan of hags)

(actually, can waves be gothic?)

(expensive bone, that ivory)

(why wouldn’t the sea swallow gold coins since they glint?)

(what is nullified when butter melts)

(though it is the hunted, coral warns)

(even false witches can samba)

(she’s always bullish on the bogus, e.g. “knight or monk, or vice versa”)

(cooks lacking insurance!)

(‘twas the first time she sewed for bit maps)

(dungeons: a waste of marble)

(regret a kingdom with unknown borders)

(she means, the marrow of obliquity)

(forgiveness become brass coin)

(snow rents the night sky to maximize the clarity of a flood losing its center)

(is it not impossible for a decade to weep?)

(oh, the awkwardness of trust!)

(she’s always spawning margins)

(will he ever find a flavorless alley)

(but a tobacco hiccup usually enhances the pinprick’s wake)

(never again will he consider peas erotic)

(magenta does not exist in Geneva)

PROCESS NOTE:
“Parentheticals” was created from handwritten reactions on each page of Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s collection, obeyed dilemma (xPress(ed). In transcribing the poems into a typed manuscript, I found that I couldn’t read much of my handwriting…so that the poem is actually comprised of secondary parentheticals from the original parentheticals to Kervinen’s text .

*****

Eileen Tabios HEARTS wine, dogs and Thou.

BELIEVE & BETRAY by CIRILO F. BAUTISTA

2007-02-12T23:25:00.000-08:00

ALFRED A. YUSON Reviews

Believe & Betray: New and Collected Poems by Cirilo F. Bautista
(De La Salle University Press, 2006)

[First published in The Philippine Star, Manila, Aug. 21, 2006, Arts & Culture Section Editor, Millet Mananquil]

Going beyond words

Late last month, the Department of Literature of De La Salle University, Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center, and the DLSU Press jointly launched Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista’s latest book, Believe & Betray: New and Collected Poems, with an Introduction, ”A Lyric Sense of History,” by Marjorie M. Evasco. Conceived by Brother Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, before he left us, the book is said to be a festschrift, or a collection of works published in honor of a scholar.

A scholar this distinguished author certainly is, although I think more of him as an excellent poet, first and foremost, as well as a terrific fiction and essay writer, critic, editor, magazine columnist, painter, semiologist, professor of literature, and mentor to a continuum of younger writers.

That is why, as a man of many hats, many parts himself, Bautista had the temerity to assume the voice of Dr. Jose P. Rizal in his magnum opus, The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, written over two decades and completed in 1998.

On the strength of that trilogy alone, I have always thought that Cirilo F. Bautista deserves all possible accolades from what should be a very grateful nation, including perhaps a statue of himself somewhere in between Arsenio Lacson’s, on a bench reading a newspaper, and the pair featuring Ninoy Aquino and Evelio Javier on the opposite side of Roxas Blvd.

Why, that would place Cirilo right on the center island. Very good. It would be similar to Don Chino Roces holding a crucifix aloft, right athwart Mendiola Bridge. A bronze Cirilo would not suffocate from all the fumes of Manila’s Baywalk traffic on weekends. He could be holding up a sheet of paper, on which may be inscribed some short verse, in ironic contrast to his epic narrative genius stature.

Of course passersby might think he stands there as a symbol of the Filipino waving a visa application form in the direction of the U.S. Embassy. No matter. If they jaywalk and come close, they will be able to read the text on the sheet, make out its title: “Post-Prandial Soliloquy: or, Dessert Song.” Why, if they clamber up the base of Bautista’s statue, they may even get to read the two-stanza poem that challenges the famous Manila Bay sunset:

“I was almost at Home in Heaven/ Until one Day I did not see/ A Sunrise or a Poem/ Performing just for Me.// So back I Flew to Earth,/ And took my Chance at Dying — / For here I have the Hues to Wear/ And Words to Hide my Lying.”

Uncharacteristic of Bautista’s poems, one might say. But then this erudite, constantly evolving master of language and experimenter in words cannot be stereotyped, I should counter.

His new mega-collection proves this beyond doubt, beyond words. Here displayed together are actually four collections: the new Believe & Betray that sees fresh publication, and three earlier ones that have long been out of print: The Cave; Charts; and Boneyard Breaking.

From the earliest, The Cave, to the newest, this festschrift is indeed a festival buffet of Bautista’s lyric poetry, the formidable foundation to his epic trilogy, and an invaluable instructional manual for all Filipino poets and lovers of poetry, from National Artists to our aspiring wunderkind.

I can only share tips of Bautista’s iceberg -- as samples of the cool confidence and poise with which he plays, nay, toys, with English.

“I have learned the subtle virtue of regret,/ how it can ride a mad horse and not fall off.” This starts off “What Rizal Told Me” — a wisdom poem couched in a conversation the national hero has with his possible doppelganger. The poem ends thus: “Each day I refute the facts with images/ of seawater assaulting the rocks./ History is the other side of regret.”

That poem, the quoted excerpt of which might also be a candidate for the sheet in bronze on the boulevard by the bay, attracting broken sunlight, is in the new collection, together with many other luminous entries on matters otherwise as mundane as “Just Another Ordinary Day” (“Every morning I wake up/ astonished that I’m still alive./ A poet, after all, has no right to live/ except as a metaphor/ in a tyrant’s dream….”).

Or a flight itinerary, “San Francisco-Vancouver-Los Angeles” (”… For it is all a form of government/ this conscious flight to nothing as though/ nothing requires all the subtle and covert/ confabulations of mankind…”)

Or national consciousness turned into art, and not just literary history, by an artist supreme, not just a literary historian, as with “Bonifacio in a Prospect of Bones” (“… I had neither treasury nor art/ to subvert the stealers of my heart:/ even my violence was not enough/ to redeem my terrorized bones — / it left no bloodstains on broken stones.”), and “The New Philippine National Anthem” (“… If we sing of your glory in spite of our wounds,/ if we light candles that fail in the wind,/ it is because you force us to hide behind our frailties.// But I will always love you, Philippines,/ because in the dead of night, when the enemies/ creep closer to the gate to break the bones of our hate,/ when the pale men with foreign tongues pillage// your mountains and meadows for minerals of money,/ money, money, when we are broke and hungry and cold,/ you keep us together with the warmth of your voice/ whispering such word as ‘Peace,’ such word as ‘Freedom.’”)

Ah, Cirilo. Not yet, Rizal, not yet.

But hey, you, everyone: buy this book. Or beg, steal and borrow. Let us betray ourselves, before we believe.

* * *

Alfred A. Yuson, nicknamed Krip, has authored 22 books: novels, poetry collections, short fiction, essays, children’s stories and biographies, apart from having edited many other titles, including literary anthologies and travel and corporate coffee-table publications. His distinctions include the SEAWrite (SouthEast Asian Writers) Award from Thai royalty for lifetime achievement. He has been elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Philippines’ most prestigious literary distinction. Yuson contributes a weekly literature and culture column to a national broadsheet, The Philippine Star, and a fortnightly column to the weekly Philippine Graphic magazine. He teaches fiction and poetry at Ateneo de Manila University, where he held the Henry Lee Irwin Professorial Chair.

MATADORA by SARAH GAMBITO

2007-02-12T23:20:00.000-08:00

ALFRED A. YUSON Reviews

Matadora by Sarah Gambito
(Alice James Books, 2005)

[First published in The Philippine Star, Manila, April 11, 2005, Arts & Culture Section Editor, Millet Mananquil]

The grouch recants

I met Fil-Am poet Sarah Gambito last year in Chicago, in attendance at the rather frenetic AWP (American Writers and Publishers) Conference 2004. There has since been the 2005 edition in Vancouver, also attended by our U.S.-based poets.

In March of 2004, the New York-based Gambito took part in a dynamic reading session arranged for a sterling roster of Fil-Am and Fil-European poets and writers at De Paul University, as hosted by UP alumnae in Illinois. Sarah was one of two poets, together with Joseph Legaspi if memory serves me right, whom I hadn’t yet made the acquaintance of, although good word had reached me on her work. I was introduced to both, but the exchange was all too brief. And the rest of that humongous convention went by in a blur.

Thankfully, however, Sarah has renewed ties through e-mail. I received a copy of her first book, Matadora (Alice James Books) a couple of months ago, but failed to find time to go through the collection, initially appealing as it seemed.

The brief bio-note on the back cover reads: “Sarah Gambito holds degrees from the University of Virginia (B.A.) and Brown University (M.F.A.) Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, New Republic, Quarterly West, Fence and other journals. She lives in New York City.”

Here’s quoting from the couple of back-cover blurbs:

“… These poems fly in from other countries. They blur the speed of prayers with alt. rock lyrics. In the poems continents reverse themselves as if drifting in amniotic fluid, lines of lineage re-emerge and voices in other languages adopt themselves to various new forms of speech. The speaker arrives from time to time. … She flits from Tagalog to East Villagese….” (by Tan Lin)

“The poems … are sheer juxtapositions of anything — star fish, Tagalog, frisson — and the friction very often adds a political dimension to the poetic. Lovely!” (by Kimiko Hahn)

Well, let’s see. The opening poem, “Paloma Loves,” starts thus: “Gayon na lamang ang pag-ibig ng Diyos sa sanlibutan, kaya ibinigay niya ang kanyang bugtong na Anak, upang ang sumampalataya sa kanya ay hindi mapahamak, kundi magkaroon ng buhay na walang hanggan.”

That is the first stanza of what appears to be a prose poem, which is why I place no slashes to signify line breaks in the quote above. This stanzaic quotation, a Tagalog translation of John 3:16 in the Bible, is repeated seven times. In each refrain, English words replace a few of the Tagalog words or parts of words, such that the second stanza reads partly thus:

“Gayon na God knew g-ibig ng Diyos sa sanlibutan, kaya ibinigay niya ang kanyang bugtong na another language lataya sa kanya…” and so forth. Note that the English words are the ones italicized, and that some Tagalog words are truncated in their displacement.

The third stanza only has “pretty well” replacing “sumampalatay” while the fourth reads partly thus: “Gayon In another language, he drank Pelligrino water, ya ibinigay niya … ay hindi mapahamak, kundi He left gift-bags for comrades. ggan.”

The fifth has “He drew reindeer.” displacing “lamang ang pag-ibig” while the sixth has the most major displacement, rendering it into the briefest stanza: “Gayon na Paloma would have written about this but she does not write every day in her Light Journal. Paloma buys jewelry. g buhay na walang hanggan.”

And so on, with the seventh stanza having the following lines of intromission in English: “I noticed a new garnet in her ear the other day. But she” and “wanted me to notice her scarf” (placed apart). And for the eighth: “She pointed to it and said,” and “Now, I am Paloma of the Mountains” (also placed apart)”

That’s it. That’s the poem.

So what are we to make of it? Charming, at best. That is, if we’re Filipino, or maybe even Muscovites who’ve been trained to understand both Tagalog and English.

Experimental, obviously. A poem that shucks tradition, convention, the well-worn paths of familiar poetry. It tries to introduce something new. Bilingual displacement, we might call it.

Does it make sense, on a bilingual level? No. Does it have to? Well… Let’s say for now that it doesn’t, and recall that old Archie once said “A poem must mean and not be.” Or was that the other way around? Can’t remember, for the life of me. Getting old, and increasingly mystified by fresh qualities of experimentation with both language and form.

Is there at least a discernable pattern to the displacement process, that is, is there something pointed to, or at, in terms of meaning/s enhanced by the displacement, granting that the reader is bilingual? Oh, okay, I’ll grant that this may not be necessary either. In which case, an appreciation of this poem will rest on the level of bemusement. Tres charmant, at best.

The next poems charm me even further, for at least a quality of line-charging, or phrasing, that’s distinctive and fresh, and occasionally riveting. But just as lines or line fragments. To wit: “America loves the oceans between the World Wars.” Or: “Who in this house will admit to my amethyst ring?/ If you are here, I feel you almost recognize me.” (both from “Paloma’s Light Journal, February 12th”) And: “Children are the imminent sojourn./ A maybe of love./” The following line, while still strong, doesn’t seem to connect: “Brilliant persuasion from the stands.//” (from “Scene: A Loom”)

Certain passages appear to have some sense of continuum, whether as narrative or simply cerebrated flow. “Family Day” starts with “I’m sand surfing. Waiting for a bad boy to come home.” Etc. Then concludes thus: “Embrace our role as temp agency to the world./ I do the laundry. I know the residents. Yet, where is he?/ I have a niece in Italy, a nephew in Bern,/ another nephew in Brussels./ I have nieces in Los Angeles and New Jersey./ How when he was showing me around London./ How I felt so special./ Please come home as I am lovesick./ ‘Look Asian, think Spanish, act American.’/ I never thought I’d be here waiting for a valentine./ Each 160-character message costs one peso (two U.S. cents).”

Now, that poem I appreciate positively. There’s an intriguing, effective refrain of a reference to the wait for “the bad boy” -- prefiguring the mysteries and myths of diaspora. Two simple lines utter: “I want him to come home so I can wrap/ my five-dollar arms around him. “ Makes sense, besides offering poignancy.

Another prose poem, “Paloma’s Church in America,” essays wonderfully curt, highly charged, demi-surreal narrative: “… We drank and became practiced. We missed our mothers. Our mothers couldn’t call. We called in dreams. We dreamed illnesses on our new bodies. The bodies clung to covenants. The covenants, in turn, drove to scholarship.” The next lines lose me: “(Stewardship, pharmacists like to say. Star Connection, my Tannenbaum makes to say.)”

Of course poems aren’t always supposed to guide us entirely through a course of meaning or sense. I grant poets the license to be private, even abstruse or hermetic in certain instances; well-hung jury am I on this one.

Other poems in this collection delight for their fanciful, character-driven dialogue, as with “1001 Nights” which features a near nonsensical yet appealing conversation between Sharazad and Sultan. Even better is the longer “Numerology” with God engaged in repartee with His Absence. (Should be great for a dramatic reading with two voices.)

All throughout the collection of 46 poems divvied up into three apparently sub-thematic sections (“Veronicas”; “Suerte de Recibir” which is prefaced with a Hemingway quote on a “dangerous … way to kill bulls”; and “Toro Libre”) is a patent parade of curious juxtapositions and disjunctions, with but a flippant voice posing as the unifying element. This voice can be diffident, indifferent, mock-naif, defiant, insouciant, imperative. What saves this voice from flimflam experimentation sans cachet is its uniform, characteristic manner of extending incongruities into jaunty elisions, that — and this is important — don’t just seem to say, Oh, whatever.

I must confess however that for a good part of this book, my appreciation hung (very well indeed) on the balance. Three elements determined the final state of this equipoise.

One: A prodigious 14-year-old daughter of a Vancouverite e-mailed her thanks for a copy I sent of Angelo Suarez’s second book, else purely it was girls, whose contents I had only recently contested the value of vis-à-vis his debut collection [Editor's Note: see Mr. Yuson's review in post below]. Well, the girl was effusive in gratitude, saying: “I am now in love with Angelo V. Suarez’s work, it’s so awesome and rhythmic and hip and snarky.” There goes my demi-demolition job. Obviously, teeners connect to what I thought was, at worst, poetic graffiti.

Second, I realized that I might hurt some feelings anew with what could be interpreted as a diatribe, such as what happened with a review I wrote last year, on a couple of poetry books by relatively young Fil-Am poets whose “disjunctions” I questioned. I’ve considered since then: Might just be getting too old for this job, and getting too quick at dispensing other than tender loving care.

Third, critically enough, I found Matadora getting more engaging towards the middle part, where that voice ever chanting incongruities turns into a more sustained force, starting with the terrific closure in the poem ”Providence,” which I’m afraid I can’t quote in this family paper. Then, too, I begin to espy a certain method to that mad/wry voice’s oft-elliptical, space-cadet stances, as evidenced by even stronger lines:

“I am short hair and small breasts. I smile at birthday cards.// I lurch from my seat.// I wear lipstick. I sweep up glass.// Heedless. // In all my selves, I am a corroded quilt./ But I welcome all the times….” (from “Paloma, Because I Love Her”)

I like the poems “Sonogram,” “Scene: This Is Your Country” (“I’m tired only in Technicolor….”), “Of My Fury,” “How to Make Your Daughter an American,” and “Asian-American Food Poem” (“I’ve been admitted to the fiesta./ I drank beer, pinched the children,/ admired the dogs.// The fact that he’s filipino and sings really hard into the mike/ makes me lie unprotected with only bangles on./ I’m ‘one-of-those.’/ I mean I’m also filipino./ That’s an understatement-underwear.// This is so similar to my accident,/ my fuckapoet syndrome: I have a beautiful/ I inform the others. It’s young yet and full of bile and Sylvester.”)

I forgive Sarah Gambito all those earlier blank lines, I mean, as in fill-in-the-blanks. I toast her blithe, city-smart ellipses, her stylistic, sudden divagations into distant peripheries, her mystifying evasiveness. I challenge her however to drop the “I persona/voice” for her near-future poems. And for now I choose not to be a grouch and say of her book Matadora that I like it, I like it.

*****

Alfred A. Yuson, nicknamed Krip, has authored 22 books: novels, poetry collections, short fiction, essays, children’s stories and biographies, apart from having edited many other titles, including literary anthologies and travel and corporate coffee-table publications. His distinctions include the SEAWrite (SouthEast Asian Writers) Award from Thai royalty for lifetime achievement. He has been elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Philippines’ most prestigious literary distinction. Yuson contributes a weekly literature and culture column to a national broadsheet, The Philippine Star, and a fortnightly column to the weekly Philippine Graphic magazine. He teaches fiction and poetry at Ateneo de Manila University, where he held the Henry Lee Irwin Professorial Chair.

Books by RUEL S. DE VERA, DINAH ROMA & ANGELO SUAREZ

2007-02-12T23:10:00.000-08:00

ALFRED A. YUSON Reviews

Faulty Electrical Wiring: Poems by Ruel S. de Vera
(Office of Research and Publication, Ateneo de Manila University, Manila, 2005)

And

A Feast of Origins by Dinah Roma
(University of Santo Tomas (UST) Publishing House, Manila, 2005)

And

else it was purely girls by Angelo Suarez
(UST Publishing House, Manila, 2005)

[First published in The Philippine Star, Manila, March 28, 2005, Arts & Culture Section Editor, Millet Mananquil]

A grampa grunt’s theory of poetry

Ruel S. de Vera’s fine title, Faulty Electrical Wiring: Poems (ORP, AdMU), was launched at the Ateneo’s ComDept on March 18. Wired yet faultless it is as a second poetry collection.

I loved “Gambaphobia,” which can well be anthemic for friends who are tragic itchers once they sing along to sinigang na sugpo:

“… My body’s gory gatecrasher/ makes its perch just above/ my torn throat, and I can feel/ every part of this crustacean art —/ a car crash in the esophagus,/ a bender in the body’s blender,/ so exoskeletal, so lethal/ as it grows, until I remember,/ I remember. All the blood’s/ a minefield just waiting/ for the perfect accident./ But it’s what I can’t have/ that I can’t help but want,/ always wondering/ if this bit of dead sea/ really is oyster-moist,/ heaven in a whole shell,/ a taste of the forbidden/ that is truly filling,/ a goodie ready to strike back./ Imagining this allergy’s/ exactly what I don’t need:/ something I don’t eat/ that keeps eating me anyway.”

Ruey situates himself in every poem, makes no bones about his stances: matter-of-fact, lyrical, sensitive, compulsive, tender, serendipitous. Why, he often feigns a tough armor, too, except that we recognize it as his very chink, because he’s sensitive, lyrical, tender. The matter-of-fact compulsion just has to be rigged as another sail. Clever voyager. Despite sometimes being “barely awake/ in a nightmare/ of harpoons in linen.” (from “Ahab”), soon he will be Master and Commander.

His place poems on London and Zamboanga are pitch-perfect, the way visiting firemen pitch themselves feet-long if warily down the crotch-smoothened pole, never knowing if they’ll land smack on a blaring red siren or a Dalmatian’s tail. When he dwells (and Ruel dwells with both heart and mind) on the possibilities of erotica, it is also as if he is Marco Polo inspecting noodles with a smile, the bulb going off in his Mediterranean radar: Ah, we will call it spaghetti.

Mark the poem “Knowledge, Carnal”: “First I was a white lace bra/ type of guy, and then/ moved on to black bras,/ until it didn’t matter/ what color they were….” This self-insistent poem proceeds to badger the object of desire, in an imagined pas de deux that’s sheer cariño brutal, till it whips up strong closure: “Answer me dammit,/ answer me.”

Hey, yo’ the man!

Then there’s the offhanded solidity, so contemporary in its recognition of ellipses, in such poems as the lead “Mythology” which ends this perfect wise: “For we’ve finally learned to dance/ in whatever space is left us, doomed to search/ for clothes branded XL/ precisely because/ They will never fit us.” Astig!

In truth, de Vera is unafraid of ill-fitting itineraries, boats, overcoats. He likes to wander about in that much of private space, before sharing his reportage that is far removed from the confines of eyewitness quickness. He takes his time, laves in all that space, and time, before rendering the communiqué with his own filtered spyglass of perception.

The cute book’s cover is so apropos. Birdwatching. That is, a bird watching tutu-ed ballet dancers conducting tightwire acts on power lines. Artist Jason Moss is like Ruey, a young genius.

In the finer sense, this poet is well-versed. His stanzaic arrangements are never arbitrary, rather prefigured by the subject and mode of attack. His form follows his function always. He writes of “jetlag between past lives…” Well, Ruel S. de Vera just as soon finds equipoise, and balances himself right here, there, with her, in quirky paradise.

+++

On March 18, National Artist Frankie Jose invited poets and writers to a reception at Solidaridad Bookstore in Ermita to fete his French translator, and a poet in her own right, Amina Said. She read her poems in the original French, and was in turn regaled by Domeng Landicho with a spontaneous Filipino paean to her loveliness. This was followed by readings by Shirley Lua, Dinah Roma, Lourd de Vera, Mila Aguilar, Alice Sun-Cua, Angelo Suarez, Marjorie Evasco, Kris Lacaba and Vince Groyon.

I came away with a gift copy from Dinah Roma of her first poetry book, A Feast of Origins (UST Publishing House), whose launch last December I failed to attend, thanks to Bayani Fernando’s traffic management efficacy.

I’ve been impressed with Dina’s steady maturity as a poet since her workshop days in DumasGoethe way back in 1988. When last I heard her read at Singapore’s Wordfeast in January 2004, I felt so proud that the Pinoy contingent was more than holding its own among the invitees. Dinah leaves for Brazil shortly; lucky girl. And luckier are the cariocas who may be privileged to hear her read her poetry to samba music.

Like this one, “A Reveller’s Song”: “I cannot enter the door/ you kept open for me/ nor sing and share/ the rhythm of songs/ rehearsed for your return./ I shall stand slender/ distal and safe from the union/ of these journeying spheres. I/ delight myself with voices/ fragmented from jungles you/ have sought, until I feel/ the surface gathers us alone/ to the center/ where I now kiss/ the mountain’s feet/ and wait for the embrace/ hidden in the rhythm/ of a reveller’s song.”

Note the purposeful enjambements that exempt themselves from the otherwise careful line breaks. It is the “I” and the “you” that are made to stand on edge, and hang there like listing forces disengaged from… one another? The tension of stasis is what gives them impetus, from inertia. Such is Roma’s poetry, hailing eternity of feasts and circuses.

The poems are so well-ordered that the disengagement in the one quoted above properly precedes another titled “A Process of Connecting.” I like this, too; Dinah does exceedingly well with the imperative voice, or what’s also called the lyric of address, as in: “…If, in digging, you reach/ the hardened stone, take it with you, take it to your Temple….// Leave it there until songs/ careen from the earth’s throng/ to pull your hand, lengthen its reach./ Leave it there until you learn to weave silence/ in ligaments of sounds/ and learn how blood flows/ into smug bones underground.”

Excellent. The subtle end-rhymes reinforce the idea of connection. Each poem here is well-thought-out, sentiment and sentience coupling for all time in an ironic sentence, make that fragmented lines, as in “… You want us/ to outlive this room/ as if it has anything to do/ with us…” (“The Room”)

Intensity is mitigated by a gentle quiescence in her cycle of song, and dance, so that even her travel poems can end with such sage quality: “In remembering name, you tell me to hold/ out my hands—still, open and bare,/ if each pilgrim is to understand/ why each quest longs to be endured.” (from “Pura Besakih”)

This is quiet, mature poetry of the first order. The boys of Brazil better watch out, for Dinah Roma can bend verses into golden goals.

+++

On the other hand, the recently released else it was purely girls (UST Publishing House) by Angelo Suarez borders on the proficiently prolix. There’s a jaunty, hip-hop sort of prosody that relies more on clever word associations than real insights, hardly present the solid grounding this precocious poet once displayed.

Here it’s the rapstyle that shows. Revolutionary Angelo Poetry? At its launch at PowerBooks on March 16, with Thomasian barkada dishing out poetry performances, I got the impression that everyone chanted with a distinct anapestic line, or more strictly, with a starting iamb followed by three anapests, as in ta-tum ta-ta-tum ta-ta-tum ta-ta-tum. Maybe they were all following the lead of the pioneering Lourd de Veyra, SAGO Man, whose Intro to Suarez’s collection, by the by, is as tastefully endearing as arnival.

Here goes moi, out on a grampa limb. Sometimes it’s not too advisable for very young poets to be in such a hurry to come up with collections. Gelo risked the challenge of topping last year’s debut, The Nymph of MTV, which went on to win Macedonia’s Bridges of Struga Prize for best international first book, AND the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle. Such a thing as the Sophomore Jinx, unless you’re LeBron. And Gelo’s ONLY the Kobe of Philippine poetry.

He should watch his back(pack). Some brat in high school, maybe at Miriam, could out-prodigy him soon, unless he settles down a bit in his junior year, and desists from regarding season’s infatuation as the be-all and end-all just like the Grecian urn.

Consider the following poem titles: “yes there is love beyond sex” / “Back-to-back Showbiz Love Cycle” / “to a girl sitting on the table” / “Prelude to a Falling Out” … Etcetera. All about one’s T.L. As in Talo Lagi? Grow up, boy. It’s a man’s game. Heh-heh. I know my buddy Gelo won’t mind this so much, which is just as well. But I have to say that I much preferred the domestic concerns, even the steady loopiness of his first book. All he tells me this time is that he can hardly handle his testosterone. Now before the pimples strike, hear ye! People are dying in Iraq. Bayani Fernando’s getting away with murder as MMDA’s Caligula. Terrorists are afoot in our holiest of seasons. And you write about making out in an inn in Baguio? Man. De-fense! De-fense!

For now he seems to be acting his age. He’s gone bananas over typographical whimsies, which are turning into the flavor of the season for impatient poets. Yet nothing beats the four-square idea, even behind a surreal presentation as in his classic “Mothers Chasing Cats” written 2-3 years ago when he was 18!

Here they’re mostly juvenile outpourings bereft of tropes other than graphic imagery and cute run-ons. Not that it’s a failure of a collection. Besides, as has been said, some artists’ failures can be more interesting than others’ peak effusions. And Suarez retains the domestic concerns that were his bread-and-butter; this strength is seen in the adroit poems “Home” and “Fathers’ Congress” and “Mother.”

Sometimes the clarity is sustained even in his love/lust keenings, as in “So”: “… I left her/ and now she has fingers/ like sunlight on the thatch// of a home in the city….” For the most part, however, it all seems like easy articulations. And outright croppers like “To err is human, but her ear divine.” Eeow.

One should, even while still young, guard against the atavism of the personal and private/s. So this Old-Guard Sarge says. But not to worry. Gelo just went AWOL: maybe it’s his idea of a holiday, a lark. Well, come back down to earth soon, son. There’s still real work out here. Especially for us grunts.

Let me explain. Years ago in Mukkula, Finland, a Danish lady novelist, ageing but regal, would herald poets’ arrival thus: “Here come the Cavalry.” She’d smile and add, “Us fiction writers, we’re just the foot soldiers.”

True, there is a bit of glam in being a poet. Ages have seen stories of poets as seers, as pretty boys, as maverick bohemians whose dashing antennae pick up legislation from the air, from very ether, and turn it into attar of roses. Sure, Dylan and Yevtushenko caused swooning. And Villa, sparks.

Some poets think all they have to do is brush that Peter Pan wand across graffitti, and Tinkerbell will ring forever. Naah. No go, not for long. One has to work with poetry.

I like what Dinah Roma is doing. She’s scaling poesie by tidal increments. I like what Ruel de Vera is doing. He’s found his métier among the observables and remarkable(’)s -- from allergy to bra spectra and then some. I also like what Angelo Suarez does when he “leaps across the air of contraband.” As long as he comes back down occasionally. And, surefooted as in his… uhh… early youth, he conducts the hard work again.

One has to work hard with poetry. Even the best of us can only pull so many Easter bunnies out of a hat.

******

Alfred A. Yuson, nicknamed Krip, has authored 22 books: novels, poetry collections, short fiction, essays, children’s stories and biographies, apart from having edited many other titles, including literary anthologies and travel and corporate coffee-table publications. His distinctions include the SEAWrite (SouthEast Asian Writers) Award from Thai royalty for lifetime achievement. He has been elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Philippines’ most prestigious literary distinction. Yuson contributes a weekly literature and culture column to a national broadsheet, The Philippine Star, and a fortnightly column to the weekly Philippine Graphic magazine. He teaches fiction and poetry at Ateneo de Manila University, where he held the Henry Lee Irwin Professorial Chair.

BACK COVER

2007-02-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

When your Mommy is Missy WinePoetics, certain things happen:

You think this is a poetry review journal. Snort -- surely you've figured out by now this is just another way for us to have a photo album on the net?!

With much Fur, Fur and Fur,

Achilles and Gabriela